All the king's men

Chapter Eight

So having lain on the bed in Long Beach, California, and seen what I had seen, I rose, much refreshed, and headed back with the morning sun in my face. I threw in my direction the shadows of white or pink or baby-blue stucco bungalows (Spanish mission, Moorish, or American-cute in style), the shadows of filling stations resembling the gingerbread house of fairy tale or Anne Hathaway's cottage or an Eskimo igloo, the shadows of palaces gleaming on hills among the arrogant traceries of eucalyptus, the shadows of leonine hunched mountains, the shadow of a boxcar forgotten on a lonely siding, and the shadow of a man walking toward me on a white road out of the distance which glittered like quartz. It threw the beautiful purple shadow of the whole world in my direction, as I headed back, but I kept right on going, at high speed, for if you have really been to Long Beach, California, and have had your dream on the hotel bed, then there is no reason why you should not return with a new confidence to where you came from, for now you know, and knowledge is power.

You can put your throttle to the floor and let the sixty-horse-power mystery whine like a wolfhound straining on leash.

I passed the man who was walking toward me, and his face whirled away like a scrap of paper in a gale or boyhood hopes. And I laughed out loud.

I saw the people walking in the plaza of little towns in the desert. I saw the waitress in the restaurant wave in feeble protest at the fly while the electric fan needled the air which was as thin and hot as the breath of a blast furnace. I saw the traveling salesman who stood at the hotel desk just ahead of me and said, "You call this a hotel, bud, and me wiring for a room and bath and you ain't held it. It's a wonder you got a room and bath in a burg like this." I saw the sheepherder standing alone on an enormous mesa. I saw the Indian woman with eyes the color of blackstrap molasses looking at me over a pile of pottery decorated with the tribal symbols of life and fertility and eminently designed for the five-and-ten-cent-store trade. As I looked at all these people I felt great strength in my secret knowledge.

I remembered how once, long back when Willie Stark had been the dummy and the sap, at the time when he was Cousin Willie from the country and was running for governor the first time, I had gone over to the flea-bitten west part of the state to cover the barbecue and speaking at Upton. I had gone on the local, which had yawed and puffed for hours across the cotton fields and then across the sagebrush. At one little town where it stopped, I had looked out of the window and thought how the board or wire fences around the little board houses were inadequate to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. I had though how the houses didn't look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned, with the scraps of washing still on the line, for there wouldn't be time to grab it off when the people finally realized they had to go and go quick. I had had that thought, but just as the train was pulling out, a woman had come to the back door of one of the nearest houses to fling out a pan of water. She flings the water out, then looks a moment at the train drawing away. She is going into the house to some secret which is there, some knowledge. And as the train pulled away, I had had the notion that I was the one running away and had better run fast for it was going to be dark soon. I had thought of that woman as having a secret knowledge, and had envied her. I had often envied people. People I had seen fleetingly, or some people I had known a long time, a man driving a long, straight furrow across a black field in April, or Adam Stanton. I had, at moments, envied the people who seemed to have a secret knowledge.

But now, as I whirled eastward, over desert, under the shadow of mountains, by mesas, across plateaus, and saw the people in that magnificent empty country, I did not think that I would ever have to envy anybody again, for I was sure that now I had the secret knowledge, and with knowledge you can face up to anything, for knowledge is power.

In a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy's jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn't going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in. It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no longer aware.

After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch, with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in the car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a rampage. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, and baby Rosebud with the running sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of 'em, flailing the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starved slowly in California. But this old fellow didn't. He was going back to north Arkansas to starve where he had come from. "Californy," he said, "hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit."

"Yeah," I replied, "that is a fact."

"You been thar?" he demanded.

I told him I had been there.

"You goen back home?" he asked I told him I was going home.

We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man's face know about the twitch, and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch.

So I kept on riding east, and after long enough I was home.

I got back, late at night, and went to bed. The next morning I turned up at the office, well rested and well shaved, and strolled in to say howdy-do to the Boss. I had a great desire to see him, to observe him closely and find if there was anything in his make-up which I had previously missed. I had to look at him very closely, for he was the man who had everything now, and I had nothing. Or rather, I corrected myself, he had everything, except the thing that I had, the great thing, the secret. So I corrected myself, and in much the mood of a priest who looks down with benign pity on the sweat and striving, I entered the Governor's office, and walked past the receptionist and, with a perfunctory knock, into the inside.

There he was, and he hadn't changed a bit.

"Hello, Jack," he said, and swiped the forelock out of his eyes and swung his feet off the desk and came toward me, putting out his hand, "where the hell you been, boy?"

"Out West," I said, with elaborate casualness, taking the proffered hand. "Just drove out West. I got sort of fed up round here, so I took me a little vacation."

"Have a good time?"

"I had a wonderful time," I said.

"Fine," he said.

"How you been making out?" I asked.

"Fine," he said, "everything is fine."

And so I had come home to the place where everything was fine. Everything was fine just the way it had been before I left, except that now I knew the secret. And my secret knowledge cut me off. If you have the secret, you cannot really communicate any more with somebody who has not got it, any more that you can really communicate with a bustling vitamin-crammed brat who is busy with his building blocks or a tin drum. And you can't take somebody off to one side and tell him the secret. If you do that, then the fellow, or female, you are trying to tell the truth to thinks you are feeling sorry for yourself and asking for sympathy, when the real case is that you are not asking for sympathy but for congratulations. So I did my daily tasks and ate my daily bread and saw the old familiar faces, and smiled benignly like a priest.

It was June, and hot. Every night, except those nights when I went to sit in an air-conditioned movie, I went to my room after dinner and stripped buck-naked and lay on the bed, with an electric fan burring and burrowing away into my brain, and read a book until the time when I would become aware that the sound of the city had sunk off to almost nothing but the single hoot of a taxis far off or the single lost clang and grind of a streetcar, an owl car heading out. Then I would reach up and switch off the light and roll over and go to sleep with the fan still burring and burrowing.

I did see Adam a few times in June. He was more deeply involved than before in the work of the medical center, more grimly and icily driving himself. There was, of course, some letup in the work at the University with the end of term, but whatever relief was there, was more than made up for by an increase in his private practice and work at the clinic. He said he was glad to see me when I went to his apartment, and maybe he was, but he didn't have much to say, and as I sat there he would seem to be drawing deeper and deeper into himself until I had the feeling that I was trying to talk to somebody down a well and had better holler if I wanted to be understood. The only time he perked up was one night when, after he had remarked on the fact that he was to perform an operation the next morning, I asked about the case.

It was a case of catatonic schizophrenia, he said.

"You mean he is a nut?" I asked Adam grinned and allowed that that wasn't too far wrong.

"I didn't know you cut on folks for being nutty," I said. "I thought you just humored and gave them cold baths and let them make raffia baskets and got them to tell you their dreams."

"No," he said, "you can cut on them." Then he added, almost apologetically, "A prefrontal lobectomy."

"What's that?"

"You remove a piece of the frontal lobe of the brain on each side," he said.

I asked would the fellow live. He said you never could tell for sure, but if he did live he would be different.

I asked how did he mean, different.

"Oh, a different personality," he replied.

"Like after you get converted and baptized?"

"That doesn't give you a different personality," he said. "When you get converted you still have the same personality. You merely exercise it in terms of a different set of values."

"But this fellow will have a different personality?"

"Yes," Adam said. "The way he is now he simply sits on a chair or lies in his back on a bed and stares into space. His brow is creased and furrowed. Occasionally he utters a low moan or an exclamation. In some such cases we discover the presence of delusions of persecution. But always the patient seems to experience a numbing, grinding misery. But after we are through with him he will be different. He will be relaxed and cheerful and friendly. He will smooth his brow. He will sleep well and eat well and will love to hang over the back fence and compliment the neighbors on their nasturtiums and cabbages. He will be perfectly happy."

"If you can guarantee results like that," I said, "you ought to do a land-office business. As soon as the news gets around."

"You can't ever guarantee anything," Adam said.

"What happens if it doesn't come out according to Hoyle?"

"Well," he said, "there have been cases–not mine, thank God–where the patient didn't come cheerfully extroverted but became completely and cheerfully amoral."

"You mean he would throw the nurses down right on the floor in broad daylight?"

"About that," Adam said. "If you'd let him. All the ordinary inhibitions disappeared."

"Well, if your guy tomorrow comes out like that he will certainly be an asset to society."

Adam grinned sourly, and said, "He won't be any worse than a lot of other people who haven't been cut on."

"Can I see the cutting" I asked. I felt all of a sudden that I had to see it. I had never seen an operation. As a newspaperman, I had seen three hangings and one electrocution, but they are different. In a hanging you do not change a man's personality. You just change the length of his neck and give him a quizzical expression, and in an electrocution you just cook some bouncing meat in a wholesale lot. But this operation was going to be more radical even than what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. So I asked could I see the operation.

"Why?" Adam asked, studying my face.

I told him it was plain curiosity.

He said, all right, but it wouldn't be pretty.

"It will be as pretty as a hanging, I guess," I replied.

Then He started to tell me about the case. He drew me pictures and he got down books. He perked up considerably and almost talked my ear off. He was so interesting that I forgot to ask him a question which had flitted though my mind earlier in our conversation. He had said that in the case of a religious conversion the personality does not change, that it is merely exercised in terms of a different set of values. Well, I had meant to ask him how, if there was no change in personality, how did the person get a different set of values to exercise his personality in terms of? But it slipped my mind at the time.

Anyway, I saw the operation.

Adam got me rigged up so I could go right down in the pit with him. They brought in the patient and put him on the table. He was a hook-nosed, sour-faced, gaunt individual who reminded me vaguely of Andrew Jackson or a back-country evangelist despite the white turban on his head made out of sterile towels. But that turban was pushed pretty far back at a jaunty angle, for the front part of his head was exposed. It had been shaved. They put the mask on him and knocked him out. Then Adam took a scalpel and cut a neat little cut across the top of the head and down at each temple, and then just peeled the skin off the bone in a neat flap forward. He did a job that would have made a Comanche brave look like a tyro with a scalping knife. Meanwhile, they were sopping up the blood, which was considerable.

Then Adam settled down to the real business. He had a contraption like a brace and bit. With that he drilled five or six holes–burr holes they call them in the trade–on each side of the skull. Then he started to work with what he had told me earlier was a Gigli saw, a thing which looked like a coarse wire. With that he sawed on the bone till he had a flap loose on each side of the front of the head and could bend the flap down and get at the real mechanism inside. Or could as soon as he had cut the pale little membrane which they call the meninges.

