Soldiers Pay (9 page)

The rector tramped heavily back and forth. “Sick?” he boomed. “Sick? But we'll cure him. Get him home here with good food and rest and attention and we'll have him well in a week. Eh, Cecily?”

“Oh, Uncle Joe! I can't believe it yet. That he is really safe.” She rose as the rector passed her chair and sort of undulated into his arms, like a slim wave. It was beautiful.

“Here's the medicine for him, Mrs. Powers,” he said with heavy gallantry, embracing Cecily, speaking over her head toward the contemplative pallor of the other woman's quiet watching face. “There, there, don't cry,” he added, kissing her. The audience watched this, Mrs. Powers with speculative detached interest and Jones with morose speculation.

“It's because I am so happy—for you, dear Uncle Joe,” she answered. She turned graceful as a flower stalk against the rector's black bulk. “And we owe it all to, Mrs.—Mrs. Powers,” she continued in her slightly rough voice, like a tangle of golden wires, “she was so kind to bring him back to us.” Her glance swept past Jones and flickered like a knife toward the other woman. (Damn little fool thinks I have tried to vamp him, Mrs. Powers thought.) Cecily moved toward her with studied impulse. “May I kiss you? do you mind?”

It was like kissing a silken smooth steel blade and Mrs. Powers said brutally: “Not at all. I'd have done the same for anyone sick as he is, nigger or white. And you would, too,” she added with satisfying malice.

“Yes, it was sweet of you,” Cecily repeated, coolly non-committal, exposing a slim leg from the arm of the caller's chair. Jones, statically remote, watched the comedy.

“Nonsense,” the rector interposed. “Mrs. Powers merely saw him fatigued with travelling. I am sure he will be a different man tomorrow.”

“I hope so,” Mrs. Powers answered with sudden weariness, recalling his devastated face and that dreadful brow, his whole relaxed inertia of constant dull pain and ebbing morale. It's too late, she thought with instinctive perspicuity. Shall I tell them about the scar? she pondered. Prevent a scene when this—this creature (feeling the girl's body against her shoulder) sees it. But no, I won't, she decided, watching the tramping rector leonine in his temporary happiness. What a coward I am. Joe should have come: he might have known I'd bungle it some way.

The rector fetched his photograph. She took it: thin faced, with the serenity of a wild thing, the passionate serene alertness of a faun; and that girl leaning against the oaken branch of the rector's arm, believing that she is in love with the boy, or his illusion—pretending she is, anyway. No, no, I won't be catty. Perhaps she is—as much as she is capable of being in love with anyone. It's quite romantic, being reft of your love and then having him returned unexpectedly to your arms. And an aviator, too. What luck that girl has playing her parts. Even God helps her. . . . You cat! she's pretty and you are jealous. That's what's the matter with you she thought in her bitter weariness. What makes me furious is her thinking that I am after him, am in love with him! Oh, yes, I'm in love with him! I'd like to hold his poor ruined head against my breast and not let him wake again ever. . . . Oh, hell, what a mess it all is! And that dull fat one yonder in somebody else's trousers, watching her with his yellow unwinking eyes—like a goat's. I suppose she's been passing the time with him.

“—he was eighteen then,” the rector was saying. “He would never wear hat nor tie: his mother could never make him. She saw him correctly dressed, but it mattered not how formal the occasion, he invariably appeared without them.”

Cecily rubbing herself like a cat on the rector's arm: “Oh, Uncle Joe, I love him so!”

And Jones like another round and arrogant cat, blinking his yellow eyes, muttered a shocking phrase. The rector was oblivious in speech and Cecily in her own graceful immersion, but Mrs. Powers half heard, half saw, and Jones looking up met her black stare. He tried to look her down but her gaze was impersonal as a dissection so he averted his and fumbled for his pipe.

There came a prolonged honking of a motor horn from without and Cecily sprang to her feet.

“Oh, there's—there's a friend of ours. I'll send him away and come straight back. Will you excuse me a moment, Uncle Joe?”

“Eh?” The rector broke his speech. “Oh, yes.”

