All the king's men

Chapter Ten

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. There were two reasons. First, I couldn't stand to stay in town. Second, Anne Stanton was at the Landing.

She had been there since Adam's funeral. She had gone down with the body, trailing the sun-glittering, expensive hearse in an undertaker's limousine with a nurse, who proved to be superfluous, and Katy Maynard, an old friend who proved, no doubt to be superfluous, too. I didn't see her as she sat in the rented limousine which moved at its decorous torturer's pace the near-hundred miles, lifting the miles slowly off the concrete slab, slowly and fastidiously as though you were peeling and endless strip of skin off the live flesh. I didn't see her, but I know how she had been: erect, white in the face, the beautiful bones of her face showing under the taut flesh, her hands clenched in her lap. For that was the way she was when I saw her standing under the moss-garlanded oaks, looking absolutely alone despite the nurse and Katy Maynard and all the people–friend of the family, curiosity-seekers come to gloat and nudge, newspapermen, big-shot doctors from town and from Baltimore and Philadelphia–who stood there while the shovels did their work.

And she was that way when she walked out of the place, not leaning on anybody, with the nurse and Katy Maynard trailing along with that look of embarrassed and false piety which people get on their faces when they are caught in the open with the principal mourner at a funeral.

Even when–just as she was coming out the gate of the cemetery–a newspaperman jammed a camera at her and took her picture, she didn't change the expression on her face.

He was still there when I came up, a squirt with his hat over one eye and the camera hung round his neck and a grin on his squirt face. I thought maybe I had seen him around town, but maybe not, the squirts look so much alike when they grind them out of journalism school. "Hello," I said.

He said hello.

"I saw you get that picture," I said.

He said yeah.

"Well, son," I said, "if you live long enough, you'll find out there are son kinds of a son-of-a-bitch you don't have to be even to be a newspaperman."

He said yeah, out of his squirt face, and looked at am. Then he asked. "You're Burden?"

I nodded

"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed, "you work for Stark and you call somebody a son-of-a-bitch."

I just looked at him. I'd been over all that ground before. I had been over it a thousand times with a thousand people. Hotel lobbies and dinner tables and club cars and street corners and bedrooms and filling stations. Sometimes they didn't say it just exactly that way and sometimes they didn't say it at all, but it was there. Oh, I'd fixed them, all right. I knew how to roll with that punch and give it right back in the gut. I ought to have known, I'd had plenty of practice.

But you get tired. In a way it is too easy, and so it isn't fun any more. And then you get so you don't get mad any more, it has happened so often. But those aren't the reasons. It is just that those people who say that to you–or don't say it–aren't right and they are wrong. If it were absolutely either way, you wouldn't have to think about it, you could just shut your eyes and let them have it in the gut. But the trouble is, they are half right and half wrong, and in the end that is what paralyzes you. Trying to sort out the one from the other. You can't explain it to them, for there isn't ever time and there is always that look on their faces. So you get to a point in the end where you don't even let them have it in the gut. You just look at them, and it is like a dream or something remembered from a long time back or like they weren't there at all.

So I just looked at the squirt face.

There were other people there. They were looking at me. They expected me to say something. Or do something. But somehow I didn't even mind their eyes on me. I didn't even hate them. I didn't feel anything except a kind of numbness and soreness inside, more numbness than soreness. I stood there and looked at him and waited the way you wait for the pain to start after you have been hit. Then, if the pain started, I would give it to him. But it didn't start, and there was just the numbness. So I turned around and walked away. I didn't even mind the eyes that were following me or the snatch of a laugh somebody gave and cut off short because it was a funeral.

I walked on down the street with the numbness and soreness in me. But what had happened at the gate hadn't given it to me. I had had it before I came.

I went on down the Row toward the Stanton house. I didn't imagine she'd want to see me right then, but I intended to leave word that I would be at the hotel down at the Landing till late afternoon. This, of course, if something didn't break about the Boss's condition But when I got to the Stanton house I learned that Anne wasn't seeing anybody. Katy Maynard and the nurse weren't superfluous any more. For when Anne entered the house she went into the living room and stood there just inside the door and looked slowly all over the place, at the piano, the furniture piece by piece, the picture above the fireplace, the way a woman looks over a room just before she sails in to redecorate that place and rearrange the furniture (that was Katy Maynard's way of putting it), and then she just gave down. She didn't even reach for the doorjamb, or stagger, or make a sound, they said. She just gave down, now it was over, and was out cold on the floor.

So when I got there, the nurse was upstairs working on her, and Katy Maynard was calling the doctor and taking charge. There wasn't any reason for me to stay. I got in my car and headed back to the city.

But now the Boss was dead, too, and I was back at the Landing. My mother and her Theodore were off on a trip and I had the house to myself. It was as empty and still as a morgue. But even so, it was a bit more cheerful than the hospitals and cemeteries I had been hanging around. What was dead in this house had been dead a long time, and I was accustomed to the fact. I was even becoming accustomed to the fact of the other deaths. They had shoveled it over Judge Irwin, and Adam Stanton, and the Boss.

But there were some of us left. And Anne Stanton was among those left. And I was.

So back at the Landing again, we sat on the gallery side by side, when there was sun–the lemon-pale sun of late autumn–and the afternoon made its shortened arc over the onyx-mottled waters of the bay, which stretched south to the autumn-hazy horizon. Or when there wasn't any sun, and the wind piled the sea up over the beach, even to the road, and the sky seemed to be nothing but gusty rain, we sat side by side in the living room. Either place, we never talked much those days, not because there was nothing to say but because there might be too much and if you once started you would upset the beautiful and perilous equilibrium which we had achieved. It was as though we each sat on the end of a seesaw, beautifully balanced, but not in any tidy little play yard but over God knows what blackness on a seesaw which God had rigged up for kiddies. And if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an inch, the balance would be upset and we would both go sliding off into blackness. But we fooled God, and didn't say a word.

We didn't say a word, but some afternoons I read to Anne. I read the first book I had laid hand to the first afternoon when I found I couldn't sit there any longer in that silence which bulged and creaked with all the unsaid words. It was the first volume of the works of Anthony Trollope. That was a safe bet. Anthony never upset any equilibriums.

In a peculiar way those late-autumn days began to remind me of the summer almost twenty years before when I had fallen in love with Anne. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. And now we were absolutely alone, but it was a different kind of floating island or magic carpet. That summer we had seemed to be caught in a massive and bemusing tide which knew its own pace and time and would not be hurried even to the happiness which is surely promised. And now again we seemed to be caught in such a tide and couldn't lift a finger in its enormous drift, for it knew its own pace and time. But what it promised we didn't know. I did not even wonder.

Now and then, however, I wondered about something else. Sometimes when I was sitting beside her, reading or not talking, and sometimes when I was away, eating breakfast or walking down the Row or lying awake. There was a question without an answer. When Anne had told me about Adam's last, wild visit to her apartment–how he rushed in and said he wouldn't be pimp for her and all that–she had said that some man had telephoned Adam to tell him about her and Governor Stark.

_Who?__

In the first days after the event I had really forgotten the fact, but then the question came. At first, even then, the question didn't seem important to me. For nothing seemed very important to me then, in the pervasive soreness and numbness. Or at least what seemed important to me then had nothing to do with the question. What had happened was important, but not the cause of what had happened in so far as such a cause was not in me myself.

But the question kept coming back. Even when I wasn't thinking of it, I would suddenly be aware of its gnawing like a mouse's tooth stitching away inside the wainscoting of my mind.

For a while I didn't see how I could ask Anne. I couldn't ever say anything to her about what had happened. We would sit forever in our conspiracy of silence, forever bound together in that conspiracy by our awareness of our earlier, unwitting conspiracy to commit Adam Stanton and Willie Stark to each other and to their death. (If we should ever break the conspiracy of silence we might have to face the fact of that other conspiracy and have to look down and see the blood on our hands.) So I said nothing.

Until the day when I had to say it.

I said, "Anne, I'm going to ask you a question. About–about–it. Then I'll never say another word about it to you unless you speak up first."

She looked at me without answering. But I could see in her eyes the recoil of fear and pain, and then the stubborn mustering of what forces she had.

So I plunged on, "You told me–that day when I came to your apartment–that somebody had telephoned Adam–had told him–had told him about–"

"About me," she said, finishing the sentence on which I had, for the moment, wvered. She hadn't waited for the impact. With whatever force she had she was meeting it head-on.

I nodded.

"Well?" she queried.

"Did he say who had telephoned him?"

She thought a minute. You could see her, even as she sat there, lifting the sheet off that moment when Adam had burst in on her, like somebody lifting the sheet off the face of a corpse on a marble slab in a morgue and peering into the face.

Then she shook her head. "No," she said, "he didn't say–" she hesitated–"except that it was a man. I'm sure he said man."

So we resumed our conspiracy of silence, while the seesaw wavered and swayed beneath us and the black clawed up at us and we clung on.

I left the Landing next day.

