A Young Man's Heart (18 page)

“How can I take you down among those peons—allow you to sit among them?” he cried.

“Whatever you do, you must not leave me sitting up here alone. I would die of fright.”

“There must be some way out.” Finally he said, “If we must, we must. I’ll telephone Serrano.”

“Yes,” she urged, “find out what he thinks. Oh, why didn’t we think of that before?”

A small directory, little more than a pamphlet, lay shelved under the night-stand. He consulted it a moment, and uncapping the telephone said in a low voice
to
the clerk downstairs, “Get 12
-
86
for me. Ask for Rafael Serrano, and call me back at once.”

An eternity went by. His mind kept repeating, 1 am between the devil and the deep sea. Expose her to the risk of remaining under the same roof as this general and his people, or eat my heart out at having her under the same roof with Serrano. And infinitely poignant was the realization: All this need not have happened.

Once Eleanor went to the door, opened it and looked out, to make sure there was no one in the corridor outside. “Be careful what you say, dear,” she murmured. “Isn’t there likely to be some one listening in?”

“I’ll speak to him in English, without mentioning any names.” While within himself he thought, I will never need to speak at all, most likely. Even he has deserted us, now that we need him.

At last there was a signal from the instrument. As he picked it up, Eleanor went down on her knees beside him, nestling her head against him. “Your recipient,” said the clerk in Spanish. Then Serrano’s voice in the customary phrase that he had so often smiled at in spite of himself: “I listen.”

“It will not be necessary to tell you who this
is—

“But who—?”

“My wife and I—you understand?”

“Perfectly, I believe.”

“Someone holding a high public position has asked us to take dinner with them. Ordered us, you might say. If we refuse it may be very dangerous to remain in our present place. I feel very uneasy on my wife’s account—”

“I thoroughly agree with you. Will you allow me to suggest something?”

“By all means.”

“Do nothing about it for the present. If it is unavoidable, keep the engagement. I will hold myself at your disposal. Telephone me at a moment’s notice and I will call for you at the hotel and bring you over here with a safe-conduct from the minister.”

“I appreciate it deeply.”

“You will do what I say? You will not fail to let me know?”

“I promise you.”

“Good. I will be waiting to hear from you.”

He turned to Eleanor with relief. “If anything unpleasant develops he’ll come over himself and get us out of here. Meanwhile, I suppose, we’ve got to go through with it.”

It was then already past four. At six she asked, “How does one dress to dine with a general? If I’m to get ready I’d better begin while there’s still enough light.”

“If I didn’t know how out of the question it was, I’d advise you to make yourself as little attractive as possible for once,” he answered curtly. “The general may take too great a liking to you.”

She felt tempted to say, “How do you know he hasn’t?”

Within half an hour a peremptory knock sounded on the door. Blair rose to open it. The mongrel officer of the night before stood there.

“The señora and you are ready? The general has just finished his duties for the day. He has already asked for you.”

Serrano had been right. They were not going to be allowed to escape accepting.

“You will have to wait outside,” he remarked, annoyed. “The señora is not quite through.”

“Don’t molest yourself. I return downstairs. You will come at your leisure.”

It was only by exercising the greatest self-control that Blair prevented himself from slamming the door shut in his face.

Eleanor stood up so that he might look at her. “There. This is the oldest thing I have.” She had put on black, but it was useless. The color itself was in league with her blondness of hair and smoothness of skin.

He shook his head, half laughingly. “I knew it would be of no earthly use. You might just as well have decked yourself out to your heart’s content while you were about it. Here, wipe your mouth on this.”

Even that she did, overawed in spite of herself at the grave implication he seemed to put upon her being so attractive.

A few moments later they found themselves in what would otherwise have resembled any of the other hotel sitting-rooms but for the number of people gathered together in it. All the faces were repulsive. Candles thrust into the necks of bottles added their haze to the clotted cigarette smoke. A glass door to an inner room hung dejectedly on its hinges, most of its panes broken through. An officer of one sort or another, seated sidewise on the edge of a table, was holding an unclean paw thrust into a basin of water, while a girl seated before him bent over his other hand manicuring the nails. A negro, reputed to be the general’s spy, was sitting in a corner, his back against the wall and his chair balanced on two legs, idly strumming a guitar. At times he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling overhead, so that only their whites remained to be seen, giving himself the appearance of having gone suddenly blind.

Blair, who did not know the general by sight, found himself being beckoned to by a swarthy individual standing talking to two or three others. He looked inquiringly at Eleanor, as though to ask her what she made of it. “I think that man must be the general,” she faltered. They drew near at the behest of the uncivilly spasmodic forefinger, and its owner remarked, “You are Guerardi?”

“That is my name.” (Bootless to try to correct the mispronunciation, since the dog did not even do him the courtesy of prefixing “señor” to it.)

“I am the general Heronimo Palacios.”

Blair muttered the conventional “your servant,” inwardly choking with both fury and amusement. He then saw that the general was looking at him inquiringly, as though expecting something further.

“My wife, General. She speaks no Spanish.”

