A Young Man's Heart (17 page)

Not that he mistrusted her sincerity. But she was Eleanor, she was woman. She could be reassured. He alone had no one to reassure him, ever.

“I’ll close the window if it bothers you,” he said quietly.

They reentered the room, and she sank into the chair before her dressing table, her back to the mirror for once.

“Blair,
give
me a cigarette, please do.”

“What for?” he said, tender and harsh at the same time, “you don’t need one any more than I do.”

The candles burned fitfully, throwing on the walls grotesque shadows it was best not to look at too closely. Outside in the corridor an occasional footstep went by their room, once or twice a distant door opened, as though someone, alarmed, were standing behind it listening.

An hour dragged by, and the night would not outlast their waning candles after all, they found out. One could in time, they now both learned, grow used to anything. Wonderful the elasticity of the human mind. When they went out on the balcony a second time, a single robe thrown over the two of them, it was no longer wholly to listen to the satanic orchestration that continued unabated somewhere in the distance: it was also to greet the first silver-green light diluting the eastern sky, with little cries of restored confidence and kisses on the single fist that their two knotted hands made.

When they woke up it surprised them at first, looking through the window, to see the sun directly overhead and casting only dwarf shadows instead of, in laboriously ascending, making of the uneven roof-tops below it a checkerboard of black and white. And the noon stillness, broken only by small casual noises of the street, made them think what they had heard during the night had been a dream. “It’s gone!” said Eleanor. They dressed and, forgetting chocolate and all, which for that matter no one had brought to them, hurried downstairs to learn the outcome.

The quiet they discovered to be that of catastrophe. The government had collapsed immediately after the first skirmishes in the suburbs began. That is to say, it had disintegrated into the unheroic spectacle furnished by a dozen or more banal middle-aged gentlemen decamping in automobiles with their blinds drawn, attempting at top speed to break out of the city in various directions, and for the most part meeting with “accidents” en route. There had been a regrettable accident in the courtyard of the presidential palace, and the body of the late president now lay in one of the churches, covered with the national flag.

The revolutionary party had taken over the city without further opposition, the troops that cheered them the loudest being those last sent against them, and at once set about establishing a government more to their liking, in other words, one in which they themselves held office. Constitutional guarantees (which had never been much to fall back on anyway) were suspended while a new constitution embodying their own nebulous theories was being drafted. Meanwhile generals and lieutenant-commanders of forty-eight hours’ standing, who a week before had handled a firearm for the first time in their lives, preëmpted the houses of the wealthy and dismissed their owners into the street. The best was none too good for them. Food, wine, furniture, diamonds for their camp-women, imported motor-cars. Protest was useless, resistance suicidal. They could, and frequently did, shoot on sight those who pained their new-found dignity.

Soldiers (“heroes of liberty” was the favorite designation in their flowery and ceaseless manifestoes) were quartered at random about the city, in public buildings, churches, and even museums, and since the greater part were accompanied by their technical wives (“soldierettes”), meals were cooked at altars and charcoal mustaches added to the male figures on priceless canvases dating from the days of the Spaniards.

Not for generations had there been such utter disregard for personal immunity and the rights of individuals; it was a throw-back to the times of the viceroys and the early dictators. Now and then excesses that were simply incredible took place on the streets in broad daylight. For instance, the amoureuse of a swarthy colonel, riding by his side in a pilfered motor, made a wager with him on how expert her marksmanship would be and extracting his revolver from its holster, calmly fired at two young girls of good family who happened to be passing in another car. One sister dropped lifeless across the other’s lap. There was no one to whom the family of the young women could appeal. There was no longer redress from injury or outrage. Anarchy stalked the city.

CHAPTER SIX

Himself

1

To the hotel then came the mighty general Heronimo Xavier Jesus Maria Palacios with all his aides and retinue, including his own cook (lest the general’s food be poisoned), two or three decorative damsels n
ow
learning to wear French heels for the first time, a Haytian negro who incessantly played the guitar but was said to be a valued spy in the general’s employ (though how he could escape detection, in view of his color, was problematical), together with supernumeraries and hangers-on galore, and evicting a Brazilian family that were the only ones who remained and had occupied the same suite for upward of four years, took over the entire ground floor and set up his establishment therein. Needless to say, without any thought of compensating the hotel management. A hint to that effect on their part would have incurred disaster. The patio, though it presumably remained open to all guests alike, became no more than an annex to the general’s quarters, ornamented at all hours of the day by the lounging, expectorating figures of members of his bodyguard, who sat sprawled in chairs, with their naked rifles over their knees and their feet provocatively extended out before them so that anyone wishing to pass had to pick their steps and edge aside. Bestially indifferent to or else actually ignorant of the existence of bathrooms, they sought carpeted corners, regardless of who might take their way down the corridors. The hotel, to those who had been compelled
to
remain in it, became a loathsome inferno. The dining room alone was spared, since a great clatter of dishes (as much in the way of breakage as usage), snatches of song and din of conviviality, usually at some such hour as twelve or one in the morning, told that the general fed in his private apartments.

