them came from was Canarsje, 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 Sun-
day 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 flimsy under his elbow. The Sunday
editor had scrawled across the top of it in red pen-
cil: "Why wish this on me?"
"Well young lady," he said without looking up,
"you've written a first rate propaganda piece for
the
N
arion
or some other parlor pink 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 got-
ten 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 boarding house
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 differ-
ently," said Mary French coldly. They were never
very good friends again after that.
Gus Moscowski found her a room with heavy
lacecurtains 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.",
undernourished children, sanitary conditions, crime,
took trips on interurban trolleys and slow locals to
Rankin and Braddock and Homestead an Bessemer
and as far as Youngstown and Steubenville and
Gary, took notes on speeches of Foster and Fitz-
patrick, 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
PARTISAN
REVIEW
stoops. "And to think," said Gus of the troopers,
"that the sonsobitchcs 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
V.P.
men
into sending straight stories, smoothed out the gram-
mar in the' English language 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 pathetic
wreck of some family's parlor, sofa cut open, chairs
smashed, chinacloset hacked to pieces with an axe,
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 for a second 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 com-
ing 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 any-
thing 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 woiking-
class won't stick together. Every kind of damn for-
eigner thinks the others is bums and the 'mericans
they think everybody's a bum except 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."
5
