All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [258]
She led the way out into the little hall again. We walked up toward the table where my hat lay. Then she turned around and scrutinized my face as though the light weren’t very good in the hall.
“You know,” she said, “I named him for Willie because–”
She was still scrutinizing my face.
“–because,” she continued, “because Willie was a great man.”
I nodded, I suppose.
“Oh, I know he made mistakes,” she said, and lifted up her chin as though facing something, “bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad things, like they say. But inside–in here, deep down–” and she laid her hand to her bosom–“he was a great man.”
She wasn’t bothering with my face any more, with trying to read it. For the moment, she wasn’t bothering with me. I might as well not have been there.
“He was a great man,” she affirmed again, in a voice nearly a whisper. Then she looked again at me, calmly. “You see, Jack,” she said, “I have to believe that.”
Yes, Lucy, you have to believe that. You have to believe that to live. I know that you must believe that. And I would not have you believe otherwise. It must be that way, and I understand the fact. For you see, Lucy. I must believe that, too. I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn’t anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that.
Because I came to believe that, I came back to Burden’s Landing. I did not come to believe it at the moment when I watched Sugar-Boy mount the stairs from the basement hall of the public library or when Lucy Stark stood before me in the hall of the little paint-peeling white house in the country. But because of those things–and of all the other things which had happened–I came, in the end, to believe that. And believing that Willie Stark was a great man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the same time that I could more surely condemn myself.
I came back to Burden’s Landing in early summer, at the request of my mother. She telephoned me one night and said, “Son, I want you to come here. As soon as you can. Can you come tomorrow?”
When I asked her what she wanted, for I still did not want to go back, she refused to answer me directly. She said she would tell me when I came.
So I went.
She was waiting for me on the gallery when I drove up late the next afternoon. We went around to the screened side gallery and had a drink. She wasn’t talking much, and I didn’t rush her.
When by near seven o’clock the Young Executive hadn’t turned up, I asked her was he coming to dinner.
She shook her head. “Where is he?” I asked.
She turned her empty glass in her hand, lightly clinking the ice left there. Then she said, “I don’t know.”
“On a trip?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered, clinking the ice. Then she turned to me. “He has been gone five days,” she said. “He won’t come back until I have gone. You see–” she set the glass down on the table beside her with an air of finality–“I am leaving him.”
“Well,” I breathed, “I’m damned.”
She continued to look at me, as though expecting something. What, I didn’t know.
“Well, I’m damned,” I said, still fumbling with the fact which she had presented to me.
“Are you surprised?” she asked me, leaning a little toward me in her chair.
“Sure, I’m surprised.”
She examined me intently, and I could detect a curious shifting and shading of feelings on her face, too evanescent and ambiguous for definition.
“Sure, I’m surprised,” I repeated.
“Oh,” she said, and sank back in her chair, sinking back like somebody who has fallen into deep water and clutches for a rope and seizes it and hangs on a moment and lose the grip and tries again and doesn