The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [302]
Flowery springtime. And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries. Whether I was all I might be troubled me as Frazer held forth, but much less than it would have done before my conversations with Clem about the axial lines and with Mintouchian in the Turkish bath. It gave me great comfort that Mintouchian was here. And in the end it was marriage-day tribute--all that happened. The champagne being at an end, the white meat eaten, the two pinochle players of the cutting table opposite putting on their jackets to depart, our company bowed out too. Farewell all, and many thanks. "Isn't my friend Frazer smart?" I said. "Yes, but you're my darling," said Stella and kissed me. So we went "to the bridal bed. Two days of honeymoon were all we had. I had to ship from Boston. Stella went up on the train with me the night before. And separating of course was tough. I sent her back in the morning. "Go, sweetheart." "Augie, darling, good-by," she said from the platform of the train. Some people can't bear a train departure at any time, and how crushing these departures were in the stations during the war, as the cars moved away and left throngs behind, and the oil-spotted empty tracks and the mounting, multiplying ties. "Please," she said, "be careful about everything." "Oh, I will," I promised her. "Don't worry about that. I love you too much to go and get sunk, on my first trip out. You take care too,' out there in Alaska." She made it sound as though it were somehow up to me, as though I could make my own safe way over the Atlantic waters of wartime. But I knew what she was trying to say. "Radar has licked the submarines," I told her. "It says so in the papers." This piece of news was improvised; it did a lot of good, however, and I went on talking, so extremely salty you'd have taken me for an old sailor. The conductor came to close the door, and I said, "Go on inside, honey, go on." Till the last moment I saw her big eyes at the window. As she bent forward from the hips in her seat, the prettiness and grace of it was a killing thing to have to miss during months on the water. So the train went and I was left in the crowd and felt low and bleak. To add to it, the weather was gray and windy and the ship. the Sam 491 Mac Manus, was old. Black machinery beside it, at the wharf, grim gimmicks on it, grease, darkness, blues, the day itself housed in iron. The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. It wasn't any apostlecrossed or Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean, the clement, silky, marvelous beauty-sparkle bath in which all the ancientest races were children. As we left the harbor, the North Atlantic, brute gray, heckled the ship with its strength, clanging, pushing, muttering; a hungry sizzle salted the bulkheads. But next morning, in the sun and warmth, we were steaming south with all our might. I came on deck from an all-night bout of seasickness the Mothersills pills, even, hadn't helpedand being torn by longing and worry about Alaska. The middle-aged ship was busting through the water so as to make you feel great depth and the air was sweet, radiant. It was pellucid. Even the sooty Mac Manus m the flush, like a kitchen insect escaping into the garden at dawn. The bluey deck rattled underfoot with the chainlike drag of the rudder engine. A few confused resemblances: clouds or distant coast, birds or corpuscles, fled across my eyes. I went to investigate my office and duties. Nothing much, in fact. Druggist and bookkeeper setup, as I've already said. Green old filing cases. Lockers of same color. A swivel chair and fair light to read by. I squared