Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

"Sure, sure. You come back. But my mind is made up."

I walked down the hall without saying good-bye. I had my hand lifted to the front door when I heard his voice calling my name. I turned and took a few steps toward him. He had come out into the hall. "I just wanted to tell you," he said, "that I did learn something new from those interesting documents. I learned that my old friend Governor Stanton impaired his honor to protect me. I do not know whether to be more glad or sorry, at the fact. At the knowledge of his attachment or the knowledge of the pain it cost him. He had never told me. That was the pitch of his generosity. Wasn't it? Not ever telling me."

I mumbled something to the effect that I supposed it was.

"I just wanted you to know about the Governor. That his failing was a defect of his virtue. The virtue of affection for a friend."

I didn't mumble anything to that.

"I just wanted you to know that about the Governor," he said.

"All right," I said, and went to the front door, feeling his yellow gaze and calm smile upon me, and out into the blaze of light.

It was still hotter than hell's hinges as I walked up the Row toward home. I debated a swim or getting into my car and heading back to town to tell the Boss that Judge Irwin wouldn't budge. Then I decided that I might wait over another day. I might wait on just the chance that the Judge would change his mind. But I wouldn't swim till later. It was too hot even to swim now. I would take a shower when I got in and lie down till it had cooled off enough for a swim.

I took my shower and lay down on my bed and went to sleep.

I came out of the sleep and popped straight up in the bed. I was wide awake. The sound that had awakened me was still ringing in my ears. I knew that it had been a scream. Then it came again. A bright, beautiful, silvery soprano scream.

I bounced off the bed and started for the door, realized that I was buck-naked, grabbed a robe, and ran out. There was a noise down the hall from my mother's room, a sound like moaning. The door was open and I ran in.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a negligee, clutching the white bedside telephone in her hand, staring at me with wide, wild eyes, and moaning in a spaced, automatic fashion. I went toward her. She dropped the telephone to the floor with a clatter, and pointed her finger at me and cried out, "You did it, you did, you killed him!"

"What?" I demanded, "what?"

"You killed him!"

"Killed who?"

"You killed him!" She began to laugh hysterically.

I was holding her by the shoulders now, shaking her, trying to make her stop laughing, but she kept clawing and pushing at me. She stopped laughing an instant to gasp for breath, and in that interval I heard the dry, clicking signal the telephone was making to call attention to the fact it was not on its rack. Then her laughter drowned out the sound.

"Shut up, shut up!" I commanded, and she suddenly stared at me as though just discovering my presence.

Then, not loud now but with intensity, she said, "You killed him, you killed him."

"Killed who?" I demanded, shaking her.

"Your father," she said, "your father and oh! you killed him."

That was how I found out. At the moment the finding out simply numbed me. When a heavy-caliber slug hits you, you may spin around but you don't feel a thing. Not at first. Anyway, I was busy. My mother was in bad shape. By this time there were a couple of black faces at the door, the cook and the maid, and I was damning them to get Dr. Bland and stop gawking. Then I raked the clicking telephone up off the floor so they could use the one downstairs, and let my mother go long enough to slam the door to keep those all-seeing, all-knowing eyes off what was happening.

My mother was talking between her moans and laughing. She was saying how she had loved him and how he was the only person she had ever loved and how I had killed him and had killed my own father and a lot of stuff like that. She was still carrying on when Dr. Bland arrived and gave her the hypodermic. Across her form on the bed, from which the moans and the mutterings were now subsiding, he turned his gray, gray-bearded owlish face and said, "Jack, I'm sending a nurse up here. A very trustworthy woman. Nobody else is to come in here. Do you understand?"

"Yes," I told him, for I understood, and understood that he had understood perfectly well what my mother's wild talking had meant.

"You stay here till the nurse arrives," he said, "and don't let anybody in. And the nurse isn't supposed to let anybody in until I get back to see if your mother is normal. Not anybody."

I nodded, and followed him to the door of the room.

After he had said his good-bye, I detained him a moment. "Doctor," I asked, "what about the Judge? I didn't get it straight from my mother. Was it a stroke?"

"No," he said, and inspected my face.

"Well, what was it?"

"He shot himself this afternoon," he replied, still inspecting my face. But then he added quite matter-of-factly, "It was undoubtedly a question of health. His health was failing. A very active man–a sportsman–very often–" he was even more dry and detached in his tone–"very often such a man doesn't want to face the last years of limited activity. Yes, I am sure that that was the reason."

I didn't answer.

"Good day, sir," the doctor said, and took his eyes off me and started down the hall.

He was almost to the head of the stairs before I called, "Doctor!" and ran after him.

I came up to him and said, "Doctor, where did he shoot himself? What part of the body, I mean? Not the head?"

"Straight to the heart," he said. And added, "A.38 automatic. A very clean wound."

Then he went off down the stairs. I stood there and thought how the dead man was shot through he heart, a very clean wound, and not through the head with the muzzle of the weapon put into the mouth to blaze into the soft membranes to scorch them and the top of the skull exploding off like an egg to make an awful mess. I stood there, and was greatly relieved to think of the nice clean wound.

I went to my own room, snatched up some clothes, and then went back to my mother's room, and shut the door. I dressed and sat by the side of the big magnificent tester bed in which the lace-filmed form looked so small. I noticed how the bosom looked slack and the face sunken and grayish. The mouth was somewhat open and the breath through it heavy. I scarcely recognized the face. Certainly it was not the face of the girl in the lettuce-green dress and with the golden hair who had stood by the stocky, dark-suited man on the steps of a company commissary in a lumber town in Arkansas, forty years before, while the scream of saws filled the air and the head like a violated nerve and the red earth between the fields of stumps curdled with pale green and steamed in the spring sun. it was not the famish-cheeked, glowing face that, back in those years, had looked up eagerly and desperately to the hawk-headed, hot-eyed man in alleys of myrtle or in secret pine groves or in shuttered rooms. No, it was an old face now. And I felt very sorry for it. I reached across to take one of the unconscious hands which lay loose on the sheet.

I held the hand and tried to image how things would have been if it had not been the Scholarly Attorney but his friend who had gone to the little lumber town in Arkansas. No, that wouldn't have helped much, I decided, remembering that at that time Monty Irwin had been married to an invalid wife, who had been crippled by being thrown from a horse and who had lain in bed for some years and had then died quietly and sunk from our sight and thought at the Landing. No doubt Monty Irwin had been held by some notion of obligation to that invalid wife: he hadn't been able to divorce her and marry the other woman. No doubt that was why he had not married the famish-cheeked girl, why he had not gone to his friend the Scholarly Attorney and told him, "I love your wife," or why, after the husband had learned the truth, as he must have done to make him walk out of the house and away to all the years in the slum garrets, he had not then married her. He still had his own wife then, to whom, because she was an invalid, he must have felt bound with a kind of twisted honor. Then my mother had married again. There must have been bitterness and dire quarrels all along mixed with the stolen satisfactions and ardors. Then the invalid had died. Why hadn't they married then? Perhaps my mother wouldn't then, to punish him for his own earlier refusals. Or perhaps their life was by this time set into a pattern they couldn't break. Anyway, he had married the woman from Savannah, the woman who hadn't brought him anything, neither money nor happiness, but who had, after a certain time, died. Why hadn't they married then?