A Young Man's Heart

by Cornell Woolrich

  But in the face of what was happening about them, the question of whether to go or whether to stay was perpetually being renewed between them. Never would she give in that they were to go like this, like these other people, snatching at their grips and umbrellas, as she put it, and flying.

  “How can we have any respect left for each other ever after if we do? You’ll think I left in order to be near someone else who was going at the same time. I’ll think you left because you were as afraid for yourself as for me. We just will, I know we will. We won’t be able to help it.”

  Which was well nigh the perfect argument, not so much because it was true but because it was so unanswerable. It effectively silenced him, in so far as it partly questioned his own courage. Yet at times he found himself wondering if this elusive stubbornness on her part might not well be due to some outside influence, pulling at cross-purposes to his own in prevailing on her to stay.

  One evening she said, “I spoke to Serrano downstairs in the patio just now as I was coming in. He stopped by here at the hotel to find out what we intended doing. I told him I didn’t know, but that just because a good many people had lost their heads and were running away was no reason we should do it too.”

  “There’s where you’re wrong,” he told her. “We have far more reason to leave than any of the others. We have no business here, nothing to hold us. We should have gone weeks ago.”

  “Well, we stayed, didn’t we?” she exclaimed, “and personally I think that right now is the worst possible time to leave. And so does he.”

  “Oh, does he?”

  “Even if we did manage to get down to the coast,” she went on without noticing, “the boats are all crowded right now. And the hotels down there are turning people away. Where would we go? Sleep in the streets?”

  “Very few visitors,” he told her humorously, “stayed in Belgium in the summer of 1914 just because they had no reservations waiting for them in the Paris hotels.”

  “Now you’re letting your imagination run away with you. That was a case of real war. Even the people up home know what a revolution means in these countries—”

  “I doubt it.”

  “And after all, what is there to be really afraid of? Are you really afraid, Blair? If you are, tell me, and we’ll go now, at once. But you must tell me whether it’s really me you’re worried about or yourself. Because I’m not frightened in the least, and I’d much rather wait for all this to be over with. But if you yourself—”

  “Now see here,” he said angrily, “that’s one point I’ve always been rather sensitive on. My father, I remember, used more or less the same argument when I was a boy. You should be above that, Eleanor. Or don’t you know me at all ?”

  “I know you, Blair,” she murmured, lifting her face to be kissed. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “My Eleanor,” he said, refusing the offer of her lips in a way that made it appear he had not noticed the gesture. “I wouldn’t care if I—died here. But why should you be exposed to any risk, when there’s no need for it?”

  In the end, he reasoned, how could she really be expected to divine the clammy suspense that hung stifled over the city day by day and hour by hour, unacquainted as she was with the language and barred from contact with the pulses of street-life, even to the limited extent permitted him himself?

  “Risk?” she was saying. “I still can’t see where any risk enters into it. Supposing worse came to worst, we don’t have to stay here at the hotel. Serrano said we can go over to his legation at any time and we’ll be perfectly safe. He’d see that they took us in. We’d be under their protection, and don’t forget they have diplomatic immunity or whatever it is.”

  “If it’s a matter of being without a roof over our heads and having to run for shelter like whipped dogs,” he remarked tartly, “aren’t you confusing us slightly? We’re not Argentines, we’re Americans.”

  She seemed to find a momentary difficulty in choosing her words. “Of course, I know that as well as you. But if that chilly-looking old house you pointed out to me from the carriage one day is our legation, I can distinctly remember how far from here it seemed to me then. We could never reach it at a pinch. Isn’t the Argentine legation, on the other hand, just a few streets away from here?”

  “I don’t recall I ever pointed out any legation building to you. You were not nearly as interested in them at that time as you seem to be now. You’re right, the Argentine legation is the closest of the two by far. I have no doubt you could find your way there even without me, if matters came to a crisis.”

  Inevitably his immediate reaction was to wish he had not said that. At the moment she had not wholly deserved it. But how could she dissemble so, pretending to have no more than gauged offhandedly the inexact whereabouts of the Argentine legation, when many a banal carriage-ride she had taken must have been adorned with an ingenious little detour to enable her in passing to steal a furtive glance at its windows and its doors?

  “How can you say anything like that to me?” she demanded, stamping her heel. “Only a husband could make such an insinuation to his wife, it wouldn’t occur to anyone else!”

  “But how is it you’re so willing to meet an accusation halfway? I said nothing out of the ordinary. How did you happen to find that it reflected on you?”

  But she had turned her back to him and refused to answer.

  At dinner they were both a trifle morose but, as though it were an affectation they were laboring under and not any real grievance, only occasionally remembered to lower their eyes moodily to their plates. At length they both reached for a saltcellar at the same moment, and their fingertips touching, they looked up and smiled at each other and let their hands remain where they were, forgetting both seasoning and estrangement in the glow of a renewed intimacy.

  They decided to take a few turns arm-in-arm on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. But Serrano (like a Nemesis, thought Blair) was out there under the lighted marquee, engrossed in conversation with two elderly women who were on the point of departure. A carriage loaded with a number of valises was drawn up waiting for them. Eleanor instinctively shrank back for a moment when she saw him.

