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!
