The Prisoner Part 50

"They know enough to understand that old rascal's game, whatever it is, and hoot with her when she's done me. And she's given me the tip, with her dramatics up there on the platform, and the way they answered.

They're children, and they want to play. She had the cleverness to see it. And they shall play with me."

"But they won't act Shakespeare," said Lydia. "They only care about their own countries. That's why they love Madame Beattie."

"What are their countries, Lydia?"

"Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia--oh, a lot more."

"Aren't they voting here in this country?"

"Why, yes, ever so many of them."

"Then," said Jeff, "this is their country, and this is their language, and they've got to learn some English plays and act them as G.o.d pleases.

But act them they shall. Or their children shall. And you may give my compliments to Madame Beattie and tell her if she blocks my game I'll block hers. She'll understand. And they've got to learn what England was and what America meant to be till she got on the rocks."

"Jeff," said Lydia, venturing, "aren't you going into business?"

"I am in business," said Jeff. "It's my business to bail out the scuppers here in Addington and bust Weedie Moore."

"If you went into business," said Lydia, "and made money you could--"

"I could pay off my creditors? No, I couldn't, Lydia. I could as easily lift this house."

"But you could pay something--"

"Something on a dollar? Lydia, I've been a thief, a plain common thief.

I stole a chicken, say. Well, the chicken got s.n.a.t.c.hed away somehow and scrambled for, and eaten. Anyway, the chicken isn't. And you want me to steal another--"

"No, no."

"Yes, you do. I should have to steal it. I haven't time enough in my whole life to get another chicken as big and as fat, unless I steal it.

No, Lydia, I can't do it. If you make me try, I shall blow my nut off, that's all."

Lydia was terrified and he rea.s.sured her.

"No. Don't worry. I sha'n't let go my grip on the earth. When I walk now I'm actually sticking my claws into her. I've found out what she is."

But Lydia still looked at him, hungry for his happiness, and he despairingly tried to show her his true mind.

"You mustn't think for a minute I can wipe out my old score and show you a perfectly clean slate with a nice scrollwork round it. Can't do it, Lydia. I sha'n't come in for any of the prizes. I've got to be a very ordinary, insignificant person from now on."

That hurt her and it did no good. She didn't believe him.

Not many days from this Jeff started out talking to men. He frankly wanted something and asked for it. Addington, he told them, if they built more factories and put in big industries, as they were trying to do, was going to call in more and more foreign workmen. It was going to be a melting-pot of small size. That was a current catchword. Jeff used it as glibly as the women of the clubs. The pot was going to seethe and bubble over and some demagogue--he did not mention Weedie--was going to stir it, and the Addington of our fathers would be lost. The business men looked at him with the slow smile of the sane for the fanatic and answered from the fatuous optimism of the man who expects the world to last at least his time. Some of them said something about "this great country", as if it were chartered by the Almighty to stand the a.s.saults of other races, and when he reminded them that Addington was not trying to amalgamate its aliens with its own ideals, and was giving them over instead to Weedon Moore, they laughed at him.

"What's Weedon Moore?" one man said. "A dirty little shyster. Let him talk. He can't do any harm."

"Do you know what he's telling them?" Jeff inquired.

They supposed they did. He was probably asking them to vote for him.

"Not a bit of it," said Jeff. "He'll do that later. He's telling them they hold the key of the treasury and they've only to turn it to be inside. He's giving no credit to brains and leaders.h.i.+p and tradition and law and punishment for keeping the world moving. He's telling the man with the hod and the man with the pickaxe that simply by virtue of the hod and the pickaxe the world is his: not a fraction of it, mind you, but the earth. To kick into s.p.a.ce, if he likes. And kick Addington with it."

They smoothed him down after one fas.h.i.+on or another, and put their feet up and offered him a cigar and wanted to hear all about his prison experiences, but hardly liked to ask, and so he went away in a queer coma of disappointment. They had not turned him out, but they didn't know what he was talking about. Every man of them was trying either to save the dollar he had or to make another dollar to keep it warm. Jeff went home sore at heart; but when he had plucked up hope again out of his sense of the ironies of things, he went back and saw the same men and hammered at them. He explained, with a categorical clearness, that he knew the West couldn't throw over the East now she'd taken it aboard.

