The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [12]
CHAPTER XIII
I was no child now, neither in age nor in protectedness, and I was thrown for fair on the free spinning of the world. If you think, and some do, that continual intimacy, familiarity, and love can result in falsehood, this being thrown on the world may be a very desirable even if sad thing. What Christ meant when he called his mother "Woman." That after all she was like any woman. That in any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside. See how long you can. I remember I was in a fishmarket square in Naples (and the Neapolitans are people who don't give up easily on consanguinity)--this fishmarket where the mussels were done up in bouquets with colored string and slices of lemon, squids rotting out their sunk speckles from their flabbiness, steely fish bleeding and others with peculiar coins of scales --and I saw an old beggar with his eyes closed sitting in the shells who had had written on his chest in mercurochrome: Profit by my imminent death to send a greeting to your loved ones in Purgatory: 50 lire. Dying or not, this witty old man was sassing everybody about the circle of love that protects you. His skinny chest went up and down with the respiration of the deep-sea stink of the hot shore and its smell of explosions and fires. The war had gone north not so long before. The Neapolitan passersby grinned and smarted, longing and ironical as they read this ingenious challenge. You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good. 1 see this now. At that time not. Well, I went back to books, to reading not stealing them, while I wed on the money Mimi repaid, and on what she loaned me when she was on her feet and working once more. Through with Frazer, Mimi had met Arthur Einhorn and had taken up with him. She was still waiting on tables. I got my meals at the joint where she worked. And I lay down and finished the Five-Foot Shelf Einhorn had given me, the fire- and water-spotted books I had kept in the original cardboard box. They had a somewhat choky smell. So if Ulysses went down to hell or there were conflagrations in Rome or London or men and women lusted as they did in St. Paul, I could breathe an odor that supplemented the reading. Kayo Obermark lent me volumes of poets and took me to lectures now and then. This improved his attendance. He didn't like to go alone. I can't be sure it isn't sour grapes that the university didn't move me much--I say that because according to the agreement I had made with Simon I was to have gone back in the spring--but it didn't. I wasn't convinced about the stony solemnity, that you couldn't get into the higher branches of thought without it or had to sit down inside these old-world-imitated walls. I felt they were too idolatrous and monumental. After all, when the breeze turned south and west and blew from the stockyards with dust from the fertilizer plants through the handsome ivy some of the stages from the brute creation to the sublime mind seemed to have been bypassed, and it was too much of a detour. That winter I had a spell of the WPA. Mimi urged me to go and be certified. She said it would be simple, which it certainly was. I had the two requirements, being indigent and a citizen. The trouble was that I didn't care to be put on one of the street details I'd see picking up bricks and laying them down, and with that shame of purposelessness you smelled as the gang moved a little, just enough to satisfy the minimum demand of the job. However, she said I could always quit if too proud to be assigned to this; she thought it wasn't a good sign in me that I had to have a clerical job; I'd be in better shape in the open ah- among simpler people. It wasn't the people that I complained of, but the clinking on a brick and that melancholy percussion of fifty hammers at a time. But I went to apply because she felt obliged to take care of me, making me her responsibility, giving me money, and as we weren't lovers this would be unfair. Anyhow, I was certified and got a strolling kind of job that was about as good as I could expect. I was with a housing survey, checking on rooms and plumbing back-of-the-yards. I could fix up my own time card and soldier considerably, as everyone expected me to do; in bitter weather I could pass the time in the back booth of a coffeepot until the check-out hour. Also, the going into houses satisfied my curiosity. It was finding ten people to a room and the toilets in excavations under the street, or the rat-bitten kids. That was what I didn't like too much. The stockyard reek clung to me worse than the smell of the dogs at Guillaume's. And even to me, as accustomed to slums as Indians are 1 to elephants, it was terra incognita. The different smells of flesh in all 1 degrees from desire to sickness followed me. And all the imagination, passion, or even murder you could conceive were wrapped up in apparent simplicity or staleness, with elementary coarseness of a housewife feeling cabbages in a Polack store, or a guy who lifted a glass of beer to his white, flat-appearing face, or a merchant hanging ladies' bloomers and elastics in the drygoods window. I stayed with this deal until the end of winter, and then Mimi, who was always up on these things, had an idea that there might be something for me in the CIO drive that had just started. This was soon