Soldiers Pay (29 page)

“Say,” Gilligan repeated, “who's swift, anyway? I kind of got bogged up back there.”

“Mr. Jones is, according to his own statement. You are Napoleon, Joe.”

“Him? Not quite swift enough to get himself a girl, though. The way he was gaining on Emmy—You ought to have a bicycle,” he suggested.

“There's your answer, Mr. Jones,” the rector told him. Jones looked toward Gilligan's fading figure in disgust, like that of a swordsman who has been disarmed by a peasant with a pitchfork.

“That's what association with the clergy does for you,” he said crassly.

“What is it?” Gilligan asked. “What did I say wrong?”

Mrs. Mahon leaned over and squeezed his arm. “You didn't say anything wrong, Joe. You were grand.”

Jones glowered sullenly in the dusk. “By the way,” he said, suddenly, “how is your husband today?

“Just the same, thank you.”

“Stands wedded life as well as can be expected, does he?” She ignored this. Gilligan watched him in leashed anticipation. He continued: “That's too bad. You had expected great things from marriage, hadn't you? Sort of a miraculous rejuvenation?”

“Shut up, fellow,” Gilligan told him. “Whatcher mean, anyway?”

“Nothing, Mr. Galahad, nothing at all. I merely made a civil inquiry. . . . Shows that when a man marries, his troubles continue, doesn't it?”

“Then you oughtn't to have no worries about your troubles,” Gilligan told him savagely.

“What?”

“I mean, if you don't have no better luck than you have twice that I know of——”

“He has a good excuse for one failure, Joe,” Mrs. Mahon said.

They both looked toward her voice. The sky was bowled with a still disseminated light that cast no shadow and branches of trees were rigid as coral in a mellow tideless sea. “Mr. Jones says that to make love to Miss Saunders would be epicene.”

“Epicene? What's that?”

“Shall I tell him, Mr. Jones? or will you?”

“Certainly. You intend to, anyway, don't you?”

“Epicene is something you want and can't get, Joe.”

Jones rose viciously. “If you will allow me, I'll retire, I think,” he said savagely. “Good evening.”

“Sure,” agreed Gilligan with alacrity, rising also. “I'll see Mr. Jones to the gate. He might get mixed up and head for the kitchen by mistake. Emmy might be one of them epicenes, too.”

Without seeming to hurry Jones faded briskly away. Gilligan sprang after him. Jones, sensing him, whirled in the dusk and Gilligan leaped upon him.

“For the good of your soul,” Gilligan told him joyously. “You might say that's what running with preachers does for you, mightn't you?” he panted as they went down.

They rolled in dew and an elbow struck him smartly under the chin, Jones was up immediately and Gilligan, tasting his bitten tongue, sprang in pursuit. But Jones retained his lead. “He has sure learned to run from somebody,” Gilligan grunted. “Practising on Emmy so much, I guess. Wish I was Emmy, now—until I catch him.”

Jones doubled the house and plunged into the dreaming garden. Gilligan, turning the corner of the house, saw the hushed expanse where his enemy was, but his enemy, himself, was out of sight. Roses bloomed quietly under the imminence of night, hyacinths swung pale bells, waiting for another day. Dusk was a dream of arrested time, the mocking bird rippled it tentatively, and everywhere blooms slept passionately, waiting for tomorrow. But Jones was gone.

He stopped to listen upon the paling gravel, between the slow unpickable passion of roses, seeing the pale broken coin of the moon attain a richer lustre against the unemphatic sky. Gilligan stilled his heaving lungs to listen, but he heard nothing. Then he began systematically to beat the firefly-starred scented dusk of the garden, beating all available cover, leaving not a blade of grass unturned. But Jones had got clean away; the slow hands of dusk had removed him as cleanly as the prestidigitator reaves a rabbit from an immaculate hat.

He stood in the centre of the garden and cursed Jones thoroughly on the off-chance that he might be within hearing, then Gilligan slowly retraced his steps, retracing the course of the race through the palpable violet dusk. He passed the unlighted house where Emmy went somewhere about her duties, where at the corner of the veranda near the silver tree's twilight-musicked ecstasy Mahon slept on his movable bed and on across the lawn while evening like a ship with twilight-co loured sails dreamed on down the world.

