by Jack London
CHAPTER V
Back in San Francisco, Daylight quickly added to his reputation In waysit was not an enviable reputation. Men were afraid of him. He becameknown as a fighter, a fiend, a tiger. His play was a ripping andsmashing one, and no one knew where or how his next blow would fall.The element of surprise was large. He balked on the unexpected, and,fresh from the wild North, his mind not operating in stereotypedchannels, he was able in unusual degree to devise new tricks andstratagems. And once he won the advantage, he pressed itremorselessly. "As relentless as a Red Indian," was said of him, andit was said truly.
On the other hand, he was known as "square." His word was as good ashis bond, and this despite the fact that he accepted nobody's word. Healways shied at propositions based on gentlemen's agreements, and a manwho ventured his honor as a gentleman, in dealing with Daylight,inevitably was treated to an unpleasant time. Daylight never gave hisown word unless he held the whip-hand. It was a case with the otherfellow taking it or nothing.
Legitimate investment had no place in Daylight's play. It tied up hismoney, and reduced the element of risk. It was the gambling side ofbusiness that fascinated him, and to play in his slashing mannerrequired that his money must be ready to hand. It was never tied upsave for short intervals, for he was principally engaged in turning itover and over, raiding here, there, and everywhere, a veritable pirateof the financial main. A five-per cent safe investment had noattraction for him; but to risk millions in sharp, harsh skirmish,standing to lose everything or to win fifty or a hundred per cent, wasthe savor of life to him. He played according to the rules of thegame, but he played mercilessly. When he got a man or a corporationdown and they squealed, he gouged no less hard. Appeals for financialmercy fell on deaf ears. He was a free lance, and had no friendlybusiness associations. Such alliances as were formed from time to timewere purely affairs of expediency, and he regarded his allies as menwho would give him the double-cross or ruin him if a profitable chancepresented. In spite of this point of view, he was faithful to hisallies. But he was faithful just as long as they were and no longer.The treason had to come from them, and then it was 'Ware Daylight.
The business men and financiers of the Pacific coast never forgot thelesson of Charles Klinkner and the California & Altamont Trust Company.Klinkner was the president. In partnership with Daylight, the pairraided the San Jose Interurban. The powerful Lake Power & ElectricLighting corporation came to the rescue, and Klinkner, seeing what hethought was the opportunity, went over to the enemy in the thick of thepitched battle. Daylight lost three millions before he was done withit, and before he was done with it he saw the California & AltamontTrust Company hopelessly wrecked, and Charles Klinkner a suicide in afelon's cell. Not only did Daylight lose his grip on San JoseInterurban, but in the crash of his battle front he lost heavily allalong the line. It was conceded by those competent to judge that hecould have compromised and saved much. But, instead, he deliberatelythrew up the battle with San Jose Interurban and Lake Power, and,apparently defeated, with Napoleonic suddenness struck at Klinkner. Itwas the last unexpected thing Klinkner would have dreamed of, andDaylight knew it. He knew, further, that the California & AltamontTrust Company has an intrinsically sound institution, but that justthen it was in a precarious condition due to Klinkner's speculationswith its money. He knew, also, that in a few months the Trust Companywould be more firmly on its feet than ever, thanks to those samespeculations, and that if he were to strike he must strike immediately."It's just that much money in pocket and a whole lot more," he wasreported to have said in connection with his heavy losses. "It's justso much insurance against the future. Henceforth, men who go in withme on deals will think twice before they try to double-cross me, andthen some."
The reason for his savageness was that he despised the men with whom heplayed. He had a conviction that not one in a hundred of them wasintrinsically square; and as for the square ones, he prophesied that,playing in a crooked game, they were sure to lose and in the long rungo broke. His New York experience had opened his eyes. He tore theveils of illusion from the business game, and saw its nakedness. Hegeneralized upon industry and society somewhat as follows:--
Society, as organized, was a vast bunco game. There were manyhereditary inefficients--men and women who were not weak enough to beconfined in feeble-minded homes, but who were not strong enough to beought else than hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Then there were the fools who took the organized bunco game seriously,honoring and respecting it. They were easy game for the others, whosaw clearly and knew the bunco game for what it was.
Work, legitimate work, was the source of all wealth. That was to say,whether it was a sack of potatoes, a grand piano, or a seven-passengertouring car, it came into being only by the performance of work. Wherethe bunco came in was in the distribution of these things after laborhad created them. He failed to see the horny-handed sons of toilenjoying grand pianos or riding in automobiles. How this came aboutwas explained by the bunco. By tens of thousands and hundreds ofthousands men sat up nights and schemed how they could get between theworkers and the things the workers produced. These schemers were thebusiness men. When they got between the worker and his product, theytook a whack out of it for themselves The size of the whack wasdetermined by no rule of equity; but by their own strength andswinishness. It was always a case of "all the traffic can bear." Hesaw all men in the business game doing this.
