The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [26]
CHAPTER XXV
As drugged with love as I was, why, nothing could deter me from marriage. I'm not sure whether Mintouchian was trying to do that, but if he was he didn't stand a chance, because I wasn't hospitable to suspicions. However, he acted the part of a good friend. He arranged with the catering service for the wedding lunch and bought roses and gardenias for everybody. By City Hall the air was blue, and there seemed to be trembles of music. When we came down in the elevator I remembered how more than a year before I was standing on top of County Hospital, Chicago, and reflecting how of all our famiiy, including old Grandma, Simon was the only one who had managed to stay out of an institution. But now I didn't have any more reason to envy him. Envy? Why, I thought I had it all over him, seeing I was married to a woman I loved and therefore I was advancing on the only true course of life. I told myself my brother was the kind of man who could only leave the world as he found it and hand on the fate he inherited to any children he might now have--I didn't for sure know whether he had any. Yes, this was how such people were subject to all the laws in the book, like the mountain peaks leaning toward their respective magnetic poles, or like crabs in the weeds or crystals in the caves. Whereas I, with the help of love, had gotten in on a much better thing and was giving this account of myself that reality comes from and was not just at the mercy. And here was the bride with me, her face was burning with happy excitement; she wanted what I wanted. In her time she had made mistakes, but all mistakes were now wiped out. We came out on the steps. The doves were walking around, and Mintouchian had arranged for a photographer to be there and make a picture of the wedding party. He was very thoughtful and acted kind to everyone. I had graduated from Sheepshead the day before and had my new 4S8 rating in my pocket. My smile was changed, because they had given me some lower teeth gratis to replace the ones I lost in Mexico. I have to confess that in addition to passionate love and the pride of the day I had a bubble in me like the air bubble of the carpenter's level. But I was shaved and combed like a movie actor and dressed in the new high-pressure uniform, which lacked only service ribbons and stars. I would have liked some, and to have married a beauty as a hero of the service of his country. I promised myself that I would have been modest. However, you wouldn't have been able to tell how nervous I was, I think. It wasn't just because I had to ship out soon after the wedding that I was nervous, but also because Stella was bound the week after for Alaska and the Aleutians with a USO show. I didn't want her to go. Of course I wouldn't say anything to spoil the occasion. We had pictures taken of the wedding party, which included also Agnes and Sylvester. I looked with changed eyes on Agnes since hearing of her self-strangulation. She was wearing a fine gray suit that showed off her hips, and a collar sweeping upward as if to keep you from seeing her throat. Anyway, turkey, ham, champagne, cognac, fruit, and cake were set up on the buffet in Stella's apartment. It was very grand. Robey and Frazer had showed up in town together, and I invited them, so I was well represented. Frazer wore a major's uniform. Robey's beard was fuller and he had put on weight down in Washington. He sat by himself in a corner, clasping his knee in two hands and never saying anything. There was enough conversation without him. After a few glasses of champagne Sylvester broke out in grins. He was a funny, melancholy guy, Sylvester. He wanted to be taken serious and straight, but gave himself away in his dark-lined grins, and the unthoughtful part of him fought its way out. In his double-breasted pinstriped business suit he sat by me. I held Stella around the waist and stroked her satin wedding dress. "What a dish!" said Sylvester to me. "What you've fallen into! And when I think you used to work for me!" This was when he had owned the Star Theatre on California Avenue, below that dentist who tormented Grandma. Sylvester was no kid; he was getting on. He said he was off politics now. I wanted to ask him about Mexico, but the wedding day was no time for that, so I passed the question over. The man of the hour at this party was not myself so much as Frazer, in a way. Frazer had just come back from the Orient. He was in the Intelligence and attached to a mission to Chungking. He was talking to Agnes and Mintouchian about the East. I still admired Frazer a whole lot and looked up to him. He was a mighty attractive and ideal man. There was a lanky American elegance