by Saul Bellow
It was in my unusual state of feeling that I reflected about this, and meantime when I would remember the rustle of Thea’s brown silk it made me shiver. Along with the strange outcomes of the history of toil.
Every chance I got I phoned her. There wasn’t any answer, and Grammick reached me before I could talk to her. He had to have my help in South Chicago that night in a gauze and bandage factory he had organized more or less in passing. For it was like a band of Jesuits landing where a heathen people thirsted for baptism in the dense thousands, thronging out of their brick towns. I had to fill a bag with literature and blanks and race over to the Illinois Central to get the electric train and meet Grammick at his headquarters in a tavern, a rough place but with a ladies’ and family entrance, for many of the gauze-winders were women. I can’t say how they kept bandages clean in that sooty, plug-ugly town built as though so many fool amateur projects for the Tower of Babel that had got crippled at the second story a few dozen times and then all hands had quit and gone in for working in them instead. Grammick was in the middle of this show and busy organizing. He was as firm as a Stonewall Jackson, but he was also as perfectly pacific as a woodshop instructor in a high school or some personage of the Congress party, somebody from that white-flutter India setting out to conquer the whole place flat. By the power of meekness.
Most of the night we were up and were ready in the morning with everything necessary, committees on their mark, demands drawn up, negotiation machinery all set and the factions in agreement. At nine o’clock Grammick picked up the phone to talk to management. At eleven the negotiations were already under way, and late that night the strike was won and we went out to a wiener and sauerkraut shindy with the glad union members. It was all a matter of course to Grammick, though I was hopped up about it and full of congratulation.
I went to the booth in the back with my glass of beer and tried Thea’s number again. This time I got through. I said, “Listen, I’m calling from out of town where I had to go on business, otherwise you would have heard from me before. But I expect to be back tomorrow.”
“When?”
“Afternoon, I think.”
“Can’t you come sooner? Where are you now?”
“Out in the sticks, and I’m coming as soon as I can.”
“But I don’t have long to stay in Chicago.”
“Do you have to go? But where?”
“Honey, I’ll explain it when I see you. I’ll wait in all day tomorrow. If you can’t phone first, ring the doorbell three times.”
Like a strong brush the excitement went over me, and I stood up to it with shut eyes of pleasure, heat snarls at the ears and thrills descending my legs. I was dying to get to her. But I wasn’t able to leave yet. There were loose ends to tie up. It was important how even victors said au revoir. Grammick couldn’t leave until he had arranged the bookkeeping and everything was in order. Then, when we got back to the city, I had to go with him to headquarters to report our success. This was to advance me too, and was to get a knockdown to Mr. Ackey and be a little thicker with the officials, not stay a supernumerary.
Ackey was waiting for us, not to congratulate us but with a redeployment order on his spindle. “Grammick,” he said, asking him instead of me, “is this your protégé March? March,” he went on, still not finding me with his eyes, as if the time wasn’t just ripe, “you’re going to have to do some serious trouble-shooting today, and right this minute. It’s one of those hot dual-union situations. They’re murder. The Northumberland Hotel—that’s a ritzy place—how many people do we have signed up there? Not enough. They must have upward of two hundred and fifty in a place like that.”
I said, “I think we have about fifty cards from the Northumberland, and most of those from chambermaids. But why, what’s going on?”
“They’re getting ready to strike, that’s what. This morning there have been about five calls for you from Sophie Geratis, one of the maids. There’s a strike meeting on right now in the linen room, and you get over there and stop them. The AFL is in there, and the thing to aim for is an election.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“Hold the line. You sign them up and keep them from going out. Quick now, there must be hell broke loose.”
I snatched up my pack of membership blanks and lit out for the Northumberland; a huge building, it was, with florid galleries and Roman awnings fluttering up to the thirtieth story and looking down at the growth of the elms and flaglike greens of Lincoln Park.
I flashed up in a Checker cab. There wasn’t any doorman on duty; the place glittered from the copper arms swelling on shields from either side and from the four glasses of the revolving door and their gold monograms. I didn’t think I’d get far by way of the lobby, and I hurried back to the alley and found a service entrance. Up three flights of steel stairs, as nobody answered the bell of the freight elevator, I heard yelling and tracked it through the corridors, now velvet, now cement, to this place, the linen room.
The fight that was going on was between those who were loyal to the recognized union and the rebellious, mostly the underpaid women, who were scalding mad about the last refusal to raise them from twenty cents an hour. All were in uniform or livery. The room was white and hot, right in the path of the sun, the doors open to the laundry, and the women in their service blues and in white caps shouted and spoiled for war and struggle. They stood on the metal tables and soap barrels and screamed for the walkout. I looked for Sophie, who saw me first. She cried, “Here’s the organizer. Here’s the man. Here comes March!” She was on top of one of the hogsheads, with her gams wide apart in their black stockings. Hot, but grim and pale, and her black hair covered by the cap, her excitement of the eyes was all the blacker. She tried to express no familiarity in them toward me, so no scrutiny could have found out that our arms ever had crossed or hands ever stroked up and down.
