CHARLEY ANDERSON. The train was three hours late getting into St

The train was three hours late getting into St. Paul.
Charley had his coat on and his bag closed an hour before
he got in. He sat fidgeting in the seat taking off and pull-
ing on a pair of new buckskin gloves. He wished they
wouldn't all be down at the station to meet him. Maybe
only Jim would be there. Maybe they hadn't got his wire.

The porter came and brushed him off, then took his
bags. Charley couldn't see much through the driving steam
and snow outside the window. The train slackened speed,
stopped in a broad snowswept freightyard, started again
with a jerk and a series of snorts from the forced draft in
the engine. The bumpers slammed all down the train.
Charley's hands were icy inside his gloves. The porter
stuck his head in and yelled, "St. Paul." There was noth-
ing to do but get out.

There they all were. Old man Vogel and Aunt Hart-
mann with their red faces and their long noses looked just
the same as ever, but Jim and Hedwig had both of them
filled out. Hedwig had on a mink coat and Jim's overcoat
looked darn prosperous. Jim snatched Charley's bags away
from him and Hedwig and Aunt Hartmann kissed him
and old man Vogel thumped him on the back. They all
talked at once and asked him all kinds of questions. When
he asked about Ma, Jim frowned and said she was in the
hospital, they'd go around to see her this afternoon. They
piled the bags into a new Ford sedan and squeezed them-
selves in after with a lot of giggling and squealing from
Aunt Hartmann. "You see I got the Ford agency now,"
said Jim. "To tell the truth, things have been pretty good
out here.""Wait till you see the house, it's all been done
over," said Hedwig. "'Vell, my poy made de Cherman
Kaiser run. Speaking for the Cherman-American com-
moonity of the Twin Cities, ve are pr'roud of you."

-32-

They had a big dinner ready and Jim gave him a drink
of whiskey and old man Vogel kept pouring him out beer
and saying, "Now tell us all about it." Charley sat there
his face all red, eating the stewed chicken and the dump-
lings and drinking the beer till he was ready to burst. He
couldn't think what to tell them so he made funny cracks
when they asked him questions. After dinner old man
Vogel gave him one of his best Havana cigars.

That afternoon Charley and Jim went to the hospital
to see Ma. Driving over, Jim said she'd been operated
on for a tumor but that he was afraid' it was cancer, but
even that hadn't given Charley an idea of how sick she'd
be. Her face was shrunken and yellow against the white
pillow. When he leaned over to kiss her her lips felt thin
and hot. Her breath was very bad. "Charley, I'm glad you
came," she said in a trembly voice. "It would have been
better if you'd come sooner. . . . Not that I'm not com-
fortable here . . . anyway I'll be glad having my boys
around me when I get well. God has watched over us all,
Charley, we mustn't forget Him." "Now, Ma, we don't
want to get tired and excited," said Jim. "We want to
keep our strength to get well."

"Oh, but He's been so merciful." She brought her small
hand, so thin it was blue, out from under the cover and
dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. "Jim, hand me my
glasses, that's a good boy," she said in a stronger voice.
"Let me take a look at the prodigal son."

Charley couldn't help shuffling his feet uneasily as she
looked at him.

"You're quite a man now and you've made quite a name
for yourself over there. You boys have turned out better
than I hoped. . . . Charley, I was afraid you'd turn out a
bum like your old man." They all laughed. They didn't
know what to say.

She took her glasses off again and tried to reach for the
bedside table with them. The glasses dropped out of her

-33-

hand and broke on the concrete floor. "Oh . . . my . . .
never mind, I don't need 'em much here."

Charley picked the pieces up and put them carefully
in his vest pocket. "I'll get 'em fixed, Ma."

The nurse was standing in the door beckoning with her
head. "Well, goodby, see you tomorrow," they said.

Once they were out in the corridor Charley felt that
tears were running down his face.

"That's how it is," said Jim, frowning. "They keep her
under dope most of the time. I thought she'd be more
comfortable in a private room, but they sure do know how
to charge in these damn hospitals." "I'll chip in on it," said
Charley. "I got a little money saved up." "Well, I sup-
pose it's no more than right you should," Jim said.

Charley took a deep breath of the cold afternoon when
they paused on the hospital steps, but he couldn't get the
smell of ether and drugs and sickness out of his head. It
had come on fine with an icy wind. The snow on the streets
and roofs was bright pink from the flaring sunset.

"We'll go down to the shop and see what's what," said
Jim. "I told the guy works for me to call up some of the
newspaperboys. I thought it would be a little free adver-
tising if they came down to the salesroom to interview
you." Jim slapped Charley on the back. "They eat up this
returnedhero stuff. String 'em along a little, won't you?"

Charley didn't answer.

" Jesus Christ, Jim, I don't know what to tell 'em," he
said in a low voice when they got back in the car. Jim was
pressing his foot on the selfstarter. "What do you think of
comin' in the business, Charley? It's gettin' to be a good
un, I can tell you that." "That's nice of you, Jim. Suppose
I kinder think about it."

When they got back to the house, they went around to
the new salesroom Jim had built out from the garage, that
had been a liverystable in the old days, back of old man
Vogel's house. The salesroom had a big plateglass window

-34-

with Ford slanting across it in blue letters. Inside stood
a new truck all shining and polished. Then there was a
green carpet and a veneered mahogany desk and a tele-
phone that pulled out on a nickel accordion bracket and an
artificial palm in a fancy jardiniere in the corner. "Take
your weight off your feet, Charley," said Jim, pointing to
the swivelchair and bringing out a box of cigars. "Let's sit
around and chew the rag a little."

Charley sat down and picked himself out a cigar. Jim
stood against the radiator with his thumbs in the armholes
of his vest. "What do you think of it, kid, pretty keen,
ain't it?"

"Pretty keen, Jim." They lit their cigars and scuffled
around with their feet a little.

Jim began again: "But it won't do. I got to get me a
big new place downtown. This used to be central. Now it's
out to hell and gone."

