All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [173]
“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 grown-up 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