The Octopus quotes

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.

‘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 tidewater, 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?

”

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.”

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.

yet, with all this, of an astonishing degree of intelligence, and possessed of an executive ability little short of positive genius. He was a ferocious worker, allowing himself no pleasures, and exacting the same degree of energy from all his subordinates.

He was widely hated, and as widely trusted.

Everyone spoke of his crusty temper and bullying disposition, invariably qualifying the statement with a commendation of his resources and capabilities. The devil of a driver, a hard man to get along with, obstinate, contrary, cantankerous; but brains! No doubt of that;

But Presley’s case was a notable exception. On no occasion was Annixter prepared to accept another man’s opinion without reserve. In conversation with him, it was almost impossible to make any direct statement, however trivial, that he would accept without either modification or open contradiction.

He had a passion for violent discussion.

He would argue upon every subject in the range of human knowledge, from astronomy to the tariff, from the doctrine of predestination to the height of a horse. Never would he admit himself to be mistaken;

Never would he admit himself to be mistaken; when cornered, he would intrench himself behind the remark, “

Yes, that’s all very well. In some ways, it is, and then, again, in some ways, it isn’t.

”

But since the first day the two had met, the shepherd’s face and bearing had, to his eyes, remained the same. At this moment, Presley was looking into the same face he had first seen many, many years ago.

It was a face stamped with an unspeakable sadness, a deathless grief, the permanent imprint of a tragedy long past, but yet a living issue.

Presley told himself that it was impossible to look long into Vanamee’s eyes without knowing that here was a man whose whole being had been at one time shattered and riven to its lowest depths, whose life had suddenly stopped at a certain moment of …

the primeval, epic life is here, here under our hands, in the desert, in the mountain, on the ranch, all over here, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe. It is the man who is lacking, the poet; we have been educated away from it all.

We are out of touch. We are out of tune.

”

A band had been crossing just at the moment of the engine’s passage. The pathos of it was beyond expression.

It was a slaughter, a massacre of innocents. The iron monster had charged full into the midst, merciless, inexorable.

To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended.

Continually there came into her pretty, wide-open eyes—the eyes of a young doe—a look of uneasiness, of distrust, and aversion.

Los Muertos frightened her.

She remembered the days of her young girlhood passed on a farm in eastern Ohio—five hundred acres, neatly partitioned into the water lot, the cow pasture, the corn lot, the barley field, and wheat farm; cosy, comfortable, homelike;

The onetime writing-teacher of a young ladies’ seminary, with her pretty deer-like eyes and delicate fingers, shrank from it. She did not want to look at so much wheat.

There was something vaguely indecent in the sight, this food of the people, this elemental force, this basic energy, weltering here under the sun in all the unconscious nakedness of a sprawling, primordial Titan.

The monotony of the ranch ate into her heart hour by hour, year by year. And with it all, when was she to see Rome, Italy, and the Bay of Naples? It was a different prospect truly.

He had had his experience with the timid little creature in the glove-cleaning establishment in Sacramento. That was enough.

Females! Rot! None of them in his, thank you.

he had seen Hilma Tree give him a look in the dairy. Aha, he saw through her! She was trying to get a hold on him, was she? He would show her. Wait till he saw her again.

No, sir. He would pack that girl off before he was a day older. He wouldn’t have that kind about the place. Not much! She’d have to get out. He would talk to old man Tree about it this afternoon.

Whatever happened, he insisted upon morality.

“And my dinner!” he suddenly exclaimed. “I’ve got to wait and go hungry—and maybe get sick again—while they carry on their disgusting lovemaking.”

he’s got his own men on the floor of the United States Senate. He has the whole thing organised like an army corps. What are you going to do?

He sits in his office in San Francisco and pulls the strings and we’ve got to dance.

”

One could not take a dozen steps upon the ranches without the brusque sensation that underfoot the land was alive; roused at last from its sleep, palpitating with the desire of reproduction.

Deep down there in the recesses of the soil, the great heart throbbed once more, thrilling with passion, vibrating with desire, offering itself to the caress of the plough, insistent, eager, imperious.

Dimly one felt the deep-seated trouble of the earth, the uneasy agitation of its members, the hidden tumult of its womb, demanding to be made fruitful, to reproduce, to disengage the eternal renascent germ of Life that stirred and struggled in its loins.

But now it was no longer parched with heat, cracked and warped by a merciless sun, powdered with dust. The rain had done its work; not a clod that was not swollen with fertility, not a fissure that did not exhale the sense of fecundity.

