All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [264]
So now I, Jack Burden, live in my father’s house. In one sense it is strange that I should be here, for the discovery of truth had one time robbed me of the past and had killed my father. But in the end the truth gave the past back to me. So I live in the house which my father left me. With me is my wife, Anne Stanton, and the old man who was once married to my mother. When a few months ago I found him sick in the room above the Mexican restaurant, what could I do but to bring him here? (Does he think that I am his son? I cannot be sure. Nor can I feel that it matters, for each of us is the son of a million fathers.)
He is very feeble. Now and then he has the strength to play a game of chess, as he used to play with his friend Montague Irwin long ago in the long room in the white house by the sea. He used to be a very good chess player, but now his attention wanders. Or on good days now he sits in the sunshine. He can read his Bible a little. He is not strong enough to write any more, but occasionally he dictated something to me or Anne for a tract which is he is writing.
Yesterday he dictated this to me:
The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power. But by God’s help. By His help and His wisdom.
He turned to me when he had spoken the last word, stared at me, and then said, “Did you put that down?”
“Yes,” I replied
Staring at me, he said with sudden violence, “It is true. I know it is true. Do you know it?”
I nodded my head and said yes (I did so to keep his mind untroubled, but later I was not certain but that in my own way I did believe what he had said.)
He kept on looking at me, after I had spoken, then said quietly, “Since that thought came into my mind my soul has been still. I have had it in my mind for three days. I have held it there to be sure by the test of my soul before I spoke it.”
He will never finish the tract. His strength fails visibly from day to day. The doctor says he will not last the winter.
By the time he is dead I shall be ready to leave the house. For one thing, the house is heavily mortgaged. Judge Irwin’s affairs, at the time of his death, were tangled, and in the end it developed that he was not rich but poor. Once before, almost twenty-five years before, it had been heavily mortgaged. But then it had been saved by a crime. A good man had committed a crime to save it. I should not be too complacent because I am not prepared to commit a crime to save the house. Perhaps my unwillingness to commit a crime to save the house (assuming that I should have the opportunity–which is doubtful) is simply a way of saying that I do not love the house as much as Judge Irwin loved it and a man’s virtue may be but the defect of his desire, as his crime may be but a function of his virtue.
Nor should I be complacent because I tried to make amends, in a way, for a crime which my father had committed. What little money did come to me from my father’s estate should go, I thought, to Miss Littlepaugh in her foul, fox-smelling room in Memphis. So I went to Memphis. But I found that she was dead. So I was denied that inexpensive satisfaction in virtue. I should have to get whatever satisfaction I was to get in a more expensive way.
But I still had the money, and so I am spending it to live on while I write the book I began years ago, the life of Cass Mastern, whom once I could not understand but whom, perhaps, I now may come to understand. I suppose that there is some humor in the fact that while I write about Cass Mastern I live in the house of Judge Irwin and eat bread bought with his money. For Judge Irwin and Cass Mastern do not resemble each other very closely. (If Judge Irwin resembles any Mastern it is Gilbert, the granite-headed brother of Cass.) But I do not find the humor in this situation very funny. The situation is too much like the world in which we live from birth to death, and the humor of it grows stale from repetition. Besides, Judge Irwin was my father and he was good to me and, in a way, he was a man and I loved him.