A Young Man's Heart (13 page)

No one noticed. They thought he was picking up his serviette or had gone away from the table to relieve himself. For a moment the shock had cleared his head. He lay there motionless, open-eyed, like some abortive idiotic thing. The smell of the carnations, the bread and the wine, had vanished. Everything was much dimmer than it had been, because a canopy of white damask had taken the place of the translucent sky. There were two rows of motionless feet facing one another, like the legs of a theatrical troupe when the scene is set but the curtain has failed to rise more than a few inches.

He looked out of the corners of his eyes, slyly, not stirring an inch. These were the shoes of Eleanor, whom he was jealous of. The snubby little toes stood side by side, perfectly matched as to position. Those next to them were Serrano’s, then. Low oxfords with the hems of the trousers lifted a fashionable two or three inches above them. They had punctured scrolls across the toe parts; they were polished until they shone like two mahogany mirrors, and the laces were tied with painstaking precision. Somehow, looking at those laces that were so carefully knotted and tucked in at the side of each shoe, an unmistakable impression flitted across Blair’s mind that here was a very selfish being, not caring for anything but his own wishes.

Blair raised the tablecloth an inch or two and could see their laps. He had his napkin folded narrowly over one thigh, hers was held nervously in her hand, all crumpled. There was a hand resting on her knee. The closely cut fingernails, all pointing downward over the cap, betokened dominion. Blair recognized a ring. He let the cloth drop again and emerged from the opposite side of the table. His face was oyster-white and he went down to the water’s edge behind a square-cut Dutch hedge, aromatic with crisp green leaves, and was sick where no one could see him.

He went through his clothes desperately, looking for a handkerchief, and could find none, until he remembered having tossed the only one he owned into the lagoon. He pulled the tail of his shirt out from under his belt and tore off a piece. He got down on his hands and knees and soaked it in the cool water that was the color of lime juice and then pressed it against his eyes and his mouth like a sponge and let the water run down his face like a coating of unbroken ice. He did this several times, and after drying his eyes and his mouth on his sleeve, composed himself to rest awhile and ended by falling asleep.

When he awoke darkness was creeping out of the east, and in the west were faint bands of yellow interspersed with pearl gray, like the markings on some dragon-snake of Chinese mythology, glowering across the heavens, threatening to devour the world. Over the prim hedge came a stream of electric light from the harlequin-lights laced above the tables. Blair stood up, lost his balance from sleepiness for a moment, and instantly regained it. The banquet was at an end. The launch had reappeared, its twin lights casting sulphurous splotches of carmine and emerald into the heaving, dying water, and they were filing into it, the half-tipsy women stepping over the gunwale in their high heels with a show of awkward helplessness that was quite assumed. The men, so sure-footed, were really the more awkward. The proprietor was thoroughly intoxicated. Two women were clinging to him and yet he missed count of the steps in going down to the boat and splashed his trouser-cuff with water. The ladies supported him anxiously by the elbows, each using two cupped hands.

Blair looked everywhere for Eleanor and could not make her out. She was not among those on the boat and yet she was not in the restaurant either. He ran to where she had sat at table. He found a small white saucer with a threadlike green circle in it where a glass of crême-de-menthe had stood. There were a profusion of gold-tipped cigarette-ends, but whether hers or Serrano’s he could not tell. The disgusting carnations were everywhere in evidence, dying at the end of their short hour of life, pulpy, unholily sweet, and white as fish-flesh. He took one and threw it down and trod upon it until juice came.

Suddenly he held his breath and a sickening suspicion grew upon him. He dared not look to confirm it. He knew the launch had gone off without him and they had not missed him or called him by name. He forced himself to turn around and look. The carmine light at the stern was skimming over the licorice-black water, it was already far out on the lagoon. A snatch of song drifted back to him. He raced down the steps to the water’s edge and almost would have thrown himself in. He sat down and buried his head in his folded arms and laughed tragically. An excess of laughter brought a despairing calm and he turned back to the restaurant and sat down, his head and the tops of his shoulders appearing above the sea of empty tables that encircled him. One or two waiters stood about, and occasionally they would make a desultory half-circle, with the flat of the hand embedded in a dish towel, over the polished table-top. They paid no attention to him nor he any to them. He wondered vaguely whether he would have to get out of the way when the place filled up for the evening.

At last the launch returned but there was no one in it he knew. He had jumped up, only to see seven or eight men and a girl come trudging up the steps carrying cased musical instruments. They collected chairs in one spot and set up a cluster of thin reed-like stands which they promptly burdened with dog-eared music-scores that were continually fluttering off to the floor. They snapped at the green-hooded rods of light that surmounted these racks, testing them to see that they were in working order, until the place sounded as though it were overrun with crickets. Blair began to be in a better humor. Next they all sat down informally at various of the tables and black coffee and rolls were served them. They chattered like bird-creatures. The girl, who was lighter than the rest of them as far as the color of her skin went, was seated by herself. She had gold bowknots on each shoulder, Blair noticed. Seeing the expression on his face she took her coffee cup in one hand and her bread in the other and moved over beside him.

“What are you doing here all alone?” she said.

“They overlooked me,” said Blair, a little ashamed of his previous emotion now that he looked back on it.

“No!” she said gravely, “Well, how could they ever do that?”

“I
expect my Eleanora at any minute,” he confided. “I didn’t see her go with them, she must have been left behind too. You think she’ll show up, don’t you?” He said this last rather too anxiously, and gave himself away.

“Oh, without doubt,” the girl assured him. This boasted superiority of the dominant race piqued her at certain times, amused her at others.

