Soldiers Pay (28 page)

“Hush!” she said. He looked up at her startled, then seeing her warning glance touch Mahon's oblivious head, he understood. She saw Emmy's wide shocked eyes on her and she rose at her place. “You are through, aren't you?” she said to the rector. “Suppose we go to the study.”

Mahon sat quiet, chewing. She could not tell whether or not he heard. She passed behind Emmy and leaning to her whispered: “I want to speak to you. Don't say anything to Donald.”

The rector, preceding her, fumbled the light on in the study. “You must be careful,” she told him, “how you talk before him, how you tell him.”

“Yes,” he agreed apologetically. “I was so deep in thought.”

“I know you were. I don't think it is necessary to tell him at all, until he asks.”

“And that will never be. She loves Donald: she will not let her people prevent her marrying him. I am not customarily in favour of such a procedure as instigating a young woman to marry against her parents' wishes, but in this case. . . . You do not think I am inconsistent, that I am partial because my son is involved?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“Don't you agree with me, that Cecily will insist on the wedding?”

“Yes, indeed.” What else could she say?

Gilligan and Mahon had gone and Emmy was clearing the table when she returned. Emmy whirled upon her.

“She ain't going to take him? What was Uncle Joe saying?”

“Her people don't like the idea. That's all. She hasn't refused. But I think we had better stop it now, Emmy. She has changed her mind so often nobody can tell what she'll do.”

Emmy turned back to the table, lowering her head, scraping a plate. Mrs. Powers watched her busy elbow, hearing the little clashing noises of china and silver. A bowl of white roses shattered slowly upon the centre of the table.

“What do you think, Emmy?”

“I don't know,” Emmy replied, sullenly. “She ain't my kind. I don't know nothing about it.”

Mrs. Powers approached the table. “Emmy,” she said. The other did not raise her head, made no reply. She turned the girl gently by the shoulder. “Would you marry him, Emmy?”

Emmy straightened hotly, clutching a plate and a fork. “Me? Me marry him? Me take another's leavings? (Donald, Donald.) And her leavings, at that, her that's run after every boy in town, dressed up in her silk clothes?”

Mrs. Powers moved back to the door and Emmy scraped dishes fiercely. This plate became blurred, she blinked and saw something splash on it. She shan't see me cry! she whispered passionately, bending her head lower, waiting for Mrs. Powers to ask her again. (Donald, Donald. . . . )

When she was young, going to school in the spring, having to wear coarse dresses and shoes while other girls wore silk and thin leather; being not pretty at all while other girls were pretty——

Walking home to where work awaited her while other girls were riding in cars or having ice cream or talking to boys and dancing with them, with boys that had no use for her; sometimes he would step out beside her, so still, so quick, all of a sudden—and she didn't mind not having silk.

And when they swam and fished and roamed the woods together she forgot she wasn't pretty, even. Because he was beautiful, with his body all brown and quick, so still . . . making her feel beautiful, too.

And when he said Come here, Emmy, she went to him, and wet grass and dew under her and over her his head with the whole sky for a crown, and the moon running on them like water that wasn't wet and that you couldn't feel. . . .

Marry him? Yes! Yes! Let him be sick: she would cure him; let him be a Donald that had forgotten her—she had not forgotten: she could remember enough for both of them. Yes! Yes! she cried, soundlessly, stacking dishes, waiting for Mrs. Powers to ask her again. Her red hands were blind, tears splashed fatly on her wrists. Yes! Yes! trying to think it so loudly that the other must hear. She shan't see me cry! she whispered again. But the other woman only stood in the door watching her busy back. So she gathered up the dishes slowly, there being no reason to linger any longer. Keeping her head averted she carried the dishes to the pantry door, slowly, waiting for the other to speak again. But the other woman said nothing and Emmy left the room, her pride forbidding her to let the other see her tears.

