Big Money (59 page)

In a crowd that had just been unloaded from the wagon on the steep street outside the policestation she caught sight of a tall man she recognized as Donald Stevens from his picture in the
Daily
. A redfaced cop held on to each of his arms. His shirt was torn open at the neck and his necktie had a stringy look as if somebody had been yanking on it. The first thing Mary thought was how handsomely he held himself. He had steelgrey hair and a brown outdoorlooking skin and luminous grey eyes over high cheekbones. When he was led away from the desk she followed his broad shoulders with her eyes into the gloom of the cells. The woman next to her whispered in an awed voice that he was being held for inciting to riot instead of sauntering and loitering like the rest. Five thousand dollars bail. He had tried to hold a meeting on Boston Common.

Mary had been there about a halfhour when little Mr. Feinstein from the office came round with a tall fashionablydressed man in a linen suit who put up the bail for her. At the same time Donald Stevens was bailed out. The four of them walked down the hill from the policestation together. At the corner the man in the linen suit said, “You two were too useful to leave in there all day. . . . Perhaps we'll see you at the Bellevue . . . suite D, second floor.” Then he waved his hand and left them. Mary was so anxious to talk to Donald Stevens she didn't think to ask the man's name. Events were going past her faster than she could focus her mind on them.

Mary plucked at Donald Stevens' sleeve, she and Mr. Feinstein both had to hurry to keep up with his long stride. “I'm Mary French,” she said. “What can we do? . . . We've got to do something.” He turned to her with a broad smile as if he'd seen her for the first time. “I've heard
of you,” he said. “You're a plucky little girl . . . you've been putting up a real fight in spite of your liberal committee.” “But they've done the best they could,” she said.

“We've got to get the entire workingclass of Boston out on the streets,” said Stevens in his deep rattling voice.

“We've gotten out the garmentworkers but that's all.”

He struck his open palm with his fist. “What about the Italians? What about the North End? Where's your office? Look what we did in New York. Why can't you do it here?” He leaned over towards her with a caressing confidential manner. Right away the feeling of being tired and harassed left her, without thinking she put her hand on his arm. “We'll go and talk to your committee; then we'll talk to the Italian committee. Then we'll shake up the unions.” “But, Don, we've only got thirty hours,” said Mr. Feinstein in a dry tired voice. “I have more confidence in political pressure being applied to the governor. You know he has presidential aspirations. I think the governor's going to commute the sentences.”

At the office Mary found Jerry Burnham waiting for her. “Well, Joan of Arc,” he said, “I was just going down to bail you out. But I see they've turned you loose.” Jerry and Donald Stevens had evidently known each other before. “Well, Jerry,” said Donald Stevens savagely, “doesn't this shake you out of your cynical pose a little?”

“I don't see why it should. It's nothing new to me that college-presidents are skunks.”

Donald Stevens drew off against the wall as if he were holding himself back from giving Jerry a punch in the jaw. “I can't see how any man who has any manhood left can help getting red . . . even a pettybourgeois journalist.”

“My dear Don, you ought to know by this time that we hocked our manhood for a brass check about the time of the first world war . . . that is if we had any . . . I suppose there'd bevarious opinions about that.” Donald Stevens had already swung on into the inner office. Mary found herself looking into Jerry's reddening face, not knowing what to say. “Well, Mary, if you have a need for a pickup during the day . . . I should think you would need it . . . I'll be at the oldstand.” “Oh, I won't have time,” Mary said coldly. She could hear Donald Stevens' deep voice from the inner office. She hurried on after him.

The lawyers had failed. Talking, wrangling, arguing about how a lastminute protest could be organized Mary could feel the hours ebb
ing, the hours of these men's lives. She felt the minutes dripping away as actually as if they were bleeding from her own wrists. She felt weak and sick. She couldn't think of anything. It was a relief to be out in the street trotting to keep up with Donald Stevens' big stride. They made a round of the committees. It was nearly noon, nothing was done. Down on Hanover Street a palefaced Italian in a shabby Ford sedan hailed them. Stevens opened the door of the car. “Comrade French, this is Comrade Strozzi . . . he's going to drive us around.” “Are you a citizen?” she asked with an anxious frown. Strozzi shook his head and smiled a thinlipped smile. “Maybe they give me a free trip back to the Italy,” he said.

Mary never remembered what they did the rest of the day. They drove all over the poorer Boston suburbs. Often the men they were looking for were out. A great deal of the time she spent in phonebooths calling wrong numbers. She couldn't seem to do anything right. She looked with numb staring eyes out of eyelids that felt like sandpaper at the men and women crowding into the office. Stevens had lost the irritated stinging manner he'd had at first. He argued with tradeunion officials, socialists, ministers, lawyers, with an aloof sarcastic coolness. “After all they are brave men. It doesn't matter whether they are saved or not any more, it's the power of the workingclass that's got to be saved,” he'd say. Everywhere there was the same opinion. A demonstration will mean violence, will spoil the chance that the governor will commute at the last moment. Mary had lost all her initiative. Suddenly she'd become Donald Stevens' secretary. She was least unhappy when she was running small errands for him.