The chairs were formless blurs beneath the tree and Mrs. Mahon's presence was indicated principally by her white collar and cuffs. As he approached he could see dimly the rector reclined in slumber, and the woman's dark dress shaped her against the dull white of her canvas chair. Her face was pallid, winged either side by her hair. She raised her hand as he drew near.

“He's asleep,” she whispered, as he sat beside her.

“He got away, damn him,” he told her, in exasperation.

“Too bad. Better luck next time.”

“You bet. And there'll be a next time soon as I see him again.”

Night was almost come. Light, all light, passed from the world, from the earth, and leaves were still. Night was almost come, but not quite; day was almost gone, but not quite. Her shoes were quite soaked in dew.

“How long he has slept.” She broke the silence diffidently. “We'll have to wake him soon for supper.”

Gilligan stirred in his chair and almost as she spoke the rector sat hugely and suddenly up.

“Wait, Donald,” he said, lumbering to his feet. With elephantine swiftness he hurried across the lawn toward the darkly dreaming house.

“Did he call?” they spoke together, in a dark foreboding. They half rose and stared toward the house, then at each other's indistinct, white face. “Did you——?” the question hung poised in the dusk between them and here was the evening star bloomed miraculously at the poplar's tip and the slender tree was a leafed and passionate Atalanta, poising her golden apple.

“No, did you?” he replied.

But they heard nothing.

“He dreamed,” she said.

“Yes,” Gilligan agreed. “He dreamed.”

VII

Donald Mahon lay quietly conscious of unseen forgotten spring, of greenness neither recalled nor forgot. After a time the nothingness in which he lived took him wholly again, but restlessly. It was like a sea into which he could neither completely pass nor completely go away from. Day became afternoon, became dusk and imminent evening: evening like a ship, with twilight-coloured sails, dreamed down the world darkly towards darkness. And suddenly he found that he was passing from the dark world in which he had lived for a time he could not remember, again into a day that had long passed, that had already been spent by those who lived and wept and died, and so remembering it, this day was his alone: the one trophy he had reft from Time and Space. Per ardua ad astra.

I never knew I could carry this much petrol, he thought in unsurprised ubiquity, leaving a darkness he did not remember for a day he had long forgot, finding that the day, his own familiar day, was approaching noon. It must be about ten o'clock, for the sun was getting overhead and a few degrees behind him, because he could see the shadow of his head bisecting in an old familiarity the hand which held the control column and the shadow of the cockpit rim across his flanks, filling his lap, while the sun fell amost directly downward upon his other hand lying idly on the edge of the fuselage. Even the staggered lower wing was partly shadowed by the upper one.

Yes, it is about ten, he thought, with a sense of familiarity. Soon he would look at the time and make sure, but now. . . . With the quick skill of practice and habit he swept the horizon with a brief observing glance, casting a look above, banking slightly to see behind. All clear. The only craft in sight were far away to the left: a cumbersome observation 'plane doing artillery work: a brief glance divulged a pair of scouts high above it, and above these he knew were probably two more.

Might have a look, he thought, knowing instinctively that they are Huns, calculating whether or not he could reach the spotter before the protecting scouts saw him. No, I guess not, he decided. Better get on home. Fuel's low. He settled his swinging compass needle.

Ahead of him and to the right, far away, what was once Ypres, was like the cracked scab on an ancient festering sore; beneath him were other shining sores lividly on a corpse that would not be left to die. . . . He passed on lonely and remote as a gull.

Then, suddenly, it was as if a cold wind had blown upon, him. What is it? he thought. It was that the sun had been suddenly blotted from him. The empty world, the sky, were yet filled with lazy spring sunlight, but the sun that had been full upon him, had been brushed away as by a hand. I the moment of realizing this, cursing his stupidity, he dived steeply, slipping to the left. Five threads of vapour passed between the upper and lower planes, each one nearer his body, then he felt two distinct shocks at the base of his skull and vision was reft from him as if a button somewhere had been pressed. His trained hand nosed the machine up smartly, and finding the Vickers release in the darkness, he fired into the bland morning marbled and imminent with March.

