U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [499]
would stop him sometimes in the hal outside the office and put her hand on his arm and make him pay attention to her. Mary working away at her desk with her tongue bitter and her mouth dry from too much smoking would look at her yel owstained fingers and push her untidy un-curled hair off her forehead and feel badlydressed and faded and unattractive. If he'd give her one smile just for her before he bawled her out before the whole office be-cause the leaflets weren't ready, she'd feel happy al day.
-448-But mostly he seemed to have forgotten that they'd ever been lovers. After the A. F. of L. officials from Washington in expen-sive overcoats and silk mufflers who smoked twentyfivecent cigars and spat on the floor of the office had taken the strike out of Ben's hands and settled it, he came back to the room on Fourth Street late one night just as Mary was going to bed. His eyes were redrimmed from lack of sleep and his cheeks were sunken and grey. "Oh, Ben," she said and burst out crying. He was cold and bitter and des-perate. He sat for hours on the edge of her bed tel ing her in a sharp monotonous voice about the sel out and the wrangles between the leftwinggers and the oldline socialists and laborleaders, and how now that it was al over here was his trial for contempt of court coming up. "I feel so bad about spending the workers' money on my defense.
. . . I'd as soon go to jail as not . . . but it's the pre-cedent. . . . We've got to fight every case and it's the one way we can use the liberal lawyers, the lousy fakers.
. . . And it costs so much and the union's broke and I don't like to have them spend the money on me . . . but they say that if we win my case then the cases against the other boys wil al be dropped. . . .""The thing to do," she said, smoothing his hair off his forehead, "is to relax a little.""You should be tel ing me?" he said and started to unlace his shoes.
It was a long time before she could get him to get into bed. He sat there halfundressed in the dark shivering and talking about the errors that had been committed in the strike. When at last he'd taken his clothes off and stood up to lay them on a chair he looked like a skeleton in the broad swath of grey glare that cut across the room from the streetlight outside her window. She burst out crying al over again at the sunken look of his chest and the deep hol ows inside his col arbone. "What's the matter, girl?" Ben said gruffly.
"You crying because you haven't
-449-got a Valentino to go to bed with you?""Nonsense, Ben, I was just thinking you needed fattening up . . . you poor kid, you work so hard,""You'l be going off with a goodlooking young bondsalesman one of these days, like you were used to back in Colorado Springs. . . . I know what to expect . . . I don't give a damn . . . I can make the fight alone.""Oh, Ben, don't talk like that . . . you know I'm heart and soul . . ." She drew him to her. Sud-denly he kissed her. Next morning they quarreled bitterly while they were dressing, about the value of her researchwork. She said that after al he couldn't talk; the strike hadn't been such a wild success. He went out without eating his breakfast. She went uptown in a clenched fury of misery, threw up her job and a few days later went down to Boston to work on the Sacco-Vanzetti case with the new committee that had just been formed.
She'd never been in Boston before. The town these
sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums back of Beacon Hil and decided that when the case was won, she'd write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty sta-tioners' shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smel of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she'd observe life. She'd never fal for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought her-self some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.
Her job was keeping in touch with newspapermen and