THE LAST OF THE BELLES
AFTER ATLANTA'S elaborate and
theatrical rendition of Southern
charm, we all underestimated
Tarleton. It was a little hotter than
anywhere we'd been a dozen
rookies collapsed the first day in that
Georgia sun and when you saw
herds of cows drifting through the
business streets, hi-yaed by
colored drovers, a trance stole down over
you out of the hot light : you
wanted to move a hand or foot to be
sure you were alive.
So I stayed out at camp and let
Lieutenant Warren tell me about
the girls. This was fifteen years
ago, and IVe forgotten how I felt,
except that the days went along,
one after another, better than they
do now, and I was empty-hearted,
because up North she whose
legend I had loved for three
years was getting married. I saw the
clippings and newspaper
photographs. It was "a romantic wartime
wedding," all very rich and
sad. I felt vividly the dark radiance of
the sky under which it took place
and, as a young snob, was more
envious than sorry.
A day came when I went into
Tarleton for a haircut and ran into
a nice fellow named Bill Knowles,
who was in my time at Harvard.
He'd been in the National Guard
division that preceded us in camp ;
at the last moment he had
transferred to aviation and had been left
behind.
"I'm glad I met you,
Andy," he said with undue seriousness. "I'll
hand you on all my information
before I start for Texas. You see,
there're really only three girls
here "
I was interested ; there was
something mystical about there being
three girls.
" and here's one of them
now."
We were in front of a drug store
and he marched me in and intro-
duced me to a lady I promptly
detested.
"The other two are Ailie
Calhoun and Sally Carrol Happer."
I guessed from the way he
pronounced her name that he was in-
terested in Ailie Calhoun. It was
on his mind what she would be
doing while he was gone ; he
wanted her to have a quiet, uninterest-
ing time.
At my age I don't even hesitate
to confess that entirely unchival-
rous images of Ailie Calhoun that
lovely name rushed into my
mind. At twenty-three there is no
such thing as a preempted beauty ;
though, had Bill asked me, I
would doubtless have sworn in all
sincerity to care for her like a
sister. He didn't ; he was just fretting
out loud at having to go. Three
days later he telephoned me that he
was leaving next morning and he'd
take me to her house that night.
We met at the hotel and walked
uptown through the flowery, hot
twilight. The four white pillars
of the Calhoun house faced the
street, and behind them the
veranda was dark as a cave with hang-
ing, weaving, climbing vines.
When we came up the walk a girl
in a white dress tumbled out of
the front door, crying, "I'm
so sorry I'm late ! " and seeing us, added :
"Why, I thought I heard you
come ten minutes "
She broke off as a chair creaked
and another man, an aviator from
Camp Harry Lee, emerged from the
obscurity of the veranda.
"Why, Canby!" she
cried. "How are you?"
He and Bill Knowles waited with
the tenseness of open litigants.
"Canby, I want to whisper to
you, honey," she said, after just a
second. "You'll excuse us,
Bill."
They went aside. Presently
Lieutenant Canby, immensely dis-
pleased, said in a grim voice,
"Then we'll make it Thursday, but
that means sure." Scarcely
nodding to us, he went down the walk,
the spurs with which he
presumably urged on his aeroplane gleam-
ing in the lamplight.
"Come in I don't just know
your name "
There she was the Southern type
in all its purity. I would have
recognized Ailie Calhoun if I'd
never heard Ruth Draper or read
Marse Chan. She had the
adroitness sugar-coated with sweet, voluble
simplicity, the suggested
background of devoted fathers, brothers
and admirers stretching back into
the South's heroic age, the unfail-
ing coolness acquired in the
endless struggle with the heat. There
Were notes in her voice that
ordered slaves around, that withered
up Yankee captains, and then
soft, wheedling notes that mingled in
unfamiliar loveliness with the
night.
I could scarcely see her in the
darkness, but when I rose to go it
was plain that I was not to
linger she stood in the orange light from
the doorway. She was small and
very blond; there was too much
fever-colored rouge on her face,
accentuated by a nose dabbed clown-
ish white, but she shone through
that like a star.
"After Bill goes I'll be
sitting here all alone night after night.
Maybe you'll take me to the
country-club dances." The pathetic
prophecy brought a laugh from
Bill. "Wait a minute," Ailie mur-
mured. "Your guns are all
crooked."
She straightened my collar pin,
looking up at me for a second with
something more than curiosity. It
was a seeking look, as if she asked,
"Could it be you?" Like
Lieutenant Canby, I marched off unwillingly
into the suddenly insufficient
night.
Two weeks later I sat with her on
the same veranda, or rather she
half lay in my arms and yet
scarcely touched me how she managed
that I don't remember. I was
trying unsuccessfully to kiss her, and
had been trying for the best part
of an hour. We had a sort of joke
about my not being sincere. My
theory was that if she'd let me kiss
her I'd fall in love with her.
Her argument was that I was obviously
insincere.
