1919 (35 page)

At the end of June she went home to spend three months on the ranch, but she was very unhappy there that summer. Somehow she couldn't get around to telling Dad about her engagement. When Joe Washburn came out to spend a week the boys made her furious teasing her about him and telling her that he was engaged to a girl in Oklahoma City, and she got so mad she wouldn't speak to them and was barely civil to Joe. She insisted on riding a mean little pinto that bucked and threw her once or twice. She drove the car right through a gate one night and busted both lamps to smithereens. When Dad scolded her about her recklessness she'd tell him he oughtn't to care because she was going back east to earn her own living and he'd be rid of her. Joe Washburn treated her with the same grave kindness as always, and sometimes when she was acting crazy she'd catch a funny understanding kidding gleam in his keen eyes that would make her feel suddenly all weak and silly inside. The night before he left the boys cornered a rattler on the rockpile behind the corral and Daughter dared Joe to pick it up and snap its head off. Joe ran for a forked stick and caught the snake with a jab behind the head and threw it with all his might against the wall of the little smokehouse. As it lay wriggling on the grass with a broken back Bud took its head off with a hoe. It had six rattles and a button. “Daughter,” Joe drawled, looking her in the face with his steady smiling stare, “sometimes you talk like you didn't have good sense.”

“You're yaller, that's what's the matter with you,” she said.

“Daughter, you're crazy . . . you apologize to Joe,” yelled Bud, running up red in the face with the dead snake in his hand. She turned and went into the ranchhouse and threw herself on her bed. She didn't come out of her room till after Joe had left in the morning.

The week before she left to go back to Columbia she was good as gold and tried to make it up to Dad and the boys by baking cakes for them and attending to the housekeeping for having acted so mean and crazy all summer. She met Ada in Dallas and they engaged a section together. She'd been hoping that Joe would come down to the station to see them off, but he was in Oklahoma City on oil business. On her way north she wrote him a long letter saying she didn't know what had gotten into her that day with the rattler and wouldn't he please forgive her.

Daughter worked hard that autumn. She'd gotten herself admitted to the School of Journalism, in spite of Edwin's disapproval. He wanted her to study to be a teacher or social worker, but she said journalism offered more opportunity. They more or less broke off over it; although they saw each other a good deal, they didn't talk so much about being engaged. There was a boy named Webb Cruthers studying journalism that Daughter got to be good friends with although Ada said he was no good and wouldn't let her bring him to the house. He was shorter than she, had dark hair and looked about fifteen although he said he was twentyone. He had a creamy white skin that made people call him Babyface, and a funny confidential way of talking as if he didn't take what he was saying altogether seriously himself. He said he was an anarchist and talked all the time about politics and the war. He used to take her down to the East Side, too, but it was more fun than going with Edwin. Webb always wanted to go in somewhere to get a drink and talk to people. He took her to saloons and to Romanian rathskellers and Arabian restaurants and more places than she'd ever imagined. He knew everybody everywhere and seemed to manage to make people trust him for the check, because he hardly ever had any money, and when they'd spent whatever she had with her Webb would have to charge the rest. Daughter didn't drink more than an occasional glass of wine, and if he began to get too obstreperous, she'd make him take her to the nearest subway and go on home. Then next day he'd be a little weak and trembly and tell her about his hangover and funny stories about adventures he'd had when he was tight. He always had pamphlets in his pockets about socialism and syndicalism and copies of
Mother Earth
or
The Masses.

After Christmas Webb got all wrapped up in a strike of textile workers that was going on in a town over in New Jersey. One Sunday they went over to see what it was like. They got off the train at a grimy brick station in the middle of the empty business section, a few people standing around in front of lunchcounters, empty stores closed for Sunday; there seemed nothing special about the town until they walked out to the long low square brick buildings of the mills. There were knots of policemen in blue standing about in the wide muddy roadway outside and inside the wiremesh gates huskylooking young men in khaki. “These are special deputies, the sons of bitches,” muttered Webb between his teeth. They went to Strike Headquarters to see a girl Webb knew who was doing publicity for them. At the head of a grimy stairway crowded with greyfaced foreign men and women in faded greylooking clothes, they found an office noisy with talk and click of typewriters. The hallway was piled with stacks of handbills that a tiredlooking young man was giving out in packages to boys in ragged sweaters. Webb found Sylvia Dalhart, a longnosed girl with glasses who was typing madly at a desk piled with newspapers and clippings. She waves a hand and said, “Webb, wait for me outside. I'm going to show some newspaper guys around and you'd better come.”