Perhaps we'd got to learn our lesson from it. Just as it might be it could learn something from us; and since it was here in our precincts, it had got to learn. We couldn't do our new citizens the deadly wrong of allowing the seeds of anarchy to be planted in them before they even got over the effects of the voyage. If there were any virtue left in the republic, the fair ideal of it should be stamped upon them as they came, before they were taught to riot over the rights no man on earth could have unless men are going to fight out the old brute battle for bare supremacy.

Then one day a man said to him, "Oh, you're an idealist!" and all his antagonists breathed more freely because they had a catchword. They looked at him, illuminated, and repeated it.

One man, a big coal dealer down by the wharves, did more or less agree with him.

"It's this d.a.m.ned immigration," he said. "They make stump speeches and talk about the open door, but they don't know enough to shut the door when the shebang's full."

It was the first pat retort of any sort Jeff had got.

"I'm not going back so far as that," he leaped at the chance of answering. "I don't want to wait for legislation to crawl along and shut the stable door. I only say, we've invited in a lot of foreigners. We've got to teach 'em to be citizens. They've got to take the country on our plan, and be one of us."

But the coal man had tipped back in his chair against the coal shed and was sc.r.a.ping his nails with his pocket knife. He did it with exquisite care, and his half-closed eyes had a look of sleepy contentment; he might have been shaping a peaceful destiny. His glimmer of responsiveness had died.

"I don't know what you're goin' to do about it," he said.

"We're going to put in a decent man for mayor," said Jeff. "And we're going to keep Weedon Moore out."

"Moore ain't no good," said the coal man. "But I dunno's he'd do any harm."

The eyes of them all were holden, Jeff thought. They were prisoners to their own greed and their own stupidity. So he sat down and ran them into his book, as blind custodians of the public weal. His book was being written fast. He hardly knew what kind of book it was, whether it wasn't a queer story of a wandering type, because he had to put what he thought into the mouths of people. He had no doubt of being able to sell it. When he first came out of prison three publis.h.i.+ng firms of the greatest enterprise had asked him to write his prison experiences. To one of these he wrote now that the book was three-quarters done, and asked what the firm wanted to do about it. The next day came an up-to-date young man, and smoked cigarettes incessantly on the veranda while he asked questions. What kind of a book was it? Jeff brought out three or four chapters, and the young man whirled over the leaves with a practised and lightning-like faculty, his spectacled eyes probing as he turned.

"Sorry," said he. "Not a word about your own experiences."

"It isn't my prison experience," said Jeff. "It's my life here. It's everybody's life on the planet."

"Couldn't sell a hundred copies," said the young man. Jeff looked at him in admiration, he was so c.o.c.ky and so sure. "People don't want to be told they're prisoners. They want you to say you were a prisoner, and tell how innocent you were and how the innocent never get a show and the guilty go scot free."

"How do you think it's written?" Jeff ventured to ask.

"Admirably. But this isn't an age when a man can sit down and write what he likes and tell the publisher he can take it and be d.a.m.ned. The publisher knows mighty well what the public wants. He's going to give it to 'em, too."

"You'd say it won't sell."

"My dear fellow, I know. I'm feeling the pulse of the public all the time. It's my business."

Jeff put out his hands for the sheets and the censor gave them up willingly.

"I'm frightfully disappointed," he said, taking off his eyegla.s.ses to wipe them on his handkerchief and looking so babyishly ingenuous that Jeff broke into a laugh. "I thought we should get something 'live out of you, something we could push with conviction, you know. But we can't this; we simply can't." He had on his gla.s.ses now, and the all-knowingness had come mysteriously back. His eyes seemed to shoot arrows, and clutch and hold you so that you wanted to be shot by them again. "Tell you what, though. We might do this. It's a crazy book, you know."

"Is it?" Jeff inquired.

"Oh, absolutely. Daffy. They'd put it in the eccentric section of a library, with books on perpetual motion and the fourth dimension. But if you'd let us publish your name--"

"Decidedly."