She puckered her brow to him and said, “It hurts my eyes so. Ask them if they don’t think one would be enough.”
He cautioned her with a slight shake of the head.
The general, however, seemed not to lack perceptions of his own. He laughed genially, screwing his face into a Mongol mask, and said to Blair, “The light harms her? That can be arranged.”
Suddenly a girl seated across from them said sharply and with no little authority, “Leave them both on! I’m no blind blonde.”
The general laughed all the louder at this, and still directing his remarks to Blair, said in what was meant to be a very good-fellowly manner, “That is women, for you! One wants it light, one wants it dark.”
Everyone present took it upon himself to laugh appreciatively at this, the louder the better, as though it were a gem of the rarest wit, so that a thunderous roar went up on all sides. The girl who had made the remark, nettled, called out in a clear ringing voice to someone who had jeered her, “Listen, thou! shut up if you know what’s good for you,” and her eyes flashed wickedly for a moment. Then tasting a drink that stood before her, she fixed the general with a satiric, meaningful look and began to hum the refrain to a popular tango of the day.
“Love in the dim light,
Kisses in the dim light,
All in the dim light.”
Blair studied her indifferently for a moment. She wore a pink chiffon shirtwaist snatched from the back of some former official’s wife. A cheap silver bracelet had been forced far up one brown arm, nearly to the shoulder. A gardenia was thrust into her sleek hair. She looked about her discontentedly and at times drummed her long dark fingers on the tabletop before her. Evidently her lot in life dissatisfied her, for the moment at least. He turned away, bored.
Another long-forgotten banquet came to mind. He saw himself as a boy, seated at a long table like this, with Sasha and his father, the jockey with the diamond studs, the girl who had arisen from nowhere to comfort him, the laughing young person who had become the Estelle of his later years. He could almost smell again the odor of dying carnations, almost hear the voices, see the faces. The champagne goblets, the women’s hair stuffed with other, artificial hair. Ah, the gentle far-off days! What dilettantes in sin people had been then. He had cried out against them in his heart then as he was crying out against them in his heart now. Unheeding they had gone their several ways. Sasha had her millinery shop in New York, an automaton with the outward appearance of a woman. Estelle had her cell and her memories, a woman with the outward appearance of an automaton. His father and his father’s chattel were in the twilight regions of love somewhere, grown fat and unfit further to be seen. The stranger he had married was enamored of a Buenos Aires dandy. The world was a vast desert in which he stood erect stretching forth his arms toward mirages.
He heard Eleanor’s voice. “This rice is precious.”
It seemed only a moment later that the general pushed back his chair and dinner was at an end. He asked Blair’s permission to show Eleanor some curios in another room. “They would only be interesting to a lady. My lieutenant here wants to ask you some questions.”
The girl in the pink shirtwaist stood smoking a cigarette, watching the door through which they had just passed.
The lieutenant’s questions were extremely stupid and pointless.
“Do you think that the Northamerican minister will return soon?”
“It may be his vacation.”
“Your country had a revolution, too, just like ours, didn’t they? I once saw pictures of it in the ciné—how was it called?—‘the Birth of the Nation.’ ”
“Yes, that is our history.”
He was relieved finally when the lieutenant abandoned all further pretense as unnecessary and walked away, joining the others who had gathered about the negro in the outer room listening to him sing. Only the girl in the shirtwaist had remained morosely behind, nude beneath her cobwebby garment in the bright glare of the lights.
“One moment. I would like to ask the señor a question.”
“At your orders,” Blair said coldly.
“How do you call yourself—Guerardi?”
“No—Giraldy.”
“But that is what I said,” she snapped. “Giraldy, Guerardi, it is the same thing.”
“It may be,” he shrugged, “I don’t know.”
“I used to live in your house,” she said. “I am Mariquita.”
He knew at once that she was indeed, and determinedly refused the fact all further contemplation. He controlled himself well, too well. Even incredulity allows itself some slight gesture of surprise. He had none to offer.
“It seems that you don’t believe me.”
“I assure you—”
“Let me tell you a few things. The house was on Bruselas. Am I right? There were three doors to the patio, one from the dining room, one from the sala, and one from your own bedroom. Now do you see? And the little one. You remember the little one? It died of typhoid afterwards.”
“You seem to have a good memory, but I am not interested,” he said, looking her straight in the eye.
She turned her head aside and began to stroke her own arms as though she were cold.