I got to town in the late afternoon, and put in a call to Sadie Burke's apartment. There was no answer. So I tried the Capitol, on the off chance that she would be there, but there was no answer on her extension. Off and on during the evening I tried her apartment number, but with no luck. I didn't go around the Capitol to see her in the morning. I didn't want to see the gang who would be there. I didn't ever want to see them again.

So I telephoned again. Her extension didn't answer. So I asked the switchboard to find out if possible where she was. After two or three minutes the voice said, "She is not here. She is ill. Will that be all, please?" Then before I could put my thought in order, I heard the click of being cut off.

I rang again

I rang again.

"This is Jack Burden," I said, "and I'd like to–"

"Oh–Mr. Burden–" the switchboard said noncommittally, or perhaps in question.

There had been a time and it hadn't been very long back when the name _Jack Burden__ got something done around that joint. But that voice, the tone of that voice, told me that the name _Jack Burden__ didn't mean a damned thing but a waste of breath around there any more.

For a second I was sore as hell. Then I remembered that things had changed.

Things had changed out there. When things change in a place like that, things change fast and all the way down, and the voice at the switchboard gets another tone when it speaks your name. I remembered how much things had changed. Then I wasn't sore any more, for I didn't give a damn.

But I said sweetly, "I wonder if you can tell me how to get in touch with Miss Burke. I'd sure appreciate it."

Then I waited a couple of minutes for her to try to find out.

"Miss Burke is at the Millett Sanatorium," the voice then said.

Cemeteries and hospitals: I was back in the swing of things, I thought.

But the Millett place wasn't like the hospital. It didn't look at all like a hospital, I discovered when I turned off the highway twenty-five miles out of the city and tooled gently up the drive under the magnificent groining of the century-old live oaks whose bough met above the avenue and dripped stalactites of moss to make a green, aqueous gloom like a cavern. Between the regularly spaced oaks stood pedestals on which classic marbles–draped and undraped, male and female, stained by weathers and leaf acid and encroaching lichen, looking as though they had, in fact, sprouted dully out of the clinging black-green humus below them–stared out at the passer-by with the faintly pained, heavy, incurious unamazement of cattle. The gaze of those marble eyes must have been the first stage in the treatment the neurotic got when he came out to the sanatorium. It must have been like smearing a cool unguent of time on the hot pustule and dry itch of the soul.

Then at the end of the avenue the neurotic reached the sanatorium, which graciously promised peace beyond the white columns. For the Millett Sanatorium was what is called a rest home. But it had been built more than a century back for vanity and love by a cotton snob to whom money n no object, who had bought near a shipload of shining marble statues in Rome for his avenue, and who had probably had a face like brutally hewed cedar and not a nerve in his body, and now people who were descended from such people, or who had enough money (made in the administration of Grant or Coolidge) to assume that they were descended from such people, brought their twitches, tics, kinks, and running sores out here and rested in the high-ceiling rooms and ate crawfish bisque and were soothed by the voice of a psychiatrist in whose wide, unwavering, brown, liquid, depthless eyes one slowly drowned.

I almost drowned in those eyes during the one-minute interview I had in order to get permission to see Sadie. "She is very difficult," he said.

Sadie was lying on a chaise longue by a window which gave over a stretch of lawn sloping down to a bayou. Her chopped-off black hair was wild and her face was chalk-white and the afternoon light striking across it made it look more than ever like the plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa riddled with BB shot. But it was a mask flung down on a pillow and the eyes that looked out of it belonged to the mask. They did not belong to Sadie Burke. There wasn't anything burning there.

"Hello, Sadie," I said, "I hope you don't mind me coming to see you."

She studied me a moment out of the unburning eyes. "It's O. K. with me," she said.

So I sat down and hitched my chair up closer and lighted a cigarette.

"How you getting on?" I asked.

She turned her head in my direction and gave me another long look. For an instant, there was a flicker in the eyes as when a breath of air touches an ember. "Look here," she said, "I'm getting on all right. Why the hell shouldn't I be getting on all right?"

"That's fine," I said.

"I didn't come out here because there was anything wrong with me. I came because I was tired. I wanted a rest. That's what I said to that God-damned doctor. I said, 'I'm here to get a rest because I'm tired and I don't want you messing around and trying to swap secrets with me and find out if I ever had any dreams about red fire engines.' I said, 'If I ever started swapping secrets with you I'd burn your ears off, but I'm here to rest and I don't want you in my hair.' I said, 'I'm tired of a lot of things and I'm God-damned tired of a lot of people and that goes for you, too, Doc.' "

She pushed herself up on one arm and looked at me. Then said, "And that goes for you, too, Jack Burden."

I didn't say anything to that and I didn't move. So she sank back down, and into herself.

I let my cigarette burn up my fingers and lighted another one before I said, "Sadie, I reckon I know how you feel and I don't want to be bringing everything up again, but–"

"You don't know a thing about how I feel," she said.

"Some idea–maybe," I said. "But what I came for was to ask you a question."

"I thought you came because you were so damned fond of me."

"As a matter of fact," I said, "I am. We've been around a long time together and we always got along. But that's not–"

"Yeah," she interrupted, and again thrust herself up on one arm, "everything and everybody just got alone fine. Oh, Jesus, just fine."

I waited while she sank back and turned her eyes from me across the lawn below toward the bayou. A crow was making its way across the clear air above the tattered cypress tops beyond the bayou. Then the crow was gone, and I said, "Adam Stanton killed the Boss, but he never got that idea by himself. Somebody primed him to do it. Somebody who knew the kind of man Adam was and knew the inside of how he took the job at the medical center and knew–"

She didn't seem to be listening to me. She was watching the clear air above the tattered cypresses where the crow had gone. I hesitated, and then, watching her face, went on. "–and knew about the Boss and Anne Stanton."

I waited again and watched her face as I handed those names to her, but it didn't show a thing. It simply looked tired, tired and not giving a damn.

"I found out one thing," I continued. "A man called Adam that afternoon and told him about the Boss and his sister. And some more stuff. You can guess what stuff. So he went wild. He went to see his sister and jumped her and she didn't deny it. She isn't the kind of person who could deny it. I guess she was sick of having a secret and she was almost glad not to have it any longer and–"

"Yeah," Sadie said, not turning to me, "tell me how noble and high-tone Anne Stanton is."

"I'm sorry," I said, and felt the blood flushing my face. "I guess I did get off the point."

"I guess you did, all right."

I waited. Then, "That man who called up Adam, do you have any notion who it was?"

She seemed to be turning that question over in her mind. If she had heard it, for I couldn't be sure.

"Do you?" I asked.

"I don't have any notion," she said.

"No?"

"No," she said, still not looking at me, "and I don't have to have any. Because, you see, I know."

"Who?" I demanded. "Who?" And came up out of my chair.

"Duffy," she said.

"I knew it!" I exclaimed, "I ought to have known it! It had to be."

"If you knew it," she said, "what the hell you come messing around me for?"

"I had to be sure. I had to know. Really know. I–" I stopped and stood there at the foot of the chaise longue and looked down at her averted face, which the sunlight lay across. "You say you know it was Duffy. How do you know?"

"God damn you, Jack Burden, God damn you," she said in a tired voice, and turned her head to look up at me. Then looking at me, she thrust herself up to a sitting position, and burst out in a voice which all at once wasn't tired any more but angry and violent, "God damn you, Jack Burden, what made you come here? What always makes you mess in things? Why can't you leave me alone? Why can't you? Why?"

I stared down into her eyes, which in the pain-contorted face were burning now and wild.

"How do you know?" I demanded softly.

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

"How do you know?" I demanded, more softly than before–I was almost whispering–and leaned down toward her.

"God damn you, Jack Burden," she said.

"How do you know?"

"Because–" she began, hesitated, and tossed her head in a desperate tired way like a fevered child on a pillow.

"Because?" I demanded.

"Because," she said, and let herself fall back on the cushions of the chaise longue, "I told him. I told him to do it."

That was it. That was it, and I hadn't guessed it. My knees gave slowly down, like a pneumatic jack letting down the weight of a car to the floor, and I was back in my chair. There I was and there Sadie Burke was, and I was looking at her as though I had never seen her before.

After a minute, she said, "Stop looking at me." But there wasn't any heat in what she said.

I must have continued to look, for she said, as before, "Stop looking at me."

Then I heard my lips saying, as though to myself, "You killed him."

"All right," she said, "all right, I killed him. He was throwing me over. For good. I knew it was for good that time. For that Lucy. After all I had done. After I made him. I told him I'd fix him, but he turned that new sick smile of his on me like he was practicing to be Jesus and took my hands in his, and asked me to understand–understand, Jesus!–and just then like a flash I knew I'd kill him."

"You killed Adam Stanton," I said.

"Oh, God," she breathed, "oh, God."

"You killed Adam," I repeated "Oh," she breathed, "and I killed Willie. I killed him."

"Yes," I agreed, and nodded.

"Oh, God," she said, and lay there staring up at the ceiling.

I had found out what I had come to find out. But I kept on sitting there. I didn't even light a cigarette.

