52
Yet, in spite of the dark texture of their minds, they were, at times, casually happy, intent, together, on mundane affairs. They were, all five, inseparable: Jaime Quintara, the eldest, was even more of an exquisite than Andrés; he imported his lemon-colored gloves by the box from Paris, where they were made to his measure; and in them, it was the common jest, he went to bed. He was almost fat, with absurdly small feet and a perceptible moustache. In addition, he was in love with a public girl who lived on Gloria Street; altogether he was a man of the world. Remigio Florez was absolutely different: the son of a great coffee estate in Pinar del Rio, of limitless riches, he was still simple and unaffected, short, with a round cheerful face and innocent lips. Tirso Labrador was tall and heavy, he had the carriage of a cavalry officer, a dragoon; and, slow mentally, his chief characteristic was a remarkable steadfastness, a loyalty of friendship, admiration, for his more brilliant companions. Tirso Labrador was very strong, and it was his boast, when they were alone, that he intended to choke a Spaniard slowly to death with his naked hands.
Except, however, for the evening, Charles was rarely idle; upheld by his fervor he studied53Spanish with an instructor through most of the morning, and rode or fenced in the sala in the afternoon. His knowledge of Spanish, supplemented by his friends, grew rapidly; he had, his teacher declared, a very special aptitude for the language. Domingo Escobar got great delight from throwing sentences, queries, at him with inconceivable rapidity, and in pretending that every reply Charles attempted was senseless.
Narcisa, when he was present, contrived to sit with her gaze on her hands folded in her ruffled lap and to lift her widely opened eyes for breathless interrogations. She was, Charles was forced to admit, notably pretty; in fact, for a little girl, she was a beauty. Now if she had been thirty he might have had a hopeless passion for her, hopeless not because she failed to return it, but for the reason that he was a man without a future—some day, they both knew, he would desert love for stark death.
They went, Charles and Andrés, Tirso and Remigio and Jaime, to the Tacon Theatre for every play, where they occupied a box in the first row, the primer piso, and lounged, between the acts, on the velvet rail with their high silk hats and canes and boutonnières. At times there were capital troupes of players and dancers from Andalusia,54and the evening was well spent. They liked, too, the zarzuelas, the operettas of one act, largely improvised with local allusions. But they most warmly applauded the dancers.
One, La Clavel, from Seville, had been announced by posters all over the city; and, at the moment she appeared on the Tacon stage, Tirso had his heavy arm about Remigio’s shoulders, Jaime’s gloved hands were draped over his cane, and Charles was sitting in the rear of the box with Andrés. The orchestra began a sharply accented dance measure—it was a jota—and a lithe figure in a mantón of blazing silks and a raked black felt hat made a sultry bow.
La Clavel was indolent; she tapped a heel and sounded her castanets experimentally; a reminiscent smile hovered on the sombre beauty of her face. Suddenly Charles’ attention was wholly captured by the dancer; he leaned forward, gazing over Remigio’s shoulder, vaguely conscious of the sound of guitars and suppressed drums, the insistent ring of a triangle. She stamped her foot now, and the castanets were sharp, exasperated. Then slowly she began to dance.
She wove a design of simple grace with her hips still and her arms lifted and swaying; she55leaned back, her eyes, under the slanted brim of her hat, half closed; and her movements, the rhythm, grew more pronounced. Through the music Charles could hear the stamp of her heels, the augmented shrilling of the castanets. Her fire increased; there were great scarlet peonies on her shawl, and they fluttered as though they were troubled by a rising wind. La Clavel swept in a widening circle on her hips, and her arms were now extended and now thrust down rigidly behind her.
She dominated the cruel colors of her shawl with a savage intensity that made them but the expressions of her feelings—the scarlet and magenta and burning orange and blue were her visible moods, her capriciousness and contempt and variability and searing passion. Her hat was flung across the stage, and, with her bound hair shaking loose from its high shell comb, she swept into an appalling fury, a tormented human flame, of ecstasy. When Charles Abbott felt that he could support it no longer, suddenly she was, apparently, frozen in the immobility of a stone; the knotted fringe of her mantón hung without a quiver.
