Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner (digital e reader txt) 📕

Dear Margaret⁠—

I got your letter and I intended to answering it sooner but I have been busy running around. Yes she was not a bad kid she has shown me a good time no she is not so good looking but she takes a good photo she wants to go in the movies. And a director told her she photographs better than any girl he has seen. She has a car and she is a swell dancer but of coarse I just like to play around with her she is to young for me. To really care for. No I have not gone to work yet. This girl goes to the U and she is talking about me going there next year. So I may go there next year. Well there is no news I have done a little flying but mostly dancing and running around. I have got to go out on a party now or I would write more. Next time more next time give my reguards to everybody I know.

Your sincere friend

Julian Lowe

Mahon liked music; so Mrs. Worthington sent her car for them. Mrs. Worthington lived in a large, beautiful old house which her husband, conveniently dead, had bequeathed, with a colorless male cousin who had false teeth and no occupation that anyone knew of, to her. The male cousin’s articulation was bad (he had been struck in the mouth with an ax in a dice game in Cuba during the Spanish-American War): perhaps this was why he did nothing.

Mrs. Worthington ate too much and suffered from gout and a flouted will. So her church connection was rather trying to the minister and his flock. But she had money⁠—that panacea for all ills of the flesh and spirit. She believed in rights for women, as long as women would let her dictate what was right for them.

One usually ignored the male relation. But sometimes one pitied him.

But she sent her car for them and with Mrs. Powers and Mahon in the rear, and Gilligan beside the negro driver, they rolled smoothly beneath elms, seeing stars in a clear sky, smelling growing things, hearing a rhythmic thumping soon to become music.

This, the spring of 1919, was the day of the Boy, of him who had been too young for soldiering. For two years he had had a dry time of it. Of course, girls had used him during the scarcity of men, but always in such a detached impersonal manner. Like committing fornication with a beautiful woman who chews gum steadily all the while. O Uniform, O Vanity. They had used him but when a uniform showed up he got the air.

Up to that time uniforms could all walk: they were not only fashionable and romantic, but they were also quite keen on spending what money they had and they were also going too far away and too immediately to tell on you. Of course it was silly that some uniforms had to salute others, but it was nice, too. Especially, if the uniform you had caught happened to be a salutee. And heaven only knows how much damage among feminine hearts a set of pilot’s wings was capable of.

And the shows:

Beautiful, pure girls (American) in afternoon or evening gowns (doubtless under Brigade Orders) caught in deserted fire trenches by Prussian Hussars (on passes signed by Belasco) in parade uniform; courtesans in Paris frocks demoralizing Brigade staffs, having subalterns with arrow collar profiles and creased breech, whom the generals all think may be German spies, and handsome old generals, whom the subalterns all think may be German spies, glaring at each other across her languid body while corporal comedians entertain the beautiful-limbed and otherwise idle Red Cross nurses (American). The French women present are either marquises or whores or German spies, sometimes both, sometimes all three. The marquises may be told immediately because they all wear sabots, having given their shoes with the rest of their clothing to the French army, retaining only a pair of forty carat diamond earrings. Their sons are all aviators who have been out on a patrol since the previous Tuesday, causing the marquises to be a trifle distrait. The regular whores patronize them, while the German spies make love to the generals.

A courtesan (doubtless also under Brigade Orders) later saves the sector by sex appeal after gunpowder had failed, and the whole thing is wound up with a sort of garden party near a papier-mâché dugout in which the army sits in sixty-pound packs, all three smoking cigarettes, while the Prussian Guard gnashes its teeth at them from an adjacent cardboard trench.

A chaplain appears who, to indicate that the soldiers love him because he is one of them, achieves innuendoes about home and mother and fornication. A large new flag is flown and the enemy fires at it vainly with .22 rifles. The men on our side cheer, led by the padre.

“What,” said a beautiful, painted girl, not listening, to James Dough who had been for two years a corporal-pilot in a French chasse escadrille, “is the difference between an American Ace and a French or British aviator?”

“About six reels,” answered James Dough glumly (such a dull man! Where did Mrs. Wardle get him?) who had shot down thirteen enemy craft and had himself been crashed twice, giving him eleven points without allowing for evaporation.

“How nice. Is that so, really? You had movies in France, too, then?”

“Yes. Gave us something to do in our spare time.”

“Yes,” she agreed, offering him her oblivious profile. “You must have had an awfully good time while we poor women were slaving here rolling bandages and knitting things. I hope women can fight in the next war: I had much rather march and shoot guns than knit. Do you think they will let women fight in the next war?” she asked, watching a young man dancing, limber as a worm.

“I expect they’ll have to.” James Dough