After a while she said, "Come over here. Pull your chair over here."

I hitched my chair over by the chaise longue, and waited. She didn't look at me, but she reached out her right hand uncertainly in my direction. I took it and held it while she continued to stare at the ceiling and the afternoon light struck cruelly across her face.

"Jack," she said, finally, still not looking at me.

"Yes?"

"I'm glad I told you," she said. "I knew I had to tell somebody. Sometime. I knew it would come, but there wasn't anybody for me to tell. Till you came. That's why I hated you for coming. As soon as you came in the door, I knew I'd have to tell you. But I'm glad I told. I don't care who knows now. I may not be noble and high-toned like that Stanton woman, but I'm glad I told you."

I didn't find much to say to that. So I continued to sit there for quite a while, holding Sadie's hand in the silence she seemed to want and looking across her down toward the bayou, which coiled under the moss depending from the line of tattered cypresses on the farther bank, the algae-mottled water heavy with the hint and odor of swamp, jungle, and darkness, along the edge of the expanse of clipped lawn.

I had found out that Tiny Duffy, who was now Governor of the state, had killed Willie Stark as surely as though his own hand had held the revolver. I had also found out that Sadie Burke had put the weapon into Duffy's hand and had aimed it for him, that she, too, had killed Willie Stark. And Adam Stanton. But what she had done had been done hot. What Duffy had done had been done cold. And, in the end, Sadie Burke's act had somehow been wiped out. I did not exist for me any more.

And that left Duffy. Duffy had done it. And strangely, there was a great joy and relief in that knowledge. Duffy had done it, and that made everything clear and bright as in frosty sunshine. There, over yonder, was Tiny Duffy with his diamond ring, and over here was Jack Burden. I felt free and clean, as when you suddenly see that, after being paralyzed by ignorance or indecision, you can act. I felt on the verge of the act.

But I did not know what the act was to be When I went back out to see Sadie–she had asked me to come back–she told me, without me saying a word on the subject, that she would make a statement if I wanted her to. I told her that that was wonderful, and I felt that it was wonderful for I still felt clean and free, on the verge of an act, and she was putting the thing into my hand. I thanked her.

"Don't thank me," she said, "I'm doing myself a favor. Duffy–Duffy–" she rose to a sitting position on the chaise longue and her eyes had the old flash–"you know what he did?"

Before I could answer she plunged on, "Afterwards–after it had happened–I didn't feel a thing. Not a thing. I knew that night what had happened, and I didn't feel a thing. And next morning Duffy came to me–he was grinning and puffing–and he said, 'Girlie, I'll sure hand it to you, I'll sure hand it to you.' I still didn't feel a thing, not even when I looked in his face. But then he put his hand around my shoulder and sort of patted and rubbed my back between the shoulder blades, and said, 'Girlie, you sure stopped his clock and I ain't forgetting you, and girlie, you and me, we might sure get along.' Then it happened. It happened right then. It was like it had all happened that second, right in front of me instead of up at the Capitol. And I clawed at him and jumped away. I ran out of the place. And three day later, after he died, I came here. It was the only place I could come."

"Well, thanks anyway," I said. "I reckon we can stop Duffy's clock."

"It won't stick in law," she said.

"I didn't reckon it would. What ever you said to him or he said to you doesn't prove a thing. But there are other ways."

She thought awhile. Then, "Any other way, law or not, and I reckon you know it drags that–" she hesitated, and did not say what she was about to say, then revised it–"drags Anne Stanton into it."

"She'll do it," I affirmed. "I know she would."

Sadie shrugged. "You know what you want," she said, "you all."

"I want to get Duffy."

"That suit me," she said, and again shrugged. Suddenly she seemed to have gone tired again. "That suits me," she repeated, "but the world is full of Duffys. It looks like I been knowing them all my life."

"I'm just thinking about one," I declared.

I was still thinking about that one about a week later (by this time it seemed that the only way was to break the thing through an antiadministration paper), when I got the note from that particular Duffy himself. Would I mind coming to see him, it said. At my convenience.

My convenience was immediately, and I found him imperially and porcinely filling his clothes and the great leather couch in the library at the Mansion where the Boss used to sit. The leather of his shoes creaked as he stepped forward to greet me, but his body swayed with the bloated lightness of a drowned body stirred loose at last from the bottom mud of the river to rise majestically and swayingly to the surface. We shook hands and he smiled. And waved me to a seat as the couch groaned to receive him.

A black boy in a white coat brought the drinks. I took the drink but declined a cigar, and waited.

He said how sad it was about the Boss. I nodded He said how the boys all missed the Boss. I nodded to that.

He said how things were getting done though. Just like the Boss would have wanted. I nodded to that.

He said how they sure missed the Boss, though. I nodded to that.

He said, "Jack, the boys sure miss you around here, too."

I nodded modestly and said that I sure missed the boys.

"Yeah," he resumed, "I was saying to myself the other day, just let me get settled into harness and I'm going to get hold of Jack. Yeah, Jack's the kind of fellow I like to have around. The Boss sure thought a lot of him, and what was good enough for the Boss is good enough for old Tiny. Yeah, I said to myself, I'm gonna get old Jack. The kind of guy I need. A square-shooter. A guy you can trust. He'll speak the truth, fear nor fear. His word is his bond.

"Are you referring to me?" I asked.

"I sure am," he replied. "And I'm making you a proposition. I don't exactly know what arrangement you had with the Boss, but you just tell me straight what it was and I'll up it ten per cent."

"I had no complaints about my treatment."

"Now that's talking like a white man, Jack," he said, and added earnestly, "And don't get me wrong, I know you and the Boss was like that." He held up two large, white, glistening episcopal fingers as in benediction. "Like that," he repeated. "And don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing the Boss. I just want to show you I appreciate you."

"Thanks," I said with some lack of warmth.

The lack of warmth was such, I presume, that he leaned slightly forward and said, "Jack, I'm going to make that twenty per cent."

"That's not enough," I said.

"Jack," he said, "you're right. That's not enough. Twenty-five per cent."

I shook my head.

He showed a slight uneasiness and the couch creaked, but he rallied with a smile. "Jack," he said soothingly, "you just tell me what you think's right, and I'll see how we make out. You tell me what's enough."

"There ain't enough," I said.

"Huh?"

"Listen," I said, "didn't you just tell me that I am the guy whose word is his bond?"

"Yeah, Jack."

"So you'll believe me if I tell you something?"

"Why, yeah, Jack."

"Well, I'm telling you something. You are the stinkingest louse God ever let live."

I relished the moment of profound silence which followed, then plunged on, "And you think you can buy me in. Well, I know why you want to. You don't know how much I know or what. I was thick with the Boss and I know a lot. I'm the joker in the deck. My name is Jack and I'm the wild jack and I'm not one-eyed. You want to deal me to yourself from the bottom of the deck. But it's no sale, Tiny, it's no sale. And it's too damned bad, Tiny. And do you know why?"

"Look here!" he said with authority. "Look here, you can't be–"

"It's too bad because I do know something. I know a lot. I know that you killed the Boss."

"It's a lie!" he exclaimed, and heaved on the couch and the couch creaked.

"It's no lie. And it's no guess. Though I ought to have guessed it. Sadie Burke told me. She–"

"She's in it, she's in it!"

"She _was__ in it," I corrected, "but not any more. And she'll tell the world. She doesn't care who knows. She's not afraid."

"She better be. I'll–"

"She's not afraid, because she's tired. She's tired of everything and she's tired of you."

"I'll kill her," he said, and the perspiration exuded delicately on his temples.

"You won't kill anybody," I said, "and this time there's nobody to do it for you. For you're afraid to. You were afraid to kill the Boss and you were afraid not to, but luck helped you out. But you gave luck a little push, Tiny, and I swear, I admire you for it. It opened my eyes. You see, Tiny, all those years I never thought you were real. You were just something off the cartoon page. With your diamond ring. You were just the punching bag the Boss used, and you just grinned your sick grin and took it. You were like the poodle I heard about. You ever hear about the poodle?"

I didn't give him time to answer. I watched his mouth get ready, then I went on. "There was a drunk had a poodle and he took him everywhere with him from bar to bar. And you know why? Was it devotion? It was not devotion. He took that poodle everywhere just so he could spit on him and not get the floor dirty. Well, you were the Boss's poodle. And you liked it. You liked to be spit on. You weren't human. You weren't real. That's what I thought. But I was wrong, Tiny. Somewhere down in you there was something made you human. You resented being spit on. Even for money."

I got up, with my half-empty glass in my hand.

"And now, Tiny," I said, "that I know you are real, I sort of feel sorry for you. You are a funny old fat man, Tiny, with your heart getting bad and your liver nigh gone and sweat running down your face and a mean worry on your mind and a great blackness like water rising in a cellar inside you and I almost feel sorry for you but if you say a word I might stop feeling sorry for you. So now I'm going to drink up your whisky and spit in the glass and go."

