Jimmie Higgins

CHAPTER XIX. JIMMIE HIGGINS PUTS ON KHAKI. I.

There were seven fellows who boarded the train that evening, under the temporary charge of a blacksmith from the near by country. At seven o'clock next morning they presented their papers at the entrance-gate of the training-camp, and under the escort of a soldier were marched down the main street, hanging on to their bundles and suit-cases, and staring about them at the sights.

It was a city inhabited by some forty thousand men, on a site which a year ago had been waste scrub-land. Long rows of wooden buildings stretched in every direction—barracks, dining-rooms, study-rooms, offices, store-houses—with great stretches of exercise and training-grounds between. Just to see this city, with its swarming population of young men, all in uniform, erect, eager, well-set-up and vivid with health, every man of them busy, and every man seemingly absorbed in his job—that alone was a worth-while experience. It was a new kind of city—a city without a loafer, without a drunkard, without a parasite. The seven working-men from Leesville felt suddenly slouchy and disgraced, with their ill-fitting civilian clothes and their miscellaneous bundles and suitcases.

The first thing they did with the new arrivals was to make them clean, to fumigate and vaccinate them. In a Socialist local one meets all sorts of eccentrics, the lunatic-fringe of the movement, and so it happened that Jimmie had listened to a tirade against the diabolical practice of inoculation, which caused more deadly diseases than it was supposed to prevent. But the medical officers of this camp did not stop to ask Jimmie's conclusions on that vital subject; they just told him to roll up the sleeve of his left arm, and proceeded to wipe his skin clean and scratch it with a needle.

And then came the tailor, to do him up in khaki. This also was something the little machinist had not bargained for; he had taken it as a matter of course that he would be allowed to work for Uncle Sam in any old clothes, just as he had done for Abel Granitch. But no—he must have an outfit, complete even to a tooth-brush, which they would show him how to use. Having been done up neat and tight in khaki, with a motor-wheel on his sleeve to show his branch of the service, he stood and looked at himself in the glass, experiencing a demoralizing and unworthy excitement. He was every bit as handsome as Comrade Stankewitz! When he walked down the street would the girls giggle, and turn to look at him, as they did at the sedate and proper Comrade Emil? So the meshes of Militarism were being woven about the soul of Jimmie Higgins.

II.

Jimmie was in quarantine, not allowed to go out of camp on account of his typhoid and other vaccinations, There was enough about the place to have interested him; but, alas, he became suddenly very sick, and was terrified to realize that the opponent of inoculation must have been right. His health had been undermined for ever, he would suffer from a dozen obscure diseases! He went to the hospital, miserable in body and still more miserable in mind; but in a couple of days he began to feel better, and listened to the nurses, who told him cheerfully that everybody felt that way for a bit. Then he got up, and had several free days in which to complete his recovery—days which he spent in wandering about the camp, watching the fascinating sights.

It was like a circus with hundreds of rings. The drilling and marching he had seen in the Leesville square were here going on wholesale. Hundreds of groups were being put through squad-drill and the manual, while other groups were having special kinds of exercises—climbing up walls, digging trenches, making roads, shooting at targets. It rained every other day, and the ground was a morass, but no one paid the least attention to that; the men came in plastered with mud, and steaming like lard-vats. They seemed to enjoy it; nothing ever interfered with their bantering and jokes.

Jimmie watched them with alternating moods of curiosity and horror; for the things that were done here brought the war, with its infinite and multiform wickedness, before his very eyes. Here was a group of men being taught to advance under fire; crawling on their bellies on the ground, jumping from one hummock to another, flinging themselves down and pretending to fire. A man in front, supposed to have a machine-gun, was shouting when he had “got” them. Now they unslung their little trenching-tools, and began to burrow themselves like wood-chucks into the ground. “Dig, you sons o' guns, dig!” the officer would shout. “Keep your head down, Smith! Make the dirt fly! Put the jazz into it! That's the stuff!”

Jimmie had never watched football practice, so he had no conception of the efforts to which men could be goaded by “coaching”. It was abhorrent—yet also it was fascinating, the spell of it got hold of him. He saw what these men were doing; they were learning to act in masses, to act with paralyzing and terrific force. Whatever it was they did, they did with the smash of a battering-ram. You saw the fire in their eyes, the grim, set look on their faces; you knew that they were not going to war with any hesitations or divided minds.

You would move over a rise in the ground, and come upon a bunch of them at bayonet-practice. You didn't require imagination to get the hang of this; they had dummies made of leather, and they rushed at these figures, hacking, stabbing—and here was the most amazing part of it, shouting with rage. Actually the officers taught them to yell, to snarl, to work up their feelings to a fury! It was blood-curdling—Jimmie turned away from it sick. It was just what he had been arguing for three years and a half—you had to make yourself into a wild beast in order to go to war!

Also Jimmie watched the target-ranges, from which came all day a rattle of shots, like the whirr of many typewriters. Companies of men came marching, and spread themselves out along the firing-steps, and under the direction of instructors proceeded to contribute their quota to the noise. Over by the targets were others who kept score and telephoned the results; so all day long, winter or summer, rain or shine, men were learning to kill their fellows, mechanically, as if it were a matter of factory routine. At other ranges were moving targets, where sharp-shooters were acquiring skill; you noticed that their targets were never birds and deer, as at the shooting-galleries which Jimmie had seen at the beaches and at Socialist picnics. No, they were the heads or bodies of men, and each body painted a greenish grey, matching the uniforms of the enemy.

III.

