The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [272]
than a latrine in jealousy, dead as a cabbage to feeling, a maggot to beauty, a shrimp to duty, spinning the same thread of cocoon preoccupation from his mouth. Without tears to weep or enough expendable breath to laugh; cruel, frigging, parasitic, sneaking, grousing, anxious, and sluggardly. Drilled like a Prussian by the coarse hollering of sergeant fears. Robey poured it on me; he let it come down. I thought, Oh, what a crazy bastard! What kind of screwloose millionaire have they sent me to? All the same my heart responded to this and these things went home. My bottommost thought was, God have mercy on us poor human saps! And this bottommost thought budded out with another: Even if God did have mercy, this was what He'd have mercy on. Then Robey switched on me. He was a quick changer of mood. The damn bourgeoisie, he said, should have been leaders and offered practical examples of happiness. But they were a historic failure. They fumbled it. A weak dominant class, because all they had known how to do was to imitate the flow of money around the world, fill in all the opportunities for profit, like water seeking its own level, and to imitate the machine. Robey didn't sound like himself now, not, that is, as earnest as before, but bookish. He scratched his foot and went on like a lecturer, and with his beard, which looked straw-stuck, he was just one more oddity of this room. But I was still enough of an Einhorn worshiper to be taken with him. And I set aside some of my criticisms and said, "You were talking about the salary before. Could you be more definite?" This made an unpleasant impression. "How m-much do you expect? Till I tell how you pan out, I c-can start you at a reasonable figure." "What's reasonable?" "Fifteen a week?" "You must be making a mistake in your figure. Fifteen? I can get that much on relief and never lift a finger." It made me indignant. "Eighteen then," he followed up fast. "You try to get a plumber to fix your washbasin for less than half a buck an hour. Are you trying to hoax me or something? I don't think you're being serious." "You ought to th-think of the eded-ucation you'll be getting. And it isn't just a job but a cau-cau-cause." He was very disturbed. "Well, twenty bu-bucks and you can live upstairs rent free." So he could lay hold of me and chew my ear whenever he felt like it, night and day? Not on his life. "No," I said, "thirty a week for thirty hours." It hurt him to put out dough. I could see what a labor it was for his soul just to think about it. Finally he said, "Okay, when you work out. Twenty-five to start." "No, thirty, I told you." He cried, "Why do you put me through this t-temble haggle? It's really t-terrible. What the devil! It defeats the whole purpose." His look was positively full of hatred. But he hired me anyway. From day to day he changed his plan. First he wanted to do the historical section and assigned me to read Max Weber, Tawney, and Marx. Next I had to drop all this to start research on a pamphlet on philanthropy. He hated all philanthropist millionaires and wanted to hit all the puritanical rich who looked so bad and felt so unhappy. He named some of his cousins among them, so I could see it was all a family affair. Even the big brazen Wall Street louse with his suckers full of blood did more good in the form of a devil than these rich men who were worried, he said, like everybody else. Simply worried. And he'd rave against them by the hour. I was used to enthusiastic projects that would never leave the inventor's hangar. Like Einhom's indexed Shakespeare back in the old days. And I really understood that Robey wanted from me what Ein- horn had wanted, the very same thing, namely, a listener. He was on the telephone continually or sending the car for me or hunting for me in the library or waiting outside classrooms for me all the time. The first few months he heaped readings on me. I never could have gotten through all those Greeks and Fathers and histories of Rome and the Eastern Empire and whatnot in years. I don't even know that anybody should want to wade