One day, in a mellow mood (induced by a string of cocktails and ahearty lunch), he started a conversation with Jones, the elevator boy.Jones was a slender, mop-headed, man-grown, truculent flame of anindividual who seemed to go out of his way to insult his passengers.It was this that attracted Daylight's interest, and he was not long infinding out what was the matter with Jones. He was a proletarian,according to his own aggressive classification, and he had wanted towrite for a living. Failing to win with the magazines, and compelledto find himself in food and shelter, he had gone to the little valleyof Petacha, not a hundred miles from Los Angeles. Here, toiling in theday-time, he planned to write and study at night. But the railroadcharged all the traffic would bear. Petacha was a desert valley, andproduced only three things: cattle, fire-wood, and charcoal. Forfreight to Los Angeles on a carload of cattle the railroad chargedeight dollars. This, Jones explained, was due to the fact that thecattle had legs and could be driven to Los Angeles at a cost equivalentto the charge per car load. But firewood had no legs, and the railroadcharged just precisely twenty-four dollars a carload.
This was a fine adjustment, for by working hammer-and-tongs through atwelve-hour day, after freight had been deducted from the selling priceof the wood in Los Angeles, the wood-chopper received one dollar andsixty cents. Jones had thought to get ahead of the game by turning hiswood into charcoal. His estimates were satisfactory. But the railroadalso made estimates. It issued a rate of forty-two dollars a car oncharcoal. At the end of three months, Jones went over his figures, andfound that he was still making one dollar and sixty cents a day.
"So I quit," Jones concluded. "I went hobbling for a year, and I gotback at the railroads. Leaving out the little things, I came acrossthe Sierras in the summer and touched a match to the snow-sheds. Theyonly had a little thirty-thousand-dollar fire. I guess that squared upall balances due on Petacha."
"Son, ain't you afraid to be turning loose such information?" Daylightgravely demanded.
"Not on your life," quoth Jones. "They can't prove it. You could sayI said so, and I could say I didn't say so, and a hell of a lot thatevidence would amount to with a jury."
Daylight went into his office and meditated awhile. That was it: allthe traffic would bear. From top to bottom, that was the rule of thegame; and what kept the game going was the fact that a sucker was bornevery minute. If a Jones were born every minute, the game wouldn'tlast very long. Lucky for the players that the workers weren't Joneses.
But there were other and larger pha
ses of the game. Little businessmen, shopkeepers, and such ilk took what whack they could out of theproduct of the worker; but, after all, it was the large business menwho formed the workers through the little business men. When all wassaid and done, the latter, like Jones in Petacha Valley, got no morethan wages out of their whack. In truth, they were hired men for thelarge business men. Still again, higher up, were the big fellows.They used vast and complicated paraphernalia for the purpose, on alarge scale of getting between hundreds of thousands of workers andtheir products. These men were not so much mere robbers as gamblers.And, not content with their direct winnings, being essentiallygamblers, they raided one another. They called this feature of thegame HIGH FINANCE. They were all engaged primarily in robbing theworker, but every little while they formed combinations and robbed oneanother of the accumulated loot. This explained thefifty-thousand-dollar raid on him by Holdsworthy and theten-million-dollar raid on him by Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer.And when he raided Panama Mail he had done exactly the same thing.Well, he concluded, it was finer sport robbing the robbers than robbingthe poor stupid workers.
Thus, all unread in philosophy, Daylight preempted for himself theposition and vocation of a twentieth-century superman. He found, withrare and mythical exceptions, that there was no noblesse oblige amongthe business and financial supermen. As a clever traveler hadannounced in an after-dinner speech at the Alta-Pacific, "There washonor amongst thieves, and this was what distinguished thieves fromhonest men." That was it. It hit the nail on the head. These modernsupermen were a lot of sordid banditti who had the successfuleffrontery to preach a code of right and wrong to their victims whichthey themselves did not practise. With them, a man's word was goodjust as long as he was compelled to keep it. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL wasonly applicable to the honest worker. They, the supermen, were abovesuch commandments. They certainly stole and were honored by theirfellows according to the magnitude of their stealings.
The more Daylight played the game, the clearer the situation grew.Despite the fact that every robber was keen to rob every other robber,the band was well organized. It practically controlled the politicalmachinery of society, from the ward politician up to the Senate of theUnited States. It passed laws that gave it privilege to rob. Itenforced these laws by means of the police, the marshals, the militiaand regular army, and the courts. And it was a snap. A superman'schiefest danger was his fellow-superman. The great stupid mass of thepeople did not count. They were constituted of such inferior clay thatthe veriest chicanery fooled them. The superman manipulated thestrings, and when robbery of the workers became too slow or monotonous,they turned loose and robbed one another.
