“I knew it the minute I laid eyes on it. She’s taken the yoke out and moved the flowers around to the side.”
These women were in no sense hostile, that is, not deeply hostile. They bore no grudges. But they consistently refused to be imposed upon and delighted in exposing their friends’ subterfuges. Stifling with boredom, cooped up in an alien setting, they reverted to the provincial, made great matters out of small ones. And Eleanor, three weeks out of New York, was still suffering from the delusion that after sundown a woman should dress to draw the favorable notice of men!
At almost ten o’clock Blair and she were still in their room, having learned the week previous that it made one feel conspicuous to exhibit oneself in the patio before at least the third dance, and preferably the fourth. At about that time almost everyone appeared at once, as though by a common signal, and the pitiful little affair was under way. And a peculiar sidelight on the invariable dullness and chaste decorum of these dances was the fact that a bar adjoining the dining room was open all evening until eleven-thirty, as on every other evening in the week, without it occurring to anyone to go in there. Ices and orangeade were called for, and an occasional Benedictine if a lady had forgotten her shawl and the evening grew chilly. Neither Blair nor Eleanor drank liquor and yet, fresh from a place where it had been nearly the sole topic of discussion for the past five years, expressed their surprise to one another, and mentioning the name of some mutual acquaintance, would smile knowingly and say, “So and so should be here, we would always know where to look for him.”
Eleanor was in orange. A fortnight after her arrival she was still wearing the only long skirts in the city. Not even the frantic lengthening of hems on the part of almost everyone that had immediately taken place following her first appearance could overtake hers. She had too much of a start. The older women, it is true, refrained. “Long dresses are only for young girls like Mrs. Giraldy,” they confided to one another. “I’d feel too self-conscious in them, wouldn’t you?”
Blair had stepped out on the balcony. All she could see was his back, with a little white line where his collar showed above his jacket. He was looking overhead. She came up behind him and tilted her own head too, to see if she could make out what he was looking at. But there was no ascension-balloon visible, no lighted kite, no rocket, nothing there at all. Only some stars.
“Every once in awhile you come out here by yourself,” she said. “What are you always looking at up there?”
“I was waiting for you to be ready,” he answered. “The room gets so full of powder.”
“Listen—isn’t that the room-phone ringing? You’d better go, it may be in Spanish.”
She remained on the balcony, inhaling by turns the natural fragrance of the night and the more pungent sweetness buried in her handkerchief.
When he returned to her he said, quite simply and quite pleasantly, “It was Serrano, asking if he might have your first dance.”
In the middle distance a church bell began tolling with a sort of throaty contralto sweetness. She lifted a warning finger, as though it must not be disturbed, as though it was capable of stopping at the mere sound of their voices. Evidently she was counting the strokes. Yet a watch was within easy reach, on Blair’s wrist. He found himself commenting a second time on the great attraction all things inconsequential seemed to hold for her.
“Ten!” said Eleanor, breaking the spell of her own accord. “Let’s go downstairs.” She faced about and leaned against the balcony rail, her arms spread far apart. “Who is Serrano?”
“Don’t bend over like that, you worry me. I introduced him to you two nights ago just as we were getting into the carriage. You dropped your handkerchief on the stairs and he came after us to give it back to you. Don’t you recall?”
“Oh, yes, my handkerchief,” she said.
“I suppose he’d already had me placed as the husband for quite some time. At any rate, he’d been making himself agreeable to me all week before that. I felt I knew him well enough, as far as things go in a place like this. He’s secretary to the Argentine minister, or something.”
She frowned slightly and looked past him. “Then you’d rather not have the first dance with me yourself?”
“Of course I would, you know I would. That isn’t what he meant at all. You know their flowery language: ‘Compliment your lovely wife for me, and may I rob you of one of her dances?’ ”
She narrowed her eyes as though she were pleased, but by her answer showed herself to be anything but pleased. “Suppose I were to tell you I intend to dance every piece with you?”
Flattered, he nevertheless tried to point out a more reasonable course.
“You know I’m not terribly light on my feet. I’d rather sit and watch you enjoy yourself. Besides, I want you to know people.”
They locked their door and went downstairs, Eleanor, in her orange dress, a little in advance, like a slender brightly blazing torch that miraculously failed to char the walls she brushed against.
Serrano was sitting alone at a wicker table arranged for three, two of its chairs tilted forward in token of prospective occupancy. He rose by way of acknowledgment and stood behind his chair as they entered the patio, as Eleanor entered it, rather.
5
Blair returned at sundown. As he entered the room the sun’s reflection still played about the base of the walls, dyeing them waveringly orange. But his face, in the glow, seemed flushed more from within than without. Eleanor was sitting at the mirror. She hardly turned her head, but seeing him in the glass, spoke to him as though he were in front of her instead of behind her.
“I’ve been lying down until now. I had a bath. Is it still so terribly warm out?”
“Frightfully. Or at least it seems so to me now. I didn’t notice it at first. Then about half an hour ago a sickly wave of heat or something seemed to rise up all around me. I’ve been feeling it ever since.”
“Why didn’t you take a carriage? You should be more careful.”
