A Young Man's Heart

by Cornell Woolrich

  Suddenly he held his breath and a sickening suspicion grew upon him. He dared not look to confirm it. He knew the launch had gone off without him and they had not missed him or called him by name. He forced himself to turn around and look. The carmine light at the stern was skimming over the licorice-black water, it was already far out on the lagoon. A snatch of song drifted back to him. He raced down the steps to the water’s edge and almost would have thrown himself in. He sat down and buried his head in his folded arms and laughed tragically. An excess of laughter brought a despairing calm and he turned back to the restaurant and sat down, his head and the tops of his shoulders appearing above the sea of empty tables that encircled him. One or two waiters stood about, and occasionally they would make a desultory half-circle, with the flat of the hand embedded in a dish towel, over the polished table-top. They paid no attention to him nor he any to them. He wondered vaguely whether he would have to get out of the way when the place filled up for the evening.

  At last the launch returned but there was no one in it he knew. He had jumped up, only to see seven or eight men and a girl come trudging up the steps carrying cased musical instruments. They collected chairs in one spot and set up a cluster of thin reed-like stands which they promptly burdened with dog-eared music-scores that were continually fluttering off to the floor. They snapped at the green-hooded rods of light that surmounted these racks, testing them to see that they were in working order, until the place sounded as though it were overrun with crickets. Blair began to be in a better humor. Next they all sat down informally at various of the tables and black coffee and rolls were served them. They chattered like bird-creatures. The girl, who was lighter than the rest of them as far as the color of her skin went, was seated by herself. She had gold bowknots on each shoulder, Blair noticed. Seeing the expression on his face she took her coffee cup in one hand and her bread in the other and moved over beside him.

  “What are you doing here all alone?” she said.

  “They overlooked me,” said Blair, a little ashamed of his previous emotion now that he looked back on it.

  “No!” she said gravely, “Well, how could they ever do that?”

  “I expect my Eleanora at any minute,” he confided. “I didn’t see her go with them, she must have been left behind too. You think she’ll show up, don’t you?” He said this last rather too anxiously, and gave himself away.

  “Oh, without doubt,” the girl assured him. This boasted superiority of the dominant race piqued her at certain times, amused her at others.

  She dipped some of the roll in the coffee cup and put it into his mouth. Her cinnamon fingers under his nose were like some kind of incense, he tried to think what it was and couldn’t remember.

  They exchanged names with a childlike simplicity that would have been beautiful to overhear. Hers was Olimpia, it turned out.

  “You’re in the band, aren’t you?” he asked her.

  “I play the cornet.”

  He did not know what a cornet was, had never heard of one.

  “It goes like this: too too tu-tu.” Appropriate finger-motions accompanied the demonstration.

  “Oh,” said Blair, perfectly satisfied. Olimpia, the cornetist. Gold shoulder-knots. Incense-fingers. “I wish I could play the cornet,” he sighed enviously.

  “I’ll show you sometime.”

  While they were having this sensible man-to-man chat, more than consoling to Blair, Eleanor appeared, having just stepped out of a small boat at the rear landing. She made her way rapidly among the hosts of empty seats with swift jerky motions that all pointed to an absence of tranquillity. Serrano, his collar loosened, was a few steps behind her, talking in a continuous plaintive undertone, but whether making love or making excuses it was not easy to determine.

  “This looks very fine for me,” she sneered without turning her head. “What did I say? They have gone!”

  In her indiscriminate anger she ignored Blair, letting him have only the whites of her outraged eyes.

  She turned her head sharply so that the nostrils were taut and said over her shoulder:

  “And how about the launch?”

  “Waiting, little dear,” Serrano said.

  The three of them descended the glossy steps, mirror- like from constant laving by the water, and which reflected Eleanor’s light shoes without a break: she allowed her husband to precede her into the unlighted launch, and accepted the arm of the mechanician in preference to that proffered her by Serrano. The latter took this little defeat ruefully, smiled and lighted a cigarette.

  “No smoking, please,” said the mechanic, “there is liable to be an explosion. We use benzine, you know.”

  “For my part, I would like to see us all in hell,” Serrano remarked morosely.

  Eleanor stabbed him impatiently with her eyes and he threw the cigarette into the water. It spat like a small toad.

  As the distance between the launch and the casino slowly widened with the strangled underwater coughing of the engine, the cornetist, who had never budged from the table all this time, slowly raised an arm to Blair, diffidently, as though not sure it would be acknowledged. He answered it with a self-conscious salute of the palm at the temple.

  “Who is that?” asked Eleanor, apparently noticing her for the first time.

  “Her name’s Olimpia.”

  The intervening water, broadening every instant, was incandescent with streaks of fluid light, reflecting the brilliantly glowing casino upside down in a rippling pool of gold and silver glass studded with living coals of vermilion and phosphorus-green. High above this fever-sore of heat and color the stars, cool and remote, were like white flowers in a great black meadow.

  Blair and Eleanor had drawn apart from their undesirable escort, they were talking in an intimate undertone, one of those oases that Blair prized so.

