July went by all too fast. August came. A growing crowd of all sorts of people began pouring through the office: old friends, wobblies who’d hitchhiked from the coast, politicians interested in the Italian vote, lawyers with suggestions for the defense, writers, outofwork newspapermen, cranks and phonies of all kinds attracted by rumors of an enormous defensefund. She came back one afternoon from speaking in a unionhall in Pawtucket and found G. H. Barrow sitting at her desk. He had written a great pile of personal telegrams to senators congressmen ministers laborleaders demanding that they join in the protest in the name of justice and civilization and the working-class, long telegrams and cables at top rates. She figured out the cost as she checked them off. She didn’t know how the committee could pay for them, but she handed them to the messengerboy waiting outside. She could hardly believe that those words had made her veins tingle only a few weeks before. It shocked her to think how meaningless they seemed to her now like the little cards you get from a onecent fortunetelling machine. For six months now she’d been reading and writing the same words every day.
Mary didn’t have time to be embarrassed meeting George Barrow. They went out together to get a plate of soup at a cafeteria talking about nothing but the case as if they’d never known each other before. Picketing the State House had begun again and as they came out of the restaurant Mary turned to him and said, “Well, George, how about going up and getting arrested… There’s still time to make the afternoon papers. Your name would give us back the front page.”
He flushed red, and stood there in front of the restaurant in the noontime crowd looking tall and nervous and popeyed in his natty lightgrey suit. “But, my dear g-g-girl, I… if I thought it would do the slightest good I would… I’d get myself arrested or run over by a truck… but I think it would rob me of whatever usefulness I might have.”
Mary French looked him straight in the eye, her face white with fury. “I didn’t think you’d take the risk,” she said, clipping each word off and spitting it in his face. She turned her back on him and hurried to the office.
It was a sort of relief when she was arrested herself. She’d planned to keep out of sight of the cops as she had been told her work was too valuable to lose, but she’d had to run up the hill with a set of placards for a new batch of picketers who had gone off without them. There was nobody in the office she could send. She was just crossing Beacon Street when two large polite cops suddenly appeared, one on each side of her. One of them said, “Sorry, miss, please come quietly,” and she found herself sitting in the dark patrolwagon. Driving to the policestation she had a soothing sense of helplessness and irresponsibility. It was the first time in weeks she had felt herself relax. At the Joy Street station they booked her but they didn’t put her in a cell. She sat on a bench opposite the window with two Jewish garmentworkers and a welldressed woman in a flowered summer dress with a string of pearls round her neck and watched the men picketers pouring through into the cells. The cops were polite, everybody was jolly; it seemed like a kind of game, it was hard to believe anything real was at stake.
In a crowd that had just been unloaded from the wagon on the steep street outside the policestation she caught sight of a tall man she recognized as Donald Stevens from his picture in the Daily. A redfaced cop held on to each of his arms. His shirt was torn open at the neck and his necktie had a stringy look as if somebody had been yanking on it. The first thing Mary thought was how handsomely he held himself. He had steelgrey hair and a brown outdoorlooking skin and luminous grey eyes over high cheekbones. When he was led away from the desk she followed his broad shoulders with her eyes into the gloom of the cells. The woman next to her whispered in an awed voice that he was being held for inciting to riot instead of sauntering and loitering like the rest. Five thousand dollars bail. He had tried to hold a meeting on Boston Common.
Mary had been there about a halfhour when little Mr. Feinstein from the office came round with a tall fashionablydressed man in a linen suit who put up the bail for her. At the same time Donald Stevens was bailed out. The four of them walked down the hill from the policestation together. At the corner the man in the linen suit said, “You two were too useful to leave in there all day… Perhaps we’ll see you at the Bellevue… suite D, second floor.” Then he waved his hand and left them. Mary was so anxious to talk to Donald Stevens she didn’t think to ask the man’s name. Events were going past her faster than she could focus her mind on them.
Mary plucked at Donald Stevens’ sleeve, she and Mr. Feinstein both had to hurry to keep up with his long stride. “I’m Mary French,” she said. “What can we do?… We’ve got to do something.” He turned to her with a broad smile as if he’d seen her for the first time. “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “You’re a plucky little girl… you’ve been putting up a real fight in spite of your liberal committee.” “But they’ve done the best they could,” she said.
“We’ve got to get the entire workingclass of Boston out on the streets,” said Stevens in his deep rattling voice.
“We’ve gotten out the garmentworkers but that’s all.”
He struck his open palm with his fist. “What about the Italians? What about the North End? Where’s your office? Look what we did in New York. Why can’t you do it here?” He leaned over towards her with a caressing confidential manner. Right away the feeling of being tired and harassed left her, without thinking she put her hand on his arm. “We’ll go and talk to your committee; then we’ll talk to the Italian committee. Then we’ll shake up the unions.” “But, Don, we’ve only got thirty hours,” said Mr. Feinstein in a dry tired voice. “I have more confidence in political pressure being applied to the governor. You know he has presidential aspirations. I think the governor’s going to commute the sentences.”
At the office Mary found Jerry Burnham waiting for her. “Well, Joan of Arc,” he said, “I was just going down to bail you out. But I see they’ve turned you loose.” Jerry and Donald Stevens had evidently known each other before. “Well, Jerry,” said Donald Stevens savagely, “doesn’t this shake you out of your cynical pose a little?”
“I don’t see why it should. It’s nothing new to me that college-presidents are skunks.”
Donald Stevens drew off against the wall as if he were holding himself back from giving Jerry a punch in the jaw. “I can’t see how any man who has any manhood left can help getting red… even a pettybourgeois journalist.”
“My dear Don, you ought to know by this time that we hocked our manhood for a brass check about the time of the first world war… that is if we had any… I suppose there’d bevarious opinions about that.” Donald Stevens had already swung on into the inner office. Mary found herself looking into Jerry’s reddening face, not knowing what to say. “Well, Mary, if you have a need for a pickup during the day… I should think you would need it… I’ll be at the oldstand.” “Oh, I won’t have time,” Mary said coldly. She could hear Donald Stevens’ deep voice from the inner office. She hurried on after him.
The lawyers had failed. Talking, wrangling, arguing about how a lastminute protest could be organized Mary could feel the hours ebb ing, the hours of these men’s lives. She felt the minutes dripping away as actually as if they were bleeding from her own wrists. She felt weak and sick. She couldn’t think of anything. It was a relief to be out in the street trotting to keep up with Donald Stevens’ big stride. They made a round of the committees. It was nearly noon, nothing was done. Down on Hanover Street a palefaced Italian in a shabby Ford sedan hailed them. Stevens opened the door of the car. “Comrade French, this is Comrade Strozzi… he’s going to drive us around.” “Are you a citizen?” she asked with an anxious frown. Strozzi shook his head and smiled a thinlipped smile. “Maybe they give me a free trip back to the Italy,” he said.