“A little over half an hour ago I came across our friend Serrano sitting in front of a café. He asked me to sit down with him, and ordered some refreshment or other I don’t even remember touching. Then he insisted on paying for it, and brought out his wallet—” Something dropped in front of her. “Is this yours?”
She glanced down at the frivolous petal of handkerchief that had not been there a moment ago.
“Yes—no—I don’t think so—”
Ignoring the startled way in which she was now looking at him, he opened a drawer of the dressing table, which crowded her arm aside as it was brought forward, and took out a little flask.
“Is this the perfume you’re in the habit of using?”
“L’Origan, yes.”
He shook it, amusingly enough (though she found that nothing was amusing at the moment), and held it to his nostrils.
“It’s the same as on the handkerchief. That’s what made me so sure, without knowing why. Scents, they say, do something to the memory. When he first opened the wallet, before I even saw it, you came before me from head to foot just as I see you each day.”
“How perfectly stupid,” she said with an injured air. “Hundreds of women use l’Origan.”
“If it isn’t yours, of course, I owe him an apology. For a moment I nearly fought him about it. I openly asked, ‘Has my wife lost her handkerchief again? I see you have it in your wallet.’ He told me I was mistaken, it was someone else’s. I said, ‘But I am certain that is my wife’s handkerchief.’ He said he was certain it was not. ‘I am sure your wife would never want to claim she is the only charming lady in town who carries a handkerchief.’ ‘If you are so positive it is not hers,’ I said, ‘suppose you let me show it to her. You’ll agree, won’t you, that she should be able to recognize her own property better than anyone else. I give this to you under protest,’ he said, ‘ask and convince yourself. She will tell you herself. Then I would like it returned to me in her presence with an apology.’ ”
> “Whoever it belongs to,” she said, “really ought not to feel flattered at the way he tamely let you carry it off like a sample of goods to be matched.”
“He probably felt it was either that or come to blows with me about it. I had no intention of letting him keep it. Now I’m heartily sorry I didn’t. I’ll telephone and beg his pardon. (Primer piso, numero cinco—”)
“Wait!” she said, starting up, “ring off a moment, I want to tell you something. He’s already said it wasn’t mine. I could very easily say the same thing. I can see he evidently counted on my denying it. But I’m not going to. I had a handkerchief tied around my wrist the other day and he took it off and asked me whether he could keep it. I didn’t stoop to trying to get it back, which was probably what he wanted me to do. Instead, all I said was that a handkerchief was only a handkerchief to me, and would never be anything else.”
“What was his answer to that?”
“ ‘Sometimes a handkerchief can be more than a handkerchief.’ Pure pose on his part. We finished the set and I threw my racket down and walked off the court without another word.”
She rolled the object that had created the discussion into a ball and petulantly flung it on the floor.
“I’m sick of hearing any more about this handkerchief, and all others as well—or do you wish me to continue?”
He leaned over her and touched the top of her head with his lips. “Do you suppose I would care if you had given it to him, in a sentimental way or any other? I would be slighting myself to think twice about someone you know less than two weeks. And slighting you to think twice about any man, whoever he was. These little surface courtesies are nothing. Your heart isn’t tied up in your handkerchief. Any more than when I tip my hat to a lady it means I am thinking of love. Our cordiality toward the rest of the world was not supposed to disappear after we knelt together in the church that day and everything turned to a rosy blur before our eyes.”
Suddenly she had begun to cry. Quite inexplicably, she put her mouth to her clenched hand, and tears stood in her eyes.
“Blair, he kissed me. Oh, I don’t see how I could have.”
With his hand still resting on her shoulder he said, “He isn’t very brave, this Serrano.” He took a handkerchief of his own from his breast pocket and touched her eyelids with it.
“You love life so, Eleanor.”
“It was the time that old Mrs. Galbraith and I stopped to take tea together at a little summer-house. He must have followed us in another carriage. He sat down at our table without being asked, and then Mrs. Galbraith went away and left me. And they lit lanterns all around us and they played a tango and he showed me how it was danced. Then he taught me how to mix anisette with my tea. And the sunset made the sky all colors imaginable. You know I didn’t mean anything—and I didn’t let him see me back to the hotel, either.”
She turned around and realized he hadn’t been listening. He had left her and gone to the window, and was standing there gazing up at some stars again.
6
For two days after this Eleanor remained constantly at Blair’s side. He could not make out whether this was to prove her devotion to him or to avoid meeting Serrano alone. He did not ask her. She said nothing about it, one way or the other. Then on the second evening, after dinner, they both met him vis-à-vis. He was sitting in the patio with a neglected cup of coffee resting on the broad arm of his bamboo chair, and pretended to be reading a newspaper. Since he appeared not to see them, Blair was under no necessity of bowing to him. Furthermore, both men were hatless. A snub could not have been more painlessly arranged by both parties under any circumstances.
