Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

Then he was gone. I was sorry, for I had liked the Count. I had liked to watch him ride a horse.

Then there was quite a while when there was nobody.

Then there was the Young Executive, who had been a Young Executive from the day his mother gave the last push and would be a Young Executive until the day they drained out the blood and pumped in the embalming fluid. But that would be a long time off, because he was just forty-four, and sitting at the desk at the oil company where he earned the pin money to supplement his allowance wasn't breaking him down fast.

Well, I'd sat in that room with all of them, the Scholarly Attorney and the Tycoon and the Count and the Young Executive, and had watched the furniture changed. So now I sat and looked at Theodore and at the new Sheraton break-front desk, and wondered how permanent they were.

I had come home. I was the thing that always came back It kept on raining that night. I lay in a big fine old family bed, which had come from somebody else's family (a long time ago there had been a white iron bed in my room standing on the floor matting, and the big fine old mahogany Burden family bed, which hadn't been fine enough and which was now in the attic, had been in my mother's room) and listened to the rain hiss on the live-oak and magnolia leaves. In the morning it had stopped raining, and there was sun. I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing on the background, like sheets of isinglass. Around the japonicas, the white and red and coral petals, which had been shattered from the blossoms, floated on the blackly gleaming pools. Some of them floated with the curled edges upward, like boats, and around them other petals floated upside down or had shipped water, making a gay carnage as though a battleship had fired a couple of salvos into a fleet of carnival barges and gondolas in some giddy, happy, far-off land.

There was a massive japonica tree by the steps. I leaned over to scoop up some petals in my hand, and walked down the curving drive to the gate. I stood there, pressing the petals in the palm and looking out at the bay, which was very bright beyond the strip of whitish sand streaked with drift.

But before noon it began to rain again, a long drizzle and drip from the spongy sky that lasted two days. That afternoon, and the next morning, and the next afternoon, I put on a raincoat belonging to the Young Executive and walked in the drizzle. Not that I was a walker who just has to have his lungs flushed out with ozone. But walking seemed the thing to do. The first afternoon I walked down the beach, past the Stanton place, which was cold and hollow-looking beyond the dripping leaves, and on out to the Irwin place, where Judge Irwin put me in a chair with my heels to the fire and opened a bottle of his choice old Maryland rye to give a drink, and invited me to dinner the next night. But I took a drink and left, and walked on where there weren't any more houses, just brush and oak tangles with here and there a pine rising, and occasionally an open patch of ground with a gray shack.

And the next day I walked up the bay, through the streets of the town, and on beyond till I came to the little half-moon-shaped cove off the bay, where the pine grove came down close to the white sand. I walked just under the shelter of the pines, my heels deep in the needles, then I came out on the sand. There was a place where a half-charred log lay, very black with the wetness and around it the sudden ashes and black butts of driftwood, blacker for the white sand. People still came here for picnics. Well, I had come here for picnics, too. I knew what picnics were like.

I knew what a picnic was like, all right.

Anne and Adam and I had come here years before when we were kids, but it was not raining that day. Not till the end. It was very hot and very still. You could look down the bay, beyond the cove, toward the Gulf, and see the water lifting up into the light as though the horizon had ceased to exist. We swam, and ate our lunch, lying on the sand, then fished some more. But we didn't have any luck. By that time clouds had begun to pile, working in over the whole sky, except toward the west, beyond the pines, where the light struck through the break. The water was very still, and suddenly dark with the darkness of the sky, and away across the bay the line of woods looked black now, not green, above the whiteness of the line which was the beach way over there. A boat, a catboat, was becalmed over in that direction, nearly a mile away, and under the sky and over the dark water and against the black line of the woods, you never saw anything so heartbreakingly white as the sharp sail.

"He better get in," Adam said. "It's going to blow."

"Not quick," Anne said, "let's swim again."

"Better not." Adam hesitated and looked off at the sky.

"Let's," she insisted and pulled at his arm. He didn't respond, still scanning the sky. All at once she dropped his arm and laughed and began to run toward the water. She didn't run directly to the water, but up the beach, toward a little spit, with her bobbed hair back loose on the air. I watched her run. She ran with her arms not quite outspread, crooked at the elbows, and with a motion of her legs which was graceful and free, and somehow awkward at the same time, as though she hadn't quite forgotten one kind of running, the child's running, and hadn't quite learned another kind of running, the woman's running. The legs seemed to be hung too loose, somewhat uncertainly, from the little hips, which weren't quite rounded yet. I watched her and noticed that her legs were long. Which I had never noticed before.

It wasn't a noise, but instead, a stillness that made me turn suddenly to Adam. He was staring at me. When I met his eyes, his face flushed, and he jerked his eyes off me, as though embarrassed. Then he said, "I'll race you," huskily, and ran after her. I ran too, and his feet threw the sand back at me.

Anne was out in the water swimming now. Adam plunged in after her and swam hard and straight, outdistancing me. He was a wonderful swimmer. He hadn't wanted to swim but now he would swim straight out, hard and fast.

I came up to Anne, and slowed down, and said, "Hello." She lifted her head high for an instant, with the gracile motion a seal has, and smiled, and curled over forward in a clean surface dive. Her sharp small heels, side by side, flickered for a second above the water, then drew under. I caught up with her, and she did it again. Every time I caught up with her she would lift her head, and smile, and dive again. The fifth time I caught up, she didn't dive. She rolled over with a light, lounging twist of her body, and floated on her back, looking up at the sky, her arms spread wide. So I turned over, too, and floated, about five or six feet from her, and looked at the sky.

The sky was darker now, with a purplish, greenish cast. The color of a turning grape. But it still looked high, with worlds of air under it. A gull crossed, very high, directly above me. Against the sky it was whiter even than the sail had been. It passed clear across all the sky I could see. I wondered if Anne had seen the gull. When I looked at her, her eyes were closed. Her arms were still spread out wide, and her hair wavered out free on the water from around her head. Her head was far back, her chin lifted. Her face looked very smooth as though she were asleep. As I lay in the water, I could see her profile sharp against the far-off black trees.

All at once, she turned, in the direction away from me, as though I hadn't been there, and began to swim in. She swam with a slow stroke now that seemed retarded and yet effortless. Her thin arms rose and sank with a languid and bemused and fastidious punctuality, like your own effortless motion in a dream.

Before we got to the beach, the rain had begun, big, spaced, heavy, independent drops that prickled the yet glossy surface of the water. Then it was a driving gust of rain, and the surface of the water was gone.