O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 13

"You've all done--what?" asked the puzzled Kirby.

"Not we alone, howadji," amended Najib, "but you also! We would not berich ourselves and leave you outward in the plan. It is you also who are to stroke yourself. And--"

"For the love of Heaven!" exclaimed Kirby in sudden loss of patience.

"What are you driving at? What do you mean about 'stroking yourselves'?

Say it in Arabic. Then perhaps I can find what you mean."

"It is not to be said in the Arabic, howadji," returned Najib, wincing at this slur on his English. "For there is not such a thing in the Arabic as to make strike. We make strike. Thus I say it we 'stroke ourselves.' If it is the wrong way for saying it--"

"Strike?" repeated Kirby, perplexed. "What do you mean? Are you still thinking about what I told you to-day? If you are going--"

"I have bethought of it, howadji, ever since," was the reply. "And it is because of my much bethoughting that I found my splenderous plan. That is my tidings. I bethought it all out with tremense clearness and wiseness. Then I told those others, down yonder. At first they were of a stupidity. For it was so new. But at last I made them understand. And they rejoiced of it. So it is all settled most sweetly. You may not fear that they will not stand by it. As soon as that was made sure I came to you to tell--"

"Najib!" groaned Kirby, his head awhirl. "_Will_ you stop chewing chunks of indigestible language, and tell me what you are jabbering about? What was it you thought over? And what is 'all settled'? What will--"

"The strike, of an a.s.suredly," explained Najib, as if in pity of his chief's denseness. "To-night we make strike. All of us. That is one tiding. And you, too, make strike with us. That is the other tiding.

Making two tidings. We make strike. To-morrow we all sleep late. No work is to be made. And so it shall be, on each dear and nice and happy day, until Cabell Effendi--be his sons an hundred and his wives true!--shall pay us the money we ask and make short our hours of toil. Then--"

Kirby sought to speak. But his breath was gone. He only gobbled. Taking the wordless sound for a token of high approval, Najib hastened on, more glibly, with his program.

"On the to-morrow's morning, howadji," he said, "we enseech that you will write a sorrowsome letter to Cabell Effendi, in the Broad Street of New York; and say to him that all of us have made strike and that we shall work no more until we have from his hands a writing that our payment shall be two mejidie for every mejidie we have been capturing from his company. Also and likewise that we shall work but half time.

And that you, howadji, are to receive even as we; save only that _your_ wage is to be enswollen to three times over than what it is now. And say to him, howadji, that unless he does our wish in this striking we shall slay all others whom he may behire in our place and that we shall dynamitely destroy that nice mine. Remind him, howadji--if perchancely he does not know of such things--that the law is with us. Say, moreoverly, that there be many importanceful shipments and contracts just now. And say he will lose all if he be so bony of head as to refuse us. Furthermore, howadji, tell him, I prythee you, that we--"

A veritable yell from Kirby broke in on the smug instructions. The American had recovered enough of his breath to expend a lungful of it in one profane bellow. In a flash he visualized the whole scene at the fellaheens' quarters--Najib's crazy explanation of the strike system and of the supposed immunity from punishment that would follow sabotage and other violence; the fellaheens' duller brains gradually seizing on the idea until it had become as much a part of their mucilaginous mentality as the Koran itself; and Najib's friendly desire that Kirby might share in the golden benefits of the new scheme.

Yes, the American grasped the whole thing at once; his knowledge of the East foretelling to him its boundless possibilities for mischief and for the ruin of the mine's new prosperity. He fairly strangled with the gust of wrath and impotent amaze which gripped him.

Najib smiled up at him as might a dog that had just performed some pretty new trick, or a child who has brought to its father a gift. But the aspect of Kirby's distorted face there in the dying firelight shocked the Syrian into a grunt of terror. Scrambling to his feet, he sputtered quaveringly.

