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Perhaps you have been there, and you know the Avenida and the way the trees grow the length of it—palm trees and the foreign varieties of hawthorn and maple. Perhaps you’ve drunk iced coffee under a colored umbrella there, with your back turned to the traffic’s noise and the sight of the horses and your face turned to the strips of green, fresh-watered grass. The trees make the long avenues of shade that flow like a dark stream through the city, and on the edges of them stagger the horses, knee-deep in burning, if imaginary, sands. Perhaps you’ve walked up the avenue through the leafy jungle-dark toward where the American flag hangs, heavy with summer, on its white pole in this foreign city’s air. Either children or tropical mirages of them must have run barefoot and scrofulous after you, asking for something as cool as money, and if you were there this summer, you must have seen Miss Del Monte eating ice cream at one of the tiny tables under the trees.

Miss Del Monte used to buy all the American picture magazines there were, and she would sit there looking at them, so as not to think of the horses, with the carts they drew breaking their backs and crippling their limbs beneath them, nor of the lather frothing under the harness that bound them irrevocably to man. Something was always doing it to her, taking the heart out of her breast and tearing it apart, and now she had come to the end. The first day she arrived, she told this to Mr. McCloskey. She said, “You can have the horses and the children with pellagra. I’ll take the mint juleps,” and Mr. McCloskey stopped looking at the German and the Polish and the Czech and the Russian refugees for a moment and decided, without much interest in it, that she was probably the prettiest woman he had ever seen.

Perhaps you even know Mr. McCloskey—the set of his shoulders in his American businessman’s suit, and the rather jaded look in his eyes, and the thick hair just beginning to go gray. He had a roll-top desk to himself, but he never sat down at it, because for eight hours a day he stood behind the elegant, glass-topped counter in the airways office and told the roomful of foreigners, and Americans even, that they wouldn’t be able to board a plane and go where they wanted to go for at least another month or two. Miss Del Monte went into the office in June, the first day she got to the city, and spun the propeller of the miniature plane with one finger as she waited there. She had left her stockings at the hotel because of the heat, and her arms and legs and her head were bare and cool enough looking; her nails were long and immaculately done, and her mouth was far too brilliant. Once you’d seen her, you watched for her everywhere you went: at the Tivoli Bar before dinner, or at the Aquarium, dining on the balcony, and after that playing at the Casino, or dancing at the Palace or the Atlantico. But she was never anywhere like that. She was always in the airways office, talking to Mr. McCloskey or waiting to talk to Mr. McCloskey, smoking one cigarette after another and putting fresh lip rouge on from time to time.

“I’d like to get over by Saturday,” Miss Del Monte had said to him the first day, and when she said it all the refugees sitting on the benches along the wall stopped breathing for a moment and looked at something that wasn’t bitterness and hopelessness at last.

“Look,” said Mr. McCloskey, making a gesture. “Everyone in this country’s trying to get over.” His eyes were haggard and his face was a little gaunt from the heat and the amount of talking he had to do. There were three telephone calls waiting for him on three different desks and fifteen people at the counter where Miss Del Monte stood. “It’s either the language that’s driving them out, or else it’s because they don’t kill their bulls in the corsos here,” he said.

“They broke my heart every Sunday afternoon in Spain,” said Miss Del Monte. “They dragged it out with the horses, and now I’m not having any more.” She took another cigarette and she said, “On account my show’s opening up, I’d like to get over by Saturday.”

“Saturday!” a little man in a pongee suit behind her cried out, and for a moment Miss Del Monte thought he had been stabbed. “I’ve been three monce waiting here—three monce!” he said, and he held up that number of fingers. He didn’t speak English very well, but he had diamonds on his hand.

That was the first day, and the second day, in the morning, they were standing three deep around the counter, so Miss Del Monte gave it up after an hour and came back in the afternoon. When she got opposite Mr. McCloskey at last, she lit a cigarette and looked at him carefully and evenly. He must have been just over thirty, in spite of the gray in his hair, and his shoulders would probably have looked too broad for any chair he sat in.

“I’m not prepared for summer,” she said. “Monday’s the latest I can wait. I haven’t a single sharkskin to put on.”

“Do you know Mr. Sumner Welles?” said Mr. McCloskey, and for the first time Miss Del Monte saw the madness in his eye. “Have you influential friends in Washington?” he asked, and Miss Del Monte shook her head. “Then perhaps I can help you out,” he said, and he walked rather handsomely to his desk, passing Mr. Concachina at the counter on his way.

Mr. Concachina was native, and his head was bald, and his mind was going. “I’m just now speaking four different languages at the same time to five different parties, Mr. McCloskey,” he said, and there was sweat on his forehead. “I tell you, I can’t do it much longer. I’m at the breaking point.”

