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

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 behavior has become inexplicably obsolete overnight.

Most of them Gilligan knew by name and he sat also upon the balustrade. He was offered and accepted a cigarette and he perched among them while they talked loudly, drowning the intimation of dancers they could not emulate, of girls who once waited upon their favors and who now ignored them⁠—the hangover of warfare in a society tired of warfare. Puzzled and lost, poor devils. Once Society drank war, brought them into manhood with a cultivated taste for war; but now Society seemed to have found something else for a beverage, while they were not yet accustomed to two and seventy-five percent.

“Look at those kids that grew up while we were away,” one advised him with passion. “The girls don’t like it. But what can they do? We can’t do them dances. It ain’t just going through the motions. You could learn that, I guess. It’s⁠—it’s⁠—” he sought vainly for words. He gave it up and continued: “Funny, too. I learned things from French women.⁠ ⁠… Say, the girls don’t like it, do they? They haven’t changed that much, you know.”

“Naw, they don’t like it,” Gilligan answered. “Look at them two.”

“Sure, they don’t like it. These are nice girls: they will be the mothers of the next generation. Of course they don’t like it.”

“Somebody sure does, though,” Gilligan replied. Dr. Gary passed, dancing smoothly, efficiently, quite decorous, yet enjoying himself. His partner was young and briefly skirted: you could see that she danced with him because it was the thing to dance with Dr. Gary⁠—no one knew exactly why. She was conscious of physical freedom, of her young, uncorseted body, flat as a boy’s and, like a boy’s, pleasuring in freedom and motion, as though freedom and motion were water, pleasuring her flesh to the intermittent teasing of silk. Her glance followed over Dr. Gary’s shoulder (it was masculine because it was drably conventional in black) and arrested seeking for a lost rhythm, lost deliberately. Dr. Gary’s partner, skilfully following him, watched the other couple, ignoring the girl. (If there’s justice in heaven, I’ll get him next time.)

“Dancing with you,” said Dr. Gary, “is like a poem by a minor poet named Swinburne.” Dr. Gary preferred Milton: he had the passages all designated, like a play.

“Swinburne?” She smiled vaguely, watching the other couple, not losing the rhythm, not cracking her paint. Her face was smooth, as skilfully done and as artificial as an orchid. “Did he write poems, too?” (Is he thinking of Ella Wilcox or Irene Castle? He is a grand dancer: takes a good dancer to get along with Cecily.) “I think Kipling is awfully cute, don’t you?” (What a funny dress Cecily has on.)

Gilligan, watching the dancers, said: “What?”

The other repeated defensively: “He was in a French base. Sure he was. Two or three years. Good fellow.” He added: “Even if he can dance like they do.”

Light, motion, sound: no solidity. A turgid compulsion, passionate and evanescent. And outside spring, like a young girl reft of happiness and incapable of sorrow.

“… throw it on the wall. Oh, oh, oh, oh⁠ ⁠…” “… won’t never forget his expression when he said, ‘Jack, mine’s got syph. Had her⁠ ⁠…’ ” “shake it and break it, shake it.⁠ ⁠…” “First night in Paris⁠ ⁠… then the other one.⁠ ⁠…” “… don’t let it fall.⁠ ⁠…” “… with a gun⁠ ⁠… twenty dollars in gold pinned to my⁠ ⁠…” “I wonder where my easy, easy rider’s.⁠ ⁠…”

“Sure,” Gilligan agreed. He wondered where Madden, whom he liked, was, and not expecting an answer he was informed. (There she is again. Her feather fan like a willow at evening, her arm crossing conventional black a slim warm plane. Jove would have said, How virginal her legs are, but Gilligan, not being Jove, said, For Christ’s sake, wishing Donald Mahon were her partner or failing this, being glad he couldn’t see her.)

The music stopped. The dancers stood waiting its renewal. The hostess talking interminably appeared and as before a plague people scattered before her passage. Gilligan caught, submerged beneath waves of talk, suffered her, watching couples pass from the veranda on to the vague lawn. How soft their bodies look, their little backs and hips, he thought, saying, yes ma’am or no ma’am. At last he walked away and left her talking, and in a swing he saw Madden and a stranger.

“This is Mr. Dough,” Madden said, greeting him. “How’s Mahon?”

Gilligan shook hands. “He’s outside there, now, with Mrs. Powers.”

“He is? Mahon was with the British,” he explained to his companion. “Aviation.”

He betrayed a faint interest. “R.A.F.?”

“I guess so,”