Charley kinder grunted and puffed on his cigar. Jim
took a couple of steps back and forth, looking at Charley
all the time. "With your connections in the Legion and
aviation and all that kinder stuff, we'll be jake. Every
other Ford dealer in the district's got a German name."

" Jim, can that stuff. I can't talk to newspapermen."

Jim flushed and frowned and sat down on the edge of
the desk. "But you got to hold up your end. . . . What
do you think I'm taking you in on it for? I'm not doin' it
for my kid brother's pretty blue eyes."

Charley got to his feet. "Jim, I ain't goin' in on it. I'm
already signed up with an aviation proposition with my
old C.O."

"Twentyfive years from now you can talk to me about
aviation. Ain't practical yet."

"Well, we got a couple of tricks up our sleeve. . . .
We're shootin' the moon."

"That's about the size of it." Jim got to his feet. His lips
got thin. "Well, you needn't think you can lay around my

-35-

house all winter just because you're a war hero. If that's
your idea you've got another think comin'." Charley burst
out laughing. Jim came up and put his hand wheedlingly
on Charley's shoulder. "Say, those birds'll be around here
in a few minutes. You be a good feller and change into
your uniform and put on all the medals. . . . Give us a
break."

Charley stood a minute staring at the ash on his cigar.
"How about givin' me a break? Haven't been in the house
five hours and there you go pickin' on me just like when
I was workin' back here. . . ."

Jim was losing control of himself, he was starting to
shake. "Well, you know what you can do about that," he
said, cutting his words off sharp. Charley felt like smash-
ing him one in his damn narrow jaw. "If it wasn't for Ma,
you wouldn't need to worry about that," he said quietly.

Jim didn't answer for a minute. The wrinkles came out
of his forehead. He shook his head and looked grave.
"You're right, Charley, you better stick around. If it gives
her any pleasure . . ."

Charley threw his cigar halfsmoked into the brass spit-
toon and walked out the door before Jim could stop him.
He went to the house and got his hat and coat and went
for a long walk through the soggy snow of the grey after-
noon.

They were just finishing at the suppertable when Char-
ley got back. His supper had been set out on a plate for
him at his place. Nobody spoke but old man Vogel. "Ve
been tinking, dese airmen maybe dey live on air too," he
said and laughed wheezily. Nobody else laughed. Jim got
up and went out of the room. As soon as Charley had swal-
lowed his supper he said he was sleepy and went up to bed.

Charley stayed on while November dragged on towards
Thanksgiving and Christmas. His mother never seemed to
be any better. Every afternoon he went over to see her for
five or ten minutes. She was always cheerful. It made him

-36-

37-124

snow, the watertanks, the little stations, the grainelevators,
the redfaced trainmen with their earflaps and gauntlets.
Early in the morning going through the industrial district
before Chicago she looked out at the men, young men old
men with tin dinnerpails, faces ruddy and screwed up with
the early cold, crowding the platforms waiting to go to
work. She looked in their faces carefully, studying their
faces; they were people she expected to get to know, be-
cause she was going to stay in Chicago instead of going
back to college.

THE CAMERA EYE (45)

the narrow yellow room teems with talk under the
low ceiling and crinkling tendrils of cigarettesmoke twine
blue and fade round noses behind ears under the rims of
women's hats in arch looks changing arrangements of lips
the toss of a bang the wise I-know-it wrinkles round the
eyes all scrubbed stroked clipped scraped with the help of
lipstick rouge shavingcream razorblades into a certain pat-
tern that implies
this warmvoiced woman who moves back and forth
with a throaty laugh head tossed a little back distributing
with teasing looks the parts in the fiveoclock drama
every man his pigeonhole
the personality must be kept carefully adjusted over
the face
to facilitate recognition she pins on each of us a badge

-125-

today entails tomorrow

Thank you but why me? Inhibited? Indeed
goodby
the old brown hat flopped faithful on the chair beside
the door successfully snatched
outside the clinking cocktail voices fade
even in this elderly brick dwellinghouse made over
with green paint orange candles a little tinted calcimine into

Greenwich Village
the stairs go up and down
lead through a hallway ranked with bells names evok-
ing lives tangles unclassified
into the rainy twoway street where cabs slither slush-
ing footsteps plunk slant lights shimmer on the curve of a
wet cheek a pair of freshcolored lips a weatherlined neck
a gnarled grimed hand an old man's bloodshot eye
street twoway to the corner of the roaring avenue
where in the lilt of the rain and the din the four directions
(the salty in all of us ocean the protoplasm throbbing
through cells growing dividing sprouting into the billion
diverse not yet labeled not yet named
always they slip through the fingers
the changeable the multitudinous lives)
box dizzingly the compass

-126-

MARY FRENCH

For several weeks the announcement of a lecture had
caught Mary French's eye as she hurried past the bulletin-
board at Hull House: May 15 G. H. Barrow, Europe:
Problems of Postwar Reconstruction. The name teased her
memory but it wasn't until she actually saw him come into
the lecturehall that she remembered that he was the nice
skinny redfaced lecturer who talked about how it was the
workingclass that would keep the country out of war at
Vassar that winter. It was the same sincere hesitant voice
with a little stutter in the beginning of the sentences some-
times, the same informal way of stalking up and down the
lecturehall and sitting on the table beside the waterpitcher
with his legs crossed. At the reception afterwards she didn't
let on that she'd met him before. When they were intro-
duced she was happy to be able to give him some informa-
tion he wanted about the chances exsoldiers had of finding
jobs in the Chicago area. Next morning Mary French was
all of a fluster when she was called to the phone and there
was Mr. Barrow's voice asking her if she could spare him
an hour that afternoon as he'd been asked by Washington
to get some unofficial information for a certain bureau.
"You see, I thought you would be able to give me the real
truth because you are in daily contact with the actual peo-
ple." She said she'd be delighted and he said would she
meet him in the lobby of the Auditorium at five.

At four she was up in her room curling her hair, won-
dering what dress to wear, trying to decide whether she'd
go without her glasses or not. Mr. Barrow was so nice.

