U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [35]
gowns one above the other said spiteful y, "Now you'l have to go and wash your face." After that they considered themselves engaged, but
they couldn't get married, because Bonel o's printshop had been gutted with the rest of the block it stood in, and Mac was out of a job. Maisie used to let him kiss her and hug her in dark doorways when he took her home at
night, but further than that he gave up trying to go. In the fal he got a job on the Bulletin. That was night work and he hardly ever saw Maisie except Sundays, but they began to talk about getting married after Christmas. When he was away from her he felt somehow sore at
Maisie most of the time, but when he was with her he melted absolutely. He tried to get her to read pamphlets on socialism, but she laughed and looked up at him with her big intimate blue eyes and said it was too deep for her. She liked to go to the theater and eat in restaurants where the linen was starched and there were waiters in dress suits. About that time he went one night to hear Upton Sin-clair speak about the Chicago stockyards. Next to him was
-88-a young man in dungarees. He had a nose like a hawk and gray eyes and deep creases under his cheekbones and talked in a slow drawl. His name was Fred Hoff. After the lecture they went and had a beer together and talked. Fred Hoff belonged to the new revolutionary organiza-tion cal ed The Industrial Workers of the World. He read Mac the preamble over a second glass of beer. Fred Hoff had just hit town as donkeyengine man on a
freighter. He was sick of the bum grub and hard life on the sea. He stil had his pay in his pocket and he was bound he wouldn't blow it in on a bust. He'd heard that there was a miners' strike in Goldfield and he thought he'd go up there and see what he could do. He made Mac feel that he was leading a pretty stodgy life helping print lies against the working class. "Godalmighty, man, you're just the kind o' stuff we need out there. We're goin' to publish a paper in Goldfield, Nevada."
That night Mac went round to the local and fil ed out a card, and went home to his boarding house with his head swimming. I was just on the point of sel ing out to the sons of bitches, he said to himself.
The next Sunday he and Maisie had been planning to
go up the Scenic Railway to the top of Mount Tamalpais. Mac was terribly sleepy when his alarmclock got him out of bed. They had to start early because he had to be on the job again that night. As he walked to the ferrystation where he was going to meet her at nine the clank of the presses was stil in his head, and the sour smel of ink and paper bruised under the presses, and on top of that the smel of the hal of the house he'd been in with a couple of the fel ows, the smel of moldy rooms and sloppails and the smal of armpits and the dressingtable of the frizzyhaired girl he'd had on the clammy bed and the taste of the stale beer they'd drunk and the cooing me-chanical voice, "Goodnight, dearie, come round soon."
"God, I'm a swine," he said to himself.
-89-For once it was a clear morning, al the colors in the street shone like bits of glass. God, he was sick of whor-ing round. If Maisie would only be a sport, if Maisie was only a rebel you could talk to like you could to a friend. And how the hel was he going to tel her he was throw-ing up his job?
She was waiting for him at the ferry looking like a Gibson girl with her neat sal orblue dress and picture hat. They didn't have time to say anything as they had to run for the ferry. Once on the ferryboat she lifted up her face to be kissed. Her lips were cool and her gloved hand rested so lightly on his. At Sausalito they took the trol ey-car and changed and she kept smiling at him when they ran to get good places in the scenic car and they felt so alone in the roaring immensity of tawny mountain and blue sky and sea. They'd never been so happy together. She ran ahead of him al the way to the top. At the ob-servatory they were both breathless. They stood against a wal out of sight of the other people and she let him kiss her al over her face, al over her face and neck. Scraps of mist flew past cutting patches out of their view of the bay and the val eys and the shadowed moun-tains. When they went round to the seaward side an icy wind was shril ing through everything. A churning mass of fog was wel ing up from the sea like a tidal wave. She gripped his arm. "Oh, this scares me, Fainy!" Then sud-denly he told her that he'd given up his job. She looked up at him frightened and shivering in the cold wind and little and helpless; tears began to run down either side of her nose. "But I thought you loved me, Fenian . . . Do you think it's been easy for me waitin' for you al this time, wantin' you and lovin' you? Oh, I thought you loved me!"