章节正文
Dog-Tooth stopped the making of money. And the women had no work,
so they took the places of the men. I worked on the fish-trap,
getting a string of money every five days. But my sister now did
my work, getting a string of money for every ten days. The women
worked cheaper, and there was less food, and Tiger-Face said we
should become guards. Only I could not become a guard because I
was lame of one leg and Tiger-Face would not have me. And there
were many like me. We were broken men and only fit to beg for work
or to take care of the babies while the women worked."
Yellow-Head, too, was made hungry by the recital and broiled a
piece of bear-meat on the coals.
"But why didn't you rise up, all of you, and kill Three-Legs and
Pig-Jaw and Big-Fat and the rest and get enough to eat?" Afraid-in-
the-Dark demanded.
"Because we could not understand," Long-Beard answered. "There was
too much to think about, and, also, there were the guards sticking
spears into us, and Big-Fat talking about God, and the Bug singing
new songs. And when any man did think right, and said so, Tiger-
Face and the guards got him, and he was tied out to the rocks at
low tide so that the rising waters drowned him.
"It was a strange thing - the money. It was like the Bug's songs.
It seemed all right, but it wasn't, and we were slow to understand.
Dog-Tooth began to gather the money in. He put it in a big pile,
in a grass house, with guards to watch it day and night. And the
more money he piled in the house the dearer money became, so that a
man worked a longer time for a string of money than before. Then,
too, there was always talk of war with the Meat-Eaters, and Dog-
Tooth and Tiger-Face filled many houses with corn, and dried fish,
and smoked goat-meat, and cheese. And with the food, piled there
in mountains the people had not enough to eat. But what did it
matter? Whenever the people grumbled too loudly the Bug sang a new
song, and Big-Fat said it was God's word that we should kill Meat-
Eaters, and Tiger-Face led us over the divide to kill and be
killed. I was not good enough to be a guard and lie fat in the
sun, but, when we made war, Tiger-Face was glad to take me along.
And when we had eaten, all the food stored in the houses we stopped
fighting and went back to work to pile up more food."
"Then were you all crazy," commented Deer-Runner.
"Then were we indeed all crazy," Long-Beard agreed. "It was
strange, all of it. There was Split-Nose. He said everything was
wrong. He said it was true that we grew strong by adding our
strength together. And he said that, when we first formed the
tribe, it was right that the men whose strength hurt the tribe
should be shorn of their strength - men who bashed their brothers'
heads and stole their brothers' wives. And now, he said, the tribe
was not getting stronger, but was getting weaker, because there
were men with another kind of strength that were hurting the tribe
- men who had the strength of the land, like Three-Legs; who had
the strength of the fish-trap, like Little-Belly; who had the
strength of all the goat-meat, like Pig-Jaw. The thing to do,
Split-Nose said, was to shear these men of their evil strength; to
make them go to work, all of them, and to let no man eat who did
not work.
"And the Bug sang another song about men like Split-Nose, who
wanted to go back, and live in trees.
"Yet Split-Nose said no; that he did not want to go back, but
ahead; that they grew strong only as they added their strength
together; and that, if the Fish-Eaters would add their strength to
the Meat-Eaters, there would be no more fighting and no more
watchers and no more guards, and that, with all men working, there
would be so much food that each man would have to work not more
than two hours a day.
"Then the Bug sang again, and he sang that Split-Nose was lazy, and
he sang also the 'Song of the Bees.' It was a strange song, and
those who listened were made mad, as from the drinking of strong
fire-brew. The song was of a swarm of bees, and of a robber wasp
who had come in to live with the bees and who was stealing all
their honey. The wasp was lazy and told them there was no need to
work; also, he told them to make friends with the bears, who were
not honey-stealers but only very good friends. And the Bug sang in
crooked words, so that those who listened knew that the swarm was
the Sea Valley tribe, that the bears were the Meat-Eaters, and that
the lazy wasp was Split-Nose. And when the Bug sang that the bees
listened to the wasp till the swarm was near to perishing, the
people growled and snarled, and when the Bug sang that at last the
good bees arose and stung the wasp to death, the people picked up
stones from the ground and stoned Split-Nose to death till there
was naught to be seen of him but the heap of stones they had flung
on top of him. And there were many poor people who worked long and
hard and had not enough to eat that helped throw the stones on
Split-Nose.
