NEWSREEL XXX 2 страница

Edwin Vinal had been a social worker and lived in a
settlement house and now he had a scholarship at Columbia
but he said the profs were too theoretical and never seemed
to realize it was real people like you and me they were
dealing with. Daughter had done churchwork and taken
around baskets to poorwhite families at Christmas time and
said she'd like to do some socialservicework right here in
New York. As they were taking off their skates he asked
her if she really meant it and she smiled up at him and
said, "Hope I may die if I don't."

So the next evening he took her downtown threequar-
ters of an hour's ride in the subway and then a long stretch
on a crosstown car to a settlement house on Grand Street
where she had to wait while he gave an English lesson to

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a class of greasylooking young Lithuanians or Polaks or
something like that. Then they walked around the streets
and Edwin pointed out the conditions. It was like the Mex-
ican part of San Antonio or Houston only there were all
kinds of foreigners. None of them looked as if they ever
bathed and the streets smelt of garbage. There was laun-
dry hanging out everywhere and signs in all kinds of funny
languages. Edwin showed her some in Russian and Yid-
dish, one in Armenian and two in Arabic. The streets were
awful crowded and there were pushcarts along the curb
and peddlers everywhere and funny smells of cooking
coming out of restaurants, and outlandish phonograph
music. Edwin pointed out two tiredlooking painted girls
who he said were streetwalkers, drunks stumbling out of
a saloon, a young man in a checked cap he said was a cadet
drumming up trade for a disorderly house, some sallow-
faced boys he said were gunmen and dope peddlers. It was
a relief when they came up again out of the subway way
uptown where a springy wind was blowing down the broad
empty streets that smelt of the Hudson River. "Well,
Anne, how did you like your little trip to the underworld?"

"Allright," she said after a pause. "Another time I think
I'll take a gun in my handbag. . . . But all those people,
Edwin, how on earth can you make citizens out of them?
We oughtn't to let all these foreigners come over and mess
up our country."

"You're entirely wrong," Edwin snapped at her.
"They'd all be decent if they had a chance. We'd be just
like them if we hadn't been lucky enough to be born of
decent families in small prosperous American towns."

"Oh, how can you talk so silly, Edwin, they're not white
people and they never will be. They're just like Mexicans
or somethin', or niggers." She caught herself up and swal-,
lowed the last word. The colored elevator boy was drows-
ing on a bench right behind her.

If you're not the benightedest little heathen I ever

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saw," said Edwin teasingly. "You're a Christian, aren'
you, well, have you ever thought that Christ was a Jew?"

"Well, I'm fallin' down with sleep and can't argue with
you but I know you're wrong." She went into the elevator
and the colored elevator boy got up yawning and stretch:'
ing. The last she saw of Edwin in the rapidly decreasing
patch of light between the floor of the elevator and the
ceiling of the vestibule he was shaking his fist at her. She
threw him a kiss without meaning to.

When she got in the apartment, Ada, who was reading
in the livingroom, scolded her a little for being so late,
but she pleaded that she was too tired and sleepy to be
scolded. "What do you think of Edwin Vinal, Ada?"
"Why, my dear, I think he's a splendid young fellow, a
little restless maybe, but he'll settle down. . . . Why?"

"Oh, I dunno," said Daughter, yawning, "Good night,
Ada darlin'."

he took a hot bath and put a lot of perfume on and
went to bed, but she couldn't go to sleep. Her legs ached
from the greasy pavements and she could feel the walls
of the tenements sweating lust and filth and the smell of
crowded bodies closing in on her, in spite of the perfume
she still had the rank garbagy smell in her nose, and the
dazzle of street lights and faces pricked her eyes. When
she went to sleep she dreamed she had rouged her lips and
was walking up and down, up and down with a gun in her
handbag; Joe Washburn walked by and she kept catching
at his arm to try to make him stop but he kept walking by
without looking at her and so did Dad and they wouldn't
look when a big Jew with a beard kept getting closer to
her and he smelt horrid of the East Side and garlic and
waterclosets and she tried to get the gun out of her bag
to shoot him and he had his arms around her and was pull-
ing her face close to his. She couldn't get the gun out of
the handbag and behind the roaring clatter of the subway
in her ears was Edwin Vinal's voice saying, "You're a

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Christian, aren't you? You're entirely wrong . . . a Chris-
tian, aren't you? Have you ever thought that Christ would
have been just like them if he hadn't been lucky enough
to have been born of decent people . . . a Christian, aren't
you. . . ."

