The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [6]
CHAPTER VIII
|m here a new course was set--by us, for us: I'm not going to try (mravel all the causes. When I face back I can recognize myself as of this time in intimate tress, with my own and family traits of hands and feet, greenness ^sgrayness of the eyes and up-springing hair; but at myself fully feed and at my new social passes I have to look twice. I don't know tit all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and sudf have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling I picked them from the air. ie city college Simon and I attended wasn't a seminary in charge of Is who taught Aristotle and casuistry and prepared you for Euro61 games and vices and all the things, true or not true, actual or not it, nevertheless insisted on as true and actual. Considering how I'world there was to catch up with--Asurbanipal, Euclid, Alaric, tinich, Madison, Blackhawk--if you didn't devote your whole 0 it, how were you ever going to do it? And the students were fcen of immigrants from all parts, coming up from Hell's Kitchen, ISicily, the Black Belt, the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of oldt Park, put through the coarse sitters of curriculum, and also ag wisdom of their own. They filled the factory-length corridors ant classrooms with every human character and germ, to undergo Bdation and become, the idea was, American. In the mixture |tras beauty--a good proportion--and pimple-insolence, and par- tiaces, gum-chew innocence, labor fodder and secretarial forces, | stability. Dago inspiration, catarrh-hampered mathematical l|flere were waxed-eared shovelers' children, sex-promising busi JSfa daughters--an immense sampling of a tremendous host, the gfcs of holy writ, begotten by West-moving, factor-shoved parj S^me, the by-blow of a traveling man. Normally Simon and I would have gone to work after high school, but jobs weren't to be had anyway, and the public college was full of students in our condition, because of the unemployment, getting a citysponsored introduction to higher notions and an accidental break into Shakespeare and other great masters along with the science and math leveled at the Civil-Service exams. In the nature of the case it couldn't be avoided; and if you were going to prepare impoverished young folks for difficult functions, or if merely you were going to keep them out of trouble by having them read books, there were going to be some remarkable results begotten out of the mass. I knew a skinny, sickly Mexican too poor for socks and spotted and stained all over, body and clothes, who could crack any equation on the board; and also Bohunk wizards at the Greeks, demon-brained physicists, historians bred under pushcarts, and many hard-grain poor boys who were going to starve and work themselves bitterly eight years or so to become doctors, engineers, scholars, and experts. I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn't feel moved to take it seriously. Nevertheless I turned in a fairly good performance in French and History. In things like Botany, my drawings were cockeyed and smudgy and I was behind the class. Though I had been Einhorn's office clerk I hadn't learned much of neatness. And besides I was working five afternoons a week and all day on Saturday. This was not at Einhom's any longer, but in women's shoes, in the basement of the downtown clothing shop where Simon was upstairs in men's suits. His situation had gotten better, and he was excited by the change. It was a fashionable store where the management wanted you to be well dressed. But he went beyond anything demanded of a salesman and was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck. I hardly knew him there, among mirrors, rugs, racks of clothes, eight stories above the Loop; he was big, fast and busy, heavy in his body, and his blood evident in him, in his face. Below, I was in a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete, skirts of heavy coats flying as shadows through these lenses, but the weight of bodies actual enough, the glass creaking and soles going every which way. This vault was for the poorer class of customers or for solitary-hornet shoppers, girls with outfits to match, hats and accessories; women with three or four little daughters to buy shoes for on the same day. The goods were heaped up on tables by sizes, and then there 126 be, cardboard-cell walls of boxes and fitting stools in a circle under I. honeycomb of the sidewalk. |Afew weeks of apprenticeship here and the buyer had me up to the j Hn floor. Only to help out, in the beginning, and run stock for the tesmen or return boxes to the shelves. And then I became a shoe-dog yself, only having to be told by the buyer to cut my hair shorter. He (S a worried guy and his stomach was bad. From shaving twice a day S skin was tender, and, on a Saturday morning when he got the salesen together before opening to give them a speech, his mouth would eed a little at the corners. He hoped to be more severe than he could i, and I expect his trouble was that he was really not the man to direct {Snazzy operation. For the place was a salon, with Frenchy torches ltd by human-arm brackets out from the walls, furled drapes, and junese furniture--such corners as are softened, sheltered from the itside air, even from the air of the Rue de Rivoli, by oriental rugs ggt swallow sounds in their nap, and hangings that make whispers H protocol unavoidable. Differences of inside and outside hard to rec(pile; for up to the threshold of a salon like this there was a tremen- WAS high tension and antagonistic energy asked to lie still that couldn't |$, till; and trying to contain it caused worry and shivers, the kind of log that could erupt in raging, bloody Gordon or Chartist riots and pot up fire like the burning of a mountain of egg crates. This un||wn, superfluous free power streaming around a cold, wet, blackened icago day, from things laid out to be still, incapable, however, of ftg still. Unancially Simon and I were doing first rate; he was getting fifteen |lars a week before commissions, and I was pulling down thirteen|. Therefore it didn't matter that we were disqualified from Char|j Practically blind, Mama couldn't do the housework any longer. |E>n hired a mulatto named Molly Simms, a strong lean woman, ! thirty-five, who slept in the kitchen--on George's old cot, in fact whispered or sang out to us when we came home late. We never ttten the habit of using the front entrance, forbidden to us in the lady's time. the means you, sport," Simon said. JSushwah, you're the one she looks at all the time." l New Year's Day she didn't show up, and I kept things running d the meals. Simon was away too. He had gone to a New Year's ty, leaving the house in his best: bowler hat, polka-dot muffler, > his two-tone shoes, pigskin gloves. And he didn't get back till Ifyening the next day, out of a rapid, sparkling snow. He was " 127 Normally Simon and I would have gone to work after high school, but jobs weren't to be had anyway, and the public college was full of students in our condition, because of the unemployment, getting a citysponsored introduction to higher notions and an accidental break into Shakespeare and other great masters along with the science and math leveled at the Civil-Service exams. In the nature of the case it couldn't be avoided; and if you were going to prepare impoverished young folks for difficult functions, or if merely you were going to keep them out of trouble by having them read books, there were going to be some remarkable results begotten out of the mass. I knew a skinny, sickly Mexican too poor for socks and spotted and stained all over, body and clothes, who could crack any equation on the board; and also Bohunk wizards at the Greeks, demon-brained physicists, historians bred under pushcarts, and many hard-grain poor boys who were going to starve and work themselves bitterly eight years or so to become doctors, engineers, scholars, and experts. I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn't feel moved to take it seriously. Nevertheless I turned in a fairly good performance in French and History. In things like Botany, my drawings were cockeyed and smudgy and I was behind the class. Though I had been Einhorn's office clerk I hadn't learned much of neatness. And besides I was working five afternoons a week and all day on Saturday. This was not at Einhom's any longer, but in women's shoes, in the basement of the downtown clothing shop where Simon was upstairs in men's suits. His situation had gotten better, and he was excited by the change. It was a fashionable store where the management wanted you to be well dressed. But he went beyond anything demanded of a salesman and