XI

The study was dark when she passed, but she could see the rector's head in dim silhouette against the more spacious darkness outside the window. She passed slowly on to the veranda. Leaning her quiet tall body against a column in the darkness beyond the fan of light from the door she listened to the hushed myriad life of night things, to the slow voices of people passing unseen along an unseen street, watching the hurried staring twin eyes of motorcars like restless insects. A car slowing, drew up to the corner, and after a while a dark figure came along the pale gravel of the path, hurried yet diffident. It paused and screamed delicately in midpath, then it sped on towards the steps, where it stopped again and Mrs. Powers stepped forward from beside her post.

“Oh,” gasped Miss Cecily Saunders, starting, lifting her hand slimly against her dark dress. “Mrs. Powers?”

“Yes. Come in, won't you?”

Cecily ran with nervous grace up the steps. “It was a f-frog,” she explained between her quick respirations. “I nearly stepped—ugh!” She shuddered, a slim muted flame hushed darkly in dark clothing. “Is Uncle Joe here? May I——” her voice died away diffidently.

“He is in the study,” Mrs. Powers answered. What has happened to her? she thought. Cecily stood so that the light from the hall fell full on her. There was in her face a thin nervous despair, a hopeless recklessness, and she stared at the other woman's shadowed face for a long moment. Then she said Thank you, thank you, suddenly, hysterically, and ran quickly into the house. Mrs. Powers looked after her, then following, saw her dark dress. She is going away, Mrs. Powers thought, with conviction.

Cecily flew on ahead like a slim dark bird, into the unlighted study. “Uncle Joe?” she said, poised, touching either side of the door-frame. The rector's chair creaked suddenly.

“Eh?” he said, and the girl sailed across the room like a bat, dark in the darkness, sinking at his feet, clutching his knees. He tried to raise her but she clung to his legs the tighter, burrowing her head into his lap.

“Uncle Joe, forgive me, forgive me?”

“Yes, yes. I knew you would come to us. I told them——”

“No, no. I—I——You have always been so good, so sweet to me, that I couldn't. . . .” She clutched him again fiercely.

“Cecily, what is it? Now, now, you mustn't cry about it. Come now, what is it?” Knowing a sharp premonition he raised her face, trying to see it. But it was only a formless. soft blur warmly in his hands.

“Say you forgive me first, dear Uncle Joe. Won't you? Say it, say it. If you won't forgive me, I don't know what'll become of me.” His hands slipping downward felt her delicate tense shoulders and he said:

“Of course, I forgive you.”

“Thank you. Oh, thank you. You are so kind——” she caught his hand, holding it against her mouth.

“What is it, Cecily?” he asked, quietly, trying to soothe her.

She raised her head. “I am going away.”

“Then you aren't going to marry Donald?”

She lowered her head to his knees again, clutching his hand in her long nervous fingers, holding it against her face. “I cannot, I cannot. I am a—I am not a good woman anymore, dear Uncle Joe. Forgive me, forgive me. . . .”

He withdrew his hand and she let herself be raised to her feet, feeling his arms, his huge kind body. “There, there;” patting her back with his gentle heavy hand. “Don't cry.”

“I must go,” she said at last, moving slimly and darkly against his bulk. He released her. She clutched his hand again sharply, Jetting it go. “Good-bye,” she whispered, and fled swift and dark as a bird, gracefully to a delicate tapping of heels, as she had come.

She passed Mrs. Powers on the porch without seeing her and sped down the steps. The other woman watched her slim dark figure until it disappeared . . . after an interval the car that had stopped at the corner of the garden flashed on its lights and drove away. . . .

Mrs. Powers, pressing the light switch, entered the study. The rector stared at her as she approached the desk, quiet and hopeless.

“Cecily has broken the engagement, Margaret. So the wedding is off.”

“Nonsense,” she told him sharply, touching him with her firm hand. “I'm going to marry him myself. I intended to all the time. Didn't you suspect?”

