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

with unbearable relief, becoming tears. It was Jones who had touched her, but anyone would have been the same and she turned in a passion of weeping, clinging to him.

(I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord.⁠ ⁠…)

Jones’ yellow stare enveloped her like amber, remarking her sunburned hair and her foreshortened thigh, wrung by her turning body into high relief.

(Whosoever believeth in Me, though he were dead.⁠ ⁠…)

My God, when will she get done weeping? First she wets my pants, then my coat. But this time she’ll dry it for me, or I’ll know the reason why.

(… yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.⁠ ⁠…)

Emmy’s sobbing died away: she knew no sensation save that of warmth and languorous contentment, emptiness, even when Jones raised her face and kissed her. “Come, Emmy,” he said, raising her by the armpits. She rose obediently, leaning against him warm and empty, and he led her through the house and up the stairs to her room. Outside the window, afternoon became abruptly rain, without warning, with no flapping of pennons nor sound of trumpet to herald it.

(The sun had gone, had been recalled as quickly as a usurer’s note and the doves fell silent or went away. The Baptist dervish’s Boy Scout lipped his bugle, sounding taps.)

II

“Hi, Bob,” called a familiar voice, that of a compatriot. “Le’s gwup to Miller’s. They’re playing ball up there.”

He looked at his friend, making no reply to the greeting, and his expression was so strange that the other said: “Whatcher looking so funny about? You ain’t sick, are you?”

“I don’t haf to play ball if I don’t want to, do I?” he replied, with sudden heat. He walked on while the other boy stood watching him with open mouth. After a while, he, too, turned and went on, stopping once or twice to look again at his friend become suddenly strange and queer. Then he passed, whooping from sight, forgetting him.

How strange everything looked! This street, these familiar trees⁠—was this his home here, where his mother and father were, where Sis lived, where he ate and slept, lapped closely around with safety and solidity, where darkness was kind and sweet for sleeping? He mounted the steps and entered, wanting his mother. But, of course, she hadn’t got back from⁠—He found himself running suddenly through the hall toward a voice raised in comforting, crooning song. Here was a friend mountainous in blue calico, her elephantine thighs undulating, gracious as the wake of a ferry boat as she moved between table and stove.

She broke off her mellow, passionless song, exclaiming: “Bless yo’ heart, honey, what is it?”

But he did not know. He only clung to her comforting, voluminous skirt in a gust of uncontrollable sorrow, while she wiped biscuit dough from her hands on a towel. Then she picked him up and sat upon a stiff-backed chair, rocking back and forth and holding him against her balloon-like breast until his fit of weeping shuddered away.

Outside the window the afternoon became abruptly rain, without warning, with no flapping of pennons nor sound of trumpet to herald it.

III

There was nothing harsh about this rain. It was gray and quiet as a benediction. The birds did not even cease to sing, and the west was already thinning to a moist and imminent gold.

The rector, bareheaded, walked slowly, unconscious of the rain and the dripping trees, beside his daughter-in-law across the lawn, houseward, and they mounted the steps together, passing beneath the dim and unwashed fanlight. Within the hall he stood while water ran down his face and dripped from his clothing in a series of small sounds. She took his arm and led him into the study and to his chair. He sat obediently and she took his handkerchief from the breast of his coat and wiped the rain from his temples and face. He submitted, fumbling for his pipe.

She watched him as he sprinkled tobacco liberally over the desktop, trying to fill the bowl, then she quietly took it from his hand. “Try this. It is much simpler,” she told him, taking a cigarette from her jacket pocket and putting it in his mouth. “You have never smoked one, have you?”

“Eh? Oh, thank you. Never too old to learn, eh?”

She lit it for him and then she quickly fetched a glass from the pantry. Kneeling beside the desk she drew out drawer after drawer until she found the bottle of whisky. He seemed to have forgotten her until she put the glass in his hand.

Then he looked up at her from a bottomless, grateful anguish and she sat suddenly on the arm of his chair, drawing his head against her breast. His untasted drink in one hand and his slowly burning cigarette lifting an unshaken plume of vapor from the other; and after a while the rain passed away and the dripping eaves but added to the freshened silence, measuring it, spacing it off; and the sun breaking through the west took a last look at the earth before going down.

“So you will not stay,” he said at last, repeating her unspoken decision.

“No,” she said, holding him.

IV

Before her descending, the hill crossed with fireflies. At its foot among dark trees was unseen water and Emmy walked slowly on, feeling the tall wet grass sopping her to the knees, draggling her skirt.

She walked on and soon was among trees that as she moved, moved overhead like dark ships parting the star-filled river of the sky, letting the parted waters join again behind them with never a ripple. The pool lay darkly in the dark: sky and trees above it, trees and sky beneath it. She sat down on the wet earth, seeing through the trees the moon becoming steadily brighter in the darkening sky. A dog saw it also and bayed: a mellow, long sound that slid immaculately down a hill of silence, yet at the