They had such an interesting talk about the employment
situation which was not at all a bright picture and when
Mr. Barrow asked her to go to supper with him at a little
Italian place he knew in the Loop she found herself say-
ing yes without a quiver in spite of the fact that she hadn't

-127-

been out to dinner with a man since she left Colorado
Springs after her father's death three years ago. She felt
somehow that she'd known Mr. Barrow for years.

Still she was a bit surprised at the toughlooking place
with sawdust on the floor he took her to, and that they
sold liquor there and that he seemed to expect her to drink
a cocktail. He drank several cocktails himself and ordered
red wine. She turned down the cocktails but did sip a little
of the wine not to seem too oldfashioned. "I admit," he
said, "that I'm reaching the age where I have to have a
drink to clear the work out of my head and let me relax.
. . . That was the great thing about the other side . . .
having wine with your meals. . . . They really under-
stand the art of life over there."

After they'd had their spumoni Mr. Barrow ordered
himself brandy and she drank the bitter black coffee and
they sat in the stuffy noisy restaurant smelly of garlic and
sour wine and tomatosauce and sawdust and forgot the
time and talked. She said she'd taken up socialservice work
to be in touch with something real but now she was be-
ginning to feel coopedup and so institutional that she often
wondered if she wouldn't have done better to join the Red
Cross overseas or the Friends Reconstruction Unit as so
many of the girls had but she so hated war that she didn't
want to do anything to help even in the most peaceful
way. If she'd been a man she would have been a C.O.,
she knew that.

Mr. Barrow frowned and cleared his throat: "Of course
I suppose they were sincere, but they were very much
mistaken and probably deserved what they got.""Do you
still,think so?""Yes, dear girl, I do. . . . Now we can
ask for anything; nobody can refuse us, wages, the closed
shop, the eighthour day. But it was hard differing with old
friends . . . my attitude was much misunderstood in cer-
tain quarters. . . ."

-128-

"But you can't think it's right to give them these dread-
ful jail sentences."

"That's just to scare the others. . . . You'll see they'll
be getting out as soon as the excitement quiets down . . .
Debs's pardon is expected any day."

"I should hope so," said Mary.

"Poor Debs," said Mr. Barrow, "one mistake has de-
stroyed the work of a lifetime, but he has a great heart,
the greatest heart in the world." Then he went on to tell
her about how he'd been a railroadman himself in the old
days, a freightagent in South Chicago; they'd made him
the businessagent of his local and he had worked for the
Brotherhood, he'd had a hard time getting an education
and suddenly he'd waked up when he was more than
thirty, in New York City writing a set of articles for the
Evening Globe, to the fact that there was no woman in his
life and that he knew nothing of the art of life and the
sort of thing that seemed to come natural to them over
there and to the Mexicans now. He'd married unwisely
and gotten into trouble with a chorusgirl, and a woman
had made his life a hell for five years but now that he'd
broken away from all that, he found himself lonely get-
ting old wanting something more substantial than the little
pickups a man traveling on missions to Mexico and Italy
and France and England, little international incidents, he
called them with a thinlipped grin, that were nice affairs
enough at the time but were just dust and ashes. Of course
he didn't believe in bourgeois morality but he wanted un-
derstanding and passionate friendship in a woman.

When he talked he showed the tip of his tongue some-
times through the broad gap in the middle of his upper
teeth. She could see in his eyes how much he had suffered.
"Of course I don't believe in conventional marriage
either," said Mary. Then Mr. Barrow broke out that she
was so fresh so young so eager so lovely so what he needed
in his life and his speech began to get a little thick and

-129-

she guessed it was time she was getting back to Hull House
because she had to get up so early. When he took her home
in a taxi she sat in the furthest corner of the seat but he
was very gentlemanly although he did seem to stagger a
little when they said goodnight.

After that supper the work at Hull House got to be
more and more of a chore, particularly as George Barrow,
who was making a lecturetour all over the country in de-
fense of the President's policies, wrote her several times a
week. She wrote him funny letters back, kidding about the
oldmaids at Hull House and saying that she felt it in her
bones that she was going to graduate from there soon, the
way she had from Vassar. Her friends at Hull House
began to say how pretty she was getting to look now that
she was curling her hair.

For her vacation that June Mary French had been plan-
ning to go up to Michigan with the Cohns, but when the
time came she decided she really must make a break; so
instead she took the Northland around to Cleveland and
got herself a job as countergirl in the Eureka Cafeteria on
Lakeside Avenue near the depot.

It was pretty tough. The manager was a fat Greek who
pinched the girls' bottoms when he passed behind them
along the counter. The girls used rouge and lipstick and
were mean to Mary, giggling in corners about their dates
or making dirty jokes with the busboys. At night she had
shooting pains in her insteps from being so long on her
feet and her head spun from the faces the asking mouths
the probing eyes jerking along in the rush hours in front of
her like beads on a string. Back in the rattly brass bed in
the big yellowbrick roominghouse, a girl she talked to on
her boat had sent her to, she couldn't sleep or get the smell
of cold grease and dishwashing out of her nose; she lay
there scared and lonely listening to the other roomers stir-
ring behind the thin partitions, tramping to the bathroom,
slamming doors in the hall.

-130-

After she'd worked two weeks at the cafeteria she de-
cided she couldn't stand it another minute, so she gave up
the job and went and got herself a room at the uptown
Y.W.C.A. where they were very nice to her when they
heard she'd come from Hull House and showed her a list
of socialservice jobs she might want to try for, but she
said No, she had to do real work in industry for once, and
took the train to Pittsburgh where she knew a girl who
was an assistant librarian at Carnegie Institute.

She got into Pittsbutgh late on a summer afternoon.
Crossing the bridge she had a glimpse of the level sun-
light blooming pink and orange on a confusion of metal-
colored smokes that jetted from a wilderness of chimneys
ranked about the huge corrugated iron and girderwork
structures along the riverbank. Then right away she was
getting out of the daycoach into the brownish dark gloom
of the station with her suitcase cutting into her hand. She
called up her friend from a dirty phonebooth that smelled
of cigarsmoke. " Mary French, how lovely!." came Lois
Speyer's comical burbling voice. "I'll get you a room right
here at Mrs. Gansemeyer's, come on out to supper. It's a
boardinghouse. Just wait till you see it. . . . But I just
can't imagine anybody coming to Pittsburgh for their vaca-
tion." Mary found herself getting red and nervous right
there in the phonebooth. "I wanted to see something dif-
ferent from the socialworker angle."