By that time it had been more than an hour, or so it seemed to me, and my feet hurt. It was hot in there, too, but I didn't get upset, even with the blood. For one thing, the man there on the table didn't seem real. I forgot that he was a man at all, and kept watching the high-grade carpenter work which was going on. I didn't pay much attention to the features of the process which did indicate that the thing on the table was a man. For instance, the nurse kept on taking blood-pressure readings and now and then she would mess with the transfusion apparatus–for they were given the patient a transfusion all the time out of a bottle rigged up on a stand with a tube coming down.

I did fine until they started the burning. For taking out the chunks of brain they use an electric gadget which is nothing but a little metal rod stuck in a handle with an electric cord coming out of the handle. The whole thing looks like and electric curling iron. In fact, all the way through I was struck by the notion that all the expensive apparatus was so logical and simple and homey, and reminded me so completely of the stuff around any well-equipped household. By ransacking the kitchen and your wife's dressing table you can get together in five minutes enough of a kit to set up in business for yourself.

Well, in the process of electrocautery this little rod does the trick of cutting, or rather burning. And there is some smoke and quite a lot of odor. At least, it seemed like a lot to me. At first it wasn't so bad, but then I knew where I had smelled an odor like that before. It was the night, long back when I was a kid, when the old livery stable had burned down at the Landing and they hadn't managed to get all the horses out. The smell of the cooking horses was on the still, damp, ripe night air and you couldn't forget it, even after you didn't hear any more the shrieks the horses had made. As soon as I realized that the burning brain had a smell like the burning horses, I didn't feel good.

But I stuck it out. It took a long time, hours more, for they can't cut but a little bit of brain at a time, and have to keep working deeper and deeper. I stuck it out until Adam had sewed up the meninges and had pulled the skull flaps back into place and had drawn up the flap of skin and laced it down all shipshape.

Then the little pieces of brain which had been cut were put away to think their little thoughts quietly somewhere among the garbage, and what was left inside the split-open skull of the gaunt individual was sealed back up and left to think up an entirely new personality.

When Adam and I went out, and he was washing up and we were getting our white nightshirts off, I said to him, "Well, you forgot to baptize him."

Baptize him?" Adam asked, sliding out of the white nightshirt.

"Yeah," I said, "for he is born again and not of woman. I baptize thee in the name of the Big Twitch, the Little Twitch, and the Holy Ghost. Who, no doubt, is a Twitch, too."

"What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded.

"Nothing," I said, "I was just trying to be funny."

Adam put on a faint, indulgent smile, but he didn't seem to think it was very funny. And looking back on it, I can't find it very funny myself. But I thought it was funny at the time. I thought it would bust a gut. But that summer from the height of my Olympian wisdom, I seemed to find a great many things funny which now do not appear quite as funny.

After the operation I did not see anything of Adam for quite a while. He went out of town, up East, on business, on some of the hospital business, I supposed. Then, shortly after he got back, the thing happened which just about left the Boss in the position of having to hunt up a new director.

What happened was simple and predictable. One night Adam and Anne, who had had dinner together, mounted the stairs of the crummy apartment house to spy, on the landing before the door, a tall, thin, white-clad figure with a white Panama hat on its head, a cigar glowing in the shadow out of one side of the place where the mouth would be and putting out an expensive aroma to compete with the cabbage. The fellow took the white hat off, tucked it lightly under an elbow, and asked if Adam was Dr. Stanton. Adam said he was. So the fellow said his name was Coffee (the name is Hubert Coffee) and asked if he could come in for a minute.

Adam and Anne went in, and Adam asked the fellow what he wanted. He stood there in his white, well-pressed suit and two-color shoes with, no doubt, intricate stitchings and ventilators in the leather (for I have found Hubert to be quite a dude–two white suits a day, and white silk shorts with red monograms, they say, and red silk socks and trick shoes), and hummed and hawed out of his knobby, long, squash-yellow face, and coughed discreetly, and significantly rolled his brown eyes (which are the color and texture of used motor oil) in the direction of Anne. Anne told me later, for she is my authority for the event, that she thought he was coming about being sick, so she excused herself and went back to the kitchen to put into the electric icebox a little carton of ice cream she had picked up at the corner drugstore. She was planning on a quiet little evening with Adam (Though her quiet little visits with Adam that summer must have been less that restful for her. She must have always had in the back of her mind the question about what would happen when Adam found out how she was spending some of her other evenings. Or was she able to lock off that part of her mind, the way you lock off some of the rooms of a big house, and just sit in the cozy, or perhaps not now so cozy, parlor? And sitting there, did she listen always for the creak on the floor or the ceaseless tread of feet in the locked-off rooms upstairs?)

After she had put the ice cream away, she noticed that some dirty dishes were piled up in the sink. So to keep out from under foot in the apartment while the men conferred she set about washing the dishes. She had about wound up the dishes, when suddenly the incomprehensible drone of voices stopped. The sudden silence was what she noticed. Then there was a dry thump (that was the way she described it), and her brother's voice saying. "Get out!" Then there was the sound of rapid motion and the slamming of the apartment door.

She went into the living room to find Adam standing in the middle of the floor, very white in the face, nursing his right hand in his left across the stomach, and staring at the door. When Anne came in, he turned his head slowly to her and said, "I hit him. I didn't mean to hit him. I never hit anybody before."

He must have hit Hubert pretty hard, too, for his knuckle was split and swelling. Adam had a good weight of shoulder even if he was slender. Anyway he stood there nursing his split knuckle and wearing an expression of blank incredulity on his face. The incredulity, apparently, was at his own behavior.

Anne, very much agitated, asked him what was the trouble.

The trouble was, as I have suggested, simple and predictable. Gummy Larson had sent Hubert Coffee, who, on account of his white suit and silk monogrammed drawers, was supposed to have finesse and the gentlemanly approach, to try to persuade Dr. Stanton to use his influence to get the Boss to throw the basic medical-center contract to Larson. Adam didn't know all of this, for we can be quite sure that Hubert had not named the behind-guy in the exploratory stages of the interview. But as soon as I heard the name of Coffee I knew that it was Larson. Hubert never got past the exploratory stages of the interview. But, apparently, he handled those stages rather broadly. At first, Adam didn't get what he was driving at, and Hubert must have decided that any of his high-priced subtlety would be wasted on this dumb cluck and moved pretty directly to the point. He got as far as the idea that there would be some candy in it for Adam, before he finally touched the button which set off the explosion.

Still caught in the incredulity and nursing the numbed hand, Adam stood there and in a distant voice told Anne what had happened. Then, having finished he leaned down o pick up, with the good left hand, the cigar stub, which was slowly burning a hole in the old green carpet. He walked across the carpet, holding the stinking stub out at some length, and flung it into the fireplace, which still had in it (as I had noticed on my visits) the ashes of the last fire of spring and bits of paper and orange peel from the summer. Then he walked back across the carpet, and ground his foot on the smoldering place, probably with a kind of symbolic savagery. At least, I could imagine that picture.

He went to his desk, sat down, took out pen and paper, and began to write. When he had finished, he swung round to Anne, and announced that he had just written his resignation. She didn't say anything. Not a word. She knew, she told me, that there wasn't any use trying to argue with him, to point out to him that it wasn't the fault of Governor Stark or the fault of the job that some crook had come and tried to bribe him. She knew from looking at his face that there wasn't any use in talking. In other words, he must have been in the grip of an instinctive withdrawal, which took the form of moral indignation and moral revulsion, but which, no doubt, was different from either, and more deep-seated than either, and finally irrational. He got up from the chair, and took a few strides about the room, apparently in great excitement. He seemed almost gay, Anne said, as though he were about to burst out laughing. He seemed happy that the whole thing had happened. Then he picked up the letter and stamped it.

Anne was afraid that he would go out immediately to mail it, for he stood there in the middle of the floor, fingering it as though debating the issue. But he did not go out. Instead, he propped it on the mantelpiece, took a few more turns about the apartment, then flung himself down on the piano bench and started to beat out the music. He sat there and beat it for more than two hours in a breathless June night, and the sweat ran down his face. Anne sat there, afraid, she told me, and not knowing what she was afraid of.

When he got through, he turned his sweat-streaked white face toward her, she fetched the ice cream and they had a jolly little family party. Then she went out and got into her car and drove home.

She telephoned me. I met her at an all-night drugstore, and across the imitation-marble top of the table in the booth. I saw her for the first time since the morning in May when she stood at the door of her apartment and had read the question in my face and had slowly and wordlessly nodded the answer. When I heard her voice on the telephone that night, my heart took the little leap and _kerplunk__, like the frog into the lily pond, just as it had before, and for the moment what had happened might as well not have happened. But it had happened, and what I had now as my cab wheeled me down-town to the all-night-drugstore, was the wry and bilious satisfaction that I was being called on for some special reason the other fellow couldn't be expected to answer. But the satisfaction forgot even to be wry and bilious and was, for the moment, just simple satisfaction when I stepped out of the cab and saw her standing inside the glass doors of the drugstore, a trim erect figure in a light-green polka-dot dress with some kind of a white jacket hung across one of her bare arms. I tried to make out the expression on her face, but before I could discover what it was, she spied me and smiled.

It was a tentative, apologetic sort of smile, which said _please__ and _thank you__ and at the same time expressed an innocent and absolute confidence that your better nature would triumph. I walked across the hot pavement toward that smile and the green polka-dot figure which stood there behind the glass like something put in a showcase for you to admire but not touch. Then I laid my hand on the glass of the door, and pushed, and left the street, where the air was hot and sticky like a Turkish bath and where the smell of gasoline fumes mixed with the brackish, dead-sweet smell of the rivers which crept city on still nights in summer, and entered the bright, crisp, antiseptic, cool world behind the glass where the smile was, for there is nothing brighter, crisper, more antiseptic, and cooler than a really first-rate corner drugstore on a hot summer night. If Anne Stanton is inside the door and the air conditioning is working.

The smile was on me and the eyes looked straight at me and she put out her hand. I took it, thought how cool and small and firm it was, as though I were just discovering the fact, and heard her say, "It looks like I'm always calling you up, Jack."

"Oh, that's O. K.," I said, and released the hand.

It couldn't have been More than an instant we stood there then without saying anything, but it seemed a long and painfully embarrassed time, as if neither of us knew what to say, before she said, "Let's sit down."

I started to move back toward the booths. Out of the tail of my eye, I notice that she made a motion, quickly suppressed, to hang on to my arm. As I noticed that fact, the satisfaction which had been for the moment simple satisfaction, was again merely the wry and bilious satisfaction with which I had started out. And it stayed that kind, as I sat in the booth and looked at her face which was not smiling now and was showing the tensions and the tightness of the skin over the fine bone and showing, I suppose, the years that had gone since the summer when we sat in the roadster and she sang to Jackie-Bird, and promised never to let anybody hurt poor Jackie-Bird. Well, she had kept her promise, all right, for Jackie-Bird had flown away that summer, before the fall came, to some place with a better climate where nobody would ever hurt him, and he had never come back. At least, I had never seen him since.

