The Octopus, by Frank Norris

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THE OCTOPUS
A Story of California

by Frank Norris

Book 1

CHAPTER I

Just after passing Caraher's saloon, on the County Road that ran
south from Bonneville, and that divided the Broderson ranch from
that of Los Muertos, Presley was suddenly aware of the faint and
prolonged blowing of a steam whistle that he knew must come from
the railroad shops near the depot at Bonneville. In starting out
from the ranch house that morning, he had forgotten his watch,
and was now perplexed to know whether the whistle was blowing for
twelve or for one o'clock. He hoped the former. Early that
morning he had decided to make a long excursion through the
neighbouring country, partly on foot and partly on his bicycle,
and now noon was come already, and as yet he had hardly started.
As he was leaving the house after breakfast, Mrs. Derrick had
asked him to go for the mail at Bonneville, and he had not been
able to refuse.

He took a firmer hold of the cork grips of his handlebars--the
road being in a wretched condition after the recent hauling of
the crop--and quickened his pace. He told himself that, no
matter what the time was, he would not stop for luncheon at the
ranch house, but would push on to Guadalajara and have a Spanish
dinner at Solotari's, as he had originally planned.

There had not been much of a crop to haul that year. Half of the
wheat on the Broderson ranch had failed entirely, and Derrick
himself had hardly raised more than enough to supply seed for the
winter's sowing. But such little hauling as there had been had
reduced the roads thereabouts to a lamentable condition, and,
during the dry season of the past few months, the layer of dust
had deepened and thickened to such an extent that more than once
Presley was obliged to dismount and trudge along on foot, pushing
his bicycle in front of him.

It was the last half of September, the very end of the dry
season, and all Tulare County, all the vast reaches of the San
Joaquin Valley--in fact all South Central California, was bone
dry, parched, and baked and crisped after four months of
cloudless weather, when the day seemed always at noon, and the
sun blazed white hot over the valley from the Coast Range in the
west to the foothills of the Sierras in the east.

As Presley drew near to the point where what was known as the
Lower Road struck off through the Rancho de Los Muertos, leading
on to Guadalajara, he came upon one of the county watering-tanks,
a great, iron-hooped tower of wood, straddling clumsily on its
four uprights by the roadside. Since the day of its completion,
the storekeepers and retailers of Bonneville had painted their
advertisements upon it. It was a landmark. In that reach of
level fields, the white letters upon it could be read for miles.
A watering-trough stood near by, and, as he was very thirsty,
Presley resolved to stop for a moment to get a drink.

He drew abreast of the tank and halted there, leaning his bicycle
against the fence. A couple of men in white overalls were
repainting the surface of the tank, seated on swinging platforms
that hung by hooks from the roof. They were painting a sign--an
advertisement. It was all but finished and read, "S. Behrman,
Real Estate, Mortgages, Main Street, Bonneville, Opposite the
Post Office." On the horse-trough that stood in the shadow of
the tank was another freshly painted inscription: "S. Behrman Has
Something To Say To You."

As Presley straightened up after drinking from the faucet at one
end of the horse-trough, the watering-cart itself laboured into
view around the turn of the Lower Road. Two mules and two
horses, white with dust, strained leisurely in the traces, moving
at a snail's pace, their limp ears marking the time; while
perched high upon the seat, under a yellow cotton wagon umbrella,
Presley recognised Hooven, one of Derrick's tenants, a German,
whom every one called "Bismarck," an excitable little man with a
perpetual grievance and an endless flow of broken English.

"Hello, Bismarck," said Presley, as Hooven brought his team to a
standstill by the tank, preparatory to refilling.

"Yoost der men I look for, Mist'r Praicely," cried the other,
twisting the reins around the brake. "Yoost one minute, you
wait, hey? I wanta talk mit you."

Presley was impatient to be on his way again. A little more time
wasted, and the day would be lost. He had nothing to do with the
management of the ranch, and if Hooven wanted any advice from
him, it was so much breath wasted. These uncouth brutes of
farmhands and petty ranchers, grimed with the soil they worked
upon, were odious to him beyond words. Never could he feel in
sympathy with them, nor with their lives, their ways, their
marriages, deaths, bickerings, and all the monotonous round of
their sordid existence.

"Well, you must be quick about it, Bismarck," he answered
sharply. "I'm late for dinner, as it is."

