All the King's Men

by Robert Penn Warren

  She was clutching my coat, a hand on each side of my chest, just under the shoulder, crumpling up the seersucker and hanging on, with her head, a little to one side and down, pressed weakly against me, as though she were asking pardon for a piece of misbehavior. She didn’t answer what I said, and when I tried to lift her face up, she pressed it harder against me and clutched the seersucker tighter. So I stood there and ran my hand over her hair and breathed in the clean odor it had.

  Then, after a while which may have been long or short, she disengaged herself from me, and stepped back. “Adam–” she said, “he’s waiting–we’ve got to go.”

  I followed her across the road and into the gateway of the Stanton drive. A few paces up the drive she hesitated for me to come abreast of her. Then she took my hand, and that way, hand in hand, we proceeded toward the gallery where back in the shadow Adam would be sitting.

  Yes, he was sitting there, for I caught the glow of a cigarette, the sudden intensification as the smoker took a deep pull, and then the fading.

  Still holding my hand, tighter now as though executing a decision, she mounted the steps of the gallery, opened the screen with her free hand, and entered, drawing me behind her. We stood there for a moment, hand in hand. Then she said, “Hello, Adam,” and I said, “Hello, Adam.”

  “Hello,” he said.

  We continued to stand there, as though waiting for something. Then she released my hand. “I’m going upstairs,” se announced. “Good night, you all.” And she was gone with the quick, muted patter of her rubber soles across the boards of the gallery floor and down the hall inside.

  I still stood there.

  Till Adam said, “Why the hell don’t you sit down?”

  So I sat down at the other end of the swing from Adam. He tossed a pack of cigarettes my way. I took one, and fumbled in my pockets for a match, but didn’t find one. He leaned toward me, struck a match, and held it for my cigarette. As the flame flared there in front of my face while the cigarette caught, I had the feeling that he had put the light there for a purpose, to spy on my face while his own was back out of the direct rays. I had the crazy impulse to jerk back and wipe my hand across my mouth to see if there was any lipstick there.

  But the cigarette caught, and I drew my head back from the light and said, “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, and that about wound up the conversation for the evening. There was something for us to say. He could ask me the question which I knew was in his mind. Or I could answer it without his asking it. But neither of us said what was to say. I was afraid he would ask me, for with all my saying to myself that he could go to hell, that it wasn’t his business, I had the feeling of guilt as though I had robbed him of something. But at the same time I sat there keyed up and wanting him to ask me, for I wanted to tell somebody that Anne Stanton was wonderful and that I was in love. It was as though the condition of being in love were not completed until I could say to somebody, “Look here,, I’m in love, be damned if I’m not.” At the moment it seemed to require the telling for its fulfillment just as much as it would later require the hot, moist contact of bodies. So I sat there in the swing, in the dark, absorbed with the fact that I was in love, wanting to say it to complete it, and not, for the moment, missing Anne, the object of my love, who had gone upstairs to her room. I was so absorbed at the time with the fact of what had happened to me that I did not even wonder why she had gone upstairs. Later I decided that she had gone because, having serve notice to Adam by standing there before him holding my hand, she wanted to leave him alone with that fact, to let him accustom himself to the new structure of our little crystal, our little world.

  But maybe, I decided later, much later, years later when it didn’t seem that it would ever matter again, she had gone up because she had to be alone, to sit by the window in the unlighted room, looking out on the night, or lying on the bed watching the dark ceiling, to accustom herself to her new self, to see if she could breathe the new air, or sustain herself in the new element or dive and lounge in the new tide of feeling. Maybe she went up there to be alone, absorbed in herself the way a child is absorbed in watching a cocoon gradually part in the dusk to divulge the beautiful moth–the Luna moth again, with its delicate green and silver damp and crumpled but gradually spreading in the dusk, defining itself, slowly fanning the air to make a breeze so slight that you would not be able to fell it on your eyeball were you to lean that close to peer. So maybe she was up in the room trying to discover what her new self was, for when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you’s, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you’s are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on it axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn’t be any difference between the two you’s or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect adjustment.

