Soldiers’ Pay - William Faulkner (people reading books TXT) 📗

pointed out. “And soon it will not even be a third of his time. The race is weakening, degenerating: we cannot stand nearly as much sleep as our comparatively recent (geologically speaking of course) forefathers could, not even as much as our more primitive contemporaries can. For we, the self-styled civilized peoples, are now exercised over our minds and our arteries instead of our stomachs and sex, as were our progenitors and some of our uncompelled contemporaries.”

“Uncompelled?”

“Socially, of course. Doe believes that Doe and Smith should and must do this or that because Smith believes that Smith and Doe should and must do this or that.”

“Ah, yes.” The divine again lifted his kind, unblinking eyes straight into the sun. Dew was off the grass and jonquils and narcissi were beginning to look drowsy, like girls after a ball. “It is drawing toward noon. Let us go in: I can offer you refreshment and lunch, if you are not engaged.”

Jones rose. “No, no. Thank you a thousand times. But I shan’t trouble you.”

The rector was hearty. “No trouble, no trouble at all. I am alone at present.”

Jones demurred. He had a passion for food, and an instinct. He had only to pass a house for his instinct to inform him whether or not the food would be good. Jones did not, gastronomically speaking, react favorably to the rector.

The divine, however, overrode him with hearty affability: the rector would not take No. He attached Jones to himself and they trod their shadows across the lawn, herding them beneath the subdued grace of a fanlight of dim-colored glass lovely with lack of washing. After the immaculate naked morning, the interior of the hall vortexed with red fire. Jones, temporarily blind, stumbled violently over an object and the handle of a pail clasped his ankle passionately. The rector, bawling Emmy! dragged him, pail and all, erect: he thanked his lucky stars that he had not been attached to the floor as he rose a sodden Venus, disengaging the pail. His dangling feet touched the floor and he felt his trouser leg with despair, fretfully. He’s like a derrick, he thought with exasperation.

The rector bawled Emmy again. There was an alarmed response from the depths of the house and one in gingham brushed them. The divine’s great voice boomed like surf in the narrow confines, and opening a door upon a flood of light, he ushered the trickling Jones into his study.

“I shall not apologize,” the rector began, “for the meagreness of the accommodation which I offer you. I am alone at present, you see. But, then, we philosophers want bread for the belly and not for the palate, eh? Come in, come in.”

Jones despaired. A drenched trouser leg, and bread for the belly alone. And God only knew what this great lump of a divine meant by bread for the belly and no bread for the palate. Husks, probably. Regarding food, Jones was sybaritically rather than aesthetically inclined. Or even philosophically. He stood disconsolate, swinging his dripping leg.

“My dear boy, you are soaking!” exclaimed his host. “Come, off with your trousers.”

Jones protested weakly. “Emmy!” roared the rector again.

“All right, Uncle Joe. Soon’s I get this water up.”

“Never mind the water right now. Run to my room and fetch me a pair of trousers.”

“But the rug will be ruined!”

“Not irreparably, I hope. We’ll take the risk. Fetch me the trousers. Now, dear boy, off with them. Emmy will dry them in the kitchen and then you will be right as rain.”

Jones surrendered in dull despair. He had truly fallen among moral thieves. The rector assailed him with ruthless kindness and the gingham-clad one reappeared at the door with a twin of the rector’s casual black nether coverings over her arm.

“Emmy, this is Mr.⁠—I do not recall having heard your name?⁠—he will be with us at lunch. And, Emmy, see if Cecily wishes to come also.”

This virgin shrieked at the spectacle of Jones, ludicrous in his shirt and his fat pink legs and the trousers jerked solemn and lethargic into the room. “Jones,” supplied Januarius Jones, faintly. Emmy, however, was gone.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Jones.” The rector fell upon him anew, doing clumsy and intricate things with the waist and bottoms of the trousers, and Jones, decently if voluminously clad, stood like a sheep in a gale while the divine pawed him heavily.

“Now,” cried his host, “make yourself comfortable (even Jones found irony in this) while I find something that will quench thirst.”

The guest regained his composure in a tidy, shabby room. Upon a rag rug a desk bore a single white hyacinth in a handleless teacup, above a mantel cluttered with pipes and twists of paper hung a single photograph. There were books everywhere⁠—on shelves, on window ledges, on the floor: Jones saw the Old Testament in Greek in several volumes, a depressing huge book on international law, Jane Austen and Les Contes Drolatiques in dog-eared amity: a mutual supporting caress. The rector reentered with milk in a pitcher of blue glass and two mugs. From a drawer he extracted a bottle of Scotch whisky.

“A sop to the powers,” he said, leering at Jones with innocent depravity. “Old dog and new tricks, my boy. But your pardon: perhaps you do not like this combination?”

Jones’ morale rose balloon-like. “I will try any drink once,” he said, like Jurgen.

“Try it, anyway. If you do not like it you are at perfect liberty to employ your own formula.”

The beverage was more palatable than he would have thought. He sipped with relish. “Didn’t you mention a son, sir?”

“That was Donald. He was shot down in Flanders last spring.” The rector rose and took the photograph down from above the mantel. He handed it to his guest. The boy was about eighteen and coatless: beneath unruly hair, Jones saw a thin face with a delicate pointed chin and wild, soft eyes. Jones’ eyes were clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat’s.

“There is death in his