"Well, it's so nice the idea of having somebody to talk
to that I hope it doesn't mean you've lost your mind . . .
you know they don't employ Vassar graduates in the open-
hearth furnaces."

"I'm not a Vassar graduate," Mary French shouted into
the receiver, feeling the near tears stinging her eyes. "I'm
just like any other workinggirl. . . . You ought to have
seen me working in that cafeteria in Cleveland.""Well,
come on out, Mary darling, I'll save some supper for

-131-

you." It was a long ride out on the streetcar. Pittsburgh
was grim all right.

Next day she went around to the employment offices of
several of the steelcompanies. When she said she'd been
a socialworker they looked at her awful funny. Nothing
doing; not taking on clerical or secretarial workers now.
She spent days with the newspapers answering helpwanted
ads.

Lois Speyer certainly laughed in that longfaced sarcastic
way she had when Mary had to take a reporting job that
Lois had gotten her because Lois knew the girl who wrote
the society column on the Times-Sentinel.

As the Pittsburgh summer dragged into August, hot and
choky with coalgas and the strangling fumes from blast-
furnaces, bloomingmills, rollingmills that clogged the
smoky Y where the narrow rivervalleys came together,
there began to be talk around the office about how red
agitators had gotten into the mills. A certain Mr. Gorman
said to be one of the head operatives for the Sherman Serv-
ice was often seen smoking a cigar in the managingeditor's
office. The paper began to fill up with news of alien riots
and Russian Bolshevists and the nationalization of women
and the defeat of Lenin and Trotzky.

Then one afternoon in early September Mr. Healy
called Mary French into his private office and asked her to
sit down. When he went over and closed the door tight
Mary thought for a second he was going to make indecent
proposals to her, but instead he said in his most tired
fatherly manner, "Now, Miss French, I have an assign-
ment for you that I don't want you to take unless you
really want to. I've got a daughter myself and I hope when
she grows up she'll be a nice simple wellbroughtup girl
like you are. So honestly if I thought it was demeaning I
wouldn't ask you to do it . . . you know that. We're
strictly the family newspaper . . . we let the other fellers
pull the rough stuff. . . . You know an item never goes

-132-

through my desk that I don't think of my own wife and
daughters, how would I like to have them read it."

Ted Healy was a large round blackhaired man with a
rolling grey eye like a codfish's eye. "What's the story,
Mr. Healy?" asked Mary briskly; she'd made up her
mind it must be something about the whiteslave traffic.
"Well, these damned agitators, you know they're trying to
start a strike. . . . Well, they've opened a publicity office
downtown. I'm scared to send one of the boys down . . .
might get into some trouble with those gorillas . . . I
don't want a dead reporter on my front page. . . . But
sending you down . . . You know you're not working for
a paper, you're a socialservice worker, want to get both
sides of the story. . . . A sweet innocentlooking girl can't
possibly come to any harm. . . . Well, I want to get the
lowdown on the people working there . . . what part of
Russia they were born in, how they got into this country
in the first place . . . where the money comes from . . .
prisonrecords, you know. . . . Get all the dope you can.
It'll make a magnificent Sunday feature."

"I'm very much interested in industrial relations . . .
it's a wonderful assignment. . . . But, Mr. Healy, aren't
conditions pretty bad in the mills?"

Mr. Healy jumped to his feet and began striding up
and down the office. "I've got all the dope on that. . . .
Those damn guineas are making more money than they
ever made in their lives, they buy stocks, they buy wash-
ingmachines and silk stockings for their women and they
send money back to the old folks. While our boys were
risking their lives in the trenches, they held down all the
good jobs and most of 'em are enemy aliens at that. Those
guineas are welloff, don't you forget it. The one thing
they can't buy is brains. That's how those agitators get at
'em. They talk their language and fill 'em up with a lot
of notions about how all they need to do is stop working
and they can take possession of this country that we've

-133-

built up into the greatest country in the world. . . . I
don't hold it against the poor devils of guineas, they're just
ignoranti but those reds who accept the hospitality of our
country and then go around spreading their devilish prop-
aganda . . . My god, if they were sincere I could forgive
'em, but they're just in it for the money like anybody else.
We have absolute proof that they're paid by Russians reds
with money and jewels they've stole over there; and
they're not content with that, they go around shaking
down those poor ignorant guineas . . . Well, all I can
say is shooting's too good for 'em." Ted Healy was red
in the face. A boy in a green eyeshade burst in with a big
bunch of flimsy. Mary French got to her feet. "I'll get
right after it, Mr. Healy," she said.

She got off the car at the wrong corner and stumbled up
the uneven pavement of a steep broad cobbled street of
little gimcrack stores poolrooms barbershops and Italian
spaghettiparlors. A gusty wind whirled dust and excelsior
and old papers. Outside of an unpainted doorway foreign-
looking men stood talking in low voices in knots of three
or four. Before she could get up her nerve to go up the
long steep dirty narrow stairs she looked for a minute into
the photographer's window below at the tinted enlarge-
ments of babies with toopink cheeks and the family groups
and the ramrodstiff bridal couples. Upstairs she paused in
the littered hall. From offices on both sides came a sound
of typing and arguing voices. In the dark she ran into a
young man. "Hello," he said in a gruff voice she liked,
"are you the lady from New York?"

"Not exactly. I'm from Colorado."
"There was a lady from New York comin' to help us
with some publicity. I thought maybe you was her."
"That's just what I came for."

