Soldier's Pay

  She crossed her knees. “Never in my life——”

  “In God’s name, don’t say it. I have heard that from so many women. I had expected better of someone as vain as I am.”

  He would be fairly decent looking, she thought, if he were not so fat—and could dye his eyes another colour. After a while, she spoke.

  “What do you think I mean when I do either of them?”

  “I couldn’t begin to say. You are a fast worker, too fast for me. I doubt if I could keep up with the men you kiss and lie to, let alone with what you mean in each case. I don’t think you can yourself.”

  “So you cannot imagine letting people make love to you and saying things to them without meaning anything by it?”

  “I cannot. I always mean something by what I say or do.”

  “For instance?” her voice was faintly interested, ironical.

  Again he considered moving, so that her face would be in light and his in shadow. But then he would no longer be beside her. He said roughly: “I meant by that kiss that someday I intend to have your body.”

  “Oh,” she said sweetly, “it’s all arranged, then? How nice. I can now understand your sucess with us. Just a question of will power, isn’t it? Look the beast in the eye and he—I mean she—is yours. That must save a lot of your valuable time and trouble, I imagine?”

  Jones’s stare was calm, bold and contemplative, obscene as a goat’s. “You don’t believe I can?” he asked.

  She shrugged delicately, nervously, and her lax hand between them grew again like a flower: it was as if her whole body became her hand. The symbol of a delicate, body less lust. Her hand seemed to melt into his yet remain without volition, her hand unawaked in his and her body also yet sleeping, crushed softly about with her fragile clothing. Her long legs, not for locomotion, but for the studied completion of a rhythm to its nth: compulsion of progress, movement; her body created for all men to dream after. A poplar, vain and pliant, trying attitude after attitude, gesture after gesture—“a girl trying gown after gown, perplexed but in pleasure.” Her unseen face nimbused with light and her body, which was no body, crumpling a dress that had been dreamed. Not for maternity, not even for love: a thing for the eye and the mind. Epicene, he thought, feeling her slim bones, the bitter nervousness latent in her flesh.

  “If I really held you close you’d pass right through me like a ghost, I am afraid,” he said and his clasp was loosely about her .

  “Quite a job,” she said coarsely. “Why are you so fat?”

  “Hush,” he told her, “you’ll spoil it.”

  His embrace but touched her and she, with amazing tact, suffered him. Her skin was neither warm nor cool, her body in the divan’s embrace was nothing, her limbs only an indication of crushed texture. He refused to hear her breath as he refused to feel a bodily substance in his arms. Not an ivory carving: this would have body, rigidity; not an animal that eats and digests—this is the heart’s desire purged of flesh. “Be quiet,” he told himself as much as her, “don’t spoil it.”

  The trumpets in his blood, the symphony of living, died away. The golden sand of hours bowled by day ran through the narrow neck of time into the corresponding globe of night, to be inverted and so flow back again. Jones felt the slow, black sand of time marking life away. “Hush,” he said, “don’t spoil it.”

  The sentries in her blood lay down, but they lay down near the ramparts with their arms in their hands, waiting the alarm, the inevitable stand-to, and they sat clasped in the vaguely gleaned twilight of the room; Jones a fat Mirandola in a chaste Platonic nympholepsy, a religio-sentimental orgy in grey tweed, shaping an insincere, fleeting articulation of damp clay to an old imperishable desire, building himself a papier-maché Virgin: and Cecily Saunders wondering what, how much, he had heard, frightened and determined. What manner of man was this? she thought alertly, wanting George to be there and put an end to this situation, how she did not know; wondering if the fact of his absence were significant.

  Outside the window leaves stirred and cried soundlessly. Noon was past. And under the bowled pale sky, trees and grass, hills and valleys, somewhere the sea, regretted him, with relief.

  No, no, he thought, with awakened despair, don’t spoil it. But she had moved and her hair brushed his face. Hair. Everyone, anyone, has hair. (To hold it, to hold it.) But it was hair and here was a body in his arms, fragile and delicate it might be, but still a body, a woman: something to answer the call of his flesh, to retreat pausing, touching him tentatively, teasing and retreating, yet still answering the call of his flesh. Impalpable and dominating. He removed his arm.