So day by day Jimmie lived with the idea of killing, confronting the grim and ferocious face of war. He had thought that repairing motor-cycles would be pretty much the same anywhere you did it; but he found that it was one thing to repair motor-cycles to be ridden by errand-boys and working-men out for a holiday with their sweethearts, and another and entirely different thing to repair them for fighting-men and dispatch-couriers. Jimmie was driven more insistently than ever to make up his mind about this war. It was every day less easy for him to hold two contradictory sets of opinions.

All the men he now met were of one opinion, and by no possibility to be persuaded to consider any other. Jimmie found that he could get them to agree that after this war for democracy there would be vast changes in this world, the people would never more let themselves be hoodwinked and exploited as they had; he found that he could interest them in the idea of having the government run the great industries, producing food and clothing for the people as it was now producing them for the troops. But when he tried to give this programme the name of Socialism, then the trouble began. Weren't Socialists the lunatics who wanted to have America “lay down” like Russia? The premise from which all discussion started with these men was that America was going to win the war; if you tried to hint that this matter could so much as be hesitated over, you met, first sharp mockery, and then angry looks, and advice to go and take a pill and get the Hun poison out of your system.

Nor was there any use trying to talk about the dangers of militarism. These men knew all about the dangers of militarism—for the Kaiser. The man who is at the buttend of a gun, and knows how to aim it so as to pick off a cat at six hundred yards—that man will let the cat do the worrying. So, at any rate, the matter seemed to these husky young recruits, who were learning to march in the mud and sleep in the rain and chew up carpet-tacks and grind Huns into leber-wurst. They were putting through the job—with a fierce and terrifying gaiety; they exulted in their toughness, they called themselves “grizzlies” and “mountain cats” and what not; they sang wild songs about their irritability, their motto was “Treat 'em rough!” It was a scary atmosphere for a dreamer and utopian; Jimmie Higgins shrank into himself, afraid even to reach about for some fellow-Socialist with whom he might exchange opinions about the events of the outside world.

IV.

In the evening there were picture-shows, concerts, lectures-nearly all dealing with the war, of course. They were held in big halls built by the Y.M.C.A., an organization for which Jimmie had a hearty contempt. He regarded it as a device of the exploiting classes to teach submission to their white-collar slaves. But nobody could live in a training-camp without being aware of the “Y”. Jimmie was invited to a lecture, and out of boredom he went.

It was Sergeant Ebenezer Collins, imported from Flanders to tell the “doughboys” about the wiles of the Hun. Sergeant Collins spoke a weird language which Jimmie had never heard before, and not all of which he could understand; it served, however, to convince him that the sergeant was genuine—for nobody could possibly have faked such a form of utterance! “When yer gow inter Wipers naow,” said the orator, “yer see owld, grye-headed lydies an' bybies like little wite gowsts, an' yer sye ter them, 'Gow-a-wye, the 'Un may be 'ere ter-dye,' but they wown't gow, they got now 'omes ter gow ter!”

But in spite of the difficulties of a foreign language, you realized that this Cockney sergeant was a man. For one thing he had a sense of humour; he had kept it in the midst of terror and death—kept it standing all night in trenches full of icy-cold water, with icy-cold water pouring down his collar. Also the sergeant had a sense of honour—there were things he could not do to a 'Un, even though the 'Un might do them to him. Jimmie had listened to excited debates in Local Leesville, as to whether the Allies were really any better than the Germans; whether, for example, the Allies would have sunk passenger-liners with women and babies on board, if it had been necessary in order to win the war. Sergeant Collins did not debate this question, he just revealed himself as a fighting man. “It's because we plye gymes, an' they down't,” he remarked. “If yer plye gymes, yer now 'ow to plye fair.”

For three years and eight months Jimmie had been hearing stories about atrocities, and for three years and eight months he had been refusing to believe them. But now the Cockney sergeant told about a pal who had been wounded in a night attack by the 'Uns, and the sergeant had tried to carry him back and had had to leave him; towards dawn they made a counter-attack, and retook the village, and there they found the sergeant's pal, still alive, in spite of the fact that he was spiked to a barn-door with bayonets through his hands and feet. When that story was told, you heard a low murmur run through the room and saw a couple of thousand young men clenching their hands and setting their jaws, getting ready for their big job in France.

“Just now,” said the sergeant, “the Germans were making the most desperate attack of the war. The British were at bay, with their backs against the wall. It was upon the men in the training-camps of America that the decision rested; there was no one but them to save the day, to save the rest of the world from falling under the hoofs of the Hun monster. Would they do their part?” Jimmie Higgins heard the answer from those two thousand young throats, and the pacifist in him shrunk deeper out of sight.

But the pacifist was never entirely silent. War was wrong! War was wrong! It was a wicked and brutal way for human beings to settle their disagreements. If human beings were not yet intelligent enough to listen to reason—well, even so, that didn't make war right! A man had to have principles, and to stand by them—how else could he make the world come his way? Yes, war was wrong! But, meantime, war was here; and calling it wrong did not put a stop to it! What the devil was a fellow to do?

V.

As soon as Jimmie was able to work, they took him to the part of the camp where a motor-cycle division was training. Here was a big repair-shop, with plenty of damaged machines upon which he might display his skill. He did not know the particular engine they used here, but he soon learned the secrets of it, and satisfied the officers in charge that he knew how to take one apart and put it together again, to replace and mend tyres, to clean ball-bearings and true crooked rims. “You're all right,” they said. “And you're needed like the devil over there. You won't have to wait long.”

