A Young Man's Heart (7 page)

Genaro Hopley-Woolrich, second from left, as he looked in December 1898 when he was in his middle to late twenties.

Cornell Woolrich as he looked in the late 1920s when he was roughly the age of his father in the picture on the opposite page.

CHAPTER THREE

His Friend

1

Suddenly
Blair was sixteen and was found to be not quite sufficiently educated. He could read and write (but never did) and add a little and draw people’s faces with considerable accuracy (and often did), and spoke two languages and thought in either one with equal ease, but he had long since forgotten what countries bordered the Caspian Sea and who followed Elizabeth on the throne of England—or even that she had been on the throne of England at any time.

This all came out one evening when he had been unwise enough to sample a quantity of whisky and water in the presence of a number of people. Their attention was drawn to him, and someone asked what he did.

“Nothing,” answered Giraldy succinctly.

A shower of suggestions immediately descended from all sides.

“Send him to the States, this is no country for a growing boy.”

“In France are the best schools,” observed one of the butterflies sagely.

Giraldy turned to her and said, “Then, will you pay for the passage?”

She parted her rouged lips in a derisive smile. “If I had the monee to go back, you think I would be here?”

Blair ended the discussion as far as he himself was concerned by turning his back on the lot of them and going in to bed. He felt sure, however, that it proceeded uninterruptedly for some little time after that. All the next day, out in the sunshine with Mariquita, he had a strange feeling that every minute must be made to count, that all this was coming swiftly to an end. Things he had never taken notice of before suddenly became precious—the golden flood of sunshine, the apoplectic bougainvillea bursting over the tops of flaky pastel walls and seeming to crack them asunder where some forgotten earthquake had left its marks, the infinitely old houses, built in the time of sedan chairs and powdered heads and the Inquisition, already old when Wellington was fighting Waterloo, a few with wires for transmitting electric current strung along the open faces of their striped and garlanded inner walls, brown and gray now where once they had been rose and blue, last papered perhaps when heads were falling into the guillotine baskets of far-away Paris, the Paris that to-day once again sent its birds of paradise to the four quarters of the earth, fleeing from the roar of cannon and the death- agonies of the musical-powder-box civilization they had known.

Sixteen though he was, the prospect of a change held no delight in it for Blair. The things he saw about him had endeared themselves to him through a slow succession of years. Here every stone, every tree, every surrounding, counted for something and could not be lightly given up. The old stone bridge astride the canal, whose arch coupled with its own reflection in the glassy water beneath to create a perfect oval, a transparent egg through which the blue sky shone. The mountain, “Our Lady of the Snows,” whose white cone overlooked the city from the south, days away, yet in clear weather seeming close enough to reach out and touch. Countless old churches of the days of the viceroys, melon-pink in the noon sunlight, with rows of gray doves perched along their ledges. And the syrupy tolling of their bells, to tell the hour by. And the doll-like images that emerged from them on feast days to parade the streets, blue-robed and flower-crowned, borne beneath starry canopies in a galaxy of lighted candles. The orange trolley-cars with their green trailers crammed with Indians, gliding swift and bright between tall rows of eucalyptus trees, with little bleats of an electric bell at widely spaced crossings. And the rain that fell each day at just such and such an hour, blackening the glaring white of the streets and causing a perfume of crushed flowers and dead unburied things to rise in the air everywhere. All these things he knew and already loved, and felt he could not do without.

In contrast, the Northland, visioned now only as a cheerless impersonal wilderness of canyons sunk between caked masses of tall buildings, where the sun never penetrated and layer upon layer of discolored snow collected all through the winter, where the streets were given numbers and not names, was no longer seen through Sasha’s eyes, idol of her dreams. He began to fear and loathe it. And the thought of school, horrible enough in itself at any time, became all the more gruesome in this alien setting. He should have gone on attending school here, then this might never have happened. “Bluff,” that was the right word in this case. He thought regretfully of the school he had gone to in Sasha’s time—the characteristic laxity of the discipline, the smocks they wore, like girls’ dresses, the singing of the ridiculous native anthem, which sounded a good deal like a music-hall two-step, the three-hour siesta from eleven until two each day.

But the decree had gone forth and there was no escaping it. Moreover, it became increasingly apparent that Giraldy wanted to be rid of Blair. At table, for some weeks past, he had formed a habit of occasionally looking at Blair as though his presence irritated him. One night, patting his mouth gingerly with a napkin at the end of their meal, he suddenly inquired:

“What clothes have you got?”

Blair glanced down at his own form.

“Just these,” he said, “I have two other shirts in my room, and a blue tie.”

“That all you have?” Giraldy remarked with polite interest. “You’re not much for dress, are you?”

Blair smiled diffidently.

Giraldy then said, “I’ve booked you on the Spanish Mail that goes out at the end of the month. You’re going to school in France.”

Blair grew cold and a little sick.

“Not New York?”

“It’s a lot cheaper than New York. Mlle. Reynaud’s relatives can look after you when you get there.”

The relatives of a bird of paradise!

“But in New York—”

“I haven’t her address,” Giraldy said impatiently, reading his thought. “She may have left there by now.”

“But the war is over
there,”
exclaimed Blair aghast.

“Not in Bordeaux,” Giraldy laughed, “and anyway, that should make it all the more interesting to you. At eighteen I had already been all through the Boxer War in China and was fighting head-hunters in the Philippines.”

How explain that he did not want to spend years of his life in a strange part of the world?

“How about the blockade, can anyone get through it?”

