A Young Man's Heart (9 page)

For one thing, she was never at a loss for something to say. She chatted throughout the course of the meal with a machine-gun-like rapidity, each word a tiny vivacious explosion of thought on the endless cartridge-belt that was her tongue. And Blair, ignored by both, ignored them in his turn, aware of only crackling fragments of her speech as she lapsed from Spanish to the French he was not meant to understand, and back again, at times too quickly to quite conceal the gist of some remark from him.

“ . . . very sincere . .. ask anyone who knows me
 
. . . all my friends will tell you so
 
. . . when you come back
 
. . . I can’t promise
 
. . . you must find that out for yourself.”

Blair turned his eyes to the window, to where the expiring sunbeams were slowly merging one by one into a paler, more diffused luminousness through which stars were beginning to bore their way like the points of gleaming needles, seen, then lost, then found again, at last becoming fixed each in its proper place as the darkening sky set them off. Unbelievable that a day or two ago at about this time each evening the thought of leaving here had chilled him with fright, that these same dissolving beams of light had been a rosary of procrastination for him, told off one by one with the prayer, “Another night gained, another night gained.” All at once he turned his head to the two people at the table with him and heard himself say, “We’ll miss the train.”

Giraldy, without troubling to look at him, remarked, “Well, go out and get a carriage.”

Blair stood up from the table and walked out of the room, leaving the two of them there together, with their mockery of love and their reading of one another’s eyes, feigning youth and loyalty and candor. He crossed the patio, and it was quite dark now, and looked up and could see stars in the square black opening above him. They disappeared for a moment while he passed through the street-doorway, and then he was out of the house and the whole heavens seemed full of them. At the very bottom of the sky, in the west, a stripe of green, lengthwise like a snake, still marked where the light had last been.

He walked as far as the corner and whistled and motioned with his arm, summoning the solitary hack that was standing as usual outside the entrance to the Legation grounds. The driver slowly guided it around in a half-circle, it had been facing the other way, and made for him, and Blair, without waiting for it to stop, jumped on the step and accompanied it back to the house, one arm and leg swinging free. Just as they drew up, Mariquita came out of the doorway. Or rather she stepped forward as though she had been standing there waiting.

“You’re going now?” she said anxiously.

“As soon as he comes out.”

They withdrew to the opposite side of the street, while the coachman alighted and went in to announce himself.

They crouched against the plaster wall, ghostly white now in the darkness, a mantilla of blue tracery thrown over it and them by the shadow of the bougainvillea sprays above, shoulder to shoulder, their arms about one another, looking toward the house and the empty carriage standing before the door. And there, all at once, their childhood came to an end. They were silent, and they were no longer as young as they had been yesterday.

Flowers perhaps had been thrown over this wall, flowers snatched at by a devout hand and never allowed to touch the ground. More than once it must have heard light whispers and the throaty trill of a guitar. And long ago, when love was still abroad in the land, perhaps someone clutching a small black lace fan had one night dropped lightly down from it into a pair of waiting arms. And Estelle, too, staring at it from her window across the street, had seen outlined upon it the portent of a better course of action. So now these two, children until a moment ago, who had played at its foot and whose hands had carelessly touched it a hundred times, found that it had bequeathed them their first sorrow.

“Here, we will stand here, where no one is looking.”

“You will remember Mariquita?”

“And will you remember Blair?”

“And you will come back like you said?”

They clasped each other’s hands and kissed the knotted fingers, their heads bent close together. It seemed not to occur to them to kiss upon the lips, they were so intent upon holding one another’s hands.

“When you grow up maybe you’ll be the most beautiful girl in the city. But pretend to all of them. Don’t really love anybody.”

“But come back Blerr I like you so.”

Giraldy came out of the house. They dropped their hands to their sides. The coachman appeared, carrying Blair’s bag. Blair started over toward them.

“Adios.”
She remained standing there.

Blair got into the carriage from one side as Giraldy stepped in at the other. “San Lázaro,” he directed indolently. Blair looked back. She was still there, but gave no sign, not even a wave of the hand; she stood motionless beside the wall. They turned a corner and she was gone. “Forever,” the world in all its wisdom seemed to say. But he replied, “I know better. I know better.”

CHAPTER FOUR

His Bride

1

When
he opened his eyes the morning after their arrival, Eleanor was standing at the window looking out. She was holding the coarse net curtains apart to obtain a better view, and her extended arms gleamed whitely with the play of the morning sunlight. He raised one shoulder and lay quietly watching her. Her hair, in great disorder, was silver in the light, and the outline of her narrow little body was sketched in silhouette through the ridiculous lilac voile nightdress she had brought from New York. She was more charming than ever. Again, and for the thousandth time, he told himself how glad he was he had married her. She turned her head slightly, and in granting him his first boon of the day, her profile, discovered him to be awake.

