“We understand you are to be congratulated on the indictment of Senator Jennings,” he said brightly to Bierce. “Congratulations from the very top, if you know what I mean.”
“Tell Mr. Huntington that I could not be more gratified,” Bierce said, leaning back in his chair. “The Girtcrest Corridor Giveaway will have to find a new sponsor.”
“Yes, that will be some trouble.” Smith snapped his fingers to show how much. He took from his pocket a folded sheet of paper, as Lawyer Curtis had done, but this was no list of philanthropies.
“The investigator investigated!” he announced. “These items!” He held up a single finger.
“The real owner of The Hornet was—until recently!—C. P. Gaines, who is also one of the owners of the Spring Valley Water Company. The author of Tattle castigated the water works while it was advertised and promoted in other parts of the paper. The author of Tattle—all unknowing, we are certain—with his great popularity, thus acted as a shill for the very aqueous corruption he purported to be exposing. Is it not true?”
Bierce looked sour. “That is not news. I forced Charley Gaines to sell out.”
Smith held up a second finger. “Sold out to Robert Macgowan, whose brother Frank owns sugar plantations in the Hawaiian Islands. The funds for the purchase thus came from those very sugar planters whom Tattle has abused for their rape of the Sandwich Islands. The Hawaiian men enslaved on the plantations, the women in Mother Hubbards! Nor can we think the investment is a disinterested one. The Hornet is and will be editorializing and promoting favorable terms for Hawaiian sugar exports in the treaty that is presently being negotiated with King Kalakaua, and denouncing the opponents of the annexation of Hawaii, which Tattle has continually opposed. Is this not true?”
Bierce did not speak.
“Thus again, the author of Tattle is shilling for the very opposite of the righteous—so righteous!—opinions he appears to hold.”
Smith smiled brightly, holding up a third finger. Bierce appeared to have sunk into his chair.
“It is reported from St. Helena that Mrs. Mollie Bierce, in her husband’s protracted absences, has been conducting a liaison with an attractive—and wealthy!—Danish gentleman there!”
Smith refolded his paper and returned it to his pocket. He beamed at Bierce. “Is it not true?”
“Get out,” Bierce said.
Smith executed a fancy little step as he went out the door.
“Huntington!” Bierce said, staring at his skull. “The swine of the century has beaten me!”
Later he sighed and said, “The bubble reputation!”
He went home to St. Helena that weekend.
On Monday he showed me the first paragraph of his final column. He had resigned his position despite Mr. Macgowan’s protestations and offers.
“We retire with an unweakened conviction of the rascality of the Railroad gang, the Water Company, the Chronicle newspaper, and the whole saints’-calendar of disreputables, detestables, insupportables, and moral canaille. We trust The Hornet will not extend to them a general amnesty.”
I said, “I don’t think you ought to let Huntington badger you into quitting the paper.”
He sat in his chair, hands in his lap, with his cold, composed face gazing at the skull. “I have considered retiring anyway,” he said. “I require the time to write some fiction.”
“A novel?”
“A bastard form,” he sneered. “No, I have a dozen stories in my head, short pieces. They concern ghosts for the most part.”
“ ‘The outward and visible sign of an inward fear,’ ” I said, quoting him.
“They come after me in their squads and companies,” he said, with a twist of his lips. “They fill my rooms. They have weight, they have demands, they pursue me until I must forge them into stories that say—” He laughed, without amusement. “That say what? That say ‘Why did we die?’ Did we Federals die to preserve a Union that was not worth so many lives to preserve? Did we Confederates die to preserve the obscenity of slavery, when not one in a hundred of us owned a slave? What did we die for? So Abe Lincoln wouldn’t go down in history as having lost half the Nation? So Bobby Lee wouldn’t have to admit he’d been defeated months, and so many lives, before he finally surrendered? The ghosts present their demands,” he said.
“I have left Mollie,” he added. “We are separated.”
Hot wings beat in my head. “Because of some rumor—”
“It is in fact only a rumor,” he interrupted. “There is no liaison. However, he has written letters to her.”
“You have separated from Mrs. Bierce because someone wrote her letters?”
“She must have encouraged it,” Bierce said.
“Does she admit that?”
“There are a thousand ways a clever woman can attract attentions.”
“That is unfair!” I protested, but he turned his cold bitter face away from me.
“I do not engage in competitions,” he said.
He was insisting on fulfilling Lillie Coit’s prophecy.
“Unfair,” I said again.
He turned. His eyes were cold as steel. “If we have come to personal judgments perhaps it is time to end this association,” he said. “Yes, sir,” I said. I had already returned his revolver to him.