XII

San Francisco, CaI.,

April 25, 1919.

Darling Margaret,

I told mother last night and of coarse she thinks we are too young. But I explained to her how times have changed since the war how the war makes you older than they used to. I see fellows my age that did not serve specially flying which is an education in itself and they seem like kids to me because at last I have found the woman I want and my kid days are over. After knowing so many women to found you so far away when I did not expect it. Mother says for me to go in business and make money if I expect a woman to marry me so I am going to start in tomorrow I have got the place already. So it will not be long till I see you and take you in my arms at last and always. How can I tell you how much I love you you are so different from them. Loving you has already made me a serious man realizing responsibilities. They are all so silly compared with you talking of jazz and going some place where all the time I have been invited on parties but I refuse because I rather sit in my room thinking of you putting my thoughts down on paper let them have their silly fun. I think of you all ways and if it did not make you so unhappy I want you to think of me always. But don't I would not make you unhappy at all my own dearest. So think of me and remember I love you only and will love you only will love you all ways.

Forever yours

Julian.

The Baptist minister, a young dervish in a white lawn tie, being most available, came and did his duty and went away. He was young and fearfully conscientious and kind-hearted; upright and passionately desirous of doing good: so much so that he was a bore. But he had soldiered after a fashion and he liked and respected Dr. Mahon, refusing to believe that simply because Dr. Mahon was Episcopal he was going to hell as soon as he died.

He wished them luck and fled busily away, answering his own obscure compulsions. They watched his busy energetic backside until he was out of sight, then Gilligan silently helped Mahon down the steps and across the lawn to his favourite seat beneath the tree. The new Mrs. Mahon walked silently beside them. Silence was her wont, but not Gilligan's. Yet he had spoken no word to her. Walking near him she put out her hand and touched his arm: he turned to her a face so bleak, so reft that she knew a sharp revulsion, a sickness with everything. (Dick, Dick. How well you got out of this mess!) She looked quickly away, across the garden, beyond the spire where pigeons crooned the afternoon away, unemphatic as sleep, biting her lips. Married, and she had never felt so alone.

Gilligan settled Mahon in his chair with his impersonal half-reckless care. Mahon said:

“Well, Joe, I'm married at last.”

“Yes,” answered Gilligan. His careless spontaneity was gone. Even Mahon noticed it in his dim oblivious way. “I say, Joe.”

“What is it, Loot?”

Mahon was silent and his wife took her customary chair, leaning back and staring up into the tree. He said at last: “Carry on, Joe.”

“Not now, Loot. I don't feel so many. Think I'll take a walk,” he answered, feeling Mrs. Mahon's eyes on him. He met her gaze harshly, combatively.

“Joe,” she said quietly, bitterly.

Gilligan saw her pallid face, her dark unhappy eyes, her mouth like a tired scar and he knew shame. His own bleak face softened.

“All right, Loot,” he said., quietly matching her tone, with a trace of his old ambiguous unseriousness. “What'll it be? Bust up a few more minor empires, huh?”

Just a trace, but it was there. Mrs. Mahon looked at him again with gratitude and that old grave happiness which he knew so well, unsmiling but content, which had been missing for so long, so long; and it was as though she had laid her firm strong hand on him. He looked quickly away from her face, sad and happy, not bitter anymore.

“Carry on, Joe.”

I

San Francisco, Cal.,

April 27, 1919.

My Dearest Sweetheart—

Just a line to let you know that I have gone into business into the banking business making money for you. To give ourselves the position in the world you deserve and a home of our own. The work is congenal talking to other people in the business that don't know anything about aviation. All they think about is going out to dance with men. Everyday means one day less for us to be with you forever. All my love.

Yours forever

Julian.

II

Nine day or ninety day or nine hundred day sensations have a happy faculty for passing away into the oblivion whence pass sooner or later all of man's inventions. Keeps from getting the world all cluttered up. You say right off that this is God's work. But it must be a woman: no man could be so utilitarian. But then, women preserve only those things which can or might be used again. So this theory is also exploded.

