All the King's Men Read online

  By that time folks were packed outside the door solid to the middle of the street. Faces were pressed up against the screen door, the way you do when you try to see through a screen into a dim room. Outside, they kept yelling, “Speech, Willie, Speech!”

  “My God,” the Boss said, in the direction of Doc, who was hanging on to one of the nickel-plated spouts of the fountain and watching every drop of the coke go down the Boss’s gullet. “My God,” the Boss said, “I didn’t come here to make a speech. I came here to go out and see my pappy.”

  “Speech, Willie, speech!” they were yelling out there.

  The Boss set his little glass on the marble.

  “It’s on the house,” Doc uttered croakingly with what strength was left in him after the rapture.

  “Thanks, Doc,” the Boss said. He turned away to head toward the door, then looked back. “You better get back in here and sell a lot of aspirin, Doc,” he said, “to make up for the charity.”

  Then he plowed out the door, and the crowd fell back, and we tailed after him.

  Mr. Duffy stepped up beside the Boss and asked him was he going to make a speech, but the Boss didn’t even look at him. He kept walking slow and steady right on across the street into the crowd, as though the crowd hadn’t been there. The red, long faces with the eyes in them watching like something wary and wild and watchful in a thicket fell back, and there wasn’t a sound. The crowd creamed back from his passage, and we followed in his wake, all of us who had been in the Cadillac, and the others who had been in the second car. The crowd closed behind.

  The Boss kept walking straight ahead, his head bowed a little, the way a man bows his head when he is out walking by himself and has something on his mind. His hair fell down over his forehead, for he was carrying his hat in his hand. I knew his hair was down over his forehead, for I saw him give his head a quick jerk once or twice, the way he always did when he was walking alone and it fell down toward his eyes, the kind of motion a horse gives just after the bit is in and he’s full of beans.

  He walked straight across the street and across the patch of grass roots and up the steps of the courthouse. Nobody else followed him up the steps. At the top he turned around, slow, to face the crowd. He simply looked at them, blinking his big eyes a little, jus as though he had just stepped out of the open doors and the dark hall of the courthouse behind him and was blinking to get his eyes adjusted to the light. He stood up there blinking, the hair down on his forehead, and the dark sweat patch showing under each arm of his Palm Beach coat. The he gave his head a twitch, and his eyes bulged wide suddenly, even if the light was hitting him full in the face, and you could see the glitter in them.

  It’s coming_, I thought.

  You saw the eyes bulge suddenly like that, as tough something had happened inside him, and there was the glitter. You knew something had happened inside him, and thought: It’s coming_. It was always that way. There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little fetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little fetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

  The Boss stood up there quiet, with the bulge and glitter in the eyes, and there wasn’t sound in the crowd. You could hear one insane and irrelevant July fly sawing away up in one of the catalpa trees in the square. Then that sound stopped, and there wasn’t anything but the waiting. Then the Boss lounged a step forward, easy and soft-footed.

  “I’m not going to make any speech,” the Boss said, and grinned. But the eyes were still big and the glitter was in them. “I didn’t come here to make any speech. I came up here to go out and see my pappy, and see if he’s got anything left in the smokehouse fit to eat. I’m gonna say: Pappy, now what about all that smoked sausage you wuz bragging about, what about all that ham you wuz bragging about all last winter, what about–” That’s what he was saying, but the voice was different, going up in his nose and coming flat with that little break they’ve got in the red hills, saying, “Pappy, now what about–”

  But the glitter was still there, and I thought: Maybe it’s coming_. Maybe it was not too late. You never could tell. Suddenly, it might be there, he might say it.

  But he was saying, “–and so I’, not going to make any speech–” In his old voice, his own voice. Or was that his voice? Which was his true voice, which one of all the voices, you would wonder.

  He was saying, “And I didn’t come here to ask you to give me anything, not even a vote. The Good Book says, ‘There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, it is enough–’ ” and the voice was different now– ” ‘the grave, and the barren womb, the earth that is not filled with water, and the fire that saith not, it is enough.’ But Solomon might have added just one little item. He might have just made his little list complete, and added, the politician who never stops saying, Gimme.”

  He was lounging back on himself now, and his head was cocked a little to one side, and his eyes blinked. The he grinned, and said, “If they had politicians back in those days, they said, Gimme, just like all of us politician do. Gimme, gimme, my name’s Jimmie. But I’m not a politician today. I’m taking the day off. I’m not even going to ask you to vote for me. To tell the God’s unvarnished and unbuckled truth, I don’t have to ask you. Not today. I still got quite a little hitch up there in the big house with the white columns two stories high on the front porch and peach ice cream for breakfast. Not that a passel of those statesmen wouldn’t like to throw me out. You know–” and he leaned forward a little now, as if to tell them a secret–”it’s funny how I just can’t make friend with some folks. No matter how hard I try. I been just as polite. I said, Please. But please_ didn’t do any good. But it looks like they got to put up with me a spell longer. And you have. Before you get shet of me. So you better just grin and bear it. It’s not any worse’n boils. Now, is it?

