JIMMIE HIGGINS FACES THE WAR
I
The ambulance arrived, and the two attendants who came with it
brought in a stretcher and carried young Granitch away. Jimmie
opened the windows to get rid of the odour of ether, and meantime he
and Lizzie sat for hours discussing every aspect of the dreadful
scene they had witnessed, and speculating as to its meaning. When
Jimmie investigated the roll of bills which had been slipped into
his hand, he found that there were ten of them, new, crisp, and
bright yellow, each having the figure twenty printed upon it. It was
more money than these two humble little people had ever had or
expected to have in all their lives. It was literally blood-money
they felt, but it would be hard to see who would be benefited if
they rejected it. Certainly the deed which had been done that night
could not be undone--not for all the money that old Granitch had
heaped up in his vaults.
Jimmie kept quiet, as he had been bidden, and apparently no one told
about his part in the affair--no reporters came out to his country
home to ask for interviews. But when he went to the cross-roads
store a couple of nights later he found that the storm was all
over--nobody was talking or thinking about anything else. The news,
in fact, had gone by telegraph all over the world, and wherever
people read it they shuddered with horror, and the Socialists had a
choice illustration of the effect of excessive wealth upon morals.
There were half a dozen versions of the story, Jimmie found; some
declared that the outraged husband had caught young Granitch in his
home and had fetched a surgeon there; others that he had taken him
to a hospital; others that the operation had been performed in a
road-house near by. But none mentioned the tenant-house on the farm
of John Cutter, and Jimmie wrapped himself in his pride of superior
knowledge, and let the loungers in the country store chatter on. He
would go back each night for new gossip; and first he heard that old
man Granitch was meaning to have all the conspirators arrested and
sent to jail; but then it was said that young Lacey had left the
hospital and vanished, no one knew where. And they never knew; never
again did he appear to curse the strikers at the Empire, nor to
break the hearts of chorus-girls on the Great White Way! His grim
old father's hair turned grey in a few weeks; and while he went on
to fill his contracts with the Russian government, all men knew that
his heart was eaten out with grief and rage and shame.
Jimmie and his wife held numerous confabulations over those
twenty-dollar bills. What should they do with their fortune? The
Worker, always in need of funds, was just now issuing bonds in small
denominations, and Jimmie could not imagine any better financial
investment than a working-class paper; but Lizzie, alas, could not
be made to see it. And then his eye was caught by an advertisement
of an oil-company, published in a Socialist paper, which lifted it
above suspicion. But again Lizzie blocked the way. She begged her
visionary husband to turn the money over to her; she argued that
half of it belonged to her anyhow--had she not done her part to earn
it? “What part?” Jimmie asked; and she answered that she had kept
quiet--and what more had he done?
Eleeza Betooser wanted that treasure to insure safety for the
children through whatever troubles might come to their propagandist
father. And finally the propagandist father gave way, and the woman
proceeded to secure the money in the ancient way of her sex. She
took the ten crisp bills and sewed them in a layer of cloth, and
wound the cloth about the ankle of her right leg, and sewed it
there, and put a stocking over it to hide it. And that apparatus
would stay there--day or night, winter or summer, it would never
part from its owner. She would be a walking bank, a bank that she
knew was safe from panic or crisis; the feeling of the two hundred
dollars about her ankle would be communicated to every part of
Lizzie--warming her heart, delighting her brain, and stimulating her
liver and digestion.
II
And soon the chances of life caused Jimmie to be glad of the innate
conservatism of the feminine nature. The giant British offensive was
drowned in mud and blood on the Somme, and the Russian offensive
went to pieces before Lemberg; and meantime John Cutter stowed his
barrels of apples in the cellar, and got the last of his corn-crop
husked, and drove his load of pumpkins to market; and then one
Saturday night, after the cows had come in, wet and steaming with
November rain, he informed his hired man that he would not need his
services after that month, he would no longer be able to afford
“help”.
Jimmie stared at him in consternation--for he had thought that he
had a permanent job, having learned the work and having heard no
serious complaints.
“But,” explained Cutter, “the work's all done. Do you expect me to
pay you to sit round? I'll be glad to take you on next spring, of
course.”
“And what'll I do in the meantime?” Jimmie glared, and all his
hatred of the villainous profit-system welled up in his heart. So
much food he had helped to raise and store away--and not a pound of
it his! “Say,” he remarked, “I know what you want! Some kind of a
trained bear, that'll work all summer, and go to sleep in winter an'
not eat nothin'!”
