The Marquise de Torre Bianca, having come home in good humor, was
disposed to find her husband’s friend very entertaining. For the moment
she had forgotten her pressing need of money, quite as though she had
found a means of satisfying her creditors.
At lunch Robledo had a great deal to do to satisfy her curiosity about
him. She wanted to know all the thrilling episodes of his adventurous
life! Nor could she possibly believe that he wasn’t rich. How unlikely
that anyone from America--either North or South America, it didn’t
matter which--should not be rich, shouldn’t have millions! It required
an effort for the Marquise, as for most Europeans, to reason that even
in the New World there must be people who are poor.
“But I’m not rich at all,” protested Robledo. “Of course I shall try to
die a millionaire, just so as not to disillusion all the people who
believe so firmly that whoever goes to America must by that very fact
make a great fortune, so that he can leave it when he dies to his nieces
and nephews in Europe!”
He began to talk about Patagonia and his undertakings there. With his
partner, a young American from the States, whom he had met in Buenos
Aires, he had tried to colonize several thousand acres near the Rio
Negro. He had risked in this enterprise all his savings, and those of
his partner, as well as whatever sums he could persuade the banks to
advance to him; but he felt certain of the safety of the investment, and
he believed that it would be the source of a great fortune.
It was his job to transform the desert lands of this tract, purchased at
a low price because of their aridity, into irrigated fields. The
Argentine government was carrying on extensive operations in the Rio
Negro region, trying to divert some of its waters. Robledo, who had been
one of the engineers first employed to carry out this scheme, resigned,
in order to colonize the lands which he was buying up in the areas
through which the government irrigation system was sure to be extended
sooner or later.
“In a few years, or even in a few months, I may strike gold,” he was
saying. “Everything depends of course on how the river behaves. If it
amiably allows itself to be divided up, and doesn’t rise suddenly, in
the grip of one of those violent convulsions which are so frequent
there, and which destroy the work of years in a few hours.... Meanwhile
my partner and I have been constructing with the strictest economy all
the minor canals and the other arteries which are to irrigate our waste
lands; and on the day when the dike is finished, and the Rio Negro
waters flow outward into our desert property....”
Robledo stopped short, smiling.
“Then,” he went on, “I shall be a millionaire in regular American style.
No one knows what the extent of our fortune may be. One square mile of
irrigated land is worth several millions, and I own several square
miles.”
Elena was listening breathlessly. But Robledo, as if made uneasy by the
admiring glance Elena’s green gold eyes shot at him, hastened to add:
“On the other hand these millions may not come for many years! They may
not arrive until I am at death’s door, and then my sister’s children,
here in Spain, will have a good time with the money I’ve worked and
sweated for in America....”
But Elena wanted to hear about his life in the Patagonian wilds, that
immense plain swept in winter by freezing hurricanes that raise towering
columns of dust, and whose sole inhabitants are bands of ostriches, and
straying pumas, that sometimes, under stress of hunger, risk attacking a
solitary explorer.
Human population had in earlier times been represented there by scanty
bands of Indians who scratched a bare living out of the river banks, and
by fugitives from Chile and the Argentine, driven through these desolate
regions by fear, either of the victims of their crimes, or of the law.
Gradually the small forts put up by the government for the troops sent
from Buenos Aires to take possession of the Patagonian desert, were
slowly converted into little villages, scattered about at distances of
hundreds of kilometres through these wild and arid lands.
It was in one of these villages that Robledo lived, slowly transforming
his workmen’s camp into a town which would become, perhaps before the
end of half a century, a flourishing city. America is rich in such
transformations.
Elena was listening delightedly, with the same pleasure she would have
felt at the theatre or cinema in watching an interesting story unfold.
“That’s what I call living,” she exclaimed. “That kind of life is worthy
of a real man!”
She turned her gold-flecked eyes away from Robledo to look at her
husband almost pityingly, as if he represented all the weaknesses of a
soft civilization which she hated--for the moment!
“And that’s the way to make money,” she went on. “Really the only men
worth considering are those who win wars, or those who win fortunes!
Even though I am a woman, I’d love a life so full of danger....”
