The bright, rational morning hours seemed safe enough, with every window in the back of the hotel looking down on the tennis courts. And the proprietor’s wife would be more of a protection than he would himself. She could not, after all, be affronted with impunity by any common soldier; she was too used to dealing with her own waiters and porters.
“But don't wear that sweater. It’s too tight over the bust. You’ll be insulted going through the patio.”
“I’ll sling it around my neck. There, that's ugly enough. And this green eye-shade.”
In an hour he strolled out to the court to see how they were getting along. No one was in sight but the two women. He noted with satisfaction that from a distance the plump matron, with her orange bandeau and knee-kilt, caught the eye more readily than Eleanor, who looked like a boy in a long shift. He waved to them and turned away.
A very short while later, however, the proprietor’s wife reached the end of her strength, and soaked to the skin and almost collapsing, she quitted the court and sought her own room. Eleanor immediately did likewise. Just as she was in sight of the stairs, though, a man standing guard at the general’s door stiffened into sudden immobility, the door opened, and the general himself emerged. He had an extremely oily face, the color of mahogany. He was picking his teeth with a matchstick.
The passageway would have been wide enough for two people to pass without their elbows touching but for the sentinel standing there rigidly against the wall, rifle-barrel to shoulder. Eleanor stood back to let the general by. He made a ludicrous bow instead and showing his teeth presented her with a gallant speech. “You first, enchanting señorita.” Eleanor understood only the noun by which he had addressed her, and sidling by, turned on the lowest step to exclaim passionately, “No señorita, señora!” (the only three words she had at her command, since they were the same in either language). After which she fairly flew up the stairs, hearing the general's explosive roar of amusement well above the next landing.
She did not know at first whether to tell Blair or not about what had happened. But it would worry him even more than it worried her, so she finally decided not to. The general’s bow and gallant speech had cost him his legendary attributes as far as she was concerned. He was no more to her now than a repulsive man. That they had met face to face was, of course, a freak of coincidence. Undoubtedly it would never happen again. Out of all the hundreds of minutes in the course of a day they had accidentally happened to choose an identical one, he to be leaving his quarters, she to be coming away from the tennis court. How could it conceivably occur a second time? And Blair would never allow her to play tennis again if she informed him of it.
She did, however, tell the proprietor’s wife about it the next time she saw her. “There’s nothing for you to be frightened about in that,” observed that matron sagely. “You have your husband.”
“Yes, but Blair says he has power of life and death over the whole city right now. He could have him shot if he opened his mouth to him.”
While making this portentous statement she was bouncing a ball up and down on the ground with the flat of her racquet. The proprietor’s wife was hardly to be blamed, therefore, for refusing to take her concern seriously at the moment
“Come, let’s begin,” she said, going behind the net, “I feel fatter than ever.”
Two days later Eleanor encountered the general a second time. He was standing in the patio talking to two of his underlings. He held a brown-paper cigarette between his fingers, and a girl clung to his arm, one of as little moment to him as the other, it seemed. Out at the door a car waited, its uncared-for chassis streaked with dust.
Eleanor stole a surreptitious glance at the girl as she went by. She wore pink lace stockings through which her tan skin peered and patent-leather opera pumps, the heel of one awry. The general appeared not to see Eleanor. She had an uncomfortable feeling that he had turned his head to look after her as soon as she had passed, however. Someone, the girl most likely, gave a derisive laugh.
In her room, with the door safely locked, she determined to play no more tennis. He had spoken to her the very first time he had set eyes on her. He might speak to her again. Let the proprietor’s wife grow elephantine, if need be. She would risk no further chance meetings in the corridors and the patio.
Blair knocked. “Why did you lock yourself in?” he asked when she had opened the door for him. It was needless to tell him, she thought; he would only worry himself sick.
“I was changing my dress. I’ve never forgotten how that waiter sailed in on us the first morning we were here.”
