Soldiers’ Pay quotes

“Here she is, Major,” responded Lowe, taking the bottle from beneath his blouse. Yaphank offered it to the two civilians.

“Think of something far, far away, and drink fast,” he advised.

“Why, thanks,” said the one called Schluss, tendering the bottle formally to his companion. They stooped cautiously and drank. Yaphank and Cadet Lowe drank, not stooping.

The policeman shouted, “Stop, there!” but they disregarded him, hurrying down the long shed, leaving the excitement to clot about itself, for all of them.

Outside the station in the twilight the city broke sharply its skyline against the winter evening and lights were shimmering birds on motionless golden wings, bell notes in arrested flight; ugly everywhere beneath a rumored retreating magic of color.

Food for the belly, and winter, though spring was somewhere in the world, from the south blown up like forgotten music.

Outside the station in the twilight the city broke sharply its skyline against the winter evening and lights were shimmering birds on motionless golden wings, bell notes in arrested flight; ugly everywhere beneath a rumored retreating magic of color.

Food for the belly, and winter, though spring was somewhere in the world, from the south blown up like forgotten music.

Caught both in the magic of change they stood feeling the spring in the cold air, as if they had but recently come into a new world, feeling their littleness and believing too that lying in wait for them was something new and strange.

He produced a pillow which he placed carefully behind the officer’s head, then he got two more pillows for the others, forcing them with ruthless kindness to relax.

He was deftly officious, including them impartially in his activities, like Fate.

Private Gilligan, unused to this, became restive.

Gilligan raised his glass, squinting at it. “Here’s to peace,” he said.

“The first hundred years is the hardest.”

Here was the porter again, with his own glass. “ ’Nother nose in the trough,” Gilligan complained, helping him.

“Let them alone, Mrs. Henderson. They’ll take care of him all right.”

She was dark. Had Gilligan and Lowe ever seen an Aubrey Beardsley, they would have known that Beardsley would have sickened for her: he had drawn her so often dressed in peacock hues, white and slim and depraved among meretricious trees and impossible marble fountains.

Gilligan rose.

The rector was silent a while.

The intermittent shadows of young leaves were bird cries made visible and sparrows in ivy were flecks of sunlight become vocal.

The rector continued:

The rector regarded Jones kindly.

“Ah, boy, there is nothing after youth’s own heart: youth has no heart.”

“But, Doctor. This borders on lese-majesty. I thought we had declared a truce regarding each other’s cloth.”

“Shall we be friends once more, then? Come, I will make a concession: I will show you my flowers. You are young enough to appreciate them without feeling called upon to comment.”

The garden was worth seeing.

An avenue of roses bordered a graveled path which passed from sunlight beneath two overarching oaks.

Against a privet hedge would soon be lilies like nuns in a cloister and blue hyacinths swung soundless bells, dreaming of Lesbos.

Upon a lattice wall wistaria would soon burn in slow inverted lilac flame, and following it they came lastly upon a single rose bush.

The branches were huge and knotted with age, heavy and dark as a bronze pedestal, crowned with pale impermanent gold. The divine’s hands lingered upon it with soft passion.

“Yes, as long as there are no women in it.” She shrugged indifferently. Jones could not bear seeming a fool to anyone as shallow as he considered her and he blurted, wanting to kick himself: “You don’t like me, do you?”

“Oh, I like anyone who believes there may be something he doesn’t know,” she replied without interest.

“What do you mean by that?” (are they green or gray?) Jones was a disciple of the cult of boldness with women. He rose and the table wheeled smoothly as he circled it: he wished faintly that he were more graceful. Those thrice unhappy trousers!

Sparse old silver on a buffet shadowed heavily under a high fanlight of colored glass identical with the one above the entrance, her fragile white dress across the table from him: he could imagine her long subtle legs, like Atalanta’s reft of running.

“Why do you tell yourself lies?” she asked with interest.

“Surely. You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.”

The path ran on beneath two formal arching oaks; lesser roses rambling upon a wall paralleled them and Gilligan following her long stride trod brittle and careful.

Whenever he was among flowers he always felt as if he had entered a room full of women: he was always conscious of his body, of his walk, feeling as though he trod in sand.

So he believed that he really did not like flowers.

“Sure: not good for anything if you pick ’em. Touch it, and it turns brown on you. Fades.”