After a while there were no more of the local curious to call; after a while those who had said I told you so when Miss Cecily Saunders let it be known that she would marry the parson's son and who said I told you so when she did not marry the parson's son forgot about it. There were other things to think and talk of: this was the lying-in period of the K. K. K. and the lying-out period of Mr. Wilson, a democratish gentleman living in Washington, D.C.

Besides, it was all legal now. Miss Cecily Saunders was safely married—though nobody knew where they were from the time they drove out of town in George Farr's car until they were properly married by a priest in Atlanta the next day (but then I always told you about that girl). They all hoped for the worst. And that Mrs. What's-her-name, that tall black-headed woman at Mahon's, had at last married someone, putting an end to that equivocal situation.

And so April became May. There were fair days when the sun, becoming warmer and warmer, rising, drank off the dew, and flowers bloomed like girls ready for a ball, then drooped in the languorous fulsome heat like girls after the ball; when earth, like a fat woman, recklessly trying giddy hat after hat, trying a trimming of apple and pear and peach, threw it away; tried narcissi and jonquil and flag: threw it away—so early flowers bloomed and passed and later flowers bloomed to fade and fall, giving place to yet later ones. Fruit blossoms were gone, pear was forgotten: what were once tall candlesticks, silvery with white bloom, were now tall jade candlesticks of leaves beneath the blue cathedral of sky across which, in hushed processional, went clouds like choir-boys slow and surpliced.

Leaves grew larger and greener until all rumour of azure and silver and pink had gone from them; birds sang and made love and married and built houses in them and in the tree at the corner of the house that yet swirled its white-bellied leaves in never-escaping skyward ecstasies; bees broke clover upon the lawn interrupted at intervals by the lawn mower and its informal languid conductor.

Their mode of life had not changed. The rector was neither happy nor unhappy, neither resigned nor protesting. Occasionally he entered some dream within himself. He conducted services in the dim oaken tunnel of the church while his flock hissed softly among themselves or slept between the responses, while pigeons held their own crooning rituals of audible slumber in the spire that, arcing across motionless young clouds, seemed slow and imminent with ruin. He married two people and buried one: Gilligan found this ominous and said so aloud; Mrs. Mahon found this silly and said so aloud.

Mrs. Worthington sent her car for them at times and they drove into the country regretting the dogwood, the three of them (two of them did, that is, Mabon had forgotten what dogwood was); the three of them sat beneath the tree while one of them wallowed manfully among polysyllabics and another of them sat motionless, neither asleep nor awake. They could never tell whether or not he heard. Nor could they ever tell whether or not he knew whom he had married. Perhaps he didn't care. Emmy, efficient and gentle, mothering him, was a trifle subdued. Gilligan still slept on his cot at the foot of Mahon's bed, lest he be needed.

“You two are the ones who should have married him,” his wife remarked with quiet wit.

III

Mrs. Mahon and Gilligan had resumed their old status of companionship and quiet pleasure in each other's company. Now that he no longer hoped to marry her she could be freer with him.

“Perhaps this is what we needed, Joe. Anyway, I never knew anyone I liked half this much.”

They walked slowly in the garden along the avenue of roses which passed beneath the two oaks, beyond which, against a wall, poplars in a restless formal row were like columns of a temple.

“You're easy pleased then,” Gilligan answered with sour assumed moroseness. He didn't have to tell her how much he liked her.

“Poor Joe,” she said. “Cigarette, please.”

“Poor you,” he retorted, giving her one. “I'm all right. I ain't married.”

“You can't escape forever, though. You are too nice:—safe for the family: will stand hitched.”

“Is that a bargain?” he asked.

“Sufficient unto the day, Joe. . . .”

After a while he stayed her with his hand. “Listen.” They halted and she stared at him intently.

