“Nor me neither.”
“And it's always going to be so?”
“You can just bet,” he assured her.
“I thought I was going to be happy married,” she went on; “but I never dreamed it would be like this.” She turned her head on his shoulder and kissed his cheek. “Billy, it isn't happiness. It's heaven.”
And Billy resolutely kept undivulged the cut in wages. Not until two weeks later, when it went into effect, and he poured the diminished sum into her lap, did he break it to her. The next day, Bert and Mary, already a month married, had Sunday dinner with them, and the matter came up for discussion. Bert was particularly pessimistic, and muttered dark hints of an impending strike in the railroad shops.
“If you'd all shut your traps, it'd be all right,” Mary criticized. “These union agitators get the railroad sore. They give me the cramp, the way they butt in an' stir up trouble. If I was boss I'd cut the wages of any man that listened to them.”
“Yet you belonged to the laundry workers' union,” Saxon rebuked gently.
“Because I had to or I wouldn't a-got work. An' much good it ever done me.”
“But look at Billy,” Bert argued. “The teamsters ain't ben sayin' a word, not a peep, an' everything lovely, and then, bang, right in the neck, a ten per cent cut. Oh, hell, what chance have we got? We lose. There's nothin' left for us in this country we've made and our fathers an' mothers before us. We're all shot to pieces. We can see our finish—we, the old stock, the children of the white people that broke away from England an' licked the tar outa her, that freed the slaves, an' fought the Indians, 'an made the West! Any gink with half an eye can see it comin'.”
“But what are we going to do about it?” Saxon questioned anxiously.