"Moore, Ward - Bring The Jubilee" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Ward)

The bartender's uninterrupted industry said clearly, then drink tomorrow.
"Listen," argued Pondible; "I'm tapering off. You know me. I've spent plenty of money here."
The bartender shrugged. "I don't own the place; anything goes over the bar has to be rung up on the cash register."
"You're lucky to have a job that pays wages."
"Times I'm not so sure. Why don't you indent?"
Pondible looked shocked. "At my age? What would a company pay for a worn-out old carcass? A hundred dollars at the top. Then a release in a couple of years with a med holdback so I'd have to report every week somewhere. No, friend, I've come through this long a free man--in a manner of speaking--and I'll stick it out. Let's have that shot; you can see for yourself I'm tapering off. You'll get your jack tomorrow."
I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal was less surly, and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a glass and bottle for Pondible and an earthenware mug of buttermilk for me. To my astonishment, I say, for credit was rarely extended on any scale, large or small. The inflation, though sixty years in the past, had left indelible impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was not only disgraceful, it was dangerous; the notion things could be paid for while, or even after, they were being used was as unthinkable as was the idea of circulating paper money instead of silver or gold.
I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible had ordered the most filling and sustaining liquid in the saloon. For all his unprepossessing appearance and peculiar moral notions, my new acquaintance seemed to have a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.
He swallowed his whiskey and called for a quart pot of light beer which he sipped slowly. "That's the trick of it, Hodge. Avoid the second shot. If you can." He sipped again. "Now what?"
"What?" I repeated.
"Now what are you going to do? What's your aim in life anyway?"
"None--now. I. . . wanted to learn. To study."
He frowned. "Out of books?"
"How else?"
"Books is mostly written and printed in foreign countries."
"There might be more written here if more people had time to learn."
Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the back of his hand. "Might and mightn't. Oh, some of my best friends are book readers, don't get me wrong, boy."
"I'd thought," I burst out, "I'd thought to try Columbia College. To offer--to beg to be allowed to do any kind of work for tuition."
"Hmm. I doubt it would have worked."
"Anyway I can't go now, looking like this."
"Might be as well. We need fighters, not readers."
"'We'?"
He did not explain. "Well, you could always take the advice our friend here gave me and indent. A young healthy lad like you could get yourself a thousand or twelve hundred dollars--"
"Sure. And be a slave for the rest of my life."
"Oh, indenting ain't slavery. It's better. And worse. For one thing the company that buys you won't hold you after you aren't worth your keep. Not that long, on account of bookkeeping; they lose when they break even. So they cancel your indenture without a cent of payment. Course they'll take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your corpse, but that's a long time away for you."
An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was the least of my distaste, though it had played a large part in the discussions at home. My mother had heard that cadavers for dissection were shipped to foreign medical schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so much at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at its disposal outside the United States.
"Yes," I said. "A long time away. So I wouldn't be a slave for life; just thirty or forty years. Till I wasn't any good to anyone, including myself."
He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer. "You're a gloomy gus, Hodge. 'Tain't 's bad 's that. Indenting's pretty strictly regulated. That's the idea anyway. I ain't saying the big companies don't get away with a lot. You can't be made to work over sixty hours a week. Ten hours a day. With twelve hundred dollars you could get all the education you want in your spare time and then turn your learning to account by making enough to buy yourself free."
I tried to think about it dispassionately, though goodness knows I'd been over the ground often enough. It was true the amount, a not improbable one, would see me through college. But Pondible's notion of turning my "learning to account" I knew to be a fantasy. Perhaps in the Confederate States or the German Union knowledge was rewarded with wealth, or at least a comfortable living, but any study I pursued--I knew my own "impracticality" well enough by now--was bound to yield few material benefits in the backward United States, which existed as a nation at all only on the sufferance and unresolved rivalries of the great powers. I'd be lucky to struggle through school and eke out some kind of living as a freeman; I could hardly hope to earn enough to buy back an indenture on what was left of my time after subtracting sixty hours a week.
"It wouldn't work," I said despondently.
Pondible nodded, as though this were the conclusion he had expected me to come to. "Well then," he said, "there's the gangs."
I looked my horror.
He laughed. "Forget your country rearing. What's right? What the strongest country or the strongest man says it is. The government says gangs are wrong, but the government ain't strong enough to stop them. And maybe they don't do as much killing as people think. Only when somebody works against them--just like the government. Sure they have to be paid off, but it's just like taxes. If you leave the parsons' sermons out of it, there's no difference joining the gangs than the army--if we had one--or the Confederate Legion--"
"They tried to recruit me yesterday. Are they always so . . ."
"Bold?" For the first time Pondible looked angry, and I thought the scar on his forehead turned whiter. "Yes, damn them. The Legion must be half United States citizens. When they have to put down a disturbance or run some little cockroach country they send off the Confederate Legion--made up of men who ought to be the backbone of an army of our own."
"But the police--don't they ever try to stop them?"
"What'd I tell you about right being what the strongest country says it is? Sure we got laws against recruiting into a foreign army. So we squawk. And what have we got to back it up with? So the Confederate Legion goes right on recruiting the men who have to beg for a square meal in their own country. Well, the government is pretty near as bad off when it comes to the gangs. Best it can do is pick off some of the little ones and forget about the big ones. Most of the gangsters never even get shot at. They all live high, high as anybody in the twenty-six states, and every so often there's a dividend--more than a workman makes in a lifetime."
I began to be sure my benefactor was a gangster. And yet . . . if this were so why had he wheedled credit from the barkeep? Was it simply an elaborate blind? It seemed hardly worth it.
"A dividend," I said, "or a rope."
"Most gangsters die of old age. Or competition. Ain't one been hung I can think of the last five-six years. But I see you've no stomach for it. Tell me, Hodge--you Whig or Populist?"
The sudden change of subject bewildered me. "Why... Populist, I guess."
"Why?"
"Oh. . . I don't know. . ." I thought of some of the discussions that used to go on among the men around the smithy. "The Whigs' 'Property, Protection, Permanent Population'--what does it mean to me?"
"Tell you, boy, means this: Property for the Confederates who own factories here and don't want to pay taxes. Protection for foreign capital to come in and buy or hire. Permanent population--cheap native labor. Build up a prosperous employing class."
"Yes, I know. I can't see how it helps. I've heard Whigs at home say the money's bound to seep down from above, but it seems awfully roundabout. And not very efficient."
He reached over and clapped me lightly on the shoulder. "That's my boy," he said. "They can't fool you."
I wasn't entirely pleased by his commendation. "And protection means paying more for things than they're worth."
" 'Tain't only that, Hodge, it's a damn lie as well. Whigs never even tried protection when they was in. Didn't dast. Knew the other countries wouldn't let them."
"As for 'permanent population' ... well, those who can't make a living are going to go on emigrating to prosperous countries. Permanent population means dwindling population if it means anything."
"Ah," he said. "You got a head on your shoulders, Hodge. You're all right; books won't hurt you. But what about emigrating? Yourself, I mean?"