  “You little fool, don’t you know you had me?”

  Her position had not changed. The divan embraced her in its impersonal clasp. Light like the thumbed rim of a coin about her indistinct face, her long legs crushed to her dress. Her hand, relaxed, lay slim and lax between them. But he ignored it.

  “Tell me what you heard,” she said.

  He rose. “Good-bye,” he said. “Thanks for lunch, or dinner, or whatever you call it.”

  “Dinner,” she told him. “We are common people.” She rose also and studiedly leaned her hip against the arm of a chair. His yellow eyes washed over her warm and clear as urine, and he said, “God damn you.” She sat down again leaning back into the corner of the divan and as he sat beside her, seemingly without moving, she came to him.

  “Tell me what you heard.”

  He embraced her, silent and morose. She moved slightly and he knew that she was offering her mouth.

  “How do you prefer a proposal?” he asked.

  “How?”

  “Yes. What form do you like it in? You have had two or three in the last few days, haven’t you?”

  “Are you proposing?”

  “That was my humble intention. Sorry I’m dull. That was why I asked for information.”

  “So when you can’t get your women any other way, you marry them, then?”

  “Dammit, do you think all a man wants of you is your body?” She was silent and he continued: “I am not going to tell on you, you know.” Her tense body, her silence, was a question. “What I heard, I mean.”

  “Do you think I care? You have told me yourself that women say one thing and mean another. So I don’t have to worry about what you heard. You said so yourself.” Her body became a direct challenge, yet she had not moved. “Didn’t you?”

  “Don’t do that,” he said sharply. “What makes you so beautiful and disturbing and so godammed dull?”

  “What do you mean? I am not used——”

  “Oh, I give up. I can’t explain to you. And you wouldn’t understand, anyway. I know I am temporarily a fool, so if you tell me I am, I’ll kill you.”

  “Who knows? I may like that,” Her soft, coarse voice was quiet.

  Light in her hair, her mouth speaking and the vague, crushed shape of her body. “Atthis,” he said.

  “What did you call me?”

  He told her. “‘For a moment, an aeon, I pause plunging above the narrow precipice of thy breast’ and on and on and on. Do you know how falcons make love? They embrace at an enormous height and fall locked, beak to beak, plunging: an unbearable ecstasy. While we have got to assume all sorts of ludicrous postures, knowing our own sweat. The falcon breaks his clasp and swoops away swift and proud and lonely, while a man must rise and take his hat and walk out.”

  She was not listening, hadn’t heard him. “Tell me what you heard,” she repeated. Where she touched him was a cool fire; he moved but she followed like water. “Tell me what you heard.”

  “What difference does it make, what I heard? I don’t care anything about your jellybeans. You can have all the Georges and Donalds you want. Take them all for lovers if you like. I don’t want your body. If you can just get that through your beautiful thick h
ead, if you will just let me alone, I will never want it again.”

  “But you proposed to me. What do you want of me?”

  “You wouldn’t understand if I tried to tell you.”

  “Then if I did marry you, how would I know how to act toward you? I think you are crazy.”

  “That’s what I have been trying to tell you,” Jones answered in a calm fury. “You won’t have to act anyway toward me. I will do that. Act with your Donalds and Georges, I tell you.”

  She was like a light globe from which the current has been shut. “I think you’re crazy,” she repeated.

  “I know I am.” He rose abruptly. “Good-bye. Shall I see your mother, or will you thank her for lunch for me?”

  Without moving she said: “Come here.”

  In the hall, he could hear Mrs. Saunders’s chair as it creaked to her rocking, through the front door he saw trees, the lawn and the street. She said Come here again. Her body was a vague white shape as he entered the room again and light was the thumbed rim of a coin about her head. He said:

  “If I come back, you know what it means.”

