Лучшие истории о любви / Best love stories
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And to give Ailie credit, it was fully a fortnight before he did come in her house, although he rushed her until she pretended to be annoyed at the next country-club dance.
“He’s the biggest tough, Andy,” she whispered to me. “But he’s so sincere.”
Somehow Mrs. Calhoun didn’t die at his appearance on the threshold. The supposedly ineradicable prejudices of Ailie’s parents were a convenient phenomenon that disappeared at her wish. It was her friends who were astonished. Ailie, always a little above Tarleton, whose admirers had usually been the “nicest” men of the camp – Ailie and Lieutenant Schoen! I grew tired of assuring people that she was merely distracting herself – and indeed every week or so there was someone new – an ensign from Pensacola, an old friend from New Orleans – but always, in between times, there was Earl Schoen.
Orders arrived for an advance party of officers and sergeants to proceed to the port of embarkation and take ship to France. My name was on the list. I had been away for a week and when I got back to camp, Earl Schoen buttonholed me immediately.
“We’re giving a little farewell party in the mess. [42] Just you and I and Captain Craker and three girls.”
Earl and I were to call for the girls. We picked up Sally Carrol Happer and Nancy Lamar, and went on to Ailie’s house; to be met at the door by the butler with the announcement that she wasn’t home.
42
mess –
“Isn’t home?” Earl repeated blankly. “Where is she?”
“Didn’t leave any information about that; just said she wasn’t home.”
“But this is a darn funny thing!” he exclaimed. He walked around the familiar veranda while the butler waited at the door. Something occurred to him. “Say,” he informed me – “I think she’s sore. [43] ”
I waited. He said to the butler, “You tell her I’ve got to speak to her a minute.”
“How am I going to tell her that when she isn’t home?”
43
she’s sore – она обиделась
Again Earl walked musingly around the porch. Then he nodded several times and said:
“She’s sore at something that happened downtown.”
In a few words he sketched out the matter to me.
“Look here; you wait in the car,” I said. “Maybe I can fix this.” When he left I said to the butler: “Oliver, you tell Miss Ailie I want to see her alone.”
After some argument he bore this message and in a moment returned with a reply:
“Miss Ailie says she doesn’t want to see that other gentleman anymore. She says come in if you like.”
She was in the library. I had expected to see a picture of cool, outraged dignity, but her face was distraught, tumultuous. Her eyes were red-rimmed, as though she had been crying slowly and painfully, for hours.
“Oh, hello, Andy,” she said brokenly. “I haven’t seen you for so long. Has he gone?”
“Now, Ailie – ”
“Now, Ailie!” she cried. “Now, Ailie! He spoke to me, you see. He lifted his hat. He stood there ten feet from me with that horrible – that horrible woman – holding her arm and talking to her, and then when he saw me he raised his hat. Andy, I didn’t know what to do. I had to go in the drug store and ask for a glass of water, and I was so afraid he’d follow in after me that I asked Mr. Rich to let me go out the back way. I never want to see him or hear of him again.”
I talked. I said what one says in such cases. I said it for half an hour. I could not move her. Several times she answered by murmuring something about his not being “sincere,” and for the fourth time I wondered what the word meant to her. Certainly not constancy; it was, I half suspected, some special way she wanted to be regarded.
I got up to go. And then, unbelievably, the automobile horn sounded three times impatiently outside. It was amazing. It said as plainly as if Earl were in the room, “All right; go to the devil then! I’m not going to wait here all night.”
Ailie looked at me horrified. And suddenly a peculiar look came into her face, flickered, and turned into a teary, hysterical smile.
“Isn’t he awful?” she cried in helpless despair. “Isn’t he terrible?”
“Hurry up,” I said quickly. “This is our last night.”
And I can still feel that last night vividly, the candlelight that flickered over the rough tables of the mess, the sad mandolin down the street that kept picking My Indiana Home out of the universal nostalgia of the departing summer. The three girls lost in this mysterious men’s city felt something, too – a bewitched impermanence as though they were on a magic carpet that had lighted on the Southern countryside, and any moment the wind would lift it and waft it away. We toasted ourselves and the South. Then we left our napkins and empty glasses and a little of the past on the table, and hand in hand went out into the moonlight itself and got into a waiting car.
Then Ailie and Earl, Sally and I, two and two in the wide back seat, each couple turned from the other, absorbed and whispering, drove away into the wide, flat darkness.
We drove through pine woods and parked under the broken shadow of a mill where there was the sound of running water and restive birds. The South sang to us – I wonder if they remember. I remember – the cool pale faces, the somnolent amorous eyes and the voices:
“Are you comfortable?”
“Yes; are you?”
“Are you sure you are?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly we knew it was late and there was nothing more. We turned home.
Our detachment started for Camp Mills next day, but I didn’t go to France after all. There wasn’t any more war. I had missed the war. When I came back to Tarleton I tried to get out of the Army, but I had a regular commission and it took most of the winter. But Earl Schoen was one of the first to be demobilized. He wanted to find a good job “while the picking was good.” Ailie was noncommittal, but there was an understanding between them that he’d be back.
By January the camps, which for two years had dominated the little city, were already fading. What life remained centered bitterly about divisional headquarters building, with the disgruntled regular officers who had also missed the war.
And now the young men of Tarleton began drifting back from the ends of the earth – some with Canadian uniforms, some with crutches or empty sleeves.
Just before Christmas, Bill Knowles arrived unexpectedly one day and left the next – either he gave Ailie an ultimatum or she had made up her mind at last. I saw her sometimes when she wasn’t busy with returned heroes from Savannah and Augusta, but I felt like an outmoded survival – and I was. She was waiting for Earl Schoen with such a vast uncertainty that she didn’t like to talk about it. Three days before I got my final discharge he came.