"Soh, now. Two minuten, und I be mit you." He drew down the
overhanging spout of the tank to the vent in the circumference of
the cart and pulled the chain that let out the water. Then he
climbed down from the seat, jumping from the tire of the wheel,
and taking Presley by the arm led him a few steps down the road.

"Say," he began. "Say, I want to hef some converzations mit you.
Yoost der men I want to see. Say, Caraher, he tole me dis
morgen--say, he tole me Mist'r Derrick gowun to farm der whole
demn rench hisseluf der next yahr. No more tenants. Say,
Caraher, he tole me all der tenants get der sach; Mist'r Derrick
gowun to work der whole demn rench hisseluf, hey? ME, I get der
sach alzoh, hey? You hef hear about dose ting? Say, me, I hef
on der ranch been sieben yahr--seven yahr. Do I alzoh----"

"You'll have to see Derrick himself or Harran about that,
Bismarck," interrupted Presley, trying to draw away. "That's
something outside of me entirely."

But Hooven was not to be put off. No doubt he had been
meditating his speech all the morning, formulating his words,
preparing his phrases.

"Say, no, no," he continued. "Me, I wanta stay bei der place;
seven yahr I hef stay. Mist'r Derrick, he doand want dot I
should be ge-sacked. Who, den, will der ditch ge-tend? Say, you
tell 'um Bismarck hef gotta sure stay bei der place. Say, you
hef der pull mit der Governor. You speak der gut word for me."

"Harran is the man that has the pull with his father, Bismarck,"
answered Presley. "You get Harran to speak for you, and you're
all right."

"Sieben yahr I hef stay," protested Hooven, "and who will der
ditch ge-tend, und alle dem cettles drive?"

"Well, Harran's your man," answered Presley, preparing to mount
his bicycle.

"Say, you hef hear about dose ting?"

"I don't hear about anything, Bismarck. I don't know the first
thing about how the ranch is run."

"UND DER PIPE-LINE GE-MEND," Hooven burst out, suddenly
remembering a forgotten argument. He waved an arm. "Ach, der
pipe-line bei der Mission Greek, und der waater-hole for dose
cettles. Say, he doand doo ut HIMSELLUF, berhaps, I doand tink."

"Well, talk to Harran about it."

"Say, he doand farm der whole demn rench bei hisseluf. Me, I
gotta stay."

But on a sudden the water in the cart gushed over the sides from
the vent in the top with a smart sound of splashing. Hooven was
forced to turn his attention to it. Presley got his wheel under
way.

"I hef some converzations mit Herran," Hooven called after him.
"He doand doo ut bei hisseluf, den, Mist'r Derrick; ach, no. I
stay bei der rench to drive dose cettles."

He climbed back to his seat under the wagon umbrella, and, as he
started his team again with great cracks of his long whip, turned
to the painters still at work upon the sign and declared with
some defiance:

"Sieben yahr; yais, sir, seiben yahr I hef been on dis rench.
Git oop, you mule you, hoop!"

Meanwhile Presley had turned into the Lower Road. He was now on
Derrick's land, division No. I, or, as it was called, the Home
ranch, of the great Los Muertos Rancho. The road was better
here, the dust laid after the passage of Hooven's watering-cart,
and, in a few minutes, he had come to the ranch house itself,
with its white picket fence, its few flower beds, and grove of
eucalyptus trees. On the lawn at the side of the house. he saw
Harran in the act of setting out the automatic sprinkler. In the
shade of the house, by the porch, were two or three of the
greyhounds, part of the pack that were used to hunt down jack-
rabbits, and Godfrey, Harran's prize deerhound.

Presley wheeled up the driveway and met Harran by the horse-
block. Harran was Magnus Derrick's youngest son, a very well-
looking young fellow of twenty-three or twenty-five. He had the
fine carriage that marked his father, and still further resembled
him in that he had the Derrick nose--hawk-like and prominent,
such as one sees in the later portraits of the Duke of
Wellington. He was blond, and incessant exposure to the sun had,
instead of tanning him brown, merely heightened the colour of his
cheeks. His yellow hair had a tendency to curl in a forward
direction, just in front of the ears.

