The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 41
“They are flattening Denny Hill,” said the man, his face pressed against the window. “Farewell, Rome of the West, the City of Seven Hills is now six.”
Rye wasn’t sure what to think of any of this.
The train rattled along Elliott Bay, then through a tunnel behind the piers, and at last into King Station south of downtown, its huge clock tower rising into the low gray clouds.
Gurley came back from the dining car with a man and a sandwich. The sandwich was wrapped in waxed paper, the man enduring a Gurley lecture, “. . . not trying to convince you of anything except that which you claim to believe,” and without a beat, she handed Rye “turkey and cheese,” then back to the man, “while you fret over a few extra pennies going to the poor,” then to Rye, “they were out of mustard,” then back to the man, “the rich live on untold millions in interest and inheritance, all of it unearned, by your own definition a free handout and proof of your inherent hypocrisy, now I hope you will pardon my candor and my brusqueness, but good day, sir,” and she dropped into the seat next to Rye. “Did you want coffee?”
Rye spent the day like this, in this revolving door of Gurley’s considerable energies, first at the train station, where she introduced him to a tall union man, “James Garrett, IWW Puget Sound organizer, this is Ryan Dolan, sixteen-year-old orphan the Spokane police very nearly beat to death—” Garrett escorted Gurley to a female boardinghouse and Rye to a flop around the corner where he dropped his bag in his room and went down to the lobby to find Gurley and a red-faced man with a notebook and pen already in deep conversation.
“I’m telling you, it’s not like Missoula. If that was a skirmish in the free speech war, this is Antietam,” Gurley said, and without pause, she touched the red-faced man on the arm. “Olen Parr, this is Ryan Dolan, sixteen-year-old orphan beaten and arrested in Spokane for nothing more than standing on the street, and then crowded into a sweatbox with thirty other men.”
“Son of a bitch.” The man looked down to write in his notebook. “Is that so?”
“Well,” Rye said, “twenty-eight, but . . . yeah.”
“Son of a bitch,” the man said again.
“Olen, walk with us.” Gurley rose and, her hand falling easily on Rye’s arm, spoke over her shoulder at Olen as they walked through the cluttered lobby. “Ryan here was on bread and water for two weeks, and he is only sixteen years old and an orphan to boot.”
“Is that so?” Olen muttered. “Son of a bitch.” Rye wished she’d go easy on the young-orphan talk, which made him sound like a baby left on her doorstep.
As they stepped through the door, she said to him, “Olen is the editor of the Socialist newspaper.”
On the sidewalk, Olen looked stricken. “But I’m not anymore, Gurley.”
“What?” She stopped, turned.
“You didn’t hear? I split with the Socialist Party in July, and went with the Socialist Workers Party, but then I left them, too.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, we got into it with the Central Branch at the state convention over their platform, those uptown sons of bitches handcuffed us and pushed the Pike Street radicals aside, so I walked out and joined the SWP for two weeks, but those petite bourgeois sons of bitches were like a knitting club, so we finally had our own goddamned convention.”
“You quit the socialists to have your own socialist convention?”
“Then National failed to recognize us, so we quit altogether.”
“You quit the Socialists? Olen, you edit a newspaper called The Socialist.”
“Like I said, I don’t anymore. I’m in the Wage Workers Party now. We started a newspaper called The Workingman Paper, but we only printed two issues. Now it’s called The Agitator.”
Gurley stared at the ground for a moment. She looked over at Rye, who had no idea what to make of any of this. He tried shrugging with his eyebrows.
She abruptly started walking again, hand on Rye’s arm, Olen at full pace behind them. “Well, you should still write about Ryan here, a poor orphan fighting for justice and for freedom of speech—”
“And to get my brother out of jail,” Rye interjected for the first time.
“Yes!” she said. “And for his equally courageous brother. That’s what we need you to write, Olen, that we came to raise money to launch a second free speech day in Spokane and to hire a lawyer of national caliber to eventually get those five hundred brave men, including Ryan’s only living relative, out of that horrible jail!”
“Five hundred. Son of a bitch.” Olen was back to scribbling in his notebook. “Is that so?”
Gurley tapped Olen Parr’s pad with her finger. “Five hundred workers whose only crime was to speak freely in the street and to seek a job without paying a crook for it! The cops filled the jail and filled the brig at Fort Wright, and they locked poor Ryan here in an old school with no heat and no electricity.”
“And he’s an orphan, you say?”
“Son of a bitch,” Rye muttered to himself.
“The police don’t even wait for them to speak now,” Gurley continued. “Man climbs off a train or asks for directions, they shackle him on the spot. It’s tyranny!” She turned them around a corner, the sidewalk rising up a hill so steep that the side door was on the second floor in front of the building. “You need to see for yourself, Olen. Come! Write about it! It’s a great story. An outrage.”
“Well, we have a committee meeting next week to vote in our bylaws, but I might be able to come after that.”
“That will be too late.”
“It’s the bylaws, Gurley.”
“Well, for God’s sake, at least write something about our trip, Olen. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Well, sure,” he said, his face flushing.
She tapped his pad again. “In ten