Fo'castle Waltz

I "danked" him heartily and left the shop.

The nice little beachcombers had disappeared and I never saw them again. I hotfooted it back toward the railroad station and found the American Consul's office a few blocks the other side of it. An Englishman whom I'd picked out flaunting Bond Street tweeds in that crowd of black-scarved, dark-suited Argentinians had directed me after I returned to the station.

It was after five—the Consul's office was locked up for the night. If that girl ever wrote me those promised letters, I've never been able to find out. They were to have been addressed to me in care of the Consul's office. I never came back to it— never could believe that dame anyway.

I stood in the streets of that large strange city. The sun was going down and it was beginning to get quite cold. People who looked like office clerks filled the narrow streets, overflowing into the gutters, and brushed by me in their rush to get home or wherever they were going.

Now the thing to do was to lay plans for a fine cultured evening—music or something—and no girls. That was a sailor's night ashore. I was on the hunt for a feast of the spirit, not the flesh. The Buenos Aires' season is quite the thing, I'd read in a tattered old Vogue magazine once. All the ranking musicians, dancers, etc., who give concerts in New York, Paris, and London during our cold months come down there to do their stuff in July, August, and September. Here I was a tourist in a fashionable city with lots of leisure and pockets lined with money of the realm. Thinly lined, to be sure, after all that black beer, but enough for a cheap ticket to hear music, a middling good restaurant, a bed down at the docks, and, if I didn't get too hungry tomorrow, I'd do the museums. Fortunately, I had my return ticket to my ship in Rio Santiago.

I stopped a couple of English-looking guys and asked the direction to the music halls. They were Germans, though they dressed like Englishmen and spoke the language with a guttural accent. As soon as it was clear that I meant concert music and not girly shows they pointed out the way and I found a large concert hall.

A large poster displayed the gaunt head of Gabrilowitsch. Even though I'd never heard him play and never seen him, I'd have known him. His name was clearly printed in large letters. I hastily looked over the range of prices listed alongside the box-office window and picked a cheap one and thrust two pesos fifty centavos through the window at an elderly man with long white mustachios who sat there dressed in a few sweaters, coats, and a small cloth cap.

He looked up as my money came through and I nodded toward the Gabrilowitsch poster in the lobby. He grunted something and shoved my money back at me. Evidently all the low-priced tickets were gone, so I piled on another peso and slid my money back. Again it came back to me. The old man simply said, "Miercoles" as if that settled it. So I slapped on a couple of more pesos and he shoved back my money. Again he said, "Miercoles" abruptly—back came my slowly growing pile of pesos.

Evidently this old fellow didn't realize how I hungered for a bit of music, how much I yearned for Gabrilowitsch. All right, so I wouldn't have dinner—and I piled on pesos and shoved them through. He seemed to be irritated as he kept repeating miercoles until it had become a shout.

When my last peso and all the loose centavos I had in my pocket had made their last journey in and out that window with the old man's mustachios bristling and his nostrils flaring as he shouted miercoles, we glared fire at each other through that barred window. We'd come to an impasse. A tall, long-nosed man stepped out of the queue which had lined up in back of me and tapped me on the shoulder.

''Miercoles —that means Wednesday," he said gently, as if that explained everything.

"Oh—well, why don't he say so?"

Then I asked this Englishman who seemed so well informed where I could hear some music that night, and he directed me toward the Teatro Colon—the big Opera House on Avenida del Mayo.

I walked off wondering why the old guy hadn't taken my money anyway. H the concert was for the following Wednesday, it would have just been my loss. He couldn't have known I was in town for that night only. But then it might have been for the Wednesday passed, and they just neglected to take that bill poster down, like the circus posters one sees in the late fall on windows of unrented stores.

The posters on the big, ornate Teatro Colon indicated that Adolf Bohm would dance Petrouchka and Stravinski's Firebird would glow through the rest of the wet night.