The little Socialist was all the crosser, because he knew that his
boss had just made a lucky stroke--they were running a spur on the
railroad out to the vast explosives plant they were constructing in
the country, and Cutter had got the price of his mortgage for a
narrow strip of land that was nothing but wood-lot. Jimmie had seen
the deal made, and had put in a useful word as to the value of that
“timber”, but now he had no share in the deal. He must be content
with an offer of the tenant-house for five dollars a month through
the winter, and a job with the rail-road company, grading track.
There came rain and snow and blizzards, but the rail-road
construction stopped for nothing. It went on in three shifts, day
and night; for half the world was clamouring for the means to blow
itself up, and the other half must work like the devil to furnish
the means. At least that was the way the matter presented itself to
Jimmie Higgins, who took it as a personal affront the way this
diabolical war kept pursuing him. He had fled into the country from
it, bringing his little family to a tenant-house on an obscure,
worn-out farm, several miles from the nearest town; but here all of
a sudden came a gang of Dagoes with picks and shovels. They lifted
up and set to one side the chicken-house where Lizzie kept her
eleven hens and one rooster, and the pig-sty where one little hog
gobbled up their table-scraps; and two days later came a huge
machine, driven by steam, creeping on a track, picking up rails and
ties from a car behind it, swinging them round and laying them in
front of it, and then rolling ahead over the bed it had made. So the
railroad just literally walked out into the country, and before long
whole train-loads of cement and sand and corrugated iron walls and
roofing came rattling and banging past the Higgins's back-door. Day
and night this continued; and a little way beyond they knew that a
two-mile square of scrubby waste was being laid out with roads and
tracks and little squat buildings, set far apart from each other. In
a few months the frightened family would lie awake at night and
listen to trains rattling past, coming out from the explosives
plant, piled to the tops with loads of trinitrotoluol, and such
unpronounceable instruments of murder and destruction. And this was
the fate which capitalism had handed out to an ardent
anti-militarist, a propagandist of international fraternity!
III
Jimmie Higgins went into the Socialist local now and then, to pay
his dues and to refresh his soul on pacifist speeches. Just before
Christmas the President of the United States wrote a letter to all
the warring nations pleading with them to end the strife; intimating
that all the belligerents were on a par as to badness, and stating
explicitly that America had nothing to do with their struggle. This,
of course, brought intense satisfaction to the members of Local
Leesville of the Socialist party; it was what they had been
proclaiming for two years and four months! They had never expected
to have a capitalist President in agreement with them, but when the
opportunity came, they made the most of it; clamouring that the
capitalist President should go farther--should back up his words by
actions. If the warring nations would not make peace, let America at
least clear her skirts by declaring an embargo, refusing to furnish
them with the means of self-destruction!
But for some reason incomprehensible to Jimmie Higgins, the
capitalist President would not take this further step; and time
moved on, and at the end of January fell a thunder-bolt, in the
shape of a declaration from the German government that beginning
next day it rescinded its agreement to visit and search steamers,
and declared war to the death against all vessels sailing in barred
zones. Jimmie went to a meeting of the local a few days after that,
and found the gathering seething with excitement. The President had
appeared before Congress that day and made a speech calling for war;
and the Germans and Austrians in the local were wild with
indignation, shaking their fists and clamouring against the
unthinkable outrage of an attack upon the Fatherland. There was a
new edition of the Worker just out, filled with bitter protests, and
the Germans and the pacifists wanted to pledge the local to a
movement for a general strike of labour throughout the country.
Street-meetings had been resumed--for, of course, since the strike
in the Empire had been settled, the police had had no pretext to
prevent them. The extremists now wanted anti-war speakers on every
corner, and anti-war leaflets shoved under every doorstep; they were
willing to put up the money and to pledge their time for these
activities.
Lawyer Norwood rose and revealed the split that was now full-grown
in the party. For the United States to lie down before that insolent
declaration of the German government would be to imperil everything
which a lover of liberty held dear. It would mean that Britain would
be starved out of the war, and British sea-power shattered--that
British sea-power upon which free government had based itself
throughout the world. Norwood was unable to get any further for the
tempest of jeering and ridicule that overwhelmed him. “Freedom in
Ireland!” shrieked Comrade Mary Allen. “And in India! And in Egypt!”
bellowed Comrade Koeln, the glass-blower, whose mighty lungs had
been twenty years preparing for this emergency.