  He stopped, and looked all around, right down at them, moving his head slow, so that he seemed to look right in a face here and stop for just a split second, and then to move on to another one a little further. Then he grinned, and his eyes blinked, and he said, “Huh? What’s the matter? Can got yore tongue?”

  “Boils on the tail!” somebody yelled back in the crowd.

  “Dammit,” Willie yelled back, “lie on yore stummick and go to sleep!”

  Somebody laughed.

  “And,” yelled Willie, “thank the good Lord who in his everlasting mercy saw fit to make something with a back side and a front side to it out of the skimpy little piece of material provided in your case!”

  “You tell em, Willie!” somebody yelled back in the crowd. Then they started to laugh.

  The Boss lifted up his right hand about as high as his head, out in
front of him, palm down, and waited till they stopped laughing and whistling. Then he said: “No, I’m not here to ask you for anything. A vote or anything else. I reckon I’ll be back later for that. If I keep on relishing that peach ice cream for breakfast in the big house. But I don’t expect all of you to vote for me. My God, if all of you went and voted for Willie, what the hell would you find to argue about? There wouldn’t be anything left but the weather, and you can’t vote on that.

  “No,” he said, and it was another voice, quiet and easy and coming slow and from a distance, “I’m not here to ask for anything today. I’m taking the day off, and I’ve come home. A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. They are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.”

  His voice just stopped. It didn’t trail off like a voice coming to a stop. One second it was there, going on, word by word, in the stillness which filled the square and the crowd in front of the courthouse and was stiller for the grinding of the July flies in the two catalpas rising above the heads of the people who had crowded up on the patch of grass roots. The voice was going there, word by word, then suddenly it was not there. There was only the sound of the July flies, which seems to be inside your head as though it were the grind and whir of the springs and cogs which are you and which will not stop no matter what you say until they are good and ready.

  He stood there a half minute, not saying a word, and not moving. He didn’t even seem to be noticing the crowd down there. Then he seemed, all at once, to discover them, and grinned. “So he comes back,” he said, grinning now. “When he gets half a day off. And he says, Hello, folks, how you making it? And that’s what I’m saying.”

  That’s what he said. He looked down, grinning, and his head turned as his eyes went down in the crowd, and seemed to stop a face there, and then go on to stop on another face.

  Then he started walking down the steps, as if he had just come out of that dusky-dark hallway beyond the big open doors behind him and was walking down the steps by himself, with nobody there in front of him and no eyes on him. He came straight down the steps toward where his gang was standing, Lucy Stark and the rest of us, and nodded at us as though he were simply passing us on the street and didn’t know us any too well anyway, and kept right on walking, straight into the crowd as though the crowd weren’t there. The people fell back a little to make a passage for him, with their eyes looking right at him, and the rest of us in his gang followed behind him, and the crowd closed up behind us.

  People were clapping now, and yelling. Somebody kept yelling, “Hi, Willie!”

  The Boss walked straight across the street, through the crowd, and got into the Cadillac and sat down. We got in with him and the photographer and the others went back to their car. Sugar-Boy started up and nosed out into the street. People didn’t get out of the way very fast. They couldn’t, they were so jammed in. When we nosed out into the crowd, the faces were right there outside the car, not more that a foot or so away. The faces looked right in at us. But they were out there and we were inside now. The eyes in the red, slick-skinned long faces, or the brown, crinkled faces, looked in at us.

  Sugar-Boy kept pecking at his horn. The words were piling up inside him. His lips started to work. I could see his face in the driver’s mirror, and the lips were working. “The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,” he said, and the spit flew.

  The Boss Had sunk in on himself now.

  “The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,” Sugar-Boy said, and pecked at his horn, but we were easing out of the square now to a side street where there weren’t any people. We were doing forty by the time we passed the brick schoolhouse on the outskirts of town. Seeing the schoolhouse made me remember how I first met Willie, about fourteen years before, back in 1922, when he wasn’t anything but the County Treasurer of Mason County and had come down to the city to see about the bound issue to build that schoolhouse. Then I remembered how I had met him, in the back room of Slade’s pool hall, where Slade sold the needle beer, and we were sitting at one of those little marble-topped tables with wirework legs, the kind they used to have in drugstores when you were a boy and took your high-school sweeties down on Saturday night to get that chocolate banana split and rub knees under the table and the wirework would always get in the way.

