Soldiers Pay (22 page)

“Yes, a little,” he admitted. She descended from the car and turning, met Cecily's startled shallow face.

“I'll leave you to visit with Donald while I have a dance or two with Mr. Madden, shall I?” She took Madden's arm. “Don't you want to come in, too, Joe?”

“I guess not,” Gilligan answered. “Competition'll be too strong for me. I'll get you to learn me private, some time, so I can be a credit to you.”

Cecily, in exasperation, saw the other woman stealing part of her audience. But here were still Jones and Gilligan. Jones climbed heavily into the vacated seat, uninvited. Cecily gave him a fierce glance and turned her back upon him, feeling his arm against her side.

“Donald, sweetheart,” she said, putting her arm about Mahon. From here she could not see the scar so she drew his face to hers with her hand, laying her cheek against his. Feeling her touch, hearing voices, he stirred. “It's Cecily, Donald,” she said sweetly.

“Cecily,” he parroted.

“Yes. Put your arm around me like you used to, Donald, dear heart,” She moved nervously, but the length of Jones's arm remained against her closely as though it were attached by suction, like an octopus's tentacle. Trying to avoid him, her clasp about Mahon tightened convulsively, and he raised his hand, touching her face, fumbling at his glasses. “Easy there, Loot,” Gilligan warned quickly, and he lowered his hand.

Cecily kissed his cheek swiftly and sat up, releasing him. “Oh, there goes the music again, and I have this dance.” She stood up in the car, looking about. One lounging immaculately, smoking, strolled past. “Oh, Lee,” she called, in happy relief, “here I am.”

She opened the door and sprang out as the conventional one approached. Jones descended fatly, baggily, and stood dragging his jacket across his thick, heavy hips, staring yellowly at Mr. Rivers. Her body poised again, turning, and she said to Gilligan: “You aren't dancing tonight?”

“Not like that,” he replied, “no, ma'am. Where I come from you'd have to have a licence to dance that way.”

Her laugh was in three notes and she was like a swept tree. Her eyes, beneath lowered lids, her teeth, between her purple lips, glittered briefly.

“I think that's awfully clever. And Mr. Jones doesn't dance either, so all I have left is Lee.”

Lee—Mr. Rivers—stood waiting, and Jones said heavily: “This is my dance.”

“I'm sorry. I promised Lee,” she answered swiftly . “But you cut in, won't you?” Her hand was briefly on his sleeve and Jones, contemplating Mr. Rivers, yellowly repeated:

“This is my dance.”

Mr. Rivers looked at him and then looked quickly away.

“Oh, beg pardon. Your dance?”

“Lee!” she said sharply, reaching her hand again. Mr. Rivers met Jones's stare once more.

“Beg pardon,” he muttered, “I'll cut in.” He lounged onward. Cecily let her glance follow him, then she shrugged and turned to Jones. Her neck, her arm, took faint light warmly, smoothly. She took Jones's tweed sleeve.

“Say,” Gilligan murmured, watching their retreat, “you can see right through her.”

“Dat's de war,” explained the negro driver, sleeping again immediately.

XIII

Jones dragged her resisting among shadows. A crepe-myrtle bush obscured them.

“Let me go!” she said, struggling.

“What's the matter with you? You kissed me once, didn't you?”

“Let me go,” she repeated.

“What for? For that goddam dead man? What does he care about you?” He held her until her nervous energy, deserting her, left her fragile as a captured bird. He stared at the white blur which was her face and she was aware of the shapeless looming bulk of his body in the darkness, smelling wool and tobacco.

“Let me go,” she repeated piteously, and finding herself suddenly free, she fled across grass, knowing dew on her shoes, seeing gratefully a row of men sitting like birds on the balustrade. Mr. Rivers's ironed face, above his immaculate linen, met her and she grasped his arm.

“Let's dance, Lee,” she said thinly, striking her body sharply against him, taking the broken suggestion of saxophones.

