U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [272]
The trol eycar was crowded with strikers and their wives and children. The meeting was to be held in the next town because in that town the Mil s owned everything and there was no way of hiring a hal . 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 po-lice out in front. "Hal ful ," a cop told them at the street-corner, "no more al owed 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
-272-crowd whispering, "Overflow meeting . . . stand your ground, folks." He began to speak hanging by one arm from a lamp-post. "Comrades, this is another insult flung in the face of the working class. There are not more than forty people in the hal and they close the doors and tel us it's ful . . ." The crowd began swaying back and forth, hats, umbrel as bobbing in the sleety rain. Then she saw the two cops were dragging Compton off and heard the jangle of the patrol-wagon. "Shame, shame," people yel ed. They began to back off from the cops; the flow was away from the hal . People were moving quietly and dejectedly down the street toward the trol ey tracks with the cordon of mounted po-lice 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 per-mit to use the hal and had hired it and no power on earth has a right to keep you out of it. To hel 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 hel ," he whispered and was off doubling back and forth among the scurrying people. She fol owed him laughing and out of breath. A trol ey 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 al after-noon and she was thinking that she ought to get home be-fore she caught her death of cold. At the station waiting for the train she saw Webb. He looked scared to death. He'd pul ed his cap down over his eyes and his muffler up over his ch0000nd pretended not to know Daughter when
-273-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. "Wel , what do you think of it?"
"I thought it was terrible . . . they're al so yal er
. . . the only people looked good to me were those boys guardin' the mil s, 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 sul en 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. "Wel , I declare," she said, "if your friend comes in we sure wil be compro-mised."