Mary never remembered what they did the rest of the day. They drove all over the poorer Boston suburbs. Often the men they were looking for were out. A great deal of the time she spent in phonebooths calling wrong numbers. She couldn’t seem to do anything right. She looked with numb staring eyes out of eyelids that felt like sandpaper at the men and women crowding into the office. Stevens had lost the irritated stinging manner he’d had at first. He argued with tradeunion officials, socialists, ministers, lawyers, with an aloof sarcastic coolness. “After all they are brave men. It doesn’t matter whether they are saved or not any more, it’s the power of the workingclass that’s got to be saved,” he’d say. Everywhere there was the same opinion. A demonstration will mean violence, will spoil the chance that the governor will commute at the last moment. Mary had lost all her initiative. Suddenly she’d become Donald Stevens’ secretary. She was least unhappy when she was running small errands for him.
Late that night she went through all the Italian restaurants on Hanover Street looking for an anarchist Stevens wanted to see. Every place was empty. There was a hush over everything. Death watch. People kept away from each other as if to avoid some contagion. At the back of a room in a little upstairs speakeasy she saw Jerry Burnham sitting alone at a table with a jigger of whiskey and a bottle of gingerale in front of him. His face was white as a napkin and he was teetering gently in his chair. He stared at her without seeing her. The waiter was bending over him shaking him. He was hopelessly drunk.
It was a relief to run back to the office where Stevens was still trying to line up a general strike. He gave her a searching look when she came in. “Failed again,” she said bitterly. He put down the telephone receiver, got to his feet, strode over to the line of hooks on the grimy yellow wall and got down his hat and coat. “Mary French, you’re deadtired. I’m going to take you home.”
They had to walk around several blocks to avoid the cordon of police guarding the State House. “Ever played tug of war?” Don was saying. “You pull with all your might but the other guys are heavier and you feel yourself being dragged their way. You’re being pulled forward faster than you’re pulling back… Don’t let me talk like a defeatist… We’re not a couple of goddamned liberals,” he said and burst into a dry laugh. “Don’t you hate lawyers?” They were standing in front of the bowfronted brick house where she had her room. “Goodnight, Don,” she said. “Goodnight, Mary, try and sleep.”
Monday was like another Sunday. She woke late. It was an agony getting out of bed. It was a fight to put on her clothes, to go down to the office and face the defeated eyes. The people she met on the street seemed to look away from her when she passed them. Death watch. The streets were quiet, even the traffic seemed muffled as if the whole city were under the terror of dying that night. The day passed in a monotonous mumble of words, columns in newspapers, telephone calls. Death watch. That night she had a moment of fierce excitement when she and Don started for Charlestown to join the protest parade. She hadn’t expected they’d be so many. Gusts of singing, scattered bars of the International burst and faded above the packed heads between the blank windows of the dingy houses. Death watch. On one side of her was a little man with eyeglasses who said he was a musicteacher, on the other a Jewish girl, a member of the Ladies’ Fullfashioned Hosiery Workers. They linked arms. Don was in the front rank, a little ahead. They were crossing the bridge. They were walking on cobbles on a badlylighted street under an elevated structure. Trains roared overhead. “Only a few blocks from Charlestown jail,” a voice yelled.
This time the cops were using their clubs. There was the clatter of the horses’ hoofs on the cobbles and the whack thud whack thud of the clubs. And way off the jangle jangle of patrolwagons. Mary was terribly scared. A big truck was bearing down on her. She jumped to one side out of the way behind one of the girder supports. Two cops had hold of her. She clung to the grimy girder. A cop was cracking her on the hand with his club. She wasn’t much hurt, she was in a patrolwagon, she’d lost her hat and her hair had come down. She caught herself thinking that she ought to have her hair bobbed if she was going to do much of this sort of thing. “Anybody know where Don Stevens is?” Don’s voice came a little shakily from the blackness in front. “That you, Mary?” “How are you, Don?” “O.K. Sure. A little battered round the head an’ ears.” “He’s bleedin’ terrible,” came another man’s voice. “Comrades, let’s sing,” Don’s voice shouted. Mary forgot everything as her voice joined his voice, all their voices, the voices of the crowds being driven back across the bridge in singing:
Arise ye prisoners of starvation…
Newsreel LXVI
HOLMES DENIES STAY
A better world’s in birth
Tiny Wasps Imported From Korea In Battle To Death With Asiatic Beetle
BOY CARRIED MILE DOWN SEWER; SHOT OUT ALIVE
CHICAGO BARS MEETINGS
For justice thunders condemnation
Washington Keeps Eye On Radicals
Arise rejected of the earth
PARIS BRUSSELS MOSCOW GENEVA ADD THEIR VOICES
It is the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
Geologist Lost In Cave Six Days
The International Party
SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE
Shall be the human race.
Much I thought of you when I was lying in the death house — the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground where there was all the life and the joy of liberty — just one step from the wall that contains the buried agony of three buried souls. It would remind me so often of you and of your sister and I wish I could see you ev ery moment, but I feel better that you will not come to the death house so that you could not see the horrible picture of three living in agony waiting to be electrocuted.
The Camera Eye (50)
they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons
all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight
there is nothing left to do we are beaten we the beaten crowd together in these old dingy schoolrooms on Salem Street shuffle up and down the gritty creaking stairs sit hunched with bowed heads on benches and hear the old words of the haters of oppression made new in sweat and agony tonight
our work is over the scribbled phrases the nights typing releases the smell of the printshop the sharp reek of newprinted leaflets the rush for Western Union stringing words into wires the search for stinging words to make you feel who are your oppressors America