It was in his mind to say that she appeared not to have remembered it until to-day, but he refrained.
Eleanor’s renunciation of tennis, she soon discovered, had, like their attempted departure, come a day too late. That evening as they returned from the dining room, reached the top of the stairs, and turned toward the corridor that led to their room, they halted abruptly, drew closer to one another, aghast.
“Someone’s standing there,” Eleanor murmured in terror, “there’s someone by our door.”
In the gloom of the passageway with its depressing oil-lamp hanging in place of an electric light, they made out the figure of a man.
“Who’s there?” Blair called in Spanish.
The individual, who had apparently been engaged in knocking on the door to their empty room, turned and walked toward them. A succession of feeble gleams down his person as he passed under the lamp turned out to be the buttons of a uniform.
“You are the husband of a lady called Guerardi?”
“Lo soy,” answered Blair guardedly.
“General Palacios sends you his compliments and desires you both to have dinner with him tomorrow night. He would like to ask you some questions about the United States.”
Blair, his hands slightly tremulous, fumbled for a cigarette, though he had trampled one underfoot only the moment before.
“Really?” he said, not in the usual negligently sophisticated sense of the word, but as though intent on discovering whether the message were actually in good faith or not.
By the flare of the match the under-officer (Eleanor could not take her eyes off the gilt eagle on his sleeve) evidently could see how discomposed his features had become.
“It’s nothing for you to be disturbed about,” he said patronizingly. “The Northamerican minister was called home, you know. I suppose he wants to ask your opinion, whether your government will recognize us or not.”
“My wife is not feeling well. If your general will excuse her—”
“It might be much better if she were to come with you,” the envoy observed pointedly. “It is not agreeable to the general to be treated so. One can never tell how he might feel about it.”
With that Blair, temporarily at least, made up his mind. Uncertain though he was as to just what motives underlay this unwelcome overture, coming as it did from a personage he had never to his knowledge set eyes on in his life before, one thing he was sure of: it was decidedly unwise to return a direct refusal. They were after all penned up in the hotel under this comic-opera general’s immediate surveillance and it was best not to turn his laughable and clumsy lack of finesse into pique and resentment. Besides, they had all the following day in which to decide what was to be done about it.
“At what hour?” he asked placidly.
“I was not told. Any hour to your taste will do.”
“Thank the general for me,” Blair said in a husky voice, forcing himself to pronounce words much against his wishes, purely as a matter of policy. The emissary left them and trotted down the stairs, holding his hand out to the wall like a man who is not yet used to staircases.
He had then to tell Eleanor what she had already half-guessed (at any rate, to the extent that “that greasy general” was attempting to communicate with them in some way). And when she learned what the gist of the matter was, a curiously perverse thought, unknown to Blair, took away all her dislike of the o
rdeal. “I will show that cheap girl down there how really well a refined woman can dress!”
The night and a morning brought them no adequate solution of their problem, though they talked of nothing else. They had, Blair especially, a feeling that it would be highly imprudent to accept the unknown quantity that the general’s hospitality represented, or become in any way familiar with him, or he with them. On the other hand it was a thousand times more imprudent not to. He could make life distinctly unpleasant, not to say precarious, for them within the next few days, before they had a chance to remove themselves beyond his jurisdiction. Which now, moreover, extended over the entire city and the whole country as well, excepting the seacoast and the foreign legations. (Serrano!) They said the American minister had been recalled. It was now the Argentine legation or nothing. Still, was the crisis sufficient to justify such a step? One could not thrust oneself on the protection of an alien government simply because one had received an invitation to dinner. Yet on the face of things, how preposterous the general’s alleged excuse that he hoped to acquire information from him, on matters in which he, Blair, was certainly the less well-versed of the two. He, an obscure sojourner at an isolated hotel, a being of no official importance whatsoever either at home or abroad. Was the man as ingenuous as all that? Or had his child-mind been unconsciously influenced by his native village, which he had left only a month before, by the American films of the vintage of 1918 in which the sons of Columbia were all alike omniscient beings, charged with important matters of state, capable of outwitting kaiser and king?