  “Watch me ignore him,” she said bravely.

  “On the contrary,” Blair said, in somewhat the same vein of self-sacrifice, “there’s no need of doing that. We’ll go right up to him.”

  “But I don’t want to say good-by to those people.”

  The two women, however, were already in the carriage, and in another moment were driven off, nodding their heads in unison and calling, “Good-by! Good-by!”

  “Good evening,” Serrano said uncertainly, turning to Blair and Eleanor, but addressing him in particular.

  Eleanor simpered and made a point of thrusting her arm still deeper through her husband’s, as though giving an object-lesson in ownership.

  “I am glad to see,” he continued, “that not every one are such fools as those two ladies who have just left. They went away without most of their things and took two thermos-bottles of tea with them to drink on the train. When they reach the States they will have to be taken in by relatives, and their husbands, who are fifty, will have to borrow the money to start over again in business. You are very sensible, you and your wife, to remain here for the present.”

  “You don’t think it’s taking too big a chance—?” Eleanor asked in a small voice, and Blair interrupted her to remark coldly, “We haven’t decided one way or the other.”

  “But there is nothing for you to be concerned about,” Serrano said in Spanish, excluding Eleanor in what was no doubt an effort to gain Blair’s confidence. “You must not let her become alarmed. If at any time it is unsafe to stay at the hotel, which is ridiculous on the face of things, then the legation is only a step away. Consider it your home.”

  “You are too good to us,” Blair answered dryly. “Has your government so much more influence here than ours, or what? Because otherwise it seems only right that we should go to our own
for protection.”

  Serrano protested with his palms outward. “Ah yes, but you forget, Senor Giraldy, to reach the United States legation you would have to go through the center of the city, which it is better not to do when there threatens to be trouble.”

  This was identically the same argument that he remembered Eleanor to have used earlier in the day. But its source had been only too apparent to him all along, in any case.

  “It seems to me you contradict yourself,” he answered. “If we run no risk whatever by staying here, why would it be at all necessary to go to a legation for refuge?”

  Eleanor, strangely reconciled to being left out of the conversation, as though she scented a motive favorable to her own ends, kept looking from one to the other, alertly watching their faces while they spoke.

  “You are hard to convince,” Serrano said with a gloomy smile. “But I am afraid I have meddled too much. I apologize.”

  “Not at all,” Blair replied with a false smile.

  The men nodded and Serrano turned away, not quite soon enough to hide a smolder of discontent in his eyes. Out of the corner of his own eye, Blair saw Eleanor give a fleeting backward glance over her shoulder as they resumed their walk. She refrained from asking him what had been said, but he knew that she knew in any case. As they walked back and forth on the deserted concrete in front of the hotel for the next half hour, now in the blue-green shadows at its extremities, now under the yellow light of the marquee in the center, he felt again and again an irresistible inclination to cry out to her, “Oh, Eleanor, Eleanor, I know why you want to stay, I know what is keeping you! It doesn’t matter, only tell me the truth, don’t pretend any more.”

  But he didn’t. And Eleanor talked of the moon and the stars and what she could do to the coral organdy to hide that coffee-stain on the front of it (“Oh, I could have murdered him, the clumsy fool!”), and kept step with him in a very devoted way by exaggerating the length of her pace.

  The following day brought new developments. The wives and families of certain high officials, with their jewels and chattels, in requisitioned parlor-cars which had been held in readiness for just such an event, were being hastened to the coast under armed escort, the first step toward a life of moneyed exile in Paris, Havana or New Orleans should the political weathervane continue unfavorable. This may have been bad for the public morale but was unquestionably good for the peace of mind of many highly placed functionaries.

  An ugly rumor was afloat that the minister of finance had vanished sometime during the night, to the consternation of his colleagues, taking a considerable part of the treasury with him. As a result there was a prompt run on the native banks, which they forestalled admirably by closing their doors in the nick of time. Blair himself was a witness to some collective stone-throwing by enraged depositors which broke a quantity of glass but accomplished little else for them.

  A shortage of food was imminent, too, since the Indians had stopped bringing their fresh vegetables, fruits and poultry to the city each Thursday, as had been the custom for generations. Prices immediately soared, as if by reflex action, and hoarding of supplies and petty profiteering began. And finally there was talk of the water supply being cut off the moment the revolutionaries came within striking distance of the old Spanish aqueduct, picturesque but highly impractical, that wound its way down from the hills like a part of the Great Wall of China.

  There could no longer be any question as to which was the wisest course to follow. Blair secured two passes for the train at an exorbitant price (the naïvely inked slips of paper cost more than the entire trip by land and sea on arriving here), and returned to the hotel with them in his pocket. It was mid-afternoon and Eleanor was not in the room. He sent someone for her, and immediately began to pack.

