Big Money

Mary French

For several weeks the announcement of a lecture had caught Mary French’s eye as she hurried past the bulletinboard at Hull House: May 15 G. H. Barrow, Europe: Problems of Post-war Reconstruction. The name teased her memory but it wasn’t until she actually saw him come into the lecturehall that she remembered that he was the nice skinny redfaced lecturer who talked about how it was the workingclass that would keep the country out of war at Vassar that winter. It was the same sincere hesitant voice with a little stutter in the beginning of the sentences sometimes, the same informal way of stalking up and down the lecturehall and sitting on the table beside the waterpitcher with his legs crossed. At the reception afterwards she didn’t let on that she’d met him before. When they were introduced she was happy to be able to give him some information he wanted about the chances exsoldiers had of finding jobs in the Chicago area. Next morning Mary French was all of a fluster when she was called to the phone and there was Mr. Barrow’s voice asking her if she could spare him an hour that afternoon as he’d been asked by Washington to get some unofficial information for a certain bureau. “You see, I thought you would be able to give me the real truth because you are in daily contact with the actual people.” She said she’d be delighted and he said would she meet him in the lobby of the Auditorium at five.

At four she was up in her room curling her hair, wondering what dress to wear, trying to decide whether she’d go without her glasses or not. Mr. Barrow was so nice.

They had such an interesting talk about the employment situation which was not at all a bright picture and when Mr. Barrow asked her to go to supper with him at a little Italian place he knew in the Loop she found herself saying yes without a quiver in spite of the fact that she hadn’t been out to dinner with a man since she left Colorado Springs after her father’s death three years ago. She felt somehow that she’d known Mr. Barrow for years.

Still she was a bit surprised at the toughlooking place with sawdust on the floor he took her to, and that they sold liquor there and that he seemed to expect her to drink a cocktail. He drank several cocktails himself and ordered red wine. She turned down the cocktails but did sip a little of the wine not to seem too oldfashioned. “I admit,” he said, “that I’m reaching the age where I have to have a drink to clear the work out of my head and let me relax… That was the great thing about the other side… having wine with your meals… They really understand the art of life over there.”

After they’d had their spumoni Mr. Barrow ordered himself brandy and she drank the bitter black coffee and they sat in the stuffy noisy restaurant smelly of garlic and sour wine and tomatosauce and sawdust and forgot the time and talked. She said she’d taken up socialservice work to be in touch with something real but now she was beginning to feel coopedup and so institutional that she often wondered if she wouldn’t have done better to join the Red Cross overseas or the Friends Reconstruction Unit as so many of the girls had but she so hated war that she didn’t want to do anything to help even in the most peaceful way. If she’d been a man she would have been a C.O., she knew that.

Mr. Barrow frowned and cleared his throat: “Of course I suppose they were sincere, but they were very much mistaken and probably deserved what they got.” “Do you still think so?” “Yes, dear girl, I do… Now we can ask for anything; nobody can refuse us, wages, the closed shop, the eighthour day. But it was hard differing with oldfriends… my attitude was much misunderstood in certain quarters…”

“But you can’t think it’s right to give them these dreadful jail sentences.”

“That’s just to scare the others… You’ll see they’ll be getting out as soon as the excitement quiets down… Debs’s pardon is expected any day.”

“I should hope so,” said Mary.

“Poor Debs,” said Mr. Barrow, “one mistake has destroyed the work of a lifetime, but he has a great heart, the greatest heart in the world.” Then he went on to tell her about how he’d been a railroadman himself in the old days, a freightagent in South Chicago; they’d made him the businessagent of his local and he had worked for the Brotherhood, he’d had a hard time getting an education and suddenly he’d waked up when he was more than thirty, in New York City writing a set of articles for the Evening Globe, to the fact that there was no woman in his life and that he knew nothing of the art of life and the sort of thing that seemed to come natural to them over there and to the Mexicans now. He’d married unwisely and gotten into trouble with a chorusgirl, and a woman had made his life a hell for five years but now that he’d broken away from all that, he found himself lonely getting old wanting something more substantial than the little pickups a man traveling on missions to Mexico and Italy and France and England, little international incidents, he called them with a thinlipped grin, that were nice affairs enough at the time but were just dust and ashes. Of course he didn’t believe in bourgeois morality but he wanted understanding and passionate friendship in a woman.

