Лучшие истории о любви / Best love stories
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I
After Atlanta’s Southern charm, we all underestimated Tarleton. It was a little hotter there than anywhere we’d been – a dozen rookies collapsed the first day in that Georgia sun. I stayed out at camp and let Lieutenant Warren tell me about the girls. This was fifteen years ago, and I’ve forgotten how I felt, except that the days went along, one after another, better than they do now, and I was empty-hearted, because up North she who I had loved for three years was getting married. I saw the clippings and newspaper photographs. It was “a romantic wartime wedding,” all very rich and sad.
A day came when I went into Tarleton for a haircut and ran into a nice fellow named Bill Knowles, who was in my time at Harvard. He’d been in the National Guard division that preceded us in camp; at the last moment he had transferred to aviation and been left behind.
“I’m glad I met you, Andy,” he said with undue seriousness. “I’ll hand you on all my information before I start for Texas. You see, there’re really only three girls here – ”
I was interested; there was something mystical about there being three girls.
“ – and here’s one of them now.”
We were in front of a drug store and he marched me in and introduced me to a lady I promptly detested.
“The other two are Ailie Calhoun and Sally Carrol Happer.”
I guessed from the way he pronounced her name, that he was interested in Ailie Calhoun – what a lovely name. It was on his mind what she would be doing while he was gone; he wanted her to have a quiet, uninteresting time.
At my age I don’t even hesitate to confess that images of Ailie Calhoun that rushed into my mind were not chivalrous at all. At twenty-three there is no such thing as a preempted beauty; [32] though, had Bill asked me, I would doubtless have sworn in all sincerity to care for her like a sister. He didn’t; he just worried about having to go. Three days later he telephoned me that he was leaving next morning and he’d take me to her house that night.
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a preempted beauty –
We met at the hotel and walked uptown through the flowery, hot twilight. The four white pillars of the Calhoun house faced the street, and behind them the veranda was dark as a cave with hanging, weaving, climbing vines.
When we came up the walk a girl in a white dress went out of the front door, crying, “I’m so sorry I’m late!” and seeing us, added: “Why, I thought I heard you come ten minutes – ”
She broke off as a chair creaked and another man, an aviator from Camp Harry Lee, emerged from the obscurity of the veranda.
“Why, Canby!” she cried. “How are you?”
He and Bill Knowles waited with the tenseness of open litigants.
“Canby, I want to whisper to you, honey,” she said, after just a second. “You’ll excuse us, Bill.”
They went aside. Soon Lieutenant Canby, very displeased, said in a grim voice, “Then we’ll make it Thursday, but that means sure.” Scarcely nodding to us, he went down the walk.
“Come in – I don’t just know your name – ”
There she was – the Southern type in all its purity. She was small and very blond. She had the adroitness sugar-coated with sweet, voluble simplicity, the unfailing coolness acquired in the endless struggle with the heat. There were notes in her voice that order slaves around, that withered up Yankee captains, and then soft, wheedling notes that mixed in unfamiliar loveliness with the night.
“After Bill goes I’ll be sitting here all alone night after night. Maybe you’ll take me to the country-club dances.” The pathetic prophecy brought a laugh from Bill. “Wait a minute,” Ailie murmured.
She straightened my collar pin, [33] looking up at me for a second with something more than curiosity. It was a seeking look, as if she asked, “Could it be you?” Like Lieutenant Canby, I marched off unwillingly.
Two weeks later I sat with her on the same veranda, or rather she half lay in my arms and yet scarcely touched me – how she managed that I don’t remember. I was trying unsuccessfully to kiss her, and had been trying for the best part of an hour. We had a sort of joke about my not being sincere. My theory was that if she’d let me kiss her I’d fall in love with her. Her argument was that I was obviously insincere.
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collar pin –
In a lull between two of these struggles she told me about her brother who had died in his senior year at Yale. She showed me his picture – it was a handsome, earnest face – and told me that when she met someone who measured up to him she’d marry. I found this family idealism discouraging; even my confidence couldn’t compete with the dead.
The evening and other evenings passed like that, and ended with my going back to camp with the remembered smell of magnolia flowers and a mood of vague dissatisfaction. I never kissed her. We went to the vaudeville and to the country club on Saturday nights, where she seldom took ten consecutive steps with one man, and she took me to barbecues and watermelon parties, and never thought it was worthwhile to change what I felt for her into love. I see now that it wouldn’t have been hard, but she was a wise nineteen and she must have seen that we were emotionally incompatible. So I became her confidant instead.
We talked about Bill Knowles. She was considering Bill; for, though she wouldn’t admit it, a winter at school in New York and a prom at Yale had turned her eyes North. She said she didn’t think she’d marry a Southern man. And by degrees I saw that she was consciously and voluntarily different from the other girls. That’s why Bill and I and others were drawn to her. We recognized her.
June and July, while the rumors reached us faintly, of battle and terror overseas, Ailie’s eyes roved here and there about the country-club floor, seeking for something among the tall young officers. She attached several, choosing them with unfailing perspicacity – save in the case of Lieutenant Canby, whom she claimed to despise, but, nevertheless, gave dates to “because he was so sincere” – and we shared out her evenings among us all summer.
One day she broke all her dates – Bill Knowles had leave and was coming. We talked of the event with scientific impersonality – would he move her to a decision? Lieutenant Canby, on the contrary, wasn’t impersonal at all. He told her that if she married Knowles he was going to climb up six thousand feet in his aeroplane, shut off the motor and let go. He frightened her – I had to yield him my last date before Bill came.
On Saturday night she and Bill Knowles came to the country club. They were very handsome together and once more I felt envious and sad. As they danced out on the floor the three-piece orchestra was playing After You’ve Gone, in a poignant way that I can hear yet, as if each bar were trickling off a precious minute of that time. [34] I knew then that I had grown to love Tarleton. It was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.
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as if each bar were trickling off a precious minute of that time – как будто с каждым тактом по капле утекали драгоценные минуты того времени
When I danced with Ailie she suddenly suggested that we go outside to a car. She wanted to know why didn’t people cut in on her tonight? Did they think she was already married?
“Are you going to be?”
“I don’t know, Andy. Sometimes, when he treats me as if I were sacred, it thrills me.” Her voice was quiet and far away. “And then – ”
She laughed. Her body, so frail and tender, was touching mine, her face was turned up to me, and there, suddenly, with Bill Knowles ten yards off, I could have finally kissed her. Our lips just touched experimentally; then an aviation officer turned a corner of the veranda near us, peered into our darkness and hesitated.