There was a platform where the trains came into the camp, and every few hours now there came a long train to be loaded with men. Jimmie got his notice, and packed his kit and answered roll call and took his place; at sundown of the next day he was detrained at a “mobilization-camp”—another huge city, described in the cautious military fashion as “Somewhere in New Jersey”, though everybody within a hundred miles knew its exact location. Here was a port, created for the purposes of war, with docks and wharves where the fleets of transports were loaded with supplies and troops. The vessels sailed in fleets, carrying thirty or forty thousand men at once. From the port of New York alone there was going out a fleet like this every week—the answer of America to the new drive of the Hun.

One met here, not merely the fighting-men, but the forces of all the complicated service behind the lines: gangs of lumbermen from the far North-west, who were to fell the forests of France and make them into railroad-ties and timber for trenches; railway-men, miners, and construction-gangs, engineers and signalmen, bridge-builders and road-makers, telephone-linemen and operators, the drivers of forty thousand motor-cars and of five thousand locomotives; bakers and cooks, menders of shoes and of clothing, farmers to till the soil of France, and doctors and nurses to tend its sick and wounded. There was nothing which the skill and knowledge of a nation of a hundred million people had to offer that was not gathered into this vast encampment. All the youngest and keenest were here, eager to do their part, laughing at danger, tingling with excitement, on tip-toe with curiosity and delight. Jimmie Higgins, watching them, found his doubts melting like an April snow-storm. How could any man see this activity and not be caught up in it? How could he be with these laughing boys and not share their mood?

Jimmie himself had not had a merry childhood, he did not know the youth of his own country—the breezy, slangy, rather shocking, utterly irrepressible youth of this democratic world. If there was anything they did not know—well, they did not know it; if there was anything they could not do—their motto was: “Show me!” Jimmie, not having been to school, found himself having a hard time with their weird slang. When one of these fellows hailed you, “Hey, pimp!” it did not necessarily mean that he did not like you: when he greeted you, “Hey, sweetness!” it did not mean that he felt for you any over-powering affection. If he referred to his officer as “hard-boiled”, he did not have in mind that this officer had been exposed to the action of water at 212 degrees Fahrenheit; he merely meant that the officer was a snob. When he remarked, “Good night!” in broad daylight, he meant you to understand that he disagreed with you.

He disagreed frequently and explosively with Jimmie Higgins, trying to point out a difference between the German rulers and the German people! Such subtleties had no interest for these all-knowing boys. When Jimmie persisted, they called him a “nut”, a “poor cheese”; they told him that he was “cuckoo”, that his “trolley was twisted”; they made whirling motions with their hands to indicate that he had “wheels in his head”, they made flapping motions over him to signify that there were “bats in his belfry”. So Jimmie subsided, and let them talk their own talk—imploring one another to “have a heart”, or to “get wise”, or to “make it snappy”, or to “cut out the rough stuff”. And he would sit and listen while they sang with zest a song telling about what they were going to do when they got to France:

CHAPTER XX. JIMMIE HIGGINS TAKES A SWIM

I.

You did not stop very long in the mobilization-camp, for the arrival of your train was timed with the arrival of the ship on which you were to sail. You had a meal, sometimes you slept a night, then you marched to the docks. Nor was there much of the traditional “sweet sorrow” about the departure of these great fleets; the weeping mothers and sisters had not been notified to be present, and the ladies of the canteen-service had given coffee and sandwiches, cigarettes and chocolate, to so many tens of thousands that they had forgotten about tears. It was like the emigration of a nation; the part of America that was now on the other side was so large that nobody would need to feel homesick.

Jimmie's embarking was done at night; on the long, covered piers, lighted by arc-lights, the soldiers set down their kits and stood about, munching food, singing songs, and keeping one another's wits sharpened for battle. They filtered on board, and then without a light or a sound the vessel stole down the long stretches of the harbour, and out to sea. One never knew at what hour the enemy submarines might attempt a raid on the American side, so the entrance to the harbour was mined and blockaded, a narrow passage being opened when the ships passed through.

When morning came the convoy was out at sea, amid glorious green rollers, and Jimmie Higgins was lying in his narrow berth, cursing the fates that had lured him, the monster of Militarism into whose clutches he had been snared. The army medical service had a serum to prevent small-pox and another to prevent typhoid, but they had nothing for sea-sickness as yet; so for the first four days of the trip Jimmie wished that a submarine would come and end his misery once for all.

At last, however, he came on deck, an utterly humbled Socialist agitator, asking only a corner to lie in the sunshine—preferably where he could not see the Atlantic surges, the very thought of which turned him inside out. But gradually he found his feet again, and ate with permanence, and looked out over the water and saw the other vessels of the convoy, weirdly painted with many-coloured splotches, steaming in the shape of a gigantic V, with two cruisers in front, and another on each side, and another bringing up the rear. Day and night the look-outs kept watch, and the wigwag men and the heliograph men were busy, and the wireless buzzed its warnings of the movements of the underwater foe. The U-boats had not yet got a transport, but they had made several tries, and everyone knew that they would continue trying. Twice a day the clanging of bells sounded from one end of the vessel to the other, and the crews rushed to the boat-drill; each passenger had his number, and unless he was ill in his berth he had to take his specified place, with his life-preserver strapped about his waist.

The passengers played cards, and read and sang and skylarked about the decks. Up on the top deck, to which Jimmie was not invited, were officers, also a number of women and girls belonging to the hospital and ambulance units. “Janes” was the term by which the soldier-boys described these latter; you could see they were a good sort of “Janes”, serious and keen for their job, looking business-like and impressive in their uniforms with many pockets. Among them were suffragists, answering the taunt of the other sex, showing that in war as well as in peace the world needed them; it had to find a place for them on board the most badly crowded transport.

