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

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 racehorse. 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 stars 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 full 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’ 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 rubber, 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 answered. “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 when 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 a 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 passersby, 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