Soldiers Pay (19 page)

Mrs. Burney took a proffered chair blindly. Her dress held heat, her umbrella tripped her bonelessly, then bonelessly avoided her. The rector closed it and Mrs. Powers settled her in the chair. She rubbed at her eyes with a black-bordered cotton handkerchief.

Donald Mahon waked to voices. Mrs. Powers was saying: “How good of you to come. All Donald's old friends have been so nice to him. Especially the ones who had sons in the war. They know, don't they?”

(Oh, the poor man, the poor man. And your scarred face. Madden didn't tell me your face was scarred, Donald.)

Pigeons like slow sleep, afternoon passing away, dying. Mrs. Burney, in her tight, hot black, the rector, huge and black and shapeless, Mrs. Burney with an unhealed sorrow, Mrs. Powers—(Dick, Dick. How young, how terribly young: tomorrow must never come. Kiss me, kiss me through my hair. Dick, Dick. My body flowing away from me, dividing. How ugly men are, naked. Don't leave me, don't leave me! No, no! we don't love each other! we don't! we don't! Hold me close, close: my body's intimacy is broken, unseeing: thank God my body cannot see. Your body is so ugly, Dick! Dear Dick. Your bones, your mouth hard and shaped as bone: rigid. My body flows away: you cannot hold It! Why do you sleep, Dick? My body flows on and on. You cannot hold it, for yours is so ugly, dear Dick. . . . “You may not hear from me for some time. I will write when I can. . . .”)

Donald Mahon, hearing voices, moved in his chair. He felt substance he could not see, heard what did not move him at all. “Carry on, Joe.”

The afternoon dreamed on, unbroken. A negro, informal in an undershirt, restrained his lawn mower, and stood beneath a tree, talking to a woman across the fence. Mrs. Burney in her rigid unbearable black; Mrs. Worthington speaks to me, but Dewey is dead. Oh, the poor man, his grey face. My boy is dead, but his boy has come home, come home . . . with a woman. What is she doing here? Mrs. Mitchell says . . . Mrs. Mitchell says . . . that Saunders girl is engaged to him. She is downtown yesterday almost nekkid. With the sun on her. . . . She wiped her eyes again under inevitable spring.

Donald Mahon, hearing voices: “Carry on, Joe.”

“I come to see how your boy is getting along, what with everything.” (Dewey, my boy.)

(I miss you like the devil, Dick. Someone to sleep with? I don't know. Oh, Dick, Dick. You left no mark on me, nothing. Kiss me through my hair, Dick, with all your ugly body, and let's don't ever see each other again, ever. . . . No, we won't, dear, ugly Dick.)

(Yes, that was Donald. He is dead.) “He is much better, thank you. Give him a few weeks' rest and he will be well again.”

“I am so glad, so glad,” she answered, pitying him, envying him. (My son died, a hero: Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Saunders, chat with me about nothing at all.) “Poor boy, don't he remember his friends at all?”

“Yes, yes.” (This was Donald, my son.) “Donald, don't you remember Mrs. Burney? She is Dewey's mother, you know.”

( . . . but not forever. I wish you all the luck and love in the world. Wish me luck, dear Dick. . . . )

Donald Mahon, hearing voices: “Carry on, Joe.”

The way that girl goes on with men! she thought exultantly. Dewey may be dead, but thank God he ain't engaged to her. “Your boy is home, he'll be married soon and everything. So nice for you, so nice. . . . “

“There, there,” the rector said, touching her shoulder kindly, “you must come often to see him.”

“Yes, I will come often,” she replied through her black-bordered cotton handkerchief. “It's so nice he come home safe and well. Some didn't.” (Dewey, Dewey.)

The sun flamed slowly across the wistaria, seeking interstices. She would see Mrs. Worthington downtown now, probably. Mrs. Worthington would ask her how she was, how her husband was. (My rheumatism, but I am old. Yes, yes. When we get old. . . . You are old, too, she would think with comfortable malice, older than me. Old, old, too old for things like this to happen to us. He was so good to me, so big and strong: brave. . . . ) She rose and someone handed her the cotton umbrella.

“Yes, yes. I will come again to see him.” (poor boy. Poor man, his face: so grey.)

