Free Soldiers Pay by William Faulkner Page A

fetch me a pair of trousers.”
    â€œBut the rug will be ruined!”
    â€œNot 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.
    â€œEmmy, 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.
    â€œAh, 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.
    â€œNow,” 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.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œTry 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?”
    â€œThat 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.
    â€œThere 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.
    â€œLet 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.
    â€œTut, tut! How careless of me!” he ejaculated, sweeping the dust carefully into an envelope. “I have often deplored the size of my hands. They