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

a boy like Lee I’d have gone and been a lieutenant in shiny boots or a general or something by now. Wouldn’t I?” Her turning body was graceful, impulsive: a fragile spontaneity. “I cannot call you mister any more. Do you mind?”

“Let’s dance.” Mr. Rivers, tapping his foot to the music, watched this with sophisticated boredom. He yawned openly. “Let’s dance.”

“Rufus, ma’am,” said Madden.

“Rufus. And you mustn’t say ma’am to me any longer. You won’t, will you?”

“No ma⁠—I mean, no.”

“Oh, you nearly forgot then⁠—”

“Let’s dance,” repeated Mr. Rivers.

“⁠—but you won’t forget any more. You won’t, will you?”

“No, no.”

“Don’t let him forget, Mr. Dough. I am depending on you.”

“Good, good. But you go and dance with Mr. Smith here.”

She rose. “He is sending me away,” she stated with mock humility. Then she shrugged narrowly, nervously. “I know we aren’t as attractive as French women, but you must make the best of us. Poor Lee, here, doesn’t know any French women so we can please him. But you soldiers don’t like us any more, I’m afraid.”

“Not at all: we give you up to Mr. Lee only on condition that you come back to us.”

“Now that’s better. But you are saying that just to be polite,” she accused.

“No, no, if you don’t dance with Mr. Lee, here, you will be impolite. He has asked you several times.”

She shrugged again nervously. “So I guess I must dance, Lee. Unless you have changed your mind, too, and don’t want me?”

He took her hand. “Hell, come on.”

Restraining him, she turned to the other two, who had risen also. “You will wait for me?”

They assured her, and she released them. Dough’s creaking, artificial knee was drowned by the music and she gave herself to Mr. Rivers’ embrace. They took the syncopation, he felt her shallow breast and her knees briefly, and said: “What you doing to him?” slipping his arm further around her, feeling the swell of her hip under his hand.

“Doing to him?”

“Ah, let’s dance.”

Locked together they poised and slid and poised, feeling the beat of the music, toying with it, eluding it, seeking it again, drifting like a broken dream.

IX

George Farr, from the outer darkness, glowered at her, watching her slim body cut by a masculine arm, watching her head beside another head, seeing her limbs beneath her silver dress anticipating her partner’s limbs, seeing the luminous plane of her arm across his black shoulders and her fan drooping from her arched wrist like a willow at evening. He heard the rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones, he saw vague shapes in the darkness and he smelled the earth and things growing in it. A couple passed them and a girl said, “Hello, George. Coming in?” “No,” he told her, wallowing in all the passionate despair of spring and youth and jealousy, getting of them an exquisite bliss.

His friend beside him, a soda-clerk, spat his cigarette. “Let’s have another drink.”

The bottle was a combination of alcohol and sweet syrup purloined from the drugstore. It was temporarily hot to the throat, but this passed away leaving in its place a sweet, inner fire, a courage.

“To hell with them,” he said.

“You ain’t going in, are you?” his friend asked. They had another drink. The music beat on among youthful leaves, into the darkness, beneath the gold and mute cacophony of stars. The light from the veranda mounting was lost, the house loomed huge against the sky: a rock against which waves of trees broke, and breaking were forever arrested; and stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows, spurning them with hooves sharp and scintillant as ice. The sky, so remote, so sad, spurned by the unicorns of gold, that, neighing soundlessly from dusk to dawn, had seen them, had seen her⁠—her taut body prone and naked as a narrow pool sweetly dividing: two silver streams from a single source.⁠ ⁠…

“I’m not going in,” he answered, moving away. They crossed the lawn and in the shadow of a crepe-myrtle one with a sound of breath became two. They walked quickly on, averting their eyes.

“Hell, no,” he repeated, “I’m not going in.”

X

This was the day of the Boy, male and female.

“Look at them, Joe,” Mrs. Powers said, “sitting there like lost souls waiting to get into hell.”

The car had stopped broadside on, where they could get a good view.

“They don’t look like they’re sitting to me,” Gilligan answered with enthusiasm. “Look at them two: look where he’s got his hand. This is what they call polite dancing, is it? I never learned it: I would have got throwed out of any place I ever danced doing that. But I had a unfortunate youth: I never danced with nice people.”

Through two heavy identical magnolias the lighted porch was like a stage. The dancers moved, locked two and two, taking the changing light, eluding it.

“… shake it and break it, don’t let it fall.⁠ ⁠…”

Along the balustrade they sat like birds, effacingly belligerent. Wallflowers.

“No, no, I mean those ex-soldiers there. Look at them. Sitting there, talking their army French, kidding themselves. Why did they come, Joe?”

“Same reason we come. Like a show, ain’t it? But how do you know they’re soldiers?⁠ ⁠… Look at them two there,” he crowed suddenly, with childish intentness. The couple slid and poised, losing the syncopation deliberately, seeking and finding it, losing it again.⁠ ⁠… Her limbs eluded his, anticipated his: the breath of a touch and an escape, which he, too, was quick to assist. Touch and retreat: no satiety. “Wow, if that tune ever stops!”

“Don’t be silly, Joe. I know them. I have seen their sort at the canteen too often, acting just that way: poor kind dull boys going to war, and because they were going girls were nice to them. But now there is no war for them to go to. And look how the girls treat them.”

“What was you saying?” asked Gilligan with detachment. He tore his eyes from the couple. “Wow, if the Loot could see this it’d sure wake him up, wouldn’t it?”

Mahon