by Jack London
CHAPTER X
The time passed, and Daylight played on at the game. But the game hadentered upon a new phase. The lust for power in the mere gambling andwinning was metamorphosing into the lust for power in order to revenge.There were many men in San Francisco against whom he had registeredblack marks, and now and again, with one of his lightning strokes, heerased such a mark. He asked no quarter; he gave no quarter. Menfeared and hated him, and no one loved him, except Larry Hegan, hislawyer, who would have laid down his life for him. But he was the onlyman with whom Daylight was really intimate, though he was on terms offriendliest camaraderie with the rough and unprincipled following ofthe bosses who ruled the Riverside Club.
On the other hand, San Francisco's attitude toward Daylight hadundergone a change. While he, with his slashing buccaneer methods, wasa distinct menace to the more orthodox financial gamblers, he wasnevertheless so grave a menace that they were glad enough to leave himalone. He had already taught them the excellence of letting a sleepingdog lie. Many of the men, who knew that they were in danger of his bigbear-paw when it reached out for the honey vats, even made efforts toplacate him, to get on the friendly side of him. The Alta-Pacificapproached him confidentially with an offer of reinstatement, which hepromptly declined. He was after a number of men in that club, and,whenever opportunity offered, he reached out for them and mangled them.Even the newspapers, with one or two blackmailing exceptions, ceasedabusing him and became respectful. In short, he was looked upon as abald-faced grizzly from the Arctic wilds to whom it was consideredexpedient to give the trail. At the time he raided the steamshipcompanies, they had yapped at him and worried him, the whole pack ofthem, only to have him whirl around and whip them in the fiercestpitched battle San Francisco had ever known. Not easily forgotten wasthe Pacific Slope Seaman's strike and the giving over of the municipalgovernment to the labor bosses and grafters. The destruction ofCharles Klinkner and the California and Altamont Trust Company had beena warning. But it was an isolated case; they had been confident instrength in numbers--until he taught them better.
Daylight still engaged in daring speculations, as, for instance, at theimpending outbreak of the Japanese-Russian War, when, in the face ofthe experience and power of the shipping gamblers, he reached out andclutched practically a monopoly of available steamer-charters. Therewas scarcely a battered tramp on the Seven Seas that was not his ontime charter. As usual, his position was, "You've got to come and seeme"; which they did, and, to use another of his phrases, they "paidthrough the nose" for the privilege. And all his venturing andfighting had now but one motive. Some day, as he confided to Hegan,when he'd made a sufficient stake, he was going back to New York andknock the spots out of Messrs. Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer. He'dshow them what an all-around general buzz-saw he was and what a mistakethey'd made ever to monkey with him. But he never lost his head, andhe knew that he was not yet strong enough to go into death-grappleswith those three early enemies. In the meantime the black marksagainst them remained for a future easement day.
Dede Mason was still in the office. He had made no more overtures,discussed no more books and no more grammar. He had no active interestin her, and she was to him a pleasant memory of what had neverhappened, a joy, which, by his essential nature, he was barred fromever knowing. Yet, while his interest had gone to sleep and his energywas consumed in the endless battles he waged, he knew every trick ofthe light on her hair, every quick denote mannerism of movement, everyline of her figure as expounded by her tailor-made gowns. Severaltimes, six months or so apart, he had increased her salary, until nowshe was receiving ninety dollars a month. Beyond this he dared not go,though he had got around it by making the work easier. This he hadaccomplished after her return from a vacation, by retaining hersubstitute as an assistant. Also, he had changed his office suite, sothat now the two girls had a room by themselves.
His eye had become quite critical wherever Dede Mason was concerned.He had long since noted her pride of carriage. It was unobtrusive, yetit was there. He decided, from the way she carried it, that she deemedher body a thing to be proud of, to be cared for as a beautiful andvalued possession. In this, and in the way she carried her clothes, hecompared her with her assistant, with the stenographers he encounteredin other offices, with the women he saw on the sidewalks. "She's surewell put up," he communed with himself; "and she sure knows how todress and carry it off without being stuck on herself and withoutlaying it on thick."
The more he saw of her, and the more he thought he knew of her, themore unapproachable did she seem to him. But since he had no intentionof approaching her, this was anything but an unsatisfactory fact. Hewas glad he had her in his office, and hoped she'd stay, and that wasabout all.
