All the King's Men: Chapter 2

The Sheriff's little wise eyes blinked at me a couple of times, then he said: “The constable ought to lock you up fer vagruncy.”

“I knowed it,” the Sheriff exploded and dropped his feet off the desk with a noise like a brick chimney falling, and heaved up in the chair and glared apoplectically at me.

The leper was sitting in the room, not doing anything, all by himself. There wasn’t anybody to sit and spit and jaw with him under his electric fan.

Well, Willie wasn’t that bad off, for he finally managed to ask me what I wanted. I told him, and he grinned a grin more wistful than happy and asked me why I wanted to know.

So I didn’t tell him that beyond my boss the managing editor there was a great high world of reasons but to a fellow like me down in the ditch it was a world of flickering diaphanous spirit-wings and faint angel-voices I didn’t always savvy and stellar influences.

...and her face was girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep brown eyes, the kind that make you think of telling secrets in the gloaming over a garden gate when the lilacs are in bloom along the picket fence of the old homestead.

There was an anti-Pillsbury faction, but it didn’t amount to much, and Willie didn’t add to its numbers.

He didn’t dent the constituency. The other fellow was elected.

The Chronicle was turning up more and more tales about finagling in county court houses around the State.

It pointed the finger of fine scorn and reprobation all over the map.

He gave the touch of drama to the sordid tale.

...Mr. Sandeen pushed back to him and grabbed him by the hand and lifted up one arm above his head and said, loud: “Oh, God, I am punished for accepting iniquity and voting against an honest man!”

Or if he had got into the gubernatorial primary on his own hook, he would have taken a realistic view.

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 local I rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawed across the cotton country.

The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to be through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth.

The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to be through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth.

Just floating around in the deep dark the idea of Willie and the idea of the thing Willie didn’t know, like two bits of drift sucked down in an eddy to the bottom of the river to revolve slowly and blindly there in the dark.

“That you’re not going to be Governor,” she said, with a dash of easy levity, but flashed me a look, the only SOS, I suppose, Sadie Burke ever sent out to anybody.

“Oh, you decoy, you wooden-headed decoy, you let ’em! Oh, yeah, you let ’em, because you thought you were the little white lamb of God—” and she paused to give him a couple of pitiful derisive baas, twisting her mouth—“yeah, you thought you were the lamb of God, all right, but you know what you are?”

"...My friends,” and she twisted her mouth in a nasty, simpering mimicry, “my friends, what this State needs is a good five-cent cigar. Oh, my God!”

“Yeah,” she replied in the manner which is called laconic.

The coat was pushed up under the armpits, the hands were crossed piously on the bosom like the hands of a gisant in a cathedral, the shirt had pulled up some from its moorings under the belt and the two lowest buttons had come unbuttoned so that a triangular patch of slightly distended stomach was visible, white with a few coarse dark hairs.

The coat was pushed up under the armpits, the hands were crossed piously on the bosom like the hands of a gisant in a cathedral, the shirt had pulled up some from its moorings under the belt and the two lowest buttons had come unbuttoned so that a triangular patch of slightly distended stomach was visible, white with a few coarse dark hairs.

I said Mr. Talos was slightly indisposed, and I would drive him out in about an hour.

Then Willie stood all alone by the table, saying, “My friends,” and turning his alabaster face precariously from one side to the other, and fumbling in the right side pocket of his coat to fish out the speech.

Then Willie stood all alone by the table, saying, “My friends,” and turning his alabaster face precariously from one side to the other, and fumbling in the right side pocket of his coat to fish out the speech.

Now he stood there clutching the manuscript in both hands, with his head lowered like a dehorned cow beset by a couple of fierce dogs in the barnyard, while the sun beat on him and the sweat dropped.

There wasn’t a sound over that five-acre tract of sweating humanity.

There he was, with the papers about his feet and one arm up, the coat sleeve jammed elbow high, face red as a bruised beet and the sweat sluicing...and behind him the bunting, red white and blue, and over him God’s bright, brassy, incandescent sky.

My job had been political reporting for the Chronicle. I had a column, too. Oh, I was a pundit.

I could hear the streetcars and the blatting of automobile horns off yonder, not too loud but variegated and unremitting, a kind of coarse, hoarse tweedy mixture of sounds to your nerve ends, and occasionally the clatter of dishes, for my room gave on the kitchen area.

Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don’t want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don’t want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning.

The time before I quit the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish my dissertation for the Ph.D. in American History.

...he would begin to smile, not much, just a sort of tentative, almost apologetic smile that took the curse off that straight mouth and square jaw, and seemed to say, “Hell, I can’t help it if I look at you that way, buddy, it’s just the way I look at things.”

We’d sit there, not talking, sipping slow, his eyes burning cold and blue in his head, bluer because of the swarthiness of the skin, which was drawn back taut over the bones of the face.

There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It’s a club, it’s the old school, it’s Skull and Bones, and there is no nasty supercilious twist to a mouth like the twist the drunk gets when he hangs over the bar beside the old pal who has turned out to be a big-shot and who hasn’t changed a bit, or when the old pal takes him home to dinner and introduces him to the pretty little clear-eyed woman and the healthy kids.

A squall might, and did, pile in off the Gulf, and the sky blacked out with the rain and the palm trees heaved in distraction and then leaned steady with the vanes gleaming like wet tin in the last turgid, bilious, tattered light, but it didn’t chill us or kill us in the kingdom by the sea, for we were safe inside a white house, their house or my house, and stood by the window to watch the surf pile up beyond the sea-wall like whipped cream.

For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can’t figure out.

“If you think you are sorry, who in the hell can tell you that you aren’t?” I demanded, for Little Jackie was a brass-bound Idealist, as I have stated, and he’s not going to call for a plebiscite on whether he is sorry or not.