Beside him, Presley made the sharpest of contrasts. Presley
seemed to have come of a mixed origin; appeared to have a nature
more composite, a temperament more complex. Unlike Harran
Derrick, he seemed more of a character than a type. The sun had
browned his face till it was almost swarthy. His eyes were a
dark brown, and his forehead was the forehead of the
intellectual, wide and high, with a certain unmistakable lift
about it that argued education, not only of himself, but of his
people before him. The impression conveyed by his mouth and chin
was that of a delicate and highly sensitive nature, the lips thin
and loosely shut together, the chin small and rather receding.
One guessed that Presley's refinement had been gained only by a
certain loss of strength. One expected to find him nervous,
introspective, to discover that his mental life was not at all
the result of impressions and sensations that came to him from
without, but rather of thoughts and reflections germinating from
within. Though morbidly sensitive to changes in his physical
surroundings, he would be slow to act upon such sensations, would
not prove impulsive, not because he was sluggish, but because he
was merely irresolute. It could be foreseen that morally he was
of that sort who avoid evil through good taste, lack of decision,
and want of opportunity. His temperament was that of the poet;
when he told himself he had been thinking, he deceived himself.
He had, on such occasions, been only brooding.

Some eighteen months before this time, he had been threatened
with consumption, and, taking advantage of a standing invitation
on the part of Magnus Derrick, had come to stay in the dry, even
climate of the San Joaquin for an indefinite length of time. He
was thirty years old, and had graduated and post-graduated with
high honours from an Eastern college, where he had devoted
himself to a passionate study of literature, and, more
especially, of poetry.

It was his insatiable ambition to write verse. But up to this
time, his work had been fugitive, ephemeral, a note here and
there, heard, appreciated, and forgotten. He was in search of a
subject; something magnificent, he did not know exactly what;
some vast, tremendous theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in
all the thundering progression of hexameters.

But whatever he wrote, and in whatever fashion, Presley was
determined that his poem should be of the West, that world's
frontier of Romance, where a new race, a new people--hardy,
brave, and passionate--were building an empire; where the
tumultuous life ran like fire from dawn to dark, and from dark to
dawn again, primitive, brutal, honest, and without fear.
Something (to his idea not much) had been done to catch at that
life in passing, but its poet had not yet arisen. The few
sporadic attempts, thus he told himself, had only touched the
keynote. He strove for the diapason, the great song that should
embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an
entire people, wherein all people should be included--they and
their legends, their folk lore, their fightings, their loves and
their lusts, their blunt, grim humour, their stoicism under
stress, their adventures, their treasures found in a day and
gambled in a night, their direct, crude speech, their generosity
and cruelty, their heroism and bestiality, their religion and
profanity, their self-sacrifice and obscenity--a true and
fearless setting forth of a passing phase of history, un-
compromising, sincere; each group in its proper environment; the
valley, the plain, and the mountain; the ranch, the range, and
the mine--all this, all the traits and types of every community
from the Dakotas to the Mexicos, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe,
gathered together, swept together, welded and riven together in
one single, mighty song, the Song of the West. That was what he
dreamed, while things without names--thoughts for which no man
had yet invented words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures,
colossal, monstrous, distorted-- whirled at a gallop through his
imagination.

As Harran came up, Presley reached down into the pouches of the
sun-bleached shooting coat he wore and drew out and handed him
the packet of letters and papers.

"Here's the mail. I think I shall go on."

"But dinner is ready," said Harran; "we are just sitting down."

Presley shook his head. "No, I'm in a hurry. Perhaps I shall
have something to eat at Guadalajara. I shall be gone all day."

He delayed a few moments longer, tightening a loose nut on his
forward wheel, while Harran, recognising his father's handwriting
on one of the envelopes, slit it open and cast his eye rapidly
over its pages.

"The Governor is coming home," he exclaimed, "to-morrow morning
on the early train; wants me to meet him with the team at
Guadalajara; AND," he cried between his clenched teeth, as he
continued to read, "we've lost the case."

"What case? Oh, in the matter of rates?"

Harran nodded, his eyes flashing, his face growing suddenly
scarlet.

"Ulsteen gave his decision yesterday," he continued, reading from
his father's letter. "He holds, Ulsteen does, that 'grain rates
as low as the new figure would amount to confiscation of
property, and that, on such a basis, the railroad could not be
operated at a legitimate profit. As he is powerless to legislate
in the matter, he can only put the rates back at what they
originally were before the commissioners made the cut, and it is
so ordered.' That's our friend S. Behrman again," added Harran,
grinding his teeth. "He was up in the city the whole of the time
the new schedule was being drawn, and he and Ulsteen and the
Railroad Commission were as thick as thieves. He has been up
there all this last week, too, doing the railroad's dirty work,
and backing Ulsteen up. 'Legitimate profit, legitimate profit,'"
he broke out. "Can we raise wheat at a legitimate profit with a
tariff of four dollars a ton for moving it two hundred miles to
tide-water, with wheat at eighty-seven cents? Why not hold us up
with a gun in our faces, and say, 'hands up,' and be done with
it?"