Robledo, to protect his host from the implications of the enthusiasm she
was rather aggressively expressing, began to talk about the less glowing
aspects of pioneering; whereupon the Marquise admitted that her
enthusiasm for a life of adventure was somewhat chilled, and ended by
confessing that she really preferred the ease and elegance of her Paris.
“But how I wish,” she added, “that my husband liked that sort of thing!
Conquering, by sheer force of will, some of the vast riches of this
earth.... He would come to see me every year, I would think of him all
the time he was away, and even join him out there for a few months! It
would be so much more exciting than this life of ours in Paris--and
then, at the end of a few years, there would be riches, real wealth,
immense wealth, like that you read about, and that you so rarely see in
our Old World.”
She paused a moment, then added gravely, looking at Robledo,
“You, for instance, don’t care so much for money. What you want is
adventure, life, activity. You like to use your strength. You don’t
really know what money means. Men like you don’t need much for
themselves. Only a woman can teach men what money is worth in this
world!”
She turned to look at Torre Bianca, adding,
“And yet the men who have a woman to take care of never have the
forcefulness, somehow, to accomplish things the way men do when they are
alone in the world....”
Robledo, after this first luncheon at his friend’s house, became a
frequent visitor at the Torre Biancas, dropping in as informally as
though he really were a member of his host’s family.
“Elena likes you very much, really likes you, my dear fellow,” Torre
assured him; and he looked immensely relieved. It would have been so
difficult if he had had to choose between his wife and his friend, as he
would have had to do in case they hadn’t hit it off!
Robledo, for his part, was somewhat disconcerted by Elena. When she was
present he yielded to the charm of her person, to the peculiar seductive
quality that enhanced her beauty. She always treated him with a gracious
familiarity, quite as though he really were her husband’s brother, and
took charge of initiating him in Paris society, giving him plenty of
advice and information so as to prevent his being taken in by those
disposed to see an advantage for themselves in his being a foreigner,
and accompanying him to the fashionable resorts of the city, either at
teatime or at night, after dinner.
Her mischievous and childlike expression, her imperturbable way of
looking at him, the childish lisp with which she pronounced certain
words, all had a certain fascination for the engineer.
“She’s a child,” he told himself. “Her husband is right about that. She
has all the tricks of the dolls that society turns out--and she must be
fearfully expensive! But, underneath all this, there is probably a very
simple woman....”
When he was not with her, however, he was less optimistic about his
friend’s wife, and smiled somewhat ironically at the latter’s credulity.
Who was this woman? Where had Torre met her?
He knew concerning her only what his friend had told him. As to that
distinguished functionary of the Czar’s court, her deceased husband, it
was difficult to gather just what the nature of his services had been,
perhaps because they had been so numerous! He had, it seemed, been Grand
Marshal of the court; then again, he had been merely a general. But when
it came to remarkable ancestry, no one could surpass Elena’s father.
Torre Bianca delighted to repeat his wife’s statements concerning a host
of personages of the Russian court, many of them great ladies, who had
added the glory of a love affair with the Emperor to their other
distinctions--yes, all these celebrities were relatives of Elena’s. He
had never seen any of them because they had died a long time ago, or
else they lived on their estates way off in Siberia somewhere.
Some of Elena’s allusions puzzled Robledo. She had never, so she told
him, been in America, yet, one afternoon as they sipped their tea at the
Ritz, she mentioned a trip through San Francisco when she was a little
girl. On other occasions she would mention places in remote parts of the
world, or persons well known in contemporary society as though she knew
them intimately; and he never succeeded in finding out how many
languages she knew.
“I speak everything!” had been her answer when Robledo asked her one day
how many languages she could use. And her anecdotes made him wonder....
She had always “heard So-and-So tell this joke;” yet the engineer had
his doubts about the real source of her rather daring stories.
“Where hasn’t this woman been?” he thought to himself. “Apparently she
has lived a thousand lives in a few years. Can all this have happened
when she was the wife of that Russian personage?”