Ada, standing over her in a nightgown, woke her up,
"What can be the matter, child?" "I was having a night-
mare . . . isn't that silly?" said Daughter and sat bolt-
upright in bed. "Did I yell bloody murder?" "I bet you
children were out eating Welsh Rabbit, that's why you
were so late," said Ada, and went back to her room
laughing.

That spring Daughter coached a girls' basketball team
at a Y.W.C.A. in the Bronx, and got engaged to Edwin
Vinal. She told him she didn't want to marry anybody for
a couple of years yet, and he said he didn't care about car-
nal marriage but that the important thing was for them to
plan a life of service together. Sunday evenings, when the
weather got good, they would go and cook a steak together
in Palisades Park and sit there looking through the trees
at the lights coming on in the great toothed rockrim of the
city and talk about what was good and evil and what real
love was. Coming back they'd stand hand in hand in the
bow of the ferry boat among the crowd of boyscouts and
hikers and picnickers and look at the great sweep of
lighted buildings fading away into the ruddy haze down
the North River and talk about all the terrible conditions
in the city. Edwin would kiss her on the forehead when
he said Goodnight and she'd go up in the elevator feeling
that the kiss was a dedication.

At the end of June she went home to spend three months
on the ranch, but she was very unhappy there that summer.
Somehow she couldn't get around to telling Dad about her
engagement. When Joe Washburn came out to spend a
week the boys made her furious teasing her about him and
telling her that he was engaged to a girl in Oklahoma City,

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and she got so mad she wouldn't speak to them and was
barely civil to Joe. She insisted on riding a mean little
pinto that bucked and threw her once or twice. She drove
the car right through a gate one night and busted both
lamps to smithereens. When Dad scolded her about her
recklessness she'd tell him he oughtn't to care because she
was going back east to earn her own living and he'd be rid
of her. Joe Washburn treated her with the same grave
kindness as always, and sometimes when she was acting
crazy she'd catch a funny understanding kidding gleam in
his keen eyes that would make her feel suddenly all weak
and silly inside. The night before he left the boys cornered
a rattler on the rockpile behind the corral and Daughter
dared Joe to pick it up and snap its head off. Joe ran for
a forked stick and caught the snake with a jab behind the
head and threw it with all his might against the wall of
the little smokehouse. As it lay wriggling on the grass
with a broken back Bud took its head off with a hoe. It
had six rattles and a button. "Daughter," Joe drawled,
looking her in the face with his steady smiling stare,
"sometimes you talk like you didn't have good sense."

"You're yaller, that's what's the matter with you," she
said.

"Daughter, you're crazy . . . you apologize to Joe,"
yelled Bud, running up red in the face with the dead snake
in his hand. She turned and went into the ranchhouse and
threw herself on her bed. She didn't come out of her room.
till after Joe had left in the morning.

he week before she left to go back to Columbia she
was good as gold and tried to make it up to Dad and the
boys by baking cakes for them and attending to the house-
keeping for having acted so mean and crazy all summer.
She met Ada in Dallas and they engaged a section to-
gether. She'd been hoping that Joe would come down to
the station to see them off, but he was in Oklahoma City
on oil business. On her way north she wrote him a long

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letter saying she didn't know what had gotten into her that
day with the rattler and wouldn't he please forgive her.

Daughter worked hard that autumn. She'd gotten her-
self admitted to the School of Journalism, in spite of Ed-
win's disapproval. He wanted her to study to be a teacher
or social worker, but she said journalism offered more op-
portunity. They more or less broke off over it; although
they saw each other a good deal, they didn't talk so much
about being engaged. There was a boy named Webb Cruth-
ers studying journalism that Daughter got to be good
friends with although Ada said he was no good and
wouldn't let her bring him to the house. He was shorter
than she, had dark hair and looked about fifteen although
he said he was twentyone. He had a creamy white skin
that made people call him Babyface, and a funny confiden-
tial way of talking as if he didn't take what he was saying
altogether seriously himself. He said he was an anarchist
and talked all the time about politics and the war. He used
to take her down to the East Side, too, but it was more fun
than going with Edwin. Webb always wanted to go in
somewhere to get a drink and talk to people. He took her
to saloons and to Roumanian rathskellers and Arabian res-
taurants and more places than she'd ever imagined. He
knew everybody everywhere and seemed to manage to
make people trust him for the check, because he hardly
ever had any money, and when they'd spent whatever she
-had with her Webb would have to charge the rest. Daugh-
ter didn't drink more than an occasional glass of wine, and
if he began to get too obstreperous, she'd make him take
her to the nearest subway and go on home. Then next day
he'd be a little weak and trembly and tell her about his
hangover and funny stories about adventures held had
when he was tight. He always had pamphlets in his pock-
ets about socialism and syndicalism and copies of Mother
Earth or The Masses.

