The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [191]
having its brief chance to clear out in the courthouse-hung tranquillity before the resumption of hostilities, the meadow hour before the ashcan barrage of Flanders tears the skies. And the lark, who doesn't need to spit or clear his throat, goes up. But then the business of the day got under way, and in my harassed inability to keep up, it was like a double-quick-time stamping or dancing; angry grim waltz in which the clutched partners were out to wear one another down; or solo clog or tarantella of the hopping mad; or the limper sway of the almost gone from consciousness; the decorous sevillanas of the stiff whose faces didn't betray how their heels were slamming; the epidemic kick of German serfdom; the squatting kawtsky; the hesitation-step of adolescence; the Charleston. I confronted all the varieties, and as far as I could I avoided rising. Except when I had to go to the biffy to take a leak, or when I thought I was hungry and ducked below to the billiard room and lunch counter, where the green of the felt went to my head. However, I had no appetite. It was another kind of gnawing, not emptiness of gut that was the matter. When I went back there was a fresh crowd waiting to do their stuff. Me the weary booking agent or impresario, watched by them with wrath' and avidity, with tics, with dignity by some and booby-hatch glares by ' I others. And what was I going to accomplish for them in the way of * redress and throwing open princedoms by explaining how they must fill out a card? Holy Lord and God! I know man's labor must be one of those deals figured out by Providence that saves him by preserving him, or he would be hungry, he would freeze, or his brittle neck would ', be broke. But what curious and strange forms he ends up surviving in, ' ' becoming them in the process. It was in my unusual state of feeling that I reflected about this, and ' meantime when I would remember the rustle of Thea's brown silk it ' made me shiver. Along with the strange outcomes of the history of toil. ^ ' Every chance I got I phoned her. There wasn't any answer, and Grammick reached me before I could talk to her. He had to have my help in South Chicago that night in a gauze and bandage factory he had organized more or less in passing. For it was like a band of Jesuits land303 ing where a heathen people thirsted for baptism in the dense thousands, thronging out of their brick towns. I had to fill a bag with literature and blanks and race over to the Illinois Central to get the electric train and meet Grammick at his headquarters in a tavern, a rough place but with a ladies' and family entrance, for many of the gauze-winders were women. I can't say how they kept bandages clean in that sooty, plugugly town built as though so many fool amateur projects for the Tower of Babel that had got crippled at the second story a few dozen times and then all hands had quit and gone in for working in them instead. Grammick was in the middle of this show and busy organizing. He was as firm as a Stonewall Jackson, but he was also as perfectly pacific as a woodshop instructor in a high school or some personage of the Congress party, somebody from that white-flutter India setting out to conquer the whole place flat. By the power of meekness. Most of the night we were up and were ready in the morning with everything necessary, committees on their mark, demands drawn up, negotiation machinery all set and the factions in agreement. At nine o'clock Grammick picked up the phone to talk to management. At eleven the negotiations were already under way, and late that night the strike was won and we went out to a wiener and sauerkraut shindy with the glad union members. It was all a matter of course to Grammick, though I was hopped up about it and full of congratulation. I went to the booth in the back with my glass of beer and tried Thea's number again. This time I got through. I said, ' 'Listen, I'm calling from out of town where I had to go on business, otherwise you would have heard from me before. But I expect to be back tomorrow." "When?" "Afternoon, I think."