JURORS AT GATES OF BEEF BARONS 2 страница

Alice Dick and Janey planned that as soon as they
got through highschool they'd get jobs and leave home.
They even picked out the house where they'd board, a
greenstone house near Thomas Circle, run by a Mrs.
Jenks, widow of a naval officer, who was very refined and
had southern cooking and charged moderately for table-
board.

One Sunday night during the spring of her last term
in highschool Janey was in her room getting undressed.
Francie and Ellen were still playing in the backyard.
Their voices came in through the open window with a
spicy waft of lilacs from the lilacbushes in the next yard.
She had just let down her hair and was looking in the
mirror imagining how she'd look if she was a peach and
had auburn hair, when there was a knock at the door and
Joe's voice outside. There was something funny about
his voice.

"Come in," she called. "I'm just fixin' my hair."

She first saw his face in the mirror. It was very white
and the skin was drawn back tight over the cheekbones
and round the mouth.

"Why, what's the matter, Joe?" She jumped up and
faced him.

"It's like this, Janey," said Joe, drawling his words out
painfully. "Alec was killed. He smashed up on his motor-
bike. I just come from the hospital. He's dead, all right."

Janey seemed to be writing the words on a white pad
in her mind. She couldn't say anything.

"He smashed up comin' home from Chevy Chase . . .
He'd gone out to the ballgame to see me pitch. You
oughter seen him all smashed to hell."

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Janey kept trying to say something.

"He was your best . . ."

"He was the best guy I'll ever know," Joe went on
gently. "Well, that's that, Janey . . . But I wanted to
tell you I don't want to hang round this lousy dump now
that Alec's gone. I'm goin' to enlist in the navy. You tell
the folks, see . . . I don't wanna talk to 'em. That's it;
I'll join the navy and see the world."

"But, Joe . . ."

"I'll write you, Janey; honest, I will . . . I'll write
you a hell of a lot. You an' me . . . Well, goodby,
Janey." He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her
awkwardly on the nose and cheek. All she could do was
whisper. "Do be careful, Joe," and stand there in front
of the bureau in the gust of lilacs and the yelling of the
kids that came through the open window. She heard Joe's
steps light quick down the stairs and heard the frontdoor
shut.

She turned out the light, took off her clothes in the
dark, and got into bed. She lay there without crying.

Graduation came and commencement and she and Alice
went out to parties and even once with a big crowd on one
of the moonlight trips down the river to Indian Head on
the steamboat Charles McAlister. The crowd was rougher
than Janey and Alice liked. Some of the boys were drink-
ing a good deal and there were couples kissing and hug-
ging in every shadow; still the moonlight was beautiful
rippling on the river and she and Janey put two chairs
together and talked. There was a band and dancing, but
they didn't dance on account of the rough men who stood
round the dancefloor making remarks. They talked and
on the way home up the river, Janey, talking very low
and standing by the rail very close to Alice, told her
about Alec. Alice had read about it in the paper but hadn't
dreamed that Janey had known him so well or felt that
way about him. She began to cry and Janey felt very

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strong comforting her and they felt that they'd be very
close friends after that. Janey whispered that she'd never
be able to love anybody else and Alice said she didn't
think she could ever love a man anyway, they all drank
and smoked and talked dirty among themselves and had
only one idea.

In July Alice and Janey got jobs in the office of Mrs.
Robinson, public stenographer in the Riggs Building, to
replace girls away on their vacations. Mrs. Robinson was
a small grayhaired pigeonbreasted woman with a Ken-
tucky shriek in her voice, that made Janey think of a
parrot's. She was very precise and all the proprieties were
observed in her office. "Miss Williams," she would chirp,
leaning back from her desk, "that em ess of Judge Rob-
erts's has absolutely got to be finished today . . . My
dear, we've given our word and we'll deliver if we have
to stay till midnight. Noblesse oblige, my dear," and the
typewriters would trill and jingle and all the girls' fingers
would go like mad typing briefs, manuscripts of unde-
livered speeches by lobbyists, occasional overflow from
a newspaperman or a scientist, or prospectuses from real-
estate offices or patent promoters, dunning letters for
dentists and doctors.