about him, in the ease of his long legs and his cropped-on-the-sides head which from chin to top showed the male molding on the strong side of haggardness; his gray eyes on the cool side of frankness. All the markings of his face were strong, with creases beginning to deepen from world pressure. And there was something else about him--as if he were in the barber's chair at the conclusion of shaving, the witch hazel drying, the fine Western shoes stuck out. He knew so much too. Suppose that you said something about D'Alembert or Isidore of Seville, Frazer would have been ready to discuss them. You couldn't find a subject that stumped him. He was going to become an important person. You could see how he was flying at the highest, from one peak of life to the next. And yet he looked relaxed. But the more ease and leisure he achieved the more distance and flashing there were; he talked about Thucydides or Marx and showed pictures of history-like visions. You got shivers on the back and thrills clear into the teeth. I was real proud to have such a friend come. He gave tone to the wedding and was a great success. But as you listened to this brilliant educational discussion it was somewhat scary too; like catching hold of high voltage. Declarations, resolutions, treaties, theories, congresses, bones of kings, Cromwells, Loyolas, Lenins and czars, hordes of India and China, famines, huddles, massacres, sacrifices, he mentioned. Great crowds of Benares and London, Rome, he made me see; Jerusalem against Titus, Hell when Ulysses visited, Paris when they butchered horses in the street. Dead Ur and Memphis. Atoms of near silence, the dead acts, that formed a collective roar. Macedonian sentinels. Subway moles. Mr. Kreindl shoving a cannon wheel with his buddies. Grandma and legendary Lausch in his armor cutaway having an argument in the Odessa railroad station the day the Japanese war broke out. My parents taking a walk by the Humboldt Park lagoon the day I was conceived. Flowery springtime. And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries. Whether I was all I might be troubled me as Frazer held forth, but much less than it would have done before my conversations with Clem about the axial lines and with Mintouchian in the Turkish bath. It gave me great comfort that Mintouchian was here. And in the end it was marriage-day tribute--all that happened. The champagne being at an end, the white meat eaten, the two pinochle players of the cutting table opposite putting on their jackets to depart, our company bowed out too. Farewell all, and many thanks. "Isn't my friend Frazer smart?" I said. "Yes, but you're my darling," said Stella and kissed me. So we went "to the bridal bed. Two days of honeymoon were all we had. I had to ship from Boston. Stella went up on the train with me the night before. And separating of course was tough. I sent her back in the morning. "Go, sweetheart." "Augie, darling, good-by," she said from the platform of the train. Some people can't bear a train departure at any time, and how crushing these departures were in the stations during the war, as the cars moved away and left throngs behind, and the oil-spotted empty tracks and the mounting, multiplying ties. "Please," she said, "be careful about everything." "Oh, I will," I promised her. "Don't worry about that. I love you too much to go and get sunk, on my first trip out. You take care too,' out there in Alaska." She made it sound as though it were somehow up to me, as though I could make my own safe way over the Atlantic waters of wartime. But I knew what she was trying to say. "Radar has licked the submarines," I told her. "It says so in the papers." This piece of news was improvised; it did a lot of good, however, and I went on talking, so extremely salty you'd have taken me for an old sailor. The conductor came to close the door, and I said, "Go on inside, honey, go on." Till the last moment I saw her big eyes at the window. As she bent forward from the hips in her seat, the prettiness and grace of it was a killing thing to have to miss during months on the water. So the train went and I was left in the crowd and felt low and bleak. To add to it, the weather was gray and windy and the ship. the Sam 491 Mac Manus, was old. Black machinery beside it, at the wharf, grim gimmicks on it, grease, darkness, blues, the day itself housed in iron. The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. It wasn't any apostlecrossed or Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean, the clement, silky, marvelous beauty-sparkle bath in which all the ancientest races were children. As we left the harbor, the North Atlantic, brute gray, heckled the ship with its strength, clanging, pushing, muttering; a