Late that night she went through all the Italian restaurants on Hanover Street looking for an anarchist Stevens wanted to see. Every place was empty. There was a hush over everything. Death watch. People kept away from each other as if to avoid some contagion. At the back of a room in a little upstairs speakeasy she saw Jerry Burnham sitting alone at a table with a jigger of whiskey and a bottle of gingerale in front of him. His face was white as a napkin and he was teetering gently in his chair. He stared at her without seeing her. The waiter was bending over him shaking him. He was hopelessly drunk.

It was a relief to run back to the office where Stevens was still trying to line up a general strike. He gave her a searching look when she came in. “Failed again,” she said bitterly. He put down the telephone
receiver, got to his feet, strode over to the line of hooks on the grimy yellow wall and got down his hat and coat. “Mary French, you're deadtired. I'm going to take you home.”

They had to walk around several blocks to avoid the cordon of police guarding the State House. “Ever played tug of war?” Don was saying. “You pull with all your might but the other guys are heavier and you feel yourself being dragged their way. You're being pulled forward faster than you're pulling back. . . . Don't let me talk like a defeatist. . . . We're not a couple of goddamned liberals,” he said and burst into a dry laugh. “Don't you hate lawyers?” They were standing in front of the bowfronted brick house where she had her room. “Goodnight, Don,” she said. “Goodnight, Mary, try and sleep.”

Monday was like another Sunday. She woke late. It was an agony getting out of bed. It was a fight to put on her clothes, to go down to the office and face the defeated eyes. The people she met on the street seemed to look away from her when she passed them. Death watch. The streets were quiet, even the traffic seemed muffled as if the whole city were under the terror of dying that night. The day passed in a monotonous mumble of words, columns in newspapers, telephone calls. Death watch. That night she had a moment of fierce excitement when she and Don started for Charlestown to join the protest parade. She hadn't expected they'd be so many. Gusts of singing, scattered bars of the
International
burst and faded above the packed heads between the blank windows of the dingy houses. Death watch. On one side of her was a little man with eyeglasses who said he was a musicteacher, on the other a Jewish girl, a member of the Ladies' Fullfashioned Hosiery Workers. They linked arms. Don was in the front rank, a little ahead. They were crossing the bridge. They were walking on cobbles on a badlylighted street under an elevated structure. Trains roared overhead. “Only a few blocks from Charlestown jail,” a voice yelled.

This time the cops were using their clubs. There was the clatter of the horses' hoofs on the cobbles and the whack thud whack thud of the clubs. And way off the jangle jangle of patrolwagons. Mary was terribly scared. A big truck was bearing down on her. She jumped to one side out of the way behind one of the girder supports. Two cops had hold of her. She clung to the grimy girder. A cop was cracking her on the hand with his club. She wasn't much hurt, she was in a patrolwagon, she'd lost her hat and her hair had come down. She
caught herself thinking that she ought to have her hair bobbed if she was going to do much of this sort of thing. “Anybody know where Don Stevens is?” Don's voice came a little shakily from the blackness in front. “That you, Mary?” “How are you, Don?” “O.K. Sure. A little battered round the head an' ears.” “He's bleedin' terrible,” came another man's voice. “Comrades, let's sing,” Don's voice shouted. Mary forgot everything as her voice joined his voice, all their voices, the voices of the crowds being driven back across the bridge in singing:

 

Arise ye prisoners of starvation
. . .

 

HOLMES DENIES STAY

 

A better world's in birth

 

Tiny Wasps Imported From Korea In Battle To Death With Asiatic Beetle

 

BOY CARRIED MILE DOWN SEWER; SHOT OUT ALIVE

 

CHICAGO BARS MEETINGS

 

For justice thunders condemnation

 

Washington Keeps Eye On Radicals

 

Arise rejected of the earth

 

PARIS BRUSSELS MOSCOW GENEVA ADD THEIR VOICES

 

It is the final conflict

      
Let each stand in his place

 

Geologist Lost In Cave Six Days

 

The International Party

 

SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE

 

Shall be the human race
.

 

Much I thought of you when I was lying in the death house—the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground where there was all the life and the joy of liberty—just one step from the wall that contains the buried agony of three buried souls. It would remind me so often of you and of your sister and I wish I could see you ev
ery moment, but I feel better that you will not come to the death house so that you could not see the horrible picture of three living in agony waiting to be electrocuted
.

they have clubbed us off the streets      they are stronger      they are rich      they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges      America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns      the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won      you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do      we are beaten      we the beaten crowd together in these old dingy schoolrooms on Salem Street shuffle up and down the gritty creaking stairs sit hunched with bowed heads on benches and hear the old words of the haters of oppression      made new in sweat and agony tonight

our work is over      the scribbled phrases      the nights typing releases the smell of the printshop the sharp reek of newprinted leaflets      the rush for Western Union stringing words into wires the search for stinging words to make you feel who are your oppressors America

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

their hired men sit on the judge's bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants

they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch

all right we are two nations

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods
for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch

but do they know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here in the mouth of a Back Bay socialworker in the mouth of an Italian printer of a hobo from Arkansas      the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight

the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died

 

If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at streetcorners to scorning men. I might have died unknown, unmarked, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as how we do by an accident