When he talked he showed the tip of his tongue sometimes through the broad gap in the middle of his upper teeth. She could see in his eyes how much he had suffered. “Of course I don’t believe in conventional marriage either,” said Mary. Then Mr. Barrow broke out that she was so fresh so young so eager so lovely so what he needed in his life and his speech began to get a little thick and she guessed it was time she was getting back to Hull House because she had to get up so early. When he took her home in a taxi she sat in the furthest corner of the seat but he was very gentlemanly although he did seem to stagger a little when they said goodnight.

After that supper the work at Hull House got to be more and more of a chore, particularly as George Barrow, who was making a lecturetour all over the country in defense of the President’s policies, wrote her several times a week. She wrote him funny letters back, kidding about the oldmaids at Hull House and saying that she felt it in her bones that she was going to graduate from there soon, the way she had from Vassar. Her friends at Hull House began to say how pretty she was getting to look now that she was curling her hair.

For her vacation that June Mary French had been planning to go up to Michigan with the Cohns, but when the time came she decided she really must make a break; so instead she took the Northland around to Cleveland and got herself a job as countergirl in the Eureka Cafeteria on Lakeside Avenue near the depot.

It was pretty tough. The manager was a fat Greek who pinched the girls’ bottoms when he passed behind them along the counter. The girls used rouge and lipstick and were mean to Mary, giggling in corners about their dates or making dirty jokes with the busboys. At night she had shooting pains in her insteps from being so long on her feet and her head spun from the faces the asking mouths the probing eyes jerking along in the rush hours in front of her like beads on a string. Back in the rattly brass bed in the big yellowbrick roominghouse, a girl she talked to on her boat had sent her to, she couldn’t sleep or get the smell of cold grease and dishwashing out of her nose; she lay there scared and lonely listening to the other room ers stirring behind the thin partitions, tramping to the bathroom, slamming doors in the hall.

After she’d worked two weeks at the cafeteria she decided she couldn’t stand it another minute, so she gave up the job and went and got herself a room at the uptown Y.W.C.A. where they were very nice to her when they heard she’d come from Hull House and showed her a list of socialservice jobs she might want to try for, but she said No, she had to do real work in industry for once, and took the train to Pittsburgh where she knew a girl who was an assistant librarian at Carnegie Institute.

She got into Pittsburgh late on a summer afternoon. Crossing the bridge she had a glimpse of the level sunlight blooming pink and orange on a confusion of metalcolored smokes that jetted from a wilderness of chimneys ranked about the huge corrugated iron and girderwork structures along the riverbank. Then right away she was getting out of the daycoach into the brownish dark gloom of the station with her suitcase cutting into her hand. She called up her friend from a dirty phonebooth that smelled of cigarsmoke. “Mary French, how lovely!” came Lois Speyer’s comical burbling voice. “I’ll get you a room right here at Mrs. Gansemeyer’s, come on out to supper. It’s a boardinghouse. Just wait till you see it… But I just can’t imagine anybody coming to Pittsburgh for their vacation.” Mary found herself getting red and nervous right there in the phonebooth. “I wanted to see something different from the socialworker angle.”

“Well, it’s so nice the idea of having somebody to talk to that I hope it doesn’t mean you’ve lost your mind… you know they don’t employ Vassar graduates in the openhearth furnaces.”

“I’m not a Vassar graduate,” Mary French shouted into the receiver, feeling the near tears stinging her eyes. “I’m just like any other workinggirl… You ought to have seen me working in that cafeteria in Cleveland.” “Well, come on out, Mary darling, I’ll save some supper for you.” It was a long ride out on the streetcar. Pittsburgh was grim all right.

Next day she went around to the employment offices of several of the steelcompanies. When she said she’d been a socialworker they looked at her awful funny. Nothing doing; not taking on clerical or secretarial workers now. She spent days with the newspapers answering helpwanted ads.

