U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [295]
"Webb, wait for me outside. I'm going to show some news-paper guys around and you'd better come." Out in the hall they ran into a fellow Webb knew, Ben Compton, a tal young man with a long thin nose and red-rimmed eyes, who said he was going to speak at the meet-ing and asked Webb if he wouldn't speak. "Jeez, what could I say to those fel ers? I'm just a bum of a col ege stoodjent, like you, Ben." "Tel 'em the workers have got to win the world, tel 'em this fight is part of a great his-toric battle. Talking's the easiest part of the movement. The truth's simple enough." He had an explosive way of talking with a pause between each sentence, as if the sen-tence took sometime to come up from someplace way down inside. Daughter sized up that he was attractive, even though he was probably a Jew. "Wel , IT try to stammer
-271-out something about democracy in industry," said Webb. Sylvia Dalhart was already pushing them down the
stairs. She had with her a pale young man in a raincoat and black felt hat who was chewing the. end of a half of a cigar that had gone out. "Fel owworkers, this is Joe Biglow from the Globe, "she had a western burr in her voice that made Daughter feel at home. "We're going to show him around."
They went al over town, to strikers' houses where tired-looking women in sweaters out at the elbows were cooking up lean Sunday dinners of corned beef and cabbage or stewed meat and potatoes, or in some houses they just had cabbage and bread or just potatoes. Then they went to a lunchroom near the station and ate some lunch. Daughter paid the check as nobody seemed to have any money, and it was time to go to the meeting.
The trol eycar was crowded with strikers and their wives and children. The meeting was to be held in the next town because in that town the Mil s owned everything and there was no way of hiring a hal . It had started to sleet, and they got their feet wet wading through the slush to the mean frame building where the meeting was going to be held. When they got to the door there were mounted po-lice out in front. "Hal ful ," a cop told them at the street-corner, "no more al owed inside." They stood around in the sleet waiting for somebody with authority. There were thousands of strikers, men and women and boys and girls, the older people talking among themselves in low voices in foreign languages. Webb kept saying, "Jesus, this is outrageous. Somebody ought to do something." Daughter's feet were cold and she wanted to go home.
Then Ben Compton came around from the back of the
building. People began to gather around him, "There's Ben . . . there's Compton, good boy, Benny," she heard people saying. Young men moved around through the
-272-crowd whispering, "Overflow meeting . . . stand your ground, folks." He began to speak hanging by one arm from a lamp-post. "Comrades, this is another insult flung in the face of the working class. There are not more than forty people in the hal and they close the doors and tel us it's ful . . ." The crowd began swaying back and forth, hats, umbrel as bobbing in the sleety rain. Then she saw the two cops were dragging Compton off and heard the jangle of the patrol-wagon. "Shame, shame," people yel ed. They began to back off from the cops; the flow was away from the hal . People were moving quietly and dejectedly down the street toward the trol ey tracks with the cordon of mounted po-lice pressing them on. Suddenly Webb whispered in her ear,
"Let me lean on your shoulder," and jumped on a hydrant.
"This is outrageous," he shouted, "you people had a per-mit to use the hal and had hired it and no power on earth has a right to keep you out of it. To hel with the cossacks." Two mounted police were loping towards