  Anyway, Anne Stanton, age seventeen, had probably gone upstairs to be alone because she was, all of a sudden, in love. She was in love with a rather tall, somewhat gangly, slightly stooped youth of twenty-one, with a bony horse face, a big almost askew hook of a nose, dark unkempt hair, dark eyes (not burning and deep like the eyes of Cass Mastern, bur frequently vague or veiled, bloodshot in the mornings, brightening only with excitement), big hands that worked and twisted slowly on his lap, plucking at each other, and twisted big feet that were inclined to shamble–a youth not beautiful, not brilliant, not industrious, not good, not kind, not even ambitious, given to excesses and confusions, thrown between melancholy and random violence, between the cold mire and the hot flame, between curiosity and apathy, between humility and self-love, between yesterday and tomorrow. What she has succeeded in creating out of that unpromising lump of clay scooped up from the general earth, nobody was ever to know.

  But in any case, in her loving she was also re-creating herself, and she had gone upstairs to be in the dark and try to learn what that new self was. While downstairs Adam and I sat in the swing on the gallery, not saying a word. That was the evening Adam got counted out for all the other evenings, and out you go, you dirty dishrag, you.

  Everybody else got counted out, too, for even on those evenings when a crowd would get together on the Stanton gallery, or my mother’s, to play a phonograph and dance (with some of the boys–some of them veterans back from France–slipping off to take a drink from a bottle hidden out there in the crotch of a live oak), Anne and I would count them out. For organdie and seersucker are pretty thin materials, and the only person on the world I ever danced decently with was Anne Stanton and the nights were warm, and I wasn’t so much taller than Anne that I could not inhale the full scent of her hair while our music-locked limbs paced out the pattern of our hypnosis and our breathing kept time together, till, after a while, I would pass from an acute awareness of body to a sense of being damned near disembodied, or floating as light as a feather or as light as a big empty-headed balloon held captive to the ground by a single thread, and waiting for a puff of breeze.

  Or we would get into the roadster and drive out of the Landing and pull the cutout and tear along, hell-for-leather, or as much hell-for-leather as was possible on the road and with the mechanism of those days, out beyond the houses between the pines and the tidelands, with her head leaned against my shoulder and her hair puffed with the wind and tendrils whipping against my cheek. She would lean there and laugh out and say, “Oh, Jackie,
Jackie, it’s a wonderful night, it’s a wonderful night, it’s a wonderful night, say it’s a wonderful night, Jackie-boy, say it, say it!” Till I have to say it after her, like a lesson I was learning. Or she would hum or sing a song, one of those off the phonograph–God, what were they then? I don’t remember. And maybe let the humming die off, and be perfectly still, with her eyes closed, until I stopped the car at some place where the breeze off the Gulf was enough to blow the mosquitoes away (On nights when there wasn’t any breeze, you simply didn’t do any stopping.) Sometimes then, when I stopped the car she wouldn’t even open her eyes till I had leaned over to kiss her, and I might have to kiss her enough to stop her breath. Or again, she would wait till just the instant before the kiss, then open her eyes wide, all at once, and say, “Boo!” and laugh.. Then she’d be all knees and sharp elbows and little short laughs and giggles and serpentine evasions and strategy worthy of a jujitsu expert when I tried to capture her for a kiss. It was remarkable then how that little seat of the roadster gave as much room for deployment and maneuver as the classic plains of Flanders and how a creature who could lie in your clutch as lissome as willow and soft as silk and cuddly as a kitten could suddenly develop that appalling number of cunning, needle-point elbows and astute knees. While beyond the elbows and knees and sharp fingers, the eyes gleamed in the moonlight, or starlight, through the hair that had worked down loose, and the parted lips emitted the little bursts of breathless laughter, between the chanted words–”I don’t–love–Jackie-Boy–nobody loves Jackie-Bird–I don’t–love–Jackie-Boy–nobody loves–Jackie-Bird–” Till she would collapse laughing and exhausted into my arms and take her kiss and sigh and whisper, “I love Jackie-Boy,” and rub a finger lightly over my face, and repeat, “I love Jackie-Boy–even with his ugly nose!” Then she would give the nose a sound tweak. And I would fondle that hooked, askew, cartilaginous monstrosity, pretending great pain but proud as Punch of the thing simply because she had put her fingers on it.