One could not take a dozen steps upon the ranches without the brusque sensation that underfoot the land was alive; roused at last from its sleep, palpitating with the desire of reproduction.

Deep down there in the recesses of the soil, the great heart throbbed once more, thrilling with passion, vibrating with desire, offering itself to the caress of the plough, insistent, eager, imperious.

Each of these ploughs held five shears, so that when the entire company was in motion, one hundred and seventy-five furrows were made at the same instant.

At a distance, the ploughs resembled a great column of field artillery.

Each driver was in his place, his glance alternating between his horses and the foreman nearest at hand. Other foremen, in their buggies or buckboards, were at intervals along the line, like battery lieutenants.

Everywhere throughout the great San Joaquin, unseen and unheard, a thousand ploughs up-stirred the land, tens of thousands of shears clutched deep into the warm, moist soil.

It was the long stroking caress, vigorous, male, powerful, for which the Earth seemed panting.

The heroic embrace of a multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown, warm flesh of the land that quivered responsive and passionate under this rude advance, so robust as to be almost an assault, so violent as to be veritably brutal.

I am only human. Her soul! That was beautiful, no doubt. But, again, it was something very vague, intangible, hardly more than a phrase.

But the touch of her hand was real, the sound of her voice was real, the clasp of her arms about my neck was real.

Oh,” he cried, shaken with a sudden wrench of passion, “give those back to me.

But the touch of her hand was real, the sound of her voice was real, the clasp of her arms about my neck was real. Oh,” he cried, shaken with a sudden wrench of passion, “give those back to me.

Tell your God to give those back to me⁠—the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, the clasp of her dear arms, real, real, and then you may talk to me of Heaven.

”

“Oh, believe, believe!” echoed the other. “What do I believe? I don’t know. I believe, or I don’t believe. I can remember what she was, but I cannot hope what she will be.

Hope, after all, is only memory seen reversed.

When I try to see her in another life—whatever you call it—in Heaven—beyond the grave—this vague place of yours; when I try to see her there, she comes to my imagination only as what she was, material, earthly, as I loved her. Imperfect, you say;

It’s that, that I want,” he exclaimed. “I don’t want her changed. I don’t want her spiritualised, exalted, glorified, celestial. I want her. I think it is only this feeling that has kept me from killing myself.

I would rather be unhappy in the memory of what she actually was, than be happy in the realisation of her transformed, changed, made celestial.

I am only human. Her soul! That was beautiful, no doubt. But, again, it was something very vague, intangible, hardly more than a phrase.

It had not returned to him empty-handed. It had come back, but now there was a change—mysterious, illusive. There were no words for this that had transpired. But for the moment, one thing only was certain.

The night was no longer voiceless, the dark was no longer empty.

Far off there, beyond the reach of vision, unlocalised, strange, a ripple had formed on the still black pool of the night, had formed, flashed one instant to the stars, then swiftly faded again. The night shut down once more. There was no sound—nothing stirred.

Beside it was a paper bag of dried prunes, and the limp volume of Copperfield, the place marked by a slip of paper torn from the edge of the bag.

Annixter slept soundly, making great work of the business, unable to take even his rest gracefully.

His eyes were shut so tight that the skin at their angles was drawn into puckers. Under his pillow, his two hands were doubled up into fists.

“Emerica? I doand know,” returned the other, insistently. “Dat’s my home yonder. Dat’s my Vaterland. Alle von we Shairmens yoost like dot. Shairmany, dot’s hell oaf some fine plaice, sure. Budt der

Vaterland iss vhair der home und der wife und kinder iss.

Eh? Yes? Voad? Ach, no. Me, I nef’r voad. I doand bodder der haid mit dose ting. I maig der wheat grow, und ged der braid fur der wife und Hilda, dot’s all. Dot’s me; dot’s Bismarck.”

There was a meeting. Annixter liked Dyke, as did everyone else in and about Bonneville. He paused now to shake hands with the discharged engineer and to ask about his little daughter, Sidney, to whom he knew Dyke was devotedly attached.

“Smartest little tad in Tulare County,” asserted Dyke.

“She’s getting prettier every day, Mr. Annixter. There’s a little tad that was just born to be a lady. Can recite the whole of ‘Snow Bound’ without ever stopping. You don’t believe that, maybe, hey? Well, it’s true.

At length Hilma found her speech. In her low voice, lower and more velvety than ever, she said:

“No⁠—I don’t like you at all.”

