Next morning they went out at six o’clock, because she had to be at Wanamaker’s at eight, to look for a room. They didn’t exactly tell the next landlady they weren’t married, but when she said, “So you’re bride and groom?” they nodded and smiled. Fortunately Helen had enough money in her purse to pay the week in advance. Then she had to run off to work. Ben didn’t have any money to buy anything to eat so he lay on the bed reading Progress and Poverty all day. When she came back in the evening she brought in some supper from a delicatessen. Eating the rye bread and salami they were very happy. She had such large breasts for such a slender little girl. He had to go out to a drugstore to buy some safeties because she said how could she have a baby just now when they had to give all their strength to the movement. There were bedbugs in the bed, but they told each other that they were as happy as they could be under the capitalist system, that some day they’d have a free society where workers wouldn’t have to huddle in filthy lodginghouses full of bedbugs or row with landladies and lovers could have babies if they wanted to.
A few days later Helen was laid off from Wanamaker’s because they were cutting down their personnel for the slack summer season. They went over to Jersey where she went to live with her folks and Ben got a job in the shipping department of a worsted mill. They rented a room together in Passaic. When a strike came he and Helen were both on the committee. Ben got to be quite a speechmaker. He was arrested several times and almost had his skull cracked by a policeman’s billy and got six months in jail out of it. But he’d found out that when he got up on a soapbox to talk he could make people listen to him, that he could talk and say what he thought and get a laugh or a cheer out of the massed upturned faces. When he stood up in court to take his sentence he started to talk about surplus value. The strikers in the audience cheered and the judge had the attendants clear the courtroom. Ben could see the reporters busily taking down what he said; he was glad to be a living example of the injustice and brutality of the capitalist system. The judge shut him up by saying he’d give him another six months for contempt of court if he didn’t keep quiet, and Ben was taken to the county jail in an automobile full of special deputies with riot guns. The papers spoke of him as a wellknown socialist agitator.
In jail Ben got to be friends with a wobbly named Bram Hicks, a tall youngster from Frisco with light hair and blue eyes who told him if he wanted to know the labormovement he ought to get him a red card and go out to the Coast. Bram was a boilermaker by profession but had shipped as a sailor for a change and landed in Perth Amboy broke. He’d been working on the repairshift of one of the mills and had gone out with the rest. He’d pushed a cop in the face when they’d broken up a picketline and been sent up for six months for assault and battery. Meeting him once a day in the prison yard was the one thing kept Ben going in jail.
They were both released on the same day. They walked along the street together. The strike was over. The mills were running. The streets where there’d been picketlines, the hall where Ben had made speeches looked quiet and ordinary. He took Bram around to Helen’s. She wasn’t there, but after a while she came in with a little redfaced ferretnosed Englishman whom she introduced as Billy, an English comrade. First thing Ben guessed that he was sleeping with her. He left Bram in the room with the Englishman and beckoned her outside. The narrow upper hall of the old frame house smelt of vinegar. “You’re through with me?” he asked in a shaky voice.
“Oh, Ben, don’t act so conventional.”
“You mighta waited till I got outa jail.”
“But can’t you see that we’re all comrades? You’re a brave fighter and oughtn’t to be so conventional, Ben…. Billy doesn’t mean anything to me. He’s a steward on a liner. He’ll be going away soon.”
“Then I don’t mean anything to you either.” He grabbed Helen’s wrist and squeezed it as hard as he could. “I guess I’m all wrong, but I’m crazy about you…. I thought you…”
“Ouch, Ben… you’re talkin’ silly, you know how much I like you.” They went back in the room and talked about the movement. Ben said he was going west with Bram Hicks.
… he becomes an appendage of the machine and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, most easily required knack that is required of him. …
Bram knew all the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram found a guy he knew who got them signed on as deckhands on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. In Duluth they joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy for Ben and Bram was scared he’d cave in, but the fourteen hour days out in the sun and the dust, the copious grub, the dead sleep in the lofts of the big barns began to toughen him up. Lying flat on the straw in his sweat clothes he’d still feel through his sleep the tingle of the sun on his face and neck, the strain in his muscles, the whir of the reapers and binders along the horizon, the roar of the thresher, the grind of gears of the trucks carrying the red wheat to the elevators. He began to talk like a harvest stiff. After the harvest they worked in a fruitcannery on the Columbia River, a lousy steamy job full of the sour stench of rotting fruitpeelings. There they read in Solidarity about the shingleweavers’ strike and the free speech fight in Everett, and decided they’d go down and see what they could do to help out. The last day they worked there Bram lost the forefinger of his right hand repairing the slicing and peeling machinery. The company doctor said he couldn’t get any compensation because he’d already given notice, and, besides, not being a Canadian… A little shyster lawyer came around to the boarding house where Bram was lying on the bed in a fever, with his hand in a big wad of bandage, and tried to get him to sue, but Bram yelled at the lawyer to get the hell out. Ben said he was wrong, the working class ought to have its lawyers too.
When the hand had healed a little they went down on the boat from Vancouver to Seattle. I.W.W. headquarters there was like a picnic ground, crowded with young men coming in from every part of the U.S. and Canada. One day a big bunch went down to Everett on the boat to try to hold a meeting at the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt Avenues. The dock was full of deputies with rifles, and revolvers. “The Commercial Club boys are waiting for us,” some guy’s voice tittered nervously. The deputies had white handkerchiefs around their necks. “There’s Sheriff McRae,” said somebody. Bram edged up to Ben. “We better stick together…. Looks to me like we was goin’ to get tamped up some.” The wobblies were arrested as fast as they stepped off the boat and herded down to the end of the dock. The deputies were drunk most of them, Ben could smell the whisky on the breath of the redfaced guy who grabbed him by the arm. “Get a move on there, you son of a bitch…” He got a blow from a riflebutt in the small of the back. He could hear the crack of saps on men’s skulls. Anybody who resisted had his face beaten to a jelly with a club. The wobblies were made to climb up into a truck. With the dusk a cold drizzle had come on. “Boys, we got to show ’em we got guts,” a redhaired boy said. A deputy who was holding on to the back of the truck aimed a blow at him with his sap but lost his balance and fell off. The wobblies laughed. The deputy climbed on again, purple in the face. “You’ll be laughin’ outa the other side of your dirty mugs when we get through with you,” he yelled.
Out in the woods where the county road crossed the railroad track they were made to get out of the trucks. The deputies stood around them with their guns leveled while the sheriff who was reeling drunk, and two welldressed middleaged men talked over what they’d do. Ben heard the word gauntlet. “Look here, sheriff,” somebody said, “we’re not here to make any kind of disturbance. All we want’s our constitutional rights of free speech.” The sheriff turned towards them waving the butt of his revolver, “Oh, you do, do you, you c — s. Well, this is