Daylight did not improve with the passing years. The life was not goodfor him. He was growing stout and soft, and there was unwontedflabbiness in his muscles. The more he drank cocktails, the more hewas compelled to drink in order to get the desired result, theinhibitions that eased him down from the concert pitch of hisoperations. And with this went wine, too, at meals, and the longdrinks after dinner of Scotch and soda at the Riverside. Then, too,his body suffered from lack of exercise; and, from lack of decent humanassociations, his moral fibres were weakening. Never a man to hideanything, some of his escapades became public, such as speeding, and ofjoy-rides in his big red motor-car down to San Jose with companionsdistinctly sporty--incidents that were narrated as good fun andcomically in the newspapers.
Nor was there anything to save him. Religion had passed him by. "Along time dead" was his epitome of that phase of speculation. He wasnot interested in humanity. According to his rough-hewn sociology, itwas all a gamble. God was a whimsical, abstract, mad thing calledLuck. As to how one happened to be born--whether a sucker or arobber--was a gamble to begin with; Luck dealt out the cards, and thelittle babies picked up the hands allotted them. Protest was vain.Those were their cards and they had to play them, willy-nilly,hunchbacked or straight backed, crippled or clean-limbed, addle-patedor clear-headed. There was no fairness in it. The cards most pickedup put them into the sucker class; the cards of a few enabled them tobecome robbers. The playing of the cards was life--the crowd ofplayers, society.
The table was the earth, and the earth, in lumps and chunks, fromloaves of bread to big red motor-cars, was the stake. And in the end,lucky and unlucky, they were all a long time dead.
It was hard on the stupid lowly, for they were coppered to lose fromthe start; but the more he saw of the others, the apparent winners, theless it seemed to him that they had anything to brag about. They, too,were a long time dead, and their living did not amount to much. It wasa wild animal fight; the strong trampled the weak, and the strong, hehad already discovered,--men like Dowsett, and Letton, andGuggenhammer,--were not necessarily the best. He remembered his minercomrades of the Arctic. They were the stupid lowly, they did the hardwork and were robbed of the fruit of their toil just as was the oldwoman making wine in the Sonoma hills; and yet they had finer qualitiesof truth, and loyalty, and square-dealing than did the men who robbedthem. The winners seemed to be the crooked ones, the unfaithful ones,the wicked ones. And even they had no say in the matter. They playedthe cards that were given them; and Luck, the monstrous, mad-god thing,the owner of the whole shebang, looked on and grinned. It was he whostacked the universal card-deck of existence.
There was no justice in the deal. The little men that came, the littlepulpy babies, were not even asked if they wanted to try a flutter atthe game. They had no choice. Luck jerked them into life, slammedthem up against the jostling table, and told them: "Now play, damn you,play!" And they did their best, poor little devils. The play of someled to steam yachts and mansions; of others, to the asylum or thepauper's ward. Some played the one same card, over and over, and madewine all their days in the chaparral, hoping, at the end, to pull downa set of false teeth and a coffin. Others quit the game early, havingdrawn cards that call
ed for violent death, or famine in the Barrens, orloathsome and lingering disease. The hands of some called for kingshipand irresponsible and numerated power; other hands called for ambition,for wealth in untold sums, for disgrace and shame, or for women andwine.
As for himself, he had drawn a lucky hand, though he could not see allthe cards. Somebody or something might get him yet. The mad god,Luck, might be tricking him along to some such end. An unfortunate setof circumstances, and in a month's time the robber gang might bewar-dancing around his financial carcass. This very day a street-carmight run him down, or a sign fall from a building and smash in hisskull. Or there was disease, ever rampant, one of Luck's grimmestwhims. Who could say? To-morrow, or some other day, a ptomaine bug, orsome other of a thousand bugs, might jump out upon him and drag himdown. There was Doctor Bascom, Lee Bascom who had stood beside him aweek ago and talked and argued, a picture of magnificent youth, andstrength, and health. And in three days he was dead--pneumonia,rheumatism of the heart, and heaven knew what else--at the endscreaming in agony that could be heard a block away. That had beenterrible. It was a fresh, raw stroke in Daylight's consciousness. Andwhen would his own turn come? Who could say?
In the meantime there was nothing to do but play the cards he could seein his hand, and they were BATTLE, REVENGE, AND COCKTAILS. And Lucksat over all and grinned.
