Soldiers Pay Part 20

"But aren't you going to marry me?"

"Darling, aren't we already married, now? Do you doubt me, or is it only a marriage licence will keep you true to me?"

"You know it isn't." He couldn't tell her that it was jealousy, that he didn't trust her. "It's only that--"

"Only what?"

"Only that if you won't marry me, you don't love me."

She moved from him. Her eyes became dark blue. "Can you say that?" She looked away, and her movement was half s.h.i.+ver, half shrug. "I might have known it, though. Well, I've been a fool, I guess. You were just-just pa.s.sing the time with me, then?"

"Cecily-" trying to take her in his arms again. She evaded him and rose.

"I don't blame you. I suppose that's what any man would have done in your place. That's all men ever want of me, anyway. So it might as well have been you, as anyone. . . . Only I'm sorry you didn't tell me before-sooner, George. I thought you were different." She gave him her narrow back. How little, how-how helpless she is! And I have hurt her, he thought, in sharp pain, rising and putting his arm about her, careless of who might see.

"Don't, don't!" she whispered, quickly turning Her eyes were quite green again. "Someone will see! Sit down!"

"Not till you take that back."

"Sit down, sit down! Please, George! Please, please!"

"Take that back, then."

Her eyes were dark again, and he read terror in her face, and he released her, sitting down again.

"Promise me not ever, ever, ever to do that again."

He promised dully and she sat beside him. She slid her hand into his and he looked up.

"Why do you treat me like this?"

"Like what?" he asked.

"Saying I don't love you. What other proof do you want? What other proof can I give? What do you consider proof? Tell me: I'll try to do it." She looked at him in delicate humility.

"I'm sorry: forgive me," he said abjectly.

"I've already forgiven you. It's forgetting it. I can't promise. I don't doubt you, George. Or I couldn't have. . . ." Her voice died away and she clutched his hand convulsively, releasing it. She rose. "I must go."

He caught her hand. It was unresponsive. "May I see you this afternoon?"

"Oh, no. I can't come back this afternoon. I have some sewing to do."

"Oh, come on, put it off. Don't treat me again like you did. I nearly went crazy. I swear I did."

"Sweetheart, I can't, I simply can't. Don't you know I want to see you as badly as you want to see me; that I would come if I could?"

"Let me come down there, then."

"I believe you are crazy," she told him, with contemplation. "Don't you know I'm not supposed to see you at all?"

"Then I'm coming tonight."

"Hus.h.!.+" she whispered, quickly, descending the steps. "But I am," he repeated stubbornly. She looked hurriedly about the store, and her heart turned to water. Here, sitting at a table in the alcove made by the ascending stairs, was that fat man, with a half-empty gla.s.s before him.

She knew dreadful terror, and as she stared at his round, bent head, all her blood drained from her icy heart. She put her hand on the railings, lest she fall. Then this gave way to anger. The man was a nemesis: every time she had seen him since that first day at luncheon with Uncle Joe, he had flouted her, had injured her with diabolic ingenuity. And now, if he had heard-- George had risen, following her, but at her frantic gesture, her terror-stricken face, he retreated again. Then she changed her expression as readily as you would a hat. She descended the steps.

"Good morning, Mr. Jones."

Jones looked up with his customary phlegmatic calm, then he rose, lazily courteous. She watched him narrowly with the terror-sharpened cunning of an animal, but his face and manner told nothing.

"Good morning, Miss Saunders."

"You have the morning coca-cola habit, too, I see. Why didn't you come up and join me?"

"I am still cursing myself for missing that pleasure. You see, I didn't know you were alone." His yellow bodyless stare was as impersonal as the stars of yellowish liquid in the windows and her heart sank.

"I didn't see nor hear you come in, or I would have called to you."

He was non-committal. "Thank you. The misfortune is mine, however."

