The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [83]
life, and triple-decker turf on which the grass lived rich. Everywhere else, in the blaze of July, it was scanty. I had the long bath hours to myself to see what the territory round about was like. It was mostly fruit country, farmed by Germans, the men like farmers anywhere, but the older women in bonnets, going barefoot in long dresses under the giant oaks of their yards. The peach branches shone with seams of gum, leaves milky from the spray of "secticides. Also, on the roads, on bicycles and in Ford trucks, were the bearded and long-haired House of David Israelites, a meat135 renouncing sect of peaceful, businesslike, pious people, who had a big estate or principality of their own, and farmhouse palaces. They spoke of Shilo and Armageddon as familiarly as of eggs and harnesses, and were a millionaire concern many times over, owning farms and springs and a vast amusement park in a big Bavarian dell, with a miniature railway, a baseball team, and a jazz band that sent music up clear to the road from the nightly dances in the pavilion. Two bands, in fact, one of each sex. I brought Mrs. Renling here a few times to dance and drink spring water; the mosquitoes, though, were too active for her. Afterward I sometimes went alone; she didn't see why I should want to. Nor did she see what I strayed into town for in the morning, or why I took pleasure in sitting in the still green bake of the Civil War 'courthouse square after my thick breakfast of griddle cakes and eggs and coffee. But I did, and warmed my belly and shins while the little locust trolley clinked and crept to the harbor and over the trestles of the bog-spanning bridge where the green beasts and bulrush-rocking birds kept up their hot, small-time uproar. I brought along a book, but there was too much brown stain on the pages from the sun. The benches were white iron, roomy enough for three or four old gaffers to snooze on in the swamp- tasting sweet warmth that made the redwing blackbirds fierce and quick, and the flowers frill, but other living things slow and lazyblooded. I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings on a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not a subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power. No more than the comb or shadow of your hair has power on your brain. Mrs. Renling did not like to be alone at meals, not even at breakfast. I had to eat with her in her room. Each morning she took sugarless tea, with milk, and a few pieces of zwieback. I had the works, the bottom half of the menu, from grapefruit to rice pudding, and ate at a little table by the open window, in the lake airs that lapped the dotted Swiss curtains. In bed, and talking all the while, Mrs. Renling took off the gauze chin band she slept in and began to treat her face with lotions and creams, plucked her eyebrows. Her usual subject of conversation was the other guests. She got them down and polished them off, but good. In the leisure of the early hour, when she bravely rode fence on her face. She would die a well-tended lady who had kept up fiercely all civilized duties, as developed before Phidias and through Botticelli-- all that great masters and women of illustrious courts had prescribed and followed for perfection, the kind of intelligence to wear in the eyes and the molds of sweetness and authority. But she had a wrathruled mind. Giving herself these feminine cares in the brightness of her suite in the soft-blown-open summer beauty, she was not satisfied without social digging and the toil of grievances and antipathies. "Did you notice the old couple on my left, last night at the Bunco party, the Zeelands? Marvelous old Dutch family. Isn't he a beautiful old man?