U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [9]
The first print Uncle Tim set up on the new machine was the phrase: Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
When Fainy was seventeen and just beginning to worry about skirts and ankles and girls'
underwear when he walked home from work in the evening and saw the lights of the city bright against the bright heady western sky, there was a strike in the Chicago printing trades. Tim O'Hara had always run a union shop and did al the union printing at cost. He even got up a handbil signed, A Citi-zen, entitled An Ernest Protest, which Fainy was al owed to set up on the linotype one evening after the operator had gone home. One phrase stuck in Fainy's mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for al honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.
The next day was Sunday, and Fainy went along
Michigan Avenue with a package of the handbil s to dis-tributd. It was a day of premature spring. Across the rot-ting yel ow ice on the lake came little breezes that smelt unexpectedly of flowers. The girls looked terribly pretty and their skirts blew in the wind and Fainy felt the spring blood pumping hot in him, he wanted to kiss and to rol on the ground and to run out across the icecakes and to make speeches from the tops of telegraph poles and to vault over trol eycars; but instead he distributed hand-bil s and worried about his pants being frayed and wished he had a swel looking suit and a swel looking girl to walk with.
Hey, young fel er, where's your permit to distribute
-19-them handbil s? It was a cop's voice growling in his ear. Fainy gave the cop one took over his shoulder, dropped the handbil s and ran. He ducked through between the shiny black cabs and carriages, ran down a side street and walked and walked and didn't look back until he managed to get across a bridge just before the draw opened. The cop wasn't fol owing him anyway.
He stood on the curb a long time with the whistle of a peanutstand shril ing derisively in his ear.
That night at supper his uncle asked him about the
handbil s.
Sure I gave 'em out al along the lakeshore . . . A cop tried to stop me but I told him right where to get off. Fainy turned burning red when a hoot went up from everybody at the table. He fil ed up his mouth with mashed potato and wouldn't say any more. His aunt and his uncle and their three daughters al laughed and laughed. Wel , it's a good thing you ran faster than the cop, said Uncle Tim, else I should have had to bail you out and that would have cost money.
The next morning early Fainy was sweeping out the
office, when a man with a face like a raw steak walked up the steps; he was smoking a thin black stogy of a sort Fainy had never seen before. He knocked on the ground glass door.
I want to speak to Mr. O'Hara, Timothy O'Hara.
He's not here yet, be here any minute now, sir. Wil you wait?
You bet I'l wait. The man sat on the edge of a
You bet I'l wait. The man sat on the edge of a
chair and spat, first taking the chewed end of the stogy out of his mouth and looking at it meditatively for a long time. When Tim O'Hara came the office door closed with a bang. Fainy hovered nervously around, a little bit afraid the man might be a detective fol owing up the affair of the handbil s. Voices rose and fel , the stranger's voice in short rattling tirades, O'Hara's voice in long expostulating
-20-clauses, now and then Fainy caught the word foreclose, until suddenly the door flew open and the stranger shot out, his face purpler than ever. On the iron stoop he turned and pul ing a new stogy from his pocket, lit it from the old onei growling the words through the stogy and the blue puff of smoke, he said, Mr. O'Hara, you have twenty-four hours to