U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [341]
He registered for the draft on Stein's advice, though he wrote conscientious objector on the card. Soon after that he and Stein quarrel ed. Stein said there was nothing to it but to bow before the storm; Ben said he was going to agi-tate against it until he was put in jail. That meant he was out of a job and it was the end of his studying law. Kahn wouldn't take him back in his drugstore because he was afraid the cops would raid him if it got to be known he had a radical working for him. Ben's brother Sam was working in a munition factory at Perth Amboy and mak-ing big money; he kept writing Ben to stop his foolishness and get a job there too. Even Gladys told him it was sil y to ram his head against a stone wal . In July he left home and went back to live with Helen Mauer over in Passaic. His number hadn't been cal ed yet, so it was easy to get a
-441-job in the shipping department of one of the mil s. They were working overtime and losing hands fast by the draft. The Rand School had been closed up, The Cal suspended, every day new friends were going around to Wil-son's way of looking at things. Helen's folks and their friends were making good money, working overtime; they laughed or got sore at any talk of protest strikes or revolu-tionary movements; people were buying washing machines, liberty bonds, vacuum cleaners, making first payments on houses. The girls were buying fur coats and silk stockings. Helen and Ben began to plan to go out to Chicago, where the wobblies were putting up a fight. September 2nd came the roundup of I.W.W. officials by government agents. Ben and Helen expected to be arrested, but they were passed over. They spent a rainy Sunday huddled on the bed in their dank room, trying to decide what they ought to do. Everything they trusted was giving way under their feet. "I feel like a rat in a trap," Helen kept saying. Every now and then Ben would jump up and walk up and down hitting his forehead with the palm of his hand. "We gotta do something here, look what they're doing in Russia." One day a warworker came around to the shipping de-partment to sign everybody up for a Liberty Bond. He was a cockylooking young man in a yel ow slicker. Ben wasn't much given to arguments during working hours, so he just shook his head and went back to the manifest he was making out. "You don't want to spoil the record of your department, do you? It's one hundred percent perfect so far." Ben tried to smile. "It seems too bad, but I guess it'l have to be." Ben could feel the eyes of the other men in the office on him. The young man in the slicker was balancing uneasily from one foot to the other. "I don't suppose you want people to think you're a pro-German or a pacifist, do you?" "They can suppose what they damn like, for al I care." "Let's see your registration card, I bet you're a slacker." "Look here, get me," said Ben, get--442-ting to his feet, "I don't believe in capitalist war and I'm not going to do anything I can help to support it." The young man in the slicker turned his back, "Oh, if you're one of them yel ow bastards I won't even talk to you." Ben went back to work. That evening when he was punch-ing the timeclock a cop stepped up to him. "Let's see your registration card, buddy." Ben brought the card out from his inside pocket. The cop read it over careful y, "Looks al right to me," he said reluctantly. At the end of the week Ben found he was fired; no reason given. He went to the room in a panic. When Helen came
back he said he was going to Mexico. "They could get me under the espionage act for what I told that guy about fighting capitalism." Helen tried to calm him down, but he said he wouldn't sleep in that room another night, so they packed their bags and went over to New York on the train. They had about a hundred dol ars saved up between them. They got a room on East 8th Street under the
name of Mr. and Mrs. Gold. It was the next morning
that they read in the Times that the Maximalists had taken over the government in Petrograd with the slogan Al Power to the Soviets. They were sitting in a smal pastry shop on 2nd Avenue drinking their morning coffee, when Ben, who had run around to the newsstand for a paper, came back with the news. Helen began to cry: "Oh, darling, it's too good to be true. It's the world revolution.