U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [539]
-453-pile of personal telegrams to senators congressmen mini-sters laborleaders demanding that they join in the protest in the name of justice and civilization and the working-class, long telegrams and cables at top rates. She figured out the cost as she checked them off. She didn't know how the committee could pay for them, but she handed them to the messengerboy waiting outside. She could hardly be-lieve that those words had made her veins tingle only a few weeks before. It shocked her to think how meaning-less they seemed to her now like the little cards you get from a onecent fortunetel ing machine. For six months now she'd been reading and writing the same words every day.
Mary didn't have time to be embarrassed meeting
George Barrow. They went out together to get a plate of soup at a cafeteria talking about nothing but the case as if they'd never known each other before. Picketing the State House had begun again and as they came out of the restau-rant Mary turned to him and said, "Wel , George, how about going up and getting arrested. . . . There's stil time to make the afternoon papers. Your name would give us back the front page." He flushed red, and stood there in front of the restau-rant in the noontime crowd looking tal and nervous and popeyed in his natty lightgrey suit. "But, my dear g-g-girl, I . . . if I thought it would do the slightest good I would
. . . I'd get myself arrested or run over by a truck . . . but I think it would rob me of whatever usefulness I might have."
Mary French looked him straight in the eye, her face white with fury. "I didn't think you'd take the risk," she said, clipping each word off and spitting it in his face. She turned her back on him and hurried to the office.
It was a sort of relief when she was arrested herself. She'd planned to keep out of sight of the cops as she had been told her work was too valuable to lose, but she'd
-454-had to run up the hil with a set of placards for a new batch of picketers who had gone off without them,
There was nobody in the office she could send. She was just crossing Beacon Street when two large polite cops suddenly appeared, one on each side of her. One of them said, "Sorry, miss, please come quietly," and she found herself sitting in the dark patrolwagon. Driving to the policestation she had a soothing sense of helplessness and irresponsibility. It was the first time in weeks she had felt herself relax. At the Joy Street station they booked her but they didn't put her in a cel . She sat on a bench opposite the window with two Jewish garmentworkers and a wel dressed woman in a flowered summer dress with a string of pearls round her neck and watched the men pick-eters pouring through into the cel s. The cops were polite, everybody was jol y; it seemed like a kind of game, it was hard to believe anything real was at stake.
In a crowd that had just been unloaded from the wagon on the steep street outside the policestation she caught sight of a tal man she recognized as Donald Stevens from his picture in the Daily. A redfaced cop held on to each of his arms. His shirt was torn open at the neck and his necktie had a stringy look as if somebody had been yank-ing on it. The first thing Mary thought was how hand-somely he held himself. He had steelgrey hair and a brown outdoorlooking skin and luminous grey eyes over high cheekbones. When he was led away from the desk she fol owed his broad shoulders with her eyes into the gloom of the cel s. The woman next to her whispered in an awed voice that he was being held for inciting to riot instead of sauntering and loitering like the rest. Five thousand dol ars bail. He had tried to hold a meeting on Boston Common.
Mary had been there about a halfhour when little