Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

But it was different that fine May morning. It was like old times, all right, with her bosom heaving and the needle of the steam gauge pricking deep into the red on the dial. Then she blew the plug.

"He's done it," she blew, "he's done it again–and I swear–"

"Done what?" I demanded, though I knew perfectly well what he had done. He had another slut.

"He's two-timing me," she said.

I lay back in my swivel chair and looked at her. The bright morning light was hitting her face square and without pity, but her eyes were magnificent.

"The bastard," she said, "he's two-timing me!"

"Now, Sadie," I said, lying back in my chair and sighting at her over the toes of my shoes crossed on the desk, "we went into that arithmetic a long time back. He's not two-timing you. He's two-timing Lucy. He may be one-timing you, or four-timing you. But it can't be two-timing." I was watching her eyes, and just saying that to see if it was possible to put a little more snap into them. It was.

For she said, "You–you–" Then words failed her.

"Me what?" I defended myself.

"You–you and your high-toned friends–what do they know–what do they know about anything–and you've got to mix them in."

"What are you talking about?"

"I may not be high-toned and maybe I live in a shack but it hadn't been for me he wouldn't be Governor this minute and he knows it and she better not get gay, for high-toned or not, I'll show her. By God, I'll show her!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about," she affirmed, and leaned over the desk top toward me, shaking her finger at me, "and you sit there and smile that way and think you are so high-toned. If you were a man you'd get up and go in there and knock hell out of him. I thought she was yours. Or maybe he's fixed you up, too. Maybe he's fixed you up like he fixed up that doctor." She leaned farther toward me. "Maybe he's making you director of a hospital. Yeah, what's he making you director of?"

Under the flood of words and the savage finger and the snapping eyes, I jerked myself forward, dropped my feet to the floor with a crash, and lunged up to stand before her, while the blood pounded in my head to make me dizzy, as it does when you rise suddenly, and little red flecks danced before me and the words kept on. Then the words stopped on her question.

"Are you saying," I began firmly, "that–that–" I had been about to pronounce the name of Anne Stanton, for the name itself had been quite clearly in my mind, as though spelled out on a billboard, but all at once the name stuck in my throat and with surprise I discovered that I could not say it. So I continued, "–that she–she–"

But Sadie Burke was looking straight into my mind–at least, I had that feeling–and quick as a boxer she jabbed that name at me, "Yeah, she, she, that Stanton girl, Anne Stanton!"

I looked at Sadie in the face for a moment and felt so sorry for her I could cry. That was what surprised me. I felt so sorry for Sadie. Then I didn't feel anything. I didn't even feel sorry for myself. I felt as wooden as a wooden Indian, and I remember being surprised to discovered that my legs worked perfectly even if they were wooden, and were walking directly toward the hatrack, where my right arm, even if it was wooden, reached out to pick up the old Panama which hung there and put it on my head, and my legs then walked straight out the door and across the long reception room over the carpet which was deep and soft as the turf of a shaven lawn in spring and walked on out the door across the ringing marble slabs.

And out into a world which seemed bigger than it had ever seemed before. It seemed forever down the length of white, sun-glittering concrete which curled and swooped among the bronze statues and brilliant flower beds shaped like stars and crescents, and forever across the green lawn to the great swollen bulbs of green which were the trees, and forever up into the sky, where the sun poured down billows and surges of heat like crystalline lava to engulf you, for the last breath of spring was gone now and gone for good, the fine, big-breasted girl popping the calico, with the face like peaches and cream and the tiny, dewy drop of perspiration at the edge of the tow head of hair, she was gone for good, too, and everything from now on out was bone and gristle and the hag face like a rusty brush hook, and green scum on the shrunk pool around which the exposed earth cracks and scales like a gray scab.

It was a source of perpetual surprise to find how well the legs worked carrying me down the white concrete of the drive, and how even if it was forever down the drive and past the trees I was finally past them and moving down the street as though sustained in a runnel of crystalline lava. I looked with the greatest curiosity at the faces which I saw but found nothing beautiful or remarkable in then and was not assured of their reality. For it takes the greatest effort to believe in their reality and to believe in their reality you must believe in your own, but to believe in your own you must believe in theirs, but to believe in theirs you must believe in your own–one-two, one-two, one-two, like feet marching. But if you have no feet to march with. Or if they are wooden. But I looked down at them and they were marching, one-two, one-two.

They march a long time. But at the end of forever they brought me to a door. Then the door opened, and there, with the cool, white-shadowy room behind her, wearing a pale-blue, cool-crisp linen dress, her bare white long small arms hanging straight down against the pale blue, was Anne Stanton. I knew that it was Anne Stanton, though I had not looked into her face. I had looked into the other faces–all the faces I had met–I had looked into them with the greatest frankness and curiosity. But now I did not look into hers.

Then I looked into her face. She met my gaze quite steadily. I did not say anything. And I did not need to. For, looking and me, she slowly nodded._

__

After my visit to Anne Stanton's apartment that morning in late May, I was out of town for a while, about eight days. I left her apartment that morning and went down to the bank and drew out some money and got my car out of the garage and packed a bag and was headed out. I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: _Flee, all is discovered__. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

It was just where I went.

The second day I was in Texas. I was traveling through the part where the flat-footed, bilious, frog-sticker-toting Baptist biscuit-eaters live. Then I was traveling through the part where the crook-legged, high-heeled, gun-wearing, spick-killing, callous-rumped sons of the range live and crowd the drugstore on Saturday night and then all go round the corner to see episode three of "Vengeance on Vinegar Creek," starring Gene Autry as Borax Pete. But over both parts, the sky was tall hot brass by day and black velvet by night, and Coca Cola is all a man needs to live on. Then I was traveling through New Mexico, which is a land of total and magnificent emptiness with a little white filling station flung down on the sand like a sun-bleached cow skull by the trail, with far to the north a valiant remnant of the heroes of the Battle of Montmartre in a last bivouac wearing huaraches and hammered silver and trying to strike up conversations with Hopis on street corners. Then Arizona, which is grandeur and the slow incredulous stare of sheep, until you hit the Mojave. You cross the Mojave at night and even at night your breath rasps your gullet as though you were a sword swallower who had got hold of a hack-saw blade by mistake, and in the darkness the hunched rock and towering cactus loom at you with the shapes of a visceral, Freudian nightmare.