In a lull between two of these
struggles she told me about her
brother who had died in his
senior year at Yale. She showed me his
picture it was a handsome,
earnest face with a Leyendecker fore-
lock and told me that when she
met someone who measured up to
him she'd marry. I found this
family idealism discouraging; even
my brash confidence couldn't compete
with the dead.
The evening and other evenings
passed like that, and ended with
my going back to camp with the
remembered smell of magnolia
flowers and a mood of vague
dissatisfaction. I never kissed her. We
went to the vaudeville and to the
country club on Saturday nights,
where she seldom took ten
consecutive steps with one man, and she
took me to barbecues and rowdy
watermelon parties, and never
thought it was worth while to
change what I felt for her into love. I
see now that it wouldn't have
been hard, but she was a wise nineteen
and she must have seen that we
were emotionally incompatible. So
I became her confidant instead.
We talked about Bill Knowles. She
was considering Bill; for,
though she wouldn't admit it, a
winter at school in New York and
a prom at Yale had turned her
eyes North. She said she didn't think
she'd marry a Southern man. And
by degrees I saw that she was
consciously and voluntarily
different from these other girls who sang
nigger songs and shot craps in
the country-club bar. That's why Bill
and I and others were drawn to
her. We recognized her.
June and July, while the rumors
reached us faintly, ineffectually,
of battle and terror overseas,
Ailie's eyes roved here and there about
the country-club floor, seeking
for something among the tall young
officers. She attached several,
choosing them with unfailing perspi-
cacity save in the case of
Lieutenant Canby, whom she claimed to
despise, but, nevertheless, gave
dates to "because he was so sincere"
and we apportioned her evenings
among us all summer.
One day she broke all her dates
Bill Knowles had leave and was
coming. We talked of the event
with scientific impersonality
would he move her to a decision ?
Lieutenant Canby, on the contrary,
wasn't impersonal at all ; made a
nuisance of himself. He told her
that if she married Knowles he
was going to climb up six thousand
feet in his aeroplane, shut off
the motor and let go. He frightened
her I had to yield him my last
date before Bill came.
On Saturday night she and Bill
Knowles came to the country club.
They were very handsome together
and once more I felt envious and
sad. As they danced out on the
floor the three-piece orchestra was
playing After You've Gone, in a
poignant incomplete way that I
can hear yet, as if each bar were
trickling off a precious minute of
that time. I knew then that I had
grown to love Tarleton, and I
glanced about half in panic to
see if some face wouldn't come in for
me out of that warm, singing,
outer darkness that yielded up couple
after couple in organdie and
olive drab. It was a time of youth and
war, and there was never so much
love around.
When I danced with Ailie she
suddenly suggested that we go out-
side to a car. She wanted to know
why didn't people cut in on her
tonight ? Did they think she was
already married ?
"Are you going to be?"
"I don't know, Andy.
Sometimes, when he treats me ^s if I were
sacred, it thrills me." Her
voice was hushed and far away. "And
then "
She laughed. Her body, so frail
and tender, was touching mine,
her face was turned up to me, and
there, suddenly, with Bill Knowles
ten yards off, I could have
kissed her at last. Our lips just touched
experimentally; then an aviation
officer turned a corner of the
veranda near us, peered into our
darkness and hesitated.
"Ailie."
"Yes."
"You heard about this
afternoon ?"
"What?" She leaned
forward, tenseness already in her voice.
"Horace Canby crashed. He
was instantly killed."
She got up slowly and stepped out
of the car.
"You mean he was
killed?" she said.
"Yes. They don't know what
the trouble was. His motor "
"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 I"
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, ex-
cept 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 dis-
cussion 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'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.
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 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. 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
toward 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 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. 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 carfare."
She turned quickly. Miss Kitty
Preston, her face curiously flus-
tered, 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 con-
sidered 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
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 ad-
dress? 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 blond
hair. "Good-by."
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 I 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 beaus 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 ; you wait in the
car," I said. "Maybe I can fix this."
And when he reluctantly
retreated: "Oliver, you tell Miss Ailie I
want to see her alone."
After some argument he bore this
message and in a moment re-
turned with a reply :
"Miss Ailie say she don't
want to see that other gentleman abou'
nothing never. She say 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, despair-
ing. 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 I 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 murmur-
ing something about his not being
"sincere," and for the fourth
time I wondered what the word
meant to her. Certainly not con-
stancy ; 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 stupefying. 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 aghast. And
suddenly a peculiar look came into
her face, spread, flickered,
broke into a teary, hysterical smile.
"Isn't he awful?" she
cried in helpless despair. "Isn't he terrible?"
"Hurry up," I said
quickly. "Get your cape. This is our last night."
And I can still feel that last
night vividly, the candlelight that
flickered over the rough boards
of the mess shack, over the frayed
paper decorations left from the
supply company's party, the sad
mandolin down a company 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.
