SOUTH OF THE SLOT
Old San Francisco, which is the San Francisco of only the other
day, the day before the Earthquake, was divided midway by the Slot.
The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the centre of Market
Street, and from the Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless
cable that was hitched at will to the cars it dragged up and down.
In truth, there were two slots, but in the quick grammar of the
West time was saved by calling them, and much more that they stood
for, "The Slot." North of the Slot were the theatres, hotels, and
shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business
houses. South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries,
machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.
The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of
Society, and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more
successfully than Freddie Drummond. He made a practice of living
in both worlds, and in both worlds he lived signally well. Freddie
Drummond was a professor in the Sociology Department of the
University of California, and it was as a professor of sociology
that he first crossed over the Slot, lived for six mouths in the
great labour-ghetto, and wrote The Unskilled Labourer--a book that
was hailed everywhere as an able contribution to the literature of
progress, and as a splendid reply to the literature of discontent.
Politically and economically it was nothing if not orthodox.
Presidents of great railway systems bought whole editions of it to
give to their employees. The Manufacturers' Association alone
distributed fifty thousand copies of it. In a way, it was almost
as immoral as the far-famed and notorious Message to Garcia, while
in its pernicious preachment of thrift and content it ran Mr. Wiggs
of the Cabbage Patch a close second.
At first, Freddie Drummond found it monstrously difficult to get
along among the working people. He was not used to their ways, and
they certainly were not used to his. They were suspicious. He had
no antecedents. He could talk of no previous jobs. His hands were
soft. His extraordinary politeness was ominous. His first idea of
the role he would play was that of a free and independent American
who chose to work with his hands and no explanations given. But it
wouldn't do, as he quickly discovered. At the beginning they
accepted him, very provisionally, as a freak. A little later, as
he began to know his way about better, he insensibly drifted into
the role that would work--namely, he was a man who had seen better
days, very much better days, but who was down on his luck, though,
to be sure, only temporarily.
He learned many things, and generalized much and often erroneously,
all of which can be found in the pages of The Unskilled Labourer.
He saved himself, however, after the sane and conservative manner
of his kind, by labelling his generalizations as "tentative." One
of his first experiences was in the great Wilmax Cannery, where he
was put on piece-work making small packing cases. A box factory
supplied the parts, and all Freddie Drummond had to do was to fit
the parts into a form and drive in the wire nails with a light
hammer.
It was not skilled labour, but it was piece-work. The ordinary
labourers in the cannery got a dollar and a half per day. Freddie
Drummond found the other men on the same job with him jogging along
and earning a dollar and seventy-five cents a day. By the third
day he was able to earn the same. But he was ambitious. He did
not care to jog along and, being unusually able and fit, on the
fourth day earned two dollars.
The next day, having keyed himself up to an exhausting high-
tension, he earned two dollars and a half. His fellow workers
favoured him with scowls and black looks, and made remarks,
slangily witty and which he did not understand, about sucking up to
the boss and pace-making and holding her down, when the rains set
in. He was astonished at their malingering on piece-work,
generalized about the inherent laziness of the unskilled labourer,
and proceeded next day to hammer out three dollars' worth of boxes.
And that night, coming out of the cannery, he was interviewed by
his fellow workmen, who were very angry and incoherently slangy.
He failed to comprehend the motive behind their action. The action
itself was strenuous. When he refused to ease down his pace and
bleated about freedom of contract, independent Americanism, and the
dignity of toil, they proceeded to spoil his pace-making ability.
It was a fierce battle, for Drummond was a large man and an
athlete, but the crowd finally jumped on his ribs, walked on his
face, and stamped on his fingers, so that it was only after lying
in bed for a week that he was able to get up and look for another
job. All of which is duly narrated in that first book of his, in
the chapter entitled "The Tyranny of Labour."
