U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [371]
-443-the house to go to his office. He went back into the hal with them and yel ed upstairs to his wife: "Mol y, come down . . . Kerensky's run out of Petrograd with a flea in his ear . . . dressed as a woman he ran." Then he said in Yiddish to Ben that if the comrades were going to hold a meeting to send greetings to the soldiers' and peasants'
government, he'd give a hundred dol ars toward expenses, but his name would have to be kept out of it or else he'd lose his practice. Mol y Ferber came downstairs in a quilted dressing gown and said she'd sel something and add another hundred. They spent the day going
around to find comrades they had the addresses of; they didn't dare use the phone for fear of the wires being tapped.
The meeting was held at the Empire Casino in the
Bronx a week later. Two Federal agents with beefsteak faces sat in the front row with a stenographer who took down everything that was said. The police closed the doors after the first couple of hundred people had come in. The speakers on the platform could hear them break-ing up the crowd outside with motorcycles. Soldiers and sailors in uniform were sneaking into the gal ery by ones and twos and trying to stare the speakers out of counte-nance. When the old whitehaired man who was chairman of
the meeting walked to the front of the stage and said,
"Comrades, gentlemen of the Department of Justice and not forgetting our young wel wishers up in the gal ery, we have met to send a resolution of greetings from the oppressed workers of America to the triumphant workers of Russia," everybody stood up and cheered. The crowd mil ing around outside cheered too. Somewhere they could hear a bunch singing the International. They could hear policewhistles and the dang dang of a patrol wagon. Ben noticed that Fanya Stein was in the audience; she looked pale and her eyes held onto him with a fixed feverish stare.
-444-When his turn came to speak he began by saying that on account of the kind sympathizers from Washington in the audience, he couldn't say what he wanted to say but that every man and woman in the audience who was not a
traitor to their class knew what he wanted to say. . . .
"The capitalist governments are digging their own graves by driving their people to slaughter in a crazy unnecessary war that nobody can benefit from except bankers and munition makers. . . . The American working class, like the working classes of the rest of the world, wil learn their lesson. The profiteers are giving us instruction in the use of guns; the day wil come when we wil use it."
"That's enough, let's go, boys," yel ed a voice from the gal ery. The soldiers and sailors started hustling the people out of the seats. The police from the entrances con-verged on the speakers. Ben and a couple of others were arrested. The men in the audience who were of conscrip-tion age were made to show their registration cards before they could leave. Ben was hustled out into a closed limou-sine with the blinds drawn before he could speak to Helen. He'd hardly noticed who it was had clicked the handcuffs on his wrists. They kept him for three days without anything to eat or drink in a disused office in the Federal building on Park Row. Every few hours a new bunch of detectives would stamp into the room and question him. His head throbbing, and ready to faint with thirst, he'd face the ring of long yel ow faces, jowly red faces, pimply faces, boozers' and hopheads'
faces, feel the eyes boring into him; sometimes they kidded and cajoled him, and sometimes they bul ied and threatened; one bunch brought in pieces of rubber hose to beat him up with. He jumped up and faced them. For some reason they didn't beat him up, but instead brought him some water and a couple of stale ham sandwiches. After that he was able to sleep a little. An agent yanked him off his bench and led him out
-445-into a wel appointed office where he was