Now she sat in the booth and told me, over our glasses of Coca Cola, what had happened in Adam's apartment.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked, when she got through.

"You know," she said.

"You want me to make him stick to it?"

"Yes," she said.

"It'll be hard."

She nodded

"It'll be hard," I said, "because he is acting perfectly crazy. The only thing I can prove to him is that if this Coffee bastard try to bribe him it only indicates that the job is on the level as long as Adam wants to keep it that way. It only indicates, furthermore, that somebody farther up the line had declined to take a bribe, too. It even indicates that Tiny Duffy is an honest man. Or," I added, "hasn't been able to deliver the goods."

"You will try?" she asked.

"I'll try," I said, "but don't get your hopes up. I can only prove to Adam what he would already know if he hadn't gone crazy. He just has the high cantankerous moral shrinks. He does not like to play with the rough boys. He is afraid they might dirty his Lord Fauntleroy suit."

"That's no fair," she burst out.

I shrugged, then said, "Well, I'll try, anyway."

"What will you do?"

"There is only one thing to do. I'll go to Governor Stark, get him to agree to arrest Coffee on the grounds of attempted bribery of an official–Adam is an official, you know–and call on Adam to swear to the charges. If he'll swear to them. That ought to make him see how things line up. That ought to show him the Boss will protect him. And–" to that point I had only been thinking of the Adam end but now my mind got to work on the possibilities of the situation–"it wouldn't do the Boss any harm to hang a rap on Coffee. Particularly if he will squeal on the behind-guy. He might bust up Larson. And with Larson out, MacMurfee wouldn't mean much. He might hang it on Coffee, too, if you–" And I stopped dead.

"If I what?" she demanded.

"Nothing," I said, and felt the way you do when you are driving merrily across the drawbridge, and all at once the span starts up.

"What," she demanded.

I looked into her level eyes and saw the way her jaw was set, and knew that I might as well say it. She would work on me till she had it. So I said it. "If you will testify," I said.

"I'll do it," she said without hesitation.

I shook my head. "No," I said.

"I'll do it."

"No, it won't wash."

"Why?"

"It just won't. After all, you didn't see anything."

"I was there."

"It would just be hearsay testimony. Absolutely that. It would never stand up."

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know about those things. But I know this. I know that isn't the reason you changed your mind. What made you change your mind?"

"You never have been on a witness stand. You don't know what it is to have a mean, smart lawyer saw at you while you sweat."

"I'll do it," she said.

"No."

"I don't mind."

"Listen here," I said, and shut my eyes and took the plunge off the end of the open drawbridge, "if you think Coffee's lawyer wouldn't have plenty on the ball you are crazy as Adam. He would be mean and he would be smart and he would not have one damned bit of fine old Southern chivalry."

"You mean–" she began, and I knew from her face that she had caught the point.

"Exactly," I said. "Nobody may know anything now, but when the fun started they would know everything."

"I don't care," she affirmed, and lifted her chin up a couple of notches. I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by the absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it. The cord is so gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally, and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn't break and is enough. I looked at the marks when Anne lifted her chin, and realized that I had never noticed them before and would always notice then again. I suddenly felt awful–literally sick, as though I had been socked in the stomach, or as though I had met a hideous betrayal. Then before I knew, the way I felt changed into anger, and I lashed out.

"Yeah," I said, "you don't care, but you forget one thing. You forget that Adam will be sitting right there looking at little sister."

Her face was white as a sheet.

The she lowered her head a little and was looking at her hands, which were clenched together now around the empty Coca Cola glass. Her head was low enough so that I could not see her eyes, only the lids coming down over them.

"My dear, my dear," I murmured. Then as I seized her hands pressed around the glass, the words wrenched out of me, "Oh, Anne, why did you do it?"

It was the one question I had never meant to ask.

For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, "He wasn't like anybody else. Not anybody else I'd ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason."

I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.

She said, "Then you told me–you told me about my father. There wasn't any reason why not then. After you told me."

I reckoned I had asked for that one, too.

She said, "He wants to marry me."

"Are you going to?"

"Not now. It would hurt him. A divorce would hurt him. Not now."

"Are you going to?"

"Perhaps. Later. After he goes to the Senate. Next year."

One part of my mind was busy ticketing that away: _The Senate next year. That means he won't let old Scoggan go back. Funny he hadn't told me__. But the other part of my mind which was not the nice, cool, steel filing cabinet with alphabetical cards was boiling like a kettle of pitch. A big bubble heaved up and exploded out of the pitch, and it was my voice saying, "Well, I suppose you know what you are up to."

"You don't know him," she said, her voice even lower than before. "You've known him all these years and you don't know him at all." Then she had lifted her head and was looking straight into my eyes. "I'm not sorry," she said, quite distinctly. "Not for anything that's happened."

I walked down the street in the hot darkness toward my hotel under a magnificent throbbing sky, breathing the old gasoline fumes the day had left and the sweet, marshy smell of the river at low water which the night brought up into the streets, and thinking, yes, I knew why she had done it.

The answer was in all the years before, and the things in them and not in them.

The answer was in me, for I had told her.

_I only told her the truth__, I said savagely to myself, _and she can't blame me for the truth!__

But was there some fatal appropriateness inherent in the very nature of the world and of me that I should be the one to tell her the truth? I had to ask myself that question, too. And I couldn't be sure of the answer. So I walked on down the street, turning that question over and over in my mind without any answer until the question lost meaning and dropped from my mind as something heavy drops from numb fingers. I would have faced the responsibility and the guilt, I was ready to do that, if I could know. But who is going to tell you?

So I walked on, and after a while I remembered how she had said I had never known him. And the _him__ was Willie Stark, whom I had known for the many years since Cousin Willie from the country, the Boy with the Christmas Tie, had walked into the back room of Slade's old place. Sure, I knew him. Like a book. I had known him a long time.

_Too long__, I thought then, _too long to know him__. For maybe the time had blinded me, or rather I had not been aware of the passing of time and always the round face of Cousin Willie had come between me and the other face so that I had never really seen the other face. Except perhaps in those moments when it had leaned forward to the crowds and the forelock had fallen and the eyes had bulged, and the crowd had roared and I had felt the surge in me and had felt that I was on the verge of the truth. But always the face of Cousin Willie above the Christmas tie had come again.

But it did not come now. I saw the face. Enormous. Bigger than a billboard. The forelock shagged down like a mane. The big jaw. The heavy lips laid together like masonry. The eyes burning and bulging powerfully.

Funny, I had never seen it before. Not really.

That night I telephoned the Boss, told him what had happened and how Anne had told me, and made my suggestion about getting Adam to swear out a warrant for Coffee. He said to do it. To do anything that would nail Adam. So I went to the hotel, where I lat on my bed under the electric fan until the desk called me to get up at about six o'clock. Then by seven I was on Adam's doorstep, with a single cup of java sloshing about in my insides and a fresh razor cut on my chin and sleep like sand under my eyelids.

I worked it. It was a hard little job I had cut out for me. First, I had to enlist Adam on the side of righteousness by getting him to agree to swear out a warrant for Coffee. My method was to assume, of course, that he was aching for the opportunity to nail Coffee, and to indicate that the Boss was cheering on the glorious exploit. Then I had to lead him to the discovery, which had to be all his own, that this would involve Anne as a witness. Then I had played the half-wit and imply that this had never occurred to me before. The danger was, with a fellow like Adam, that he would get so set on seeing justice done that he would let Anne testify, hell and high water. He almost did that, but I painted a gory picture of the courtroom scene (but not as gory by half as it would have been in truth), refused to be party to the business, hinted that he was an unnatural brother, and wound up with a vague notion of another way to get Coffee for a similar attempt in another quarter–a vague notion of laying myself open for Coffee to approach me. I could put out a feeler for him, and all that. So Adam dropped the idea of the charge, but retained the implied idea that he and the Boss had teamed up to keep things clean for the hospital.

Just as we were ready to walk out of the apartment, he stepped to the mantelpiece and picked up the stamped letters waiting there to be mailed. I had spotted the top envelope already, the one address to the Boss. So as he turned around with the letters in his hand, I simply lifted that one out of his grasp, said with my best smile, "Hell, you haven't got any use for this in the daylight," and tore it across and put the pieces into my pocket.

Then we went out back and got into his car. I rode with him all the way to his office. I would have sat with him all day to keep an eye on him if it had been possible. Anyway, I chatted briskly all the way down-town to keep his mind clear. My chatter was as gay and sprightly as bird song.

So the summer moved on, swelling slowly like a great fruit, and everything was as it had been before. I went to my office. I went back to my hotel and sometimes ate a meal and sometimes did not and lay under the fan and read till late. I saw the same faces, Duffy, the Boss, Sadie Burke, all the faces I had known for a long time and saw so often I didn't notice the changes in them. But I did not see Adam and Anne for a while. And I had not seen Lucy Stark for a long time. She was living out in the country now. The Boss would still go out to see her now and then, to keep up appearances, and have his picture taken among the white leghorns. Sometimes Tom Stark would stand there with him and, perhaps, Lucy, with the white leghorns in the foreground and a wire fence behind. _Governor Willie Stark and Family__, the caption would read.

Yes, those pictures were an asset to the Boss. Half the people in the state knew that the Boss had been tom-catting around for years, but he pictures of the family and the white leghorns gave the voters a nice warm glow, it made them feel solid, substantial, and virtuous, it made them think of gingerbread and nice cold buttermilk, and if somewhere not too far in the wings there was a flicker of a black-lace negligee and a whiff of musky perfume, then, "Well, you can't blame him a-taken hit, they put hit up to him." It only meant that the Boss was having it both ways, and that seemed a mark of the chosen and superior. It was what the voter did when he shook loose and came up to town to the furniture dealers' convention and gave the bellhop a couple of bucks to get him a girl up to the room. Or if he wasn't doing it classy, he rode into town with his truckload of hogs and for two bucks got the whole works down at a crib. But either way, classy or crib, the voter knew what it meant, and he wanted both Mom's gingerbread and the black-lace negligee and didn't hold it against the Boss for having both. What he would have held against the Boss was a divorce. Anne was right about that. It would have hurt even the Boss. That would have been very different, and would have robbed the voter of something he valued, the nice warm glow of complacency, the picture that flattered him and his own fat or thin wife standing in front of the henhouse.

