Mary hardly knew Ben he looked so much older. There was grey in the hair spilling out untidily from under his cap. He stooped and peered into her face querulously through his thick glasses. He didn’t shake hands. “Well, I might as well tell you… you’ll know it soon enough if you don’t know it already… I’ve been expelled from the party… oppositionist… exceptionalism… a lot of nonsense… Well, that doesn’t matter, I’m still a revolutionist… I’ll continue to work outside of the party.”
“Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry,” was all Mary could find to say. “You know I don’t know anything except what I read in the Daily. It all seems too terrible to me.” “Let’s go out, that guard’s watching us.” Outside Ben began to shiver from the cold. His wrists stuck out red from his frayed green overcoat with sleeves much too short for his long arms. “Oh, where can we go?” Mary kept saying.
Finally they went down into a basement automat and sat talking in low voices over a cup of coffee. “I didn’t want to go to your place because I didn’t want to meet Stevens… Stevens and me have never been friends, you know that… Now he’s in with the comintern crowd. He’ll make the centralcommittee when they’ve cleaned out all the brains.”
“But, Ben, people can have differences of opinion and still…”
“A party of yesmen… that’ll be great… But, Mary, I had to see you… I feel so lonely suddenly… you know, cut off from every You know if we hadn’t been fools we’d have had that baby that time… we’d still love each other… Mary, you were very lovely to me when I first got out of jail… Say, where’s your friend Ada, the musician who had that fancy apartment?”
“Oh, she’s as silly as ever… running around with some fool violinist or other.”
“I’ve always liked music… I ought to have kept you, Mary.”
“A lot of water’s run under the bridge since then,” said Mary coldly.
“Are you happy with Stevens? I haven’t any right to ask.”
“But, Ben, what’s the use of raking all this old stuff up?”
“You see, often a young guy thinks, I’ll sacrifice everything, and then when he is cut off all that side of his life, he’s not as good as he was, do you see? For the first time in my life I have no contact. I thought maybe you could get me in on reliefwork somehow. The discipline isn’t so strict in the relief organizations.”
“I don’t think they want any disrupting influences in the I.L.D.,” said Mary.
“So I’m a disrupter to you too… All right, in the end the workingclass will judge between us.”
“Let’s not talk about it, Ben.”
“I’d like you to put it up to Stevens and ask him to sound out the properquarters… that’s not much to ask, is it?”
“But Don’s not here at present.” Before she could catch herself she’d blurted it out.
Ben looked her in the eye with a sudden sharp look.
“He hasn’t by any chance sailed for Moscow with certain other comrades?”
“He’s gone to Pittsburgh on secret partywork and for God’s sake shut up about it. You just got hold of me to pump me.” She got to her feet, her face flaming. “Well, goodby, Mr. Compton… You don’t happen to be a stoolpigeon as well as a disrupter, do you?”
Ben Compton’s face broke in pieces suddenly the way a child’s face does when it is just going to bawl. He sat there staring at her, senselessly scraping the spoon round and round in the empty coffeemug. She was halfway up the stairs when on an impulse she went back and stood for a second looking down at his bowed head. “Ben,” she said in a gentler voice, “I shouldn’t have said that… without proof… I don’t believe it.” Ben Compton didn’t look up. She went up the stairs again out into the stinging wind and hurried down Fortysecond Street in the afternoon crowd and took the subway down to Union Square.
The last day of the year Mary French got a telegram at the office from Ada Cohn. PLEASE PLEASE COMMUNICATE YOUR MOTHER IN TOWN AT PLAZA SAILING SOON WANTS TO SEE YOU DOESN’T KNOW ADDRESS WHAT SHALL I TELL HER. Newyearsday there wasn’t much doing at the office. Mary was the only one who had turned up, so in the middle of the morning she called up the Plaza and asked for Mrs. French. No such party staying there. Next she called up Ada. Ada talked and talked about how Mary’s mother had married again, a Judge Blake, a very prominent man, a retired federal circuit judge, such an attractive man with a white vandyke beard and Ada had to see Mary and Mrs. Blake had been so sweet to her and they’d asked her to dinner at the Plaza and wanted to know all about Mary and that she’d had to admit that she never saw her although she was her best friend and she’d been to a newyearseve party and had such a headache she couldn’t practice and she’d invited some lovely people in that afternoon and wouldn’t Mary come, she’d be sure to like them.
Mary almost hung up on her, Ada sounded so silly, but she said she’d call her back right away after she’d talked to her mother. It ended by her going home and getting her best dress on and going uptown to the Plaza to see Judge and Mrs. Blake. She tried to find some place she could get her hair curled because she knew the first thing her mother would say was that she looked a fright, but everything was closed on account of its being newyearsday.
Judge and Mrs. Blake were getting ready to have lunch in a big private drawingroom on the corner looking out over the humped snowy hills of the park bristly with bare branches and interwoven with fastmoving shining streams of traffic. Mary’s mother didn’t look as if she’d aged a day, she was dressed in darkgreen and really looked stunning with a little white ruffle round her neck sitting there so at her ease, with rings on her fingers that sparkled in the grey winter light that came in through the big windows. The judge had a soft caressing voice. He talked elaborately about the prodigal daughter and the fatted calf until her mother broke in to say that they were going to Europe on a spree; they’d both of them made big killings on the stockexchange on the same day and they felt they owed themselves a little rest and relaxation. And she went on about how worried she’d been because all her letters had been returned from Mary’s last address and that she’d written Ada again and again and Ada had always said Mary was in Pittsburgh or Fall River or some horrible place doing social work and that she felt it was about time she gave up doing everything for the poor and unfortunate and devoted a little attention to her own kith and kin.
“I hear you are a very dreadful young lady, Mary, my dear,” said the judge, blandly, ladling some creamofcelery soup into her plate. “I hope you didn’t bring any bombs with you.” They both seemed to think that that was a splendid joke and laughed and laughed. “But to be serious,” went on the judge, “I know that social inequality is a very dreadful thing and a blot on the fair name of American democracy. But as we get older, my dear, we learn to live and let live, that we have to take the bad with the good a little.”
“Mary dear, why don’t you go abroad with Ada Cohn and have a nice rest?… I’ll find the money for the trip. I know it’ll do you good… You know I’ve never approved of your friendship with Ada Cohn. Out home we are probably a little oldfashioned about those things. Here she seems to be accepted everywhere. In fact she seems to know all the prominent musical people. Of course how good a musician she is herself I’m not in a position to judge.”