"Come in, I'm just Gus Moscowski. I'm kinder the
officeboy." He opened one of the closed doors for her into
a small dusty office piled with stackedup papers and filled

-134-

up with a large table covered with clippings at which two
young men in glasses sat in their shirtsleeves. "Here are
the regular guys." All the time she was talking to the
others she couldn't keep her eyes off him. He had blond
closecropped hair and very blue eyes and a big bearcub
look in his cheap serge suit shiny at the elbows and knees.
The young men answered her questions so politely that she
couldn't help telling them she was trying to do a feature
story for the Times-Sentinel. They laughed their heads
off. "But Mr. Healy said he wanted a fair wellrounded
picture. He just thinks the men are being misled." Mary
found herself laughing too. "Gus," said the older man,
"you take this young lady around and show her some of
the sights. . . . After all Ted Healy may have lost his
mind. First here's what Ted Healy's friends did to Fanny
Sellers." She couldn't look at the photograph that he
poked under her nose. "What had she done?""Tried to
organize the workinaclass, that's the worst crime you can
commit in this man's country."

It was a relief to be out on the street again, hurrying
along while Gus Moscowski shambled grinning beside her.
"Well, I guess I'd better take you first to see how folks
live on fortytwo cents an hour. Too bad you can't talk
Polish. I'm a Polack myself.""You must have been born
in this country.""Sure, highschool graduate. If I can get
the dough I want to take engineering at Carnegie Tech.
. . . I dunno why I string along with these damn Po-
lacks." He looked her straight in the face and grinned
when he said that. She smiled back at him. "I understand
why," she said. He made a gesture with his elbow as they
turned a corner past a group of ragged kids making mud-
pies; they were pale flabby filthy little kids with pouches
under their eyes. Mary turned her eyes away but she'd
seen them, as she'd seen the photograph of the dead
woman with her head caved in. "Git an eyeful of cesspool

-135-

alley the land of opportunity," Gus Moscowski said way
down in his throat.

That night when she got off the streetcar at the corner
nearest Mrs. Gansemeyer's her legs were trembling and
the small of her back ached. She went right up to her room
and hurried into bed. She was too tired to eat or to sit up
listening to Lois Speyer's line of sarcastic gossip. She
couldn't sleep. She lay in her sagging bed listening to the
voices of the boarders rocking on the porch below and to
the hooting of engines and the clank of shunted freight-
cars down in the valley, seeing again the shapeless broken
shoes and the worn hands folded over dirty aprons and the
sharp anxious beadiness of women's eyes, feeling the quake
underfoot of the crazy stairways zigzagging up and down
the hills black and bare as slagpiles where the steelworkers
lived in jumbled shanties and big black rows of smoke-
gnawed clapboarded houses, in her nose the stench of
cranky backhouses and kitchens with cabbage cooking and
clothes boiling and unwashed children and drying diapers.
She slept by fits and starts and would wake up with Gus
Moscowski's warm tough voice in her head, and her whole
body tingling with the hard fuzzy bearcub feel of him
when his arm brushed against her arm or he put out his
big hand to steady her at a place where the boardwalk had
broken through and she'd started to slip in the loose shaly
slide underneath. When she fell solidly asleep she went
on dreaming about him. She woke up early feeling happy
because she was going to meet him again right after break-
fast.

That afternoon she went back to the office to write the
piece. Just the way Ted Healy had said, she put in all she
could find out about the boys running the publicity bureau.
The nearest to Russia any of them came from was Canar-
sie, Long Island. She tried to get in both sides of the ques-
tion, even called them "possibly misguided."

About a minute after she'd sent it in to the Sunday edi-

-136-

tor she was called to the city desk. Ted Healy had on a
green eyeshade and was bent over a swirl of galleys. Mary
could see her copy on top of the pile of papers under his
elbow. Somebody had scrawled across the top of it in red
pencil: Why wish this on me? "Well, young lady," he said
without looking up, "you've written a firstrate propaganda
piece for the Nation or some other parlorpink sheet in
New York, but what the devil do you think we can do with
it? This is Pittsburgh." He got to his feet and held out his
hand. "Goodby, Miss French, I wish I had some way of
using you because you're a mighty smart girl . . . and
smart girl reporters are rare. . . . I've sent your slip to
the cashier. . . ." Before Mary French could get her
breath she was out on the pavement with an extra week's
salary in her pocketbook, which after all was pretty white
of old Ted Healy.

That night Lois Speyer looked aghast when Mary told
her she'd been fired, but when Mary told Lois that she'd
gone down and gotten a job doing publicity for the Amal-
gamated Lois burst into tears. "I said you'd lost your mind
and it's true. . . . Either I'll have to move out of this
boardinghouse or you will . . . and I won't be able to go
around with you like I've been doing.""How ridiculous,
Lois.""Darling, you don't know Pittsburgh. I don't care
about those miserable strikers but I absolutely have got to
hold onto my job. . . . You know I just have to send
money home. . . . Oh, we were just beginning to have
such fun and now you have to go and spoil everything."

"If you'd seen what I've seen you'd talk differently,"
said Mary French coldly. They were never very good
friends again after that.

Gus Moscowski found her a room with heavy lace cur-
tains in the windows in the house of a Polish storekeeper
who was a cousin of his father's. He escorted her solemnly
back there from the office nights when they worked late,
and they always did work late.

-137-

Mary French had never worked so hard in her life. She
wrote releases, got up statistics on t.b., undernourishment
of children, sanitary conditions, crime, took trips on inter-
urban trolleys and slow locals to Rankin and Braddock and
Homestead and Bessemer and as far as Youngstown and
Steubenville and Gary, took notes on speeches of Foster
and Fitzpatrick, saw meetings broken up and the troopers
in their darkgrey uniforms moving in a line down the un-
paved alleys of company patches, beating up men and
women with their clubs, kicking children out of their way,
chasing old men off their front stoops. "And to think," said
Gus of the troopers, "that the sonsabitches are lousy Po-
lacks themselves most of 'em. Now ain't that just like a
Polack?"