She said suddenly: "I wonder if you will do me a favour? I have a thousand million things to do this morning. Will you go with me and help me remember them-do you mind?" Her eyes held a desperate coquetry.

Jones's eyes were fathomless, slowly yellow. "I'll be delighted. "

"Finish your drink, then."

George Farr's good-looking face, wrung and jealous, peered down at them. She made no sign, yet there was such pitiful terror in her whole att.i.tude that even George's dull and jealous intelligence took her meaning. His face sank again from view. Jones said: "Let the drink go. I don't know why I keep on trying the things. Make myself think I have a highball, perhaps."

She laughed in three notes. "You can't expect to satisfy tastes like that in this town. In Atlanta now--"

"Yes, you can do lots of things in Atlanta you can't do here."

She laughed again, flatteringly, and they moved up the antiseptic tunnel of the drug store, toward the entrance. She would laugh in such a way as to lend the most innocent remark a double entendre: you immediately accepted the fact that you had said something clever, without recalling what it was at all. Jones's yellow idol's stare remarked her body's articulation, her pretty, nervous face, while George Farr, in a sick, dull rage, watched them in silhouette, flatly. Then they rea.s.sumed depth and she, fragile as a Tanagra, and he slouching and shapeless and tweeded, disappeared.

II.

"Say," said young Robert Saunders, "are you a soldier, too?"

Jones, lunching to a slow completion, heavily courteous, deferentially conversational, had already won Mrs. Saunders. Of Mr. Saunders he was not so sure, nor did he care. Finding that the guest knew practically nothing about money or crops or politics, Mr. Saunders soon let him be to gossip trivially with Mrs. Saunders. Cecily was perfect: pleasantly tactful, letting him talk. Young Robert though was bent on a seduction of his own.

"Say," he repeated, for the third time, watching Jones's every move with admiration-"was you a soldier, too?"

"Were, Robert," corrected his mother.

"Yessum. Was you a soldier in the war?"

"Robert. Let Mr. Jones alone, now."

"Sure, old fellow," Jones answered. "I fought some."

"Oh, did you?" asked Mrs. Saunders. "How interesting," she commented without interest. Then: "I suppose you never happened to run across Donald Mahon in France, did you?"

"No. I had very little time in which to meet people, you see," replied Jones with gravity, who had never seen the Statue of Liberty-even from behind.

"What did you do?" asked young Robert indefatigable.

"I suppose so." Mrs. Saunders sighed with repletion and rang a bell. "The war was so big. Shall we go?"

Jones drew her chair and young Robert repeated tirelessly: "What did you do in the war? Did you kill folks?"

The older people pa.s.sed on to the veranda. Cecily with a gesture of her head, indicated a door and Jones entered, followed by young Robert, still importunate. The scent of Mr. Saunders's cigar wafted down the hall and into the room where they sat and young Robert, refraining his litany, caught Jones's yellow, fathomless eye like a snake's, and young Robert's spine knew an abrupt, faint chill. Watching Jones cautiously he moved nearer his sister.

"Run along, Bobby. Don't you see that real soldiers never like to talk about themselves?"

He was nothing loath. He suddenly desired to be in the warm sun. This room had got cold. Still watching Jones he sidled past him to the door. "Well," he remarked, "I guess I'll be going."

"What did you do to him?" she asked, when he had gone.

"I? Nothing. Why?"

"You scared him, some way. Didn't you see how he watched you?"

"No, I didn't notice it." He filled his pipe, slowly.

"I suppose not. But then you frighten lots of people, don't you?"

"Not as many as you'd think. Lots of them I'd like to frighten can take care of themselves too well."

"Yes? But why frighten them?"

"Sometimes that's the only way to get what you want from people:"

"Oh. . . . They have a name for that, haven't they? Blackmail, isn't it?"

"I don't know. Is it?"

She shrugged with a.s.sumed indifference. "Why do you ask me about it?"

