U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [369]
-439-town sometimes when he had several meetings in one eve-ning. His heart would always be thumping when he went into the hal where the meeting was and began to hear the babble and rustle of the audience filing in, garment work-ers on the East Side, waterfront workers in Brooklyn, workers in chemical and metalproducts plants in Newark, parlor socialists and pinks at the Rand School or on lower Fifth Avenue, the vast anonymous mass of al classes, races, trades in Madison Square Garden. His hands would always be cold when he shook hands with the chairman and other speakers on the platform. When his turn came to speak there'd be a moment when al the faces looking up at him would blur into a mass of pink, the hum of the hal would deafen him, he'd be in a panic for fear he'd for-gotten what he wanted to say. Then al at once he'd hear his own voice enunciating clearly and firmly, feel its re-verberance along the wal s and ceiling, feel ears growing tense, men and women leaning forward in their chairs, see the rows of faces quite clearly, the groups of people who couldn't find seats crowding at the doors. Phrases like pro- test, massaction, united workingclass of this country and the world, revolution, would light up the eyes and faces under him like the glare of a bonfire. After the speech he'd feel shaky, his glasses would be so misted he'd have to wipe them, he'd feel al the awk-wardness of his tal gangling frame. Fanya would get him away as soon as she could, tel him with shining eyes that he'd spoken magnificently, take him downtown, if the meeting had been in Manhattan, to have some supper in the Brevoort basement or at the Cosmopolitan Café before he went home on the subway to Brooklyn. He knew that she was in love with him, but they rarely talked about anything outside of the movement.
When the Russian revolution came in February, Ben
and the Steins bought every edition of the papers for weeks, read al the correspondents'
reports with desperate
-440-intentness; it was the dawning of The Day. There was a feeling of carnival al down the East Side and in the Jew-ish sections of Brooklyn. The old people cried whenever they spoke of it. "Next Austria, then the Reich, then Eng-land . . . freed peoples everywhere," Pop would say.
"And last, Uncle Sam," Ben would add, grimly setting his jaw. The April day Woodrow Wilson declared war, Fanya
went to bed with a hysterical crying fit. Ben went up to see her at the apartment Morris Stein and his wife had on Riverside Drive. She'd come back from Washington the day before. She'd been up there with a women's peace delegation trying to see the President. The detectives had run them off the White House lawn and several girls had been arrested. "What did you expect?. . . of course the capitalists want war. They'l think a little different when they find what they're getting's a revolution." She begged him to stay with her, but he left saying he had to go see them down at The Call. As he left the house, he found himself making a spitting noise with his lips like his father. He told himself he'd never go there again.
He registered for the draft on Stein's advice, though he wrote conscientious objector on the card. Soon after that he and Stein quarrel ed. Stein said there was nothing to it but to bow before the storm; Ben said he was going to agi-tate against it until he was put in jail. That meant he was out of a job and it was the end of his studying law. Kahn wouldn't take him back in his drugstore because he was afraid the cops would raid him if it got to be known he had a radical working for him. Ben's brother Sam was working in a munition factory at Perth Amboy and mak-ing big money; he kept writing Ben to stop his foolishness