So I drank off the whisky, dropped the glass on the floor (on the thick rug it didn't break), and started for the door. I had almost got there, when I heard a croak from the couch. I looked around.

"It–" he croaked, "it won't stand in a court."

I shook my head. "No," I said, "it won't. But you still got plenty to worry about."

I opened the door and walked through and left the door open behind me and walked down the long hall under the great, glittering chandelier, and walked out into the brisk night.

I took a deep drag of fresh air and looked up through the trees at the distinct stars. I felt like a million. I had sure-God brought off that scene. I had hit him where he lived. I was full of beans. I had fire in my belly. I was a hero. I was St. George and the dragon, I was Edwin Booth bowing beyond the gaslights, I was Jesus Christ with the horsewhip in the temple.

I was the stuff.

And all at once the stars I was like a man who has done himself the best from soup to nuts and a Corona Corona and feels like a virtuous million and all at once there isn't anything but the yellow, acid taste which has crawled up to the back of the mouth from the old, tired stomach.

Three days later I got the registered letter from Sadie Burke. It read: Dear Jack: Just so you won't think I am going to welch on what I said I would do I am enclosing the statement I said I would make. I have got it witnessed and notarized and nailed down as tight as you can nail anything down and you can do anything with it you want for it is yours. I mean this. It is your baby, just like I said.

As for me I am getting out of here. I don't mean just getting out of this cross between an old folks' home and a booby-hatch, but out of this town and out of this state. I can't stand it round here and I'm pulling out. I'll be gone a long way and I'll be gone a long time and maybe somewhere the climate will be better. But my cousin (Mrs. Sill Larkin, 2331 Rousseau Ave.) who is the nearest thing to a relative I got will have some kind of address for me sometime, and if you ever want to contact me just write me care of her. Wherever I am I'll do what you say. I'll come if you say come. I don't want you thinking I am going to welch. I don't care who knows anything. I'll do anything you say about that piece of business.

But if you take my advice about that piece of business you will let it drop. This is not because I love Duffy. I hope you will give him an earful and let him wet his pants. But my advice is to let it drop. First, you cannot do anything in law. Second, if you use it politically the best you can get will be to keep Duffy from being re-elected, and you know as well as I do he will never get nominated even. The boys will never nominate him for they know he is a dummy even by their standards. He was just something the Boss kept around. Springing this stuff won't hurt the gang any. I will just give them an excuse to get rid of Duffy. If you want to get the gang you got to let them dig their own grave like they sure will now the Boss is gone. But third, it is sure going to be rough on that Stanton dame if you break this stuff. She may be so noble and high-toned like you said that she will want you to do it, but you are a sap if you do. She has maybe had plenty to put up with already in her way, and you would be a sap to crucify her just because you got some high-faluting idea you are an Eagle Scout and she is Joan of Arc. You would be a sap to tell her even. Unless you are so blabber mouthed you have done it already. Like you maybe have. I am not going on to say she is my best friend but she has had her troubles like I said and you might give her a break.

Remember I am not welching. I am just giving you my advice.

Keep your tail over the dashboard.

Sincerely yours,

SADIE BURKE

I read through Sadie's statement. It said everything there was to say, and each page was signed and witnessed. Then I folded up. It was no good to me. Not because of the advice which Sadie had given me. Her letter made sense, all right. That is, the part about Duffy and the gang. But something had happened. To hell with them all, I thought. I was sick of it all.

I looked down at the letter again. So Sadie had called me an Eagle Scout. But that wasn't news, either. I had called myself worse names than that the night after I had seen Duffy and was walking down the street under the stars. But it touched the sore place and made it throb. It throbbed the worse because I knew that it wasn't a secret sore place. Sadie had known about it. She had seen through me. She had read me like a book.

There was only one wry piece of consolation in the thought. At least, I had not had to wait for her to read me. I had read myself to myself that night walking down the street, full of beans and being an Eagle Scout, when the yellow, acid taste had all at once crawled up to the back of my mouth.

What had I read? I had read this: When I found out about Duffy's killing the Boss and Adam I had felt clean and pure, and when I kicked Duffy around I felt like a million because I thought it let me out. Duffy was the villain and I was the avenging hero. I had kicked Duffy around and my head was big as a balloon with grandeur. Then all at once something happened and the yellow taste was in the back of my mouth.

This happened: I suddenly asked myself why Duffy had been so sure I would work for him. And suddenly I saw the eyes of the little squirt-face newspaperman at the cemetery gate on me, and all the eyes that had looked at me that way, and suddenly I knew that I had tried to make Duffy into a scapegoat for me and to set myself off from Duffy, and my million-dollar meal of heroism backfired that yellow taste into my gullet and I felt caught and tangled and mired and stuck like an ox in a bog and a cat in flypaper. It wasn't simply that I again saw myself as party to that conspiracy with Anne Stanton which had committed Willie Stark and Adam Stanton to each other and to their death. It was more than that. It was as though I were caught in a more monstrous conspiracy whose meaning I could not fathom. It was as though the scene through which I had just lived had been a monstrous and comic miming for ends I could not conceive and for an audience I could not see but which I knew was leering from the shadow. It was as though in the midst of the scene Tiny Duffy had slowly and like a brother winked at me with his oyster eye and I had known he knew the nightmare truth, which was that we were twins bound together more intimately and disastrously than the poor freaks of the midway who are bound by the common stitch of flesh and gristle and the seepage of blood. We were bound together forever and I could never hate him without hating myself or love myself without loving him. We were bound together under the unwinking eye of Eternity and by the Holy Grace of the Great Twitch whom we must all adore.

And I heaved and writhed like the ox or the cat, and the acid burned my gullet and that was all there was to it and I had everything and everybody and myself and tiny Duffy and Willie Stark and Adam Stanton. To hell with them all, I said impartially under the stars. They all looked alike to me then. And I looked like them.

That was the way it was for quite a while.

I did not go back to the Landing. I did not want to see Anne Stanton. I did not even open a letter she wrote me. It lay on my bureau where I saw it every morning. I did not want to see anybody I knew. I hung around town and sat in my room or sat in bars which I had never frequented and sat in movies in the front row, where I could admire the enormous and distorted shadows which gesticulated and struck or clutched or clung and uttered asseverations which reminded you of everything which you had ever remembered. And I sat for hours in the newspaper room of the public library, the place like railway stations and missions and public latrines is where the catarrhal old men and bums go and where they sit to thumb the papers which tell about the world in which they live for a certain number of years or to sit and wheeze and stare while the gray rain slides down the big windowpanes above them.

It was in the newspaper room of the library that I saw Sugar-Boy. It was such an improbable place to encounter him that at first I scarcely accepted the evidence of my eyes. But there he was. The rather largish head hung forward as though its weight were too much for the little stem of a neck, and I could see how thin and pink like a baby's the skin was over the skull in the areas where the hair had prematurely gone. His short arms in sleeves of wrinkled blue serge lay symmetrically out before him on the table, like a brace of stuffed sacks of country sausage laid on a butcher's counter. The pale, chubby hands curled innocently on the varnished yellow oak of the table. He was looking at a picture magazine.

Then one of the hands, the right hand, with the quick, flickering motion which I remembered, dropped below the level of the table–to the side pocket of his coat, I presumed–and returned with a cube of sugar which he popped into his mouth. The flickering motion of the hand reminded me, and I wonder if he was still carrying a gun. I looked at the left side toward the shoulder, but I couldn't tell. Sugar-Boy's blue serge coat was always a size too big for him.

It was Sugar-Boy all right, and I didn't want to see him. If he should raise his head he would look right at me. Now while he was sunk in the picture magazine I tried for the door. I edged over to one side easy and was almost past his natural area of vision when he lifted his head and our eyes met. He rose from the chair and came toward me.

I gave an ambiguous nod which might have served merely for recognition, a rather chilly and discouraging recognition, or for a signal to follow me out to the hall where we could talk. He took the latter interpretation, and followed me. I didn't wait just outside the door, but move some distance across the hall to the steps (those newspaper rooms in public libraries are always in a half basement, next to the men's latrine) which led up to the main lobby. Maybe he would read something into that extra distance. But he didn't. He came padding over to me, with his blue serge trousers bagging down low of his can and the tops crumpling over his black, soft-leather box-toed shoes.

"How-how-how–" he began, and the face began its pained, apologetic contortions, and the spit flew.

"I'm making out," I said, "How're you making out?"

"Aw-aw-aw-right."

He stood there in the dingy, dimly lit basement hall of the public library with the cigarette butts on the cement floor around us and the door of the men's latrine behind us and the air smelling of dry paper and dust and disinfectant. It was eleven-thirty in the morning and outside the gray sky dripped steadily like a sogged old awning. We looked at each other. Each one knew the other was there out of the rain because he had no other place to go.

He shuffled his feet on the floor, looked down to the floor, then back up at me. "I-I-I could-a had a-a-a-a job," he declared earnestly.

"Sure," I said, without much interest.

"I-I-I-I just didn't wa-wa-wa-want one. Not yet," he said. "I didn't fee-fee-feel like no job yet."