Lois Speyer certainly laughed in that longfaced sarcastic way she had when Mary had to take a reporting job that Lois had gotten her because Lois knew the girl who wrote the society column on the Times-Sentinel.

As the Pittsburgh summer dragged into August, hot and choky with coalgas and the strangling fumes from blastfurnaces, blooming-mills, rollingmills that clogged the smoky Y where the narrow rivervalleys came together, there began to be talk around the office about how red agitators had gotten into the mills. A certain Mr. Gorman said to be one of the head operatives for the Sherman Service was often seen smoking a cigar in the managingeditor’s office. The paper began to fill up with news of alien riots and Russian Bolshevists and the nationalization of women and the defeat of Lenin and Trotzky.

Then one afternoon in early September Mr. Healy called Mary French into his private office and asked her to sit down. When he went over and closed the door tight Mary thought for a second he was going to make indecent proposals to her, but instead he said in his most tired fatherly manner, “Now, Miss French, I have an assignment for you that I don’t want you to take unless you really want to. I’ve got a daughter myself and I hope when she grows up she’ll be a nice simple wellbroughtup girl like you are. So honestly if I thought it was demeaning I wouldn’t ask you to do it… you know that. We’re strictly the family newspaper… we let the other fellers pull the rough stuff… You know an item never goes through my desk that I don’t think of my own wife and daughters, how would I like to have them read it.”

Ted Healy was a large round blackhaired man with a rolling grey eye like a codfish’s eye. “What’s the story, Mr. Healy?” asked Mary briskly; she’d made up her mind it must be something about the whiteslave traffic. “Well, these damned agitators, you know they’re trying to start a strike… Well, they’ve opened a publicity office downtown. I’m scared to send one of the boys down… might get into some trouble with those gorillas… I don’t want a dead reporter on my front page… But sending you down… You know you’re not working for a paper, you’re a socialservice worker, want to get both sides of the story… A sweet innocent looking girl can’t possibly come to any harm… Well, I want to get the lowdown on the people working there… what part of Russia they were born in, how they got into this country in the first place… where the money comes from… prison records, you know… Get all the dope you can. It’ll make a magnificent Sunday feature.”

“I’m very much interested in industrial relations it’s a wonderful assignment… But, Mr. Healy, aren’t conditions pretty bad in the mills?”

Mr. Healy jumped to his feet and began striding up and down the office. “I’ve got all the dope on that… Those damn guineas are making more money than they ever made in their lives, they buy stocks, they buy washingmachines and silk stockings for their women and they send money back to the old folks. While our boys were risking their lives in the trenches, they held down all the good jobs and most of ’em are enemy aliens at that. Those guineas are welloff, don’t you forget it. The one thing they can’t buy is brains. That’s how those agitators get at ’em. They talk their language and fill ’em up with a lot of notions about how all they need to do is stop working and they can take possession of this country that we’ve built up into the greatest country in the world… I don’t hold it against the poor devils of guineas, they’re just ignorant; but those reds who accept the hospitality of our country and then go around spreading their devilish propaganda… My god, if they were sincere I could forgive ’em, but they’re just in it for the money like anybody else. We have absolute proof that they’re paid by Russian reds with money and jewels they’ve stole over there; and they’re not content with that, they go around shaking down those poor ignorant guineas… Well, all I can say is shooting’s too good for ’em.” Ted Healy was red in the face. A boy in a green eyeshade burst in with a big bunch of flimsy. Mary French got to her feet. “I’ll get right after it, Mr. Healy,” she said.

She got off the car at the wrong corner and stumbled up the uneven pavement of a steep broad cobbled street of little gimcrack stores poolrooms barbershops and Italian spaghetti-parlors. A gusty wind whirled dust and excelsior and old papers. Outside of an un-painted doorway foreignlooking men stood talking in low voices in knots of three or four. Before she could get up her nerve to go up the long steep dirty narrow stairs she looked for a minute into the photographer’s window below at the tinted enlargements of babies with too-pink cheeks and the family groups and the ramrodstiff bridal couples. Upstairs she paused in the littered hall. From offices on both sides came a sound of typing and arguing voices. In the dark she ran into a young man. “Hello,” he said in a gruff voice she liked, “are you the lady from New York?”