hungry sizzle salted the bulkheads. But next morning, in the sun and warmth, we were steaming south with all our might. I came on deck from an all-night bout of seasickness the Mothersills pills, even, hadn't helpedand being torn by longing and worry about Alaska. The middle-aged ship was busting through the water so as to make you feel great depth and the air was sweet, radiant. It was pellucid. Even the sooty Mac Manus m the flush, like a kitchen insect escaping into the garden at dawn. The bluey deck rattled underfoot with the chainlike drag of the rudder engine. A few confused resemblances: clouds or distant coast, birds or corpuscles, fled across my eyes. I went to investigate my office and duties. Nothing much, in fact. Druggist and bookkeeper setup, as I've already said. Green old filing cases. Lockers of same color. A swivel chair and fair light to read by. I squared myself away for the voyage. So there were several days of mechanical progress over the water, the horizon sea rising to grip after a cloud like a crab after a butterfly, with armored totter, then falling and travailing. Plus the sun's heat and the patriarch wake, spitting and lacy. In my privacy I read books and wrote an endless letter chronicle to Stella which I hoped to send from Dakar, our first port, out to Alaska. Of course there were guns and a radar ring to remind you of danger, but the time was very pleasant. Before long the word got around that I was a listener to hard-luck stories, personal histories, gripes, and that I gave advice, and by and by I had a daily clientele, almost like a fortuneteller. By golly, I could have taken fees! Clem knew what he was talking about when he urged me to come into the advice business. Here I was doing it free of charge, and in dangerous conditions. Although all seemed tranquil enough. Of an early evening, say, red and gold, with the deep blue tense surface, the full-up ocean, and some guy came darkening between me and the light, as if to a session of spiritual guidance. I can't claim it annoyed me. It gave me a chance to learn secrets, and also to sound off on the problems of life. I was on fine terms practically with everyone. Even the union delegate, when he saw I didn't intend to be hard-nosed and difficult about the company's interests. And the Old Man--he did correspondence courses in philosophy at a bunch of universities, it was his hobby, and was forever writing out assignments--he took to me too, though he didn't approve of my leniency. Anyway, I became ship's confidant. Though not all the confidences gave hope to the soul. More than one guy dropped in to sound me out on a black-market proposition or fast buck on foreign soil. One planned to become a hairdresser after the war, he told me, because then he'd have his hands on the head of every broad in Kenosha. One who had washed out of paratroop school and still wore his Fort Benning boots told me frankly when the matter of his beneficiary came up that he had three legal wives in different parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Some wanted diagnosis, as if I were a professional head-feeler. and not the humble understudy's understudy of the cult of Asclepius the Maritime Commission had made me. "You think I maybe have an inferiority complex, do you think?" one of them asked me. Indeed I saw many ravages, but I never said. Beside-itself humanity, hurrying, hurrying, with liquid eyes. 'Suppose you was the guy in a fix like this..." "There was this certain friend of mine..." "He said, 'You support the old man for a while and see how you like it.' " "He ran away for a Carnie." "Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory." "He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a river." "If he floated down the river with a hard-on he expected them to raise the bridges for him, that's how he was an egotist." "I said, 'You listen here to me, fart-blossom, you chiseler...' " "Though I knew she was so sweet and we had the kids, the time just came when I couldn't keep the multiplication table out of my head, and then I knew, 'Bitches is all you deserve and should be with. Let them rob you and kick you around. That's okay!' " Lasciar le donne? Pazzo! Lasciar le donne! "I was trying to have one night with this girl before I shipped out. We both worked in the shipping department. But I couldn't swing it. So for weeks I was carrying a safety in my pocket and couldn't get to use it. One time it was all set and then my wife's grandmother died. I had to go fetch grandfather to the funeral. He couldn't understand what it was all about. We sat in the chapel where the organ played. He said, 'Why, that's the music the old dog died to,' and made one joke after another. Then he recognized her in the