He dug his boot-heel into the ground and turned away to the house
abruptly, cursing beneath his breath.

"By the way," Presley called after him, "Hooven wants to see you.
He asked me about this idea of the Governor's of getting along
without the tenants this year. Hooven wants to stay to tend the
ditch and look after the stock. I told him to see you."

Harran, his mind full of other things, nodded to say he
understood. Presley only waited till he had disappeared indoors,
so that he might not seem too indifferent to his trouble; then,
remounting, struck at once into a brisk pace, and, turning out
from the carriage gate, held on swiftly down the Lower Road,
going in the direction of Guadalajara. These matters, these
eternal fierce bickerings between the farmers of the San Joaquin
and the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad irritated him and
wearied him. He cared for none of these things. They did not
belong to his world. In the picture of that huge romantic West
that he saw in his imagination, these dissensions made the one
note of harsh colour that refused to enter into the great scheme
of harmony. It was material, sordid, deadly commonplace. But,
however he strove to shut his eyes to it or his ears to it, the
thing persisted and persisted. The romance seemed complete up to
that point. There it broke, there it failed, there it became
realism, grim, unlovely, unyielding. To be true--and it was the
first article of his creed to be unflinchingly true--he could not
ignore it. All the noble poetry of the ranch--the valley--seemed
in his mind to be marred and disfigured by the presence of
certain immovable facts. Just what he wanted, Presley hardly
knew. On one hand, it was his ambition to portray life as he saw
it--directly, frankly, and through no medium of personality or
temperament. But, on the other hand, as well, he wished to see
everything through a rose-coloured mist--a mist that dulled all
harsh outlines, all crude and violent colours. He told himself
that, as a part of the people, he loved the people and
sympathised with their hopes and fears, and joys and griefs; and
yet Hooven, grimy and perspiring, with his perpetual grievance
and his contracted horizon, only revolted him. He had set
himself the task of giving true, absolutely true, poetical
expression to the life of the ranch, and yet, again and again, he
brought up against the railroad, that stubborn iron barrier
against which his romance shattered itself to froth and
disintegrated, flying spume. His heart went out to the people,
and his groping hand met that of a slovenly little Dutchman, whom
it was impossible to consider seriously. He searched for the
True Romance, and, in the end, found grain rates and unjust
freight tariffs.

"But the stuff is HERE," he muttered, as he sent his wheel
rumbling across the bridge over Broderson Creek. "The romance,
the real romance, is here somewhere. I'll get hold of it yet."

He shot a glance about him as if in search of the inspiration.
By now he was not quite half way across the northern and
narrowest corner of Los Muertos, at this point some eight miles
wide. He was still on the Home ranch. A few miles to the south
he could just make out the line of wire fence that separated it
from the third division; and to the north, seen faint and blue
through the haze and shimmer of the noon sun, a long file of
telegraph poles showed the line of the railroad and marked
Derrick's northeast boundary. The road over which Presley was
travelling ran almost diametrically straight. In front of him,
but at a great distance, he could make out the giant live-oak and
the red roof of Hooven's barn that stood near it.

All about him the country was flat. In all directions he could
see for miles. The harvest was just over. Nothing but stubble
remained on the ground. With the one exception of the live-oak
by Hooven's place, there was nothing green in sight. The wheat
stubble was of a dirty yellow; the ground, parched, cracked, and
dry, of a cheerless brown. By the roadside the dust lay thick
and grey, and, on either hand, stretching on toward the horizon,
losing itself in a mere smudge in the distance, ran the
illimitable parallels of the wire fence. And that was all; that
and the burnt-out blue of the sky and the steady shimmer of the
heat.

The silence was infinite. After the harvest, small though that
harvest had been, the ranches seemed asleep. It was as though
the earth, after its period of reproduction, its pains of labour,
had been delivered of the fruit of its loins, and now slept the
sleep of exhaustion.

It was the period between seasons, when nothing was being done,
when the natural forces seemed to hang suspended. There was no
rain, there was no wind, there was no growth, no life; the very
stubble had no force even to rot. The sun alone moved.