after the first sitdown strikes. Mimi was an early member of the restaurant workers' union CIO. Not that she had any special grievance where she worked, but she believed in unions and she was on fine terms with her organizer, a man named Grammick. She brought us together. This Grammick was no rough-and-tumble type but had points of similarity with Frazer and also Sylvester. He was "a college man, softspoken, somewhat of a settlement-house minister doing his best, meek with the punks but used to them, and causing you a sense of regret. He ^1 had a long chest but his legs were relatively short; he walked quickly, ^^ toes in, slovenly in his double-breasted long jacket, a densely hairy,. mild, even delicate person. But he wasn't an easy man for opponents to deal with. He couldn't be caught off balance, he clung hard, he was ^clever, and he knew a thing or two about deceit himself, Grammick did. ^* I produced a pretty favorable impression, and he agreed I might make an organizer. In fact his behavior toward me was very sweet. I had an idea that my good impression wasn't all my doing, but that he was trying to make time with Mimi. But I got to value Grammick for various reasons. Though he was so inconspicuous that he could come and go, not specially noticed around hotel lobbies and service passages, still when a matter came to a head he could act with authority and not be frightened by a situation he had created. I appreciated his consciousness in advance of rights and wrongs that hadn't risen to view yet. "Yes, they're hiring organizers. They want experienced people, but where are they going to find them? The problems are piling up too fast." 'Augie is the kind of person you ought to have," said Mimi, "somebody who can speak the workers' language." "Oh, really, does he?" said Grammick, looking at me. It made me laugh to hear this advertised of me, and I said I didn't know whose language I spoke. It couldn't have made less difference I soon learned when I began to work at the job. People were rushing to join up, and it was a haste that practically belonged to nature, like a change of hives, and, bent on their ends, they had that touchiness from being immersed in the sense of their own motion that causes striking and stinging. It must have resembled a migration, land race, or Klondike. Except that this time the idea was about justice. The big strikes had set it off, those people sitting down by their machines and holding parties, but grim parties. That was in the automobile and rubber industries, and of this I saw the farreaching result, down to the most negligible pearldiver on skid row. I started out at a table of the union hall--which wasn't the kind of rugged place you might picture but as solid as a bank building, on Ashland Avenue; it even had a restaurant of its own as well as a pool parlor--just a toy, for the members' recreation, nothing like Einhorn's --in the basement. I was supposed to be Grammick's inside man and take care of the telephone and office part of things. It was anticipated I wouldn't be busy above what was average and could gradually pick up what I needed to know. Instead there was a rush on me of people having to have immediate action; some hand-hacked old kitchen stiff as thickened with grease as a miner or sandhog would be with clay, wanting me to go and see his boss, subito; or an Indian would bring his grievances written in a poem on a paper bag soaked with doughnut oil. There wasn't an empty chair in my room, which was a room well apart from the main offices reserved for workers in the big industries. It made no difference how hidden I was. I'd have been found had I been in a steel vault by the feeblest signal of possible redress, or as faint a trace as makes the night moth scamper ten miles through clueless fields. There were Greek and Negro chambermaids from all the hotels, porters, doormen, checkroom attendants, waitresses, specialists like the director of the garde-manger from flossy Gold Coast joints, places where I had gone with the dog-wagon and so understood a little. All kinds were coming. The humanity of the under-galleries of pipes, storage, and coal made an appearance, maintenance men, short-order grovelers; or a ducal Frenchman, in homburg, like a singer, calling himself "the beauty cook," who wrote down on his card without taking off his gloves. And then old snowbirds and white hound-looking faces, guys with Wobbly cards from an earlier time, old Bohunk women with letters explaining what was wanted, and all varieties of assaulted kissers, infirmity, drunkenness, dazedness, innocence, limping, crawling, insanity, prejudice, and from downright leprosy the whole way again to the most vigorous straight-backed beauty. So if this collection of people has nothing in common with vhat would have brought up the back of a Xerxes' army or a Constantine's, new things have been formed; but what struck me in them was a feeling of antiquity and thick crust. But I expect happiness and gladness have always been the same, so how much variation should there be in their opposite? Dealing with them, signing them into the organization and explaining what to expect, wasn't all generous kindness. In large part it was rough, when I wanted to get out of the way. The demand was that fierce, the idea having gotten around that it was a judgment hour, that they wanted to pull you from your clerical