Out in the hall they ran into a fellow Webb knew, Ben Compton, a tall young man with a long thin nose and redrimmed eyes, who said he was going to speak at the meeting and asked Webb if he wouldn't speak. “Jeez, what could I say to those fellers? I'm just a bum of a college student, like you, Ben.” “Tell 'em the workers have got to win the world, tell 'em this fight is part of a great historic battle. Talking's the easiest part of the movement. The truth's simple enough.” He had an explosive way of talking with a pause between each sentence, as if the sentence took sometime to come up from someplace way down inside. Daughter sized up that he was attractive, even though he was probably a Jew. “Well, I'll try to stammer out something about democracy in industry,” said Webb.

Sylvia Dalhart was already pushing them down the stairs. She had with her a pale young man in a raincoat and black felt hat who was chewing the end of a half of a cigar that had gone out. “Fellow-workers, this is Joe Biglow from the
Globe,
” she had a western burr in her voice that made Daughter feel at home. “We're going to show him around.”

They went all over town, to strikers' houses where tiredlooking women in sweaters out at the elbows were cooking up lean Sunday dinners of corned beef and cabbage or stewed meat and potatoes, or in some houses they just had cabbage and bread or just potatoes. Then they went to a lunchroom near the station and ate some lunch. Daughter paid the check as nobody seemed to have any money, and it was time to go to the meeting.

The trolleycar was crowded with strikers and their wives and children. The meeting was to be held in the next town because in that town the Mills owned everything and there was no way of hiring a hall. It had started to sleet, and they got their feet wet wading through the slush to the mean frame building where the meeting was going to be held. When they got to the door there were mounted police out in front. “Hall full,” a cop told them at the streetcorner, “no more allowed inside.”

They stood around in the sleet waiting for somebody with authority. There were thousands of strikers, men and women and boys and girls, the older people talking among themselves in low voices in foreign languages. Webb kept saying, “Jesus, this is outrageous. Somebody ought to do something.” Daughter's feet were cold and she wanted to go home.

Then Ben Compton came around from the back of the building. People began to gather around him, “There's Ben . . . there's Compton, good boy, Benny,” she heard people saying. Young men moved around through the crowd whispering, “Overflow meeting . . . stand your ground, folks.”

He began to speak hanging by one arm from a lamppost. “Comrades, this is another insult flung in the face of the working class. There are not more than forty people in the hall and they close the doors and tell us it's full . . .” The crowd began swaying back and forth, hats, umbrellas bobbing in the sleety rain. Then she saw the two cops were dragging Compton off and heard the jangle of the patrolwagon. “Shame, shame,” people yelled. They began to back off from the cops; the flow was away from the hall. People were moving quietly and dejectedly down the street toward the trolley tracks with the cordon of mounted police pressing them on. Suddenly Webb whispered in her ear, “Let me lean on your shoulder,” and jumped on a hydrant.

“This is outrageous,” he shouted, “you people had a permit to use the hall and had hired it and no power on earth has a right to keep you out of it. To hell with the cossacks.”

Two mounted police were loping towards him, opening a lane through the crowd as they came. Webb was off the hydrant and had grabbed Daughter's hand, “Let's run like hell,” he whispered and was off doubling back and forth among the scurrying people. She followed him laughing and out of breath. A trolley car was coming down the main street. Webb caught it on the move but she couldn't make it and had to wait for the next. Meanwhile the cops were riding slowly back and forth among the crowd breaking it up.

