Chapter 35

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_ CHAPTER XXXV

The workmen at Highcourt were of the nondescript labor army that America has recruited. For the rougher outside work there were a number of Italians, whom Adelle liked to entertain with her tourist Italian. There were also a few Greeks and Slavs who had got into this kind of work from other occupations. Inside the house the carpenters, painters, and plumbers were Swedes, Finns, Germans, one Englishman--no one who might justly be described as a native American. It was a typical instance of the way in which all the hard, rough labor of the country was being done, from building railroads to getting out the timber from the forests or making shoes and blankets in the factories. Hard physical labor was no longer performed to any extent by native Americans. Contractors everywhere recruited their polyglot companies in the great cities and shipped them out into the country where there was a demand. The men employed at Highcourt were thus obtained in San Francisco by the head contractor and merely boarded in the town of Bellevue. They lived "across the tracks" in the labor settlement, or in lath and tar-paper shacks about the hills, camping in their eternal campaign of day labor wherever the job happened to take them. Few were married, and all were given more or less to drink and riotous living when pay-day came; and of course they were constantly changing jobs. Adelle often heard the architect and the head contractor deplore the conditions of the labor market and the poor quality of work to be got out of the men at ruinous wages. She had also heard her neighbors, Carter Pound and Nelson Carhart, speak feelingly about the "foreign riff-raff" they had to employ on their estates. No workman had a conscience these days, they said. The women, too, talked of the rowdy character of the town "across the tracks," and the unsafety of the roads for women. Adelle did not think much about the matter, accepting it as a necessity, like gnats or drought or flood.

The Italians at least stuck to their jobs and were good-natured. Adelle always said "bon giorno" when she ran across them toiling up the slippery paths with their loads of stone or cement. She liked the way in which they showed their teeth and touched their hats politely to "la signora." They had a feeling for her as the mistress of the house, a latent sense of feudal loyalty to their employer that had quite disappeared among the other workmen. Apart from the Italians, the faces of the men upon the job were not familiar to her and were constantly changing, a strange one appearing almost every day. So Adelle felt less at home with them and rarely spoke to them unless she had an order to give that she could not easily transmit through the foreman.

One morning in early March--it was while the Seaboard trouble was acute--Adelle made her customary rounds of the place to see what was being done. She descended to the canon and stopped for some time where the stone masons were laying up the wall that was to support the terraces. It was a continuation of the massive wall that rose sheer from the bottom of the little canon to the front of the house, nearly a hundred feet in all perpendicularly from the bottom course to the first floor of the house. (It was the decision to thrust the house out over the canon that had necessitated the building of this massive wall and had delayed matters for months.) Adelle had heard Archie grumble about the useless expense caused by this great wall, but she liked it. Its sheer height and strength gave her a pleasant sensation of accomplishment and endurance. She liked to stare up at it as she liked to see great trees or massive mountains or tall buildings. It was a symbol of something humanly important which supplied a secret craving in her soul.

So this morning she stood silently watching the masons at their slow work. One of the men she recognized as having been steadily on the job ever since her arrival at Highcourt. He was a youngish, slender man with sandy hair and blue eyes, and had the unmistakable air of being a native-born American. His sinewy hands were roughened by his work, and his face was almost a brick red, either from constant exposure to the sun or from drinking, probably both. He seemed morose, as if he were consciously ignoring the presence of his "boss," and worked steadily on, once even failing to answer Adelle when she spoke, apparently unconscious of her presence behind him. Adelle liked especially to watch the masons at work. Their clever management of the great stones they had to handle, the precise yet easy way in which they lined and chipped and trigged and mortared, fitting all the detail of their rough mosaic, gave her a pleasant sense of accomplishment such as she had felt in her own efforts with metal and stone. It stirred an instinct for manual labor which was not far down in her character, and actually made her own shapely hands twitch to be at the fascinating work. And the masons' work grew so surely, course upon course, and when done seemed so solid, so eternal!... This morning she lingered longer than usual watching the young mason wield his hammer and trowel. Archie had ruffled her badly with his talk about money losses, and now she felt soothed, freed from stupid perplexities. The mason's large hands, she noted, were supple and dexterous--he made no useless movements. Occasionally he turned his head to spit tobacco or drew off to look at his wall, but these were the only interruptions in his rhythmic motions. He paid no attention whatever to the woman behind him.