was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck. I hardly knew him there, among mirrors, rugs, racks of clothes, eight stories above the Loop; he was big, fast and busy, heavy in his body, and his blood evident in him, in his face. Below, I was in a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete, skirts of heavy coats flying as shadows through these lenses, but the weight of bodies actual enough, the glass creaking and soles going every which way. This vault was for the poorer class of customers or for solitary-hornet shoppers, girls with outfits to match, hats and accessories; women with three or four little daughters to buy shoes for on the same day. The goods were heaped up on tables by sizes, and then there were cardboard-cell walls of boxes and fitting stools in a circle under the honeycomb of the sidewalk. A few weeks of apprenticeship here and the buyer had me up to the main floor. Only to help out, in the beginning, and run stock for the salesmen or return boxes to the shelves. And then I became a shoe-dog myself, only having to be told by the buyer to cut my hair shorter. He was a worried guy and his stomach was bad. From shaving twice a day his skin was tender, and, on a Saturday morning when he got the salesmen together before opening to give them a speech, his mouth would bleed a little at the corners. He hoped to be more severe than he could be, and I expect his trouble was that he was really not the man to direct a snazzy operation. For the place was a salon, with Frenchy torches held by human-arm brackets out from the walls, furled drapes, and Chinese furniture--such corners as are softened, sheltered from the outside air, even from the air of the Rue de Rivoli, by oriental rugs that swallow sounds in their nap, and hangings that make whispers and protocol unavoidable. Differences of inside and outside hard to reconcile; for up to the threshold of a salon like this there was a tremendous high tension and antagonistic energy asked to lie still that couldn't lie still; and trying to contain it caused worry and shivers, the kind of thing that could erupt in raging, bloody Gordon or Chartist riots and shoot up fire like the burning of a mountain of egg crates. This unknown, superfluous free power streaming around a cold, wet, blackened Chicago day, from things laid out to be still, incapable, however, of being still. Financially Simon and I were doing first rate; he was getting fifteen dollars a week before commissions, and I was pulling down thirteenfifty. Therefore it didn't matter that we were disqualified from Charity. Practically blind, Mama couldn't do the housework any longer. Simon hired a mulatto named Molly Simms, a strong lean woman, about thirty-five, who slept in the kitchen--on George's old cot, in fact --and whispered or sang out to us when we came home late. We never had gotten the habit of using the front entrance, forbidden to us in the old lady's time. "She means you, sport," Simon said. "Bushwah, you're the one she looks at all the time." On New Year's Day she didn't show up, and I kept things running and fixed the meals. Simon was away too. He had gone to a New Year's Eve party, leaving the house in his best: bowler hat, polka-dot muffler, ^ats on his two-tone shoes, pigskin gloves. And he didn't get back till early evening the next day, out of a rapid, sparkling snow. He was filthy, scowling, with blood in his eyes and scratches through his blond stubble. A first good look at his violent and lavish nature, it was, to see him heaving in from the quiet snowfall of the back porch, kicking his shoes clean on the bricks and bristling over them with broom, next showing his face, streaky, as if he had been shagged through brambles, and putting his hard hat, with a puncture in it, on the chair. It was lucky Mama couldn't see him; at that she knew something was wrong and asked in her high cry. "Why, there's nothing the matter, Ma," we said to her. Slangily, so that she wouldn't understand, he told me a cock-and-bull story about a scrap on a Well Street El platform with a couple of drunk jokers, ferocious Irishmen, of one catching his arms in his coat by yanking down the collar while the other pushed his face into those guard wires on the banister and threw him down the stairs. None of that convinced me. It didn't explain where he had been a day and a night. I said, "You know, Molly Simms didn't show up, and she said she was going to." He didn't try to deny he had been with her, but sat heavy in his wet, foul best, brute-exhausted. He had me heat the boiler for his bath, and when he stripped his shirt revealed more skin torn from his back. He didn't trouble himself as to what I thought. And, neither boasting nor complaining, he told me that he had gone to Molly Simms' room eatly in the morning. It was true he had fought with two micks; he was drunk, after the party; but she had given him the scratches. Furthermore, she hadn't let him go till good and dark, and then he blundered in the Black Belt streets, in the snow. Lifting the covers to climb into bed, he said to me that we would have to get rid of Molly Simms. "Where do you get that 'we' stuff?" "Or she'll think she's boss of the place, and the woman's a wildcat." We were in our ancient little room, where the stiff wallpaper of many layers bulged out in bubbles and the comfortable snow raced dry on the window and mounted on the sill. "She'll want to build it up to something. She told me already." "What did she tell you?" "That she loves me," he said, grinning but somber. "She's a crazy bitch." "What? She's close on forty." "What difference does that make? She's a woman. And I went to see her. I didn't ask her age before getting on her." He sent her away that week. I noticed how she observed his scratched face at breakfast. She was a thin, gypsyish woman, and her face was very keen; she could put on a manner when she felt like it, but she didn't care a damn who saw her when she didn't, and she gave her sharp, greenish-eyed grin. He wasn't rattled by her; he had decided she was going to be a nuisance, and she caught on at once that he was bent on giving her the shove-ho. She was an experienced woman, rough from being so much on the losing side and from having knocked around from town to town, Washington to Brooklyn to Detroit, with what other stops you'd never know, getting gold teeth here and a slash in the cheek there. But she was an independent and never appealed for any sympathy; was never offered any either. Simon bounced her and hired Sablonka, an old Polish woman who disliked us, a slow-climbing, muttering, mob-faced, fat, mean, pious widow who was a bad cook besides. But we were neither of us around much. Within a few weeks after she began I was not even living at home, but had dropped from school and was living and working in Evanston. And I was on a peculiar circuit, for a while, of the millionaire suburbs--Highland Park, Kenilworth, and Winnetka--selling things, a specialized salesman in luxury lines and dealing with aristocrats. It was the shoe buyer who put me onto this when asked by a business acquaintance in Evanston to recommend someone; he brought me forward, where Mr. Renting, this Evanstonian sporting-goods man, could get a load of me as I crossed the floor. "Where does he come from?" he asked, this frosty, dry, selfcommenting, neutral-eyed man, long-legged and stylish. He looked like a Scotsman. "From the Northwest Side," said the buyer. "His brother works upstairs. They're clever boys, both of them." "Jehudim?" said Mr. Renling, still looking neutrally at the buyer. "Jew?" the buyer said to me. He well knew the answer; he merely passed the question on. "Yes. I guess." "Ah," said Renling, this time to me. "Well, out there on the North Shore they don't like Jews. But," he said, brimming frostily with a smile, "who makes them happy? They like hardly anybody. Anyway, they'll probably never know." And to the buyer again he said, "Well, do you think this is a kid who can be glamorized?" "He's done all right here." "It's a little more high-pressure on the North Shore." Prospective house slaves from the shacks got the same kind of going- w^, I suppose, or girls brought to an old cocotte by their mothers for e* 129 training. He had me strip my jacket so he could see my shoulders and my fanny, so that I was just about to tell him what he could do with his job when he said I was built right for his purpose, and my vanity was more influential than my self-respect. He then said to me, "I want to put you in my saddle shop--riding habits, boots, dude-ranch stuff, fancy articles. I'll pay twenty bucks a week while you're learning, and when you're broken in I'll pay you twenty-five plus commission." Naturally I took the job. I'd be earning more money than