A little later, in another department of the Wilmax Cannery,
lumping as a fruit-distributor among the women, he essayed to carry
two boxes of fruit at a time, and was promptly reproached by the
other fruit-lumpers. It was palpable malingering; but he was
there, he decided, not to change conditions, but to observe. So he
lumped one box thereafter, and so well did he study the art of
shirking that he wrote a special chapter on it, with the last
several paragraphs devoted to tentative generalizations.
In those six months he worked at many jobs and developed into a
very good imitation of a genuine worker. He was a natural
linguist, and he kept notebooks, making a scientific study of the
workers' slang or argot, until he could talk quite intelligibly.
This language also enabled him more intimately to follow their
mental processes, and thereby to gather much data for a projected
chapter in some future book which he planned to entitle Synthesis
of Working-Class Psychology.
Before he arose to the surface from that first plunge into the
underworld he discovered that he was a good actor and demonstrated
the plasticity of his nature. He was himself astonished at his own
fluidity. Once having mastered the language and conquered numerous
fastidious qualms, he found that he could flow into any nook of
working-class life and fit it so snugly as to feel comfortably at
home. As he said, in the preface to his second book, The Toiler,
he endeavoured really to know the working people, and the only
possible way to achieve this was to work beside them, eat their
food, sleep in their beds, be amused with their amusements, think
their thoughts, and feel their feeling.
He was not a deep thinker. He had no faith in new theories. All
his norms and criteria were conventional. His Thesis on the French
Revolution was noteworthy in college annals, not merely for its
painstaking and voluminous accuracy, but for the fact that it was
the dryest, deadest, most formal, and most orthodox screed ever
written on the subject. He was a very reserved man, and his
natural inhibition was large in quantity and steel-like in quality.
He had but few friends. He was too undemonstrative, too frigid.
He had no vices, nor had any one ever discovered any temptations.
Tobacco he detested, beer he abhorred, and he was never known to
drink anything stronger than an occasional light wine at dinner.
When a freshman he had been baptized "Ice-Box" by his warmer-
blooded fellows. As a member of the faculty he was known as "Cold-
Storage." He had but one grief, and that was "Freddie." He had
earned it when he played full-back in the 'Varsity eleven, and his
formal soul had never succeeded in living it down. "Freddie" he
would ever be, except officially, and through nightmare vistas he
looked into a future when his world would speak of him as "Old
Freddie."
For he was very young to be a doctor of sociology, only twenty-
seven, and he looked younger. In appearance and atmosphere he was
a strapping big college man, smooth-faced and easy-mannered, clean
and simple and wholesome, with a known record of being a splendid
athlete and an implied vast possession of cold culture of the
inhibited sort. He never talked shop out of class and committee
rooms, except later on, when his books showered him with
distasteful public notice and he yielded to the extent of reading
occasional papers before certain literary and economic societies.
He did everything right--too right; and in dress and comportment
was inevitably correct. Not that he was a dandy. Far from it. He
was a college man, in dress and carriage as like as a pea to the
type that of late years is being so generously turned out of our
institutions of higher learning. His handshake was satisfyingly
strong and stiff. His blue eyes were coldly blue and convincingly
sincere. His voice, firm and masculine, clean and crisp of
enunciation, was pleasant to the ear. The one drawback to Freddie
Drummond was his inhibition. He never unbent. In his football
days, the higher the tension of the game, the cooler he grew. He
was noted as a boxer, but he was regarded as an automaton, with the
inhuman precision of a machine judging distance and timing blows,
guarding, blocking, and stalling. He was rarely punished himself,
while he rarely punished an opponent. He was too clever and too
controlled to permit himself to put a pound more weight into a
punch than he intended. With him it was a matter of exercise. It
kept him fit.
As time went by, Freddie Drummond found himself more frequently
crossing the Slot and losing himself in South of Market. His
summer and winter holidays were spent there, and, whether it was a
week or a week-end, he found the time spent there to be valuable
and enjoyable. And there was so much material to be gathered. His
third book, Mass and Master, became a text-book in the American
universities; and almost before he knew it, he was at work on a
fourth one, The Fallacy of the Inefficient.
