It was July. The Jefferson Hotel seemed strangely shabby and stuffy—a boosters’ club burst into intermittent song in the dining-room that my memory had long dedicated to officers and girls. I recognized the taxi driver who took me up to Ailie’s house, but his “Sure, I do, Lieutenant,” was unconvincing. I was only one of twenty thousand.
It was a curious three days. I suppose some of Ailie’s first young lustre must have gone the way of such mortal shining, but I can’t bear witness to it. She was still so physically appealing that you wanted to touch the personality that trembled on her lips. No—the change was more profound than that.
At once I saw she had a different line. The modulations of pride, the vocal hints that she knew the secrets of a brighter, finer ante-bellum day, were gone from her voice; there was no time for them now as it rambled on in the half-laughing, half-desperate banter of the newer South. And everything was swept into this banter in order to make it go on and leave no time for thinking—the present, the future, herself, me. We went to a rowdy party at the house of some young married people, and she was the nervous, glowing centre of it. After all, she wasn’t eighteen, and she was as attractive in her role of reckless clown as she had ever been in her life.
“Have you heard anything from Earl Schoen?” I asked her the second night, on our way to the country-club dance.
“No.” She was serious for a moment. “I often think of him. He was the—” she hesitated.
“Goon.”
“I was going to say the man I loved most, but that wouldn’t be true. I never exactly loved him, or I’d have married him any old how, wouldn’t I?” She looked at me questioningly. “At least I wouldn’t have treated him like that.”
“It was impossible.”
“Of course,” she agreed uncertainly. Her mood changed; she became flippant: “How the Yankees did deceive us poor little Southern girls. Ah, me!”
When we reached the country club she melted like a chameleon into the—to me—unfamiliar crowd. There was a new generation upon the floor, with less dignity than the ones I had known, but none of them were more a part of its lazy, feverish essence than Ailie. Possibly she had perceived that in her initial longing to escape from Tarleton’s provincialism she had been walking alone, following a generation which was doomed to have no successors. Just where she lost the battle, waged behind the white pillars of her veranda, I don’t know. But she had guessed wrong, missed out somewhere. Her wild animation, which even now called enough men around her to rival the entourage of the youngest and freshest, was an admission of defeat.
I left her house, as I had so often left it that vanished June, in a mood of vague dissatisfaction. It was hours later, tossing about my bed in the hotel, that I realized what was the matter, what had always been the matter—I was deeply and incurably in love with her. In spite of every incompatibility, she was still, she would always be to me, the most attractive girl I had ever known. I told her so next afternoon. It was one of those hot days I knew so well, and Ailie sat beside me on a couch in the darkened library.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t marry you,” she said, almost frightened; “I don’t love you that way at all… I never did. And you don’t love me, I didn’t mean to tell you now, but next month I’m going to marry another man. We’re not even announcing it, because I’ve done that twice before.” Suddenly it occurred to her that I might be hurt: “Andy, you just had a silly idea, didn’t you? You know I couldn’t ever marry a Northern man.”
“Who is he?” I demanded.
“A man from Savannah.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Of course I am.” We both smiled. “Of course I am! What are you trying to make me say?”
There were no doubts, as there had been with other men. She couldn’t afford to let herself have doubts. I knew this because she had long ago stopped making any pretensions with me. This very naturalness, I realized, was because she didn’t consider me as a suitor. Beneath her mask of an instinctive thoroughbred she had always been on to herself, and she couldn’t believe that anyone not taken in to the point of uncritical worship could really love her. That was what she called being “sincere”; she felt most security with men like Canby and Earl Schoen, who were incapable of passing judgements on the ostensibly aristocratic heart.
“All right,” I said, as if she had asked my permission to marry. “Now, would you do something for me?”
“Anything.”
“Ride out to camp.”
“But there’s nothing left there, honey.”
“I don’t care.”
We walked downtown. The taxi-driver in front of the hotel repeated her objection: “Nothing there now, Cap.”
“Never mind. Go there anyhow.”
Twenty minutes later he stopped on a wide unfamiliar plain powdered with new cotton fields and marked with isolated clumps of pine.
“Like to drive over yonder where you see the smoke?” asked the driver. “That’s the new state prison.”
“No. Just drive along this road. I want to find where I used to live.”
An old racecourse, inconspicuous in the camp’s day of glory, had reared its dilapidated grandstand in the desolation. I tried in vain to orient myself.
“Go along this road past that clump of trees, and then turn right—no, turn left.”
He obeyed, with professional disgust.
“You won’t find a single thing, darling,” said Ailie. “The contractors took it all down.”
We rode slowly along the margin of the fields. It might have been here—
“All right. I want to get out,” I said suddenly.
I left Ailie sitting in the car, looking very beautiful with the warm breeze stirring her long, curly bob.
It might have been here. That would make the company streets down there and the mess shack, where we dined that night, just over the way.
The taxi-driver regarded me indulgently while I stumbled here and there in the knee-deep underbrush, looking for my youth in a clapboard or a strip of roofing or a rusty tomato can. I tried to sight on a vaguely familiar clump of trees, but it was growing darker now and I couldn’t be quite sure they were the right trees.
“They’re going to fix up the old racecourse,” Ailie called from the car. “Tarleton’s getting quite doggy in its old age.”
No. Upon consideration they didn’t look like the right trees. All I could be sure of was this place that had once been full of life and effort was gone, as if it had never existed, and that in another month Ailie would be gone, and the South would be empty for me for ever.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine (2 March 1929).
