A Young Man's Heart (16 page)

“This street is closed to the public after sundown, unless you have a pass.”

Even the coachman professed ignorance of this new ruling. They had to turn around and go back the way they had come. Soon after they returned to the hotel.

It was nearing twelve when Blair, with the click of his own trunk-lock still ringing in his ears, leaned against the balcony rail, questioning once more the star of happiness. In the lighted room at his back Eleanor still passed to and fro, like a priestess carrying garments to be sacrificed, one at a time, at some unseen altar. She held each one before her, looking at it with both arms outstretched, as she walked toward the hidden angle where the trunk was. And coming back empty-handed, occasionally looked back over her shoulder at it. Only once did she glance toward the balcony.

But Blair was not watching her. Vainly searching the star for an answer when he did not even know what the problem was he had set it. Always looking backward, loving the thing past more than the thing ahead. Again a departure. Again a new box for the same old jack-in- the-box. Nothing more. The same far star and the same inner voice and the one great cry that was all it knew, falling short in the space between— “Only happiness, happiness!”

They lost the morning train because Eleanor had not quite finished packing yet, and in setting apart something to wear during the trip had set aside along with it two or three alternatives from which to choose. These had to be returned to the trunk in due course, once the momentous decision was made. She also insisted upon having her last cup of morning chocolate out on the open balcony in the sun. Chocolate was served at eleven and the train left at seven. The so-called evening train no longer left at nightfall these days but in mid-afternoon in order for it to be well advanced on its way by the time darkness overtook it, for the zone of uncertainty through which it had to pass lay closer to the city than to the coast.

There was no one at hand to say good-by to them when they finally set out from the hotel at three. As the hotel receded in back of them its sharp outlines seemed to quiver in the heat that rose in magnetic waves from the pavement of the street. “Look,” said Eleanor, pointing to a window just before they turned a corner, “there’s where our room was.”

The houses and the streets slipped sluggishly by them, and security was only a few hours away.

“You were very happy here, weren’t you, Eleanor?”

“Yes, I guess so,” she admitted uncertainly.

“I’m sorry I’m taking you away like this.”

They rolled into the great stone courtyard of the station at last, and got out of the carriage. Eleanor looked as cool and charming as ever, even in the dust and swelter of the place. Her face gave no indication of what she might feel. She seemed neither pleased nor displeased. She looked about her apparently without seeing anything at all.

The entrance, usually so noisy and swarming with hangers-on, was lifeless save for a group of porters squatting in one of the doorways gambling, their backs recklessly exposed to the sun. They passed through a deserted waiting-room, given over to flies and scattered leaves of newspaper.

“They must have let them in the train already,” he muttered.

Eleanor hurried along at his side on her high slim heels, her footsteps little
pizzicato
notes on the cement underscored by the slower basso of his heavy tread. The rails alongside the long shady platform held no cars. They stretched away to infinity, empty, two silver lines that the eye grew tired of following.

“Where is the train?” Blair asked an official who was busy locking a door.

“There are no more trains. The tracks were dynamited last night. One cannot leave,” he added despondently, shuffling off with a large ring of keys in his hand.

Blair, his chest all at once weighted with lead, felt Eleanor’s touch on his sleeve. “Did we miss this one too?”

“They aren’t running any more.” He saw sudden unmistakable fright come into her eyes. “We’ll have to stay.” It relieved him, in spite of the concern he felt over their predicament, to see that she was at last no longer pleased at staying.

“I didn’t want to go while we still had the chance. Now that we can’t leave, I want to get away so badly. Oh, why did we delay?”

“We’ll go back to the hotel for the time being.” He laughed a little sadly. “There’s not much danger of anyone else having engaged our room while we’ve been gone.”

She took his arm once more and they turned their backs as bravely as they might on the distant ironical point toward which the barren rails converged.

At the upper end of the platform a woman of seeming refinement, dressed entirely in black, was seated upon a valise, holding a handkerchief to her face. “Only to-day I sold my house,” she sobbed, lifting tear-spangled eyes at Blair’s murmured inquiry. “Now that I am unable to go to my sister on the coast, I have no place to stay.”

“Why not a hotel, for example?” he suggested.

She raised her arms, the knotted handkerchief still in one hand, in a protest of utter disbelief. “Can you credit it?” she cried. “Such a thing never occurred to me until now that you mention it. I have had my own home here for eight years. Yes, yes, I will go to the Imperial. Yes, that will be the best thing to do.”

“She’s a charlatan,” Blair remarked as they walked away. “Do you notice? She hasn’t moved from the spot.”

And a moment later a station guard, touching his cap to attract their attention, remarked respectfully, “The
caballero
didn’t give any money to that old girl over there?”

“No,” said Blair, “why?”

“She comes here every day and sits there pretending to cry. When the trains were still running, it was because she had lost her pass. A few foreign señors were foolish enough to give her the money and help her climb aboard. Each time the train started she jumped off the last car with her empty satchel.”

“Why don’t you have her arrested?”

“It isn’t my affair,” the trainman shrugged. “If she’s clever enough to manage, let her.”