XIV

Mrs. Powers had a small triumph: the rail birds had given her a “rush.”

“Say,” they had nudged each other, “look who Rufe's got.”

And while the hostess stood in effusive volubility beside her straight, dark dress, two of them, whispering together, beckoned Madden aside.

“Powers?” they asked, when he joined them. But he hushed them.

“Yes, that was him. But that's not for talk, you know. Don't tell them, see.” His glance swept the group along the rail. “Won't do any good, you know.”

“Hell, no,” they assured him. Powers!

And so they danced with her, one or two at first, then having watched her firm, capable performance, all of them that danced at all were soon involved in a jolly competition, following her while she danced with another of their number, importuning her between dances: some of them even went so far as to seek out other partners whom they knew.

Madden after a time merely looked on, but his two friends were assiduous, tireless; seeing that she did not dance too long with the poor dancers, fetching her cups of insipid punch; kind and a little tactless.

Her popularity brought the expected harvest of feminine speculation. Her clothes were criticized, her “nerve” in coming to a dance in a street dress, in coming at all. Living in a house with two young men, one of them a stranger. No other woman there . . . except a servant. And there had been something funny about that girl, years ago. Mrs. Wardle spoke to her, however. But she speaks to everyone who can't avoid her. And Cecily Saunders stopped between dances, holding her arm, chatting in her coarse, nervous, rushing speech, rolling her eyes about at all the inevitable men, talking all the time. . . . The negro cornetist unleashed his indefatigable pack anew and the veranda broke again into clasped couples.

Mrs. Powers, catching Madden's eye, signalled him. “I must go,” she said. “If I have to drink another cup of that punch——”

They threaded their way among dancers, followed by her protesting train. But she was firm and they told her good night with regret and gratitude, shaking her hand.

“It was like old times,” one of them diffidently phrased it, and her slow, friendly, unsmiling glance took them all.

“Wasn't it? Again soon, I hope. Good-bye, good-bye.” They watched her until her dark dress merged with shadow beyond the zone of light. The music swept on, the brass swooned away and the rhythm was carried by a hushed plaintive minor of voices until the brass recovered.

“Say, you could see right through her,” Gilligan remarked with interest as they came up. Madden opened the door and helped her in, needlessly.

“I'm tired, Joe. Let's go.”

The negro driver's head was round as a capped cannonball and he was not asleep. Madden stood aside, hearing the spitting engine merge into a meshed whine of gears, watching them roll smoothly down the drive.

Powers . . . a man jumping along a trench of demoralised troops caught in a pointless hysteria. Powers. A face briefly spitted on the flame of a rifle: a white moth beneath a reluctant and sorrowful dawn.

XV

George Farr and his friend the soda clerk walked beneath trees that in reverse motion seemed to swim backward above them, and houses were huge and dark or else faintly luminous shapes of flattened lesser dark where no trees were. People were asleep in them, people lapped in slumber, temporarily freed of the flesh. Other people elsewhere dancing under the spring sky: girls dancing with boys while other boys whose bodies had known all intimacies with the bodies of girls, walked dark streets alone, alone. . . .

“Well,” his friend remarked, “we got two more good drinks left.”

He drank fiercely, feeling the fire in his throat become an inner grateful fire, pleasuring in it like a passionate muscular ecstasy. (Her body prone and naked as a narrow pool, flowing away like two silver streams from a single source.) Dr. Gary would dance with her, would put his arm around her, anyone could touch her. (Except you: she doesn't even speak of you who have seen her prone and silver . . . moonlight on her like sweetly dividing water, marbled and slender and un-blemished by any shadow, the sweet passion of her constricting arms that constricting hid her body beyond the obscuring prehensileness of her mouth—) Oh God, oh God!

“Say, whatcher say we go back to the store and mix another bottle?”

He did not answer and his friend repeated the suggestion.

“Let me alone,” he said suddenly, savagely.

“Goddam you, I'm not hurting you!” the other answered with justifiable heat.

