Soldiers Pay (20 page)

“I expect they'll have to,” James Dough shifted his artificial leg, nursing his festering arm between the bones of which a tracer bullet had passed. “If they want to have another one.”

“Yes.” She yearned toward the agile, prancing youth. His body was young in years, his hair was glued smoothly to his skull. His face, under a layer of powder, was shaved and pallid, sophisticated, and he and his blonde and briefly-skirted partner slid and poised and drifted like a dream. The negro cornetist stayed his sweating crew and the assault arrested withdrew, leaving the walls of silence people by the un-conquered defenders of talk. Boys of both sexes swayed arm in arm, taking sliding tripping steps, waiting for the music and the agile youth, lounging immaculately, said: “Have this dance?”

She said “Hel—lo,” sweetly drawling. “Have you met Mr. Dough? Mr. Rivers, Mr. Dough. Mr. Dough is a visitor in town.”

Mr. Rivers patronized Mr. Dough easily and repeated: “Dance the next?” Mr. Rivers had had a year at Princeton.

“I'm sorry. Mr. Dough doesn't dance,” answered Miss Cecily Saunders faultlessly. Mr. Rivers, well bred, with all the benefits of a year at a cultural centre, mooned his blank face at her.

“Aw, come on. You aren't going to sit out all evening, are you? What did you come here for?”

“No, no: later, perhaps. I want to talk to Mr. Dough. You hadn't thought of that, had you?”

He stared at her quietly and emptily. At last he mumbled “Sorry,” and lounged away.

“Really,” began Mr. Dough, “not on my account, you know. If you want to dance——”

“Oh, I have to see those—those infants all the time. Really, it is quite a relief to meet someone who knows more than dancing and—and—dancing. But tell me about yourself. Do you like Charlestown? I can see that you are accustomed to larger cities, but don't you find something charming about these small towns?”

Mr. Rivers roved his eye, seeing two girls watching him in poised invitation, but he moved on toward a group of men standing and sitting near the steps, managing in some way to create the illusion of being both participants and spectators at the same time. They were all of a kind: there was a kinship like an odour among them, a belligerent self-effacement. Wallflowers. Wallflowers. Good to talk to the hostess and dance with the duds. But even the talkative hostess had given them up now. One or two of them, bolder than the rest, but disseminating that same faint identical odour stood beside girls, waiting for the music to start again, but the majority of them herded near the steps, touching each other as if for mutual protection. Mr. Rivers heard phrases in bad French and he joined them, aware of his own fitted dinner jacket revealing his matchless linen.

“May I see you a minute, Madden?”

The man quietly smoking detached himself from the group. He was not big, yet there was something big and calm about him: a sense of competent inertia after activity.

“Yes?” he said.

“Do me a favour, will you?”

“Yes?” the man repeated courteously non-committal.

“There's a man here who can't dance, that nephew of Mrs. Wardle's that was hurt in the war. Cecily—I mean Miss Saunders—has been with him all evening. She wants to dance.”

The other watched him with calm intentness and Mr. Rivers suddenly lost his superior air.

“To tell the truth, I want to dance with her. Would you mind sitting with him a while? I'd be awfully obliged to you if you would.”

“Does Miss Saunders want to dance?”

“Sure she does. She said so.” The other's gaze was so penetrating that he felt moisture and drew his handkerchief, wiping his powdered brow lightly, not to disarrange his hair. “God damn it,” he burst out, “you soldiers think you own things, don't you?”

Columns, imitation Doric, supported a remote small balcony, high and obscure, couples strolled in, awaiting the music, talk and laughter and movement distorted by a lax transparency of curtains inside the house. Along the balustrade of the veranda red eyes of cigarettes glowed; a girl stooping ostrich-like drew up her stocking and light from a window found her young shapeless leg. The negro cornetist, having learned in his thirty years a century of the white man's lust, blinked his dispassionate eye, leading his crew in a fresh assault. Couples erupted in, clasped and danced; vague blurs locked together on the lawn beyond the light.

“. . . Uncle Joe, Sister Kate, all shimmy like jelly on a plate. . . .”