Toward two o'clock, Presley reached Hooven's place, two or three
grimy frame buildings, infested with a swarm of dogs. A hog or
two wandered aimlessly about. Under a shed by the barn, a
broken-down seeder lay rusting to its ruin. But overhead, a
mammoth live-oak, the largest tree in all the country-side,
towered superb and magnificent. Grey bunches of mistletoe and
festoons of trailing moss hung from its bark. From its lowest
branch hung Hooven's meat-safe, a square box, faced with wire
screens.

What gave a special interest to Hooven's was the fact that here
was the intersection of the Lower Road and Derrick's main
irrigating ditch, a vast trench not yet completed, which he and
Annixter, who worked the Quien Sabe ranch, were jointly
constructing. It ran directly across the road and at right
angles to it, and lay a deep groove in the field between Hooven's
and the town of Guadalajara, some three miles farther on.
Besides this, the ditch was a natural boundary between two
divisions of the Los Muertos ranch, the first and fourth.

Presley now had the choice of two routes. His objective point
was the spring at the headwaters of Broderson Creek, in the hills
on the eastern side of the Quien Sabe ranch. The trail afforded
him a short cut thitherward. As he passed the house, Mrs. Hooven
came to the door, her little daughter Hilda, dressed in a boy's
overalls and clumsy boots, at her skirts. Minna, her oldest
daughter, a very pretty girl, whose love affairs were continually
the talk of all Los Muertos, was visible through a window of the
house, busy at the week's washing. Mrs. Hooven was a faded,
colourless woman, middle-aged and commonplace, and offering not
the least characteristic that would distinguish her from a
thousand other women of her class and kind. She nodded to
Presley, watching him with a stolid gaze from under her arm,
which she held across her forehead to shade her eyes.

But now Presley exerted himself in good earnest. His bicycle
flew. He resolved that after all he would go to Guadalajara. He
crossed the bridge over the irrigating ditch with a brusque spurt
of hollow sound, and shot forward down the last stretch of the
Lower Road that yet intervened between Hooven's and the town. He
was on the fourth division of the ranch now, the only one whereon
the wheat had been successful, no doubt because of the Little
Mission Creek that ran through it. But he no longer occupied
himself with the landscape. His only concern was to get on as
fast as possible. He had looked forward to spending nearly the
whole day on the crest of the wooded hills in the northern corner
of the Quien Sabe ranch, reading, idling, smoking his pipe. But
now he would do well if he arrived there by the middle of the
afternoon. In a few moments he had reached the line fence that
marked the limits of the ranch. Here were the railroad tracks,
and just beyond--a huddled mass of roofs, with here and there an
adobe house on its outskirts--the little town of Guadalajara.
Nearer at hand, and directly in front of Presley, were the
freight and passenger depots of the P. and S. W., painted in the
grey and white, which seemed to be the official colours of all
the buildings owned by the corporation. The station was
deserted. No trains passed at this hour. From the direction of
the ticket window, Presley heard the unsteady chittering of the
telegraph key. In the shadow of one of the baggage trucks upon
the platform, the great yellow cat that belonged to the agent
dozed complacently, her paws tucked under her body. Three flat
cars, loaded with bright-painted farming machines, were on the
siding above the station, while, on the switch below, a huge
freight engine that lacked its cow-catcher sat back upon its
monstrous driving-wheels, motionless, solid, drawing long breaths
that were punctuated by the subdued sound of its steam-pump
clicking at exact intervals.

But evidently it had been decreed that Presley should be stopped
at every point of his ride that day, for, as he was pushing his
bicycle across the tracks, he was surprised to hear his name
called. "Hello, there, Mr. Presley. What's the good word?"

Presley looked up quickly, and saw Dyke, the engineer, leaning on
his folded arms from the cab window of the freight engine. But
at the prospect of this further delay, Presley was less troubled.
Dyke and he were well acquainted and the best of friends. The
picturesqueness of the engineer's life was always attractive to
Presley, and more than once he had ridden on Dyke's engine
between Guadalajara and Bonneville. Once, even, he had made the
entire run between the latter town and San Francisco in the cab.

Dyke's home was in Guadalajara. He lived in one of the
remodelled 'dobe cottages, where his mother kept house for him.
His wife had died some five years before this time, leaving him a
little daughter, Sidney, to bring up as best he could. Dyke
himself was a heavy built, well-looking fellow, nearly twice the
weight of Presley, with great shoulders and massive, hairy arms,
and a tremendous, rumbling voice.