Лучшие истории о любви / Best love stories - Маевская И. - Страница 3

“Sometimes,” she said, “Clementina exhausts me. I’m afraid she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and that does get monotonous. But Gen. Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with Clementina at the piano – he is a widower, you know – and stands there pulling his white goatee. ‘And how are the semiquavers and the demisemiquavers[25] progressing?’ he always asks.

“Clementina has such a funny little cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting attached to her, she is so gentle and highbred. Gen. Pinkney’s brother was once Minister to Bolivia.”

And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five, a two and a one, and laid them beside Delia’s earnings.

“Sold that watercolour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,” he announced.

“Don’t joke with me,” said Delia, “not from Peoria!”

“All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen scarf. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and thought it was a windmill at first. He bought it anyhow, though. He ordered another one to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.”

“I’m so glad you’ve kept on,” said Delia, heartily. “You’re bound to win, dear. Thirty – three dollars! We never had so much to spend before. We’ll have oysters tonight.”

“ And filet mignon with champignons,” said Joe. “Where is the olive fork?”

On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his $18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark paint from his hands.

Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages.

“How is this?” asked Joe after the usual greetings. Delia laughed, but not very joyously.

“Clementina,” she explained, “insisted upon a Welsh rabbit[26] after her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at 5 in the afternoon. I know Clementina isn’t in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But Gen. Pinkney! – Joe, that old man nearly went distracted.[27] He rushed downstairs and sent somebody – they said the furnaceman[28] or somebody in the basement – out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”

“What’s this?” asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some white strands beneath the bandages.

“It’s something soft,” said Delia, “that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you sell another sketch?” She had seen the money on the table.

“Did I?” said Joe; “just ask the man from Peoria. He isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another landscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?”

“Five o’clock, I think,” said Dele, sadly. “The iron – I mean the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen Gen. Pinkney, Joe, when – ”

“Sit down here a moment, Dele,” said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.

“What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?” he asked.

She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of Gen. Pinkney; but finally down went her head and out came the truth and tears.

“I couldn’t get any pupils,” she confessed. “And I couldn’t bear to have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twenty-fourth street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General Pinkney and Clementina, don’t you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You’re not angry, are you, Joe? And if I hadn’t got the work you mightn’t have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.”

“He wasn’t from Peoria,” said Joe, slowly.

“Well, it doesn’t matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe – and – kiss me, Joe – and what made you ever suspect that I wasn’t giving music lessons to Clementina?”

“I didn’t,” said Joe, “until tonight. And I wouldn’t have then, only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine room[29] this afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron.[30] I’ve been firing the engine[31] in that laundry for the last two weeks.”

“And then you didn’t – “

“My purchaser from Peoria,” said Joe, “and Gen. Pinkney are both creations of the same art – but you wouldn’t call it either painting or music.”

And then they both laughed, and Joe began:

“When one loves one’s Art no service seems – ”

But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. “No,” she said – “just ‘When one loves.’”

After Atlanta’s Southern charm, we all underestimated Tarleton. It was a little hotter there than anywhere we’d been – a dozen rookies collapsed the first day in that Georgia sun. I stayed out at camp and let Lieutenant Warren tell me about the girls. This was fifteen years ago, and I’ve 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 who 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.

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 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 introduced 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 interested in Ailie Calhoun – what a lovely name. It was on his mind what she would be doing while he was gone; he wanted her to have a quiet, uninteresting time.

At my age I don’t even hesitate to confess that images of Ailie Calhoun that rushed into my mind were not chivalrous at all. At twenty-three there is no such thing as a preempted beauty;[32] though, had Bill asked me, I would doubtless have sworn in all sincerity to care for her like a sister. He didn’t; he just worried about 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 hanging, weaving, climbing vines.

When we came up the walk a girl in a white dress went 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 – ”