“You’ve been saying that for a year and a half,” said Mr. McCloskey. He was looking among the other papers for the typewritten list of names. “But nothing ever breaks, nothing,” he said, and he repeated it vaguely. “Nothing ever breaks,” and he held the list in one hand while he said “Hello there” into one of the three telephones. When he came back to the counter, he looked at Miss Del Monte. “We have a very nice opening for the seventeenth of November,” he said.

This went on for a week or more, and then, one Monday morning, Miss Del Monte felt she was getting somewhere at last. She was on her fourth cigarette, and she had combed back her hair and put fresh lipstick on her mouth, and she looked more beautiful than ever.

“Just a minute,” said Mr. McCloskey, studying the list. “How old are you? How much do you weigh?”

“A hundred and fifteen,” said Miss Del Monte quickly. “I’m twenty-four, but I feel a lot older.”

Mr. McCloskey pondered for a moment, and then he said, “Did you ever think of trying a boat, Miss Del Monte?”

“A boat? Do you mean a boat?” she said.

“Yes,” said Mr. McCloskey. He looked at her and moved his hand in a swaying motion. “You’d be surprised. You might like a boat.”

Mr. Concachina, a little way down the counter, had a telephone receiver in one hand and a fountain pen in the other, and he was writing something down. But still be had time enough to look up at Miss Del Monte. “You know about Pola Negri?” he said, and then he spoke the other language into the mouthpiece. “Well, Pola Negri got fed up,” he said, after a moment. “She went out of here in a huff this morning. She’s going to take a boat.”

“I’d just as soon go out of here in a huff as in what I have on,” said Miss Del Monte, evenly. “I’m sure it would be cooler.”

“It ought to be awfully cool on shipboard,” Mr. McCloskey said.

*  *  *  *  *

It was never Mr. McCloskey’s intention to start going out in the evening with Miss Del Monte, but by the second week he had got so accustomed to seeing her around that it seemed the natural thing to find her on the Avenida one evening after dinner and walk back and forth with her beneath the trees. She carried a guidebook in one hand, with a cablegram marking a page in it, and she said she’d just had a double whiskey and soda.

“It breaks my heart to talk shop,” she said, “but my show’s opening on the first of September.”

“It can’t if you’re not there,” said Mr. McCloskey. Behind them, in the fountains, illuminated water lilies with iron stems and china petals floated monstrously through the night, and the bookstalls, each one shaped like a book, and the leather tooled across the back, were open.

“If I stay much longer, I’ll be right in time for the summer season,” said Miss Del Monte. “It says so in the guidebook on page twenty-three. It says there are always balls and processions, varinos exhibitions, gymkhanas, and firelarks. However they want to spell it, I’d give up the varinos exhibitions any day if I could see a gymkhana or a firelark.”

“You probably will without a bit of trouble if you have another double whiskey,” said Mr. McCloskey, but Miss Del Monte said she’d rather hear a fado sung.

Mr. McCloskey had never been to a fado café before, but Miss Del Monte seemed quite familiar with the back street where one was. The lights were still on when they walked in and took a table, and all the men in their pongee suits and their white silk shoes turned to watch Miss Del Monte go past. The only other women there were the female fado singers, with their Spanish-looking shawls on their shoulders, sitting there rather grimly at separate tables, some with their fathers keeping an eye on them and some with their entrepreneurs, either sitting silent or writing out fados while they waited for their turn to come. In a minute the lights went out, and two guitar players mounted a little platform and sat down on the chairs that were placed on opposite sides of it and tuned their instruments up. No one looked very pleased about it, not even when the fado singer himself ran quickly up the steps in his patent-leather shoes and stood in the spotlight between the two guitarists on the platform’s boards. He was a short, evil-looking man in a black suit, and his hair was wavy and very well greased, and he kept his hands in his trousers’ pockets all the time.

“If he takes his hands out of his pockets, he isn’t a fado singer,” said Miss Del Monte, and although the man hadn’t yet started to sing, someone behind her hissed.

Presently the singer announced the title of the fado and added that this was the first time it had been sung in public, for it was about a stabbing that had occurred near the fish market that day. But when he opened his mouth he might just as well have been telling them all what he thought of them, one minute facing half of the room with his neck going red, and then one minute berating the other half with the veins in his forehead beginning to swell. He said the same words over and over to them, so that there could be no mistake, breaking the rhythm savagely and throwing it in their faces while the throbbing of the guitars wove steadily and systematically upward and, finding no foothold, wove steadily and carefully down again.

When he was done, the lights sprang up all over, and the applause scattered about him, and Miss Del Monte lit another cigarette.

“Did you find this in the guidebook?” Mr. McCloskey asked. He removed the crockery jug from its pail of ice and poured the green wine out.