  You never could tell whether it was going to be the long kiss or the furious swirl of elbows and giggles. And it didn’t matter much, for it always came to the same thing in the end, for she would lean back with her head on my shoulder and look up at the sky. Between kisses we might not talk at all, or I might quote her poetry–for in those days I used to read some of it and thought I liked it–or we would talk about what we would do after we were married. I had never proposed to her. We simply assumed that we were going to be married and be together always in a world composed of sunlit beaches and moonlit pines by the sea and trips to Europe (where neither of us had ever been) and a house in an oak grove and the leather cushions of a roadster and somewhere a handful of delightful children who remained very vague in my imagination though very vivid in hers, and whose names, in moments when other topics of conversation failed, we would decide on with great debate and solemnity. All of them would have to have Stanton for a middle name. And one of the boys would be named Joel Stanton for the Governor. Of course, the oldest would be named Jack, for me. “Because you are the oldest thing in the world, Jackie-Boy,” Anne would say. “The oldest will be named Jackie for you, because you are the oldest thing in the world, you are older than the ocean, you are older than the sky, you are older than the ground, you are older than the trees, and I always loved you and I always pulled your nose because you are an old, old mess, Jackie-Boy, Jackie-Bird, and I love you.” So she would pull my nose.

  Only once, toward the end of the summer, did she ask me what I was going to do for a living. Lying quietly on my arm, after a long silence, she suddenly said, “Jack, what are you going to do?”

  I didn’t know what the hell she was taking about. So I said, “What am I going to do? I am going to blow in your ear.” And did it.

  “What are you going to do? Do for a living? she asked, again.

  “Going to blow in your ear for a living,” I said.

  She didn’t smile. “I mean it,” she said.

  I didn’t answer for a minute. Then I said, “I’ve been thinking I might study law.”

  She was quiet for a little, then said, “You just thought of that this minute. You just said it.”

  I had just said it. The subject of my future, as a matter of fact, was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn’t care. I would think that I’d get a job, any kind of a job, and do it and collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Monday morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions. But I couldn’t sit there and say to Anne, “Oh, I’ll just get some kind of job.” I had to give the impression of being farsighted and purposeful and competent.

  I had played hell giving that impression.

  She had seen right through me, like a piece of glass, and there wasn’t anything to answer except to say that she was very wrong, that I was indeed going to study law, and what was wrong with studying law, please?

  “You just made it up,” she repeated stubbornly.

  “Hell,” I said, “I won’t let you starve, I’ll give you everything you’ve got. If you’ve got to have a big house and a lot of dresses and parties, well, I’ll–”

  But I didn’t get to finish that.

  “You know perfectly well, Jack Burden,” she interrupted, “I don’t have to have anything like that. You’re just being mean. You’re trying to put me in the wrong. I don’t want anything like that. You know I don’t. You know I love you and I’ll live in a shack and eat red beans if you’ve got to live that way because what you want to do doesn’t make any money. But if you don’t want to do anything–even if you do just sort of get a job and have plenty of money–oh, you know what I mean–you know the way some people are.” She sat up very straight on the seat of the roadster and her eyes, even in nothing but starlight, flashed that fine seventeen-year-old scorn. Then she fixed the gleam on me very steadily and said in a serious way that made her a funny mixture of a really grownup woman and a little girl plat-acting, probably with mother’s loose clip-clopping high-heeled shoes and a feather boa, a serious way that made her both older and younger that she was–she said, “You know I love you, Jack Burden, and I believe in you, Jack Burden, and you are not going to be like those people, Jack Burden.”

  I laughed, it was so funny, and tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t let me and became suddenly all sharp elbows and knees working like a mowing machine and in dead earnest and I was the hay crop. I couldn’t soothe her. I couldn’t even lay a finger on her. She made me take her home, and wouldn’t even kiss me good night.