"And, after the death of Split-Nose, there was but one other man
that dared rise up and speak his mind, and that man was Hair-Face.
'Where is the strength of the strong?' he asked. 'We are the
strong, all of us, and we are stronger than Dog-Tooth and Tiger-
Face and Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and all the rest who do nothing and
eat much and weaken us by the hurt of their strength which is bad
strength. Men who are slaves are not strong. If the man who first
found the virtue and use of fire had used his strength we would
have been his slaves, as we are the slaves to-day of Little-Belly,
who found the virtue and use of the fish-trap; and of the men who
found the virtue and use of the land, and the goats, and the fire-
brew. Before, we lived in trees, my brothers, and no man was safe.
But we fight no more with one another. We have added our strength
together. Then let us fight no more with the Meat-Eaters. Let us
add our strength and their strength together. Then will we be
indeed strong. And then we will go out together, the Fish-Eaters
and the Meat-Eaters, and we will kill the tigers and the lions and
the wolves and the wild dogs, and we will pasture our goats on all
the hill-sides and plant our corn and fat roots in all the high
mountain valleys. In that day we will be so strong that all the
wild animals will flee before us and perish. And nothing will
withstand us, for the strength of each man will be the strength of
all men in the world.'
"So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was
a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very
strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those
that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And
the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all
fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were
called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get
enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.
"And the tribe went on losing strength. The children were weak and
sickly. And, because we ate not enough, strange sicknesses came
among us and we died like flies. And then the Meat-Eaters came
upon us. We had followed Tiger-Face too often over the divide and
killed them. And now they came to repay in blood. We were too
weak and sick to man the big wall. And they killed us, all of us,
except some of the women, which they took away with them. The Bug
and I escaped, and I hid in the wildest places, and became a hunter
of meat and went hungry no more. I stole a wife from the Meat-
Eaters, and went to live in the caves of the high mountains where
they could not find me. And we had three sons, and each son stole
a wife from the Meat-Eaters. And the rest you know, for are you
not the sons of my sons?"
"But the Bug?" queried Deer-Runner. "What became of him?"
"He went to live with the Meat-Eaters and to be a singer of songs
to the king. He is an old man now, but he sings the same old
songs; and, when a man rises up to go forward, he sings that that
man is walking backward to live in a tree."
Long-Beard dipped into the bear-carcass and sucked with toothless
gums at a fist of suet.
"Some day," he said, wiping his hands on his sides, "all the fools
will be dead and then all live men will go forward. The strength
of the strong will be theirs, and they will add their strength
together, so that, of all the men in the world, not one will fight
with another. There will be no guards nor watchers on the walls.
And all the hunting animals will be killed, and, as Hair-Face said,
all the hill-sides will be pastured with goats and all the high
mountain valleys will be planted with corn and fat roots. And all
men will be brothers, and no man will lie idle in the sun and be
fed by his fellows. And all that will come to pass in the time
when the fools are dead, and when there will be no more singers to
stand still and sing the 'Song of the Bees.' Bees are not men."
SOUTH OF THE SLOT
Old San Francisco, which is the San Francisco of only the other
day, the day before the Earthquake, was divided midway by the Slot.
The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the centre of Market
Street, and from the Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless
cable that was hitched at will to the cars it dragged up and down.
In truth, there were two slots, but in the quick grammar of the
West time was saved by calling them, and much more that they stood
for, "The Slot." North of the Slot were the theatres, hotels, and
shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business
houses. South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries,
machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.
