Chapter 48
"I didn't tell you to bring a waiter. I told you to bring two bottles of champagne. Bring them yourself."
The grand pimp returned very meekly with the bottles.
"Dat's more like. Draw the cork of one."
The grand pimp asked if he should put the other on ice.
"Don't you worry about the other," said Morera. "The other's only there so I can break it on your d.a.m.ned head in case I get tired of looking at you. See what I mean?"
The grand pimp professed the most perfect comprehension.
"Well, this is a b.u.m place," Morera declared, after they had sat for a while. "I believe we sha'n't get no fun here. Let's quit."
He drove her back to the pension, and the next day they took s.h.i.+p to La Plata for Buenos Aires.
Morera insisted on Sylvia's staying at an expensive hotel and was very anxious for her to buy plenty of new evening frocks.
"I've got a fancy," he explained, "to show you a bit of life. You hadn't seen life before you came to Argentina."
The change of air had made Sylvia feel much better, and when she had fitted herself out with new clothes, to which Morera added a variety of expensive and gaudy jewels, she felt quite ready to examine life under his guidance.
He took her to one or two theaters, to the opera, and to the casinos; then one evening he decided upon a special entertainment of which he made a secret.
"I want you to dress yourself up fine to-night," he said. "We're going to some smart ball. Put on all your jewelry. I'm going to dress up smart, too."
Sylvia had found that overdressing was the best way of returning his hospitality; this evening she determined to surpa.s.s all previous efforts.
"Heavens!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, when she made the final survey of herself in the looking-gla.s.s. "Do I look more like a Christmas tree or a chemist's shop?"
When she joined Morera in the lounge, she saw that he was in evening dress, with diamonds wherever it was possible to put them.
"You're fine," he said, contentedly. "Dat's the way I like to see a goil look. I guess we're going to have lots of fun to-night."
They drank a good deal of champagne at dinner, and about eleven o'clock went out to their carriage. When the coachman was given the address of the ballroom, he looked round in surprise and was sworn at for his insolence, so with a shrug of the shoulders he drove off. They left the ordinary centers of amus.e.m.e.nt behind them and entered a meaner quarter where half-breeds and negroes predominated; at last after a very long drive they pulled up before what looked like a third-rate saloon. Sylvia hesitated before she got out; it did not seem at all a suitable environment for their conspicuous attire.
"We shall have lots of fun," Morera promised. "This is the toughest dancing-saloon in Buenos Aires."
"It looks it," Sylvia agreed.
They entered a vestibule that smelt of sawdust, n.i.g.g.e.rs, and raw spirits, and went up-stairs to a crowded hall that was thick with tobacco smoke and dust. A negro band was playing ragtime in a corner; all along one side of the hall ran a bar. The dancers were a queer medley. The men were mostly of the Parisian apache type, though naturally more swarthy; the women were mostly in black dresses, with shawls of brilliantly colored silk and tawdry combs in their black hair.
There were one or two women dancing in coat and skirt and hat, whose lifted petticoats and pale, dissolute faces shocked even Sylvia's masculine tolerance; there was something positively evil in their commonplace attire and abandoned motion; they were like anemic shop-girls possessed with unclean spirits.
"I believe we shall make these folks mad," said Morera, with a happy chuckle. Before Sylvia could refuse he had taken her in his arms and was dancing round the room at double time. The cracked mirrors caught their reflections as they swept round, and Sylvia
"Some of these guys are looking mad already," Morera proclaimed, enthusiastically.
The dance came to an end, and they leaned back against the wall exhausted. Several men walked provocatively past, looking Sylvia and her partner slowly up and down.
"Come along of me," Morera said. "We'll promenade right around the hall."
He put her arm in his and swaggered up and down. The other dancers were gathering in knots and eyeing them menacingly. At last an enormous American slouched across the empty floor and stood in their path.
"Say, who the h.e.l.l are you, anyway?" he asked.
"Say, what the h.e.l.l's dat to you?" demanded Morera.
"Quit!" bellowed the American.
Morera fired without taking his hand from his pocket, and the American dropped.
"Hands up! _Manos arriba!_" cried Morera, pulling out his two pistols and covering the dancers while he backed with Sylvia toward the entrance. When they were up-stairs in the vestibule he told her to look if the carriage were at the door; when he heard that it was not he gave a loud whoop of exultation.
"I said I believed we was going to have lots of fun. We got to run now and see if any of those guys can catch us."