  “We went rowing,” she murmured, “and he lost one of the oars. I thought we’d be out there all night.” She shrugged her shoulders wearily.

  “Charming idea,” observed Blair disconsolately. “I guess you thought so, too.”

  “Please, Blair, I don’t want to hear anything—”

  “Lovely night,” remarked Serrano. “Don’t you agree?”

  She raised her voice so that it would reach him. “I’ve no doubt you think so,” she answered. They had entered the canal, and the unseen, unfelt lily beds so cruelly parted to give them passage, that floated slowly together again on dismembered pods in their heaving wake, retaliated by filling the air with an evil smell of death and rottenness. And over it all the stars were as beautiful as sin. Eleanor was barely audible through her compressed handkerchief: “Damn him!”

  Blair hired a carriage at the old stone wharf to take them back to the hotel. The wharf was three hundred years old and the hotel only ten or twelve. Thus they passed from the ancient part of the city to the modern, from that which was slowly decaying to that which was brisk with life.

  Serrano Eleanor had discarded as one would an outworn glove, with a limp gesture of the hand. Nothing was said.

  They went up to their room. Eleanor pulled the cord of the light and took up a book which she pretended to read. There was something strained about her.

  Suddenly there was a sharp report. The book had struck the wall opposite. “Accuse me! Accuse me!” she shrieked hysterically. “Don’t torture me like this. I know what you are thinking. And we did! We did! Do you hear me? I should hate him, and I love him all the more—I tell you I love him—”

  Blair covered his ears with his hands and paced back and forth in agony. “Don’t, don’t,” he moaned.

  And long after there was silence in the room, his mind kept pleading, “Don’t! don’t!”

  3

  These various travesties on human conduct were one and all cut short by an occurrence which, unnoticed by the hotel dwellers at first and later only jokingly mentioned in passing, suddenly loomed menacingly in the air about them and seemed to threaten their security. For some weeks past the
vernacular newspapers, which few in the foreign colony read, had made off-hand mention of disorders in various towns near by in connection with elections which were then in progress throughout the country. Then all further reference to the matter abruptly ceased, which to the initiated was not as reassuring as it might have been, since the press was known to be under the thumb of the existing regime. On the heels of this tactful silence, rumors began to filter into the city. The disaffection had grown beyond control, it had found leaders, it was being organized into a rival government. Regiments of unpaid soldiers sent to crush the movement had executed their own officers instead and gone over to it in a body. Others, less certain of their own minds, had threatened to lay down their arms unless they were paid immediately. But a third group of the military, who had perhaps been paid more recently than the rest, were as yet willing enough to carry out their orders, and bloodshed was imminent, if indeed it had not already begun. In short, revolution and all that it implied was under way.

  These rumors soon found ample confirmation. People who had business that took them by the railroad station in the early mornings noticed lounging groups of unkempt flea-bitten soldiers waiting to entrain, their rifles stacked in little tripods up and down the length of the platforms. The sweethearts, wives and sisters of these luckless ones, many of them employed as servants in foreign households, helped to spread the general uneasiness farther afield by relaying to their mistresses all the fantastic and highly colored reports they had gotten from their men. Orders were posted making it a military offense to spread false rumors or in any way “disturb the public tranquillity.” A number of arrests following this, which at any other time would have gone unnoticed and which may well have been caused by nothing more than shoplifting, were immediately attributed to it. It was said, further, that the suspects had been denied a trial and handed over to a firing-squad forthwith. Suddenly the newspapers appeared with great blank patches scattered throughout their columns. A day or two later they suspended publication entirely. The telegraph wires had been cut, some said. At the telegraph offices themselves, governmentally owned, this was indignantly denied, the excuse being given that a severe electrical storm several miles out in the hills had brought the wires down and they were in process of being repaired. People reminded one another that this was not the usual time of year for electrical storms and that the sky had been cloudless in every direction for the past six weeks. An operator, in one instance, was said, at the risk of his own welfare, to have advised an elderly German woman who had once befriended him, to leave the city without losing a moment’s time. He had been thrown into jail for it, the story went.

  With the arrival of the first foreign refugees, a handful of mining superintendents, travelers, engineers, coffee and banana growers and sugar-cane planters and their wives, trickling back into the city from isolated outlying points all in a state of the highest excitement and delighting at their own unlooked-for importance, uncertainty became certainty, the tension broke and a mad scramble to be the first to leave was on. These people, through their own vanity and shortsightedness, created a panic where there had been no panic before. They explained away their own cowardice and unwarranted desertion of their posts and responsibilities by vivid, and for the most part, imaginative accounts of arson, pillage, seizure of property, grave personal danger and last-moment escapes. According to them, the country was up in arms, it was no longer safe for foreigners. So-and-so had been butchered in cold blood at the door of his hacienda. A few hours later so-and-so arrived in town himself, as frightened as anyone else but otherwise sound and untouched. Meanwhile the hegira had already begun and only a miracle could have stopped it. Each succeeding train to go was more crowded than the one before. Disorganization proceeded rapidly. Pullmans were done away with almost at once. Tickets were literally fought for, and unscrupulous employees made small fortunes selling them at two and three times their fixed amounts. Soon passes took their place entirely, signed slips giving no more than access to the train. Securing a seat then became a matter of bribery. People were willing to stand all night in the aisles between the seats so long as they made sure of reaching the coast. Socially correct women considered themselves fortunate to ride in the second class carriages alongside families of Indians and professional beggars, afflicted with vermin. A highly improbable story drifted back on the lips of trainmen that one such woman had bartered her pearl necklace for a share in some food that her seat- neighbors had brought with them. Considering the innate simplicity of people of that class, it was probably no more than a string of beads.

