Soldiers Pay (24 page)

But it was Mrs. Saunders in the door, and Jones was calm, circumspect, lazy and remote as an idol.

“Why, it's quite cool in here, isn't it? But so dark. How do you keep awake?” said Mrs. Saunders, entering. “I nearly went to sleep several times on the porch. But the glare is so bad on the porch. Robert went off to school without his hat: I don't know what he will do.”

“Perhaps they haven't a porch at the schoolhouse,” murmured Jones.

“Why, I don't recall. But our school is quite modern. It was built in—when was it built, Cecily?”

“I don't know, mamma.”

“Yes. But it is quite new. Was it last year or the year before, darling?”

“I don't know, mamma.”

“I told him to wear his hat because of the glare, but of course, he didn't. Boys are so hard to manage. Were you hard to manage when you were a child, Mr. Jones?”

“No, ma'am,” answered Jones, who had no mother that he could name and who might have claimed any number of possible fathers, “I never gave my parents much trouble. I am of a quiet nature, you see. In fact, until I reached my eleventh year, the only time I ever knew passion was one day when I discovered beneath the imminent shadow of our annual picnic that my Sunday school card was missing. At our church they gave prizes for attendance and knowing the lesson, and my card bore forty-one stars, when it disappeared.” Jones grew up in a Catholic orphanage, but like Henry James, he attained verisimilitude by means of tediousness.

“How dreadful. And did you find it again?”

“Oh, yes. I found it in time for the picnic. My father had used it to enter a one-dollar bet on a race-horse. When I went to my father's place of business to prevail on him to return home, as was my custom, just as I passed through the swinging doors, one of his business associates there was saying. ‘Whose card is this?' I recognized my forty-one star immediately, and claimed it. collecting twenty-two dollars, by the way. Since then I have been a firm believer in Christianity.”

“How interesting,” Mrs. Saunders commented, without having heard him. “I wish Robert liked Sunday school as much as that.”

“Perhaps he would, at twenty-two to one.”

“Pardon me?” she said. Cecily rose, and Mrs. Saunders said: “Darling, if Mr. Jones is going, perhaps you had better lie down. You look tired. Don't you think she looks tired, Mr. Jones?”

“Yes, indeed. I had just commented on it.”

“Now, mamma,” said Cecily.

“Thank you for lunch.” Jones moved doorward and Mrs. Saunders replied conventionally, wondering why he did not try to reduce. (But perhaps he is trying, she added, with belated tolerance.) Cecily followed him.

“Do come again,” she told him staring at his face. “How much did you hear?” she whispered, with fierce desperation. “You MUST tell me.”

Jones bowed fatly to Mrs. Saunders, and again bathed the girl in his fathomless, yellow stare. She stood beside him in the door and the afternoon fell upon her slender fragility. Jones said:

“I am coming tonight.”

She whispered, “What?” and he repeated.

“You heard that?” Her mouth shaped the words against her blanched face. “You heard that?”

“I say that.”

Blood came beneath her skin again and her eyes became opaque, cloudy. “No, you aren't,” she told him. He looked at her calmly, and her knuckles whitened on his sleeve. “Please,” she said, with utter sincerity. He made no answer, and she added: “Suppose I tell daddy?”

“Come in again, Mr. Jones,” Mrs. Saunders said. Jones's mouth shaped You don't dare. Cecily stared at him in hatred and bitter desperation, in helpless terror and despair. “So glad to have you,” Mrs. Saunders was saying. “Cecily, you had better lie down: you don't look at all well. Cecily is not very strong, Mr. Jones.”

“Yes, indeed. One can easily see she isn't strong,” Jones agreed, politely. The screen door severed them and Cecily's mouth, elastic and mobile as red blubber, shaped Don't.

But Jones made no reply. He descended wooden steps and walked beneath locust trees in which bees were busy. Roses were slashed upon green bushes, roses red as the mouths of courtesans, red as Cecily's mouth, shaping Don't.

She watched his fat, lazy, tweed back until he reached the gate and the street, then she turned to where her mother stood in impatient anticipation of her freed stout body. The light was behind her and the older woman could not see her face, but there was something in her attitude, in the relaxed hopeless tension of her body that caused the other to look at her in quick alarm.

