There wasn't a sound for half a minute. Mr. Patton's granite visage seemed to lean toward me like a monument about to fall, and the satchel under Mr. Patton's chin quivered like a tow sack full of kittens, and the sound of the Young Executive's adenoids was plainly audible, and the Judge just sat, with his yellow eyes working over the crowd, and my mother's hands turned in her lap. Then she said, "Why, Son. I didn't know you–you felt that–that way!"
"Why–er–no," Mr. Patton said, "I didn't realize you–er–"
"I didn't say I felt any way," I said. "I just offered a proposition for the sake of argument."
"Argument! Argument!" burst out Mr. Patton, himself again. "It doesn't matter what kind of government this state's had in the past. They never had this kind. Nobody ever tried to grab te whole damned state. Nobody ever–"
"It's a very interesting proposition," the Judge said, and sipped his brandy.
And they were at it again, all except my mother, whose hands kept turning slow in her lap, with the firelight exploding in the big diamond which never came from the Scholarly Attorney. They kept at it until it was time to do.
"Who is that Miss Dumode?" I asked my mother late the next afternoon, sitting in front of the fire.
"Mr. Orton's sister's child," she said, "and she'll inherit his money."
"Well," I said, "somebody ought to wait till she gets the dough and then marry her and drown her in the bathtub."
"Don't talk that way," my mother was saying.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'd like to drown her but I don't want her money. I'm not interested in money. If I wanted to I could reach out any day and knock off ten thousand. Twenty thousand. I–"
"Oh, Son–what Mr. Patton said–those people you're with–Son, now don't get mixed up in any graft, now–"
"Graft is what it calls it when the fellows do it who don't know which fork to use."
"It's the same thing, Son–those people–"
"I don't know what those people, as you call them, do. I'm very careful not to ever know what anybody anywhere does any time."
"Now, Son, don't you, please don't–"
"Don't what?"
"Don't get mixed up in–in anything."
"All I aid was I _could__ reach out and knock off ten thousand. And not graft. Information. Information is money. But I told you I'm not interested in money. Not the slightest. Willie isn't either."
"Willie?" she asked.
"The Boss. The Boss isn't interested in money."
"What's he interested in, the"
"He's interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It's only the half-baked people like Mr. Patton who are interested in money. Even the big boys who make a real lot of money aren't interested in money. Henry Ford isn't interested in money. He is interested in Henry Ford and therefore he is a genius."
She reached over and took my hand, and spoke earnestly to me. "Don't, Son, don't talk that way," she said.
"What way?"
"When you talk that way I don't know what to think. I just don't know." And she looked imploringly at me, with the firelight striking across her cheek to make the hollow there hollower and hungrier. She laid her free hand on the hand of mine she held, and when a woman makes that kind of a sandwich out of one of your hands it is always a prelude to something. Which, in this case, was: "Why don't you, Son–why don't you–settle down–why don't you marry some nice girl and–"
"I tried that," I offered. "And if you tried to rig anything for me which that Dumonde you sure rang the lemons."
She was looking at me with a growing, searching, discovering look from her too bright eyes, like somebody puzzling something out of distance. Then she said, "Son–Son, you were sort of funny last night–you didn't enter into things–then the tone you took– "All right," I said.
"You weren't like yourself, like you used to be, you–"
"If I'm ever like I used to be I'll shoot myself," I said, "and if I embarrassed you before those half-wit Pattons and that half-wit Dumonde, I'm sorry."
"Judge Irwin–" she began.
"Leave him out of it," I said. "He's different."
"Oh, Son," she exclaimed, "what makes you be that way? You didn't embarrass me but what makes you that way? It's those people–what you do–why don't you settle down–get a decent job–Judge Irwin, Theodore, they could get you a–"
I snatched my hand out of the sandwich she had made, and said, "I don't want anything in God's world out of them. Or anybody. And I don't want to settle down, and I don't want to get married, and I don't want any other job, and as for the money–"
"Son–Son–" she said, and turned her hand together on her lap.
"And as for money, I don't want any more than I've got. And besides I don't have to worry about that. You've got enough–" I got up from the couch and lighted a cigarette and flung the match stub into the fire– "enough to leave both Theodore and me pretty well fixed."
She didn't move or say anything. She just looked up at me, and I saw that her eyes had tears coming into them, and that she loved me, for I was her son. And that Time didn't mean anything, but that the lifted face with the bright, too large eyes was an old face. The skin lanked down from the cheek hollows under the bright eyes.
"Not that I want your money," I said.
She reached out with one hand, in a tentative, humble way, and took my right hand, not by my hand itself but just by the fingers, crumpling then together.
"Son," she said "you know whatever I've got is yours. Don't you know that?"
I didn't say anything.
"Don't you know that?" she said, and swung on to my fingers as though they were the end of a rope somebody had tossed in the water to her.
"All right," I heard my voice say, and left my fingers twitching to get away, but at the same time I felt my heart suddenly go soft and fluid in my chest like a melting snowball you squash in your hand. "I'm sorry I talked that way," I said, "but, damn it, why can't we just stop talking? Why can't I just come home for a day or two and us not talk, not open our mouths?"
She didn't answer, but kept on holding my fingers. So I released my fingers, and said, "I'm going up and take a bath before dinner," and started toward the door. I knew that she didn't turn her head to watch me go out of the room, but as I crossed the room I felt as though they had forgotten to ring down the curtain at the end of something and a thousand eyes were on my back and the clapping hadn't started. Maybe the bastards didn't know it was over. Maybe they didn't know it was time to clap.
I went upstairs and lay in the bathtub with the hot water up to my ears and knew that it was over. It was over again. I would get in my car, right after dinner, and drive like hell toward town over the new concrete slab between the black, mist streaked fields, and get to town about midnight and go up to my hotel room where nothing was mine and nothing knew my name and nothing had a thing to say to me about anything that had ever happened.