Soldiers Pay (4 page)

Damned old bitch Gilligan muttered, careful not to wake him.

“Look how you've got his arm,” the girl said, returning. She moved his withered hand from his thigh. (His hand, too, seeing the scrofulous indication of his bones beneath the blistered skin.) “Oh, his poor terrible face,” she said, shifting the pillow under his head.

“Be quiet, ma'am,” Gilligan said.

She ignored him. Gilligan, expecting to see him wake, admitted defeat and she continued:

“Is he going far?”

“Lives in Georgia,” Gilligan said. He and Cadet Lowe seeing that she was not merely passing their section, rose.

Lowe remarking her pallid distinction, her black hair, the red scar of her mouth, her slim dark dress, knew an adolescent envy of the sleeper. She ignored Lowe with a brief glance. How impersonal she was, how self-contained. Ignoring them.

“He can't get home alone,” she stated with conviction. “Are you all going with him?”

“Sure,” Gilligan assured her. Lowe wished to say something, something that would leave him fixed in her mind: something to reveal himself to her. But she glanced at the glasses, the bottle that Lowe, feeling a fool, yet clasped.

“You seem to be getting along pretty well, yourselves,” she said.

“Snake medicine, miss, But won't you have some?”

Lowe, envying Gilligan's boldness, his presence of mind, watched her mouth. She looked down the car.

“I believe I will, if you have another glass.”

“Why, sure. General, ring the bell.” She sat down beside Mabon and Gilligan and Lowe sat again. She seemed . . . she was young; she probably liked dancing, yet at the same time she seemed not young—as if she knew everything. (She is married, and about twenty-five, thought Gilligan.) (She is about nineteen, and she is not in love, Lowe decided.) She looked at Lowe.

“What's your outfit, soldier?”

“Flying Cadet,” answered Lowe with slow patronage, “Air Service.” She was a kid: she only looked old.

“Oh. Then, of course, you are looking after him. He's an aviator, too, isn't he?”

“Look at his wings,” Lowe answered. “British. Royal Air Force. Pretty good boys.”

“Hell,” said Gilligan, “he ain't no foreigner.”

“You don't have to be a foreigner to be with the British, or French. Look at Lufbery. He was with the French until we come in.”

The girl looked at him and Gilligan, who had never heard of Lufbery, said: “Whatever he is, he's all right. With us, anyway. Let him be whatever he wants.”

The girl said: “I am sure he is.”

The porter appeared. “Cap'm's all right?” he whispered, remarking her without surprise as is the custom of his race.

“Yes,” she told him, “he's all right.”

Cadet Lowe thought I bet she can dance and she added: “He couldn't be in better hands than these gentlemen.” How keen she is! thought Gilligan. She has known disappointment. “I wonder if I could have a drink on your car?”

The porter examined her and then he said: “Yes, ma'am. I'll get some fresh ginger ale. You going to look after him?”

“Yes, for a while.”

He leaned down to her. “I'm from Gawgia, too. Long time ago.”

“You are? I'm from Alabama.”

“That's right. We got to look out for our own folks, ain't we? I'll get you a glass right away.”

The officer still slept and the porter returning hushed and anxious, they sat drinking and talking with muted voices. New York was Ohio, and Ohio became a series of identical cheap houses with the same man entering gate after gate, smoking and spitting. Here was Cincinnati and under the blanched flash of her hand he waked easily.

“Are we in?” he asked. On her hand was a plain gold band. No engagement ring. (pawned it, maybe, thought Gilligan. But she did not look poor.)

“General, get the Lootenant's hat.”

Lowe climbed over Gilligan's knees and Gilligan said:

“Here's an old friend of ours. Loot, meet Mrs. Powers.”

She took his hand helping him to his feet, and the porter appeared.

“Donald Mahon,” he said, like a parrot. Cadet Lowe assisted by the porter returned with a cap and stick and a coat and two kit bags. The porter helped him into the coat.

“I'll get yours, ma'am,” said Gilligan, but the porter circumvented him. Her coat was rough and heavy and light of colour. She wore it carelessly and Gilligan and Cadet Lowe gathered up their “issued” impedimenta. The porter handed the officer his cap and stick, then he vanished with the luggage belonging to them. She glanced again down the length of the car.