Meanwhile, if the voter knew that the Boss had been tom-catting for years, and could name the names of half of the ladies involved, he didn't know about Anne Stanton. Sadie had found out, but that was no miracle. But as far as I could detect, nobody else knew, not even Duffy with his wheezing, elephantine with and leer. Maybe Sugar-Boy knew, but he could be depended upon. He knew everything. The Boss didn't mind telling anything in front of Sugar-Boy, or close to it–anything, that is, that he would tell. Which probably left a lot untold, at that. Once Congressman Randall was in the Boss's library with him, Sugar-Boy, and me, pacing up and down the floor, and the Boss was giving him play-by-play instructions on how to conduct himself when the Milton-Broderick Bill was presented to Congress. Te instructions were pretty frank, and the Congressman kept looking nervously at Sugar-Boy. The Boss noticed him. "God damn it," the Boss said, "you afraid Sugar-Boy's finding out something? Well, you're right, he's finding out something. Well, Sugar-Boy has found out plenty. He knows more about this state than you do. And I trust him a hell of a lot farther than I'd trust you. You're my pal, ain't you, Sugar-Boy?"

Sugar-Boy's face darkened with the rush of pleasurable, embarrassed blood and his lips began to work and the spit to fly as he prepared to speak.

"Yeah, Sugar's my pal, ain't you, Sugar-Boy?" he said, and slapped Sugar-Boy on the shoulder, and then swung again toward the Congressman while Sugar-Boy finally was managing to say, "I'm–y-y-y-your pal–and_–__I–ain't ta-ta-ta-talking–none."

Yes, Sugar-Boy probably knew, but he was dependable.

And Sadie was dependable, too. She had told me, but that was in the flush of her first fine rage and I (I thought of this with a certain grim humor) was, you might say, in the family. She wouldn't tell anybody else. Sadie Burke didn't have any confidant, for she didn't trust anybody. She didn't ask any sympathy, for the world she had grown up in didn't have any. So she would keep her mouth shut. And she had plenty of patience. She knew he'd come back. Meanwhile, she could hack him into a rage, or could try to for it was hard to do, and she herself would get into one, and you would think that they would be ready to fly at each other in the frenzy they could build up. By that time, too, you wouldn't be able to tell whether it was a frenzy of love or hate that coiled and tangled them together. And after all the years it had been going on, it probably didn't matter which it was. Her eyes would blaze black out of her chalk-white, pocked face and her wild black hair would seem to lift electrically off her scalp and her hands would fly out in a gesture of rending and tearing. While the flood of her language poured over him, his head would rock massively but almost imperceptibly from side to side and his eyes would follow her every motion, at first drowsily, then raptly, until he would heave himself up, the big veins in his temples pumping and his right fist raised. Then the raised fist would crash into the palm of the other hand, and he would burst out, "God damn, God damn it, Sadie!"

Or for weeks there wouldn't be any shenanigans. Sadie would treat the Boss with an icy decorum, meeting him only and strictly in the course of business, standing quietly before him while he talked. She would stand there before him and study him out of the black eyes, in which the blaze was banked now. Well, despite all the shenanigans, Sadie knew how to wait for everything she had ever got out of the world.

So the summer went on, and we all lived in it. It was a way to live, and when you have lived one way for a while you forget that there was ever any other way and that there may be another way again. Even when the change came, it didn't at first seem like a change but like more of the same, an extension and repetition.

It came through Tom Stark.

Given the elements, it was perfectly predictable. On one hand there was the Boss, and on the other hand there was MacMurfee. MacMurfee didn't have any choice. He had to keep fighting the Boss, for the Boss wouldn't deal with him, and if (and it looked more likely _when__ than _if__) the Boss ever broke MacMurfee in the Fourth District, Mac was a goner. So he had no choice, and he would use anything he could lay his hands on.

What he laid his hands on was a fellow named Marvin Frey, previously unknown to fame. Frey had a daughter named Sibyl, also unknown to fame, but not, Mr. Frey said, unknown to Tom Stark. It was simple, not a new turn to the plot, not a new line in the script. An old home remedy. Simple. Simple and sordid.

The outraged father, accompanied by a friend, for witness and protector no doubt, called on the Boss and stated his case. He got out, white in the face and obviously shaken, but he had the strength to walk. He walked across the long stretch of carpet from the Boss's door to the door to the corridor, getting inadequate support from the friend, whose own legs seemed to have lost some of their stiffening, and went out.

Then the buzzer on my desk went wild, the little red light which meant headquarters flashed, and when I switched on the voice box, the Boss's voice said, "Jack, get the hell in here." When I got the hell in there, he succinctly outlined the case to me, and gave me two assignments: first, get hold of Tom Stark, and second, find all there was about Marvin Frey.

It took all day and the efforts of half of the Highway Patrol to locate Tom Stark, who was, it developed, at a fishing lodge on Bigger's Bay with several cronies and some girls and a lot of wet glasses and dry fishing tackle. It was near six o'clock before they fetched him in. I was out in the reception room when he came in. "Hi, Jack," he said, "what's eating on him now?" And he cocked his head toward the Boss's door.

"He'll tell you," I said, and watched him head toward the door, a wonderfully set-up in dirty white duck trousers, sandals, and a pale-blue short-sleeved silky sport shirt that stuck to the damp pectoral muscles and almost popped over the brown biceps. His head, with a white gob cap stuck on it, was thrust forward just a little bit, and had the slightest roll when he walked, and his arms hung slightly crooked with the elbows a little out. Watching the arms hanging that way, you got the impression that they were like weapons just loosened and riding easy and ready in the scabbards. He didn't knock, but walked straight into the Boss's office. I retreated to my own office and waited for the dust to settle. Whatever it was, Tom was not going to stand and take it, not even from the Boss.

A half hour later Tom came out, slamming the door so that the heavy gold-framed paintings of the former governors hung around the paneled walls of the big reception room shivered like autumn leaves in a blast. He stalked across the room, not even giving a look in the direction of my open door, and went out. At first, he had, the Boss told me later, denied everything. Then he had admitted everything, looking the Boss in the eye, with a what-the-hell's-it-to-you expression. The Boss was fit to be tied when I saw him a few minutes after Tom's departure. He had only a small comfort–that from the legal point of view, Tom had been just one of a platoon of Sibyl's friends, according to Tom himself. But, aside from the legal point of view, that fact just made the Boss madder, Tom's being one of a platoon. It would be convenient in any discussion of the paternity of Sibyl's alleged child, but it seemed to hurt the Boss's pride.

I had found Tom and brought him in as one of my assignments. The second one took a little longer. Finding out about Marvin Frey. There wasn't much to find out, it appeared. He was a barber in the only hotel in a fair-sized town, Duboisville, over in the Fourth District. He was a sporting barber, with knifeedged creases in his striped pants, ointment on his thinning hair, hands like inflated white rubber gloves, a _Racing Form__ in his hip pocket, the shapeless soft nose with the broken veins like tiny purple vines, and breath sweetly flavored with Sen-Sen and red-eye. He was a widower, living with his two daughters. You don't have to find out much about a fellow like that. You know it all already. Sure, he has an immortal soul which is individual and precious in God's eye, and he is that unique agglomeration of atomic energy known as Marvin Frey, bur you know all about him. You know his jokes, you know the insinuative _hee-hee__ through his nose with which he prefaces them, you know how the gray tongue licks luxuriously over his lips at the conclusion, you know how he fawns and drools over the inert mass with the face covered with steaming towels which happens to be the local banker or the local gambling-house proprietor or the local congressman, you know how he kids the hotel chippies and tries to talk them out of something, you know how he gets in debt because of his bad hunches on the horses and bad luck with the dice, you know how he wakes up in the morning and sits on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the cold floor and a taste like brass on the back of his tongue and experiences his nameless despair. You know that, with the combination of poverty, fear, and vanity, he is perfectly designed to be robbed of his last pride and last shame and be used by MacMurfee. Or by somebody else.

But it happened to be MacMurfee. This angle had not appeared in Marvin's first interview. It appeared a few days later. One of the MacMurfee's boys called on the Boss, said MacMurfee had heard how a fellow named Frey had a daughter named Sibyl who had something on Tom Stark, but MacMurfee had always liked football and sure liked the way Tom carried the ball, and didn't want to see the boy get mixed up in anything unpleasant. Frey, the fellow said, was not in any frame of mind to be reasonable. He was going to make Tom marry the daughter. (The Boss's face must have been something to see at that point.) But Frey lived over in MacMurfee's district, and MacMurfee knew him a little, and maybe MacMurfee could put some reasonableness into Frey's head. It would cost something, of course, to do it that way, but there wouldn't be any publicity, and Tom would still be a bachelor.

What would it cost? Well, some money for Sibyl. Folding money.

But this meant that MacMurfee was simply acting out of deep heart and generous nature.

What would it cost? Well, MacMurfee was thinking he might run for Senator.

So that was it.

But the Boss, as Anne Stanton had told me, was figuring on going to the Senate himself. He had it in the sack. He had the state in a sack. Except for MacMurfee. MacMurfee and Marvin Frey. But still, he wasn't in any mood to dicker with MacMurfee. He didn't dicker, but he stalled.

There was one reason he could take the chance and stall. If Marvin and MacMurfee had had it sewed up absolutely tight, and could have ruined the Boss, they would have done it without further ado. They wouldn't have bothered to dicker. They had some cards, all right, but it wasn't necessarily a straight flush, and they had to take their gamble, too. They had to wait, while the Boss did his thinking, and hope that he wouldn't think up anything unpleasant in his turn.

While the Boss did his thinking, I saw Lucy Stark. She wrote me a note and asked me to come to see her. I knew what she wanted. She wanted to talk about Tom. Obviously, she wasn't finding out anything from Tom himself, or at least, what she considered to be the truth and the whole truth, and she wasn't talking it over with the Boss for on the matter of Tom she and the Boss had never agreed. So she was going to ask me questions, and I was going to sit and sweat on the red plush upholstery in the parlor of the farmhouse where she was living. But that had to be. Long back, I had made up my mind that when Lucy Stark asked me to do something I was going to do it. It was not exactly that I felt I owed Lucy Stark a debt, or had to make restitution, or do penance. At least, if there was a debt, it was not to Lucy Stark, and if there was restitution to be made it was not to be made to her. If there was a debt, it was, perhaps, due to me, from me. And if restitution was to be made, it was to be made to me, by me. And as for penance, there had been no crime for which I should do it. My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.

If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you know the kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the front side by rank ligustrums and canna beds, for hens to congregate and fluff in the dust and an old shepherd dog to lie and pant in the hot days. It sits pretty well back from the road, in a lawn gone sparse and rusty in the late season. On each side of an anachronistic patch of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two round flower beds made by lying an old automobile tire on the ground and filling it with wood earth. There are few zinnias in each, hairy like an animal, brilliant in the dazzling sun. At each end of the house is a live oak, not grand ones. Beyond the house, flanking it on each side are the chicken houses and barns, unpainted. But the faded-white decent house itself, sitting there in the middle of the late-summer afternoon, in the absolute quiet of that time of day and year, with the sparse lawn and tidy flower beds and the prideful patch of concrete walk in front, the oaks at each side, is like nothing so much as a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, the pepper-and-salt hair coiled on her head, sitting in her rocker with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease, now the day's work is done and the menfolks are in the field and it's not yet time to think about supper and strain the evening milk.

