Лучшие истории о любви / Best love stories - стр. 14
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.