"Sure," I repeated.

"I-I-I got me some mo-mo-money saved up," he said apologetically.

"Sure."

He looked searchingly at me. "Y-y-y-you got a job?" he asked.

I shook my head, but was about to say in my defense what he had just said, that I could have had one if I had wanted. I could have been sitting up in a nice office next door to Tint Duffy's office with my feet on a mahogany desk. If I had wanted. And as that crossed my mind, with the momentary flicker of weary self-irony, I suddenly saw like a blaze of lightening and a clap of thunder what the Lord had put before me. Duffy, I thought, Duffy.

And there was Sugar-Boy standing before me.

"Listen," I said, and leaned toward him in the empty hall, "listen, do you know who killed the Boss?"

The biggish head rolled a little to one side on the little stem of a neck as he looked up at me and the face began its painful twitching. "Yeah," he said, "yeah–the son-of-a-bi-bi-bitch and I-I-I shot him."

"Yeah," I said, "you shot Stanton–" and I thought with an instantaneous stab of Adam Stanton alive a long time back and now dead, and I hated the malformed, sad little creature before me–"yeah, you shot him.

The head rolled slightly and tiredly on the neck, and he repeated, "I-I-I shot him."

But suppose you don't know," I said, leaning, "suppose there was somebody behind Stanton, somebody who framed him to do it."

I let that sink in, and watched his face twitch while no sound came.

"Suppose," I continued, "suppose I could tell you who–suppose I could prove it–what would you do?"

Suddenly his face wasn't twitching. It was smooth as a baby's and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.

"What would you do?" I demanded "I'd kill the son-of-a-bitch," he said. And he had not stuttered at all.

"They'd hang you," I said.

"I'd k-k-k-kill him. They couldn't h-h-h-hang me before I killed him."

"Remember," I whispered, leaning closer, "they'd hang you."

He stared up at me, prying into my face. "Who-who-who is it?"

"They'd hang you. Are you sure you'd kill him?"

"Who-who-who–" he began. Then he clutched my coat. "Y-y-you know–" he said, "y-y-you know something you ain't t-t-t-telling me."

I could tell him. I could say to him, meet me here at three o'clock, I want to show you something. I could bring the stuff from Sadie, the stuff that lay up in my room in a desk, and he would take one look. One look. It would be like touching a trigger.

His hands were clutching and clawing at my coat. "T-t-tell me," he was saying.

One look. It was perfect. I could meet him here in the afternoon. We could step into the latrine and he could take one look, and I would go home and burn the stuff. Hell, why burn it? What had I done? I even warned the little burger they'd hang him. They had nothing on me.

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

It would be too easy. It was perfect. And the perfect mathematical irony of it–the perfect duplication of what Duffy had done–struck me, and I felt like laughing out loud. "Listen here," I said to Sugar-Boy. "Stop clawing on me and listen here and I'll–"

He stopped clawing and stood meekly before me.

He would do it, I knew he would do it. And it was such a joke on Duffy I almost laughed out loud. And as the name of Duffy flashed across my mind I saw Duffy's face, large and lunar and sebaceous, nodding at me as at the covert and brotherly appreciation of a joke, and even s I opened my lips to speak the syllables of his name, he winked. He winked right at me like a brother.

I stood there stock-still.

Sugar-Boy' face began to twitch again. He was going to ask again. I stared down at him. "I was kidding," I said.

There was absolute blankness on his face, and then an absolute murderousness. There wasn't any flare of fury. It was a cold and innocent and murderous certainty. It was as though his face had suddenly frozen in a split second in that certainty, and it looked like the face of a man who had been trapped and had died in the snow long ago, centuries ago–back in the ice age, perhaps–and the glacier brings it down all those centuries, inch by inch, and suddenly, with its primitive purity and lethal innocent, it stares at you through the last preserving glaze of ice.

I stood there for what seemed forever. I couldn't move. I was sure I was a goner.

Then the ice face wasn't there. It was just Sugar-Boy's face on a head to big for the neck, and it was saying, "I-I-I durn near d-d-done it."

I ran my tongue over my dry lips. "I know it," I said.

"Y-y-you oughtn't d-d-d-done me that way," he said in humble complaint.

"I'm sorry."

"Y-y-you know h-h-how I feel, and y-y-you oughtn't d-d-done me like that."

"I know how you feel," I said. "And I'm sorry. I really am."

"F-f-ferget it," he said. He stood there, seeming smaller than before, slumped and forlorn as though he were a doll that had lost some of his sawdust.

I studied him. Then I said, as much to myself as him, I suppose, "You really would have done it."

"It w-w-was the B-B-Boss," he said.

"Even if they'd hang you."

"They w-w-wasn't n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss. And they k-k-killed him. They h-h-had to go and k-k-kill him."

He shuffled his feet on the cement floor and looked down at them. "He could t-t-talk so good," he half-mumbled with his stuttering. "The B-B-Boss could. Couldn't nobody t-t-talk like him. When he m-m-made a speech and ev-ev-everybody y-y-yelled, it looked l-l-like something was gonna b-b-bust inside y-y-you." He touched his chest with his hand to indicate where something looked like it might bust inside you. Then he looked questioningly at me.

"Sure," I agreed, "he was a great talker."

We stood there for half minute more without anything to say to each other. He looked at me and then down at his feet. Then back at me, and said, "W-w-well, I reckon I'll b-b-be getting on."

He put out one of his hands to me and I took it and gave it a shake.

"Well, good luck," I said.

And he went up the stairs, bending his knees excessively for the stairs, for his legs were stumpy. When he used to drive the big black Cadillac he always had a couple of flat cushions–the kind you take with you on picnics or in a canoe–to prop behind him so he could properly work the clutch and break pedals.

So that was the last I saw of Sugar-Boy. He had been born over in Irish Town. He had been the runt the big boys shoved around in the vacant lot. They had played baseball, but he hadn't been good enough to play. "Hey, Sawed-Off," they'd say, "go git me that bat." Or, "Hey, Sawed-Off, go git me a coke." And he had gone to get the bat or the coke. Or they'd say, "Aw, dry up, Mush-Mouth, write me a letter." And he had dried up. But somehow, sometimes, he had learned what he could do. Those stubby arms could flip the steering wheel of a car as clean as a bee martin whips around the corner of a barn. Those pale-blue eyes, which didn't have any depth, could look down the barrel of a.38 and see, really see for one frozen and apocalyptic instant, what was over yonder. So he had found himself one day in the big black Cadillac with a couple of tons of expensive machinery pulsing under his fingers and the blue-steel.38 riding in the dark under his left armpit like a tumor. And the Boss was by his side, who could talk so good.

"Well, good look," I had said to him, but I knew what his luck would be. Some morning I would pick up the paper and see that a certain Robert (or it was Roger?) O'Sheean had been killed in an automobile crash. Or had been shot to death by unidentified assailants while he sat in the shadow outside the Love-Me-and-Leave-Me roadhouse and gambling hell operated by his employer. Or had that morning walked unassisted to the scaffold as a result of having been quicker on the draw than a policeman named, no doubt, Murphy. Or perhaps that was romantic. Perhaps he would live forever and outlive everything and his nerve would go (likker, dope, or just plain time) and he would sit, morning after morning while the gray winter rain sluiced down the high windows, in the newspaper room of the public library, a scrawny bald little old man in greasy, tattered clothes bent over a picture magazine.

So perhaps I hadn't done Sugar-Boy any favor after all in not telling him about Duffy and the Boss and allowing him to whang straight to his mark and be finished like a bullet when it strikes in.. Perhaps I had robbed Sugar-Boy of the one thing which he had earned out of the years he had lived and which was truly himself, and everything else to come after, no matter what it was, would be waste and accident and the sour and stinking curdle of truth like what you find in the half-full bottle of milk you had left in the ice-box when you went away for your six-week vacation.

Or perhaps Sugar-Boy had had something of which he could never be robbed.

I stood there in the hall after Sugar-Boy had gone, breathing the odor of old paper and disinfectant, and turning these thoughts over in my mind. Then I went back into the newspaper room and sat down and bent over a picture magazine.

It was February when I saw Sugar-Boy in the library. I continued with the way of life which I had adopted, still hugging the aimlessness and the anonymity about me like a blanket. But there was a difference now, in my own mind if not in the circumstances of my life. And in the end, months later, in May, in fact, the difference which my meeting with Sugar-Boy had made in my mind sent me to see Lucy Stark. Now, at least, I can see that such was the case.

I telephoned her out at the farm where she was still staying. She sounded all right on the phone. And she asked me to come out.

So I was back in the parlor in the little white house, among the black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, looking down at the flowers in the carpet. Nothing had changed in that room for a long time, or would change for a long time. But Lucy had changed a little. She was fleshier now, with a more positive gray in her hair. She was more like the woman the house had reminded me of the first time I had seen it–a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, sitting in her rocker on the porch, with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease now the day's work is done and the menfolks are still in the fields and it's not yet time to think about supper or strain the evening milk. She wasn't that woman yet, but give her six or seven more years and she would be.