coffin, and he said, excited, 'Why, there's Mother! I saw her yesterday in the A and P. What's she doing here? Mother, why, Mother!' And then he understood and bust into tears. Oh, he cried. Me too. All of us. Me with the safety still in my pocket. What do you think? Everybody is some kind of tricker. Even me. "Then my wife and kid took me to the station. I still hadn't made it with that girl and probably she forgot all about it and started with another guy. My little daughter said, 'Daddy, I got to take a pisst.' She'd heard the boys talk. We had to laugh. But then, good-by. My heart weighed a ton. So long, honey. She was cryin' away by the train window, and I felt the same. And meantime that safety was in my vest pocket. I didn't throw it away." This man's face was flat, slender, rosy, bony-nosed, gray-eyed, and his mouth was small. I passed out advice in moderate amounts; nobody is perfect. I advocated love, especially. Some terribly strange personalities came forward. Griswold, for instance, one of the stewards. A former undertaker and also zoot-suiter and cat. A light Negro, extremely handsome and grand, short beard full of graceful glitters, hair rich and oiled; a bum on his cheek gleamed with Unguentine. His pants flowed voluminous and stripy down to a two-strap shoe. He smoked tea for his quiet recreation and studied grammar in a number of languages for kicks. Griswold handed me the following poem of his own writing: " How much, you ask me, do I suffer. Now, baby, listen, I am not a good bluffer. My ambitions and aspirations don't leave me no rest; I am born with a high mind and aim for the best. His knee went up and down rapidly while I read this, and his eyes were dark and anxious. If I dwell on these individual members of the crew it's in the nature of a memorial. For on the fifteenth day out, when we were off the Canaries, the Sam Mac Manus was sent down by a torpedo. It happened while I was hearing one of these unofficial confiteors, in fact. It was night, and we must have been making twelve knots, when suddenly there came a crushing great blow on the side; we were flung down. There were bucklings and crashes and then the inside stun of an explosion. We rushed for the outer deck, fast. Already hairs of fire came up through the busted plates, and the superstructure was lighted clear by the flames. Patches of water also burned close by, and the bright water approached. Hungry yells and steam blasts, plunges; the huge rafts swooped over the side, released, and the boats crashed from the davits. We scrambled up to the boats, this guy and I, and started to wind one out. It hung caught and crooked. I shouted to him to jump in and see what was fouling. He didn't seem to get this, his eyes looking wildly at me. "Get in there!" I yelled, weirdly hoarse with the terror. Then I hopped in myself to free the boat, whereupon, the winch letting go, unbraked, the boat slammed fast and hard on the water, knocking me overboard. My thought when I went under was that the ship would suck me with it as it sank. The fear squeezed and milked the strength out of my arms and legs, but I tried to fight, hearing grunts and Orpheus pulls of string from the deep bottom, and then all the consciousness there was to me seemed a hairlash in the crushing water universe. I came up wanting to howl but unable to; my jaws tore open only to breathe. And where was the lifeboat? Well, there were boats and rafts here and there in the water-fires. I was spitting, vomiting up sea, weeping, and straining to get distance from the flaming ship from which, in the white of the fire, men were still jumping. I made for a boat that floated a hundred yards or so off. I labored after it in terror lest it pull away. However, I saw no oars out. I couldn't have hollered after; my voice seemed to have gone. But it only drifted, and I made it. I grabbed the painter and called to whoever might be lying inside, for I was too beat to get in. But the boat was vacant. Then the Mac Manus went down. The sudden quench of the white light was how I knew it. Fire still burned all over the surface, but the current was carrying fast. I saw a loaded raft in the torn light of flames. Then I had another go at climbing into the boat. I worked my way to the middle, where the gunwale was lower. From that position I saw a guy who held on to the stem. poor bastard. I yelled to him, thrilled, glad, but his head hung back. I frantically swam behind him to see what was wrong. "You hurt?" I asked. "No, bushed," he muttered. "Come, I'll boost you over and then you give me a hand. We've got to see if we can pick up any other guys." We had to wait until he had the strength to try. Finally I gave him a hand-stirrup, and he made it. I waited for his