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

and lie to, let alone with what you mean in each case. I don’t think you can yourself.”

“So you cannot imagine letting people make love to you and saying things to them without meaning anything by it?”

“I cannot. I always mean something by what I say or do.”

“For instance?” her voice was faintly interested, ironical.

Again he considered moving, so that her face would be in light and his in shadow. But then he would no longer be beside her. He said roughly: “I meant by that kiss that some day I intend to have your body.”

“Oh,” she said sweetly, “it’s all arranged, then? How nice. I can now understand your success with us. Just a question of will power, isn’t it? Look the beast in the eye and he⁠—I mean she⁠—is yours. That must save a lot of your valuable time and trouble, I imagine?”

Jones’ stare was calm, bold and contemplative, obscene as a goat’s. “You don’t believe I can?” he asked.

She shrugged delicately, nervously, and her lax hand between them grew again like a flower: it was as if her whole body became her hand. The symbol of a delicate, bodyless lust. Her hand seemed to melt into his yet remain without volition, her hand unawaked in his and her body also yet sleeping, crushed softly about with her fragile clothing. Her long legs, not for locomotion, but for the studied completion of a rhythm carried to its nth: compulsion of progress, movement; her body created for all men to dream after. A poplar, vain and pliant, trying attitude after attitude, gesture after gesture⁠—“a girl trying gown after gown, perplexed but in pleasure.” Her unseen face nimbused with light and her body, which was no body, crumpling a dress that had been dreamed. Not for maternity, not even for love: a thing for the eye and the mind. Epicene, he thought, feeling her slim bones, the bitter nervousness latent in her flesh.

“If I really held you close you’d pass right through me like a ghost, I am afraid,” he said and his clasp was loosely about her.

“Quite a job,” she said coarsely. “Why are you so fat?”

“Hush,” he told her, “you’ll spoil it.”

His embrace but touched her and she, with amazing tact, suffered him. Her skin was neither warm nor cool, her body in the divan’s embrace was nothing, her limbs only an indication of crushed texture. He refused to hear her breath as he refused to feel a bodily substance in his arms. Not an ivory carving: this would have body, rigidity; not an animal that eats and digests⁠—this is the heart’s desire purged of flesh. “Be quiet,” he told himself as much as her, “don’t spoil it.”

The trumpets in his blood, the symphony of living, died away. The golden sand of hours bowled by day ran through the narrow neck of time into the corresponding globe of night, to be inverted and so flow back again. Jones felt the slow, black sand of time marking life away. “Hush,” he said, “don’t spoil it.”

The sentries in her blood lay down, but they lay down near the ramparts with their arms in their hands, waiting the alarm, the inevitable stand-to, and they sat clasped in the vaguely gleamed twilight of the room, Jones a fat Mirandola in a chaste Platonic nympholepsy, a religio-sentimental orgy in gray tweed, shaping an insincere, fleeting articulation of damp clay to an old imperishable desire, building himself a papier-mâché Virgin: and Cecily Saunders wondering what, how much, he had heard, frightened and determined. What manner of man was this? she thought alertly, wanting George to be there and put an end to this situation, how she did not know; wondering if the fact of his absence were significant.

Outside the window leaves stirred and cried soundlessly. Noon was past. And under the bowled pale sky, trees and grass, hills and valleys, somewhere the sea, regretted him, with relief.

No, no, he thought, with awakened despair, don’t spoil it. But she had moved and her hair brushed his face. Hair. Everyone, anyone, has hair. (To hold it, to hold it.) But it was hair and here was a body in his arms, fragile and delicate it might be, but still a body, a woman: something to answer the call of his flesh, to retreat pausing, touching him tentatively, teasing and retreating, yet still answering the call of his flesh. Impalpable and dominating. He removed his arm.

“You little fool, don’t you know you had me?”

Her position had not changed. The divan embraced her in its impersonal clasp. Light like the thumbed rim of a coin about her indistinct face, her long legs crushed to her dress. Her hand, relaxed, lay slim and lax between them. But he ignored it.

“Tell me what you heard,” she said.

He rose. “Goodbye,” he said. “Thanks for lunch, or dinner, or whatever you call it.”

“Dinner,” she told him. “We are common people.” She rose also and studiedly leaned her hip against the arm of a chair. His yellow eyes washed over her warm and clear as urine, and he said, “God damn you.” She sat down again leaning back into the corner of the divan and as he sat beside her, seemingly without moving, she came to him.

“Tell me what you heard.”

He embraced her, silent and morose. She moved slightly and he knew that she was offering her mouth.

“How do you prefer a proposal?” he asked.

“How?”

“Yes. What form do you like it in? You have had two or three in the last few days, haven’t you?”

“Are you proposing?”

“That was my humble intention. Sorry I’m dull. That was why I asked for information.”

“So when you can’t get your women any other way, you marry them, then?”

“Dammit, do you think all a man wants of you is your body?” She was silent and he continued: “I am not going to tell on you, you know.” Her tense body, her silence, was a question. “What I heard, I mean.”

“Do you think I care? You have told me