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

He desisted saying “Is this all right, Cap’m?”

“Yes, all right, thanks,” the officer answered. Then: “Bring your glass and get a drink.”

Gilligan solved the bottle and filled the glasses. Ginger ale hissed sweetly and pungently. “Up and at ’em, men.”

The officer took his glass in his left hand and then Lowe noticed his right hand was drawn and withered.

“Cheer-O,” he said.

“Nose down,” murmured Lowe. The man looked at him with poised glass. He looked at the hat on Lowe’s knee and that groping puzzled thing behind his eyes became clear and sharp as with a mental process, and Lowe thought that his lips had asked a question.

“Yes, sir. Cadet,” he replied, feeling warmly grateful, feeling again a youthful clean pride in his corps.

But the effort had been too much and again the officer’s gaze was puzzled and distracted.

Gilligan raised his glass, squinting at it. “Here’s to peace,” he said. “The first hundred years is the hardest.”

Here was the porter again, with his own glass. “ ’Nother nose in the trough,” Gilligan complained, helping him.

The negro patted and rearranged the pillow beneath the officer’s head. “Excuse me, Cap’m, but can’t I get you something for your head?”

“No, no, thanks. It’s all right.”

“But you’re sick, sir. Don’t you drink too much.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Sure,” Gilligan amended, “we’ll watch him.”

“Lemme pull the shade down. Keep the light out of your eyes?”

“No, I don’t mind the light. You run along. I’ll call if I want anything.”

With the instinct of his race the negro knew that his kindness was becoming untactful, yet he ventured again.

“I bet you haven’t wired your folks to meet you. Whyn’t you lemme wire ’em for you? I can look after you far as I go, but who’s going to look after you, then?”

“No, I’m all right, I tell you. You look after me as far as you go. I’ll get along.”

“All right. But I am going to tell your paw how you are acting some day. You ought to know better than that, Cap’m.” He said to Gilligan and Lowe: “You gentlemen call me if he gets sick.”

“Yes, go on now, damn you. I’ll call if I don’t feel well.”

Gilligan looked from his retreating back to the officer in admiration. “Loot, how do you do it?”

But the man only turned on them his puzzled gaze. He finished his drink and while Gilligan renewed them Cadet Lowe, like a trailing hound, repeated:

“Say, sir, what kind of ships did you use?”

The man looked at Lowe kindly, not replying, and Gilligan said:

“Hush. Let him alone. Don’t you see he don’t remember himself? Do you reckon you would, with that scar? Let the war be. Hey, Lootenant?”

“I don’t know. Another drink is better.”

“Sure it is. Buck up, General. He don’t mean no harm. He’s just got to let her ride as she lays for a while. We all got horrible memories of the war. I lose eighty-nine dollars in a crap game once, besides losing, as that wop writer says, that an’ which thou knowest at Chatter Teary. So how about a little whisky, men?”

“Cheer-O,” said the officer again.

“What do you mean, Château Thierry?” said Lowe, boyish in disappointment, feeling that he had been deliberately ignored by one to whom Fate had been kinder than to himself.

“You talking about Chatter Teary?”

“I’m talking about a place you were not at, anyway.”

“I was there in spirit, sweetheart. That’s what counts.”

“You couldn’t have been there any other way. There ain’t any such place.”

“Hell there ain’t! Ask the Loot here if I ain’t right. How about it, Loot?”

But he was asleep. They looked at his face, young, yet old as the world, beneath the dreadful scar. Even Gilligan’s levity left him. “My God, it makes you sick at the stomach, don’t it? I wonder if he knows how he looks? What do you reckon his folks will say when they see him? or his girl⁠—if he has got one. And I’ll bet he has.”

New York flew away: it became noon within, by clock, but the gray imminent horizon had not changed. Gilligan said: “If he has got a girl, know what she’ll say?”

Cadet Lowe, knowing all the despair of abortive endeavor, asked, “What?”

New York passed on and Mahon beneath his martial harness slept. (Would I sleep? thought Lowe; had I wings, boots, would I sleep?) His wings indicated by a graceful sweep pointed sharply down above a ribbon. Purple, white, purple, over his pocket, over his heart (supposedly). Lowe descried between the pinions of a superimposed crown and three letters, then his gaze mounted to the sleeping scarred face. “What?” he repeated.

“She’ll give him the air, buddy.”

“Ah, come on. Of course she won’t.”

“Yes, she will. You don’t know women. Once the new has wore off it’ll be some bird that stayed at home and made money, or some lad that wore shiny leggings and never got nowheres so he could get hurt, like you and me.”

The porter came to hover over the sleeping man.

“He ain’t got sick, has he?” he whispered.

They told him no; and the negro eased the position of the sleeping man’s head. “You gentlemen look after him and be sure to call me if he wants anything. He’s a sick man.”

Gilligan and Lowe, looking at the officer, agreed and the porter lowered the shade. “You want some more ginger ale?”

“Yes,” said Gilligan, assuming the porter’s hushed tone, and the negro withdrew. The two of them sat in silent comradeship, the comradeship of those whose lives had become pointless through the sheer equivocation of events, of the sorry jade, Circumstance. The porter brought ginger ale and they sat drinking while New York became Ohio.

Gilligan, that talkative unserious one, entered some dream within himself and Cadet Lowe, young and dreadfully disappointed, knew all the old sorrows of the Jasons of the world who see their vessels sink ere the harbor is left behind.⁠ ⁠… Beneath his scar the officer slept in all the travesty of his wings and leather and brass, and