  “But I can’t marry you. I am engaged.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “Good-bye,” he repeated. At the front door he could hear Mr. and Mrs. Saunders talking but from the room he had left came a soft movement, louder than any other sound. He thought she was following him, but the door remained empty and when he looked into the room again she sat as he had left her. He could not even tell if she were looking at him.

  “I thought you had gone,” she remarked.

  After a time he said: “Men have lied to you a lot, haven’t they?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  He looked at her a long moment. Then he turned to the door again. “Come here,” she repeated quickly.

  She made no movement, save to slightly avert her face as he embraced her. “I’m not going to kiss you,” he told her.

  “I’m not so sure of that.” Yet his clasp was impersonal.

  “Listen. You are a shallow fool, but at least you can do as you are told. And that is, let me alone about what I heard. Do you understand? You’ve got that much sense, haven’t you? I’m not going to hurt you: I don’t even want to see you again. So just let me alone about it. If I heard anything I have already forgotten it—and it’s damn seldom I do anything this decent. Do you hear?”

  She was cold and pliant as a young tree in his arms and against his jaw she said: “Tell me what you heard.”

  “All right then,” he said savagely. His hand cupped her shoulder, holding her powerless and his other hand ruthlessly brought her face around. She resisted, twisting her face against his fat palm.

  “No, no; tell me first.”

  He dragged her face up brutally and she said in a smothered whisper: “You are hurting me!”

  “I don’t give a damn. That might go with George, but not with me.”

  He saw her eyes go dark, saw the red print of his fingers on her cheek and chin. He held her face where the light could fall on it, examining it with sybaritish anticipation. She exclaimed quickly, staring at him: “Here comes daddy! Stop!”

  But it was Mrs. Saunders in the door, and Jones was calm, circumspect, lazy and remote as an idol.

  “Why, it’s quite cool in here, isn’t it? But so dark. How do you keep awake?” said Mrs. Saunders, entering. “I nearly went to sleep several times on the porch. But the glare is so bad on the porch. Robert went off to school without his hat: I don’t know what he will do.”

  “Perhaps they haven’t a porch at the schoolhouse,” murmured Jones.

  “Why, I don’t recall. But our school is quite modern. It was built in—when was it built, Cecily?”

  “I don’t know, mamma.”

  “Yes. But it is quite new. Was it last year or the year before, darling?”

  “I don’t know, mamma.”

  “I told him to wear his hat because of the glare, but of course, he didn’t. Boys are so hard to manage. Were you hard to manage when you were a child, Mr. Jones?”

  “No, ma’am,” answered Jones, who had no mother that he could name and who might have claimed any number of possible fathers, “I never gave my parents much trouble. I am of a quiet nature, you see. In fact, until I reached my eleventh year, the only time I ever knew passion was one day when I discovered beneath the imminent shadow of our annual picnic that my Sunday school card was missing. At our church they gave prizes for attendance and knowing the lesson, and my card bore forty-one stars, when it disappeared.” Jones grew up in a Catholic orphanage, but like Henry James, he attained verisimilitude by means of tediousness.

  “How dreadful. And did you find it again?”

  “Oh, yes. I found it in time for the picnic. My father had used it to enter a one-dollar bet on a race-horse. When I went to my father’s place of business to prevail on him to return home, as was my custom, just as I passed through the swinging doors, one of his business associates there was saying. ‘Whose card is this?’ I recognized my forty-one star immediately, and claimed it. collecting twenty-two dollars, by the way. Since then I have been a firm believer in Christianity.”

  “How interesting,” Mrs. Saunders commented, without having heard him. “I wish Robert liked Sunday school as much as that.”

  “Perhaps he would, at twenty-two to one.”

  “Pardon me?” she said. Cecily rose, and Mrs. Saunders said: “Darling, if Mr. Jones is going, perhaps you had better lie down. You look tired. Don’t you think she looks tired, Mr. Jones?”

  “Yes, indeed. I had just commented on it.”

  “Now, mamma,” said Cecily.

