The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [414]
The sneer from the old days, the old Studs Lonigan sneer of confidence and a superior feeling came on his face, and he threw back his aching shoulders. He wanted to be noticed by these passing strangers, wanted them to see his surly expression telling them, he hoped, that here was a guy who did not give a good whooping goddamn and just walked along, taking his time and did not run to get out of the rain and hide from it in doorways, worried and afraid. A guy who had a perfect right to worry about plenty of things, plenty, and still did not worry. He stopped in a building entrance-way and drew out his package of cigarettes. Shouldn’t smoke. Phrigg you Doctor O’Donnell! Phrigg you Catherine! Phrigg everybody! He made the act of lighting a cigarette into a gesture of defiance. He stood watching a street car crawl northward, its roof blackened by rain. Automobiles swished past it. Its gong clanged. A second surface car crawled behind it.
“Look at the rain, just like a silver stream from the heavens, Martha,” a sallow fellow with a ruined panama hat said to a girl.
Studs glanced at them, sneered. But she was nice.
“It just looks wet to me,” she said.
“But you don’t see it with the poet’s lyric eye.”
Poet. He better watch himself before somebody slapped his wrist and kidnapped him.
“Now, as a poet, what does it mean, this silver rain, these puny crawling little packages of wet mortality?”
“Oh, Alvin, please.”
Studs sneered at the nut, walked out of the entrance-way laughing to himself. Anyway, he wasn’t like that pansy. He tried to forget the discomforts of wet feet, soaked clothing, the feeling of dirtiness he had. That pansy poet. Silver rain. B.S. A cold rain-drop spattered on his cheek. Some day, some day, goddamn it, if he wouldn’t make the f n world take back everything it was doing to him. Some day he would make the world, and plenty of damn bastards in it, too, eat what he was eating, and in bigger doses. Some day, he, Studs Lonigan, was going to bust loose like hell on wheels, and when he did, look out, you goddamn world!
He lit a fresh cigarette from his soggy butt. He sneezed. He had to laugh, and couldn’t get over what that lily of a poet had been springing on the dame. Tell it to Martin tonight. He sneezed again, and the sneeze made him fear he was getting sick. He felt himself growing weak, and under the armpits he was sticky and clammy. He was afraid of poverty, and the fight he would have to make. He was afraid that he would get sick, die, from being exposed in this rain. He wished, with a weak will, that many things that had been done could be undone. If he had never met Catherine. If they’d never had that scrap and made up just the way they had. If he had never gone to that New Year’s Eve party in 1929. If he hadn’t drunk as much as he had in the old days. If he had only let himself get an education. If he hadn’t lost his dough in Imbray stock. He stepped into the crowded entrance-way of a music store near Van Buren Street and stood listening to radio music. He noticed the faces on the men about him, blank and dull and dreamy, hopeless-looking. They seemed half asleep on their feet. Mopes. Studs muttered to himself. Look out, boys,