side of the desk to go with them. Instead I had to promise to investigate. "When?" "Soon. As soon as possible. We have a big backlog. But soon." "Sonsof bitches! Those guys! We're just waiting there to give it to them. You should see that kitchen!" "There'll be an organizer out to contact you." "When?" "Well, I'll tell you the truth, we're shorthanded because there's such a rush; we haven't got enough men. But what you must do meanwhile | is get ready, have your people sign the cards, and prepare your demands I and grievances." "Yeah, yeah. But, mister, when is the man going to come? The boss is gonna call in the ALL and sign a contract with them, that's some outfit." I tried to discuss this danger with my higher-ups. Just then hotels and restaurants were a sideline with them, however; they lacked time to deal with them, busy with retail clerks who were out on a big strike and with runaway dress shops in Chicago Heights and so forth, but they couldn't bring themselves to turn down new memberships and aimed to keep them until they were prepared to devote the necessary time and money. In short, Grammick and I were intended to hold the line. I learned to do somewhat as he did. He would work sixteen hours daily for ten or twelve days at a stretch and then for two whole days he couldn't be found by anyone. He spent that time in his mother's flat, sleeping and eating steaks and ice-cream, taking the old lady to the movies or read K* ing. Once in a while he slipped away to a lecture. He was studying law too. Grammick wasn't going to be sucked away from all private existence. I went along with this rush, really needing some such thing now because of my blowout with Simon. After office hours I was out on the streetcars, traveling to see cooks and dishwashers or hotel clerks on night duty--those leafy nights of the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont, when the white catalpa bells were opening and even the dust could have a sweet odor. Many clerks especially asked you to come at night, when they could speak freely. The conspiratorial part of it was fine; and with the radical ideas then going, these people who were placed in a position to be thoughtful, since they were up all night, wanted the chance to say those self-rehearsed things that sometimes had been on their hearts too long. True and false light was distributed just about as usual, is my opinion. But it wasn't my place to judge that, but only to advance the work. Some of these guys just plain meant business. I suspect they wanted me to be more dangerous than I appeared to be.. I know I, seemed too fresh and well in color, not enough smoked and yellowed to appreciate what they were up against. My manner was both slipshod and peppy. They were looking for some fire-fed secret personality that would prepare the moment when they could stand up yelling rebellion. And here instead I would breeze in--I knew sometimes that my color and the height of my hair, my relaxed way, would give offense. But there wasn't any help for that. Occasionally they'd even ask for my credentials. "Did they send you from headquarters?" "You Eddie Dawson?" "That's right." "I'm March. You talked to me on the telephone." "You?" said Dawson. And I knew he had expected to see some sandy, suck-cheeked devil, veteran of coal fields or oil or New Jersey textile strikes. Yes, that at least--someone on whom it was evident that his first strength had been drawn out of him in the Paterson jail. "You don't have to worry. I'm reliable." Then he resigned himself; he had been taken in by my telephone voice. I could be at least a messenger to the higher-ups who'd be busy Guy-Fawkesing the Drake Hotel or the Palmer House--because it was that to Eddie Dawson, hauling up gunpowder in the tunnels. He would tell me, then, what he wanted my superiors to know and give me directives. "I want you to arrange a meeting with your top man down there--" "Mr. Ackey, you mean?" "You tell him I can get the employees together, but before we go out off strike we want to talk to him, all of us. That's to give my people confidence." "Why are you sure you'll have to go out? Maybe you'll get your demands." "Do you know who runs this bedbug palace?" "What, some bank? Is it a receivership? Most of these small joints--" "It's an outfit called Holloway Enterprises." "Karas?" "You know him?" "Yes, I do, it so happens. I used to work for the insurance man Einhorn who is his cousin-in-law." "He writes the policies for this place. You know what kind of a joint this is, don't you? For quickies." "Is that so?" I said, observing that the big forehead, flushed and deeply vein-fed in the light cloud of fair hair, was covered with a sweat and that he wiped his hands the nails of which were manicured nails on his pink-striped shirt with an unconscious clutch. "If that's a problem it's a police problem. You don't want the CIO to start a union of | them, do you?" "Don't talk foolish. I mean I get the brunt of the trouble because I'm- night clerk. Anyhow, if you know Karas you can tell me how easy it'll be to get our demands." "He's a pretty tough character." "Now when I have the shop ready to go, you ask Mr. Ackey for a few minutes so we can talk to him." "We can arrange it," I said, who didn't know Ackey well enough to say good day when passing in and out of the toilet. But I represented him. The situation was different