All the king's men

After a while I got up and walked out of the house and down the Row. It was a very calm, clear night with scarcely a sibilance from the water on the shingle of the beach, and the bay was bright under the stars. I walked down the Row until I came to the Stanton house. There was a light on in the little back sitting room, a dim light as though from a reading lamp. I looked at the house for a couple of minutes and then entered the gate and walked up the path.

The screen door of the gallery was latched. But the main door of the hall inside the gallery was open, and looking across the gallery I could see down the hall to the place where a rectangle of light was laid on the floor from the open door of the back sitting room. I knocked on the frame of the screen door and waited.

In a moment A

"Who is it?" she called "It's me," I called back.

She came down the hall and across the gallery toward me. Then she was at the door, a thin, white-clad figure in the dimness beyond the screen. I started to say hello, but didn't. And she did not speak, either, as she fumbled with the latch. Then the door was open and I stepped inside.

As I stood there, I caught the trace of the scent she used, and a cold hand compressed my heart.

"I didn't know you'd let me in," I said, trying to make it sound like a joke and trying to see her face in the shadow. I could only see the paleness in shadow and the gleam of her eyes.

"Of course I'd let you in," she said.

"Well, I didn't know," I said, and gave a kind of laugh.

"Why?"

"Oh, the way I've behaved."

We moved over to the swing on the gallery and sat down. The chains creaked, but we sat so still that the thing did not sway a hair's breadth.

"What have you done?" she asked I fished for a cigarette, found one, and lighted it. I flicked the match out without looking at her face. "What have I done?" I repeated. "Well, it's what I didn't do. I didn't answer your letter."

"That's all right," she said. Then added reflectively, as though to herself, "That was a long time ago."

"It was a long time back, six months, seven months. But I did worse than not answering it," I said. "I didn't even read it. I just set it up on my bureau and never even opened it."

She didn't say anything to that. I took a few drags on the cigarette and waited but there wasn't a word.

"It came at the wrong time," I said finally. "It came at a time when everything and everybody–even A

"Yes," she said.

"Like hell you do," I said.

"Maybe I do," she said quietly.

"Not the way I mean. You couldn't."

"Maybe."

"Well, anyway that was the way it was. Everything and everybody looked alike. I didn't even feel sorry for anybody. I didn't even feel sorry for myself."

"I never asked you to feel sorry for me," she said fiercely. "In the letter or anywhere else."

"No," I said slowly, "I don't reckon you did."

"I never asked you that."

"I know," I said, and fell silent for a moment. Then said: "I came up here to tell you I don't feel that way any more. I had to tell somebody–I had to say it out loud–to be sure it's true. But it is true."

I waited in the silence, which remained unbroken until I began again.

"It's my mother," I said. "You know," I said, "how it always was with us. How we didn't get along. How I thought that she–"

"Don't!" A

"He's not my father," I said.

"Not your father!"

"No," I said, and sitting there in the motionless swing on the dark gallery, I told her what there was to tell about the pale-haired and famish-checked girl who had come down from Arkansas, and tried to tell her what my mother had finally given back to me. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there ca

I tried to tell her that.

Then, after a long silence, she said, "I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have lived."

We did not talk any more. I smoked another half a pack of cigarettes, sitting there in the swing in the dark with the summer air heavy and damp and almost sick-sweet around us, and trying to catch the sound of her breath in the silence. Then after a long time I said good night, and went down the Row to my father's house.

This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.

At first that thought was horrible to him when it was forced on him by what seemed the accident of circumstance, for it seemed to rob him of a memory by which, unconsciously, he had lived; but then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having delivered his two friends into each other's hands and death.

But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die. He had seen Lucy Stark and Sugar-Boy and the Scholarly Attorney and Sadie Burke and A

He had seen his two friends, Willie Stark and Adam Stanton, live and die. Each had killed the other. Each had been the doom of the other. As a student of history, Jack Burden could see that Adam Stanton, whom he came to call the man of idea, and Willie Stark, whom he came to call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each other, just as each was doomed to try to use the other and to yearn toward and try to become the other, because each was incomplete with the terrible division of their age. But at the same time Jack Burden came to see that his friend had been doomed, he saw that though doomed they had nothing to do with any doom under the godhead of the Great Twitch. They were doomed, but they lived in the agony of will. As Hugh Miller (once Attorney General under Willie Stark and much later Jack Burden's friend) said to him when they were discussing the theory of the moral neutrality of history: "History is blind, but man is not." (It looks as though Hugh will get back into politics, and when he does I'll be along to hold his coat. I've had some valuable experience in that line.)

So now I, Jack Burden, live in my father's house. In one sense it is strange that I should be here, for the discovery of truth had one time robbed me of the past and had killed my father. But in the end the truth gave the past back to me. So I live in the house which my father left me. With me is my wife, A