The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [245]
As far as I could make it, it was. It may have looked like a game to you. I guess it would. Maybe you wouldn't have anything else." "We're not talking about the same thine. Not the love. It's the other things you're so fantastic about." "Me--so fantastic?" she said with dry mouth and laid her hand over her breast. "Well, how can you think you're not--the eagle, the other things, the snakes, hunting every day?" It gave her another hurt. "What, were you just being indulgent with me? About the eagle? That didn't mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?" I felt what a terrible thing I had done to her by this, and so I tried to mitigate it. "Don't those things ever strike you as queer, even for a minute?" I said. This made her throat tighten, and the tears, before, were nothing to this tightness. She said, "A lot of things look queer to me too. Some of I them maybe much more than what I do seems to you. Loving you, that wasn't queer at all to me. But now you start to seem queer, like many other things. Maybe I am peculiar, that I only know these strange ways of doing something. Instead of sticking to the ordinary way and doing something false. So"--and I was silent, recognizing the right on her side in this--"you made allowances for me." I could scarcely bear how she suffered. Sometimes I wasn't sure whether she could add the next word, her throat kept so many other sounds back, in abeyance. "I didn't ask you to--ever. Why didn't you say how you felt? You could have told me. I didn't want to seem fantastic to you," "You yourself, you never were. No, you weren't." "You don't tell anybody, I suppose. But to me you didn't have to behave as you do with anyone else. You could have done as you couldn't with anyone else. Isn't there one person in the whole world to whom you could? Do you tell anybody? Yes, I guess love would come in a queer form. You think the queemess is your excuse. But perhaps love would bs strange and foreign to you no matter which way it happened, and maybe you just don't want it. In that case I made a mistake, because I thought you did. And you don't, do you?" "What do you want to do to me, burn me down to the ground? It's just because you're so jealous and sore--" "Yes, I am jealous. I feel very sick and disappointed, otherwise I probably wouldn't do this. I know you can't take it. But I'm disappointed. I'm not just jealous. When I came up to your room in Chicago you had a girl, and when you came to see me I didn't ask you first whether you loved her or not. I knew it couldn't amount to much. But even if it had been important I thought I had to try! I felt mostly alone, as if the world were full of things but empty of people. I know," she admitted, dismaying me deeper than ever, "I must be a little crazy." She said it in a husky and quiet tone. "I must be, I have to admit. But I thought if I could get through to one other person I could get through to more. So people wouldn't tire me, and so I wouldn't be afraid of them. Because my feeling can't be people's fault, so much. They don't make it. Well, I believed it must be you who could do this for me. And you could. I was so happy to find you. I thought you knew all about what you could do and you were so lucky and so special. That's why it's not just jealousy. I didn't want you to come back. I'm sorry you're here now. You're not special. You're like everybody else. You get tired easily. I don't want to see you any more." Now she bent her head. She was crying. The hat dropped from her head and held by the cord. Gripped hard in my chest like a sick squir- i rel trapped in a chimney, in the silky shudder of smoke, was a terrible stuck feeling. I tried to come near again, and she straightened, looked me in the face, and cried, "I don't want you to do that! I don't want it; I can't allow you to. I know you think this, that, or the other can; always be overlooked, but I don't.": She walked past me to the door, where she stopped. "I'm going to Chilpanzingo," she said. She had stopped crying. "I'll come with you." "No, you won't. There won't be