All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [154]
We came to an open pier which I remembered as the place where excursion boats picked up their crowds in summer afternoons for the moonlight ride up the river–big, jostling, yelling, baby-carrying, pop-and-likker-drinking, sweating crowds. But there wasn’t any big side-wheeler there now, white as wedding cake, cranky and improbable, with red and gilt decorations, and no calliope was playing “Dixie” and no whistles blowing. The place was as still as a tomb and as blank as Gobi on a moonless night. We walked out to the end of the pier, leaned on the railing, and looked across the river.
“All right,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“All right,” I repeated, “I thought you wanted to talk.”
“It’s Adam,” she said.
“What about Adam? I asked, evenly.
“You know–you know perfectly well–you went there and–”
“Look here,” I said, and I felt my blood getting up and my voice taking on an edge, “I went there and made him a proposition. He’s a grown man and if he doesn’t like it he doesn’t have to take it. There’s no use blaming me and–”
“I’m not blaming you,” she said.
“You just started to jump me,” I said, “but if Adam can’t make up his own mind and can’t take care of himself, you needn’t blame me.”
“I’m not blaming you, Jack. You’re so jumpy and touchy, Jack.” She laid her hand on my arm, on the rail, and patted me, and I felt the head of steam in me drop a few pounds of pressure.
“If he can’t take care of himself, then you–” I began.
But she cut in, quick and sharp, “He can’t. That’s the trouble.”
“Now, look here, all I did was to offer him a proposition.”
Her hand, which had been laid on my forearm to soothe me and pat down the steam pressure, suddenly clamped on me, driving the fingers damned near to the bone. I jumped, an even as I jumped, I heard her say, in a low, tense voice, almost a whisper, “You can make him take it.”
“He’s a grown man and he–” I began.
But she cut in again, “You’ve got to make him–you’ve got to!”
“For God’s sake!” I said.
“You’ve got to,” she repeated, in that same voice, and I was sure that the fingers clenched on my arm were bringing blood.
“You were just now giving me hell because I merely offered him the proposition,” I said, “and now you say I’ve got to make him take it.”
“I want him to take it,” she said, and her fingers fell away from their grip.
“Well, I’m damned,” I observed in the direction of the great interstellar darkness, and then peered into her face. There wasn’t much light–I could see the face, an unnatural chalk-white, and the eyes were just dark gleams–but I could tell that she meant what she said. “So you want him to take it?” I said slowly. “And you’re Governor Stanton’s daughter and Adam Stanton’s sister, and you want him to take it?”
“He’s got to,” she said, and I saw her small gloved hands clench on the railing, and felt sorry for the railing. She stared out over the coiling carpet of the river mist, as from the mountain out over the clouds hiding the dark world.
“Why?” I asked.
“I went up there,” she said, still looking out over the river, “to talk to him about it. I wasn’t sure he ought to when I went up. I wasn’t sure then, but when I saw him I was.”
Something about what she was saying disturbed me, like an offstage noise or something caught out of the tail of your eye or an itch that comes when your hands are full and you can’t scratch. I was listening to what she was saying, and it wasn’t that. It was something else. But I couldn’t catch what. So I shoved it onto the back of the stove, and listened to what she was saying.
“When