Simon. I moved into a student loft in Evanston, where soon the most distinguished thing was my wardrobe. Maybe I ought to say my livery, since Mr. and Mrs. Renting saw to it that I was appropriately dressed, in fact made a clotheshorse of me, advancing the money and picking out the tweeds and flannels, plaids, foulards, sport shoes, woven shoes Mexican style, and shirts and handkerchiefs--in the right taste for waiting on a smooth trade of mostly British inclination. When I had sounded the place out good I didn't go for it, but I was too stirred up at first, and enthusiastic, to see it well. I was dressed with splendor and working back of the most thrilling plate glass I had ever seen, on a leafy street, in a fashionable store three steps under a western timber from the main part of Renling's shop, which sold fishing, hunting, camping, golf and tennis equipment, canoes and outboard motors. You see now what I meant by saying that I have to marvel at my social passes, that I was suddenly sure and efficacious in this business, could talk firmly and knowingly to rich young girls, to country-club sports and university students, presenting things with one hand and carrying a cigarette in a long holder in the other. So that Renling had to grant that I had beat all the foreseen handicaps. I had to take riding lessons-- not too many, they were expensive. Renting didn't want me to become an accomplished horseman. "What for?" he said. "I sell these fancy guns and never shot an animal in my life." But Mrs. Renting wanted me to become a rider and to refine and school me every way. She had me register for evening courses at Northwestern. Of the four men who worked in the store--I was the youngest --two were college graduates. "And you," she said, "with your appearance, and your personality, if you have a college degree..." Why, she showed me the result, as if it already lay in my hands. She played terribly on my vanity. "I'll make you perfect," she said, "completely perfect," Mrs. Renting was pushing fifty-five, light-haired, only a little gray, small, her throat whiter than her face. She had tiny, dry red freckles and eyes of light color, but not gentle. Her accent was foreign; she came from Luxembourg, and it was a great pride of hers that she was connected with names in the Almanach de Gotha for that part of the world. Once in a while she assured me, "It is all nonsense; I am a democrat; I am a citizen of this country. I voted for Cox, I voted for Al Smith, and I voted for Roosevelt. I do not care for aristocrats. They hunted on my father's estate. Queen Carlotta used to go to chapel near us, and she never forgave the French, because of Napoleon the Third. I was going to school in Brussels when she died." She corresponded with ladies of the nobility in different places. She exchanged recipes with a German woman who lived in Doom and had something to do with the Kaiser's household. "I was in Europe a few years ago and I saw this baroness. I knew her long. Of course they can never really accept you. I told her, 'I am really an American.' I brought some of my pickled watermelon. There is nothing like that over there, Augie. She taught me how to make veal kidneys with cognac. One of the rare dishes of the world. There's a restaurant now in New York that makes them. People have to make reservations, even now, in Depression time. She sold the recipe to a caterer for five hundred dollars. I would never do that. I go and cook it for my friends, but I would consider it beneath me to sell an old family secret." She could cook all right, she had all the cooking arcana. She was known all over for the dinners she threw. Or for those she cooked at other places, because she might decide to make one anywhere, for friends. Her social set were the hotel manager's wife at the Symington, the jewelers, Vietold, who sold to the carriage trade--the heaviest, crested, cymbal-sized fruit dishes and Argonaut gravy boats. There also was the widow of a man involved in the Teapot Dome Scandal, who bred coach dogs Any number of people like this. For new friends who didn't know her veal kidneys she'd prepare everything at home and cook it in at their table. She was an ardent feeder of people, and often cooked for the salesmen; she hated to see us go to restaurants, where everything, she said, in her impersonator's foreign voice that nothing could interrupt, was so cheap and sticky. That was just it, with Mrs. Renting--she couldn't be interrupted or stopped, in her pale-fire concentration. She would cook for you if she wanted to, feed you, coach, you, instruct you, play mah-jongg with you, and there was scarcely anything you could do about it, she had so much "lore force than anybody else around; with her light eyes and the pale, tox stain of her freckles lying in the dust of powder or on the back of faer hands, with long hard rays of the tendons. She told me I would study advertising in the School of Journalism at the University, and she paid my fees, and so I did. She also chose for me the other courses I needed for a degree, stressing that a cultured man could have anything he wanted in America for the asking, standing out, she said, like a candle in a coal mine. ^ I had a busy life. In my new person of which, at the time, I was ungodly proud. With my class evenings, evenings in the library reading history and the cunning books for creating discontent in the consumer; attending Mrs. Renling's bridge or mah-jongg soirees in her silk, penthouse parlor, something of a footman, something of a nephew, passing around candy dishes, opening ginger ale in the pantry, with my cigarette holder in my mouth, knowing, obliging, with hints of dalliance behind me, Sta-comb shining on my hair, flower blooming out of my lapel, smelling of heather lotion, snitching tips on what was what in behavior and protocol; till I found that much of this last was off the cuf E and that many looked to you to know what tone to take. The real touchstone was Mrs. Renting, who couldn't be denied leadership. Mr. Renting didn't seem to care and played his cards or ivories, truly detached and passionless. He didn't speak much, and Mrs. Ren Sing said what she was going to say without hearing other opinion. This other opinion, what was said about servants, or about unemployment or the government, was monstrous, no two ways about it. Renting knew this but he didn't care. These were his friends of the business community; a man in -business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever. He had a personality strictly relative to his business. Once in a while he'd take off to show his skill with a piece of rope in knot tying, or he'd sing; "So this, so this, is Wenice I And where do we park the car?" His upper lip had a pretty big perch on the other one, and he looked gloomy and patient. He was a wintry, slick guy, like many people who have to do service but save something for their own--like a headwaiter or chief of bellhops--individuals who are mixed up in a peculiar lifegame where they sign on to lose and then anyhow put up a kind of | underneath battle. He was a fight fan and took me to the matches now: and then, at a ring near the Montrose Cemetery. Saying, at about ten o'clock, in a gathering, "Augie and I have a pair of duckets it would be a shame to waste altogether. We can still make the main event if we leave now." Since there were things men found it necessary to do, Mrs. Renling said, "Well, by all means." During the bouts Renling didn't holler or carry on, but he ate them up. Anything that took stamina got him--six-day bike races, dance marathons, walkathons, flagpole sitting, continuous and world flights, long fasts by Gandhi or striking prisoners, people camping underground, buried alive and fed and breathing through a shaft--any miracles of endurance and effort, as if out of competition with cylinder walls or other machine materials that withstand steam, gases, and all inhuman pressure. Such exhibitions he'd drive any distance in his powerful Packard to get a load of, and, driving, he raced. But he did not appear to be going fast. For there was his stability in the green leather seat, plus his unshaking, high-placed knees beside the jade onion of the gear knob, his hands trimmed with sandy hairs on the wheel, the hypersmoothness of the motor that made you feel deceived in the speedometer that stood at eighty. Until you noticed how a mile of trees cracked open like a shadow inch of tape, that the birds resembled flies and the sheep birds, and how swift the blue, yellow, and red little bloods of bugs spattered on the glass. He liked me to go with him. And what his idea of company was was perplexing, since, as we came and went like a twister, there was no warmth of conversation to counteract the scene-ignoring