I stepped gingerly up that patch of concrete walk, as though I were treading on dozens of eggs laid by all those white leghorns back in the chicken run.

Lucy led me into the parlor, which was just the place I had known it would be, the carved black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, with a few tassels still left hanging here and there, the Bible and the stereoscope and the neat pile of cards for the stereoscope on the carved black-walnut table, a flowered carpet, with little rag rugs laid over the places most worn, the big walnut and gilt frames on the wall enclosing the stern, malarial, Calvinistic faces whose eyes fixed you with little sympathy. The windows of the room were closed, and the curtains drawn to give a shadowy, aqueous light in which we sat silently for a minute as though at a funeral. The palm of my hand laid down on the plush prickled drily.

She sat there as though I hadn't come, not looking at me but down at the floral figure in the carpet. The abundant dark-brown hair which, when I first met Lucy out at the Stark place, had been massacred off at the neck and marcelled by the beauty operator of Mason City, had long since grown back to its proper length. The auburn luster was still in it, maybe, but I couldn't see it in the dim light of the parlor. I had, however, noticed the few touches of gray, when I met her at the door. She sat across from me on the red plush seat of a stiff, carved, walnut chair, with her still good ankles crossed in front of her, and her waist, not so little now, still straight, and her bosom full but not shapeless under the blue summer cloth. The soft soothing contours of her face weren't girlish any more, as they had been on that first evening back in Old Man Stark's house, for now there was a hint of weight, of the infinitesimal downward drag, in the flesh, the early curse and certain end of those soft, soothing faces which, especially when very young, appeal to all our natural goodness and make us think of the sanctity of motherhood. Yes, that is the kind of face you would put on the United States Madonna if you were going to paint her. But you aren't, and meanwhile it is the kind of face they try to put on advertisements of ready-mix cake flour and patented diapers and whole-wheat bread–good, honest, wholesome, trusting, courageous, tender, and with the glow of youth. The glow of youth wasn't on the particular face any more, but when Lucy Stark lifted her head to speak, I saw that the large, deep-brown eyes hadn't changed much. Time and trouble had shaded and deepened them some, but that was all.

She said, "It's about Tom."

"Yes," I said.

She said, "I know something is wrong."

I nodded

She said, "Tell me."

I inhaled the dry air and the faint closed-parlor odor of furniture polish, which is the odor of decency and care and modest hopes, and squirmed on my seat while the red plush prickled my pressed-down palm like a nettle.

She said, "Jack, tell me the truth. I've got to know the truth, Jack. You will tell me the truth. You've always been a good friend. You were a good friend to Willie and me–back yonder–back yonder–when–"

Her voice trailed off.

So I told her the truth. About Marvin Frey's visit.

Her hands twisted in her lap while I spoke, and then clenched and lay still. Then she said, "There's just one thing fro him to do."

"There might be a–a settlement–you know, a–"

But she broke in. "There's just one right thing," she said.

I waited.

"He'll–he'll marry her," she said, and held her head up very straight.

I squirmed a little, then said, "Well–well, you see–it looks like–like there might have been–some others–other friends of Sibyl–others who–"

"Oh, God," she breathed so softly I could scarcely tell it was more than a breath she uttered, and I saw the hands clench and unclench on her lap again.

"And," I went on, now I was in it, "there's another angle to it, too. There's some politics mixed up, too. You see–MacMurfee wants–"

"Oh, God," she breathed again, and rose abruptly from the chair, and pressed her clenched hand together in front of her bosom. "Oh, God, politics," she whispered, and took a distracted step or two away from me, and said again, "Politics." Then she swung toward me, and said, out loud now, "Oh, God, in this too."

"Yes," I nodded, "like most things."

She went to one of the windows, where she stood with her back to me and the parlor and peered through a crack between the curtains out into the hot, sun-dazzled world outside, where everything happened.

After a minute she said, "Go on, tell me what you were going to tell."

So not looking at her as she peered out the crack into the world but looking at the empty chair where she had been sitting, I told her about the MacMurfee proposition and how things were.

My voice stopped. Then there was another minute of silence. Then, I heard her voice back over by the window, "It had to be this way, I guess. I have tried to do right but it had to be this way, I guess. Oh, Jack–" I heard the rustle as she turned from the window, and swung my head toward her, as she said–"Oh, Jack, I tried to do right. I loved my boy and tried to raise him right. I loved my husband and tried to do my duty. And they love me. I think they love me. After everything I have to think that, Jack. I have to."

I sat there and sweated on the red plush, while the large, deep-brown eyes fixed on me in a mixture of appeal and affirmation.

Then she said, very quietly now, "I have to think that. And think that it will be all right in the end."

"Listen," I said, "the Boss stalled them off, he'll think of something, it'll be all right."

"Oh, I didn't mean that, I meant–" but she stopped.

But I knew what she had meant, even as her voice, lower and steadier now, and at the same time more resigned, resumed to say, "Yes, he'll think of something. It will be all right."

There wasn't any use to hang round longer. I got up, rescued my old Panama off the carved walnut table, where the Bible and stereoscope were, walked across to Lucy, put out my hand to her, and said, "It'll be all right."

She looked at my hand as though she didn't know why it was there. Then she looked at me. "It's just a baby," she almost whispered. "It's just a little baby. It's a little baby in the dark. It's not even born yet, and it doesn't know about what's happened. About money and politics and somebody wanting to be a senator. It doesn't know about anything–about how it came to be–about what that girl did–or why–or why the father–why he–" She stopped, and the large brown eyes kept looking at me with appeal and what might have been accusation. Then she said, "Oh, Jack, it's a little baby, and nothing's its fault."

I almost burst out that it wasn't my fault, either, but I didn't.

Then she added, "It may be my grandbaby. It may be my boy's baby."

Then, after a moment, "I would love it."

Her hands, which had been clenched into fists and pressed together at the level of her breast, opened slowly at the words, and reached out, supine and slightly cupped, but with the wrists still against her own body as though expectation were humble or hopeless.

She noticed me looking down at the hands, then quickly let them drop.

"Good-bye," I said, and moved toward the door.

"Thank you, Jack," she said, but didn't follow me. Which suited me down to the ground, for I was really on my way out.

I walked out into the dazzling world and down the prideful patch of concrete and got into my car and headed back to town, where, no doubt, I belonged.

The Boss did think up something.

First, he thought that it might be a good idea to get in touch with Marvin Frey, directly and not through MacMurfee, to feel out the situation there. But MacMurfee was too smart for that. He didn't trust Frey or the Boss, either, and Marvin had been whisked off, nobody knew where exactly. But, as it developed later, Marvin and Sibyl had been carried off into Arkansas, which was probably the last place they wanted to be, on a farm up in Arkansas, where the only horses were mules and the brightest light came from a patented gasoline pressure lamp on the parlor table and there weren't any fast cars and people went to bed to sleep at eight-thirty and got up at dawn. Of course, they had some company along, and could play three-handed poker and rummy, for MacMurfee had sent along one of his boys, who, I was to learn, kept the car keys in his pants pocket by day and under his pillow by night, and practically stood outside the door of the backhouse, leaning on the trellis of honeysuckle, with a derby on the side of his head, when one of them went there, just to be sure there weren't any shenanigans like cutting across the back lot in the direction of the railroad ten miles off. He was also one who thumbed through the mail first, for Marvin and Sibyl weren't supposed to be getting any mail. Nobody was supposed to know where they were. And we didn't find out. Not until a long time after.

Second, the Boss thought about Judge Irwin. If MacMurfee would listen to sense at al, he would listen to sense from Judge Irwin. He owed Irwin a lot, and there weren't so many legs left to MacMurfee's stool he could afford to loose one. So, the Boss thought, there was Judge Irwin.

He called me in and said, "I told you to dig on Irwin. What did you get?"

"I got something," I said.

"What?"

"Boss," I said, "I'm going to give Irwin a break. If he can prove to me it isn't true, I won't spill it."

"God damn it," he began, "I told you–"

"I'm giving Irwin a break," I said. "I promised two people I would do it."

"Who?"

"Well, I promised myself, for one. The other doesn't matter."

"You promised yourself, huh?" He looked hard at me.

"Yeah, I did."

"O. K.," he said. "Do it your way. If it'll stick, you know what I want." He surveyed me glumly, then added, "And it better stick."

"Boss," I said, "I'm afraid it will."

"Afraid?" he said "Yeah."

"Who you working for? Him or me?"

"Well, I'm not framing Judge Irwin."

He kept on studying me. "Boy," he said then, "I'm not asking you to frame him. I never asked you to frame anybody. Did I?"

"No."

"I never did ask you to frame anybody. And you know why?"

"No."

"Because it ain't ever necessary. You don't ever have to frame anybody, because the truth is always sufficient."

"You sure take a high view of human nature," I said.

"Boy," he said, "I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school back in the days when they still had some theology, and that much of it stuck. And–" he grinned suddenly–"I have found it very valuable."

So our conversation ended, and I got into my car and headed for Burden's Landing.

The next morning, as soon as I had my breakfast, which I ate alone, for the Young Executive had left for town and my mother wouldn't get up till pushing noon, I strolled down the beach. It was a fine morning, but not as hot as usual. The beach was deserted at that hour, except for some kids playing in the bright shallows a quarter of a mile off, thin-legged little kids like sandpipers. I wandered on down past them, and as I passed they paused an instant in their leaping and splashing and gyration to favor me with an indifferent stare from their brown, water-slick faces. But it was only for an instant, for I obviously belonged to that dull and purblind race which wears shoes and trousers. You do not even walk on the sand and get sand in your shoes if you can avoid it. But at least I was walking on the sand and getting it liberally into my shoes. I wasn't too old for that. I reflected on that with satisfaction, and moved on toward the cluster of pines and the big oak and the mimosas and myrtles, just back from the beach, where the tennis courts were. There were some benches there in the shade, and I had the unread morning paper in my hand. After I had read the paper, I would begin to think about what would happen later on the day. But I wasn't even thinking about it yet.

I found the bench near the vacant court and lighted my cigarette and began to read. I read the front page, every word, with the mechanical devotion of a padre working over the missal, and didn't even think of all the news which I knew and which wasn't on the front page. I was well into the third page, when I heard voices and looked up to see the pair of players, a boy and girl, approaching on the other side of the courts. After an idle glance at me, they took possession of the farther court, and began to beat the little white ball back and forth, just idly to loosen up their muscles.

