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

the garden, beyond the spire where pigeons crooned the afternoon away, unemphatic as sleep, biting her lips. Married, and she had never felt so alone.

Gilligan settled Mahon in his chair with his impersonal half-reckless care. Mahon said:

“Well, Joe, I’m married at last.”

“Yes,” answered Gilligan. His careless spontaneity was gone. Even Mahon noticed it in his dim oblivious way. “I say, Joe.”

“What is it, Loot?”

Mahon was silent and his wife took her customary chair, leaning back and staring up into the tree. He said at last: “Carry on, Joe.”

“Not now, Loot. I don’t feel so many. Think I’ll take a walk,” he answered, feeling Mrs. Mahon’s eyes on him. He met her gaze harshly, combatively.

“Joe,” she said quietly, bitterly.

Gilligan saw her pallid face, her dark unhappy eyes, her mouth like a tired scar and he knew shame. His own bleak face softened.

“All right, Loot,” he said, quietly matching her tone, with a trace of his old ambiguous unseriousness. “What’ll it be? Bust up a few more minor empires, huh?”

Just a trace, but it was there. Mrs. Mahon looked at him again with gratitude and that old grave happiness which he knew so well, unsmiling but content, which had been missing for so long, so long; and it was as though she had laid her firm strong hand on him. He looked quickly away from her face, sad and happy, not bitter any more.

“Carry on, Joe.”

VIII I

San Francisco, Cal.,
April 27, 1919.

My dearest sweetheart⁠—

Just a line to let you know that I have gone into business into the banking business making money for you. To give ourselves the position in the world you deserve and a home of our own. The work is congenal talking to other people in the business that don’t know anything about aviation. All they think about is going out to dance with men. Everyday means one day less for us to be with you forever. All my love.

Yours forever

Julian.

II

Nine day or ninety day or nine hundred day sensations have a happy faculty for passing away into the oblivion whence pass sooner or later all of man’s inventions. Keeps from getting the world all cluttered up. You say right off that this is God’s work. But it must be a woman: no man could be so utilitarian. But then, women preserve only those things which can or might be used again. So this theory is also exploded.

After a while there were no more of the local curious to call; after a while those who had said I told you so when Miss Cecily Saunders let it be known that she would marry the parson’s son and who said I told you so when she did not marry the parson’s son forgot about it. There were other things to think and talk of: this was the lying-in period of the K.K.K. and the lying-out period of Mr. Wilson, a democratish gentleman living in Washington, DC.

Besides, it was all legal now. Miss Cecily Saunders was safely married⁠—though nobody knew where they were from the time they drove out of town in George Farr’s car until they were properly married by a priest in Atlanta the next day (but then I always told you about that girl). They all hoped for the worst. And that Mrs. What’s-her-name, that tall black-headed woman at Mahon’s, had at last married someone, putting an end to that equivocal situation.

And so April became May. There were fair days when the sun, becoming warmer and warmer, rising, drank off the dew, and flowers bloomed like girls ready for a ball, then drooped in the languorous fulsome heat like girls after the ball; when earth, like a fat woman, recklessly trying giddy hat after hat, trying a trimming of apple and pear and peach, threw it away; tried narcissi and jonquil and flag: threw it away⁠—so early flowers bloomed and passed and later flowers bloomed to fade and fall, giving place to yet later ones. Fruit blossoms were gone, pear was forgotten: what were once tall candlesticks, silvery with white bloom, were now tall jade candlesticks of leaves beneath the blue cathedral of sky across which, in hushed processional, went clouds like choirboys slow and surpliced.

Leaves grew larger and greener until all rumor of azure and silver and pink had gone from them; birds sang and made love and married and built houses in them and in the tree at the corner of the house that yet swirled its white-bellied leaves in never-escaping skyward ecstasies; bees broke clover upon the lawn interrupted at intervals by the lawn mower and its informal languid conductor.

Their mode of life had not changed. The rector was neither happy nor unhappy, neither resigned nor protesting. Occasionally he entered some dream within himself. He conducted services in the dim oaken tunnel of the church while his flock hissed softly among themselves or slept between the responses, while pigeons held their own crooning rituals of audible slumber in the spire that, arcing across motionless young clouds, seemed slow and imminent with ruin. He married two people and buried one: Gilligan found this ominous and said so aloud; Mrs. Mahon found this silly and said so aloud.

Mrs. Worthington sent her car for them at times and they drove into the country regretting the dogwood, the three of them (two of them did, that is, Mahon had forgotten what dogwood was); the three of them sat beneath the tree while one of them wallowed manfully among polysyllabics and another of them sat motionless, neither asleep nor awake. They could never tell whether or not he heard. Nor could they ever tell whether or not he knew whom he had married. Perhaps he didn’t care. Emmy, efficient and gentle, mothering him, was a trifle subdued. Gilligan still slept on his cot at the foot of Mahon’s bed, lest he be needed.

“You two are the ones who should have married him,” his wife remarked