Adelle was prettily dressed in a costume of white linen with a cloud of chiffon tied about her small hat and a parasol that she had purchased this summer in Paris, which consisted of an enormous gold lace butterfly. She was fuller in figure than before her child had come and in perfect health, though still pale. Fresh and well cared for, she was if not beautiful very attractive and dainty--all that money could make of her human person. Adelle was not given to prolonged reflection of any sort, but probably she could not help comparing her own dainty, cool, exquisitely clean person with this sweaty, sun-burned, coarse laborer in his black cotton shirt, frayed khaki trousers, and shoes that the lime had burned all color from. She must have felt a complacent sense of physical superiority to the man who was working for her, and perhaps congratulated herself that her lot in the universe had come out such a comfortable one.

The mason rolled up a large stone and prepared to set it home in the bottom course. Adelle observed that he was about to crush one of the Japanese shrubs that she had been at such pains to have planted along the bank of the canon.

"Look out--don't hurt that bush!" she ordered peremptorily, as she was in the habit of speaking to servants.

The mason tranquilly deposited the rock full upon the shrub and proceeded to slap mortar around it and tap it home with his mallet.

"Didn't you hear me?" Adelle demanded, stepping forward and pointing at the offending rock with her heavily jeweled finger. "Take it out! I don't want the shrubs killed."

The mason looked up for the first time. There was a glint in his clear blue eyes as he said distinctly, without any trace of foreign accent,--

"It's got to go there!"

A smile relaxed his red face, a scornful smile at the impertinence of this dainty specimen of woman-kind who thought that the foundation course of his rock wall could be disturbed for such a trivial matter as a bush.

"No, it hasn't," Adelle rejoined in her imperious tone. "Fix it some other way."

But the mason continued to pat his rock, looking around for the next one to lay upon it.

"Do what I say!" Adelle ordered, almost angrily, irritated by the man's obstinacy.

Then the mason rose, and with his trowel tapping the rock said slowly and emphatically,--

"I'm laying this wall--and I don't take no orders from you!"

Whereupon, after another shot from his hard blue eyes, he turned back to the wall.

At first Adelle was speechless; then she asked in a less peremptory tone,--

"Don't you know who I am?"

"Yes," the mason called back over his shoulder. "You're the boss up there." He indicated the unfinished house with a wave of his trowel, and went on with his work. He seemed indifferent to the fact that he was dealing with the mistress of Highcourt, and Adelle helplessly retreated.

"I will have you discharged!" she said as she walked away.

The mason did not reply, and his face exhibited no emotion over this dire threat.

After considerable search Adelle found the contractor and made her complaint against the mason.

"I warned him not to hurt the shrubs and he kept right on. Please discharge him at once."

The contractor, who had not been long away from the trowel and mortar himself, frowned.

"He's a good worker, ma'am," he protested. "It ain't always you can get a man like him out on a country job. Happens there is a building strike in the city, and he needed the work, so he came. And he's been steady, which is more than most masons."

"He's impudent," Adelle asserted with an air of finality.

"Very well, ma'am," the contractor said reluctantly. "I'll fire him to-night."

And Adelle thereupon went back to the house, gratified that she had enforced discipline, not hearing the contractor's profanity about meddlesome women. Later on the same day after the workmen had left,--they knocked off from their eight hours while the sun was still high in the heavens,--Adelle was wandering over the place, idly looking for a suitable location for a tennis-court. The doctor had told her to take some active exercise like tennis to prevent becoming unduly stout. And Archie had picked out a site below the new house on fairly level ground, but Adelle wanted to have the court cut out of the steep hillside above the pool. Having found what she considered to be the right spot, which would necessitate much expensive excavation and building of retaining walls, she followed a little worn path through the eucalyptus grove over the brow of the hill, curious to discover where it led. After a time she emerged on the other side of the hill, and getting through the barbed wire fence that marked the boundary of her own estate, she followed the path along the farther side of the slope through a clearing in the woods to an open field. From this side there was a wild prospect westwards to the low haze which she knew indicated the presence of the Pacific. The country on this slope of the hills seemed wild and uninhabited. Adelle did not remember ever to have been in the place and wondered if it was accessible by motor. At the farther end of the field there was one of the tar-paper shacks that the workmen put up for themselves, and the path evidently led to this hut. Usually these shacks were huddled together in bunches nearer the town, within easy reach of shop and saloon, but this one stood all alone on the edge of the clearing. A man was bending over a tin basin before the door, apparently washing out some clothes. As Adelle approached, he looked up from his washing and Adelle recognized the impertinent stone mason. He looked at her coolly, as if this time she were trespassing on his domain, and as she came leisurely down the path, trying to ignore his presence, he calmly threw out the dirty water from his pan on the path and went into his shack, pulling the door to after him with a bang. Adelle suspected the smile of contempt upon his face as he recognized her. She did not like the movement he had made in throwing the dirty water from his washpan directly in her path, although she was some distance away. Probably by this time he had learned his fate and took this means of testifying his resentment. The color rose in her pale face. She was not a proud woman, had no large amount of that self-importance which is the almost inevitable result of possessing wealth. But one of the penalties of property is that it cultivates whatever egotism and sensitiveness to its prerogative its owner is capable of. That one of the common laborers employed upon her estate should thus openly flout her made Adelle angry.