“It’s a Spanish boat. They have safe conducts to touch at Vigo once a week. You’re showing more yellow than I thought you would. Perhaps you’d like to stay here and make lace. That girl Renée,” he said bitingly, “sailed alone from a French port last year. They ‘got’ the ship, and she was in an open boat in the Bay of Biscay for twenty-four hours. Five days later she sailed a second time, with everything gone but the clothes she wore on her back, and got through the barred zone, by Jove, and landed here with a smile on her face.”

Blair felt like saying, “Who paid her passage?”

“Pluck, wasn’t it? And
you
—” Giraldy favored him with a grimace of bitter disgust, to take the place of the unspoken thought.

“And
you,”
thought Blair in his turn. A man to whom the height of youthful endeavor had been firing at yellow and brown peasants. A man who had no doubt overlooked all the beauty of a strange world, the temples and the sunsets and the moonlit waters, in his haste to be at some ill-famed house in the back alleys of Tientsin or Manila. A man who would send his son halfway around the world, to live among strangers in a land of rumbling terrors, to make room for a soiled mannequin. (Blair knew by now; the motive had slowly dawned on him.)

Giraldy stood up, flung his crumpled napkin down, and turning as he was about to leave the room, said: “Well, you’re going, like it or not.”

Blair sat there, expressionless, until, hearing the patio gate click to musically, and alone with his inner wounds, he flung his arms across the table and buried his face in them. To go away from here was like dying a little death before the time for death had really come.

That night he dreamed he was adrift in a boat on the bosom of the Bay of Biscay. Great boiling maddened waves reared themselves on all sides, as though to look at him before they devoured him. The sea went up, up, flattening itself against the sky, and then down, down, as though there were no bottom to the world. Then close beside him, so near that he could touch it, insinuatingly almost, rose the polished gun-metal turret of one of the terrifying U-boats. When it had quite emerged, then suddenly a door opened where there had been no door before, and a woman stepped out. Her lips were rouged and parted in a sarcastic smile, and she seemed to bear the likeness of Mlle. Reynaud. He heard himself pleading that she spare him, trying to mollify her by reminding her that she too had once been adrift in a boat on the broad Bay of Biscay. And while she stood unrelenting, her aigrets ruffling in the breeze, his father joined her. Giraldy stared hard at him, as though measuring the distance between them, and slowly raised a rifle to his shoulder.

“Father!” he called, clasping his hands in supplication, “I am not Chinese! I am not Chinese!” It was as though he were bound by a spell. The rifle must surely go off unless he could utter the other word in time, the name of the race his father hated equally with the Chinese. And he could not remember it. Chokingly, shudderingly, he failed to remember it. And chokingly, shudderingly, he awoke. And the word came to him almost at once.
Philippines.
Presently he could afford a sad little smile. He had remembered it too late to be of any use in the dream.

He slept again, and when he awoke the broad green leaves outside his room in the patio were spotted with sunlight. He could see them through the open doors beyond the foot of his bed. By that he knew it must be late. It was not until nine or after that the sun attained sufficient elevation in the sky to shine down into the patio well from above. He dressed, and dressing, remembered the time that Mariquita had crept to the door when his back was turned and stood there unnoticed, mimicking all his motions while he adjusted a tie about his neck. The fact that he was going away and there would be no more Mariquita for him may have had something to do with his recalling this incident. The morning after it he had not remembered it, nor on any of the many other mornings until now. It was like a little nugget of recollection, buried one day, to be dug up again a year later and never again forgotten.

He went into the kitchen, and Mariquita was in there, sitting on the stool Estelle had sat upon, eating a tortilla which she held folded in one hand.

“Ola,
lazy,” she said. “Every morning he gets up later. He will end by getting up when the stars come out.”

“A lot
you
know,” he answered matter-of-factly, but with flirtatious overtones, “it’s only nine.”

“For us nine is half the day gone,” said the old woman. “Get him his breakfast,” she added to Mariquita. “Haven’t you eyes to see I’m busy?”

She was on her knees giving the baby a bath in a large, squat tin, ordinarily used for boiling the wash. The baby, undergoing a rite which was evidently blissfully unknown to it in its own home, wore an expression of painful apprehension which puckered into a whimper each time soap flecked its mouth or nose. Each time a whimper manifested itself that threatened to develop into a howl, Mariquita and the old woman cowed it to silence by both hissing “Sh!” at it simultaneously, with the ferocity of adders or steam valves.

“What, you don’t want to be clean?” the old woman said to it at various times. “Aren’t you ashamed at all? Do you want to be like one of the dirty little chickens out in the yard?
Malcriada.
Look at the señor Blerr looking at you.”

“Poor thing, I don’t blame it,” Blair saw fit to remark, as a challenge to Mariquita.

“Shut up, you,” she smirked, giving him a push on the arm.

When Blair had breakfasted and the baby had been dried and clothed, a simple matter of pulling a coral-pink shift down over its head, Mariquita and he took it outdoors with them. For a little while Blair forgot that to-day was different from other days, that there was to be an end to all this, and the end spelt nostalgia, fright and heart-sickness. How could anything seem to impend, with so new-minted a sky bending low over the world to lend it confidence, with arias of bougainvillea at hand nearly too vivid for the eye to believe in, with houses old and comforting that seemed to say, “I am here—I have always been here—I shall always be here.” Then in the afternoon the familiar, cooling, almost-friendly downpour, diminishing in duration now from day to day as it neared the end of its allotted time.