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?”
Someone said, loudly, but behind his hand, “Siddown!”