“Not exactly. I’m from Colorado.”

“There was a lady from New York comin’ to help us with some publicity. I thought maybe you was her.”

“That’s just what I came for.”

“Come in, I’m just Gus Moscowski. I’m kinder the officeboy.” He opened one of the closed doors for her into a small dusty office piled with stackedup papers and filled up with a large table covered with clippings at which two young men in glasses sat in their shirtsleeves. “Here are the regular guys.” All the time she was talking to the others she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. He had blond closecropped hair and very blue eyes and a big bearcub look in his cheap serge suit shiny at the elbows and knees. The young men answered her questions so politely that she couldn’t help telling them she was trying to do a feature story for the Times-Sentinel. They laughed their heads off. “But Mr. Healy said he wanted a fair wellrounded picture. He just thinks the men are being misled.” Mary found herself laughing too. “Gus,” said the older man, “you take this young lady around and show her some of the sights… After all Ted Healy may have lost his mind. First here’s what Ted Healy’s friends did to Fanny Sellers.” She couldn’t look at the photograph that he poked under her nose. “What had she done?” “Tried to organize the workingclass, that’s the worst crime you can commit in this man’s country.”

It was a relief to be out on the street again, hurrying along while Gus Moscowski shambled grinning beside her. “Well, I guess I’d better take you first to see how folks live on fortytwo cents an hour. Too bad you can’t talk Polish. I’m a Polack myself.” “You must have been born in this country.” “Sure, highschool graduate. If I can get the dough I want to take engineering at Carnegie Tech… I dunno why I string along with these damn Polacks.” He looked her straight in the face and grinned when he said that. She smiled back at him. “I understand why,” she said. He made a gesture with his elbow as they turned a corner past a group of ragged kids making mudpies; they were pale flabby filthy little kids with pouches under their eyes. Mary turned her eyes away but she’d seen them, as she’d seen the photograph of the dead woman with her head caved in. “Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity,” Gus Moscowski said way down in his throat.

That night when she got off the streetcar at the corner nearest Mrs. Gansemeyer’s her legs were trembling and the small of her back ached. She went right up to her room and hurried into bed. She was too tired to eat or to sit up listening to Lois Speyer’s line of sarcastic gossip. She couldn’t sleep. She lay in her sagging bed listening to the voices of the boarders rocking on the porch below and to the hooting of engines and the clank of shunted freightcars down in the valley, seeing again the shapeless broken shoes and the worn hands folded over dirty aprons and the sharp anxious beadiness of women’s eyes, feeling the quake underfoot of the crazy stairways zigzagging up and down the hills black and bare as slagpiles where the steelworkers lived in jumbled shanties and big black rows of smokegnawed clapboarded houses, in her nose the stench of cranky backhouses and kitchens with cabbage cooking and clothes boiling and unwashed children and drying diapers. She slept by fits and starts and would wake up with Gus Moscowski’s warm tough voice in her head, and her whole body tingling with the hard fuzzy bearcub feel of him when his arm brushed against her arm or he put out his big hand to steady her at a place where the boardwalk had broken through and she’d started to slip in the loose shaly slide underneath. When she fell solidly asleep she went on dreaming about him. She woke up early feeling happy because she was going to meet him again right after breakfast.

That afternoon she went back to the office to write the piece. Just the way Ted Healy had said, she put in all she could find out about the boys running the publicity bureau. The nearest to Russia any of them came from was Canarsie, Long Island. She tried to get in both sides of the question, even called them “possibly misguided.”