cold rush, the thin thresh of the radio antenna and yacking of broadcasts through the gold-mesh mouth in the panel. But what was mostly touched on, now and again, was the performance of the ear and gas and oil statistics. We'd stop for barbecue chicken in some piny place, on warm sand, like a couple of earth-visiting Plutonians, and sip beer in the perfect clothes we wore, of sporting hound's-tooth or brown Harris tweed, carrying field glasses in cases from the shop: a gloomy, rich gentleman and his gilded nephew or young snob cousin, we must have looked. I was too much engaged with feeling this raiment on me, the closeness of good cloth to my body, or with thoughts of the cock-green Tyrolean brush in my hat and splendor of British shoes, to be able to see Renling as I did see him later. He was an obstacle-eater. He rushed over roads. He loved feats and worshiped endurance, and he took between his teeth all objections, difficulties, hindrances, and chewed and swallowed them down. Sometimes he'd tell something of himself in the form of a short remark, as when we passed under a North Shore viaduct once and he ^id, "I helped build that. I wasn't any older than you then, and helped Pass cement to the mixer. Must have been the year the Panama Canal was opened. Thought the job would knock me out in the stomach muscles. Buck and a quarter was pretty good dough in those days." This was how he borrowed me for company. It probably gave him some amusement, how I took to this sort of life. There was a spell in which I mainly wished to own dinner clothes and be invited to formal parties and thought considerably about how to get into the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Not that I had any business ideas. I was better than fair in the shop, but I had no wider inventiveness about money. It was social enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clotheshorseyness. The way a pair of tight Argyle socks showed in the crossing of legs, a match to the bow tie settled on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I was given over to it. Briefly I ran with a waitress from the Symington, Willa Steiner. I took her dancing at the Merry Garden and went to the beach with her at night. She kindly let me get by most of the time with putting on the dog and pompousness, being a warm girl. She was nowise shy herself, making no bones about what we were together for. She had a home-town lover too, whom she talked about marrying--I'm certain without any hinder-thought of making me jealous. For she had a number of things against me about which she was probably in the right, my dandy gab and conceit and my care about clothes. Soon informed, Mrs. Renting came down hard on me for getting mixed up with her. Einhom didn't know more of what went on around him than she did about everything in her territory. "Augie, I'm astonished at you," she said. "She's not even a pretty girl. She has a nose like a little Indian"-- I had especially petted Willa Steiner with this pretty nose for my theme; it wasn't courageous of me not to defend it--"and she's covered with freckles. I have freckles too, but mine are different, and anyhow, it's only as an older person that I'm talking to you. Besides, the girl is a little prostitute, and not an honest prostitute, because an honest prostitute, all she wants is your money. And if you have to do this, if you come to me and tell me you have to--and don't be ashamed of that-- I'll give you money to go somewhere on Sheridan Road near Wilson, where such places are." Another instance of people offering to contribute money to keep me out of trouble; as Einhorn had, when he lectured me about the robbery. "Augie, don't you see this little tramp wants you to get her in trouble so that you'll have to marry her? That's all you need now, to have a baby with her right at the start of your career. I would think that you would know what this is about." Sometimes I thought it was clever and free of her to talk as she did, and again that it was terribly stupid. I had an impression that, glancing out from the partitions where she observed, with her dotty, smarting, all-interfering face, she was bent on pulling whom she wanted to her, to infuse and instill. It was the kind of talk gilded dumb young men have heard from protectresses, generals' and statesmen's wives, in all the duchies, villas, and capital cities of the world. "But you don't really know anything about Willa, Mrs. Renling," I said clumsily. "She doesn't--" I didn't go on, because of all the scorn in her face. "My dear boy, you talk like a nitwit. Go on with her if you want. I'm not your mother. But you'll see," she said in her impersonator's voice, "when she has you roped. D'you think all she wants out of life is to wait on tables and work to feed herself just to keep in shape for you, so you'll have nothing to do but enjoy her? You know nothing about girls; girls want to marry. And it's not in the modest old times when they sat on it till somebody would have mercy." She spoke disgustedly; she had disgust to bum. It didn't occur to me, when Mrs. Renling had me drive her to Benton Harbor where she took mineral baths for her arthritis, that she was getting me away from Willa. She said she couldn't think of going out to Michigan alone, and that I would drive and keep her company in the hotel. Afterward I understood. Benton Harbor was plenty different for me from what it had been last time, when I had hitch-hiked back from Muskegon with Nails and Dingbat, with sweat shirt tied on my neck by the sleeves and my feet road-sore. Actually we stayed in St. Joe, next to Lake Michigan, at the Merritt Hotel, right in front of the water and the deep, fresh smell of sea volume in the glossy pink walls of the rooms. The hotel was vast, and it was brick construction, but went after the tone of old Saratoga Springs establishments, greenery and wickerwork, braid cord on the portieres, menus in French, white hall runners and deep fat of money, limousines in the washed gravel, lavish culture of flowers bigger than life, and triple-decker turf on which the grass lived rich. Everywhere else, in the blaze of July, it was scanty. I had the long bath hours to myself to see what the territory round about was like. It was mostly fruit country, farmed by Germans, the men like farmers anywhere, but the older women in bonnets, going barefoot in long dresses under the giant oaks of their yards. The peach branches shone with seams of gum, leaves milky from the spray of "secticides. Also, on the roads, on bicycles and in Ford trucks, were the bearded and long-haired House of David Israelites, a meat135 renouncing sect of peaceful, businesslike, pious people, who had a big estate or principality of their own, and farmhouse palaces. They spoke of Shilo and Armageddon as familiarly as of eggs and harnesses, and were a millionaire concern many times over, owning farms and springs and a vast amusement park in a big Bavarian dell, with a miniature railway, a baseball team, and a jazz band that sent music up clear to the road from the nightly dances in the pavilion. Two bands, in fact, one of each sex. I brought Mrs. Renling here a few times to dance and drink spring water; the mosquitoes, though, were too active for her. Afterward I sometimes went alone; she didn't see why I should want to. Nor did she see what I strayed into town for in the morning, or why I took pleasure in sitting in the still green bake of the Civil War 'courthouse square after my thick breakfast of griddle cakes and eggs and coffee. But I did, and warmed my belly and shins while the little locust trolley clinked and crept to the harbor and over the trestles of the bog-spanning bridge where the green beasts and bulrush-rocking birds kept up their hot, small-time uproar. I brought along a book, but there was too much brown stain on the pages from the sun. The benches were white iron, roomy enough for three or four old gaffers to snooze on in the swamp- tasting sweet warmth that made the redwing blackbirds fierce and quick, and the flowers frill, but other living things slow and lazyblooded. I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings on a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not a subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power. No more than the comb or shadow of your hair has power on your brain. Mrs. Renling did not like to be alone at meals, not even at breakfast. I had to eat with her in her room. Each morning she took sugarless tea, with milk, and a few pieces of zwieback. I had the works, the bottom half of the menu, from grapefruit to rice pudding, and ate at a little table by the open window, in the lake airs that lapped the dotted Swiss curtains. In bed, and talking all the while, Mrs. Renling