The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page A

It’s not ‘on’ again. I have no claim on you. I’ve had my chance. Making a mess of things hardly entitles me to another.”
    â€œOh, ‘entitles.’” He shrugged his shoulders, almost in irritation as he repeated her word. “When women say they’re not ‘entitled’ to something, what they usually mean is that any man who’s not an utter heel would make sure that they get it.”
    The tears started to Maud’s eyes. It was the tone that he had sometimes used in court, or to people whom he thought little of, like Lila, or to the world. Never to her.
    â€œHalsted,” she protested in a low voice. “That’s not fair.”
    He looked down into his glass. “Maybe not.”
    â€œAnd it’s not like you to be unfair,” she continued. “It isn’t as if I were expecting you to fall all over me. I know it would be a miracle if you had any feeling left.”
    He looked even more sullen at this. “But you still feel sorry for yourself,” he retorted.
    Maud put her napkin on the table and reached for her cigarettes. “Good night, Colonel,” she said crisply. “There’s nothing like auld lang syne, is there?”
    â€œNothing.”
    She got up. “You needn’t worry about taking me back,” she said. “I can find my way.”
    â€œOh, sit down,” he said roughly, but in a more human tone. “We’ve got a whole bottle of whiskey here. I don’t suppose you expect me to get through it alone?”
    â€œI’m sure,” she said with dignity, “that I don’t care how you get through it. There must be plenty of other officers with desk jobs in London who can help you out.”
    He caught her by the arm and pulled her back into her chair. “Desk jobs, hell,” he muttered and poured her a drink. “Now drink that and shut up. I wish to hell I did have a desk job. Would you like to know where I was last week?”
    â€œWe’re warned,” she said, “not to encourage officers who drink too much and start revealing military information.”
    He finished his drink in a gulp and leaned his head on his hands. “Oh, Christ, Maud,” he said.
    She said nothing.
    â€œI don’t know why you had to come back,” he continued. “The same prim little girl. Just a bit older, that’s all. I’d gotten over you, you know. I mean it, God damn it. And I was enjoying my melancholy. I liked feeling a hero and thinking of the little girl back home who didn’t give a rap about me, and wouldn’t she be sorry now? Oh, I could spit.” He reached again for the bottle and poured himself another drink. “Now I don’t know what I feel. I wish like hell, Maud, that I could say it’s all the way it was, but I’m damned if I know.”
    She believed him, believed him absolutely, but there was no humiliation or pain in it. For her the long uncertainty had ended. In her excitement his doubts seemed almost irrelevant.
    â€œYou needn’t worry about it, Halsted,” she said. “It seems so fair.”
    He looked at her suspiciously. “Fair?” he repeated. “You must be an icebox, Maud. How else could you talk that way?”
    â€œIt’s just that I don’t know how to talk,” she said humbly. “You know that.”
    He smiled at her. “Oh, you can talk, Maud.”
    â€œYou can make your life very difficult by being complicated,” she went on. “I ought to know something about that. You can think you ought to be feeling all sorts of things that you don’t. The people around you don’t help. I’ve been through that. I was a fool.”
    He stared hard at her for a moment, but as if he were concentrating on something else. He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something and then closed it.
    â€œMaud,” he said finally, looking down again at the table,