Soldiers Pay Part 26

"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 grat.i.tude 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 anymore.

"Carry on, Joe."

Chapter 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 pa.s.sing away into the oblivion whence pa.s.s sooner or later all of man's inventions. Keeps from getting the world all cluttered up. You say right off that this is G.o.d'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 Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

Besides, it was all legal now. Miss Cecily Saunders was safely married-though n.o.body 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of apple and pear and peach, threw it away; tried narcissi and jonquil and flag: threw it away-so early flowers bloomed and pa.s.sed 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 choir-boys slow and surpliced.

Leaves grew larger and greener until all rumour 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, Mabon 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 with quiet wit.

III.

Mrs. Mahon and Gilligan had resumed their old status of companions.h.i.+p and quiet pleasure in each other's company. Now that he no longer hoped to marry her she could be freer with him.

"Perhaps this is what we needed, Joe. Anyway, I never knew anyone I liked half this much."

They walked slowly in the garden along the avenue of roses which pa.s.sed beneath the two oaks, beyond which, against a wall, poplars in a restless formal row were like columns of a temple.

"You're easy pleased then," Gilligan answered with sour a.s.sumed moroseness. He didn't have to tell her how much he liked her.

"Poor Joe," she said. "Cigarette, please."

"Poor you," he retorted, giving her one. "I'm all right. I ain't married."

"You can't escape forever, though. You are too nice:-safe for the family: will stand hitched."

"Is that a bargain?" he asked.

"Sufficient unto the day, Joe. . . ."

After a while he stayed her with his hand. "Listen." They halted and she stared at him intently.

"What?"

"There's that d.a.m.n mockingbird again. Hear him? What's he got to sing about, you reckon?"

"He's got plenty to sing about. April's got to be May, and still spring isn't half over. Listen. . ."

IV.

Emmy had become an obsession with Januarius Jones, such an obsession that it had got completely out of the realm of s.e.x into that of mathematics, like a paranoia. He manufactured chances to see her, only to be repulsed; he lay in wait for her like a highwayman, he begged, he threatened, he tried physical strength, and he was repulsed. It had got to where, had she acceded suddenly, he would have been completely reft of one of his motivating impulses, of his elemental impulse to live: he might have died. Yet he knew that if he didn't get her soon he would become crazy, an imbecile.

After a time it a.s.sumed the magic of numbers. He had failed twice: this time success must be his or the whole cosmic scheme would crumble, hurling him, screaming, into blackness, where no blackness was, death, where death was not. Januarius Jones, by nature and inclination a Turk, was also becoming an oriental. He felt that his number must come: the fact that it would not was making an idiot of him.

He dreamed of her at night, he mistook other women for her. other voices for hers; he hung skulking about the rectory at all hours, too wrought up to come in where ne might have to converse sanely with sane people. Sometimes the rector, tramping huge and oblivious in his dream, flushed him in out-of-the-way corners of concealment, flushed him without surprise.

"Ah, Mr. Jones," he would say, starting like a goaded elephant, "good morning."

"Good morning, sir," Jones would reply, his eyes glued on the house.

"You are out for a walk?"

"Yes, sir. Yes, sir." And Jones would walk hurriedly away in an opposite direction as the rector, entering his dream again, resumed his own.

Ernmy told Mrs. Mahon of this with scornful contempt.

"Why don't you tell Joe, or let me tell him?" Mrs. Mahon asked.

Emmy sniffed with capable independence. "About that worm? I can take care of him, all right. I do my own fighting. "

"And I bet you are good at it, too."

And Emmy said: "I guess I am."

V.

April had become May.

Fair days, and wet days in which rain ran with silver lances over the lawn, in which rain dripped leaf to leaf while birds still sang in the hushed damp greenness under the trees, and made love and married and built houses and still sang; in which rain grew soft as the grief of a young girl grieving for the sake of grief.

Mahon hardly ever rose now. They had got him a movable bed and upon this he lay, sometimes in the house, sometimes on the veranda where the wistaria inverted its cool lilac flame, while Gilligan read to him. They had done with Rome and they now swam through the tedious charm of Rousseau's "Confessions" to Gilligan's hushed childish delight.

Kind neighbours came to inquire; the specialist from Atlanta came once by request and once on his own initiative, making a friendly call and addressing Gilligan meticulously as "Doctor," spent the afternoon chatting with them, and went away. Mrs. Mahon and he liked each other immensely. Dr. Gary called once or twice and insulted them all and went away nattily smoking his slender rolled cigarettes. Mrs. Mahon and he did not like each other at all. The rector grew greyer and quieter, neither happy nor unhappy, neither protesting nor resigned.

"Wait until next month. He will be stronger then. This is a trying month for invalids. Don't you think so?" he asked his daughter-in-law.

"Yes," she would tell him, looking out at the green world, the sweet, sweet spring, "yes, yes."