THE CAMERA EYE (14)

Sunday nights when we had fishballs and baked beans
and Mr. Garfield read to us in a very beautiful reading
voice and everybody was so quiet you could have heard
a pin drop because he was reading The Man Without a
Country and it was a very terrible story and Aaron Burr

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had been a very dangerous man and this poor young man
had said "Damn the United States; I never hope to hear
her name again" and it was a very terrible thing to say
and the grayhaired judge was so kind and good

and the judge sentenced me and they took me far
away to foreign lands on a frigate and the officers were
kind and good and spoke in kind grave very sorry read-
ing voices like Mr. Garfield and everything was very
kind and grave and very sorry and frigates and the blue
Mediterranean and islands and when I was dead I began
to cry and I was afraid the other boys would see I had
tears in my eyes

American shouldn't cry he should look kind and
grave and very sorry when they wrapped me in the stars
and stripes and brought me home on a frigate to be buried
I was so sorry I never remembered whether they brought
me home or buried me at sea but anyway I was wrapped
in Old Glory

NEWSREEL XI

the government of the United States must insist and
demand that American citizens who may be taken prisoner
whether by one party or the other as participants in the present
insurrectionary disturbances shall be dealt with in accordance
with the broad principles of international law

SOLDIERS GUARD CONVENTION

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the Titanic left Southampton on April 10th on its maiden
operation is to be performed against the wishes of the New
York Life according to " Kimmel" Why they know I'm
Kimmel in Niles I'm George to everyone even mother and
sister when we meet on the streets

I'm going to Maxim's
Where fun and frolic beams
With all the girls I'll chatter
I'll laugh and kiss and flatter
Lolo, Dodo, Joujou.
Cloclo, Margot, Froufrou

TITANIC LARGEST SHIP IN THE WORLD
SINKING

personally I am not sure that the twelvehour day is bad
for employees especially when they insist on working that long
in order to make more money

Still all my song shall be
Nearer My God to thee
Nearer to thee

it was now about one AM, a beautiful starlight night
with no moon. The sea was as calm as a pond, just a gentle
heave as the boat dipped up and down in the swell, an ideal
night except for the bitter cold. In the distance the Titanic
looked an enormous length, its great hulk outlined in black
against the starry sky, every porthole and saloon blazing with
light

ASK METHODISM TO OUST TRINITY

the bride's gown is of charmeuse satin with a chiffon
veiled lace waist. The veil is of crepe lisse edged with point
de venise a departure from the conventional bridal veil and
the bouquet is to be lilies of the valley and gardenias

Lolo, Dodo, Joujou,
Cloclo, Margot, Froufrou
I'm going to Maxim's
And you can go to . . .

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the Titanic slowly tilted straight on end with the stern
vertically upward and as it did so the lights in the cabins and
saloons which had not flickered for a moment since we left,
died out, came on again for a single flash and finally went out
altogether. Meanwhile the machinery rattled through the
vessel with a rattle and a groaning that could be heard for
miles. Then with a quiet slanting dive

JANEY

"But it's so interesting, mommer," Janey would say
when her mother bewailed the fact that she had to work.
"In my day it wasn't considered ladylike, it was thought
to be demeaning.""But it isn't now," Janey would say
getting into a temper. Then it would be a great relief to
get out of the stuffy house and the stuffy treeshaded
streets of Georgetown and to stop by for Alice Dick and
go down town to the moving pictures and to see the pic-
tures of foreign countries, and the crowds on F Street
and to stop in at a drugstore for a soda afterwards, before
getting on the Georgetown car, and to sit up at the foun-
tain talking about the picture they'd seen and Olive
Thomas and Charley Chaplin and John Bunny. She began
to read the paper every day and to take an interest in
politics. She began to feel that there was a great throb-
bing arclighted world somewhere outside and that only
living in Georgetown where everything was so poky and
oldfashiohed, and Mommer and Popper were so poky and
oldfashioned, kept her from breaking into it.

Postcards from Joe made her feel like that too. He
was a sailor on the battleship Connecticut. There'd be a
picture of the waterfront at Havana or the harbor of
Marseille or Villefranche or a photograph of a girl in
peasant costume inside a tinsel horseshoe and a few lines

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hoping she was well and liked her job, never a word about
himself. She wrote him long letters full of questions about
himself and foreign countries but he never answered them.
Still it gave her a sort of feeling of adventure to get the
postcards. Whenever she saw a navy man on the street or
marines from Quantico she thought of Joe and wondered
how he was getting on. The sight of a gob lurching along
in blue with his cap on one side took a funny twist at her
heart.

Sundays Alice almost always came out to Georgetown.
The house was different now, Joe gone, her mother and
father older and quieter, Francie and Ellen blooming out
into pretty giggly highschool girls, popular with the boys
in the neighborhood, going out to parties, all the time
complaining because they didn't have any money to spend.
Sitting at the table with them, helping Mommer with
the gravy, bringing in the potatoes or the Brussels sprouts
for Sunday dinner, Janey felt grownup, almost an old
maid. She was on the side of her father and mother now
against the sisters. Popper began to look old and shrunk-
up. He talked often about retiring, and was looking for-
ward to his pension.