Somewhere in his make-up there was a strange twist or quirk.
Perhaps it was a recoil from his environment and training, or from
the tempered seed of his ancestors, who had been book-men
generation preceding generation; but at any rate, he found
enjoyment in being down in the working-class world. In his own
world he was "Cold-Storage," but down below he was "Big" Bill
Totts, who could drink and smoke, and slang and fight, and be an
all-round favourite. Everybody liked Bill, and more than one
working girl made love to him. At first he had been merely a good
actor, but as time went on, simulation became second nature. He no
longer played a part, and he loved sausages, sausages and bacon,
than which, in his own proper sphere, there was nothing more
loathsome in the way of food.
From doing the thing for the need's sake, he came to doing the
thing for the thing's sake. He found himself regretting as the
time drew near for him to go back to his lecture-room and his
inhibition. And he often found himself waiting with anticipation
for the dreamy time to pass when he could cross the Slot and cut
loose and play the devil. He was not wicked, but as "Big" Bill
Totts he did a myriad things that Freddie Drummond would never have
been permitted to do. Moreover, Freddie Drummond never would have
wanted to do them. That was the strangest part of his discovery.
Freddie Drummond and Bill Totts were two totally different
creatures. The desires and tastes and impulses of each ran counter
to the other's. Bill Totts could shirk at a job with clear
conscience, while Freddie Drummond condemned shirking as vicious,
criminal, and un-American, and devoted whole chapters to
condemnation of the vice. Freddie Drummond did not care for
dancing, but Bill Totts never missed the nights at the various
dancing clubs, such as The Magnolia, The Western Star, and The
Elite; while he won a massive silver cup, standing thirty inches
high, for being the best-sustained character at the Butchers and
Meat Workers' annual grand masked ball. And Bill Totts liked the
girls and the girls liked him, while Freddie Drummond enjoyed
playing the ascetic in this particular, was open in his opposition
to equal suffrage, and cynically bitter in his secret condemnation
of coeducation.
Freddie Drummond changed his manners with his dress, and without
effort. When he entered the obscure little room used for his
transformation scenes, he carried himself just a bit too stiffly.
He was too erect, his shoulders were an inch too far back, while
his face was grave, almost harsh, and practically expressionless.
But when he emerged in Bill Totts' clothes he was another creature.
Bill Totts did not slouch, but somehow his whole form limbered up
and became graceful. The very sound of the voice was changed, and
the laugh was loud and hearty, while loose speech and an occasional
oath were as a matter of course on his lips. Also, Bill Totts was
a trifle inclined to late hours, and at times, in saloons, to be
good-naturedly bellicose with other workmen. Then, too, at Sunday
picnics or when coming home from the show, either arm betrayed a
practised familiarity in stealing around girls' waists, while he
displayed a wit keen and delightful in the flirtatious badinage
that was expected of a good fellow in his class.
So thoroughly was Bill Totts himself, so thoroughly a workman, a
genuine denizen of South of the Slot, that he was as class-
conscious as the average of his kind, and his hatred for a scab
even exceeded that of the average loyal union man. During the
Water Front Strike, Freddie Drummond was somehow able to stand
apart from the unique combination, and, coldly critical, watch Bill
Totts hilariously slug scab longshoremen. For Bill Totts was a
dues-paying member of the Longshoremen Union and had a right to be
indignant with the usurpers of his job. "Big" Bill Totts was so
very big, and so very able, that it was "Big" Bill to the front
when trouble was brewing. From acting outraged feelings, Freddie
Drummond, in the role of his other self, came to experience genuine
outrage, and it was only when he returned to the classic atmosphere
of the university that he was able, sanely and conservatively, to
generalize upon his underworld experiences and put them down on
paper as a trained sociologist should. That Bill Totts lacked the
perspective to raise him above class-consciousness Freddie Drummond
clearly saw. But Bill Totts could not see it. When he saw a scab
taking his job away, he saw red at the same time, and little else
did he see. It was Freddie Drummond, irreproachably clothed and
comported, seated at his study desk or facing his class in
Sociology 17, who saw Bill Totts, and all around Bill Totts, and
all around the whole scab and union-labour problem and its relation
to the economic welfare of the United States in the struggle for
the world market. Bill Totts really wasn't able to see beyond the
next meal and the prize-fight the following night at the Gaiety
Athletic Club.
