All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [150]
“To be perfectly brutal,” I said, “it is because he is Adam Stanton, the son of Governor Stanton and grandson of Judge Peyton Stanton, and the great-grandson of General Morgan Stanton, and he has lived all his life in the idea that there was a time a long time back when everything was run by high-minded, handsome men wearing knee breeches and silver buckles or Continental blue or frock coats, or even buckskin and coonskin caps, as the case may be–for Adam Stanton isn’t any snob–who sat around a table and candidly debated the good of the public thing. It is because he is a romantic, and he has a picture of the world in his head, and when the world doesn’t conform in any respect to the picture, he wants to throw the world away. Even if that means throwing out the baby with the bath. Which,” I added, “it always does mean.”
That held her for a moment. She turned her face from me and looked out over the misty river again. The she murmured, “He ought to take it.”
“Well,” I said, “if you want him to do it, you’ve got to change the picture of the world inside his head. If I know Adam Stanton.” And I did know Adam Stanton, and at that moment I could see his face with the skin drawn back tight over the bone and the strong mouth like the neatly healed wound and the deep-set blue eyes blazing like pale ice.
She hadn’t answered me.
“That’s the only way,” I said, “and you might as well settle for that.”
“He ought to do it,” she whispered, looking over the river.
“How much do you want him to?”
She swung to me, and I peered into her face. Then she said, “As much as I want anything.”
“You mean that?” I said.
“I mean it. He’s got to. To save himself.” She grabbed my arm again. “For himself. As much as for everybody else. For himself.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure,” she said, fiercely.
“I mean sure that you want him to do it? More than anything?”
“Yes,” she said.
I studies her face. It was a beautiful face–or if not beautiful, better than beautiful, a tense, smooth, spare-modeled, finished face, and it was chalk-white in the shadow and in the eyes were dark gleams. I studied her face, and for a moment just did that and let all the questions just slide away, like something dropped into the mist and water below us to slide away in the oily silence of the current.
“Yes,” she repeated, whispering.
But I kept on peering into her face, really looking at it for the first time, after all the years, for the close, true look at a thing can only be one snatched outside of time and the questions.
“Yes,” she whispered, and laid her hand on my arm, lightly this time.
And at the touch I came out of what I had been sunk in.
“All right,” I said, shaking myself, “but you don’t know what you are asking for.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Can you make him?”
“I can,” I said.
“Well, why didn’t you–why did you wait–why–”
“I don’t think–” I said slowly–“I don’t think I would have ever done it–at least, not this way–if you, you yourself, hadn’t asked me.”
“How can you do it?” she demanded, and the fingers closed on my arm.
“It is easy,” I said, “I can change the picture of the world he carries around in his head.”
“How?”
“I can give him a history lesson.”
“A history lesson?”
“Yes, I am a student of history, don’t you remember? And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost. But Adam, he is a scientist, and everything is tidy for him, and one molecule of oxygen always behaves the same way when it gets around two molecules of hydrogen, and a thing is always what it is, and so when Adam the romantic makes a picture of the world in his head, it is just like the picture of the world Adam the scientist works with. All tidy. All neat. The molecule of good always behaves the same way. The molecule of bad always behaves the same way. There are