Never having been on an ocean-liner before, Jimmie did not know that it was crowded; it did not trouble him that there was hardly room for a walk on the decks. He watched the sea and the great white gulls and the piebald ships; he watched the crew at work, and got acquainted with his fellow-passengers. Before long he found a driver of an ambulance who was a Socialist; also an I.W.W. from the Oregon lumber-camps. Even the “wobblies”, it appeared, had come to hate the Kaiser; a bunch of them were in France, and more would have come, if the government had not kept them cross by putting their leaders into jail. An army officer with some sense had gone into the spruce-country of the far North-west, and had appealed to the patriotism of the men, giving them decent hours and wages, and recognizing their unions; as a result, even the dreaded I.W.W. organization had turned tame, and all the lumberjacks had pitched in to help in “canning the Kaiser!”

II.

The fleet was nearing the submarine-zone and it was time for the convoying destroyers to arrive. Everybody was peering out ahead, and at last a cry ran along the decks: “There they are!” Jimmie made out a speck of smoke upon the horizon, and saw it turn into a group of swiftly-flying vessels. He marvelled at the skill whereby they had been able to find the transports on this vast and trackless sea; he marvelled at the slender vessels with their four low, rakish stacks. These sea-terriers were thin skins of steel, covering engines of enormous power; they tore through the water, literally with the speed of an express train, leaving a boiling white wake behind. Seeing them rock and swing from side to side in the waves, hurled this way and that, you marvelled that human beings could live in them and not be jerked to pieces. Jimmie never tired of observing them, nor did they tire of racing in and out between the vessels of the convoy, weaving patterns of foam, the men on their decks watching, watching for the secret foe.

Everyone on board the transports, of course, was on the alert. Jimmie in his secret heart was scared stiff, but he did not reveal it to these mocking soldier-boys, who made merry over German U-boats as they did over sauerkraut and pretzels and Limburger and “wienies”, otherwise known as “hot dogs”. Actually, Jimmie found, they were hoping to encounter a submarine; not to be hit, of course, but to have the torpedo pass within a foot or two, so that they might have something thrilling to write to the folks at home.

There came storms, and blinding sheets of rain across the water, and mists that hid everything from view; but still the little sea-terriers dashed here and there, winding their foam wakes about the fleet, by night as well as by day. How they managed to avoid collisions in the dark was a mystery beyond imagining; Jimmie lay awake, picturing one of them plunging like a sharp spear into the rows of bunks in the steerage where he had been stowed. But when morning dawned, his berth was unspeared, and the watch-dogs of the sea were still weaving their patterns.

It was a day of high wind, with clouds and fitful bursts of sunshine in which the waves shone white and sparkling. Jimmie was standing by the fail with his “wobbly” friend, watching the white-caps, when his companion called his attention to a sparkle that seemed to persist, hitting one in the eye. They pointed it out to others, and as the orders were strict to report anything out of the way, someone shouted to the nearest look-out. A cry went over the ship, and there was hasty wigwagging of the signalman, and three of the destroyers leaped away like hounds on the chase.

There were some on board who had glasses, and they cried out that it was a black object, and finally reported it a raft with people on it. Later, when Jimmie reached port, he heard an explanation of the sparkle which had caught his eye—a woman on the raft had a little pocket-mirror, and had used this to flash the sun's rays upon the vessel, until at last she had attracted attention.

Those who had glasses were mostly on the upper deck, so Jimmie did not see anything of the rescue; the transports, of course, did not swerve or delay, for their orders forbade all altruisms. Even the little destroyers would not approach the raft until they had scoured the sea for miles about, and then they did not stop entirely, but slid by and tossed ropes to the people on the raft, dragging them aboard one by one. A seaman standing near Jimmie explained this procedure; it appeared that the submarines were accustomed to lurk near rafts and life-boats, preying upon those vessels which came to their rescue. Distressed castaways were bait—“live bait”, explained the seaman; the U-boats would lurk about for days, sometimes for a week, watching the people in the life-boats struggle against the waves, watching them die of exposure, and starvation and thirst, watching them signal frantically, waving rags tied on to oars, shouting and praying for help. One by one the castaways would perish, and when the last of them was gone, the U-boat would steal away. “Dead bait's no good,” explained the seaman.

III.

This mariner, Toms by name, came from Cornwall; for the transport was British, and so also the convoying warships—Jimmie's fate had been entrusted to “perfidious Albion”! Seven times this Toms had been torpedoed and seven times rescued, and he had most amazing tales to tell to landlubbers, and a new light to throw on a subject which our Socialist landlubber had been debating for several years—the torpedoing of passenger-vessels with women and children on board. Somehow Jimmie found it a different proposition when he heard of particular women and children, how they looked and what they said, and what happened when they took to open boats in midwinter, and the boats filled up with water, and the children turned blue and then white, and were rescued with noses and ears and hands and feet frozen off.

Jimmie was a working-man, and understood the language of working-men, their standards and ways of looking at life. And here was a working-man; not a conscious Socialist, to be sure, but a union man, sharing the Socialist distrust of capitalists and rulers. What this weather-bitten toiler of the sea told to Jimmie, Jimmie was prepared to understand and believe; so he learned, what he had refused to learn from prostitute newspapers, that there was a code of sea-manners and sea-morals, a law of marine decency, which for centuries had been unbroken save by pirates and savages. The men who went down to the sea in ships were a class of their own, with instincts born of the peculiar cruelties of the element they defied—instincts which broke across all barriers of nations and races, and even across the hatreds of war.

But now these sea-laws had been defied, and the Hun who had defied them had placed himself outside the pale of the human race. In the souls of seamen there had been generated against him a hatred of peculiar and unique ferocity; they hunted him as men hunt vipers and rattlesnakes. The union to which this Toms belonged had pledged itself, not merely for the war, but for years afterwards, that its members would not sail in German ships, nor in any ship in which a German sailed, nor in any ship which sailed to a German port, nor which carried German goods. It had refused to carry Socialist delegates desiring to attend international conferences with German Socialists; it had refused to carry for any purpose labour leaders whom it considered too mercifully disposed towards Germany.

