The Accursed (27 page)

Upton had hidden the revolver. And the bullets, too. Yet, should Meta want to injure herself, how could he prevent her?—for all the sincerity of his love, and the passion of his moral beliefs, he knew himself helpless.

Sensuality often grows too fast for love to keep up with. Then love’s root remains weak and is easily torn.

Upton had noted this remark of Friedrich Nietzsche in his journal. It was not clear that it applied to him and Meta but there was a disturbing wisdom here.

At first, as the Sinclairs had decided to live chastely, as “sister and brother,” to prevent another pregnancy, Meta had appeared pallid, nervous, anxious and short-tempered; yet strangely, with the passing of time, she began to exude an air of well-being, and secrecy; even, Upton thought, sensuousness.

(Or did he imagine it?)

There were the lengthy, unexplained walks, for which Meta scarcely troubled to apologize; there were occasions when Meta slept luxuriantly well past dawn, as she had not slept in the past, with an air of utter abandon, oblivion; and a notable reluctance to wake up, and resume her housewife-duties even when little David screamed for his mother’s attention.

She played with the baby less. If she and Upton chanced to touch, to bump into each other in the cramped space of a room, she froze at once; which Upton did not find at all flattering.

Naturally, the Sinclairs no longer shared a bed; Meta elected to sleep on a narrow cot in the front room, assuring Upton that she didn’t mind in the slightest.

As autumn deepened into early winter, Upton became ever more conscious of his wife’s undefined air of well-being; the play of a smile about her lips, instead of a frown, as she prepared meals, or cleaned the kitchen after meals; the way she gazed at her reflection, in the sole mirror in the house, attached to a bedroom bureau, with an expression of wistfulness, hope, and—(unless Upton was imagining this, too)—coquetry. He was not by nature a suspicious person, yet it seemed to him significant that Meta now spent five or more minutes brushing her hair and, with girlish expectancy, viewing herself from several angles in the mirror, and fashioning her hair into unusual styles, he could only conclude were copied from sleek magazines like
Vanity Fair,
which certainly didn’t come into his household.

Once, Upton came into the farmhouse from his cabin unexpectedly, to discover Meta trying on one of her old bonnets which she’d “livened up” with a bit of satin ribbon; another time, while searching in a drawer, he discovered, hidden behind items of feminine apparel, an expensive-looking brooch he’d never seen before, of mother-of-pearl inlaid with small red stones. (Rubies?) Meta claimed that this was a gift from her grandmother but Upton was suspicious, for why hadn’t he seen it before?

Evasively Meta said it was but a “trifle”—she’d never worn it in his presence.

One morning in late October when Upton was sitting at his writing table, in the little cabin overlooking a desiccated cornfield, he found himself so distracted by thoughts of Meta that he couldn’t write; and sat for a long while with his head in his hands. He’d been writing a letter to a comrade in the city but the passage of wind through the dried cornstalks seemed like whispering to him, though no words could be discerned.

It was at this moment that Upton saw, some distance away, yet within the (evident) border of the cornfield, a horse and buggy moving at a leisurely pace, though no road or lane existed there, and no horse and buggy could cross a cornfield in so smooth-gliding a way . . . The buggy was attractive, though old-fashioned in style; yet, in this rural place, where no farmers owned motorcars, it did not appear so extraordinary as it would have appeared in Princeton.

This had to be an optical illusion, Upton thought. Or a moment of weakness, from overwork. Or maybe the horse and buggy were passing along a road, invisible from the cabin. He returned to the letter and forced himself to reread it: the general subject was the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which had been organized early in the year with the purpose of counteracting the teachings of American professors in their ignorant and biased presentations of Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Feuerbach, Bakunin, et al.; the specific subject, the hoped-for election of Jack London to its presidency. For Upton revered London; he considered London one of Socialism’s proudest figures: handsome, bold, outspoken, provocative, and widely acknowledged as a genius for the “fireball” success of such best sellers as
The Call of the Wild
and
The Sea Wolf.
What excellent publicity the Society would reap if London were elected, and agreed to take office!—the fledgling organization would be flooded with applications for membership.

