THE MAN IN THE BROOKS SHIRT
287
fight when things get too rough. I'd like to see this country stay
out of it. That's why I'm for Thomas."
"You're a very interesting man," said the girl, tears coming
to her eyes, perhaps because of the whiskey. "I've never known
anyone like you. You're not the kind of businessman I write edi–
torials against."
"You people are crazy, though," he said genially. "You're
never going to get anywhere in America with that proletariat·stuff.
Every working man wants to live the way I do. He doesn't want
me to live the way he does. You people go at it from the wrong
end. I remember a Socialist organizer came down fifteen years ago
into Southern Illinois. I was in the coal business then, working
for my first wife's father. This Socialist was a nice fellow...."
His voice was dreamy again, but there was an undercurrent
of excitement in it.
It
was as if he were reviving some buried love
affair, or, rather, some wispy young tendresse that had never come
to anything. The Socialist organizer had been a distant connection
of his first wife's; the two men had met and had some talks; later
the Socialist had been run out of town; the man had stood aloof,
neither helping nor hindering.
"I wonder what's become of him," he said finally. "In jail
somewhere, I guess."
"Oh no," said the girl. "You don't understand modern life.
He's a big bureaucrat in the CIO. Just like a business man, only
not so well paid."
The man looked puzzled and vaguely sad. "He had a lot of
nerve," he murmured, then added quickly, in a loud, bumptious
tone, "But you're all nuts!"
The girl bit her lips. The man's vulgarity was undeniable.
For some time now she had been attempting (for her own sake) to
whitewash him, but the crude raw material would shine through in
spite of her. It had been possible for her to remain so long in the
compartment only on the basis of one of two assumptions, both of
them literary, (a) that the man was a frustrated socialist, (b) that
he was a frustrated man of sensibility, a kind of Sherwood Ander–
son character. But the man's own personality kept popping up,
perversely, like a Jack-in-the-box, to confound these theories. The
most one could say was that the man was frustrated. She had
hoped to "give him back to himself," but these fits of self-assertion