assistance but it didn't come. He let me trail for I don't know how long. I hollered and cried, cursed, rocked the boat. No soap. At last I threw a leg over the side and toiled and dragged myself astride the gunwale. He was sitting on a thwart, there, hands between his knees. Furious, I drove my fist down on his sodden back. He lurched but otherwise didn't move, only turned up a pair of animal-in-theheadlights eyes. "Le' me drown, you sonofabitch? I'll bash your brains out!" I yelled. He didn't answer, only covered me with his cold eyes and his face twitched. "Grab an oar and let's go pick up survivors," I said. But there was only one oar to grab. The rest were gone. There was nothing to do but sit and drift. I gazed and called over the water in case there should be someone carried out this way. But there wasn't anybody. The fires were receding and going out. I half expected the sub to surface and take stock, and I half wanted it to. It was around, all right, beating it down in the sea. What did I think-- that I'd get a chance to holler and give them a piece of my mind? No, they went away, no doubt, continuing their supper perhaps, or playing cards. And by the time night fell completely there wasn't the light of boat or raft to be seen anywhere. I sat and waited for daylight, when I hoped there'd something show on the horizon. Nothing showed. At dawn we were in a haze like the swelter of an old-fashioned laundry Monday, with the sun a burning copper-bottom, and through this air distortion and diffused color you couldn't see fifty yards. We sighted some wreckage but no boats. The sea was empty. I was awed by the death of those guys and the disappearance of the survivors, swept away. Down in the engine room they couldn't have had much of a chance. Glum and bitter, I started to take stock. There were smudgepots and flares for signaling, and there was no food or water problem for the time being, since there were only two of us. But who was it that fate had billeted on me? This guy sitting on the thwart whom I had beaten last night, as far as my strength permitted, what trouble would I have with him? He was the ship's carpenter and handyman, and from one point of view I was in luck, having no manual skill or ingenuity myself. He rigged up a kind of sail by stepping up the oar; and he claimed we couldn't be more than two hundred miles west of the Canaries, and that if we had any luck at all we'd sail right into them. He told me that every day he'd gone and looked at the charts, and so he knew exactly where we were and what the currents were doing. He figured it out with great satisfaction and self-confidence, and he seemed absolutely untroubled. About my beating and cursing him, not a single word. He was of broad, stocky build, carrying a judicious big ball of a head, cut close. Many of his bristles were white, but not with age; he had a dark mustache that followed the corners of his mouth calmly downward. His eyes were blue and he wore specs. A pair of bleachedat-the-knees overalls dried slowly on his wide calves. I took a flier of imagination at his past and saw him at age ten reading Popular Mechanics. Even as I sized him up, he did me, of course. "You're Mr. March, the purser," he said at last. He commanded, when he wanted to, a very cultured deep voice. "That's right," said I, surprised by the sudden viola tone. "Basteshaw, ship's carpenter. By the way, aren't you a Chicagoan too?" Basteshaw, after all, was a name I had heard before. "Wasn't your dad in the realestate business? Around Einhorn's, back in the twenties, there w. as a man named Basteshaw." "He dabbled in real estate. He was in the produce business. Basteshaw the Soupngreens King." "That's not what Commissioner Einhorn called him." "What was that?" It was too late now to back out, and so I said, "He nicknamed him Butcher-Paper." Basteshaw laughed. He had broad teeth. "That's great!" he said. Imagine! Over this trouble, solitude, danger, heartbreak of the disaster, there blows suddenly home-town familiarity, and even a faux pas about the nickname. He didn't respect his old father. I didn't approve of that. Respect? Why, it came out how he downright hated him. He was glad he was dead. I'm willing to believe old Basteshaw was a tyrant, a miser, a terrible man. Nevertheless he was the fellow's father. In beauty or doom colors, according to what was in your heart, the sea and skies made their cycles of day and night, the jeweled water gadding universally, the night-glittering fury setting in. The days were sultry. We sat under the crust of the canvas, in the patch of shade. There was scarcely any wind for the first few days, which was lucky. I tried to master my anxious mind, which kept asking whether I'd ever see Stella