Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

He had been going to get a chunk of all there was. But in the end it was a chunk of law. Lucy came into the picture, and then the kid Tom, and there was working, and later the courthouse, but in the end he got a chunk of law. An old lawyer over at Tyree helped him, lending him books and answering questions. There had been about three years of that. If he had just been trying to squeeze by the bar with as little as possible he could have done it a lot sooner, for back in those days, or now for that matter, it didn't take any master mind to pass the bar examination. "I sure was a fool," Willie said to me once, talking about those times, "I though you had really to learn all that stuff. I thought they meant for you to learn law. Hell, I got down to that bar examination and I looked at the questions and I nearly busted out laughing. Me sitting up there bearing down on those books, and then they gave me those little crappy questions. A corn-field nigger could have answered them if he's been able to spell. I ought to have looked twice at some of the lawyers I'd seen and I'd known a half-with could pass it. But, oh, no, I was hell-bent on learning me some law." The he laughed, stopped laughing, and said with a touch of the grimness which must have belong to the long night up there in his room when he bent over the trash-burner or heard the moths batting soft at the screen in the August dark: "Well, I learned me some law, I could wait." He could wait. He had read the books the old lawyer over at Tyree had, and then he bought new books, sending away for them with the money he grubbed out of the ground or got with his patented Fix-It Household Kit. The time came in the end, and he put on his good suit, blue serge and slick in the seat, and caught the train down to the city to take the examination. He had waited, and now he really knew what was in the books.

He was a lawyer now. He could hang the overalls on a nail and let them stiffen with the last sweat he had sweated in them. He could rent himself a room over the dry-goods store in Mason City and call it its office, and wait for somebody to come up the stairs where it was so dark you had to feel your way and where it smelled like the inside of an old trunk that's been in the attic twenty years. He was a lawyer now and it had taking him a long time. It had taken him a long time because he had had to be a lawyer on his terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had taken him too long. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.

But the wanting and the waiting were over now, and Willie had a haircut and a new hat and a new brief case with the copy of his speech in it (which he had written out in longhand and had said to Lucy with gestures, as tough he were getting ready for the high-school oratorical contest) and a lot of new friends, with drooping blue jowls or sharp pale noses, who slapped him on the back, and a campaign manager, Tiny Duffy, who would introduce him to you and say with a tin-glittering heartiness, "Meet Willie Stark, the next Governor of this state!" And Willie would put out his hand to you with the gravity of a bishop. For he never tumbled to a thing.

I used to wonder how he got that way. If he had been running for something back in Mason City he never in God's world would have been that way. He would have taken a perfectly realistic view of things and counted up his chances. Or if he had got into the gubernatorial primary on his own hook, he would have taken a realistic view. But this was different. He had been called. He had been touched. He had been summoned. And he was a little bit awestruck by the fact. It seemed incredible that he hadn't taken one look at Tiny Duffy and his friends and realized that things might not be absolutely on the level. But actually, as I figured it, it wasn't incredible. For the voice of Tiny Duffy summoning him was nothing but the echo of a certainty and a blind compulsion within him, the thing that had made him sit up in his room, night after night, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, to write the fine phrases and the fine ideas in the big ledger or to bend with a violent, almost physical intensity over the yellow page of an old law book. For him to deny the voice of Tiny Duffy would have been as difficult as for a saint to deny the voice that calls in the night.

He wasn't really in touch with the world. He was not only bemused by the voice he had heard. He was bemused by the very grandeur of the position to which he aspired. The blaze of light hitting him in the eyes blinded him. After all, he had just come out of the dark, the period when he grubbed on the farm all day and didn't see anybody but the family (and day after day he must have moved by them as though they weren't half-real) and sat at night in his room with the books and hurt inside with the effort and the groping and the wanting. So it isn't much wonder that the blaze of light blinded him.

He knew something about human nature, all right. He's sat around the county courthouse long enough to find out something. (True, he had got himself thrown out of the courthouse. But that wasn't ignorance of human nature. It was, perhaps, a knowledge not of human nature in general but of his own nature in particular, something deeper than the mere question of right and wrong. He became a martyr, not through ignorance, not only for the right but also for some knowledge of himself deeper than right or wrong.) He knew something about human nature, but something now came between him and that knowledge. In a way, he flattered human nature. He assumed that other people were as bemused by the grandeur and as blinded by the light of the post to which he aspired, and that they would only listen to argument and language that was grand and bright. So his speeches were cut to that measure. It was a weird mixture of facts and figures on one hand (his tax program, his road program) and of fine sentiments on the other hand (a faint echo, somewhat dulled by time, of the quotations copied out in the ragged, boyish hand in the big ledger).

Willie went around the country in a good secondhand automobile, which had been bought on the eighteen-payment plan, and saw his face on the posters nailed to telephone poles and corncribs and board fences. He'd got to town, and after he'd been to the post office to see if there was a letter from Lucy and after he had had a session with the local politicos and done some handshaking (he wasn't too hot at that, too much talk about principles and not enough about promises), he would hole up in a hotel room ($2.00 without bath) and work some more on his speech. He kept on polishing and revising the damned thing. He was hell-bent on making each one a second Gettysburg Address. And maybe after he had tinkered with it awhile, he would get up and start pacing in his room. He would pace and pace, and pretty soon he would start to say his speech. If you were in the next room, you could hear him pacing and speeching, and when he stopped pacing you knew he had stopped in front of the mirror to polish up a gesture.

And sometimes I'd be in the next room, for I was supposed to cover his campaign for the _Chronicle__. I'd be lying there in the hole in the middle of my bed where the spring had given down with the weight of wayfaring humanity, lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. I'd be lying there letting the smoke drift up out of my mouth and not feeling anything, just watching the smoke as though I didn't have any past or future, and suddenly Willie would start in the next room. Tramping and mumbling.