About a minute after she’d sent it in to the Sunday editor she was called to the city desk. Ted Healy had on a green eyeshade and was bent over a swirl of galleys. Mary could see her copy on top of the pile of papers under his elbow. Somebody had scrawled across the top of it in red pencil: Why wish this on me? “Well, young lady,” he said without looking up, “you’ve written a firstrate propaganda piece for the Nation or some other parlorpink sheet in New York, but what the devil do you think we can do with it? This is Pittsburgh.” He got to his feet and held out his hand. “Goodby, Miss French, I wish I had some way of using you because you’re a mighty smart girl… and smart girl reporters are rare… I’ve sent your slip to the cashier…” Before Mary French could get her breath she was out on the pavement with an extra week’s salary in her pocketbook, which after all was pretty white of old Ted Healy.

That night Lois Speyer looked aghast when Mary told her she’d been fired, but when Mary told Lois that she’d gone down and gotten a job doing publicity for the Amalgamated Lois burst into tears. “I said you’d lost your mind and it’s true… Either I’ll have to move out of this boardinghouse or you will… and I won’t be able to go around with you like I’ve been doing.” “How ridiculous, Lois.” “Darling, you don’t know Pittsburgh. I don’t care about those miserable strikers but I absolutely have got to hold onto my job… You know I just have to send money home… Oh, we were just beginning to have such fun and now you have to go and spoil everything.”

“If you’d seen what I’ve seen you’d talk differently,” said Mary French coldly. They were never very good friends again after that.

Gus Moscowski found her a room with heavy lace curtains in the windows in the house of a Polish storekeeper who was a cousin of his father’s. He escorted her solemnly back there from the office nights when they worked late, and they always did work late.

Mary French had never worked so hard in her life. She wrote releases, got up statistics on t.b., undernourishment of children, sanitary conditions, crime, took trips on interurban trolleys and slow locals to Rankin and Braddock and Homestead and Bessemer and as far as Youngstown and Steubenville and Gary, took notes on speeches of Foster and Fitzpatrick, saw meetings broken up and the troopers in their darkgrey uniforms moving in a line down the unpaved alleys of company patches, beating up men and women with their clubs, kicking children out of their way, chasing old men off their front stoops. “And to think,” said Gus of the troopers, “that the sonsabitches are lousy Polacks themselves most of ’em. Now ain’t that just like a Polack?”

She interviewed metropolitan newspapermen, spent hours trying to wheedle A.P. and U.P. men into sending straight stories, smoothed out the grammar in the Englishlanguage leaflets. The fall flew by before she knew it. The Amalgamated could only pay the barest expenses, her clothes were in awful shape, there was no curl in her hair, at night she couldn’t sleep for the memory of the things she’d seen, the jailings, the bloody heads, the wreck of some family’s parlor, sofa cut open, chairs smashed, chinacloset hacked to pieces with an ax, after the troopers had been through looking for “literature.” She hardly knew herself when she looked at her face in the greenspotted giltframed mirror over the washstand as she hurriedly dressed in the morning. She had a haggard desperate look. She was beginning to look like a striker herself.

She hardly knew herself either when Gus’s voice gave her cold shivers or when whether she felt good or not that day depended on how often he smiled when he spoke to her; it didn’t seem like herself at all the way that whenever her mind was free for a moment, she began to imagine him coming close to her, putting his arms around her, his lips, his big hard hands. When that feeling came on she would have to close her eyes and would feel herself dizzily reeling. Then she’d force her eyes open and fly at her typing and after a while would feel cool and clear again.

The day Mary French admitted to herself for the first time that the highpaid workers weren’t coming out and that the lowpaid workers were going to lose their strike she hardly dared look Gus in the face when he called for her to take her home. It was a muggy drizzly outofseason November night. As they walked along the street without saying anything the fog suddenly glowed red in the direction of the mills. “There they go,” said Gus. The glow grew and grew, first pink then orange. Mary nodded and said nothing. “What can you do when the woikin’class won’t stick together. Every kind of damn foreigner thinks the others is bums and the ’Mericans they think everybody’s a bum ’cept you an’ me. Wasn’t so long ago we was all foreigners in this man’s country. Christ, I dunno why I string along wid ’em.”

“Gus, what would you do if we lost the strike? I mean you personally.”