An uproar of applause rose from the theatre, a confusion of cries, of Olé! Olé!56Anda! Anda! Chiquella! A flight of men’s hats sailed like birds around her. Jaime Quintara pounded his cane until it broke, and, with the others, Charles shouted his unrestrained Spanish approbation. They crowded into the front of the box, intent on every movement, every aspect, of the dancer. Afterwards, at the Tuileries, Andrés expressed their concerted feeling:
“The most magnificent woman alive!”
Jaime went across the café to speak to a man who had a connection with the Tacon Theatre. He returned with an assortment of information—La Clavel was staying at the St. Louis; she would be in Havana for a month; and she had been seen with Captain Ceaza y Santacilla, of the regiment of Isabel II. This latter fact cast them into a gloom; and Remigio Florez so far broke the ban of sustained caution as to swear, in the name of the Lady of Caridad, at Santacilla and his kind.
Nothing, though, could reduce their enthusiasm for La Clavel; they worshipped her severally and together, discussing to the last shading her every characteristic. She was young, but already the greatest dancer the world had—would ever have, Charles added. And Andrés was instructed to secure the box for her every appearance in Havana; they must learn, they decided,57if she were to dance in Santiago de Cuba, in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, in Cathay. They, if it were mortally possible, would be present. Meanwhile none of them was to take advantage of the others in the contingency that she should miraculously come to love him. That incredible happiness the individual must sacrifice to his friendship, to his oath above all other oaths—Cuba. The country’s name was not spoken, but it was entirely understood.
They were seated on the lower floor, by the stairs which led up to the salon for women; and, sharply, Charles grasped Andrés’ arm. Passing them was a slender woman muffled in a black silk capote, with no hat to cover the intricate mass of her hair piled against a high comb. Behind her strode a Spanish officer of cavalry, his burnished scabbard hooked on his belt against its silver chain; short, with a thick sanguine neck above the band of his tunic, he had morose pale blue eyes and the red hair of compounded but distinct bloods.
“La Clavel,” Charles whispered; “and it must be that filthy captain, Santacilla, with her.”
58
Seated on the roof of the Hotel San Felipe, the night’s trade wind faintly vibrant with steel strings, Charles Abbott thought at length about La Clavel. Two weeks had passed since she first danced at the Tacon Theatre; she had appeared on the stage three times afterward; and she was a great success, a prodigious favorite, in Havana. Charles and Andrés, Jaime and Remigio and Tirso Labrador, had, frankly, become infatuated with her; and it was this feeling which Charles, at present, was examining. If it endangered the other, his dedication to an ordeal of right, he had decided, he must resolutely put the dancer wholly outside his consideration.
This, he hoped, would not be necessary: his feeling for La Clavel lay in the realm of the impersonal. It was, in fact, parallel with the other supreme cause. La Clavel was a glittering thing of beauty, the perfection of all that in a happier world, an Elysium—life and romance might be. He regarded her in a mood of decided melancholy as something greatly desirable and never to be grasped. When she danced his every sensibility was intensified; life, for the moment, was immeasurably lovely, flooded with lyrical splendor, vivid with gorgeous color and aching happiness. Charles’ pleasure in every circumstance of being59was acutely expanded—his affection for Andrés, the charm of Havana, the dignity of his impending fate.
Ordinarily he would not have been content with this; he would have striven to turn such abstractions into the concrete of an actual experience. But now an unusual wisdom held him intent on the vision; that, he recognized, was real; but what the reality, the woman herself, was, who could be sure? No, he wasn’t in love with La Clavel in the accepted sense of that indefinite term; he was the slave of the illusion, the emotions, she spun; he adored her as the goddess of his youth and aspirations.
He tried to explain this, in halting and inadequate Spanish, to his tertulia; and because of his spirit rather than his words, his friends understood him. They were standing by the marble statue of Ferdinand VII in the Plaza de Armas, waiting for the ceremony of Retrata, to begin in a few moments. The square was made of four gardens, separated by formal walks, with a circular glorieta; and the gardens, the royal palms and banyans and flambeau trees, were palely lighted by gas lamps which showed, too, the circling procession of carriages about the Plaza. The square itself was filled with sauntering men,60a shifting pattern of white linens, broad hats and glimmering cigars, diversified by the uniforms of Spain.
At eight o’clock a sergeant’s guard and the band marched smartly into position before the Governor-General’s palace, where they stood at rest until the drums of the barracks announced retreat. Then, at attention, the gun of El Morro sounded, and the band swept into the strains of Philemon et Baucis.