“Where are my——”

“Yessum,” the porter called from the door, across the coated shoulders of passengers, “I got your things, ma'am.”

He had gotten them and his dark gentle hand lowered the officer carefully to the platform.

“Help the lootenant there,” said the conductor officiously, but he bad already got the officer to the floor.

“You'll look after him, ma'am?”

“Yes. I'll look after him.”

They moved down the shed and Cadet Lowe looked back. But the negro was, efficient and skilful, busy with other passengers. He seemed to have forgotten them. And Cadet Lowe looked from the porter occupied with bags and the garnering of quarters and half dollars, to the officer in his coat and stick, remarking the set of his cap slanting backward bonelessly from his scarred brow, and he marvelled briefly upon his own kind.

But this was soon lost in the mellow death of evening in a street between stone buildings, among lights, and Gilligan in his awkward khaki and the girl in her rough coat, holding each an arm of Donald Mahon, silhouetted against it in the doorway.

III

Mrs. Powers lay in her bed aware of her long body beneath strange sheets, hearing the hushed night sounds of a hotel—muffled footfalls along mute carpeted corridors, discreet opening and shutting of doors, somewhere a murmurous pulse of machinery—all with that strange propensity which sounds, anywhere else soothing, have, when heard in a hotel, for keeping you awake. Her mind and body warming to the old familiarity of sleep became empty, then as she settled her body to the bed, shaping it for slumber, it filled with a remembered troubling sadness.

She thought of her husband youngly dead in France in a recurrence of fretful exasperation with having been tricked by a wanton Fate: a joke amusing to no one. Just when she had calmly decided that they had taken advantage of a universal hysteria for the purpose of getting of each other a brief ecstasy, just when she had decided calmly that they were better quit of each other with nothing to mar the memory of their three days together and had written him so, wishing him luck, she must be notified casually and impersonally that he had been killed in action. So casually, so impersonally; as if Richard Powers, with whom she had spent three days, were one man and Richard Powers commanding a platoon in the—Division were another.

And she being young must again know all the terror of parting, of that passionate desire to cling to something concrete in a dark world, in spite of war departments. He had not even got her letter! This in some way seemed the infidelity: having him die still believing in her, bored though they both probably were.

She turned feeling sheets like water, warmed by her bodily heat, upon her legs.

Oh, damn, damn. What a rotten trick you played on me. She recalled those nights during which they had tried to eradicate tomorrows from the world. Two rotten tricks, she thought. Anyway, I know what I'll do with the insurance, she added, wondering what Dick thought about it—if he did know or care.

Her shoulder rounded upward, into her vision, the indication of her covered turning body swelled and died away toward the foot of the bed: she lay staring down the tunnel of her room, watching the impalpable angles of furniture, feeling through plastered smug walls a rumour of spring outside. The airshaft was filled with a prophecy of April come again into the world. Like a heedless idiot into a world that had forgotten Spring. The white connecting door took the vague indication of a transom and held it in a mute and luminous plane, and obeying an impulse she rose and slipped on a dressing gown.

The door opened quietly under her hand. The room, like hers, was a suggestion of furniture, identically vague. She could hear Mahon's breathing and she found a light switch with her fingers. Under his scarred brow he slept, the light full and sudden on his closed eyes did not disturb him. And she knew in an instinctive flash what was wrong with him, why his motions were hesitating, ineffectual.

He's going blind, she said, bending over him. He slept and after a while there were sounds without the door. She straightened up swiftly and the noises ceased. Then the door opened to a blundering key and Gilligan entered supporting Cadet Lowe, glassy-eyed and quite drunk.

Gilligan standing his lax companion upright, said:

“Good afternoon, ma'am.”

Lowe muttered wetly and Gilligan continued:

“Look at this lonely mariner I got here. Sail on. O proud and lonely,” he told his attached and aimless burden. Cadet Lowe muttered again, not intelligible. His eyes were like two oysters.

“Huh?” asked Gilligan. “Come on, be a man: speak to the nice lady.”

Cadet Lowe repeated himself liquidly and she whispered: “Shhh: be quiet.”