It was while gathering material for Women and Work that Freddie
received his first warning of the danger he was in. He was too
successful at living in both worlds. This strange dualism he had
developed was after all very unstable, and, as he sat in his study
and meditated, he saw that it could not endure. It was really a
transition stage, and if he persisted he saw that he would
inevitably have to drop one world or the other. He could not
continue in both. And as he looked at the row of volumes that
graced the upper shelf of his revolving book-case, his volumes,
beginning with his Thesis and ending with Women and Work, he
decided that that was the world he would hold to and stick by.
Bill Totts had served his purpose, but he had become a too
dangerous accomplice. Bill Totts would have to cease.
Freddie Drummond's fright was due to Mary Condon, President of the
International Glove Workers' Union No. 974. He had seen her,
first, from the spectators' gallery, at the annual convention of
the Northwest Federation of Labour, and he had seen her through
Bill Totts' eyes, and that individual had been most favourably
impressed by her. She was not Freddie Drummond's sort at all.
What if she were a royal-bodied woman, graceful and sinewy as a
panther, with amazing black eyes that could fill with fire or
laughter-love, as the mood might dictate? He detested women with a
too exuberant vitality and a lack of . . . well, of inhibition.
Freddie Drummond accepted the doctrine of evolution because it was
quite universally accepted by college men, and he flatly believed
that man had climbed up the ladder of life out of the weltering
muck and mess of lower and monstrous organic things. But he was a
trifle ashamed of this genealogy, and preferred not to think of it.
Wherefore, probably, he practised his iron inhibition and preached
it to others, and preferred women of his own type, who could shake
free of this bestial and regrettable ancestral line and by
discipline and control emphasize the wideness of the gulf that
separated them from what their dim forbears had been.
Bill Totts had none of these considerations. He had liked Mary
Condon from the moment his eyes first rested on her in the
convention hall, and he had made it a point, then and there, to
find out who she was. The next time he met her, and quite by
accident, was when he was driving an express waggon for Pat
Morrissey. It was in a lodging-house in Mission Street, where he
had been called to take a trunk into storage. The landlady's
daughter had called him and led him to the little bedroom, the
occupant of which, a glove-maker, had just been removed to
hospital. But Bill did not know this. He stooped, up-ended the
trunk, which was a large one, got it on his shoulder, and struggled
to his feet with his back toward the open door. At that moment he
heard a woman's voice.
"Belong to the union?" was the question asked.
"Aw, what's it to you?" he retorted. "Run along now, an' git outa
my way. I wanta turn round."
The next he know, big as he was, he was whirled half around and
sent reeling backward, the trunk overbalancing him, till he fetched
up with a crash against the wall. He started to swear, but at the
same instant found himself looking into Mary Condon's flashing,
angry eyes.
"Of course I b'long to the union," he said. "I was only kiddin'
you."
"Where's your card?" she demanded in businesslike tones.
"In my pocket. But I can't git it out now. This trunk's too damn
heavy. Come on down to the waggon an' I'll show it to you."
"Put that trunk down," was the command.
"What for? I got a card, I'm tellin' you."
"Put it down, that's all. No scab's going to handle that trunk.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you big coward, scabbing on
honest men. Why don't you join the union and be a man?"
Mary Condon's colour had left her face, and it was apparent that
she was in a rage.
"To think of a big man like you turning traitor to his class. I
suppose you're aching to join the militia for a chance to shoot
down union drivers the next strike. You may belong to the militia
already, for that matter. You're the sort--"
"Hold on, now, that's too much!" Bill dropped the trunk to the
floor with a bang, straightened up, and thrust his hand into his
inside coat pocket. "I told you I was only kiddin'. There, look
at that."