They stopped at a corner, where another street stretched away beneath trees into obscurity, in uncomfortable intimacy. (I'm sorry: I'm a fool. I'm sorry I flew out at you, who are not at all to blame.) He turned heavily.

“Well, I guess I'll go in. Don't feel so good tonight. See you in the morning.”

His friend accepted the unspoken apology. “Sure. See you tomorrow.”

The other's coatless figure faded and after a while his footsteps died away. And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumour beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!)

At last George Farr
gave up trying to see her. He had 'phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her. Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance. And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed, to dream of her brokenly.

When her note came at last, he knew relief, sharp and bitter as the pain had been. When he took the square white paper from the post office, when he saw her nervous spidery script sprawled thinly across it, he felt something like a shocking silent concussion at the base of his brain. I won't go, he told himself, knowing that he would, and he re-read it, wondering if he could bear to see her, if he could speak to her, touch her again.

He was ahead of the appointed time, sitting hidden from view at a turn of the stairs ascending to the balcony. The stairs were enclosed by a solid wood balustrade and from the foot of the steps the long tunnel of the drug store swept toward light and the entrance, a tunnel filled with the mingled scents of carbolic and sweet syrups: a medicated, a synthetic purity.

He saw her as she entered the door and, rising, he saw her pause on seeing him, then, as in a dream, silhouetted against the door, with light toying with her white dress, giving it a shallow nimbus, she came tap-tapping on her high heels toward him. He sat back trembling and heard her mount the steps. He saw her dress, and feeling his breath catch, he raised his eyes to her face as without pausing she sank into his arms like a settling bird.

“Cecily, oh, Cecily,” he said brokenly, taking her kiss. He withdrew his mouth. “You damn near killed me.”

She drew his face quickly back to hers, murmuring against his cheek. He held her close and they sat so for a long time. At last he whispered: “You'll ruin your dress sitting here.” But she only shook her head, clinging to him. Finally she sat up.

“Is this my drink?” she asked, picking up one of the glassed, sweetish liquids beside him. She put the other glass in his hand, and he closed his fingers about it, still looking at her.

“Now, we'll have to get married,” he said, fatuously.

“Yes?” sipping her drink.

“Well, won't we?” he asked, in surprise.

“You've got it backward. Now we don't have to get married.” She gave him a quick glance, and seeing his face, she laughed. Her occasional coarseness so out of keeping with her innate and utter delicacy always shocked him. But then George Farr, like most men, was by nature a prude. He eyed her with disapproval, silent. She set her glass down and leaned her breast against him. “George?”

He thawed, putting his arm about her, but she refused her mouth. She thrust herself away from him and he, feeling that he had conquered, released her.

“But aren't you going to marry me?”

“Darling, aren't we already married, now? Do you doubt me, or is it only a marriage licence will keep you true to me?”

“You know it isn't.” He couldn't tell her that it was jealousy, that he didn't trust her. “It's only that——”

“Only what?”

“Only that if you won't marry me, you don't love me.”

She moved from him. Her eyes became dark blue. “Can you say that?” She looked away, and her movement was half shiver, half shrug. “I might have known it, though. Well, I've been a fool, I guess. You were just—just passing the time with me, then?”

“Cecily—” trying to take her in his arms again. She evaded him and rose.

“I don't blame you. I suppose that's what any man would have done in your place. That's all men ever want of me, anyway. So it might as well have been you, as anyone. . . . Only I'm sorry you didn't tell me before—sooner, George. I thought you were different.” She gave him her narrow back. How little, how—how helpless she is! And I have hurt her, he thought, in sharp pain, rising and putting his arm about her, careless of who might see.

“Don't, don't!” she whispered, quickly turning Her eyes were quite green again. “Someone will see! Sit down!”

“Not till you take that back.”

“Sit down, sit down! Please, George! Please, please!”

“Take that back, then.”

Her eyes were dark again, and he read terror in her face, and he released her, sitting down again.

“Promise me not ever, ever, ever to do that again.”