When she'd been eight months with Mrs. Robinson
she got an offer from Dreyfus and Carroll, the patent
lawyers up on the top floor of the Riggs Building to work
for them for seventeen a week, which was five dollars
more than she was getting from Mrs. Robinson. It made
her feel fine. She realized now that she was good at her
work and that she could support herself whatever hap-
pened. On the strength of it she went down to Wood-
ward and Lothrop's with Alice Dick to buy a dress. She
wanted a silk grownup dress with embroidery on it. She
was twentyone and was going to make seventeen dollars
a week and thought she had a right to one nice dress.
Alice said it ought to be a bronzy gold color to match her
hair. They went in all the stores down F Street, but they

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couldn't find anything that suited that wasn't too expen-
sive, so all they could do was buy some materials and
some fashion magazines and take it home to Janey's
mother to make up. It galled Janey still being dependent
on her mother this way, but there was nothing for it; so
Mrs. Williams had to make up Janey's new dress the
way she had made all her children's dresses since they
were born. Janey had never had the patience to learn to
sew the way Mommer could. They bought enough ma-
terial so that Alice could have one too, so Mrs. Williams
had to make up two dresses.

Working at Dreyfus and Carroll's was quite different
from working at Mrs. Robinson's. There were mostly
men in the office. Mr. Dreyfus was a small thinfaced man
with a small black moustache and small black twinkly
eyes and a touch of accent that gave him a distinguished
foreign diplomat manner. He carried yellow wash gloves
and a yellow cane and had a great variety of very much
tailored overcoats. He was the brains of the firm, Jerry
Burnham said. Mr. Carroll was a stout redfaced man
who smoked many cigars and cleared his throat a great
deal and had a very oldtimey Southern Godblessmysoul
way of talking. Jerry Burnham said he was the firm's
bay window. Jerry Burnham was a wrinklefaced young
man with dissipated eyes who was the firm's adviser in
technical and engineering matters. He laughed a great
deal, always got into the office late, and for some reason
took a fancy to Janey and used to joke about things to her
while he was dictating. She liked him, though the dis-
sipated look under his eyes scared her off a little. She'd
have liked to have talked to him like a sister, and gotten
him to stop burning the candle at both ends. Then there
was an elderly accountant, Mr. Sills, a shriveled man who
lived in Anacostia and never said a word to anybody.
At noon he didn't go out for lunch, but sat at his desk
eating a sandwich and an apple wrapped in waxed paper

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which he carefully folded afterwards and put back in
his pocket. Then there were two fresh errandboys and a
little plainfaced typist named Miss Simonds who only
got twelve a week. All sorts of people in every sort of
seedyrespectable or Peacock Alley clothes came in during
the day and stood round in the outer office listening to
Mr. Carroll's rich boom from behind the groundglass
door. Mr. Dreyfus slipped in and out without a word,
smiling faintly at his acquaintances, always in a great
mysterious hurry. At lunch in the little cafeteria or at a
sodafountain Janey 'ud tell Alice all about it and Alice
would look up at her admiringly. Alice always waited for
her in the vestibule at one. They'd arranged to go out then
because there was less of a crowd. Neither of them ever
spent more than twenty cents, so lunch didn't take them
very long and they'd have time to take a turn round
Lafayette Square or sometimes round the White House
grounds before going back to the office.

There was one Saturday night when she had to work
late to finish up typing the description of an outboard
motor that had to be in at the Patent Office first thing
Monday morning. Everybody else had left the office. She
was making out the complicated technical wording as best
she could, but her mind was on a postcard showing the
Christ of the Andes she'd gotten from Joe that day. All
it said was:

"To hell with Uncle Sam's tin ships. Coming home
soon."

It wasn't signed but she knew the writing. It worried
her. Jerry Burnham sat at the telephone switchboard going
over the pages as she finished them. Now and then he
went out to the washroom; when he came back each
time a hot breath of whisky wafted across the office. Janey
was nervous. She typed till the little black letters squirmed
before her eyes. She was worried about Joe. How could
he be coming home before his enlistment was up? Some-

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thing must be the matter. And Jerry Burnham moving
restlessly round on the telephone girl's seat made her
uncomfortable. She and Alice had talked about the danger
of staying in an office alone with a man like this. Late like
this and drinking, a man had just one idea.

