III
So matters went in Local Leesville. The upshot of the debate was
that Comrade Dr. Service declared that he washed his hands of the
Socialist Party from that time on. And the Comrade Doctor buttoned
his handsome black coat over his stately chest and stalked out of
the room. The greater part of the remainder of that meeting was
devoted to a discussion of him and his personality and his influence
in the local. He was no Socialist at all, declared Schneider, he was
an English aristocrat, or the next thing to it--his wife had two
brothers in the British Expeditionary Force, and a nephew already
enlisted in the Territorials, and a visiting cousin on the point of
setting out for Canada, as the quickest way of getting into the
mix-up. But in spite of all these damaging circumstances, the local
was not disposed to give up its most generous supporter, and Comrade
Gerrity, the organizer, and Comrade Goldstein of the Ypsels, were
constituted a committee to go and plead with him and try to bring
him back into the fold.
As for Jimmie Higgins, his problem was not so complicated. He had no
relatives anywhere that he knew of; and if he had any "country", the
country had failed to make him aware of the fact. The first thing
the "country" had done for him was to put him into the hands of a
negro woman who fed him gruel and water and gave him no blanket in
winter. To Jimmie this country was an aggregation of owners and
bosses, who made you sweat hard for your wages, and sent the police
to club you if you made any kick. A soldier Jimmie thought of as a
fellow who came to help the police when they got hard pushed. This
soldier walked with his chest out and his nose in the air, and
Jimmie referred to him as a "tin willie", and summed him up as a
traitor to the working-class.
And so it was easy for our little machinist to agree with the
Roumanian Jewish cigar-seller in calling himself an "anti-
nationalist". It was easy for him to laugh and applaud when "Wild
Bill" demanded what the hell difference it made to any working man
whether or not the Kaiser got a railroad to Bagdad. He did not
thrill in the least over the story of the British Army falling back
step by step across France, and holding ten times their number of
invaders. The papers called this "heroism"; but to Jimmie it was a
lot of poor fools who had had a flag waved in their eyes, and had
sold themselves for a shilling to the landlords of their country. In
one of the Socialist papers that Jimmie read, there appeared every
week a series of comic pictures in which the working man was figured
as a guileless fool by the name of "Henry Dubb". Poor Henry always
believed what he was told, and at the end of each adventure he got a
thump on the top of his nut which caused stars to sprout over the
page. And of the many adventures of Henry Dubb, the most absurd were
when he got himself into a uniform. Jimmie would cut these pictures
out and pass them round in the shop, and among his neighbours in the
row of tenement-shacks where he lived.
Nor did it make much difference in Jimmie's feelings when he read of
German atrocities. To begin with, he did not believe in them; they
were just a part of the poison-gas of war. When men were willing to
stab one another with bayonets, and to blow one another to pieces
with bombs, they would be willing to lie about one another, you
might be sure; the governments would lie deliberately, as one of the
ways of making the soldiers fight harder. What? argued Jimmie: tell
him that Germans were a lot of savages? When he lived in a city with
hundreds of them, and met them all the time at the local?
Here, for instance, was the Forster family; where would you find a
kinder lot of people? They were much above Jimmie in social
standing--they owned their own house and had whole shelves full of
books, and a pile of music as high as yourself; but recently Jimmie
had stopped on a Socialist errand, and they had invited him in to
supper, and there was a thin, worn, sweet-faced little woman, and
four growing daughters--nice, gentle, quiet girls--and two sons
younger than Emil; they had a pot-roast of beef, and a big dish of
steaming potatoes, and another of sauerkraut, and some queer pudding
that Jimmie had never heard of; and then they had music--they were
fairly dippy on music, that family, they would play all night if you
would listen, old Hermann Forster with his stout, black-bearded
face turned up as if he were seeing Heaven. And you wanted Jimmie to
believe that a man like that would carry a baby on a bayonet, or
rape a girl and then cut off her hands!
Or there was Comrade Meissner, a neighbour of Jimmie's, a friendly
little chatter-box of a man who was foreman-in-charge of a dozen
women from as many different races of the earth, packing bottles in
the glass-works. The tears would come into Meissner's pale blue eyes
when he told how he was made to drive these women, sick, or in the
family way, or whatever it might be. And remember, it was an
American superintendent and an American owner who gave Meissner his
orders--not a German! The little man could not quit his job, because
he had a brood of children and a wife with something the matter with
her--nobody could tell what it was, but she took all kinds of patent
medicines, which kept the family poor. Sometimes Lizzie Higgins
would go over to see her, and the two would sit and exchange ideas
about ailments and the prices of food; and meantime Meissner would
come over to where Jimmie was minding the Jimmie babies, and the two
would puff their cobs and discuss the disputes between the
"politicians" and the "direct actionists" in the local. And you
wanted Jimmie to believe that men like Meissner were standing old
Belgian women against the walls of churches and shooting them full
of bullets!