She thought first to turn back,--her walk was really aimless,--but she felt that the man would interpret such a retreat as due to his impertinence, would think that she was afraid of him. So she kept on past the shack into another open field. This was but the beginning of a wild treeless descent towards the ocean. The little tar-paper shack was the only sign of habitation in sight. There was an immense panorama of tumbled hill and valley bounded westward by the curving coast-line where the Pacific surges broke into faint lines of white spume, and where, she might reflect sadly, the ill-fated Seaboard Railroad should now be running trains to open up all this unoccupied land to civilization. However, wild and unsettled as it was, it offered an attractive view, and Adelle at once coveted it. They must buy up this tract over the hill--they should have looked into it when they had arranged to take Highcourt. Thus musing, she wandered on into the country until the sun dipping into the ocean warned her to return for dinner.

As she came back along the crest of the hill, she thought again of the discharged stone mason and for her did a large amount of reflection. Why was he living like this in a lonely shack far away from everybody? Why had he chosen to isolate himself from his fellow-workmen, who herded together near the town where they could slip down to the saloons after their work? He must be by nature a sullen, unsociable fellow. And what sort of life did he live in there, doing his own washing and probably also his own cooking? A kind of curiosity about the truculent stone mason and his way of life thus occupied Adelle's unspeculative mind. He was a good-looking young fellow, lean and well muscled. If he were dissipated, as she had been told all the laborers were, his excesses had not yet shown in his person. What would he do now that he had lost his job at Highcourt?

There he was sitting on the doorstep of his shack, smoking his pipe, his bare arms akimbo, staring out across the sunset void towards the sea. He seemed also to be meditating with himself upon something of interest. Upon Adelle's approach this time, he did not take himself off, but continued to smoke indifferently, totally ignoring her presence. As she came in front of him, she stopped involuntarily and found herself speaking to the mason.

"Good-evening," was all she said.

The man mumbled some reply, as if against his will. And then again the unexpected happened to Adelle,--at least the unforeseen. She asked him a question. It was a simple question, but it was entirely out of Adelle's character to make even the small advance implied by asking a question, especially to a servant who had been discharged on her orders.

"Do you live up here alone?"

"Have been living here," the man replied grudgingly, "till to-day. Don't expect to much longer," he added meaningly.

Adelle knew that he was referring to what had occurred earlier in the day between them, and throwing the blame for his dislodgment upon her.

"What are you going to do?" she asked after a pause.

He looked at her with mild astonishment for her question in his blue eyes, then said,--

"Donno exactly--get drunk, maybe," and he glanced at her truculently.

Adelle did not know why she went on talking to the man, but her curiosity was thoroughly aroused and the questions popped unexpectedly into her mind.

"Why did you kill that shrub when I asked you not to put the stone upon it?" she demanded next.

The man looked at her for a moment with an expression of mingled surprise, dislike, and amusement.

"Asked me! You ordered me."

"Why did you do it?" Adelle repeated, ignoring this subtle distinction.

"Guess I felt like it," he replied evasively. "I don't take no orders except from my boss," he grumbled. "Don't like no interference."

"But it's my place--you were working for me!" Adelle rejoined convincingly.

"And," the mason demanded bluntly, "who in hell are you, anyway?"

Adelle had not heard such direct language from a man for a good many years, although Archie sometimes hinted the same thing in slightly more polished language. At first she was staggered and thought she had made a mistake in giving this man another opportunity to insult her. But Adelle, thanks to her origin, was not easily insulted. She stayed on--to hear more.

"You've got a big pile of money and that place and lots of servants and motors and all the rest," the mason went on to explain. "But that's no reason you should go bossing around my job 'bout what you don't know nothing. I get my orders from the boss, my boss--see? And I know how to lay a wall as good as any man--and your damned bushes shouldn't been there."

"You needn't be insulting," Adelle gasped with an attempt at dignity.