took off the gauze chin band she slept in and began to treat her face with lotions and creams, plucked her eyebrows. Her usual subject of conversation was the other guests. She got them down and polished them off, but good. In the leisure of the early hour, when she bravely rode fence on her face. She would die a well-tended lady who had kept up fiercely all civilized duties, as developed before Phidias and through Botticelli-- all that great masters and women of illustrious courts had prescribed and followed for perfection, the kind of intelligence to wear in the eyes and the molds of sweetness and authority. But she had a wrathruled mind. Giving herself these feminine cares in the brightness of her suite in the soft-blown-open summer beauty, she was not satisfied without social digging and the toil of grievances and antipathies. "Did you notice the old couple on my left, last night at the Bunco party, the Zeelands? Marvelous old Dutch family. Isn't he a beautiful old man? Why, he was one of the greatest corporation lawyers in Chicago, and he's a trustee for the Robinson Foundation, the glass people. The university gave him an honorary degree, and when he has a birthday the newspapers write editorials. And still his wife is stupid as her own feet, and she drinks, and the daughter is a drunkard too. If I knew she was going to be here I would have gone to Saratoga instead. I wish there was some way to get an advance guest list from these hotels. There ought to be a service like that. They have a suite for six hundred dollars a month in Chicago. And as soon as the chauffeur comes for the old man in the morning--this is something I know!--the bellhop goes out and buys them a bottle of bourbon and bets on a horse for them. Then they drink and wait for the results. But that daughter--she keeps herself a little old-fashioned. If you didn't notice her last night, look for a heavy-built woman who wears feathers. She threw a child out of the window and killed it. They used all their influence and got her free. A poor woman would have gotten the chair, like Ruth Snyder, with the matrons standing all around and picking up their skirts so the photographers couldn't get a picture of it. I wonder if she dresses like this now so as to feel nothing in common with that young flapper who did that thing." You needed a strong constitution to stick to your splendor of moming in the face of these damnation chats. I had to struggle when she called out her whole force of frights, apocalypse death riders, churchporch devils who grabbed naked sinners from behind to lug them down to punishment, her infanticides, plagues, and incests. I managed. But the situation was that I was enjoying what a rich young man enjoys and arranged my feelings accordingly, filling in and plastering over objections. Except that there were rotten moments, ^ch as when she spoke of the Snyder execution and evoked this terrible protection of a woman's modesty who was writhing in thousands of volts. And though I was avoiding everything that didn't agree with what I wanted, the consistent painting of doomedness and evil she specialized in did get under my skin. What if it really was as she said? If, for instance, the woman had thrown her baby out of the window? It wasn't Medea, a good, safe long time ago, chasing her pitiful kids, but a woman I saw in the dining room, wearing feathers, sitting down with her whitehaired father and mother. But there were people at the table near theirs that soon were of more interest to me--two young girls, of beauty to put a stop to such thoughts or drive them to the dwindling point. There was a moment when I could have fallen for either one of them, and then everything bent to one side, toward the slenderer, slighter, younger one. I fell in love with her, and not in the way I had loved Hilda Novinson either, going like a satellite on the back of the streetcar or sticking around her father's tailor shop. This time I had a different kind of maniac energy and knew what sexual sting was. My expectations were greater; more corrupt too, maybe, owing to the influence of Mrs. Renling and her speaking always of lusts, no holds barred. So that I allowed suggestions in all veins to come to me. I never have learned to reproach myself for such things; and then my experience in curtailing them was limited. Why, I had accepted of Grandma Lausch's warning only the part about the danger of our blood and that, through Mama, we were susceptible to love; not the stigmatizing part that made us out the carriers of the germ of ruination. So I was dragged, entrained, over a barrel. And I had a special handicap, because of the way I presented myself--due to Mrs. Renling--as if God had not left out a single one of His gifts, and I was advertising His liberality with me: good looks, excellent wardrobe, mighty fine manners, social ease, wittiness, handsome-devil smiles, neat dancing and address with women--all in the freshest gold-leaf. And the trouble was that I had what you might call forged credentials. It was my worry that Esther Fenchel would find this out. I worked, heart-choked, for the grandest success in these limits, as an impostor. I spent hours getting myself up to be a living petition. By dumb concentration and notice-wooing struggle. The only way I could conceive, in my blood-loaded, picturesque amorousness. But, the way a hint of plague is given in the mild wind of flags and beauty of a harbor --a scene of sate, busy peace--I could perhaps, for all of my sane look of easy, normal circumstances, have passed the note of my thoughts in the air--on the beach, on the flower-cultured lawn, in the big open of the white and gold dining room--and these thoughts were that I could submit to being hung in the girl's hair--of that order. I had heavy dreams about her lips, hands, breasts, legs, between legs. She could not stoop for a ball on the tennis court--I standing stiff in a foulard with brown horses on a green background that was ingeniously slipped through a handcarved wooden ring which Renting made popular ttiat season in Evanston--,-1 couldn't witness this, I say, without a push of love and worship in my bowels at the curve of her hips. and triumph ant maiden shape behind, and soft, protected secret. Where, to be allowed with love, would be the endorsement of the world, that it was not the barren confusion distant dry fears hinted and whispered, but was necessary, justified, the justification proved by joy. That if she would have, approve, kiss, use her hands on me, allow me the clay dust of the court from her legs, the mild sweat, her intimate dirt and sweat, deliver me from suffering falsehood--show that there wasn't anything false, injurious, or empty-hearted that couldn't be corrected! But in the evening, when nothing had come of my effort, a scoreless day, I lay on the floor of my room, all dressed up to go to dinner, with doomed patience, eaten with hankering and thinking futilely what brilliant thing to do--some floral, comet, star action, casting off stupidity and clumsiness. But I had marked carefully all that I could about Esther, in order to study what could induce her to see herself with me-, in my light. That is, up there in sublimity. Asking only that she join me, let me, ride and row in love with me, with her fresh, great female wonders and beauties which would increase by my joy that she was exactly as she was, with her elbows, her nipples at her sweater. I watched how she chased a little awkwardly on the tennis court and made to protect her breasts and closed in her knees when a fast ball came over the net. My study of her didn't much support my hopes; which was why I lay on the floor with a desiring, sunburned face and lips open in thought. I realized that she knew she had great value, and that she was not subject to urgent-heartedness. In short, that Esther Fenchel was not of my persuasion and wouldn't much care to hear about her perspiration and little personal dirts. Nevertheless the world never had better color, to say it exactly as it strikes me, or finer and more reasonable articulation. Nor ever gave me better trouble. I felt I was in the real and the true as far as nature and pleasure went in forming the native place of human and all other existence. And I behaved ingeniously too. I got into conversations with old Fenchel, not the girls' father but their uncle, who was in the mine ralwater business. It wasn't easy, because he was a millionaire. He drove a Packard, the same model and color as the Renlings';! parked behind him on the drive so that he had to look twice to see which was his, and then I had him. Inter pares. For how could he tell that I earned twentyfive dollars a week and didn't own the car? We talked. I offered him a Perfecto Queen. He smiled it