Read Online Soldiers Pay by William Faulkner - Free Book Online

him. Sparrows were delirious in ivy and the rambling facade of the rectory was a dream in jonquils and clipped sward. There should be children here, thought Jones. He said:
    â€œI most humbly beg your pardon for my flippancy, Doctor. I assure you that I—ah—took advantage of the situation without any ulterior motive whatever.”
    â€œI understand that, dear boy. My rebuke was tendered in the same spirit. There are certain conventions which we must observe in this world; one of them being an outward deference to that cloth which I unworthily, perhaps, wear. And I have found this particularly incumbent upon us of the—what shall I say—?”
    â€œInteger vitae scelerisque purus
    non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu
    nec venenatis gravida sagittis,
    Fusee, pharetra—” began Jones.
    The rector chimed in:
    â€œâ€”sive per Syrtis iter aestuosas
    sive facturus per inhospitalem
    Causasum vel quae loca fabulosus
    lambit Hydaspes,”
    they concluded in galloping duet and stood in the ensuing silence regarding each other with genial enthusiasm.
    â€œBut, come, come,” cried the rector. His eyes were pleasant. Shall I let the stranger languish without my gates?” The grilled iron swung open and his earthy hand was heavy on Jones’s shoulder. “Come, let us try the spire. “
    The grass was good. A myriad bees vacillated between clover and apple bloom, apple bloom and clover, and from the Gothic mass of the church the spire rose, a prayer imperishable in bronze. immaculate in its illusion of slow ruin across motionless young clouds.
    â€œMy one sincere parishioner,” murmured the divine. Sunlight was a windy golden plume about his bald head, and Januarius Jones’s face was a round mirror before which fauns and nymphs might have wantoned when the world was young.
    â€œParishioner, did I say? It is more than that: it is by such as this that man may approach nearest to God. And how few will believe this! How few, how few!” He stared unblinking unto the sun-filled sky: drowned in his eyes was a despair long since grown cool and quiet.
    â€œThat is very true, sir. But we of this age believe that be who may be approached informally, without the intercession of an office-boy of some sort, is not worth the approaching. We purchase our salvation as we do our real estate. Our God,” continued Jones, “need not be compassionate, he need not be very intelligent. But he must have dignity.”
    The rector raised his great dirty hand. “No, no. You do them injustice. But who has ever found justice in youth, or any of those tiresome virtues with which we coddle and cradle our hardening arteries and souls? Only the ageing need conventions and laws to aggregate to themselves some of the beauty of this world. Without laws the young would reave us of it as corsairs of old combed the blue seas.”
    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:
    â€œHad I the arranging of this world I should establish a certain point, say at about the age of thirty, upon reaching which a man would be automatically relegated to a plane where his mind would no longer be troubled with the futile recollection of temptations he had resisted and of beauty he had failed to garner to himself. It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.”
    Jones, wondering what temptations he had ever resisted and then recalling the women he might have seduced and hadn’t, said: “And then what? What would the people who have been unlucky enough to reach thirty do?”
    â€œOn this plane there would be no troubling physical things such as sunlight and space and birds in the trees—but only unimportant