Jaime Quintara smiled sceptically at Charles’ periods: Platonic sentiments might satisfy Abbott, he declared, but for himself.... At this, Remigio insisted on their moving out to inspect the carriages. They were, for the most part, quitrins, drawn with two horses, one outside the shafts ridden by a calesero in crimson velvet laced with gold and a glazed hat. The quitrins had two wheels, a leather hood strapped back, and held three passengers by means of a small additional seat, called, Andrés explained, la niña bonita, where the prettiest woman was invariably placed. None of the women wore hats, but they were nearly all veiled, and the carriages were burdened with seductive figures in wide dresses of perfumed white waving slow fans.
There was, however, little conversation between61the men on foot and the women carefully cultivating expressions of remote unconcern. Rarely, if she were accompanied by a masculine member of her family, a woman came to earth for a short stroll in the gardens. Charles was absolutely inattentive to them, but his companions, particularly Tirso and Jaime, noted and, with dismaying freedom, commented on every feminine detail that struck their fancy. It was Tirso who excitedly called their attention to one of the new volantas in which sat La Clavel. Ceaza y Santacilla was not with her; the place at her side was occupied by the man to whom Jaime had spoken about the dancer in the Tuileries. Quintara, capturing his attention, spoke in his profoundest manner. There was a halt in the movement of carriages, and La Clavel was directly before them.
She wore the high comb and a mantilla of black lace falling in scalloped folds around the vivid flower of her face—her beauty, at least to Charles, was so extraordinary, her dark loveliness was so flaming, that the scarlet camellia in her hair seemed wan. They were, all four, presented to the dancer; and four extreme bows, four fervid and sonorous acknowledgments, rose to the grace, the divinity, above. It seemed to62Charles that, perhaps because he was an American, La Clavel noticed him more than the others: certainly she smiled at him and the brilliancy of her gaze was veiled, made enigmatic, by the lowering of her sweeping eyelashes.
The checked restlessness of the horses was again released in a deliberate progress, but, as La Clavel was carried on, the man with her added that, after Retreta, they would stop at the El Louvre for an ice cream, a mantecado. Remigio Florez drew in a deep breath which he allowed to escape in the form of a sigh; Jaime smoothed the wrists of his bright yellow gloves; Tirso Labrador settled his guardsman’s shoulders into his coat. “She won’t get out of the volanta,” Charles said thoughtfully; “and someone will have to bring out her refresco. We’d better get there early and stand at the door.”
“No hurry,” the suave Jaime put in; “no one will leave here until after tattoo.”
At nine o’clock the drums and bugles sounded from various parts of the city. There was one more tune played directly under the palace windows, after which the band and its guards left briskly to the measure of a quickstep. Charles led the way through the crowd to the Prado and the Parque Isabel. A number of carriages were63there before them, the occupants mostly eating ices, and the café was being rapidly filled. Waiting keen-eyed at the entrance, they saw the volante with La Clavel before it drew up, and the calesero had scarcely dismounted from his horse when the dancer was offered her choice of the available sweets. She preferred, rather than an ice, an orchata, and sipped it slowly with an air of complete enjoyment. Her every movement, Charles Abbott saw, the turn of the hand holding the glass, her chin and throat against the black film of lace, her slender body’s poise, was utterly and strongly graceful: it was, more than any other quality, the vigor of her beauty that impressed him. It seemed as though she must be superbly young, and dance magnificently, forever.
As Charles was considering this he was unceremoniously thrust aside for the passage of Captain Santacilla with another cavalry officer whose cinnamon colored face was stamped with sultry ill-humor. Santacilla addressed the dancer aggressively with the query of why she misspent her evening with the cursed Cuban negroes.
La Clavel made no reply, but tended her64empty glass to Andrés; then she glanced indifferently at the captains. “Their manners,” she said, “are very pretty; and as for the negro—” she shrugged her delectable shoulders.
“My blood is as pure, as Castilian, as your own,” Tirso Labrador began hotly; but Remigio stilled him with a hand on his arm. In an uncolored voice he begged the dancer to excuse them; and, sweeping off their hats, they were leaving when Santacilla’s companion stepped forward in a flash of ungoverned anger like an exposed knife:
“I’ve noticed you before,” he addressed Tirso, “hanging and gabbling around the cafés and theatres, and it’s my opinion you are an insurrectionist. If the truth were known, I dare say, it would be found you are a friend to Cespedes. Anyhow, I’m tired of looking at you; if you are not more retiring, you will find yourself in the Cabañas.”