“That’s true of almost everything, isn’t it?”

“Yeh, but how many folks believe it? Reckon the Loot does?”

“Not at all, not at all, my dear madam. An old man is always flattered when his flowers are admired.

The young are so beautifully convinced that their emotions are admirable: young girls wear the clothes of their older sisters who require clothes, principally because they do not need them themselves, just for fun, or perhaps to pander to an illusion of the male; but as we grow older what we are loses importance, giving place to what we do.

And I have never been able to do anything well save to raise flowers. And that is, I think, an obscure emotional housewifery in me: I had thought to grow old with my books among my roses:

“Listen to me. You are not to see that Farr boy, any more. Understand?”

Her eyes were unfathomable as sea water.

“Do you understand me?” he repeated.

Her tact and her graceful deference were such that they discussed her disparagingly only behind her back. None of them could long resist her. She always seemed to enjoy other people’s gossip.

It was not until later you found that she had gossiped none herself. And this, indeed, requires tact.

She chattered briefly while her hostess pottered among tubbed flowers, then asking and receiving permission, she entered the house to use the telephone.

Niggers and mules. Afternoon lay in a coma in the street, like a woman recently loved. Quiet and warm: nothing now that the lover has gone away.

Leaves were like a green liquid arrested in mid-flow, flattened and spread; leaves were as though cut with scissors from green paper and pasted flat on the afternoon: someone dreamed them and then forgot his dream.

Niggers and mules.

Niggers and mules.

Afternoon lay in a coma in the street, like a woman recently loved.

Quiet and warm: nothing now that the lover has gone away. Leaves were like a green liquid arrested in mid-flow, flattened and spread; leaves were as though cut with scissors from green paper and pasted flat on the afternoon:

“I never speculate on what I would have done,” he answered shortly. “

There can be no If in my profession. I work in tissue and bone, not in circumstance.

”

They then turned and walked on, out of his sight.

Night was almost come: only the footprint of day, only the odor of day, only a rumor, a ghost of light among the trees.

He burst into his sister’s room. She was fixing her hair and she saw him in the mirror, panting and regrettably soiled.

“Come on, come on, snap into it. If I hear another word from a man he goes before the Captain.” Sergeant Madden had also changed.

In wartime one lives in today. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come.

Wait till we get into action, they told each other, we’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch. “Not Madden?” asked one horrified. They only looked at him. “For Christ’s sake,” remarked one at last.

They tramped by night, feeling their feet sink, then hearing them suck in mud. Then they felt sloping ground and were in a ditch.

It was as if they were burying themselves, descending into their own graves in the bowels of the wet black earth, into a darkness so dense as to constrict breathing, constrict the heart.

They stumbled on in the darkness.

Mrs. Worthington ate too much and suffered from gout and a flouted will. So her church connection was rather trying to the minister and his flock. But she had money—that panacea for all ills of the flesh and spirit.

She believed in rights for women, as long as women would let her dictate what was right for them.

One usually ignored the male relation. But sometimes one pitied him.

… creased breech, whom the generals all think may be German spies, and handsome old generals, whom the subalterns all think may be German spies, glaring at each other across her languid body while corporal comedians entertain the beautiful-limbed and otherwise idle Red Cross nurses (American).

The French women present are either marquises or whores or German spies, sometimes both, sometimes all three.

The marquises may be told immediately because they all wear sabots, having given their shoes with the rest of their clothing to the French army, retaining only a pair of forty carat diamond earrings.

The man quietly smoking detached himself from the group.

He was not big, yet there was something big and calm about him: a sense of competent inertia after activity.

“Do me a favor, will you?”

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 they were not yet accustomed to two and seventy-five percent.

“Look at those kids that grew up while we were away,” one advised him with passion. “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.

“Not like that,” he replied, “no, ma’am. Where I come from you’d have to have a license to dance that way.”

Her laugh was in three notes and she was like a swept tree.

Her eyes, beneath lowered lids, her teeth, between her purple lips, glittered briefly.

“

You’ve got it backward. Now we don’t have to get married.

” She gave him a quick glance, and seeing his face, she laughed. Her occasional coarseness so out of keeping with her innate and utter delicacy always shocked him. But then George Farr, like most men, was by nature a prude.

“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 damn well what I meant when you let me kiss you that day.”

The trumpets in his blood, the symphony of living, died away.

