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

their “issued” impedimenta. The porter handed the officer his cap and stick, then he vanished with the luggage belonging to them. She glanced again down the length of the car.

“Where are my⁠—”

“Yessum,” the porter called from the door, across the coated shoulders of passengers, “I got your things, ma’am.”

He had gotten them and his dark gentle hand lowered the officer carefully to the platform.

“Help the lootenant there,” said the conductor officiously, but he had already got the officer to the floor.

“You’ll look after him, ma’am?”

“Yes. I’ll look after him.”

They moved down the shed and Cadet Lowe looked back. But the negro was efficient and skillful, busy with other passengers. He seemed to have forgotten them. And Cadet Lowe looked from the porter occupied with bags and the garnering of quarters and half dollars, to the officer in his coat and stick, remarking the set of his cap slanting backward bonelessly from his scarred brow, and he marvelled briefly upon his own kind.

But this was soon lost in the mellow death of evening in a street between stone buildings, among lights, and Gilligan in his awkward khaki and the girl in her rough coat, holding each an arm of Donald Mahon, silhouetted against it in the doorway.

III

Mrs. Powers lay in her bed aware of her long body beneath strange sheets, hearing the hushed night sounds of a hotel⁠—muffled footfalls along mute carpeted corridors, discreet opening and shutting of doors, somewhere a murmurous pulse of machinery⁠—all with that strange propensity which sounds, anywhere else soothing, have, when heard in a hotel, for keeping you awake. Her mind and body warming to the old familiarity of sleep became empty, then as she settled her body to the bed, shaping it for slumber, it filled with a remembered troubling sadness.

She thought of her husband youngly dead in France in a recurrence of fretful exasperation with having been tricked by a wanton Fate: a joke amusing to no one. Just when she had calmly decided that they had taken advantage of a universal hysteria for the purpose of getting of each other a brief ecstasy, just when she had decided calmly that they were better quit of each other with nothing to mar the memory of their three days together and had written him so, wishing him luck, she must be notified casually and impersonally that he had been killed in action. So casually, so impersonally; as if Richard Powers, with whom she had spent three days, were one man and Richard Powers commanding a platoon in the ⸻ Division were another.

And she being young must again know all the terror of parting, of that passionate desire to cling to something concrete in a dark world, in spite of war departments. He had not even got her letter! This in some way seemed the infidelity: having him die still believing in her, bored though they both probably were.

She turned feeling sheets like water, warmed by her bodily heat, upon her legs.

Oh, damn, damn. What a rotten trick you played on me. She recalled those nights during which they had tried to eradicate tomorrows from the world. Two rotten tricks, she thought. Anyway, I know what I’ll do with the insurance, she added, wondering what Dick thought about it⁠—if he did know or care.

Her shoulder rounded upward, into her vision, the indication of her covered turning body swelled and died away toward the foot of the bed: she lay staring down the tunnel of her room, watching the impalpable angles of furniture, feeling through plastered smug walls a rumor of spring outside. The airshaft was filled with a prophecy of April come again into the world. Like a heedless idiot into a world that had forgotten Spring. The white connecting door took the vague indication of a transom and held it in a mute and luminous plane, and obeying an impulse she rose and slipped on a dressing gown.

The door opened quietly under her hand. The room, like hers, was a suggestion of furniture, identically vague. She could hear Mahon’s breathing and she found a light switch with her fingers. Under his scarred brow he slept, the light full and sudden on his closed eyes did not disturb him. And she knew in an instinctive flash what was wrong with him, why his motions were hesitating, ineffectual.

He’s going blind, she said, bending over him. He slept and after a while there were sounds without the door. She straightened up swiftly and the noises ceased. Then the door opened to a blundering key and Gilligan entered supporting Cadet Lowe, glassy-eyed and quite drunk.

Gilligan standing his lax companion upright, said:

“Good afternoon, ma’am.”

Lowe muttered wetly and Gilligan continued:

“Look at this lonely mariner I got here. Sail on, O proud and lonely,” he told his attached and aimless burden. Cadet Lowe muttered again, not intelligible. His eyes were like two oysters.

“Huh?” asked Gilligan. “Come on, be a man: speak to the nice lady.”

Cadet Lowe repeated himself liquidly and she whispered: “Shhh: be quiet.”

“Oh,” said Gilligan with surprise, “Loot’s asleep, huh? What’s he want to sleep for, this time of day?”

Lowe with quenchless optimism essayed speech again and Gilligan comprehending, said:

“That’s what you want, is it? Why couldn’t you come out like a man and say it? Wants to go to bed, for some reason,” he explained to Mrs. Powers.

“That’s where he belongs,” she said; and Gilligan with alcoholic care led his companion to the other bed and with the exaggerated caution of the inebriate laid him upon it. Lowe drawing his knees up sighed and turned his back to them, but Gilligan dragging at his legs removed his puttees and shoes, taking each shoe in both hands and placing it on a table. She leaned against the foot of Mahon’s bed, fitting her long thigh to the hard rail, until he had finished.

At last Lowe freed of his shoes turned sighing to the wall and she said:

“How drunk are you, Joe?”

“Not very, ma’am. What’s wrong? Loot need something?”

Mahon