hey stole the best. We
gulped and hesitated. Then we stole, too, (or, at least, they stole and
I shared) and we all fattened, for the dainties were marvelous. You
slipped a bit here and hid it there; you cut off extra portions and gave
false orders; you dashed off into darkness and hid in corners and ate
and ate! It was nasty business. I hated it. I was too cowardly to steal
much myself, and not coward enough to refuse what others stole.

Our work was easy, but insipid. We stood about and watched overdressed
people gorge. For the most part we were treated like furniture and were
supposed to act the wooden part. I watched the waiters even more than
the guests. I saw that it paid to amuse and to cringe. One particular
black man set me crazy. He was intelligent and deft, but one day I
caught sight of his face as he served a crowd of men; he was playing the
clown,--crouching, grinning, assuming a broad dialect when he usually
spoke good English--ah! it was a heartbreaking sight, and he made more
money than any waiter in the dining-room.

I did not mind the actual work or the kind of work, but it was the
dishonesty and deception, the flattery and cajolery, the unnatural
assumption that worker and diner had no common humanity. It was uncanny.
It was inherently and fundamentally wrong. I stood staring and thinking,
while the other boys hustled about. Then I noticed one fat hog, feeding
at a heavily gilded trough, who could not find his waiter. He beckoned
me. It was not his voice, for his mouth was too full. It was his way,
his air, his assumption. Thus Caesar ordered his legionaries or
Cleopatra her slaves. Dogs recognized the gesture. I did not. He may be
beckoning yet for all I know, for something froze within me. I did not
look his way again. Then and there I disowned menial service for me and
my people.

I would work my hands off for an honest wage, but for "tips" and
"hand-me-outs," never! Fortson was a pious, honest fellow, who regarded
"tips" as in the nature of things, being to the manner born; but the
hotel that summer in other respects rather astonished even him. He came
to us much flurried one night and got us to help him with a memorial to
the absentee proprietor, telling of the wild and gay doings of midnights
in the rooms and corridors among "tired" business men and their
prostitutes. We listened wide-eyed and eager and wrote the filth out
manfully. The proprietor did not thank Fortson. He did not even answer