So Upton Sinclair was arguing that the Society must elect London, and not Eugene Debs; though Debs was a veteran of the Socialist struggle, the man had undeniable problems—(excessive drinking, marital complications, ill temper)—and could not hope to command such general attention from both Socialists and “unbelievers” as the dashing London.

Hadn’t London already distinguished himself in several confrontations with the enemies of Socialism?—hadn’t he addressed hostile gatherings, and launched an ambitious if ill-advised campaign for the mayoralty of Oakland, California? He was brash, but well spoken; “rough” yet “poetical”; a man among men but popular with women, including “ladies” of the upper classes. Inspired, Upton wrote: “He has been a salmon fisher, an ‘oyster pirate,’ a longshoreman, a sailor. He has tramped our great nation and knows it inside and out; he has lived in the horror of the Whitechapel slums, and searched for gold in the Klondike. He has been beaten by police, and jailed.”

(Though Upton didn’t think to mention it, London had dashed off a generous blurb for
The Jungle,
soon to appear in hardcover: “Here it is at last! The book we have been waiting for! The
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of wage slavery! Comrade Sinclair’s
The Jungle
! And what
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
did for black slaves,
The Jungle
will do for the white slaves of today . . . It will be read by every workingman. It will open countless ears that have been deaf to Socialism. It will plough the soil for the seed of our propaganda. It will make thousands of converts to our cause.
Comrades, it is up to you!
”)

Upton took pains to defend Jack London against “vulgar and meretricious gossip” circulating at the present time about London and the “temptress” Charmian; for if London remained with his wife, or chose to leave her, how should that matter to Socialism? In any case, London had denied even knowing the exotic “Charmian” and that was enough for Upton Sinclair to endorse.

At this moment he glanced up to see, or to seem to see, the apparition of the horse-drawn buggy yet again—now making its way in his direction.

“Is it coming for
me
?”

The vehicle seemed to be solid enough, drawn by a bay horse with a splotched white star on its forehead; it was more commodious than the ordinary two-seater buggy, in fact a
landau,
gray or pearl in color; its black top was partly lowered and its fringed hammer-cloth distinctly white. A gentleman was driving it, flicking a whip light over the bay’s withers, and a lady sat close beside him, her head inclined against his shoulder and a part-opened silk fan raised to shield her face from the sun.

In astonishment Upton stared. And in that instant he blinked, and rubbed his eyes, for the vision had abruptly vanished, and the cornfield was empty again.

“Am I losing my mind?—
me
? Who has always prided himself on his
rationality
?”

UPTON RETURNED TO
his writing, as swiftly and powerfully as he could. Though it was difficult to keep his mind from wandering: for perhaps the
landau
had something to do with the
poison
in the Princeton atmosphere? A man had been arrested and, probably by now, condemned, in the matter of the Spags murder; but Upton had no faith in the local police, that they’d arrested the actual murderer. And there had been other acts of violence and vandalism in the county, it was rumored. And sporadic demonstrations of the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan, that sprang up overnight, in rural enclaves of New Jersey, like deadly nightshade.

It was sobering to recall, as Marx and Engels had taught, that the proletariat isn’t invariably saintly but, as a consequence of brutalizing labor, often transformed into
brutes
. Drunkenness—prostitution—licentiousness of all sorts; robbery, manslaughter, murder, “lynchings”—all were inevitable consequences of the capitalist crime against human nature. Why should the proletariat not steal, or become brutalized, even against their brothers and sisters? Who has taught wage slaves to be
good
?

