He got to talking to a young narrowfaced fellow at the bar who had just been to a peace meeting at Madison Square Garden. Charley pricked his ears up when the fellow said there’d be a revolution in New York if they tried to force conscription on the country. His name was Benny Compton and he’d been studying law at New York University. Charley went and sat with him at a table with another fellow who was from Minnesota and who was a reporter on The Call. Charley asked them about the chances of working his way through the engineering school. He’d about decided to back out of this ambulance proposition. But they didn’t seem to think there was much chance if you hadn’t any money saved up to start on. The Minnesota man said New York was no place for a poor man.
“Aw, hell; I guess I’ll go to the war,” said Charley.
“It’s the duty of every radical to go to jail first,” said Benny Compton. “Anyway, there’ll be a revolution. The working class won’t stand for this much longer.”
“If you want to make some jack the thing to do is to go over to Bayonne and get a job in a munitions factory,” said the man from Minnesota in a tired voice.
“A man who does that is a traitor to his class,” said Benny Compton.
“A working stiff’s in a hell of a situation,” said Charley. “Damn it, I don’t want to spend all my life patchin’ up tin lizzies at seventyfive a month.”
“Didn’t Eugene V. Debs say, ‘I want to rise with the ranks, not from them?’”
“After all, Benny, ain’t you studyin’ night an’ day to get to be a lawyer an’ get out of the workin’ class?” said the man from Minnesota.
“That is so I can be of some use in the struggle… I want to be a wellsharpened instrument. We must fight capitalists with their own weapons.”
“I wonder what I’ll do when they suppress The Call.”
“They won’t dare suppress it.”
“Sure, they will. We’re in this war to defend the Morgan loans… They’ll use it to clear up opposition at home, sure as my name’s Johnson.”
“Talking of that, I got some dope. My sister, see, she’s a stenographer… She works for J. Ward Moorehouse, the public relations counsel, you know… he does propaganda for the Morgans and the Rockefellers. Well, she said that all this year he’s been working with a French secret mission. The big interests are scared to death of a revolution in France. They paid him ten thousand dollars for his services. He runs pro-war stuff through a feature syndicate. And they call this a free country.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised at anything,” said the man from Minnesota, pouring himself out the last of the bottle of wine. “Why, any one of us may be a government agent or a spy right at this minute.” The three of them sat there looking at each other. It gave Charley chills down his spine.
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell ye… My sister, she knows all about it, see, on account of workin’ in this guy’s office… It’s a plot of the big interests, Morgan an’ them, to defeat the workers by sendin’ ’em off to the war. Once they get you in the army you can’t howl about civic liberty or the Bill of Rights… They can shoot you without trial, see?”
“It’s an outrage… The people of the Northwest won’t stand for it,” said the man from Minnesota. “Look here, you’ve been out there more recently than I have. La Follette expresses the opinion of people out there, don’t he?”
“Sure,” said Charley.
“Well, what the hell?”
“It’s too deep for me,” said Charley and started working his way among the closepacked tables to find Doc. Doc was pretty drunk, and Charley was afraid the evening would start running into money, so they said goodby to Mr. Segal who said please to kill a lot of Germans just for him, and they went out and started walking west along Houston Street. There were pushcarts all along the curb with flares that made the packed faces along the sidewalk glow red in the rainy darkness.
They came out at the end of a wide avenue crowded with people pouring out from a theater. In front of the Cosmopolitan Café a man was speaking on a soapbox. As the people came out of the theater they surged around him. Doc and Charley edged their way through to see what the trouble was. They could only catch scraps of what the man was shouting in a hoarse barking voice:
“A few days ago I was sittin’ in the Cooper Institute listenin’ to Eugene Victor Debs, and what was he sayin’?… ‘What is this civilization, this democracy that the bosses are asking you workers to give your lives to save, what does it mean to you except wageslavery, what is…?’”
“Hey, shut up, youse… If you don’t like it go back where you came from,” came voices from the crowd.
“Freedom to work so that the bosses can get rich… Opportunity to starve to death if you get fired from your job.”
Doc and Charley were shoved from behind. The man toppled off his box and disappeared. The whole end of the avenue filled with a milling crowd. Doc was sparring with a big man in overalls. A cop came between them hitting right and left with his billy. Doc hauled off to slam the cop but Charley caught his arm and pulled him out of the scrimmage.
“Hey, for crissake, Doc, this ain’t the war yet,” said Charley. Doc was red in the face. “Ah didn’t like that guy’s looks,” he said.
Behind the cops two policedepartment cars with big searchlights were charging the crowd. Arms, heads, hats, jostling shoulders, riot-sticks rising and falling stood out black against the tremendous white of the searchlights. Charley pulled Doc against the plateglass window of the café.
“Say, Doc, we don’t want to get in the can and lose the boat,” Charley whispered in his ear. “What’s the use?” said Doc. “It’ll all go bellyup before we get there.”
“Today the voikers run before the cops, but soon it will be the cops run before the voikers,” someone yelled. Someone else started singing The Marseillaise. Voices joined. Doc and Charley were jammed with their shoulders against the plate glass. Behind them the café was full of faces swimming in blue crinkly tobaccosmoke like fish in an aquarium. The plate glass suddenly smashed. People in the café were hopping to their feet. “Look out for the Cossacks,” a voice yelled.
A cordon of cops was working down the avenue. The empty pavement behind them widened. The other way mounted police were coming out of Houston Street. In the open space a patrolwagon parked. Cops were shoving men and women into it.
Doc and Charley ducked past a mounted policeman who was trotting his horse with a great clatter down the inside of the sidewalk, and shot round the corner. The Bowery was empty and dark. They walked west toward the hotel.
“My God,” said Charley, “you almost got us locked up that time… I’m all set to go to France now, and I wanter go.”
A week later they were on the Chicago of the French Line steaming out through the Narrows. They had hangovers from their farewell party and felt a little sick from the smell of the boat and still had the music of the jazzband on the wharf ringing through their heads. The day was overcast, with a low lid of leaden clouds, looked like it was going to snow. The sailors were French and the stewards were French. They had wine with their first meal. There was a whole tableful of other guys going over in the ambulance service.
After dinner Doc went down to the cabin to go to sleep. Charley roamed around the ship with his hands in his pockets without knowing what to do with himself. In the stern they were taking the canvas cover off the seventyfive gun. He walked round the lowerdeck full of barrels and packingcases and stumbled across coils of big fuzzy cable to the bow. In the bow there was a little pinkfaced French sailor with a red tassel on his cap stationed as a lookout.