“What?”

“There's that damn mockingbird again. Hear him? What's he got to sing about, you reckon?”

“He's got plenty to sing about. April's got to be May, and still spring isn't half over. Listen. . .”

IV

Emmy had become an obsession with Januarius Jones, such an obsession that it had got completely out of the realm of sex into that of mathematics, like a paranoia. He manufactured chances to see her, only to be repulsed; he lay in wait for her like a highwayman, he begged, he threatened, he tried physical strength, and he was repulsed. It had got to where, had she acceded suddenly, he would have been completely reft of one of his motivating impulses, of his elemental impulse to live: he might have died. Yet he knew that if he didn't get her soon he would become crazy, an imbecile.

After a time it assumed the magic of numbers. He had failed twice: this time success must be his or the whole cosmic scheme would crumble, hurling him, screaming, into blackness, where no blackness was, death, where death was not. Januarius Jones, by nature and inclination a Turk, was also becoming an oriental. He felt that his number must come: the fact that it would not was making an idiot of him.

He dreamed of her at night, he mistook other women for her. other voices for hers; he hung skulking about the rectory at all hours, too wrought up to come in where ne might have to converse sanely with sane people. Sometimes the rector, tramping huge and oblivious in his dream, flushed him in out-of-the-way corners of concealment, flushed him without surprise.

“Ah, Mr. Jones,” he would say, starting like a goaded elephant, “good morning.”

“Good morning, sir,” Jones would reply, his eyes glued on the house.

“You are out for a walk?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” And Jones would walk hurriedly away in an opposite direction as the rector, entering his dream again, resumed his own.

Ernmy told Mrs. Mahon of this with scornful contempt.

“Why don't you tell Joe, or let me tell him?” Mrs. Mahon asked.

Emmy sniffed with capable independence. “About that worm? I can take care of him, all right. I do my own fighting. “

“And I bet you are good at it, too.”

And Emmy said: “I guess I am.”

V

April had become May.

Fair days, and wet days in which rain ran with silver lances over the lawn, in which rain dripped leaf to leaf while birds still sang in the hushed damp greenness under the trees, and made love and married and built houses and still sang; in which rain grew soft as the grief of a young girl grieving for the sake of grief.

Mahon hardly ever rose now. They had got him a movable bed and upon this he lay, sometimes in the house, sometimes on the veranda where the wistaria inverted its cool lilac flame, while Gilligan read to him. They had done with Rome and they now swam through the tedious charm of Rousseau's “Confessions” to Gilligan's hushed childish delight.

Kind neighbours came to inquire; the specialist from Atlanta came once by request and once on his own initiative, making a friendly call and addressing Gilligan meticulously as “Doctor,” spent the afternoon chatting with them, and went away. Mrs. Mahon and he liked each other immensely. Dr. Gary called once or twice and insulted them all and went away nattily smoking his slender rolled cigarettes. Mrs. Mahon and he did not like each other at all. The rector grew greyer and quieter, neither happy nor unhappy, neither protesting nor resigned.

“Wait until next month. He will be stronger then. This is a trying month for invalids. Don't you think so?” he asked his daughter-in-law.

“Yes,” she would tell him, looking out at the green world, the sweet, sweet spring, “yes, yes.”

VI

It was a postcard. You buy them for a penny, stamp and all. The post office furnishes writing material free.

Got your letter. Will write later. Remember me to Gilligan and Lieut. Mahon.

Julian L.

VII

Mahon was asleep on the veranda and the other three sat beneath the tree on the lawn, watching the sun go down. At last the reddened edge of the disc was sliced like a cheese by the wistaria-covered lattice wall and the neutral buds were a pale agitation against the dead afternoon. Soon the evening star would be there above the poplar tip, perplexing it, immaculate and ineffable, and the poplar was vain as a girl darkly in an arrested passionate ecstasy. Half of the moon was a coin broken palely near the zenith and at the end of the lawn the first fireflies were like lazily blown sparks from cool fires. A negro woman passing crooned a religious song, mellow and passionless and sad.