His attempts to sound his friend on the subject of the Marquise had only
one result. They showed that Torre’s confidence in his wife hedged him
round like a thick wall of credulity. It was impossible to scale this
wall or make the slightest breach in it. He would never discover the
truth about Elena from her husband. But he did learn that since the day
he had met her in London Torre knew nothing about his wife beyond what
she herself had told him.
Of course, when he married her Federico must have seen some of the
papers required for the civil ceremony.... But no, apparently he had
not. The marriage had taken place in London, and had come off as rapidly
as a film wedding. All that was needed was a minister to read the prayer
book, a few witnesses, and some passports and papers, probably lent for
the occasion.
But after awhile Robledo grew ashamed of his suspicions. Federico seemed
happy and proud of his marriage. That gave his friend little right to
interfere.... Besides, his suspicions might very well be due to the fact
that he had lived too long in the woods. He had not yet adjusted himself
to the complexities of life in Paris.
Elena was a woman of elegance, a woman of the kind he had never known
before. It was his classmate’s marriage which made this unexpected
friendship possible. And it was very natural that he should find in this
new society things that seemed startling or even shocking. It had
already happened to him on several occasions to consider as perfectly
natural things that a few minutes earlier had seemed to him quite
improper. Undoubtedly it was his lack of social experience that made him
so suspicious.... And then, at a smile from Elena, at a caressing glance
of her gold-flecked green eyes, he would express a trust and an
admiration in no degree inferior to her husband’s.
Robledo was living near the _Boulevard des Italiens_ in an old house
which he had admired on one of his early visits to Paris. Then it had
seemed to him the nearest approach to Paradise that an earthly building
could make. Now however, he left it frequently to dine with Torre Bianca
and his wife. Sometimes he was their guest in their luxurious home.
Sometimes he played the host at some famous Paris restaurant.
Elena was pleased to have him come to the numerous teas she gave, so she
could show him off to her friends. She took childish delight in
opposing the wishes of the “Patagonian bear,” as she liked to call him,
regardless of the fact that he always declared there were no bears to be
found in the part of the world she attributed him to. He detested these
occasions and Elena shamelessly resorted to ruses in order to get him to
come.
Little by little he met all the friends of the house who usually
appeared at the formal dinners given by the Torre Biancas. Elena
invariably presented him, not as an engineer whose enterprises were in
their first and most precarious stages, but as one whose work was
already a success, and who had returned from America well provided with
millions. She took care however to impart this misinformation behind his
back, and Robledo was somewhat at a loss to understand the profound
respect with which he was treated, and the sympathetic attention with
which his friends’ guests turned to listen to him whenever he offered a
remark.
The most important guests were several deputies and journalists, friends
of the banker Fontenoy. The latter was a man of middle age,
clean-shaven, entirely bald, who affected the dress and manners of an
American business man.
Robledo, as he looked at him, was reminded of an occasion long ago in
Buenos Aires when a note was to fall due the following day, and he had
not yet been able to raise the money to meet it. Fontenoy looked exactly
like the popular idea of the successful man of affairs who is directing
business enterprises in every quarter of the globe. Everything about him
seemed calculated to inspire confidence, above all his obvious faith in
his own resourcefulness. Yet, at times, he would frown, and plunged in
silence, give the impression of being completely detached from all that
surrounded him.
“He is thinking of some new combination,” Torre Bianca would say to his
guest. “The way that man’s mind works is extraordinary!”
Yet Robledo, without quite knowing why, was again reminded of his own
anxieties and those of so many others way off there in Buenos Aires when
they had borrowed money at ninety days, and were facing the necessity of
meeting this debt on the morrow.
As he left the Torre Bianca’s one evening, Robledo started off down the
_Avenue Henri Martin_ towards the Trocadero, where he expected to take
the subway. One of the guests accompanied him, a dubious looking person,
who sat at the last seat at table, and now seemed quite happy to be
walking along with a South American millionaire. He was a protégé of
Fontenoy’s and edited a business weekly, one of the banker’s innumerable
enterprises. A close and acid person, he seemed to expand only in those
moments when he was criticising his benefactors, which was always the
moment their backs were turned. At the end of a few yards he began to
pay off his debt toward his host and hostess by gossiping about them. He
knew of course that Robledo was a school friend of the Marquis.