His yellow stare became unbearable and she looked away. How quiet it is outside, under the spell of noon. Trees shaded the house, the room was dark and cool. Furniture was slow unemphatic gleams of lesser dark and young Robert Saunders, at the age of sixty-five, was framed and indistinct above the mantel: her grandfather.

She wished for George. He should be here to help her. But what could she do? she reconsidered with that vast tolerance of their men which women must gain by giving their bodies (else how do they continue to live with them?) that the conquering male is after all no better than a clumsy, tactless child. She examined Jones with desperate speculation. If he were not so fat! Like a worm.

She repeated: "Why do you ask me?"

"I don't know. You have never been frightened by anyone, have you?"

She watched him, not replying.

"Perhaps that's because you have never done anything to be afraid of?"

She sat on the divan, her hands palm up on either side, watching him. He rose suddenly and she as suddenly shed her careless laxness, becoming defensive, watchful. But he only scratched a match on the iron grate screen. He sucked it into his pipe bowl while she watched the fleshy concavity of his cheeks and the golden pulsations of the flame in his eyes. He pushed the match through the screen and resumed his seat. But she did not relax.

"When are you to be married?" he asked suddenly.

"Married?"

"Yes. Isn't it all arranged?"

She felt slow, slow blood in her throat and wrists, in her palms: her blood seemed to mark away an interval that would never pa.s.s. Jones, watching the light in her fine hair, lazy and yellow as an idol, Jones released her at last. "He expects it, you know."

Her blood liquefied again and became cold. She could feel the skin all over her body. She said: "What makes you think he does? He is too sick to expect anything, now."

"He?"

"You said Donald expects it."

"My dear girl, I said. . . ." He could see a nimbus of light in her hair and the shape of her, but her face he could not see. He rose. She did not move as he sat beside her. The divan sank luxuriously beneath his weight, sensuously enfolding him. She did not move, her hand lay palm up between them, but he ignored it. "Why don't you ask me how much I heard?"

"Heard? When?" Her whole att.i.tude expressed ingenuous interest.

He knew that in her examination of his face there was calm speculation and probably contempt. He considered moving beyond her so that she must face the light and leave his own face in shadow. . . . The light in her hair, caressing the shape of her cheek. Her hand between them, naked and palm upward, grew to be a monstrous size: it was the symbol of her body. His hand a masculine body for hers to curl inside. Browning, is it? seeing noon become afternoon, becoming gold and slightly wearied among leaves like the limp hands of women. Her hand was a frail, impersonal barrier, restraining him.

"You attach a lot of importance to a kiss, don't you?" she asked at length. He shaped her unresponsive hand to his and she continued: "That's funny, in you."

"Why, in me?"

"You've had lots of girls crazy about you, haven't you?"

"What makes you think that?"

"I don't know. The way you-everything about you." She could never decide exactly about him. The feminine predominated so in him, and the rest of him was feline: a woman with a man's body and eat's nature.

"I expect you're right. You are an authority regarding your own species yourseIf." He released her hand saying, "Excuse me," and lit his pipe again. Her hand remained lax impersonal between them: it might have been a handkerchief. He pushed the dead match through the screen and said: "What makes you think I attach so much importance to a kiss?"

Light in her hair was the thumbed rim of a silver coin, the divan embraced her quietly and light quietly followed the long slope of her limbs. A wind came among leaves without the window, stroking them together. Noon was past.

"I mean, you think that whenever a woman kisses a man or tells him something that she means something by it."

"She does mean something by it. Of course it never is what the poor devil thinks she means, but she means something."

"Then you certainly don't blame the woman if the man chooses to think she meant something she didn't at all mean, do you?"

"Why not? It would be the devil of a chaotic world if you never could count on whether or not people mean what they say. You knew d.a.m.n well what I meant when you let me kiss you that day."

"But I don't know that you meant anything, anymore than I did. You are the one who--"

"Like h.e.l.l you didn't," Jones interrupted roughly. "You knew what I meant by it."