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

he seems to be waiting for something. Something he has begun, but has not completed, something he has carried from his former life that he does not remember consciously. That is his only hold on life that I can see.” He gave her another keen glance. “How does he regard you now? He remembers nothing of his life before he was injured.”

She met his sharp, kind gaze a moment, then she suddenly decided to tell him the truth. He watched her intently until she had finished.

“So you are meddling with Providence, are you?”

“Wouldn’t you have done the same?” she defended herself.

“I never speculate on what I would have done,” he answered shortly. “There can be no If in my profession. I work in tissue and bone, not in circumstance.”

“Well, it’s done now. I am in it too far to withdraw. So you think he may go at any time?”

“You are asking me to speculate again. What I said was that he will go whenever that final spark somewhere in him is no longer fed. His body is already dead. Further than that I cannot say.”

“An operation?” she suggested.

“He would not survive it. And in the second place, the human machine can only be patched and parts replaced up to a certain point. And all that has been done for him, or he would have never been released from any hospital.”

Afternoon drew on. They sat quietly talking while sunlight becoming lateral, broke through the screening leaves and sprinkled the porch with flecks of yellow, like mica in a stream. The same negro in the same undershirt droned up and down the lawn with his mower, an occasional vehicle passed slumbrous and creaking behind twitching mules, or moving more swiftly, leaving a fretful odor of gasoline to die beneath the afternoon.

The rector joined them after a while.

“Then there’s nothing to do except let him build himself up, eh, Doctor?” he asked.

“Yes, that is my advice. Attention, rest and quiet, let him resume old habits. About his sight, though⁠—”

The rector looked up slowly. “Yes, I realize his sight must go. But there are compensations. He is engaged to be married to a very charming lady. Don’t you think that will give him incentive to help himself?”

“Yes, that should, if anything can.”

“What do you think? Shall we hurry the marriage along?”

“We⁠—ll⁠—” the doctor hesitated: he was not exactly accustomed to giving advice on this subject.

Mrs. Powers came to his rescue. “I think we had better not hurry him at all,” she said quickly. “Let him accustom himself leisurely, you see. Don’t you think so, Doctor Baird?”

“Yes, Reverend, you let Mrs. Powers here advise you about that. I have every confidence in her judgment. You let her take charge of this thing. Women are always more capable than we are, you know.”

“That’s quite true. We are already under measureless obligations to Mrs. Powers.”

“Nonsense. I have almost adopted Donald myself.”

The cab came at last and Gilligan appeared with the doctor’s things. They rose and Mrs. Powers slipped her arm through the rector’s. She squeezed his arm and released him. As she and Gilligan, flanking the doctor, descended the steps the rector said again, timidly:

“You are sure, Doctor, that there is nothing to be done immediately? We are naturally anxious, you know,” he ended apologetically.

“No, no,” the doctor replied testily, “he can help himself more than we can help him.”

The rector stood watching until the cab turned the corner. Looking back, she could see him in the door staring after them. Then they turned a corner.

As the train drew into the station the doctor said, taking her hand:

“You’ve let yourself in for something that is going to be unpleasant, young lady.”

She gave him a straight glance in return.

“I’ll take the risk,” she said, shaking his hand firmly.

“Well, goodbye, then, and good luck.”

“Goodbye, sir,” she answered, “and thank you.”

He turned to Gilligan, offering his hand.

“And the same to you, Doctor Gilligan,” he said with faint sarcasm. They saw his neat gray back disappear and Gilligan, turning to her, asked:

“What’d he call me Doctor for?”

“Come on, Joe,” she said, not replying to his question, “let’s walk back. I want to walk through the woods again.”

IV

The air was sweet with fresh-sawed lumber and they walked through a pale yellow city of symmetrical stacked planks. A continuous line of negroes carried boards up a cleated incline like a chicken run into a freight car and flung them clashing to the floor, under the eye of an informally clad white man who reclined easily upon a lumber pile, chewing indolent tobacco. He watched them with interest as they passed, following the faint wagon road.

They crossed grass-grown steel rails, and trees obscured the lumber yard, but until they reached the bottom of the hill the voices of the negroes raised in bursts of meaningless laughter or snatches of song in a sorrowful minor came to them, and the slow reverberations of the cast boards smote at measured intervals. Quietly under the spell of the still late afternoon woods they descended a loamy hill, following the faint downward winding of the road. At the foot of the hill a dogwood tree spread flat palm-like branches in invocation among dense green, like a white nun.

“Niggers cut them for firewood because they are easy to chop,” she said, breaking the silence. “Shame, isn’t it?”

“Do they?” he murmured without interest. With the soft, sandy soil giving easily under their feet they came upon water. It ran sombrely from out massed honeysuckle vines and crossed the dim road into another impenetrable thicket, murmuring. She stopped, and bending slightly, they could see their heads and their two foreshortened bodies repeating themselves.

“Do we look that funny to people, I wonder?” she said. Then she stepped quickly across. “Come on, Joe.”

The road passed from the dim greenness into sunlight again. It was still sandy and the going was harder, exasperating.

“You’ll have to pull me, Joe.” She took his arm, feeling her heels sink and slip treacherously at each step. Her unevenly