I looked around and could see my friends and enemies in a minute, jeering or urging, distrustful, partisan, indignant, crying. There was one gaffer dressed up as white as any intern, and a face on him like Tecumseh, or one of the painted attackers of Schenectady; he wanted right away to explain a strategy to me, being very deliberate in that birdhouse of tropical screaming and laundry heat, to say nothing of the whiteness of the sun.
“Now wait,” I called, taking Sophie’s place on the hogshead.
Some began to yell, “We strike!”
“Now please listen. It won’t be legal—”
“Oh, the hell! Cry-eye! What’s legal, that we get a buck and a half a day? What’s there after carfare and union dues? Do we eat? We’re just going to walk out.”
“No, you don’t want to do that. It would be a wildcat strike. The Federation guys would send other people to take your place and it would be legal. The thing to do is sign with us so there can be an election, and when we win we can represent you.”
“Or if you win. That’s again a few months.”
“But it’s the best you can do.”
I broke open a bundle of cards from my bag and was distributing them into the waving hands when suddenly a bulge started from the direction of the laundry; several men were fighting through the crowd, thrusting away the women, and the joint began to jump. Just as I realized that these were the enemy union guy and his goons I was grabbed from behind, off the barrel, and slugged as I landed, in the eye and on the nose. I burst into blood. My buddy with the Indian’s beak stepped on me, but that was in his rush at the guy who hit me. As he pushed him back a Negro chambermaid raised me. Sophie thrust her hand into my pocket and pulled out my handkerchief.
“Dirty gangsters! Honey, don’t worry. Throw your head back.”
There was now a ring of women guarding me, formed around the overturned barrel. When one of the sluggers made a start for me there was a lunge of the women for that place. Some had picked up scissors, knives, soap scoops, so the union guy called off his gorillas, and they came to position around him, who was small by contrast but dang
erous-looking, if a runt, in his snappy man-about-town suit and his Baltimore heater. He appeared like somebody from the sheriff’s office who had changed to the other side of the law; or from cat meat to human flesh. He seemed as if he would smell at close quarters like a drinking man, but that was perhaps the color of rage and not of whisky in him. Of unpreventable meanness, able to harm as much as he threatened. I could somewhat show that with those bursts of blood on my noserag and shirt, and snorting out more, while my stinging eye swelled to a slit. However, he was the one who had the law on his side, being the representative under contract of these people.
“Now, ladies, get out of the way and let my men take over this punk who got no business here. He’s breakin’ Acts of Congress and I could swear a warrant against him. Besides the hotel could jug him for trespassin’.”
The women screamed and showed their scissors and weapons, and the Negro woman, who sounded like a West Indian or some Empire Britisher, said, “Never, you bloody little peanut!” So, while scared, I was also astonished.
“That’s okay, sister, we’ll get him,” said one of the goons. “He can’t go everywhere with this nooky protection.”
His boss told him, “Whyn’t you shut your trap!” And he said to me, “What right you got to come here?”
“I was asked here.”
“Damn right he was! You bet we asked him!” While the cooks in their long hats and others of the better-off faction hollered and scoffed and held noses and pulled the imaginary toilet chain at me.
“Listen, you-all. I’m your representative. When there’s any beefs, what am I for?”
“To throw us out when we come to the hall to ask you something, while your feet are on the table and you’re drinking from the bottle and pickin’ horses!”
“There doesn’t have to be any goddam mutiny, does there? Now I see a lot of cards this sonofabitch meddler passed around, and I want you all to tear ‘em up and have no more truck with him and them.”
I said, “Don’t do it!”
The guy who had slugged me made a pass to push through the defense of women and they heaved against him. Sophie pulled me away, through the back and along service corridors. “There’s a firedoor back here,” she said. “You can get down the escape. Take care, honey, they’ll be after you now.”
“What about you?”
“What can they do me?”
“You’d better forget about striking for the time being.”
Drawing strongly, her feet planted wide apart, she hauled open the ponderous firedoor, and as I went out she said, “Augie, you and me will never get together again, will we?”
“I think not, Sophie. There is this other girl.”
“Good-by, then.”
I hustled down the hot black fire-escape frames and swung from the ladder, jumped, and when I made a choice of streets to run to I had no luck. One of the goons was there; he came for me, and I took off toward Broadway. I flinched from the shots he might have taken, that not being unknown in Chicago, that people should be knocked off in the street. But there was no noise of any gun, and I reckoned that his object was to work me over, finish the beating, break bones perhaps, and lay me up.
I had just enough of a lead on the slugger to get across Broadway before him. I saw him, waist up, stopped by traffic, his eyes still on me, and I breathed on the dry snot of fear in my blood-clotted nose. A streetcar making slow time came by, and I sprang to the platform. I was sure to be followed, because of the slow cumbersomeness of the car approaching the Loop. But I might be able to shake him in the crowds. Meanwhile I rode in the front with the motorman, where I could watch the length of the car and also had within reach the switch-iron that motormen lower through a hole in the floorboards. I could be sure the slugger was coming on behind in one of the taxis in the file of cars fluddering and shimmering off their blue gas stink in this dull hot brute shit of a street. I was harrowed by my hate for it, as well as for the creeping of the trolley. I was torn up and sick with it. But gradually the bridge approached and the towers, all series and the same from top to bottom, the river of washwater filth and the bone-nosed gulls. The car picked up speed over the clear of the bridge and came down the swoop with heavy liberty, but then crept again in the Loop and its crush of traffic. I waited until near Madison Street, and in the middle of the block I said to the motorman, “Off here!”