After Christmas Webb got all wrapped up in a strike of

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textile workers that was going on in a town over in New
Jersey. One Sunday they went over to see what it was like.
They got off the train at a grimy brick station in the mid-
dle of the empty business section, a few people standing
around in front of lunchcounters, empty stores closed for
Sunday; there seemed nothing special about the town until
they walked out to the long low square brick buildings of
the mills. There were knots of policemen in blue standing
about in the wide muddy roadway outside and inside the
wiremesh gates huskylooking young men in khaki. "Those
are special deputies, the sons of bitches," muttered Webb
between his teeth. They went to Strike Headquarters to see
a girl Webb knew who was doing publicity for them. At
the head of a grimy stairway crowded with greyfaced for-
eign men and women in faded greylooking clothes, they
found an office noisy with talk and click of typewriters. The
hallway was piled with stacks of handbills that a tiredlook-
ing young man was giving out in packages to boys in
ragged sweaters. Webb found Sylvia Dalhart, a longnosed
girl with glasses who was typing madly at a desk piled
with newspapers and clippings. She waved a hand and said,
"Webb, wait for me outside. I'm going to show some news-
paper guys around and you'd better come."

ut in the hall they ran into a fellow Webb knew, Ben
Compton, a tall young man with a long thin nose and red-
rimmed eyes, who said he was going to speak at the meet-
ing and asked Webb if he wouldn't speak. "Jeez, what
could I say to those fellers? I'm just a bum of a college
stoodjent, like you, Ben." "Tell 'em the workers have got
to win the world, tell 'em this fight is part of a great his-
toric battle. Talking's the easiest part of the movement.
The truth's simple enough." He had an explosive way of
talking with a pause between each sentence, as if the sen-
tence took sometime to come up from someplace way down
inside. Daughter sized up that he was attractive, even
though he was probably a Jew. "Well, I’ll try to stammer

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out something about democracy in industry," said Webb.

Sylvia Dalhart was already pushing them down the
stairs. She had with her a pale young man in a raincoat
and black felt hat who was chewing the. end of a half of
a cigar that had gone out. "Fellowworkers, this is Joe Big-
low from the Globe, "she had a western burr in her voice
that made Daughter feel at home. "We're going to show
him around."

They went all over town, to strikers' houses where tired-
looking women in sweaters out at the elbows were cooking
up lean Sunday dinners of corned beef and cabbage or
stewed meat and potatoes, or in some houses they just had
cabbage and bread or just potatoes. Then they went to a
lunchroom near the station and ate some lunch. Daughter
paid the check as nobody seemed to have any money, and
it was time to go to the meeting.

The trolleycar was crowded with strikers and their wives
and children. The meeting was to be held in the next town
because in that town the Mills owned everything and there
was no way of hiring a hall. It had started to sleet, and
they got their feet wet wading through the slush to the
mean frame building where the meeting was going to be
held. When they got to the door there were mounted po-
lice out in front. "Hall full," a cop told them at the street-
corner, "no more allowed inside."

They stood around in the sleet waiting for somebody
with authority. There were thousands of strikers, men and
women and boys and girls, the older people talking among
themselves in low voices in foreign languages. Webb kept
saying, "Jesus, this is outrageous. Somebody ought to do
something." Daughter's feet were cold and she wanted to
go home.

Then Ben Compton came around from the back of the
building. People began to gather around him, "There's
Ben . . . there's Compton, good boy, Benny," she heard
people saying. Young men moved around through the

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crowd whispering, "Overflow meeting . . . stand your
ground, folks."

He began to speak hanging by one arm from a lamp-
post. "Comrades, this is another insult flung in the face of
the working class. There are not more than forty people in
the hall and they close the doors and tell us it's full . . ."
The crowd began swaying back and forth, hats, umbrellas
bobbing in the sleety rain. Then she saw the two cops were
dragging Compton off and heard the jangle of the patrol-
wagon. "Shame, shame," people yelled. They began to
back off from the cops; the flow was away from the hall.
People were moving quietly and dejectedly down the street
toward the trolley tracks with the cordon of mounted po-
lice pressing them on. Suddenly Webb whispered in her
ear, "Let me lean on your shoulder," and jumped on a
hydrant.

"This is outrageous," he shouted, "you people had a per-
mit to use the hall and had hired it and no power on earth
has a right to keep you out of it. To hell with the cossacks."

