A Young Man's Heart (14 page)

These rumors soon found ample confirmation. People who had business that took them by the railroad station in the early mornings noticed lounging groups of unkempt flea-bitten soldiers waiting to entrain, their rifles stacked in little tripods up and down the length of the platforms. The sweethearts, wives and sisters of these luckless ones, many of them employed as servants in foreign households, helped to spread the general uneasiness farther afield by relaying to their mistresses all the fantastic and highly colored reports they had gotten from their men. Orders were posted making it a military offense to spread false rumors or in any way “disturb the public tranquillity.” A number of arrests following this, which at any other time would have gone unnoticed and which may well have been caused by nothing more than shoplifting, were immediately attributed to it. It was said, further, that the suspects had been denied a trial and handed over to a firing-squad forthwith. Suddenly the newspapers appeared with great blank patches scattered throughout their columns. A day or two later they suspended publication entirely. The telegraph wires had been cut, some said. At the telegraph offices themselves, governmentally owned, this was indignantly denied, the excuse being given that a severe electrical storm several miles out in the hills had brought the wires down and they were in process of being repaired. People reminded one another that this was not the usual time of year for electrical storms and that the sky had been cloudless in every direction for the past six weeks. An operator, in one instance, was said, at the risk of his own welfare, to have advised an elderly German woman who had once befriended him, to leave the city without losing a moment’s time. He had been thrown into jail for it, the story went.

With the arrival of the first foreign refugees, a handful of mining superintendents, travelers, engineers, coffee and banana growers and sugar-cane planters and their wives, trickling back into the city from isolated outlying points all in a state of the highest excitement and delighting at their own unlooked-for importance, uncertainty became certainty, the tension broke and a mad scramble to be the first to leave was on. These people, through their own vanity and shortsightedness, created a panic where there had been no panic before. They explained away their own cowardice and unwarranted desertion of their posts and responsibilities by vivid, and for the most part, imaginative accounts of arson, pillage, seizure of property, grave personal danger and last-moment escapes. According to them, the country was up in arms, it was no longer safe for foreigners. So-and-so had been butchered in cold blood at the door of his hacienda. A few hours later so-and-so arrived in town himself, as frightened as anyone else but otherwise sound and untouched. Meanwhile the hegira had already begun and only a miracle could have stopped it. Each succeeding train to go was more crowded than the one before. Disorganization proceeded rapidly. Pullmans were done away with almost at once. Tickets were literally fought for, and unscrupulous employees made small fortunes selling them at two and three times their fixed amounts. Soon passes took their place entirely, signed slips giving no more than access to the train. Securing a seat then became a matter of bribery. People were willing to stand all night in the aisles between the seats so long as they made sure of reaching the coast. Socially correct women considered themselves fortunate to ride in the second class carriages alongside families of Indians and professional beggars, afflicted with vermin. A highly improbable story drifted back on the lips of trainmen that one such woman had bartered her pearl necklace for a share in some food that her seat- neighbors had brought with them. Considering the innate simplicity of people of that class, it was probably no more than a string of beads.

It took Eleanor a matter of several days to realize that no one any longer cared just what dress she chose to appear in, or whom her smiles were directed at, or in fact whether she lived or died or what became of her. People had scattered to their rooms, were hovering anxiously over the lids of their trunks. She found difficulty even in securing a partner for the tennis courts. She discovered herself lording it over emptiness. There had been no good-bys. Each day some additional face, grown gradually familiar, was missing. A certain number of these defections she found particularly hard to brook.

“Have you seen Mr. Nichols anywhere about? He promised me to reserve this court for us, and I’ve been waiting out here for over ten minutes.”

“He left last evening, with a lot of other people.”

(“The coward! If I ever see him again I’ll cut him completely.”)

Or, “Mrs. Galbraith must have overslept to-day. She’s always in that end chair there by the door.”

“Oh, didn’t you know? She took the morning train.”

(“I’m glad,” thought Eleanor, “she saw me in my mauve velvet at least before she left.”)

And Blair must have smiled inwardly, with sardonic intent, as often as he saw her face drop on gathering these pieces of chance information, the only adieux she ever got. One by one the objects of her attention were bursting asunder like so many tinsel Christmas ornaments.

“We’ll stay,” she said fiercely, “we’ll show them we’re not afraid. The silly goats, all rushing off!”

And she displayed her scorn of them, and incidentally revealed her lacerated amour-propre, in the only way that occurred to her: by becoming twice as casual as before, and more addicted to trifles than ever.

While she saw perspiring porters carry trunks and other luggage out through the main entrance of the hotel and pile them out on the open pavement in indiscriminate heaps beyond all capacity of the carts and wagons to do away with, she sat in the patio with a box of chocolates someone had given her open beside her, vapidly nibbling, one leg crossed over the other.

A woman rushed by on the way to her quarters with a welter of dresses flung over one arm. She paused to stare.

“Aren’t you going, Mrs. Giraldy?”

“I don’t know,” Eleanor said, looking up innocently. “Blair’s down at a jeweler’s getting his wrist-watch repaired just now.”

“I shouldn’t advise you to wait until it’s too late. One never can tell which train will be the last.” She hurried on, almost as though she were vexed that anyone could preserve such tranquillity at a time like this. Which was precisely the impression Eleanor had wished to convey.