“It is not that you have forgotten, it is that you don’t wish to remember.”
After a moment she said, “That wall across the street. The first few years I went back there once each year on the day you had gone away, and wrote my name on it in chalk, thinking you might see it.”
“I admire your loyalty toward whoever this man was. But why tell me all this?”
“Yes, and how barbarous you can be. Thus you went away and thus you have returned. They do well to hate your nation. Frozen, blue-eyed statues—”
He shrugged, and laughed a little, and turned to leave her.
“And have you no other word to say to me?” she pleaded, taking him by the sleeve.
“To you as you are now, nothing.”
She shut her eyes for a moment as though overpowered by an immense weariness.
“It seems like only yesterday—What is your given name? I never could remember.”
“Don’t concern yourself,” he advised dryly.
Suddenly Eleanor reappeared, wrapped in a magnificently embroidered white shawl, the long silk fringe trailing after her. Behind her came the general, beaming with satisfaction.
“Blair,” she cried (he saw Mariquita’s face light up for a moment), “isn’t this the most exquisite thing you’ve ever seen! I think he wants to give it to me.”
“Don’t accept it,” he said.
“This,” remarked the general, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder for a moment, “was made for the ‘little friend’ of a bullfighter. They call it Moon of Seville. I am anxious that the señora should keep it.”
“You gave it to me, Heronimo,” Mariquita exclaimed. “I do not want her to have it.”
He struck her fiercely across the mouth with the back of his hand.
“Next time, watch what you are saying.”
Eleanor stared, then giggled nervously. “Who is she?” she asked Blair in an undertone.
“Come, señora,” said the general deferentially, “I have not finished showing you—”
“Stay out here with me,” Blair murmured.
“But why? Don’t be silly, he’s like a lamb,” she replied impatiently. “I wish you could see the things in there.” She crossed the room, hugging the shawl about herself greedily, and disappeared through the door.
“Your wife is very beautiful, isn’t she?” Mariquita had been studying Eleanor. Wistfully, he thought.
“I’m glad you think so,” he replied.
“She does not know the meaning of love, Blerr.”
“How do you come to say that, when you don’t even know her?”
“No,” she assented, “I do not speak her language and she does not speak mine. But some things are the same all over the world. I have eyes. You please her very much, yes, but
love, no, never.”
“And you?” he said cruelly. “I suppose you love your general very much.”
She laughed scornfully, a single heartsick note that pierced them both, somehow.
“And yet I find you with him, Mariquita.”
“Claro! I find you married and you find me with him. So the story ends.”
She dropped her cigarette to the floor and trod upon it with her toe, and smartly brushed her hands afterward.
“I will tell you something that doesn’t matter any more. You were the dream that shone before me by night. You were my Satan and my Christ. I didn’t know your name any more. A name isn’t much. I had never forgotten you.”
“And that is why you are—as I see you? I am not impressed, Mariquita of a former day.”
“Then if you cannot see inside me, you cannot see at all. It is useless for us to be talking together.”
“No, I cannot see. Perhaps the mirror is a little soiled.”
“It is soiled and it is broken, and I am glad, for I see now there was nothing to be awaited at the end.”
She turned and walked away from him.
From the other room the negro’s voice, risen in some dolorous chant of the West Indies, came to him. He went to the door and stood looking in. The others were standing about listening to him respectfully, though the language was as strange to them as to Blair. Some were seated against the edge of the table, long-forgotten glasses held in their hands. The lieutenant who had been Blair’s interlocutor a short while before sat with head bowed over his knees, wrists dangling loosely before him, wisps of stringy black hair hanging over his brow. The singer sprawled flung back in his corner, head cradled at the juncture of the two walls, eyes rolling in an anguish of forgotten things recalled, his mouth a pink spade-shaped incision out of which poured the sounds of a distant jungle and its gods.
Suddenly Eleanor was standing beside Blair. Her face was white and drawn. She had no eye for the singer, however. “I am going to move slowly toward the outside door,” she murmured in a strange voice. “Stay where you are, so they won’t notice anything. You can say I have gone upstairs to get my powder-rag.”
“Here, what’s happened?” he asked sharply.
“He wouldn’t let me out of there. I was afraid for your sake to call you. Then that girl came in, and while she was arguing with him I managed to slip out.”
“Stand here beside me. If you had stayed out of there as I told you—”
“I’ll get word through to Serrano while I’m out of the room. He’s got to get us out of here without another moment’s delay. No, don’t follow me, for God’s sake. How do you say the number, ‘doce-ochenta-y-seis’ isn’t it?”