Two mounted police were loping towards him, opening
a lane through the crowd as they came. Webb was off the
hydrant and had grabbed Daughter's hand, "Let's run like
hell," he whispered and was off doubling back and forth
among the scurrying people. She followed him laughing
and out of breath. A trolley car was coming down the main
street. Webb caught it on the move but she couldn't make
it and had to wait for the next. Meanwhile the cops were
riding slowly back and forth among the crowd breaking
it up.

Daughter's feet ached from paddling in slush all after-
noon and she was thinking that she ought to get home be-
fore she caught her death of cold. At the station waiting
for the train she saw Webb. He looked scared to death.
He'd pulled his cap down over his eyes and his muffler up
over his ch0000nd pretended not to know Daughter when

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she went up to him. Once they got on the overheated train
he sneaked up the aisle and sat down next to her.

"I was afraid some dick ud recognize me at the station,"
he whispered. "Well, what do you think of it?"

"I thought it was terrible . . . they're all so yaller
. . . the only people looked good to me were those boys
guardin' the mills, they looked like white men. . . . And
as for you, Webb Cruthers, you ran like a deer."

"Don't talk so loud. . . . Do you think I ought to have
waited and gotten arrested like Ben."

"Of course it's none of my business."

"You don't understand revolutionary tactics, Anne.'

Going over on the ferry they were both of them cold
and hungry. Webb said he had the key to a room a friend
of his had down on Eighth Street and that they'd better
go there and warm their feet and make some tea before
they went uptown. They had a long sullen walk, neither of
them saying anything, from the ferry landing to the house.
The room, that smelt of turpentine and was untidy, turned
out to be a big studio heated by a gasburner. It was cold
as Greenland, so they wrapped themselves in blankets and
took off their shoes and stockings and toasted their feet in
front of the gas. Daughter took her skirt off under the
blanket and hung it up over the heater. "Well, I declare,"
she said, "if your friend comes in we sure will be compro-
mised."

"He won't," said Webb, "he's up at Cold Spring for
the weekend." Webb was moving around in his bare feet,
putting on water to boil and making toast. "You'd better
take your trousers off, Webb, I can see the water dripping
off them from here." Webb blushed and pulled them off,
draping the blanket around himself like a Roman senator.

For a long time they didn't say anything and all they
could hear above the distant hum of traffic was the hiss of
the gasflame and the intermittent purr of the kettle just
beginning to boil. Then Webb suddenly began to talk in

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a nervous spluttering way. "So you think I'm yellow, do
you? Well, you may be right, Anne . . . not that I give
a damn . . . I mean, you see, there's times when a fellow
ought to be a coward and times when he ought to do the
he-man stuff. Now don't talk for a minute, let me say
something. . . . I'm hellishly attracted to you . . . and
it's been yellow of me not to tell you about it before, see?
I don't believe in love or anything like that, all bourgeois
nonsensei but I think when people are attracted to each
other I think it's yellow of them not to . . . you know
what I mean."

"No, I doan', Webb," said Daughter after a pause.

Webb looked at her in a puzzled way as he brought her
a cup of tea and some buttered toast with a piece of cheese
on it. They ate in silence for a while; it was so quiet they
could hear each other gulping little swallows of tea. "Now,
what in Jesus Christ's name did you mean by that?" Webb
suddenly shouted out.

Daughter felt warm and drowsy in her blanket, with the
hot tea in her and the dry gasheat licking the soles of her
feet. "Well, what does anybody mean by anything," she
mumbled dreamily.

Webb put down his teacup and began to walk up and
down the room trailing the blanket after him. "S -- t," he
suddenly said, as he stepped on a thumbtack. He stood on
one leg looking at the sole of his foot that was black from
the grime of the floor. "But, Jesus Christ, Anne . . . peo-
ple ought to be free and happy about sex . . . come ahead
let's." His cheeks were pink and his black hair that needed
cutting was every which way. He kept on standing on one
leg and looking at the sole of his foot. Daughter began to
laugh. "You look awful funny like that, Webb." She felt
a warm glow all over her. "Give me another cup of tea
and make me some more toast."

After she'd had the tea and toast she said, "Well isn't
it about time we ought to be going uptown?" "But Christ,

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Anne, I'm making indecent proposals to you," he said
shrilly, half laughing and half in tears. "For God's sake
pay attention . . . Damn it, I'll make you pay attention,
you little bitch." He dropped his blanket and ran at her.
She could see he was fighting mad. He pulled her up out
of her chair and kissed her on the mouth. She had quite a
tussle with him, as he was wiry and strong, but she man-
aged to get her forearm under his chin and to push his
face away far enough to give him a punch on the nose.
His nose began to bleed. "Don't be silly, Webb," she said,
breathing hard, "I don't want that sort of thing, not yet,
anyway . . . go and wash your face."

