Soldiers Pay Part 18

"Sit down. Mr. Dough was a soldier, too, you know."

Mr. Rivers said heavily: "Mr. Dough will excuse you. How about a dance? Time to go home soon."

She civilly ignored him and James Dough shifted his leg. "Really, Miss Saunders, please dance, I wouldn't spoil your evening for anything."

"Do you hear that, Mr. Madden? The man is driving me away. Would you do that?" she tilted her eyes at him effectively. Then she turned to Dough with restrained graceful impulsiveness. "I still call him Mr. Madden, though we have know each other all our lives. But then he was in the war, and I wasn't. He is so-so experienced, you see. And I am only a girl. If I had been a boy like Lee I'd have gone and been a lieutenant in shiny boots or a general or something by now. Wouldn't I?" Her turning body was graceful. impulsive: a fragile spontaneity. "I cannot call you mister anymore. Do you mind?"

"Let's dance." Mr. Rivers, tapping his foot to the music, watched this with sophisticated boredom. He yawned openly. "Let's dance."

"Rufas, ma'am," said Madden.

"Rufas. And you musn't say ma'am to me any longer. You won't, will you?"

"No ma-I mean, no."

"Oh, you nearly forgot then-"

"Let's dance," repeated Mr. Rivers.

"-but you won't forget anymore. You won't, will you?"

"No, no,"

"Don't let him forget, Mr. Dough. I am depending on you."

"Good, good. But you go and dance with Mr. Smith here."

She rose. "He is sending me away," she stated with mock humility. Then she shrugged narrowly, nervously. "I know we aren't as attractive as French women, but you must make the best of us. Poor Lee, here, doesn't know any French women so we can please him. But you soldiers don't like us anymore, I'm afraid."

"Not at all: we give you up to Mr. Lee only on condition that you come back to us."

"Now that's better. But you are saying that just to be polite," she accused.

"No, no, if you don't dance with Mr. Lee, here, you will be impolite. He has asked you several times."

She shrugged again nervously. "So I guess I must dance, Lee. Unless you have changed your mind, too, and don't want me?"

He took her hand. "h.e.l.l, come on."

Restraining him, she turned to the other two, who had risen also. "You will wait for me?"

They a.s.sured her, and she released them. Dough's creaking, artificial knee was drowned by the music and she gave herself to Mr. Rivers's embrace. They took the syncopation he felt her shallow breast and her knees briefly, and said: "What you doing to him?" slipping his arm farther around her, feeling the swell of her hip under his hand.

"Doing to him?"

"Ah, let's dance."

Locked together they poised and slid and poised, feeling the beat of the music, toying with it, eluding it, seeking it again, drifting like a broken dream.

IX.

George Farr, from the outer darkness, glowered at her, watching her slim body cut by a masculine arm, watching her head beside another head, seeing her limbs beneath her silver dress antic.i.p.ating her partner's limbs, seeing the luminous plane of her arm across his black shoulders and her fan drooping from her arched wrist like a willow at evening. He heard the rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones, he saw vague shapes in the darkness and he smelled the earth and things growing in it. A couple pa.s.sed them and a girl said, "h.e.l.lo, George. Coming in?" "No," he told her, wallowing in all the pa.s.sionate despair of spring and youth and jealousy, getting of them an exquisite bliss.

His friend beside him, a soda clerk, spat his cigarette. "Let's have another drink."

The bottle was a combination of alcohol and sweet syrup purloined from the drug store. It was temporarily hot to the throat, but this pa.s.sed away leaving in its place a sweet, inner fire, a courage.

"To h.e.l.l with them," he said.

"You ain't going in, are you?" his friend asked. They had another drink. The music beat on among youthful leaves, into the darkness, beneath the gold and mute cacophony of stars. The light from the veranda mounting was lost, the house loomed huge against the sky: a rock against which waves of trees broke, and breaking were forever arrested; and stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows, spurning them with hooves sharp and scintillant as ice. The sky, so remote, so sad, spurned by the unicorns of gold, that, neighing soundlessly from dusk to dawn, bad seen them, had seen her-her taut body p.r.o.ne and naked as a narrow pool sweetly dividing: two silver streams from a single source. . . .

"I'm not going in," he answered, moving away. They crossed the lawn and in the shadow of a crepe-myrtle one with a sound of breath became two. They walked quickly on, averting their eyes.

"h.e.l.l, no," he repeated, "I'm not going in."

X.

This was the day of the Boy, male and female.

"Look at them, Joe," Mrs. Powers said, "sitting there like lost souls waiting to get into h.e.l.l."

The car had stopped broadside on, where they could get a good view.

"They don't look like they're sitting to me," Gilligan answered with enthusiasm. "Look at them two: look where he's got his hand. This is what they call polite dancing, is it? I never learned it: I would have got throwed out of any place I ever danced doing that. But I had a unfortunate youth: I never danced with nice people."

Through two heavy identical magnolias the lighted porch was like a stage. The dancers moved, locked two and two, taking the changing light, eluding it.

" . . . shake it and break it, don't let it fall . . . ."