  “Thank you for lunch.” Jones moved doorward and Mrs. Saunders replied conventionally, wondering why he did not try to reduce. (But perhaps he is trying, she added, with belated tolerance.) Cecily followed him.

  “Do come again,” she told him staring at his face. “How much did you hear?” she whispered, with fierce desperation. “You MUST tell me.”

  Jones bowed fatly to Mrs. Saunders, and again bathed the girl in his fathomless, yellow stare. She stood beside him in the door and the afternoon fell upon her slender fragility. Jones said:

  “I am coming tonight.”

  She whispered, “What?” and he repeated.

  “You heard that?” Her mouth shaped the words against her blanched face. “You heard that?”

  “I say that.”

  Blood came beneath her skin again and her eyes became opaque, cloudy. “No, you aren’t,” she told him. He looked at her calmly, and her knuckles whitened on his sleeve. “Please,” she said, with utter sincerity. He made no answer, and she added: “Suppose I tell daddy?”

  “Come in again, Mr. Jones,” Mrs. Saunders said. Jones’s mouth shaped You don’t dare. Cecily stared at him in hatred and bitter desperation, in helpless terror and despair. “So glad to have you,” Mrs. Saunders was saying. “Cecily, you had better lie down: you don’t look at all well. Cecily is not very strong, Mr. Jones.”

  “Yes, indeed. One can easily see she isn’t strong,” Jones agreed, politely. The screen door severed them and Cecily’s mouth, elastic and mobile as red blubber, shaped Don’t.

  But Jones made no reply. He descended wooden steps and walked beneath locust trees in which bees were busy. Roses were slashed upon green bushes, roses red as the mouths of courtesans, red as Cecily’s mouth, shaping Don’t.

  She watched his fat, lazy, tweed back until he reached the gate and the street, then she turned to where her mother stood in impatient anticipation of her freed stout body. The light was behind her and the older woman could not see her face, but there was something in her attitude, in the relaxed hopeless tension of her body that caused the other to
look at her in quick alarm.

  “Cecily?”

  The girl touched her and Mrs. Saunders put her arm around her daughter. The older woman had eaten too much as usual, and she breathed heavily, knowing her corsets, counting the minutes until she would be free of them.

  “Cecily?”

  “Where is daddy, mamma?”

  “Why, he’s gone to town. What is it, baby?” She asked, quickly, “what’s the matter?”

  Cecily clung to her mother. The other was like a rock, a panting rock: something imperishable, impervious to passion and fear. And heartless.

  “I must see him,” she anwered. “I have just got to see him.”

  The other said: “There, there. Go to your room and lie down a while.” She sighed heavily. “No wonder you don’t feel well. Those new potatoes at dinner! When will I learn to stop eating? But if it isn’t one thing, it’s another, isn’t it? Darling, would you mind coming in and unlacing me? I think I’ll lie down a while before I dress to go to Mrs. Coleman’s.”

  “Yes, mamma. Of course,” she answered, wanting her father, George, anyone to help her.

  III

  George Farr, lurking along a street, climbed a fence swiftly when the exodus from the picture show came along. Despite himself, he simply could not act as though he were out for casual stroll, but must drift aimlessly and noticeably back and forth along the street with a sort of skulking frankness. He was too nervous to go somewhere else and time his return; he was too nervous to conceal himself and stay there. So he gave up and became frankly skulking, climbing a fence smartly when the exodus from the picture show began.

  Nine-thirty

  People sat on porches rocking and talking in low tones, enjoying the warmth of April, people passing beneath dark trees along the street, old and young, men and women, making comfortable, unintelligible sounds, like cattle going to barn and bed. Tiny red eyes passed along at mouth-height and burning tobacco lingered behind sweet and pungent. Spitting arc lights, at street corners, revealed the passers-by, temporarily dogging them with elastic shadows. Cars passed under the lights and he recognized friends: young men and the inevitable girls with whom they were “going”—coiffed or bobbed hair and slim young hands fluttering forever about it, keeping it in place. . . . The cars passed on into darkness, into another light, into darkness again.