She interviewed metropolitan newspapermen, spent
hours trying to wheedle A.P. and U.P. men into sending
straight stories, smoothed out the grammar in the English-
language leaflets. The fall flew by before she knew it. The
Amalgamated could only pay the barest expenses, her
clothes were in awful shape, there was no curl in her hair,
at night she couldn't sleep for the memory of the things
she'd seen, the jailings, the bloody heads, the wreck of
some family's parlor, sofa cut open, chairs smashed, china-
closet hacked to pieces with an ax, after the troopers had
been through looking for "literature." She hardly knew
herself when she looked at her face in the greenspotted
giltframed mirror over the washstand as she hurriedly
dressed in the morning. She had a haggard desperate look.
She was beginning to look like a striker herself.

She hardly knew herself either when Gus's voice gave
her cold shivers or when whether she felt good or not that
day depended on how often he smiled when he spoke to
her; it didn't seem like herself at all the way that when-
ever her mind was free for a moment, she began to im-
agine him coming close to her, putting his arms around.
her, his lips, his big hard hands. When that feeling came

-138-

on she would have to close her eyes and would feel herself
dizzily reeling. Then she'd force her eyes open and fly at
her typing and after a while would feel cool and clear
again.

The day Mary French admitted to herself for the first
time that the highpaid workers weren't coming out and
that the lowpaid workers were going to lose their strike
she hardly dared look Gus in the face when he called for
her to take her home. It was a muggy drizzly outofseason
November night. As they walked along the street without
saying anything the fog suddenly glowed red in the direc-
tion of the mills. "There they go," said Gus. The glow
grew and grew, first pink then orange. Mary nodded and
said nothing. "What can you do when the woikin'class
won't stick together. Every kind of damn foreigner thinks
the others is bums and the 'Mericans they think every-
body's a bum 'cept you an' me. Wasn't so long ago we was
all foreigners in this man's country. Christ, I dunno why I
string along wid 'em."

"Gus, what would you do if we lost the strike? I mean
you personally."

"I'll be on the black books all right. Means I couldn't
get me another job in the metaltrades not if I was the last
guy on earth. . . . Hell, I dunno. Take a false name an'
join the Navy, I guess. They say a guy kin get a real good
eddication in the Navy."

"I guess we oughtn't to talk about it. . . . Me, I don't
know what I'll do."

"You kin go anywheres and git a job on a paper like
you had. . . . I wish I had your schoohn'. . . . I bet
you'll be glad to be quit of this bunch of hunkies."

"They are the workingclass, Gus."

"Sure, if we could only git more sense into our damn
heads. . . . You know I've got an own brother scabbin'
right to this day."

"He's probably worried about his wife and family."

-139-

"I'd worry him if I could git my hands on him. . . .
A woikin'man ain't got no right to have a wife and family."

"He can have a girl. . . ." Her voice failed. She felt
her heart beating so hard as she walked along beside him
over the uneven pavement she was afraid held hear it.

"Girls aplenty." Gus laughed. "They're free and easy,
Polish girls are. That's one good thing."

"I wish . . ." Mary heard her voice saying.

"Well, goodnight. Rest good, you look all in." He'd
given her a pat on the shoulder and he'd turned and gone
off with his long shambling stride. She was at the door of
her house. When she got in her room she threw herself on
the bed and cried.

It was several weeks later that Gus Moscowski was ar-
rested distributing leaflets in Braddock. She saw him
brought up before the squire, in the dirty courtroom packed
close with the grey uniforms of statetroopers, and sen-
tenced to five years. His arm was in a sling and there was
a scab of clotted blood on the towy stubble on the back of
his head. His blue eyes caught hers in the crowd and he
grinned and gave her a jaunty wave of a big hand. "So
that's how it is, is it?" snarled a voice beside her. "Well,
you've had the last piece of c -- k you get outa dat baby."

There was a hulking grey trooper on either side of her.
They hustled her out of court and marched her down to
the interurban trolleystop. She didn't say anything but she
couldn't keep back the tears. She hadn't known men could
talk to women like that. "Come on now, loosen up, me an'
Steve here we're twice the men. . . . You ought to have
better sense than to be spreadin' your legs for that punk."

At last the Pittsburgh trolley came and they put her on
it with a warning that if they ever saw her around again
they'd have her up for soliciting. As the car pulled out
she saw them turn away slapping each other on the back
and laughing. She sat there hunched up in the seat in the
back of the car with her stomach churning and her face set.

-140-

Back at the office all she said was that the cossacks had run
her out of the courthouse.

When she heard that George Barrow was in town with
the Senatorial Investigating Commission, she went to him
at once. She waited for him in the lobby of the Schenley.
The still winter evening was one block of black iron cold.
She was shivering in her thin coat. She was deadtired. It
seemed weeks since she'd slept. It was warm in the big
quiet hotel lobby, through her thin paper soles she could
feel the thick nap of the carpet. There must have been a
bridgeparty somewhere in the hotel because groups of
welldressed middleaged women that reminded her of her
mother kept going through the lobby. She let herself drop
into a deep chair by a radiator and started at once to
drowse off.

"You poor little girl, I can see you've been working.
. . . This is different from socialservice work, I'll bet."
She opened her eyes. George had on a furlined coat with
a furcollar out of which his thin neck and long knobby
face stuck out comically like the head of a marabou stork.
She got up. "Oh, Mr. Barrow . . . I mean George." He
took her hand in his left hand and patted it gently with
his right. "Now I know what the frontline trenches are
like," she said, laughing at his kind comical look. "You're
laughing at my furcoat. . . . Wouldn't help the Amal-
gamated if I got pneumonia, would it? . . . Why haven't
you got a warm coat? . . . Sweet little Mary French.
. . . Just exactly the person I wanted to see. . . . Do you
mind if we go up to the room? I don't like to talk here,
too many eavesdroppers."

Upstairs in his square warm room with pink hangings
and pink lights he helped her off with her coat. He stood
there frowning and weighing it in his hand. "You've got to
get a warm coat," he said. After he'd ordered tea for her
from the waiter he rather ostentatiously left the door into
the hall open. They settled down on either side of a little

-141-

table at the foot of the bed that was littered with news-
papers and typewritten sheets. "Well, well, well," he said.
"This is a great pleasure for a lonely old codger like me.
What would you think of having dinner with the senator?
. . . To see how the other half lives."