When Jimmie learned this, you can imagine the arguments, continuing far into the night! Quite a crowd gathered about, and they gave it to the little Socialist hot and heavy. The upshot of it was that somebody reported him, and the officer in command of his “motor-unit” read him a stern lecture. He was not here to settle peace-terms, but to do his work and hold his tongue. Jimmie, awed by the fangs and claws of the monster of Militarism, answered, “Yes, sir,” and went away and sulked by himself the whole day, wishing that the submarines might get this transport, with everybody on board except two Socialists and one “wobbly”.

IV.

It was the morning of the day they were due in port. Everybody wore life-preservers, and stood at his station; when suddenly came a yell, and a chorus of shouts from the side of the ship, and Jimmie rushed to the rail, and saw a white wake coming like a swift fish directly at the vessel. “Torpedo!” was the cry, and men stood rooted to the spot. Far back, where the white streak started, you could see a periscope, moving slowly; there was a volley of cracking sounds, and the water all about it leaped high, and the little sea-terriers rushed towards it, firing, and getting ready their deadly depth-bombs. But of all that Jimmie got only a glimpse; there came a roar like the opening of hell in front of him; he was thrown to the deck, half-stunned, and a huge fragment of the rail of the vessel whirled past his head, smashing into a stateroom behind him.

The ship was in an uproar; people rushing here and there, the members of the crew leaping to get away the boats. Jimmie sat up and stared about him, and the first thing he saw was his friend the “wobbly”, lying in a pool of blood, with a great gash in his head.

Suddenly somebody began to sing: “Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light—” Jimmie had always hated that song, because jingoes and patrioteers used it as an excuse to bully and humiliate radicals who did not jump to their feet with sufficient alacrity. But now it was wonderful to see the effect of the song; everybody joined and the soldier-boys and working-men and nurses and lady ambulance-drivers, no matter how badly scared, recalled that they were part of an army on the way to war. Some helped the crews to get the boats into the water; others bound up the wounds of the injured, and carried them across the rapidly-slanting decks.

The great ship was going down. It was horrible to realize—this mighty structure, this home for two weeks of several thousand people, this moving hotel with its sleeping-berths, its dining-saloons, its kitchens with lunch ready to be eaten, its mighty engines and its cargo of every kind of necessity and comfort for an army—all was about to plunge to the bottom of the sea! Jimmie Higgins had read about the torpedoing of scores of ocean-liners, but in all that reading he had learned less about the matter than he learned in a few minutes while he clung half-dazed to a stay rope, and watched the life-boats swing out over the sides and disappear.

V.

“Women first!” was the cry; but the women would not go until the wounded had been taken, and this occasioned delay. Jimmie helped to get his friend the “wobbly”, and passed him on to be lowered with a rope. By that time the deck had got such a slant that it was hard to walk on it; the bow was settling, and the stern rearing up in the air. Never could you have realized the size of an ocean-liner, until you saw it rear itself up like a monstrous mountain, preparatory to plunging beneath the waves! “Jump for it!” shouted voices. “They'll pick you up from the other vessels. Jump and swim.”

So Jimmie rushed to the rail. He saw a life-boat below, trying to push away, and being beaten against the vessel by the heavy waves. He heard a horrible scream, and saw a man slip between the boat and the side of the liner. People on every side of him were jumping—so many that he could not find a clear spot in the water. But at last he saw one, and climbed upon the rail and took the plunge.

He struck the icy water and sank, and a wave rolled over him. He came up quickly, owing to his life-preserver, and gasped for breath, and was choked by another rushing wave and then pounded on the head by an oar in the hands of a struggling sailor. He managed to get out of the way, and struck out to get clear of the vessel. He knew how to do this, thanks to many “swimmin'-holes”—including the one he had visited with the Candidate. But he had never before swam in such deadly cold as this; it was colder than he had dreamed when he had talked about it with Comrade Meissner! Its icy hand seemed to smite him, to smite the life out of him; he struggled desperately, as one struggles against suffocation.

The waves beat him here and there; and then suddenly he was seized as if by the falls of Niagara, drawn along and drawn under—down, down. He thought it was the end, and when again he bobbed up to the surface, his breath was all but gone. The great bulk of the vessel was no longer in sight, and Jimmie was struggling in a whirlpool, along with upset boats and oars and deck-chairs and miscellaneous wreckage, and scores of people clinging to such objects, or swimming frantically to reach them.

Jimmie was just about ready to roll over and let his face go under, when suddenly there loomed above him on the top of a wave a boat rowed swiftly by sailors. One in the boat flung a rope to him, and he tried to catch it, but missed; the boat plunged towards him, and an arm reached out, and caught him by the collar. It was a strong and comforting arm, and Jimmie abandoned himself to it, and remembered nothing more for a long time.

VI.

When Jimmie opened his eyes again he was in a most extraordinary position. At first he could not make it out, he was only aware of endless bruises and blows, as if someone were shaking him about in a gigantic pepper-cruet. As Nature protested desperately against such treatment, Jimmie fought his way back to consciousness, and caught hold of something, in his neighbourhood, which presently turned out to be a brass railing; he struggled to ward off the blows of his tormentors, which turned out to be the aforesaid railing, plus a wall, plus two other men, one on each side of him, the three of them being lashed to the brass railing with ropes. The wall and railing and Jimmie and the other men were behaving in an incredible fashion—swinging down, as if they were plunging into a bottomless abyss, then swinging up, as if they were going to part altogether from this mundane sphere; the total enormous swing, from bottom to top, being mathematically calculated to occupy a period of five and one-half seconds of time.