Along the bal.u.s.trade they sat like birds, effacingly belligerent. Wallflowers.

"No, no, I mean those ex-soldiers there. Look at them. Sitting there, talking their army French, kidding themselves. Why did they come, Joe?"

"Same reason we come. Like a show, ain't it? But how do you know they're soldiers? . . . Look at them two there," he crowed suddenly, with childish intentness. The couple slid and poised, losing the syncopation deliberately, seeking and finding it, losing it again. . . . Her limbs eluded his, antic.i.p.ated his: the breath of a touch and escape, which he, too, was quick to a.s.sist. Touch and retreat: no satiety. "Wow, if that tune ever stops!"

"Don't be silly, Joe. I know them. I have seen their sort at the canteen too often, acting just that way: poor kind dull boys going to war, and because they were going girls were nice to them. But now there is no war for them to go to. And look how the girls treat them."

"What were you saying?" asked Gilligan with detachment. He tore his eyes from the couple. "Wow, if the Loot could see this it'd sure wake him up, wouldn't it?"

Mahon sat quietly beside Mrs. Powers. Gilligan turning in his seat beside the negro driver looked at his quiet shape. The syncopation pulsed about them, a reiteration of wind and strings warm and troubling as water. She leaned toward him.

"Like it, Donald?"

He stirred, raising his hand to his gla.s.ses.

"Come on, Loot," said Gilligan quickly; "don't knock 'em off. We might lose 'em here." Mahon lowered his hand obediently. "Music's pretty good, ain't it?"

"Pretty good, Joe," he agreed.

Gilligan looked at the dancers again. "Pretty good ain't the half of it. Look at 'em."

" . . . oh, oh, I wonder where my easy rider's gone. . . ."

He turned suddenly to Mrs. Powers. "You know who that is there?"

Mrs. Powers saw Dr. Gary, without his gla.s.s of water, she saw a feather fan like a willow at evening and the luminous plane of a bare arm upon conventional black. She saw two heads as one head, cheek to cheek, expressionless and fixed as a ritual above a slow synchronization of limbs. "That Saunders lady," Gilligan explained.

She watched the girl's graceful motion, a restrained delicate abandon, and Gilligan continued: "I think I'll go closer, with them birds sitting there. I got to see this."

They greeted him with the effusiveness of people who are brought together by invitation yet are not quite certain of themselves and of the spirit of the invitation; in this case the eternal country boys of one national mental state, lost in the comparative metropolitan atmosphere of one diametrically opposed to it. To feel provincial: finding that a certain conventional state of behaviour has become inexplicably obsolete overnight.

Most of them Gilligan knew by name and he sat also upon the bal.u.s.trade. He was offered and accepted a cigarette and he perched among them while they talked loudly, drowning the intimation of dancers they could not emulate, of girls who once waited upon their favours and who now ignored them-the hangover of warfare in a society tired of warfare. Puzzled and lost, poor devils. Once Society drank war, brought them into manhood with a cultivated taste for war; but now Society seemed to have found something else for a beverage, while I they were not yet accustomed to two and seventy-five per cent.

"Look at those kids that grew up while we were away," one advised him with pa.s.sion. "The girls don't like it. But what can they do? We can't do them dances. It ain't just going through the motions. You could'learn that, I guess. It's-it's--" he sought vainly for words. He gave it up and continued: "Funny, too. I learned things from French women. . . . Say, the girls don't like it, do they? They haven't changed that much, you know."

"Naw, they don't like it," Gilligan answered. "Look at them two."

"Sure, they don't like it. These are nice girls: they will be the mothers of the next generation. Of course they don't like it."

"Somebody sure does, though," Gilligan replied. Dr. Gary pa.s.sed, dancing smoothly, efficiently, quite decorous, yet enjoying himself, His partner was young and briefly skirted: you could see that she danced with him because it was the thing to dance with Dr. Gary-no one knew exactly why. She was conscious of physical freedom, of her young, uncorseted body, flat as a boy's and, like a boy's, pleasuring in freedom and motion, as though freedom and motion were water, pleasuring her flesh to the intermittent teasing of silk. Her glance followed over Dr. Gary's shoulder (it was masculine because it was drably conventional in black) an arrested seeking for a lost rhythm, lost deliberately. Dr. Gary's partner, skilfully following him, watched the other couple, ignoring the girl. (If there's justice in heaven, I'll get him next time.) "Dancing with you," said Dr. Gary, "is like a poem by a minor poet named Swinburne." Dr. Gary preferred Milton: he had the pa.s.sages all designated, like a play.

"Swinburne?" She smiled vaguely, watching the other couple, not losing the rhythm, not cracking her paint. Her face was smooth, as skilfully done and as artificial as an orchid. "Did he write poems, too?" (Is he thinking of Ella Wilc.o.x or Irene Castle? He is a grand dancer; takes a good dancer to get along with Cecily.) "I think Kipling is awfully cute, don't you?" (What a funny dress Cecily has on.) Gilligan, watching the dancers, said: "What?"

The other repeated defensively: "He was in a French base. Sure he was. Two or three years. Good fellow." He added: "Even if he can dance like they do."

