Soldiers Pay (7 page)

“Uncompelled?”

“Socially, of course. Doe believes that Doe and Smith should and must do this or that because Smith believes that Smith and Doe should and must do this or that.”

“Ah, yes.” The divine again lifted his kind, unblinking eyes straight into the sun. Dew was off the grass and jonquils and narcissi were beginning to look drowsy, like girls after a ball. “It is drawing toward noon. Let us go in: I can offer you refreshment and lunch, if you are not engaged.”

Jones rose. “No, no. Thank you a thousand times. But I sha'nt trouble you.”

The rector was hearty. “No trouble, no trouble at all. I am alone at present.”

Jones demurred. He had a passion for food, and an instinct. He had only to pass a house for his instinct to inform him whether or not the food would be good. Jones did not, gastronomically speaking, react favourably to the rector.

The divine, however, overrode him with hearty affability: the rector would not take no. He attached Jones to himself and they trod their shadows across the lawn, herding them beneath the subdued grace of a fanlight of dim-coloured glass lovely with lack of washing. After the immaculate naked morning, the interior of the hall vortexed with red fire. Jones, temporarily blind, stumbled over an object and the handle of a pail clasped his ankle passionately. The rector, bawling Emmy! dragged him, pail and all, erect: he thanked his lucky stars that he had not been attached to the floor as he rose a sodden Venus, disengaging the pail. His dangling feet touched the floor and he felt his trouser leg with despair, fretfully. He's like a derrick, he thought with exasperation.

The rector bawled Emmy again. There was an alarmed response from the depths of the house and one in gingham brushed them. The divine's great voice boomed like surf in the narrow confines, and opening a door upon a flood of light, he ushered the trickling Jones into his study.

“I shall not apologize,” the rector began, “for the meagreness of the accommodation which I offer you. I am alone at present, you see. But, then, we philosophers want bread for the belly and not for the palate, eh? Come in, come in.”

Jones despaired. A drenched trouser leg, and bread for the belly alone. And God only knew what this great lump of a divine meant by bread for the belly and no bread for the palate. Husks, probably. Regarding food, Jones was sybaritically rather than aesthetically inclined. Or even philosophically. He stood disconsolate, swinging his dripping leg.

“My dear boy, you are soaking!” exclaimed his host. “Come, off with your trousers.”

Jones protested weakly. “Emmy!” roared the rector again.

“All right, Uncle Joe. Soon's I get this water up.”

“Never mind the water right now. Run to my room and fetch me a pair of trousers.”

“But the rug will be ruined!”

“Not irreparably, I hope. We'll take the risk. Fetch me the trousers. Now, dear boy, off with them. Emmy will dry them in the kitchen and then you will be right as rain,”

Jones surrendered in full despair. He had truly fallen among moral thieves. The rector assailed him with ruthless kindness and the gingham-clad one reappeared at the door with a twin of the rector's casual black nether coverings over her arm.

“Emmy, this is Mr.——I do not recall having heard your name?—he will be with us at lunch. And, Emmy, see if Cecily wishes to come also.”

This virgin shrieked at the spectacle of Jones, ludicrous in his shirt and fat pink legs and the trousers jerked solemn and lethargic into the room. “Jones,” supplied Januaris Jones, faintly. Emmy, however, was gone.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Jones.” The rector fell upon him anew, doing clumsy and intricate things with the waist and bottoms of the trousers, and Jones, decently if voluminously clad, stood like a sheep in a gale while the divine pawed him heavily.

“Now,” cried his host, “make yourself comfortable (even Jones found irony in this) while I find something that will quench thirst.”

The guest regained his composure in a tidy, shabby room.

Upon a rag rug a desk bore a single white hyacinth in a handleless teacup, above a mantel cluttered with pipes and twists of paper hung a single photograph. There were books everywhere—on shelves, on window ledges, on the floor: Jones saw the Old Testament in Greek in several volumes, a depressing huge book on international law, Jane Austen and” Les Contes Drolatiques” in dog-eared amity: a mutual supporting caress. The rector re-entered with milk in a pitcher of blue glass and two mugs. From a drawer he extracted a bottle of Scotch whisky.

“A sop to the powers,” he said, leering at Jones with innocent depravity. “Old dog and new tricks, my boy. But your pardon: perhaps you do not like this combination?”