Jimmie discovered before long that there were a whole row of men, lashed fast and subjected to this perplexing form of torture. They made you think of a row of carcasses in a butcher-shop—only, who could picture a butcher-shop whose floor careened to an angle of forty-five degrees in one direction, and then, in a space of precisely five and a half seconds, careened to an angle of forty-five degrees in the opposite direction?

And they kept bringing more carcasses and hanging them in this insane butcher-shop! Two sailors in uniforms would come staggering, carrying a man between them, clinging to the railing, to Jimmie, to the other men, to anything else they could grab. They would make a desperate rush while the swing was right, and get to a new place on the railing, where they would tie the new man with a bit of rope about his waist, and leave him there to be mauled and pounded. One side of the room was lined solid with carcasses, and then the other side, and still they came. This was apparently a dining-saloon, there being a table down the middle, and two rows of chairs; they lashed people into these chairs, they brought others and lashed them to the bottom of the chairs—any old place at all! There were some who thought they could hold on for themselves; but after the sailors were gone they discovered that it took more skill to hold on than they realized, and they would come hurtling across the floor, winding up with a crash on top of someone else.

It was not the first time in Jimmie's life that he had had to scramble for himself in some uncomfortable situation; he got his wits together quickly. He was shivering as if with ague, and he managed to get out of his wet coat. There being a couple of ladies strapped into chairs in front of him, he did not like to go further; but presently came sailors with armfuls of blankets, and made him perform the complicated feat of getting out of his dripping icy uniform and getting the blanket wrapped around his middle, so that the rope would not saw him into halves. Then came a steward with a pot of hot coffee; being marvellously expert at holding this at all angles of the ship, he poured it into cups with little funnels for drinking, and thus got some down Jimmie's throat.

The little machinist felt better after that, and was able to devote attention to the man on his right, who had hit his nose so many times that it was bleeding in a stream, and had been tilted at so many angles that the blood had run into his eyes and made him blind. The man on the other side of him apparently could make no effort at all to keep his face from being pounded, or his feet from being thrown into the pit of Jimmie's stomach; after Jimmie made a number of protests, an officer came along, and put his ear to the man's chest and pronounced him dead. They brought another rope, and lashed him tighter, so that he would behave himself.

For several hours Jimmie clung to that railing. The destroyer would soon be in port, they kept telling him; meantime they brought him hot soup to keep up his strength. Some people fainted, but there was nothing that could be done for them. The first boat-loads of the rescued had filled up the berths of both officers and crew; the rest must hang on to the railings as best they could. They should be thankful it was decent weather, said one of the sailors; the vessel didn't roll any faster in bad weather, but it rolled much farther in the same time—a distinction which struck Jimmie as over-subtle.

The poor fellow's arms were numb with exhaustion, he had lost hope that anything in the world ever could be still, when the announcement was made that the harbour was in sight, and everybody's troubles would soon be over. And sure enough, the rolling gradually became less. The little vessel still quivered from stem to stern with the movement of her enormous engines, but Jimmie didn't mind that—he was used to machinery; he got himself untied from the railing, and lay down on the floor, right there where he was, and fell asleep. Nor did he open his eyes when they came with a stretcher, and carried him on to a pier and slid him into a motor-truck and whisked him off to a hospital.

CHAPTER XXI. JIMMIE HIGGINS ENTERS SOCIETY

I.

When Jimmie took an interest in life again he was lying in a bed: a bed that actually was still, that did not rise with a leaping motion to the ceiling, and then sink like a swift elevator into the basement. Better yet was the fact that this bed had clean sheets, and a lovely angel in spotless white hovering about it. You who read of Jimmie Higgins's adventures have perhaps been blessed with some of the good things of life, and may need to have it explained to you that never before had Jimmie known what it was to sleep between sheets—to say nothing of clean sheets; never had he known what it was to sleep in a night-gown; never had he had hot broth fetched to him by a snow-white angel with a bright smile and an aureole of golden-brown hair. This marvellous creature waited on his slightest nod, and when she was not busy running errands for him, she sat by his bedside and chatted, asking him all sorts of questions about himself and his life. She thought he was a soldier, and he, shameless wretch, discovered what she thought, and delayed to tell her that he was a common repairer of motor-cycles!

This was a war-hospital, and there were terrible sights to be seen here, terrible sounds to be heard; but Jimmie for a long time missed them almost entirely—he was so comfortable! He lay like a nice dozy cat; he ate good things and drank good things, and then he fell asleep, and then he opened his eyes in the sunshine of a golden brown aureole. It was only gradually that he realized that somewhere in the ward a man was choking and gasping all night, because the inside of his lungs had been partly eaten out with poisonous acids.

Jimmie inquired and was told that more than a hundred people on the transport had lost their lives, including several women; the nurse brought a paper with a list of the casualties, among which he read the name of Mike Angoni—his friend the “wobbly” from the far West! Also the name of Peter Toms—the seaman from Cornwall, caught at the eighth attempt! Jimmie read that the submarine which had sunk the transport had been shattered by a depth-charge, and the sea all strewn with the wreckage of it; and strange and terrible as it might seem, Jimmie, the pacifist, the Socialist, experienced a thrill of satisfaction! Not once did he stop to reflect that on board this under-water craft might have been some German comrade, some poor, enslaved, unhappy internationalist like himself! Jimmie wanted the sneaking, treacherous terrors of the sea exterminated, regardless of everything!