He promised dully and she sat beside him. She slid her hand into his and he looked up.

“Why do you treat me like this?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Saying I don't love you. What other proof do you want? What other proof can I give? What do you consider proof? Tell me: I'll try to do it.” She looked at him in delicate humility.

“I'm sorry: forgive me,” he said abjectly.

“I've already forgiven you. It's forgetting it. I can't promise. I don't doubt you, George. Or I couldn't have. . . .” Her voice died away and she clutched his hand convulsively, releasing it. She rose. “I must go.”

He caught her hand. It was unresponsive. “May I see you this afternoon?”

“Oh, no. I can't come back this afternoon. I have some sewing to do.”

“Oh, come on, put it off. Don't treat me again like you did. I nearly went crazy. I swear I did.”

“Sweetheart, I can't, I simply can't. Don't you know I want to see you as badly as you want to see me; that I would come if I could?”

“Let me come down there, then.”

“I believe you are crazy,” she told him, with contemplation. “Don't you know I'm not supposed to see you at all?”

“Then I'm coming tonight.”

“Hush!” she whispered, quickly, descending the steps. “But I am,” he repeated stubbornly. She looked hurriedly about the store, and her heart turned to water. Here, sitting at a table in the alcove made by the ascending stairs, was that fat man, with a half-empty glass before him.

She knew dreadful terror, and as she stared at his round, bent head, all her blood drained from her icy heart. She put her hand on the railings, lest she fall. Then this gave way to anger. The man was a nemesis: every time she had seen him since that first day at luncheon with Uncle Joe, he had flouted her, had injured her with diabolic ingenuity. And now, if he had heard——

George had risen, following her, but at her frantic gesture, her terror-stricken face, he retreated again. Then she changed her expression as readily as you would a hat. She descended the steps.

“Good morning, Mr. Jones.”

Jones looked up with his customary phlegmatic calm, then he rose, lazily courteous. She watched him narrowly with the terror-sharpened cunning of an animal, but his face and manner told nothing.

“Good morning, Miss Saunders.”

“You have the morning coca-cola habit, too, I see. Why didn't you come up and join me?”

“I am still cursing myself for missing that pleasure. You see, I didn't know you were alone.” His yellow bodyless stare was as impersonal as the stars of yellowish liquid in the windows and her heart sank.

“I didn't see nor hear you come in, or I would have called to you.”

He was non-committal. “Thank you. The misfortune is mine, however.”

She said suddenly: “I wonder if you will do me a favour? I have a thousand million things to do this morning. Will you go with me and help me remember them—do you mind?” Her eyes held a desperate coquetry.

Jones's eyes were fathomless, slowly yellow. “I'll be delighted. “

“Finish your drink, then.”

George Farr's good-looking face, wrung and jealous, peered down at them. She made no sign, yet there was such pitiful terror in her whole attitude that even George's dull and jealous intelligence took her meaning. His face sank again from view. Jones said:

“Let the drink go. I don't know why I keep on trying the things. Make myself think I have a highball, perhaps.”

She laughed in three notes. “You can't expect to satisfy tastes like that in this town. In Atlanta now——”

“Yes, you can do lots of things in Atlanta you can't do here.”

She laughed again, flatteringly, and they moved up the antiseptic tunnel of the drug store, toward the entrance. She would laugh in such a way as to lend the most innocent remark a double entendre: you immediately accepted the fact that you had said something clever, without recalling what it was at all. Jones's yellow idol's stare remarked her body's articulation, her pretty, nervous face, while George Farr, in a sick, dull rage, watched them in silhouette, flatly. Then they reassumed depth and she, fragile as a Tanagra, and he slouching and shapeless and tweeded, disappeared.

II

“Say,” said young Robert Saunders, “are you a soldier, too?”

