All the King's Men

by Robert Penn Warren

  I have not seen the town. I had never even set foot inside the State of Arkansas. But I have seen the town in my head. And standing on the steps of the commissary is a girl with yellow hair hanging in two heavy braids and with large blue eyes and with the hint of a delicate, famished hollow in each cheek. Let us say that she is wearing a lettuce-green gingham dress, for lettuce-green is nice, fresh color for a blond girl to be wearing as she stands in the morning sunlight on the commissary steps and listens to the saws scream and watches a stocky man in a dark suit come picking his way soberly through the red mud left by the last big spring rain.

  The girl is standing on the commissary steps because her father clerks in the commissary for the company. That is what I know about her father.

  The man in the dark suit stays in the town for two months transacting his legal business. In the evening, toward sunset, he and the girl walk down the street of the town, now dusty, and move out beyond the houses, where the stumps are. I can see them standing in the middle of the ruined land, against the background of the brass-and-blood-colored summer sunset of Arkansas. I cannot make out what they say to each other.

  When the man has finished his business and leaves the town, he takes the girl with him. He is a kind, innocent, shy man, and as he sits beside the girl on the red plush of the train seat, he holds her hand in his, stiffly and carefully as though he might drop and break something valuable.

  He puts her in a big white house, which his grandfather had built. In front of it is the sea. That is new to her. Everyday she spends a great deal of time looking at it. Sometimes she goes down to the beach and stands there, alone, looking out at the lift of the horizon.

  I know that that is true, the business of looking at the sea, for my mother once, years later when I was a big boy, said to me, “When I first came here I used to stand down at the gate and just look out over the water. I spent hours doing it, and didn’t know why. But it wore off. It wore off a long time before you were born, Son.”

  The Scholarly Attorney went to Arkansas and the girl was on the steps of the commissary, and that is why I was in the car, in the rain, at night.

  I entered the lobby of my hotel just about midnight. The clerk saw me enter, beckoned to me, and gave me a number to call. “They been giving the operator prostration,” he said. I didn’t recognize the number. “Said ask for a party named Miss Burke,” the clerk added.

  So I didn’t bother to go upstairs before calling, but stepped into one of the lobby booths. “Markheim Hotel,” the crisp voice answered, and I asked for Miss Burke, and there was Sadie’s voice saying, “Well, by God, it’s time you got here. I called Burden’s Landing God knows when and they said you’d left. What did you do, walk?”

  “I’m not Sugar-Boy,” I said.

  “Well, get on over here. Suite 905. Hell has popped.”

  I hung the receiver up very deliberately, walked over to the desk and asked the clerk to give my bag to a bellhop, got a drink out of the lobby cooler, bought a couple of packs of cigarettes from the sleepy sister at the lobby stand, opened a package and lighted myself one, and stood there to take a long drag and look at the blank lobby, as though there weren’t any place in the world where I had to go.

  But there was such a place. And I went there. Quick, once I started.

  Sadie was sitting in the outside room of Suite 905, over by the telephone stand, with a tray full of cigarette butts in front of her and a coronal of smoke revolving slowly about hr head of hacked-off black hair.

  “Well,” she said in the tone of the matron of a home for wayward girls from inside the smoke screen, but I didn’t answer. I walked straight over to her, past the form of Sugar-Boy, who snored in a chair, and grabbed a handful of that wild black Irish hair to steady her and kissed her smack on the forehead before she could God-damn me.

  Which she did.

  “You have no idea why I did that,” I said.

  “I don’t care, just so it isn’t a habit.”

  “It was nothing personal,” I said. “It was just because your name is not Dumonde.”

  “Your name is going to be mud if you don’t get on in here,” she said, and twitched her head in the direction of a door.

  “Maybe I’ll resign,” I said in my whimsey, then for a split second, with a surprising flash in my head like the flash of a photographer’s bulb, I thought maybe I would.

  Sadie was just about to say something, when the telephone rang and she sprang at it as though she’d strangle it with her bare hands and snatched up the receiver. As I walked toward the inner door, I heard her saying, “So you got him. All right, get him to town here…. To hell with his wife. Tell him he’ll be sicker’n she is if he don’t come…. Yeah, tell him–”

  Then I knocked on the inner door, heard a voice, and went in.

  I saw the Boss in shirt sleeves, cocked back in an easy chair with his sock-feet propped on a straight chair in front of him, and his tie askew, and his eyes bugging out and a forefinger out in the air in front of him as tough it were the stock of a bull whip. Then I saw what the snapper of the bull whip would have been flicking the flies off of if that forefinger of the Boss had been the stock of a bull whip: it was Mr. Byram B. White, State Auditor, and his long bony paraffin-colored face was oozing a few painful drops of moisture and his eyes reached out and grabbed me like the last hope.

  I took in the fact that I was intruding.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and started to back out of the door.

  “Shut the door and sit down,” the Boss said, and his voice moved right on without any punctuation to something it had been saying before my entrance, and the forefinger snapped, “–and you can just damned well remember you aren’t supposed to get rich. A fellow like you, fifty years old and gut-shot and teeth gone and never had a dime, if God-Almighty had never intended you to be rich he’d done it long back. Look at yourself, damn it! You to figure you’re supposed to be rich, it is plain blasphemy. Look at yourself. Ain’t it a fact?” And the forefinger leveled at Mr. Byram B. White.