“Cecily?”

The girl touched her and Mrs. Saunders put her arm around her daughter. The older woman had eaten too much as usual, and she breathed heavily, knowing her corsets, counting the minutes until she would be free of them.

“Cecily?”

“Where is daddy, mamma?”

“Why, he's gone to town. What is it, baby?” She asked, quickly, “what's the matter?”

Cecily clung to her mother. The other was like a rock, a panting rock: something imperishable, impervious to passion and fear. And heartless.

“I must see him,” she anwered. “I have just got to see him.”

The other said: “There, there. Go to your room and lie down a while.” She sighed heavily. “No wonder you don't feel well. Those new potatoes at dinner! When will I learn to stop eating? But if it isn't one thing, it's another, isn't it? Darling, would you mind coming in and unlacing me? I think I'll lie down a while before I dress to go to Mrs. Coleman's.”

“Yes, mamma. Of course,” she answered, wanting her father, George, anyone to help her.

III

George Farr, lurking along a street, climbed a fence swiftly when the exodus from the picture show came along. Despite himself, he simply could not act as though he were out for casual stroll, but must drift aimlessly and noticeably back and forth along the street with a sort of skulking frankness. He was too nervous to go somewhere else and time his return; he was too nervous to conceal himself and stay there. So he gave up and became frankly skulking, climbing a fence smartly when the exodus from the picture show began.

Nine-thirty

People sat on porches rocking and talking in low tones, enjoying the warmth of April, people passing beneath dark trees along the street, old and young, men and women, making comfortable, unintelligible sounds, like cattle going to barn and bed. Tiny red eyes passed along at mouth-height and burning tobacco lingered behind sweet and pungent. Spitting arc lights, at street corners, revealed the passers-by, temporarily dogging them with elastic shadows. Cars passed under the lights and he recognized friends: young men and the inevitable girls with whom they were “going”—coiffed or bobbed hair and slim young hands fluttering forever about it, keeping it in place. . . . The cars passed on into darkness, into another light, into darkness again.

Ten o'clock

Dew on the grass, dew on small unpickable roses, making them sweeter, giving them an odour. Otherwise, they had no odour, except that of youth and growth, as young girls have no particular attributes, save the kinship of youth and growth. Dew on the grass, the grass assumed a faint luminousness as if it had stolen light from day and the moisture of night were releasing it, giving it back to the world again. Tree frogs shrilled in the trees, insects droned in the grass. Tree frogs are poison, negroes had told him. If they spit on you, you›ll die. When he moved they fell silent (getting ready to spit, perhaps), when he became still again, they released the liquid flute-like monotony swelling in their throats, filling the night with the imminence of summer. Spring, like a girl loosing , her girdle. . . . People passed in belated ones and twos. Words reached him in meaningless snatches. Fireflies had not yet come.

Ten-thirty

Rocking blurs on the verandas of houses rose and went indoors, entering rooms, and lights went off here and there, beyond smoothly descending shades. George Farr stole across a deserted lawn to a magnolia tree. Beneath it, fumbling in a darkness so inky that the rest of the world seemed quite visible in comparison, he found a water tap. Water gushed, filling his incautious shoe, and a mockingbird flew darkly and suddenly out. He drank, wetting his dry hot mouth, and returned to his post. When he was still again, the frogs and insects teased at silence gently, not to break it completely. As the small odourless roses unfolded under the dew their scent grew as though they, too, were growing, doubling in size.

Eleven o'clock

Solemnly the clock on the courthouse, staring its four bland faces across the town, like a kind and sleepless god, dropped eleven measured golden bells of sound. Silence carried them away, silence and dark that passing along the street like a watchman, snatched scraps of light from windows, palming them as a pickpocket palms snatched handkerchiefs. A belated car passed swiftly. Nice girls must be home by eleven. The street, the town, the world, was empty for him.

