U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [149]
At the office next morning, she looked him up in Who's Who and there he was, Barrow, George Henry, publicist
. . . but she didn't think she could ever love him. At the office that day J. Ward looked very worried and sick and Janey felt so sorry for him and quite forgot about G. H. Barrow. She was cal ed into a private conference J. Ward was having with Mr. Robbins and an Irish lawyer named O'Grady, and they said did she mind if they rented a safe deposit box in her name to keep certain securities in and started a private account for her at the Bankers Trust. They were forming a new corporation. There were busi-ness reasons why something of the sort might become imperative. Mr. Robbins and J. Ward would own more
than half the stock of a new concern and would work for
-347-it on a salary basis. Mr. Robbins looked very worried and a little drunk and kept lighting cigarettes and forgetting them on the edge of the desk and kept saying, "You know very wel , J. W., that anything you do is O.K. by me." J. Ward explained to Janey that she'd be an officer of the new corporation but of course would in no way be personal y liable. It came out that old Mrs. Staple was suing J. Ward to recover a large sum of money and that his wife had started divorce proceedings in Pennsylvania and that she was refusing to let him go home to see the children and that he was living at the McAlpin.
"Gertrude's lost her mind," said Mr. Robbins genial y. Then he slapped J. Ward on the back. "Looks like the fat was in the fire now," he roared. "Wel , I'm goin' out to lunch; a man must eat . . . and drink . . . even if he's a putative bankrupt." J. Ward scowled and said nothing and Janey thought it was in very bad taste to talk like that and so loud too. When she went home that evening she told the Ting-leys that she was going to be a director of the new cor-poration and they thought it was wonderful that she was getting ahead so fast and that she real y ought to ask for a raise even if business was in a depressed state. Janey smiled, and said, "Al in good time." On the way home she had stopped in the telegraph office on Twentythird Street and wired G. H. Barrow, who had gone up to
Washington: LET'S JUST BE FRIENDS.
Eddy Tingley brought out a bottle of sherry and at
dinner he and Eliza drank a toast, "To the new execu-tive," and Janey blushed crimson and was very pleased. Afterwards they played a rubber of dummy bridge.
-348-THE CAMERA EYE (26)
the garden was crowded and outside Madison Square
was ful of cops that made everybody move on and the bombsquad al turned out we couldn't get a seat so we ran up the stairs to the top gal ery and looked down through the blue air at the faces thick as gravel and above them on the speakers' stand tiny black figures and a man was speaking and whenever he said war there were hisses and whenever he said Russia there was clapping on account of the revolution I didn't know who was speaking somebody said Max Eastman and some-body said another guy but we clapped and yel ed for the revolution and hissed for Morgan and the capitalist war and there was a dick looking into our faces as if he was trying to remember them then we went to hear Emma Goldman at the Bronx
Casino but the meeting was forbidden and the streets around were very crowded and there were moving vans moving through the crowd and they said the moving vans were ful of cops with machineguns and there were little policedepartment. Fords with searchlights and they charged the crowd with the Fords and the searchlights every-body talked machineguns revolution civil liberty freedom of speech but occasional y somebody got into the way of a cop and was beaten up and shoved into a patrol wagon
-349-and the cops were scared and they said