Sight flickered on again, like a poorly made electrical contact, he watched holes pitting into the fabric near him like a miraculous small-pox and as he hung poised firing into the sky a dial on his instrument board exploded with a small sound. Then he felt his hand, saw his glove burst, saw his bared bones. Then sight flashed off again and he felt himself lurch, falling until the belt caught him sharply across the abdomen, and he heard something gnawing through his frontal bone, like mice. You'll break your damn teeth, there, he told them, opening his eyes.

His father's heavy face hung over him in the dusk like a murdered Caesar's.

He knew sight again and an imminent nothingness more profound than any yet, while evening, like a ship with twilight-coloured sails, drew down the world, putting calmly out to an immeasurable sea. “That's how it happened,” he said, staring at him.

Sex and death: the
front door and the back door of the world. How indissolubly are they associated in us! In youth they lift us out of the flesh, in old age they reduce us again to the flesh; one to fatten us, the other to flay us, for the worm. When are sexual compulsions more readily answered than in war or famine or flood or fire?

Jones, lurking across the street, saw the coast clear at last.

(First, marched a uniformed self-constituted guard, led by a subaltern with three silver V's on his sleeve and a Boy Scout bugler furnished by the young Baptist minister, a fiery-eyed dervish, who had served in the Y.M.C.A.)

And then fatly arrogant as a cat, Jones let himself through the iron gate.

(The last motorcar trailed slowly up the street and the casuals gathered through curiosity—the town should raise a monument to Donald Mahon, with effigies of Margaret Mahon-Powers and Joe Gilligan for caryatides—and the little blackguard boys, both black and white, and including young Robert Saunders, come to envy the boy bugler, drifted away.)

And still cat-like, Jones mounted the steps and entered the deserted house. His yellow goat's eyes became empty as he paused, listening. Then he moved quietly toward the kitchen.

(The procession moved slowly across the square. Country people, in town to trade, turned to stare vacuously, merchant and doctor and lawyer came to door and window to look; the city fathers, drowsing in the courthouse yard, having successfuly circumvented sex, having reached the point where death would look after them instead of they after death, waked and looked and slept again. Into a street, among and between horses and mules tethered to wagons, it passed, into a street bordered by shabby negro stores and shops, and here was Loosh standing stiffly at salute as it passed. “Who dat, Loosh?” “Mist' Donald Mahon.” “Well, Jesus! we all gwine dat way, someday. All road leads to de graveyard.”)

Emmy sat at the kitchen table, her head between her hard elbows, her hands clasping behind her in her hair. How long she had sat there she did not know, but she had heard them clumsily carrying him from the house and she put her hands over her ears, not to hear. But it seemed as if she could hear in spite of her closed ears those horrible, bhmdering, utterly unnecessary sounds: the hushed scraping of timid footsteps, the muted thumping of wood against wood, that passing, left behind an unbearable unchastity of stale flowers—as though flowers themselves getting a rumour of death became corrupt—all the excruciating ceremony for disposing of human carrion. So she had not heard Mrs. Mahon until the other touched her shoulder. (I would have cured him! If they had just let me marry him instead of her!) At the touch Emmy raised her swollen, blurred face, swollen because she couldn't seem to cry. (If I could just cry. You are prettier than me, with your black hair and your painted mouth. That's the reason.)

“Come, Emmy,” Mrs. Mahon said.

“Let me alone! Go away!” she said, fiercely. “You got him killed: now bury him yourself.”

“He would have wanted you to come, Emmy,” the other woman said, gently.

“Go away, let me alone, I tell you!” She dropped her head to the table again, bumping her forehead. . . .

There was no sound in the kitchen save a clock. Life. Death. Life. Death. Life. Death. Forever and ever. (If I could only cry!) She could hear the dusty sound of sparrows and she imagined she could see the shadows growing longer across the grass. Soon it will be night, she thought remembering that night long, long ago, the last time she had seen Donald, her Donald—not that one! and he had said, “Come here, Emmy,” and she had gone to him. Her Donald was dead long, long ago. . . . The clock went Life. Death. Life. Death. There was something frozen in her chest, like a dischloth in winter.

(The procession moved beneath arching iron letters. Rest in Peace in cast repetition: Our motto is one for every cemetery, a cemetery for everyone throughout the land. Away, following where fingers of sunlight pointed among cedars, doves were cool, throatily unemphatic among the dead.)

