U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [163]
The army officer went over to the orchestra leader
and said, "Please play our national anthem again." At the first bar he came stiffly to attention. The other men rushed the round table. Doc and the man with the English accent were jostling each other. Doc squared off to hit him.
"Come outside if you want to fight," the man with the English accent was saying.
"Leave 'em be, boys," Doc was shouting. "I'l take 'em on outside, two at a time." The table was upset and the party began backing off towards the door. The woman with the red hat picked up a bowl of lobster mayonnaise and was holding back the crowd by chucking handfuls of it in their faces. At that moment three cops appeared and arrested the damn paci-fists. Everybody stood around wiping mayonnaise off his clothes. The band played The Star-Spangled Banner again and everybody tried to sing but it didn't make much of an effect because nobody knew the words.
After that Doc and Charley went to a bar to have a
whisky sour. Doc wanted to go to see a legshow and asked the barkeep. A little fat man with an American flag in the lapel of his coat overheard him and said the best legshow in New York was Minsky's on East Houston Street. He set them up to some drinks when Doc said they were
going to see this here war, and said he'd take them down to Minsky's himself. His name was Segal and he said
-409-he'd been a socialist up to the sinking of the Lusitania, but now he thought they ought to lick the Germans and de-stroy Berlin. He was in the cloak and suit business and was happy because he'd as good as landed a contract for army uniforms. "Ve need the var to make men of us," he'd say and strike himself on the chest. They went down town in a taxi but when they got to the burlesque show it was so ful they couldn't get a seat.
"Standin' room, hel . . . Ah want women," Doc was saying. Mr. Segal thought a little while with his head cocked to one side. "Ve wil go to 'Little Hungary,'" he said. Charley felt let down. He'd expected to have a good time in New York. He wished he was in bed. At "Little Hungary" there were many German and Jewish and Rus-sian girls. The wine came in funnylooking bottles upside down in a stand in the middle of each table. Mr. Segal said it was his party from now on. The orchestra played foreign music. Doc was getting pretty drunk. They sat at a table crowded in among other tables. Charley roamed round and asked a girl to dance with him but she wouldn't for some reason. He got to talking to a young narrowfaced fel ow at the bar who had just been to a peace meeting at Madison Square Garden. Charley pricked his ears up when the fel-low said there'd be a revolution in New York if they tried to force conscription on the country. His name was Benny Compton and he'd been studying law at New York Uni-versity. Charley went and sat with him at a table with another fel ow who was from Minnesota and who was a reporter on The Call. Charley asked them about the chances of working his way through the engineering
school. He'd about decided to back out of this ambulance proposition. But they didn't seem to think there was much chance if you hadn't any money saved up to start on. The
-410-Minnesota man said New York was no place for a poor man.
"Aw, hel ; I guess I'l go to the war," said Charley.
"It's the duty of every radical to go to jail first," said Benny Compton. "Anyway, there'l be a revolution. The working class won't stand for this much longer."
"If you want to make some jack the thing to do is to go over to Bayonne and get a job in a munitions factory," said the man from Minnesota in a tired voice.
"A man who does that is a traitor to his class," said Benny Compton.
"A working stiff's in a hel of a situation," said Charley.
"Damn it, I don't want to spend al my life patchin' up tin lizzies at seventyfive a month".
"Didn't Eugene V. Debs say, 'I want to rise with the ranks, not from them?'"
"After al , Benny, ain't you studyin' night an' day to get to be a lawyer an' get out of the workin' class?" said the man from Minnesota.
"That is so I can be of some use in the struggle . . . I want to be a wel sharpened instrument. We must fight capitalists with their own weapons."