It was hard to stop the laughter--it seemed so funny that a man who
called himself a Socialist should be defending British battleships!
But Comrade Gerrity, the chairman, pounded with his gavel, and
insisted that the meeting should give fair play, that every speaker
should be heard in his turn. So Norwood went on. He understood that
no government in this world was perfect, but some were better than
others, and it was a fact of history, whether or not they chose to
admit it, that such freedom as had already been secured in the
world--in Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and the
United States--had rested under the protection of British
battleships. If those battleships went down, it would mean that
every one of those free communities would begin building up a
military force many times as strong as they had now. If the United
States did not maintain the established customs of sea-commerce in
the present crisis, it would mean one thing and one only--that
America would spend the next thirty years devoting her energies to
preparing for a life-and-death struggle with German Imperialism. If
we were not to fight later, we must fight now--
“All right, you fight!” shouted Comrade Schneider, the brewer, his
purple face more purple than ever before in the history of Local
Leesville.
“I'm going to fight all right,” answered the young lawyer. “This is
my last speech here or anywhere else--I'm leaving for an officers'
training-camp to-morrow. I have come here to do my duty, to warn you
comrades--even though I know it will be in vain. The time for debate
has passed--the country is going into war--”
“I'm not going into war!” roared Schneider.
“Be careful,” answered the other. “You may find yourself in before
you know it.”
And the big brewer laughed to shake the plaster off the walls. “I'd
like to see them send me! To fight for the British sea-power! Ho!
Ho! Ho!”
IV
It was a stormy speech young Norwood made, but he persisted to the
end, so that, as he said, his conscience might be clear, he might
know that he had done what he could to protect the movement from its
greatest blunder. He warned them that the temper of the country was
rising; you could see it rising hour by hour, and things which had
been tolerated in the past would be tolerated no longer. Democracy
would protect its life--it would show that in a crisis it was as
strong as militarism--
“Yes, and turn itself into militarism to do it!” cried Comrade Mary
Allen. The Quaker lady was almost beside herself; she, more even
than the Germans, saw in what was transpiring the violation of her
most sacred convictions.
America, her own country, was giving itself to war, making ready to
turn its resources to the wholesale mutilation of men! Comrade
Mary's thin face was white; her lips were tight with resolve, but
her feelings betrayed themselves by the quivering of her nostrils.
And oh, what a speech she made! Such torrents of furious hatred in
the cause of universal love! Comrade Mary quoted a Socialist writer
who had said that just as gladiatorial combats had continued until
Christian monks were willing to throw themselves into the arena, so
war would continue until Socialists were willing to throw themselves
beneath the hoofs of the cavalry. And in this Quaker spinster you
saw one Socialist who was ready to go out that very night and throw
herself beneath the hoofs of cavalry, infantry, or artillery, or
even of a police automobile.
And that was the sentiment of the meeting as a whole. If America
entered the European strife, it would be because the Socialist
organization had exhausted its means of protest in vain. They would
call meetings, they would distribute literature, they would voice
their convictions on the streets and in the shops and wherever the
people might be reached. They would have no part in this wicked
strife, either now or later; they would continue in the future, as
in the past, to denounce and to expose the capitalist politicians
and the capitalist newspapers who caused war and thrived upon war.
And in proportion to the intensity of their feelings would be their
bitterness and contempt for the few renegades who in this hour of
crisis, this test of manhood and integrity, were deserting the
movement and going to enrol themselves in officers' training-camps!
And so when Jimmie went home that night he carried with him an
armful of revolutionary literature, which during the noon-hour he
proceeded to distribute among the workers on the construction-job,
which was now inside the preserves of the explosives company. So
naturally in the course of the afternoon he was summoned before the
boss and discharged; they escorted him to the limits of the
property, and told him that if he ever returned he would be shot on
sight. And then at night he went up to the cross-roads store and
tried to give out his literature there, and got into a controversy
with some of the cracker-box loungers, one of whom jumped up and
shook his fist in Jimmie's face, shouting, “Get out of here, you
dirty little louse! If you don't stop talking your treason round
here, we'll come down some night and ride you out of the country on
a rail!”