All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [235]
But as I thought of the figures and resumed my passage across the big room to the door of my office, I heard, or thought I heard, a noise from one of the offices on the other side. I looked over there. There wasn’t any light showing under either of the doors. Then I heard the noise again. It was a perfectly real noise. Nobody–certainly nobody without a light–was supposed to be in there. So I went across the room, my feet noiseless on the thick carpet, and pushed open the door.
It was Sadie Burke. She sat in the chair before her desk (it must have been t creaknof t chair I had heard), her arms were laid on the desk, the forearms bent together, and I knew that she had, just that instant, raised her head from them. Not that Sadie had been crying. But she had been sitting in the dusk, in the abandoned office, on Saturday evening when everybody else was out having a hell of a good time, with her head laid on her arms on the desk.
“Hello, Sadie,” I said.
She eyed me for a moment. Her back was toward what little light seeped in from the window, on which the Venetian blind was closed, and so I could not make out the expression of her face, just the gleam of the eyes. Then she demanded, “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Well, you needn’t wait.”
I went across to a chair and sat down and looked at her.
“You heard what I said,” she commented.
“I heard it.”
“Well, you’ll hear it again: you needn’t wait.”
“I find it quite restful here,” I replied, making no motion to rise. “Because, Sadie, we’ve got so much in common. You and me.”
“I hope you don’t mean that as a compliment,” she said.
“No, just a scientific observation.”
“Well, it don’t make you any Einstein.”
“You mean because it is not true that we have a lot in common or because it is so obviously true that doesn’t take Einstein’s brain to figure it out?”
“I mean I don’t give a damn,” she said sourly. And added, “And I don’t give a damn about having you in here either.”
I stayed in the chair and studied her. “It’s Saturday night,” I said. “Why aren’t you out painting the town?”
“To hell with this town.” She fished a cigarette out of the desk and lighted it. The flare of the match jerked the face out of the shadow. She whipped the match flame out with a snapping motion of her arm, then spewed the first gulp of smoke out over the full, curled-down lower lip. That done, she looked at me, and said, “And to hell with you.” She swept her damning gaze around the office as though it were full of forms and faces, and spewed the gray smoke out of her lungs and said, “And to hell with all of them. To hell with this place.”
Her eyes came back to rest on me, and she said, “I’m going to get out of here.”
“Here?” I questioned
“This whole place,” she affirmed, and swung her arm wide with the cigarette tip glowing with the swiftness of the motion, “this place, this town.”
“Stick around and you’ll get rich,” I said.
“I could have been rich a long time back,” she said, “paddling in this muck. If I had wanted to.”
She could have, all right. But she hadn’t. At least as far as I knew.
“Yeah–” she jabbed out the cigarette in the tray on the desk–“I’m getting out of here.” She lifted her eyes to mine, as though daring me to say something.
I didn’t say anything, but I shook my head.
“You think I won’t?” she demanded.
“I think you won’t.”
“I’ll show you, damn you.”
“No,” I said, and shook my head again, “you won’t. You’ve got a talent for this, just like a fish for swimming. And you can’t expect a fish not to swim.”
She started to say something, but didn’t. We sat there in the dimness for a couple of minutes. “Stop staring at me,” he ordered. Then, “Didn’t I tell you to get out of here? Why don’t you get out and go home?”
“I’m waiting for the Boss,” I said matter-of-factly, “he’s–” Then I remembered. “Didn’t you hear what happened?”
“What?”
“Tom Stark.”
“Somebody ought to kick his