John Passos - 1919

After Christmas Webb got all wrapped up in a strike of 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 middle 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. “These 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 foreign 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 tiredlooking 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 waves a hand and said, “Webb, wait for me outside. I’m going to show some newspaper guys around and you’d better come.”

Out in the hall they ran into a fellow Webb knew, Ben Compton, a tall young man with a long thin nose and redrimmed eyes, who said he was going to speak at the meeting and asked Webb if he wouldn’t speak. “Jeez, what could I say to those fellers? I’m just a bum of a college student, like you, Ben.” “Tell ’em the workers have got to win the world, tell ’em this fight is part of a great historic 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 sentence 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 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. “Fellow-workers, this is Joe Biglow 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 tiredlooking 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 police out in front. “Hall full,” a cop told them at the streetcorner, “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 crowd whispering, “Overflow meeting… stand your ground, folks.”

He began to speak hanging by one arm from a lamppost. “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 patrolwagon. “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 police 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 permit 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 afternoon and she was thinking that she ought to get home before 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 this chin and pretended not to know Daughter when 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 compromised.”

“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 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 nonsense; but I think when people are attracted to each other I think it’s yellow of them not to… you know what I mean.”