Mr. Rivers felt like a chip in a current: he knew a sharp puerile anger. Then as they turned the angle of the porch he saw Cecily clothed delicately in a silver frock, fragile as spun glass. She carried a green feather fan and her slim, animated turned body, her nervous prettiness, filled him with speculation. The light falling diffidently on her, felt her arm, her short body, suavely indicated her long, virginal legs.

“. . . Uncle Bud, ninety-two, shook his cane and shimmied too. . . .”

Dr. Gary danced by without his glass of water: they avoided him and Cecily looked up, breaking her speech.

“Oh, Mr. Madden! How do you do?” She gave him her hand and presented him to Mr. Dough. “I'm awfully flattered that you decided to speak to me—or did Lee have to drag you over? Ah, that's how it was. You were going to ignore me, I know you were. Of course we can't hope to compete with French women—”

Madden protested conventionally and she made room for him beside her.

“Sit down. Mr. Dough was a soldier, too, you know.”

Mr. Rivers said heavily: “Mr. Dough will excuse you. How about a dance? Time to go home soon.”

She civilly ignored him and James Dough shifted his leg. “Really, Miss Saunders, please dance, I wouldn't spoil your evening for anything.”

“Do you hear that, Mr. Madden? The man is driving me away. Would you do that?” she tilted her eyes at him effectively. Then she turned to Dough with restrained graceful impulsiveness. “I still call him Mr. Madden, though we have know each other all our lives. But then he was in the war, and I wasn't. He is so—so experienced, you see. And I am only a girl. If I had been a boy like Lee I'd have gone and been a lieutenant in shiny boots or a general or something by now. Wouldn't I?” Her turning body was graceful. impulsive: a fragile spontaneity. “I cannot call you mister anymore. Do you mind?”

“Let's dance.” Mr. Rivers, tapping his foot to the music, watched this with sophisticated boredom. He yawned openly. “Let's dance.”

“Rufas, ma'am,” said Madden.

“Rufas. And you musn't say ma'am to me any longer. You won't, will you?”

“No ma—I mean, no.”

“Oh, you nearly forgot then—”

“Let's dance,” repeated Mr. Rivers.

“—but you won't forget anymore. You won't, will you?”

“No, no,”

“Don't let him forget, Mr. Dough. I am depending on you.”

“Good, good. But you go and dance with Mr. Smith here.”

She rose. “He is sending me away,” she stated with mock humility. Then she shrugged narrowly, nervously. “I know we aren't as attractive as French women, but you must make the best of us. Poor Lee, here, doesn't know any French women so we can please him. But you soldiers don't like us anymore, I'm afraid.”

“Not at all: we give you up to Mr. Lee only on condition that you come back to us.”

“Now that's better. But you are saying that just to be polite,” she accused.

“No, no, if you don't dance with Mr. Lee, here, you will be impolite. He has asked you several times.”

She shrugged again nervously. “So I guess I must dance, Lee. Unless you have changed your mind, too, and don't want me?”

He took her hand. “Hell, come on.”

Restraining him, she turned to the other two, who had risen also. “You will wait for me?”

They assured her, and she released them. Dough's creaking, artificial knee was drowned by the music and she gave herself to Mr. Rivers's embrace. They took the syncopation he felt her shallow breast and her knees briefly, and said: “What you doing to him?” slipping his arm farther around her, feeling the swell of her hip under his hand.

“Doing to him?”

“Ah, let's dance.”

Locked together they poised and slid and poised, feeling the beat of the music, toying with it, eluding it, seeking it again, drifting like a broken dream.

IX

George Farr, from the outer darkness, glowered at her, watching her slim body cut by a masculine arm, watching her head beside another head, seeing her limbs beneath her silver dress anticipating her partner's limbs, seeing the luminous plane of her arm across his black shoulders and her fan drooping from her arched wrist like a willow at evening. He heard the rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones, he saw vague shapes in the darkness and he smelled the earth and things growing in it. A couple passed them and a girl said, “Hello, George. Coming in?” “No,” he told her, wallowing in all the passionate despair of spring and youth and jealousy, getting of them an exquisite bliss.

His friend beside him, a soda clerk, spat his cigarette. “Let's have another drink.”