Jones, lunching to a slow completion, heavily courteous, deferentially conversational, had already won Mrs. Saunders. Of Mr. Saunders he was not so sure, nor did he care. Finding that the guest knew practically nothing about money or crops or politics, Mr. Saunders soon let him be to gossip trivially with Mrs. Saunders. Cecily was perfect: pleasantly tactful, letting him talk. Young Robert though was bent on a seduction of his own.

“Say,” he repeated, for the third time, watching Jones's every move with admiration—“was you a soldier, too?”

“Were, Robert,” corrected his mother.

“Yessum. Was you a soldier in the war?”

“Robert. Let Mr. Jones alone, now.”

“Sure, old fellow,” Jones answered. “I fought some.”

“Oh, did you?” asked Mrs. Saunders. “How interesting,” she commented without interest. Then: “I suppose you never happened to run across Donald Mahon in France, did you?”

“No. I had very little time in which to meet people, you see,” replied Jones with gravity, who had never seen the Statue of Liberty—even from behind.

“What did you do?” asked young Robert indefatigable.

“I suppose so.” Mrs. Saunders sighed with repletion and rang a bell. “The war was so big. Shall we go?”

Jones drew her chair and young Robert repeated tirelessly: “What did you do in the war? Did you kill folks?”

The older people passed on to the veranda. Cecily with a gesture of her head, indicated a door and Jones entered, followed by young Robert, still importunate. The scent of Mr. Saunders's cigar wafted down the hall and into the room where they sat and young Robert, refraining his litany, caught Jones's yellow, fathomless eye like a snake's, and young Robert's spine knew an abrupt, faint chill. Watching Jones cautiously he moved nearer his sister.

“Run along, Bobby. Don't you see that real soldiers never like to talk about themselves?”

He was nothing loath. He suddenly desired to be in the warm sun. This room had got cold. Still watching Jones he sidled past him to the door. “Well,” he remarked, “I guess I'll be going.”

“What did you do to him?” she asked, when he had gone.

“I? Nothing. Why?”

“You scared him, some way. Didn't you see how he watched you?”

“No, I didn't notice it.” He filled his pipe, slowly.

“I suppose not. But then you frighten lots of people, don't you?”

“Not as many as you'd think. Lots of them I'd like to frighten can take care of themselves too well.”

“Yes? But why frighten them?”

“Sometimes that's the only way to get what you want from people:”

“Oh. . . . They have a name for that, haven't they? Blackmail, isn't it?”

“I don't know. Is it?”

She shrugged with assumed indifference. “Why do you ask me about it?”

His yellow stare became unbearable and she looked away. How quiet it is outside, under the spell of noon. Trees shaded the house, the room was dark and cool. Furniture was slow unemphatic gleams of lesser dark and young Robert Saunders, at the age of sixty-five, was framed and indistinct above the mantel: her grandfather.

She wished for George. He should be here to help her. But what could she do? she reconsidered with that vast tolerance of their men which women must gain by giving their bodies (else how do they continue to live with them?) that the conquering male is after all no better than a clumsy, tactless child. She examined Jones with desperate speculation. If he were not so fat! Like a worm.

She repeated: “Why do you ask me?”

“I don't know. You have never been frightened by anyone, have you?”

She watched him, not replying.

“Perhaps that's because you have never done anything to be afraid of?”

She sat on the divan, her hands palm up on either side, watching him. He rose suddenly and she as suddenly shed her careless laxness, becoming defensive, watchful. But he only scratched a match on the iron grate screen. He sucked it into his pipe bowl while she watched the fleshy concavity of his cheeks and the golden pulsations of the flame in his eyes. He pushed the match through the screen and resumed his seat. But she did not relax.

“When are you to be married?” he asked suddenly.

“Married?”

“Yes. Isn't it all arranged?”

She felt slow, slow blood in her throat and wrists, in her palms: her blood seemed to mark away an interval that would never pass. Jones, watching the light in her fine hair, lazy and yellow as an idol, Jones released her at last. “He expects it, you know.”

Her blood liquefied again and became cold. She could feel the skin all over her body. She said: “What makes you think he does? He is too sick to expect anything, now.”