“Oh-h-h!” Her rasping whisper came through the hands suddenly covering her face. We watched her helplessly as she put her head on the side of the car, gagging dry tears. After a minute I went for Bill, who was standing in the stag line, searching anxiously about for her, and told him she wanted to go home.
I sat on the steps outside. I had disliked Canby, but his terrible, pointless death was more real to me then than the day’s toll of thousands in France. In a few minutes Ailie and Bill came out. Ailie was whimpering a little, but when she saw me her eyes flexed and she came over swiftly.
“Andy”— she spoke in a quick, low voice—“of course you must never tell anybody what I told you about Canby yesterday. What he said, I mean.”
“Of course not.”
She looked at me a second longer as if to be quite sure. Finally she was sure. Then she sighed in such a quaint little way that I could hardly believe my ears, and her brow went up in what can only be described as mock despair.
“An-dy!”
I looked uncomfortably at the ground, aware that she was calling my attention to her involuntarily disastrous effect on men.
“Good night, Andy!” called Bill as they got into a taxi.
“Good night,” I said, and almost added: “You poor fool.”
II
Of course I should have made one of those fine moral decisions that people make in books, and despised her. On the contrary, I don’t doubt that she could still have had me by raising her hand.
A few days later she made it all right by saying wistfully, “I know you think it was terrible of me to think of myself at a time like that, but it was such a shocking coincidence.”
At twenty-three I was entirely unconvinced about anything, except that some people were strong and attractive and could do what they wanted, and others were caught and disgraced. I hoped I was of the former. I was sure Ailie was.
I had to revise other ideas about her. In the course of a long discussion with some girl about kissing—in those days people still talked about kissing more than they kissed—I mentioned the fact that Ailie had only kissed two or three men, and only when she thought she was in love. To my considerable disconcertion the girl figuratively just lay on the floor and howled.
“But it is 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. They had queer names without vowels in them, and save for a few young militiamen, you couldn’t take it for granted that they came out of any background at all. 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 colour, 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. I had an idea that New Bedford was a country town, and set down his bumptious qualities to that.
We were doubled up in living quarters and he came into my hut. Inside of a week there was a cabinet photograph of some Tarleton girl nailed brutally to the shack wall.
“She’s no jane or anything like that. She’s a society girl; goes with all the best people here.”
The following Sunday afternoon I met the lady at a semi-private 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 towards the girl at his side. Then, digging her in the ribs, 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.
A moment later he crawled 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 towards 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. Then minutes later I saw them in the water together, Ailie swimming away with a grim little stroke she had, and Schoen wallowing riotously around her and ahead of her, sometimes pausing and staring at her, fascinated, as a boy might look at a nautical doll.
While the afternoon passed he remained at her side. Finally Ailie came over to me and whispered, with a laugh: “He’s a following me around. He thinks I haven’t paid my car-fare.”
She turned quickly. Miss Kitty Preston, her face curiously flustered, stood facing us.
“Ailie Calhoun, I didn’t think it of you to go out and delib’ately try to take a man away from another girl.”—An expression of distress at the impending scene flitted over Ailie’s face—“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 towards us.
“If you care for him you certainly oughtn’t to belittle yourself in front of him,” said Ailie in a flash, her head high.
It was her acquaintance with the traditional way of behaving against Kitty Preston’s naive 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 slicked-back blonde hair. “Goodbye.”
On the way home she laughed. Her air of having been unwittingly 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 to wear, like a fraternity pin. 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 to 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.”
She used the word “tough” without the conviction it would have carried had he been a Southern boy. She only knew it with her mind; her ear couldn’t distinguish between one Yankee voice and another. And somehow Mrs. Calhoun didn’t expire 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 beaux had been very carefully 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 on the range 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. 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 no information about that; just said she wasn’t home.”
“But this is a darn funny thing!” he exclaimed. He walked around the familiar dusky veranda while the butler waited at the door. Something occurred to him. “Say,” he informed me—“say, I think she’s sore.”
I waited. He said sternly to the butler, “You tell her I’ve got to speak to her a minute.”
“How’m I goin’ tell her that when she ain’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;