They talked and talked. Now and then he slipped a
little whiskey in her tea. He was very kind, said he was
sure all the boys could be gotten out of jail as soon as the
strike was settled and that it virtually was settled. He'd
just been over in Youngstown talking to Fitzpatrick. He
thought he'd just about convinced him that the only thing
to do was to get the men back to work. He had Judge
Gary's own private assurance that nobody would be dis-
criminated against and that experts were working on the
problem of an eighthour day. As soon as the technical dif-
ficulties could be overcome the whole picture of the steel-
worker's life would change radically for the better. Then
and there he offered to put Mary French on the payroll
as his secretary. He said her actual experience with condi-
tions would be invaluable in influencing legislation. If the
great effort of the underpaid steelworkers wasn't to be lost
it would have to be incorporated in legislation. The center
of the fight was moving to Washington. He felt the time
was ripe in the senate. She said her first obligation was to
the strike committee. "But, my dear sweet child," George
Barrow said, gently patting the back of her hand, "in a few
days there won't be any strikecommittee."

The senator was a southerner with irongrey hair and
white spats who looked at Mary French when he first
came in the room as if he thought she was going to plant a
bomb under the big bulge of his creamcolored vest, but
his fatherly respectful delicate flowerofwomanhood man-
ner was soothing. They ordered dinner brought up to
George's room. The senator kidded George in a heavy
rotund way about his dangerous Bolsheviki friends. They'd
been putting away a good deal of rye and the smoky air of

-142-

George's room was rich with whiskey. When she left them
to go down to the office again they were talking about tak-
ing in a burlesque show.

The bunch down at the office looked haggard and sour.
When she told them about G. H. Barrow's offer they told
her to jump at it; of course it would be wonderful to have
her working for them in Washington and beside they
wouldn't be able to pay even her expenses any more. She
finished her release and glumly said goodnight. That night
she slept better than she had for weeks though all the way
home she was haunted by Gus Moscowski's blue eyes and
his fair head with the blood clotted on it and his jaunty
grin when his eyes met hers in the courtroom. She had
decided that the best way to get the boys out of jail was to
go to Washington with George.

Next morning George called her up at the office first
thing and asked her what about the job. She said she'd take
it. He said would fifty a week be all right; maybe he could
raise it to seventyfive later. She said it was more than she'd
ever made in her life. He said he wanted her to come
right around to the Schenley; he had something important
for her to do. When she got there he met her in the lobby
with a hundreddollar bill in his hand. "The first thing I
want you to do, sweet girl, is to go buy yourself a warm
overcoat. Here's two weeks' salary in advance. . . . You
won't be any good to me as a secretary if you catch your
death of pneumonia the first day."

On the parlorcar going to Washington he handed over
to her two big square black suitcases full of testimony.
"Don't think for a moment there's no work connected with
this job," he said, fishing out manila envelope after manila
envelope full of closely typed stenographers' notes on
onionskin paper. "The other stuff was more romantic," he
said, sharpening a pencil, "but this in the longrange view
is more useful."

"I wonder," said Mary.

-143-

"Mary dear, you are very young . . . and very sweet."
He sat back in his greenplush armchair looking at her a
long time with his bulging eyes while the snowy hills
streaked with green of lichened rocks and laced black with
bare branches of trees filed by outside. Then he blurted out
wouldn't it be fun if they got married when they got to
Washington. She shook her head and went back to the
problem of strikers' defense but she couldn't help smiling
at him when she said she didn't want to get married just
yet; he'd been so kind. She felt he was a real friend.

In Washington she fixed herself up a little apartment
in a house on H Street that was being sublet cheap by
Democratic officeholders who were moving out. She often
cooked supper for George there. She'd never done any
cooking before except camp cooking, but George was quite
an expert and knew how to make Italian spaghetti and
chiliconcarne and oysterstew and real French bouillabaisse.
He'd get wine from the Rumanian Embassy and they'd
have very cozy meals together after long days working in
the office. He talked and talked about love and the impor-
tance of a healthy sexllfe for men and women, so that at
last she let him. He was so tender and gentle that for a
while she thought maybe she really loved him. He knew
all about contraceptives and was very nice and humorous
about them. Sleeping with a man didn't make as much dif-
ference in her life as she'd expected it would.

The day after Harding's inauguration two seedylooking
men in shapeless grey caps shuffled up to her in the lobby
of the little building on G Street where George's office was.
One of them was Gus Moscowski. His cheeks were hollow
and he looked tired and dirty. "Hello, Miss French," he
said. "Meet the kid brother . . . not the one that scabbed,
this one's on the up and up. . . . You sure do look well."
"Oh, Gus, they let you out." He nodded. "New trial, cases
dismissed. . . . But I tell you it's no fun in that cooler."

-144-

She took them up to George's office. "I'm sure Mr. Bar-
row'l want to get firsthand news of the steelworkers."

Gus made a gesture of pushing something away with his
hand. "We ain't steelworkers, we)re bums. . . . Your
friends the senators sure sold us out pretty. Every sonofa-
bitch ever walked across the street with a striker's black-
listed. The old man got his job back, way back at fifty
cents instead of a dollar ten after the priest made him kiss
the book and promise not to join the union. . . . Lots of
people goin' back to the old country. Me an' the kid we
pulled out, went down to Baltimore to git a job on a boat
somewheres but the seamen are piled up ten deep on the
wharf. . . . So we thought we might as well take in the
'nauguration and see how the fat boys looked."

Mary tried to get them to take some money but they
shook their heads and said, "We don't need a handout, we
can woik." They were just going when George came in.
He didn't seem any too pleased to see them, and began
to lecture them on violence; if the strikers hadn't threat-
ened violence and allowed themselves to be misled by a lot
of Bolshevik agitators, the men who were really negotiat-
ing a settlement from the inside would have been able to
get them much better terms. "I won't argue with you,
Mr. Barrow. I suppose you think Father Kazinski was a
red and that it was Fanny Sellers that bashed in the head
of a statetrooper. An' then you say you're on the side of
the woikin'man."