It was a union card properly enough.
"All right, take it along," Mary Condon said. "And the next time
don't kid."
Her face relaxed as she noticed the ease with which he got the big
trunk to his shoulder, and her eyes glowed as they glanced over the
graceful massiveness of the man. But Bill did not see that. He
was too busy with the trunk.
The next time he saw Mary Condon was during the Laundry Strike.
The Laundry Workers, but recently organized, were green at the
business, and had petitioned Mary Condon to engineer the strike.
Freddie Drummond had had an inkling of what was coming, and had
sent Bill Totts to join the union and investigate. Bill's job was
in the wash-room, and the men had been called out first, that
morning, in order to stiffen the courage of the girls; and Bill
chanced to be near the door to the mangle-room when Mary Condon
started to enter. The superintendent, who was both large and
stout, barred her way. He wasn't going to have his girls called
out, and he'd teach her a lesson to mind her own business. And as
Mary tried to squeeze past him he thrust her back with a fat hand
on her shoulder. She glanced around and saw Bill.
"Here you, Mr. Totts," she called. "Lend a hand. I want to get
in."
Bill experienced a startle of warm surprise. She had remembered
his name from his union card. The next moment the superintendent
had been plucked from the doorway raving about rights under the
law, and the girls were deserting their machines. During the rest
of that short and successful strike, Bill constituted himself Mary
Condon's henchman and messenger, and when it was over returned to
the University to be Freddie Drummond and to wonder what Bill Totts
could see in such a woman.
Freddie Drummond was entirely safe, but Bill had fallen in love.
There was no getting away from the fact of it, and it was this fact
that had given Freddie Drummond his warning. Well, he had done his
work, and his adventures could cease. There was no need for him to
cross the Slot again. All but the last three chapters of his
latest, Labour Tactics and Strategy, was finished, and he had
sufficient material on hand adequately to supply those chapters.
Another conclusion he arrived at, was that in order to sheet-anchor
himself as Freddie Drummond, closer ties and relations in his own
social nook were necessary. It was time that he was married,
anyway, and he was fully aware that if Freddie Drummond didn't get
married, Bill Totts assuredly would, and the complications were too
awful to contemplate. And so, enters Catherine Van Vorst. She was
a college woman herself, and her father, the one wealthy member of
the faculty, was the head of the Philosophy Department as well. It
would be a wise marriage from every standpoint, Freddie Drummond
concluded when the engagement was consummated and announced. In
appearance cold and reserved, aristocratic and wholesomely
conservative, Catherine Van Vorst, though warm in her way,
possessed an inhibition equal to Drummond's.
All seemed well with him, but Freddie Drummond could not quite
shake off the call of the underworld, the lure of the free and
open, of the unhampered, irresponsible life South of the Slot. As
the time of his marriage approached, he felt that he had indeed
sowed wild oats, and he felt, moreover, what a good thing it would
be if he could have but one wild fling more, play the good fellow
and the wastrel one last time, ere he settled down to grey lecture-
rooms and sober matrimony. And, further to tempt him, the very
last chapter of Labour Tactics and Strategy remained unwritten for
lack of a trifle more of essential data which he had neglected to
gather.
So Freddie Drummond went down for the last time as Bill Totts, got
his data, and, unfortunately, encountered Mary Condon. Once more
installed in his study, it was not a pleasant thing to look back
upon. It made his warning doubly imperative. Bill Totts had
behaved abominably. Not only had he met Mary Condon at the Central
Labour Council, but he had stopped at a chop-house with her, on the
way home, and treated her to oysters. And before they parted at
her door, his arms had been about her, and he had kissed her on the
lips and kissed her repeatedly. And her last words in his ear,
words uttered softly with a catchy sob in the throat that was
nothing more nor less than a love cry, were "Bill . . . dear, dear
Bill."