Then, as the tears suddenly overpowered her, she dashed a hand across her eyes, and ran from the room and out of doors.

“Yes—I know—but—but what bit it off?”

“Ah,” vociferated Osterman, “that’s just what you promised not to ask.”

The company doubled up with hilarity. Caraher leaned against the door, holding his sides, but Hooven, all abroad, unable to follow, gazed from face to face with a vacant grin, thinking it was still a question of his famous phrase.

There was a pause. The others waited for the rest of the story.

“Afterwards? Nothing afterwards. I never saw her again. Her name was Celestine.”

The company raised a chorus of derision, and Osterman cried ironically:

Annixter fulminated a vigorous protest.

“I am so warm!” murmured Hilma, fanning herself with her handkerchief;

“and, oh! such a good time as I have had! I was so afraid that I would be a wallflower and sit up by mamma and papa the whole evening;

Annixter hardly moved. He stood some thirty paces from the buster, his hands still in his coat pockets, his eyes glistening, watchful.

Excitable and turbulent in trifling matters, when actual bodily danger threatened he was of an abnormal quiet.

“I’m watching you,” cried the other. “Don’t make any mistake about that. Keep your hands in your coat pockets, if you’d like to live a little longer, understand?

“Wh‑a‑a‑t!” he exclaimed; “wh‑a‑a‑t did you say? Why, I guess you must be looking for trouble; that’s what I guess.”

“There’s where you’re wrong, m’son,” muttered Annixter, partly to Delaney, partly to himself. “If I was looking for trouble there wouldn’t be any guesswork about it.”

With the words he began firing. Delaney had hardly entered the barn before Annixter’s plan had been formed. Long since his revolver was in the pocket of his coat, and he fired now through the coat itself, without withdrawing his hands.

“Well, where did you learn to shoot that way?” someone in the crowd demanded. Annixter moved his shoulders with a gesture of vast unconcern.

“Oh,” he observed carelessly, “it’s not my shooting that ever worried me, m’son.”

The crowd gaped with delight. There was a great wagging of heads.

“Well … what do you think of it all?”

“I think,” answered Vanamee slowly, “I think that there was a dance in Brussels the night before Waterloo.”

There was the land grab. His withdrawal from an unholy cause would mean the weakening, perhaps the collapse, of another cause that he believed to be righteous as truth itself. He was hopelessly caught in the mesh.

Wrong seemed indissolubly knitted into the texture of Right.

He was blinded, dizzied, overwhelmed, caught in the current of events, and hurried along he knew not where. He resigned himself.

and S.W. Railroad. Every State has its own grievance. If it is not a railroad trust, it is a sugar trust, or an oil trust, or an industrial trust, that exploits the People, because the People allow it.

The indifference of the People is the opportunity of the despot.

It is as true as that the whole is greater than the part, and the maxim is so old that it is trite—it is laughable.

The Chinaman, in the robes of a mandarin, lectured on Confucius. The Armenian, in fez and baggy trousers, spoke of the Unspeakable Turk. The mandolin player, dressed like a bull fighter, held musical conversaziones, interpreting the peasant songs of Andalusia.

It was the Fake, the eternal, irrepressible Sham; glib, nimble, ubiquitous, tricked out in all the paraphernalia of imposture, an endless defile of charlatans that passed interminably before the gaze of the city

, marshalled by “lady presidents,” exploited by clubs of women, by literary societies, reading circles, and culture organisations. The attention the Fake received, the time devoted to it, the money which it absorbed, were incredible. It was all one that impostor after impostor was exposed;

Mrs. Cedarquist was busy from morning until night. One after another, she was introduced to newly arrived fakirs. To each poet, to each litterateur, to each professor she addressed the same question:

“How long have you known you had this power?”

She spent her days in one quiver of excitement and jubilation. She was “in the movement.” The people of the city were awakening to a Realisation of the Beautiful, to a sense of the higher needs of life.

… and Cedarquist, as he said goodbye to Presley, looked first at the retreating figures of the ranchers, then at the gayly dressed throng of beautiful women and debonair young men, and indicating the whole scene with a single gesture, said, smiling sadly as he spoke:

“Not a city, Presley, not a city, but a Midway Plaisance.”

of the slowness of the work on the irrigating ditch, and, as a matter of course, of the general hard times.

“Miss Hilma,” he said abruptly, “never you marry a ranchman. He’s never out of trouble.”

