Someone else said, “There’s Jimmie!”
Several men laughed.
Still another man called, “Hello, Jimmie! Come on in and see how the last little band of Americans is clinging to the Faith!”
So Jimmie went in. He went, because he was interested. This was some subcommittee from the America Forever Committee. Jimmie looked at his father, who sat behind the big table, as chairman, evidently, and Jimmie’s eyes were bright with satire.
His father put on a stuffy expression and said, “Join us, James. That is, if you want, sincerely, to see the opposition at work. And if you can remember that opposition is one of the honest functions of democracy.”
Jimmie nodded meekly and sprawled in a leather chair. For a while the meeting amused him. An American ship had been fired on by a submarine, and it appeared that the Muskogewan members of America Forever had passed a resolution “suggesting” that the submarine had been English. Then the Germans had admitted it was their submarine.
The incident was two months old, but due to it, the America Forever Committee in Muskogewan had been grossly lampooned in a new issue of a monthly magazine. Their first agendum was to draw up a resolution informing the magazine that England had perfidiously drawn America into the war. They next framed a resolution to stay out of war.
After that a long telegram was read. It came from a gentleman of national importance. Its purport was that, even with a congressional declaration of war, the work of America Forever would go forward. Such a declaration, the message said, could only be regarded as the act of a body of rubberstamps who no longer represented the people, or held the power originally vested in them by the Constitution but now assumed by a band of thieves. In view of the fact that no act of Congress could be considered responsible, the wire said, the members of America Forever were urged to disregard all such acts. And so on.
Jimmie reflected that the “members” were, in effect, being urged to consider the future possibility of treason. The men did not seem to see it in that light. Jimmie grinned inwardly.
Money was voted for an advertisement in the local paper which would proclaim that American boys were about to die for the ideology of Red Russia. There were other matters, all heatedly executed and all steadfastly aimed at making it as hard as possible for the existing government to maintain its thesis that the United States was in terrible danger, not of its own making, but inescapable, nonetheless.
Jimmie was planning to slip out of the room, when his name was called. It was called after a whispered conversation at the long table.
A man with horn-rimmed glasses and a small, yellowish mustache said, “Jimmie!” overloudly. “Jimmie,” he repeated, “would you mind a couple of questions?”
Surprised, Jimmie rose awkwardly and said, “Why, no. Certainly not. Shoot!” He sat down again.
The man went on: “We—er—in this subcommittee—we keep an eye on things happening in this town. Feel it’s our duty. My name, incidentally, is Murton.” Jimmie ducked his head. Mr. Murton continued, “I don’t mean spying. Just—watching things.”
Jimmie bowed again. If they wanted to play spy, let them. The next words, however, alarmed Jimmie. “Things like your factory.”
Jimmie stood. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about that, Mr. Murton. We’re under secret orders—as you doubtless know.”
Everyone pivoted to look at the young man. Chairs creaked. Mr. Murton said, “Exactly. Nevertheless, we happen to know that you are manufacturing large quantities of poison gas in your factory.”
“Oh? You do?”
“Naturally, we don’t ask you to admit this. We know it. We also know that some of this—er—material goes to England. Via the Great Lakes and Canada. We have traced it.”
“Very enterprising,” Jimmie said unsympathetically.
Mr. Murton cleared his throat. “Mr. Bailey!” He was addressing the son. “We do not like the manufacture of poison gas anywhere.” There was a loud babble of agreement.
“And we will not tolerate it—in Muskogewan!”
Jimmie sucked in his cheeks and thought a moment. “Look,” he said presently.
“You gotta have poison gas! Plenty. In storage. On hand. Ready to use. And you gotta have soldiers and aviators trained to use it. Here’s why. If you’re all set—with plenty of it—your enemy will never try it on you. If you’re not, your enemy is bound to pour it on you. Make myself clear?”
A lean, enormously tall man with a cubical face and icy gray eyes that looked familiar to Jimmie—came to his feet. “I say—that statement is rationalized! Does this twirp believe Muskogewan is going to be gassed? Does he realize that, for a community like ours, making poison gas is intolerable! An affront! A crime! There was a time”—the hard face softened briefly—“when I respected Willie Corinth. Loved him, almost. That time is past. Willie’s a criminal.”
Jimmie interrupted. “Do you gentlemen imagine you can interrupt the activities of my firm?”
There was a silence, a muttering, and several of the twenty-odd men swore. “Tell him,” somebody said.
The very tall man was still standing. “My name is Wilson,” he said frigidly to Jimmie. “Yes, we do. I don’t think your knowing will stop us in any way. It happens, for one thing, through certain arrangements, that we can call a strike in your plant, at will.
That is, arrange to have one called. It also happens that certain buildings on the grounds were mortgaged to—various persons—by Willie Corinth during the depression. We have bought those mortgages. No doubt Willie could pay them off. We could make the reacquisition of the structures a long process, I believe. There are certain other moves we could make—local ordinances passed and enforced—which would automatically render this particular function of the factory impossible. Am I clear?”
“Yeah,” Jimmie said. He looked at the aggressive faces. “Very. I don’t know how much of this is true and how much is a crummy boast. I don’t know to what extent you can interfere with a plant working for the government. Some, no doubt. The right of people like you to make monkeys out of the majority is the very damn’ right that I’m busy defending! But let me remind you of something. You call yourselves ‘opposition.’ Gentlemen, sabotage is not—’opposition’.” Jimmie sat down.
Mr. Murton’s mustache wiggled. The men palavered, sotto voce. Mr. Wilson said, “Quiet!” He breathed hard and his eyes rocked in their sockets. “Do you recall the name of the man, Jimmie, who sold out to the British—as you have? The name was—Benedict Arnold.”
Jimmie was twenty-eight years old, not fifty or sixty, like most of the men in the room. He was tired. He was spiritually raw from a number of small injuries. He looked at the towering man who had insulted him; his brain leaped and flashed, as if fireworks were going off inside his skull. His eyes roved from the face of Audrey’s father to the other faces and back to the big man. He began to speak:
“The Wehrmacht,” he said unevenly, “the Hitler war machine, may indeed fall apart, somehow—someday. Next year. In five years. America may never hear or feel the fall of a bomb. In that case, America’s problem will be economic. Stuck with arms, the machines for making arms, the debt they cost—in a world that is a ruin. As you men say, it may never literally become our war. All we will face will be—shambles. But you are the people, or the heirs of the people, who pushed the oxcarts out here to Muskogewan. The people who settled the Eastern coasts, whipped the British, pushed on to the Mississippi basin—and the far West. The people who made, in a couple of centuries, the greatest, strongest, finest, most whistling damn’ civilization in the history of man! You fought every nation that tried to clear you out of the sea, or poach on your land, and you—some of you sitting right here—as little as twenty-five years ago took German slugs, to give Democracy a chance! You failed once. So you quit. Won’t try again! Is that—our heritage? To quit flat after one half-try?”