U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [190]
'em how they were prisoners there like they were fritzes. Jez, it made 'em sore. Flannagan started tel ing about how the frogs had arrested him one time for getting into a fight with an orangeman in a bar in Marseil es and had
-62-been ready to shoot him because they said the Irish were al pro-German. Joe told about how the limeys had run him in in Liverpool. They were al grousing about how the whole business was a lousy deal when Ben Tarbel the mate turned up with an old guy from the consulate and told 'em to come along.
They had to troop half across town through streets
black dark for fear of airraids and slimy with rain, to a long tarpaper shack inside a barbedwire enclosure. Ben Tarbel told the boys he was sorry but they'd have to stay there for the present, and that he was trying to get the consul to do something about it and the old man had cabled the owners to try to get 'em some pay. Some girls from the Red Cross brought them grub, mostly bread and mar-malade and meatpaste, nothing you could real y sink your teeth into, and some thin blankets. They stayed in that damn place for twelve days, playing poker and yarning and reading old newspapers. Evenings sometimes a frousy halfdrunk woman would get past the old guard and peel in the door of the shack and beckon one of the men out into the foggy darkness behind the latrines somewhere. Some of the guys were disgusted and wouldn't go.
They'd been shut up in there so long that when the
mate final y came around and told 'em they were going home they didn't have enough spunk left in 'em to yel . They went across the town packed with traffic and gas-flare in the fog again and on board a new 6000 ton freighter, the Vicksburg, that had just unloaded a cargo of cotton. It felt funny being a passenger and being able to lay around al day on the trip home.
Joe was lying out on the hatchcover the first sunny day they'd had when old Cap'n Perry came up to him. Joe got to his feet. Cap'n Perry said he hadn't had a chance to tel him what he thought of him for having the presence of mind to cut the lashings on those rafts and that half the men on the boat owed their lives to him. He said Joe was
-63-a bright boy and ought to start studying how to get out of the focastle and that the American merchant marine was growing every day on account of the war and young fel ers like him were just what they needed for officers.
"You remind me, boy," he said, "when we get to Hampton Roads and I'l see what I can do on the next ship I get. You could get your third mate's ticket right now with a little time in shore school." Joe grinned and said he sure would like to. It made him feel good the whole trip. He couldn't wait to go and see Del and tel her he wasn't in the focastle any more. Dod gast it, he was tired of being treated like a jailbird al his life. The Vicksburg docked at Newport News. Hampton Roads was ful er of shipping than Joe had ever seen it. Along the wharves everybody was talking about the Deutschland that had just unloaded a cargo of dyes in Baltimore. When Joe got paid off he wouldn't even take a drink with his shipmates but hustled down to the ferry station to get the ferry for Norfolk. Jez, the old ferry seemed slow. It was about five o'clock a Saturday after-noon when he got into Norfolk. Walking down the street he was scared she wouldn't be home yet.
Del was home and seemed glad to see him. She said
she had a date that night but he teased her into breaking it off. After al , weren't they engaged to be married? They went out and had a sundae at an icecream parlor and she told him al about her new job with the Duponts and how she was getting ten more a week and how al the boys she knew and several girls were working in the munition factories and how some of 'em were making fifteen dol ars a day and they were buying cars and the boy she'd had a date with that night had a Packard. It took a long time for Joe to get around to tel her about what old Cap'n Perry had said and she was al excited about his having been torpedoed and said why didn't he go and get a job over at Newport News in the shipyard and make real money, she