I sat there with my eyes on a flower in the carpet, or I looked up at her and then again at the flower, and her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act. We were saying things to each other all the while, but they were strained and difficult things, completely empty.

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied.. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward 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. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together, but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn't playing any more. So there you are.

So there we sat for a while, and the minutes sifted and wavered down around us, one by one, like leaves dropping in still autumn air. Then, after a space of silence, she excused herself and I was left alone to watch the leaves drift down.

But she came back, carrying now a tray on which was a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses with sprigs of mint stuck in them, and a large devil's-food cake. That is what they give you in the country in a little white house like that when you make a visit, iced tea and devil's-food cake. She had made the cake that morning, no doubt, in preparation for my visit.

Well, eating the cake would be something to do. Nobody expects you to talk with your mouth full of cake.

In the end, however, she said something. Perhaps having the cake on the table beside her, seeing somebody eat her cake, which she knew was a good cake, as people had sat on Sunday afternoons and eaten cake in that room for years, made it possible for her to say something.

She said, "You knew Tom was dead."

She said it perfectly matter-of-factly, and that was a comfort.

"Yes," I replied, "I knew it."

I had seen it in the paper, back in February. I hadn't gone to the funeral. I figured I had been to enough funerals. And I hadn't written her a letter. I couldn't very well write a letter and say I was sorry, and I couldn't very well write her a letter of congratulations.

"It was pneumonia," she said.

I remembered Adam's saying that that was what often got such cases.

"He died very quickly," she continued. "Just three days."

"Yes," I said.

She was silent for a moment, then said, "I am resigned now. I am resigned to it all now, Jack. A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it. I am resigned now, by God's help."

I didn't make any answer.

"Then after I was resigned, God gave me something so I could live."

I murmured something inarticulate.

She rose abruptly from her chair, and thinking I was being dismissed, I rose, too, clumsily, and started to say something by way of a good-bye. I was ready and anxious to go. I had been a fool to come. But she reached to touch my sleeve, and said, "I want to show you something." She moved away, toward the door. "Come with me," she said.

I followed her into the little hall, down it, and into a back room. She went across the room briskly. I didn't take it in at first, but there by the window was a crib and in the crib was a baby.

She was standing on the far side of the crib looking across at me at the instant when I really saw what was there. I guess my face was a study. Anyway, she said, "It's Tom's baby. It's my little grandbaby. It's Tom's baby."

She leaned over the crib, touching the baby here and there the way women do. Then she picked it up, holding it up with one hand behind its head to prop the head. She joggled it slightly and looked directly in its face. The baby's mouth opened in a yawn, and its eyes squinched and unsquinched, and then with the joggling and clucking it was getting it gave a moist and pink and toothless smile, like an advertisement. Lucy Stark's face had exactly the kind of expression on it which you would expect, and that expression said everything there was to say on the subject in hand.

She came around the crib, holding the baby up for my inspection.

"It's a pretty baby," I said, and put out a forefinger for the baby to clutch, the way you are supposed to do.

"It looks like Tom," she said. "Don't you think so?"

Then before I could get an answer ready that wouldn't be too horrendous a lie, she went on. "But that's silly to ask you. You wouldn't know. I mean he looks like Tom when he was a baby." She paused to inspect the baby again. "It looks like Tom," she said, more to herself than to me. Then she looked directly at me. "I know it's Tom's," she declared fiercely to me, "it's got to be Tom's, it looks like him."

I looked critically at the baby, and nodded. "It favors him, all right," I agreed.

"To think," she said, "there was a time I prayed to God it wasn't Tom's baby. So an injustice wouldn't be Tom's." The baby bounced a little in her arms. It was a husky, good-looking baby, all right. She gave the baby an encouraging jiggle, and then looked back at me. "And now," she continued, "I have prayed to God that it is Tom's. And I know now."

I nodded.

"I knew in my heart," she said. "And then, do you think that poor girl–the mother–would have given it to me if she hadn't known it was Tom's. No matter what that girl did–even what they said–don't you think a mother would know? She would just know."

"Yes," I said.

"But I knew, too. In my heart. So I wrote her a letter. I went to see her, I saw the baby and held him. I persuaded her to let me adopt him."

"You've got it fixed for a legal adoption?" I asked. "So she won't–" I stopped before I could say, "be bleeding you for years."

"Oh, yes," she said, apparently not reading my mind. "I got a lawyer to see her and fix everything. I gave her some money, too. The poor girl wanted to go to California and get away. Willie didn't have much money–he spent almost everything he made–but I gave her what I could. I gave her six thousand dollars."

So Sibyl had made a good thing out of it after all, I reflected.

"Don't you want to hold him?" Lucy asked me in an excess of generosity, thrusting out the expensive baby in my direction.

"Sure," I said, and took him. I hefted him, while I carefully tried to keep him from falling apart. "How much does he weigh?" I asked, and suddenly realized that I had the tone of a man about to buy something.

"Fifteen pounds and three ounces," she answered promptly; and added, "that is very good for three months."

"Sure," I said, "that's a lot."

She relieved me of the baby, gave him a sort of quick snuggle to her bosom, bending her head down so her face was against the baby's head, and then replaced him in the crib.

"What's his name?" I asked.

She straightened up and came around to my side of the crib. "At first," she said, "I thought I'd name him for Tom. I thought that for quite a while. Then it came to me. I would name him for Willie. His name is Willie–Willie Stark."

She led the way out into the little hall again. We walked up toward the table where my hat lay. Then she turned around and scrutinized my face as though the light weren't very good in the hall.

"You know," she said, "I named him for Willie because–"

She was still scrutinizing my face.

"–because," she continued, "because Willie was a great man."

I nodded, I suppose.

"Oh, I know he made mistakes," she said, and lifted up her chin as though facing something, "bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad things, like they say. But inside–in here, deep down–" and she laid her hand to her bosom–"he was a great man."

She wasn't bothering with my face any more, with trying to read it. For the moment, she wasn't bothering with me. I might as well not have been there.

"He was a great man," she affirmed again, in a voice nearly a whisper. Then she looked again at me, calmly. "You see, Jack," she said, "I have to believe that."

Yes, Lucy, you have to believe that. You have to believe that to live. I know that you must believe that. And I would not have you believe otherwise. It must be that way, and I understand the fact. For you see, Lucy. I must believe that, too. I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that.

Because I came to believe that, I came back to Burden's Landing. I did not come to believe it at the moment when I watched Sugar-Boy mount the stairs from the basement hall of the public library or when Lucy Stark stood before me in the hall of the little paint-peeling white house in the country. But because of those things–and of all the other things which had happened–I came, in the end, to believe that. And believing that Willie Stark was a great man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the same time that I could more surely condemn myself.

I came back to Burden's Landing in early summer, at the request of my mother. She telephoned me one night and said, "Son, I want you to come here. As soon as you can. Can you come tomorrow?"

When I asked her what she wanted, for I still did not want to go back, she refused to answer me directly. She said she would tell me when I came.

So I went.

She was waiting for me on the gallery when I drove up late the next afternoon. We went around to the screened side gallery and had a drink. She wasn't talking much, and I didn't rush her.

When by near seven o'clock the Young Executive hadn't turned up, I asked her was he coming to dinner.

She shook her head. "Where is he?" I asked.

She turned her empty glass in her hand, lightly clinking the ice left there. Then she said, "I don't know."

"On a trip?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered, clinking the ice. Then she turned to me. "He has been gone five days," she said. "He won't come back until I have gone. You see–" she set the glass down on the table beside her with an air of finality–"I am leaving him."

"Well," I breathed, "I'm damned."

She continued to look at me, as though expecting something. What, I didn't know.

"Well, I'm damned," I said, still fumbling with the fact which she had presented to me.

"Are you surprised?" she asked me, leaning a little toward me in her chair.

"Sure, I'm surprised."

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

"Sure, I'm surprised," I repeated.

"Oh," she said, and sank back in her chair, sinking back like somebody who has fallen into deep water and clutches for a rope and seizes it and hangs on a moment and lose the grip and tries again and doesn't make it and knows it's no use to try again. There wasn't anything ambiguous now about her face. It was like what I said. She had missed her grip.

She turned her face away from me, out toward the bay, as though she didn't want me to see what was on it. Then she said, "I thought–I thought maybe you wouldn't be surprised."

I couldn't tell her why I or anybody else would be surprised. I couldn't tell her that when a woman as old as she was getting to be had her hooks in a man not much more than forty years old and not wind-broke it was surprising if she didn't hang on. Even if the woman had money and the man was as big a horse's-ass as the Young Executive. I couldn't tell her that, and so I didn't say anything.

She kept on looking out to the bay. "I thought," she said, hesitated, and resumed, "I thought maybe you'd understand why, Jack."

"Well, I don't," I replied.

She held off awhile, then began again. "It happened last year. I knew when it happened.–Oh, I knew it would be like this."