Jones's morale rose balloon-like. “I will try any drink once,” he said, like Jurgen.

“Try it, anyway. If you do not like it you are at perfect liberty to employ your own formula.”

The beverage was more palatable than he would have thought. He sipped with relish. “Didn't you mention a son, sir?”

“That was Donald. He was shot down in Flanders last spring.” The rector rose and took the photograph down from above the mantel. He handed it to his guest. The boy was about eighteen and coatless: beneath unruly hair, Jones saw a thin face with a delicate pointed chin and wild, soft eyes. Jones's eyes were clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat's.

“There is death in his face,” said Jones.

His host took the photograph and gazed at it. “There is always death in the faces of the young spirit, the eternally young. Death for themselves or for others. And dishonour. But death, surely. And why not? why should death desire only those things which life no longer had use for? Who gathers the withered rose?” The rector dreamed darkly in space for a while. After a time he added: “A companion sent back a few of his things.” He propped the photograph upright on the desk and from a drawer he took a tin box. His great hand fumbled at the catch.

“Let me, sir,” offered Jones, knowing that it was useless to volunteer, that the rector probably did this every day. But the lid yielded as he spoke and the divine spread on the desk the sorry contents: a woman's chemise, a cheap paper-covered “Shropshire Lad,” a mummied hyacinth bulb. The rector picked up, the bulb and it crumbled to dust in his hand.

“Tut, tut! How careless of me!” he ejaculated, sweeping the dust carefully into an envelope. “I have often deplored the size of my hands. They should have been given to someone who could use them for something other than thumbing books or grubbing in flower beds. Donald's hands, on the contrary, were quite small, like his mother's: he was quite deft with his hands. What a surgeon he would have made.”

He placed the things upon the desk, before the propped photograph like a ritual, and propping his face in his earthy hands he took his ruined dream of his son into himself as one inhales tobacco smoke.

“Truly, there is life and death and dishonour in his face. Had you noticed Emmy? Years ago, about the time this picture was made. . . . But that is an old story. Even Emmy has probably forgotten it. . . . You will notice that he has neither coat nor cravat. How often has he appeared after his mother had seen him decently arrayed, on the street, in church, at formal gatherings, carrying hat, coat and collar in his hands. How often have I heard him say ‘Because it is too hot.' Education in the bookish sense he had not: the schooling he got was because he wanted to go, the reading he did was because he wanted to read. Least of all did I teach him fortitude. What is fortitude? Emotional atrophy, gangrene. . . .” He raised his face and looked at Jones. “What do you think? was I right? Or should I have made my son conform to a type?”

“Conform that face to a type? (So Emmy has already been dishonoured, once, anyway.) How could you? (I owe that dishonoured one a grudge, too.) Could you put a faun into formal clothes?”

The rector sighed. “Ah, Mr. Jones, who can say?” He slowly replaced the things in the tin box and sat clasping the box between his hands. “As I grow older, Mr. Jones, I become more firmly convinced that we learn scarcely anything as we go through this world, and that we learn nothing whatever which can ever help us or be of any particular benefit to us, even. However! . . .” He sighed again, heavily.

II

Emmy, the dishonoured virgin, appeared, saying: “What do you want for dinner, Uncle Joe? Ice cream or strawberry shortcake?” Blushing, she avoided Jones's eye.

The rector looked at his guest, yearning. “What would you like, Mr. Jones? But I know how young people are about ice cream. Would you prefer ice cream!”

But Jones was a tactful man in his generation and knowing about food himself he had an uncanny skill in anticipating other people's reactions to food. “If it is the same to you, Doctor, let it be shortcake.”

“Shortcake, Emmy,” the rector instructed with passion. Emmy withdrew. “Do you know,” he continued with apologetic gratitude, “do you know, when a man becomes I old, when instead of using his stomach, his stomach uses him, as his other physical compulsions become weaker and decline, his predilections toward the food he likes obtrude themselves.”

“Not at all, sir,” Jones assured him. “I personally prefer a warm dessert to an ice.”

“Then you must return when there are peaches. I will give you a peach cobbler, with butter and cream. . . . But, ah, my stomach has attained a sad ascendancy over me.”

“Why shouldn't it, sir? Years reave us of sexual compulsions: why shouldn't they fill the interval with compulsions of food?”

