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

I guess it isn’t in the cards, is it?” She raised her face and he kissed her.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Joe.”

But why not? he thought with cinders under his feet, why not take her this way? I could persuade her in time, perhaps before we reached Atlanta. He turned and sprang back on board the train. He hadn’t much time and when he saw that her seat was empty he rushed through the car in a mounting excitement. She was not in the next car either.

Have I forgotten which car she is in? he thought. But no, that was where he had left her, for there was the negro youth, still motionless opposite the window. He hurried back to take another look at her place. Yes, there were her bags. He ran, blundering into other passengers, the whole length of the train. She was not there.

She has changed her mind and got off, looking for me, he thought, in an agony of futile endeavor. He slammed open a vestibule and leaped to the ground as the train began to move. Careless of how he must look to the station loungers he leaped toward the waiting room. It was empty, a hurried glance up and down the platform did not discover her and he turned despairing to the moving train.

She must be on it! he thought furiously, cursing himself because he had not stayed on it until she reappeared. For now the train was moving too swiftly and all the vestibules were closed. Then the last car slid smoothly past and he saw her standing on the rear platform where she had gone in order to see him again and where he had not thought of looking for her.

“Margaret!” he cried after the arrogant steel thing, running vainly down the track after it, seeing it smoothly distancing him. “Margaret?” he cried again, stretching his arms to her, to the vocal support of the loungers.

“Whup up a little, mister,” a voice advised. “Ten to one on the train,” a sporting one offered. There were no takers.

He stopped at last, actually weeping with anger and despair, watching her figure, in its dark straight dress and white collar and cuffs, become smaller and smaller with the diminishing train that left behind a derisive whistle blast and a trailing fading vapor like an insult, moving along twin threads of steel out of his sight and his life.

… At last he left the track at right angles and climbed a wire fence into woods where spring becoming languorous with summer turned sweetly nightward, though summer had not quite come.

VI

Deep in a thicket from which the evening was slowly dissolving a thrush sang four liquid notes. Like the shape of her mouth, he thought, feeling the heat of his pain become cool with the cooling of sunset. The small stream murmured busily like a faint incantation and repeated alder shoots leaned over it Narcissus-like. The thrush, disturbed, flashed a modest streak of brown deeper into the woods, and sang again. Mosquitoes spun about him, unresisted: he seemed to get ease from their sharp irritation. Something else to think about.

I could have made up to her. I would make up to her for everything that ever hurt her, so that when she remembered things that once hurt her she’d say: Was this I? If I could just have told her! Only I couldn’t seem to think of what to say. Me, that talks all the time, being stuck for words.⁠ ⁠… Aimlessly he followed the stream. Soon it ran among violet shadows, among willows and he heard a louder water. Parting the willows he came upon an old millrace and a small lake calmly repeating the calm sky and the opposite dark trees. He saw fish gleaming dully upon the earth, and the buttocks of a man.

“Lost something?” he asked, watching ripples spread from the man’s submerged arm. The other heaved himself to his hands and knees, looking up over his shoulder.

“Dropped my terbaccer,” he replied, in an unemphatic drawl. “Don’t happen to have none on you, do you?”

“Got a cigarette, if that’ll do you any good.” Gilligan offered his pack and the other, squatting back on his heels, took one.

“Much obliged. Feller likes a little smoke once in a while, don’t he?”

“Fellow likes a lot of little things in this world, once in a while.”

The other guffawed, not comprehending, but suspecting a reference to sex. “Well, I ain’t got any o’ that, but I got the next thing to it.” He rose, lean as a hound, and from beneath a willow clump he extracted a gallon jug. With awkward formality he tendered it. “Allers take a mite with me when I go fishing,” he explained. “Seems to make the fish bite more ’n the muskeeters less.”

Gilligan took the jug awkwardly. What in hell did you do with it? “Here, lemme show you,” his host said, relieving him of it. Crooking his first finger through the handle the man raised the jug with a round backhanded sweep to his horizontal upper arm, craning his neck until his mouth met the mouth of the vessel. Gilligan could see his pumping adam’s apple against the pale sky. He lowered the jug and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. “That’s how she’s done,” he said, handing the thing to Gilligan.

Gilligan tried it with inferior success, feeling the stuff chill upon his chin, sopping the front of his waistcoat. But in his throat it was like fire: it seemed to explode pleasantly as soon as it touched his stomach. He lowered the vessel, coughing.

“Good God, what is it?”

The other laughed hoarsely, slapping his thighs. “Never drunk no corn before, hain’t you? But how does she feel inside? Better’n out, don’t she?”

Gilligan admitted that she did. He could feel all his nerves like electric filaments in a bulb: he was conscious of nothing else. Then it became a warmth and an exhilaration. He raised the jug again and did better.

I’ll