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

You have been out late enough. Had a fight and everything.”

George Farr, panting, rearranged his clothes. Jones bulked vaguely beside him. “Good night,” said Jones, at last.

“Good night.”

They faced each other and after a time Jones repeated:

“Good night, I said.”

“I heard you.”

“What’s the matter? Not going in now?”

“Hell, no.”

“Well, I am.” He turned away. “See you again.” George Farr followed him, doggedly. Jones, slow and fat, shapeless, in the darkness, remarked: “Do you live down this way now? You’ve moved recently, haven’t you?”

“I live wherever you do tonight,” George told him, stubbornly.

“Thanks, awfully. But I have only one bed and I don’t like to sleep double. So I can’t ask you in. Some other time.”

They walked slowly beneath dark trees, in dogged intimacy. The clock on the courthouse struck one and the stroke died away into silence. After a while Jones stopped again. “Look here, what are you following me for?”

“She didn’t ask you to come there tonight.”

“How do you know. If she asked you, she would ask someone else.”

“Listen,” said George Farr, “if you don’t let her alone, I’ll kill you. I swear I will.”

“Salut,” murmured Jones. “Ave Caesar.⁠ ⁠… Why don’t you tell her father that? Perhaps he’ll let you set up a tent on the lawn to protect her. Now, you go on and let me alone, do you hear?” George held his ground stubbornly. “You want me to beat hell out of you again?” Jones suggested.

“Try it,” George whispered with dry passion. Jones said:

“Well, we’ve both wasted this night, anyway. It’s too late, now⁠—”

“I’ll kill you! She never told you to come at all. You just followed me. I saw you behind that tree. You let her alone, do you hear?”

“In God’s name, man! Don’t you see that all I want now is sleep? Let’s go home, for heaven’s sake.”

“You swear you are going home?”

“Yes, yes. I swear. Good night.”

George Farr watched the other’s shapeless fading figure, soon it became but a thicker shadow among shadows. Then he turned homeward himself in cooled anger and bitter disappointment and desire. That blundering idiot had interfered this time, perhaps he would interfere every time. Or perhaps she would change her mind, perhaps, since he had failed her tonight.⁠ ⁠… Even Fate envied him this happiness, this unbearable happiness, he thought bitterly. Beneath trees arching the quiet sky, spring loosing her girdle languorous⁠ ⁠… her body, like a narrow pool, sweetly.⁠ ⁠… I thought I had lost you, I found you again, and now he.⁠ ⁠… He paused, sharply struck by a thought, an intuition. He turned and sped swiftly back.

He stood near a tree at the corner of the lawn and after a short time he saw something moving shapeless and slow across the faint grass, along a hedge. He strode out boldly and the other saw him and paused, then that one, too, stood erect and came boldly to meet him. Jones joined him, murmuring, “Oh, hell,” and they stood in static dejection, side by side.

“Well?” challenged George Farr, at last.

Jones sat down heavily on the sidewalk. “Let’s smoke a while,” he suggested, in that impersonal tone which people sitting up with corpses use.

George Farr sat beside him and Jones held a match to his cigarette, then lit his own pipe. He sighed, clouding his head with an unseen pungency of tobacco. George Farr sighed also, resting his back against a tree. The stars swam on like the masthead lights of squadrons and squadrons on a dark river, going on and on. Darkness and silence and a world turning through darkness toward another day.⁠ ⁠… The bark of the tree was rough, the ground was hard. He wished vaguely that he were fat like Jones, temporarily.⁠ ⁠…

… Then, waking, it was about to be dawn. He no longer felt the earth and the tree save when he moved. It seemed to him that his thighs must be flattened like a tabletop and that his back had assumed depressions into which the projections of the tree trunk fitted like the locked rims of wheels.

There was a rumor of light eastward, somewhere beyond her house and the room where she lay in the soft familiar intimacy of sleep, like a faintly blown trumpet; soon perspective returned to a mysterious world, and instead of being a huge portentous shadow among lesser shadows, Jones was only a fat young man in baggy tweed, white and pathetic and snoring on his back.

George Farr, waking, saw him so, saw earth stains on him and a faint incandescence of dew. George Farr bore earth stains himself and his tie was a hangman’s knot beneath his ear. The wheel of the world, slowing through the hours of darkness, passed the dead center point and gained momentum. After a while Jones opened his eyes, groaning. He rose stiffly, stretching and spitting, yawning.

“Good time to go in, I think,” he said. George Farr, tasting his own sour mouth, moved and felt little pains, like tiny red ants, running over him. He, too, rose and they stood side by side. They yawned again.

Jones turned fatly, limping a little.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night.”

The east grew yellow, then red, and day had really come into the world, breaking the slumber of sparrows.

IV

But Cecily Saunders was not asleep. Lying on her back in her bed, in her dark room she, too, heard the hushed sounds of night, smelled the sweet scents of spring and dark and growing things: the earth, watching the wheel of the world, the terrible calm, inevitability of life, turning through the hours of darkness, passing its dead center point and turning faster, drawing the waters of dawn up from the hushed cistern of the east, breaking the slumber of sparrows.

V

“May I see him,” she pleaded hysterically, “may I? Oh, may I, please?”

Mrs. Powers, seeing her face, said: “Why, child! What is it? What is it, darling?”

“Alone, alone. Please. May I? May I?”

“Of course. What⁠—”

“Thank you, thank you.” She sped down the hall and