  That was the last I heard of it, except for one sentence. The next day, when she and I were lying out on the diving float, she said, all of a sudden, after a long sun-baked silence, “You remember last night?”

  I said I did.

  “Well,” she said, “I meant it. I really did.” Then she took her hand out of mine, slipped off the float, and swam away to keep me from making any answer.

  I didn’t hear any more about that business. And didn’t think anything more about it. Anne was just like before, and I fell back into the full flood of the summer, into the full tide of feeling in which we drifted in a kind of breathless ease, like a strong, massive, deep current which didn’t hurry but which had an irresistible weight of water behind it, and over which the days and night passed like flickers of light and shade. It was drifting, all right, but not drifting in any nasty pejorative sense, like a waterlogged old skiff drifting in a horsepond or a cake of soap in the gray water before you pull the plug in the bathtub. No, it was a fine, conscious surrender which was a participation in and a willing of the flood itself, and not a surrender at all but an affirmation and all that, like the surrender of the mystic to God, which isn’t a surrendering to God any more than it is also a creating of God, for if he loves God he has willed the being of God. Well, in my very surrender I willed and mastered that great current in which I drifted, and over which the days and night flickered, and in which I didn’t have to lif a hand to hurry myself, for the current knew its own pace and
own time, and would take me with it.

  I never tried to hurry anything all summer. Not in the porch swing, or in the pine woods, or on the float at night when we swam out, or in the roadster. Everything that happened came to happen as simply and as naturally and as a gradually as a season coming on or a plant unrolling a leaf or a kitten waking up. And there was a kind of luxuriousness in not rushing things, in not driving toward the hot grip and awkward tussle and the leer for the boys back in the dormitory when you got in, a new sensuality in waiting for the massive current to take you where you belonged and would go in the end. She was young–she seemed younger to me then than she did later on looking back, for that summer I was so sure that I was old and jaded–and she was timid and sensitive and shy, but it wasn’t any squealing, squeaking, pullet-squawking, teasing, twitching, oh-that’s-not-nice-and-I-never-let-anybody-do-that-before-oh kind of shyness. Perhaps shyness is the wrong word for it, after all. Certainly it is wrong if back behind that word there is any implication or color of shame or fear or desire to be “nice.” For in one way, she seemed to be detached from her very slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered body, as though it were an elaborate and cunning mechanism in which she and I shared ownership, which had suddenly dropped to us out of the blue, and which, in our ignorance, we had to study with the greatest patience and most reverent attention lest we miss some minute, scholarly detail without knowledge would be wasted. So it was a period of the most delicate discrimination and subtle investigations, with her seriousness mixed with a graceful gaiety (“Oh, Jackie-Boy, oh, Jackie-Bird, it’s a wonderful night, a wonderful night, his eyes are not bad but his nose is a fright”), a gaiety to which the word didn’t mean much but the tune meant everything, a tune which seemed to come from the very air as though it were full of invisible strings and she simply reached out at random in the dark to pluck them with an idle familiar finger. And beyond the serious investigations was a kind of level-eyed affection, as natural and simple as the air you breathe, which sometimes didn’t seem to belong with our hot-lipped and shallow-breathed occupations, which seemed to be something I had always had and not something connected with the new, mysterious body which now fascinated both her and me. She would sit and cup my head in both her hands and press it against her breast and sing, with the words just a whisper, the rhymes she made up as she went along (“Poor Jackie-Bird, he is a pest, but I’ll rock him to sleep in a soft warm nest, and I’ll sing a song to Jackie-Bird, the sweetest song he ever heard, poor Jackie-Bird, poor Jackie-Bird”), and after a while the words would just die away until there was only the little crooning sound, with the whisper now and then, “Poor Jackie-Bird, I’ll never let anything hurt poor Jackie-Bird.” Then after a while I would turn my face a little, toward her body, and kiss it through the light summer cloth and breathe through the cloth, upon it.