U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [405]
"I wonder," said Mary.
-143-"Mary dear, you are very young . . . and very sweet." He sat back in his greenplush armchair looking at her a long time with his bulging eyes while the snowy hil s streaked with green of lichened rocks and laced black with bare branches of trees filed by outside. Then he blurted out wouldn't it be fun if they got married when they got to Washington. She shook her head and went back to the problem of strikers' defense but she couldn't help smiling at him when she said she didn't want to get married just yet; he'd been so kind. She felt he was a real friend. In Washington she fixed herself up a little apartment in a house on H Street that was being sublet cheap by Democratic officeholders who were moving out. She often cooked supper for George there. She'd never done any cooking before except camp cooking, but George was quite an expert and knew how to make Italian spaghetti and chiliconcarne and oysterstew and real French bouil abaisse. He'd get wine from the Rumanian Embassy and they'd
have very cozy meals together after long days working in the office. He talked and talked about love and the impor-tance of a healthy sexl fe for men and women, so that at last she let him. He was so tender and gentle that for a while she thought maybe she real y loved him. He knew al about contraceptives and was very nice and humorous about them. Sleeping with a man didn't make as much dif-ference in her life as she'd expected it would. The day after Harding's inauguration two seedylooking men in shapeless grey caps shuffled up to her in the lobby of the little building on G Street where George's office was. One of them was Gus Moscowski. His cheeks were hol ow and he looked tired and dirty. "Hel o, Miss French," he said. "Meet the kid brother . . . not the one that scabbed, this one's on the up and up. . . . You sure do look wel ."
"Oh, Gus, they let you out." He nodded. "New trial, cases dismissed. . . . But I tel you it's no fun in that cooler."
-144-She took them up to George's office. "I'm sure Mr. Bar-row'l want to get firsthand news of the steelworkers." Gus made a gesture of pushing something away with his hand. "We ain't steelworkers, we)re bums. . . . Your friends the senators sure sold us out pretty. Every sonofa-bitch ever walked across the street with a striker's black-listed. The old man got his job back, way back at fifty cents instead of a dol ar ten after the priest made him kiss the book and promise not to join the union. . . . Lots of people goin' back to the old country. Me an' the kid we pul ed out, went down to Baltimore to git a job on a boat somewheres but the seamen are piled up ten deep on the wharf. . . . So we thought we might as wel take in the
'nauguration and see how the fat boys looked." Mary tried to get them to take some money but they
shook their heads and said, "We don't need a handout, we can woik." They were just going when George came in. He didn't seem any too pleased to see them, and began to lecture them on violence; if the strikers hadn't threat-ened violence and al owed themselves to be misled by a lot of Bolshevik agitators, the men who were real y negotiat-ing a settlement from the inside would have been able to get them much better terms. "I won't argue with you, Mr. Barrow. I suppose you think Father Kazinski was a red and that it was Fanny Sel ers that bashed in the head of a statetrooper. An' then you say you're on the side of the woikin'man."
"And, George, even the senate committee admitted that the violence was by the deputies and statetroopers. . . . I saw it myself after al ," put in Mary.
"Of course, boys . . . I know what you're up against. I hold no brief for the Steel Trust. . . . But, Mary, what I want to impress on these boys is that the working-man is often his own worst enemy in these things."
"The woikin' man gits f'rooked whatever way you look at it," said Gus, "and I don't know whether it's his
-145-friends or his enemies does the worst rookin'.