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

glance follow him, then she shrugged and turned to Jones. Her neck, her arm, took faint light warmly, smoothly. She took Jones’ tweed sleeve.

“Say,” Gilligan murmured, watching their retreat, “you can see right through her.”

“Dat’s de war,” explained the negro driver, sleeping again immediately.

XIII

Jones dragged her resisting among shadows. A crepe-myrtle bush obscured them.

“Let me go!” she said, struggling.

“What’s the matter with you? You kissed me once, didn’t you?”

“Let me go,” she repeated.

“What for? For that goddam dead man? What does he care about you?” He held her until her nervous energy, deserting her, left her fragile as a captured bird. He stared at the white blur which was her face and she was aware of the shapeless looming bulk of his body in the darkness, smelling wool and tobacco.

“Let me go,” she repeated piteously, and finding herself suddenly free, she fled across grass, knowing dew on her shoes, seeing gratefully a row of men sitting like birds on the balustrade. Mr. Rivers’ ironed face, above his immaculate linen, met her and she grasped his arm.

“Let’s dance, Lee,” she said thinly, striking her body sharply against him, taking the broken suggestion of saxophones.

XIV

Mrs. Powers had a small triumph: the railbirds had given her a “rush.”

“Say,” they had nudged each other, “look who Rufe’s got.”

And while the hostess stood in effusive volubility beside her straight, dark dress, two of them, whispering together, beckoned Madden aside.

“Powers?” they asked, when he joined them. But he hushed them.

“Yes, that was him. But that’s not for talk, you know. Don’t tell them, see.” His glance swept the group along the rail. “Won’t do any good, you know.”

“Hell, no,” they assured him. Powers!

And so they danced with her, one or two at first, then having watched her firm, capable performance, all of them that danced at all were soon involved in a jolly competition, following her while she danced with another of their number, importuning her between dances: some of them even went so far as to seek out other partners whom they knew.

Madden after a time merely looked on, but his two friends were assiduous, tireless; seeing that she did not dance too long with the poor dancers, fetching her cups of insipid punch; kind and a little tactless.

Her popularity brought the expected harvest of feminine speculation. Her clothes were criticized, her “nerve” in coming to a dance in a street dress, in coming at all. Living in a house with two young men, one of them a stranger. No other woman there⁠ ⁠… except a servant. And there had been something funny about that girl, years ago. Mrs. Wardle spoke to her, however. But she speaks to everyone who can’t avoid her. And Cecily Saunders stopped between dances, holding her arm, chatting in her coarse, nervous, rushing speech, rolling her eyes about at all the inevitable men, talking all the time.⁠ ⁠… The negro cornetist unleashed his indefatigable pack anew and the veranda broke again into clasped couples.

Mrs. Powers, catching Madden’s eye, signaled him. “I must go,” she said. “If I have to drink another cup of that punch⁠—”

They threaded their way among dancers, followed by her protesting train. But she was firm and they told her good night with regret and gratitude, shaking her hand.

“It was like old times,” one of them diffidently phrased it, and her slow, friendly, unsmiling glance took them all.

“Wasn’t it? Again soon, I hope. Goodbye, goodbye.” They watched her until her dark dress merged with shadow beyond the zone of light. The music swept on, the brass swooned away and the rhythm was carried by a hushed plaintive minor of voices until the brass recovered.

“Say, you could see right through her,” Gilligan remarked with interest as they came up. Madden opened the door and helped her in, needlessly.

“I’m tired, Joe. Let’s go.”

The negro driver’s head was round as a capped cannonball and he was not asleep. Madden stood aside, hearing the spitting engine merge into a meshed whine of gears, watching them roll smoothly down the drive.

Powers⁠ ⁠… a man jumping along a trench of demoralized troops caught in a pointless hysteria. Powers. A face briefly spitted on the flame of a rifle: a white moth beneath a reluctant and sorrowful dawn.

XV

George Farr and his friend the soda-clerk walked beneath trees that in reverse motion seemed to swim backward above them, and houses were huge and dark or else faintly luminous shapes of flattened lesser dark where no trees were. People were asleep in them, people lapped in slumber, temporarily freed of the flesh. Other people elsewhere dancing under the spring sky: girls dancing with boys while other boys whose bodies had known all intimacies with the bodies of girls, walked dark streets alone, alone.⁠ ⁠…

“Well,” his friend remarked, “we got two more good drinks left.”

He drank fiercely, feeling the fire in his throat become an inner grateful fire, pleasuring in it like a passionate muscular ecstasy. (Her body prone and naked as a narrow pool, flowing away like two silver streams from a single source.) Dr. Gary would dance with her, would put his arm around her, anyone could touch her. (Except you: she doesn’t even speak of you who have seen her prone and silver⁠ ⁠… moonlight on her like sweetly dividing water, marbled and slender and unblemished by any shadow, the sweet passion of her constricting arms that constricting hid her body beyond the obscuring prehensileness of her mouth⁠—) Oh God, oh God!

“Say, whatcher say we go back to the store and mix another bottle?”

He did not answer and his friend repeated the suggestion.

“Let me alone,” he said suddenly, savagely.

“Goddam you, I’m not hurting you!” the other answered with justifiable heat.

They stopped at a corner, where another street stretched away beneath trees into obscurity, in uncomfortable intimacy. (I’m sorry: I’m a fool. I’m sorry I flew out at you, who are not at all to blame.) He turned heavily.

“Well, I guess I’ll go in. Don’t feel so good tonight. See you in the