All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [43]
It would be a reproach, an affront, a cause for laughter and a thing for tears. Knowing what you knew, you would lie there listening to him getting ready to be Governor, and want to stuff the pillow slip in your mouth to stop the giggles. The poor half-witted bastard and his speech. But the voice would keep on going over there beyond the wall, and the feet would keep on tramping, back and forth like the feet of a heavy animal prowling and swinging back and forth with a heavy swaying of the head in a locked-up room, or a cage, hunting for the place to get out, not giving up and irreconcilably and savagely sure that there was going to be a loose board or bar or latch sometime, not now but sometime. And listening to it, you wouldn’t be so sure for a minute the bar or board would hold. Or the feet would not stop and they were like a machine, which was not human or animal either, and were tramping on you like pestles or plungers in a big vat and you were the thing in the vat, the thing that just happened to be there. The plungers didn’t care about its being you, or not being you, in the vat. But they would continue until there wasn’t any you, and afterward for a long time until the machine wore out or somebody switched off the juice.
Then, because you wanted to lie down in the late afternoon on a strange bed in a shadowy room and watch the smoke drift up and not think about anything, what you’ve been or what you’re going to be,, and because the feet, the beast, the plungers, the half-wit won’t stop, you jerk yourself up and sit on the edge of the bed and feel like swearing. But you don’t. For you are wondering, with the beginnings of pain and insufficiency, what it is inside that won’t let the feet stop. Maybe he is a half-wit, maybe he won’t be Governor, maybe nobody will listen to his speeches but Lucy, but the feet won’t stop.
Nobody would listen to the speeches, including me. They were awful. They were full of facts and figures he had dug up about running the state. He would say, “Now, friends, if you bear patiently with me for a few minutes, I will give you the figures,” and he would clear his throat and fumble with a sheet of paper and backbones would sag lower in the seats and folks would start cleaning their fingernails with their pocket knifes. If Willie had ever thought of talking to folks up on the platform just the way he could talk to you face when he got heated about something, leaning at you as if he meant every damned word he said and his eyes bugging out and shining, he might have swayed the constituency. But no, he was trying to live up to his notion of a high destiny.
It didn’t matter so much as long as Willie was playing the local circuit. The carry-over of the schoolhouse episode was still strong enough to mean something. He was the fellow on the Lord’s side and the Lord had given a sign. The Lord had knocked over the fire escape just to prove a point. But when Willie got down in the middle of the state he began to run into trouble. And when he hit a town of any size he found out that the folks didn’t care much which side of a question was the Lord’s side.
Willie knew what was happening, but he didn’t know why. His face got a little thinner, and the thin skin seemed to draw back tighter over the flesh, but he didn’t look worried. That was the funny part. If ever a man had a right to look worried, it was Willie. But he didn’t. He just looked like a man in a kind of walking dream, and when he walked out on the platform before he began talking his face looked purified and lifted up and serene like the face of a man who has just pulled out of a hard sickness.
But he hadn’t pulled out of the sickness he had. He had galloping political anemia.
He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He was like a man with a chill who simply reckons that the climate is changing all of a sudden, and wonders why everybody else isn’t shivering too. Perhaps it was a desire for just a little human warmth that got him in the habit of dropping into my room late at night, after the speaking and the handshaking were over. He would sit for a spell, while I drank off my nightcap, and not talk much, but one time, at Morristown, where the occasion had sure-God been a black frost, he did, after sitting quiet, suddenly say,