“And you, Mrs. Powers?” She moved toward the door and her glance swept Jones again. “And you, Mr. Jones?”

“George got a car, has he?” Jones asked as she passed him. “Bet you don't come back.”

She gave him her cool stare and from beyond the study door she heard the rector's voice resume the story again—of Donald, of course. And now I'm engaged again, she thought complacently, enjoying George's face in anticipation when she would tell him. And that long black woman has been making love to him—or he to her. I guess it's that, from what I know of Donald. Oh, well that's how men are, I guess. Perhaps he'll want to take us both. . . . She tripped down the steps into the sunlight: the sunlight caressed her with joy, as though she were a daughter of sunlight. How would I like to have a husband and wife, too, I wonder? Or two husbands? I wonder if I want one even, want to get married at all. . . . I guess it's worth trying, once. I'd like to see that horrible fat one's face if he could hear me say that, she thought. Wonder why I let him kiss me? Ugh!

George leaned from his car watching her restricted swaying stride with faint lust. “Come on, come on,” he called.

She did not increase her gait at all. He swung the door open, not bothering to dismount himself, “My God, what took you so long?” he asked plaintively. “Dam'f I thought you were coming at all.”

“I'm not,” she told him, laying her hand on the door. Her white dress in the nooning sun was unbearable to the eye, sloped to her pliant fragility. Beyond her, across the lawn, was another pliant gesture though this was only a tree, a poplar.

“Huh?”

“Not coming. My fiancé is arriving today.”

“Aw hell, get in.”

“Donald's coming today,” she repeated, watching him. His face was ludicrous; blank as a plate, then shocked to slow amazement.

“Why, he's dead,” he said vacuously.

“But he isn't dead,” she told him sweetly. “A lady friend he's travelling with came on ahead and told us. Uncle Joe's like a balloon.”

“Ah, come on, Cecily, you're kidding me.”

“I swear I'm not. I'm telling you the God's truth.”

His smooth empty face hung before her like a handsome moon, empty as a promise. Then it filled with an expression of a sort.

“Hell, you got a date with me tonight. Whatcher going to do about that?”

“What can I do? Donald will be here by then.”

“Then it's all off with us?”

She gazed at him, then looked quickly away. Funny how only an outsider had been able to bring home to her the significance of Donald's imminence, his return. She nodded dumbly, beginning to feel miserable and lost.

He leaned from the car and caught her hand. “Get in here,” he commanded.

“No, no, I can't,” she protested, trying to draw back. He held her wrist. “No, no, let me go. You are hurting me.”

“I know it,” he answered grimly. “Get in.”

“Don't, George, don't! I must go back.”

“Well, when can I see you?”

Her mouth trembled. “Oh, I don't know. Please, George. Don't you see how miserable I am?” Her eyes became blue, dark; the sunlight made bold the wrenched thrust of her body, her thin taut arm. “Please, George.”

“Are you going to get in or do you want me to pick you up and put you in?”

“I'm going to cry in a minute. You'd better let me go.”

“Oh, damn! Why, sugar, I didn't mean it that way. I just wanted to see you. We've got to see each other if it's going to be all off with us. Come on, I've been good to you.”

She relaxed. “Well, but just around the block then. I've got to get back to them.” She raised a foot to the running board. “Promise?” she insisted.

“Sure. Round the block it is. I won't run off with you if you say not.”

She got in, and as they drove off she looked quickly to the house. There was a face in the window, a round face.

IV

George turned from the street and drove down a quiet lane bordered by trees, between walls covered with honeysuckle. He stopped the car, and she said swiftly:

“No, no, George! Drive on.”

But he cut the switch. “Please,” she repeated. He turned in his seat.

“Cecily, you are kidding me, aren't you?”

She turned the switch and tried to reach the starter with her foot. He caught her hands, holding her. “Look at me.”

Her eyes grew blue again with foreboding.