Once, on her way home from a long tramp across the Stony Brook Creek, Meta had accepted a ride from a neighboring farmer in his crude horse-drawn wagon; Upton had been distressed to see his wife in the company of so uncouth an individual. As a Socialist, he was bound to identify with all workingmen and all exploited persons; yet, as a well-bred young man of a good family, with a love of the arts, and a wish to believe in the natural goodness of humankind, he was frankly dismayed by the degenerate behavior of some persons in the area. Wife- and child-beating, venereal disease, drunkenness, outright madness and rampant cruelty were all to be found within a few miles of the Sinclairs’ rented property. Most widespread was sheer stupidity, for Upton had discovered that few farmers knew how to farm intelligently, or seemed to care; their most lucrative undertakings were the illegal manufacture of “applejack” (sold, it was said, surreptitiously to the most exclusive eating clubs at Princeton University) and the shameless prostitution of their voters’ rights as male citizens of the United States—such votes were sold, in Mercer County, for a meager two dollars! Nor could it fail to astonish the young Socialist who’d written so passionately of wage slavery in Chicago, with a special grievance against child labor, to discover, in his very backyard, so to speak, that the young children of neighboring farmers were expected to work for as many as sixteen hours a day on their family farms; the more cruelly in that their fathers’ crops were haphazardly sowed, and each farm chore involved a waste of human energy and spirit. Most sickening, when the scanty crop was at last harvested and sown, the father was likely to “drink it up” as quickly as possible.

Upton had learned that the only efficient farmers in the Hopewell Valley seemed to be those who’d acquired, through superior intelligence, cunning, conniving, or outright cheating, farms of substantial size, above one hundred acres; which farms replicated, in a sense, factories, in the mass means of production and in the employment of “dirt-cheap” labor. These farmers, though genial enough in conversation, God-fearing Christians of Protestant stock, could not have prospered as they did without a
systematic and sustained exploitation
of others, including their own families. Rural America was no paradise, indeed; the farm no idyllic retreat, as some urban Socialists seemed to think.

Upton was particularly distressed that even poor farmers had so little sense of camaraderie with others like themselves, or worse off than themselves; he and Meta had both been shocked by jocular references to the terrible lynchings in Camden, some months before, made by neighbors—“If it takes that to teach ’em, it’s their own fault.”

And: “A Nigra has got to learn he ain’t a white man and if it’s a female Nigra, her too.”

At the same time, Upton wished to believe that in the near future a special cadre of Socialists would establish a co-operative “home colony” in a secluded rural place like Mercer County. Was there a contradiction? What was one to believe? As Upton fiercely noted in his journal:

We must, like the prophet Zarathustra, overcome our own weakness, that we may become Übermensch.

YET, A HALF
hour later, Upton happened to look up from his writing table, to see an astonishing spectacle outside his window: in fact, an
obscene spectacle,
not thirty yards from the cabin, at the edge of the cornfield.

The gentleman and the lady from the
landau
had alighted from the vehicle and, imagining themselves alone and unobserved in this rural place, were now embracing most intimately, and passionately. Upton rubbed his eyes: was the woman Meta, his own wife?

“It can’t be! No.”

The man had a ruffian’s swagger, a solid body and a ruddy complexion; for his excursion into the country he was wearing “sporting” clothes, and a yachting cap. Judging by the fashionable cut of his clothes, his class was that of the
capitalist exploiter;
and judging by the extreme ruddiness of his skin, he could be nothing other than a
carnivore.

The stricken Upton Sinclair found it difficult to make out the woman’s features, as in mock protestation of her companion’s forwardness she squirmed, butted, punched (lightly, with playful fists), tried to kick, and wildly laughed, while her amorous suitor held her in a lewd embrace; the silk fan had been allowed to fall to the ground. The young woman was wearing an attractive striped silk dress in the fashionable “hobble” silhouette, now partly undone; her red-blond hair, fashionably coiled at the top of her head in a Gibson Girl style, had loosened in the amorous struggle. Upton had never seen the striped dress, he was sure, nor had he noticed his wife’s hair so styled; yet there was no mistaking Meta’s pert Scots profile, or the girlish ring of her laughter.

“Stop! You must stop! Meta!”

Upton threw down his writing things, and ran outside.

But now, another time: where had the lovers gone?

Nor were the pearl-colored
landau,
and the bay horse with the splotched white star, visible.

“Meta? Where are you? Where are you hiding?
Answer me
.”