“And have you known his wife a long time too?” he inquired, and smiled
meaningly when Robledo admitted that he had first made her acquaintance
a few weeks ago.
“Russian! Do you really think that she is Russian?... Of course that’s
what she says she is, just as she says her first husband was a Marshall
of the Czar’s court.... Yet a good many people can’t help wondering
whether there ever was such a husband. I don’t care to say anything
about the truth of all this. But I do know that I never have met any
Russians at the noble lady’s house.”
He paused to take breath, and added,
“Moreover, some of her supposed countrymen, people in a position to know
what they were talking about, told me that she wasn’t Russian. I’ve been
told that she’s Rumanian, by some people who claim to have seen her when
she was a girl, in Bucharest--and I have heard that she was born in
Italy, and that her parents were Poles.... Well, there you are! And it’s
lucky we don’t have to know the history of all the people who invite us
to dinner....”
Whereupon he glanced at Robledo in an attempt to discover whether he had
succeeded in whetting the Spaniard’s curiosity, and whether it would be
safe for him to go on....
“The Marquis is a good fellow enough. You must know him pretty well.
Fontenoy has given him a fairly important job. He is well aware of Torre
Bianca’s good qualities ... and....”
Robledo sensed that his escort was on the point of saying something
which it would be impossible for him to accept in silence. He called to
a passing taxi, murmured something about a forgotten engagement, and
made haste to be rid of the spiteful sycophant.
In his conversation with Torre Bianca, the latter always took up, sooner
or later, the subject that obsessed him. He needed so much money to
keep up his social position!
“You have no idea how much a wife costs, my dear fellow! Winters at the
Riviera, summers at fashionable watering places, trips to famous resorts
in the spring and fall, all that costs something....”
Robledo always received these outbursts with expressions of sympathy;
but there was an ironic note in them which exasperated Torre.
“Of course anyone who can get along without women is free to assume that
superior air of yours, my dear boy. That’s what people usually do who
know nothing about love....”
Robledo turned white, and the smile that usually played about his lips
vanished. So, he knew nothing about love.... Something stirred in his
memory....
Torre Bianca knew very little of his friend’s early experiences. The
Marquis had a vague impression that Robledo’s sweetheart had married
someone else, or maybe she had died.... Anyway something had happened,
and he suspected that Robledo had, as a consequence of it, vowed never
to marry.... Yet who would suspect that this well-fed, practical, and
ironical friend of his bore a wound that the years had not yet been able
to heal?
But, as though fearful that his friend might possibly think of him as
“romantic,” Robledo hastened to smile sceptically.
“When I want women they are not hard to find ... and then I am free to
go my way. Why complicate my life by taking into it a companion I don’t
need?”
As the three friends were leaving the theatre one evening, Elena
expressed a desire to go to a certain Montmartre cabaret that was
causing a stir in Paris by the magnificence of its new decorations, in
the Persian style of the Thousand and One Nights, adapted of course to
the architectural necessities of a _faubourg_ cabaret.
Green lights gave the effect of a sea cave to the high-ceilinged room in
which the crowd looked as livid as so many corpses, recent victims of
the hangman’s art. Two orchestras working in shifts filled the air with
jerking and broken rythms. Violins and banjos vied with indefinable
instruments in the production of disharmonies, while automobile horns,
drums and cymbals, contributed to a pandemonium in which heavy objects
crashed on the ground, rails squeaked, and the barnyard squawked.
In an open space between tables groups of dancers came and went. The
women’s dresses and hats, like rainbow-hued foam flecked with gold,
floated in and out among the black coats of the men and the white
squares of the tablecloths. The orchestras shrieked, and the guests
tried hard to be as noisy as the patrons of a country fair. Those who
did not dance lassooed everything in sight with paper trailers, threw
cotton snowballs about, blew whistles and played with other childish
toys. Multicolored balloons floated on the smoke-laden air, while men
and women, as they ate and drank, wore paper caps of ridiculous cut,
baby bonnets tied on with strings, clown’s hats and fantastic
bird-crests.
