All the King's Men (22 page)

“They are fighting a war over there now,” I said.

“They’ll stop before long,” she said, “then it will be easier.”

“Yeah, and it would be easier for you to tell somebody I was in Harvard than in a place they never heard of like State. They wouldn’t even have heard of the name of the state it was in.”

It’s just I want you to go to a nice place, Son, where you’ll make nice friends. And like I said, it would be easier for you to come over to see me in the summer.”

(She was taking about going to Europe again, and was very annoyed at the war. The Count had been gone quite a spell, since just before the war, and she was going back across. She did go back across, after the war, but she didn’t get any more counts. Maybe she figured it was too expensive to marry them. She didn’t marry again until the Young Executive.)

Well, I told her I didn’t want to go to a nice place and didn’t want any nice friends and wasn’t going to Europe and wasn’t going to take any money from her. That last part about the money just slipped out in the heat of the moment. It 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. It knocked her breath out. It almost floored her. I suppose that she wasn’t accustomed to hear anything in pants talk like that. Not that she didn’t try to persuade me, but I got on my high horse and was stubborn. A thousand times in the next four years I thought what a damned fool I was. I would be hashing or typing or even, in the last year, doing part-time newspaper work, and I would think how I had thrown away about five thousand dollars, just because I had read something in a book about it being manly to work your way through college. Not that my mother didn’t send me money. On Christmas and birthdays. And I took that and had me a blowout, a real one with trimmings for days, and then went back to hashing or whatever it was. They didn’t take me in the Army. Bad feet.

When he got back from the war, he was full of beans about it. He had been a colonel of artillery and had had himself a wonderful time. He had got there early enough to fire off a lot of iron at the Germans and to dodge a lot of their stuff in reply. In the Spanish-American War he hadn’t got farther than a case of flux in Florida. But now his happiness was complete. He felt that all the years he had been making maps of Caesar’s campaigns and making working models of catapults and ballistas and scorpions and wild asses and battering rams along ancient and medieval lines hadn’t been wasted. Well, they hadn’t been wasted as far as I was concerned, for I used to help him make them when I was a kid, and the trick were wonderful little gadgets. For a kid, anyway. And the war hadn’t been wasted, either, for he had made a visit to Alise-Ste-Reine, which was where Caesar beat Vercingetorix, and toward the end of the summer after he got back he had Foch and Caesar and Pershing and Haig and Vercingetorix and Critognatus and Vercassivellunus and Ludendorff and Edith Cavell pretty well mixed up in his mind. And he got out all the catapults ands scorpions we had made and dusted them off. But he had been a good officer, they said, and a brave man. He had a medal to prove it.

I suppose that for a long time I took a snotty tone about the Judge as hero because it was a fashion for a while to take such a tone about heroes and I grew up in that fashion. Or perhaps it was because I had bad feet and never got into the Army, or even the S. A. T. C. when I was in college, and therefore had the case of sour grapes that the wallflower always has. Perhaps if I had been in the Army everything would have been different. But the Judge was a brave man, even if he did have a medal to prove it. He had proved it before he ever got the medal. And he was to prove it again. There was, for instance, the time a fellow he had sent up to the pen stopped him in the street down at the Landing and told him he was going to kill him. The Judge just laughed and turned his back and walked away. The fellow took out a pistol then and called to the Judge, two or three times. Finally the Judge looked around. When he saw the man had a pistol and had it pointing at him, the Judge turned right there and walked straight at the man, not saying a word. He got right up to the man and took the pistol away from him. What he did in the war, I never knew.

The night my mother and the Young Executive and I went to dinner at his place, nearly fifteen years later, he dug up some of the junk again. There were the Pattons, a couple who lived down the Row, and a girl named Dumonde, whose presence I took to be tribute to me, and Judge Irwin, and us. Digging up the ballista was, I suppose, a tribute to me, too, though he always had sown a tendency to instruct his guests in the art of war of the pregunpower epochs. All during the meal it had been old times, which was another tribute to me, for you come back to the place you have been and they always start chewing over that bone: old times. Old times, just before dessert, worked around to how I used to make models with him. So he got up and went into the library and came back with a ballista, about twenty inches long, and shoved his dessert to one side and set it up there on the table. Then he cocked it,, using the little crank on the draw drum to wind back the carriage, just as though he hadn’t been strong enough to do it with a finger or two all at once. Then he didn’t have anything to shoot. So he rang for the black boy and got a roll. He broke open the roll and removed a little hunk of the soft bread and tried to make a pellet of it. It didn’t make a very good pellet, so he dipped it in water to make it stick. He put it in the carriage, “Now,” he said, “it works like this,” and tipped the trigger.

