THE
EINHORNS
639
on them toward a goal-seduction. When he kidded and laughed,
the laugh was about his disability; he was explaining it, and he was
\
not so secretly saying to women that
if
they'd look further they'd
find to their surprise that there was the real thing, not disabled. He
promised. So that when he worked his wicked charm, apparently so
safe, like a worldly priest or elderly gentleman from whom it's safe
to accept a little complimentary badinage or tickle, he was really
single-mindedly and grimly fixed on the one thing, ultimately
the
thing that brought men and women together. And he was the same
with them all, not, of course, foreseeing any great success, but hoping
all the same that one of them-beautiful, forward, intrigued with
him, wishing to playa secret game, maybe a trifle perverse (he sug–
gested)-would see, would grasp, would crave, burn for him. He
looked and hoped for this in every woman.
He wouldn't stay a cripple, Einhorn; he couldn't hold his soul
in it. Sometimes it was dreadful, this; he'd lose everything he'd
thought through uncountable times to reconcile himself to it, and be
like the wolf in the pit in the zoo who keeps putting his muzzle to
the corners of the walls, back and forth in his exhibition
jail.
It
didn't
happen often; probably not oftener than ordinary people get a shove
of the demon. But it happened. On one of those days when he was
off his feed, or had a cold and a little fever, or when there was a rift
in the organization or his position didn't feel so eminent and he
wasn't getting the volume of homages and mail he needed, or when
it
was the turn of a feared truth to come up unseen through the
multitude of elements out of which he composed his life, you'd see
it come upon him. And then he'd s.ay:
"I used to think I'd either walk or swallow iodine, and I'd have
massages and take exercises, and do drills when I'd concentrate on
a single muscle and think I was building it up by my will, and
it was all the bunk, Augie, all the Coue theories, etcetera. For the
birds. And
It Can Be Done
and that sort of stuff that big-shot
Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his books. Nobody'll ever know all the
things I tried before I finally decided it was no go. I couldn't take it,
and I took it. And I
can't
take it, but yet I do take it. But how!
You can get along twenty-nine days with your trouble, but there's
always that thirtieth day when God damn it you can't, when you feel
like the stinking fly in the first cold-snap, when you look about and
