All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [156]
“How much do you want him to?”
She swung to me, and I peered into her face. Then she said, “As much as I want anything.”
“You mean that?” I said.
“I mean it. He’s got to. To save himself.” She grabbed my arm again. “For himself. As much as for everybody else. For himself.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure,” she said, fiercely.
“I mean sure that you want him to do it? More than anything?”
“Yes,” she said.
I studies her face. It was a beautiful face–or if not beautiful, better than beautiful, a tense, smooth, spare-modeled, finished face, and it was chalk-white in the shadow and in the eyes were dark gleams. I studied her face, and for a moment just did that and let all the questions just slide away, like something dropped into the mist and water below us to slide away in the oily silence of the current.
“Yes,” she repeated, whispering.
But I kept on peering into her face, really looking at it for the first time, after all the years, for the close, true look at a thing can only be one snatched outside of time and the questions.
“Yes,” she whispered, and laid her hand on my arm, lightly this time.
And at the touch I came out of what I had been sunk in.
“All right,” I said, shaking myself, “but you don’t know what you are asking for.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Can you make him?”
“I can,” I said.
“Well, why didn’t you–why did you wait–why–”
“I don’t think–” I said slowly–“I don’t think I would have ever done it–at least, not this way–if you, you yourself, hadn’t asked me.”
“How can you do it?” she demanded, and the fingers closed on my arm.
“It is easy,” I said, “I can change the picture of the world he carries around in his head.”
“How?”
“I can give him a history lesson.”
“A history lesson?”
“Yes, I am a student of history, don’t you remember? And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost. But Adam, he is a scientist, and everything is tidy for him, and one molecule of oxygen always behaves the same way when it gets around two molecules of hydrogen, and a thing is always what it is, and so when Adam the romantic makes a picture of the world in his head, it is just like the picture of the world Adam the scientist works with. All tidy. All neat. The molecule of good always behaves the same way. The molecule of bad always behaves the same way. There are–”
“Stop it,” she ordered, “stop it, and tell me. You are trying not to tell me. You are talking so you won’t tell me. Now, tell me.”
“All right,” I said. “You remember I asked you about Judge Irwin being broken?” Well, he was. His wife wasn’t rich, either. He just thought she was. And he took a bribe.”
“Judge Irwin?” she echoed. “A bribe?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I can prove it.”
“He–he was father’s friend, he was–” She paused, straightened herself, swung her face from me and looked out over the river, then, after a moment, in a sturdy voice, as though not to me but to the whole wide world over there beyond the mist: “Well, that doesn’t prove anything. Judge Irwin.”
I didn’t reply. I, too, stared out over the coiling mist, in the dark.
I was aware, though I didn’t look when she turned toward me again.
“Well, say something,” she said, and I heard the tension in her voice.
But I didn’t say anything. I stood there waiting; and waiting, I could hear, in the silence, the tiny suck and lapping about the piles down in the mist.
Then she said, “Jack–was my–was my father–was–”
I didn’t answer.
“You coward!” she said, “you coward, you won’t tell me.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did he take a bribe? Did he? Did he?” She had grabbed my arm and was shaking me, hard.
“Not that bad,” I said.
“Not that bad, not that bad,” she mimicked, and burst out laughing, hanging on my arm. The she suddenly released me, thrust my arm from her as though it were foul, and shrank back. “I don’t believe it,” she announced.
“It’s true,” I said. “He knew about Irwin