All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [146]
As I turned away, there was the wild burst of music from up in the building, louder than the baby’s cry, shaking the mortar out of the old brick work. It was Adam’s piano.
I caught the train for Memphis, stayed three days, had my séance with Miss Littlepaugh, and returned. With some photostats and an affidavit in my brief case.
Upon my return I found the call in my box. It was Anne’s number, then Anne’s voice on the wire, and, as always, the little leap and plunk in my heart like a frog jumping into a lily pool. With the ripples spreading round.
It was her voice saying she had to see me. I told her that was easy, she could see me all the rest of her life. But she ignored that little joke, as no doubt it deserved, and said for me to meet her right away. “At the Crescent Cove,” I suggested, and she agreed. The Crescent Cove was Slade’s place.
I was there first, and had a drink with Slade himself in the midst of soft lights and sweet music and the gleam of chromium, and looked at Slade’s yellow-ivory bullet head and expensive tailoring and at the reigning blond at the cash register, and remembered wistfully the morning long ago in Prohibition, when in the back room of his fly-bitten speakeasy Slade, with hair on his head than and not a dime in his pocket, had refused to fall in with Duffy’s attempt to force beer on Cousin Willie from the country, who was, it turned out, Willie Stark, and who wanted orange pop. That had fixed Slade for ever. So now I had my drink, and looking at him, marveled how little is required for a man to be lost or saved.
And I looked up into the mirror of the bar and saw Anne Stanton come in the door. Or rather, her image come through the image of the door. For the moment I did not turn to face the reality. Instead, I looked at the image which hung there in the glass like a recollection caught in the ice of the mind–you have seen, in winter in the clear ice of a frozen stream, some clean bright gold and red leaf embedded to make you think suddenly of the time when all the bright gold and red leaves had been on the trees like a party and the sunshine had poured down over them as though it would never stop. But it wasn’t a recollection, it was Anne Stanton herself, who stood there in the cool room of the looking glass, above the bar barricade of bright bottles and siphons across some distance of blue carpet, a girl–well, not exactly a girl any more, a young woman about five-feet-four with the trimmest pair of nervous ankles and smallish hips which, however, looked as round as though they had been turned on a lathe, and a waist just the width to make you wonder if you could span it with your hand, and all of this done up in a swatch of gray flannel which pretended to a severe mannish cut but actually did nothing but scream for attention to some very unmannish arrangements within.
She was standing there, not quite ready to start patting the blue carpet with an impatient toe, turning her smooth, cool face (under a light-blue felt hat) slowly from one side to the other to survey the room. I caught the flash of blue in her eyes in the mirror. When she was just behind me, she said, “Jack.”
I didn’t look round. “Slade,” I said, “this strange woman keeps following me round, and I thought you ran a respectable place. What the hell are you going to do about it?”
Slade had swung round to look at the strange woman, whose face was all at once chalk-white and whose eyes were uttering sparks like a couple of arc lights. “Lady,” Slade said, “now look here, lady–”
Then the lady suddenly overcame the paralysis which had frozen her tongue and the blood hit her cheeks. “Jack Burden!” she said, “if you don’t–”
“She knows your name,” Slade said.
I turned around to face the reality which was not something caught in the ice of the mind but was something now flushed, feline, lethal, and electric and about to blow a fuse. “Well, I declare,” I said, “if it isn’t my fiancée! Say, Slade, I want you to meet Anne Stanton. We’re going to get married.”
“Gee,” Slade said, his pan as dead as something in the sink next morning,