The general studied Eleanor with a kindly gleam in his eyes, meant to be paternal but not quite successful at it. “Always humbly at your orders,” he mouthed, with a flourish and a bow.

“How do you do?” Eleanor said matter-of-factly in English, but with a slight simper.

“I see that you take a great interest in the tennis.”

“He sees that you take a great interest in tennis,” Blair translated.

Eleanor smiled and nodded affirmatively, seeming slightly troubled, nevertheless.

“Do you recall that day we met on the stairs? You were in a great hurry to go by,” the general proceeded. Blair: “He wants to know if you recall meeting him on the stairs one day.”

She sighed wearily. “Why wouldn’t I? He has a face that frightens children.”

“I inquired of my people at once who the charming lady in our midst was.”

Blair gave her a deadly look. “By not telling me this before,” he remarked in an undertone, “you’ve managed to place yourself in considerable jeopardy.”

She smiled in spite of herself at the pompous word he had used with such nervous intensity, and without thinking began to hum,

“My country ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of jeopardy
—”

Blair laughed bitterly.

“She sings,” said the general.

“Our national anthem,” Blair explained.

A Chinaman in a black sateen skirt appeared in the doorway bordered by the framework of shattered panes, blinked two or three times, scowled at the room in general, and disappeared again. This momentary apparition, however, had not escaped the general’s notice.
“A comer!”
he exclaimed, smacking his hands together vigorously and seeming to wash them in mid-air. He turned and made his way into the next room, everyone immediately crowding at his heels, with the exception of the negro who, forgotten by everybody, remained in his corner mournfully plucking at the guitar. This, then, must be the way dinner was announced in this charming household. Blair and Eleanor, after a moment of hesitancy, followed the others and found two chairs unoccupied side by side.

A most unusual effect had been obtained, the like of which Blair had never seen before in his life. To offset the lack of electric light the batteries had been torn out of one of the general’s many and deviously-acquired automobiles and brought into the room. The two powerful headlights, likewise decapitated, were trained on the table from opposite sides. In the glare it was at first not alone impossible to distinguish faces, it was also difficult even to keep one’s eyes open. Every grain of dust floating in the air became visible, and as a result a constant rain of blinding electric snowflakes seemed to be falling. Blair, with dazzled half-shut eyes, looked at Eleanor. The rouge under her eyes, so sparingly used at all times, had gone purple. Otherwise he found no great cause for complaint in her appearance. He wondered if she retained enough conventionality at the moment to feel thankful that she was young enough to bear the devastating scrutiny reasonably well. The faces of the men looked like skulls stripped of their flesh.

She puckered her brow to him and said, “It hurts my eyes so. Ask them if they don’t think
one
would be enough.”

He cautioned her with a slight shake of the head.

The general, however, seemed not to lack perceptions of his own. He laughed genially, screwing his face into a Mongol mask, and said to Blair, “The light harms her? That can be arranged.”

Suddenly a girl seated across from them said sharply and with no little authority, “Leave them both on! I’m no blind blonde.”

The general laughed all the louder at this, and still directing his remarks to Blair, said in what was meant to be a very good-fellowly manner, “That is women, for you! One wants it light, one wants it dark.”

Everyone present took it upon himself to laugh appreciatively at this, the louder the better, as though it were a gem of the rarest wit, so that a thunderous roar went up on all sides. The girl who had made the remark, nettled, called out in a clear ringing voice to someone who had jeered her, “Listen, thou! shut up if you know what’s good for you,” and her eyes flashed wickedly for a moment. Then tasting a drink that stood before her, she fixed the general with a satiric, meaningful look and began to hum the refrain to a popular tango of the day.

 
“Love in the dim light,

 
Kisses in the dim light,

 
All in the dim light.”

Blair studied her indifferently for a moment. She wore a pink chiffon shirtwaist snatched from the back of some former official’s wife. A cheap silver bracelet had been forced far up one brown arm, nearly to the shoulder. A gardenia was thrust into her sleek hair. She looked about her discontentedly and at times drummed her long dark fingers on the tabletop before her. Evidently her lot in life dissatisfied her, for the moment at least. He turned away, bored.

Another long-forgotten banquet came to mind. He saw himself as a boy, seated at a long table like this, with Sasha and his father, the jockey with the diamond studs, the girl who had arisen from nowhere to comfort him, the laughing young person who had become the Estelle of his later years. He could almost smell again the odor of dying carnations, almost hear the voices, see the faces. The champagne goblets, the women’s hair stuffed with other, artificial hair. Ah, the gentle far-off days! What dilettantes in sin people had been then. He had cried out against them in his heart then as he was crying out against them in his heart now. Unheeding they had gone their several ways. Sasha had her millinery shop in New York, an automaton with the outward appearance of a woman. Estelle had her cell and her memories, a woman with the outward appearance of an automaton. His father and his father’s chattel were in the twilight regions of love somewhere, grown fat and unfit further to be seen. The stranger he had married was enamored of a Buenos Aires dandy. The world was a vast desert in which he stood erect stretching forth his arms toward mirages.