  It took Eleanor a matter of several days to realize that no one any longer cared just what dress she chose to appear in, or whom her smiles were directed at, or in fact whether she lived or died or what became of her. People had scattered to their rooms, were hovering anxiously over the lids of their trunks. She found difficulty even in securing a partner for the tennis courts. She discovered herself lording it over emptiness. There had been no good-bys. Each day some additional face, grown gradually familiar, was missing. A certain number of these defections she found particularly hard to brook.

  “Have you seen Mr. Nichols anywhere about? He promised me to reserve this court for us, and I’ve been waiting out here for over ten minutes.”

  “He left last evening, with a lot of other people.”

  (“The coward! If I ever see him again I’ll cut him completely.”)

  Or, “Mrs. Galbraith must have overslept to-day. She’s always in that end chair there by the door.”

  “Oh, didn’t you know? She took the morning train.”

  (“I’m glad,” thought Eleanor, “she saw me in my mauve velvet at least before she left.”)

  And Blair must have smiled inwardly, with sardonic intent, as often as he saw her face drop on gathering these pieces of chance information, the only adieux she ever got. One by one the objects of her attention were bursting asunder like so many tinsel Christmas ornaments.

  “We’ll stay,” she said fiercely, “we’ll show them we’re not afraid. The silly goats, all rushing off!”

  And she displayed her scorn of them, and incidentally revealed her lacerated amour-propre, in the only way that occurred to her: by becoming twice as casual as before, and more addicted to trifles than ever.

  While she saw perspiring porters carry trunks and other luggage out through the main entrance of the hotel and pile them out on the open pavement in indiscriminate heaps beyond all capacity of the carts and wagons to do away with, she sat in the patio with a box of chocolates someone had given her open beside her, vapidly nibbling, one leg crossed over the other.

  A woman rushed by on the way to her quarters with a welter of dresses flung over one arm. She paused to stare.

  “Aren’t you going, Mrs. Giraldy?”

  “I don’t know,” Eleanor said, looking up innocently. “Blair’s down at a jeweler’s getting his wrist-watch repaired just now.”

  “I shouldn’t advise you to wait until it’s too late. One never can tell which train will be the last.” She hurried on, almost as though she were vexed that anyone could preserve such tranquillity at a time like this. Which was precisely the impression Eleanor had wished to convey.

  When Blair returned she greeted him, with what he at times was wont to consider as typical frivolity and then again at other times rather liked in her, by insisting much against his wishes upon popping a chocolate between his lips. He loathed chocolates.

  “Is your watch all right now?” she asked.

  He looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t know anything was wrong with it.”

  She laughed gleefully. She had believed her own improvisation.

  “I told one of these nervous wrecks you had gone to have it repaired, to try and make her understand how calm and unmoved we both feel. I never saw such chicken-hearted people in all my life. Some of them are doing their packing almost in public. It’s like the last day in Pompeii.”

  “At the same time,” Blair answered, “i
t might be just as well to do a little packing ourselves. I don’t see any reason for our remaining much longer. We have been here since November. And I must start work soon, Eleanor. There’s absolutely no need of going into the money Sasha left us. If we have any family later, she intended it for—”

  “Your arguments sound weak to me,” she said truculently, “and I won’t be subjected to the inconvenience of those trains while this stampede is going on. It will be over within a day or two. After all, there aren’t so many of them. And we’ll go as we came, at leisure. This place has been so divine. I want to leave it with a sweet taste in my mouth.”

  “Still, if anything happens to you, how will I feel about it, with no one but myself to blame? And Eleanor, if that woman you spoke to has been about town to-day, she knows you told her a fib, because all the jewelry shops have let their shutters down. I noticed that myself. And it isn’t an encouraging sign.”

  “Yes, but who buys jewelry here? Only the foreigners. And you can’t convince me,” she went on, with the excited air of pleading some special cause of her own, “that the people here themselves, the natives I suppose you might call them, have any idea of leaving their homes and gamboling off. I know, because I made signs to our chambermaid and asked her, and she made signs back and told me not to be afraid, it was just politics.”

  He laughed in spite of himself and said, “Suppose you had ever so slightly misunderstood just one single sign of hers, mightn’t that throw her whole argument out?”

  “Blair, I want a gardenia,” she cried happily, “a gardenia for my black dress. Send someone out for me. No, you go yourself. Oh, it must be perfect-looking, just as if it were made of wax!”

  “You deserve a thousand of them, for being able to want just one so keenly,” he assured her. How like a silly child, how like Eleanor.