in the hash-houses. I was more trusted and highly regarded. In the kitchens were old men--flophouse. County Hospital, and mission attendance inscribed all over them big and bold, and there was nothing like the resentment of a fellow like Dawson in that striped shirt, who was close enough to Karas's condition to figure how he made profit, to hate and envy, and also to wish to be nifty at (he track, to wear hound's-tooth checks, to have a case and binoculars and be seen with a proud-cheeked fine big broad. But take one of these old guys from a Van Buren Street greasy-spoon --I'd be requested by him to come around by the alley, the large paving stones breathing fumes of piss, and signal him through the window. Whereupon he'd go tight with caution and make me an oblique response with his head that might be taken by other eyes as a random motion. At last, by the door, we'd have a shushing conversation that we could have had just as well after hours. Except that he would want me to have a look at his place of work probably. The angry skin of his dish-plunging arms and his twist horse-gauntness, long teeth and spread liquidness of eyes in the starry alley evening; also that terrible state of food when you suspect it of approaching garbage that he brought out in his clothes and on all his person, his breath and the hair of his head just below me. Under the fragile shell of his skull he leakily was reasoning. And did it matter to him as it did to Dawson whether I looked like the organizer of his dreams? He wanted to make his dim contribution to the righting of wrongs, so that it was enough for him that he could locate me in an office or that I would come down this reeking alley to talk to him and accept the lists he slipped me of other stiffs who wanted to belong to the union. I was supposed to hunt them up in their moldy rooms. Where I had been on altogether different errands while I worked for Simon, recruiting coal hikers. No use assuming that I had reversed all and was now entering these flophouse doors from the side of light, formerly from that of darkness. Those times that I thought clearly of my duties I decided that I couldn't consider persons so much but rather the one degree of advancement in which everybody could be included. Having a call in the old neighborhood one morning, I dropped in on Einhorn and found him in his sunny parlor office, in that peculiar, familiar staleness of coffee and bed, papers, his own shaving lotions and the powders of the two women. Mildred with her orthopedic shoes --she was polite but didn't like me--was already at her machine, heated and lit on the back of the neck, which had just been shaved up to the border where her potent hair began. Over the way, empty, were the windows of the old place of great days and grands cir Constances. I didn't find Einhom in a good state though I wasn't supposed to know it from his weighty face. For a while I thought he wanted to sit me out silently, until I went away. He breathed and felt of himself, looked out in the morning, smoked, nibbled, croaked off some shallow gas. He appeared melancholy and even savage. "How's the pay at this new job of yours?" he asked me, deciding to speak. "Fair?" "It's liberal." "Then there's good coming out of it," he said with his dry decisiveness. I laughed at him. "Is that all you think?" "At least that anyway. Kid, I don't want to take away your zeal if you think you're doing something. And remember, I'm no conservative. Just because 1 sit here in a chair. This is no rich guys' club. In fact I have less to lose than other men, so I don't shrink from thinking to the extreme. I do a little business with Karas, but it doesn't follow that my ideas have to be where my interests are. What interests! Some interests! He's a knacker, Karas, he just bought a big new place in San Antonio." I was now convinced that something was wrong. "Then you think it's a waste of time, what I'm doing?" "Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same. What's the use of the same old ideas? On both sides. To take some from one side and give it to the other, the same old economics." He hadn't wanted to talk to me in the first place, but since I didn't go away he drove himself into the subject at first by irritation and then summoning up what he really thought. I wasn't zealous, not as he implied, but I did feel called on to say, "Well, people get up every morning to go to work; it isn't right that it should be an illusion, or that they should be so grateful for being allowed to continue in their habit that they shouldn't ask for anything more." "You think that with a closed shop you're going to make men out of slobs? If they have a steward to gripe for them? Pooey!" "So," I said, "is it better to leave it to Karas or a gorilla of a business- agent who takes graft from him?" "Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That's just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last. If it makes dough it's for dough." "If there can't be much sense in these big organizations that's all the more reason why they should stand for a variety of things," said I. "There ought to be all kinds." Meanwhile, ignoring, Mildred went on typing out statements. Einhorn didn't reply; I thought it was the appearance of Arthur from the kitchen half of the house that stopped him, for Arthur's brainy authority made his dad occasionally