away; he had his own tailor-made Havanas in a case big enough for a pistol, and he was so ponderously huge it didn't even bulge in his pocket. His face was fat and seamed, blackeyed--eyes black as the meat of Chinese litchi nuts--with gray, heinie hair, clipped to the fat of the scalp, back and sides. It was a little discouraging that the girls were his heiresses, as he right away told me, probably guessing that I wasn't bringing out the flower of my charm for his old cartilage-heavy Rembrandt of a squash nose with its white hairs and gunpowder speckles. To be sure not. And he wanted me to know in what league I was playing. I didn't give an inch. I've never backed down from male relatives, either calf or bull, or let father and guardians discomfit me. Getting to Esther's aunt was harder, since she was sickly, timid, and silent, with the mood of rich people whose health lets them down. Her clothes and jewelry were fine, but the poor lady's face was full of private effort; she was a little deaf from it. I didn't have to put on friendly interest; I really (God knows from where) had it. And by instinct I knew that what would fetch her--as infirm, loaded with dough, and beaten a long way out of known channels by the banked spoon-oars of special silver as she was--was the charm of ordinary health. So I talked away to her and was pretty acceptable. "My dear Augie, was that Mrs. Fenchel you were sitting with?" said Mrs. Renling. "She hasn't done anything but watch the sprinkler all month, so I thought she was screwloose. Did you speak to her first?" "Well, I just happened to be sitting by her." I got a good mark for this; she was pleased. But the next thing to be thought of was my purpose, and this she immediately and roughly found out. "It's the'girls, isn't it! Well, they are very beautiful, aren't they? Especially the black-haired one. Gorgeous. And mischievous, full of the devil she looks. But remember, Augie, you're with me; I'm responsible for your behavior. And the girl is not a waitress, and you better not think you-know-what. My dear boy, you're very clever and good, and I want to see you get ahead. I'll see that you do. Naturally, with this girl, you haven't got a chance. Of course, rich girls can sometimes be little whores too, and have the same itch as common ones and sometimes even worse. But not these girls. You don't know what German upbringing is." So to speak, reserved for the brass, the Fenchel heiresses. But Mrs. Renling wasn't infallible, and had already made one mistake, that of thinking it was Thea rather than. Esther Fenchel I was in love with. Also, she had no notion how much in love I was, down to the poetic threat of death. I didn't want her to have any notion either, though I would have been happy to tell someone. I did not like what I foresaw Mrs. Renling would make of it, and so I was satisfied to let her think it was Thea, the kinky-haired but also glorious-looking sister I carried the torch for, and I used some deceit. It didn't take much, as it was pleasing to Mrs. Renling's pride to think she had guessed, quick and infallible, what was bothering me. As a matter of fact Thea Fenchel was better than merely pleasant to me, and I was fishing after her uncle, who was in a bad mood, surly and difficult, one morning, when she asked me whether I played tennis. I had to say, and though it was a bad moment for me, smiling, that riding was my sport; and I desperately thought that I must get a racket and go at once to the public courts in Benton Harbor to learn. Not that I had been born to the saddle either; but it covered my origins somewhat to say that I was a horseman and had a pretty creditable clang. "My partner hasn't come," said Thea, "and Esther's on the beach." Within ten minutes I too was on the sand, notwithstanding that I had promised to play cards with Mrs. Renling after her mineral bath, when, she said, she felt too weakened to read. I lay hot and wandering-witted on my belly, watching Esther, and my notions were many-branched, high-seasoned, erotic, a good half painful, hoping for and afraid of notice as she bent down and rubbed sun-oil like brightness on her legs, and her head turned toward me, who was loony and drunk with assessing the weight of her breasts and the soft little heaviness of her belly, so elegantly banded in by the sheath of her swim suit, or her hair which she combed, it seemed to me, with great animal strength, taking off the close white rubber helmet. The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun. Presently she went up; and so did I, a little later. Mrs. Renling gave me the icy treatment for being late. And, I thought, lying on the floor of my room with my heels upon the bedspread like an armored man fallen from his horse, spur-tangled and needing block and tackle to be raised, that it was time, seeing my inattention was making Mrs. Renling angry, to have some progress to show for it at least. I got up and brushed myself without particular heart or interest, using two military brushes she had given me. I went down in the slow, white elevator and, on the ground floor, moseyed around in the lobby. It was sundown, near dinnertime, with brilliant darkening water, napkins and broad menus standing up in the dining room, and roses and ferns in long-necked vases, the orchestra tuning back of its curtain. I was alone in the corridor, troubled and rocky, and trod on slowly to the music room, where the phonograph was playing Caruso, stifled and then clear cries of operatic mother-longing, that ornate, at heart somber, son's appeal of the Italian taste. Resting her elbows on the closed cabinet, in a white suit and round white hat, next thing to a bishop's biretta, bead-embroidered, was Esther Fenchel; she stood with one foot set on its point. I said, "Miss Fenchel, I wonder if you would like to go with me some evening to the House of David." Astonished, she looked up from the music. "They have dancing every night." I saw nothing but failure, from the first word out, and felt smitten, pounded from all sides. "With you? I should say not. I certainly won't." The blood came down out of my head, neck, shoulders, and I fainted dead away. I came out of it without help. There wasn't anyone to offer any, Esther not having spent an instant in seeing what had happened to me, evidently, because the singing rolled in on me in the splendor of its wind-up, at first with the noise of a seashell, then louder, with the climbing of the orchestra on the staircase of a magnificent hall, to the clear heartbreak of the very top where the drums severed and killed and gave a hammering burial to everything. I don't know whether it was the refusal or the emotion of speaking and being spoken to that knocked me down, and I wasn't in any condition to touch around and feel for the trigger, where it was and why it was like a loose tooth. It was enough I had found out how strong the charge was, and that it was the kick of a false situation that went off. And meanwhile I was sucking breath and the air felt chilly to me because of my damp face. I got my back against a sofa, where I felt I had got trampled all over my body by a thing some way connected by weiaht with my mother and my brother George, who perhaps this very minute was working on a broom, or putting it down to shamble in to supper; or with Grandma Lausch in the Nelson Home--somehow as though run over by the beast that kept them steady company and that I thought I was safely away from. Meantime Miss Zeeland was standing in the doorway, the daughter of the famous corporation lawyer, looking at me, in her evening feathers, and her body in the long drape of her dress making a single unbroken human roll. She had on golden shoes and white gloves to the elbow, and looked visionary, oriental, with her rich hair swept up in a kind of tower that was in equilibrium to her big bust. Her face was clear and cold, like a kind of weather, though the long clean groove of her upper lip was ready to go into motion, as if she were going to break her silence with something momentous and long-matured; explain love to me, perhaps. But no, her ideas remained closed to me, though she didn't leave until I got up to turn off the phonograph, and then she glided or fanned away. I went to the men's toilet to wash my face with a little warm water and then went to dinner. I didn't do much with the food, not even the peche flambee, as didn't escape Mrs. Renling, and she said, "Augie, when is this love nonsense going to stop? You'll hurt your system. Is it that important?" Then she used her most fondling words on me, to get me around by kidding, and, as a woman, tried to put a top on my imagination of women where she thought a top should be, explaining what there was and was not to women, and praised the male