Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [136]
They heard the click of the cue balls from the back where Stan Simonsky was practicing. An elevated train rumbled. An automobile whizzed by. A heavy-footed, well-formed girl passed.
“How you like it?”
“Push-Push!” mumbled Mike.
VII
IT WAS Saturday night. A cardboard picketing sign, letters turned downwards, lay in a corner of the small, disorderly bedroom. Mr. Le Gare looked at it. He felt like a dead man who had returned to life.
Blacklisted!
No hotel in the city would hire him. He had been a waiter all his life. What work could he do now?
When he had told his family, their faces had dropped. They were discussing it now in the dining room. They had opposed his striking, picketing the Shrifton Hotel, and serving on the strike committee, acting as treasurer for the union. They said nothing; but their silence was more criticizing than anything they might say. He had supported them for years. Now they were irked, lest he be a burden to them. Well, by God, he wouldn’t.
But what else could he do?
He had been sold out, and made the goat. Most of the other waiters had crawled back on their knees, begging for their jobs at any salary, under any condition. Yellow Scabs! They had betrayed him, betrayed the cause of the American working man. They had betrayed themselves. The rankling of defeat and disappointment grew upon him until he cursed, using the filthiest words he knew.
The blacklist meant the dust heap, the garbage can, for a man his age. And his sons, daughter, wife, didn’t understand; it was tragedy, living with people who couldn’t understand what a man was doing. Only Andy stuck by him. But Andy didn’t have a very good brain, poor boy. Andy, whose brain was not so good, alone of his children had been loyal. But Andy did not understand either.
He wasn’t a fool! He wasn’t! He had been right. And they needn’t have lost the strike, if only they had all shown unity, courage, heart. But they, foreigners, Syrian bus boys, fat Dutchmen, foreigners, hadn’t been interested in strikes. They wanted Shrifton’s crumbs. They wanted their tips. They had come over, not to make America their home, but to milk it as well as they could, and go back. They had their stocks, and some of them owned buildings. They served the rich, and tried to think that they were rich. All waiters, almost, did that; aped the rich, and thought that some day they would be rich. Scabs!
Suddenly, he laughed with twisted joy. They had sold themselves for nothing. Girls were cheaper and most of them were on the blacklist too.
He could see it so clear. They could have won if only . . . Some day all the American working-men would strike, and even the waiters would have to then, and then too . . . they would win, and men like himself wouldn’t be made goats. He clenched his weak fists, wanting to fight back. But there was no fighting left in him.
Others before him had been blacklisted, and had known his bitterness. Others had been betrayed. But it wouldn’t, couldn’t, always be thus. All that bitterness and defeat would not die. It would gnaw the souls of men. It would fester. It would spit poison. It was only with bitterness and poison that the workingmen, even the waiters, would beat the Shriftons. He vowed that his defeat would not be in vain. He would pass the bitterness of it on, help to make for that day when he would be dead, but when the bitterness of workingmen would rise above the brim, and then, the Shriftons would be blacklisted. He felt a brief exaltation. It drowsed and died.
“Hello, dad,” Andy said.
He looked at his son whose brain was not very good.
“Don’t worry, dad. Maybe I’ll get a job next week and help out.”
Tears grew in Mr. Le Gare’s eyes.
Chapter Seven
I
His life was much the same as it had been last week or last year. It was a week now since his twenty-first birthday, and his life was much the same as it had been last week or a year ago.
The old man owned a new building on Michigan, near the Carter School, and the Lonigans lived on the third floor south. Studs emerged from the building and walked along, taking loose,