He seized Sylvia's arm, and they darted down the steps and out into the street. Morera looked rapidly right and left along the narrow thoroughfare. They could hear the noise of angry voices gathering in the vestibule of the saloon.
"This way and round the turning," he cried, pulling Sylvia to the left.
There was only one window alight in the narrow alley up which they had turned, a dim orange stain in the darkness. Morera hammered on the door as their pursuers came running round the corner. Two or three shots were fired, but before they were within easy range the door had opened and they were inside. The old hag who had opened it protested when she saw Sylvia, but Morera commanded her in Spanish to bolt it, and she seemed afraid to disobey. Somewhere in a distant part of the house there was a sound of women's crooning; outside they could hear the shuffling of their pursuers' feet.
"Say, this is fun," Morera chuckled. "We've arrived into a _burdel_."
It was impossible for Sylvia to be angry with him, so frank was he in his enjoyment of the situation. The old woman, however, was very angry indeed, for the pursuers were banging upon her door and she feared a visit from the police. Her clamor was silenced with a handful of notes.
"Champagne for the girls," Morera cried.
For Sylvia the evening had already taken on the nature of a dream, and she accepted the immediate experience as only one of an inconsequent procession of events. Having attained this state of mind, she saw nothing unusual in sitting down with half a dozen women who clung to their sofas as sea-anemones to the rocks of an aquarium. She had a fleeting astonishment that they should have names, that beings so utterly indistinguishable should be called Juanilla or Belita or Tula or Lola or Maruca, but the faint shock of realizing a common humanity pa.s.sed off almost at once, and she found herself enjoying a conversation with Belita, who spoke a few words of broken French. With the circulation of the champagne the women achieved a kind of liveliness and examined Sylvia's jewels with murmurs of admiration. The ancient bawd who owned them proposed a dance, to which Morera loudly agreed. The women whispered and giggled among themselves, looking bashfully over their shoulders at Sylvia in a way that made the crone thump her stick on the floor with rage. She explained in Spanish the cause of their hesitation.
"They don't want to take off their clothes in front of you," Morera translated to Sylvia, with apologies for such modesty from women who no longer had the right to possess even their own emotions; nevertheless, he suggested that they might be excused to avoid spoiling a jolly evening.
"Good heavens! I should think so!" Sylvia agreed.
Morera gave a magnanimous wave of his arm, in which he seemed to confer upon the women the right to keep on their clothes. They clapped their hands and laughed like children. Soon to the sound of castanets they wriggled their bodies in a way that was not so much suggestive of dancing as of flea-bites. A lamp with a tin reflector jarred fretfully upon a shelf, and the floor creaked.
Suddenly Morera held up his hand for silence. The knocking on the street door was getting louder. He asked the old woman if there was any way of getting out at the back.
"Dat's all right, kid," he told Sylvia. "We can crawl over the dooryards at the back. Dat door in front ain't going to hold not more than five minutes."
He tore the elastic from a bundle of notes and scattered them in the air like leaves; the women pounced upon the largesse and were fighting with one another on the floor when Sylvia and Morera followed the old woman to the back door and out into a squalid yard.
How they ever surmounted the various walls and crossed the various yards they encountered Sylvia could never understand. All she remembered was being lifted on packing-cases and dust-bins, of slipping once and cras.h.i.+ng into a hen-coop, of tearing her dress on some broken gla.s.s, of riding astride walls and p.r.i.c.king her face against plants, and of repeating to herself all the time, "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed." When at last they extricated themselves from the maze of dooryards they wandered for a long time through a maze of narrow streets. Sylvia had managed to stuff all her jewelry out of sight into her corsage, where it scratched her most uncomfortably, but any discomfort was preferable to the covetous eyes of the half-breeds that watched her from the shadows.
"I guess you enjoyed yourself," said Morera, in a satisfied voice, when at last they found a carriage and leaned back to breathe the gentle night air.
"I enjoyed myself thoroughly," said Sylvia.
"Dat's the way to see a bit of life," he declared. "What's the good of sitting in a b.u.m theater all the night? Dat don't amuse me any. I plugged him in the leg," he added, in a tone of almost tender reminiscence.
Sylvia expressed surprise at his knowing where he had hit him, and Morera was very indignant at the idea of her supposing that he should shoot a man without knowing exactly at what part of him he was aiming and where he should hit him.