Taps had been played ; there was
no sound but the far-away whinny
of a horse, and a loud persistent
snore at which we laughed, and the
leathery snap of a sentry coming
to port over by the guardhouse.
Craker was on duty ; we others
got into a waiting car, motored into
Tarleton and left Craker's girl.
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 heavy
with lichen and Spanish moss,
and between the fallow cotton
fields along a road white as the rim
of the world. We parked under the
broken shadow of a mill where
there was the sound of running
water and restive squawky birds and
over everything a brightness that
tried to filter in anywhere into
the lost nigger cabins, the
automobile, the fastnesses of the heart.
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. We passed a
cold month on Long Island, marched
aboard a transport with steel
helmets slung at our sides and then
marched off again. 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 noncom-
mittal, 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.
There was only the persistent in-
cinerator smell to remind one of
all that activity and bustle. What
life remained centred 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. A returned
battalion of the National Guard pa-
raded through the streets with
open ranks for their dead, and then
stepped down out of romance
forever and sold you things over the
counters of local stores. Only a
few uniforms mingled with the dinner
coats at the country-club dance.
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 out-
moded 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.
I first happened upon them
walking down Market Street together,
and I don't think I've ever been
so sorry for a couple in my life ;
though I suppose the same
situation was repeating itself in every
city where there had been camps.
Exteriorly Earl had about every-
thing wrong with him that could
be imagined. His hat was green,
with a radical feather ; his suit
was slashed and braided in a grotesque
fashion that national advertising
and the movies have put an end to.
Evidently he had been to his old
barber, for his hair bloused neatly on
his pink, shaved neck. It wasn't
as though he had been shiny and
poor, but the background of
mill-town dance halls and outing clubs
flamed out at you or rather
flamed out at Ailie. For she had never
quite imagined the reality ; in
these clothes even the natural grace of
that magnificent body had
departed. At first he boasted of his fine
job ; it would get them along all
right until he could "see some easy
money." But from the moment
he came back into her world on its
own terms he must have known it
was hopeless. I don't know what
Ailie said or how much her grief
weighed against her stupefaction.
She acted quickly three days
after his arrival, Earl and I went
North together on the train.
"Well, that's the end of
that," he said moodily. "She's a wonder-
ful girl, but too much of a
highbrow for me. I guess she's got to
marry some rich guy that'll give
her a great social position. I can't
see that stuck-up sort of
thing." And then, later : "She said to come
back and see her in a year, but
I'll never go back. This aristocrat
stuff is all right if you got the
money for it, but "
"But it wasn't real,"
he meant to finish. The provincial society in
which he had moved with so much
satisfaction for six months already
appeared to him as affected,
"dudish" and artificial.
"Say, did you see what I saw
getting on the train?" he asked me
after a while. "Two
wonderful janes, all alone. What do you say we
mosey into the next car and ask
them to lunch? I'll take the one in
blue." Halfway down the car
he turned around suddenly. "Say,
Andy," he demanded,
frowning; "one thing how do you sup-
pose she knew I used to command a
street car? I never told her
that."
"Search me."
Ill
This narrative arrives now at one
of the big gaps that stared me
in the face when I began. For six
years, while I finished at Harvard
Law and built commercial
aeroplanes and backed a pavement block
that went gritty under trucks,
Ailie Calhoun was scarcely more than
a name on a Christmas card ;
something that blew a little in my mind
on warm nights when I remembered
the magnolia flowers. Occasion-
ally an acquaintance of Army days
would ask me, "What became
of that blond girl who was so
popular?" but I didn't know. I ran into
Nancy Lamar at the Montmartre in
New York one evening and
learned that Ailie had become
engaged to a man in Cincinnati, had
gone North to visit his family
and then broken it off. She was lovely
as ever and there was always a
heavy beau or two. But neither Bill
Knowles nor Earl Schoen had ever
come back.
And somewhere about that time I
heard that Bill Knowles had
married a girl he met on a boat.
There you are not much of a
patch to mend six years with.
Oddly enough, a girl seen at
twilight in a small Indiana station
started me thinking about going
South. The girl, in stiff pink organdie,
threw her arms about a man who
got off our train and hurried him to
a waiting car, and I felt a sort
of pang. It seemed to me that she was
bearing him off into the lost
midsummer world of my early twenties,
where time had stood still and
charming girls, dimly seen like the
past itself, still loitered along
the dusky streets. I suppose that
poetry is a Northern man's dream
of the South. But it was months
later that I sent off a wire to
Ailie, and immediately followed it to
Tarleton.
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.
"Go on."
"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 be-
came flippant : "How the
Yankees did deceive us poor little South-
ern girls. Ah, me I "
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
judgments 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 re-
peated her objection :
"Nothing there now, cap."
"Never mind. Go there
anyhow."
Twenty minutes later he stopped
on a wide unfamiliar plain pow-
dered 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 race course, 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 contrac-
tors 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 race course," 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 so 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
forever.