It worked. The pellet was heavy with a good soaking and the zip hadn’t gone out of the ballista with the passage of the years, for the next thing I knew there was an explosion in the chandelier and Mrs. Patton screamed and spewed mint ice over her black velvet and bits of glass showered down over the tablecloth and the big bowl of japonicas. The Judge had made it dead center on an electric-light bulb. He had also fetched down one of the crystal bangles of the chandelier.

The Judge said he was very sorry about Mrs. Patton. He said that he was a very stupid old man in his second childhood to be playing with toys, and then sat up very straight in his chair to show what a chest and pair of shoulders he still had. Mrs. Patton ate the rest of the mint ice, punctuating her activity with distrustful glances at the disgraced ballista. Then we all went back into the Judge’s library to wait for the coffee and the brandy bottle.

But I loitered behind in the dinning room for a moment. I have said that the zip hadn’t gone out of the ballista with the passage of the years. But that was a misstatement of fact. It hadn’t had a chance to. I went over to examine the thing, with a motive more sentimental than scientific. But then I notice the twists, which gave its zip. There are two twist of fiber on all those things, ballistas, some types of catapults, scorpions, and wild asses, through each of which the butt of a propelling arm is adjusted to make, as it were, half of the bow of a kind of supercrossbow. We used to cheat by mixing in catgut and fine steel wire with the string of the twists on our models to give more force. Now, as I looked at the thing, I realized that the twists weren’t the old twists which I had put in back in the dear dead days. Not by a damned sight. They were practically new.

And all at once I had the sight of Judge Irwin sitting up nights, back in the library, with catgut and steel wire and strings and pliers and scissors on the desk beside him, and with his high old red-thatched head bent over, the yellow eyes gimleted upon the task. And seeing that picture in my head, I felt sad and embarrassed. I had never felt anything, one way or the other, about the Judge’s making those things in the first place, years back. When I was a kid it seemed natural that anybody in his right mind would want to make them, and read books about them, and make maps and models. And it had kept on seeming all right that the Judge
had
_ made them. But the picture I now had in my head was different. I felt sad and embarrassed and, somehow, defrauded.

So I joined the guests in the library and left a piece of Jack Burden in the dinning room, with the ballista, for good and all.

They were having coffee. All except the Judge, who was opening up a bottle of brandy. He looked up as I came in, and said, “Been looking at our old peashooter, huh?” He put the slightest emphasis upon
our
_.

“Yes.” I said.

The yellow eyes bored right into me for a second, and I knew he knew what I’d found out. “I fixed it up,” he said, and laughed the most candid and disarming laugh in the world. “The other day. You know, and old fellow with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. You can’t read law and history and Dickens all the time. Or fish.”

I grinned a grin which I somehow felt I had to grin as a tribute to something, not specified in my mind. But I knew that the grin was about as convincing as cold chicken broth in a boarding house.

Then I went over and sat beside the Dumonde girl, who had been provided for my delight. She was a prettyish, dark girl, well got-up but lacking something, too brittle and vivacious, with a trick of lassoing you with her anxious brown eyes and fluttering eyelids as she cinched the rope and then saying what her mother had told her ten years before to say. “Oh, Mr. Burden, they say you’re in politics, oh, it must be just fascinating!” No doubt, her mother had taught her that. Well, she was pushing thirty and it hadn’t worked yet. But the eyelids were still busy.

“No, I’m not in politics,” I said. “I’ve just got a job.”

“Tell me about you job, Mr. Burden.”

“I’m an office boy,” I said.

“Oh, they say you’re very important, Mr. Burden. They say you’re very influential. Oh, it must be fascinating. To be influential, Mr. Burden!”

