U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [373]
"He can have a girl. . . ." Her voice failed. She felt her heart beating so hard as she walked along beside him over the uneven pavement she was afraid held hear it.
"Girls aplenty." Gus laughed. "They're free and easy, Polish girls are. That's one good thing."
"I wish . . ." Mary heard her voice saying.
"Wel , goodnight. Rest good, you look al in." He'd given her a pat on the shoulder and he'd turned and gone off with his long shambling stride. She was at the door of her house. When she got in her room she threw herself on the bed and cried. It was several weeks later that Gus Moscowski was ar-rested distributing leaflets in Braddock. She saw him brought up before the squire, in the dirty courtroom packed close with the grey uniforms of statetroopers, and sen-tenced to five years. His arm was in a sling and there was a scab of clotted blood on the towy stubble on the back of his head. His blue eyes caught hers in the crowd and he grinned and gave her a jaunty wave of a big hand. "So that's how it is, is it?" snarled a voice beside her. "Wel , you've had the last piece of c --k you get outa dat baby." There was a hulking grey trooper on either side of her. They hustled her out of court and marched her down to the interurban trol eystop. She didn't say anything but she couldn't keep back the tears. She hadn't known men could talk to women like that. "Come on now, loosen up, me an'
Steve here we're twice the men. . . . You ought to have better sense than to be spreadin'
your legs for that punk." At last the Pittsburgh trol ey came and they put her on it with a warning that if they ever saw her around again they'd have her up for soliciting. As the car pul ed out she saw them turn away slapping each other on the back and laughing. She sat there hunched up in the seat in the back of the car with her stomach churning and her face set.
-140-Back at the office al she said was that the cossacks had run her out of the courthouse.
When she heard that George Barrow was in town with
the Senatorial Investigating Commission, she went to him at once. She waited for him in the lobby of the Schenley. The stil winter evening was one block of black iron cold. She was shivering in her thin coat. She was deadtired. It seemed weeks since she'd slept. It was warm in the big quiet hotel lobby, through her thin paper soles she could feel the thick nap of the carpet. There must have been a bridgeparty somewhere in the hotel because groups of wel dressed middleaged women that reminded her of her mother kept going through the lobby. She let herself drop into a deep chair by a radiator and started at once to drowse off.
"You poor little girl, I can see you've been working.
. . . This is different from socialservice work, I'l bet." She opened her eyes. George had on a furlined coat with a furcol ar out of which his thin neck and long knobby face stuck out comical y like the head of a marabou stork. She got up. "Oh, Mr. Barrow . . . I mean George." He took her hand in his left hand and patted it gently with his right. "Now I know what the frontline trenches are like," she said, laughing at his kind comical look. "You're laughing at my furcoat. . . . Wouldn't help the Amal-gamated if I got pneumonia, would it? .
. . Why haven't you got a warm coat? . . . Sweet little Mary French.
. . . Just exactly the person I wanted to see. . . . Do you mind if we go up to the room? I don't like to talk here, too many eavesdroppers."
Upstairs in his square warm room with pink hangings and pink lights he helped her off with her coat. He stood there frowning and weighing it in his hand. "You've got to get a warm coat," he said. After he'd ordered tea for her from the waiter he rather ostentatiously left the door into the hal open. They settled down on either side of a little
-141-table at the foot of the bed that was littered with news-papers and typewritten sheets. "Wel , wel , wel ," he said.
"This is a great pleasure for a lonely old codger like me. What would you think of having dinner with the senator?
. . . To see how the other half lives."
They talked and talked. Now and then he slipped a