You could tell by the first exchange that they knew what they were about. And you could tell that their muscles didn't need much loosening up. He was of medium height, perhaps a shade under, with a deep chest and big arms and nothing extra around the waist. His red hair had a crew cut, crinkly red hair showed on his chest above the underwear vest he was wearing instead of a shirt, and his skink was an even baby-pink except for the big blotches of brown freckles on his face and shoulders. In the middle of the freckles his face was all white-toothed grin and the glint of blue eyes. She was a brown lively girl, short brown hair that snapped when she pirouetted, and brown arms and shoulders above the white halter tied over her breasts, and brown legs flashing above white shoes and socks, and a little brown flat tummy between the white shorts and the white halter. They were both pretty young.

They began the game right quick, and I watched them over my newspaper. Maybe the red-headed felloe wasn't trying his hardest, but she was handing them back to him well enough and could make him move around the court. She was even taking a game from him now and then. She was a pretty thing to watch, so light and springy and serious-faced and flashy-legged. But not as pretty as Anne Stanton had been, I decided. I even meditated on the superior beauty of a white skirt which could flow and whip with the player's motion as compared to shorts. But shorts were good. They were good on the lively brown girl. I had to admit that.

And I had to admit, as I watched, that I had a knot in my stomach. Because I wasn't out there on the court. With Anne Stanton. It was a terrific and fundamental injustice that I wasn't out there. What was that red-faced, crop-headed fellow doing there? What was the girl doing there? I suddenly didn't like them. I felt like going there and stopping the game and saying, "You think you'll be here playing tennis forever, don't you. Well, you wont."

"Why, no," the girl would say, "not forever."

"Hell, no," the fellow would say, "we're going swimming this afternoon, then tonight we're–"

"You don't get it," I would say. "Sure, I know you're going swimming, and you're going out somewhere tonight and you'll stop the car on the way home. But you think you'll be here this way forever."

"Hell, no," he would say, "I'm going back to college next week."

"I'm going off to school," she would shay, "but Thanksgiving I'll see Al, won't I, Al–and you'll take me to the big game–won't you, Al?"

They wouldn't get it worth a damn. There was no use in giving them the benefit of my wisdom. Not even of the great big piece of wisdom which I had learned on my trip to California. They didn't know the wisdom of the Great twitch, but they would have to find it out for themselves, for there was no use to tell them. They might listen politely, but they wouldn't believe a word of it. And watching the brown girl dance and flash over there against the myrtles and the brilliant sea, I wasn't so sure for the moment that I believed it myself.

But I did believe it, of course, for I had had my trip to California.

I didn't see out the first set. The score was five to two when I left, but it seemed that she might make it five-three, for the crop-headed fellow was feeding them to her, not too obviously, and grinning out of the freckles when she'd whang them back.

I went to the house, changed, and took a swim. I idled out a long way, and floated around in the bay, which is a corner of the Gulf of Mexico, which is a corner of the great, salt, unplumbed waters of the world, and got back in time for lunch.

My mother had lunch with me. She kept giving me a chance to tell her why I had come down, but I just skirted round the subject till we got to the desert. Then I asked her if Judge Irwin was at the Landing. I hadn't asked that yet. I could have found out the night before. But I hadn't asked. I had postponed finding out.

He was at the Landing, all right.

My mother and I went out on the side gallery and had coffee and cigarettes. After a while I went upstairs to lie down for a spell and digest. I lay up there in my old room for an hour or so. Then I figured I had better get on with my work. I eased downstairs and started out the front door.

But my mother was in the living room and called to me. It was a strange place for her to be at that time of the day, but there she was. She had waited to waylay me, I decided. I stepped inside and leaned against the wall, waiting for her to speak.

"You're going down to the Judge's" she asked.

I said, yes, I was.

She was holding up her right hand, the back to her, the fingers spread, to inspect the polish on her red nails. Then with her brow ruffled as though the inspection were not satisfactory, she asked, "Oh, politics, I suppose?"

"Sort of," I said.

"Why don't you go later on?" she asked. "He hates to be bothered this time of day."

"There isn't any time, day or night, when he wouldn't hate to hear what I'm going to tell him."

She looked sharply at me, her hand with the spread fingers forgotten in the air.

Then she said, "He is not very well. Why do you have to bother him? He isn't at all well now."

"I can't help that," I said, feeling the stubbornness grow inside me.

"He's not well."

"I cant' help it."

"You at least might wait till alter."

"No, I'm not waiting," I said. I felt that I couldn't wait. I had to go on and get it done. The obstacle, the resistance, had confirmed me in that. I had to know. Quick.

"I wish you wouldn't," she said, and lowered the hand which she had held up, forgotten, in the air the time we had been talking.

"I can't help it."

"I wish you wouldn't get mixed up in–in things," she complained "I'm not the one mixed up in this something."

"What do you mean?"

"I'll know when I've put it up to Irwin," I told her, and went out of the room, and the house, and walked up the Row toward the Irwin place. At least, I would walk, hot as it was, and that would give the old bugger a little extra time before I popped the question to him. He deserved the extra few minutes, I reckoned.

The old bugger was upstairs lying down when I got there.

That was what the black boy in the white coat said. "The Jedge, he upstairs layen on the baid, he resten," he said, and seemed to think that that settled something.

"All right," I said, "I'll wait till he comes down." An without invitation I drew open the screen door, and entered into the shadowy gracious coolness of the hall, like the perfect depth of time, where the mirrors and the great hurricane glasses glittered like ice, and my image was caught as noiselessly as velvet or recollection in all the reflecting surfaces.

"The Jedge, he–" the black boy began again to protest.

I walked right past him saying. "I'll sit in the library. Till he comes down."

So I walked past the eyes of which the whites were like peeled hard-boiled eggs and past the sad big mouth which didn't know what to say now and just hung open to show the pink, and walked on back to the library, and entered into the deep, shuttered shadow which depended from the high ceiling and the walls of books laid close like stone and which lay on the deep-red Turkey carpet like a great dog asleep and scarcely breathing. I sat down in one of the big leather chairs, dropped by the chair the big manila envelope I had brought, and lay back. I got the notion that all the books were staring meaninglessly down at me like sculptured stone closed eyes, in a gallery. I noticed, as before, that all the old calf-bound law books there gave the room the faint odor of cheese.

After a while, there was some movement upstairs, then the tinkle of a bell in the back of the house. I guessed that the Judge had rung for the boy. A moment later I heard the boy's soft feet padding in the hall, and guessed that he was headed upstairs.

In about ten minutes the Judge came down. His firm tread came toward the library door. He paused an instant at the threshold, a tall head above a black bowtie and white coat, as though to adjust his eyes to the shadow, then moved toward me with his hand out. "Hello, Jack," he was saying, in the voice I had always known, "damned glad you came by. I didn't know you were at the Landing. Just get in?"

"Last night," I said briefly, and rose to take the hand.

He gave me a firm grasp, then waved me back into the chair. "Damned glad you came by," he repeated, and smiled out of the high, tired, rust-colored old hawk's head up there in the shadow. "How long you been in the house? Why didn't you make that rascal rout me out instead of letting me sleep all afternoon? It's a long time since I've seen you, Jack."

"Yes," I agreed, "it is."

It had been a long time. The last time had been in the middle of the night. With the Boss. And in the silence after my remark I knew that he was remembering, too. He was remembering, but after he had said it. Then I knew that he had put the memory away. He was denying the memory. "Well, it is a long time," he said as he settled himself, as though he had remembered nothing, "but don't let it be as long next time. Aren't you ever coming to see the old fellow? We old ones like a little attention."

He smiled, and there wasn't anything I could say into the face of that smile.

"Damn it," he said, popping out of his chair without any audible creaking of joints, "look at me forgetting hospitality. I bet you are dry as Andy Jackson's powder. Little early in the day perhaps for the real thing, but a touch of gin and tonic never hurt anybody. Not you and me, anyway. We're indestructible, aren't we, you and me?"

He was halfway across to the bellpull before I managed to say anything.

"No, thanks," I said.

He looked down at me, the faintest shade of disappointment on his face. Then the smile came back, a good, honest, dog-toothed, manly smile, and he said, "Aw, come on, and have a little one. This is a celebration. I want to celebrate your coming to se me!"

He got in another step toward the bellpull before I said, "No, thanks."

For a moment he stood there looking down at me again, with his arm lifted for the pull. Then he let his arm drop and turned again toward his own chair, with the slightest slackening visible–or I imagined it–in his frame. "Well," he said offering something which wasn't quite the smile, "I'm not going to drink by myself. I'll get my stimulation out of your conversation. What's on your mind?

"Nothing much," I said.

I looked at him over there in the shadow and saw that something was keeping the old shoulders straight and the old head up. I wondered what it was. I wondered if what I had dug up were true. I looked across at him, and didn't want it to be true. With all my heart, I discovered, I didn't want it to be true. And I had the sudden thought that I might have his drink of gin and tonic, and talk with him and never tell him, and go back to town and tell the Boss that I was convinced it was not true. The Boss would have to take that. He would pitch and roar, but he would know it was my show. Besides by that time I would have destroyed the stuff from Miss Littlepaugh. I could do that.

But I had to know. Even as the thought of going away without knowing came through my head, I knew that I had to know the truth. For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge to blackness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

So I looked across at Judge Irwin, and liked him suddenly in a way I hadn't liked him in years, his old shoulders were so straight and the dog-toothed smile so true. But I knew I had to know.

So, as he studied me–for my face must have been something then to invite a reading–I met his gaze.

"I said there wasn't much," I said. "But there is something."

"Out with it," he said.

"Judge," I began, "you know who I work for."

"I know, Jack," he said, "but let's just sit here and forget it. I can't say I approve of Stark, but I'm not like most of our friends down the Row. I can respect a man, and he's a man. I was almost for him at one time. He was breaking the windowpanes out and letting in a little fresh air. But–" he shook his head sadly, and smiled–"I began to worry about him knocking down the house, too. And some of his methods. So–" He didn't finish the sentence, but gave his shoulders the slightest shrug.

"So," I finished it for him, "you threw in with MacMurfee."

"Jack," he said, "politics is always a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price."

"Yes, but–"

"Jack, I'm not criticizing you," he said. "I trust you. Time will show which of us is wrong. And meanwhile, Jack, let's don't let it come between. If I lost my temper that night, I apologize. From my heart. It has cost me some pain.

"You say you don't like Stark's methods," I said. "Well, I'll tell you something about MacMurfee's methods. Listen, here is what MacMurfee is up to–" And I lurched and ground on like a runaway streetcar charging downhill and the brakes busted. I told him what MacMurfee was up to.

He sat and took it.

Then I asked him, "Is that pretty?"

"No," he said, and shook his head.

"It is not pretty," I said. "And you can stop it."