“It’s news to me,” I said, and discovered that they were all looking at me as though it had just dawned on them that I was sitting there buck-naked on the couch beside Miss Dumonde, with a demitasse on my knee. It’s the human fate. Every time some dame like Miss Dumonde snags you and you have to start talking the way you have to talk to dames like Miss Dumonde, the whole world starts listening in. I saw the Judge smiling with what I took to be a vengeful relish.

Then he said, “Don’t let him kid you, Miss Dumonde. Jack is very influential.”

“I knew it,” Miss Dumonde said. “It must be fascinating.”

“All right,” I said, “I’m influential. You got any pals in the pen you want me to get a pardon for?” Then I thought:
Wonderful manners you got, Jack. You might at least smile if you’ve got to say that
_. So I smiled.

“Well, there’s going to be somebody in the pen,” old Mr. Patton said, “before it’s over. What’s going on up there in the city. All these–”

“George,” his wife breathe at him, but it didn’t do any good, for Mr. Patton was a bluff, burly type, with lots of money and a manly candor. He kept right on: “–yes, sir, all these wild goings-on. Why, that fellow is giving this state away. Free this and free that and free other. Every wool-hat jackass thinking the world is free. Who’s going to pay? That’s what I want to know? What does he say to that, Jack?”

“I never asked him,” I said.

“Well, you ask him,” Mr. Patton said. “And ask him, too, how much grabbing there is. All that money flowing, and don’t tell me there’s not a grab. And ask him what he’s going to do when they impeach him? Tell him there’s a constitution in this state, or was before he blew it to hell. Tell him that.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said, and laughed, and then laughed again when I thought how Willie would look if I did tell him.

“George,” the Judge said, “you’re an old fogy. Government is committed these days to give services we never heard of when we were growing up. The world’s changing.”

“It’s changed so much a fellow can step in and grab the whole state. Give him another few years and nothing can blast him out. He’ll have half the state on a pay roll and the other half will be afraid to vote. Strong-arm, blackmail, God knows what.”

“He’s a hard man,” the Judge said. “He’s played it hard and close. But there’s one principle he’s grasped: you don’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. And precedents. He’s broken plenty of eggs and he may make his omelettes. And remember, the Supreme Court has backed him up on every issue raised to date.”

“Yeah, and it’s
his
_ court. Since he got Armstrong on, and Talbott. And the issues raised. But what about the issues that haven’t been raised? That people have been afraid to raise?

“There’s a great deal of talk,” the Judge said calmly, “but we don’t really know much.”

“I know he’s going to tax this state to death,” Mr. Patton said, and shifted his big arms, and glared. “And drive business out of this state. Raising royalty on the state coal land. On the oil land. On–”

“Yes, George,” the Judge laughed, “and he slammed an income tax on you and me, too.”

“On the oil situation, now,” the Young Executive, for the sacred name of oil had been mentioned, “as I see it, the situation–”

Well, Miss Dumonde had certainly opened the corral gate when she mentioned politics, and it was thunder of hoofs and swirl of dust from then on, and I was sitting on the bare ground in the middle of it. For a while it didn’t occur to me that there was anything peculiar about the scene. Then it did occur to me. After all, I did work for the fellow who had the tail and the cloven hoof and this was, or had started out to be, a social occasion. I suddenly remembered that fact and decided that the developments were peculiar. Then I realized that they weren’t so peculiar, after all. Mr. Patton, and the Young Executive, and Mrs. Patton, for she had begun putting her oar in, and even the Judge, they all assumed that even tough I did work for Willie my heart was with them. I was just picking up a little, or maybe a lot, of change with Willie, but my heart was in Burden’s Landing and they had no secrets from me and they knew they couldn’t hurt my feelings. Maybe they were right. Maybe my heart was in Burden’s Landing. Maybe they couldn’t hurt my feelings. But I just broke in, after an hour of sitting quiet and drinking in Miss Dumonde’s subtle scent, and said something. I don’t recall what I interrupted, but it all amounted to the same thing anyway. I said, “Doesn’t it all boil down to this? If the government of this state for quite a long time back had been doing anything for the folks in it, would Stark have been able to get out there with his bare hands and bust the boys? And would he be having to make so many short cuts to get something done to make up for the time lost all these years in not getting something done? I’d just like to submit that question for the sake of argument.”