The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of
Society, and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more
successfully than Freddie Drummond. He made a practice of living
in both worlds, and in both worlds he lived signally well. Freddie
Drummond was a professor in the Sociology Department of the
University of California, and it was as a professor of sociology
that he first crossed over the Slot, lived for six mouths in the
great labour-ghetto, and wrote THE UNSKILLED LABOURER - a book that
was hailed everywhere as an able contribution to the literature of
progress, and as a splendid reply to the literature of discontent.
Politically and economically it was nothing if not orthodox.
Presidents of great railway systems bought whole editions of it to
give to their employees. The Manufacturers' Association alone
distributed fifty thousand copies of it. In a way, it was almost
as immoral as the far-famed and notorious MESSAGE TO GARCIA, while
in its pernicious preachment of thrift and content it ran MR. WIGGS
OF THE CABBAGE PATCH a close second.
At first, Freddie Drummond found it monstrously difficult to get
along among the working people. He was not used to their ways, and
they certainly were not used to his. They were suspicious. He had
no antecedents. He could talk of no previous jobs. His hands were
soft. His extraordinarypoliteness was ominous. His first idea of
the role he would play was that of a free and independent American
who chose to work with his hands and no explanations given. But it
wouldn't do, as he quickly discovered. At the beginning they
accepted him, very provisionally, as a freak. A little later, as
he began to know his way about better, he insensibly drifted into
the role that would work - namely, he was a man who had seen better
days, very much better days, but who was down on his luck, though,
to be sure, only temporarily.
He learned many things, and generalized much and often erroneously,
all of which can be found in the pages of THE UNSKILLED LABOURER.
He saved himself, however, after the sane and conservative manner
of his kind, by labelling his generalizations as "tentative." One
of his first experiences was in the great Wilmax Cannery, where he
was put on piece-work making small packing cases. A box factory
supplied the parts, and all Freddie Drummond had to do was to fit
the parts into a form and drive in the wire nails with a light
hammer.
It was not skilled labour, but it was piece-work. The ordinary
labourers in the cannery got a dollar and a half per day. Freddie
Drummond found the other men on the same job with him jogging along
and earning a dollar and seventy-five cents a day. By the third
day he was able to earn the same. But he was ambitious. He did
not care to jog along and, being unusually able and fit, on the
so they took the places of the men. I worked on the fish-trap,
getting a string of money every five days. But my sister now did
my work, getting a string of money for every ten days. The women
worked cheaper, and there was less food, and Tiger-Face said we
should become guards. Only I could not become a guard because I
was lame of one leg and Tiger-Face would not have me. And there
were many like me. We were broken men and only fit to beg for work
or to take care of the babies while the women worked."
Yellow-Head, too, was made hungry by the recital and broiled a
piece of bear-meat on the coals.
"But why didn't you rise up, all of you, and kill Three-Legs and
Pig-Jaw and Big-Fat and the rest and get enough to eat?" Afraid-in-
the-Dark demanded.
"Because we could not understand," Long-Beard answered. "There was
too much to think about, and, also, there were the guards sticking
spears into us, and Big-Fat talking about God, and the Bug singing
new songs. And when any man did think right, and said so, Tiger-
Face and the guards got him, and he was tied out to the rocks at
low tide so that the rising waters drowned him.
"It was a strange thing - the money. It was like the Bug's songs.
It seemed all right, but it wasn't, and we were slow to understand.
Dog-Tooth began to gather the money in. He put it in a big pile,
in a grass house, with guards to watch it day and night. And the
more money he piled in the house the dearer money became, so that a
man worked a longer time for a string of money than before. Then,
too, there was always talk of war with the Meat-Eaters, and Dog-
Tooth and Tiger-Face filled many houses with corn, and dried fish,
and smoked goat-meat, and cheese. And with the food, piled there
in mountains the people had not enough to eat. But what did it
matter? Whenever the people grumbled too loudly the Bug sang a new
song, and Big-Fat said it was God's word that we should kill Meat-
Eaters, and Tiger-Face led us over the divide to kill and be
killed. I was not good enough to be a guard and lie fat in the
sun, but, when we made war, Tiger-Face was glad to take me along.