They sat talking quietly. The grass was becoming grey with dew and she felt dew on her thin shoes. Suddenly Emmy came around the corner of the house running and darted up the steps and through the entrance, swift in the dusk.

“What in the world——” began Mrs. Mahon, then they saw Jones, like a fat satyr, leaping after her, hopelessly distanced. When he saw them he slowed immediately and lounged up to them slovenly as ever. His yellow eyes were calmly opaque but she could see the heave of his breathing. Convulsed with laughter she at last found her voice.

“Good evening, Mr. Jones.”

“Say,” said Gilligan with interest, “what was you——”

“Hush, Joe,” Mrs. Mahon told him. Jones's eyes, clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat's, roved between them.

“Good evening, Mr. Jones.” The rector became abruptly aware of his presence. “Walking again, eh?”

“Running,” Gilligan corrected, and the rector repeated, “Eh?” looking from Jones to Gilligan.

Mrs. Mahon indicated a chair. “Sit down, Mr. Jones. You must be rather fatigued, I imagine.”

Jones stared toward the house, tore his eyes away and sat down. The canvas sagged under him and he rose and spun his chair so as to face the dreaming facade of the rectory. He sat again.

“Say,” Gilligan asked him, “what was you doing, anyway?”

Jones eyed him briefly, heavily. “Running,” he snapped, turning his eyes again to the dark house.

“Running?” the divine repeated.

“I know: I seen that much from here. What was you running for, I asked.”

“Reducing, perhaps,” Mrs. Mahon remarked, with quiet malice.

Jones turned his yellow stare upon her. Twilight was gathering -swiftly. He was a fat and shapeless mass palely tweeded. “Reducing, yes. But not to marriage.”

“I wouldn't be so sure of that if I were you,” she told him. “A courtship like that will soon reduce you to anything, almost.”

“Yeh,” Gilligan amended, “if that's the only way you got to get a wife you'd better pick out another one besides Emmy. You'll be a shadow time you catch her. That is,” he added, “if you aim to do your courting on foot.”

“What's this?” the rector asked.

“Perhaps Mr. Jones was merely preparing to write a poem. Living it first, you know,” Mrs. Mahon offered. Jones looked at her sharply. “Atalanta,” she suggested in the dusk.

“Atlanta?” repeated Gilligan, “what——”

“Try an apple next time, Mr. Jones,” she advised.

“Or a handful of salt, Mr. Jones,” added Gilligan in a thin falsetto. Then in his natural voice. “But what's Atlanta got to——”

“Or a cherry, Mr. Gilligan,” said Jones viciously. “But then, I am not God, you know.”

“Shut your mouth, fellow,” Gilligan told him roughly.

“What's this?” the rector repeated. Jones turned to him heavily explanatory:

“It means, sir, that Mr. Gilligan is under the impression that his wit is of as much importance to me as my actions are to him.”

“Not me,” denied Gilligan with warmth. “You and me don't have the same thoughts about anything, fellow.”

“Why shouldn't they be?” the rector asked. “It is but natural to believe that one's actions and thoughts are as important to others as they are to oneself, is it not?”

Gilligan gave this his entire attention. It was getting above his head, beyond his depth. But Jones was something tangible, and he had already chosen Jones for his own.

“Naturally,” agreed Jones with patronage. “There is a kinship between the human instruments of all action and thought and emotion. Napoleon thought that his actions were important, Swift thought his emotions were important, Savonarola thought his beliefs were important. And they were. But we are discussing Mr. Gilligan.”

“Say——” began Gilligan .

“Very apt, Mr. Jones,” murmured Mrs. Mahon above the suggested triangle of her cuffs and collar. “A soldier, a priest and a dyspeptic.”