Victor looked after her in surprise. He noticed her low black shoe and the slender instep showing from beneath the skirt as she worked the pedal. She wore thin black stockings, which in some way suddenly impressed the Swiss youth. Her bare blond head shone brightly as it disappeared through the gate into the outer court. He remembered that she had no children; that, too, struck him and made him think. Why had she no children? So that was humbug, too, like everything else. All life was humbug. The long one was also a humbug. He owed his wife children, and he only nursed himself; even now he was lying asleep in the shed. Victor despised him; he did not deserve such a woman; she was far too good for this wretched toil. That she should come every day on her wheel to bring the lunch and stand at the door in the crowd was unendurable to him. Good heavens! There was nothing for it but to kill all that were responsible for this state of things, beginning from above with the thrones and the gilded armchairs, until the people should come into their own. But the wife of Höflinger had impressed him today. She seemed to make fun of this life; that made him think. He concluded that this childless wife deserved more intimate study. Everything else could go to hell. When the siren called him back to the idol, he held his head more haughtily than ever before.
One day he remembered Spiele's hint to inquire about the organization. Höflinger, who had considered it premature to speak of it or take him there, glanced at him in surprise and silently turned back to the idol. But in the next working pause he told Pratteler that he could go with him to a meeting that night, if he cared. Victor went along. They entered a large hall, the walls of which were hung with all sorts of pictures, trophies and wreaths. It was the home of two singing societies, a brass band and a dramatic club, each having reserved one wall for its photographs and testimonials. Now workingmen were sitting around the same tables. Under the shining loving cups, wreaths, bows and flags their colorless gray or brown clothes reflected the want and stress of their existence like a spiritless sea. Victor's eye took in at once the contrast between the childish trash of the privileged class that covered the walls and the seriously contained, yet deeply gnawing consciousness of belonging to the disowned that slumbered in the men who now sat in the bourgeois atmosphere of the hall.
Höflinger took his place at the table of the executive committee. Pratteler was surprised to learn that the spirit of revolt had been haunting the iron-works for some months past. A big strike was being planned in order to rebel against decades of oppression and prepare the foundations for a better future. Pratteler was confused. He could not understand why he had not met this spirit in any of his noon hour ramblings. He could not conceive that everybody should then take a nap, return to his machine when the siren blew, draw himself in when the idol wheezed or one of its servants passed. An elderly workingman got up on a chair and reported how far preparations had gone and how large the strike fund had grown; he also mentioned what organizations had declared their solidarity and their readiness to give aid.
Victor was interested in everything that referred to the strike, but could not approve the circuitous preparations and all the secret machinations with which the attack upon the monster was planned, instead of seizing it simply by the horns, as he thought they had the power to do. When the old man stepped down and some others had spoken, he could hardly restrain himself. He felt too closely hedged in in this gingerly movement of the mass. He swallowed nervously and clutched and tugged at his collar; he gulped down one glass of beer after another to quiet himself. In his mind he saw a vision of violent revolt, the masses furiously attacking the idol with axes and clubs, and hacking it to pieces. The bourgeois state was just such an idol. Höflinger got up on a chair and asked all those who had not yet joined the organization, to sign their names. He reminded them of the powers that work up singly from the depths and are back of every uprising of mankind: discipline, devotion and perseverance. He informed the meeting that a food-centre had been established at which a striker's wife could for a minimum price get her supply of coal, bread and potatoes; out of this centre was to grow the workingmen's consumers' league. Finally he warned the men earnestly against damage to the company's property, smashing of windows and breaking of machines. Help should come in a positive and constructive manner, and the destructive tactics of passive resistance and of sabotage should be discarded as being unworthy of a German workingman. One should not forget that besides a strong body one had to transmit to one's children class honor and trade character.
These words from the lips of the childless man stung Victor into opposition. He gasped for air and struck the table with his fist. Then he hissed like a rocket; he, too, could talk as well as the long one. Before anybody had noticed him, he was standing on his chair, challenging attention by an imperious movement of his fist, and swallowed once more. "Attention, Garibaldi wants to speak!" called a workingman that knew him. All looked astonished at the stranger. Many laughed at his agitation. His necktie glowed lurid like a midsummer eve bonfire against the pictures and trophies on the walls.
