There was no one at hand to say good-by to them when they finally set out from the hotel at three. As the hotel receded in back of them its sharp outlines seemed to quiver in the heat that rose in magnetic waves from the pavement of the street. “Look,” said Eleanor, pointing to a window just before they turned a corner, “there’s where our room was.”
The houses and the streets slipped sluggishly by them, and security was only a few hours away.
“You were very happy here, weren’t you, Eleanor?”
“Yes, I guess so,” she admitted uncertainly.
“I’m sorry I’m taking you away like this.”
They rolled into the great stone courtyard of the station at last, and got out of the carriage. Eleanor looked as cool and charming as ever, even in the dust and swelter of the place. Her face gave no indication of what she might feel. She seemed neither pleased nor displeased. She looked about her apparently without seeing anything at all.
The entrance, usually so noisy and swarming with hangers-on, was lifeless save for a group of porters squatting in one of the doorways gambling, their backs recklessly exposed to the sun. They passed through a deserted waiting-room, given over to flies and scattered leaves of newspaper.
“They must have let them in the train already,” he muttered.
Eleanor hurried along at his side on her high slim heels, her footsteps little pizzicato notes on the cement underscored by the slower basso of his heavy tread. The rails alongside the long shady platform held no cars. They stretched away to infinity, empty, two silver lines that the eye grew tired of following.
“Where is the train?” Blair asked an official who was busy locking a door.
“There are no more trains. The tracks were dynamited last night. One cannot leave,” he added despondently, shuffling off with a large ring of keys in his hand.
Blair, his chest all at once weighted with lead, felt Eleanor’s touch on his sleeve. “Did we miss this one too?”
“They aren’t running any more.” He saw sudden unmistakable fright come into her eyes. “We’ll have to stay.” It relieved him, in spite of the concern he felt over their predicament, to see that she was at last no longer pleased at staying.
“I didn’t want to go while we still had the chance. Now that we can’t leave, I want to get away so badly. Oh, why did we delay?”
“We’ll go back to the hotel for the time being.” He laughed a little sadly. “There’s not much danger of anyone else having engaged our room while we’ve been gone.”
She took his arm once more and they turned their backs as bravely as they might on the distant ironical point toward which the barren rails converged.
At the upper end of the platform a woman of seeming refinement, dressed entirely in black, was seated upon a valise, holding a handkerchief to her face. “Only to-day I sold my house,” she sobbed, lifting tear-spangled eyes at Blair’s murmured inquiry. “Now that I am unable to go to my sister on the coast, I have no place to stay.”
“Why not a hotel, for example?” he suggested.
She raised her arms, the knotted handkerchief still in one hand, in a protest of utter disbelief. “Can you credit it?” she cried. “Such a thing never occurred to me until now that you mention it. I have had my own home here for eight years. Yes, yes, I will go to the Imperial. Yes, that will be the best thing to do.”
“She’s a charlatan,” Blair remarked as they walked away. “Do you notice? She hasn’t moved from the spot.”
And a moment later a station guard, touching his cap to attract their attention, remarked respectfully, “The caballero didn’t give any money to that old girl over there?”
“No,” said Blair, “why?”
“She comes here every day and sits there pretending to cry. When the trains were still running, it was because she had lost her pass. A few foreign señors were foolish enough to give her the money and help her climb aboard. Each time the train started she jumped off the last car with her empty satchel.”
“Why don’t you have her arrested?”
“It isn’t my affair,” the trainman shrugged. “If she’s clever enough to manage, let her.”
“And a Castilian (synonym for one of white origin, without Indian blood) at that,” Blair observed.
The ride back to the hotel was psychologically trying to both of them. It was like the aftermath of a diminutive Flight to Varennes. Now for the first time they felt robbed of their freedom of movement. The streets and scenes that half an hour ago their minds had unceremoniously hurried away, glad to dismiss from sight, now forced themselves unpleasantly back upon them. Each tried haltingly to console the other.
“It won’t be for very long. We’ll go in a few days for good.”
“It’s my fault. You were right. We should have left when everyone else did.”
At the hotel they asked for their key once more and went upstairs to the room. It was exactly as they had left it, the bed unmade, empty drawers in the furniture hanging open, the chambermaid having not yet found time to attend to it. Within a very few moments, however, informed of their return (and no doubt scenting an eventual second fee as large as the one she had received less than an hour before), she presented herself with the utmost alacrity and good will and began to restore it to order. Their trunks followed, carried in the door by the same individuals who so short a while before had taken them away.
Left alone finally, Eleanor and he sat abjectly facing one another for awhile, with nothing to say. Not even the balcony was much consolation to them now. The speckless blue vault that showed beyond it was too close for comfort, seemed to weigh down upon them, leaving no loophole of escape.
She stood up at last with a philosophical little sigh and took off her hat, and he watched her empty the contents of her trunk into the cavernous recesses of the huge mirrored wardrobe that swallowed her New York things with an air of never meaning to give them up again.
