by H. T. Tsiang
* * *
—
When he saw the tears in the eyes of this woman, heard the baby’s crying and felt the silence of a silent night, Nut thought of all that had happened to him since two o’clock Sunday afternoon. Worry. Cold. Hunger. Being beaten. Misery. Wandering. And he thought of the situation he was in now. And of the hope there was for him in the future. And his eyes were wet, also.
He turned his head towards the wall, so that the woman would not see. He felt better. For he was now rich enough to have a quiet place and a few moments of leisure for weeping.
* * *
—
While he was sentimentally overflowing, the woman thought that two dollars was too high. Nut didn’t look that prosperous. She thought that a dollar and fifty cents would be all right. She no longer had any moral or sentimental feelings. She had to be practical. She became a businesswoman. She offered Nut a bargain.
Nut didn’t know how to respond to her offer. He dried his eyes with his overcoat-sleeve and said nothing.
The woman lowered the price to one dollar.
Nut was still drying his eyes. He didn’t turn his head. He still said nothing.
The woman became angry: “Say! Can’t you see I’m without any makeup.
“I’m not old. I’m only twenty-three. I’ve often been told I was good-looking. I’m good-looking now. What?—I’m not worth even a dollar?”
Nut did not say anything. He wanted to leave. But he thought of the snow outside and hesitated.
“Make it snappy; give me seventy-five cents! I’m not a woman of the street. Tonight is the first time I’ve ever talked this way. You’re my first customer. Give me seventy-five cents! And make it snappy.”
Nut was wondering how, with nothing in his pocket, he could help her.
The woman became angrier: “I thought that only rich men were misers. You don’t look so rich. Be a good fellow. Don’t be like Wall Street.”
Nut was very sorry he had torn up all those bills in that rich man’s apartment. He was angry with himself, too.
The woman became gentler in her tone. She talked like a person pleading for mercy. “Listen, I must have twenty-five cents. Ten cents to buy a basket of rotten bananas, ten cents to buy a basket of solid bread. And five cents to a candle for our Saint. My husband sold his coat two days ago for twenty-five cents. But his overcoat is too old and nobody wants it. He must have an overcoat so he can go out to look for a job. We are hungry. We must have twenty-five cents! The baby is hungry!”
Nut struck his head with his fist. Why the hell did he tear up those bills?
Since she got no answer from Nut, she began weeping again. “Mister, I must have a quarter. A quarter for a good-looking woman. You can’t get a bargain like this in the whole world. Be a good fellow. Don’t be like Wall Street. Our Saint will bless you.”
* * *
—
Now Nut got an idea. He spoke: “Listen. I haven’t a cent in my pocket. But I can give you my coat. Tomorrow you can sell it for twenty-five cents the way your husband sold his. But you should use that twenty-five cents to buy bananas and bread and you should not spend a cent for the Saint. Why should she take twenty percent commission on what you make?”
Nut took off his overcoat and coat and put on only his overcoat. The woman was happy. She smiled. For tomorrow she was going to sell that coat and get a week’s supply of food.
Nut opened the door and was ready to leave.
The woman was surprised and began pulling Mr. Nut’s sleeve. She said, “You forgot something,” and drew him to that bed of wooden boxes and paper.
Nut asked what he had forgot. Hadn’t he left the coat as he had said he would?
“No, you forgot something!” The woman lay on her bed and began to pull up her skirt. Even in that dim light of the kerosene-lamp, things could be seen.
Nut moved towards the door.
“What? I’m clean!” said the woman.
Nut moved towards the door.
“Say, I’m clean. I’m no streetwoman. I have my husband inside. Can’t you see a man’s shoes on the floor?”
Nut moved towards the door.
“Say, young fellow, we wouldn’t take something for nothing. Our Saint would not allow us to do that.”
The husband jumped up from the bed and came in from the other room.
Nut moved towards the door.
“If you take nothing, then we take nothing. We’re willing to starve,” the wife and husband said together.
Nut moved towards the door.
The husband and wife became mad and put his coat into Nut’s hand and pushed him out.
* * *
—
Nut pushed the door open again, threw his coat into the room and swiftly ran down the stairs.
XIX:
HE SUDDENLY LOST HIS BUREAUCRATIC AIR
“Heaven is above,
Hell below.
Nothing in pocket,
Where to go?”
It was seven in the morning.
* * *
—
Nut walked back to Third Avenue and followed the Elevated going up town. He reached Fourteenth Street.
He saw Miss Stubborn, with a leather jacket on, come out of an apartment building. She ran towards Union Square in a great hurry.
Nut wanted to approach her and express his regrets and gratitude. For because of an affair of his, Miss Stubborn had been clubbed. But the street was already full of people and she was lost in the crowd.