  But Mr. White didn’t answer. He just stood there in his unhappiness and looked at the finger.

  “God damn it, has the cat got your tongue?” the Boss demanded. “Can’t you answer a civil question?”

  “Yes,” Mr. White managed with gray lips that scarcely moved.

  “Speak up, don’t mumble, say, ‘It’s a fact, it’s blasphemous fact,’ ” the Boss insisted, still pointing the finger.

  Mr. White’s lips went grayer, and the voice was less than loud and clear, but he said it. Every word.

  “All right, that’s better,” the Boss said. “Now you know what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to stay pore and take orders. I don’t care about your chastity, which from the looks of you you don’t have any trouble keeping plenty of, but I mean it’s poverty and obedience and don’t you forget it. Especially the last. There’ll be a little something coming to you now and then in the way of sweetening, but Duffy’ll tend to that. Don’t you go setting up on your own any more. There just aren’t going to be any one-man bonanzas. You got that? Speak up!”

  “Yes,” Mr. White said.

  “Louder” And say, ‘I got that.’ “

  He said it. Louder.

  “All right,” the Boss said, “I’m going to stop this impeachment business for you. But don’t go and get the notion it’s because I love you. It’s just because those fellows can’t get the idea they can just up and knock off somebody. Are my motives clear?”

  “Yes,” Mr. White said.

  “All right, then sit down over there at the desk.” And the Boss pointed at the little desk with the pen tray and telephone. “Get a sheet of plain paper out of the drawer and take your pen in hand.” He waited until Mr. White had glided spectrally across the room and settled himself at the desk, making himself remarkably small, like the genie getting ready to go back into the bottle, drawing himself into hunch as though he wanted to assume the prenatal position and be little and warm and safe
in the dark. But the Boss was saying, “Now write what I say.” Then he began to dictate: “Dear Governor Stark,–because of ill health–which renders it difficult for me to attend consciously–” The Boss interrupted himself, saying, “Be sure you put that consciously_ in now, you wouldn’t want to leave that out,” and then continued in the business voice–”to the duties of my position as Auditor–I wish to offer my resignation–to take effect as soon after the above date–as you can relieve me.” He eyed the hunched figure, and added, “Respectfully yours.”

  There was a silence, and the pen scratched across the paper, then stopped. But Mr. White’s tall, bald, narrow head remained bent over close to the paper, as though he were nearsighted, or praying, or had lost whatever it is in the back of a neck that keeps a head up straight.

  The Boss studied the back of the bent head. Then he demanded, “Did you sign it?”

  “No,” the voice said.

  “Well, God damn it, sign!” The when the pen had again stopped scratching across the paper, “Don’t put any date on it. I can fill that in when I want.”

  Mr. White’s head did not lift. From where I sat I could see that his hand still held the pen staff, the point still touching the paper at the end of the last letter of his name.

  “Bring it here,” the Boss said.

  Mr. White rose and turned, and I looked at his still bent-over face to see what I could see. His eyes didn’t have any appeal in them now as he swung them past me. They didn’t have anything in them. They were as numb and expressionless as a brace of gray oysters on the half shell.

  He held out the sheet to the Boss, who read it, folded it, tossed it over to the foot of the bed near which he sat. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll fill in the date when I need to. If I need to. It all depends on you. But you know, Byram–why I didn’t get one of those undated resignations from you from the start I don’t know. I got a stack of ‘em. But I just misjudged you. I just took one look at you, and said, ‘Shucks, there ain’t any harm in the old bugger.’ I figured you were so beat down you’d know the good Lord never meant for you to be rich. I figured you never would try to pull any shines. Shucks, I figured you didn’t have any more initiative than a wet washrag dropped on the bathroom floor in a rooming house for old maids. I was wrong, Byram, I am free to confess. Fifty years old and all that time just waiting your one big chance. Waiting for your ship to come in. Saving up one little twitch and try like a one-nut for his wedding night. Waiting for the big chance, and that was it, and everything was going to be different. But–” and he whipped the forefinger at Mr. White again–”you were wrong, Byram. This was not your chance. And there never will be one. Not for the likes of you. Now get out!”

  Mr. White got out. One second he was there, and the next second he wasn’t there, and there had been scarcely a sound for his passing. There was just the empty space which had been occupied by the empty space which went by the name of Mr. Byram B. White.

  “Well,” I said to the Boss, “you gave yourself a good time.”

  “Damn it,” he said, “it’s just something in their eyes makes you do it. This fellow now, he’d lick spit, and you can see that, and it makes you do it.”

  “Yeah, I said, “it looks like he’s a long worm with no turning, all right.”

