will people be when the trains start bringing home the bodies of the laborers and farmers the capitalists have murdered for the sake of greed and markets?”
Bruck raised a placating hand. “You’re not on the soapbox now, Flora. Our congressmen, our senators, are going to vote unanimously—even the fourteen said they’d go along with the party. Will you stand alone?”
“No, I suppose not,” Flora said with a weary sigh. Discipline told on her, too. “If we don’t back the caucus, what kind of party are we? We might as well be Democrats in that case.”
“That’s right,” Bruck said with an emphatic nod. “You’re just worn out because you’ve been on the stump and nobody’s listened to you. What do you say we walk across the street and get something to eat?”
“All right,” she said. “Why not? It has to be better than this.”
Bruck rescued his boater from the hat rack and set it on his head at a jaunty angle. “We’ll be back soon,” he told the secretaries, who nodded. With a flourish, he held the door open for Flora, saying, “If you will forgive the bourgeois courtesy.”
“This once,” she said, something more than half seriously. A lot of bourgeois courtesy was a way to sugar-coat oppression. Then, out in the hall, Bruck slipped an arm around her waist. He’d done that once before, and she hadn’t liked it. She didn’t like it now, either, and twisted away, glaring at him. “Be so kind as to keep your hands to yourself.”
“You begrudge bourgeois courtesy, but you’re trapped in bourgeois morality,” Bruck said, frustration on his face.
“Socialists should be free to show affection where and how they choose,” Flora answered. “On the other hand, they should also be free to keep from showing affection where there is none.”
“Does that mean what I think it means?”
“It means exactly that,” Flora said as they started down the stairs.
They walked across Centre Market Place toward the countless stalls selling food and drink in a silence that would have done for filling an icebox. From behind the butcher-shop counter, Max Fleischmann watched them and shook his head.
All of Richmond streamed toward Capitol Square. Reginald Bartlett was one more drop of water in the stream, one more straw hat and dark sack suit among thousands sweating in the early August sun. He turned to the man momentarily beside him and said, “I should be back behind the drugstore counter.”
“Is that a fact?” the other replied, not a bit put out by such familiarity, not today. “I should be adding up great long columns of figures, myself. But how often do we have the chance to see history made?”
“Not very often,” Bartlett said. He was a round-faced, smiling, freckled man of twenty-six, the kind of man who wins at poker because you trust him instinctively. “That’s why I’m on my way. The pharmacist told me to keep things running while he went to hear President Wilson, but if he’s not there, will he know I’m not there?”
“Not a chance of it,” the accountant assured him. “Not even the slightest—Oof!” Someone dug an elbow into the pit of his stomach, quite by accident. He stumbled and staggered and almost fell; had he gone down, he probably would have been trampled. As things were, he fell back several yards, and was replaced beside Bartlett by a colored laborer in overalls and a cloth cap. Nobody would be asking the Negro for a pass, not today. If he got fired tomorrow for not being on the job…he took the same chance Bartlett did.
There weren’t many Negroes in the crowd, far fewer in proportion to the mass than their numbers in Richmond as a whole. Part of the reason for that, probably, was that they had more trouble getting away from their jobs than white men did. And part of it, too, was that they had more trouble caring about the glorious destiny of the Confederate States than whites did.
The bell in the tower in the