Daughter's feet ached from paddling in slush all afternoon and she was thinking that she ought to get home before she caught her death of cold. At the station waiting for the train she saw Webb. He looked scared to death. He'd pulled his cap down over his eyes and his muffler up over this chin and pretended not to know Daughter when she went up to him. Once they got on the overheated train he sneaked up the aisle and sat down next to her.

“I was afraid some dick ud recognize me at the station,” he whispered. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“I thought it was terrible . . . they're all so yaller . . . the only people looked good to me were those boys guardin' the mills, they looked like white men. . . . And as for you, Webb Cruthers, you ran like a deer.”

“Don't talk so loud. . . . Do you think I ought to have waited and gotten arrested like Ben.”

“Of course it's none of my business.”

“You don't understand revolutionary tactics, Anne.”

Going over on the ferry they were both of them cold and hungry. Webb said he had the key to a room a friend of his had down on Eighth Street and that they'd better go there and warm their feet and make some tea before they went uptown. They had a long sullen walk, neither of them saying anything, from the ferry landing to the house. The room, that smelt of turpentine and was untidy, turned out to be a big studio heated by a gasburner. It was cold as Greenland, so they wrapped themselves in blankets and took off their shoes and stockings and toasted their feet in front of the gas. Daughter took her skirt off under the blanket and hung it up over the heater. “Well, I declare,” she said, “if your friend comes in we sure will be compromised.”

“He won't,” said Webb, “he's up at Cold Spring for the weekend.” Webb was moving around in his bare feet, putting on water to boil and making toast. “You'd better take your trousers off, Webb, I can see the water dripping off them from here.” Webb blushed and pulled them off, draping the blanket around himself like a Roman senator.

For a long time they didn't say anything and all they could hear above the distant hum of traffic was the hiss of the gasflame and the intermittent purr of the kettle just beginning to boil. Then Webb suddenly began to talk in a nervous spluttering way. “So you think I'm yellow, do you? Well, you may be right, Anne . . . not that I give a damn . . . I mean, you see, there's times when a fellow ought to be a coward and times when he ought to do the he-man stuff. Now don't talk for a minute, let me say something. . . . I'm hellishly attracted to you . . . and it's been yellow of me not to tell you about it before, see? I don't believe in love or anything like that, all bourgeois nonsense; but I think when people are attracted to each other I think it's yellow of them not to . . . you know what I mean.”

“No, I doan', Webb,” said Daughter after a pause.

Webb looked at her in a puzzled way as he brought her a cup of tea and some buttered toast with a piece of cheese on it. They ate in silence for a while; it was so quiet they could hear each other gulping little swallows of tea. “Now, what in Jesus Christ's name did you mean by that?” Webb suddenly shouted out.

Daughter felt warm and drowsy in her blanket, with the hot tea in her and the dry gasheat licking the soles of her feet. “Well, what does anybody mean by anything,” she mumbled dreamily.

Webb put down his teacup and began to walk up and down the room trailing the blanket after him. “S—t,” he suddenly said, as he stepped on a thumbtack. He stood on one leg looking at the sole of his foot that was black from the grime of the floor. “But, Jesus Christ, Anne . . . people ought to be free and happy about sex . . . come ahead let's.” His cheeks were pink and his black hair that needed cutting was every which way. He kept on standing on one leg and looking at the sole of his foot. Daughter began to laugh. “You look awful funny like that, Webb.” She felt a warm glow all over her. “Give me another cup of tea and make me some more toast.”

After she'd had the tea and toast she said, “Well, isn't it about time we ought to be going uptown?” “But Christ, Anne, I'm making indecent proposals to you,” he said shrilly, half laughing and half in tears. “For God's sake pay attention . . . Damn it, I'll make you pay attention, you little bitch.” He dropped his blanket and ran at her. She could see he was fighting mad. He pulled her up out of her chair and kissed her on the mouth. She had quite a tussle with him, as he was wiry and strong, but she managed to get her forearm under his chin and to push his face away far enough to give him a punch on the nose. His nose began to bleed. “Don't be silly, Webb,” she said, breathing hard, “I don't want that sort of thing, not yet, anyway . . . go and wash your face.”