“Good evening,” Remigio repeated in an even tone. With his hand still on Tirso’s arm he tried to force him into the café; but the other, dark with passion, broke away.
“You have dishonored my father and the name of a heroic patriot,” he said to the officer of cavalry. “In this I am alone.” With a suspicious65quickness he leaned forward and his big hands shut about the Spaniard’s throat.
Charles, with a suppressed exclamation, recalled Tirso’s determination to choke one of the enemies of Cuba. The man in the gripping fingers stiffened and then, grotesquely, lost his aspect of a human form; suddenly he was no more than a thing of limp flesh and gay fabrics. Instantly an uproar, a surging passionate excitement grew, at the heart of which Tirso Labrador was curiously still. Heaving bodies, at once closing in and prudently scattering, hid from Charles his friend. There was an onrush of gendarmes, harsh exclamations and oaths; then, at the flash of steel, a short agonized cry—Tirso’s voice at once hoarse and inhuman with death.
Charles Abbott, hurrying away at Andrés’ urgent insistence, caught a final glimpse of a big young body sunk on the flagging of the Paseo; he saw a leaden face and a bubbling tide of blood. Beyond the Montserrat gate they halted, and he was shocked to hear Remigio Florez curse Tirso as brutally as any Spaniard. Andrés, white and trembling, agreed. “Here is what I warned you of,” he turned to Charles; “it is fatal to lose your temper. You think that what Tirso did ends with him in purgatory ... ha! Perhaps66he is best out of it among us all. It might be better for you to go back to America tomorrow and forget about Cuba.”
“Yes,” Remigio added, “probably we are all ruined; and certainly the police spies will be waiting for us at home.”
“It would have been better if we had dissipated more,” Jaime added: “we have been entirely too high-minded and unnatural. Young men meet together only to conspire or find love—the Spaniards know that and we were fools.”
“We haven’t been suspected of anything,” Andrés pointed out; “and it may be said that Tirso was killed defending his name. No, the trouble is to come; and it wasn’t our fault. We must see less of each other, at least in public, and be quite overcome about Tirso; that is another account I charge to Spain: I knew him when I was a child ... in the Vuelta Arriba—” Andrés Escobar began to cry wholly and unaffectedly; he leaned against an angle of the gate, his head in an arm, and prolonged sobs shook his body. Tears were silently streaming over Jaime’s face, but Charles Abbott’s eyes were dry. He was filled by an ecstasy of horror and detestation at the brutal murder of Tirso. Fear closed his throat67and pinched his heart with icy fingers; but he ignored, rose above, himself, in a tremendous accession of his determination to drive injustice—if not yet from the world—from Cuba.
How little, he thought, anyone knew him who advised a return to America. Before the cold violent fact of death a great part of his early melodramatic spirit evaporated; the last possible trace of any self-glorification left him, the lingering mock-heroics of boyhood were gone. His emotion, now, was almost exultant; like a blaze of insuperable white light it drowned all the individual colors of his personality; it appeared to him almost that he had left the earth, that he was above other men.
More than anything, he continued, he would require wisdom, the wisdom of patience, maturity; Tirso had been completely wasted. He was seated, again, on the roof of his hotel, and again it was night: the guitars were like a distant sounding of events evolved in harmonies, and there was the gleam of moonlight on the sea, a trace of the moon and the scent of mignonette trees.
He was, he felt, very old, grave, in deportment; this detachment from living must be the mark of age. Charles had always been a little68removed from activity by sickness; and now his almost solitary, dreaming habit of existence had deepened in him. He thought, from time to time, of other periods than his own, of ages when such service as his had been, for gentlemen, the commonplace of living: he saw, in imagination, before the altar of a little chapel, under the glimmer of tall candles, a boyish figure kneeling in armor throughout the night. At morning, with a faint clashing of steel, the young knight under a vow rode into black forests of enchanted beasts and men and impure magic, from which he delivered the innocent and the pure in heart.
Charles Abbott recalled the burning of the Protestant Cranmer, and, as well, the execution of John Felton for posting the Papal bull against the Queen on the door of London House. They too, like the knights of Arthurian legend, had conquered the flesh for an ideal. He was carried in spirit into a whole world of transcendent courage, into a company who scorned ease and safety in the preservation of an integrity, a devotion, above self. This gave him a release, the sense that his body was immaterial, that filled him with a calm serious fervor.