"When what happened?"

"When you–when you–" Then she stopped, and corrected what she had been about to say. "When Monty–died."

And she sung back toward me and on her face was a kind of wild appeal. She was making another grab for that rope. "Oh, Jack," she said, "Jack, it was Monty–don't you see?–it was Monty."

I reckoned that I saw, and I said so. I remembered the silvery, pure scream which had jerked me out into the hall that afternoon of Judge Irwin's death, and the face of my mother as she lay on the bed later with the knowledge sinking into her.

"It was Monty," she was saying. "It was always Monty. I didn't really know it. There hadn't been–been anything between us for a long time. But it was always Monty. I knew it when he was dead. I didn't want to know it but I knew it. And I couldn't go on. There came a time I couldn't go on. I couldn't."

She rose abruptly from her chair, like something jerked up by a string.

"I couldn't," she said. "Because everything was a mess. Everything has always been a mess." Her hands twisted and tore the handkerchief she held before her at the level of her waist. "Oh, Jack," she cried out, "it had always been a mess."

She flung down the shredded handkerchief and ran off the gallery. 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.

I waited on the gallery for a while. Then I went back to the kitchen. "My mother isn't feeling very well," I told the cook. "You or Jo-Belle might go up a little later and see if she will take some broth and egg or something like that."

Then I went back into the dining room and sat down in the candlelight and they brought me the food and I ate some of it.

After dinner Jo-Belle came to tell me that she had carried a tray up to my mother's room but she wouldn't take it. She hadn't even opened the door at the knock. She had just called to say she didn't want anything.

I sat on the gallery a long time while the sounds died out back in the kitchen. Then the light went out back there. The rectangle of green in the middle of blackness where the light of the window fell on the grass was suddenly black, too.

After a while I went upstairs and stood outside the door of my mother's room. Once or twice I almost knock to go in. But I decided that even if I went in, there wouldn't be anything to say. There isn't ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the truth about himself, whether it is good or bad.

So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my father I had saved my mother's soul. Then I thought how all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost some blood.

My mother left the next day. She was going to Reno. I drove her down to the station, and arranged all her nice, slick matched bags and valises and cases and hatboxes in a nice row on the cement of the platform to wait for the train. 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.

We stood there quite a while, looking up the track for the first smudge of smoke on the heat-tingling horizon beyond the tide flat and the clumps of pines. Then my mother suddenly said. "Jack, I want to tell you something."

"Yes?"

"I am letting Theodore have the house."

That took me so by surprise I couldn't say anything. I thought of all the years she ahd been cramming the place with furniture and silver and glass till it was a museum and she was God' gift to the antique dealers of New Orleans, New York, and London. I was surprised anything could pry her loose from it.

"You see," she said, hurrying on in the tone of explanation, misreading my silence, "it isn't really Theodore's fault and you know how crazy he is about the place and about living on the Row and all that. And I didn't think you'd want it. You see–I thought–I thought you had Monty's place and if you ever Lived at the Landing you'd prefer that because–because–"

"Because he was my father," I finished for her, a little grimly.

"Yes," she said, simply. "Because he was your father. So I decided to–"

"Damn it," I burst out, "it is your house and you can do whatever you want to with it. I wouldn't have it. As soon as I get my bag out of there this afternoon I'll never set foot in it again, and that is a fact. I don't want it and I don't care what you do with it or with your money. I don't want that either. I've always told you that."

"There won't be any too much money to worry about," she said. "You know what the last six or seven years have been like."

"You aren't broke?" I asked. "Look here, if you're broke, I'll–"

"I'm not broke," she said. "I'll have enough to get on with. If I go somewhere quiet and am careful. At first I thought I might go to Europe, then I–"

"You better stay out of Europe," I said. "All hell is going to break loose over there and not long either."

"Oh, I'm not going. I'm going to some quiet, cheap place. I don't know where. I'll have to think."

"Well," I said, "don't worry about me and the house. You can be plenty sure I'll never set foot in it again."

She looked up the tracks, east, where there wasn't any smoke yet beyond the pines and the tidelands. She mused for a couple of minute on the emptiness off there. Then said, as though just picking up my own words. "I ought never set foot in it. I married and I came to it and he was a good man. But I ought to have stayed where I was. I ought never come."

I couldn't very well argue that point with her one way or the other, and so I kept quiet.

But as she stood there in the silence, she seemed to be arguing it with herself, for suddenly she lifted up her head and looked straight at me and said, "Well, I did it. And now I know." And she squared her trim shoulders under her trim blue linen suit and held her face up in the old way like it was a damned expensive present she was making to the world and the world had better appreciate it.

Well, she knew now. As she stood there on the hot cement in the dazzle, she seemed to be musing on what she knew.

But it was on what she didn't know. For after a while she turned to me and said, "Son, tell me something."

"What?"

"It's something I've got to know, Son."

"What is it?"

"When–when it happened–when you went to see Monty–"

That was it. I knew that was it. And in the midst of the dazzle and the heat shimmering off the cement, I was cold as ice and my nerves crawled cold inside me.

"–did he–was there–" she was looking away from me.

"You mean," I said, "Had he got into a jam and had to shoot himself? Is that it?"

She nodded, then looked straight at me and waited for what was coming.

I looked into her face and studied. The light wasn't any too kind to it. Light would never be kind to it again. But she held it up and looked straight at me and waited.

"No," I said, "he wasn't in any jam. We had a little argument about politics. Nothing serious. But he talked about his health. About feeling bad. That was it. He said good-bye to me. I can see now he meant it as the real thing. That was all."

She sagged a little. She didn't have to brace up so stiff any longer.

"Is that the truth?" she demanded.

"Yes," I said. "I swear to God it is."

"Oh," she said softly and let her breath escape in an almost soundless sigh.

So we waited again. There wasn't anything else to say. She had finally, at the last minute, asked what she had been waiting to ask and had been afraid to ask all the time.

Then, after a while, there was the smoke on the horizon. Then we could see, far off, the black smoke moving toward us along the edge of the bright water. Then with the great grinding and tramping and hissing and the wreaths of steam, the engine had pulled past us to a stop. A white-coated porter began to gather up the nice matched bags and boxes.

My mother turned to me and took me by the arm. "Good-bye, Son," she said.

"Good-bye," I said.

She stepped toward me and I put my arm around her.

"Write to me, Son," she said. "Write to me. You are all I've got."

I nodded. "Let me know how you make out," I said.

"Yes," she said, "yes."

Then I kissed her good-bye, and as I did so I saw the conductor who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety-second stop at a hick town. I knew he was that very instant going to call, "All aboard!" But it seemed a long time coming. It was like looking at a man across a wide valley and seeing the puff of smoke from his gun and then waiting God knows how long for the tiny report, or like seeing the lightning way off and waiting for the thunder. I stood there with my arm around my mother's shoulder and her cheek against mine (her cheek was wet, I discovered) and waited for the conductor to call, "All aboard!"

Then it came, and she stepped back from me and mounted the steps and turned to wave as the train drew away and the porter slammed the vestibule door.

I looked after the dwindling train was carrying my mother away until it was nothing but the smudge of smoke to the west, and thought how I had lied to her. Well, I had given that lie to her as a going-away present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.

Then I thought how maybe I had lied just to cover up myself.

"Damn it," I said out loud, savagely, "it wasn't for me, it wasn't."

And that was true. It was really true.

I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return she had given me a present, too, which was truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world. Or rather, the new picture of herself filled in the blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the world which had been given to me by many people, by Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Willie Stark, Sugar-Boy, Adam Stanton. And that meant that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and with myself.

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. And my mother, realizing a condemnation of her, but without, perhaps, realizing its nature, had done everything she could to hold me and to throttle the condemnation. What she could do to me was to use the force which she was able to use on other men. I resisted and resented this but I wanted to be loved by her and at the same time I was drawn by the force, for she was a vital and beautiful woman by whom I was drawn and by whom I was repelled, whom I condemned and of whom I was proud. But the change came.

The first hint was in the wild, silvery scream which filled the house when the word of Judge Irwin's death was received. That scream rang in my ears for many months, but it had faded away, lost in the past and the corruption of the past, by the time she called me back to Burden's Landing to tell me that she was going to go away. Then I knew that she was telling the truth. And I felt at peace with her and with myself.

I did not say why to myself at the moment when she told me or even the next day when we stood on the cement platform and waited for the train, or even when I stood there alone and watched the last smudge of smoke fade to the west. Not did I say why to myself when I sat alone that night in the house which had been Judge Irwin's house but which was now mine. I had closed up my mother's house that afternoon, had put the key under the mat on the gallery, and had left it for good.

Judge Irwin's house had the odor of dust and disuse and close air. In the afternoon I opened all the windows and left them open while I went down to the Landing for some supper. When I got back and turned the lights on, it seemed more like the house which I remembered from all the years. But sitting there in the study, with the damp, sweet-heavy night air coming in through the windows, I did not say to myself why I now felt so fully at peace with myself. I thought of my mother and I felt the peace and the relief and the new sense of the world.

