ENVY IS THE SULPHUR IN HUMAN PIG-IRON
While I was feasting on the watermelons and feeling at peace with all the world, a long passenger train pulled into the junction. The train was made up of Pullmans and each car was covered with flags, streamers and lodge insignia. On the heels of this train came another and then another. These gay cars were filled with members of the Knights of Pythias going to their convention in Denver.
At the sight of these men in their Pullmans, my friend the communist first turned pale, then green, then red. His eyes narrowed and blazed like those of a madman. He stood up on his porch, clenched his fists and launched into the most violent fit of cursing I ever heard. The sight of those holiday-makers had turned him into a demon. He thought they were capitalists. Here was the hated tribe of rich men, the idle classes, all dressed up with flags flying, riding across the country on a jamboree.
"The blood-sucking parasites! The bleareyed barnacles!" yelled Comrade Bannerman. He shook his fists at the plutocrats and cursed until he made me sick. He was a tank-town nut who didn't like to work; had built up a theory that work was a curse and that the "idle classes" had forced this curse on the masses, of which he was one. He believed that all the classes had to do was to clip coupons, cash them and ride around the country in Pullman palace cars. Here was the whole bunch of them in seven "specials"rolling right by his front door. He cursed them again and prayed that the train might be wrecked and that every one of the blinkety blinkety scoundrels might be killed. If all these idle plutocrats could be destroyed in a heap they would be lifted from the backs of the masses, and the masses would not have to work any more.
Bannerman was a fool, and I could even then see just what made him foolish. He was full of the brimstone of envy. The sight of those well-dressed travelers eating in the dining cars drove him wild. He wanted to be in their places, but he was too lazy to work and earn the money that would put him there. I knew that they were not rich men; they were school-teachers, doctors, butchers and bakers, machinists and puddlers. They had saved their money for a year in order to have the price of this convention trip to Denver. Comrade Bannerman was pig-iron, and envy made him brittle. He should have been melted down and had the sulphur boiled out of him. Then he would have been wrought iron; as were the men he was so envious of.
He was not envious of me, of course, because he thought I was a tramp. Indeed he thought I was as envious as he, and so he classed the two of us as "intellectuals." From this I learned that "Intellectuals" is a name that weak men, crazed with envy, give to themselves. They believe the successful men lack intellect; are all luck. This thought soothes their envy and keeps it from driving them mad.
I thanked Comrade Bannerman for his pamphlets and threw him a few coins to pay for the melons he had given me. But my peep into his soul had taught me more than his propaganda could teach me.
Later I read all the pamphlets because I had promised I would.
They told of the labor movement and the theories at work in Germany. One of them was called Merrie England and declared that England had once been merry, but capitalism had crushed all joy and turned the island into a living hell. I remembered my mother in Wales rocking her baby's cradle and singing all day long with a voice vibrant with joy. If capitalism had crushed her heart she hadn't heard about it.
When the lodge excursion train had passed on toward the convention city, I hopped a freight and bade Comrade Bannerman goodby. Had I told him that from my earnings I had salted away enough money to buy his little shack he would have hated me as he hated the lodge members in the Pullmans. I did not hate those men. They were doing me a service by traveling across the country. For they belonged to the fare-paying classes; their money kept the railroads going so they could carry politicians and some of us working men free.
