“Well, I hate to see prohibition come. But I guess most of the people want it.”
“Yes, that is the intolerance of your mob. The tyranny of the majority. If fifty-one per cent of the people don’t want to drink, or don’t want to smoke, or don’t want to sing songs on Sunday, they make everybody else conform. The mob uses its liberty to deprive the individual of his freedom.”
For the first time Robert felt ill at ease in Levin’s company. The knowledge that Levin was a Jew and that he himself was a member of the Trick Track Tribe made him feel uneasy, as though he were a traitor, but whether to his old friendship or to the Tribe he was uncertain. They sat talking for a while, exchanging reminiscences of Paris and New York, and Levin finally walked with Robert back to his hotel.
“Be sure to come up Friday,” said Levin.
Robert promised, yet he knew that he would not keep the appointment. It was bad enough going out with him, but he had been unable to avoid that. But to break bread with him in his own house, to accept his hospitality and that of his family, that would be going too far. Not while he remained a member of the Tribe.
XXXII
Robert called up Friday—Mrs. Levin answered the phone—and pleaded a mythical headache. No. No. Her son was not to visit him. It was nothing. Something that would go away of its own accord. Only he would have to eat very little and get a good rest. Mrs. Levin offered some advice—aspirin tablets, or something like that. It was rather confusing, her insistent hospitality, and she rang off only after she had gained his promise to come the next week.
Robert was growing a bit more accustomed to Chicago. Freeman had taken him, over his protest, to Armours, where he had seen the rather gruesome spectacle of hundreds of hogs and cattle converted into pork and beef by swift knives and dexterous hands. He had never dreamed of this world of cattle pens, stretching out in all directions like a vast sea and filled with thousands of bellowing animals. He had never imagined such a tangle of tracks as those over which the loaded cattle cars rumbled. And there were cowboys on ponies.
He was becoming accustomed to the rush of people among the streets and to the noise. But the soot still bothered him. He had visited the Art Institute and found it a haven from the surrounding spirit of commercialism and decided to visit the Field Museum—a glittering white palace of classical design that rose at the far end of a promontory jutting into the lake a mile or so south.
In some places there were almost as many Negroes as in the South. But unlike the South, the Negroes sat beside you in the presence of white ladies—like the white men. For the first time Robert perceived that in going back to Corinth he had unconsciously slipped back to his pre-war attitude. He had taken Jim Crow cars for granted. He had taken it for granted that colored men should step out of his path when he walked down the street. These things had all seemed perfectly natural in Corinth. He had not even noticed them until now.