“Blair,” she exclaimed, “it’s beautiful, beautiful. I’m so glad you brought me.”

He came and stood beside her, and arms interlocked behind their backs, the entire city lay spread before them, not unreal and seen from a great height as it would have been in the North, but just slightly below them, its rooftops on a level with the eye, and in the clear air even the furthest houses stood out distinctly, each with its tiny window-openings, balconies and roof-tiles all microscopically complete, as on a doll-house held in the palm of one’s hand. And even beyond those, a ribbon of green haze that lay coiled around the city’s outermost limits told where the suburbs and the open country began, fading to a milky blue miles away where the slow climb of the uplands set in, and just above that emerging again to full color-strength in the silver and purple masses of Our Lady of the Snows and its sister peaks, as sharply defined as though cut out with scissors.

Eleanor drew in her breath, as though she received a physical sensation from it.

“It’s a dream,” she remarked.

He remembered hearing her say the same thing about a new dress she had once admired, and about the engagement ring he had bought her. It seemed to him incongruous to class, at a word, this glimpse of terrestrial paradise with a few yards of fluff or a platinum thread.

A knock on the door drew their attention back within the room. A waiter entered with their chocolate on a tray. Eleanor screamed gently and slipped behind a screen. “How terrible they are here,” she remarked from in back of it, with complacency enough.

“You were never taught how to enter a room?” Blair shouted at the man. “Your time is so valuable you have not a minute to lose? Put that down and get out.”

The waiter stammered an apology and withdrew, cringing backwards as though in the presence of infuriated royalty.

Eleanor stepped out of her retreat with a little laugh. “How quaint they are.”

“Not too quaint,” Blair growled.

“Now that the horse is stolen,” she said gayly, struggling into a wrapper, “I’ll lock the stable.”

And now, seated facing one another across a knee-high onyx tabouret, their faces alight and golden in the sunlight reflected upward by the tiled floor, their knees touching, their feet flexed back on tiptoe under the seats of their chairs, they had reached a quintessence of happiness. A content so deep that it compelled them to toy with trivial things: with the chocolate cups, with the breaking-off and garnishing of tiny fragments of sweet roll with which to feed one another, he with twirling the tassel-cord of his robe, she with pumping her heels in and out of the embroidered mules she wore. The aroma of the chocolate, the touch of
l’Origan
she bore cached behind the lobe of each ear, the unraveled lace that slowly escaped from Blair’s cigarette, were all like incense to the little gods of felicity, exacting so little, bestowing so much. In through the window came a breeze too warm to stir anything, making itself evident only by means of the slight sweet odor of lemon-blossom it carried. Outside on distant roofs fragments of glass imbedded in mortar sparkled intermittently in the sun, out of all proportion to their size and relevancy.

It was momentary, it was an illusion, it was too complete to last. Though it were to repeat itself identically a day following, that following day would necessarily be less perfect, for perfection cannot be halved. Even if it were only the novelty that was to be lost, with the novelty would go some of the inner substance. They may have realized this without quite understanding. Eleanor, in fact, holding her hands to her cheeks, stopped to say, “I can’t quite believe in it, it’s all so new to me yet.” But doubt foundered without their even recognizing it as such.

Hours later, in the depths of the sapphire evening they appeared in the doorway together, groomed in their dinner clothes, and shutting out the light of the corridor and the downstairs music, went to the window and stood looking out again. The sky was a mosaic of stars. Tremulous with satisfaction at everything they saw about them in the world, they clung together and stroked one another’s faces.

“We’ll be so happy here,” she said.

“Yes, the setting is complete,” Blair assented, “the rest depends on ourselves.”

Again that lode-star, as in his mother’s time, seeming to hang suspended over their heads: happiness, happiness. . .

2

They had gone downstairs and were getting into a carriage. Blair wanted to see if his father was still in the city. They had slighted the music that was still going on in the palm-banked patio, played much less admirably than in New York, Eleanor thought. They didn’t know anyone yet, and Eleanor was tired of dancing only with her husband. A horse-drawn carriage open to the night was a novelty, too.

He lowered the little seat opposite and she put her feet upon it. Original Perugias had probably never touched it before now. “That’s rather fast for here,” Blair said.

“Will they stare much?” She continued to be delighted with everything. “Look. A gold tooth. What does that say?”

“Painless extractions,” he translated.

“Of course,” she murmured, crestfallen.

