Page:Manhattan Transfer (John Dos Passos, 1925).djvu/49

Rh She got very angry and started screeching. Then I began to learn Angleesh Go awright to 'ell, I says to her Then the old man comes and chases me out into a street with a carriage whip and says he wont pay me my week While we were arguing he got a policeman, and when I try to explain to the policeman that the old man owed me ten dollars for the week, he says Beat it you lousy wop, and cracks me on the coco with his nightstick Merde alors"

Marco was red in the face. "He call you lousy wop?"

Congo nodded his mouth full of doughnut.

"Notten but shanty Irish himself," muttered Marco in English. "I'm fed up with this rotten town

"It's the same all over the world, the police beating us up, rich people cheating us out of their starvation wages, and who's fault? Dio cane! Your fault, my fault, Emile's fault"

"We didn't make the world They did or maybe God did."

"God's on their side, like a policeman When the day comes we'll kill God I am an anarchist."

Congo hummed "les bourgeois à la lanterne nom de dieu."

"Are you one of us?"

Congo shrugged his shoulders. "I'm not a catholic or a protestant; I haven't any money and I haven't any work. Look at that." Congo pointed with a dirty finger to a long rip on his trouserknee. "That's anarchist Hell I'm going out to Senegal and get to be a nigger."

"You look like one already," laughed Emile.

"That's why they call me Congo."

"But that's all silly," went on Emile. "People are all the same. It's only that some people get ahead and others dont That's why I came to New York."

"Dio cane I think that too twentyfive years ago When you're old like me you know better. Doesnt the shame of it get you sometimes? Here" he tapped with his knuckles on his stiff shirtfront "I feel it hot and