They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second ComingSinclair, Upton
General
They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second Coming
Sinclair, Upton
Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) -- Fiction; Jesus Christ -- Fiction
When I got back to the Labor Temple, I learned that there was to be
a mass-meeting of the strikers this Saturday evening. It had been
planned some days ago, and now was to be turned into a protest
against police violence and “government by injunction.” There was a
cheap afternoon paper which professed sympathy with the workers, and
this published a manifesto, signed by a number of labor leaders,
summoning their followers to make clear that they would no longer
submit to “Cossack rule.”
It appeared now that these leaders were considering inviting
Carpenter to become one of the speakers at their meeting. Two of
them came up to me. I had heard this stranger speak, and did I think
he could hold an audience? I gave assurance; he was a man of
dignity, and would do them credit. They were afraid the newspapers
would represent him as a freak, but of course their meeting would
hardly fare very well in the papers anyhow. One of them asked,
cautiously, how much of an extremist was he? Labor leaders were
having a hard time these days to hold down the “reds,” and the
employers were not giving them any help. Did I think Carpenter would
support the “reds”? I answered that I didn't know the labor movement
well enough to judge, but one thing they could be sure of, he was a
man of peace, and would not preach any sort of violence.
The matter was settled a little later, when Mary Magna drove up to
the Labor Temple in her big limousine. Mary, for the first time in
the memory of anyone who knew her, was without her war-paint;
dressed like a Quakeress--a most uncanny phenomenon! She had not a
single jewel on; and before long I learned why--she had taken all
she owned to a jeweler that morning, and sold them for something
over six thousand dollars. She brought the money to the fund for the
babies of the strikers; nor did she ask anyone else to hand it in
for her. It was Mary's fashion to look the world in the eye and say
what she was doing.
T-S was still hanging about, and at first he tried to check this
insane extravagance, but then he thought it over and grinned,
saying, “I git my tousand dollars back in advertising!” When I
pointed out to him what would be the interpretation placed by
newspaper gossip on Mary's intervention in the affairs of Carpenter,
he grinned still more widely. “Ain't he got a right to be in love
vit Mary? All de vorld's in love vit Mary!” And of course, there was
a newspaper reporter standing by his side, so that this remark went
out to the world as semi-official comment!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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