"Me?" he demanded.

"MacMurfee will listen to you. He's got to listen to you, for you are one of the few friends he's got left, and he knows the Boss's breath is hot on his neck. If he really had anything of more than nuisance value, he would go on and try to bust the Boss and not haggle. But he knows he hasn't got anything. And I'll tell you that if it comes to a pinch the Boss will fight in the courts. This Sibyl Frey is a homemade tart, and we can damned well prove it. We'll have an entire football squad in there, plus a track team, and all the truckers who run Highway 69 past her pappy's house. If you talk MacMurfee into sense, there might be some chance of saving his shirt when the time comes. But mind you, I can't promise a thing. Not now."

There was nothing but shadow and silence and the faint odor like old cheese for a spell, while what I had just said all went through the hopper inside that handsome old head. Then he shook the head slowly. "No," he said.

"Look here," I said, "there'll be something in it for Sibyl, the tart. We can take care of that side of it, unless she's got ideas of grandeur. She'll have to sign a little statement, of course. And I won't conceal from you that our side will have a few affidavits from her other boy-friends salted away just in case she ever gets gay again. If you think Sibyl isn't getting a square deal, I can reassure you on that point."

"It isn't that," he said.

"Judge," I said, and caught the tone of pleading in my own voice, "what the hell is it?"

"It's MacMurfee's affair. He may be making a mistake. I think he is. But it is his affair. It is the sort of thing I am not mixing in."

"Judge," I begged, "you think it over. Take a little time to think it over."

He shook his head.

I got up. "I've got to run," I said. "You think it over. I'll be back tomorrow and we can talk about it then. Give me your answer then."

He put the yellow agates on me and shook his head again. "Come to see me tomorrow, Jack. Tomorrow and every other day. But I'm giving you my answer now."

"I'm asking you, Judge, as a favor to me. Wait till tomorrow to make up your mind."

"You talk like I didn't know my own mind, Jack. That's about the only thing I've learned out of my three score and ten. That I know when I know my own mind. But you come back tomorrow, anyway. And we won't talk politics." He made a sudden gesture as though sweeping off the top of a table with his arm. "Damn politics anyway!" he exclaimed humorously.

I looked at him, and even with the wry, humorous expression on his face and the arm flung out at the end of its gesture, knew that this was it. It wasn't the dabble of the foot in the water, or even the steady deep pull of the undertow or the peripheral drag of the whirlpool. It was the heady race and plunge of the vortex. I ought to have known it would be this way.

Looking at him, I said, almost whispering, "I asked you, Judge. I near begged you, Judge."

A mild question came on his face.

"I tried," I said. "I begged you."

"What?" he demanded.

"Did you ever hear," I asked, my voice still not much more than a whisper, "of a man named Littlepaugh?"

"Littlepaugh?" he queried, and his brow wrinkled in an effort of memory.

"Mortimer L. Littlepaugh," I said, "don't you remember?"

The flesh of the forehead drew more positively together to make the deep vertical mark like a cranky exclamation point between the heavy, rust-colored eyebrows. "No," he said, and shook his head, "I don't remember."

And he didn't. I was sure he didn't. He didn't even remember Mortimer L. Littlepaugh.

"Well," I questioned, "do you remember the American Electric Power Company?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I? I was their counsel for ten years." There wasn't a flicker.

"Do you remember how you got the job?"

"Lt me see–" he began, and I knew that he didn't for the moment remember, that he was in truth reaching back into the past, trying to remember. Then, straightening himself, he said, "Yes, of course, I remember. It was through a Mr. Satterfield."

But there had been the flicker. The barb had found meat, and I knew it.

I waited a long minute, looking at him, and he looked straight back at me, very straight in his chair.

"Judge," I asked softly, "you won't change your mind? About MacMurfee?"

"I told you," he said.

Then I could hear his breathing, and I wanted more than anything to know what was in his head, why he was sitting there straight and looking at me, while the barb bled into him.

I stepped to the chair which I had occupied and lean down to pick up the manila envelope on the floor beside it. Then I moved to his chair, and laid the envelope on his lap.

He looked at the envelope, without touching it. Then he looked up at me, a hard straight look out of the yellow agates, with no question in them. Then, without saying a word, he opened the envelope and read the papers there. The light was bad, but he did not lean forward. He held the papers, one by one, up to his face. He read them very deliberately. Then he laid the last, deliberately, on his lap.

"Littlepaugh," he said musingly, and waited. "You know," he said marveling, "you know, I didn't remember his name. I swear, I didn't even remember his name."

He waited again.

"Don't you think it remarkable," he asked, "that I didn't even remember his name?"

"Maybe so," I said.

"You know," he said, still marveling, "for weeks–for months sometimes–I don't even remember any of–" he touched the papers lightly with his strong right forefinger–"of this."

He waited, drawn into himself.

Then he said, "You know, sometimes–for a long time at a stretch–it's like it hadn't happened. Not to me. Maybe to somebody else, but not to me. Then I remember, and when I first remember I say, No, it could not have happened to me."

Then he looked up at me, straight in the eye. "But it did," he said.

"Yes," I said, "it did."

"Yes," he nodded, "but it is difficult for me to believe."

"It is for me, too," I said.

"Thanks for that much, Jack," he said, and smiled crookedly.

"I guess you know the next move," I said.

"I guess so. Your employer is trying to put pressure on me. To blackmail me."

"_Pressure__ is a prettier word," I averred.

"I don't care much about pretty words any more. You live with words a long time. Then all at once you are old, and there are the things and the words don't matter any more."

I shrugged my shoulders. "Suit yourself," I replied, "but you get the idea."

"Don't you know–your employer ought to know, since he claims to be a lawyer, that this stuff," he tapped the papers again with the forefinger, "wouldn't stick? Not for one minute. In a court of law. Why, it happened almost twenty-five years ago. And you wouldn't get any testimony, anyway. Except from this Littlepaugh woman. Which would be worthless. Everybody is dead."

"Except you, Judge," I said.

"It wouldn't stick in court."

"But you don't live in a court. You aren't dead, and you live in the world and people think you are a certain kind of man. You aren't the kind of man who could bear for them to think different, Judge."

"They couldn't think it!" he burst out, leaning forward. "By God, they haven't any right to think it. I've done right, I've done my duty, I've–"

I took my gaze from his face and directed it to the papers on his lap. He saw me do that, and looked down, too. The words stopped, and his fingers touched the papers, tentatively as though to verify their reality. Quite slowly, he raised his eyes back to me. "You're right," he said. "I did this, too."

"Yes," I said, "you did."

"Does Stark know it?"

I tried to make out what was behind that question, but I couldn't read him.

"No, he doesn't," I replied. "I told him I wouldn't tell him till I'd seen you. I had to be sure, you see, Judge."

"You have a tender sensibility," he said. For a blackmailer."

"We won't start calling names. All I'll say is that you're trying to protect a blackmailer."

"No, Jack," he said quietly, "I'm not trying to protect MacMurfee. Maybe–" he hesitated–"I'm trying to protect myself."

"You know how to do it, then. And I'll never tell Stark."

"Maybe you'll never tell him, anyway."

He said that even more quietly, and for the instant I though he might be ready to reach for a weapon–the desk was near him–or ready to spring at me. He might be old but he would still be a customer.

He must have guessed the thought, for he shook his head, smiled, and said, "No, don't worry. You needn't be afraid."

"Look here–" I began angrily.

"I wouldn't hurt you," he said. Then, reflectively, added, "But I could stop you."

"By stopping MacMurfee," I said.

"A lot easier than that."

"How?"

"A lot easier than that," he repeated.

"How?"

"I could just–" he began, "I could just say to you–I could just tell you something–" He stopped, the suddenly rose to his feet, spilling the papers off his knees. "But I won't," he said cheerfully, and smiled directly at me.

"Won't tell me what?"

"Forget it," he said, still smiling, and waved his hand in a gay dismissal of the subject.

I stood there irresolutely for a moment. Things were not making sense. He was not supposed to be standing there, brisk and confident and cheerful, with the incriminating papers at his feet. But he was.

I stooped to pick up the papers, and he watched me from his height.

"Judge," I said, "I'll be back tomorrow. You think it over, and make up your mind tomorrow."

"Why, it's made up."

"You'll–"

"No, Jack."

I went to the hall door. "I'll be back tomorrow," I said.

"Sure, sure. You come back. But my mind is made up."

I walked down the hall without saying good-bye. I had my hand lifted to the front door when I heard his voice calling my name. I turned and took a few steps toward him. He had come out into the hall. "I just wanted to tell you," he said, "that I did learn something new from those interesting documents. I learned that my old friend Governor Stanton impaired his honor to protect me. I do not know whether to be more glad or sorry, at the fact. At the knowledge of his attachment or the knowledge of the pain it cost him. He had never told me. That was the pitch of his generosity. Wasn't it? Not ever telling me."

I mumbled something to the effect that I supposed it was.

"I just wanted you to know about the Governor. That his failing was a defect of his virtue. The virtue of affection for a friend."

I didn't mumble anything to that.

"I just wanted you to know that about the Governor," he said.

"All right," I said, and went to the front door, feeling his yellow gaze and calm smile upon me, and out into the blaze of light.

It was still hotter than hell's hinges as I walked up the Row toward home. I debated a swim or getting into my car and heading back to town to tell the Boss that Judge Irwin wouldn't budge. Then I decided that I might wait over another day. I might wait on just the chance that the Judge would change his mind. But I wouldn't swim till later. It was too hot even to swim now. I would take a shower when I got in and lie down till it had cooled off enough for a swim.

I took my shower and lay down on my bed and went to sleep.

I came out of the sleep and popped straight up in the bed. I was wide awake. The sound that had awakened me was still ringing in my ears. I knew that it had been a scream. Then it came again. A bright, beautiful, silvery soprano scream.

I bounced off the bed and started for the door, realized that I was buck-naked, grabbed a robe, and ran out. There was a noise down the hall from my mother's room, a sound like moaning. The door was open and I ran in.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a negligee, clutching the white bedside telephone in her hand, staring at me with wide, wild eyes, and moaning in a spaced, automatic fashion. I went toward her. She dropped the telephone to the floor with a clatter, and pointed her finger at me and cried out, "You did it, you did, you killed him!"

"What?" I demanded, "what?"

"You killed him!"

"Killed who?"

"You killed him!" She began to laugh hysterically.

I was holding her by the shoulders now, shaking her, trying to make her stop laughing, but she kept clawing and pushing at me. She stopped laughing an instant to gasp for breath, and in that interval I heard the dry, clicking signal the telephone was making to call attention to the fact it was not on its rack. Then her laughter drowned out the sound.

"Shut up, shut up!" I commanded, and she suddenly stared at me as though just discovering my presence.