"And, George, even the senate committee admitted that
the violence was by the deputies and statetroopers. . . . I
saw it myself after all," put in Mary.
"Of course, boys . . . I know what you're up against.
I hold no brief for the Steel Trust. . . . But, Mary,
what I want to impress on these boys is that the working-
man is often his own worst enemy in these things."

"The woikin' man gits f'rooked whatever way you
look at it," said Gus, "and I don't know whether it's his

-145-

friends or his enemies does the worst rookin'. . . . Well,
we got to git a move on."

"Boys, I'm sorry I've got so much pressing business to
do. I'd like to hear about your experiences. Maybe some
other time," said George, settling down at his desk.

As they left Mary French followed them to the door
and whispered to Gus, "And what about Carnegie Tech?"
His eyes didn't seem so blue as they'd seemed before he
went to jail. "Well, what about it?" said Gus without look-
ing at her and gently closed the groundglass door behind
him.

That night while they were eating supper Mary sud-
denly got to her feet,and said, "George, we're as respon-
sible as anybody for selling out the steelworkers.""Non-
sense, Mary, it's the fault of the leaders who picked the
wrong minute for the strike and then let the bosses hang
a lot of crazy revolutionary notions on them. Organized
labor gets stung every time it mixes in politics. Gompers
knows that. We all did our best for 'em."

Mary French started to walk back and forth in the
room. She was suddenly bitterly uncontrollably angry.
"That's the way they used to talk back in Colorado
Springs. I might better go back and live with Mother and
do charitywork. It would be better than making a living
off the workingclass."

She walked back and forth. He went on sitting there at
the table she'd fixed so carefully with flowers and a white
cloth, drinking little sips of wine and putting first a little
butter on the corner of a cracker and then a piece of Roque-
fort cheese and then biting it off and then another bit of
butter and another piece of cheese, munching slowly all
the time. She could feel his bulging eyes traveling over her
body. "We're just laborfakers," she yelled in his face, and
ran into the bedroom.

He stood over her still chewing on the cheese and
crackers as he nervously patted the back of her shoulder.

-146-

"What a spiteful thing to say. . . . My child, you mustn't
be so hysterical. . . . This isn't the first strike that's ever
come out badly. . . . Even this time there's a gain. Fair-
minded people all over the country have been horrified by
the ruthless violence of the steelbarons. It will influence
legislation. . . . Sit up and have a glass of wine. . . .
Now, Mary, why don't we get married? It's too silly liv-
ing like this. I have some small investments. I saw a nice
little house for sale in Georgetown just the other day.
This is just the time now to buy a house when prices are
dropping . . . personnel being cut out of all the depart-
ments. . . . After all I've reached an age when I have a
right to settle down and have a wife and kids. . . . I
don't want to wait till it's too late."

Mary sat up sniveling. "Oh, George, you've got plenty
of time. . . . I don't know why I've got a horror of get-
ting married. . . . Everything gives me the horrors to-
night.""Poor little girl, it's probably the curse coming
on," said George and kissed her on the forehead. After
he'd gone home to his hotel she decided she'd go back to
Colorado Springs to visit her mother for a while. Then
she'd try to get some kind of newspaper job.

Before she could get off for the West she found that a
month had gone by. Fear of having a baby began to obsess
her. She didn't want to tell George about it because she
knew he'd insist on their getting married. She couldn't
wait. She didn't know any doctor she could go to. Late
one night she went into the kitchenette to stick her head
in the oven and tried to turn on the gas, but it seemed so
inconvenient somehow and her feet felt so cold on the
linoleum that she went back to bed.

Next day she got a letter from Ada Cohn all about what
a wonderful time Ada was having in New York where she
had the loveliest apartment and was working so hard on
her violin and hoped to give a concert in Carnegie Hall
next season. Without finishing reading the letter Mary

-147-

French started packing her things. She got to the station in
time to get the ten o'clock to New York. From the station
she sent George a wire: FRIEND SICK CALLED TO NEW YORK
WRITING.

She'd wired Ada and Ada met her at the Pennsylvania
station in New York looking very handsome and rich. In
the taxicab Mary told her that she had to lend her the
money to have an abortion. Ada had a crying fit and said
of course she'd lend her the money but who on earth could
she go to? Honestly she wouldn't dare ask Dr. Kirstein
about it because he was such a friend of her father's and
mother's that he'd be dreadfully upset. "I won't have a
baby. I won't have a baby," Mary was muttering.

Ada had a fine threeroom apartment in the back of a
building on Madison Avenue with a light tancolored car-
pet and a huge grandpiano and lots of plants in pots and
flowers in vases. They ate their supper there and strode
up and down the livingroom all evening trying to think.
Ada sat at the piano and played Bach preludes to calm her
nerves, she said, but she was so upset she couldn't follow
her music. At last Mary wrote George a specialdelivery
letter asking him what to do. Next evening she got a reply.
George was brokenhearted, but he enclosed the address of
a doctor. Mary gave the letter to Ada to read. "What a
lovely letter. I don't blame him at all. He sounds like a
fine sensitive beautiful nature.""I hate him," said Mary,
driving her nails into the palms of her hands. "I hate
him."

Next morning she went down all alone to the doctor's
and had the operation. After it she went home in a taxicab
and Ada put her to bed. Ada got on her nerves terribly
tiptoeing in and out of the bedroom with her face wrinkled
up. After about a week Mary French got up. She seemed to
be all right, and started to go around New York looking
for a job.

-148-

THE CAMERA EYE (46)

walk the streets and walk the streets inquiring of
Coca Cola signs Lucky Strike ads pricetags in storewindows
scraps of overheard conversations stray tatters of news-
print yesterday's headlines sticking out of ashcans

for a set of figures a formula of action an address you
don't quite know you've forgotten the number the street
may be in Brooklyn a train leaving for somewhere a steam-
boat whistle stabbing your ears a job chalked up in front
of an agency

to do to make there are more lives than walking des-
perate the streets hurry underdog do make

a speech urging action in the crowded hall after hand-
clapping the pats and smiles of others on the platform the
scrape of chairs the expectant hush the few coughs during
the first stuttering attempt to talk straight tough going the