All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [74]
But I loitered behind in the dinning room for a moment. I have said that the zip hadn’t gone out of the ballista with the passage of the years. But that was a misstatement of fact. It hadn’t had a chance to. I went over to examine the thing, with a motive more sentimental than scientific. But then I notice the twists, which gave its zip. There are two twist of fiber on all those things, ballistas, some types of catapults, scorpions, and wild asses, through each of which the butt of a propelling arm is adjusted to make, as it were, half of the bow of a kind of supercrossbow. We used to cheat by mixing in catgut and fine steel wire with the string of the twists on our models to give more force. Now, as I looked at the thing, I realized that the twists weren’t the old twists which I had put in back in the dear dead days. Not by a damned sight. They were practically new.
And all at once I had the sight of Judge Irwin sitting up nights, back in the library, with catgut and steel wire and strings and pliers and scissors on the desk beside him, and with his high old red-thatched head bent over, the yellow eyes gimleted upon the task. And seeing that picture in my head, I felt sad and embarrassed. I had never felt anything, one way or the other, about the Judge’s making those things in the first place, years back. When I was a kid it seemed natural that anybody in his right mind would want to make them, and read books about them, and make maps and models. And it had kept on seeming all right that the Judge had made them. But the picture I now had in my head was different. I felt sad and embarrassed and, somehow, defrauded.
So I joined the guests in the library and left a piece of Jack Burden in the dinning room, with the ballista, for good and all.
They were having coffee. All except the Judge, who was opening up a bottle of brandy. He looked up as I came in, and said, “Been looking at our old peashooter, huh?” He put the slightest emphasis upon our.
“Yes.” I said.
The yellow eyes bored right into me for a second, and I knew he knew what I’d found out. “I fixed it up,” he said, and laughed the most candid and disarming laugh in the world. “The other day. You know, and old fellow with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. You can’t read law and history and Dickens all the time. Or fish.”
I grinned a grin which I somehow felt I had to grin as a tribute to something, not specified in my mind. But I knew that the grin was about as convincing as cold chicken broth in a boarding house.
Then I went over and sat beside the Dumonde girl, who had been provided for my delight. She was a prettyish, dark girl, well got-up but lacking something, too brittle and vivacious, with a trick of lassoing you with her anxious brown eyes and fluttering eyelids as she cinched the rope and then saying what her mother had told her ten years before to say. “Oh, Mr. Burden, they say you’re in politics, oh, it must be just fascinating!” No doubt, her mother had taught her that. Well, she was pushing thirty and it hadn’t worked yet. But the eyelids were still busy.
“No, I’m not in politics,” I said. “I’ve just got a job.”
“Tell me about you job, Mr. Burden.”
“I’m an office boy,” I said.
“Oh, they say you’re very important, Mr. Burden. They say you’re very influential. Oh, it must be fascinating. To be influential, Mr. Burden!”
“It’s news to me,” I said, and discovered that they were all looking at me as though it had just dawned on them that I was sitting there buck-naked on the couch beside Miss Dumonde, with a demitasse on my knee. It’s the human fate. Every time some dame like Miss Dumonde snags you and you have to start talking the way you have to talk to dames like Miss Dumonde, the whole world starts listening in. I saw the Judge smiling with what I took to be a vengeful relish.
Then he said, “Don’t let him kid you, Miss Dumonde. Jack is very influential.”
“I knew it,” Miss Dumonde said. “It must be fascinating.”
“All right,” I said, “I’m influential. You got any pals in the pen you want me to get a pardon for?