Freddie Drummond shuddered at the recollection. He saw the pit
yawning for him. He was not by nature a polygamist, and he was
appalled at the possibilities of the situation. It would have to
be put an end to, and it would end in one only of two ways: either
he must become wholly Bill Totts and be married to Mary Condon, or
he must remain wholly Freddie Drummond and be married to Catherine
Van Vorst. Otherwise, his conduct would be beneath contempt and
horrible.
In the several months that followed, San Francisco was torn with
labour strife. The unions and the employers' associations had
locked horns with a determination that looked as if they intended
to settle the matter, one way or the other, for all time. But
Freddie Drummond corrected proofs, lectured classes, and did not
budge. He devoted himself to Catherine Van Vorst, and day by day
found more to respect and admire in her--nay, even to love in her.
The Street Car Strike tempted him, but not so severely as he would
have expected; and the great Meat Strike came on and left him cold.
The ghost of Bill Totts had been successfully laid, and Freddie
Drummond with rejuvenescent zeal tackled a brochure, long-planned,
on the topic of "diminishing returns."
The wedding was two weeks off, when, one afternoon, in San
Francisco, Catherine Van Vorst picked him up and whisked him away
to see a Boys' Club, recently instituted by the settlement workers
in whom she was interested. It was her brother's machine, but they
were alone with the exception of the chauffeur. At the junction
with Kearny Street, Market and Geary Streets intersect like the
sides of a sharp-angled letter "V." They, in the auto, were coming
down Market with the intention of negotiating the sharp apex and
going up Geary. But they did not know what was coming down Geary,
timed by fate to meet them at the apex. While aware from the
papers that the Meat Strike was on and that it was an exceedingly
bitter one, all thought of it at that moment was farthest from
Freddie Drummond's mind. Was he not seated beside Catherine? And
besides, he was carefully expositing to her his views on settlement
work--views that Bill Totts' adventures had played a part in
formulating.
Coming down Geary Street were six meat waggons. Beside each scab
driver sat a policeman. Front and rear, and along each side of
this procession, marched a protecting escort of one hundred police.
Behind the police rearguard, at a respectful distance, was an
orderly but vociferous mob, several blocks in length, that
congested the street from sidewalk to sidewalk. The Beef Trust was
making an effort to supply the hotels, and, incidentally, to begin
the breaking of the strike. The St. Francis had already been
supplied, at a cost of many broken windows and broken heads, and
the expedition was marching to the relief of the Palace Hotel.
All unwitting, Drummond sat beside Catherine, talking settlement
work, as the auto, honking methodically and dodging traffic, swung
in a wide curve to get around the apex. A big coal waggon, loaded
with lump coal and drawn by four huge horses, just debouching from
Kearny Street as though to turn down Market, blocked their way.
The driver of the waggon seemed undecided, and the chauffeur,
running slow but disregarding some shouted warning from the
crossing policemen, swerved the auto to the left, violating the
traffic rules, in order to pass in front of the waggon.
At that moment Freddie Drummond discontinued his conversation. Nor
did he resume it again, for the situation was developing with the
rapidity of a transformation scene. He heard the roar of the mob
at the rear, and caught a glimpse of the helmeted police and the
lurching meat waggons. At the same moment, laying on his whip, and
standing up to his task, the coal driver rushed horses and waggon
squarely in front of the advancing procession, pulled the horses up
sharply, and put on the big brake. Then he made his lines fast to
the brake-handle and sat down with the air of one who had stopped
to stay. The auto had been brought to a stop, too, by his big
panting leaders which had jammed against it.
Before the chauffeur could back clear, an old Irishman, driving a
rickety express waggon and lashing his one horse to a gallop, had
locked wheels with the auto. Drummond recognized both horse and
waggon, for he had driven them often himself. The Irishman was Pat
Morrissey. On the other side a brewery waggon was locking with the
coal waggon, and an east-bound Kearny Street car, wildly clanging
its gong, the motorman shouting defiance at the crossing policeman,
was dashing forward to complete the blockade. And waggon after
waggon was locking and blocking and adding to the confusion. The
meat waggons halted. The police were trapped. The roar at the
rear increased as the mob came on to the attack, while the vanguard
of the police charged the obstructing waggons.
