U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [402]
. You know I just have to send money home. . . . Oh, we were just beginning to have such fun and now you have to go and spoil everything."
"If you'd seen what I've seen you'd talk differently," said Mary French coldly. They were never very good
friends again after that.
Gus Moscowski found her a room with heavy lace cur-tains in the windows in the house of a Polish storekeeper who was a cousin of his father's. He escorted her solemnly back there from the office nights when they worked late, and they always did work late.
-137-Mary French had never worked so hard in her life. She wrote releases, got up statistics on t.b., undernourishment of children, sanitary conditions, crime, took trips on inter-urban trol eys and slow locals to Rankin and Braddock and Homestead and Bessemer and as far as Youngstown and Steubenvil e and Gary, took notes on speeches of Foster and Fitzpatrick, saw meetings broken up and the troopers in their darkgrey uniforms moving in a line down the un-paved al eys of company patches, beating up men and women with their clubs, kicking children out of their way, chasing old men off their front stoops. "And to think," said Gus of the troopers, "that the sonsabitches are lousy Po-lacks themselves most of 'em. Now ain't that just like a Polack?" She interviewed metropolitan newspapermen, spent
hours trying to wheedle A.P. and U.P. men into sending straight stories, smoothed out the grammar in the English-language leaflets. The fal flew by before she knew it. The Amalgamated could only pay the barest expenses, her clothes were in awful shape, there was no curl in her hair, at night she couldn't sleep for the memory of the things she'd seen, the jailings, the bloody heads, the wreck of some family's parlor, sofa cut open, chairs smashed, china-closet hacked to pieces with an ax, after the troopers had been through looking for "literature." She hardly knew herself when she looked at her face in the greenspotted giltframed mirror over the washstand as she hurriedly dressed in the morning. She had a haggard desperate look. She was beginning to look like a striker herself.
She hardly knew herself either when Gus's voice gave her cold shivers or when whether she felt good or not that day depended on how often he smiled when he spoke to her; it didn't seem like herself at al the way that when-ever her mind was free for a moment, she began to im-agine him coming close to her, putting his arms around. her, his lips, his big hard hands. When that feeling came
-138-on she would have to close her eyes and would feel herself dizzily reeling. Then she'd force her eyes open and fly at her typing and after a while would feel cool and clear again.
The day Mary French admitted to herself for the first time that the highpaid workers weren't coming out and that the lowpaid workers were going to lose their strike she hardly dared look Gus in the face when he cal ed for her to take her home. It was a muggy drizzly outofseason November night. As they walked along the street without saying anything the fog suddenly glowed red in the direc-tion of the mil s. "There they go," said Gus. The glow grew and grew, first pink then orange. Mary nodded and said nothing. "What can you do when the woikin'class won't stick together. Every kind of damn foreigner thinks the others is bums and the 'Mericans they think every-body's a bum 'cept you an' me. Wasn't so long ago we was al foreigners in this man's country. Christ, I dunno why I string along wid 'em."
"Gus, what would you do if we lost the strike? I mean you personal y."
"I'l be on the black books al right. Means I couldn't get me another job in the metaltrades not if I was the last guy on earth. . . . Hel , I dunno. Take a false name an'
join the Navy, I guess. They say a guy kin get a real good eddication