in all things as if she was working for Athena. It drove me a little crazy. I wasn't right on my rocker anyway, and hearing her run down the body of womankind in her metal, bristling way made me look at her with a streak of bad blood in the eye. And I waited almost with the shakes of malaria for Esther to appear in the dining room. The old Fenchels were already at their table. Then Thea came, but her sister wasn't having supper apparently. "And you know," said Mrs. Renling after a time, "the girl hasn't had her eyes off you since she came in. Is there something between you already? Augie! Have you done something? Is that why you're low? What have you done?" "I haven't done anything," I said. "You better not!" She was on me, sharp and shrewd, just like a police matron. "You're too attractive to women for your own good, and you'll end up in trouble. So will she; she's got hot pants, that little miss." She gave Thea stare for stare. The waiter set light to the Fenchels' flambee, and there were little fires here and there in the green of twilight. I left the dining room without saying more. To walk around on the shore road and get the shameful twists out of my guts and digest my trouble. It was awful, the feelings I was having, the disgrace and anger over Esther and the desire to conk Mrs. Renling on the head. I went along the edge of the water, and then around the grounds, staying away from the porch where I knew Mrs. Renling would be waiting to pay me off for my rudeness, and then to the back, to the children's playground, and sat down on the slat seat of the garden swing. Sitting here, I started to dream that Esther had thought it over and had come out of her room to look for me, so that I had to groan over the grip my stupidity had on me and was sloshed all over with corrupting feelings, worse than before. Then I heard someone light coming near, a woman stepping under the tree into the dusty rut worn beside the swing by the feet of kids. It was Esther's sister Thea, come to talk to me, the one Mrs. Renling warned me of. In her white dress and her shoes that came down like pointed shapes of birds in the vague whiteness of the furrow by the swing, with lace on her arms and warm opening and closing differences of the shade of leaves back of her head, she stood and looked at me. "Disappointed that it isn't Esther, aren't you, Mr. March? I guess you must be having a terrible time. You looked pretty white in the dining room." Wondering what she knew and what she was after, I didn't say anything. "Have you recovered a little?" "Recovered from what?" "From fainting. Except Esther thought it might be an epileptic fit." "Well, maybe it was one," I said, feeling heavy, sullen, and crumbling. "I don't think so. You're just sore, and you don't want me to bother you." That wasn't so; on the contrary, I wanted her to stay. So I said, "No," and she sat down beside my feet, touching them with her thigh. I made a move, but she touched my ankles and said, "Don't bother. You don't have to make yourself uncomfortable because of me. What happened anyway?" "I asked your sister for a date." ' "And when she said 'No' you passed out." I thought she was warm toward me and not merely curious. "I'm all for you, Mr. March," she said, "so I'll tell you what Esther thinks. She thinks that you service the lady you're with." "What?" I cried out and jumped from the seat and gave myself a crack on the head against the dowels of the swing. "That you're her gigolo and lay her. Why don't you sit down? I thought I should explain this to you." As if I had been carrying something with special sacred devotedness and it had spilled and scalded me, that was how I felt. And here I had all along thought that the worst that could occur in the minds of young girls, heiresses even, was innocent by the standards of Einhom's poolroom. "Who thought of that, you or your sister?" "I don't want to throw all the blame on Esther. I thought it might be so too, even though she brought it up first. We. knew you weren't related to Mrs. Renling because we heard her say once to Mrs. Zeeland that you were her husband's protege. You never danced with anybody else, and you held hands with her, and she is a sexy-looking woman for her age. You ought to see the two of you together! And then she's a European, and they don't think it's so terrible for a woman to have a much younger lover. I don't see what's so terrible about it either. Just my deadhead of a sister does." "But I'm not European. I come from Chicago. I work for her husband in Evanston. I'm a clerk in his store, and that's the only occupation I have." "Now don't be upset, Mr. March. Please don't be. We get around and see a lot. Why do you think I came out here to talk to you? Not to trouble you more. If you did, you did, and if you didn't, you didn't." "You don't know what you're saying. It's a lousy thing to think of me, and of Mrs. Renling too, who's been only kind to me." I was angry and sounded angry, and she held Her answers back; she also was heated and tight with excitement. I felt as well as saw her eyes deeply studying me. Whereas till now she had smiled occasionally there was no longer the least bit of humor in her face, which I saw well in the whiteness and ground dust and orchard leaves. I began to understand that I was with someone extraordinary, for it was a hot, prompt, investigative, and nearly imploring face. It was delicate but also full of strong nerve, with the recklessness that gives you as much concern as admiration, seeing it in a young woman; as when you see birds battling, like two fierce spouts of blood; they could easily die from small harms and don't seem to realize it. Of course that's one of those innocent male ideas probably. "You don't really believe I'm Mrs. Renling's gigolo, do you?" "I've already told you I wouldn't care if you were." "Sure, what difference should it make to you!" "No, you don't get it. You've been in love with my sister and following her around, so you haven't noticed that I've done exactly the same to you." "You've what?" "I've fallen in love with you. I love you." "Go away. You don't. It's just an idea. If it's even an idea. What are you trying to give me?" "You couldn't love Esther if you knew her. You're like me. That's why you fell in love. She couldn't. Augie! Why don't you change to me?" She took my hand and drew it to her, leaning toward me from the hips, which were graceful. Oh, Mrs. Renling over whom I thought I had triumphed because her suspicions were so misplaced! "I don't care about Mrs. Renling," she said. "Suppose you did, once." "Never!" "A young person can do all sorts of things because he has more in him than he knows what to do with." Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you. "Now, Miss Fenchel," I said, trying to keep her in her seat as I stood up. "You're lovely, but what do you think we're doing? I can't help it, I love Esther." And as she wouldn't stay put I had to escape from the swing and get away in the orchard. "Mr. March--Augie," she called. But I wasn't going to talk to her now. I went into the hotel by the service entrance. When I was in the room, with the phone off the hook so that Mrs. Renling couldn't reach me, I explained to myself, while taking off my good duds and dropping them on the floor, that this was merely something between sisters and I figured in it accidentally, not really personally. But my other thought was that, if it weren't so, there was no luck in these things; how everyone seemed to get drawn in the wrong direction. So for the same desires to meet was a freak occurrence. And to feel them so specific, settled on one person, maybe was an unallowable presumption, too pure,, too special, and a misunderstanding of the real condition of things.; When I walked in to have breakfast with Mrs. Renling next moming I left the door open. "What, were you born in the coal scuttle?" she said. "Close it. I'm lying here." And when I went, halfhearted, to do it, she observed how wrinkled I looked. "Go down to the tailor after breakfast and get pressed. You must have slept in your pants. I make allowance for you because you're in love, even the way you were so courteous to me last night. But you don't have to be a tramp." After breakfast she took off for her mineral bath and I went down I to the lobby. The Fenchels had checked out. There was a note at the desk for me from Thea. "Esther told uncle about you, and we are going to Waukesha for a few days and then East. You were foolish last night. Think about it. It's true I love you. You'll see me again." Then I had a few rough days and got stretched out in melancholy. I thought, where did I get that way, putting in for the best there was in the departments of beauty and joy as if I were a count of happy