Hilma gasped, her eyes widening till the full round of the pupil was disclosed. Instantly, a certain, inexplicable guiltiness overpowered her with incredible confusion. Her hands trembled as she pressed the bundle of cresses into a hard ball between her palms.

S. Behrman emphasised each word of his reply with a tap of one forefinger on the counter before him:

“All⁠—the⁠—traffic⁠—will⁠—bear.”

The ex-engineer stepped back a pace, his fingers on the ledge of the counter, to steady himself. He felt himself grow pale, his heart became a mere leaden weight in his chest, inert, refusing to beat.

This poor, crude fellow, harsh, hard, narrow, with his unlovely nature, his fierce truculency, his selfishness, his obstinacy, abruptly knew that all the sweetness of life, all the great vivifying eternal force of humanity had burst into life within him.

The little seed, long since planted, gathering strength quietly, had at last germinated.

Then as the realisation of this hardened into certainty, in the growing light of the new day that had just dawned for him, Annixter uttered a cry. Now at length, he knew the meaning of it all.

She stood before him, a Vision realised—a dream come true. She emerged from out the invisible. He beheld her, a figure of gold and pale vermilion, redolent of perfume, poised motionless in the faint saffron sheen of the new-risen moon.

She, a creation of sleep, was herself asleep. She, a dream, was herself dreaming.

Called forth from out the darkness, from the grip of the earth, the embrace of the grave, from out the memory of corruption, she rose into light and life, divinely pure.

The Wheat! In the night it had come up. It was there, everywhere, from margin to margin of the horizon. The earth, long empty, teemed with green life. Once more the pendulum of the seasons swung in its mighty arc, from death back to life.

Life out of death, eternity rising from out dissolution.

There was the lesson. Angéle was not the symbol, but the proof of immortality. The seed dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth;

“

Oh, Death, where is thy sting? Oh, Grave, where is thy victory?

”

“Well,” insinuated Osterman, “what are you dallying ’round ’Frisco so much for?”

“Cat fur, to make kitten-breeches,” retorted Annixter with oracular vagueness.

Two weeks before this time, Annixter had come up to the city and had gone at once to a certain hotel on Bush Street, behind the First National Bank, that he knew was kept by a family connection of the Trees.

He could think of no words to say. The tears overflowed his eyes and ran down upon his cheeks. She drew away from him and held him a second at arm’s length, looking at him, and he saw that she, too, had been crying.

“I think,” he said, “we are a couple of softies.”

“No, no,” she insisted. “I want to cry and want you to cry, too. Oh, dear, I haven’t a handkerchief.”

“Fair black night, isn’t it?”

“Black as a pocket. Let’s see, you’re the party in upper and lower 9.”

Annixter caught at the back of the nearest seat, just in time to prevent a fall, and the conductor’s cash box was shunted off the surface of the plush seat and came clanking to the floor.

Then ensued an interminable period of silence. The entire train seemed deserted.

Helpless, bereft of its engine, a huge, decapitated monster it lay, halfway around a curve, rained upon, abandoned.

There was more fear in this last condition of affairs, more terror in the idea of this prolonged line of sleepers, with their nickelled fittings, their plate glass, their upholstery, vestibules, and the like, loaded down with people, lost and forgotten in the night and …

“And I thought,” cried Hilma, drawing back fearfully from the case of rifles, “and I thought it was a wedding present.”

And that was their homecoming, the end of their bridal trip.

Through the terror of the night, echoing with pistol shots, through that scene of robbery and murder, into this atmosphere of alarms, a manhunt organising, armed horsemen silhouetted against the horizons, cases of rifles where wedding presents should have been, Annixter brought his young wife …

“But the good work has been most auspiciously inaugurated,” continued Lyman. “Reforms so sweeping as the one contemplated cannot be accomplished in a single night.

Great things grow slowly, benefits to be permanent must accrue gradually.

Yet, in spite of all this, your commissioners have done much. Already the phalanx of the enemy is pierced, already his armour is dinted.

As if human agency could affect this colossal power! What were these heated, tiny squabbles, this feverish, small bustle of mankind, this minute swarming of the human insect, to the great, majestic, silent ocean of the Wheat itself!

Indifferent, gigantic, resistless, it moved in its appointed grooves.

Men, Liliputians, gnats in the sunshine, buzzed impudently in their tiny battles, were born, lived through their little day, died, and were forgotten; while the Wheat, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, grew steadily under the night, alone with the stars and with God.

I wish I could have talked to you and your friends before you went into that Sacramento fight. I could have told you then how little chance you had. When will you people realise that you can’t buck against the Railroad?