She dipped some of the roll in the coffee cup and put it into his mouth. Her cinnamon fingers under his nose were like some kind of incense, he tried to think what it was and couldn’t remember.

They exchanged names with a childlike simplicity that would have been beautiful to overhear. Hers was Olimpia, it turned out.

“You’re in the band, aren’t you?” he asked her.

“I play the cornet.”

He did not know what a cornet was, had never heard of one.

“It goes like this: too too tu-tu.” Appropriate finger-motions accompanied the demonstration.

“Oh,” said Blair, perfectly satisfied. Olimpia, the cornetist. Gold shoulder-knots. Incense-fingers.
“I
wish I could play the cornet,” he sighed enviously.

“I’ll show you sometime.”

While they were having this sensible man-to-man chat, more than consoling to Blair, Eleanor appeared, having just stepped out of a small boat at the rear landing. She made her way rapidly among the hosts of empty seats with swift jerky motions that all pointed to an absence of tranquillity. Serrano, his collar loosened, was a few steps behind her, talking in a continuous plaintive undertone, but whether making love or making excuses it was not easy to determine.

“This looks very fine for me,” she sneered without turning her head. “What did I say? They have gone!”

In her indiscriminate anger she ignored Blair, letting him have only the whites of her outraged eyes.

She turned her head sharply so that the nostrils were taut and said over her shoulder:

“And how about the launch?”

“Waiting, little dear,” Serrano said.

The three of them descended the glossy steps, mirror- like from constant laving by the water, and which reflected Eleanor’s light shoes without a break: she allowed her husband to precede her into the unlighted launch, and accepted the arm of the mechanician in preference to that proffered her by Serrano. The latter took this little defeat ruefully, smiled and lighted a cigarette.

“No smoking, please,” said the mechanic, “there is liable to be an explosion. We use benzine, you know.”

“For my part, I would like to see us all in hell,” Serrano remarked morosely.

Eleanor stabbed him impatiently with her eyes and he threw the cigarette into the water. It spat like a small toad.

As the distance between the launch and the casino slowly widened with the strangled underwater coughing of the engine, the cornetist, who had never budged from the table all this time, slowly raised an arm to Blair, diffidently, as though not sure it would be acknowledged. He answered it with a self-conscious salute of the palm at the temple.

“Who is that?” asked Eleanor, apparently noticing her for the first time.

“Her name’s Olimpia.”

The intervening water, broadening every instant, was incandescent with streaks of fluid light, reflecting the brilliantly glowing casino upside down in a rippling pool of gold and silver glass studded with living coals of vermilion and phosphorus-green. High above this fever-sore of heat and color the stars, cool and remote, were like white flowers in a great black meadow.

Blair and Eleanor had drawn apart from their undesirable escort, they were talking in an intimate undertone, one of those oases that Blair prized so.

“We went rowing,” she murmured, “and he lost one of the oars. I thought we’d be out there all night.” She shrugged her shoulders wearily.

“Charming idea,” observed Blair disconsolately. “I guess you thought so, too.”

“Please, Blair, I don’t want to hear anything—”

“Lovely night,” remarked Serrano. “Don’t you agree?”

She raised her voice so that it would reach him. “I’ve no doubt
you
think so,” she answered. They had entered the canal, and the unseen, unfelt lily beds so cruelly parted to give them passage, that floated slowly together again on dismembered pods in their heaving wake, retaliated by filling the air with an evil smell of death and rottenness. And over it all the stars were as beautiful as sin. Eleanor was barely audible through her compressed handkerchief: “Damn him!”

Blair hired a carriage at the old stone wharf to take them back to the hotel. The wharf was three hundred years old and the hotel only ten or twelve. Thus they passed from the ancient part of the city to the modern, from that which was slowly decaying to that which was brisk with life.

Serrano Eleanor had discarded as one would an outworn glove, with a limp gesture of the hand. Nothing was said.

They went up to their room. Eleanor pulled the cord of the light and took up a book which she pretended to read. There was something strained about her.

Suddenly there was a sharp report. The book had struck the wall opposite. “Accuse me! Accuse me!” she shrieked hysterically. “Don’t torture me like this. I know what you are thinking. And we
did!
We
did!
Do you hear me? I should hate him, and I love him all the more—I tell you I love him—”

Blair covered his ears with his hands and paced back and forth in agony. “Don’t, don’t,” he moaned.

And long after there was silence in the room, his mind kept pleading, “Don’t! don’t!”

3

These various travesties on human conduct were one and all cut short by an occurrence which, unnoticed by the hotel dwellers at first and later only jokingly mentioned in passing, suddenly loomed menacingly in the air about them and seemed to threaten their security. For some weeks past the vernacular newspapers, which few in the foreign colony read, had made off-hand mention of disorders in various towns near by in connection with elections which were then in progress throughout the country. Then all further reference to the matter abruptly ceased, which to the initiated was not as reassuring as it might have been, since the press was known to be under the thumb of the existing regime. On the heels of this tactful silence, rumors began to filter into the city. The disaffection had grown beyond control, it had found leaders, it was being organized into a rival government. Regiments of unpaid soldiers sent to crush the movement had executed their own officers instead and gone over to it in a body. Others, less certain of their own minds, had threatened to lay down their arms unless they were paid immediately. But a third group of the military, who had perhaps been paid more recently than the rest, were as yet willing enough to carry out their orders, and bloodshed was imminent, if indeed it had not already begun. In short, revolution and all that it implied was under way.