When she handed him the next to the last sheet his eye,
bright and moist, caught hers. "I bet you're tired, Miss
Williams," he said. "It's a darned shame to keep you in
like this and Saturday night too.""It's quite all right, Mr.
Burnham," she said icily and her fingers chirruped. "It's
the damned old baywindow's fault. He chewed the rag
so much about politics all day, nobody could get any work
done.""Well, it doesn't matter now," said Janey. "Noth-
ing matters any more. . . . It's almost eight o'clock. I
had to pass up a date with my best girl . . . or there-
abouts. I bet you passed up a date too, Miss Williams."
"I was going to meet another girl, that's all.""Now I'll
tell one . . ." He laughed so easily that she found her-
self laughing too.

When the last page was done and in the envelope,
Janey got up to get her hat. "Look, Miss Williams, we'll
drop this in the mail and then you'd better come and have
a bite with me."

Going down in the elevator Janey intended to excuse
herself and go home but somehow she didn't and found
herself, everything aflutter inside of her, sitting coolly
down with him in a French restaurant on H Street.

"Well, what do you think of the New Freedom, Miss
Williams?" asked Jerry Burnham with a laugh after he'd
sat down. He handed her the menu. "Here's the score-
card . . . Let your conscience be your guide."

"Why, I hardly know, Mr. Burnham."

"Well, I'm for it, frankly. I think Wilson's a big man
. . . Nothing like change anyway, the best thing in the
world, don't you think so? Bryan's a big bellowing
blatherskite but even he represents something and even

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Josephus Daniels filling the navy with grapejuice. I think
there's a chance we may get back to being a democracy
. . . Maybe there won't have to be a revolution; what
do you think?"

He never waited for her to answer a question, he just
talked and laughed all by himself.

When Janey tried to tell Alice about it afterwards the
things Jerry Burnham said didn't seem so funny, nor the
food so good nor everything so jolly. Alice was pretty
bitter about it. "Oh, Janey, how could you go out late at
night with a drunken man and to a place like that and
here I was crazy anxious . . . You know a man like that
has only one idea . . . I declare I think it was heartless
and light . . . I wouldn't have thought you capable of
such a thing.""But, Alice, it wasn't like that at all,"
Janey kept saying, but Alice cried and went round looking
hurt for a whole week; so that after that Janey kept off
the subject of Jerry Burnham. It was the first disagree-
ment she'd ever had with Alice and it made her feel bad.

Still she got to be friends with Jerry Burnham. He
seemed to like taking her out and having her listen to him
talk. Even after he'd thrown up his job at Dreyfus and
Carroll, he sometimes called for her Saturday afternoons
to take her to Keith's. Janey arranged a meeting with
Alice out in Rock Creek Park but it wasn't much of a
success. Jerry set the girls up to tea at the old stone mill.
He was working for an engineering paper and writing a
weekly letter for The New York Sun. He upset Alice by
calling Washington a cesspool and a sink of boredom and
saying he was rotting there and that most of the inhabit-
ants were dead from the neck up anyway. When he put
them on the car to go back to Georgetown Alice said em-
phatically that young Burnham was not the sort of boy
a respectable girl ought to know. Janey sat back happily
in the seat of the open car, looking out at trees, girls in
summer dresses, men in straw hats, mailboxes, storefronts

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sliding by and said, "But, Alice, he's smart as a whip. . . .
Gosh, I like brainy people, don't you?" Alice looked at
her and shook her head sadly and said nothing.

That same afternoon they went to the Georgetown
hospital to see Popper. It was pretty horrible. Mommer
and Janey and the doctor and the wardnurse knew that
he had cancer of the bladder and couldn't live very long
but they didn't admit it even to themselves. They had
just moved him into a private room where he would be
more comfortable. It was costing lots of money and they'd
had to put a second mortgage on the house. They'd al-
ready spent all Janey's savings that she had in a bank-
account of her own against a rainy day. That afternoon
they had to wait quite a while. When the nurse came out
with a glass urinal under a towel Janey went in alone.
"Hello, Popper," she said with a forced smile. The smell
of disinfectant in the room sickened her. Through the
open window came warm air of sunwilted trees, drowsy
Sundayafternoon noises, the caw of a crow, a distant sound
of traffic. Popper's face was drawn in and twisted to one
side. His big moustaches looked pathetically silky and
white. Janey knew that she loved him better than any-
body else in the world . . . His voice was feeble but
fairly firm. " Janey, I'm in drydock, girl, and I guess I'll
never . . . you know better'n I do, the sonsobitches won't
tell me . . . Say, tell me about Joe. You hear from him,
don't you? I wish he hadn't joined the navy; no future
for a boy there without pull higher up; but I'm. glad he
went to sea, takes after me . . . I'd been three times
round the Horn in the old days before I was twenty.
That was before I settled down in the towboat business,
you understand . . . But I been thinkin' here lyin' in
bed that Joe done just what I'd 'a' done, a chip of the
old block, and I'm glad of it. I don't worry about him,
but I wish you girls was married an' off my hands. I'd
feel easier. I don't trust girls nowadays with these here

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monopoly. You boys are working for a bunch of thieves,
but I know it ain't your fault. Here's lookin' at you."