“I don't know. Oh, George, it all happened so suddenly! I don't know what to think. When we were in there talking about him it all seemed so grand for Donald to be coming back, in spite of that woman with him; and to be engaged to a man who will be famous when he gets here—oh, it seemed then that I did love him: it was exactly the thing to do. But now . . . I'm just not ready to be married yet. And he's been gone so long, and to take up with another woman on his way to me—I don't know what to do. I—I'm going to cry,” she ended suddenly, putting her crooked arm on the seatback and burying her face in her elbow. He put his arm around her shoulders and tried to draw her to him. She raised her hands between them, straightening her arms.

“No, no, take me back.”

“But Cecily—”

“You mustn't! Don't you know I'm engaged to be married? He'll probably want to be married tomorrow, and, I'll have to do it.”

“But you can't do that. You aren't in love with him.”

“But I've got to, I tell you!”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Take me back to Uncle Joe's. Please!”

He was the stronger and at last he held her close, feeling her small bones, her frail taut body beneath her dress. “Are you in love with him?” he repeated.

She burrowed her face into his coat.

“Look at me.” She refused to lift her face and he slipped his hand under her chin, raising it. “Are you?”

“Yes, yes,” she said wildly, staring at him. “Take me back!”

“You are lying. You aren't going to marry him.”

She was weeping. “Yes, I am. I've got to. He expects it and Uncle Joe expects it. I must, I tell you.”

“Darling, you can't. Don't you love me? You know you do. You can't marry him.” She stopped struggling and lay against him, crying. “Come on, say you won't marry him.”

“George, I can't,” she said hopelessly. “Don't you see I have got to marry him?”

Young and miserable they clung to each other. The slumbrous afternoon lay about them in the empty lane. Even the sparrows seemed drowsy and from the spire of the church pigeons were remote and monotonous, unemphatic as sleep. She raised her face.

“Kiss me, George.”

He tasted tears: their faces were coolly touching. She drew her head back, searching his face. “That was the last time, George.”

“No, no,” he objected, tightening his arms. She resisted a moment, then kissed him passionately. “Darling!”

“Darling!”

She straightened up, dabbing at her eyes with his handkerchief . “There! I feel better now. Take me home, kind sir.”

“But, Cecily,” he protested, trying to embrace her again. She put him aside coolly.

“Not anymore, ever. Take me home, like a nice boy.”

“But, Cecily——”

“Do you want me to get out and walk? I can, you know: it isn't far.”

He started the engine and drove on in a dull youthful sorrow. She patted at her hair, her fingers bloomed slimly in it, and they turned on to the street again. As she descended at the gate he made a last despairing attempt.

“Cecily, for God's sake!”

She looked over her shoulder at his stricken face. “Don't be silly. George. Of course I'll see you again. I'm not married—yet. “

Her white dress in the sun was an unbearable shimmer sloping to her body's motion and she passed from sunlight to shadow, mounting the steps. At the door she turned, flashed him a smile and waved her hand. Then her white dress faded beyond a fanlight of muted colour dim with age and lovely with lack of washing, leaving George to stare at the empty maw of the house in hope and despair and baffled youthful lust.

V

Jones at the window saw them drive away. His round face was enigmatic as a god's, his clear obscene eyes showed no emotion. You are good, you are, he thought in grudging, unillusioned admiration. I hand it to you. He was still musing upon her when the mean-looking black-haired woman, interrupting the rector's endless reminiscences of his son's boyhood and youth, suggested that it was time to go to the station.

The divine became aware of the absence of Cecily, who was at that moment sitting in a stationary motorcar in an obscure lane, crying on the shoulder of a man whose name was not Donald. Jones, the only one who had remarked the manner of her going, was for some reason he could not have named safely non-committal. The rector stated fretfully that Cecily, who was at that moment kissing a man whose name was not Donald, should not have gone away at that time, But the other woman (I bet she's mean as hell, thought Jones) interrupted again, saying that it was better so.

“But she should have gone to the station to meet him,” the rector stated with displeasure.

“No, no. Remember, he is sick. The less excitement the better for him. Besides, it is better for them to meet privately.”

“Ah, yes, quite right, quite right. Trust a woman in these things, Mr. Jones. And for that reason perhaps you had better wait also, don't you think?”

“By all means, sir. I will wait and tell Miss Saunders why you went without her. She will doubtless be anxious to know.”