"We're in for it," Drummond remarked coolly to Catherine.
"Yes," she nodded, with equal coolness. "What savages they are."
His admiration for her doubled on itself. She was indeed his sort.
He would have been satisfied with her even if she had screamed, and
clung to him, but this--this was magnificent. She sat in that
storm centre as calmly as if it had been no more than a block of
carriages at the opera.
The police were struggling to clear a passage. The driver of the
coal waggon, a big man in shirt sleeves, lighted a pipe and sat
smoking. He glanced down complacently at a captain of police who
was raving and cursing at him, and his only acknowledgment was a
shrug of the shoulders. From the rear arose the rat-rat-tat of
clubs on heads and a pandemonium of cursing, yelling, and shouting.
A violent accession of noise proclaimed that the mob had broken
through and was dragging a scab from a waggon. The police captain
reinforced from his vanguard, and the mob at the rear was repelled.
Meanwhile, window after window in the high office building on the
right had been opened, and the class-conscious clerks were raining
a shower of office furniture down on the heads of police and scabs.
Waste-baskets, ink-bottles, paper-weights, type-writers--anything
and everything that came to hand was filling the air.
A policeman, under orders from his captain, clambered to the lofty
seat of the coal waggon to arrest the driver. And the driver,
rising leisurely and peacefully to meet him, suddenly crumpled him
in his arms and threw him down on top of the captain. The driver
was a young giant, and when he climbed on his load and poised a
lump of coal in both hands, a policeman, who was just scaling the
waggon from the side, let go and dropped back to earth. The
captain ordered half-a-dozen of his men to take the waggon. The
teamster, scrambling over the load from side to side, beat them
down with huge lumps of coal.
The crowd on the sidewalks and the teamsters on the locked waggons
roared encouragement and their own delight. The motorman, smashing
helmets with his controller bar, was beaten into insensibility and
dragged from his platform. The captain of police, beside himself
at the repulse of his men, led the next assault on the coal waggon.
A score of police were swarming up the tall-sided fortress. But
the teamster multiplied himself. At times there were six or eight
policemen rolling on the pavement and under the waggon. Engaged in
repulsing an attack on the rear end of his fortress, the teamster
turned about to see the captain just in the act of stepping on to
the seat from the front end. He was still in the air and in most
unstable equilibrium, when the teamster hurled a thirty-pound lump
of coal. It caught the captain fairly on the chest, and he went
over backward, striking on a wheeler's back, tumbling on to the
ground, and jamming against the rear wheel of the auto.
Catherine thought he was dead, but he picked himself up and charged
back. She reached out her gloved hand and patted the flank of the
snorting, quivering horse. But Drummond did not notice the action.
He had eyes for nothing save the battle of the coal waggon, while
somewhere in his complicated psychology, one Bill Totts was heaving
and straining in an effort to come to life. Drummond believed in
law and order and the maintenance of the established, but this
riotous savage within him would have none of it. Then, if ever,
did Freddie Drummond call upon his iron inhibition to save him.
But it is written that the house divided against itself must fall.
And Freddie Drummond found that he had divided all the will and
force of him with Bill Totts, and between them the entity that
constituted the pair of them was being wrenched in twain.
Freddie Drummond sat in the auto, quite composed, alongside
Catherine Van Vorst; but looking out of Freddie Drummond's eyes was
Bill Totts, and somewhere behind those eyes, battling for the
control of their mutual body, were Freddie Drummond the sane and
conservative sociologist, and Bill Totts, the class-conscious and
bellicose union working man. It was Bill Totts, looking out of
those eyes, who saw the inevitable end of the battle on the coal
waggon. He saw a policeman gain the top of the load, a second, and
a third. They lurched clumsily on the loose footing, but their
long riot-clubs were out and swinging. One blow caught the
teamster on the head. A second he dodged, receiving it on the
shoulder. For him the game was plainly up. He dashed in suddenly,
clutched two policemen in his arms, and hurled himself a prisoner
to the pavement, his hold never relaxing on his two captors.