“I’ll be on the black books all right. Means I couldn’t get me another job in the metaltrades not if I was the last guy on earth… Hell, I dunno. Take a false name an’ join the Navy, I guess. They say a guy kin get a real good eddication in the Navy.”

“I guess we oughtn’t to talk about it… Me, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You kin go anywheres and git a job on a paper like you had… I wish I had your schoolin’… I bet you’ll be glad to be quit of this bunch of hunkies.”

“They are the workingclass, Gus.”

“Sure, if we could only git more sense into our damn heads… You know I’ve got an own brother scabbin’ right to this day.”

“He’s probably worried about his wife and family.”

“I’d worry him if I could git my hands on him… A woikin’man ain’t got no right to have a wife and family.”

“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 he’d 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.

“Well, goodnight. Rest good, you look all 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 arrested 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 sentenced 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. “Well, 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 trolleystop. 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 trolley 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 pulled 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. Back at the office all 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 still 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 welldressed 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’ll bet.” She opened her eyes. George had on a furlined coat with a furcollar out of which his thin neck and long knobby face stuck out comically 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 Amalgamated if I got pneumonia, would it?… Why haven’t you got a warmcoat?… 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 hall open. They settled down on either side of a little table at the foot of the bed that was littered with newspapers and typewritten sheets. “Well, well, well,” 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 little whiskey in her tea. He was very kind, said he was sure all the boys could be gotten out of jail as soon as the strike was settled and that it virtually was settled. He’d just been over in Youngstown talking to Fitzpatrick. He thought he’d just about convinced him that the only thing to do was to get the men back to work. He had Judge Gary’s own private assurance that nobody would be discriminated against and that experts were working on the problem of an eighthour day. As soon as the technical difficulties could be overcome the whole picture of the steelworker’s life would change radically for the better. Then and there he offered to put Mary French on the payroll as his secretary. He said her actual experience with conditions would be invaluable in influencing legislation. If the great effort of the underpaid steel-workers wasn’t to be lost it would have to be incorporated in legislation. The center of the fight was moving to Washington. He felt the time was ripe in the senate. She said her first obligation was to the strikecommittee. “But, my dear sweet child,” George Barrow said, gently patting the back of her hand, “in a few days there won’t be any strikecommittee.”

The senator was a southerner with irongrey hair and white spats who looked at Mary French when he first came in the room as if he thought she was going to plant a bomb under the big bulge of his creamcolored vest, but his fatherly respectful delicate flowerofwomanhood manner was soothing. They ordered dinner brought up to George’s room. The senator kidded George in a heavy rotund way about his dangerous Bolsheviki friends. They’d been putting away a good deal of rye and the smoky air of George’s room was rich with whiskey. When she left them to go down to the office again they were talking about taking in a burlesque show.

The bunch down at the office looked haggard and sour. When she told them about G. H. Barrow’s offer they told her to jump at it; of course it would be wonderful to have her working for them in Washington and besides they wouldn’t be able to pay even her expenses any more. She finished her release and glumly said goodnight. That night she slept better than she had for weeks though all the way home she was haunted by Gus Moscowski’s blue eyes and his fair head with the blood clotted on it and his jaunty grin when his eyes met hers in the courtroom. She had decided that the best way to get the boys out of jail was to go to Washington with George.

Next morning George called her up at the office first thing and asked her what about the job. She said she’d take it. He said would fifty a week be all right; maybe he could raise it to seventyfive later. She said it was more than she’d ever made in her life. He said he wanted her to come right around to the Schenley; he had something important for her to do. When she got there he met her in the lobby with a hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “The first thing I want you to do, sweet girl, is to go buy yourself a warm overcoat. Here’s two weeks’ salary in advance… You won’t be any good to me as a secretary if you catch your death of pneumonia the first day.”

On the parlorcar going to Washington he handed over to her two big square black suitcases full of testimony. “Don’t think for a moment there’s no work connected with this job,” he said, fishing out manila envelope after manila envelope full of closely typed stenographers’ notes on onionskin paper. “The other stuff was more romantic,” he said, sharpening a pencil, “but this in the longrange view is more useful.”