hesitate to sound off. But this time it wasn't E: that. He came forward only briefly, but it was evident that all the nervousness and difficulty were because of him. In a black sweater, narrow-shouldered, his hands in his back pockets, he sauntered, an elderly... ': 293 wrinkle on him that surprised me, and his eyes retreated with gradations of dark into a very somber color of trouble. He put his head to the side, his bushy hair touched the doorframe, and the smoke of his cigarette escaped to the sun where it became silky. Though he wasn't quite sure who I was at first, his smile was all the same suave, but also sick or fatigued. I was aware that Einhorn, to the very cloth of his coat, was stiff to him and prepared to be curt, within a degree of telling him to beat it, and I realized also that this was why Mildred had been so cold to me and hitting her machine as though it were a way to get me to leave. Then a little kid came running from the kitchen, and Arthur held it with the clasp of a father, unmistakably, the kid swaying from his fingers. Behind, Tillie stood but didn't come forward. If I'm not mistaken they hadn't yet decided whether they could keep this a secret, for I realized it was recent news to the Einhorns too, and it was touch and go about acknowledging the baby, a little boy. He, while Arthur turned back into the kitchen, came running to Mildred and secured himself on her knee. She picked him up eagerly, and his booties catching in her skirt, it rode up on her thighs with their little dark hairs. About which she was calm. Thither I followed Einhorn's look. She kissed the boy with almost adult kisses and sought the hem to straighten her dress. "What do you say to our news!" Einhorn spoke harshly and turned to me with a stiff curve in the back of his neck, partly with intention to bully but also greatly bowed by trouble, and that great representative of him, his face, twitched with an impulse that darted in from a littleexplored place. "That Arthur is married?" I didn't know what to say. "Already divorced. It went through last week, and we didn't know anything about it. The girl was from Champaign." "So you have a grandson. Congratulations!" He looked strained, his eyes gemmy with the determination to sustain all, but his nosy face flat and with a light of pale unhappiness. "And this is his first visit?" I said. "Visit? She dumped him on us. She put him inside the door with a note and beat it, and then we had to wait for Arthur to come home and explain." "Oh, he's dear and sweet," Mildred said with great spirit, the child on her breast cruelly clasping her neck. "I'll take him any time." At this from his second wife, which in effect she was, Einhorn had all his cares come around to his first source: himself; his sensuality. And he looked angrily struck by this thought for all his Bourbon pride of profile and reflected it to the very depth of his black eyes. Like the roof-crouched goblin of an old church, he looked, his hands covered with pale spots placed at the sides of his often purposeless-appearing pants. His hair had the wave of unstranded rope, and from the set of his head there was the sense of ruins forming up behind him. With no motion in his arms, he might have been a man in a cape or a bound prisoner. Poor Einhorn! At any hour of his decline he could formerly have taken out the gilt bond representing Arthur, and now the spite had come upon him that the value had gone, like that of Grandma's picturewatered czarist money. The gleaming vault where he had kept this reserve wealth now let out the smell of squalor. Einhorn didn't even look at the kid, which was a jolly little kid that trod in Mildred's lap. Tillie stayed out of sight altogether. I hesitated to show sympathy; he'd have thrown it back, though I was one of the few remaining people, I imagine, who'd give him full credit on his old-time greatness. I served a purpose that way for him, that I was prepared to testify that it was true noble and regal greatness. But he himself now started out weakly, saying, "It's not a good situation. Augie--you have some idea what capacities Arthur has. And before he can begin to use them, he gets into this--" "I don't see what's so wrong," said Mildred. "You have a cute grandson." "Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn't a toy." "Oh," she said, "they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit." Einhorn said to me in a lower voice, wanting no conversation with her, "I think Arthur hangs around your part of the woods. And there^s a girl named Mimi he's interested in. You know her?" "She's a good friend of mine." Quick his brows rose, and I interpreted the hope that she was my mistress and therefore Arthur couldn't get into further trouble. "Not that kind of friend." "You don't lay her?" he said secretly. "No." I disappointed him; there was also a very fine salt of condescension or mockery, only a glitter on the surface of his look, but I saw it. "Don't forget I was practically engaged until New Year's Day," I told him. "Well, what kind of girl is this Mimi? He brought her around a couple of weeks ago, and Tillie and I thought she was pretty tough, and with somebody like Arthur whose thoughts always have an intellectual or poetic direction, she could give him a pretty rough time of it. But maybe she's goodhearted. I don't want to tear her down needlessly." "Why, is