He lay on his back in a slow consciousness of relaxing muscles, feeling his back and thighs and legs luxuriously. It became so quiet that he dared to smoke, though being careful not to expose the match unduly. Then he lay down again, stretching, feeling the gracious earth through his clothing. After a while his cigarette burned down and he spun it from two fingers and sickled his knee until he could reach his ankle, scratching. Life of some sort was also down his back, or it felt like it, which was the same thing. He writhed his back against the earth and the irritation ceased. . . . It must be eleven-thirty by now. He waited for what he judged to be five minutes, then he held his watch this way and that, trying to read it. But it only tantalized him: he could have. sworn to almost any hour or minute you could name. So he cupped another cautious match. It was eleven-fourteen. Hell.

He lay back again cradling his head in his clasped arms. From this position the sky became a flat plane, flat as the brass-studded lid of a dark-blue box. Then, as he watched, it assumed depth again, it was as if he lay on the bottom of the sea while seaweed, clotting blackly, lifted surfaceward unshaken by any current, motionless; it was as if he lay on his stomach, staring downward into water into which his gorgon›s hair, clotting blackly, hung motionless. Eleven-thirty.

He had lost his body. He could not feel it at all. It was as though vision were a bodiless Eye suspended in dark-blue space, an Eye without Thought, regarding without surprise an antic world where wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows. . . . After a while, the Eye, having nothing in or by which to close itself, ceased to see, and he waked, thinking that he was being tortured, that his arms were being crushed and wrung from his body. He dreamed that he had screamed, and finding that to move his arms was an agony equalled only by that of letting them stay where they were, he rolled writhing, chewing his lip. His whole blood took fire: the pain became a swooning ecstasy that swooned away. Yet they still felt like somebody else's arms, even after the pain had gone. He could not even take out his watch, he was afraid he would not be able to climb the fence.

But he achieved this, knowing it was midnight, because the street lamps had been turned off, and in the personal imminent desertion of the street he slunk, feeling, though there was none to see him, more like a criminal than ever, now that his enterprise was really under way. He walked on trying to bolster his moral courage, trying not to look like a sneaking nigger, but, in spite of him, it seemed that every dark quiet house stared at him, watching him with blank and lightless eyes, making his back itch after he had passed. But what if they do see me? What am I doing, that anyone should not do? Walking along a deserted street after midnight. That's all. But this did not stop the prickling of hair on the back of his neck.

His gait faltered, not quite stopping altogether: near the trunk of a tree, he discerned movement, a thicker darkness. His first impulse was to turn back, then he cursed himself for an excitable fool. Suppose it were someone. He had as much right to the street as the other had—more, if the other were concealing himself. He strode on no longer skulking, feeling on the contrary quite righteous. As he passed the tree, the thicker darkness shifted slowly. Whoever it was did not wish to be seen. The other evidently feared him more than he did the other, so he passed on boldly. He looked back once or twice, but saw nothing.

Her house was dark, but remembering the shadow behind the tree, and for the sake of general precaution, he passed steadily on. After a block or so he halted, straining his ears. Nothing save the peaceful, unemphatic sounds of night. He crossed the street and stopped again, listening. Nothing. Frogs and crickets, and that was all. He walked in the grass beside the pavement, stealing quiet as a shadow to the corner of her lawn. He climbed the fence and, crouching, stole along beside a hedge until he was opposite the house, where he stopped again. The house was still, unlighted, bulking huge and square in slumber and he sped swiftly from the shadow of the hedge to the shadow of the veranda at the place where a french window gave upon it. He sat down in a flower bed, leaning his back against the wall.

The turned flower bed filled the darkness with the smell of fresh earth, something friendly and personal in a world of enormous vague formless shapes of greater and lesser darkness. The night, the silence, was complete and profound: a formless region filled with the smell of fresh earth and the measured ticking of the watch in his pocket. After a time, he felt soft damp earth through his trousers upon his thighs and he sat in a slow physical content, a oneness with the earth, waiting a sound from the dark house at his back. He heard a sound after a while but it was from the street. He sat still and calm. With the inconsistency of his kind, he felt safer here, where he had no business being, than on the street to which he had every right. The sound, approaching, became two vague figures, and Lobe and the cook passed along the drive toward their quarters, murmuring softly to each other . . . Soon the night was again vague and vast and empty.