The golden sand of hours bowled by day ran through the narrow neck of time into the corresponding globe of night, to be inverted and so flow back again.

Jones felt the slow, black sand of time marking life away. “Hush,” he said, “don’t spoil it.”

He told her. “ ‘For a moment, an aeon, I pause plunging above the narrow precipice of thy breast’ and on and on and on.

Do you know how falcons make love? They embrace at an enormous height and fall locked, beak to beak, plunging: an unbearable ecstasy.

While we have got to assume all sorts of ludicrous postures, knowing our own sweat. The falcon breaks his clasp and swoops away swift and proud and lonely, while a man must rise and take his hat and walk out.”

“

Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank.

Imply criticism—unless the criticized is not within earshot.”

The rose splashed redly against the front of her dark dress. She secured it with a pin. “Let me give you some advice,” she continued sharply, “the next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

”

when it ran down they repaired to a filthy alley behind the filthier kitchen to drink of George Farr’s whisky. Then they returned and played the record through again, clutching hands while frank tears slid down their otherwise unwashed cheeks. “Cloooooooover blaaaaaarsummmssss. …”

Truly vice is a dull and decorous thing: no life in the world is as hard, requiring so much sheer physical and moral strength as the so-called “primrose path.” Being “good” is much less trouble.

… After a while his attention was called to the fact that someone had been annoying him for some time. Focusing his eyes he at last recognized the proprietor in an apron on which he must have dried his dishes for weeks.

“George, it’s Cecily. Cecily. …”

Drunkenness left him like a retreating wave.

He could feel his heart stop, then surge, deafening him, blinding him with his own blood.

tried narcissi and jonquil and flag: threw it away—so early flowers bloomed and passed 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 choirboys slow and surpliced.

Leaves grew larger and greener until all rumor of azure and silver and pink had gone from them;

And Emmy said: “I guess I am.”

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.

“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, turning the corner of the house, saw the hushed expanse where his enemy was, but his enemy, himself, was out of sight. Roses bloomed quietly under the imminence of night, hyacinths swung pale bells, waiting for another day.

Dusk was a dream of arrested time, the mockingbird rippled it tentatively, and everywhere blooms slept passionately, waiting for tomorrow.

But Jones was gone.

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

How indissolubly are they associated in us! In youth they lift us out of the flesh, in old age they reduce us again to the flesh; one to fatten us, the other to flay us, for the worm.

Outside the window the afternoon became abruptly rain, without warning, with no flapping of pennons nor sound of trumpet to herald it.

There was nothing harsh about this rain. It was gray and quiet as a benediction.

The birds did not even cease to sing, and the west was already thinning to a moist and imminent gold.

Then she sauntered along the platform to the admiration of those casuals always to be found around small railway stations anywhere in these United States. And yet Continentals labor under the delusion that we spend all our time working!

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

She felt freer, more at peace with herself than she had felt for months. But I won’t think about that, she decided deliberately. It is best just to be free, not to let it into the conscious mind.

it does not wait for the act. She felt freer, more at peace with herself than she had felt for months. But I won’t think about that, she decided deliberately. It is best just to be free, not to let it into the conscious mind.

To be consciously anything argues a comparison, a bond with antithesis.

Live in your dream, do not attain it—else comes satiety. Or sorrow, which is worse, I wonder? Dr. Mahon and his dream: reft, restored, reft again. Funny for someone, I guess.

But I won’t think about that, she decided deliberately. It is best just to be free, not to let it into the conscious mind. To be consciously anything argues a comparison, a bond with antithesis.

Live in your dream, do not attain it⁠—else comes satiety.

Or sorrow, which is worse, I wonder? Dr. Mahon and his dream: reft, restored, reft again. Funny for someone, I guess.

“Yes, summer is almost here. Funny, ain’t it? I’m always kind of surprised to find that things get on about the same, spite of us.

I guess old nature does too much of a wholesale business to ever be surprised at us, let alone worrying if we ain’t quite the fellows we think we ought to of been.

”

“Yes, summer is almost here. Funny, ain’t it?

I’m always kind of surprised to find that things get on about the same, spite of us.

I guess old nature does too much of a wholesale business to ever be surprised at us, let alone worrying if we ain’t quite the fellows we think we ought to of been.”

“

I can’t imagine you doing anything without considering someone else’s feelings.

”