The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [94]
first, if he wants to be a dumbbell and work for other people all his life. If I let him, he'd be married already to the waitress next door, that Indian with the squashed nose, and waiting for a baby, so in two years he'd be ready to take gas. Offer him gold and he says, no, he chooses shit!" She went on like that and worked ugly terror on me. Renling was disturbed. Not terribly disturbed, but in the manner a nightbird, that knows all about daylight, will beat through it if he must, a crude, big, brown-barred shape, but only if he must, and then he will fly toward the thick of the woods and get back to the darkness. And I--I always heard from women that I didn't have the profounder knowledge of life, that I didn't know its damage or its sufferi / ing or its stupendous ecstasies and glories. Being not weak, nor with breasts where its dreads could hit me. Looking not so strong as to be capable of a superior match with it. Other people showed me their achievements, claims and patents, paradise and hell-evidence, their prospectors' samples--often in their faces, in lumps--and, especially women, told me of my ignorance. Here Mrs. Renling was menacing me, crying out that I was the child of fools, dead sure that I would be crushed in the gate, stamped out in the life struggle. For, listen to her, and I was made for easy conditions, and to rise from' a good bed to the comfort of a plentiful breakfast, to dip my roll in yolk and smoke a cigar with coffee, in sunshine and comfort, free from melancholy or stains. Such the kind faction of the world wanted for me, and if I refused my chance there was oblivion waiting for me instead; the wicked would get hold of me. I tried not to reject the truth in what I was told, and I had a lot of regard for the power of women to know it. But I asked for time to think the matter over, and I could have thought very successfully, for the weather favored it--the first and best of autumn, football weather, cold yellow asters in the fine air, and the full sounds of punting and horses stamping on the bridle path. I took an afternoon off to consult Einhom. Einhom's luck had begun to turn again and he had opened a new office, moving from the poolroom to a flat across the street where he could continue to keep an eye on it. The change made him somewhat egotistical, as also the fact that there was a woman in love with him. It gave him a big boost. He had been putting out his paper for shut-ins again, on the mimeograph machine, and one of his readers, a crippled girl named Mildred Stark, had fallen for him. She wasn't in first youth any more; she was aged about thirty and heavy, but she had a vital if somewhat struggle-weakened head, hair and brows strong and black. She wrote answers m verse to his inspirational poems and at last she had her sister bring her to the office, where she made a scene and wouldn't go away until Einhom had promised to let her work for him. She didn't ask for any salary, only that he should rescue her from homeboredom. Mildred's trouble was with her feet, and she wore orthopedic shoes. They made slow going, and, as I later had the chance to learn, Mildred was somebody for whom impulses came fast and in force, and these impulses ran onto non-conductors and were turned back, stored up until she got dark in the face. In her person, as I say, she was heavy, and her eyes were black, her skin was not well lit. To de154 velop from crippled girl into crippled woman, in the family, in the house such staleness and hardship--that's what it makes for, darkness, saturn'inity, oversat grievance. Being without what's needed to put a satisfied, not dissatisfied, face at the window. But Mildred wouldn't accept lying down and dying, though she never recovered from looking near middle-aged and dark and sore, as a woman forced to sit, or someone who has missed out on children, or whom men have swindled. It could not be rubbed out, though it was arrested by her love for Einhorn, who permitted her to love him. In the beginning she came only two or three times a week to type some letters for him, and ended