It was all a breathless monotony, suddenly cut off. She had groped out for me and had seized the cloth of my coat in her hands and had stuck her bowed head up against my chest. So I stood there with my right arm around her shoulder, patting her, patting and making a kind of smoothing-out motion with my hand on her back that shook soundlessly with what I took to be sobs.
Then, not lifting her head, she was saying, "It's going to be like that–it's always been that way, and it'll keep on–being like that–"
_It__, I thought, and thought she was talking about the face.
But she wasn't, for she was saying, "–it'll keep on–they'll kiss it and slobber–then they'll slap you in the face–no matter what you do, do anything for them, make them what they are–take them out of the gutter and make something out of them–and they'll slap you in the face–the first chance–because you had smallpox–they'll some naked slut on skates and they'll slap you in the face–they'll kick up dirt in your face–"
I kept on patting and making the smoothing-out motion, for there wasn't anything else to do.
"–that's the way it'll be–always some slut on skates–some–"
"Look here," I said, still patting, "you make out. What do you care what he does?"
She jerked her head up. "What do you know, what the hell do you know?" she demanded, and dug her fingers in my coat and shook me.
"If it's all this grief," I said, "let him go."
"Let him go! Let him go! I'll kill him first, I swear it," she said, glaring at me out of the now red eyes. "Let him go? Listen here–" and she shook me again–"if he does run after some slut, he'll come back. He's got to come back, do you hear? He's got to. Because he can't do without me. And he knows it. He can do without any of those sluts, but he can't do without me. Not without Sadie Burke, and he knows it."
And she lifted her face up, high, almost thrusting it at me, as though she were showing me something I ought damned well to be proud to look at.
"He'll always come back," she asserted grimly.
And she was right. He always came back. The world was full of sluts on skates, even if some of them weren't on skates. Some of them wore grass skirts and some of them pounded typewriters and some of them checked hats and some of them were married to legislators, but he always came back. Not necessarily to be greeted with open arms and a tender smile, however. Sometimes it was a cold silence like the artic night. Sometimes it was delirium for every seismograph on the continent. Sometimes it was a single well-chosen epithet. For instance, the time the Boss and I had to do a little trip up to the north of the state. The afternoon we got back we walked into the Capitol and there, in the stately lobby, under the great bronze dome, was Sadie. We approached her. She waited until we had arrived, then said, without preliminary, quite simply, "You bastard."
"Gee, Sadie," the Boss said, and grinned his grin of the wayward attractive boy, "you don't even wait to find out anything."
"You just can't keep buttoned up, you bastard," she said, still simply, and walked away.
"Gee," the Boss said ruefully to me, "I didn't do a thing this trip, and look what happens."
What did Lucy Stark know? I don't know. As far as you could tell, she didn't know anything. Even when she told the Boss she was going to pack her bag, it was, so he said, because he hadn't thrown Byram B. White to the wolves.
But she didn't pack the bag, even then.
She didn't pack it because she was too honorable, or too generous, or too something, to hit when she thought he was down. Or about to go down. She wasn't going to add the weight of her thumb to what closely resembled a tidy package of disaster lying on the scales with the blood seeping through the brown paper. For the impeachment of Byram B. White had become a minor issue. They had uncorked the real stuff: the impeachment of Willie Stark.
I don't know whether or not they had planned it that way. Or whether they were forced into it before they planned when they figured the Boss was turning on too much heat and it was their only chance to get back on the offensive. Or whether they figured that the Lord had delivered the enemy into their hands, that they could get him dead to rights on the business of attempting to corrupt, coerce, and blackmail the Legislature, in addition to the other little charges of malfeasance and nonfeasance. Maybe they had some heroes lined up from among the ranks to testify that they had had the heat put on them. It would have taken a hero, too (or sound inducements), for nobody but a half-wit would have believed, in the light of the record, that the Boss was bluffing. But apparently they figured they had found, or bought, some heroes.
Anyway, they tried it, and for a brief interval life was a blur for speed. I gravely doubt that the Boss did any sleeping for two weeks. That is, bed sleeping. No doubt, he snatched something in the back of automobiles roaring down highways at night, or in a chair between the time one fellow went out of the door and the next came in. He roared across the state at eighty miles an hour, the horn screaming, from town to town, crossroads to crossroads, five, or six, or seven, or eight speaking in a day. He would come out on the platform, almost slouching out, lounging out, as though all the time in the world were before him and all the time were his. He would begin, easy, "Folks, there's going to be a leetle mite of trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them and their kind so long, I just figures I'd take me a little trip and see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot. Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of what they are saying in that Legislature and getting paid five dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They're saying you didn't have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred ballot to elect me Governor of this state. Maybe you didn't have bat sense. Don't ask me, I'm prejudiced. But–" and now he wouldn't be lounging with his head cocked a little on one side in that easy sizing-up way, looking out from under the eyelids that drooped a little, for now he'd thrust, all at one, the heavy head forward, and the eyes, red from sleepless ness, would bulge–"I'll ask you a question. And I want an answer. I want an answer before God and under the awful hand of the Most High. Answer me: Have I disappointed you? Have I? Then, leaning sharply, he would lift his right hand while the question still ringing in the air, and say, "Stop! Don't answer until you look into the depth of your heart to see the truth. For there is where truth is. Not in a book. Not in a lawyer's book. Not on any scrap of paper. In your heart." Then, in a long pause, he would swing his gaze slowly over the crowd of faces. The, "Answer me!"
I would wait for a roar. You can't help it. I knew it would come, but I would wait for it, and every time it would seem intolerably long before it came. It was like a deep dive. You start up toward the light but you know you can't breathe yet, not yet, and all you are aware of is the blood beating in your own head in the intolerable timelessness. Then the roar would come and I would feel the way you do when you pop out of the water from a deep dive and the air bursts out of your lungs and everything reels in the light. There is nothing like the roar of as crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing is in every an in the crowd but is not himself. The roar would swell and rise and fall and swell again, with the Boss standing with his right arm raised straight to Heaven and his red eyes bulging.
And when the roar fell away, he said, with his arm up, "I have looked in your faces!"
And they would yell.
And he said, "O Lord, and I have seen a sign!"