That night, her chin grimly tilted as though defying the circumstances that had compelled them to remain almost the hotel’s sole remaining guests, Eleanor dressed with ironic elaborateness. She revealed a pungent sense of humor (or possibly, he thought, a complete lack of any) in the added touch of a pair of swathing white kid gloves, elbow-length.
“Eleanor, not for here!” he cried. “You’ll make a fool of yourself.”
“Dear, I know what I’m doing,” she said, and then in a momentary flash of self-revealment, “All these things give me courage. I’m frightened. Frightened at our staying on here alone like this. I must dress, powder, paint. Otherwise I’ll find myself crying hysterically on that bed.”
Just outside the doors of the dining room she removed her shawl, as on any other night, and handed it to him, then swept on in, in a flare of jade velvet and powdered shoulders. The empty tables looked pitifully forlorn with their white cloths and rosebud-stalks in glass vials. The two or three diners in it could not fill the long room.
With spoons halfway to their lips, about to taste the soup, the lights suddenly went out, plunging them into helpless paralysis of movement. A few low, startled cries were uttered, and then the waiters hurried about distributing lighted candles at the various tables.
The room grew jeweled with sparkling points of yellow, like a field of daisies. Eleanor, visible to him once more in the soft diffused glow, had gone on eating. “You see, I dressed for a formal occasion. They’ve at last become fashionable here.” She smiled across at him, and her smile was very witching with the shadows that were now added to it. Neglecting the remainder of his dinner, he sat and admiringly watched her and tried not to show how wrung with apprehension he was at the thought of her being endangered in any way.
“What happened?” he asked the waiter under his breath.
“It looks as though the power-house has fallen into their hands. They say the streets outside are dark, too.”
Blair and he exchanged mutually troubled looks.
When they had left the dining room, Eleanor turned t
o him and suggested, “A carriage ride?”
“I’m afraid not, dear. The street-lights are out, too.”
“Are all the lights out everywhere? What happened, did a fuse blow out?”
He laughed, only because he knew she meant that to be laughed at, and taking her hand, kissed it with sudden intensity.
In the patio the gloom was only half-heartedly dispelled by the few lanterns strung here and there. She looked about and he thought he saw her shudder slightly. “Well, shall we play cards then?” she proposed. Additional candles were called for, and with two acquaintances who were as glad to afford their company as they were to receive it, they sat down to a huddled, frightened little game, lowering their voices whenever they became too conscious of the silence about them.
That night Blair dreamed he was in a vast office in New York surrounded by noisy typewriters. He started up in bed and the sound continued, withdrawn to a distance but unmistakable. The metallic clatter that a wireless might make, but more monotonous, with only dots and no dashes at all.
Then he saw that Eleanor was awake too, and was pressing her cheek to his shoulder.
“What is it? I’ve been listening to it for half an hour. I was afraid to wake you. Blair, what is it?”
He jumped up and reached for the switch, then remembering, fumbled for matches and lit the candle.
“The other one, too,” she wailed, “oh, make it light.” And then jumping out of bed to follow him out on the balcony, went on irrelevantly, “After this I hate candlelight. I never again want to go to another dinner-party where they have it.”
Out on the open balcony the sound was more pronounced than ever. They stood listening for awhile.
“It’s like riveting when they’re putting up a new building. They wouldn’t do that at night. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“But it is. Oh, but what is it?”
“Machine guns,” he said, putting his arm around her.
He felt her body stiffen for a moment. Then he could tell she was scanning his face, waiting for him to give the cue, waiting to adopt whatever emotion he might display and carry it much further, to the exaggerated limits of the feminine temperament.
Not that he mistrusted her sincerity. But she was Eleanor, she was woman. She could be reassured. He alone had no one to reassure him, ever.
“I’ll close the window if it bothers you,” he said quietly.
They reentered the room, and she sank into the chair before her dressing table, her back to the mirror for once.
“Blair, give me a cigarette, please do.”
“What for?” he said, tender and harsh at the same time, “you don’t need one any more than I do.”
The candles burned fitfully, throwing on the walls grotesque shadows it was best not to look at too closely. Outside in the corridor an occasional footstep went by their room, once or twice a distant door opened, as though someone, alarmed, were standing behind it listening.
An hour dragged by, and the night would not outlast their waning candles after all, they found out. One could in time, they now both learned, grow used to anything. Wonderful the elasticity of the human mind. When they went out on the balcony a second time, a single robe thrown over the two of them, it was no longer wholly to listen to the satanic orchestration that continued unabated somewhere in the distance: it was also to greet the first silver-green light diluting the eastern sky, with little cries of restored confidence and kisses on the single fist that their two knotted hands made.
When they woke up it surprised them at first, looking through the window, to see the sun directly overhead and casting only dwarf shadows instead of, in laboriously ascending, making of the uneven roof-tops below it a checkerboard of black and white. And the noon stillness, broken only by small casual noises of the street, made them think what they had heard during the night had been a dream. “It’s gone!” said Eleanor. They dressed and, forgetting chocolate and all, which for that matter no one had brought to them, hurried downstairs to learn the outcome.
