• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 10454 0

He hitched at me and kept on and on. So I said, "You don't want me to work for you. You want somebody who'll take this lousy nervousness from you." And I wrapped my old coat around me, which was a camel's hair going bald in places, and set off across the yard. He came after me to take it all back. In the thick powder of snow I had on overshoes, but he came on in his fine tan shoes which were slipperlike, saying, "Augie, let's not have a fight. For the love of God. Listen, I'm sorry." But I went on, good and mad. And that evening he phoned me and asked me to come and get him downtown. I could hear that things weren't right. He said he'd be at the Pump Room, than which few places were considered niftier in the city. When I got there and ;' asked for him, two knickered footmen brought him out. He was drunk, mute, numb, and could scarcely budge a feature of his face or work his tongue. Little by little he had come to depend on me. Somewhat like Einhom in the old days, he had found I wouldn't take advantage of him and that I was dependable. And with his peculiarity and confusion, downright Guiana jungle manifestations or freaks that the power of life will squeeze into sometimes, there nevertheless was something in him that drew me. Just that power, no doubt, tormenting his humanity and tormented in return. And while he was a bachelor and shared that mansion with his sister Caroline--well, she didn't do him much good. She was screwy. And when she found I had been in Mexico she took a shine to me, believing herself Spanish. She wrote me notes, such as, "Eres muy Guapo." And now and then a telegram arrived, like, "Amiga, que te vaya con toda suerte, Carolina." She was terribly scrambled, poor woman. After all, I had taken care of my brother George. That ability or quality was with me yet, and sometimes people sensed it. Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.

CHAPTER XXII

In my old room up at Owens' which I finally got back I went along with the changes of the times, industrial, military, scientific. Personally I experienced steep variations myself, bad news, wasted expenditures, wicked dreams, wizard happenings like the appearance of animals in the heat of evenings to desert Fathers, still I am thankful to say that as I view it I was not harmed. The police couldn't have had any complaint against me, regardless of what the moralists might have had. The worse offenses were in my imagination, where such belong, while like a big and busy enterprise that tries to cover all it can, I also brooded in my higher mind over my course of life. I came to certain conclusions too, which were -sometimes fragmentary--such as, The reason for solitude can only be reunion; or. Oh, it's very tiring to have your own opinions on everything--but other times were very full indeed, as will be shown in due course. I rambled around Chicago, my sociable self as always. But I was reverberating still from the plucks and pulls of Mexico. Thea didn't write, having disappeared for good to some blue shores of the ancient seas, probably on the trail of flamingos, with some new lover who would understand her no better than I did, and camping on a parapet with her guns and nooses, cameras, long-distance glasses. She'd pass into old age like this and never be any different. I wasn't getting any younger myself, and my friends would make pleasantries about my appearance, which wasn't at all prosperous. I smiled minus a couple of teeth of the lower line and was somewhat smeared, or knocked, kissed by the rocky face of clasping experience. My hair grew upward, copious, covering my old mountain hunter's scars. Undeniably I had a touch of the green of cousin Five Properties' eyes in my own, and I went along whiffing a cigar and lacking any air of steady application to tasks, forgetful, elliptical, gleeful sometimes, but ah, more larky formerly than now. While I mused I often picked Wp-i St up objects off the street because they looked to me like coins; slugs, metals from bottletops, and tinfoil scraps buried, thus obviously hoping for a lucky break. Also I wished