“What’s that, now?” The steward was in the pantry again. “What’s this fine story, chef?”
“Nothing at all, Sah Farrel. I done pull a good bull on them fellars, tha’s all. Cause theyse all trying to get mah goat. L’em quit fooling with the kitchen, Sah Farrel. I does mah wuk and I don’t want no fooling fwom them nigger waiters, nohow.”
“I guess you spit in it as you said, all right,” cried the pantryman. … “Yes, you! You’d wallow in a pigpen and eat the filth, youse so doggone low-down.”
“Now cut all o’ that out,” said the steward. “How could he do anything like that, when he eats the food, and I do meself?”
“In the hole!” shouted Jake.
The third and fifth waiters hurried into the pantry and brought out the waiters’ food. … First a great platter of fish and tomatoes, then pork chops and mashed potatoes, steaming Java and best Borden’s cream. The chef had made homemade bread baked in the form of little round caps. Nice and hot, they quickly melted the butter that the boys sandwiched between them. He was a splendid cook, an artist in creating palatable stuff. He came out of the kitchen himself, to eat in the dining-room and, diplomatically, he helped himself from the waiters’ platter of fish. … Delicious food. The waiters fell to it with keen relish. Obliterated from their memory the sewer-incident of the moment before. … Feeding, feeding, feeding.
But Ray remembered and visualized, and his stomach turned. He left the food and went outside, where he found Jake taking the air. He told Jake how he felt.
“Oh, the food is all right,” said Jake. “I watch him close anough in that there kitchen, and he knows I ain’t standing in with him in no low-down stuff.”
“But do you think he would ever do such a thing?” asked Ray.
Jake laughed. “What won’t a bad nigger do when he’s good and mean way down in his heart? I ain’t ’lowing mahself careless with none o’ that kind, chappie.”
Two Pullman porters came into the dining-car in the middle of the waiters’ meal.
“Here is the chambermaids,” grinned the second cook.
“H’m, but how you all loves to call people names, though,” commented the fourth waiter.
The waiters invited the porters to eat with them. The pantryman went to get them coffee and cream. The chef offered to scramble some eggs. He went back to the kitchen and, after a few minutes, the fourth cook brought out a platter of scrambled eggs for the two porters. The chef came rocking importantly behind the fourth cook. A clean white cap was poised on his head and fondly he chewed his cigar. A perfect menial of the great railroad company. He felt a wave of goodness sweeping over him, as if he had been patted on the head by the Angel Gabriel for his good works. He asked the porters if they had enough to eat and they thanked him and said they had more than enough and that the food was wonderful. The chef smiled broadly. He beamed upon steward, waiters, and porters, and his eyes said: See what a really fine fellow I am in spite of all the worries that go with the duties of a chef?
One day Ray saw the chef and the pantryman jesting while the pantryman was lighting his cigarette from the chef’s stump of cigar. When Ray found the pantryman alone, he laughingly asked him if he and the chef had smoked the tobacco of peace.
“Fat chance!” retorted the first waiter. “I gotta talk to him, for we get the stores together and check up together with the steward, and I gotta hand him the stuff tha’s coming to him outa the pantry, but I ain’t settle mah debt with him yet. I ain’t got no time for no nigger that done calls me ‘bastard-begotten’ and means it.”
“Oh, forget it!” said Ray. “Christ was one, too, and we all worship him.”
“Wha’ you mean?” the pantryman demanded.
“What I said,” Ray replied. …
“Oh! … Ain’t you got no religion in you none ’tall?”
“My parents were Catholic, but I ain’t nothing. God is white and has no more time for niggers than you’ve got for the chef.”
“Well, I’ll be browned but once!” cried the pantryman. “Is that theah what youse l’arning in them books? Don’t you believe in getting religion?”
Ray laughed.
“You kain laugh, all right, but watch you’ step Gawd don’t get you yet. Youse sure trifling.”
The coldness between the kitchen and the pantry continued, unpleasantly nasty, like the wearing of wet clothes, after the fall of a heavy shower, when the sun is shining again. The chef was uncomfortable. A waiter had never yet opposed open hostility to his personality like that. He was accustomed to the crew’s surrendering to his ways with even a little sycophancy. It was always his policy to be amicable with the pantryman, playing him against the other waiters, for it was very disagreeable to keep up a feud when the kitchen and the pantry had so many unavoidable close contacts.
So the chef made overtures to the pantryman with special toothsome tidbits, such as he always prepared for the only steward and himself. But the pantryman refused to have any specially-prepared-for-his-Irishness-the-Steward’s stuff that the other waiters could not share. Thereupon the chef gave up trying to placate him and started in hating back with profound African hate. African hate is deep down and hard to stir up, but there is no hate more realistic when it is stirred up.
One morning in Washington the iceman forgot to supply ice to the dining-car. One of the men had brought a little brass top on the diner and the waiters were excited over an easy new game called “put-and-take.” The pantryman forgot his business. The chef went to another dining-car and obtained ice for the kitchen. The pantryman did not