again, or my mother, my brothers, Einhom, Clem. I kept the smudgepot and flares by me, dry. Our chances of being picked up were not bad in these parts. It wasn't as though we had gone down in the extreme south where there wasn't much shipping then. As the heat fanned over you, you sometimes heard the actual salt in the water, like rustling, or like a brittle snow when it starts to melt. Basteshaw was forever watching me through those goggles. Even during a nap he seemed to watch, his head backed off, studious, vigilant. Cousin Anna Coblin didn't look more persistently into mirrors. There he sat, with his thick chest interposed, ponderous. He was built like a horse, this Basteshaw. As if hoofs, not hands, were on his knees. If he had hit back at me that first night there'd have been real trouble. But then we were both too weak to fight. And now he seemed to have forgotten all about it. His poise was that of a human fortress, and you could never catch him off balance. He often laughed. But while the sounds of his laughter went out into the spaces of the sea his eyes, blue and small, never lost sight of me through the goggles. "One thing I'm glad of," he said, "is that I didn't meet my end by drowning. Not yet, anyway. I'd rather die of hunger, exposure, anything else. My dad, you see, drowned in the lake." "Did he?" Ah, then, farewell Butcher-Paper. This was when I learned of his death. "At Montrose Beach during his vacation. Busy men often die on their holiday, as if they had no time for it during the business week. Relaxation kills them. He had a heart attack." "But I thought he drowned?" "He fell in the water and was drowned. Early in the morning. He was sitting on the pier, reading the Trib. He always got up before dawn, from years in the market. The coronary was slight and wouldn't have been fatal. It was the water in his lungs." Basteshaw, I discovered, loved medical and all scientific conversation of any sort. "The guards found him when they came on duty. The afternoon papers carried a story of foul play. There was a wad of money in his pocket, big thick rings on his fingers. That infuriated me. I went down to Brisbane Street to give them a piece of my mind. I thought it was scandalous. Trading on people's emotions like that. There was poor Ma, horrified. Murder? I forced them to print a retraction." I know those small paragraphs of retraction on page thirty, in tiny print. However, Basteshaw announced it with real pride. He put on his old man's best Borsalino hat, he told me, and he took the Cadillac out of the garage and smashed it up. He drove it into a wall on purpose. For the old man never would let him have it and kept it like a Swiss watch. The late Butcher-Paper had had a thing about breakage. When he had a violent fit and was about to smash something, Mrs. Basteshaw would cry, "Aaron, Aaron, the drawer!" Old pie tins were kept in a kitchen drawer for him that he could fling and stamp on. No matter how enraged, he always used these pie tins, not good china. Basteshaw laughed as he told this, but I was sad for the old man. "The car couldn't be used in the funeral because it was in smithereens. That made it a Viking funeral, after a fashion. After he was planted my next move"--I flinched in advance--"was to break off with my cousin Lee. The old man made me get engaged to her on the ground that I trifled with her affections. After he mixed in I never intended to marry her." "Trifle? What did he mean?" "That I was in the sack with her. But I swore I'd never give the old man the satisfaction." "You might have been in love with her, old man or no old man." He gave me a sharp glance. I didn't know what sort of person I was dealing with. "She had pulmonary phthisis, and people like that are frequently highly stimulated. Increased temperatures often act on the erogenous zones spectacularly," said he in his lecturer's tone. "But was she in love with you?" "Birds with their higher temperature also lead a more intense emotional life. I see from the way you speak of love that you don't know a thing about psychology or biology. She needed me and therefore loved me. If another guy had been around she would have loved him. Suppose I had never been born, does that mean she wouldn't have loved anyone? If the old man hadn't interfered I might have married her, but he was pro so I was contra. Besides, she was dying. So I told her I couldn't possibly marry her. Why string her along?" Brute! Pig! Snake! Murderer! He had hastened her death. I couldn't bear the look of him for a while. "Within a year she died. Toward the end her face was absolutely mealy, poor girl. She was quite pretty originally." "Why don't you shut up!" He was surprised at me. "Why, what's eating you?" he said. "Listen, drop