  “I gave him every chance,” the Boss said glumly. “Every chance. He didn’t have to say what I told him to say. He didn’t have to listen to me. He could have just walked out of the door and kept on walking. He could have put a date on that resignation and handed it to me. He could have done a dozen of things. But did he? Hell, no. Not Byram, and he just stands there and his eyes blink right quick like a dog’s do when he leans up against your leg before you hit him, and, by God, you have the feeling if you don’t do it you won’t be doing God’s will. You do it because you are helping Byram fulfill his nature.

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” I said, “but what’s all the shouting about?”

  “Didn’t you read the paper?”

  “No, I was on vacation.”

  “And Sadie didn’t tell you?”

  “Just got here,” I said.

  “Well, Byram rigged him up a nice little scheme to get rich. Got himself a tie-in with a realty outfit and fixed things up with Hamill in the Tax Lands Bureau. Pretty, only they wanted it all to themselves and somebody got sore at not being cut in, and squawked to the MacMurfee boys in the Legislature. And if I get my hands on who it was–”

  “Was what?”

  “Squawked to the MacMurfee outfit. Ought to taken it up with Duffy. Everybody knows he’s supposed to handle complaints. And now we got this impeachment business.”

  “Of who?”

  “Byram.”

  “What’s happened to Hamill?”

  “He’s moved to Cuba. You know, better climate. And, from reports, he moved fast. Duffy went around this morning, and Hamill caught a train. But we got to handle this impeachment.”

  “I don’t think they could put it through.”

  “They ain’t even going to try. You let a thing like that get started and no telling what’ll happen. The time to stomp ‘em is now. I’ve got boys out picking up soreheads and wobblies and getting ‘em to town. Sadie’s been on the phone all day taking the news. Some of the birds are hiding out, for the word must have got round by this time, but the boys are running ‘em down. Brought in three this afternoon, and we gave ‘em what it took. But we had something ready on them all. You ought to’ve seen Jeff Hopkins’s face when he found out I knew about his pappy selling likker out of that little one-horse drugstore he’s got over in Talmadge and then forging prescriptions for the record. Or Martten’s when he found out I knew how the bank over in Okaloosa holds a mortgage on his place falling due in about five weeks. Well–” and he wriggled his toes comfortably inside of the socks–”I quieted their nerves. It’s the old tonic, but still soothes.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Get over to Harmonville tomorrow and see if you can beat some sense into Sim Harmon’s head.”

  “That all?”

  Before we could answer Sadie popped her head in the door, and said the boys had brought in Witherspoon, who was a representative from the north tip of the state.

  “Put him in the other room,” the Boss said, “and let him stew.” Then, as Sadie popped out again, he turned to me and answered my question. “All, except get me together all you have on Al Coyle before you leave town. The boys are trying to run him down and I want to be heeled when they book him.”

  “O. K.,” I said, and stood up.

  He looked at me as tough he were about to say something up to it, and I stood in front of my chair, waiting. But Sadie stuck her head in. “Mr. Miller would like to see you,” she said to the Boss, and didn’t give the impression of glad tidings.

  “Send him in,” the Boss ordered, and I could tell that, no matter what he had had on his mind to say to me a second before, he had something else on it now. He had Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, Attorney General, on his mind.

  “He won’t like it,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “he won’t.”

  And then in the doorway stood the tall, lean, somewhat stooped man, with swarthy face and unkempt dark hair and sad eyes under black brows, and with a Phi Beta Kappa key slung across his untidy blue serge. He stood there for a second, blinking the sad eyes, as though he had come out of darkness into a sudden light, or had stumbled into the wrong room. He looked like the wrong thing to be coming through that door, all right.

  The Boss had stood up and padded across in his sock-feet, holding out his hand, saying, “Hello, Hugh.”

  Hugh Miller shook hands, and stepped into the room, and I started to edge out the door. Then I caught the Boss’s eye, and he nodded, quick, toward my chair. So I shook hands with Hugh Miller, too, and sat back down.

  “Have a seat,” the Boss said to Hugh Miller.

  “No
, thanks, Willie,” Hugh Miller replied in his slow solemn way. “But you sit down, Willie.”

  The Boss dropped back into his chair, cocked his feet up again, and demanded, “What’s on your mind?”

  “I reckon you know,” Hugh Miller said.

  “I reckon I do,” the Boss said.

  “You are saving White’s hide, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t give a damn about White’s hide,” the Boss said. “I’m saving something else.”

  “He’s guilty.”

  “As hell,” the Boss agreed cheerfully. “If the category of guilt and innocence can be said to have any relevance to something like Byram B. White.”

  “He’s guilty,” Hugh Miller said.

  “My God, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell, Byram is just something you use, and he’ll sure be useful from now on.”

  “That sounds fine, Willie, but it just boils down to the fact you’re saving White’s hide.”

  “White’s hide be damned,” the Boss said, “I’, saving something else. You let that gang of MacMurfee’s boys in the Legislature get the notion they can pull something like this and there’s no telling where they’d stop. Do you think they like anything that’s been done? The extraction tax? Raising the royalty rate on state land? The income tax? The highway program? The Public Health Bill?”

  “No, they don’t,” Hugh Miller admitted. “Or rather, the people behind MacMurfee don’t like it.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yes,” Hugh Miller said, “I like it_. But I can’t say I like some of the stuff around it.”