“Don’t be absurd,” said Miss Del Monte. “This is neither a bewildering panorama nor a rendezvous of the elite, nor is it an imposing terrace overlooking the sea.”

“It might be a gymkhana,” said Mr. McCloskey, and he took another drink of wine. ‘

The second night they went out together, again to one of the back-street cafes, Miss Del Monte explained to him further about the fados. She said the better ones were either patriotic or heroic, and these had been handed down from generation to generation. The ones they sat writing out quickly at the tables were only the personal ones, she told him.

“You simply have to sense which kind it is,” she said.

This time it was a girl who sang first, standing up on the platform between the two seated guitarists, with the fringe of the black Spanish shawl hanging just below her knees. Her throat was bare and broad, and her face was primitive under the maquillage, and it was only the feet that had nothing to do with the rest. She wore pink stockings, and her feet were as small as mice and twisted like mice in the traps of the open-toed, cork-soled shoes she had on. She began her statement of fact with her teeth showing white in her mouth, and her voice was husky. She said it beautifully, repeating it first to one side of the room and then to the other, with her hands clasped on her stomach, holding the shawl.

“This is a personal one,” said Miss Del Monte in a whisper to Mr. McCloskey.

“I’d be interested to know,” said Mr. McCloskey rather wearily, “if she makes any mention of Mr. Sumner Welles.”

“It’s something she read in the paper,” said Miss Del Monte. “It’s about a girl whose fiancé kills her sister because she takes the bracelets he’d given the other one and wears them to go out dancing with another man. He couldn’t stand it.”

Mr. McCloskey filled their glasses up again. “Miss Del Monte,” he said, “I don’t know how your public’s getting on without you.”

*  *  *  *  *

It may have been later in the summer, perhaps it was in July, that Mr. McCloskey took her across on the ferry to have dinner on the other shore. They were probably sitting on the open part of the ferry’s deck when Mr. McCloskey said, “She’s over there.” He didn’t look toward the city’s delicately starred hills but off into the darkness. “The only thing in life I care about is over there,” he said, and as he spoke the strung lights of the battleship and the cutter went running past.

He said it again, after they had left the ferry and left the taxi and were walking down through the grass to the river’s edge. The moon had risen now, and everything was as brilliantly lit as if by daylight, and although no explanation had been asked for or given as to why they had come here, and why they went down through the night-drenched grass to where the bright stream of water lay, still it seemed, and singularly without question, the one thing left for them to do.

“She’s out there, tethered on the water,” Mr. McCloskey said. “The plane,” he said, a little impatiently, because Miss Del Monte didn’t seem to be able to understand English any more. “She’s out there. You can see her just to the left of the jetty.” They stood on a footpath at the water’s edge, where a half-dozen dories, white-flanked and rocking empty on the tide, were chained up to the shore. “We can row out to her,” he said, and Miss Del Monte stepped into the boat that he held steady with his foot and sat down on the cross seat, doing it slowly and without wonder, like one hypnotized.

Mr. McCloskey followed her in and fitted the oars in their rowlocks and then pushed off from shore. The water was smooth, and the light and the dark moved clearly in broken pieces on it, first light and then dark around them as the oars dipped softly in the night. Every now and then he turned part way in his seat and feathered the oars while he looked ahead at the suave, enormous body of the plane.

“I love her,” he said. “I love her,” and Miss Del Monte couldn’t think of the right thing, to say. As they drew nearer he pulled hard and in silence on one oar so as to bring them up against the wing.

“Have you ever piloted one?” Miss Del Monte asked, and Mr. McCloskey didn’t say anything for a little while. They were riding close to the plane and he had pulled the oars in, and, until the water began drying on them, the splays of them looked as bright as glass.

“That’s what’s the matter with me,” he said after a moment. “I used to be one. I used to fly them across.” He did not move from his seat, but he raised one hand and ran it along the hard, sweet, sloping, metallic breast. “I didn’t have what it takes,” he said, and his voice was bitter to hear. “Or, rather, I gave away what it takes. I had it. I had it.” The dory gyrated slowly and without direction near the marvelously still body of the plane. “One or two whiskeys too much every now and then, and jitters,” he said. “Single whiskeys when I was tired and double ones to get me out of whatever trouble I happened to be in. Jitters,” he said. “So now I’m just good enough to stand up all day behind a counter and tell them what day the company’s going to let them fly.”

*  *  *  *  *

When Miss Del Monte got to the airways office the next morning, there was one Frenchwoman talking faster and better than the others, leaning across to Mr. McCloskey, with her hand in the black fish-net glove closed sharply on his arm. She was telling him, in French, that she knew Mr. Sumner Welles and that she’d been to school with Eve Curie, and Mr. McCloskey was saying nothing in French or in any other language. He simply stood there looking at her with a rather faded, hopeless look around his eyes.