Роберт Уоррен: All the king's men

He kept on looking at me, after I had spoken, then said quietly, "Since that thought came into my mind my soul has been still. I have had it in my mind for three days. I have held it there to be sure by the test of my soul before I spoke it."

He will never finish the tract. His strength fails visibly from day to day. The doctor says he will not last the winter.

By the time he is dead I shall be ready to leave the house. For one thing, the house is heavily mortgaged. Judge Irwin's affairs, at the time of his death, were tangled, and in the end it developed that he was not rich but poor. Once before, almost twenty-five years before, it had been heavily mortgaged. But then it had been saved by a crime. A good man had committed a crime to save it. I should not be too complacent because I am not prepared to commit a crime to save the house. Perhaps my unwillingness to commit a crime to save the house (assuming that I should have the opportunity–which is doubtful) is simply a way of saying that I do not love the house as much as Judge Irwin loved it and a man's virtue may be but the defect of his desire, as his crime may be but a function of his virtue.

Nor should I be complacent because I tried to make amends, in a way, for a crime which my father had committed. What little money did come to me from my father's estate should go, I thought, to Miss Littlepaugh in her foul, fox-smelling room in Memphis. So I went to Memphis. But I found that she was dead. So I was denied that inexpensive satisfaction in virtue. I should have to get whatever satisfaction I was to get in a more expensive way.

But I still had the money, and so I am spending it to live on while I write the book I began years ago, the life of Cass Mastern, whom once I could not understand but whom, perhaps, I now may come to understand. I suppose that there is some humor in the fact that while I write about Cass Mastern I live in the house of Judge Irwin and eat bread bought with his money. For Judge Irwin and Cass Mastern do not resemble each other very closely. (If Judge Irwin resembles any Mastern it is Gilbert, the granite-headed brother of Cass.) But I do not find the humor in this situation very funny. The situation is too much like the world in which we live from birth to death, and the humor of it grows stale from repetition. Besides, Judge Irwin was my father and he was good to me and, in a way, he was a man and I loved him.

When the old man is dead and the book is finished, I shall let the First and Third National Bank take the house and I don't care who lives here afterward, for from that day it will be nothing to me but a well-arranged pile of brick and lumber. Anne and I shall never live here again, not in the house or at the Landing. (She doesn't want to live here any more than I do. She has let her place go to the Children's Home she was interested in and I imagine it will become a kind of sanatorium. She's not very complacent about having done that. With Adam dead the place was not a joy but a torture to her, and the gift of the house was finally her gift to the ghost of Adam, a poor gift humbly offered, like the handful of wheat or a painted pot in the tomb, to comfort the ghost and send it on its way so that it would trouble the living no longer.)

So by summer of this year, 1939, we shall have left Burden's Landing.

We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among the trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

The End