And when we had eaten, all the food stored in the houses we stopped
fighting and went back to work to pile up more food."
"Then were you all crazy," commented Deer-Runner.
"Then were we indeed all crazy," Long-Beard agreed. "It was
strange, all of it. There was Split-Nose. He said everything was
wrong. He said it was true that we grew strong by adding our
strength together. And he said that, when we first formed the
tribe, it was right that the men whose strength hurt the tribe
should be shorn of their strength - men who bashed their brothers'
heads and stole their brothers' wives. And now, he said, the tribe
was not getting stronger, but was getting weaker, because there
were men with another kind of strength that were hurting the tribe
- men who had the strength of the land, like Three-Legs; who had
the strength of the fish-trap, like Little-Belly; who had the
strength of all the goat-meat, like Pig-Jaw. The thing to do,
Split-Nose said, was to shear these men of their evil strength; to
make them go to work, all of them, and to let no man eat who did
not work.
"And the Bug sang another song about men like Split-Nose, who
wanted to go back, and live in trees.
"Yet Split-Nose said no; that he did not want to go back, but
ahead; that they grew strong only as they added their strength
together; and that, if the Fish-Eaters would add their strength to
the Meat-Eaters, there would be no more fighting and no more
watchers and no more guards, and that, with all men working, there
would be so much food that each man would have to work not more
than two hours a day.
"Then the Bug sang again, and he sang that Split-Nose was lazy, and
he sang also the 'Song of the Bees.' It was a strange song, and
those who listened were made mad, as from the drinking of strong
fire-brew. The song was of a swarm of bees, and of a robber wasp
who had come in to live with the bees and who was stealing all
their honey. The wasp was lazy and told them there was no need to
work; also, he told them to make friends with the bears, who were
not honey-stealers but only very good friends. And the Bug sang in
crooked words, so that those who listened knew that the swarm was
the Sea Valley tribe, that the bears were the Meat-Eaters, and that
the lazy wasp was Split-Nose. And when the Bug sang that the bees
listened to the wasp till the swarm was near to perishing, the
people growled and snarled, and when the Bug sang that at last the
good bees arose and stung the wasp to death, the people picked up
stones from the ground and stoned Split-Nose to death till there
was naught to be seen of him but the heap of stones they had flung
on top of him. And there were many poor people who worked long and
hard and had not enough to eat that helped throw the stones on
Split-Nose.
"And, after the death of Split-Nose, there was but one other man
that dared rise up and speak his mind, and that man was Hair-Face.
'Where is the strength of the strong?' he asked. 'We are the
strong, all of us, and we are stronger than Dog-Tooth and Tiger-
Face and Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and all the rest who do nothing and
eat much and weaken us by the hurt of their strength which is bad
strength. Men who are slaves are not strong. If the man who first
found the virtue and use of fire had used his strength we would
have been his slaves, as we are the slaves to-day of Little-Belly,
who found the virtue and use of the fish-trap; and of the men who
found the virtue and use of the land, and the goats, and the fire-
brew. Before, we lived in trees, my brothers, and no man was safe.
But we fight no more with one another. We have added our strength
together. Then let us fight no more with the Meat-Eaters. Let us
add our strength and their strength together. Then will we be
indeed strong. And then we will go out together, the Fish-Eaters
and the Meat-Eaters, and we will kill the tigers and the lions and
the wolves and the wild dogs, and we will pasture our goats on all
the hill-sides and plant our corn and fat roots in all the high
mountain valleys. In that day we will be so strong that all the
wild animals will flee before us and perish. And nothing will
withstand us, for the strength of each man will be the strength of
all men in the world.'
"So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was
a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very
strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those
that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And
the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all
fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were
called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get
enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.