The quiet they discovered to be that of catastrophe. The government had collapsed immediately after the first skirmishes in the suburbs began. That is to say, it had disintegrated into the unheroic spectacle furnished by a dozen or more banal middle-aged gentlemen decamping in automobiles with their blinds drawn, attempting at top speed to break out of the city in various directions, and for the most part meeting with “accidents” en route. There had been a regrettable accident in the courtyard of the presidential palace, and the body of the late president now lay in one of the churches, covered with the national flag.
The revolutionary party had taken over the city without further opposition, the troops that cheered them the loudest being those last sent against them, and at once set about establishing a government more to their liking, in other words, one in which they themselves held office. Constitutional guarantees (which had never been much to fall back on anyway) were suspended while a new constitution embodying their own nebulous theories was being drafted. Meanwhile generals and lieutenant-commanders of forty-eight hours’ standing, who a week before had handled a firearm for the first time in their lives, preëmpted the houses of the wealthy and dismissed their owners into the street. The best was none too good for them. Food, wine, furniture, diamonds for their camp-women, imported motor-cars. Protest was useless, resistance suicidal. They could, and frequently did, shoot on sight those who pained their new-found dignity.
Soldiers (“heroes of liberty” was the favorite designation in their flowery and ceaseless manifestoes) were quartered at random about the city, in public buildings, churches, and even museums, and since the greater part were accompanied by their technical wives (“soldierettes”), meals were cooked at altars and charcoal mustaches added to the male figures on priceless canvases dating from the days of the Spaniards.
Not for generations had there been such utter disregard for personal immunity and the rights of individuals; it was a throw-back to the times of the viceroys and the early dictators. Now and then excesses that were simply incredible took place on the streets in broad daylight. For instance, the amoureuse of a swarthy colonel, riding by his side in a pilfered motor, made a wager with him on how expert her marksmanship would be and extracting his revolver from its holster, calmly fired at two young girls of good family who happened to be passing in another car. One sister dropped lifeless across the other’s lap. There was no one to whom the family of the young women could appeal. There was no longer redress from injury or outrage. Anarchy stalked the city.
CHAPTER SIX
Himself
1
To the hotel then came the mighty general Heronimo Xavier Jesus Maria Palacios with all his aides and retinue, including his own cook (lest the general’s food be poisoned), two or three decorative damsels now learning to wear French heels for the first time, a Haytian negro who incessantly played the guitar but was said to be a valued spy in the general’s employ (though how he could escape detection, in view of his color, was problematical), together with supernumeraries and hangers-on galore, and evicting a Brazilian family that were the only ones who remained and had occupied the same suite for upward of four years, took over the entire ground floor and set up his establishment therein. Needless to say, without any thought of compensating the hotel management. A hint to that effect on their part would have incurred disaster. The patio, though it presumably remained open to all guests alike, became no more than an annex to the general’s quarters, ornamented at all hours of the day by the lounging, expectorating figures of members of his bodyguard, who sat sprawled in chairs, with their naked rifles over their knees and their feet provocatively extended out before them so that anyone wishing to pass had to pick their steps and edge aside. Bestially indifferent to or else actually ignorant of the existence of bathrooms, they sought carpeted corners, regardless of who might take their way down the corridors. The hotel, to those who had been compelled to remain in it, became a loathsome inferno. The d
ining room alone was spared, since a great clatter of dishes (as much in the way of breakage as usage), snatches of song and din of conviviality, usually at some such hour as twelve or one in the morning, told that the general fed in his private apartments.
At every turn she made, Eleanor found herself stared at; in the passageways no longer brightened by electricity, on the stairs, at the hotel entrance, there was always some individual or some group to pass with lowered eyes, not venturing even a single glance to judge them by, tightening her grip on Blair’s arm a little. Stares had once been pleasant things for her to face. She had dressed to meet them, but sometimes she had walked past them as though unconscious that they were being given her, and sometimes she had let it be seen that she knew, pleased nevertheless. They had been martial music to her, quickening the pulse of her vanity. Not these though. There was a world of difference in these. She did not have to be told by Blair to keep her eyes on the ground. It was as though she had kept a store of just such knowledge hidden within her all her life, to be revealed and made use of at the opportune moment. As a woman she could feel the altered nuance in these glances. As an ordinary human being she could detect the hostility, the mockery and menace, as in passing a cage of tigers or savage apes with the bars let down. These were not men and women interested in the cut of her dress or in signaling a frivolous message to her eyes. This was a species altogether different. At times she would have liked to run amuck among them with a riding-whip, so that they would never dare look twice at her again. Each evening he and she walked with quickened steps, looking neither to the left nor right of them, to the dining room and found comparative shelter awhile. And leaving it, they walked again with quickened steps, until they had reached their room and closed the door behind them. So far so good. Another day's safety scored.
One morning Eleanor said she must have exercise. “Or I shall die. I’ll play a little tennis with the proprietor’s wife. She’s fat and wants to reduce. They never go near the court. It’s in the rear, you know.”
A Young Man's Heart Page 12