The lawn mower chattered slowly, reluctantly breaking the evening. Mrs. Burney, disturbing bees, crossed grass blindly. Someone passed her at the gate and remarking an arching thrust of poorly laid concrete and a broken drain, she slanted her umbrella backward, shielding her neat, black-clad, airproof black.

Sucking silver sound of pigeons slanting to and from the spire like smears of soft paint on a cloudless sky., The sun lengthened the shadow of the wistaria-covered wall, immersing the grouped chairs in cool shadow. Waiting for sunset.

(Dick, my love, that I did not love, Dick, your ugly body breaking into mine like a burglar, my body flowing away, washing away all traces of yours. . . . Kiss and forget me: remember me only to wish me luck, dear, ugly, dead Dick. . . . )

(This was my son, Donald. He is dead.)

Gilligan, crossing the lawn, said: “Who was that?”

“Mrs. Burney,” the rector told him. “Her son was killed. You've probably heard of him downtown.”

“Yeh, I've heard of him. He was the one under indictment for stealing fifty pounds of sugar and they let him go to enlist, wasn't he?”

“There were stories. . . .” The rector's voice died away. Donald Mahon, hearing silence: “You stopped, Joe.”

Gilligan stood near him, settling the coloured glasses over his eyes. “Sure, Loot. More Rome?”

The shadow of the wall took them completely and at last he said:

“Carry on, Joe.”

V

She missed Mrs. Worthington. She saw the old woman drive smoothly away from Price's in her car, alone in the back seat. The negro driver's head was round as a cannon ball and Mrs. Burney watched it draw away, smelling gasoline. The shadow of the courthouse was like thinned tobacco smoke filling one side of the square, and standing in the door of a store she saw an acquaintance, a friend of her son's. He had been in Dewey's company, an officer or something, but he hadn't got killed, not him! Trust them generals and things.

(No, no! I won't feel like this! He done the best he could. It ain't his fault if he wasn't brave enough to get killed, like Dewey was. They are all jealous of Dewey anyway: won't talk about him except that he done what was right. Done what was right! Didn't I know he would? Dewey, Dewey. So young he was, so big and brave. Until that Green man took him off and got him killed.)

She felt sorry for the man, felt kindly toward him, pitying him. She stopped him. Yes, ma'am, he was all right. Yes, the other boys were all right.

“But then you wasn't killed,” she explained. “All soldiers wasn't like Dewey: so brave—foolhardy, almost. . . . I always told him not to let that Green get him—get him—”

“Yes, yes,” he agreed, looking at her meticulous, bent neatness.

“He was all right? He didn't want for nothing?”

“No, no, he was all right,” he assured her. Sunset was almost come. Sparrows in a final delirium in the dusty elms, the last wagons going slowly countryward.

“Men don't know,” she said bitterly. “You probably never done for him what you could. That Mr. Green . . . I always misdoubted him.”

“He is dead, too, you know,” he reminded her.

(I won't be unjust to him!) “You was a officer or something: seems like you'd have took better care of a boy you knowed.”

“We did all we could for him,” he told her patiently. The square, empty of wagons, was quiet. Women went slowly in the last of the sun, meeting husbands, going home to supper. She felt her rheumatism more, now that the air was getting cooler, and she became restive in her fretful black.

“Well. You seen his grave, you say. . . . You are sure he was all right?” So big and strong he was, so good to me.

“Yes, yes. He was all right.”

Madden watched her bent, neat rotundity going down the street among shadows, beneath metallic awnings. The shadow of the courthouse had taken half the town like a silent victorious army, not firing a shot. The sparrows completed a final dusty delirium and went away, went away across evening into morning, retracing months: a year.

Someone on a fire-step had shouted Gas and the officer leaped among them striking, imploring. Then he saw the officer's face in red and bitter relief as the man on the fire-step, sharp against the sorrowful dawn, turned screaming, You have got us killed, and shot him in the face at point-blank range.

VI

San Francisco, Cal.

April 14, 1919.

Dear Margaret,

I got your letter and I intended to answering it sooner but I have been busy running around. Yes she was not a bad kid she has shown me a good time no she is not so good looking but she takes a good photo she wants to go in the movies. And a director told her she photographs better than any girl he has seen. She has a car and she is a swell dancer but of course I just like to play around with her she is to young for me. To really care for. No I have not gone to work yet. This girl goes to the U and she is talking about me going there next year. So I may go there next year. Well there is no news I have done a little flying but mostly dancing and rurining around. I have got to go out on a party now or I would write more. Next time more next time give my reguards to everybody I know.