"And the tribe went on losing strength. The children were weak and
sickly. And, because we ate not enough, strange sicknesses came
among us and we died like flies. And then the Meat-Eaters came
upon us. We had followed Tiger-Face too often over the divide and
killed them. And now they came to repay in blood. We were too
weak and sick to man the big wall. And they killed us, all of us,
except some of the women, which they took away with them. The Bug
and I escaped, and I hid in the wildest places, and became a hunter
of meat and went hungry no more. I stole a wife from the Meat-
Eaters, and went to live in the caves of the high mountains where
they could not find me. And we had three sons, and each son stole
a wife from the Meat-Eaters. And the rest you know, for are you
not the sons of my sons?"
"But the Bug?" queried Deer-Runner. "What became of him?"
"He went to live with the Meat-Eaters and to be a singer of songs
to the king. He is an old man now, but he sings the same old
songs; and, when a man rises up to go forward, he sings that that
man is walking backward to live in a tree."
Long-Beard dipped into the bear-carcass and sucked with toothless
gums at a fist of suet.
"Some day," he said, wiping his hands on his sides, "all the fools
will be dead and then all live men will go forward. The strength
of the strong will be theirs, and they will add their strength
together, so that, of all the men in the world, not one will fight
with another. There will be no guards nor watchers on the walls.
And all the hunting animals will be killed, and, as Hair-Face said,
all the hill-sides will be pastured with goats and all the high
mountain valleys will be planted with corn and fat roots. And all
men will be brothers, and no man will lie idle in the sun and be
fed by his fellows. And all that will come to pass in the time
when the fools are dead, and when there will be no more singers to
stand still and sing the 'Song of the Bees.' Bees are not men."
SOUTH OF THE SLOT
Old San Francisco, which is the San Francisco of only the other
day, the day before the Earthquake, was divided midway by the Slot.
The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the centre of Market
Street, and from the Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless
cable that was hitched at will to the cars it dragged up and down.
In truth, there were two slots, but in the quick grammar of the
West time was saved by calling them, and much more that they stood
for, "The Slot." North of the Slot were the theatres, hotels, and
shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business
houses. South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries,
machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.
The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of
Society, and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more
successfully than Freddie Drummond. He made a practice of living
in both worlds, and in both worlds he lived signally well. Freddie
Drummond was a professor in the Sociology Department of the
University of California, and it was as a professor of sociology
that he first crossed over the Slot, lived for six mouths in the
great labour-ghetto, and wrote THE UNSKILLED LABOURER - a book that
was hailed everywhere as an able contribution to the literature of
progress, and as a splendid reply to the literature of discontent.
Politically and economically it was nothing if not orthodox.
Presidents of great railway systems bought whole editions of it to
give to their employees. The Manufacturers' Association alone
distributed fifty thousand copies of it. In a way, it was almost
as immoral as the far-famed and notorious MESSAGE TO GARCIA, while
in its pernicious preachment of thrift and content it ran MR. WIGGS
OF THE CABBAGE PATCH a close second.
At first, Freddie Drummond found it monstrously difficult to get
along among the working people. He was not used to their ways, and
they certainly were not used to his. They were suspicious. He had
no antecedents. He could talk of no previous jobs. His hands were
soft. His extraordinarypoliteness was ominous. His first idea of
the role he would play was that of a free and independent American
who chose to work with his hands and no explanations given. But it
wouldn't do, as he quickly discovered. At the beginning they
accepted him, very provisionally, as a freak. A little later, as
he began to know his way about better, he insensibly drifted into
the role that would work - namely, he was a man who had seen better
days, very much better days, but who was down on his luck, though,
to be sure, only temporarily.
He learned many things, and generalized much and often erroneously,
all of which can be found in the pages of THE UNSKILLED LABOURER.
He saved himself, however, after the sane and conservative manner
of his kind, by labelling his generalizations as "tentative." One
of his first experiences was in the great Wilmax Cannery, where he
was put on piece-work making small packing cases. A box factory
supplied the parts, and all Freddie Drummond had to do was to fit
the parts into a form and drive in the wire nails with a light
hammer.
