All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [263]
I waited in the silence, which remained unbroken until I began again.
“It’s my mother,” I said. “You know,” I said, “how it always was with us. How we didn’t get along. How I thought that she–”
“Don’t!” Anne burst out. “Don’t! I don’t want to hear you talk that way. What makes you so bitter? What do you talk that way for? Your mother, Jack, and that poor old man your father!”
“He’s not my father,” I said.
“Not your father!”
“No,” I said, and sitting there in the motionless swing on the dark gallery, I told her what there was to tell about the pale-haired and famish-checked girl who had come down from Arkansas, and tried to tell her what my mother had finally given back to me. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.
I tried to tell her that.
Then, after a long silence, she said, “I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have lived.”
We did not talk any more. I smoked another half a pack of cigarettes, sitting there in the swing in the dark with the summer air heavy and damp and almost sick-sweet around us, and trying to catch the sound of her breath in the silence. Then after a long time I said good night, and went down the Row to my father’s house.
This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.
At first that thought was horrible to him when it was forced on him by what seemed the accident of circumstance, for it seemed to rob him of a memory by which, unconsciously, he had lived; but then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having delivered his two friends into each other’s hands and death.
But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die. He had seen Lucy Stark and Sugar-Boy and the Scholarly Attorney and Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton live and the ways of their living had nothing to do with the Great Twitch. He had seen his father die. He had seen his friend Adam Stanton die. He had seen his friend Willie Stark die, and he had heard him say his last breath, “It might have been all different, Jack. You got to believe that.”
He had seen his two friends, Willie Stark and Adam Stanton, live and die. Each had killed the other. Each had been the doom of the other. As a student of history, Jack Burden could see that Adam Stanton, whom he came to call the man of idea, and Willie Stark, whom he came to call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each other, just as each was doomed to try to use the other and to yearn toward and try to become the other, because each was incomplete with the terrible division of their age. But at the same time Jack Burden came to see that his friend had been doomed, he saw that though doomed they had nothing to do with any doom under the godhead of the Great Twitch. They were doomed, but they lived in the agony of will. As Hugh Miller (once Attorney General under Willie Stark and much later Jack Burden’s friend) said to him when they were discussing the theory of the moral neutrality of history: “History is blind, but man is not.” (It looks as though Hugh will get back into politics, and when he does I