After the fight the night before, in the cafeteria on Fourteenth Street, Comrade Stubborn had wanted to get hold of Mr. Nut and go with him to the office of the Communist paper and report the happening, but she could not find him. Therefore she went with other comrades.
When she reached the Editorial Office on Thirteenth Street,16 the elevator of the building was not running and she and the others had to climb up to the eighth floor.
She saw a person sitting on a chair with a pipe in his mouth. She thought this person was the city-editor and so she told the story about what had happened in the cafeteria.
He asked her whether this was a Class issue or just a matter concerning individuals. Stubborn said it was a Class issue, for Nut was an unemployed worker and he had been only one nickel short.
The city-editor asked again whether Nut was a party member or if he belonged to any other mass organization. Otherwise why should a Communist waste time and energy on him? Stubborn thought that was a funny question. As long as Nut was a worker, it seemed to her, it was enough.
Stubborn and the other comrades demanded an interview with the editor-in-chief.
The editor-in-chief came out from an inner room with a blue pencil stuck behind his right ear. He had a piece of paper in one hand and he was biting the fingernails of the other.
He asked what it was all about.
Stubborn again told her story.
He asked the location of the cafeteria and went back into an inner room. Again he came out looking at a small piece of paper in his hand.
From this small piece of paper he had learned, the editor-in-chief said, that the cafeteria was the same one against which the Food Workers’ Union had complained, because it had secured an injunction against picketing. It had been decided to boycott the cafeteria and now there were two charges against the place. The announcement of the boycott would appear in Tuesday’s paper, for Monday’s paper was already printed.
Comrade Stubborn was satisfied, since it had been decided that the clubbing of Nut’s head was a Class issue.
Stubborn and the comrades who had come with her asked the editor-in-chief who the person sitting at that table was—pointing to the man she had approached first. Was he the city editor? Why did he ask such funny questions?
The editor-in-chief smiled and told them
that the man was not a city-editor by any means. He was just a college graduate. He was interested in the movement and he was willing to come to this office in order to learn something. He decided that the college-graduate sympathizer had better go to shops and picket-lines to learn things there first.
When the college graduate heard this, he suddenly lost his bureaucratic air and became nervous.
* * *
—
It was not because of her oratory that Stubborn had acquired the confidence of her union, her shop-committee and her Party Unit. It was not her oratory that enabled her to act boldly in a matter like this. For she was not a good speaker.
Nor was it because of her special dancing at the Webster Hall affairs;17 for she was seldom there and whenever she was there, it was in order to get contributions or to sell some pamphlets.
It was because she was a good Communist.
Occasionally, a millionaire’s son or a well-known writer got into a mess at a demonstration and so got his picture in the paper. The publicity he received would be enough; he was satisfied and would never show up again. Stubborn picketed and demonstrated not once or twice—but all the time.
(Some Communists who like excitement do participate in demonstrations. But when it comes to the plodding routine work, they become spiritless.)
Stubborn sold more copies of the party paper than many other comrades. Every time she sold a copy she got the address of the buyer. And she made a note of it and wrote to get that person’s opinions. When she found out that he or she was a sympathizer or party member, she thought that her job was done and she passed the address along to a less experienced comrade who could sell the paper to that person from then on. She wanted to use her time on strangers only.
In getting signatures for the election campaign or signatures for petitions of various kinds, she always left the radical district to others and herself approached a more backward and conservative district. Work in a conservative district took more time. It needed more argument. But she thought that it was the only way to make the movement grow.
At the open-air meetings, she always mixed with the crowd and listened to their gossip and comment. And then she reported what she had heard to the speaker! If the talk she heard brought up an issue of general importance, she made a report of her finding to the party—and asked the editor to solve the difficult points in the Open Question column.
When she rode in the subway, she always sat among the poorly-dressed women or men and spread the Party paper out widely so that they could see it; for she remembered how she had become radical. When she finished reading the paper, she always left it on a seat and hoped someone else would pick it up.
Whenever she passed by a newsstand, she would ask the newsdealer for the Party paper. For she knew frequent mention of the paper gave it publicity.
* * *
—
She did these things because she was interested in doing them—not because they were an assignment. Assignments were easily dodged, anyway. She could always have said she had to make a living and she was not a Party-paid functionary. But she enjoyed her work for the movement.
XX:
“YOU! YOU! YOU!”
“Heaven is above,
Hell below.
Nothing in pocket,
Where to go?”
At half past eight Monday morning.
Nut saw many Communists and sympathizers walking on the Northside of Fourteenth Street between Second and Third Avenue. Most of them had placards under their overcoats.
The City Marshal brought a few movers with him and came to the building in which Stubborn’s family lived, to bring the family possessions to the street.
The movers complained that the snow had made the stairs wet and that they had to move a sick woman from the top floor down to the street—a trip of five flights of stairs. Perhaps the movers did not care for a sick woman, for she had to die anyhow; but they had to take care of themselves.
And now in front of the building, on the snowy, smudged pavement, there were beds, tables, mattresses, chairs, cooking utensils, papers, clothes and other things; and on all these furnishings snow was still falling.
In the hallway a sick woman lay on a bed, shivering and trembling. Near the sick woman, a middle-aged man stood by. His mouth was open and his eyes alternately looked at his wife and at the things on the pavement.
The passers-by threw pennies and nickels on the mattress and tables.
* * *
—
At nine o’clock a young girl emerged from the crowd and stepped on a table.
It was Stubborn! She spoke to the people there hesitatingly—in broken sentences.
And now placards appeared. . . . The crowd applauded and shouted.
Because of the shouts and applause of the crowd, the girl became more courageous. Her voice became louder and clearer.
“The evicted family is my family!” she said. “Look! There! That man is my father. Look at him again. Look at his face. Look at his eyes. Look at his bowed back. Do you believe that he, my father, is a lazy bum—a man who doesn’t want to work?”
“No!” shouted the crowd.
“Look at my hands!” the father cried out. “See how tough and rough they are. I’ve worked all my life. Only a few months ago, I lost my job.”
“Now,” exclaimed Stubborn, “look at that sick woman. She is my mother. Do you think I lie when I say she’s sick—sick in this snow and cold? The landlord is killing her!”
“The landlord’s a bastard!” said a woman passerby.
“Now look at me,” continued Stubborn, “I’ve done everything I could to make a few dollars to buy bread and butter for my unemployed father and my sick mother! Do you think that I should see my father and my sick mother starve and pay the landlord? I have done all I can to make a few dollars to pay the rent. One thing I did not do and won’t ever do. . . .”
“Be friendly to your landlord, Mr. System. Everything would be all right! Girl, you’ve a nice face, don’t be so stubborn!” advised a well-dressed fellow.
“How long have we lived in this building?” Stubborn again continued. “A year! How much rent do we owe the landlord? Two months. Are we the only family who are behind in paying the landlord? There are sixteen million workers out of jobs!
“Are you sure that some day you won’t be like our family? Maybe it will be you. Maybe you! Maybe all of you! You! You! You!
“Why are you walking in the snow, to get to your work? Why do you live in this poor neighborhood? We are all in the same boat.
“We must all fight against this eviction! When you fight for my family, you are fighting for yourselves!”
* * *
—
“Down with Capitalism!” came a voice from the crowd.
* * *
—
Before Stubborn had a chance to say anything else, some plainclothesmen, who had pushed their way through the orderly crowd, forced Stubborn off the table.
After Stubborn had been forced down from the table another speaker stood up. The speaker was not on a table nor even on a chair, but on two men’s crossed arms.
As the speaker was thickly surrounded by the crowd, the police could not break in.
When the police pushed, the whole crowd moved in the direction of the push—and the speaker went on just the same.
And while the speaker spoke, the crowd moved the furniture into the building, and up into the rooms from which it had been taken.
How long Stubborn’s family would remain in the apartment no one could tell. But everyone could see that her family had that day moved in. And that because of the struggle, the eviction had been stopped.
* * *
—
As the fighting went on Mr. Wiseguy and Miss Digger, who had come out of the rich men’s night club, passed by and
stopped to look on a little while.
Miss Digger had picked up so many five-dollar bills at the club, she felt she was rich, and that she was surely going to move out of that East Side dump in which she had been living.
When the fighting against eviction was going on, Nut was in the crowd. He did all that he could to stop the dispossessing and help move the furniture in again. And he was glad that he had a chance to pay his tribute to Stubborn.
Later when all was over, Nut in his wanderings stopped in front of a ten-cent movie on Third Avenue near Fourteenth Street. A poster made of cardboard, said:
“Prosperity is coming back very soon.
A New Deal!”
Nut stamped his foot on the pavement and exclaimed: “Damn Liar!”
As he stamped his foot, a dime dropped out from the cuff of his trousers. It was his dime. It was his long-lost dime! It was his “prosperity!”
He picked up the dime. He got a ticket for the movie.
He slept there. He slept in a dime hotel.
He slept on a chair bed!
XXI:
HE WAS SATIRIZING
. . . Try my pill—New Deal!
Hello,
Everybody:
How do you feel?”
When the deal was old,
We were told:
“Chicken in every pot!”18
Now the deal is new—
So the guy is telling you.
I see no chicken hot.
And I even lost my little pot.
When the deal was old,
We were told:
“There is a little dark spot
In the sun, you see—
So the depression
Hits you and me.”
But it’s the same sun
In one country where