It was not skilled labour, but it was piece-work. The ordinary
labourers in the cannery got a dollar and a half per day. Freddie
Drummond found the other men on the same job with him jogging along
and earning a dollar and seventy-five cents a day. By the third
day he was able to earn the same. But he was ambitious. He did
not care to jog along and, being unusually able and fit, on the
- cheese [tʃi:z]
n.干酪，乳酪 (初中英语单词) - whenever [wen´evə] conj.&ad.无论何时 (初中英语单词)
- working [´wə:kiŋ] a.工人的；劳动的 (初中英语单词)
- robber [´rɔbə] n.强盗；盗贼 (初中英语单词)
- valley [´væli] n.谷；河谷；流域 (初中英语单词)
- virtue [´və:tʃu:] n.美德；贞操；长处 (初中英语单词)
- pasture [´pɑ:stʃə] n.牧场；放牧 v.吃(草) (初中英语单词)
- perish [´periʃ] v.灭亡；消灭；(使)死去 (初中英语单词)
- backward [´bækwəd] ad.向后 a.向后的 (初中英语单词)
- singer [´siŋə] n.歌手，演唱者 (初中英语单词)
- california [,kæli´fɔ:njə] n.加利福尼亚 (初中英语单词)
- literature [´litərətʃə] n.文学；文献；著作 (初中英语单词)
- cabbage [´kæbidʒ] n.卷心菜；洋白菜 (初中英语单词)
- previous [´pri:viəs] a.先，前，以前的 (初中英语单词)
- extraordinary [ik´strɔ:dinəri] a.非常的；额外的 (初中英语单词)
- beginning [bi´giniŋ] n.开始，开端；起源 (初中英语单词)
- ambitious [æm´biʃəs] a.有雄心的；热望的 (初中英语单词)
- naught [nɔ:t] n.无；零 (高中英语单词)
- weaken [´wi:kən] v.(使)弱化；衰弱；稀薄 (高中英语单词)
- theirs [ðeəz] pron.他们的 (高中英语单词)
- earthquake [´ə:θkweik] n.地震；大变动 (高中英语单词)
- respectable [ri´spektəbəl] a.可敬的；有身价的 (高中英语单词)
- boiler [´bɔilə] n.锅炉 (高中英语单词)
- contribution [,kɔntri´bju:ʃən] n.贡献；捐献；投稿 (高中英语单词)
- suspicious [sə´spiʃəs] a.可疑的，多疑的 (高中英语单词)
- namely [´neimli] ad.即，也就是 (高中英语单词)
- learned [´lə:nid] a.有学问的，博学的 (高中英语单词)
- conservative [kən´sə:vətiv] a.保守的 n.保守者 (高中英语单词)
- skilled [skild] a.有技能的，熟练的 (高中英语单词)
- midway [,mid´wei] n.中途 ad.&a.中途(的) (英语四级单词)
- notorious [nəu´tɔ:riəs] a.臭名昭著的 (英语四级单词)
- thrift [θrift] n.节俭，节约 (英语四级单词)
- ominous [´ɔminəs] a.不祥的；预示的 (英语四级单词)
- unusually [ʌn´ju:ʒuəli] ad.异常地；非常 (英语四级单词)
- recital [ri´saitl] n.背诵；叙述；音乐会 (英语六级单词)
- hunting [´hʌntiŋ] n.打猎 (英语六级单词)
- ceaseless [´si:slis] a.不绝的，不停的 (英语六级单词)
- calling [´kɔ:liŋ] n.点名；职业；欲望 (英语六级单词)
- pernicious [pə´niʃəs] a.有害的；有毒的；致命的 (英语六级单词)
- politeness [pə´laitnis] n.礼貌；文雅；温和 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
章节正文
京公网安备 11011202003401号