Daylight was philosophical, but not a philosopher. He had never readthe books. He was a hard-headed, practical man, and farthest from himwas any intention of ever reading the books. He had lived life in thesimple, where books were not necessary for an understanding of life,and now life in the complex appeared just as simple. He saw throughits frauds and fictions, and found it as elemental as on the Yukon.Men were made of the same stuff. They had the same passions anddesires. Finance was poker on a larger scale. The men who played werethe men who had stakes. The workers were the fellows toiling forgrubstakes. He saw the game played out according to the everlastingrules, and he played a hand himself. The gigantic futility of humanityorganized and befuddled by the bandits did not shock him. It was thenatural order. Practically all human endeavors were futile. He hadseen so much of it. His partners had starved and died on the Stewart.Hundreds of old-timers had failed to locate on Bonanza and Eldorado,while Swedes and chechaquos had come in on the moose-pasture andblindly staked millions. It was life, and life was a savageproposition at best. Men in civilization robbed because they were somade. They robbed just as cats scratched, famine pinched, and frostbit.
So it was that Daylight became a successful financier. He did not goin for swindling the workers. Not only did he not have the heart forit, but it did not strike him as a sporting proposition. The workerswere so easy, so stupid. It was more like slaughtering fat hand-rearedpheasants on the English preserves he had heard about. The sport tohim, was in waylaying the successful robbers and taking their spoilsfrom them. There was fun and excitement in that, and sometimes theyput up the very devil of a fight. Like Robin Hood of old, Daylightproceeded to rob the rich; and, in a small way, to distribute to theneedy.
But he was charitable after his own fashion. The great mass of humanmisery meant nothing to him. That was part of the everlasting order.He had no patience with the organized charities and the professionalcharity mongers. Nor, on the other hand, was what he gave a consciencedole. He owed no man, and restitution was unthinkable. What he gavewas a largess, a free, spontaneous gift; and it was for those abouthim. He never contributed to an earthquake fund in Japan nor to anopen-air fund in New York City. Instead, he financed Jones, theelevator boy, for a year that he might write a book. When he learnedthat the wife of his waiter at the St. Francis was suffering fromtuberculosis, he sent her to Arizona, and later, when her case wasdeclared hopeless, he sent the husband, too, to be with her to the end.Likewise, he bought a string of horse-hair bridles from a convict in aWestern penitentiary, who spread the good news until it seemed toDaylight that half the convicts in that institution were making bridlesfor him. He bought them all, paying from twenty to fifty dollars eachfor them. They were beautiful and honest things, and he decorated allthe available wall-space of his bedroom with them.
The grim Yukon life had failed to make Daylight hard. It requiredcivilization to produce this result. In the fierce, savage game he nowplayed, his habitual geniality imperceptibly slipped away from him, asdid his lazy Western drawl. As his speech became sharp and nervous, sodid his mental processes. In the swift rush of the game he found lessand less time to spend on being merely good-natured. The change markedhis face itself.
The lines grew sterner. Less often appeared the playful curl of hislips, the smile in the wrinkling corners of his eyes. The eyesthemselves, black and flashing, like an Indian's, betrayed glints ofcruelty and brutal consciousness of power. His tremendous vitalityremained, and radiated from all his being, but it was vitality underthe new aspect of the man-trampling man-conqueror. His battles withelemental nature had been, in a way, impersonal; his present battleswere wholly with the males of his species, and the hardships of thetrail, the river, and the frost marred him far less than the bitterkeenness of the struggle with his fellows.
He still had recrudescence of geniality, but they were largelyperiodical and forced, and they were usually due to the cocktails hetook prior to meal-time. In the North, he had drunk deeply and atirregular intervals; but now his drinking became systematic anddisciplined. It was an unconscious development, but it was based uponphysical and mental condition. The cocktails served as an inhibition.Without reasoning or thinking about it, the strain of the office, whichwas essentially due to the daring and audacity of his ventures,required check or cessation; and he found, through the weeks andmonths, that the cocktails supplied this very thing. They constituteda stone wall. He never drank during the morning, nor in office hours;but the instant he left the office he proceeded to rear this wall ofalcoholic inhibition athwart his consciousness. The office becameimmediately a closed affair. It ceased to exist. In the afternoon,after lunch, it lived again for one or two hours, when, leaving it, herebuilt the wall of inhibition. Of course, there were exceptions tothis; and, such was the rigor of his discipline, that if he had adinner or a conference before him in which, in a business way, heencountered enemies or allies and planned or prosecuted campaigns, heabstained from drinking. But the instant the business was settled, hiseverlasting call went out for a Martini, and for a double-Martini atthat, served in a long glass so as not to excite comment.
