Лучшие истории о любви / Best love stories. Отсутствует

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it’s true,” I assured her, suddenly knowing it wasn’t. “She told me herself.”

      “Ailie Calhoun! Oh, my heavens! Why, last year at the Tech spring house party – ”

* * *

      This was in September. We were going overseas any week now, and to bring us up to full strength a last batch of officers from the fourth training camp arrived. The fourth camp wasn’t like the first three – the candidates were from the ranks; even from the drafted divisions.[36] The addition to our company was Lieutenant Earl Schoen from New Bedford, Massachusetts; as fine a physical specimen as I have ever seen. He was six-foot-three, with black hair, high color and glossy dark-brown eyes. He wasn’t very smart and he was definitely illiterate, yet he was a good officer, high-tempered and commanding, and with that becoming touch of vanity that sits well on the military.

      We were doubled up in living quarters and he came into my hut. After a week there was a photograph of some Tarleton girl nailed brutally to the wall.

      “She’s no jane or anything like that.[37] She’s a society girl; goes with all the best people here.”

      The following Sunday afternoon I met the lady at a semiprivate swimming pool in the country. When Ailie and I arrived, there was Schoen’s muscular body rippling out of a bathing suit at the far end of the pool.

      “Hey, lieutenant!”

      When I waved back at him he grinned and winked, jerking his head toward the girl at his side. Then, digging her in the ribs,[38] he jerked his head at me. It was a form of introduction.

      “Who’s that with Kitty Preston?” Ailie asked, and when I told her she said he looked like a street-car conductor, and pretended to look for her transfer.[39]

      A moment later he crawled[40] powerfully and gracefully down the pool and pulled himself up at our side. I introduced him to Ailie.

      “How do you like my girl, lieutenant?” he demanded. “I told you she was all right, didn’t I?” He jerked his head toward Ailie; this time to indicate that his girl and Ailie moved in the same circles. “How about us all having dinner together down at the hotel some night?”

      I left them in a moment, amused as I saw Ailie visibly making up her mind that here, anyhow, was not the ideal. But Lieutenant Earl Schoen was not to be dismissed so lightly. He ran his eyes cheerfully and inoffensively over her cute, slight figure, and decided that she would do even better than the other.

      While the afternoon passed he remained at her side. Finally Ailie came over to me and whispered, with a laugh: “He’s following me around. He thinks I haven’t paid my carfare.”

      She turned quickly. Miss Kitty Preston stood facing us.

      “Ailie Calhoun, I didn’t think it of you to go out and deliberately try to take a man away from another girl. I thought you considered yourself above anything like that.”

      Miss Preston’s voice was low, but it held that tensity that can be felt farther than it can be heard, and I saw Ailie’s clear lovely eyes glance about in panic. Luckily, Earl himself was ambling cheerfully and innocently toward us.

      “If you care for him you certainly oughtn’t to belittle yourself in front of him,” said Ailie, her head high.

      It was her acquaintance with the traditional way of behaving against Kitty Preston’s naïve and fierce possessiveness, or if you prefer it, Ailie’s “breeding” against the other’s “commonness.” She turned away.

      “Wait a minute, kid!” cried Earl Schoen. “How about your address? Maybe I’d like to give you a ring on the phone.”

      She looked at him in a way that should have indicated to Kitty her entire lack of interest.

      “I’m very busy at the Red Cross this month,” she said, her voice as cool as her blond hair. “Good-by.”

      On the way home she laughed. Her air of having been unintentionally involved in a contemptible business vanished.

      “She’ll never hold that young man,” she said. “He wants somebody new.”

      “Apparently he wants Ailie Calhoun.”

      The idea amused her.

      “He could give me his ticket punch[41] to wear. What fun! If mother ever saw anybody like that come in the house, she’d just lie down and die.”

      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.

      “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?”

      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.”

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