All the King's Men (27 page)

Men with tripods and cameras were scurrying about on the edges of the crowd, setting up their rigs on the Capitol steps, climbing on the bases of the frock-coated statues to get shots. Here and there around the edge of the crowd you could see the blue coat of a mounted cop up above the crowd, and in the open space of lawn between the crowd and the Capitol there were more cops, just standing, and a few highway patrolmen, very slick and businesslike in their bright-green uniforms and black boots and black Sam Browne belts and dangling holsters.

The crowd began chanting, “Willie, Willie, Willie–We want Willie!”

I looked out of a window on the second floor and saw it. I wondered if the sound carried into the Chamber of Representatives, where they were yammering and arguing and orating. Outside it was very simple, out there on the lawn, under the bright spring sky. No arguing. Very simple. We want Willie–Willie, Willie, Willie!” In a long rhythm, with a hoarse undertone, like surf.

Then I saw a big black car pull slowly into the drive before the Capitol, and stop. A man got out, waved his hand to the cops, and walked to the bandstand there on the edge of the lawn. It was a fat man. Tiny Duffy.

Then he was speaking to the crowd. I could not hear his words, but I knew what he was saying. He was saying that Willie Stark asked them to go peaceably into the city, to wait until dark, to be back on the lawn before the Capitol by eight o’clock, when he would have something to tell them.

I knew what he would tell them. I knew that he would stand up before them and say that he was still Governor of the state.

I knew that, because early the previous evening, around seven-thirty, he had called me in and given me a big brown manila envelope. “Lowdan is down at the Haskell Hotel,” he said. “I know he’s in his room now. Go down there and let him take a peep at that but don’t let him get his hands on it and tell him to call his dogs off. Not that it matters whether he does or not, for they’ve changed their minds.” (Lowdan was the kingpin of the MacMurfee boys in the House.)

I had gone down to the Haskell and to Mr. Lowdan’s room without sending my name. I knocked on the door, and when I heard the voice, said, “Message.” He opened the door, a big jovial-looking man with a fine manner, in a flowered dressing gown. He didn’t recognize me at first, just seeing a big brown envelope and some sort of face above it. But I withdrew the brown envelope and some sort of face above it. But I withdrew the brown envelope just as his hand reached for it, and stepped over the sill. Then he must have looked at the face. “Why, Howdy-do, Mr. Burden,” he said, “they say you’ve been right busy lately.”

“Loafing,” I said, “just plain loafing. And I was just loafing by and thought I’d stop and show you something a fellow gave me.” I took the long sheet out of the envelope, and held it up for him to look at. “No, don’t touch, burn-y, burn-y,” I said.

He didn’t touch but he looked hard. I saw his Adam’s apple jerk a couple of times; then he removed his cigar from his mouth (a good cigar, two-bit at least, by the smell) and said, “Fake.”

“The signatures are supposed to be genuine,” I said, “but if you aren’t sure you might ring up one of your boys whose name you see on here and ask him man to man.”

He pondered that thought a moment, and the Adam’s apple worked again, harder now, but he was taking it like a soldier. Or he still thought it was a fake. Then he said, “I’ll call your bluff on that,” and walked over to the telephone.

Waiting for his number, he looked up and said, “Have a seat, won’t you?”

“No, thanks,” I said, for I didn’t regard the event as social.

Then he had the number.

“Monty,” he said into the telephone, “I’ve got a statement here to the effect that the undersigned hold that the impeachment proceedings are unjustified and will vote against them despite all pressure. That’s what it says–’all pressure.’ Your name’s on the list. How about it?”

There was a long wait, then Mr. Lowdan said, “For God’s sake, quit mumbling and blubbering and speak up!”

There was another wait, then Mr. Lowdan yelled, “You– you–” But words failed him, and he slammed the telephone to the cradle, and swung the big, recently jovial-looking face toward me. He was making a gasping motion with his mouth, but no sound.

“Well,” I said, “you want to try another one?”

“It’s blackmail,” he said, very quietly, but huskily as though he didn’t have the breath to spare. Then, seeming to get a little more breath, “It’s blackmail. It’s coercion. Bribery, it’s bribery. I tell you, you’ve blackmailed and bribed those men and I–”

“I don’t know why anybody signed this statement,” I said, “but if what you charge should happen to be true then the moral strikes me as this: MacMurfee ought not to elect legislators who can be bribed or who have done things they can get blackmailed for.”

“MacMurfee–” he began, the fell into a deep silence, his flowered bulk brooding over the telephone stand. He’d have his own troubles with Mr. MacMurfee, no doubt.

“A small detail,” I said, “but it would probably be less embarrassing to you, and especially to the signers of this document, if the impeachment proceedings were killed before coming to a vote. You might try to see about getting that done by late tomorrow. That should give you time to make your arrangements, and to figure out as graceful a way as possible. Of course, it would be more effective politically for the Governor to let the matter come to a vote, but he is willing to let you do it the easy way, particularly since there’s a good deal of unrest in the city about the matter.”