At every turn she made, Eleanor found herself stared at; in the passageways no longer brightened by electricity, on the stairs, at
the hotel entrance,
there was always some individual or some group to pass with lowered eyes, not venturing even a single glance to judge them by, tightening her grip on Blair’s
 
arm a little. Stares had once been pleasant things for her to face. She had dressed to meet them, but sometimes she had walked past them as though unconscious that they were being given her, and sometimes she had let it be seen that she knew, pleased nevertheless. They had been martial music to her, quickening the pulse of her vanity. Not these though. There was a world of difference in these. She did not have to be told by Blair to keep her eyes on the ground. It was as though she had kept a store of just such knowledge hidden within her all her life, to be revealed and made use of at the opportune moment. As a woman she could feel the altered nuance in these glances. As an ordinary human being she could detect the hostility, the mockery and menace, as in passing a cage of tigers or savage apes with the bars let down. These were not men and women interested in the cut of her dress or in signaling a frivolous message to her eyes. This was a species altogether different. At times she would have liked to run amuck among them with a riding-whip, so that they would never dare look twice at her again. Each evening he and she walked with quickened steps, looking neither to the left nor right of them, to the dining room and found comparative shelter awhile. And leaving it, they walked again with quickened steps, until they had reached their room and closed the door behind them. So far so good. Another day's safety scored.

One morning Eleanor said she must have exercise. “Or I shall die. I’ll play a little tennis with the proprietor’s wife. She’s fat and wants to reduce.
They
never go near the court. It’s in the rear, you know.”

The bright, rational morning hours seemed safe enough, with every window in the back of the hotel looking down on the tennis courts. And the proprietor’s wife would be more of a protection than he would himself. She could not, after all, be affronted with impunity by any common soldier; she was too used to dealing with her own waiters and porters.

“But don't wear that sweater. It’s too tight over the bust. You’ll be insulted going through the patio.”

“I’ll sling it around my neck. There, that's ugly enough. And this green eye-shade.”

In an hour he strolled out to the court to see how they were getting along. No one was in sight but the two women. He noted with satisfaction that from a distance the plump matron, with her orange bandeau and knee-kilt, caught the eye more readily than Eleanor, who looked like a boy in a long shift. He waved to them and turned away.

A very short while later, however, the proprietor’s wife reached the end of her strength, and soaked to the skin and almost collapsing, she quitted the court and sought her own room. Eleanor immediately did likewise. Just as she was in sight of the stairs, though, a man standing guard at the general’s door stiffened into sudden immobility, the door opened, and the general himself emerged. He had an extremely oily face, the color of mahogany. He was picking his teeth with a matchstick.

The passageway would have been wide enough for two people to pass without their elbows touching but for the sentinel standing there rigidly against the wall, rifle-barrel to shoulder. Eleanor stood back to let the general by. He made a ludicrous bow instead and showing his teeth presented her with a gallant speech. “You first, enchanting señorita.” Eleanor understood only the noun by which he had addressed her, and sidling by, turned on the lowest step to exclaim passionately, “No señorita, señora!” (the only three words she had at her command, since they were the same in either language). After which she fairly flew up the stairs, hearing the general's explosive roar of amusement well above the next landing.

She did not know at first whether to tell Blair or not about what had happened. But it would worry him even more than it worried her, so she finally decided not to. The general’s bow and gallant speech had cost him his legendary attributes as far as she was concerned. He was no more to her now than a repulsive man. That they had met face to face was, of course, a freak of coincidence. Undoubtedly it would never happen again. Out of all the hundreds of minutes in the course of a day they had accidentally happened to choose an identical one, he to be leaving his quarters, she to be coming away from the tennis court. How could it conceivably occur a second time? And Blair would never allow her to play tennis again if she informed him of it.

She did, however, tell the proprietor’s wife about it the next time she saw her. “There’s nothing for you to be frightened about in that,” observed that matron sagely. “You have your husband.”

“Yes, but Blair says
he
has power of life and death over the whole city right now.
He
could have him shot if he opened his mouth to him.”

While making this portentous statement she was bouncing a ball up and down on the ground with the flat of her racquet. The proprietor’s wife was hardly to be blamed, therefore, for refusing to take her concern seriously at the moment

“Come, let’s begin,” she said, going behind the net, “I feel fatter than ever.”

Two days later Eleanor encountered the general a second time. He was standing in the patio talking to two of his underlings. He held a brown-paper cigarette between his fingers, and a girl clung to his arm, one of as little moment to him as the other, it seemed. Out at the door a car waited, its uncared-for chassis streaked with dust.