"Tame yourself, howadji, I enseech you! Why are you not rejoiceful? Will it not mean much money for you; and--"

"You mangy brown rat!" shouted Kirby in fury. "What in blazes have you done? You know, as well as I do, that such an idea will never get out of those fellaheens' skulls, once it's really planted there. They'll believe every word of that wall-eyed rot you've been telling them! And they'll go on a _genuine_ strike on the strength of it. They'll--"

"Of an a.s.suredly, howadji, they will," a.s.sented the bewildered Najib. "I made me very a.s.sured of that. Four times I told it all over to them, until even poor Imbarak--whose witfulness hath been beblown out from his brain by the breath of the Most High--until even Imbarak understood. But why it should enrouse you to a lionsome raging I cannot think. I bethought you would be pleasured--"

"Listen to me!" ordered Kirby, fighting hard for self-control and forcing himself to speak with unnatural slowness. "You've done more damage than if you had dynamited the whole mine and then turned a river into the shaft. This kind of news spreads. In a week there won't be a worker east of the Jordan who won't be a strike fan. And these people here will work the idea a step farther. I know them. They'll decide that if one strike is good, two strikes are better. And they will strike every week--loafing between times."

This prospect brought a grin of pure bliss to Najib's swarthy face. He looked in new admiration upon his farsighted chief. Kirby went on:

"Not that that will concern us. For this present strike will settle the Cabell mine. It means ruin to our business here, and the loss of all your jobs, as well as my own. Why, you idiot, can't you see what you've done? If you don't take that asinine grin off your ugly face, I'll knock it off!" he burst out, his hard-held patience momentarily fraying.

Then, taking new hold on his self-control, Kirby began again to talk. As if addressing a defective child, which, as a matter of fact, he was doing, he expounded the hideous situation.

He explained the disloyalty to the Cabells of such a move as Najib had planned. He pointed out the pride he and Najib had taken in the new business they had secured for the home office; and the fact that this new business had brought an increase of pay to them both as well as to the fellaheen. He showed how great a triumph for the mine was this vast increase of business; and the stark necessity of impressing the new customers by the prompt.i.tude and uniform excellence of all shipments. He pointed out the utter collapse to this and to all the rest of the mine's connections which a strike would entail. Najib listened unmoved.

Hopeless of hammering American ethics into the brain of an Oriental, Kirby set off at a new angle. He explained the loss of prestige and position which he himself would suffer. He would be discharged--probably by cable--for allowing the mine's bourgeoning prosperity to go to pieces in such fashion. Another and less lenient and understanding manager would be sent out to take his place. A manager whose first official act would probably be the discharging of Najib as the cause of the whole trouble.

Najib listened to this with a new interest, but with no great conviction.

Even Kirby's declaration that the ridiculous strike be a failure, and that the government would a.s.suredly punish any damage done to the Cabell property, did not serve to impress him. Najib was a Syrian. An idea once firm-rooted in his mind, was loathe to let itself be torn thence by mere words. Kirby waxed desperate.

"You have wrecked this whole thing!" he stormed. "You got an idiotically wrong slant on what I told you about strikes to-day; and you have ruined us all. Even if you should go down there to the quarters this minute and tell the men that you were mistaken and that the strike is off--you know they wouldn't believe you. And you know they would go straight ahead with the thing. That's the Oriental of it. They'd refuse to go on working. And our shipments wouldn't be delivered. None of the ore for the next shipments would be mined. The men would just hang about, peacefully waiting for the double pay and the half time that you've promised them."

"Of an a.s.suredly, that is true, howadji," conceded Najib. "They would--"

"They _will_!" corrected Kirby with grim hopelessness.

"But soon Cabell Effendi will reply to your letter," went on Najib. "And then the double paying--"

"To my letter!" mocked the raging Kirby.

Then he paused, a sudden inspiration smiting him.

"Najib," he continued after a minute of concentrated thought, "you have sense enough to know one thing: You have sense enough to know you people can't get that extra pay till I write to Mr. Cabell and demand it for you. There's not another one of you who can write English. There's no one here but yourself who can speak or understand it or make shift to spell out a few English words in print And Mr. Cabell doesn't know a word of Arabic--let alone the Arabic script. And your own two years at Coney Island must have shown you that no New Yorkers would know how to read an Arabic letter to him. Now I swear to you, by every Christian and Moslem oath, that _I_ shan't write such a letter! So how are you going to get word to him that you people are on strike and that you won't do another lick of work till you get double pay and half time? How are you going to do that?"