After a while I got up and walked out of the house and down the Row. It was a very calm, clear night with scarcely a sibilance from the water on the shingle of the beach, and the bay was bright under the stars. I walked down the Row until I came to the Stanton house. There was a light on in the little back sitting room, a dim light as though from a reading lamp. I looked at the house for a couple of minutes and then entered the gate and walked up the path.

The screen door of the gallery was latched. But the main door of the hall inside the gallery was open, and looking across the gallery I could see down the hall to the place where a rectangle of light was laid on the floor from the open door of the back sitting room. I knocked on the frame of the screen door and waited.

In a moment Anne Stanton appeared in the patch of light down the hall.

"Who is it?" she called "It's me," I called back.

She came down the hall and across the gallery toward me. Then she was at the door, a thin, white-clad figure in the dimness beyond the screen. I started to say hello, but didn't. And she did not speak, either, as she fumbled with the latch. Then the door was open and I stepped inside.

As I stood there, I caught the trace of the scent she used, and a cold hand compressed my heart.

"I didn't know you'd let me in," I said, trying to make it sound like a joke and trying to see her face in the shadow. I could only see the paleness in shadow and the gleam of her eyes.

"Of course I'd let you in," she said.

"Well, I didn't know," I said, and gave a kind of laugh.

"Why?"

"Oh, the way I've behaved."

We moved over to the swing on the gallery and sat down. The chains creaked, but we sat so still that the thing did not sway a hair's breadth.

"What have you done?" she asked I fished for a cigarette, found one, and lighted it. I flicked the match out without looking at her face. "What have I done?" I repeated. "Well, it's what I didn't do. I didn't answer your letter."

"That's all right," she said. Then added reflectively, as though to herself, "That was a long time ago."

"It was a long time back, six months, seven months. But I did worse than not answering it," I said. "I didn't even read it. I just set it up on my bureau and never even opened it."

She didn't say anything to that. I took a few drags on the cigarette and waited but there wasn't a word.

"It came at the wrong time," I said finally. "It came at a time when everything and everybody–even Anne Stanton–looked just alike to me and didn't give a damn. You know what I mean?"

"Yes," she said.

"Like hell you do," I said.

"Maybe I do," she said quietly.

"Not the way I mean. You couldn't."

"Maybe."

"Well, anyway that was the way it was. Everything and everybody looked alike. I didn't even feel sorry for anybody. I didn't even feel sorry for myself."

"I never asked you to feel sorry for me," she said fiercely. "In the letter or anywhere else."

"No," I said slowly, "I don't reckon you did."

"I never asked you that."

"I know," I said, and fell silent for a moment. Then said: "I came up here to tell you I don't feel that way any more. I had to tell somebody–I had to say it out loud–to be sure it's true. But it is true."

I waited in the silence, which remained unbroken until I began again.

"It's my mother," I said. "You know," I said, "how it always was with us. How we didn't get along. How I thought that she–"

"Don't!" Anne burst out. "Don't! I don't want to hear you talk that way. What makes you so bitter? What do you talk that way for? Your mother, Jack, and that poor old man your father!"

"He's not my father," I said.

"Not your father!"

"No," I said, and sitting there in the motionless swing on the dark gallery, I told her what there was to tell about the pale-haired and famish-checked girl who had come down from Arkansas, and tried to tell her what my mother had finally given back to me. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

I tried to tell her that.

Then, after a long silence, she said, "I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have lived."

We did not talk any more. I smoked another half a pack of cigarettes, sitting there in the swing in the dark with the summer air heavy and damp and almost sick-sweet around us, and trying to catch the sound of her breath in the silence. Then after a long time I said good night, and went down the Row to my father's house.

This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.

At first that thought was horrible to him when it was forced on him by what seemed the accident of circumstance, for it seemed to rob him of a memory by which, unconsciously, he had lived; but then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having delivered his two friends into each other's hands and death.

But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die. He had seen Lucy Stark and Sugar-Boy and the Scholarly Attorney and Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton live and the ways of their living had nothing to do with the Great Twitch. He had seen his father die. He had seen his friend Adam Stanton die. He had seen his friend Willie Stark die, and he had heard him say his last breath, "It might have been all different, Jack. You got to believe that."

He had seen his two friends, Willie Stark and Adam Stanton, live and die. Each had killed the other. Each had been the doom of the other. As a student of history, Jack Burden could see that Adam Stanton, whom he came to call the man of idea, and Willie Stark, whom he came to call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each other, just as each was doomed to try to use the other and to yearn toward and try to become the other, because each was incomplete with the terrible division of their age. But at the same time Jack Burden came to see that his friend had been doomed, he saw that though doomed they had nothing to do with any doom under the godhead of the Great Twitch. They were doomed, but they lived in the agony of will. As Hugh Miller (once Attorney General under Willie Stark and much later Jack Burden's friend) said to him when they were discussing the theory of the moral neutrality of history: "History is blind, but man is not." (It looks as though Hugh will get back into politics, and when he does I'll be along to hold his coat. I've had some valuable experience in that line.)

So now I, Jack Burden, live in my father's house. In one sense it is strange that I should be here, for the discovery of truth had one time robbed me of the past and had killed my father. But in the end the truth gave the past back to me. So I live in the house which my father left me. With me is my wife, Anne Stanton, and the old man who was once married to my mother. When a few months ago I found him sick in the room above the Mexican restaurant, what could I do but to bring him here? (Does he think that I am his son? I cannot be sure. Nor can I feel that it matters, for each of us is the son of a million fathers.)

He is very feeble. Now and then he has the strength to play a game of chess, as he used to play with his friend Montague Irwin long ago in the long room in the white house by the sea. He used to be a very good chess player, but now his attention wanders. Or on good days now he sits in the sunshine. He can read his Bible a little. He is not strong enough to write any more, but occasionally he dictated something to me or Anne for a tract which is he is writing.

Yesterday he dictated this to me: The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God's omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man's glory and power. But by God's help. By His help and His wisdom.

He turned to me when he had spoken the last word, stared at me, and then said, "Did you put that down?"

"Yes," I replied Staring at me, he said with sudden violence, "It is true. I know it is true. Do you know it?"

I nodded my head and said yes (I did so to keep his mind untroubled, but later I was not certain but that in my own way I did believe what he had said.)

He kept on looking at me, after I had spoken, then said quietly, "Since that thought came into my mind my soul has been still. I have had it in my mind for three days. I have held it there to be sure by the test of my soul before I spoke it."

He will never finish the tract. His strength fails visibly from day to day. The doctor says he will not last the winter.

By the time he is dead I shall be ready to leave the house. For one thing, the house is heavily mortgaged. Judge Irwin's affairs, at the time of his death, were tangled, and in the end it developed that he was not rich but poor. Once before, almost twenty-five years before, it had been heavily mortgaged. But then it had been saved by a crime. A good man had committed a crime to save it. I should not be too complacent because I am not prepared to commit a crime to save the house. Perhaps my unwillingness to commit a crime to save the house (assuming that I should have the opportunity–which is doubtful) is simply a way of saying that I do not love the house as much as Judge Irwin loved it and a man's virtue may be but the defect of his desire, as his crime may be but a function of his virtue.

Nor should I be complacent because I tried to make amends, in a way, for a crime which my father had committed. What little money did come to me from my father's estate should go, I thought, to Miss Littlepaugh in her foul, fox-smelling room in Memphis. So I went to Memphis. But I found that she was dead. So I was denied that inexpensive satisfaction in virtue. I should have to get whatever satisfaction I was to get in a more expensive way.

But I still had the money, and so I am spending it to live on while I write the book I began years ago, the life of Cass Mastern, whom once I could not understand but whom, perhaps, I now may come to understand. I suppose that there is some humor in the fact that while I write about Cass Mastern I live in the house of Judge Irwin and eat bread bought with his money. For Judge Irwin and Cass Mastern do not resemble each other very closely. (If Judge Irwin resembles any Mastern it is Gilbert, the granite-headed brother of Cass.) But I do not find the humor in this situation very funny. The situation is too much like the world in which we live from birth to death, and the humor of it grows stale from repetition. Besides, Judge Irwin was my father and he was good to me and, in a way, he was a man and I loved him.

When the old man is dead and the book is finished, I shall let the First and Third National Bank take the house and I don't care who lives here afterward, for from that day it will be nothing to me but a well-arranged pile of brick and lumber. Anne and I shall never live here again, not in the house or at the Landing. (She doesn't want to live here any more than I do. She has let her place go to the Children's Home she was interested in and I imagine it will become a kind of sanatorium. She's not very complacent about having done that. With Adam dead the place was not a joy but a torture to her, and the gift of the house was finally her gift to the ghost of Adam, a poor gift humbly offered, like the handful of wheat or a painted pot in the tomb, to comfort the ghost and send it on its way so that it would trouble the living no longer.)

So by summer of this year, 1939, we shall have left Burden's Landing.

We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among the trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

The End