All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [159]
And the crowd roared.
He brought both hand slowly down, for silence.
Then said, “Your will is my strength.”
And after a moment of silence said, “Your need is my justice.”
Then, “That is all.”
He turned and walked slowly back into the tall doorway of the Capitol, into the darkness there, and disappeared. The roar was swelling and heaving in the air now, louder than ever, and I felt it inside of me, too, swelling like blood and victory. I stared into the darkness of the great doorway of the Capitol, where he had gone, while the roar kept on.
Anne Stanton was tugging at my arm. She asked me, “Does he mean that, Jack?”
“Hell,” I said, and heard the savage tone in my own voice, “hell, how the hell do I know?”
Adam Stanton’s lips curled and he said, “Justice! He used that word.”
And suddenly, for the flicker of an instant, I hated Adam Stanton.
I told them I had to go, which was true, and worked my way around through the edge of the crowd, to the police cordon. Then I went around to the back of the Capitol, where I joined the Boss.
Late that night, back at the Mansion, after he had thrown Tiny and his rabble out of the study, I asked him the question. I asked, “Did you mean what you said?”
Propped back on the big leather couch, he stared at me, and demanded, “What?”
“What you said,” I replied, “tonight. You said your strength was their will. You said your justice was their need. All of that.”
He kept on staring ay me, his eyes bulging, his stare grappling and probing into me.
“You said that,” I said.
“God damn it,” he exclaimed, violently, still staring at me, “God damn it–” he clenched his right fist and struck himself twice on the chest–“God damn it, there’s something inside you–there’s something inside–”
He left the words hanging there. He turned his eyes from me and stared moodily into the fire. I didn’t press my question
Well, that was how it had been when I asked him a question, a long time back. Now I had a new question to ask him: If he believed that you had to make the good out of the bad because there wasn’t anything else to make it out of, why did he stir up such a fuss about keeping Tiny’s hands off the Willie Stark Hospital?
There was another little question. One I would have to ask Anne Stanton. It had come to me that night down on the pier at the mist-streaked river when Anne said that she had gone up to Adam Stanton’s apartment “to talk to him about it”–about the offer of the directorship of the Willie Stark Hospital. She had said that to me, and at the moment, it had disturbed like an itch that comes when your hands are full and you can’t scratch. I hadn’t, in the press of the moment, defined what was disturbing, what was the question. I had simply pushed the whole pot to the back of the stove and left it to simmer. And there it simmered for weeks. But one day, all at once, it boiled over and I knew what the question was: How had Anne Stanton Known about the hospital offer?
One thing was a cinch. I hadn’t told her.
Perhaps Adam had told her, and then she had gone up there “to talk to him about it.” So I went to see Adam, who was furiously deep in work, his usual practice and teaching, and in addition, the work on the hospital plans, who hadn’t been able, he said, to touch the piano in almost a month, whose eyes fixed on me glacially out of a face now thin from sleepless ness, and who treated me with a courtesy too chromium-plated to be given to the friend of your youth. It took some doing, on my part, in the face of that courtesy, to get my nerve up to ask him the question. But I finally asked it. I said, “Adam, that first time Anne came up to talk to you about–about the job–you know, the hospital–had you told–”
And he said, with a voice like a scalpel, “I don’t want to discuss it.”
But I had to know. So I said, “Had you told her about the proposition?”
“No,” he said, “and I said I didn’t want to discuss it.”
“O.K.,” I heard myself saying, in a flat voice which wasn’t quite my own. “O.K.”
He looked sharply at me, then rose from his chair and took a step toward me.