“And a Castilian (synonym for one of white origin, without Indian blood) at that,” Blair observed.

The ride back to the hotel was psychologically trying to both of them. It was like the aftermath of a diminutive Flight to Varennes. Now for the first time they felt robbed of their freedom of movement. The streets and scenes that half an hour ago their minds had unceremoniously hurried away, glad to dismiss from sight, now forced themselves unpleasantly back upon them. Each tried haltingly to console the other.

“It won’t be for very long. We’ll go in a few days for good.”

“It’s my fault. You were right. We should have left when everyone else did.”

At the hotel they asked for their key once more and went upstairs to the room. It was exactly as they had left it, the bed unmade, empty drawers in the furniture hanging open, the chambermaid having not yet found time to attend to it. Within a very few moments, however, informed of their return (and no doubt scenting an eventual second fee as large as the one she had received less than an hour before), she presented herself with the utmost alacrity and good will and began to restore it to order. Their trunks followed, carried in the door by the same individuals who so short a while before had taken them away.

Left alone finally, Eleanor and he sat abjectly facing one another for awhile, with nothing to say. Not even the balcony was much consolation to them now. The speckless blue vault that showed beyond it was too close for comfort, seemed to weigh down upon them, leaving no loophole of escape.

She stood up at last with a philosophical little sigh and took off her hat, and he watched her empty the contents of her trunk into the cavernous recesses of the huge mirrored wardrobe that swallowed her New York things with an air of never meaning to give them up again.

That night, her chin grimly tilted as though defying the circumstances that had compelled them to remain almost the hotel’s sole remaining guests, Eleanor dressed with ironic elaborateness. She revealed a pungent sense of humor (or possibly, he thought, a complete lack of any) in the added touch of a pair of swathing white kid gloves, elbow-length.

“Eleanor, not for here!” he cried. “You’ll make a fool of yourself.”

“Dear, I know what I’m doing,” she said, and then in a momentary flash of self-revealment, “All these things give me courage. I’m frightened. Frightened at our staying on here alone like this. I must dress, powder, paint. Otherwise I’ll find myself crying hysterically on that bed.”

Just outside the doors of the dining room she removed her shawl, as on any other night, and handed it to him, then swept on in, in a flare of jade velvet and powdered shoulders. The empty tables looked pitifully forlorn with their white cloths and rosebud-stalks in glass vials. The two or three diners in it could not fill the long room.

With spoons halfway to their lips, about to taste the soup, the lights suddenly went out, plunging them into helpless paralysis of movement. A few low, startled cries were uttered, and then the waiters hurried about distributing lighted candles at the various tables.

The room grew jeweled with sparkling points of yellow, like a field of daisies. Eleanor, visible to him once more in the soft diffused glow, had gone on eating. “You see, I dressed for a formal occasion. They’ve at last become fashionable here.” She smiled across at him, and her smile was very witching with the shadows that were now added to it. Neglecting the remainder of his dinner, he sat and admiringly watched her and tried not to show how wrung with apprehension he was at the thought of her being endangered in any way.

“What happened?” he asked the waiter under his breath.

“It looks as though the power-house has fallen into their hands. They say the streets outside are dark, too.”

Blair and he exchanged mutually troubled looks.

When they had left the dining room, Eleanor turned to him and suggested, “A carriage ride?”

“I’m afraid not, dear. The street-lights are out, too.”

“Are all the lights out everywhere? What happened, did a fuse blow out?”

He laughed, only because he knew she meant that to be laughed at, and taking her hand, kissed it with sudden intensity.

In the patio the gloom was only half-heartedly dispelled by the few lanterns strung here and there. She looked about and he thought he saw her shudder slightly. “Well, shall we play cards then?” she proposed. Additional candles were called for, and with two acquaintances who were as glad to afford their company as they were to receive it, they sat down to a huddled, frightened little game, lowering their voices whenever they became too conscious of the silence about them.

That night Blair dreamed he was in a vast office in New York surrounded by noisy typewriters. He started up in bed and the sound continued, withdrawn to a distance but unmistakable. The metallic clatter that a wireless might make, but more monotonous, with only dots and no dashes at all.

Then he saw that Eleanor was awake too, and was pressing her cheek to his shoulder.

“What is it? I’ve been listening to it for half an hour. I was afraid to wake you. Blair, what is it?”

He jumped up and reached for the switch, then remembering, fumbled for matches and lit the candle.

“The other one, too,” she wailed, “oh, make it light.” And then jumping out of bed to follow him out on the balcony, went on irrelevantly, “After this I hate candlelight. I never again want to go to another dinner-party where they have it.”

Out on the open balcony the sound was more pronounced than ever. They stood listening for awhile.

“It’s like riveting when they’re putting up a new building. They wouldn’t do that at night. What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“But it is. Oh, but what is it?”

“Machine guns,” he said, putting his arm around her.

He felt her body stiffen for a moment. Then he could tell she was scanning his face, waiting for him to give the cue, waiting to adopt whatever emotion he might display and carry it much further, to the exaggerated limits of the feminine temperament.