He went to the sink and began dabbling his face with
water. Daughter hurried into her skirt and shoes and stock-
ings and went over to the sink where he was washing his
face, "That was mean of me, Webb, I'm terribly sorry.
There's something always makes me be mean to people I
like." Webb wouldn't say anything for a long time. His
nose was still bleeding.

"Go along home," he said, "I'm going to stay here. . . .
It's all right . . . my mistake."

She put on her dripping raincoat and went out into the
shiny evening streets. All the way home on the express in
the subway she was feeling warm and tender towards
Webb, like towards Dad or the boys.

She didn't see him for several days, then one evening
he called and asked her if she wanted to go out on the
picket line next morning. It was still dark when she met
him at the ferry station. They were both cold and sleepy
and didn't say much going out on the train. From the train
they had to run through the slippery streets to get to the
mills in time to join the picket line. Faces looked cold and
pinched in the blue early light. Women had shawls over
their heads, few of the men or boys had overcoats. The
young girls were all shivering in their cheap fancy topcoats
that had no warmth to them. The cops had already begun

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to break up the head of the line. Some of the strikers were
singing Solidarity Forever, others were yelling Scabs, Scabs
and making funny long jeering hoots. Daughter was con-
fused and excited.

Suddenly everybody around her broke and ran and left
her in a stretch of empty street in front of the wire fencing
of the mills. Ten feet in front of her a young woman
slipped and fell. Daughter caught the scared look in her
eyes that were round and black. Daughter stepped for-
ward to help her up but two policemen were ahead of her
swinging their nightsticks. Daughter thought they were
going to help the girl up. She stood still for a second,
frozen in her tracks when she saw one of the policemen's
feet shoot out. He'd kicked the girl full in the face. Daugh-
ter never remembered what happened except that she was
wanting a gun and punching into the policeman's big red
face and against the buttons and the thick heavy cloth of
his overcoat. Something crashed down on her head from
behind; dizzy and sick she was being pushed into the po-
licewagon. In front of her was the girl's face all caved in
and bleeding. In the darkness inside were other men and
women cursing and laughing. But Daughter and the
woman opposite looked at each other dazedly and said
nothing. Then the door closed behind them and they were
in the dark.

When they were committed she was charged with riot-
ing, felonious assault, obstructing an officer and inciting to
sedition. It wasn't so bad in the county jail. The women's
section was crowded with strikers, all the cells were full of
girls laughing and talking, singing songs and telling each
other how they'd been arrested, how long they'd been in,
how they were going to win the strike. In Daughter's cell
the girls all clustered around her and wanted to know how
she'd gotten there. She began to feel she was quite a hero.
Towards evening her name was called and she found Webb
and Ada and a lawyer clustered around the policesergeant's

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desk. Ada was mad, "Read that, young woman, and see
how that'll sound back home," she said, poking an after-
noon paper under her nose.

TEXAS BELLE ASSAULTS Cop said one headline. Then
followed an account of her knocking down a policeman
with a left on the jaw. She was released on a thousand dol-
lars bail; outside the jail, Ben Compton broke away from
the group of reporters around him and rushed up to her.
"Congratulations, Miss Trent," he said, "that was a darn
nervy thing to do . . . made a very good impression in
the press." Sylvia Dalhart was with him. She threw her
arms around her and kissed her: "That was a mighty
spunky thing to do. Say, we're sending a delegation to
Washington to see President Wilson and present a peti-
tion and we want you on it. The President will refuse to
see the delegation and you'll have a chance to picket the
White House and get arrested again."

"Well, I declare," said Ada when they were safely on
the train for New York. "I think you've lost your mind."
"You'd have done the same thing, Ada darlin', if you'd
seen what I saw . . . when I tell Dad and the boys about
it they'll see red. It's the most outrageous thing I ever
heard of." Then she burst out crying.

When they got back to Ada's apartment they found a
telegram from Dad saying Coming at once. Make no state-
ment until I arrive. Late that night another telegram
came; it read: Dad seriously ill come on home at once
have Ada retain best lawyer obtainable. In the morning
Daughter scared and trembling was on the first train
south. At St. Louis she got a telegram saying Don't worry
condition fair double pneumonia. Upset as she was it cer-
tainly did her good to see the wide Texas country, the
spring crops beginning, a few bluebonnets in bloom. Buster
was there to meet her at the depot, "Well, Daughter," he
said after he had taken her bag, "you've almost killed
Dad."