The nurse with the halo of golden-brown hair got interested in her American patient, and would sit and talk with him every chance she got. She learned about Eleeza Betooser and the babies who had been blown to pieces in the explosion. Also she learned about Jimmie's being a Socialist, and asked him questions about it. Wasn't he just a little hard on the leisure classes? Might it not be that some of the capitalists would be as glad as he to know about a better social system? The young lady pronounced the word “capitalists” with the accent on the “it”, which puzzled Jimmie for a time; also she assured him that “wage schedules” would never go back to what they were before the war, and Jimmie had to ask what a “schedule” might be. He did not have to ask what she meant by a “tart”, because there it was on his tray—a delicious little strawberry pie.

II.

This meant that the destroyer had come to an English port; the nurse was a Britisher. If Jimmie had had tact, he would have remembered that Britishers have an outfit of earls and dukes and lords and things, to which they are sentimentally attached. But tact is not the leading virtue of Socialists; in fact, Jimmie made a boast of scorning it—if people asked his opinion, he “gave it to 'em straight”. So now he caused this white angel to understand that he regarded the effete aristocracies of the old world with abysmal contempt; he meant to put them out of business right off the bat. In vain the white angel pleaded that some of them might be useful people, or at any rate well-meaning: Jimmie pronounced them a bunch of parasites and grafters; the thing to do was to make a clean sweep of them.

“You won't cut off their heads?” pleaded the nurse. “Surely they ought to have a chance to reform!”

“Oh, sure!” answered Jimmie. “All I mean is, everybody's got to go to work—the dooks an' aristercrats like the rest.”

The nurse went off, carrying Jimmie's chamber to be emptied; and while she was gone, the man in the next bed, a gun-pointer from an American destroyer with his head bandaged up so that he looked like a Hindu swami, turned his tired eyes upon Jimmie and drawled: “Say, you guy, you better can that line o' talk!”

“Whaddyer mean?” demanded Jimmie, scenting controversy with some militarist.

“I mean that there young lady belongs to the nobility herself.”

“Go on!” said Jimmie.

“Straight!” said the other. “Her father's the earl of Skye-terrier, or some such damn place.”

“Aw, cut it out!” growled the little machinist—for you never knew in dealing with these soldier-boys whether you were being “kidded” or not.

“Did you ask her name?”

“She told me it was Miss Clendenning.”

“Well, you ask her if she ain't the Honourable Beatrice Clendenning, and see what she says.”

But Jimmie could not get up the nerve to ask. When the young lady came back, carrying his chamber washed clean, her pet patient was lying still, but so red in the face that she suspected that he had been trying to get out of bed without permission.

III.

Nor was that the end of wonders. Next day there ran a murmur of excitement through the ward, and everything was cleaned up fresh, though there was really nothing that needed cleaning. Flowers were brought in, and each nurse had a flower pinned on her waist. When Jimmie asked what was “up”, the Honourable Beatrice looked at him with a quizzical smile. “We're going to have some distinguished visitors,” she said. “But you won't be interested—a class-conscious proletarian like you.”

And she would not tell him; but when she went out, the fellow in the next bed told. “It's the king and queen that's comin',” said the gun-pointer.

“Aw, ferget it!” said Jimmie—quite sure he was being “kidded” this time.

“Comin' to see the submarine victims,” said the gun-pointer. “You cut out your Socialist rough stuff for to-day.”

Jimmie asked the nurse when she came back; and sure enough it was true—the king and queen were to visit the hospital, and pay their respects to the victims of the U-boat. But that wouldn't interest Jimmie Higgins. Would he not rather be carried away and put in a private room somewhere, so that his revolutionary eyes would not be offended? Or would he stay, and make a soap-boxer of His Majesty?

“Sure, he won't have no time to talk to a feller like me!” said Jimmie.

“Don't you be too sure,” replied the other. “He's got nothing to do but talk, you know!”

Jimmie didn't venture any farther, because he knew that the Honourable Beatrice was laughing at him, and he had never been laughed at by a woman before, and didn't know quite how to take it. He could not have been expected to understand that the Honourable Beatrice was a suffragette, and laughed at all men on general principles. Jimmie lay quietly in his bed and concealed the unworthy excitement in his soul. Wasn't that the devil now? Him, a little runt of a working man from nowhere in particular, that had been brought up on a charity-farm, and spent a good part of his life as a tramp—him to be meeting the king of England! Jimmie had a way of disposing of kings that was complete and final; he called them “kinks” and when he had called them that he had settled them, wiped them clean out. “None o' them kinks for me!” he had said to the Honourable Beatrice.

But now a “kink” was coming to the hospital! And what was Jimmie going to do? How the devil did you talk to 'em? Did you have to say, “Your Majesty”? Jimmie gripped his hands under the bed-covers. “I'll be damned if I do!” He summoned his revolutionary fervour, he called up the spirits of his “wobbly” friends, “Wild Bill” and “Strawberry” Curran and “Flathead Joe” and “Chuck” Peterson. What would they do under these circumstances? What would the Candidate do? Somehow, Jimmie's revolutionary education had been neglected—nothing had ever been said in any Socialist local as to how a comrade should behave when a “kink” came to visit him!

Jimmy was naturally a kindly human being; he was ready to respond to the kindness of other human beings. But was it in accord with revolutionary ethics to be polite to a “kink”? Was it not his duty to do something to show his contempt for “kinks”? Maybe his Royal Nibs never had anybody to “stand up to him” in all his life before. Well, let him have it to-day!

IV.

A nurse rushed into the ward in great excitement, and whispered, “They're coming!” And after that the nurses all stood round, twisting their hands together nervously, and the patients lay with their eyes glued on the door where the apparition was to appear.