"Insultin'!" the man blazed. "Who's insultin'? It's you who are insultin' to God's earth--rich folks like you who've got more money that ain't yours by rights than you know what to do with. You think because you pay the bill you own the earth and every man on it. But you don't--not everybody! And the quicker you and your kind learn that the easier it will be for all of us."

This was what Major Pound meant by "anarchy among the working-classes." She had often heard him and Nelson Carhart deplore this,--using interchangeably the two dread terms, "socialism" and "anarchy." Both the gentlemen were of the opinion that "before we see an end to this spirit in the working-classes, we shall have bloodshed." But it was the first time Adelle had met the thing face to face, and it gave her a faint thrill. She tried to think of some of Major Pound's excellent arguments directed against the "anarchy" of the laboring-classes.

"You're paid good wages, very high wages," she said after a time, remembering that that was one of the grievances gentlemen most often complained of--that laborers were paid altogether too much, thanks to the unions, so that no profit was left for the men who supplied capital, and also that they did less work and poorer work than they had once done when they got only half the wages now paid.

"You think five dollars a day is big money, don't you? It wouldn't go far to fit you out!" He nodded at Adelle's rich dress. "It would hardly get you a dinner--wouldn't pay for the booze your husband will drink to-night."

Adelle winced at this shot, because it was only too evident to the servants and the men about the place that Archie drank too much at times. How could she complain of the workingman's drinking and wasting his money, which was the next argument she remembered from her neighbors' repertory, when her own husband drank more than was good for him and many of the men they knew socially did the same?

"It's no thanks to you rich people we get big pay either," the man continued. "You'd like mighty well to cut it down to nothing if you could get your work done."

That was perfectly true. All their crowd at Bellevue were perpetually complaining of the high wages they had to pay. They gave it as an excuse for all sorts of petty meanness. Adelle felt that Major Pound would have the suitable reply to the mason's argument, but she could not remember it.

"Five dollars a day for a day's hard work ain't so much either, when you think how many days in the year there's nothing doing for one reason or another. Last year I only had four months' work all told on account of the strikes."

"Yes," Adelle joined in eagerly, feeling that this ground was familiar and safe, "but the strikes were your own fault, weren't they? You didn't have to strike?"

For reply the mason looked wearily at her, and rising from his seat on the doorstep with a gesture remarked,--

"Well, I can't stay here gassin' all night, lady. I must hike along soon to get the Frisco train.... What do you care about it anyway, whether the strikes are our fault or not? You've got plenty of the stuff, and we little folks ain't got nothin' but what we earn, and that ought to satisfy you. We must work for you sometimes, and you don't have to do a damn thing for anybody no times. You've got the luck, and we ain't! See? And that's about all there is to it."

Adelle felt that so far as her own case went, the man had come remarkably near the truth. The mason turned, with an afterthought.

"And I'm not whinin' 'bout it neither, remember that! I can always earn enough to keep me goin' and get whiskey when I want it."

He said it with a touch of pride, his workman's boast that he was beholden to no one for meat or drink. It was more than Archie could say now or at any time in his life.

"Are you married?" Adelle asked, feeling that if there was a woman in the situation another line of argument might be used.

"Married! Hell, no! What do I want of being married?"

Married men, Adelle had heard, were likely to be steadier workers than the unmarried. Also more what her class called "moral."

"I should think you would want to have your own home and children in it," she ventured.

The mason gave her an ironical look full of meaning.

"That would sure be nice, if I could always give 'em plenty to eat and education, the same as you can. But what can a man do with a wife when he's here to-day and off to the other end of the land to-morrow lookin' for a job? A steady job in one place where it's fit for a woman to live ain't to be found every day.... A workingman who marries, unless he's got money in the bank and a sure payin' job that'll last, is a fool or worse. What good is it to bring children into the world to be like him or maybe worse?"

Adelle had no reply to this blunt logic. Marriage, he seemed to think, was one of the privileges of the rich class, which she was sure ought not to be so.

"The trouble with the workingman, ma'am, is that he has done that too long,--got families that had to live the best they could, any old way, and take any old job they could get. That's what's made it easy goin' for you! But the workingman is learnin' a thing or two. Men like me won't get married, nor have children to slave for the rich."

"What do the girls do?" Adelle asked, thinking of her own fate if she had been left in the Church Street rooming-house.

The mason shrugged his shoulders and came out with another brutality.

"Some of 'em go into the houses for your men to use--there's always that for 'em," he added, with a disagreeable laugh. "No, ma'am, I tell you until things are made more right in this world, it's better for a poor man to get along the best he can without draggin' a woman after him and a lot of helpless children."

"I didn't know it was as bad as that," Adelle remarked helplessly.

