So I joined the guests in the library and left a piece of Jack Burden in the dinning room, with the ballista, for good and all.
They were having coffee. All except the Judge, who was opening up a bottle of brandy. He looked up as I came in, and said, "Been looking at our old peashooter, huh?" He put the slightest emphasis upon _our__.
"Yes." I said.
The yellow eyes bored right into me for a second, and I knew he knew what I'd found out. "I fixed it up," he said, and laughed the most candid and disarming laugh in the world. "The other day. You know, and old fellow with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. You can't read law and history and Dickens all the time. Or fish."
I grinned a grin which I somehow felt I had to grin as a tribute to something, not specified in my mind. But I knew that the grin was about as convincing as cold chicken broth in a boarding house.
Then I went over and sat beside the Dumonde girl, who had been provided for my delight. She was a prettyish, dark girl, well got-up but lacking something, too brittle and vivacious, with a trick of lassoing you with her anxious brown eyes and fluttering eyelids as she cinched the rope and then saying what her mother had told her ten years before to say. "Oh, Mr. Burden, they say you're in politics, oh, it must be just fascinating!" No doubt, her mother had taught her that. Well, she was pushing thirty and it hadn't worked yet. But the eyelids were still busy.
"No, I'm not in politics," I said. "I've just got a job."
"Tell me about you job, Mr. Burden."
"I'm an office boy," I said.
"Oh, they say you're very important, Mr. Burden. They say you're very influential. Oh, it must be fascinating. To be influential, Mr. Burden!"
"It's news to me," I said, and discovered that they were all looking at me as though it had just dawned on them that I was sitting there buck-naked on the couch beside Miss Dumonde, with a demitasse on my knee. It's the human fate. Every time some dame like Miss Dumonde snags you and you have to start talking the way you have to talk to dames like Miss Dumonde, the whole world starts listening in. I saw the Judge smiling with what I took to be a vengeful relish.
Then he said, "Don't let him kid you, Miss Dumonde. Jack is very influential."
"I knew it," Miss Dumonde said. "It must be fascinating."
"All right," I said, "I'm influential. You got any pals in the pen you want me to get a pardon for?" Then I thought: _Wonderful manners you got, Jack. You might at least smile if you've got to say that__. So I smiled.
"Well, there's going to be somebody in the pen," old Mr. Patton said, "before it's over. What's going on up there in the city. All these–"
"George," his wife breathe at him, but it didn't do any good, for Mr. Patton was a bluff, burly type, with lots of money and a manly candor. He kept right on: "–yes, sir, all these wild goings-on. Why, that fellow is giving this state away. Free this and free that and free other. Every wool-hat jackass thinking the world is free. Who's going to pay? That's what I want to know? What does he say to that, Jack?"
"I never asked him," I said.
"Well, you ask him," Mr. Patton said. "And ask him, too, how much grabbing there is. All that money flowing, and don't tell me there's not a grab. And ask him what he's going to do when they impeach him? Tell him there's a constitution in this state, or was before he blew it to hell. Tell him that."
"I'll tell him," I said, and laughed, and then laughed again when I thought how Willie would look if I did tell him.
"George," the Judge said, "you're an old fogy. Government is committed these days to give services we never heard of when we were growing up. The world's changing."
"It's changed so much a fellow can step in and grab the whole state. Give him another few years and nothing can blast him out. He'll have half the state on a pay roll and the other half will be afraid to vote. Strong-arm, blackmail, God knows what."
"He's a hard man," the Judge said. "He's played it hard and close. But there's one principle he's grasped: you don't make omelettes without breaking eggs. And precedents. He's broken plenty of eggs and he may make his omelettes. And remember, the Supreme Court has backed him up on every issue raised to date."
"Yeah, and it's _his__ court. Since he got Armstrong on, and Talbott. And the issues raised. But what about the issues that haven't been raised? That people have been afraid to raise?
"There's a great deal of talk," the Judge said calmly, "but we don't really know much."
"I know he's going to tax this state to death," Mr. Patton said, and shifted his big arms, and glared. "And drive business out of this state. Raising royalty on the state coal land. On the oil land. On–"
"Yes, George," the Judge laughed, "and he slammed an income tax on you and me, too."
"On the oil situation, now," the Young Executive, for the sacred name of oil had been mentioned, "as I see it, the situation–"
Well, Miss Dumonde had certainly opened the corral gate when she mentioned politics, and it was thunder of hoofs and swirl of dust from then on, and I was sitting on the bare ground in the middle of it. For a while it didn't occur to me that there was anything peculiar about the scene. Then it did occur to me. After all, I did work for the fellow who had the tail and the cloven hoof and this was, or had started out to be, a social occasion. I suddenly remembered that fact and decided that the developments were peculiar. Then I realized that they weren't so peculiar, after all. Mr. Patton, and the Young Executive, and Mrs. Patton, for she had begun putting her oar in, and even the Judge, they all assumed that even tough I did work for Willie my heart was with them. I was just picking up a little, or maybe a lot, of change with Willie, but my heart was in Burden's Landing and they had no secrets from me and they knew they couldn't hurt my feelings. Maybe they were right. Maybe my heart was in Burden's Landing. Maybe they couldn't hurt my feelings. But I just broke in, after an hour of sitting quiet and drinking in Miss Dumonde's subtle scent, and said something. I don't recall what I interrupted, but it all amounted to the same thing anyway. I said, "Doesn't it all boil down to this? If the government of this state for quite a long time back had been doing anything for the folks in it, would Stark have been able to get out there with his bare hands and bust the boys? And would he be having to make so many short cuts to get something done to make up for the time lost all these years in not getting something done? I'd just like to submit that question for the sake of argument."
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."