“Drive us through the city,” Blair told the coachman, “and then in an hour to the street
Bruselas.”

As they entered the midtown section the streets became better lighted yet narrower, more crowded yet more unkempt. At times the second-story balconies overhead almost met above the roadway.

“It would have been risking your dress to go through here
in
the old days. They used to throw things out,” Blair told her.

“What things?” she wanted to know.

“Oh, never mind. I think I know,” he said presently.

At once she was all animation again. “Look. A restaurant. And people drinking coffee on the sidewalk.”

She had pointed with her entire arm, and he smiled.

“Their music,” she commented learnedly, “isn’t played as well for dancing as ours is, but it seems to have more romance to it, more—”

“That was
Poor Butterfly
you heard back there,” he interrupted hastily, to protect her feelings as best he could.

“I know
that,”
she answered almost at once, “what I meant was, they give it more soul, they
do
something to it—”

At the intersection of two notably narrow streets their progress was blocked. The coachman drew rein and rising in his seat, unburdened himself of a torrent of speech, in which Blair recognized a good many words he had learned in his own boyhood here. However, an old woman, taking advantage of the halt they had made, approached the side of the carriage and thrust a handful of printed papers toward them, whining insinuatingly. Blair arbitrarily waved her away.

“What does she want?” Eleanor asked.

“She’s selling lottery tickets.”

Eleanor stared interestedly at the hag, who, emboldened, instantly resumed her sing-song invocation. “Isn’t she afraid of the police?” she asked, after allowing it to continue for a moment. Such slight things, he was beginning to notice, could awaken Eleanor’s interest.

“It’s run by the government.”

Eleanor’s eyes sparkled. “I’d love to try my luck,” she exclaimed. “Couldn’t you get me one? I mean just a small one.”

Blair opened his wallet and the old woman mumbled blessings on them and trotted off. He handed Eleanor the coupon, which was printed on thin, almost transparent paper.

“I may as well tell you I don’t think it operates honestly.”

“But I thought you said the gov—”

“What is any government but a group of people? And in this country—”

But she had already returned it to him. “You keep it for me so I won’t lose it. And tell me if I’ve won or not when the time comes. But if I shouldn’t win anything, and I seem to have forgotten about it, don’t remind me by mentioning it to me. Then it would be a disappointment.”

Her attention reverted to the scene about them. “That couple standing on the corner can’t forget me. How dark she is. She shouldn’t use so much white powder, it makes her throat seem twice as brown.”

Large numbers of people on both sides of the street were staring curiously at Eleanor. Not only those coming toward her from an opposite direction, as might have been expected, but also those walking in advance of the carriage, who would turn their heads, as though gifted with some sixth sense, and look over their shoulders before it had yet drawn abreast of them. And Blair could understand their looking at her, and felt that that was as it should be. She was wearing the clothes of the smartest city in the world, and her bared blond head was a beautiful sight in this land of dark women. He knew that he, too, had he been a passer-by, would have looked at her and wondered who she was. But being in the carriage, he merely looked at her and wondered if he understood her.

Eleanor, meanwhile, was perfectly aware of the contagion of curiosity she was spreading about her as they slowly traversed one street after another. Nor did it seem unpleasant to her, as far as he could make out. Her satin shoes remained uplifted to the bench facing her with the hem of her dress allowing only the gold-silk of her insteps to be seen, and her chin was held neither low enough for humility nor high enough for disdain.

“This
is
a novelty. I’ll rouge my lips while they’re looking at me. No, give me a cigarette instead.”

He refused. “That’s entirely too fast for here. You don’t understand.” And he added almost apologetically, “Neither would they, you see.”

“But are you serious, dear?” she exclaimed. She appeared vastly surprised.

“Up home everyone is good, more or less,” he explained, “so appearances don’t matter so terribly. But down here the good take a great deal of care not to have themselves misjudged, because the bad are—well, pretty much beyond description. I mean there are all sorts of young ladies from the States who find the statutes here more hospitable, so—”

“And they ride about in carriages with their friends just as you and I are doing?”

“Why, yes,” he said embarrassedly.

“If you think you’ve frightened me, I adore it,” she declared with gusto. “Just think of being mistaken for—oh, the darling, silly town! In New York there’s been no way of being sensational for years. Everyone at once was constantly doing whatever you wanted to do yourself. I’ve always wanted to be thought—er, sinister, without really being that way at all.”

“Won’t you make it a little hard for me if you carry that out here?” he suggested. “When we get back to New York I’ll let you do anything you want to—”

“Don’t let’s talk of going back there yet,” she begged. “Look. The women here wear shawls on their heads.”