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By Root 9008 0

as happy as they could be under the capitalist system, that some day they'd have a free society where workers wouldn't have to huddle in filthy lodginghouses ful of bedbugs or row with land-ladies and lovers could have babies if they wanted to. A few days later Helen was laid off from Wanamaker's because they were cutting down their personnel for the slack summer season. They went over to Jersey where she went to live with her folks and Ben got a job in the ship-ping department of a worsted mil . They rented a room together in Passaic. When a strike came he and Helen were both on the committee. Ben got to be quite a speechmaker. He was arrested several times and almost had his skul cracked by a policeman's bil y and got six months in jail out of it. But he'd found out that when he got up on a soapbox to talk he could make people listen to him, that he could talk and say what he thought and get a laugh or a cheer out of the massed upturned faces. When he stood up in court to take his sentence he started to talk about surplus value. The strikers in the audience cheered and the judge had the attendants clear the courtroom. Ben could see the reporters busily taking down what he said; he was

-433-glad to be a living example of the injustice and brutality of the capitalist system. The judge shut him up by saying he'd give him another six months for contempt of court if he didn't keep quiet, and Ben was taken to the county jail in an automobile ful of special deputies with riot guns. The papers spoke of him as a wel known socialist agitator. In jail Ben got to be friends with a wobbly named Bram Hicks, a tal youngster from Frisco with light hair and blue eyes who told him if he wanted to know the labor-movement he ought to get him a red card and go out to the Coast. Bram was a boilermaker by profession but had shipped as a sailor for a change and landed in Perth Amboy broke. He'd been working on the repairshift of one of the mil s and had gone out with the rest. He'd pushed a cop in the face when they'd broken up a picketline and been sent up for six months for assault and battery. Meeting him once a day in the prison yard was the one thing kept Ben going in jail.

They were both released on the same day. They walked along the street together. The strike was over. The mil s were running. The streets where there'd been picketlines, the hal where Ben had made speeches looked quiet and or-dinary. He took Bram around to Helen's. She wasn't there, but after a while she came in with a little redfaced ferret-nosed Englishman whom she introduced as Bil y, an Eng-lish comrade. First thing Ben guessed that he was sleeping with her. He left Bram in the room with the Englishman and beckoned her outside. The narrow upper hal of the old frame house smelt of vinegar.

"You're through with me?" he asked in a shaky voice.

"Oh, Ben, don't act so conventional."

"You mighta waited til I got outa jail."

"But can't you see that we're al comrades? You're a brave fighter and oughtn't to be so conventional, Ben. . . . Bil y doesn't mean anything to me. He's a steward on a liner. He'l be going away soon."

-434-"Then I don't mean anything to you either." He grabbed Helen's wrist and squeezed it as hard as he could.

"I guess I'm al wrong, but I'm crazy about you. . . . I thought you. . ."

"Ouch, Ben . . . you're talkin' sil y, you know how much I like you." They went back in the room and talked about the movement. Ben said he was going west with Bram Hicks.

. . . he becomes an appendage of the machine and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, most easily re- quired knack that is required of him. . . . Bram knew al the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram found a guy he knew who got them signed on as deckhands on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. In Duluth they joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy for Ben and Bram was scared he'd cave in, but the four-teen