“How can I take you down among those peons—allow you to sit among them?” he cried.
“Whatever you do, you must not leave me sitting up here alone. I would die of fright.”
“There must be some way out.” Finally he said, “If we must, we must. I’ll telephone Serrano.”
“Yes,” she urged, “find out what he thinks. Oh, why didn’t we think of that before?”
A small directory, little more than a pamphlet, lay shelved under the night-stand. He consulted it a moment, and uncapping the telephone said in a low voice to the clerk downstairs, “Get 12 - 86 for me. Ask for Rafael Serrano, and call me back at once.”
An eternity went by. His mind kept repeating, 1 am between the devil and the deep sea. Expose her to the risk of remaining under the same roof as this general and his people, or eat my heart out at having her under the same roof with Serrano. And infinitely poignant was the realization: All this need not have happened.
Once Eleanor went to the door, opened it and looked out, to make sure there was no one in the corridor outside. “Be careful what you say, dear,” she murmured. “Isn’t there likely to be some one listening in?”
“I’ll speak to him in English, without mentioning any names.” While within himself he thought, I will never need to speak at all, most likely. Even he has deserted us, now that we need him.
At last there was a signal from the instrument. As he picked it up, Eleanor went down on her knees beside him, nestling her head against him. “Your recipient,” said the clerk in Spanish. Then Serrano’s voice in the customary phrase that he had so often smiled at in spite of himself: “I listen.”
“It will not be necessary to tell you who this is—
“But who—?”
“My wife and I—you understand?”
“Perfectly, I believe.”
“Someone holding a high public position has asked us to take dinner with them. Ordered us, you might say. If we refuse it may be very dangerous to remain in our present place. I feel very uneasy on my wife’s account—”
“I thoroughly agree with you. Will you allow me to suggest something?”
“By all means.”
“Do nothing about it for the present. If it is unavoidable, keep the engagement. I will hold myself at your disposal. Telephone me at a moment’s notice and I will call for you at the hotel and bring you over here with a safe-conduct from the minister.”
“I appreciate it deeply.”
“You will do what I say? You will not fail to let me know?”
“I promise you.”
“Good. I will be waiting to hear from you.”
He turned to Eleanor with relief. “If anything unpleasant develops he’ll come over himself and get us out of here. Meanwhile, I suppose, we’ve got to go through with it.”
It was then already past four. At six she asked, “How does one dress to dine with a general? If I’m to get ready I’d better begin while there’s still enough light.”
“If I didn’t know how out of the question it was, I’d advise you to make yourself as little attractive as possible for once,” he answered curtly. “The general may take too great a liking to you.”
She felt tempted to say, “How do you know he hasn’t?”
Within half an hour a peremptory knock sounded on the door. Blair rose to open it. The mongrel officer of the night before stood there.
“The señora and you are ready? The general has just finished his duties for the day. He has already asked for you.”
Serrano had been right. They were not going to be allowed to escape accepting.
“You will have to wait outside,” he remarked, annoyed. “The señora is not quite through.”
“Don’t molest yourself. I return downstairs. You will come at your leisure.”
It was only by exercising the greatest self-control that Blair prevented himself from slamming the door shut in his face.
Eleanor stood up so that he might look at her. “There. This is the oldest thing I have.” She had put on black, but it was useless. The color itself was in league with her blondness of hair and smoothness of skin.
He shook his head, half laughingly. “I knew it would be of no earthly use. You might just as well have decked yourself out to your heart’s content while you were about it. Here, wipe your mouth on this.”
Even that she did, overawed in spite of herself at the grave implication he seemed to put upon her being so attractive.
