The Iron Heel Page #10

"The Iron Heel" by Jack London, published in 1908, is a dystopian political novel that explores themes of authoritarianism, class struggle, and revolution. It is considered one of the earliest examples of dystopian fiction, influencing later works like 1984 and Brave New World.

• Novel

								

 called pedlers. They carried their whole stock in trade from door to
 door. It was a most wasteful expenditure of energy. Distribution was
 as confused and irrational as the whole general system of society.

“Notice the sleeve of his left arm,” Ernest said gently.

I looked, and saw that the sleeve was empty.

“It was some of the blood from that arm that I heard dripping from your
roof-beams,” Ernest said with continued gentleness. “He lost his arm in
the Sierra Mills, and like a broken-down horse you turned him out on
the highway to die. When I say ‘you,’ I mean the superintendent and the
officials that you and the other stockholders pay to manage the mills
for you. It was an accident. It was caused by his trying to save the
company a few dollars. The toothed drum of the picker caught his arm.
He might have let the small flint that he saw in the teeth go through.
It would have smashed out a double row of spikes. But he reached for
the flint, and his arm was picked and clawed to shreds from the finger
tips to the shoulder. It was at night. The mills were working overtime.
They paid a fat dividend that quarter. Jackson had been working many
hours, and his muscles had lost their resiliency and snap. They made
his movements a bit slow. That was why the machine caught him. He had a
wife and three children.”

“And what did the company do for him?” I asked.

“Nothing. Oh, yes, they did do something. They successfully fought the
damage suit he brought when he came out of hospital. The company
employs very efficient lawyers, you know.”

“You have not told the whole story,” I said with conviction. “Or else
you do not know the whole story. Maybe the man was insolent.”

“Insolent! Ha! ha!” His laughter was Mephistophelian. “Great God!
Insolent! And with his arm chewed off! Nevertheless he was a meek and
lowly servant, and there is no record of his having been insolent.”

“But the courts,” I urged. “The case would not have been decided
against him had there been no more to the affair than you have
mentioned.”

“Colonel Ingram is leading counsel for the company. He is a shrewd
lawyer.” Ernest looked at me intently for a moment, then went on. “I’ll
tell you what you do, Miss Cunningham. You investigate Jackson’s case.”

“I had already determined to,” I said coldly.

“All right,” he beamed good-naturedly, “and I’ll tell you where to find
him. But I tremble for you when I think of all you are to prove by
Jackson’s arm.”

And so it came about that both the Bishop and I accepted Ernest’s
challenges. They went away together, leaving me smarting with a sense
of injustice that had been done me and my class. The man was a beast. I
hated him, then, and consoled myself with the thought that his behavior
was what was to be expected from a man of the working class.




CHAPTER III.
JACKSON’S ARM


Little did I dream the fateful part Jackson’s arm was to play in my
life. Jackson himself did not impress me when I hunted him out. I found
him in a crazy, ramshackle[1] house down near the bay on the edge of
the marsh. Pools of stagnant water stood around the house, their
surfaces covered with a green and putrid-looking scum, while the stench
that arose from them was intolerable.

 [1] An adjective descriptive of ruined and dilapidated houses in which
 great numbers of the working people found shelter in those days. They
 invariably paid rent, and, considering the value of such houses,
 enormous rent, to the landlords.

I found Jackson the meek and lowly man he had been described. He was
making some sort of rattan-work, and he toiled on stolidly while I
talked with him. But in spite of his meekness and lowliness, I fancied
I caught the first note of a nascent bitterness in him when he said:

“They might a-given me a job as watchman,[2] anyway.”

 [2] In those days thievery was incredibly prevalent. Everybody stole
 property from everybody else. The lords of society stole legally or
 else legalized their stealing, while the poorer classes stole
 illegally. Nothing was safe unless guarded. Enormous numbers of men
 were employed as watchmen to protect property. The houses of the
 well-to-do were a combination of safe deposit vault and fortress. The
 appropriation of the personal belongings of others by our own children
 of to-day is looked upon as a rudimentary survival of the
 theft-characteristic that in those early times was universal.

I got little out of him. He struck me as stupid, and yet the deftness
with which he worked with his one hand seemed to belie his stupidity.
This suggested an idea to me.

“How did you happen to get your arm caught in the machine?” I asked.

He looked at me in a slow and pondering way, and shook his head. “I
don’t know. It just happened.”

“Carelessness?” I prompted.

“No,” he answered, “I ain’t for callin’ it that. I was workin’
overtime, an’ I guess I was tired out some. I worked seventeen years in
them mills, an’ I’ve took notice that most of the accidents happens
just before whistle-blow.[3] I’m willin’ to bet that more accidents
happens in the hour before whistle-blow than in all the rest of the
day. A man ain’t so quick after workin’ steady for hours. I’ve seen too
many of ’em cut up an’ gouged an’ chawed not to know.”

 [3] The laborers were called to work and dismissed by savage,
 screaming, nerve-racking steam-whistles.

“Many of them?” I queried.

“Hundreds an’ hundreds, an’ children, too.”

With the exception of the terrible details, Jackson’s story of his
accident was the same as that I had already heard. When I asked him if
he had broken some rule of working the machinery, he shook his head.

“I chucked off the belt with my right hand,” he said, “an’ made a reach
for the flint with my left. I didn’t stop to see if the belt was off. I
thought my right hand had done it—only it didn’t. I reached quick, and
the belt wasn’t all the way off. And then my arm was chewed off.”

“It must have been painful,” I said sympathetically.

“The crunchin’ of the bones wasn’t nice,” was his answer.

His mind was rather hazy concerning the damage suit. Only one thing was
clear to him, and that was that he had not got any damages. He had a
feeling that the testimony of the foremen and the superintendent had
brought about the adverse decision of the court. Their testimony, as he
put it, “wasn’t what it ought to have ben.” And to them I resolved to
go.

One thing was plain, Jackson’s situation was wretched. His wife was in
ill health, and he was unable to earn, by his rattan-work and peddling,
sufficient food for the family. He was back in his rent, and the oldest
boy, a lad of eleven, had started to work in the mills.

“They might a-given me that watchman’s job,” were his last words as I
went away.

By the time I had seen the lawyer who had handled Jackson’s case, and
the two foremen and the superintendent at the mills who had testified,

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