VI.

It was a postcard. You buy them for a penny, stamp and all. The post office furnishes writing material free.

Got your letter. Will write later. Remember me to Gilligan and Lieut. Mahon.

Julian L.

VII.

Mahon was asleep on the veranda and the other three sat beneath the tree on the lawn, watching the sun go down. At last the reddened edge of the disc was sliced like a cheese by the wistaria-covered lattice wall and the neutral buds were a pale agitation against the dead afternoon. Soon the evening star would be there above the poplar tip, perplexing it, immaculate and ineffable, and the poplar was vain as a girl darkly in an arrested pa.s.sionate ecstasy. Half of the moon was a coin broken palely near the zenith and at the end of the lawn the first fireflies were like lazily blown sparks from cool fires. A negro woman pa.s.sing crooned a religious song, mellow and pa.s.sionless and sad.

They sat talking quietly. The gra.s.s was becoming grey with dew and she felt dew on her thin shoes. Suddenly Emmy came around the corner of the house running and darted up the steps and through the entrance, swift in the dusk.

"What in the world--" began Mrs. Mahon, then they saw Jones, like a fat satyr, leaping after her, hopelessly distanced. When he saw them he slowed immediately and lounged up to them slovenly as ever. His yellow eyes were calmly opaque but she could see the heave of his breathing. Convulsed with laughter she at last found her voice.

"Good evening, Mr. Jones."

"Say," said Gilligan with interest, "what was you--"

"Hush, Joe," Mrs. Mahon told him. Jones's eyes, clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat's, roved between them.

"Good evening, Mr. Jones." The rector became abruptly aware of his presence. "Walking again, eh?"

"Running," Gilligan corrected, and the rector repeated, "Eh?" looking from Jones to Gilligan.

Mrs. Mahon indicated a chair. "Sit down, Mr. Jones. You must be rather fatigued, I imagine."

Jones stared toward the house, tore his eyes away and sat down. The canvas sagged under him and he rose and spun his chair so as to face the dreaming facade of the rectory. He sat again.

"Say," Gilligan asked him, "what was you doing, anyway?"

Jones eyed him briefly, heavily. "Running," he snapped, turning his eyes again to the dark house.

"Running?" the divine repeated.

"I know: I seen that much from here. What was you running for, I asked."

"Reducing, perhaps," Mrs. Mahon remarked, with quiet malice.

Jones turned his yellow stare upon her. Twilight was gathering -swiftly. He was a fat and shapeless ma.s.s palely tweeded. "Reducing, yes. But not to marriage."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that if I were you," she told him. "A courts.h.i.+p like that will soon reduce you to anything, almost."

"Yeh," Gilligan amended, "if that's the only way you got to get a wife you'd better pick out another one besides Emmy. You'll be a shadow time you catch her. That is," he added, "if you aim to do your courting on foot."

"What's this?" the rector asked.

"Perhaps Mr. Jones was merely preparing to write a poem. Living it first, you know," Mrs. Mahon offered. Jones looked at her sharply. "Atalanta," she suggested in the dusk.

"Atlanta?" repeated Gilligan, "what--"

"Try an apple next time, Mr. Jones," she advised.

"Or a handful of salt, Mr. Jones," added Gilligan in a thin falsetto. Then in his natural voice. "But what's Atlanta got to--"

"Or a cherry, Mr. Gilligan," said Jones viciously. "But then, I am not G.o.d, you know."

"Shut your mouth, fellow," Gilligan told him roughly.

"What's this?" the rector repeated. Jones turned to him heavily explanatory: "It means, sir, that Mr. Gilligan is under the impression that his wit is of as much importance to me as my actions are to him."

"Not me," denied Gilligan with warmth. "You and me don't have the same thoughts about anything, fellow."

"Why shouldn't they be?" the rector asked. "It is but natural to believe that one's actions and thoughts are as important to others as they are to oneself, is it not?"

Gilligan gave this his entire attention. It was getting above his head, beyond his depth. But Jones was something tangible, and he had already chosen Jones for his own.

"Naturally," agreed Jones with patronage. "There is a kins.h.i.+p between the human instruments of all action and thought and emotion. Napoleon thought that his actions were important, Swift thought his emotions were important, Savonarola thought his beliefs were important. And they were. But we are discussing Mr. Gilligan."

"Say--" began Gilligan .

"Very apt, Mr. Jones," murmured Mrs. Mahon above the suggested triangle of her cuffs and collar. "A soldier, a priest and a dyspeptic."

"Say," Gilligan repeated, "who's swift, anyway? I kind of got bogged up back there."

"Mr. Jones is, according to his own statement. You are Napoleon, Joe."

"Him? Not quite swift enough to get himself a girl, though. The way he was gaining on Emmy-You ought to have a bicycle," he suggested.