Owing to the patio’s limitations, Blair and Eleanor had to content themselves with chairs which remained in full view of him. A triple cat-and-mouse-play at once began. Serrano, over the top of his newspaper, stared at Eleanor as if to determine just how much she had admitted to her husband. Blair kept his eyes on Eleanor’s face to find out if she were looking at Serrano, and if any signals were passing between them. Eleanor gazed steadily downward into her own lap, and seemed to be absorbed in nervously twisting her ring about on her finger, now this way, now that. Finally, as though she could bear the situation no longer, she got up and went up to their room, saying she had forgotten her powder puff and would be down in a moment. Blair at once transferred his interest to Serrano, to see what move he would make. Their glances met and Serrano, as soon as Eleanor was gone, rose to his feet and idly sauntered over to him. He nodded his head in recognition and said, “I must be getting blind. I did not see you until now. And where is your wife this evening?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Blair said. “Perhaps she is taking her usual tea and anisette.”
Serrano gave him a disconcerted look and made as if to move on.
“About that little matter we were discussing the other day,” Blair proceeded, “if you still want the handkerchief, there is ample time for you to intercept the chambermaid who cleans our room. It was my wife’s, and she threw it into the waste-basket.”
Serrano arched his brows in mock inquiry.
“It is customary, then, for her to treat her handkerchiefs so?”
“Yes,” Blair answered, “you see with us, as she has already told you, a handkerchief is only a handkerchief, nothing more.”
“And what do you think it is to other people,” Serrano asked insolently, “a sacred symbol of salvation?”
“Good evening,” Blair said, without moving from where he sat.
Serrano gave him a scornful look and walked on, his newspaper pinned under one arm.
Neither of them wished a scene, Serrano probably because of his infant diplomatic career and certainly Blair because Eleanor’s name was more or less involved, and yet both realized that in a moment more they would have rushed headlong into one. More than one of the costume-connoisseurs scattered about the patio at strategic spots reading books, playing solitaire, and deciphering anagrams, would look intently over at them from time to time whenever she thought herself unobserved. Serrano’s maneuver in not venturing to approach until after Eleanor was gone had been duly noted and had whetted their curiosity to the point of conjecture. From conjecture it was only a step to firm belief, though each one held to her own theory and was in no way loath to set it forth.
“She’s had a quarrel with him, and now he’s trying to curry favor with the husband.”
“No, I think it’s the other way around. Her husband’s smelt a rat and is keeping them away from each other, and the other fellow is trying to get information out of him.”
“It’s about time he found out, anyway. I saw the two of them drive back in a carriage one afternoon and he was wearing the same kind of flower in his buttonhole that she held in her lap, he’d evidently bought them for her.”
“And Mrs. Galbraith told me that one day she took tea with her outside the city and he suddenly popped up magically right under their feet, and when Mrs. Galbraith felt that the only thing to do was to leave, she stayed behind”—a suitable pause —”alone with him!”
The sum total of which was that Eleanor had gotten herself liberally talked about.
Meanwhile, since she did not return and it seemed to him he had remained an intolerable length of time surrounded by these cranelike women, whose necks appeared to lengthen each time they scrutinized him, Blair got up and decided to follow her to their room. Just before he had gained the stairs, however, he was forced to pass close to a white-haired woman with rakishly short sleeves whom he vaguely placed as the Mrs. Galbraith of the famous tea incident. As she had spent an afternoon in Eleanor’s company and as she now looked up from her mythical absorption in a book (not a page of which had stirred within the last half hour) to greet him, he had to consent to stop and chat with her a moment.
“We are all holding our breaths,” she said, “to see what beautiful new dress your wife will wear at the dance this Saturday night.”
“I don’t think she has any new ones lef
t,” he said absent-mindedly, staring over her head into the middle of a potted palmetto.
“I’m sure she must have some hidden away that even you don’t know about. I know she wouldn’t be cruel enough to disappoint us.”
“Her public,” he echoed, striking an egotistical pose as he remembered having seen someone do in New York.
“Even we poor women admire her taste in clothes,” she went on, “and that’s saying a lot, you know, envious creatures that we are.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that,” he protested gallantly, hardly knowing what he was saying at all.
This matter disposed of, he mounted the stairs two at a time, giving the impression of having just escaped from something unpleasant, and threw open the door to the room with a suddenness which made Eleanor rear upright. She had been lying crouched on the bed with her hands pressed to her eyes.
“This entire place is getting impossible,” he said. “The sooner we leave—”
He thought there was a touch of guilt (Had she been crying? But that couldn’t be, what was there for her to cry about?) in the strained gayety she at once assumed, and the mocking bravado with which she undertook to answer him.
“Absolutely not,” she said, “until after I have stunned them with that mauve velvet I got at Worth’s. Once they’ve seen that I don’t care where we go.”
“You too?” he lamented. “That’s all I’ve been hearing on all sides. You seem to have turned into a sort of clothes-horse for everyone to stare at.”
She laughed and, disturbed, he thought he detected a note of vindictiveness in her laughter.
“Poor souls,” she said, “what have they been telling you now?”
And on Saturday evening, during the cloistered hour from nine to ten, as he sat watching her touch the stopper of a perfume bottle to each pulse, he remarked: “Eleanor, is that your only reason for staying, just to show them how well you can dress?”
A Young Man's Heart Page 8