Catherine Van Vorst was sick and faint at sight of the blood and
brutal fighting. But her qualms were vanquished by the sensational
and most unexpected happening that followed. The man beside her
emitted an unearthly and uncultured yell and rose to his feet. She
saw him spring over the front seat, leap to the broad rump of the
wheeler, and from there gain the waggon. His onslaught was like a
whirlwind. Before the bewildered officer on the load could guess
the errand of this conventionally clad but excited-seeming
gentleman, he was the recipient of a punch that arched him back
through the air to the pavement. A kick in the face led an
ascending policeman to follow his example. A rush of three more
gained the top and locked with Bill Totts in a gigantic clinch,
during which his scalp was opened up by a club, and coat, vest, and
half his starched shirt were torn from him. But the three
policemen were flung far and wide, and Bill Totts, raining down
lumps of coal, held the fort.
The captain led gallantly to the attack, but was bowled over by a
chunk of coal that burst on his head in black baptism. The need of
the police was to break the blockade in front before the mob could
break in at the rear, and Bill Totts' need was to hold the waggon
till the mob did break through. So the battle of the coal went on.
The crowd had recognized its champion. "Big" Bill, as usual, had
come to the front, and Catherine Van Vorst was bewildered by the
cries of "Bill! O you Bill!" that arose on every hand. Pat
Morrissey, on his waggon seat, was jumping and screaming in an
ecstasy, "Eat 'em, Bill! Eat 'em! Eat 'em alive!" From the
sidewalk she heard a woman's voice cry out, "Look out, Bill--front
end!" Bill took the warning and with well-directed coal cleared
the front end of the waggon of assailants. Catherine Van Vorst
turned her head and saw on the curb of the sidewalk a woman with
vivid colouring and flashing black eyes who was staring with all
her soul at the man who had been Freddie Drummond a few minutes
before.
The windows of the office building became vociferous with applause.
A fresh shower of office chairs and filing cabinets descended. The
mob had broken through on one side the line of waggons, and was
advancing, each segregated policeman the centre of a fighting
group. The scabs were torn from their seats, the traces of the
horses cut, and the frightened animals put in flight. Many
policemen crawled under the coal waggon for safety, while the loose
horses, with here and there a policeman on their backs or
struggling at their heads to hold them, surged across the sidewalk
opposite the jam and broke into Market Street.
Catherine Van Vorst heard the woman's voice calling in warning.
She was back on the curb again, and crying out--
"Beat it, Bill! Now's your time! Beat it!"
The police for the moment had been swept away. Bill Totts leaped
to the pavement and made his way to the woman on the sidewalk.
Catherine Van Vorst saw her throw her arms around him and kiss him
on the lips; and Catherine Van Vorst watched him curiously as he
went on down the sidewalk, one arm around the woman, both talking
and laughing, and he with a volubility and abandon she could never
have dreamed possible.
The police were back again and clearing the jam while waiting for
reinforcements and new drivers and horses. The mob had done its
work and was scattering, and Catherine Van Vorst, still watching,
could see the man she had known as Freddie Drummond. He towered a
head above the crowd. His arm was still about the woman. And she
in the motor-car, watching, saw the pair cross Market Street, cross
the Slot, and disappear down Third Street into the labour ghetto.
In the years that followed no more lectures were given in the
University of California by one Freddie Drummond, and no more books
on economics and the labour question appeared over the name of
Frederick A. Drummond. On the other hand there arose a new labour
leader, William Totts by name. He it was who married Mary Condon,
President of the International Glove Workers' Union No. 974; and he
it was who called the notorious Cooks and Waiters' Strike, which,
before its successful termination, brought out with it scores of
other unions, among which, of the more remotely allied, were the
Chicken Pickers and the Undertakers.