Why, Magnus, it’s like me going out in a paper boat and shooting peas at a battleship.

”

Only its righteousness had made his wrath terrible; only the justice of his anger had made him feared. Now the foundation was gone from under his feet; he had knocked it away himself.

Three times feeble was he whose quarrel was unjust.

Before this country editor, this paid speaker of the Railroad, he stood, convicted. The man had him at his mercy. The detected briber could not resent an insult. Genslinger rose, smoothing his hat.

… the old school, Roman in his iron integrity, abandoning a career rather than enter the “new politics,” had, in one moment of weakness, hazarding all, even honour, on a single stake, taking great chances to achieve great results, swept away the work of a lifetime.

Gambler that he was, he had at last chanced his highest stake, his personal honour, in the greatest game of his life, and had lost.

It was Presley’s morbidly keen observation that first noticed the evidence of a new trouble in the Governor’s face and manner. Presley was sure that Lyman’s defection had not so upset him.

“Why is it,” he observed, “that as soon as a man is about to get married, he buys himself pale blue suspenders, silk ones? Think of it. You, Buck Annixter, with sky-blue, silk suspenders.

It ought to be a strap and a nail.

”

“He’s hit,” cried Delaney. “I know I hit him. He can’t go far now. After him again. He won’t dare go through Bonneville.”

It was true. Dyke had stood between cab and tender throughout all the duel, exposed, reckless, thinking only of attack and not of defence

, and a bullet from one of the pistols had grazed his hip. How serious was the wound he did not know, but he had no thought of giving up.

S. Behrman watched the fight complacently.

“That all may show obstinacy,” he commented, “but it don’t show common sense.”

Yet, however Dyke might throw off the clutches and fettering embraces that encircled him, however he might disintegrate and scatter the band of foes that heaped themselves upon him, however he might gain one instant of comparative liberty, someone of his assailants always hung, doggedly, …

“They own us, these taskmasters of ours; they own our homes, they own our legislatures. We cannot escape from them. There is no redress.

We are told we can defeat them by the ballot-box. They own the ballot-box.

We are told that we must look to the courts for redress; they own the courts. We know them for what they are—ruffians in politics, ruffians in finance, ruffians in law, ruffians in trade, bribers, swindlers, and tricksters.

“

They swindle a nation of a hundred million and call it Financiering; they levy a blackmail and call it Commerce; they corrupt a legislature and call it Politics; they bribe a judge and call it Law; they hire blacklegs to carry out their plans and call it Organisation; they prostitute the honour of a State and call it Competition.

“And this is America. We fought Lexington to free ourselves; we fought Gettysburg to free others. Yet the yoke remains; we have only shifted it to the other shoulder. We talk of liberty—oh, the farce of it, oh, the folly of it!

“For we conceive of Liberty in the statues we raise to her as a beautiful woman, crowned, victorious, in bright armour and white robes, a light in her uplifted hand—a serene, calm, conquering goddess. Oh, the farce of it, oh, the folly of it!

Liberty is not a crowned goddess, beautiful, in spotless garments, victorious, supreme.

Liberty is the Man In the Street, a terrible figure, rushing through powder smoke, fouled with the mud and ordure of the gutter, bloody, rampant, brutal, yelling curses, in one hand a smoking rifle, in the other, a blazing torch.

“I’m afraid I shall be very poor company, sir,” hazarded Presley. “There’s no ‘go,’ no life in me at all these days.

I am like a clock with a broken spring.

”

If you want to fasten the blame of the affair at Los Muertos on any one person, you will make a mistake.

Blame conditions, not men.

”

Somehow, he could not deny it. It rang with the clear reverberation of truth. Was no one, then, to blame for the horror at the irrigating ditch? Forces, conditions, laws of supply and demand—were these then the enemies, after all?

Not enemies; there was no malevolence in Nature. Colossal indifference only, a vast trend toward appointed goals.

Nature was, then, a gigantic engine, a vast cyclopean power, huge, terrible, a leviathan with a heart of steel, knowing no compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance;

“I?” she cried. “

Oh, I’ve gone to hell. It was either that or starvation.

”

She was dumb, bewildered, stupid, animated but by a single impulse.

She clung to life, and to the life of her little daughter Hilda, with the blind tenacity of purpose of a drowning cat.

Thus, when ordered to move on by the officer, she had silently obeyed, not even attempting to explain her situation. She walked away to the next street-crossing.