  Word was brought back that she could not be located about the hotel. He told them to ask her to come up to the room at once as soon as she returned. He resumed his packing, then after a moment or two gave it up and squatted back on his heels, a great slab of trunk upright before him like a tombstone. Where was she, and why didn’t she come? Other days she was always waiting for him, either downstairs in the patio or up here. Why was it just to-day that she had chosen to go off somewhere? And she really oughtn’t to go about alone at a time like this. At first impatient, he grew a little anxious as time wore on, then began to imagine no end of things, until finally a mild sort of terror had slipped upon him unawares.

  With that, as though she were clairvoyant, she opened the door and stepped into the room. She took in the open trunk, his kneeling posture, and the cluster of neckties over his shoulders as though rosettes had been pinned to them, all in a glance.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were doing this?” she said. “Is that what you wanted me for?”

  “I have the passes,” he answered, getting up from the floor slowly, “but we’re already too late for the evening train. Where’ve you been?”

  “Oh, reading,” she tossed over her shoulder carelessly. “I found a perfect love of a place. A little pavilion with a tiled top and flower-vines all around it. I sat in it all afternoon by myself. If only someone had brought me my tea out there—”

  “Yes, I know where it is.”

  “Do you?”

  “So do you. If you had really wanted tea they would have brought it to you from the legation, it’s directly opposite.”

  “It is?” she said politely. “Then why not go there and count the cigarette stubs lying about the floor? Or ask me why I’ve come back without my book.”

  “Nothing matters except that we’re leaving here.”

  “You’re afraid to stay, that’s why we’re going.”

  “You’re infatuated, that’s why we’re going.”

  “Of course,” she said, “shall I tell you what I did? Shall I tell you what you already know? I had no book. Instead I carried on a delightful conversation with Serrano. With signs, by means of our handkerchiefs. He was in his window and I was sitting there.”

  “Sarcasm was never your forte.”

  “If that won’t satisfy you, perhaps this would be better: he left the legation and came over to me himself, with two footmen in powdered wigs carrying a tray of tea between them. He bent over and kissed my hand—”

  “Your sense of humor is at its lowest right now.”

  “Very well, we’re going. That’s all there is to it. Then it’s settled. There’s no need of talking any more about it.”

  She was seated at the glass again, and while her image did the conversing for her and eyed him brittly from time to time, its original, with raised elbows, was entirely absorbed in touching her hands to face, hair, and the back of her head, now unclasping the wholly invisible catch of an almost invisible neck-chain purely by memory to exchange it for another, now teasing the point of her chin with a huge puff-ball of down that was never allowed to quite approach it, now running a fingernail along her lips and seeming to make them bleed.

  “You’ll help me, won’t you?” he asked. “You’d know more about where you want your own things to go.”

  “Yes, after dinner,” she said. “It’s almost time, you’d better get fixed—”

  After dinner she found still another excuse for putting off the packing awhile longer. A carriage ride “to say good-by to the city.” Blair, none too unsentimental himself, made no comment save that she must not put her feet up before her as on the night of their arrival. He showed her the front of the bank where the plate-glass had been shattered earlier in the day. It yawned blackly, with not even a night-watchman in evidence. Altogether the streets bore a totally different aspect from that which they had worn on the previous occasion. There was no longer an air of gayety about them, no music was to be heard, few people were sitting in the cafes, and the few who seemed worried and subdued, were no longer chattering like monkeys, arguing at the tops of their voices nor gesturing explosively as had been the case formerly. There was only dull curiosity in the few looks that passers-by vouchsafed Elea
nor, as though this was not the time to admire beauty (or for that matter, display it), and at the entrance to a street that Blair vaguely recalled as leading to the City Hall, a sullen gendarme stopped the carriage and questioned their destination.

  “This street is closed to the public after sundown, unless you have a pass.”

  Even the coachman professed ignorance of this new ruling. They had to turn around and go back the way they had come. Soon after they returned to the hotel.

  It was nearing twelve when Blair, with the click of his own trunk-lock still ringing in his ears, leaned against the balcony rail, questioning once more the star of happiness. In the lighted room at his back Eleanor still passed to and fro, like a priestess carrying garments to be sacrificed, one at a time, at some unseen altar. She held each one before her, looking at it with both arms outstretched, as she walked toward the hidden angle where the trunk was. And coming back empty-handed, occasionally looked back over her shoulder at it. Only once did she glance toward the balcony.

  But Blair was not watching her. Vainly searching the star for an answer when he did not even know what the problem was he had set it. Always looking backward, loving the thing past more than the thing ahead. Again a departure. Again a new box for the same old jack-in- the-box. Nothing more. The same far star and the same inner voice and the one great cry that was all it knew, falling short in the space between— “Only happiness, happiness!”

  They lost the morning train because Eleanor had not quite finished packing yet, and in setting apart something to wear during the trip had set aside along with it two or three alternatives from which to choose. These had to be returned to the trunk in due course, once the momentous decision was made. She also insisted upon having her last cup of morning chocolate out on the open balcony in the sun. Chocolate was served at eleven and the train left at seven. The so-called evening train no longer left at nightfall these days but in mid-afternoon in order for it to be well advanced on its way by the time darkness overtook it, for the zone of uncertainty through which it had to pass lay closer to the city than to the coast.