Your sincere friend

Julian Lowe.

VII

Mahon liked music; so Mrs. Worthington sent her car for them. Mrs. Worthington lived in a large, beautiful old house which her husband, conveniently dead, had bequeathed, with a colourless male cousin who had false teeth and no occupation that anyone knew of, to her. The male cousin's articulation was bad (he had been struck in the mouth with an axe in a dice game in Cuba during the Spanish-American War): perhaps this was why he did nothing,

Mrs. Worthington ate too much and suffered from gout and a flouted will. So her church connection was rather trying to the minister and his flock. But she had money—that panacea for all ills of the flesh and spirit. She believed in rights for women, as long as women would let her dictate what was right for them.

One usually ignored the male relation, But sometimes one pitied him.

But she sent her car for them and with Mrs. Powers and Mahon in the rear, and Gilligan beside the negro driver, they rolled smootly beneath elms, seeing stars in a clear sky, smelling growing things, hearing a rhythmic thumping soon to become music.

VIII

This, the spring of 1919, was the day of the boy, of him who had been too young for soldiering. For two years he had had a dry time of it. Of course, girls had used him during the scarcity of men, but always in such a detached, impersonal manner. Like committing fornication with a beautiful woman who chews gum steadily all the while. O Uniform, O Vanity. They had used him, but when a uniform showed up he got the air.

Up to that time uniforms could all walk: they were not only fashionable and romantic, but they were also quite keen on spending what money they had and they were also going too far away and too immediately to tell on you. Of course it was silly that some uniforms had to salute others, but it was nice, too. Especially if the uniform you had caught happened to be a salutee. And heaven only knows how much damage among feminine hearts a set of pilot's wings was capable of,

And the shows:

Beautiful, pure girls (American) in afternoon or evening gowns (doubtless under Brigade Orders) caught in deserted fire trenches by Prussian Hassars (on passes signed by Belasco) in parade uniform ; courtesans in Paris frocks demoralizing Brigade staffs, having subalterns with arrow collar profiles and creased breech, whom generals all think may be German spies, and handsome old generals, whom the subalterns all think may be German spies, glaring at each other across her languid body while corporal comedians entertain the beautiful-limbed and otherwise idle Red Cross nurses (American). The French women present are either marquises or whores or German spies, sometimes both, sometimes all three. The marquises may be told immediately because they all wear sabots, having given their shoes with the rest of their clothing to the French army, retaining only a pair of forty carat diamond earrings. Their sons are all aviators who have been out on a patrol since the previous Tuesday, causing the marquises to be a trifle distrait. The regular whores patronize them, while the German spies make love to the generals.

A courtesan (doubtless also under Brigade Orders) later saves the sector by sex appeal after gun-powder had failed, and the whole thing is wound up with a sort of garden party near a papier-maché dugout in which the army sits in sixty-pound packs, all three smoking cigarettes, while the Prussian Guard gnashes its teeth at them from an adjacent trench.

A chaplain appears who, to indicate that the soldiers love him because he is one of them, achieves innuendoes about home and mother and fornication. A large new flag is flown and the. enemy fires at it vainly with .22 rifles. The men on our side cheer, led by the padre.

“What,” said a beautiful, painted girl, not listening, to James Dough who had been for two years a corporal-pilot in a French chasse escadrille, “is the difference between an American Ace and a French or British aviator?”

“About six reels,” answered James Dough glumly (such a dull man! Where did Mrs. Wardle get him?) who had shot down thirteen enemy craft and had himself been crashed twice, giving him eleven points without allowing for evaporation.

“How nice. Is that so, really? You had movies in France, too, then?”

“Yes. Gave us something to do in our spare time.”

“Yes,” she agreed, offering him her oblivious profile. “You must have had an awfully good time while we poor women were slaving here rolling bandages and knitting things. I hope woman can fight in the next war: I had much rather march and shoot guns than knit. Do you think they will let women fight in the next war?” she asked, watching a young man dancing, limber as a worm.