At last there came in sight a man dressed in uniform, who Jimmie would never have dreamed could be a king—except that he had seen his picture in the illustrated papers. He was a medium-sized, rather stoop-shouldered little gentleman, decidedly commonplace-looking, with a closely-trimmed brown beard turning grey, and rosy cheeks such as all Englishmen have. He was escorted by the head of the hospital staff; and behind him came a lady, a severe-looking lady dressed in black, with a couple more doctors escorting her, and behind them several officers in uniform.

The king and queen stopped at the head of the room, and looked down the rows of beds. Each of them wore a friendly smile, and nodded, and said: “How do you do?” And, of course, everybody smiled back, and the nurses curtsied and said, “How do you do, Your Majesties?”

And then His Majesty said: “I hope everybody is doing well?” And the doctor called the head nurse in charge of the ward, who came up smiling and bowing and answered that everybody was doing beautifully, thank you; at which both His Majesty and Her Majesty declared that they were so pleased. The queen looked about, and seeing a man with many bandages, went to him and sat by his bedside and began to ask him questions; the king moved down the centre of the room, until suddenly his eye happened on the Honourable Beatrice.

She had not moved; she stood at her place like the other nurses. But Jimmie, watching, saw a smile come upon the king's face, and he moved towards her saying: “Oh! how do you do?” The young lady went to meet him, quite as if she were used to meeting kings every day.

“How are your patients doing?” inquired His Majesty.

“Beautifully,” said she; and His Majesty said that he was pleased—just as if he had not said the same words only a minute before. He looked at the patients with benevolent but tired-looking eyes; and the Honourable Beatrice, by those subtle methods known to women, brought it about that he looked especially at her favourite. She knew that he would wish to talk to some of the patients, and by ever so slight a movement she brought it about that it was towards Jimmie Higgins he advanced.

“What is your name?” he asked, and then, “Well, Higgins, how are you feeling?”

“Sure, I'm all right,” said Jimmie sturdily; “I wanner get up, only she won't let me.”

“Well,” said His Majesty, “the time was when the king was the tyrant, but now it's the nurse.” He smiled at the Honourable lady. “Are you an American soldier?”

“Naw,” replied Jimmie, “I'm only a machinist.”

“This is a war of machines,” replied His Majesty, graciously.

“I'm a Socialist!” exclaimed Jimmie, right off the bat.

“Indeed!” said His Majesty.

“You bet!” was the reply.

“But you're not one of those Socialists who oppose their country, I see.”

“I done it for a long time,” said Jimmie. “I didn't see we had no business in this here war. But I been changin'—a bit.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” remarked His Majesty. “Doubtless your recent experience has helped you to change.”

“Sure,” replied Jimmie. “But I'm still a Socialist, don't you make no mistake about that, Mr. King.”

“I won't,” said His Majesty; and he looked at the Honourable Beatrice, and between them there flashed one of those subtle messages which highly sophisticated people know how to give and to catch—entirely over the heads of Socialist machinists from Leesville, U.S.A. To the Honourable Beatrice the message conveyed. “How perfectly delicious!” To His Majesty it conveyed, “I knew you'd enjoy it!”

Jimmie's mind was, of course, occupied entirely with the idea of propaganda. He must make the most of this strange opportunity! “Things is goin' to be changed after this here war!” said he. “Fer the workin' people, I mean.”

“They'll be changed for all of us,” said His Majesty. “The dullest of us know that.”

“The workin' people got to get what they earn!” persisted Jimmie. “Why, Mr. King—back home where I come from a feller could work twelve hours a day all his life, an' not have enough saved up to bury himself with. An' they say it was worse here in England.”

“We have had terrible poverty,” admitted His Majesty. “We shall have to find some way of getting rid of it.”

“There ain't no way but Socialism,” cried Jimmie. “Look into it, an' you'll see! We gotter get rid o' the profit-system. The feller that does the work has gotter get what he produces.”

“Well,” said His Majesty, “you'll agree with me this far at least—we must beat the Germans first.” And then he turned to the Honourable Beatrice. “We shall learn much from our American visitors,” he said, and flashed her another of those subtle messages, which indicated that perhaps it was not a good thing for patients in hospitals to become excited over Socialist propaganda! So the Honourable Beatrice turned to the man in the other bed, and His Majesty turned also; he ascertained that the man's name was Deakin, and that he came from Cape Cod. His Majesty remarked how badly England needed good Yankee gun-pointers, and how grateful he was to those who came to help the British Navy. Jimmie listened, just a tiny bit jealous—not for himself, of course, but because he knew that Socialism was so much more important than gun-pointing!

V.

At the foot of the bed there stood a military officer. He had been there for some time, but Jimmie did not notice him till the king rose and moved away. The officer was just the sort of hand-made aristocrat that Jimmie imagined all officers to be; smooth-shaven, except for a little toy moustache, with serene, impassive features, a dapper and immaculate uniform, and a queer little fancy stick in his hand, to show that he never did anything resembling work. He was eyeing the machinist with what the machinist suspected to be a superior air. “Well, my good man,” said he, “you had a talk with the king!”

That seemed obvious enough. “Sure!” said Jimmie.

“Generally,” continued the officer, “when one talks with the king, one addresses him as 'Your Majesty'—not as 'Mr. King'.”

Jimmie was tired now, and not looking for controversy; so he did not bridle as he might otherwise have done. “Nobody told me,” said he.

“Also,” continued the other, “one is not supposed to volunteer opinions. One waits for the king to ask a question, and then one answers.”

Jimmie's eyes were closed, and he only half-opened them as he answered. “They been tellin' me this here is a war for Democracy!” said he.