Light, motion, sound: no solidity. A turgid compulsion, pa.s.sionate and evanescent. And outside spring, like a young girl left of happiness and incapable of sorrow."

" . . . throw it on the wall. Oh, oh, oh, oh . . ." ". . . won't never forget his expression when he said, *Jack, mine's got syph. Had her . . . '" "shake it and break it, shake it. . . ." "First night in Paris then the other one. . . . ." "don't let it fall. . . ." " . . . with a gun . . . twenty dollars in gold pinned to my . . ." "I wonder where my easy, easy rider's . . ."

"Sure," Gilligan agreed. He wondered where Madden, whom he liked, was, and not expecting an answer he was informed. (There she is again. Her feather fan like a willow at evening, her arm crossing conventional black a slim warm plane. Jove would have said, How virginal her legs are, but Gilligan, not being Jove, said, For Christ's sake, wishing Donald Mahon were her partner or failing this, being glad he couldn't see her.) The music stopped. The dancers stood waiting its renewal. The hostess talking interminably appeared and as before a plague people scattered before her pa.s.sage. Gilligan caught, submerged beneath waves of talk, suffered her, watching couples pa.s.s from the veranda on to the vague lawn. How soft their bodies look, their little backs and hips, he thought, saying, yes ma'am or no ma'am. At last he walked away and left her talking, and in a swing he saw Madden and a stranger.

"This is Mr. Dough," Madden said, greeting him. "How's Mahon?"

Gilligan shook hands. "He's outside there, now, with Mrs. Powers."

"He is? Mahon was with the British," he explained to his companion. "Aviation."

He betrayed a faint interest. "R.A.F.?"

"I guess so," Gilligan replied. "We brought him over to hear the music a while."

"Brought him?"

"Got his in the head. Don't remember much," Madden informed the other. "Did you say Mrs. Powers is with him?" he asked Gilligan.

"Yeh, she came. Why not come out and speak to her?"

Madden looked at his companion. Dough shifted his cork leg. "I think not," he said. "I'll wait for you."

Madden rose. "Come on," Gilligan said, "she'll be glad to see you. She ain't a bad sort, as Madden can tell you."

"No, I'll wait here, thanks. But come back, will you?"

Madden read his unexpressed thought. "She's dancing now. I'll be back before then."

They left him lighting a cigarette. The negro cornetist had restrained his men and removed them temporarily and the porch was deserted save for the group sitting on the bal.u.s.trade. These, the hostess, with a renascence of optimism, had run to earth and captured.

Gilligan and Madden crossed gra.s.s, leaving lights behind. "Mrs. Powers, you remember Mr. Madden," Gilligan informed her formally. He was not big, yet there was something big and calm about him, a sense of competent inertia after activity. Madden saw her colourless face against the canopied darkness of the car, her black eyes and her mouth like a scar. Beside her Mahon sat motionless and remote, waiting for music which you could not tell whether or not he heard.

"Good evening, ma'am," Madden said, enveloping her firm, slow hand, remembering a figure sharp against the sky screaming. You got us killed and firing point-blank into another man's face red and bitter in a relief of transient flame against a sorrowful dawn.

XI.

Jones, challenging the compet.i.tion, danced with her twice, once for six feet and then for nine feet. She could not dance with the muscular facility of some of the other girls. Perhaps this was the reason she was in such demand. Dancing with the more skilled ones was too much like dancing with agile boys. Anyway, men all seemed to want to dance with her, to touch her.

Jones, foiled for the second time, became yellowly speculative: tactical; then, watching his chance, he cut in upon glued hair and a dinner coat. The man raised his empty ironed face fretfully, but Jones skilfully cut her out of the prancing herd and into the angle made by the corner of the bal.u.s.trade. Here only his back could be a.s.sailed.

He knew his advantage was but temporary, so he spoke quickly.

"Friend of yours here tonight."

Her feather fan drew softly across his neck. He sought her knee with his and she eluded him with efficiency, trying vainly to manoeuvre from the corner. One desiring to cut in importuned him from behind and she said with exasperation: "Do you dance, Mr. Jones? They have a good floor here. Suppose we try it?"

"Your friend Donald dances. Ask him for one," he told her, feeling her shallow breast and her nervous efforts to evade him. One importuned him from behind and she raised her pretty unpretty face. Her hair was soft and fine, carelessly caught about her head and her painted mouth was purple in this light.

"Here? Dancing?"

"With his two Niobes. I saw the female one and I imagine the male one is here also."

"Niobes?"

"That Mrs. Powers, or whatever her name is."

She held her head back so as to see his face. "You are lying."

"No, I'm not. They are here."

She stared at him. He could feel her fan drooping from her arched wrist on his cheek softly and one importuned him from behind. "Sitting out now, in a car," he added.

"With Mrs. Powers?"

"Watch your step, sister, or she'll have him."

She slipped from him suddenly. "If you aren't going to dance--"

One importuning him from behind repeated tirelessly. "May I cut in," and she evaded Jones's arm.

"Oh, Lee. Mr. Jones doesn't dance."