The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

That it seemed was all they could do and after June realized that they couldn’t shout themselves to a more bloodthirsty pitch and she could not push through to see the fighting that was going on, she lost her enthusiasm and turned to the bloody policeman.

This time, he could see the police card that was pinned to the front of her coat and allowed her to stand at the wagon and survey the prisoners as they were pushed through the crowd and handed in. It was impossible to find out names. There were too many of them. One after another, five wagons drew up, received their load and departed. When no more arrests were made, the crowd dispersed.

June found time to observe from her position of vantage that nine-tenths of the prisoners were well-dressed youths, quite totteringly drunk. By their tattered American flags they were in favor of the war which was to be voted on the next day. It was harder to tell which were pacifists and which bystanders who had become involved.

But it was easy enough to complete the story by calling up the Baltimore police station where the prisoners had been taken. There she found that five were professed pacifists. The captain was affable enough to tell her that most of the crowd had been enthusiastic young city men of reliable parentage who had been released on cognizance.

“My dear,” she told her mother, “it was just fun. It was like a holiday or a picnic and I’m tickled to death that I got the assignment. There were four young women in the party and about fifteen young men, all from Columbia, but me.” (It was when she had returned to New York and was relating the exciting adventure. She had left on such short notice that there was not even time to telephone her mother that she was going to leave the city for several days. She just arrived at the office in the morning, found a note there from Ivan to take the Chinatown bus at Union Square and go to Washington.)

“The two drivers of the bus were such a strange contrast to the students who were so enthusiastic. It seemed to me that they typified the American people. They were just ordinary bus drivers and didn’t have any conviction one way or the other. Their usual work every day is to station themselves on the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway and make up excursions of sightseers. And here they were hired for this funny job.

“We rolled out of New York, crossed the river on a ferry and went through Newark with placards all over the car demanding peace. Some people cheered, but most of them were indifferent. They didn’t seem to care whether war were declared the next day or not. And everywhere we’d stop and some of the students would make speeches in favor of peace. Or at least try to make speeches. Most of the time, a policeman would come along and tell us to move on. They were very good-natured about it and accepted it as a lark.

“We stayed in Philadelphia the first night and had a long, long drive the next day to get to Baltimore that evening. We all were sunburned and our lips got chapped and we had lunch at a farmhouse. A professor from Columbia chaperoned the party and paid all the bills.

“And then Baltimore and the riot. After that it seemed that the declaration of war on Monday was an anticlimax⁠—at least in personal experience. It’s really too huge to realize, even to think about.

“I was treated as a person of authority because I had to send stories by telegraph once or twice every day⁠—on the condition of the countryside on the brink of the declaration of war. Most of it was imaginative, because the country people were all quite solid, too solid even to care whether we were rabidly pacifists or not. And then we got to Washington, too worn out and dirty to care whether war was declared and that was the end of the assignment.”

One day June was walking leisurely along Fourteenth Street when she met Terry Wode coming out of a saloon.

“A little appetizer,” he murmured, wiping his lips.

“Aren’t you pretty far uptown?” June reproved him. “And I thought that you weren’t going to do any investigating without me.”

Terry was a feature writer whom June had met while she was working on the Clarion, with whom she had often joined forces while on an assignment. Some time before, they had started what they called an investigation of all the saloons, between the Battery and Canal Street and the East and North Rivers. By limiting themselves thus they had hopes of someday visiting them all. (But they had not finished their explorations before prohibition went into effect.)

“Why, it’s only twelve o’clock and you know I never begin my investigations until two. As I said, I merely dropped in to build up an appetite for lunch and if you’ll come in and have a glass of port I’ll take you along. You’ll have an opportunity of meeting Mr. Hugh Brace, assistant managing editor of the Flame. I’ve got to hand in the stuff for the dramatic page today.”

“Sure, I’d love to. But I’ve already got an appetite and don’t want to drink. You’re only looking for a chance and an excuse to go back into a saloon again.”

As they entered a German restaurant on Third Avenue, a young man rose from his table to meet them.

Hugh Brace was a tall, slightly-built youth who was thirty-three and looked twenty-three. There was a look of great delicacy about him, an appearance of living in the night hours and sleeping during the day. As a matter of fact most of his work was done at night, not only on his own writing, but his editorial work on the Flame, a monthly magazine.

An