All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [225]
Then as I stood there, the thought changed. But the sneer remained flickering along the edge of the mind, like a little flame nibbling at the edge of a piece of damp paper. Only now it was for myself. What right had I to sneer at them, I demanded. I had had all those good times too. If I wasn’t having one tonight it wasn’t because I had passed beyond it into a stage of beatitude. Perhaps it was something had passed out of me. Virtue by defect. Abstinence by nausea. When they give you the cure, they put something in your likker to make you puke, and after they have puked you enough you begin to take a distaste to your likker. You are like Pavlov’s dog whose saliva starts every time he hears the bell. Only with you the reflex works so that every time you catch a whiff of likker or even think of it, you stomach turns upside down. Somebody must have slipped the stuff into my good times, for now I just didn’t want any more good time. Not now, anyway. But I could pinch out the sneer that flickered along the edge of my mind. I didn’t have to be proud because a good time wouldn’t stay on my stomach.
So I would go into my office and, after sitting there a couple of minutes in the dusk, would flick on the light and get out the tax figures and work on them. I though of the figures with a sense of cleansing and relief.
But as I thought of the figures and resumed my passage across the big room to the door of my office, I heard, or thought I heard, a noise from one of the offices on the other side. I looked over there. There wasn’t any light showing under either of the doors. Then I heard the noise again. It was a perfectly real noise. Nobody–certainly nobody without a light–was supposed to be in there. So I went across the room, my feet noiseless on the thick carpet, and pushed open the door.
It was Sadie Burke. She sat in the chair before her desk (it must have been t creaknof t chair I had heard), her arms were laid on the desk, the forearms bent together, and I knew that she had, just that instant, raised her head from them. Not that Sadie had been crying. But she had been sitting in the dusk, in the abandoned office, on Saturday evening when everybody else was out having a hell of a good time, with her head laid on her arms on the desk.
“Hello, Sadie,” I said.
She eyed me for a moment. Her back was toward what little light seeped in from the window, on which the Venetian blind was closed, and so I could not make out the expression of her face, just the gleam of the eyes. Then she demanded, “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Well, you needn’t wait.”
I went across to a chair and sat down and looked at her.
“You heard what I said,” she commented.
“I heard it.”
“Well, you’ll hear it again: you needn’t wait.”
“I find it quite restful here,” I replied, making no motion to rise. “Because, Sadie, we’ve got so much in common. You and me.”
“I hope you don’t mean that as a compliment,” she said.
“No, just a scientific observation.”
“Well, it don’t make you any Einstein.”
“You mean because it is not true that we have a lot in common or because it is so obviously true that doesn’t take Einstein’s brain to figure it out?”
“I mean I don’t give a damn,” she said sourly. And added, “And I don’t give a damn about having you in here either.”
I stayed in the chair and studied her. “It’s Saturday night,” I said. “Why aren’t you out painting the town?”
“To hell with this town.” She fished a cigarette out of the desk and lighted it. The flare of the match jerked the face out of the shadow. She whipped the match flame out with a snapping motion of her arm, then spewed the first gulp of smoke out over the full, curled-down lower lip. That done, she looked at me, and said, “And to hell with you.” She swept her damning gaze around the office as though it were full of forms and faces, and spewed the gray smoke out of her lungs and said, “And to hell with all of them. To hell with this place.”
Her eyes came back to rest on me, and she said, “I’m going to get out of here.”
“Here?” I questioned
“This whole place,” she affirmed, and swung her arm wide with the cigarette tip glowing with the swiftness of the motion,