"Workingmen, proletaires!" he began. "I am of another opinion. Why? Because capitalists are vampires and scoundrels. Why should so many precautions be taken? Up and on, as the old Swiss used to do--that is what I say. If our fathers in Switzerland had waited until a consumers' league had been established and the men of Zurich or Basel sent money, all the cats would still be sitting on their tails and we should be paying our debts with Austrian coin. By God! They rose with clubs and ploughshares, and when the others sent a new army, they attacked it again and again, until there was none left. We must smash all the iron and other idols and serve their servant with the arrows of Tell. And when new ones are erected, we must hack those too to bits. The whole harvest must be ours. We don't want to spill our blood for the wives and the children of others. We must plague capitalism until it gets tired and surrenders. That is the meaning and purpose of capitalism: to capitulate. Everything else is good for people who have no children and no future to think of. They imagine one sort of class honor and another sort of trade character, which at the end amounts to as little as one had before. Class rule and trade fortune must come first; then character will follow. When Switzerland got to that point, Swiss character developed. But one must have courage, by Jove! Well, I have had my say!"
He nodded at the assembly with an important and excited air, hesitated a moment, and then got down from his chair. When he was no longer in sight, there was a moment of silence. Then a murmur of amusement and surprise arose and ended in good-natured laughter. But that, too, did not last long. The old workingman who had opened the meeting got up once more and all heads turned to him. So they passed over the rugged cliffs of Victor's address to the order of the day and listened to the final words of the old leader.
Yet they had taken the measure of the long-necked Swiss fighter just as Spiele had done. By this debut he became a well-known figure and his publicity began, without affecting or modifying his personality. The surname Garibaldi was soon generally accepted, but with its irony mingled something like an affectionate respect and beyond that something of that motherly expectation which is not spoken of: he was considered the promising child of the family. Victor on his part felt uneasy at this kindly and somewhat sarcastic indulgence which the submissive mass showed him from that day on. The laughter had struck him like a thunderbolt. Yet he felt vaguely that by participating in the movement he had linked his fate and established his kinship with that mass. Instead of celebrating the occasion by a feast, it began without further ceremony to correct and to train him, and this feature of their mutual relation was one he disliked. It should have been reversed: the mass should have been corrected and trained. It had no backbone and no faith in its own fist. It wanted to do everything by organization and pleading for help from Tom, Dick and Harry. It had no real men at the head. The committee was a calculating and deliberating bunch of old maids, and the organization was a girls' school led by their apron strings. He thought with indignation of those conditions, worked himself into a rage when he remembered that those immature fellows had laughed at him, and turned his attention to the tailor's daughter.
Höflinger did not allude with a single word to Victor's maiden speech. He did not even seem to have felt the pointed hint about childless people, or he bore him no grudge. That made Pratteler more angry with him. That long fellow had no temperament; that is why the couple had no children. Victor sulkily took up Spiele's sprinkler and deluged her lettuce plants until they were almost drowned. He scratched the weeds from the paths, raked them up and grumpily fed them to the rabbit. He thought by himself that Höflinger could well afford to talk: he would not be thrown out of his home when he went on strike, because he was a house-owner. Then he spat furiously. After all the long one had worked hard and saved in order to get where he was. And if he had drawn his purse-strings tight, when the organization was in need, he would not have been held in such esteem. So much he had to admit: that Höflinger was devoted to the cause. But he had a good job; so what credit was there in it?
Victor cleaned Spiele's wheel. He took it apart, washed everything in kerosene, oiled all the parts and set it up again. There was a human being for whom it was worth while to do something. He proposed that she should have the handle-bar lowered; he himself almost touched the road with his nose when he was on his wheel, and brushed the branches with his back: that he considered the sporting way to ride. When she refused and laughed, he laughed with her, and their merriment and friendliness was doubled. But she ought to have an auto-horn, he said; that would make the children heed her more than the thin little bell. When she refused that, too, he suggested that she should discard the mud-brake to make the wheel run more lightly. He had removed his; and when he returned in rainy weather he bore on his back an armor of dirt thrown up by the machine. When all the spinach was eaten, he dug over the bed and wanted to help Spiele plant cabbage. But when he came home that evening, she had done it herself. He sulked, she laughed, and finally he joined in her laugh.