"I guess, ma'am, there are a good many things about life you don't know."

"That's so," Adelle admitted honestly.

"But I know!" the mason exclaimed with rising excitement. "I've seen it over and over, everywhere. I've seen it in my own family," he said in a burst of bitter confidence. "There were eight of us and we were only middling poor until father died. The old man was a carpenter, up north in Sacramento County. He had a small place outside of town and we raised some stuff. But he got sick and died, when he weren't forty, and mother had the whole eight of us on her hands. I was just twelve and my oldest brother fifteen,--he was the only one could earn a dollar. We got on somehow, those that lived. Two of my sisters are married to farmers and there's another--well, she's the other thing." He stopped to look belligerently at Adelle as if she had somehow to do with it. "She was married to a workingman, good enough, I guess, but he got out of work and heard of something up north and never came back.... We boys scattered around where we could get work. Two of us is married and got families. Guess they wish often enough they hadn't, too!"

Adelle was absorbed by the mason's personal statement. She had forgotten by this time her first self-consciousness in talking to the discharged workman, and he, too, seemed less truculent, as if he enjoyed letting off steam and stating his point of view to his ex-employer.

"How old are you?" Adelle asked.

"Twenty-eight," the mason replied.

That was only a few years older than Adelle herself, but she recognized that the man's experience of living had been far more than hers, also deeper, so that he was justified in having opinions on the serious things of life. Wealth, she might think, was not the only road to "a full life" so much talked of in her circle.

"Have you always been a stone mason?" she wanted to know.

"Pretty much ever since I could lift a stone. An old feller took me from mother to work for my keep when I was fourteen. He used to do some mason work, and he knew how to lay stone--none better! He learned his trade back East where he come from. He was one of the real forty-niners, and knew my grandfather's folks--they all came to California the same time.... I've been all over this country, up and down the Coast, to Alasky and over in Nevada, at Carson City; drilling for oil, too, south. Oh, I've seen things," he mused complacently, puffing at his pipe and scratching his bare arms that were as smooth and brown as fine bronze. "And I tell you there ain't much in it for the laboring-man, no matter what wages he gets, unless he's got extry luck, which most of 'em ain't. No wonder he goes after booze when he has the chance. What's there in it for him anyhow?"

Adelle, who had not been educated to philanthropy and social service, did not attempt to answer this difficult question.

"Not that I booze often," the mason explained with pride. "I reckon not to make a hog of myself, but when you've been off on a job for months, working all day long six days in the week in the heat and dust, you accumulate a thirst and a devilment in you that needs letting out."

He grinned at Adelle as if he felt that she might be sympathetic with his simple point of view and added,--

"I guess that's what made me sassy to you this morning!"

It was his sole apology. They both laughed, accepting it as such, and Adelle, to shift the topic, remarked,--

"You've got a nice place up here for your house."

The mason wrinkled his lips against the suggestion of sentiment.

"The shack's all right--kind of fur to tote supplies over the hill. But I can't stand those dagoes and their dirty ways. They have too many boarders where they live."

His American ancestry betrayed itself thus in his selection of an exclusive position for his bunk. The conversation seemed to have come to a natural conclusion, but Adelle did not start. At last she said what she had had in mind for some time,--

"You'd better stay here--come back to work Monday."

"I don't know as I want to," the mason replied, with a touch of his former truculency. "I can get all the work I want most anywheres."

"I'll speak to Mr. Ferguson about it," Adelle said. "Good-night!"

She could not do more, she thought, as she hurried along the path, although she was unreasonably anxious not to have the young stone mason leave, more anxious than she had been that morning to have him discharged for his insolence to her. When she was about to enter the wood, she turned and looked back at the shack. She hoped that he was not going to start on a spree. The mason, who had been sitting on the step where she had left him, rose as if he had come to a sudden resolution and marched into the shack. Adelle felt sure that he had made up his mind to go to San Francisco and get his "booze." She divined the craving in him for excitement, some relief from his toilsome hours under the hot sun. Possibly he had fought against this desire all the summer, restrained from breaking loose by a prudence which she had defeated by arbitrarily discharging him from his job and could not so easily restore with her change of whim. She did not feel any personal blame for his action, however, nor did she blame him for yielding to this gross temptation, as her more conservative neighbors might, although they sometimes yielded themselves both to drink and the stock market to stimulate their nerves. She merely hoped that he would think better of his purpose. For the man interested her, and before she dressed for dinner she sent a servant to the village with a note for the contractor, asking him to reengage the discharged stone mason and be sure that he came back to work on the Monday. _

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