“This ain’t the stop.”
I said, raging, “Open it up or I’ll bust your head open,” and when he saw the ugliness of my face and the chink of my eye he let me get off and I ran for it, but ran only to turn the corner and lose myself. I took the chance of getting into a line moving rapidly at the McVickers where there was a Garbo picture, and inside the thick red cords that looped off in-going from departing crowds, and in the lobby, which was like an apartment Cagliostro and Seraphina had laid out to fuddle the court and royalty, I was out of danger for the time. I was anyway beginning to feel that if he trapped me now it might be dangerous for him too, as for the overseer killed by Moses. I went down to the can and vomited up my breakfast. Bathing off the blood, I dried at the electric blower. Then I went up and lay in one of the seats at the back of the house where I could watch who entered, and there I rested until the end of the show and next change of audience, when I went out too, straight to the middle of the street, which was roaring and flinging up hot midday dust.
I jumped into a taxi and drove to Thea’s, which had been my real objective of days.
Chapter 14
I WAS HURRYING to fulfill the prophecy Thea Fenchel had made on that swing in St. Joe. And while it was no minor thing to me that I was beat up and chased like this, I couldn’t feel the importance of the cause much, or that it would benefit anyone for me to fight on in it. If I had felt this as such a matter of conscience I might have been out in front of Republic Steel at the hour of the Decoration Day Massacre, as Grammick was. He was clubbed on the head. But I was with Thea. It wasn’t even in my power to be elsewhere, once we had started. No, I just didn’t have the calling to be a union man or in politics, or any notion of my particle of will coming before the ranks of a mass that was about to march forward from misery. How would this will of mine have got there to lead the way? I couldn’t just order myself to become one of those people who do go out before the rest, who stand and intercept the big social ray, or collect and concentrate it like burning glass, who glow and dazzle and make bursts of fire. It wasn’t what I was meant to be.
As I ran into Thea’s apartment house from the cab and rang the bell three times, fast, I didn’t especially observe where I had come. It was a showy, heavily furnished lobby, no one in it, and as I was trying to find out which of the elegant doors belonged to the elevator, a square of light appeared in one of them. Thea had come down for me. The door opened. There was a velvet bench and we sank down on it, pressing and kissing as the smooth elevator rose. Not noticing the blood-stiffened shirt, she passed her hand over my chest and up to my shoulders. I opened her housecoat on her breasts. I was not in control of my head. I was unaware, nearly blind. If anyone else had been near neither of us would have known it. I can’t for certain say I don’t remember a face, maybe that of a maid when the door opened, and we went on embracing in the corridor and then in the apartment, by the door, on the carpet.
With Thea it wasn’t at all as it had been with other women, those who gave you their permission, so to speak, to undo one thing at a time and admire it, the next thing guarded again, and the last thing most guarded of all. She didn’t delay, or seem to hurry either. As if studying deeply from a surrendered mind, and with the lips, the hands and hair, the rising bosom and legs, without the use of any force, presently it seemed as if an exchange or transfer had happened of us both into still another person who hadn’t existed before. There was a powerful feeling of love. And so finally, as if I had been on my bent knees in what’s supposed to be an entirely opposite spirit, praying, with my fingers pressed together, I think it would have been no different from what I
felt come over me with the fingers not together but touching her on the breasts instead. My bursting face with the swatted eye lay between, and her arms were around my neck.
Now the sun began to heat us by the door, on the rug where we were lying. It had the same filmy whiteness as it had in the linen room. It had shone dirtier on the Loop sidewalk where I jumped from the streetcar. Here it glowed white once more. Presently I wanted to pull the curtain because of the glare on my eye, and when I stood up she observed for the first time how I looked.
“Who did that to you?” she cried.
I explained the whole business to her, and she kept saying, “Is that why you didn’t come? Is that what you were doing all that time?” The time lost was the most important thing of all to her. Although it gave her a tremor to look straight at my bruise, the specific reason for my being beaten didn’t interest her and she wasn’t very curious about it. Yes, she had heard of the big union drive, but that I was in it was sort of irrelevant. For while I was not with her, where I was intended to be, it didn’t make much difference where I was. All intervening things and interferences were of the same unreal kind and belonged—out there. Gauze-winders, hotel workers on strike, errors like my illusion about her sister, that farce of being taken for Mrs. Renling’s gigolo, all that Thea had herself done meanwhile, these were entirely “out there.” The reality was now, and in here; she had followed it by instinct since St. Joe. So this was the reason for the cry of all that time lost and it made me feel what her fear was like of never succeeding in finding her way from the “out there” but blundering forever.
