U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [536]
"Oh, she's as sil y as ever running around with some fool violinist or other."
"I've always liked music. . . . I ought to have kept you, Mary."
"A lot of water's run under the bridge since then?" said Mary coldly.
"Are you happy with Stevens? I haven't any right to ask."
"But, Ben, what's the use of raking al this old stuff up?"
"You see, often a young guy thinks, I'l sacrifice every-thing, and then when he is cut off al that side of his life, he's not as good as he was, do you see? For the first time in my life I have no contact. I thought maybe you could get me in on reliefwork somehow. The discipline isn't so strict in the relief organizations."
"I don't think they want any disrupting influences in the I.L.D.," said Mary.
"So I'm a disrupter to you too. Al right, in the end the workingclass wil judge between us."
"Let's not talk about it, Ben."
"I'd like you to put it up to Stevens and ask him to sound out the proper quarters . . . that's not much to ask, is it?"
-540-"But Don's not here at present." Before she could catch herself she'd blurted it out. Ben looked her in the eye with a sudden sharp look.
"He hasn't by any chance sailed for Moscow with cer-tain other comrades?"
"He's gone to Pittsburgh on secret partywork and for God's sake shut up about it. You just got hold of me to pump me." She got to her feet, her face flaming. "Wel , goodby, Mr. Compton. . . . You don't happen to be a stoolpigeon as wel as a disrupter, do you?" Ben Compton's face broke in pieces suddenly the way a child's face does when it is just going to bawl. He sat there staring at her, senselessly scraping the spoon round and round in the empty coffeemug. She was halfway up the stairs when on an impulse she went back and stood for a second looking down at his bowed head. "Ben," she said in a gentler voice, "I shouldn't have said that . . . with-out proof. . . . I don't believe it." Ben Compton didn't look up. She went up the stairs again out into the stinging wind and hurried down Fortysecond Street in the after-noon crowd and took the subway down to Union Square. The last day of the year Mary French got a telegram at the office from Ada Cohn. PLEASE PLEASE COMMUNICATE
YOUR MOTHER IN TOWN AT PLAZA
SAILING SOON WANTS TO
SEE YOU DOESNT KNOW ADDRESS WHAT SHALL I TELL HER.
Newyearsday there wasn't much doing at the office. Mary was the only one who had turned up, so in the middle of the morning she cal ed up the Plaza and asked for Mrs. French. No such party staying there. Next she cal ed up Ada. Ada talked and talked about how Mary's mother had married again, a Judge Blake, a very prominent man, a retired federal circuit judge, such an attractive man with a white vandyke beard and Ada had to see Mary and Mrs. Blake had been so sweet to her and they'd asked her to dinner at the Plaza and wanted to know al about Mary and that she'd had to admit that she never saw her al--541-though she was her best friend and she'd been to a new-yearseve party and had such a headache she couldn't prac-tice and she'd invited some lovely people in that afternoon and wouldn't Mary come, she'd be sure to like them. Mary almost hung up on her, Ada sounded so sil y, but she said she'd cal her back right away after she'd talked to her mother. It ended by her going home and getting her best dress on and going uptown to the Plaza to see Judge and Mrs. Blake. She tried to find some place she could get her hair curled because she knew' the first thing her mother would say was that she looked a fright, but everything was closed on account of its being newyearsday. Judge and Mrs. Blake were getting ready to have lunch in a big private drawingroom on the corner looking out over the humped snowy hil s of the park bristly with bare branches and interwoven with fastmoving shining streams of traffic. Mary's mother didn't look as if she'd aged a day, she was dressed in darkgreen and real y looked stunning with a little white ruffle round her neck sitting there so at her ease, with rings on her fingers that sparkled in the grey winter light that came in through the big windows. The judge had a soft caressing voice. He talked elab-orately about the prodigal daughter and the fatted calf until her mother broke in to say that they were going to Europe on a spree; they'd both of them made big kil -ings on the stockexchange on the same day and they felt they owed themselves a little rest and relaxation. And she went on about how worried she'd been because al her let-ters had been returned from Mary's last address and that she'd written Ada again and again and Ada had always said Mary was in Pittsburgh or Fal River or some hor-rible place doing social work and that she felt it was about time she gave up doing everything for the poor and un-fortunate and devoted a little attention to her own kith and kin.