The Reign of Darkness (Dystopian Collection). Джек Лондон
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Название: The Reign of Darkness (Dystopian Collection)

Автор: Джек Лондон

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Языкознание

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isbn: 9788027248155

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СКАЧАТЬ Bishop and my father were embarrassed and perturbed. They tried to lead the conversation away into easier channels; but Ernest opened his eyes, looked at me, and waved them aside. His mouth was stern, and his eyes too; and in the latter there was no glint of laughter. What he was about to say, what terrible castigation he was going to give me, I never knew; for at that moment a man, passing along the sidewalk, stopped and glanced in at us. He was a large man, poorly dressed, and on his back was a great load of rattan and bamboo stands, chairs, and screens. He looked at the house as if debating whether or not he should come in and try to sell some of his wares.

      “That man’s name is Jackson,” Ernest said.

      “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

       Table of Contents

      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:

      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.

      “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, I began to feel that there was something after all in Ernest’s contention.

      He СКАЧАТЬ