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

Mrs. Mahon and Gilligan had resumed their old status of companionship and quiet pleasure in each other’s company. Now that he no longer hoped to marry her she could be freer with him.

“Perhaps this is what we needed, Joe. Anyway, I never knew anyone I liked half this much.”

They walked slowly in the garden along the avenue of roses which passed beneath the two oaks, beyond which, against a wall, poplars in a restless formal row were like columns of a temple.

“You’re easy pleased then,” Gilligan answered with sour assumed moroseness. He didn’t have to tell her how much he liked her.

“Poor Joe,” she said. “Cigarette, please.”

“Poor you,” he retorted, giving her one. “I’m all right. I ain’t married.”

“You can’t escape forever, though. You are too nice:⁠—safe for the family: will stand hitched.”

“Is that a bargain?” he asked.

“Sufficient unto the day, Joe.⁠ ⁠…”

After a while he stayed her with his hand. “Listen.” They halted and she stared at him intently.

“What?”

“There’s that damn mockingbird again. Hear him? What’s he got to sing about, you reckon?”

“He’s got plenty to sing about. April’s got to be May, and still spring isn’t half over. Listen.⁠ ⁠…”

Emmy had become an obsession with Januarius Jones, such an obsession that it had got completely out of the realm of sex into that of mathematics, like a paranoia. He manufactured chances to see her, only to be repulsed; he lay in wait for her like a highwayman, he begged, he threatened, he tried physical strength, and he was repulsed. It had got to where, had she acceded suddenly, he would have been completely reft of one of his motivating impulses, of his elemental impulse to live: he might have died. Yet he knew that if he didn’t get her soon he would become crazy, an imbecile.

After a time it assumed the magic of numbers. He had failed twice: this time success must be his or the whole cosmic scheme would crumble, hurling him, screaming, into blackness, where no blackness was, death where death was not. Januarius Jones, by nature and inclination a Turk, was also becoming an oriental. He felt that his number must come: the fact that it would not was making an idiot of him.

He dreamed of her at night, he mistook other women for her, other voices for hers; he hung skulking about the rectory at all hours, too wrought up to come in where he might have to converse sanely with sane people. Sometimes the rector, tramping huge and oblivious in his dream, flushed him in out-of-the-way corners of concealment, flushed him without surprise.

“Ah, Mr. Jones,” he would say, starting like a goaded elephant, “good morning.”

“Good morning, sir,” Jones would reply, his eyes glued on the house.

“You are out for a walk?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” And Jones would walk hurriedly away in an opposite direction as the rector, entering his dream again, resumed his own.

Emmy told Mrs. Mahon of this with scornful contempt.

“Why don’t you tell Joe, or let me tell him?” Mrs. Mahon asked.

Emmy sniffed with capable independence. “About that worm? I can take care of him, all right. I do my own fighting.”

“And I bet you are good at it, too.”

And Emmy said: “I guess I am.”

April had become May.

Fair days, and wet days in which rain ran with silver lances over the lawn, in which rain dripped leaf to leaf while birds still sang in the hushed damp greenness under the trees, and made love and married and built houses and still sang; in which rain grew soft as the grief of a young girl grieving for the sake of grief.

Mahon hardly ever rose now. They had got him a movable bed and upon this he lay, sometimes in the house, sometimes on the veranda where the wistaria inverted its cool lilac flame, while Gilligan read to him. They had done with Rome and they now swam through the tedious charm of Rousseau’s Confessions to Gilligan’s hushed childish delight.

Kind neighbors came to inquire; the specialist from Atlanta came once by request and once on his own initiative, making a friendly call and addressing Gilligan meticulously as “Doctor,” spent the afternoon chatting with them, and went away. Mrs. Mahon and he liked each other immensely. Dr. Gary called once or twice and insulted them all and went away nattily smoking his slender rolled cigarettes. Mrs. Mahon and he did not like each other at all. The rector grew grayer and quieter, neither happy nor unhappy, neither protesting nor resigned.

“Wait until next month. He will be stronger then. This is a trying month for invalids. Don’t you think so?” he asked his daughter-in-law.

“Yes,” she would tell him, looking out at the green world, the sweet, sweet spring, “yes, yes.”

It was a postcard. You buy them for a penny, stamp and all. The post office furnishes writing material free.

“Got your letter. Will write later. Remember me to Gilligan and Lieut. Mahon.

“Julian L.”

Mahon was asleep on the veranda and the other three sat beneath the tree on the lawn, watching the sun go down. At last the reddened edge of the disc was sliced like a cheese by the wistaria-covered lattice wall and the neutral buds were a pale agitation against the dead afternoon. Soon the evening star would be there above the poplar tip, perplexing it, immaculate and ineffable, and the poplar was vain as a girl darkly in an arrested passionate ecstasy. Half of the moon was a coin broken palely near the zenith and at the end of the lawn the first fireflies were like lazily blown sparks from cool fires. A negro woman passing crooned a religious song, mellow and passionless and sad.

They sat talking quietly. The grass was becoming gray with dew and she felt dew on her thin shoes. Suddenly Emmy came around the corner of the house running and darted up the steps and through the entrance, swift in the