He wasn’t paying any attention to me, as far as I could tell. I went to the door, opened it, and looked back. “Ultimately,” I said, “it is immaterial to the Governor how you manage the matter.”

Then I closed the door and went down the hall.

That had been the night of the fourth of April. I was almost sorry, the next day as I looked out the high window at the mass of people filling the streets and the wide sweep of lawn beyond the statues in front of the Capitol, that I knew what I knew. If I hadn’t known, I could have stood there in the full excitement of the possibilities of the moment. But I knew how the play would come out. This was like a dress rehearsal after the show has closed down. I stood there and felt like God-Almighty brooding on History.

Which must be a dull business for God-Almighty, Who knows how it is gone to come out. Who knew, in fact, how it was going to come out even before He knew there was going to be any History. Which is complete nonsense, for that involved Time and He is out of Time, for God is Fullness of Being, and in Him the End is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts written and handed out on the streets corners by the fat, grubby, dandruff-sprinkled old man, with the metal-rimmed spectacles, who used to be the Scholarly Attorney and who married the girl with the gold braids and the clear, famished-looking cheeks, up in Arkansas. But those tracts he wrote were crazy, I thought back then. I thought God cannot be Fullness of being. For Life is Motion.

(I use the capital letters as the old man did in the tracts. I had sat across the table from him, with the foul unwashed dishes on one end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the room over across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said, “God is Fullness of Being.” And I had said, “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. For Life is Motion. For–”

(For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of being, we worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above the metal-rimmed spectacles, which had hung down on the end of his nose. He had shaken his head and a flake or two of dandruff had sifted down from the spare white hair ends which fringed the skull within which the words had been taking shape from the electric twitches in the tangled and spongy and blood-soaked darkness. He had said then, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” And I had said, “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.”

(For Life is a fire burning along a piece of string–or is it a fuse to a power keg which we call God?–and the string is what we don’t know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man’s Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man’s Knowledge will be equal to God’s Knowledge and there won’t be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a power keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away. So I had said to the old man.

(But he had replied, “You think in Finite terms.” And I had said, “I’m not thinking at all, I’m just drawing a picture.” He had said, “Ha!” The way I remembered he had done a long time back when he played chess with Judge Irwin in the long room in the white house toward the sea. I had said, “I’ll draw you another picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the color always changes and the shape. Let us give a name to the picture which is trying to paint: Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is therefore Non-Knowledge, the Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God, Who is Complete Knowledge.”

(The old man had said, “I will pray for your soul.”)

But even if I didn’t believe in the old man’s God, that morning as I stood at the window of the Capitol and looked down on the crowd, I felt like God, because I had the knowledge of what was to come. I felt like God brooding on History, for as I stood there I could see a little chunk of History right there in front. There were the bronze statues on their pedestals, on the lawn, in frock coats, with the right hand inserted under the coat, just over the heart, in military uniforms with a hand on the sword hilt, even one in buckskin with the right hand grasping a barrel of grounded long rifle. They were already History, and the grass around their pedestals was shaved close and the flowers were planted in stars and circles and crescents. Then over beyond the statues, there were the people who weren’t History yet. Not quite. But to me they looked like History, because I knew the end of the event of which they were part. Or thought I knew the end.

I knew, too, how the newspapers would regard that crowd of people, as soon as they knew the end of the event. They would regard that crowd as cause, “A shameful display of cowardice on the part of the Legislature …” You could look at the crowd out there and hear that undertone in its cry, hoarse like surf, and think that the crowd there could cause the event. But no, it could be said, Willie Stark caused the event by corrupting and blackmailing the Legislature. But no, in turn it could be replied that Willie Stark merely gave the Legislature the opportunity to behave in the way appropriate to its nature and that MacMurfee, who sponsored the election of those men, thinking to use their fear and greed for his own ends, was truly responsible. But no, to that it could be replied that the responsibility belonged, after all, to that crowd of people, indirectly in so far as it had, despite MacMurfee, elected Willie Stark. But why had they elected Willie Stark? Because of a complex of forces which had made them what they were, or because Willie Stark could lean toward them with bulging eyes and right arm raised to Heaven?

One thing was certain: The sound of that chant hoarsely rising and falling was to be the cause of nothing, nothing at all. I stood in the window of the Capitol and hugged that knowledge like a precious and thorny secret, and did not think anything.

I watched the fat man get out of the black limousine and mount the bandstand. I saw the crowd shift and curdle and thin and dissolve. I looked across beyond the now lonely and occupationless policemen, beyond the statues–frock coats, uniforms, buckskin–to the great lawn, which was empty and bright in the spring sunshine. I spewed out the last smoke from my cigarette and flicked the butt out the open window and watched it spin over and over to the stone steps far below.

Willie Stark was to stand on those steps at eight o’clock that night, in a flood of light, looking small at the top of the great steps with the mountainous heave of the building behind him.

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.