The bottle was a combination of alcohol and sweet syrup purloined from the drug store. It was temporarily hot to the throat, but this passed away leaving in its place a sweet, inner fire, a courage.

“To hell with them,” he said.

“You ain't going in, are you?” his friend asked. They had another drink. The music beat on among youthful leaves, into the darkness, beneath the gold and mute cacophony of stars. The light from the veranda mounting was lost, the house loomed huge against the sky: a rock against which waves of trees broke, and breaking were forever arrested; and stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows, spurning them with hooves sharp and scintillant as ice. The sky, so remote, so sad, spurned by the unicorns of gold, that, neighing soundlessly from dusk to dawn, bad seen them, had seen her—her taut body prone and naked as a narrow pool sweetly dividing: two silver streams from a single source. . . .

“I'm not going in,” he answered, moving away. They crossed the lawn and in the shadow of a crepe-myrtle one with a sound of breath became two. They walked quickly on, averting their eyes.

“Hell, no,” he repeated, “I'm not going in.”

X

This was the day of the Boy, male and female.

“Look at them, Joe,” Mrs. Powers said, “sitting there like lost souls waiting to get into hell.”

The car had stopped broadside on, where they could get a good view.

“They don't look like they're sitting to me,” Gilligan answered with enthusiasm. “Look at them two: look where he's got his hand. This is what they call polite dancing, is it? I never learned it: I would have got throwed out of any place I ever danced doing that. But I had a unfortunate youth: I never danced with nice people.”

Through two heavy identical magnolias the lighted porch was like a stage. The dancers moved, locked two and two, taking the changing light, eluding it.

“ . . . shake it and break it, don't let it fall . . . .”

Along the balustrade they sat like birds, effacingly belligerent. Wallflowers.

“No, no, I mean those ex-soldiers there. Look at them. Sitting there, talking their army French, kidding themselves. Why did they come, Joe?”

“Same reason we come. Like a show, ain't it? But how do you know they're soldiers? . . . Look at them two there,” he crowed suddenly, with childish intentness. The couple slid and poised, losing the syncopation deliberately, seeking and finding it, losing it again. . . . Her limbs eluded his, anticipated his: the breath of a touch and escape, which he, too, was quick to assist. Touch and retreat: no satiety. “Wow, if that tune ever stops!”

“Don't be silly, Joe. I know them. I have seen their sort at the canteen too often, acting just that way: poor kind dull boys going to war, and because they were going girls were nice to them. But now there is no war for them to go to. And look how the girls treat them.”

“What were you saying?” asked Gilligan with detachment. He tore his eyes from the couple. “Wow, if the Loot could see this it'd sure wake him up, wouldn't it?”

Mahon sat quietly beside Mrs. Powers. Gilligan turning in his seat beside the negro driver looked at his quiet shape. The syncopation pulsed about them, a reiteration of wind and strings warm and troubling as water. She leaned toward him.

“Like it, Donald?”

He stirred, raising his hand to his glasses.

“Come on, Loot,” said Gilligan quickly; “don't knock 'em off. We might lose 'em here.” Mahon lowered his hand obediently. “Music's pretty good, ain't it?”

“Pretty good, Joe,” he agreed.

Gilligan looked at the dancers again. “Pretty good ain't the half of it. Look at 'em.”

“ . . . oh, oh, I wonder where my easy rider's gone. . . .”

He turned suddenly to Mrs. Powers. “You know who that is there?”

Mrs. Powers saw Dr. Gary, without his glass of water, she saw a feather fan like a willow at evening and the luminous plane of a bare arm upon conventional black. She saw two heads as one head, cheek to cheek, expressionless and fixed as a ritual above a slow synchronization of limbs. “That Saunders lady,” Gilligan explained.

She watched the girl's graceful motion, a restrained delicate abandon, and Gilligan continued: “I think I'll go closer, with them birds sitting there. I got to see this.”

They greeted him with the effusiveness of people who are brought together by invitation yet are not quite certain of themselves and of the spirit of the invitation; in this case the eternal country boys of one national mental state, lost in the comparative metropolitan atmosphere of one diametrically opposed to it. To feel provincial: finding that a certain conventional state of behaviour has become inexplicably obsolete overnight.