“You’ve memorized it?” he gasped.
“I heard you use it this afternoon.” She walked leisurely toward the outer door, opened it and disappeared.
How perfectly she had pronounced the numerals, she who knew no Spanish, he told himself mournfully. What frequent use she must have made of them latterly. Strange were the ways of the heart, recognizing no obstacles of language or of race, overleaping faith and duty and gratitude to answer the light in a stranger’s eye.
He turned toward the table, and seeing a glass of crystal-clear aguardiente someone had let stand, grasped it and swallowed its furious contents at one sustained draught. Now he had lost her. Now she had gained their room in the hurried, sobbing flight that had begun just at the other side of this door. Now she was telephoning. “Quick, beloved, take me away with you!” The singer’s song came to an end, and in that moment his heart’s long solitude seemed to have begun.
A door opened and the general came out, and behind him Mariquita. The gardenia had fallen from her hair. She walked slowly across the room and leaned against the wall, cushioning the back of her head in her clasped hands.
“Where is your wife?” remarked the general, “I do not see her.”
“She has gone upstairs to powder her face.” Blair answered without looking at him.
“And perhaps there are other reasons, eh?”
He felt himself grow paler for a moment. Then he realized that no more than an obscene jest was intended by the remark.
The general walked toward the negro and laid a hand affectionately on his shoulder. “Sing us your song of the Cockroach, my partner.”
Mariquita signaled to Blair, and moving along the wall until she stood just behind him, murmured :
“She has nothing to be afraid of. He is too much of a coward, he. To-night when we are alone he will beat me for interfering.”
He sought her hand and finding it, clasped it. “Mariquita, you did this for her?”
“No, for you,” she said. “Well do I know how you love her.”
She drew back suddenly. He turned and saw the general staring curiously at the two of them. But after a moment he contented himself with finishing the drink he held in his hand, as though neither of them were of sufficient importance to distract his attention for long.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, during which the general had cast frequent impatient glances toward the door, Eleanor returned. Palacios’ face lighted up for a moment, then he scowled in surprise. She was no longer alone. Serrano stood at her elbow. She remained standing in the doorway, while he, nodding to Blair as he crossed the room, singled out the general and drawing him aside a little, began talking to him earnestly in a low voice. Presently, with evident nervousness, he produced a paper which he extended toward the general. The latter, possibly because he could not read, made no attempt to take it. Serrano then bowed elaborately, and leaving him, went to Eleanor, who took his arm. He turned and signaled unobtrusively to Blair to join them.
As Blair moved toward them, however, he felt himself suddenly seized from behind, and a silver bracelet flashed before his face for a moment. “Do not go with her! Do not leave me like this—never will I see you again!” And with the words came a shattering crash, as though the walls of the room had fallen about him and upon all those gathered within it. Then through the hazy candle-lit air a bluer exhalation seemed to weave its way, wafted past him into nothingness. He heard a moan close beside his ear, and the brown arms twined about his throat slipped away and were gone, as though they had never existed at all.
He turned, quivering in every nerve, to find Mariquita at his feet. At the far end of the room stood the general, in a tableau of unreality, a plume of pale smoke still licking the metal cylinder clasped in his hand.
“Ask him now to bring you back to life.”
She opened her eyes and looked at Blair.
“My dream of you is now forever.”
He turned suddenly to the doorway where Eleanor clung convulsively to Serrano’s arm, both their faces gone ashen.
“If you are so fond of her why don’t you take her out of here quickly? Don’t let her stand there and see this girl dying on the floor.”
“You—?” urged Serrano.
“Blair!” Eleanor sobbed, “come away—”
“Don’t trouble yourselves,” he exclaimed bitterly.
The general moved forward impatiently. They both turned with one accord and vanished through the door.
Blair knelt down and took Mariquita’s head in his arms.
“Little friend, don’t be frightened. We’ll be happier some other day.”
Then to the figure that seemed to tower above him, tall as God, breathing wrath, he muttered in a low voice, “Swine! what are you waiting for?”
Eleanor, trembling from head to foot, her breath coming in little gasps, climbed hurriedly into the carriage Serrano had waiting at the door. They drove rapidly down the street toward the legation, just too soon to hear a second revolver-shot echo hollowly within the general’s quarters.
The End
A Young Man's Heart Page 14