Then, not loud now but with intensity, she said, "You killed him, you killed him."

"Killed who?" I demanded, shaking her.

"Your father," she said, "your father and oh! you killed him."

That was how I found out. At the moment the finding out simply numbed me. When a heavy-caliber slug hits you, you may spin around but you don't feel a thing. Not at first. Anyway, I was busy. My mother was in bad shape. By this time there were a couple of black faces at the door, the cook and the maid, and I was damning them to get Dr. Bland and stop gawking. Then I raked the clicking telephone up off the floor so they could use the one downstairs, and let my mother go long enough to slam the door to keep those all-seeing, all-knowing eyes off what was happening.

My mother was talking between her moans and laughing. She was saying how she had loved him and how he was the only person she had ever loved and how I had killed him and had killed my own father and a lot of stuff like that. She was still carrying on when Dr. Bland arrived and gave her the hypodermic. Across her form on the bed, from which the moans and the mutterings were now subsiding, he turned his gray, gray-bearded owlish face and said, "Jack, I'm sending a nurse up here. A very trustworthy woman. Nobody else is to come in here. Do you understand?"

"Yes," I told him, for I understood, and understood that he had understood perfectly well what my mother's wild talking had meant.

"You stay here till the nurse arrives," he said, "and don't let anybody in. And the nurse isn't supposed to let anybody in until I get back to see if your mother is normal. Not anybody."

I nodded, and followed him to the door of the room.

After he had said his good-bye, I detained him a moment. "Doctor," I asked, "what about the Judge? I didn't get it straight from my mother. Was it a stroke?"

"No," he said, and inspected my face.

"Well, what was it?"

"He shot himself this afternoon," he replied, still inspecting my face. But then he added quite matter-of-factly, "It was undoubtedly a question of health. His health was failing. A very active man–a sportsman–very often–" he was even more dry and detached in his tone–"very often such a man doesn't want to face the last years of limited activity. Yes, I am sure that that was the reason."

I didn't answer.

"Good day, sir," the doctor said, and took his eyes off me and started down the hall.

He was almost to the head of the stairs before I called, "Doctor!" and ran after him.

I came up to him and said, "Doctor, where did he shoot himself? What part of the body, I mean? Not the head?"

"Straight to the heart," he said. And added, "A.38 automatic. A very clean wound."

Then he went off down the stairs. I stood there and thought how the dead man was shot through he heart, a very clean wound, and not through the head with the muzzle of the weapon put into the mouth to blaze into the soft membranes to scorch them and the top of the skull exploding off like an egg to make an awful mess. I stood there, and was greatly relieved to think of the nice clean wound.

I went to my own room, snatched up some clothes, and then went back to my mother's room, and shut the door. I dressed and sat by the side of the big magnificent tester bed in which the lace-filmed form looked so small. I noticed how the bosom looked slack and the face sunken and grayish. The mouth was somewhat open and the breath through it heavy. I scarcely recognized the face. Certainly it was not the face of the girl in the lettuce-green dress and with the golden hair who had stood by the stocky, dark-suited man on the steps of a company commissary in a lumber town in Arkansas, forty years before, while the scream of saws filled the air and the head like a violated nerve and the red earth between the fields of stumps curdled with pale green and steamed in the spring sun. it was not the famish-cheeked, glowing face that, back in those years, had looked up eagerly and desperately to the hawk-headed, hot-eyed man in alleys of myrtle or in secret pine groves or in shuttered rooms. No, it was an old face now. And I felt very sorry for it. I reached across to take one of the unconscious hands which lay loose on the sheet.

I held the hand and tried to image how things would have been if it had not been the Scholarly Attorney but his friend who had gone to the little lumber town in Arkansas. No, that wouldn't have helped much, I decided, remembering that at that time Monty Irwin had been married to an invalid wife, who had been crippled by being thrown from a horse and who had lain in bed for some years and had then died quietly and sunk from our sight and thought at the Landing. No doubt Monty Irwin had been held by some notion of obligation to that invalid wife: he hadn't been able to divorce her and marry the other woman. No doubt that was why he had not married the famish-cheeked girl, why he had not gone to his friend the Scholarly Attorney and told him, "I love your wife," or why, after the husband had learned the truth, as he must have done to make him walk out of the house and away to all the years in the slum garrets, he had not then married her. He still had his own wife then, to whom, because she was an invalid, he must have felt bound with a kind of twisted honor. Then my mother had married again. There must have been bitterness and dire quarrels all along mixed with the stolen satisfactions and ardors. Then the invalid had died. Why hadn't they married then? Perhaps my mother wouldn't then, to punish him for his own earlier refusals. Or perhaps their life was by this time set into a pattern they couldn't break. Anyway, he had married the woman from Savannah, the woman who hadn't brought him anything, neither money nor happiness, but who had, after a certain time, died. Why hadn't they married then?

I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we had made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.

As I say, I dismissed the question, and dismissed the answer I had tried to give to it, and simply held the lax hand between my own, and listened to the heavy breathing from the sunken face, and thought how in the scream which had snatched me from sleep that afternoon there had been the bright, beautiful, silver purity of feeling. It had been, I decided, the true cry of the buried soul which had managed, for one instant after all the years, to utter itself again. Well, she had loved Monty Irwin, I supposed. I had thought that she had never loved anybody. So now, as I held the hand, I felt not only pity for her but something like love, too, because she had loved somebody.

After a while the nurse came and released me from the room. Then Mrs. Daniell, who was a neighbor of Judge Irwin, came by to see my mother. It had been her telephone call which brought the news to my mother. Mrs. Daniell had heard the shot in the afternoon but had thought nothing about it until the colored boy at the Irwin place ran out into the yard and began yelling. She had gone back into the house with the boy, and had seen the Judge sitting in one of the big leather chairs in his library with the pistol on his knee, his head canted over one shoulder, and the blood spreading out over the left side of the white coat. She had plenty to tell, and she was working down the Row in a systematic fashion. She told me her story, pried unsuccessfully into my visit there of the afternoon and into my mother's indisposition (she had, of course, heard the scream on the telephone), and then took her leave without much to add to her basic narrative at the next port of call.

The Young Executive came in about seven o'clock. He already knew about the death of Judge Irwin, but I had to tell him about my mother. I made it damned plain and without trimmings that he was to stay out of her room. Then he and I went out on the side gallery and had a silent drink together. I didn't mind his presence more than a shadow.

Two days later Judge Irwin was buried in the churchyard under the ghostly, moss-garlanded oaks. Earlier, in his house, I had filed past the coffin with everybody else and had looked down at the dead face. The hawk nose seemed to be paper thin and almost transparent. The usual strong color of the flesh was gone and on the cheeks there was only the coy tint of the mortician's art. But the coarse rufous hair, thinner than ever, seemed to stand up electrically and individually from the high-domed skull. The people filed past, looked down, murmured to each other, and went to stand at the end of the drawing room near the potted palms imported for the occasion. Thus the fact of his death was absorbed effortlessly into the life of the community, like a single tiny drop of stain dropped into a glass of clear water. it would spread outward and outward from the point of vindictive concentration, raveling and thinning away, drawing away the central fact of the stain until nothing at all was visible.

I stood then in the churchyard, while the process was being completed, and the earth, a mixture of sand and the black surface humus, was being shoveled into the hole where Judge Irwin lay. I thought how he had forgotten the name of Mortimer L. Littlepaugh, had forgotten that he had ever existed, but how Mortimer had never forgotten him. Mortimer had been dead more than a score of years but he had never forgotten Judge Irwin. Remembering the letter in his sister's trunk, he had worn his fleshless grin and soundless chuckle and waited. Judge Irwin had killed Mortimer L. Littlepaugh. But Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin in the end. Or had it been Mortimer? Perhaps I had done it. That was one way of looking at it. I turned that thought over and speculated upon my responsibility. It would be quite possible to say that I had none, no more than Mortimer had. Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had killed him, and I had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had created me, and looking at matters in that light one could say that Mortimer and I were merely the twin instruments of Judge Irwin's protracted and ineluctable self-destruction. For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.

They filled up the hole and rounded off a neat mound on which they placed a carpet of artificial grass, savagely green, in the churchyard where, under the dense shade of moss and boughs and under the mat of trodden leaves, no natural grass ever sprang. Then following the decorous crowd, I left the dead man under that green grass of the mortician's fancy which spared all tender sensibilities the sight of raw earth and proclaimed that nothing whatsoever had happened and veiled, as it were, all significance of life and death.

So I left my father, and walked down the Row. I had by this time grown accustomed to think of him as my father. But this meant that I had disaccustomed myself o thinking of the man who had been the Scholarly Attorney as my father. There was a kind of relief in knowing that that man was not my father. I had always felt some curse of his weakness upon me, or what I had felt to be that. He had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man had taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and all he had done was to walk away, leaving her in possession of everything he owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums and lie there like a wounded animal and let his intellect bleed away into pious drivel and his strength bleed away into weakness. And he had been good. But his goodness had told me nothing except that I could not live by it. My new father, however, had not been good. He had cuckolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken a bribe, driven a man, though unwittingly, to death. But he had done good. He had been a just judge. And he had carried his head high. That last afternoon of his life he had done that. He hadn't said, "Look here, Jack, you can't do it–you can't–you see, you see–I am your father."

Well, I had swapped the good, weak father for the evil, strong one. I didn't feel bad about it. I felt sorry for the Judge as I walked down the Row by the sea, but as far as I myself was concerned I didn't feel dissatisfied with the swap. Then I thought of the other old man leaning over the half-wit acrobat in the grubby room and holding out the bit of chocolate to the tear-stained face, and I thought of the child on the rug before the fire and the stocky black-coated man leaning to him and saying, "Here, Son, just one bite before supper." Then I wasn't so sure what I felt.

So I quit trying to decide. There was no use trying to probe my feelings about them, for I had lost both of them. Most people lose one father, but I was peculiarly situated, I had lost two at the same instant. I had dug up the truth and the truth always kills the father, the good and weak one or the bad and strong one, and you are left alone with yourself and the truth, and can never ask Dad, who didn't know anyway and who is deader than mackerel.

The next day, after I was back in town, I got a call from the Landing. It was a Mr. Pettus, who, it turned out, was the Judge's executor. According to what he said, I was, except for a few minor bequests to servants, the sole heir. I was the sole heir to the estate which Judge Irwin had saved, years before, by his single act of dishonesty, the act for which I, as the blameless instrument of justice, had put the pistol to his heart.

The whole arrangement seemed so crazy and so logical that after I had hung up the phone I burst out laughing and could scarcely stop. Before I stopped, as a matter of fact, I found that I was not laughing at all but was weeping and was saying over and over again, "The poor old bugger, the poor old bugger." It was like the ice breaking up after a long winter. And the winter had been long.