A few moments later they found themselves in what would otherwise have resembled any of the other hotel sitting-rooms but for the number of people gathered together in it. All the faces were repulsive. Candles thrust into the necks of bottles added their haze to the clotted cigarette smoke. A glass door to an inner room hung dejectedly on its hinges, most of its panes broken through. An officer of one sort or another, seated sidewise on the edge of a table, was holding an unclean paw thrust into a basin of water, while a girl seated before him bent over his other hand manicuring the nails. A negro, reputed to be the general’s spy, was sitting in a corner, his back against the wall and his chair balanced on two legs, idly strumming a guitar. At times he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling overhead, so that only their whites remained to be seen, giving himself the appearance of having gone suddenly blind.
Blair, who did not know the general by sight, found himself being beckoned to by a swarthy individual standing talking to two or three others. He looked inquiringly at Eleanor, as though to ask her what she made of it. “I think that man must be the general,” she faltered. They drew near at the behest of the uncivilly spasmodic forefinger, and its owner remarked, “You are Guerardi?”
“That is my name.” (Bootless to try to correct the mispronunciation, since the dog did not even do him the courtesy of prefixing “señor” to it.)
“I am the general Heronimo Palacios.”
Blair muttered the conventional “your servant,” inwardly choking with both fury and amusement. He then saw that the general was looking at him inquiringly, as though expecting something further.
“My wife, General. She speaks no Spanish.”
The general studied Eleanor with a kindly gleam in his eyes, meant to be paternal but not quite successful at it. “Always humbly at your orders,” he mouthed, with a flourish and a bow.
“How do you do?” Eleanor said matter-of-factly in English, but with a slight simper.
“I see that you take a great
interest in the tennis.”
“He sees that you take a great interest in tennis,” Blair translated.
Eleanor smiled and nodded affirmatively, seeming slightly troubled, nevertheless.
“Do you recall that day we met on the stairs? You were in a great hurry to go by,” the general proceeded. Blair: “He wants to know if you recall meeting him on the stairs one day.”
She sighed wearily. “Why wouldn’t I? He has a face that frightens children.”
“I inquired of my people at once who the charming lady in our midst was.”
Blair gave her a deadly look. “By not telling me this before,” he remarked in an undertone, “you’ve managed to place yourself in considerable jeopardy.”
She smiled in spite of herself at the pompous word he had used with such nervous intensity, and without thinking began to hum,
“My country ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of jeopardy—”
Blair laughed bitterly.
“She sings,” said the general.
“Our national anthem,” Blair explained.
A Chinaman in a black sateen skirt appeared in the doorway bordered by the framework of shattered panes, blinked two or three times, scowled at the room in general, and disappeared again. This momentary apparition, however, had not escaped the general’s notice. “A comer!” he exclaimed, smacking his hands together vigorously and seeming to wash them in mid-air. He turned and made his way into the next room, everyone immediately crowding at his heels, with the exception of the negro who, forgotten by everybody, remained in his corner mournfully plucking at the guitar. This, then, must be the way dinner was announced in this charming household. Blair and Eleanor, after a moment of hesitancy, followed the others and found two chairs unoccupied side by side.
A most unusual effect had been obtained, the like of which Blair had never seen before in his life. To offset the lack of electric light the batteries had been torn out of one of the general’s many and deviously-acquired automobiles and brought into the room. The two powerful headlights, likewise decapitated, were trained on the table from opposite sides. In the glare it was at first not alone impossible to distinguish faces, it was also difficult even to keep one’s eyes open. Every grain of dust floating in the air became visible, and as a result a constant rain of blinding electric snowflakes seemed to be falling. Blair, with dazzled half-shut eyes, looked at Eleanor. The rouge under her eyes, so sparingly used at all times, had gone purple. Otherwise he found no great cause for complaint in her appearance. He wondered if she retained enough conventionality at the moment to feel thankful that she was young enough to bear the devastating scrutiny reasonably well. The faces of the men looked like skulls stripped of their flesh.
A Young Man's Heart Page 13
