John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

In Philadelphia he was walking into the lobby of the Bellevue Stratford when he met Annabelle Marie. She greeted him amiably and said she’d heard of him and his publicity business and they had dinner together, talking about old times. “You certainly have improved,” Annabelle Marie kept saying. Ward could see that she regretted the divorce a little but he felt he couldn’t say the same for her. The lines on her face had deepened and she didn’t finish her sentences, and had a parrot screech to her voice. She was tremendously made up and he wondered if she took drugs. She was busy divorcing Beale who she said had turned homosexual on her. Ward said dryly that he had married again and was very happy. “Who wouldn’t be with the Staple fortune back of them?” she said. Her little air of ownership irritated Ward and he excused himself right after dinner, saying he had work to do. Annabelle looked at him through halfclosed eyes with her head to one side, said “I wish you luck,” and went up in the hotel elevator in a shrill cackle of laughter.

Next day he took the Pennsylvania to Chicago, traveling in a drawing room. Miss Rosenthal, his secretary, and Morton, his English valet, went with him. He had his dinner in the drawing room with Miss Rosenthal, a sallowfaced girl, shrewd and plain, who he felt was devoted to his interests. She had been with him in Pittsburgh with Bessemer Products. When the coffee had been cleared away and Morton had poured them each out a swallow of brandy that Miss Rosenthal giggled over a great deal declaring it would go to her head, he started to dictate. The train rumbled and lurched and now and then he could smell coalsmoke and the hot steamygreasy body of the engine up ahead, hot shiny steel charging through the dark Appalachians. He had to talk loudly to be heard. The rumble of the train made the cords of his voice vibrate. He forgot everything in his own words… American industry like a steamengine, like a highpower locomotive on a great express train charging through the night of old individualistic methods…. What does a steamengine require? Coöperation, coördination of the inventor’s brain, the promoter’s brain that made the development of these highpower products possible… Coördination of capital, the storedup energy of the race in the form of credit intelligently directed… labor, the prosperous contented American working man to whom the unprecedented possibilities of capital collected in great corporations had given the full dinnerpail, cheap motor transport, insurance, short working hours… a measure of comfort and prosperity unequaled before or since in the tragic procession of recorded history or in the known regions of the habitable globe.

But he had to stop dictating because he found he’d lost his voice. He sent Miss Rosenthal to bed and went to bed himself, but he couldn’t sleep; words, ideas, plans, stockquotations kept unrolling in endless tickertape in his head.

Next afternoon at the LaSalle he had a call from Judge Bowie C. Planet. Ward sat waiting for him to come up, looking out at the very pale blue Lake Michigan sky. In his hand he had a little filing card on which was written:

Planet, Bowie C… Tennessee Judge, married Elsie Wilson Denver; small copper lead interests…. Anaconda? unlucky oil speculator… member one-horse lawfirm Planet and Wilson, Springfield, Illinois.

“All right, Miss Rosenthal,” he said when there was a knock at the door. She went off into the other room with the filing card.

Morton opened the door to let in a roundfaced man with a black felt hat and a cigar.

“Hello, judge,” Ward said, getting to his feet and holding out his hand. “How’s everything? Won’t you sit down?” Judge Planet advanced slowly into the room. He had a curious rolling gait as if his feet hurt him. They shook hands, and Judge Planet found himself sitting facing the steelbright light that came through the big windows back of Moorehouse’s desk.

“Won’t you have a cup of tea, sir?” asked Morton, who advanced slowly with a tray glittering with silver teathings. The judge was so surprised that he let the long ash that he’d been carrying on his cigar to prove to himself he was sober drop off on his bulging vest. The judge’s face remained round and bland. It was the face of a mucker from which all the lines of muckerdom had been carefully massaged away. The judge found himself sipping a cup of lukewarm tea with milk in it.

“Clears the head, judge, clears the head,” said Ward, whose cup was cooling untasted before him.

Judge Planet puffed silently on his cigar.

“Well, sir,” he said, “I’m very glad to see you.”

At that moment Morton announced Mr. Barrow, a skinny man with popeyes and a big adamsapple above a stringy necktie. He had a nervous manner of speaking and smoked too many cigarettes. He had the look of being stained with nicotine all over, face, fingers, teeth yellow.

On Ward’s desk there was another little filing card that read:

Barrow, G. H., labor connections, reformer type. Once sec. Bro. locomotive engineers; unreliable.

As he got to his feet he turned the card over. After he’d shaken hands with Mr. Barrow, placed him facing the light and encumbered him with a cup of tea, he began to talk.

“Capital and labor,” he began in a slow careful voice as if dictating, “as you must have noticed, gentlemen, in the course of your varied and useful careers, capital and labor, those two great forces of our national life neither of which can exist without the other are growing further and further apart; any cursory glance at the newspapers will tell you that. Well, it has occurred to me that one reason for this unfortunate state of affairs has been the lack of any private agency that might fairly present the situation to the public. The lack of properly distributed information is the cause of most of the misunderstandings in this world… The great leaders of American capital, as you probably realize, Mr. Barrow, are firm believers in fairplay and democracy and are only too anxious to give the worker his share of the proceeds of industry if they can only see their way to do so in fairness to the public and the investor. After all, the public is the investor whom we all aim to serve.”

“Sometimes,” said Mr. Barrow, “but hardly…”

“Perhaps you gentlemen would have a whisky and soda.” Morton stood sleekhaired between them with a tray on which were decanters, tall glasses full of ice and some open splits of Apollinaris.

“I don’t mind if I do,” said Judge Planet.

Morton padded out, leaving them each with a clinking glass. Outside the sky was beginning to glow with evening a little. The air was winecolored in the room. The glasses made things chattier. The judge chewed on the end of a fresh cigar.

“Now, let’s see if I’m getting you right, Mr. Moorehouse. You feel that with your connections with advertising and big business you want to open up a new field in the shape of an agency to peaceably and in a friendly fashion settle labor disputes. Just how would you go about it?”

“I am sure that organized labor would coöperate in such a movement,” said G. H. Barrow, leaning forward on the edge of his chair. “If only they could be sure that… well, that…”

“That they weren’t getting the wool pulled over their eyes,” said the judge, laughing.

“Exactly.”

“Well, gentlemen, I’m going to put my cards right down on the table. The great motto upon which I have built up my business has always been coöperation.”

“I certainly agree with you there,” said the judge, laughing again and slapping his knee. “The difficult question is how to bring about that happy state.”

“Well, the first step is to establish contact… Right at this moment under our very eyes we see friendly contact being established.”