Arthur thinking of remarrying already? Well, I'm an admirer of Mimi." "Platonic?" I laughed but felt sullen too, for it seemed to me that Einhom didn't want his son to succeed me as Mimi's lover, cr any girl's. I said, "The best person to ask about Mimi is Mimi herself. But I was going to say that I don't think she would be interested in a marriage proposal." "That's good," I expressed no agreement. "Augie," he said with a rich preliminary of the face which I knew belonged to business, "it occurs to me that maybe my son could fit into your organization somewhere." "Is he looking for a job?" "No, I am for him." "I could try." It was a discouraging favor to be asked. I could see Arthur stooping his weight on a desk in the union hall, one finger between the covers of his Valery, or whatever he was interested in. "Mimi could help him if she wanted to," I said. "I got the job because she knew someone." "Who knew someone, your friend?" He hoped still, slyly, to trap me into confessing intimacy with Mimi, but he drew a blank. "Well," he said, "you don't mean to tell me you keep that bursting health without the cooperation of a dear friend?" He was so pleased to have said this that his own troubles for a moment slipped his mind. But then the kid crowed on Mildred's neck and he changed again from a sensual to a sad or austere face. It was a true guess that I had a friend. She was a Greek girl whose name was Sophie Geratis and she was chambermaid in a luxury hotel. She spoke for a delegation that came to me to apply for membership. They were earning twenty cents an hour, and when they went to their local to ask one of the head guys to put in for a raise he was playing poker and wouldn't be bothered. They knew he was in cahoots with the management. This small Greek girl was shapely every which way, in legs, mouth, and face; her lips went a little forward and their expression was sweetened a lot by the clear look of her eyes. She had a set of hard-worked hands and she lived with her beauty on rough terms. I couldn't for even a minute pretend that I didn't go for her. As soon as I saw her I thought that in the form of her eye-corners there was a personal hope of tenderness, and it got me. What I felt was tender too, rather than that heat that makes Nile mud of you, as like to crack as to be fertile. As soon as the women signed there was a wild excitement and up- rush of indignation and they began to call out, as if it was a working woman's Thesmophoria of these pale people. They wanted to be led into a strike right away. But I explained, and felt as usual the creep over me of legalistic hypocrisy, that it was a case of dual unionism. Legally they were represented by the ALL and therefore another union couldn't bargain for them. But when a majority of the employees was on the CIO side an election could be held. They didn't understand this, and as I couldn't talk against their noise I asked Sophie to come out with me and I would make the position clear. The corridor being empty for the moment, we kissed at once, riskily. Our legs were shaking. She said under her breath that I could explain the whole thing to her later; she would take the women away and come back. I locked up the office, and when she returned I took her home with me. We couldn't go to her room. She lived with her sister and the two were engaged to a pair of brothers. They were going to be married in June, six weeks' time. I saw the photo of her fiance; he was a calm, responsible-looking gink. She thought she was being sensible, storing up pleasure so she wouldn't have any unfaithful craving once married. She-was made very finely, all her little formations intricate and close and everything smooth. That was the happiness Einhorn took notice of, that I enjoyed in Sophie. Kayo Obermark had too much masculine respect to ask me about her utterances and noises, laughing and otherwise. But Mimi said, "What kind of dame do you have who carries on like that?" She took a kidding tone, but I felt her nose was somewhat out of joint. "She brings her own cheering section." I had no answer ready because I had never expected to be asked. "There was someone else looking for you the other day," she went on. "I forgot to tell you. It's getting to be like a shrine up here." "Who was it?" "A young lady and a very pretty one, prettier than the noisy girl." I wondered if it could be that Lucy had changed her mind. "She didn't leave a note?" "No, she said she had to talk to you, and I thought she was very agitated, but maybe she wasn't used to climbing stairs and was winded." It didn't especially stir me to think that it had been Lucy. I had no further interest in her; I was only rather curious about her visit. I took up Einhom's suggestion about Arthur with Mimi. If Einhom had found fault with her, she was violent against him. knock at the door. It came at an awkward time, when Sophie Geratis was sitting on the bed in her slip and we were talking away. Seeing her startled, I said, "Don't worry, honey, nobody's going to bother us." She liked my saying this, so that it led to our starting to kiss, and the hooked links of the spring made that sound which goes in such a queer way with love, and which would have sent away anyone but this particular knocker. She said, "Augie--Mr. March!" and not in the voice of Lucy Magnus but that of Thea Fenchel. For some reason I remembered it and placed it immediately. I got out of bed. "Hey, put on a robe," said Sophie. She was disappointed at the kissing ending when another woman spoke at the door. I put my head out and blocked the door with my shoulder and naked foot. It was Thea. She had said in that note I hadn't seen the last of her, and here she was. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I've already come a couple of times and I want to see you." "Only once, I thought. How did you find me?" "I hired a detective. Then that girl didn't tell you about both times. Is she in there with you? Ask her." "No, that's not the same one. You actually went to a detective agency?" "I'm glad it's not that girl," she said. I didn't answer, only looked. She wasn't keeping her composure very well. That prompt face, different from what I remembered, delicate but not so firm in nerve, widecheeked and pale, her nostrils open wide. I recalled that Mimi had told me she was breathing heavily from the climb, but it must also have been from determination not to give in to disappointment at not finding me alone. She was dressed in a brown silk suit, kind of strikingly watermarked; in spite of all, she wanted me to notice it. But at the same time, by her gloved hands and the unsteadiness of her hat of flowers, I was aware she was trembling; and as the rustling in midocean against the bulwarks is the slight sign of very great miles of depth and extent, the stiffness of the silk gave a small sound of continual tremor. "It's nothing," she said. "How could you tell that I was coming? I don't expect..." I felt no need to be pardoned, as if I should have been waiting for her, and would have been within my rights in smiling but I wasn't able to do that. I had thought back on her as an erratic rich girl with whom the main thing was to be rivals with her sister; I couldn't continue to think so, for no matter how it had started it was now clearly something else. What sets you off not being good enough, you find the better reason once you have got going. This might have happened to her; but I couldn't tell which was uppermost, nobility or illness, whether she was struggling with personal objections of pride or the social ones about what is due a young woman from herself--those spiked things that press with such ugly sharpness on the greater social weakness of women. Whether she fought against or went out to look for a torturing occasion, I mean. But that was not all I thought of or felt by any means. Otherwise I'd have shooed her away, for I liked Sophie Geratis too well to tgive her up because I was merely interested or flattered. Or because I saw a chance to get back at Esther Fenchel through her sister, for, as SSi've said before, I haven't any grudge-bearing ability to speak of. But Isa B at once Sophie wasn't even in it. |f Ht. K "What are you doing?" I said, turning to her. She had put on her |||Jthoes. I saw her hold up her arms and the black dress fell on her ijshoulders. She softly battled her body into it, pulled it into place across |iher breasts and over her hips, and shook her face free of her hair. "Honey, if this is somebody you want to see..." "But, Sophie, I'm with you tonight." "You and me are just having a fling before I'm married, aren't we? taybe you want to get married too. It's just an affair, isn't it?" "You're not going," I said. But she didn't listen, and when she went a. to tie her laces covered the underside of her thigh from me as she Pted her knee. Because I didn't sound firm enough. And through this ! X of covering her. bare leg--not sore, but with a resigned sort of drop | her head--she drew back those vital degrees from lover's heat. To |ve her again I realized I'd have to pass a large number of tests and E| ips last of all I'd have to ask her to marry me. So I admitted in my te mind she was right to go since I couldn't any longer honestly sh that gay interest that had brought us together. A piece of paper slid under the door, and we heard Thea going |ay. t "At least she's not so brassy as to stand and look at me come out," ftsad Sophie. "Anyway, she had plenty of brass to knock when she could ^ffl you had company. Are you engaged to her or something? Go ahead ||ttd read your note." Sophie took her conge and kissed me on the face but wouldn't let me Morn the kiss or accompany her down to the door. So, undressed still, KSat on the cot in the May night air of the high window and opened f piece of paper. It gave her address and number and said, "Please THE ADVENTURBS call me tomorrow, and don't be angry because of what I can't help." When I thought how she had been ashamed for the jealousy rising to her face, and how rich in trouble the moment had been for her to hold fast while I came to the door naked and talked to her, I wasn't inclined to feel angry at all. In fact I couldn't help but be glad. Even though it was high-handed to go and proceed against Sophie as she did and assume that only she had the right grade of love. And then I had a lot of other notions, such as whether I was in danger of falling in love to oblige. Why? Because love was so rare that if one had it the other should capitulate to it? If, for the time, he had nothing more important on? In this thought there was a good measure of poking fun, with, however, the fact that I was stirred in all kinds of ways, including the soft shuffle in the treetop of leaves just broken