U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [536]
She threw herself into her work for the strikecommittee harder than ever. Sometimes for weeks she only slept four or five hours a night. She took to smoking a great deal. There was always a cigarette resting on a corner of her typewriter. The fine ash dropped into the pages as they
-447-came from the multigraph machine. Whenever she could be spared from the office she went around col ecting money from wealthy women, inducing prominent liberals to come and get arrested on the picketline, coaxing articles out of newspapermen, traveling around the country to find chari-table people to go on bailbonds. The strikers, the men and women and children on picketlines, in soupkitchens, being interviewed in the dreary front parlors of their homes stripped of furniture they hadn't been able to make the last payment on, the buses ful of scabs, the cops and deputies with sawedoff shotguns guarding the tal palings of the silent enormouslyextended oblongs of the blackwindowed mil buildings, passed in a sort of dreamy haze before her, like a show on the stage, in the middle of the continuous typing and multigraphing, the writing of let-ters and working up of petitions, the long grind of office-work that took up her days and nights. She and Ben had no life together at al any more. She thril ed to him the way the workers did at meetings when he'd come to the platform in a tumult of stamping and applause and talk to them with flushed cheeks and shining eyes talking clearly directly to each man and woman, en-couraging them, warning them, explaining the economic setup to them. The mil girls were al crazy about him. In spite of herself Mary French would get a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the way they looked at him and at the way some big buxom freshlooking woman
would stop him sometimes in the hal outside the office and put her hand on his arm and make him pay attention to her. Mary working away at her desk with her tongue bitter and her mouth dry from too much smoking would look at her yel owstained fingers and push her untidy un-curled hair off her forehead and feel badlydressed and faded and unattractive. If he'd give her one smile just for her before he bawled her out before the whole office be-cause the leaflets weren't ready, she'd feel happy al day.
-448-But mostly he seemed to have forgotten that they'd ever been lovers. After the A. F. of L. officials from Washington in expen-sive overcoats and silk mufflers who smoked twentyfivecent cigars and spat on the floor of the office had taken the strike out of Ben's hands and settled it, he came back to the room on Fourth Street late one night just as Mary was going to bed. His eyes were redrimmed from lack of sleep and his cheeks were sunken and grey. "Oh, Ben," she said and burst out crying. He was cold and bitter and des-perate. He sat for hours on the edge of her bed tel ing her in a sharp monotonous voice about the sel out and the wrangles between the leftwinggers and the oldline socialists and laborleaders, and how now that it was al over here was his trial for contempt of court coming up. "I feel so bad about spending the workers' money on my defense.
. . . I'd as soon go to jail as not . . . but it's the pre-cedent. . . . We've got to fight every case and it's the one way we can use the liberal lawyers, the lousy fakers.
. . . And it costs so much and the union's broke and I don't like to have them spend the money on me . . . but they say that if we win my case then the cases against the other boys wil al be dropped. . . .""The thing to do," she said, smoothing his hair off his forehead, "is to relax a little.""You should be tel