Before they knew it Larry and Joe were singing. The
old man was talking about cotton spinning machinery and
canecrushers and pouring out drinks from a rumbottle.
They were pretty goddam drunk. They didn't know how
they got aboard. Joe remembered the dark focastle and
the sound of snoring from the bunks spinning around,
then sleep hitting him like a sandbag and the sweet, sicky
taste of rum in his mouth.

A couple of days later Joe came down with a fever
and horrible pains in his joints. He was out of his head
when they put him ashore at St. Thomas's. It was dengue
and he was sick for two months before he had the strength
even to write Del to tell her where he was. The hos-
pital orderly told him he'd been out of his head five days
and they'd given him up for a goner. The doctors had
been sore as hell about it because this was post hospital;
after all he was a white man and unconscious and they
couldn't very well feed him to the sharks.

It was July before Joe was well enough to walk around
the steep little coraldust streets of the town. He had to
leave the hospital and would have been in a bad way if one
of the cooks at the marine barracks hadn't looked out for
him and found him a flop in an unused section of the
building. It was hot and there was never a cloud in the
sky and he got pretty sick of looking at the niggers and
the bare hills and the blue shutin harbor. He spent a lot
of time sitting out on the old coalwharf in the shade of a
piece of corrugated iron roof looking through the plank-
ing at the clear deep bluegreen water, watching shoals of
snappers feeding around the piles. He got to thinking*
about Del and that French girl in Bordeaux and the war
and how the United Fruit was a bunch of thieves and then
the thoughts would go round and round in his head like
the little silver and blue and yellow fish round the swaying

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weeds on the piles and he'd find held dropped off to
sleep.

When a northbound fruitsteamer came into the harbor
he got hold of one of the officers on the wharf and told
him his sad story. They gave him passage up to New
York. First thing he did was try to get hold of Janey;
maybe if she thought he ought to, he'd give up this dog's
life and take a steady job ashore. He called up the J.
Ward Moorehouse advertising office where she worked
but the girl at the other end of the line told him she was
the boss's secretary and was out west on business.

He went over and got a flop at Mrs. Olsen's in Red-
hook. Everybody over there was talking about the draft
and how they rounded you up for a slacker if they picked
you up on the street without a registration card. And sure
enough, just as Joe was stepping out of the subway at
Wall Street one morning a cop came up to him and asked
him for his card. Joe said he was a merchant seaman and
had just got back from a trip and hadn't had time to regis-
ter yet and that he was exempt, but the cop said he'd have
to tell that to the judge. They were quite a bunch being
marched down Broadway; smart guys in the crowd of
clerks and counterjumpers along the sidewalks yelled
"Slackers" at them and the girls hissed and booed.

In the Custom House they were herded into some of
the basement rooms. It was a hot August day. Joe elbowed
his way through the sweating, grumbling crowd towards
the window. Most of them were foreigners, there were
longshoremen and waterfront loafers; a lot of the group
were talking big but Joe remembered the navy and kept
his mouth shut and listened. He was in there all day. The
cops wouldn't let anybody telephone and there was only
one toilet and they had to go to that under guard. Joe
felt pretty weak on his pins, he hadn't gotten over the
effect of that dengue yet. He was about ready to pass out

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when he saw a face he knew. Damned if it wasn't Glen
Hardwick.

Glen had been picked up by a Britisher' and taken into
Halifax. He'd signed as second on the Chemang, taking
out mules to Bordeaux and a general cargo to Genoa, going
to be armed with a threeinch gun and navy gunners, Joe
ought to come along. "Jesus, do you think I could get
aboard her?" Joe asked. "Sure, they're crazy for naviga-
tion officers; they'd take you on even without a ticket."
Bordeaux sounded pretty good, remember the girlfriends
there? They doped out that when Glen got out he'd phone
Mrs. Olsen to bring over Joe's license that was in a cigar-
box at the head of his bed. When they finally were taken
up to the desk to be questioned the guy let Glen go right
away and said Joe could go as soon as they got his license
over but that they must register at once even if they were
exempt from the draft. "After all, you boys ought to re-
member that there's a war on," said the inspector at the
desk. "Well, we sure ought to know," said Joe.