“Oh,” said Gilligan with surprise, “Loot's asleep, huh? What's he want to sleep for, this time of day?”

Lowe with quenchless optimism essayed speech again and Gilligan comprehending, said:

“That's what you want, is it? Why couldn't you come out like a man and say it? Wants to go to bed, for some reason,” he explained to Mrs. Powers.

“That's where he belongs,” she said; and Gilligan with alcoholic care led his companion to the other bed and with the exaggerated caution of the inebriate laid him upon it. Lowe drawing his knees up sighed and turned his back to them but Gilligan dragging at his legs removed his puttees and shoes, taking each shoe ill both bands and placing it on a table. She leaned against the foot of Mahon's bed, fitting her long thigh to the hard rail, until he had finished.

At last Lowe freed of his shoes turned sighing to the wall and she said:

“How drunk are you, Joe?”

“Not very, ma'am. What's wrong? Loot need something?”

Mahon slept and Cadet Lowe immediately slept.

“I want to talk to you, Joe. About him,” she added quickly, feeling Gilligan's stare. “Can you listen or had you rather go to bed and talk it over in the morning?”

Gilligan, focusing his eyes, answered:

“Why, now suits me. Always oblige a lady.”

Making her decision suddenly she said:

“Come in my room then.”

“Sure: lemme get my bottle and I'm your man.”

She returned to her room while he sought his bottle and when he joined her she was sitting on her bed clasping her knees, wrapped in a blanket. Gilligan drew up a chair.

“Joe, do you know he's going blind?” she said abruptly.

After a time her face became a human face and holding it in his vision he said:

“I know more than that. He's going to die.”

“Die?”

“Yes, ma'am. If I ever seen death in a man's face, it's in his. Goddam this world,” he burst out suddenly.

“Shhh!” she whispered.

“That's right, I forgot,” he said swiftly.

She clasped her knees, huddled beneath the blanket, changing the position of her body as it became cramped, feeling the wooden head board of the bed, wondering why there were not iron beds, wondering why everything was as it was—iron beds, why you deliberately took certain people to break your intimacy, why these people died, why you yet took others. . . . Will my death be like this: fretting and exasperating? Am I cold by nature, or have I spent all my emotional coppers, that I don't seem to feel things like others? Dick, Dick. Ugly and dead.

Gilligan sat brittlely in his chair, focusing his eyes with an effort, having those intruments of vision evade him, slimy as broken eggs. Lights completing a circle, an orbit; she with two faces sitting on two beds, clasping four arms around her knees. . . . Why can't a man be very happy or very unhappy? It's only a sort of pale mixture of the two. Like beer when you want a shot—or a drink of water. Neither one nor the other.

She moved and drew the blanket closer about her. Spring in an airshaft, the rumour of spring; but in the room steam heat suggested winter, dying away.

“Let's have a drink, Joe.”

He rose careful and brittle and walking with meticulous deliberation he fetched a carafe and glasses. She drew a small table near them and Gilligan prepared two drinks. She drank and set the glass down. He lit a cigarette for her.

“It's a rotten old world, Joe.”

“You damn right. And dying ain't the half of it.”

“Dying?”

“In his case, I mean. Trouble is, he probably won't die soon enough.”

“Not die soon enough?”

Gilligan drained his glass. “I got the low down on him, see. He's got a girl at home: folks got 'em engaged when they was young, before he went off to war. And do you know what she's going to do when she see his face?” he asked, staring at her. At last her two faces became one face and her hair was black. Her mouth like a scar.

“Oh, no, Joe. She wouldn't do that.” She sat up. The blanket slipped from her shoulders and she replaced it, watching him intently.

Gilligan breaking the orbit of visible things by an effort of will said:

“Don't kid you yourself, I've seen her picture. And the last letter he had from her.”

“He didn't show them to you!” she said quickly.

“That's all right about that. I seen 'em.”

“Joe. You didn't go through his things?”

“Hell, ma'am, ain't I and you trying to help him? Suppose I did do something that ain't exactly according to holy Hoyle: you know damn well that I can help him—if I don't let a whole lot of don'ts stop me. And if I know I'm right there ain't any don'ts or anything else going to stop me.”