dead!" He would have let me drown too, or be eaten by sharks. Nevertheless the conversation was resumed by and by. Under the circumstances, what else? So now Basteshaw told me about another relative, an aunt. She slept for fifteen years. And then one day suddenly arose and went about the house as if nothing had happened. "She dropped off when I was ten years old. She woke up when I was twenty-five, and she knew me right as soon as she saw me. She wasn't even surprised." I'll bet. "One day my uncle Mort was coming home from workthis was out in Ravenswood. You know how they build the bungalows there? He was going around to the back, between two houses, and as he passed the bedroom he saw her hand reach out to pull the window blind. He recognized the hand by the wedding band, and he came close to filling his pants. He stumbled in, and sure enough, she had cooked supper and it was on the table. She said, 'Go wash!' " "Incredible! Could it really happen? Why, it's a regular sleepingbeauty story. Was it sleeping sickness?" "If she had been a beauty she wouldn't have slept so long. My own diagnosis is some form of narcolepsy. Etiology purely mental. It may account for Lazarus. For Miss Usher of the House of Usher and many others. Only my aunt's case is extremely illuminating. Deep secrets of life. Deeper than this ocean. To hold tight is the wish of every neurotic character. While she slept she ruled. In some part of her mind she knew what was going on, as evidenced by the fact that she could resume life after fifteen years with accuracy- She knew where things were, and she was not surprised by the changes. She had the power achieved by those who lie still." I had to think of Einhom in his wheel chair, lecturing me about strength. "While battles rage, planes fly, machinery produces, money changes hands, Eskimos hunt, kidnapers sweep the roadsthat person is safe who by lying in bed can make the world come to him, or to her. My Aunt Ettl's whole life was a preparation for this miracle." "It's something, all right," 1 said. ' "You bet your sweet life. It's of the utmost significance too. Do you remember how the great Sherlock Holmes doped things out in his room on Baker Street? But compared to his brother Mycroft he was no place. That Mycroft! There was a brain, March! He never budged from his club, and he was a real mastermind and knew everything. So when Sherlock was stumped he came to Mycroft, who gave him the answer. You know the reason? Because Mycroft sat tighter than Sherlock. Sitting tight is power. The king sits on his prat, and the common folks are on their feet. Pascal says people get in trouble because they can't stay in their rooms. The next poet laureate of England--I figure --prays God to teach us to sit still. You know that famous painting of the gypsy Arab traveler sleeping with his mandolin and the lion gazing on him? That doesn't mean the lion respects his repose. No, it means the Arab's immobility controls the lion. This is magic. Passivity plus power. Listen to me, March, that old Rip van Winkle conked out on purpose." "Who took care of your aunt all that time?" "A Polack woman--Wadjka. And let me say that after the miracle was over my uncle was in a hell of a spot. Because he had arranged his life around my sleeping aunt. She slept, and he had his card parties and his honeybunch. After she woke we all pitied him." "As far as compassion goes," I said, "what about some for your aunt? She put in all that time, a chunk of her life like that. Like a long prison term practically." A smile began to draw Basteshaw's mustache. "I once was bugs on the history of art," he said. "Instead of being on the hustle in the summer, as my old man wanted, I'd slip away to the Newberry library where I'd be the only lad among eight or ten nuns at a reading table. I picked up a book by Ghiberti once, anyhow, and it made a great impression on me. He told about a German goldsmith of the Duke of Anjou who was the equal of the great sculptors of Greece. At the end of his life he had to stand by and watch his masterpieces melted down for bullion. His labor all in vain. He prayed on his knees, '0 Lord, creator of all, let me not follow after false gods.' Then he went into a monastery, this holy man, where he cashed in his chips and checked out for good." 0 blight! That the firm world should give out at the end of life. Blasted! But he had God to fall back on. And what if there had been no God for him? What if the truth should be even more terrible and furious? "So what was Aunt Ettl's sickness but a work of art? And just like this poor German fellow, she had to be prepared for failure. That's what they mean by the ruins of time Or go to Rome, which is the sepulcher. I suppose you know Shelley