When Blair returned she greeted him, with what he at times was wont to consider as typical frivolity and then again at other times rather liked in her, by insisting much against his wishes upon popping a chocolate between his lips. He loathed chocolates.

“Is your watch all right now?” she asked.

He looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t know anything was wrong with it.”

She laughed gleefully. She had believed her own improvisation.

“I told one of these nervous wrecks you had gone to have it repaired, to try and make her understand how calm and unmoved we both feel. I never saw such chicken-hearted people in all my life. Some of them are doing their packing almost in public. It’s like the last day in Pompeii.”

“At the same time,” Blair answered, “it might be just as well to do a little packing ourselves. I don’t see any reason for our remaining much longer. We have been here since November. And I
must
start work soon, Eleanor. There’s absolutely no need of going into the money Sasha left us. If we have any family later, she intended it for—”

“Your arguments sound weak to me,” she said truculently, “and I won’t be subjected to the inconvenience of those trains while this stampede is going on. It will be over within a day or two. After all, there aren’t so many of them. And we’ll go as we came, at leisure. This place has been so divine. I want to leave it with a sweet taste in my mouth.”

“Still, if anything happens to you, how will I feel about it, with no one but myself to blame? And Eleanor, if that woman you spoke to has been about town to-day, she knows you told her a fib, because all the jewelry shops have let their shutters down. I noticed that myself. And it isn’t an encouraging sign.”

“Yes, but who buys jewelry here? Only the foreigners. And you can’t convince me,” she went on, with the excited air of pleading some special cause of her own, “that the people here themselves, the natives I suppose you might call them, have any idea of leaving their homes and gamboling off. I
know,
because I made signs to our chambermaid and asked her, and she made signs back and told me not to be afraid, it was just politics.”

He laughed in spite of himself and said, “Suppose you had ever so slightly misunderstood just one single sign of hers, mightn’t that throw her whole argument out?”

“Blair, I want a gardenia,” she cried happily, “a gardenia for my black dress. Send someone out for me. No,
you
go yourself. Oh, it must be perfect-looking, just as if it were made of wax!”

“You deserve a thousand of them, for being able to want just one so keenly,” he assured her. How like a silly child, how like Eleanor.

But in the face of what was happening about them, the question of whether to go or whether to stay was perpetually being renewed between them. Never would she give in that they were to go like this, like these other people, snatching at their grips and umbrellas, as she put it, and flying.

“How can we have any respect left for each other ever after if we do? You’ll think I left in order to be near someone else who was going at the same time. I’ll think you left because you were as afraid for yourself as for me. We just will, I know we will. We won’t be able to help it.”

Which was well nigh the perfect argument, not so much because it was true but because it was so unanswerable. It effectively silenced him, in so far as it partly questioned his own courage. Yet at times he found himself wondering if this elusive stubbornness on her part might not well be due to some outside influence, pulling at cross-purposes to his own in prevailing on her to stay.

One evening she said, “I spoke to Serrano downstairs in the patio just now as I was coming in. He stopped by here at the hotel to find out what we intended doing. I told him I didn’t know, but that just because a good many people had lost their heads and were running away was no reason we should do it too.”

“There’s where you’re wrong,” he told her. “We have far more reason to leave than any of the others. We have no business here, nothing to hold us. We should have gone weeks ago.”

“Well, we stayed, didn’t we?” she exclaimed, “and personally I think that right now is the worst possible time to leave. And so does he.”

“Oh, does he?”

“Even if we did manage to get down to the coast,” she went on without noticing, “the boats are all crowded right now. And the hotels down there are turning people away. Where would we go? Sleep in the streets?”

“Very few visitors,” he told her humorously, “stayed in Belgium in the summer of 1914 just because they had no reservations waiting for them in the Paris hotels.”

“Now you’re letting your imagination run away with you. That was a case of real war. Even the people up home know what a revolution means in these countries—”

“I doubt it.”

“And after all, what is there to be really afraid of? Are you really afraid, Blair? If you are, tell me, and we’ll go now, at once. But you must tell me whether it’s really me you’re worried about or yourself. Because I’m not frightened in the least, and I’d much rather wait for all this to be over with. But if you yourself—”

“Now see here,” he said angrily, “that’s one point I’ve always been rather sensitive on. My father, I remember, used more or less the same argument when I was a boy. You should be above that, Eleanor. Or don’t you know me at all ?”

“I know you, Blair,” she murmured, lifting her face to be kissed. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

“My Eleanor,” he said, refusing the offer of her lips in a way that made it appear he had not noticed the gesture. “I wouldn’t care if I—died here. But why should you be exposed to any risk, when there’s no need for it?”

In the end, he reasoned, how could she really be expected to divine the clammy suspense that hung stifled over the city day by day and hour by hour, unacquainted as she was with the language and barred from contact with the pulses of street-life, even to the limited extent permitted him himself?

“Risk?” she was saying. “I still can’t see where any risk enters into it. Supposing worse came to worst, we don’t have to stay here at the hotel. Serrano said we can go over to his legation at any time and we’ll be perfectly safe. He’d see that they took us in. We’d be under their protection, and don’t forget they have diplomatic immunity or whatever it is.”