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

hair, blue eyes and a thin little face. There was a flyaway look about her and you felt ponderous when with her. Perhaps that was why Hugh and she lived together for only two months.

The evenings were not all devoted to dinner parties. Daniel liked to visit burlesque shows occasionally, although once when he and June and Kenneth went to one on Fourteenth Street, he got up and walked out because too much emphasis was laid on the osculatory habits of the French comedian. Daniel was fiercely pro-French. The war seemed to enter into everything.

Kenneth developed a penchant (he called it that himself) for riding on Staten Island ferry boats, and, if the night were especially warm, continuing to South Beach on the front seat of an open car. If it was hot, the four of them and whoever else happened to be along, threw off their clothes on the dark beach and scampered into the surf. It was quite black and June did not feel that she was being immodest.

There was even a night at Coney Island, and Hugh, who had never been there before, insisted on riding on all the roller coasters and kissing June in the tunnels. And they all squealed at each steep descent.

From the many holidays they took to celebrate nothing in particular you would naturally think that no work was done at the Flame office. But the manuscripts were read and returned, book reviews were written, the accepted contributions sent to the printer and engraver, and the magazine came out as usual once a month.

On a magazine dealing with ideas about the news of the month rather than the news itself, exciting things do not happen with enough frequency to make them commonplace. Newspaper life is crammed with events, which taken by themselves would provide ideal situations around which to write many novels. But they come so thick and fast that they lose in emphasis. When June had worked on the Flame for six months she began to feel as though she were regaining perspective.

There was excitement though. For instance, one of the artists drew at random a picture of two women, one upright and lofty, looking to the horizon, the other kneeling at her feet and gazing up at her wistfully.

“Didn’t draw anything for this issue,” he told Hugh vaguely. “I was working on a portrait. Can you use this, do you think?” and he drew the picture of the two women from his portfolio.

“We need a cover for this issue and that ought to show up well.”

And the drawing was accepted as listlessly as it had been offered for it was a hot day and no one cared much whether the August number had a cover on it or not.

Later, in view of the trouble with the suffragists in Washington, Hugh decided to call it “the militant” with the result that when the magazine appeared on the newsstands it caught the eye of the suffrage party who immediately ordered five thousand copies of the drawing, and afterwards bought the original to hang at headquarters. There was much enthusiasm around the office that day for the artist was a poor man.

Twice also within the last year (but this was before June joined) the issues of the paper had aroused much excitement. Once for a Christmas poem about Mary and more especially about the nobility of Joseph who married her when she was pregnant and in danger of disgrace. There was also a picture of Christ on the cover with the announcement “Christ will speak in Brotherhood Hall.” Unfortunately, the men at the head of the company who controlled the newsstands in the subway and elevated stations were Catholics and objected to the issue. And now the Flame was no longer sold on the stands which they owned.

Another month a large clothing firm gave a full page advertisement to the magazine, offering prizes for the best essays written on several economic subjects. They had made a custom of offering prizes every year, but the Flame had never been one of the magazines to carry the advertisement. The post office took this occasion to stop the number stating as a reason that the magazine was advertising a lottery. None of the other magazines which carried the advertisement received any notice whatever.

After war was declared the capitalist press took every opportunity to sneer at the radical monthly. One month a full column called attention to a bit of verse written by one of the editors which poeticized the hungry passion of a middle-aged woman at that period in her life which is more often treated by doctors and pathologists than by poets. The poem appealed to June’s erotic sensibilities but she did not much blame the newspaper for its jostling comment. The editors themselves took it, as they took all adverse criticism, as free advertisement.

Then, as the magazine daily received more attention, and the circulation steadily rose till it was higher than it had ever been before, the post office delayed the issues more frequently, and more reluctantly released them. With the end of September, came federal officers and all the back numbers of the magazine, the material for the next number, all the contributions which were in the editorial office and all the books and correspondence of the business office were confiscated. The end had come. Everyone knew that even before more federal officers came with warrants for five of the editors and two outside contributors. June felt rather out of it⁠—for she did not regard the arrests at all seriously⁠—until she also received a slip of paper which proved to be a subpoena. The date of the trial had not been set, but until after the trial she would feel that her work on the Flame was not yet over. Meanwhile, there was nothing to do.

III

Everyone in the radical movement had gone to jail at some time or another for at least a few days,