Chapter 6

JIMMIE HIGGINS HELPS THE KAISER

I

Jimmie Higgins regarded with the utmost resentment the determination of the war to come to Leesville, in spite of all his labours to keep it out. Take the most preposterous thing you could imagine--the most idiotic thing on the face of the earth--take German spies! When Jimmie heard people talking about German spies, he laughed in their faces, he told them they were a bunch of fools, they belonged in the nursery; for Jimmie classed German spies with goblins, witches and sea-serpents. And here suddenly the bewildered little man found himself in the midst of a German spy mania, the like of which he could never have dreamed!

Everybody seemed to take it for granted that the Empire Machine Shops had been burned by German agents; they just knew it, and by the time the fire was out they had a hundred various stories to support their conviction. The fire had leaped from place to place in a series of explosions; the watchman, who had passed through the building only two minutes before, had rushed back and seen blazing gasolene, and had almost lost his life in the sweep of the flames. And next morning the Leesville Herald was out with letters half a foot high, telling these tales and insisting that the plant had been full of German agents, disguised as working men.

Before the day was by the police had arrested a dozen perfectly harmless German and Austrian labourers; at least that was the way it seemed to Jimmie, because of the fact that two of the men were members of the Socialist local. Somebody told Mrs. Meissner that all the Germans in Leesville were to be arrested, and the poor woman was trembling with terror. She wanted her husband to run away, but Jimmie persuaded them that this would be the worst possible course; so Meissner stayed in the house, and Jimmie kept his mouth shut for three whole days--an extraordinary feat for him, and a trial more severe than being in gaol.

He had lost his job--for ever, he thought. But in this again he misjudged the forces which had taken his life in their grip--the power of the gold which had come to Leesville by way of Russia. The day after the fire he received word to report for work again; old man Granitch was so anxious to keep his workers out of the clutches of the Hubbard Engine Company that he put them all, skilled and unskilled, at the job of clearing away the debris of the fire! And five days later came the first carloads of new material, brought on motor-trucks, and the rebuilding of the Empire Shops began. Would you believe it--some of the machinery which had not been damaged too much in the fire was fixed up, and at the end of a couple of weeks was starting up again, covered by a temporary canvas shelter, and with the walls of the new building rising round it!

That was the kind of thing which made America the marvel of the world. It had made old man Granitch young again, people said; he worked twenty hours a day in his shirt-sleeves, and the increase in his profanity was appalling. Even Lacey Granitch, his dashing son, quitted the bright lights of Broadway and came home to help the old man keep his contracts. The enthusiasm for these contracts became as it were the religion of Leesville; it spread even to the ranks of labour, so that Jimmie found himself like a man in a surf, struggling to keep his feet against an undertow.

II

The plans for the Worker were delayed, for the reason that when Comrade Mary Allen, the Quaker, went to look for Jerry Coleman the day after the fire, that dispenser of ten dollar bills had mysteriously disappeared. It was a week before he showed up again; and meantime fresh events had taken place, both in the local and outside. To begin with the latter, as presumably the more important, an English passenger liner, the pride of the Atlantic fleet, loaded to the last cabin with American millionaires, was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine. More than a thousand men, women and children went down, and the deed sent a shudder of horror through the civilized world. At the meeting of Local Leesville, which happened to take place the evening afterward, it proved a difficult matter to get business started.

The members stood about and argued. What could you say about a government that ordered a crime like that? What could you say about a naval officer who would carry out such an order? Thus Comrade Norwood, the young lawyer; and Schneider, the brewer, answered that the German government had done everything that any reasonable man could ask. It had published a notice in the New York papers, to the effect that the vessel was subject to attack, and that anyone who travelled on her would do so at his peril. If women and children would ride on munition-ships--

“Munition-ships?” cried Norwood; and then Schneider pointed to a news-dispatch, to the effect that the Lusitania had had on board a shipment of cartridge-cases.

“A fine lot of munitions!” jeered the lawyer.

Well, was the reply, what were cartridge-cases for, if not to kill Germans? The Germans had been attacked by the whole world, and they had to defend themselves. When you looked at Comrade Schneider, you saw a man who felt himself attacked by the whole world; his face was red up to the roots of his hair, and he was ready to defend himself with any weapon he could get hold of.

Comrade Koeln, a big glass-blower, broke into the discussion. The German government was authority for the statement that the Lusitania had been armed with guns. And when Norwood hooted at this, every German in the room was up in arms. What did he have to disprove it? The word of the British government! Was not “perfidious Albion” a byword!

“The thing that beats me,” declared the young lawyer, “is the way you Germans stand up for the Kaiser now, when before the war you couldn't find enough bad things to say about him.”

“What beats me,” countered Schneider, “is how you Americans stand up for King George. Every newspaper in Wall Street howling for America to go into the war--just because some millionaires got killed!”

“You don't seem to realize that the greater number of the men who lost their lives on that ship were working men!”

“Ho! Ho!” hooted Comrade Stankewitz. “Vall Street loves so the vorking men!”

Comrade Mary Allen, who loved all men, took up the argument. If those working men had been killed in a mine disaster, caused by criminal carelessness and greed for profits; if they had died of some industrial disease which might easily have been prevented; if they had been burned in a factory without fire-escapes--nobody in Wall Street would have wanted to go to war. And, of course, every Socialist considered this was true; every Socialist saw quite clearly that the enormity of the Lusitania sinking lay in the fact that it had reached and injured the privileged people, the people who counted, who got their names in the papers and were not supposed to be inconvenienced, even by war. So it was possible for Jimmie Higgins, even though shocked by what the Germans had done, to be irritated by the fuss which the Wall Street newspapers made.

Young Emil Forster spoke, and they listened to him, as they always