friends, how much drips down from the eaves of the rich men's mansions to water the shacks where the Negroes live, scarcely better off than the brute beasts beside which they labour in the fields? You know the answer as well as I.'
'To hell with the damn niggers,' somebody called from the audience. 'Talk about the white man!' Cries of agreement rose.
Lincoln held up a hand. 'I am talking about the white man,' he said. 'You cannot part nor separate the two, not in the Southern Confederacy. For if the white labourer there dare go to his boss and speak the truth, which is that he has not got enough to live on, the boss will tell him, 'Live on it and like it, or I'll put a Negro in your place and you can learn to live on nothing.'
'And what of our United States, which were, if nothing else, left all free when the Rebels departed from the Union?' Lincoln went on. 'Are we-are you-all free now? Do we-do you-enjoy the great and glorious blessings of liberty the Founding Fathers fondly imagined would be the birthright of every citizen of our Republic?
'Or are we returning to the unhappy condition in which we found ourselves in the years before the War of Secession? Do not our capitalists in New York, in Chicago, yes, and in Denver, look longingly at their Confederate brethren in Richmond, in Atlanta, in new and brawling Birmingham, and wish they could do as do those brethren?
'Are we not once more becoming a nation half slave, half free, my friends? Does not the capitalist eat bread gained by the sweat of your brows, as the slavemaster does by virtue-and there's a word turned on its ear! — of the labour of his Negroes?' Lincoln had to stop then, for the shouts that rose up were fierce and angry.
'You know your state, your condition,' he continued when he could. 'You know I tell you nothing but the truth. Time was in this country when a man would be hired labour one year, his own man the next, and hiring labourers to work for him the year after that. Such days, I fear, are over and done. On the railroads, in the mines, in the factories, one man's a magnate, and the rest toil for him. If you go to your boss and tell him you have not got enough to live on, the boss will tell you, 'Live on it and like it, or I'll put a Chinaman or an Italian or a Jew in your place and you can learn to live on nothing.'
'
A low murmur came from his audience, more frightening in its way than the fury they had shown before. Fury didn't last. Now Lincoln was making them think. Thought was slower than anger to flower into action, but it was a hardy perennial. It did not bloom and die.
'What do we do about it, Abe?' shouted a miner still grimy from his long day of labour far below ground.
'What do we do?' Lincoln repeated. 'The Democrats had their day, and a long day it was, from my time up until President Blaine's inauguration last month. Did they do a thing, a single solitary thing, to help the lot of the working man?' He smiled at the cries of No! before going on, 'And Blaine, too, though the good Lord knows I wish him well, has railroad money in his pockets. How much labour can hope for from him, I do not know.
'But I know this, my friends: when the United States were a house divided before, they were divided, and did divide, along lines of geography. No such choice avails us now. The capitalists cannot secede as the slavemasters did. If we are not satisfied with our government and the way it treats its citizens, we have the revolutionary right and duty to overthrow it and substitute one that suits us better, as our forefathers did in the days of George III.'
That brought a storm of applause. Men stomped on the floor, so that it shook under Lincoln 's feet. Someone fired a pistol in the air, deafeningly loud in the closed hall. Lincoln held up both hands. Slowly, slowly, quiet crawled back. Into it, he said, 'I do not advocate revolution. I pray it shall not be necessary. But if the old order will not yield to justice, it shall be swept aside. I do not threaten, any more than a man who says he sees a tornado coming. Folks can take shelter from it, or they can run out and play in it. That is up to them. You, friends, you are a tornado. What happens next is up to the capitalists.' He stepped away from the podium.
Joe McMahan pumped his hand. 'That was powerful stuff, Mr. Lincoln,' he said. 'Powerful stuff, yes indeed.'
'For which I thank you,' Lincoln said, raising his voice to be heard through the storm of noise that went on and on.
'Ask you something, Mr. Lincoln?' McMahan said. Lincoln nodded. McMahan leaned closer, so only the former president would hear. 'You ever come across the writings of a fellow named Marx, Mr. Lincoln? Karl Marx?'
Lincoln smiled. 'As a matter of fact, I have.'
'Sam!' Clay Herndon spoke sharply. 'Sam, you're wool-gathering again.'
'The devil I am,' Samuel Clemens replied, though his friend's comment did return his attention to the cramped office of the San Francisco Morning Call. 'I was trying to come up with something for tomorrow's editorial, and I'm dry as the desert between the Great Salt Lake and Virginia City. I hate writing editorials, do you know that?'
'You have mentioned it a time or two.' Now Herndon's voice was sly. That suited the reporter's face: he looked as if he had a fox for his maternal grandmother. His features were sharp and clever, his green eyes studied everything and respected nothing, and his rusty hair only added to the impression. Grinning, he sank his barb: 'Or a hundred times or two.'
'Still true,' Clemens snapped, running a hand through his own unruly mop of red-brown hair. 'Do you have any notion of the strain on a man's constitution, having to come up with so many column inches every day on demand? — and always something new, regardless of whether there's anything new to write about. If I had my Tennessee lands-'
Herndon rolled his eyes. 'For God's sake, Sam, give me the lecture on editorials if you must, but spare me the Tennessee lands. They're stale as salt beef shipped round the Horn.'
'You're a scoffer, that's what you are-nothing but a scoffer,' Clemens said, half amused but still half annoyed, too. 'Forty thousand acres of fine land, with God only knows how much timber and coal and iron, and maybe gold and silver, too, and all of it in my family.'
'It's in another country these days,' Clay Herndon reminded him. 'The Confederate States have been a going concern for a long time now.'
'Yes, a long time ago, and in another country-and besides, the wench is dead,' Clemens said, scratching his mustache.
Herndon gave him a quizzical look. However clever the reporter was, he wouldn't have known Marlowe from a marlinspike. 'The way you do go on,' he said. 'Let's us go on over to Martin's and get some dinner.'
'Now you're talking.' Clemens rose from his chair with enthusiasm and stuck his hat on his head. 'Any excuse not to work is good enough for me. Weren't for this'-he patted the battered copy of the American Cyclopedia on his desk with a touch as tender as a lover's for his beloved-'I don't know how I'd ever manage to come out for something or against something every day of the year. As if any man needs so blamed many opinions, or has any business holding them! Wasting my sweetness on the morning air, that's what I'm doing.'
Herndon pulled out his pocket watch. 'As of right now, you're wasting your sweetness on the afternoon air, and you have been for the past ten minutes. Now let's get moving, before we can't find a place to sit down at Martin's.'
Clemens followed his friend out onto the street. It was an April midday in San Francisco: not too warm, not too cold, the sun shining down from a clear but hazy sky. It might as easily have been August or November or February. To Clemens, who had grown up with real seasons, always seeming not far from spring remained strange after almost twenty years.
When he remarked on that, Herndon snorted. 'You don't like it, go down to Fresno. It's always July there, and a desert July at that.'
With a lamb chop, fried potatoes, and a shot of whiskey in front of Sam Clemens, life improved. He knocked back the shot and ordered another. When it came, he knocked it back, too, with the sour toast, 'Here's to hard work every day.'
Clay Herndon snorted again. 'I've heard that one almost as often as the Tennessee lands, Sam. What the devil would you be doing if you weren't running the Morning Calll'
'Damned if I know,' Clemens answered. 'Writing stories, maybe, and broke. But who has time? When the big panic of '63 hit after we lost the war and hung on and on and on, the whole world turned upside down. I was damn lucky to have any sort of position, and I knew it. So I hung on like a limpet on a harbor rock. If I ever get ahead of the game-' He laughed. 'About as likely as the Mormons giving up their extra wives, I expect.'