youth, and like born to elegance and sweet love, with bones made of candy? And had to remember what very seldom mattered with me, namely, where I came from, parentage, and other history, things I had never much thought of as difficulties, being democratic in temperament, available to everybody and assuming about others what I assumed about myself. And in the meantime, more and more, I had to carry what till now had carried me. This place, for instance, the Merritt, cream and gold, was now on my neck--the service, the dinner music, the dances; the hyperbolical flowers all of a sudden like painted iron; the chichi a millstone; and, on top of it, Mrs. Renling and her foundry-cast weight. I couldn't take her now when she was difficult. There was bad luck even in the weather, which turned cool and rainy toward the last; and rather than stay in where she could lay hands on me and carry on and tyrannize, I stuck around the amusement park at Silver Beach, where the seats of the Ferris wheel were covered, getting blackened, and I got soaked through my raincoat (from the old times and not up to my recenter elegance). I sat in the hot-dog stands among the carnies, con^cessionaires, and shell-game operators, waiting for the course of baths to finish. Near the end of the holiday Simon wrote that he was coming to St. Joe with a girl friend, and he had luck with the weather. I was on the pier when the white steamer tied up. All the blue and green was fresher from the rains, and the cold of the wet days was down to a pin core. As for the people debarking, the hard use of the city was on them; it had come off only a little during this four-hour excursion on the water. Families, single men, working girls in pairs bringing their beach and summer things, some not so visibly encumbered but heavily loaded all the same. Tough or injured, according to their lot or nature. Off the ship they tramped, over the motor-driven edge of water and into the peaceful swale of brightness, and here and there the light picked out a specialized or warily happy face; and also illuminated were silks, hairs, brows, straws, breasts come to breathe out charges of nerves or let rise the driven-down simplicities, bearers of things as old as the most ancient of cities and older; desires and avoidances bred into bellies, shoulders, legs, as long ago as Eden and the Fall. Taller than most, blond and brown, there was my Germanic-looking brother. He was dolled up like a Fourth of July sport, and a little like a smart gypsy, smiling, his chipped tooth foremost, his double-breasted plaid jacket open wide, knuckles down on the handles of two grips. He gave off his fairness with a kind of heat in the blue color of his eyes, terrifically; it was also in his cheeks, down into his neck, rich and animal. He walked heavy in balance, in his pointed shoes over the gangplank, arms drawn down by the weight of the valises, searching for me in the shade of the pier. I never saw him looking better than there, in the sun, rolling in with the crowd in his glad rags. When he clapped his arm around me I was happy to feel and smell him, and we grinned, mugged, pushed faces, with man's bristles under each other's fingers, and went through a rough, teasing grip. "Well, you jerk?" "And you, moneyman?" There wasn't any sting in this, though Simon had for a while been acting quiet toward me because I was earning more than he and cruising in luxury. "How's everybody--Mama?" "Well, the eyes, you know. But she's okay." And then he fetched up his girl--a big dark girl named Cissy Flexner. I had known her at school; she was from the neighborhood. Her father, before he went bust, had owned a drygoods store--overalls, laborers' canvas gloves and longjohns, galoshes, things like that; and he was a fleshy, diffident, pale, inside sort of man, back in his boxes. But she, although in a self-solicitous way, was a beautiful piece of tall work, on colossal but careful legs, hips forward; her mouth was big and would have been perfect if there hadn't been something selftasting in it, eyes with complicated lids but magnificent in their slow heaviness, an erotic development. So that she had to cast down these eyes a little to be decent with her endowment, that height of the bosom and form of hips and other generic riches, smooth and soft, that may take the early person, the little girl, by surprise in their ampleness when they come on. She accused me somewhat of examining her too much, but could anybody help that? And it was excusable on the further score that she might become my sister-in-law, for Simon was powerfully in love. He already was husbandly toward her, and they hung on each other with fondling and kissing and intimacy, strolling by the steep colors of water and air, while I swam by myself in the lake a little distance away. Also on the sand, when Simon, after he had rubbed his fine shield of chest hair, dried her back, he kissed it, and it gave me a moment's ache in the roof of the mouth, as if I had got the warm odor and touch of skin myself. She had so much, gave out so much splendor. As stupendous quiff. But personally I didn't care too much for her. Partly because I was gone on Esther. But also because what came across as her own, that is, apart from female brilliance, was slow. Maybe she herself was stupefied by what she had, her slaying weight. It must have pressed down on her thoughts, like any great vitality in nature. Like the aims that live; in the blood of grizzly or tiger, bearing down on the mind of such beasts with square weight, a manifestation of one thing carried out completely, to the very stripes and claws. But what about the privilege over that of being in the clasp of nature, and in on the mission of a species? The ingredient of thought was weaker in Cissy's mixture than the other elements. But she was a sly girl, soft though she seemed. And as she lay stretched on the sand, and the hot oil of popcorn and sharpness of mustard came in puffs, with crackling, from the stands of Silver Beach, she kept answering Simon, whom I couldn't hear-- he was on his sids next to'her in his red trunks--"Oh, fooey, no. What | bushwah! Love, shmuv!" But her pleasure was high. "I'm so glad you brought me, dear. So clean. It's heavenly here." I didn't like Simon's struggle with her--for that was what it was-- to convince her, sway her, work her around. Nearly everything he proposed she refused. "Let's not and say we did," and similar denials, i It led him into crudenesses I hadn't ever seen him in before, the way he laid himself out, dug, campaigned, swashed, flattered her, was gross. His tongue hung out with the heat of work and infatuation; and there was a bottom ground where he was angry, his anger rising straight into his face in two naming centers, under his eyes, on either side of his nose. I understood this, as we were covering the same field of difficulty and struggle in front of the identical Troy. This that hap-) pened to us would have given Grandma Lausch the satisfaction of a: prophetess--the spirit, anyhow, of her; the actual was covered up in the dust of the Home, in the band of finalists for whom there was I the little guessing game of which would next be taken out of play. So I recorded this seeming success of prediction for her. And as for Simon, all the places where he and I had once been joined while still young brothers, before there were differences and distances between us--these places began to act up, feeling attachment near again. The reattachment didn't actually take place, but I loved him nevertheless. When he was on his feet with the flowered cloth of her beach dress on his shoulders, it made something crass but brave, his standing up raw and sunburned, by the pure streak of the water, as if he were being playful about the wearing of this girl's favor. I took them to the evening steamer, for she refused to stay overnight, and was on deck with them through the long working out of sunset, down to the last blue, devoid of other lights; fall weight and furrows in the clouds set cityward, let go from the power of the sun to sink down on the moundings and pilings of the water, gray and powerful. "Well, sport, we may be married in the next few months," he said. "You envy me? I bet you do." And he covered her up with his hands and arms, his chin on her shoulder and kissing her on the neck. The flamboyant way he had of making love to her was curious to me--his leg advanced between her legs and his fingers spread on her face. She didn't refuse anything he did, although in words never agreed; she had no kindness in speaking. With her hands up the sleeves of her white coat, hugging out the chill, she stood by a davit. He was still in his shirt, owing to sunburn, but wore his panama, the breeze molding the brim around.