“I wonder,” said Mary.

“Mary dear, you are very young… and very sweet.” He sat back in his greenplush armchair looking at her a long time with his bulging eyes while the snowy hills streaked with green of lichened rocks and laced black with bare branches of trees filed by outside. Then he blurted out wouldn’t it be fun if they got married when they got to Washington. She shook her head and went back to the problem of strikers’ defense but she couldn’t help smiling at him when she said she didn’t want to get married just yet; he’d been so kind. She felt he was a real friend.

In Washington she fixed herself up a little apartment in a house on H Street that was being sublet cheap by Democratic officeholders who were moving out. She often cooked supper for George there. She’d never done any cooking before except camp cooking, but George was quite an expert and knew how to make Italian spaghetti and chiliconcarne and oysterstew and real French bouillabaisse. He’d get wine from the Rumanian Embassy and they’d have very cozy meals together after long days working in the office. He talked and talked about love and the importance of a healthy sexlife for men and women, so that at last she let him. He was so tender and gentle that for a while she thought maybe she really loved him. He knew all about contraceptives and was very nice and humorous about them. Sleeping with a man didn’t make as much difference in her life as she’d expected it would.

The day after Harding’s inauguration two seedylooking men in shapeless grey caps shuffled up to her in the lobby of the little building on G Street where George’s office was. One of them was Gus Moscowski. His cheeks were hollow and he looked tired and dirty. “Hello, Miss French,” he said. “Meet the kid brother… not the one that scabbed, this one’s on the up and up… You sure do look well.” “Oh, Gus, they let you out.” He nodded. “New trial, cases dismissed… But I tell you it’s no fun in that cooler.” She took them up to George’s office. “I’m sure Mr. Barrow’ll want to get firsthand news of the steelworkers.”

Gus made a gesture of pushing something away with his hand. “We ain’t steelworkers, we’re bums… Your friends the senators sure sold us out pretty. Every sonofabitch ever walked across the street with a striker’s blacklisted. The old man got his job back, way back at fifty cents instead of a dollar ten after the priest made him kiss the book and promise not to join the union… Lots of people goin’ back to the old country. Me an’ the kid we pulled out, went down to Baltimore to git a job on a boat somewheres but the seamen are piled up tendeep on the wharf… So we thought we might as well take in the ’nauguration and see how the fat boys looked.”

Mary tried to get them to take some money but they shook their heads and said, “We don’t need a handout, we can woik.” They were just going when George came in. He didn’t seem any too pleased to see them, and began to lecture them on violence; if the strikers hadn’t threatened violence and allowed themselves to be misled by a lot of Bolshevik agitators, the men who were really negotiating a settlement from the inside would have been able to get them much better terms. “I won’t argue with you, Mr. Barrow. I suppose you think Father Kazinski was a red and that it was Fanny Sellers that bashed in the head of a statetrooper. An’ then you say you’re on the side of the woikin’man.”

“And, George, even the senate committee admitted that the violence was by the deputies and statetroopers… I saw it myself after all,” put in Mary.

“Of course, boys… I know what you’re up against… I hold no brief for the Steel Trust… But, Mary, what I want to impress on these boys is that the workingman is often his own worst enemy in these things.”

“The woikin’ man gits f’rooked whatever way you look at it,” said Gus, “and I don’t know whether it’s his friends or his enemies does the worst rookin’… Well, we got to git a move on.”

“Boys, I’m sorry I’ve got so much pressing business to do. I’d like to hear about your experiences. Maybe some other time,” said George, settling down at his desk.

As they left Mary French followed them to the door and whispered to Gus, “And what about Carnegie Tech?” His eyes didn’t seem so blue as they’d seemed before he went to jail. “Well, what about it?” said Gus without looking at her and gently closed the groundglass door behind him.

That night while they were eating supper Mary suddenly got to her feet and said, “George, we’re as responsible as anybody for selling out the steelworkers.” “Nonsense, Mary, it’s the fault of the leaders who picked the wrong minute for the strike and then let the bosses hang a lot of crazy revolutionary notions on them. Organized labor gets stung every time it mixes in politics. Gompers knows that. We all did our best for ’em.”

