Ben needed clothes and so did Mary; she never had any of the money from the job left over from week to week, so for the first time in her life she wrote her mother asking for five hundred dollars. Her mother sent back a check with a rather nice letter saying that she’d been made Republican State Committeewoman and that she admired Mary’s independence because she’d always believed women had just as much right as men to earn their own living and maybe women in politics would have a better influence than she’d once thought, and certainly Mary was showing grit in carving out a career for herself, but she did hope she’d soon come around to seeing that she could have just as interesting a career if she’d come back to Colorado Springs and occupy the social position her mother’s situation entitled her to. Ben was so delighted when he saw the check he didn’t ask what Mary had got the money for. “Five hundred bucks is just what I needed,” he said. “I hadn’t wanted to tell you but they want me to lead a strike over in Bayonne… rayonworkers… you know, the old munitionplants made over to make artificial silk… It’s a tough town and the workers are so poor they can’t pay their union dues… but they’ve got a fine radical union over there. It’s important to get a foothold in the new industries… that’s where the old sellout organizations of the A.F. of L. are failing… Five hundred bucks’ll take care of the printing bill.”
“Oh, Ben, you are not rested yet. I’m so afraid they’ll arrest you again.”
He kissed her. “Nothing to worry about.”
“But, Ben, I wanted you to get some clothes.”
“This is a fine suit. What’s the matter with this suit? Didn’t Uncle Sam give me this suit himself?… Once we get things going we’ll get you over to do publicity for us… enlarge your knowledge of the clothing industry. Oh, Mary, you’re a wonderful girl to have raised that money.”
That fall when Ada came back, Mary moved out and got herself a couple of small rooms on West Fourth Street in the Village, so that Ben could have some place to go when he came over to New York. That winter she worked tremendously hard, still handling her old job and at the same time doing publicity for the strikes Ben led in several Jersey towns. “That’s nothing to how hard we’ll have to work when we have soviets in America,” Ben would say when she’d ask him didn’t he think they’d do better work if they didn’t always try to do so many things at once.
She never knew when Ben was going to turn up. Sometimes he’d be there every night for a week and sometimes he would be away for a month and she’d only hear from him through newsreleases about meetings, picketlines broken up, injunctions fought in the courts. Once they decided they’d get married and have a baby, but the comrades were calling for Ben to come and organize the towns around Passaic and he said it would distract him from his work and that they were young and that there’d be plenty of time for that sort of thing after the revolution. Now was the time to fight. Of course she could have the baby if she wanted to but it would spoil her usefulness in the struggle for several months and he didn’t think this was the time for it. It was the first time they’d quarreled. She said he was heartless. He said they had to sacrifice their personal feelings for the working-class, and stormed out of the house in a temper. In the end she had an abortion but she had to write her mother again for money to pay for it.
She threw herself into her work for the strikecommittee harder than ever. Sometimes for weeks she only slept four or five hours a night. She took to smoking a great deal. There was always a cigarette resting on a corner of her typewriter. The fine ash dropped into the pages as they came from the multigraph machine. Whenever she could be spared from the office she went around collecting money from wealthy women, inducing prominent liberals to come and get arrested on the picketline, coaxing articles out of newspapermen, traveling around the country to find charitable people to go on bail-bonds. The strikers, the men and women and children on picketlines, in soupkitchens, being interviewed in the dreary front parlors of their homes stripped of furniture they hadn’t been able to make the last payment on, the buses full of scabs, the cops and deputies with sawedoff shotguns guarding the tall palings of the silent enormously-extended oblongs of the blackwindowed millbuildings, passed in a sort of dreamy haze before her, like a show on the stage, in the middle of the continuous typing and multigraphing, the writing of letters and working up of petitions, the long grind of officework that took up her days and nights.
She and Ben had no life together at all any more. She thrilled to him the way the workers did at meetings when he’d come to the platform in a tumult of stamping and applause and talk to them with flushed cheeks and shining eyes talking clearly directly to each man and woman, encouraging them, warning them, explaining the economic setup to them. The millgirls were all crazy about him. In spite of herself Mary French would get a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the way they looked at him and at the way some big buxom freshlooking woman would stop him sometimes in the hall 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 yellowstained fingers and push her untidy uncurled 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 because the leaflets weren’t ready, she’d feel happy all day. But mostly he seemed to have forgotten that they’d ever been lovers.
After the A.F. of L. officials from Washington in expensive 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 desperate. He sat for hours on the edge of her bed telling her in a sharp monotonous voice about the sellout and the wrangles between the leftwingers and the oldline socialists and laborleaders, and how now that it was all 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 precedent… 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 will all be dropped…” “The thing to do,” she said, smoothing his hair off his forehead, “is to relax a little.” “You should be telling me?” he said and started to unlace his shoes.