I went back to my new room on Bush Street and tore up the letter I had written to Amelia Brittain, likening her marriage to a wealthy man more than twice her age not only to Sarah Althea Hill’s liaison with Senator Sharon, but to the transactions of Morton Street. I had even quoted Bierce on marriage: “On the offer of a woman’s body: a custom as a sacrifice of virginity, to earn dowry, or as a religious service, a religious duty.” I didn’t want to quote Bierce any more, for he had made me ashamed of myself. Amelia had warned me against becoming like him.
My father had been right about him. Lillie Coit had been right about him. He would die a lonely and a hated man.
That night I sat down to write a letter to Amelia, addressed to her at 913 Taylor Street, expressing my hope that she would find great happiness in her marriage.
In the Alhambra Saloon the backs of the Democracy solidly lined the bar, and Chris Buckley sat in his corner, surrounded by his crowd. With him were fat Sam Rainey and skinny Mattie Mogle. I had been summoned, and I made my way through my fellow Democrats to present myself to the Boss.
“It is Tom Redmond of the True Blues,” he was informed. His unblinking eyeballs fixed on me. He sat in a big chair leaning his two hands on the head of his cane. His pals, seated and standing, regarded me in a moment of silence. I had the feeling of a schoolboy brought before the headmaster.
“Your boss has quit The Hornet,” Buckley said, smiling. “And what will you do, Tom?”
“I will look for another position.”
“Would you be interested in a job as a schoolmaster? There are positions available.”
“I’ll try to get work as a journalist.”
“What paper?” Sam Rainey said in his gravelly voice. Seated beside Buckley he looked like a wise old frog.
“I have a friend at the Chronicle.”
“Republican,” Buckley said, shaking his head, smiling.
“We can talk to George Hearst,” Mogle said. “The Examiner’s Democrat for sure.”
I shrugged.
“Your boss was not always a reasonable man,” Buckley said.
So I was to defend Bierce.
“He was not pleased by the scandals in the school directors, that was for certain,” I said. Where there were jobs Buckley could pass out.
“ ‘A crying roguery,’ I believe he put it,” Sam Rainey said.
“That was mild for Bierce,” I said. I was feeling a little more cheerful, all these Democrats looking at me with disfavor because I had worked with Bierce, who was as hard on Democrats as he was on Republicans.
“He especially didn’t like the Board of Supervisors granting a substantial portion of Beach Street to the Spring Valley Water Company,” I went on. “It reminded him of the Girtcrest Corridor giveaway.”
“That is the Railroad, Tom,” Buckley said reprovingly.
“And this was the water works.”
“Bierce is a very negatively minded kind of fellow, Tom. You will admit that yourself, I’m sure. We are trying to ascertain if you are going to be that kind of journalist also, to the detriment of the Democracy.”
“Why, Mr. Buckley, I would think the Democrats ought to be reproved as well as the Republicans, when they go in for boodle, and dummies on the payrolls and giveaways. Don’t you?”
“Those things should be corrected in the Party councils, not in the newspapers.”
“Oh, my!” I said. “Is that what you called me here to tell me?”
There was another silence.
“For instance,” I said. “Captain Pusey has collected a deal of money from Lady Caroline Stearns for services rendered. For silence, that is. As for many years he collected the same kind of boodle from Senator Jennings. And everyone knows he has been collecting it from Mammy Pleasant’s employer, Thomas Bell, for decades.”
“Isaiah Pusey is a good Party man, Tom,” Buckley said. He was no longer smiling.
“I suppose his tendencies to blackmail that come from his position, and from his archive of photographs, will be corrected in the Party councils?”
Silence again.
“I think ‘a crying roguery’ like that has to be addressed in the newspapers,” I said.
“We understand you were given a beating by the Railroad ruffians,” Sam Rainey said.
“Is that a threat?”
“What we are dying to understand,” the Blind Boss interrupted, smiling, “is if it is your intention to carry on the same kind of warfare with the Railroad as Bierce has done.”
“Why?” I asked.
“There have been some accommodations made, Tom. We are not going after the Monopoly so hard, and the SP is giving us some funds for the fall campaign.”
“I see,” I said. I felt as though I was dropping down a mine shaft. “Well, don’t count on me, Mr. Buckley. I am Antimonopoly to the grave.”
The Blind Boss turned his face away with a pinched expression, as though I had created a bad smell. I gathered that I was excused. So I left the Alhambra Saloon gathering of the party chiefs of the San Francisco Democracy.