The rector regarded him kindly and piercingly. “You are becoming specious. Man's life need not be always filled with compulsions of either sex or food, need it?”

But here came quick tapping feet down the uncarpeted hall and she entered, saying: “Good morning, Uncle Joe,” in her throaty voice, crossing the room with graceful effusion, not seeing Jones at once. Then she remarked him and paused like a bird in midflight, briefly. Jones rose and under his eyes she walked mincing and graceful, theatrical with body-consciousness to the desk. She bent sweetly as a young tree and the divine kissed her cheek. Jones's goat's eyes immersed her in yellow contemplation.

“Good morning, Cecily.” The rector rose. “I had expected you earlier, on such a day as this. But young girls must have their beauty sleep regardless of weather,” he ended with elephantine joviality. “This is Mr. Jones, Cecily. Miss Saunders, Mr. Jones.”

Jones bowed with obese incipient grace as she faced him, but at her expression of hushed delicate amazement he knew panic. Then he remembered the rector's cursed trousers and he felt his neck and ears slowly burn, knowing that not only was he ridiculous looking, but that she supposed he wore such things habitually. She was speechless and Jones damned the hearty oblivious rector slowly and completely. Curse the man: one moment it was Emmy and no trousers at all, next moment an attractive stranger and nether coverings like a tired balloon. The rector was saying bland as Fate:

“I had expected you earlier. I had decided to let you take some hyacinths.”

“Uncle Joe! How won—derful!” Her voice was rough, like a tangle of golden wires. She dragged her fascinated gaze from Jones and hating them both Jones felt perspiration under his hair. “Why didn't I come sooner? But I am always doing the wrong thing, as Mr.—Mr. Jones will know from my not coming in time to get hyacinths.”

She looked at him again, as she might at a strange beast. Jones's confusion became anger and he found his tongue.

“Yes, it is too bad you didn't come earlier. You would have seen me more interestingly gotten up than this even. Emmy seemed to think so, at least.”

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

The rector regarded him with puzzled affability. Then he understood. “Ah, yes, Mr. Jones suffered a slight accident and was forced to don a garment of mine.”

“Thanks for saying ‘was forced,'” Jones said viciously. “Yes, I stumbled over that pail of water the doctor keeps just inside the front door, doubtless for the purpose of making his parishioners be sure they really require help from heaven, on their second visit,” he explained, Greek-like, giving his dignity its death-stroke with his own hand. “You, I suppose, are accustomed to it and can avoid it.”

She looked from Jones's suffused angry face to the rector's kind, puzzled one and screamed with laughter.

“Forgive me,” she pleaded, sobering as quickly. “I simply couldn't help it, Mr. Jones. You'll forgive me, won't you?”

“Certainly. Even Emmy enjoyed it. Doctor, Emmy cannot have been so badly outraged after all, to suffer such shock from seeing a man's bare——”

She covered up this gaucherie, losing most of the speech in her own words. “So you showed Mr. Jones your flowers? Mr. Jones should be quite flattered: that is quite a concession for Uncle Joe to make,” she said smoothly, turning to the divine, graceful and insincere as a French sonnet. “Is Mr. Jones famous, then? You haven't told me you knew famous men.”

The rector boomed his laugh. “Well, Mr. Jones, you seem to have concealed something from me.” (Not as much as I would have liked to, Jones thought.) “I didn't know I was entertaining a celebrity.”

Jones's essential laziness of temper regained its ascendency and he answered civilly: “Neither did I, sir.”

“Ah, don't try to hide your light, Mr. Jones. Women know these things. They see through us at once.”

“Uncle Joe,” she cautioned swiftly at this unfortunate remark, watching Jones. But Jones was safe now.

“No, I don't agree with you. If they saw through us they would never marry us.”

She was grateful and her glance showed a faint interest (what colour are her eyes?).

“Oh, that's what Mr. Jones is an authority on women.”

Jones's vanity swelled and the rector, saying, “Pardon me,” fetched a chair from the. hall. She leaned her thigh against the desk and her eyes (are they grey or blue or green?) met his yellow unabashed stare. She lowered her gaze and he remarked her pretty, self-conscious mouth. This is going to be easy, he thought. The rector placed the chair for her and she sat, and when the rector had taken his desk chair again, Jones resumed his own seat. How long her legs are, he thought, seeing her frail white dress shape to her short torso. She felt his bold examination and looked up.