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

himself out at the gate. He saw no pursuit so his pace slackened to a walk. Beneath quiet elms his breath became easier. Branches motionlessly leafed were still against stars, and mopping his face and neck with his handkerchief he walked along a deserted street. At a corner he stopped to dip his handkerchief in a trough for watering horses, bathing his face and hands. The water reduced the pain of the blows he had received and as he paced fatly on from shadow to moonlight and then to shadow again, dogged by his own skulking and shapeless shadow, the calm still night washed his recent tribulation completely from his mind.

From shadowed porches beyond oaks and maples, elms and magnolias, from beyond screening vines starred with motionless pallid blossoms came snatches of hushed talk and sweet broken laughter.⁠ ⁠… Male and female created He them, young. Jones was young, too. “Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close! / The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, / Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!⁠ ⁠…” Wish I had a girl tonight, he sighed.

The moon was serene: “Ah, Moon of my Delight, that knows’t no wane, / The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again: / How oft hereafter rising shall she look / Through this same Garden after me⁠—in vain!” But how spring itself is imminent with autumn, with death: “As autumn and the moon of death draw nigh / The sad long days of summer herein lie / And she too warm in sorrow ’neath the trees / Turns to night and weeps, and longs to die.” And in the magic of spring and youth and moonlight Jones raised his clear sentimental tenor.

“Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.”

His slow shadow blotted out the pen strokes of iron pickets but when he had passed, the pen strokes were still there upon the dark soft grass. Clumps of petunia and cannas broke the smooth stretch of lawn and above the bronze foliage of magnolias the serene columns of a white house rose more beautiful in simplicity than death.

Jones leaned his elbows on a gate, staring at his lumpy shadow at his feet, smelling cape jasmine, hearing a mockingbird somewhere, somewhere.⁠ ⁠… Jones sighed. It was a sigh of pure ennui.

VII

On the rector’s desk was a letter addressed to Mr. Julian Lowe, ⸻ St., San Francisco, Cal., telling him of her marriage and of her husband’s death. It had been returned by the post office department stamped, “Removed. Present address unknown.”

VIII

Gilligan, sitting in the hyacinth bed, watched Jones’ flight. “He ain’t so bad for a fat one,” he admitted, rising. “Emmy’ll sure have to sleep single tonight.” The mockingbird in the magnolia, as though it had waited for hostilities to cease, sang again.

“What in hell have you got to sing about?” Gilligan shook his fist at the tree. The bird ignored him and he brushed dark earth from his clothes. Anyway, he soliloquized, I feel better. Wish I could have held the bastard, though. He passed from the garden with a last look at the ruined hyacinth bed. The rector, looming, met him at the corner of the house, beneath the hushed slumbrous passion of the silver tree.

“That you, Joe? I thought I heard noises in the garden.”

“You did. I was trying to beat hell out of that fat one, but I couldn’t hold the so⁠—I couldn’t hold him. He lit out.”

“Fighting? My dear boy!”

“It wasn’t no fight; he was too busy getting away. It takes two folks to fight, padre.”

“Fighting doesn’t settle anything, Joe. I’m sorry you resorted to it. Was anyone hurt?”

“No, worse luck,” Gilligan replied ruefully, thinking of his soiled clothes and his abortive vengeance.

“I am glad of that. But boys will fight, eh, Joe? Donald fought in his day.”

“You damn right he did, reverend. I bet he was a son-of-a-gun in his day.”

The rector’s heavy lined face took a flared match, between his cupped hands he sucked at his pipe. He walked slowly in the moonlight across the lawn, toward the gate. Gilligan followed. “I feel restless tonight,” he explained. “Shall we walk a while?”

They paced slowly beneath arched and moon-bitten trees, scuffing their feet in shadows of leaves. Under the moon lights in houses were yellow futilities.

“Well, Joe, things are back to normal again. People come and go, but Emmy and I seem to be like the biblical rocks. What are your plans?”

Gilligan lit a cigarette with ostentatiousness, hiding his embarrassment. “Well, padre, to tell the truth, I ain’t got any. If it’s all the same to you I think I’ll stay on with you a while longer.”

“And welcome, dear boy,” the rector answered heartily. Then he stopped and faced the other, keenly. “God bless you, Joe. Was it on my account you decided to stay?”

Gilligan averted his face guiltily. “Well, padre⁠—”

“Not at all. I won’t have it. You have already done all you can. This is no place for a young man, Joe.”

The rector’s bald forehead and his blobby nose were intersecting planes in the moonlight. His eyes were cavernous. Gilligan knew suddenly all the old sorrows of the race, black or yellow or white, and he found himself telling the rector all about her.

“Tut, tut,” the divine said, “this is bad, Joe.” He lowered himself hugely to the edge of the sidewalk and Gilligan sat beside him. “Circumstance moves in marvellous ways, Joe.”

“I thought you’d a said God, reverend.”

“God is circumstance, Joe. God is in this life. We know nothing about the next. That will take care of itself in good time. ‘The Kingdom of God is in man’s own heart,’ the Book says.”

“Ain’t that a kind of funny doctrine for a parson to get off?”

“Remember, I am an old man, Joe. Too old for bickering or bitterness. We make our own heaven or hell in this world. Who knows; perhaps when we die we may not be required to go anywhere nor do anything