Najib's solid face went blank. Here at last was an argument that struck home. He had known Kirby for years, long enough to know that the American was most emphatically a man of his word. If Kirby swore he would not act as the men's intermediary with the company, then decisively Kirby would keep his oath. And Najib realized the futility of getting any one else to write such a letter in any language which the Cabell Smelting Company's home office would decipher.

He peered up at Kirby with disconsolate astonishment. Quick to take advantage of the change, the manager hurried on:

"Now, the men are on strike. That's understood. Well what are you and they going to do about it? When the draft for the monthly pay roll comes to the bank, at Jerusalem as usual, I shall refuse to indorse it. I give you my oath on that, too. I am not going to distribute the company's cash among a bunch of strikers. Without my signature, the bank won't cash the draft. You know that. Well, how are you going to live, all of you, on nothing a month? When the present stock of provisions gives out I'm not going to order them renewed. And the provision people in Jerusalem won't honour any one's order for them but mine. This is the only concern in Syria to-day that pays within forty per cent, of the wages you chaps are getting. With no pay and no food you're due to find your strike rather costly. For when the mine shuts down I'm going back to America. There'll be nothing to keep me here. I'll be ruined, in any case. You people will find yourself without money or provisions. And if you go elsewhere for work it will be at a pay that is only a little more than half what you are getting now. Your lookout isn't cheery, my striking friend!"

He made as though to go into his tent. After a brief pause of horror, Najib pattered hurriedly and beseechingly in his wake.

"Howadji!" pleaded the Syrian shakily. _"Howadji!_ You would not, in the untamefulness of your mad, desertion us like that? Not _me_, at anyhow?

Not me, who have loved you as Daoud the Emir loved Jonathan of old! You would not forsook me, to starve myself! _Aie! Ohe!_"

"Shut up that unG.o.dly racket!" snapped Kirby, entering his tent and lighting his lamp, as the first piercing notes of the traditional mourner chant exploded through the unhappy Najib's wide-flung jaws.

"Shut up! You'll start every hyena and jackal in the mountains to howling! It's bad enough as it is without adding a native concert to the rest of the mess."

"But, howadji!" pleaded Najib.

_"Taman!"_ growled Kirby, summarily speaking the age-hallowed Arabic word for the ending of all interviews.

"But I shall be beruinated, howadji!" tearfully insisted Najib.

Covertly the American watched his henchman while pretending to make ready for bed. If he had fully and permanently scared Najib into a conviction that the strike would spell ruin for the Syrian himself, then the little man's brain might possibly be jarred into one of its rare intervals of uncanny craftiness; and Najib might hit upon some way of persuading the fellaheen that the strike was off.

This was Kirby's sole hope. And he knew it. Unless the fellaheen could be so convinced, it meant the strike would continue until it should break the mine as well as the mine's manager. Kirby knew of no way to persuade the men. The same arguments which had crushed Najib would mean nothing to them. All their brains could master at one time, without the aid of some uprooting shock, was that henceforth they were to get double pay and half labour.

A calm fatalism of hopelessness, bred perhaps of his long residence in the homeland of fatalism began to creep over Kirby. In one hour his golden ambitions for the mine and for himself had been smashed. At best he saw no hope of getting the obsessed mine crew to work soon enough to save his present contracts. He would be lucky if, on non-receipt of their demanded increase, they did not follow Najib's muddled preachments to the point of sabotage.

The more he thought of it, the less possible did it seem to Kirby that Najib could undo the damage he had so blithely done. Ordering the blubbering little fellow out of the tent and refusing to speak or listen further, Kirby went to bed.

Oddly enough, he slept. There was nothing to worry about. When a man's job or fortune are imperilled sleep vanishes. But after the catastrophe what sense is there in lying awake? Depression and nervous fatigue threw Kirby into a troubled slumber. Only once in the night was he roused.

Perhaps two hours before dawn he started up at sound of a humble scratching at the open door flap of his tent. On the threshold cowered Najib.

"Furthermore, howadji," came the Syrian's woe-begone voice through the gloom, "could I borrow me a book if I shall use it with much carefulness?"