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 stre
et 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.”
3
As they rounded a corner and entered Bruselas Street, Blair shut his eyes for a moment as though to recapture some long-lost dream. When he opened them the moon, like a beacon directly overhead, had strewn a lane of blue-white powder down the center of the glistening macadam roadway. A light behind a window was like the mouth of a ruddy furnace open to the street. For an instant one expected smoke to pour from it. And over there was a garden wall, that somehow he guessed, without knowing why, must be pink in the sunlight.
“This is the door, stop here.” And to Eleanor, “Wait for me, I’ll go in alone.”
From the doorway he turned to look back at the wall, but she and the carriage were in the way. Her feet were still up and she was smiling whimsically at him, as though to humor him were a deliciously amusing thing.
“Go ahead,” she encouraged, appropriating his hesitation to herself, “I’m not afraid to wait for you.” It hadn’t been on that account at all that he had paused.
So he went in, entering the house of seven years before with the thought that Eleanor should not have come here with him, that her presence stood ever so slightly between him and an elusive something that he was trying to recapture, what it was he did not exactly know. Some dream-effect most likely, some confirmation that there actually was such a place and he had been here before, that the scene he had been dimly remembering all these years was not imaginary but really existed after all. And Eleanor, by being with him, by waiting for him just outside in a carriage, with her feet up before her and a knowing smile on her face and the air of a great city vividly stamped all over her, made the something he was searching for elude him, made it as though it had never been, made it as far out of reach as before. He might just as well have not come at all. Now it was like any other house on any other street. Thoughts like these were dishonorable, he knew. They were his first treachery toward her. And yet he could not shake the impression off. She jarred. She was an anachronism. She held him firmly in the present, and he was trying to find the past. Certainly it had nothing to do with his seeing Giraldy again. Giraldy was only a shadowy excuse for coming near here at all. His father was less to him now than most of the friends he had made in New York, and whose names he was already beginning to forget one by one. In all these years only one letter had passed between them, a letter from Blair to which there had never been an answer, a letter two weeks after his departure, parts of which he could still recall, it had seemed so important to him then:
“The boat docked here for two days, and as the purser told me the rest of the passage money would be returned to me at the steamship office, I stayed here to try and talk to Sasha if I can find out where she is . . .”
Inside, the patio had not changed. The same plants as before, unless perhaps one had died and been replaced in kind. (But plants seldom died in this land, they grew old and flourished, and outlived the people that had planted them.) And on the patio floor the same depression that he remembered, centered about a mildewed iron drain, to carry off the rain-water.
He rang for admittance, and presently a South American negress shuffled languidly as far as the patio gate and stood regarding him, her sleek forearms tucked across her stomach.
“You are the owner here?”
“I work for the Gomez,” she answered.
“How long have they occupied this house?”
She rolled her china-white eyes upward toward the sky, as though seeking inspiration, and began laboriously whispering the names of the months. When he had overheard her repeat each name a second time, she triumphantly announced the result:
“Two years.”
A woman thrust her disheveled head out of the door to Estelle’s old bedroom and exclaimed, “Who is out there, Serafina?”
“An Englishman looking for someone,” the negress replied patronizingly.
Her mistress, drawn by curiosity and perhaps expecting to see a monocle and a kilt, stepped outside of the door to look for herself. She wore a slovenly wrapper in conjunction with a pair of diamond earrings, and to judge by her figure seemed to have reached a critical stage of overindulgence in eating chocolates. She was fanning herself slowly as she stared.
“I am simply looking for someone who lived here before you,” Blair said to her, annoyed at being considered something of a freak. “A man named Giraldy. Can you tell me where he moved?”
The matron appeared to ponder, never once forgetting to keep her fan going. Her attitude seemed to imply not whether or no she could answer the question but whether he had any right to expect her to answer it. Finally she said to the servant, “Ask my old man, he may know something about it.”
The black woman shuffled back into the house and Blair, to break the awkward wait, said, “Pardon the annoyance.”
She seemed to agree that it was indeed an annoyance and sighed resignedly.
The servant returned and delivered her message in the style of a six-year-old child committing something to memory: “He said to tell you to tell the Englishman that another Englishman lived here before us, and when he went away, the other Englishman, he said he was going to the opal mines of Queretaro to do some business, and he took his wife with him.”
“I remember,” said the lady fanning herself, “she was that Frenchwoman with the little poodle dog.”
“She taught you how to do your hair,” added the negress conversationally.
“No,” her mistress corrected her, “I always knew how to do it. She gave me some advice, that was all.”
“Thank you,” interrupted Blair, “Good night,” and left the house. He hardly knew whether to laugh or swear at them.
As he came out of the house he put forth a hand, as though to steady himself, and touched the wall. It was a gesture of farewell to the place.
Eleanor looked very beautiful sitting there in the moonlight. It made her face and arms even whiter than they were and her dress very black, it sprinkled silver dust on her light hair. She gathered her skirt and made room for him beside her in the carriage.
“He’s gone, they don’t know where.”
“Oh,” she mourned, properly sympathetic, “I’m so sorry.”
The carriage moved, the wall slipped past, and with it went his long-spun dreams a second t
ime.
4
At nine each Saturday evening practically everybody in the hotel had gone to their rooms to prepare for the function that was to take place that night. The patio and the corridors were deserted. Only waiters moved about, rearranging chairs and replacing exhausted lights with fresh ones here and there. These gloomy Saturday night dances continued to be, as in Blair’s childhood, a feature of hotel-life in the little city. They broke the monotony of routine existence for the permanent guests, creating little oases of gossip, mild flirtation and sartorial comparison in the arid tenor of hotel-bound lives. The hapless wives of electrical engineers, petroleum experts, representatives of foreign banks and what not, exiled here for five and ten years of their lives, dared to wear the same gowns only a certain number of times in succession, and then by makeshift alterations that fooled nobody, must try to make them appear as something quite different again. There were women residing in the hotel who had entire genealogies of their friends’ dresses down pat, and whom it was useless to attempt to mislead on that point. They were looked upon, and rightly, as authorities in the matter. And some were base enough at times to try to entrap their victims into false admissions and misrepresentations, going up to them smilingly and saying, “What a lovely dress you have on! It’s new, isn’t it? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it before.” But woe betide her who swallowed the bait and attempted to deceive these experts. Within an hour her dress antecedents were common knowledge throughout the hotel, and the various transfigurations it had gone through had been outlined in detail.
A Young Man's Heart Page 7
