All the King's Men: Chapters 7–9

So I corrected myself, and in much the mood of a priest who looks down with benign pity on the sweat and striving, I entered the Governor’s office, and walked past the receptionist and, with a perfunctory knock, into the inside.

So I did my daily tasks and ate my daily bread and saw the old familiar faces, and smiled benignly like a priest.

It was a case of catatonic schizophrenia, he said.

It was the night, long back when I was a kid, when the old livery stable had burned down at the Landing and they hadn’t managed to get all the horses out.

In other words, he must have been in the grip of an instinctive withdrawal, which took the form of moral indignation and moral revulsion, but which, no doubt, was different from either, and more deep-seated than either, and finally irrational.

But was there some fatal appropriateness inherent in the very nature of the world and of me that I should be the one to tell her that truth?

That would have been very different, and would have robbed the voter of something he valued, the nice warm glow of complacency, the picture that flattered him and his own fat-or-thin wife standing in front of the henhouse.

Her eyes would blaze black out of her chalk-white, pocked face and her wild black hair would seem to lift electrically off her scalp and her hands would flay out in a gesture of rending and tearing.

When I got the hell in there, he succinctly outlined the case to me, and gave me two assignments: first, get hold of Tom Talos, and second, find all there is about Marvin Frey.

You know his jokes, you know the insinuation hee-hee through his nose with which he prefaces them, you know how the gray tongue licks luxuriously over his lips at the conclusion, you know how he fawns and drools over the inert mass with the face covered with steaming towels which happens to be the local banker or the local gambling-house proprietor or the local Congressman...

It was not exactly that I felt I owed Lucy Talos a debt, or had to make restitution, or do penance.

On each side of an anachronistic patch of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two round flower beds made by laying an old automobile tire on the ground and filling it with wood-earth.

She had waited to waylay me, I decided.

“Pressure is a prettier word,” I averred.

Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had killed him, and I had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had created me, and looking at matters in that light one could say that Mortimer and I were merely the twin instruments of Judge Irwin’s protracted and ineluctable self-destruction.

He had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man had taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and all he had done was to walk away, leaving her in possession of everything he owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums and lie there like a wounded animal and let his intellect bleed away into pious drivel and his strength bleed away into weakness.

According to what he said, I was, except for a few minor bequests to servants, the sole heir.

“Yes, there is MacMurfee, but if you want any blackmailing done, get somebody else to do it.”
“Even on MacMurfee?” he asked, with a hint of jocularity, to which I didn’t respond.

Out at the University, on the practice field, the toe of some long-legged, slug-footed, box-shouldered lad kept smacking the leather, over and over, and farther away the scrimmage surged and heaved to the sound of shouts and peremptory whistles.

Second, if he let MacMurfee climb back on the gravy train, a lot of people on whose brows the cold sweat would break now if even in the privacy of the boudoir the mere thought of crossing the Boss should dawn, would begin to figure that you could buck the Boss and get away with it.

He had cringed and sweated and felt the baleful speculative stare of the Boss on him in the long silence after he had tried to sell the idea of Gummy Larson.

I didn’t go away, but I was out of the swim of things, and sat in my office or out at the University library and read books and monographs on taxation, for I now had a nice clean assignment to work on: a tax bill.

They might have managed very well, if they hadn’t got into a fight with some yokels who didn’t know or care much about football and who resented having their girls fooled with.

I had had all those good times too. If I wasn’t having one tonight it wasn’t because I had passed beyond it into a state of beatitude.

I wasn’t, however, looking out over the mist-veiled, romantic, crepuscular city, but was bent over my nice, tidy, comforting tax figures, under a green-shaded light, when the telephone rang.

Adam was looking inquiringly at Lucy Talos, as though he wished corroboration from her.

The pocket book is where it hurts. A man may forget the death of the father, but never the loss of the patrimony, the cold-faced Florentine who is the founding father of our modern world said, and he said a mouthful which was not a mouthful of mush.

Lucy raised her head, met the sister’s reproving gaze, murmured humbly, “I’m sorry, Ellie, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve—I’ve—”

After the boss was safe underground, and the pussel-gutted city cops sweating in their blue and the lean, natty boys of the State Patrol and the mounted police on glossy, dancing horses whose hoofs sank fetlock deep in the flower beds had driven the crowd sullenly out of the cemetery—but long before the tramped grass began to lift itself or the caretakers came to repair the knocked-over tombstones—I left town and took out for the Landing.

For nothing seemed very important to me then, in the pervasive soreness and numbness.

It must have been like smearing a cool unguent of time on the hot pustule and dry itch of the soul.

“God damn you, Jack Burden, God damn you,” she said like a litany.

The leather of his shoes creaked as he stepped forward to greet me, but his body swayed with the bloated lightsomeness of a drowned body stirred loose at last from the bottom mud of the river to rise majestically and swayingly to the surface.

He was clawing at me, importunately and feebly, saying, “T-t-tell me, you better t-t-tell me now.”

Then afterwards you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit.

Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost.

She examined me intently, and I could detect a curious shifting and shading of feelings on her face, too evanescent and ambiguous for definition.

I heard the sound of her heels on the floor inside, but it wasn’t the old bright, spirited tattoo. It was a kind of desperate, slovenly clatter, suddenly muted on the rug.

The day was hot and bright, and the cement was hot and gritty under our feet as we stood there in that vacuity which belongs to the period just before parting at a railway station.

For years I had condemned her as a woman without heart, who loved merely power over men and the momentary satisfaction to vanity or flesh which they could give her, who lived in a strange loveless oscillation between calculation and instinct.