All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [229]
“Dr. Stanton said he did, but he wasn’t wreathed in smiles.”
“What are they going to do? Operate?”
“There is another big-shot doctor coming in from Johns Hopkins for a consultation. After he gets here they will flip a nickel and find out what to do.”
“Did he sound like there was a real chance?” Her hand was still clutching my sleeve.
“How do I know?” I was suddenly irritated. I jerked my sleeve out of her grasp.
“If you find out anything–you know, when the doctor comes–will you let me know?” she asked humbly, letting her hand fall.
“Why the hell don’t you go home and quit spooking around here in the dark? Why don’t you go home?”
She shook her head, still humbly.
“You wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, and now you hang around and loose sleep. Why don’t you go home?”
She shook her head slowly. “I’ll wait,” she said.
“You’re a sap,” I affirmed.
“Let me know,” she said, “when you find out anything.”
I didn’t even say anything to that, but walk on away, back upstairs, where I rejoined the party. Things hadn’t changed in the atmosphere of the room.
After a spell, a nurse came back to say that the plane was expected at the port in about thirty or forty minutes. Then a little later she came back to say that there was a telephone call for me.
“Who is it?” I asked the nurse.
“It’s a lady,” she said, “but she wouldn’t give her name.”
I figured that one out, and when I got to the phone at the floor desk I found I was right. It was Anne Stanton. She had stood it as long as she could. She didn’t seize me by the sleeve, for she was a few miles away in her apartment, but her voice did pretty near the same thing. I told her what I knew, and answered her repetitious questions. She thanked me and apologized or bothering me. She had had to know, she said. She had been calling at my hotel all evening, thinking I would come in, then she had called me at the hospital. There wasn’t anybody else she could ask. When she had just called the hospital and had asked for news, they had been noncommittal. “So you see,” she said “so you see I had to call you.”
I said I saw, all right, and hung up the phone and went back down the hall. In the room nothing had changed. And nothing did change till toward four o’clock, when the Boss, who had been sunk in the chintz chair with his gaze on the artificial logs, suddenly lifted up his head, the way a drowsing dog does on the hearth to a sound you can’t even hear. But the Boss hadn’t been drowsing. He had been listening for that sound. One instant he held his head up intently, then swung up to his feet. “There!” he exclaimed raspingly. “There!”
Then I heard it, for the first time, the far-off wail of the siren of the motorcycle escort. The plane had got in.
In a minute a nurse came in and announced that Dr. Burnham was with Dr. Stanton. She would not say how long before they would give an opinion.
The Boss had not sat back down, after the first sound of the siren. He had stood in the middle of the floor, with his head up, hearing the siren wail and fade and wail again and die off, then waiting for the steps in the hall. He did not sit back down now. He began to pace up and down. Over to the window, where he snatched back the chintz curtains to look out on the blackness of the lawn and off across the lawn, where no doubt, a solitary street light glowed in the mist. Then back to the fireplace, where he would turn with a grinding motion that twisted the rug under his heel. His hands were clasped behind him, and his head, with the forelock down, hung forward sullenly and seemed to sway a little from side to side.
I kept on looking at my picture magazines, but the solid tread, nervous and yet deliberate, stirred something back in my mind. I was irritated, as you are when the memory will no rise and be recognize. Then I knew what it was. It was the sound of a tread, back and forth, back and forth, caged in a room in a country hotel beyond the jerry-built wall. That was it.
He was still pacing when a hand outside was laid on the knob of the door. But at that sound, the first sound of the hand on the knob, he swung his head toward the door and froze in his tracks like a pointer. Adam walked into the room into the clutch of that gaze.