A forced merriment prevailed, a desire to revert to the stammerings of
babyhood, as though this would give new incentive to the monotonous
sinnings of middle age.
Elena seemed delighted with the scene.
“There’s nothing like Paris, after all, is there Robledo?” she cried.
But Robledo, the savage, smiled with an indifference magnificently
insolent. The three ate and drank, though they were neither hungry nor
thirsty. At every table the champagne bottles appeared, nestling in
their silver pails. One might have thought them the gods of the place,
in whose honor the feast was held. And always, before one bottle was
empty, another took its place as though it had grown out of the frosty
depths of the bucket.
Elena, who was looking about with a certain impatience, suddenly smiled
and waved to a man who had just come in. It was Fontenoy, who joined
them at their table.
Robledo suddenly remembered that Elena had mentioned the banker several
times while they were at the theatre. Perhaps she and the banker had
arranged this “chance” meeting at Montmartre?
But Fontenoy was saying to Torre,
“What a coincidence! I have just been dining with some business friends,
and I thought I needed something frivolous to take my mind off my work
for a little while. I might have gone to any one of a dozen other
restaurants, but I just happened to drop in here--and here you all are!”
For a moment Robledo was tempted to believe that eyes can smile without
the help of lips, such a mischievous and triumphant gleam flashed from
Elena’s. But when the champagne bottle had renewed itself three times
in its silver nest, Elena began to look enviously at the dancers.
Finally she exclaimed, like a petulant small girl,
“I’d give anything to dance, and yet none of you gives me an
opportunity!”
The Marquis got up as though at an imperial command, and husband and
wife threaded their way in and out among the other couples.
When they returned to their table, Elena was protesting with comic
indignation.
“Here I’ve come all the way to Montmartre to dance with my own
husband...!”
With an affectionate glance at Fontenoy she went on,
“Of course I wouldn’t think of expecting you to dance with me. You don’t
know how, and anyway it’s too frivolous. Some of your stockholders might
see you, and they’d be sure to lose confidence in you, if they saw you
in this sort of place.”
Turning to Robledo, she inquired,
“Don’t you dance?”
The engineer pretended to be scandalized at the suggestion. Where could
he have learned the modern steps? The only ones he knew were those of
the Chilian “cueca” that his peons always danced on pay days, or the
“pericon” and the “gato” as danced by some old _gaucho_ to the clatter
of his spurs.
“So, I shall have to sit here! That’s what happens when I go out with
three men.... I never saw anything so ridiculous!”
But, as though he had heard what she was saying, a young man came
towards their table, a young dancer whom they had often seen at
well-known dancing palaces. Torre made a gesture of annoyance. The fact
that he had heard Elena express her admiration of the dancer had been
enough to arouse his dislike.
The youth enjoyed a certain celebrity. Someone had ironically indicated
to what heights of glory he had attained by calling him “the tango-god.”
Robledo guessed from the smallness of his feet, always encased in
high-heeled shoes, and the brilliance of his thick hair, as black as
Chinese laquer, that he was a South American.
This “tango-god” who allowed his partners to pay for the dances they had
with him--or so those envious of his celebrity whispered--had no
difficulty in persuading Elena to accompany him to the dance floor.
Several times she came back to her place to rest, but in a few minutes
her eyes would begin following the dancer, and he, as though conscious
of an inaudible summons, made haste to seek her out again.
Meanwhile Torre Bianca was not concealing his disgust. Fontenoy appeared
impassive and smiled absently in those intervals Elena spent with them.
But Robledo remembered the absent-minded gestures he had observed among
people who have a promissory note soon falling due....
He looked more attentively at the banker, who seemed absorbed in the
thought of distant things. But little by little Elena’s persistence in
dancing with the young South American had induced on his face an
expression of annoyance quite as marked as her husband’s. Yet,
invariably, as she passed by in her partner’s arms, she smiled
mischievously at Fontenoy, as though his air of disgust delighted her.
Robledo, sitting between the two, thought to himself,
“To look at them it would be hard to say which one looks more like a
jealous husband than the other....”