Mary French started to walk back and forth in the room. She was suddenly bitterly uncontrollably angry. “That’s the way they used to talk back in Colorado Springs. I might better go back and live with Mother and do charitywork. It would be better than making a living off the workingclass.”

She walked back and forth. He went on sitting there at the table she’d fixed so carefully with flowers and a white cloth, drinking little sips of wine and putting first a little butter on the corner of a cracker and then a piece of Roquefort cheese and then biting it off and then another bit of butter and another piece of cheese, munching slowly all the time. She could feel his bulging eyes traveling over her body. “We’re just laborfakers,” she yelled in his face, and ran into the bedroom.

He stood over her still chewing on the cheese and crackers as he nervously patted the back of her shoulder. “What a spiteful thing to say… My child, you mustn’t be so hysterical… This isn’t the first strike that’s ever come out badly… Even this time there’s a gain. Fairminded people all over the country have been horrified by the ruthless violence of the steelbarons. It will influence legislation… Sit up and have a glass of wine… Now, Mary, why don’t we get married? It’s too silly living like this. I have some small investments. I saw a nice little house for sale in Georgetown just the other day. This is just the time now to buy a house when prices are dropping… personnel being cut out of all the departments… After all I’ve reached an age when I have a right to settle down and have a wife and kids… I don’t want to wait till it’s too late.”

Mary sat up sniveling. “Oh, George, you’ve got plenty of time… I don’t know why I’ve got a horror of getting married… Everything gives me the horrors tonight.” “Poor little girl, it’s probably the curse coming on,” said George and kissed her on the forehead. After he’d gone home to his hotel she decided she’d go back to Colorado Springs to visit her mother for a while. Then she’d try to get some kind of newspaper job.

Before she could get off for the West she found that a month had gone by. Fear of having a baby began to obsess her. She didn’t want to tell George about it because she knew he’d insist on their getting married. She couldn’t wait. She didn’t know any doctor she could go to. Late one night she went into the kitchenette to stick her head in the oven and tried to turn on the gas, but it seemed so inconvenient somehow and her feet felt so cold on the linoleum that she went back to bed.

Next day she got a letter from Ada Cohn all about what a wonderful time Ada was having in New York where she had the loveliest apartment and was working so hard on her violin and hoped to give a concert in Carnegie Hall next season. Without finishing reading the letter Mary French started packing her things. She got to the station in time to get the ten o’clock to New York. From the station she sent George a wire: FRIEND SICK CALLED TO NEW YORK WRITING.

She’d wired Ada and Ada met her at the Pennsylvania station in New York looking very handsome and rich. In the taxicab Mary told her that she had to lend her the money to have an abortion. Ada had a crying fit and said of course she’d lend her the money but who on earth could she go to? Honestly she wouldn’t dare ask Dr. Kirstein about it because he was such a friend of her father’s and mother’s that he’d be dreadfully upset. “I won’t have a baby. I won’t have a baby,” Mary was muttering.

Ada had a fine threeroom apartment in the back of a building on Madison Avenue with a light tancolored carpet and a huge grandpiano and lots of plants in pots and flowers in vases. They ate their supper there and strode up and down the livingroom all evening trying to think. Ada sat at the piano and played Bach preludes to calm her nerves, she said, but she was so upset she couldn’t follow her music. At last Mary wrote George a specialdelivery letter asking him what to do. Next evening she got a reply. George was brokenhearted, but he enclosed the address of a doctor. Mary gave the letter to Ada to read. “What a lovely letter. I don’t blame him at all. He sounds like a fine sensitive beautiful nature.” “I hate him,” said Mary, driving her nails into the palms of her hands. “I hate him.”

Next morning she went down all alone to the doctor’s and had the operation. After it she went home in a taxicab and Ada put her to bed. Ada got on her nerves terribly tiptoeing in and out of the bedroom with her face wrinkled up. After about a week Mary French got up. She seemed to be all right, and started to go around New York looking for a job.