All the King's Men: Chapters 3–4

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.

Her thin arms rose and sank with a languid and bemused and fastidious punctuality, like your own effortless motion in a dream.

That last part about the money just slipped out in the heat of the moment. It just sort of seemed a big manly thing to say, but the effect was so much superior to anything I had expected that I couldn’t renege and spoil the drama.

And all at once I had the sight of Judge Irwin sitting up nights, back in the library, with cat-gut and steel wire and string and pliers and scissors on the desk beside him, and with his high old red-thatched head bent over, the red flesh sagging somewhat off the long jaw-bone, like incipient wattles, and the yellow eyes gimletted upon the task.

Mr. Patton’s granite visage seemed to lean toward me like a monument about to fall, and the satchel under Mrs. Patton’s chin quivered like a tow-sack full of kittens, and the sound of the Young Executive’s adenoids was plainly audible, and the Judge just sat, with his yellow eyes working over the crowd, and my mother’s hands turned in her lap.

And all at once I had the satisfactory vision of Miss Dumonde’s face being pushed back below the surface of the bath, her eyelids fluttering over the dark eyes with fascinating alacrity and her mouth making a perfect, soundless “O” before the water poured into it.

“All I said was I could reach out and knock off ten thousand. And not graft. Information. Information is money. But I told you I’m not interested in money. Not the slightest. Willie isn’t either.”

“Well,” she said in the tone of the matron of a home for wayward girls from inside the smoke screen, but I didn’t answer.

I saw a tear gather at the inner corner of each eye, gather very slowly and swollenly and then run down with the precision of a tiny mechanical toy, one on each side of the slightly pitted nose, until they simultaneously arrived at the smear of dark lipstick, and spread. I saw the tongue come out and fastidiously touch the upper lip as though to sample the salt.

Not necessarily to be greeted with open arms and a tender smile, however. Sometimes it was a cold silence like the Arctic night. Sometimes it was delirium for every seismograph on the continent. Sometimes it was a single well chosen epithet.

Or whether they figured that the Lord had delivered the enemy into their hands, that they could get him dead to rights on the business of attempting to corrupt, coerce, and blackmail the Legislature, in addition to the other little charges of malfeasance and nonfeasance.

“A shameful display of cowardice on the part of the Legislature...allow themselves to be intimidated by...deplorable lack of leadership...”

They called and chanted, “Willie—Willie—Willie,” pressing at the cordon of police at the foot of the steps.

“Could you not have taken me with you, dear Brother Gilbert? I would have been ever so dutiful and affectionate a sister,” so she wrote to him in the copy-book hand, in brown ink, in a language not her own, a language of school-room propriety.

We see the red, square, strong hand (“my brother is strong-made and florid”) protruding from the white cuff, grasping the crop which in that grasp looks fragile like a twig.

(“My brother is a man of great taciturnity and strong mind, and when he peaks, though he practices no graces and ingratiations, all men, especially those of the sober sort who have responsibility and power, weigh his words with respect.”

“My brother is a man of great taciturnity and strong mind, and when he speaks, though he practices no graces and ingratiations, all men, especially those of the sober sort who have responsibility and power, weigh his words with respect.”

There was no remorse or horror at the turpitude of the act, but only the incredulity which I have referred to.

She stood in the middle of the room pressing her hair into place, and I stumblingly ventured some remark about our future, a remark very vague for my being was still confused, but she responded, ‘Oh, let us not think about it now,’ as though I had broached a subject of no consequence.

When her husband came, she greeted him familiarly and affectionately, and as I witnessed it my own heart was wrenched, but not, I must confess, with compunction.

She must indeed have been agile and resourceful, for to carry on such a liaison undetected in that age and place must have been a problem.

Cass Mastern, with five other young men of Lexington, cronies and boon companions of the dead man, carried the coffin.

The passion which had seized me to the very extent of paroxysm that afternoon at the very brink of my friend’s grave was gone.

It was, instead, the fact that all of these things—the death of my friend, the betrayal of Phebe, the suffering and rage and great change of the woman I had loved—all had come from my single act of sin and perfidy, as the boughs from the bole and the leaves from the bough.

I recovered the bowie from the floor, and with it faced the man who seemed to be the friend of the man who was now prostrate.

Gilbert had opposed secession, writing to Cass: “The fools, there is not a factory for arms in the state. Fools not to have prepared themselves if they have foreseen the trouble. Fools, if they have not foreseen it, to act thus in the face of facts. Fools not to temporize now and, if they must, prepare themselves to strike a blow. I have told responsible men to prepare. All fools.”

But if he had put on the gray jacket in anguish of spirit and in hope of expiation, he came to wear it in pride, for it was a jacket like those worn by the men with whom he marched.

...the admiration for the feints and delays executed by Johnston’s virtuosity on the approaches to Atlanta, at Buzzard’s Roost, Snake Creek Gap, New Hope Church, Kennesaw Mountain (“there is always a kind of glory, however stained or obscured, in whatever man’s hand does well, and General Johnston does well”).

He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide.

But that didn’t last, and I saw him sitting in the long room in the white house by the sea, leaning over a chess board, facing the Scholarly Attorney, and he wasn’t an old man, he was a young man, and the high aquiline florid face was brooding over the board.

An unfortunate is a bum who is fortunate enough to get his foot inside a softy’s door and stay there. If he gets a good berth he is promoted from bum to unfortunate.

Then the old man broke off a piece of chocolate and placed it between the expectant lips, and peered into George’s face while taste buds, no doubt, glowed incandescent in the inner dark and glands with a tired, sweet, happy sigh released their juices, and George’s face took on an expression of slow, deep, inward, germinal bliss, like that of a saint.

The old man looked up at me and said querulously, “What—what did you say?”

But I knew that when I turned around there would also be, in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence, a woman kneeling before the cold blackness of the wide fireplace to put pine cones and bits of lightwood beneath the logs there.

Well, I had been in this room when the Governor had not been the marmoreal brow in the massy gold frame but a tall man sitting with his feet on the hearth rug with a little girl, a child, on a hassock at his feet, leaning her head against his knee and gazing into the fire while his large man-hand toyed deliciously with the loose, silken hair.

I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undulating over them and the sound of the music drifts out to the street while you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls down the shade.

And when he died in 1904 he had been rich, according to the probate of the will.

Mr. Percy Poindexter was not in Savannah now, and scarcely in this world, for after the exhalation of each breath you waited and waited for that delicate little contraption of matchwood and transparent parchment and filigree of blue veins to gather strength enough for one more effort.

He had fallen from the fifth floor, and that was the end of Mortimer. At the inquest his sister, who lived with him, said he had recently been in ill health and had complained of fits of dizziness.

After that, there were wheezings and moanings for a bit, the chink of metal which I took to be from one of the trumpets, some conversation, not very enlightening or edifying, from Princess Spotted Deer, who was Miss Littlepaugh’s control, and some even more unenlightening remarks, given in a husky guttural, from somebody on the Other Side who claimed to be named Jimmy and to have been a friend of my youth.