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He searched the unconscious drunk and pocketed eight dollars. He walked on.

The gray dawn spread, lightened. Snow fell more rapidly from the muggy sky of the New Year.

It was Studs Lonigan, who had once, as a boy, stood before Charlie Bathcellar’s poolroom thinking that some day, he would grow up to be strong, and tough, and the real stuff.

XXV

THERE was an inward, self-absorbed expression upon the black face of woolly-headed, fourteen-year-old Stephen Lewis, as he walked along Fifty-eighth Street. He thought of an awkward black girl named Eliza May Smith. He spotted a tin can on the sidewalk, and kicked it, thinking that he was the hero of a high school soccer game, and that Eliza May Smith, pretty as a picture, was watching him. Suddenly he paused, fearful. He couldn’t remember now, gosh darn it, whether his mother had told him to get butter or sugar. He stood as if petrified, with his eyes popped open, the whites showing. He scratched his head. He proceeded slowly, racking his brain.

At the corner of Fifty-eighth and Prairie, he stopped to watch some older fellows shooting craps. He listened to their language, watched the dice, gazed large-eyed at the money. Some day, he would be big enough to stand on the corner and shoot craps for real money, and he’d win and buy something pretty for Eliza May Smith. He went on because he had been instructed to hurry home. In the chain store, he ordered sugar. A clerk left a half pound of butter on the counter, and continued to fill an order. Stephen copped it; he had both butter and sugar. He paused a few more minutes at the crap game. He went on, kicking a tin can, imagining himself to be the hero of a high school soccer game, while Eliza May Smith, pretty as a picture, watched him.

1929—1933

Judgment Day

Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death in that tremendous day when the heavens and the earth shall be shaken, when Thou shalt come to judge the world with fire. Seized am I with trembling, and I fear that approaching trial, and that wrath to come. 0 that day, that day of wrath, of calamity and misery, that great and bitter day indeed, when Thou shalt come to judge the world with fire.

FROM DEVOTION TO BE SAID AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MASS FOR THE DEAD.

SECTION ONE

Chapter One

I

“RED, I tell you, when I saw poor Shrimp Haggerty laid out in the coffin, I got a damn snaky feeling,” Stan Simonsky, riding backward by the window, morosely said, turning to Red Kelly beside him.

“I used to tell Shrimp, Lord have mercy on his soul, I used to warn him that with his health and condition, he shouldn’t do as much carousing and drinking as he did,” Red Kelly oracularly said, and he and Stan glanced unobtrusively at Studs opposite Stan.

Twisted partially sidewise, Studs Lonigan captured quick-appearing and -disappearing glimpses of flat Indiana plains and isolated farm houses, in the early drizzling twilight. Buildings, tumbling shacks, barns, dotting the landscape, heralded the approach to a small town, and he commenced to see thin puffs of smoke snaking from occasional chimneys. The train clattered over a wetted road where, beyond the closed train-gates, an impassive, overalled man leaned on the handlebars of a bicycle, waiting next to a Ford automobile. With decreasing speed, they were carried down the center of a small-town street that was set against a background of sooty clapboard buildings. Among the dribbling of people on the narrow sidewalk, Studs singled out a schoolboy, who was staring dreamily at the train with open-mouth wonder, his strapped books flung over his shoulder. Whisked along, the train swept by a paved street, flanked with stucco bungalows, and Studs thought that the hick villagers, stopping to gape at the train, might have caught a load of him from the window, wondering who he was, and where he was going. If they had, he was a mystery to them, and being a mystery to others when he knew himself so well, stuffed him with the feeling of being important.

The train crawled through a station