out of the thick red beaks. I thought the business of a woman must be only love. Or, at another time, only a child. And I let this be an amusement and an objection in my light mind. And this lightness of mind--I could have benefited from the wisdom about it that the heavy is the root of the light. First, that is, that the graceful comes out of what is buried at great depth. But as wisdom has to spread and knot out in all directions, this can also refer to the slight laugh which is only a little of what is sent upward by great heaviness of heart, or also to the gravity which passes off by performer's flutter or pitch for laughs. Even the man who wants to'believe, you sometimes note kidding his way to Jesus. That night I fell deeply asleep, any old way, in and out of the sheets. They still smelled of Sophie's powder, or whatever she had imparted to them, so I slept wrapped in her banners, after a fashion. When I waked I thought it had been a peaceful sleep, and the early day was radiant. But I was mistaken. I remembered nightmares I had had of the jackals trying to get over the walls of Harar, Abyssinia, to eat the plague dead --from a book Arthur had left lying around, about one of his favorite poets. I heard Mimi below bitching and yelling at the telephone, though it was just some ordinary conversation. It was a fresh day, of beauty nearly material enough to pick up, with corners of the yard full of the heat of flowers grown in old iron and adapted cast-off boilers. That red which in the greater strength of the day would make you giddy and attack your heart with a power almost like a sickness, some sickness causing spat blood, spasm, and rot just as much and as rich as pleasure. My face prickled as if I had been hit sharp enough to cause nosebleed. I looked and felt puffy and sullen, and as if I had a surplus of blood and foresaw trouble from it, that it would have to be let. Also my hands and feet were that ominous way. I went out half stone, but even the pave302 ment chafed me through the leather; my veins seemed slowed up with lead. I couldn't bear being in the confinement of the drugstore even for the minute of time it took to swallow a cup of coffee. I dragged myself to the office in the poky cars, and when I had fallen into my chair with my legs spread out, I felt the toil of all my processes, down to the arteries of the feet as they sprung and shot with regularity, and I prayed I wouldn't have to get up. The door and window were open, the lustiness of the hard-trod place having its brief chance to clear out in the courthouse-hung tranquillity before the resumption of hostilities, the meadow hour before the ashcan barrage of Flanders tears the skies. And the lark, who doesn't need to spit or clear his throat, goes up. But then the business of the day got under way, and in my harassed inability to keep up, it was like a double-quick-time stamping or dancing; angry grim waltz in which the clutched partners were out to wear one another down; or solo clog or tarantella of the hopping mad; or the limper sway of the almost gone from consciousness; the decorous sevillanas of the stiff whose faces didn't betray how their heels were slamming; the epidemic kick of German serfdom; the squatting kawtsky; the hesitation-step of adolescence; the Charleston. I confronted all the varieties, and as far as I could I avoided rising. Except when I had to go to the biffy to take a leak, or when I thought I was hungry and ducked below to the billiard room and lunch counter, where the green of the felt went to my head. However, I had no appetite. It was another kind of gnawing, not emptiness of gut that was the matter. When I went back there was a fresh crowd waiting to do their stuff. Me the weary booking agent or impresario, watched by them with wrath' and avidity, with tics, with dignity by some and booby-hatch glares by ' I others. And what was I going to accomplish for them in the way of * redress and throwing open princedoms by explaining how they must fill out a card? Holy Lord and God! I know man's labor must be one of those deals figured out by Providence that saves him by preserving him, or he would be hungry, he would freeze, or his brittle neck would ', be broke. But what curious and strange forms he ends up surviving in, ' ' becoming them in the process. 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 land303 ing 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, plugugly 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. Ackev 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 protege March? March," he went on, still not finding me with his eyes, as if the time wasn't just ripe, "you're soin" 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 ALL 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 scis- sors, knives, soap scoops, so the union guy called off his gorillas, and they came to position around him, who was small by contrast but dangerous-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 fire307 door 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 fireescape 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 switchiron 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 bonenosed 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 Me Vickers 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 clanserous 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.