All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [262]
I did not say why to myself at the moment when she told me or even the next day when we stood on the cement platform and waited for the train, or even when I stood there alone and watched the last smudge of smoke fade to the west. Not did I say why to myself when I sat alone that night in the house which had been Judge Irwin’s house but which was now mine. I had closed up my mother’s house that afternoon, had put the key under the mat on the gallery, and had left it for good.
Judge Irwin’s house had the odor of dust and disuse and close air. In the afternoon I opened all the windows and left them open while I went down to the Landing for some supper. When I got back and turned the lights on, it seemed more like the house which I remembered from all the years. But sitting there in the study, with the damp, sweet-heavy night air coming in through the windows, I did not say to myself why I now felt so fully at peace with myself. I thought of my mother and I felt the peace and the relief and the new sense of the world.
After a while I got up and walked out of the house and down the Row. It was a very calm, clear night with scarcely a sibilance from the water on the shingle of the beach, and the bay was bright under the stars. I walked down the Row until I came to the Stanton house. There was a light on in the little back sitting room, a dim light as though from a reading lamp. I looked at the house for a couple of minutes and then entered the gate and walked up the path.
The screen door of the gallery was latched. But the main door of the hall inside the gallery was open, and looking across the gallery I could see down the hall to the place where a rectangle of light was laid on the floor from the open door of the back sitting room. I knocked on the frame of the screen door and waited.
In a moment Anne Stanton appeared in the patch of light down the hall.
“Who is it?” she called
“It’s me,” I called back.
She came down the hall and across the gallery toward me. Then she was at the door, a thin, white-clad figure in the dimness beyond the screen. I started to say hello, but didn’t. And she did not speak, either, as she fumbled with the latch. Then the door was open and I stepped inside.
As I stood there, I caught the trace of the scent she used, and a cold hand compressed my heart.
“I didn’t know you’d let me in,” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke and trying to see her face in the shadow. I could only see the paleness in shadow and the gleam of her eyes.
“Of course I’d let you in,” she said.
“Well, I didn’t know,” I said, and gave a kind of laugh.
“Why?”
“Oh, the way I’ve behaved.”
We moved over to the swing on the gallery and sat down. The chains creaked, but we sat so still that the thing did not sway a hair’s breadth.
“What have you done?” she asked
I fished for a cigarette, found one, and lighted it. I flicked the match out without looking at her face. “What have I done?” I repeated. “Well, it’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t answer your letter.”
“That’s all right,” she said. Then added reflectively, as though to herself, “That was a long time ago.”
“It was a long time back, six months, seven months. But I did worse than not answering it,” I said. “I didn’t even read it. I just set it up on my bureau and never even opened it.”
She didn’t say anything to that. I took a few drags on the cigarette and waited but there wasn’t a word.
“It came at the wrong time,” I said finally. “It came at a time when everything and everybody–even Anne Stanton–looked just alike to me and didn’t give a damn. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Like hell you do,” I said.
“Maybe I do,” she said quietly.
“Not the way I mean. You couldn’t.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, anyway that was the way it was. Everything and everybody looked alike. I didn’t even feel sorry for anybody. I didn’t even feel sorry for myself.”
“I never asked you to feel sorry for me,” she said fiercely. “In the letter or anywhere else.”
“No,” I said slowly, “I don’t reckon you did.”
“I never asked you that.”
“I know,” I said, and fell silent for a moment. Then said: