A Young Man's Heart Read Free Page B

quantities of money, ungrudgingly, eagerly. They vied with one another. “Get yourself this, get yourself that. Go ahead.” He was mystified, embarrassed. All these were indications of insanity.
    When he returned, gorged, Sasha called him to her. It was seven in the evening and she had her hat on; it fitted the head very closely and had grosgrain cockades over the ears. She looked like a French medallion, he thought. At the same time he discovered something that made him uneasy. The taffeta pin-bolsters, shaped like éclairs, were gone from the top of her dressing table. So was every other imaginable thing. The room was bare of ornament, the closets empty. In a moment his face was as pale as a sheet of paper. He looked at her with abnormal intensity.
    The irises of her eyes, swimming with tears, were refracted crookedly by the coating of liquid that her heavy lashes would not suffer to escape.
    “You will have your dinner later with your father,” she told him. “I am going to the train now.”
    He buried his face against her artificially flattened bosom.
    “And me—what about me?”
    “Yes, what about you, poor thing! He won’t let me take you with me.”
    “He’s got to,” Blair sobbed.
    “I would take you to the Hippodrome and to vaudevilles. I would buy a wrist-watch for you. Oh, how can I give you up?”
    Her voice, her form, her very nearness to him, all dissolved in a salt agony.
    His father, it seemed, had something to say to him. Blair steadied himself to listen, the corners of his mouth dragged down by weights of lead, his head suffused with unshed tears that, turned back upon themselves, bit like acid.
    “—I’ll make a man of you, what’s more.”
    Blair regarded his father with mute acquiescence.
    Then at last he was alone, crucified no longer to the fetish of appearances.
     
    3
     
    Getting up, he allowed a jet of gaseous cold water to dash headlong into the crockery washbowl until it was brimming. Then he plunged his head in over the ears. The water streamed from his hair, carrying it down over his forehead in stringy disorder. He combed it as it was, corrugating the mirror with beads of water that flew off as they met with the close teeth of the comb. He was very particular about parting it, this hair that belonged to Sasha and was being irremediably severed from her.
    He went through his father’s room and the sepulcher that had been hers until an hour ago, and descended to the lobby. There was a thunderous shifting of trunks going on on the part of unwashed porters in black blouses. A carriage was drawn up at the entrance to the hotel. Sasha was seated in it, biting the bulb of handkerchief at her lips. Blair took the small flat seat that faced backward and had to be lowered on braces. His father appeared and entered the carriage, seating himself at Sasha’s side.
    “Have the trunks been seen to?” she asked quietly.
    “I attended to them,” he said.
    “Thank you,” she replied with grave courtesy.
    The driver’s whip snapped and they rolled noiselessly away on wheels dipped in red gum. They traversed the quiet evening streets of the residential section, lined with long unbroken garden-walls bristling at the top with chopped glass purposely mixed in with the cement, like raisins in a pudding. A glimpse of the lighted sidewalks about the cafe district, and then the station, its thickly lettered kiosks advertising native cigarettes and bottled grenadines.
    He and she and Blair stood on a vast concrete dais beside the coaches to say farewell to one another. The engine, lacquered and black as licorice, cast a satanic brick-red funnel of light ahead of it into eternity. Overhead gleamed the forget-me-not blue of the depot arc-lights hanging high as Babel from the beams, in long rows that began as big as full moons and ended the size of luminous peas.
    “Sasha,” said the man at her side, “I can’t see you leave me like this. I love you more (go away, Blair) than anything I know of.