“Go away,” Emmy repeated to another touch on her shoulder, thinking she had dreamed. It was a dream! she thought and the frozen dishrag in her chest melted with unbearable relief, becoming tears. It was Jones who had touched her, but anyone would have been the same and she turned in a passion of weeping, clinging to him.

(I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. . . . )

Jones's yellow stare enveloped her like amber, remarking her sun-burned hair and her foreshortened thigh, wrung by her turning body into high relief.

(“Whosoever believeth in Me, though he were dead. . . . )

My God, when will she get done weeping? First she wets my pants, then my coat. But this time she'll dry it for me, or I'll know the reason why.

( . . . yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die. . . . )

Emmy's sobbing died away: she knew no sensation save that of warmth and languorous contentment, emptiness, even when Jones raised her face and kissed her. “Come, Emmy,” he said, raising her by the armpits. She rose obediently, leaning against him warm and empty, and he led her through the house and up the stairs to her room. Outside the window, afternoon became abruptly rain; without warning, with no flapping of pennons nor sound of trumpet to herald it.

(The sun had gone, had been recalled as quickly as a usurer's note . and the doves fell silent or went away. The Baptist dervish's Boy Scout lipped his bugle, sounding taps.)

II

“Hi, Bob,” called a familiar voice, that of a compatriot. “Le's gwup to Miller's. They're playing ball up there.”

He looked at his friend, making no reply to the greeting, and his expression was so strange that the other said: “Whatcher looking so funny about? You ain't sick, are you?”

“I don't haf to play ball if I don't want to, do I?” he replied, with sudden heat. He walked on while the other boy stood watching him with open mouth. After a while, he, too, turned and went on, stopping once or twice to look again at his friend become suddenly strange and queer. Then he passed, whooping from sight, forgetting him.

How strange everything looked! This street, these familiar trees—was this his home here, where his mother and father were, where Sis lived, where he ate and slept, lapped closely around with safety and solidity, where darkness was kind and sweet for sleeping? He mounted the steps and entered, wanting his mother. But, of course, she hadn't got back from—He found himself running suddenly through the hall toward a voice raised in comforting, crooning song. Here was a friend mountainous in blue calico, her elephantine thighs undulating, gracious as the wake of a ferry boat as she moved between table and stove.

She broke off her mellow, passionless song, exclaiming: “Bless yo' heart, honey, what is it?”

But he did not know. He only clung to her comforting, voluminous skirt in a gust of uncontrollable sorrow, while she wiped biscuit dough from her hands on a towel. Then she picked him up and sat upon a stiff-backed chair, rocking back and forth and holding him against her balloon-like breast until his fit of weeping shuddered away.

Outside the window the afternoon became a bruptly rain, without warning, with no flapping of pennons nor sound of trumpet to herald it.

III

There was nothing harsh about this rain. It was grey and quiet as a benediction. The birds did not even cease to sing, and the west was already thinning to a moist and imminent gold.

The rector, bareheaded, walked slowly, unconscious of the rain and the dripping trees, beside his daughter-in-law across the lawn, houseward, and they mounted the steps together, passing beneath the dim and unwashed fanlight. Within the hall he stood while water ran down his face and dripped from his clothing in a series of small sounds. She took his arm and led him into the study and to his chair. He sat obediently and she took his handkerchief from the breast of his coat and I wiped the rain from his temples and face. He submitted, fumbling for his pipe.

She watched him as he sprinkled tobacco liberally over the desk top, trying to fill the bowl, then she quietly took it from his hand. “Try this. It is much simpler,” she told him, taking a cigarette from her jacket pocket and putting it in his mouth. “You have never smoked one, have you?”

“Eh? Oh, thank you. Never too old to learn, eh?”

She lit it for him and then she quickly fetched a glass from the pantry. Kneeling beside the desk, she drew out drawer after drawer until she found the bottle of whisky. He seemed to have forgotten her until she put the glass in his hand.

Then he looked up at her from a bottomless, grateful anguish and she sat suddenly on the arm of his chair drawing his head against her breast. His untasted drink in one hand and his slowly burning cigarette lifting an unshaken plume of vapour from the other; and after a while the rain passed away and the dripping eaves but added to the freshened silence, measuring it, spacing it off; and the sun breaking through the west took a last look at the earth before going down.

“So you will not stay,” he said at last, repeating her unspoken decision.

