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 penciclass="underline" 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.