Oakley Hall - Warlock

“But they won’t listen to you,” he said, and smiled.

Fitzsimmons grimaced. “There’s not three of them could beat me single-jacking before I got burnt — Brunk couldn’t. But there’s not three of them will listen to me, either. All they’ll listen to is Frank and Frenchy and old Heck. But they’ll listen to me some day!

“Frank’s all right in a way,” he went on. “He didn’t want nothing for himself, and I expect he would jump down a shaft if it would help get a union. Except he would just as soon jump everybody else downshaft too, and then look back and find there wasn’t anybody to make a union with.”

“I have noticed that in Brunk,” the doctor said.

“He is that way, all right. They are all too wrapped up in how they hate MacDonald’s guts. Well, I do too, but it doesn’t do anybody much good — hating Mister Mac. He is not the only super there’ll ever be. The way they are thinking, union now is only something against MacDonald. If the company was smart enough to fire MacDonald the whole union idea’d blow up in Brunk’s face.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true, Jimmy,” he said. Fitzsimmons looked pleased.

“I’ve tried to tell them MacDonald is nothing but company policy, and policy will change a good deal faster if the company sees it is good sense to change. Burning the stope or the rest of it’ll just bring in a harder man than MacDonald. But they won’t listen.”

He sat there frowning. This was the most serious the doctor had ever seen Jimmy Fitzsimmons; even when he had warned him about his hands he had been cheerful. He was a strange boy, though not a boy. He wondered if there was not more iron in him than there was in Brunk. There was certainly better sense.

“Well, Jimmy,” he said. “I would vote for you for president of the union rather than Brunk, I’ll say that.”

He had meant it jokingly; he saw that Fitzsimmons had not taken it so. “No,” the boy said, very seriously. “I’m too young yet.” He looked up from under his thick eyebrows and grinned again. “But I would vote for you, Doc.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said; his heart began to labor, as though he had been running.

“No, I’d vote for you,” Fitzsimmons said. “There’s others that would too. There’s a lot that’s sensible but just get carried along by the wild ones like Brunk because they’re loudest. Doc, what we need is somebody that can talk straight with MacDonald and Godbold and the rest of them and not be made a fool of. Somebody that is quick and smart, but somebody that is respectable too. It’s true what Frank says. But because we are not respectable don’t mean a man doesn’t have pride in being a miner. My grandaddy and my dad had pride in it, and me too. Brunk doesn’t much, underneath all. That is his trouble trying to deal with MacDonald — so that all he can think to do is things like stope-burning. But there is talking and dealing has to be done too, and that is where you would do for us, Doc. Some of us have talked of it already.”

“I’m no miner, Jimmy.”

“You are for us, Doc. Everybody knows that. That’s the main thing.”

He wondered if he really was; he knew he was against the things that destroyed and maimed them.

Fitzsimmons said quickly, “Well, I guess there is no use talking about it just yet. I guess they are going to have to bust loose this time again, and maybe they will learn from it.” Then he said, “I thought of even going to tell Schroeder they was thinking of firing the Medusa, but I couldn’t do that. That would bust me with them if they ever found out.”

The doctor was surprised at the calculation in Fitzsimmons’ voice; it was a side he hadn’t seen before.

Fitzsimmons gazed back at him boldly, as though aware of what he was thinking. He grinned again, not quite so boyishly. “What’s wrong with that?” he said. “Sometimes if you know better than a bunch what has to be done you have to undercut them a little. You have to be careful, though, for they are hard when they think a man is against them. They will listen to me some day,” he said, and rose. Then he laughed. “And don’t think you are out of it, Doc. I have got plans for you.”

The doctor rose to open the door for Fitzsimmons, who now thanked him for his time and said good night very formally. He went back to the table and took up the bottle of laudanum and held it until his hand warmed the glass. But finally he put it back into his bag, and undressed and went to bed.

In bed he could not sleep, not merely because he had not taken his evening potion, but because always, in the darkness, Jessie’s face hung in his eyes. He saw Blaisedell drunken and sagging, and yet, try as he would, he could not look upon him with contempt. He saw Brunk’s face, with the jealousy as pitiful and hopeless as his own behind the hate. He saw Morgan’s face, full of murder, and yet it was the face of a man much more than the mere unscrupulous and violent gambler he had seemed. He remembered Jessie and Morgan crying at the same instant to Brunk to stop, in their different voices that were as one voice, and remembered them only minutes later facing each other as deadly enemies.

It seemed to him that in this night he had seen many symptoms of the obsession which he had already known in Jessie. He had seen that both Jessie and Morgan accepted the importance of Blaisedell’s name and all that it implied even in their antipathy for one another. He had seen the same obsession, though not for Blaisedell, in possession of Brunk, and even stronger in Jimmy Fitzsimmons. It seemed to him, as he considered it, more than an obsession, a disease of the spirit; and yet he wondered if this disease, this obsession, this struggle to pre-eminence, was not the reason for mankind’s triumph on the earth — the complex brain developed to plot for it, the opposing thumb to grasp at it — if it was not what set mankind apart from the animals. No animal cared what was its name.

He stared out at the bright stars over Warlock, regarding, now, himself, and what Fitzsimmons had said about his leading the miners. He felt no call within himself. He felt no urge to strive to be anything more than what, long ago, he had been content to be. He considered his freedom and his bondage, his own soul’s sickness and his own particular health, and wondered at the will he did not possess.

ACROSS from Morgan at the desk in the office of the Glass Slipper, Clay sat with his fair head canted forward, his lips pouting a little. He looked white and ill, Morgan thought; Clay had had a bellyful of whisky last night, but he looked sicker than that.

“What do you hear from Porphyry City, Morg?” he said. “I hear it is booming some.”

“It is booming right here.”

“Not for me,” Clay said.

“Why, Porphyry City sounds fine, from what I hear. You thinking of going there?”

“I don’t know,” Clay said. “I suppose it wouldn’t be much different.”

Morgan laughed and said, “You were surely bound and determined to go back to the General Peach last night. See the lady today?”

Clay glanced up at him and nodded tersely. Then he leaned back in his chair and said, “I shouldn’t have gone back there.”

He nodded too.

“It is not her, Morg,” Clay said, as though to answer what he, Morgan, had not wanted to ask. “It is everybody. I can feel it walking down the street or anywhere. Even if there is nobody around I can feel it. I can’t do what they want. They don’t even know what they want, and I can’t do anything, for anything I do is either all the way wrong or not right enough.”

“Eat your guts out!” Morgan said, and all at once he was angrier at Clay than he had ever been before. “You are either a peace officer eating your guts up, or you are a faro banker. God damn it, Clay, wherever you go you are going to have to not give a damn what people want of you. You can quit marshaling and make it stick here as well as anywhere.”