“No,” she said, holding him.

IV

Before her descending, the hill crossed with fireflies. At its foot among dark trees was unseen water and Emmy walked slowly on, feeling the tall wet grass sopping her to the knees, draggling her skirt.

She walked on and soon was among trees that, as she moved, moved overhead like dark ships parting the star-filled river of the sky, letting the parted waters join again behind them with never a ripple. The pool lay darkly in the dark: sky and trees above it, trees and sky beneath it. She sat down on the wet earth, seeing through the trees the moon becoming steadily brighter in the darkening sky. A dog saw it also and bayed: a mellow, long sound that slid immaculately down a hill of silence, yet at the same time seemed to linger about her like a rumour of a far despair.

Tree trunks taking light from the moon, streaks of moonlight in the water—she could almost imagine she saw him standing there across the pool with her beside him; leaning above the water, she could almost see them darting keen and swift and naked, flashing in the moon.

She could feel earth strike through her clothes against legs and belly and elbows . . . the dog bayed again, hopeless and sorrowful, dying, dying away. . . . After a while she rose slowly, feeling her damp clothes, thinking of the long walk home. Tomorrow was washday.

V

“Damn!” said Mrs. Mahon, staring at the bulletin board. Gilligan, setting down her smart leather bags against the station wall, remarked briefly:

“Late?”

“Thirty minutes. What beastly luck!”

“Well, can't be helped. Wanta go back to the house and wait?”

“No, I don't. I don't like these abortive departures. Get my ticket, please.” She gave him her purse and standing on tiptoe to see her reflection in a raised window she did a few deft things to her hat. Then she sauntered along the platform to the admiration of those casuals always to be found around small railway stations anywhere in these United States. And yet Continentals labour under the delusion that we spend all our time working!

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act. She felt freer, more at peace with herself than she had felt for months. But I won't think about that, she decided deliberately. It is best just to be free, not to let it into the conscious mind. To be consciously anything argues a comparison, a bond with antithesis. Live in your dream, do not attain it—else comes satiety. Or sorrow, which is worse, I wonder? Dr. Mahon and his dream: reft, restored, reft again. Funny for someone, I guess. And Donald, with his scar and his stiffened hand quiet in the warm earth, in the warmth and the dark, where the one cannot hurt him and the other he will not need. No dream for him! The ones with whom he now sleeps don't care what his face looks like. Per ardua ad astra. . . . And Jones, what dream is his? “Nightmare, I hope,” she said aloud, viciously, and one collarless and spitting tobacco said Ma'am? with interest.

Gilligan reappeared with her ticket.

“You're a nice boy, Joe,” she told him, receiving her purse.

He ignored her thanks. “Come on, let's walk a ways.”

“Will my bags be all right there, do you think?”

“Sure.” He looked about, then beckoned to a negro youth reclining miraculously on a steel cable that angled up to a telephone pole. “Here, son.”

The negro said Suh? without moving. “Git up dar, boy. Dat white man talkin' to you,” said a companion, squatting on his heels against the wall. The lad rose and a coin spun arcing from Gilligan's hand.

“Keep your eye on them bags till I come back, will you?”

“Awright, cap'm.” The boy slouched over to the bags and became restfully and easily static beside them, going to sleep immediately, like a horse.

“Damn 'em, they do what you say, but they make you feel so—so——”

“Immature, don't they?” she suggested.

“That's it. Like you was a kid or something and that they'd look after you even if you don't know exactly what you want.”

“You are a funny sort, Joe. And nice. Too nice to waste.”

Her profile was sharp, pallid against a doorway darkly opened. “I'm giving you a chance not to waste me.”

“Come on, let's walk a bit.” She took his arm and moved slowly along the track, conscious that her ankles were being examined. The two threads of steel ran narrowing and curving away beyond trees. If you could see them as far as you can see, farther than you can see. . . .

“Huh?” asked Gilligan, walking moodily beside her.

“Look at the spring, Joe. See, in the trees: summer is almost here, Joe.”

“Yes, summer is almost here. Funny, ain't it? I'm always kind of surprised to find that things get on about the same, spite of us. I guess old nature does too much of a wholesale business to ever be surprised at us, let alone worrying if we ain't quite the fellows we think we ought to of been.”