Eleanor stole a surreptitious glance at the girl as she went by. She wore pink lace stockings through which her tan skin peered and patent-leather opera pumps, the heel of one awry. The general appeared not to see Eleanor. She had an uncomfortable feeling that he had turned his head to look after her as soon as she had passed, however. Someone, the girl most likely, gave a derisive laugh.

In her room, with the door safely locked, she determined to play no more tennis. He had spoken to her the very first time he had set eyes on her. He might speak to her again. Let the proprietor’s wife grow elephantine, if need be. She would risk no further chance meetings in the corridors and the patio.

Blair knocked. “Why did you lock yourself in?” he asked when she had opened the door for him. It was needless to tell him, she thought; he would only worry himself sick.

“I was changing my dress. I’ve never forgotten how that waiter sailed in on us the first morning we were here.”

It was in his mind to say that she appeared not to have remembered it until to-day, but he refrained.

Eleanor’s renunciation of tennis, she soon discovered, had, like their attempted departure, come a day too late. That evening as they returned from the dining room, reached the top of the stairs, and turned toward the corridor that led to their room, they halted abruptly, drew closer to one another, aghast.

“Someone’s standing there,” Eleanor murmured in terror, “there’s someone by our door.”

In the gloom of the passageway with its depressing oil-lamp hanging in place of an electric light, they made out the figure of a man.

“Who’s there?” Blair called in Spanish.

The individual, who had apparently been engaged in knocking on the door to their empty room, turned and walked toward them. A succession of feeble gleams down his person as he passed under the lamp turned out to be the buttons of a uniform.

“You are the husband of a lady called Guerardi?”

“Lo soy,”
answered Blair guardedly.

“General Palacios sends you his compliments and desires you both to have dinner with him tomorrow night. He would like to ask you some questions about the United States.”

Blair, his hands slightly tremulous, fumbled for a cigarette, though he had trampled one underfoot only the moment before.

“Really?” he said, not in the usual negligently sophisticated sense of the word, but as though intent on discovering whether the message were actually in good faith or not.

By the flare of the match the under-officer (Eleanor could not take her eyes off the gilt eagle on his sleeve) evidently could see how discomposed his features had become.

“It’s nothing for you to be disturbed about,” he said patronizingly. “The Northamerican minister was called home, you know. I suppose he wants to ask your opinion, whether your government will recognize us or not.”

“My wife is not feeling well. If your general will excuse her—”

“It might be much better if she were to come with you,” the envoy observed pointedly. “It is not agreeable to the general to be treated so. One can never tell how he might feel about it.”

With that Blair, temporarily at least, made up his mind. Uncertain though he was as to just what motives underlay this unwelcome overture, coming as it did from a personage he had never to his knowledge set eyes on in his life before, one thing he was sure of: it was decidedly unwise to return a direct refusal. They were after all penned up in the hotel under this comic-opera general’s immediate surveillance and it was best not to turn his laughable and clumsy lack of finesse into pique and resentment. Besides, they had all the following day in which to decide what was to be done about it.

“At what hour?” he asked placidly.

“I was not told. Any hour to your taste will do.”

“Thank the general for me,” Blair said in a husky voice, forcing himself to pronounce words much against his wishes, purely as a matter of policy. The emissary left them and trotted down the stairs, holding his hand out to the wall like a man who is not yet used to staircases.

He had then to tell Eleanor what she had already half-guessed (at any rate, to the extent that “that greasy general” was attempting to communicate with them in some way). And when she learned what the gist of the matter was, a curiously perverse thought, unknown to Blair, took away all her dislike of the ordeal. “I will show that cheap girl down there how really well a refined woman can dress!”

The night and a morning brought them no adequate solution of their problem, though they talked of nothing else. They had, Blair especially, a feeling that it would be highly imprudent to accept the unknown quantity that the general’s hospitality represented, or become in any way familiar with him, or he with them. On the other hand it was a thousand times more imprudent not to. He could make life distinctly unpleasant, not to say precarious, for them within the next few days, before they had a chance to remove themselves beyond his jurisdiction. Which now, moreover, extended over the entire city and the whole country as well, excepting the seacoast and the foreign legations. (Serrano!) They said the American minister had been recalled. It was now the Argentine legation or nothing. Still, was the crisis sufficient to justify such a step? One could not thrust oneself on the protection of an alien government simply because one had received an invitation to dinner. Yet on the face of things, how preposterous the general’s alleged excuse that he hoped to acquire information from him, on matters in which he, Blair, was certainly the less well-versed of the two. He, an obscure sojourner at an isolated hotel, a being of no official importance whatsoever either at home or abroad. Was the man as ingenuous as all that? Or had his child-mind been unconsciously influenced by his native village, which he had left only a month before, by the American films of the vintage of 1918 in which the sons of Columbia were all alike omniscient beings, charged with important matters of state, capable of outwitting kaiser and king?