  There were four of us. There was Tiny Duffy, who was almost as big back then as he was to get to be. He didn’t need any sign to let you know what he was. If the wind was right, you knew he was a city-hall slob long before you could see the whites of his eyes. He had the belly and he sweated through his shirt just above the belt buckle, and he had the face, which was creamed and curded like a cow patty in a spring pasture, only it was the color of biscuit dough, and in the middle was his grin with the gold teeth. He was Tax assessor, and he wore a flat hard straw on the back of his head. There was a striped band on the hat.

  Then there was Alex Michel, who was a country boy from up in Mason County but who was learning fast. He had learned fast enough to get to be a deputy sheriff. But he wasn’t that long. He wasn’t anything, for he got in the gut by a coke-frisky piano player in a cribhouse where he had gone to take out a little in trade on his protection account. Alex was, as I have said, from up in Mason County.

  Duffy and I had been in the back room of Slade’s place waiting for Alex, with whom I had the hope of transacting a little business. I was a newspaperman and Alex knew something I wanted to know. Duffy had called him in, for Duffy was a friend of mine. At least, he knew that I worked for the Chronicle_, which at that time was supporting the Joe Harrison outfit. Joe Harrison was Governor then. And Duffy was one of Joe Harrison’ boys.

  So I was sitting in the back room of Slade’s place, one hot morning in June or July, back in 1922, waiting for Alex Michel to turn up and listening to the silence in the back room of Slade’s place. A funeral parlor at midnight is ear-splitting compared to the effect you get in the middle of the morning in the back room of a place like Slade’s if you are the first man there. You sit there and think how cozy it was last night, with the effluvium of brotherly bodies and the haw-haw of camaraderie, and you look at the floor where now there are little parallel trails of damp sawdust the old broom left this morning when the unenthusiastic old Negro man cleaned up, and the general impression is that you are alone with the Alone and it is his move. So I sat there in silence (Duffy was never talkative in the morning before he had worried down two or three drinks), and listened to my tissues break down and the beads of perspiration explode delicately out of the ducts embedded in the ample flesh of my companion.

  Alex came in with a fellow with him, and I knew my little conversation was not promising. My mission was of some delicacy, not fit for the ear of a stranger. I figured that might be the reason Alex had his friend in tow. Maybe it was, foe Alex was cagey in an amateurish sort of way. In any case, he had the Boss with him.

  Only it was not the Boss. Not to the crude eye of the homme sensuel_. Metaphysically it was the Boss, but how was I to know? Fate come walking through the door, and it is five feet eleven inches tall and heavyish in the chest and shortish in the leg and is wearing a seven-fifty seersucker suit which is too long in the pants so the cuffs crumple down over the high black shoes, which could do with a polishing, and a stiff high collar like a Sunday-school superintendent and a blue-stripe tie which you know his wife gave him last Christmas and which he has kept in tissue paper with the holly card (“Merry Xmas to my Darling Willie from your Loving Wife”) until he got ready to go up the city,
and a gray felt hat with the sweat stains showing through the band. It comes in just like that, and how are you to know? It comes in, trailing behind Alex Michel, who is, or was before the piano player got him, six-feet-two of beautifully articulated bone and gristle with a hard, bony, baked-looking face and two little quick brown eyes which don’t belong above that classic torso and in that face and which keep fidgeting around like a brace of Mexican jumping beans. So Fate trails modestly along behind Alex Michel, who approaches the table with an air of command which would deceive no one.

  Alex shook my hand and said, “Hi, pal,” and slapped me on the shoulder with a palm that was tough enough to crack a black walnut, and paid proper obeisance to Mr. Duffy, who extended a hand without rising; and then, as a sort of afterthought, Alex jerked a thumb toward his trailing companion and said, “This is Willie Stark, gents. From up home at Mason City. Me and Willie was in school together. Yeah, and Willie, and he was a bookworm, he was teacher’s pet. Wuzn’t you, Willie?” And Alex whickered like a stallion in full appreciation of his own delicious humor and nudged the teacher’s pet in the ribs. Then, controlling himself, he added, “And he’s still teacher’s pet, ain’t you, Willie, ain’t you?”

  And he turned to Duffy and me, and explained, before mirth again took him and Slade’s back room again resounded with the cheerful note of the breeding paddock, “Willie–Willie–he married a school-teacher!”

  That idea seemed monstrously funny to Alex. Meanwhile, Willie, unable to complete the amenities of the situation, bowed to the blast and stood there with the old gray felt hat in his hand, with the sweat showing around the band outside where it had soaked through. Willie’s large face, above the stiff country collar, didn’t show a thing.