All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [162]
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” she affirmed, and leaned over the desk top toward me, shaking her finger at me, “and you sit there and smile that way and think you are so high-toned. If you were a man you’d get up and go in there and knock hell out of him. I thought she was yours. Or maybe he’s fixed you up, too. Maybe he’s fixed you up like he fixed up that doctor.” She leaned farther toward me. “Maybe he’s making you director of a hospital. Yeah, what’s he making you director of?”
Under the flood of words and the savage finger and the snapping eyes, I jerked myself forward, dropped my feet to the floor with a crash, and lunged up to stand before her, while the blood pounded in my head to make me dizzy, as it does when you rise suddenly, and little red flecks danced before me and the words kept on. Then the words stopped on her question.
“Are you saying,” I began firmly, “that–that–” I had been about to pronounce the name of Anne Stanton, for the name itself had been quite clearly in my mind, as though spelled out on a billboard, but all at once the name stuck in my throat and with surprise I discovered that I could not say it. So I continued, “–that she–she–”
But Sadie Burke was looking straight into my mind–at least, I had that feeling–and quick as a boxer she jabbed that name at me, “Yeah, she, she, that Stanton girl, Anne Stanton!”
I looked at Sadie in the face for a moment and felt so sorry for her I could cry. That was what surprised me. I felt so sorry for Sadie. Then I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t even feel sorry for myself. I felt as wooden as a wooden Indian, and I remember being surprised to discovered that my legs worked perfectly even if they were wooden, and were walking directly toward the hatrack, where my right arm, even if it was wooden, reached out to pick up the old Panama which hung there and put it on my head, and my legs then walked straight out the door and across the long reception room over the carpet which was deep and soft as the turf of a shaven lawn in spring and walked on out the door across the ringing marble slabs.
And out into a world which seemed bigger than it had ever seemed before. It seemed forever down the length of white, sun-glittering concrete which curled and swooped among the bronze statues and brilliant flower beds shaped like stars and crescents, and forever across the green lawn to the great swollen bulbs of green which were the trees, and forever up into the sky, where the sun poured down billows and surges of heat like crystalline lava to engulf you, for the last breath of spring was gone now and gone for good, the fine, big-breasted girl popping the calico, with the face like peaches and cream and the tiny, dewy drop of perspiration at the edge of the tow head of hair, she was gone for good, too, and everything from now on out was bone and gristle and the hag face like a rusty brush hook, and green scum on the shrunk pool around which the exposed earth cracks and scales like a gray scab.
It was a source of perpetual surprise to find how well the legs worked carrying me down the white concrete of the drive, and how even if it was forever down the drive and past the trees I was finally past them and moving down the street as though sustained in a runnel of crystalline lava. I looked with the greatest curiosity at the faces which I saw but found nothing beautiful or remarkable in then and was not assured of their reality. For it takes the greatest effort to believe in their reality and to believe in their reality you must believe in your own, but to believe in your own you must believe in theirs, but to believe in theirs you must believe in your own–one-two, one-two, one-two, like feet marching. But if you have no feet to march with. Or if they are wooden. But I looked down at them and they were marching, one-two, one-two.
They march a long time. But at the end of forever they brought me to a door. Then the door opened, and there, with the cool, white-shadowy room behind her, wearing a pale-blue, cool-crisp linen dress, her bare white long small arms hanging straight down against the pale blue, was Anne Stanton. I knew that it was Anne Stanton, though I had not looked into her face. I had looked into the other faces