All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [93]
That night the people pressed up to the very steps, filling all the shadow beyond the sharply defined area of light. (Lighting apparatus had been mounted on the pedestals of two statues, one buckskin, one frock coat.) They called and chanted, “Willie–Willie–Willie,” pressing at the cordon of police at the foot of the steps. Then, after a while, out of the tall doorway of the Capitol, he appeared. Then, as he stood there, blinking in the light, the words of the chant disappeared, and there was a moment of stillness, and then there was only the roar. It seemed a long time before he lifted his hand to stop it. Then the roar seemed to die away, slowly, under the downward pressure of his hand.
I stood in the crowd with Adam Stanton and Anne Stanton and watched him come out on the steps of the Capitol. When it was over–when he had said what he had to say to the crowd and had gone back inside leaving the new, unchecked roar of voices behind him–I told Anne and Adam good night and went to meet the Boss.
I rode with him back to the Mansion. He hadn’t said a word when I joined him at the car. Sugar-Boy worked through the back streets, while behind us we could still hear the roaring and shouting and the protracted blatting of automobile horns. Then Sugar-Boy shook himself free into a quiet little street where the houses sat back from the pavement, lights on inside them now and people in the lighted rooms, and where the budding boughs interlaced above us. At the corners where the street lamps were you could catch the hint of actual green on the boughs. Sugar-Boy drove up to the rear entrance of the Mansion. The Boss got out and went into the door. I followed him. He walked down the back hall, where we met nobody, and then into the big hall. He paced right across the hall, under the chandeliers and mirrors, past the sweep of the stairway, looked into the drawing room, crossed the hall again to look into the back sitting room, then again to look into the library. I caught on, and quit following him. I just stood in the middle of the big hall and waited. He hadn’t said he wanted me, but he hadn’t said he didn’t. In fact he hadn’t said anything. Not a word.
When he turned from the library into the hall again, a white-coated Negro boy came out of the dining room. “Boy,” the Boss asked, “you seen Mrs. Stark?”
“Yassuh.”
“Where, dammit?” the Boss snapped. “You think I’m asking for my health?”
“Naw, suh, I didn’t think nuthin, I–”
“Where?” the Boss demanded in a tone to set the chandelier tingling.
After the first paralysis, the lips began to work in the black face. In the beginning without effect. Then a sound was detectable. “Upstairs–she done gone upstairs–I reckin she done gone to bed–she–”
The Boss had headed up the stairs.
He came back almost immediately, walked past me without a word, and back to the library. I trailed along. He flung himself down on the big leather couch, heaved his feet off the floor to the leather, and said, “Shut the God-damned door.”
I shut the door, he leaned back on the cushions, at about a thirty-degree angle from horizontal, and glumly studied his knuckles. “You would have thought she might wait up for me tonight,” he said finally, still studying the knuckles. Then, looking at me, “She’s gone to bed. Gone to bed and locked her door. Said she had a headache. I go upstairs and there id Tom sitting in the room across from her room doing his schoolwork. Before I lay hand to the knob of her door, he comes out and says, ‘She don’t want to be bothered.’ Like I was a delivery boy. ‘I’m not going to bother her,’ I said to him, ‘I’m just going to tell her what happened.’ He looked at me and said, ‘She’s got a headache, and she don’t want to be bothered.’ ” He hesitated, looked at the knuckles again, then back to me, and said with a hint of defensiveness in his tone, “All I was going to do was tell her how it came out tonight.”
“She wanted you to throw Byram to the wolves,” I said. “Did she want you to throw yourself to the wolves?”
“I don’t know what the hell she wants,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell any of