The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [124]
So I couldn't be more on the level with them." You couldn't blame me for listening to this with some amount of skepticism. But then things like this are done by people with the specific ambition to do them. I didn't like the way he talked; for instance, the boast that we were handsome men--it made us sound like studs. However, I couldn't hope that he'd have another failure; he wasn't that rich in heart that he could make good use of it. "Let's see the girl's picture." He had it in his pants pocket. She seemed young enough, a big girl, with a pretty good face. I thought she was rather handsome, though not of an open or easy nature. "She's attractive, I told you. A little too heavy maybe." Her name was Charlotte Magnus. "Magnus? Wasn't it a Magnus truck that delivered coal to the Einhoras?" "That's her uncle, in the coal business. Four or five big yards. And her father owns property by the acre. Hotels. Also a few five-and-dime stores. It'll be the coal business for me. That's where I think the most dough is. I'll ask for a yard as a wedding present." "You have it all pretty well figured out" "Sure. I have something figured out for you too." "What, am I supposed to get married also?"; "In time, yes, we'll fix you up. Meanwhile you have to help me out. I'have to have some family. I've been told they're family-minded people. They wouldn't understand or like it, the way we are, and we have to make it look better. There'll be dinners and such things, and probably a big engagement party. You don't expect me to go downstate and fetch George here to show them, do you? No, I have to have you. We need clothes. Do you have any?" "They're in hock." "Get them out.".... "And what am I going to use for money?" "Don't you have any at all? I thought you were in some kind of book business here.";,' "Mama gets all the money I have to spare." He said tightly, "All right, don't be wise. I'll take care of all that soon. I'll raise the dough." I wondered where his credit might still be good. Perhaps his buyer friend lent him some money. Anyway, I got a postal order from Simon a few days later, and when I redeemed the clothes he came to borrow one of my Evanston suits. Soon he said that he had met Charlotte Magnus. He believed she was already in love with him. ift*
CHAPTER XI
Now there's a dark Westminster of a time when a multitude of objects cannot be clear; they're too dense and there's an island rain. North Sea lightlessness, the vein of the Thames. That darkness in which resolutions have to be made--it isn't merely local; it's the same darkness that exists in the fiercest clearnesses of torrid Messina. And what about the coldness of the rain? That doesn't deheat foolishness in its residence of the human face, nor take away deception nor change defects, but this rain is an emblem of the shared condition of all. It maybe means that what is needed to mitigate the foolishness or dissolve the deception is always superabundantly about and insistently offered to us--a black offer in Charing Cross; a gray in Place Pereires where you see so many kinds and varieties of beings go to and fro in the liquid and fog; a brown in the straight unity of Wabash Avenue. With the dark, the solvent is in this way offered until the time when one thing is determined and the offers, mercies, and opportunities are finished. The house where I was living on the South Side was a student house within range of the university chimes and chapel bell when the evenings were still, and it had a crowded medieval fullness, besides, of hosts inside the narrow walls, faces in every window, every inch occupied. I had some student book customers and even several friends here. In fact I really knew everybody through the circumstance that Owens, the old Welshman who operated the place, had me answering telephone calls and distributing the mail in the little varnished hole called the lobby. This I did in exchange for my rent. And as I sorted the letters I unavoidably read return addresses and postcards, and, signaling by bell to call people to the telephone, I had to hear their conversations