He was conscious, through this, of the ceaseless playing of the guitars, strains of jotas and69malagueñas, laden with the seductiveness, the fascination, of sensuous warm life. It was, in its persistence, mocking; and finally it grew into a bitter undertone to the elevation of his thought: he wanted, like Savonarola, to bring to an end the depravity of the city; he wanted to cleanse Havana of everything but the blanched heavenly ardor of his own dedication. The jotas continued and the scent of mignonette increased. The moon, slipping over the sea, shone with a vague brightness on the leaves of the laurels below, on the whiteness of marble walks, and in the liquid gleam of fountains. A woman laughed with a note of uncertainty and passion.... It was all infinitely removed from him, not of the slightest moment. What rose, dwelt, in Charles was a breath of eternity, of infinitude; he was lost in a vision of good beyond seasons, changeless, and for all men whomsoever. It must come, he told himself so tensely that he was certain he had cried his conviction aloud. The music sustained its burden of earthly desire to which the harsh whispering rustle of the palm fronds added a sound like a scoffing laughter.
70
At the Plaza de Toros, the following Sunday afternoon, Charles saw La Clavel; she was seated on an upper tier near the stand of the musicians, over the entrance for the bulls; and, in an audience composed almost entirely of men, she was brilliantly conspicuous in a flaming green mantón embroidered in white petals; her mantilla was white, and Charles could distinguish the crimson blot of the flower by her cheek. The brass horns and drums of the band were making a rasping uproar, and the crowded wooden amphitheatre was tense with excitement. Andrés Escobar, beside Charles, was being gradually won from a settled melancholy; and, in an interested voice, he spoke to Charles about the espada, José Ponce, who had not yet killed a bull in Cuba, but who was a great hero of the ring in Spain and South America.
“There is La Clavel,” Charles said by way of reply; “she is with Captain Santacilla, and I think, but I can’t be sure, the officer Tirso tried to choke to death. What is his name—de Vaca, Gaspar Arco de Vaca.”
“Even that,” Andrés answered, “wasn’t accomplished. La Clavel’s engagement in Havana is over; I suppose it will be Buenos Aires next. Do you remember how we swore to follow her all71over the world, and how Tirso wanted to drag her volanta in place of the horses? At heart, it’s no doubt, she is Spanish, and yet.... There’s the procession.”
The key bearer, splendid in velvet and gold and silver, with a short cloak, rode into the ring followed by the picadores on broken-down horses: their legs were swathed in leather and their jackets, of ruby and orange and emerald, were set with expensive lace. They carried pikes with iron points; while the banderilleros, on foot, with hair long and knotted like a woman’s, hung their bright cloaks over an arm and bore the darts gay with paper rosettes.
The espada, José Ponce, was greeted with a savage roar of approbation; he was dressed in green velvet, his zouave jacket heavy with gold bullion; and his lithe slender dark grace recalled to Charles Abbott La Clavel. Charles paid little attention to the bull fighting, for he was far in the sky of his altruism; his presence at the Plaza de Toros was merely mechanical, the routine of his life in Havana. Across from him the banked humanity in the cheaper seats à sol, exposed to the full blaze of mid-afternoon, made a pattern without individual significance; he heard the quick bells of the mules that dragged out the dead72bulls; a thick revolting odor rose from the hot sand soaked with the blood and entrails of horses.
At times, half turning, he saw the brilliant shawl of the dancer, and more than once he distinguished her voice in the applause following a specially skilful or daring pass. He thought of her with a passionate admiration unaffected by the realization that she had brought them the worst of luck: perhaps any touch of Spain was corrupting, fatal. And the sudden desire seized him to talk to La Clavel and make sure that her superb art was unshadowed by the disturbing possibilities voiced by Andrés.
There were cries of fuego! fuego! and Charles Abbott was conscious of a bull who had proved indifferent to sport. A banderillero, fluttering his cloak, stepped forward and planted in the beast’s shoulder a dart that exploded loudly with a spurt of flame and smoke; there was a smothered bellow, and renewed activities went forward below. “What a rotten show!” Charles said to Andrés, and the latter accused him of being a tender sentimentalist. José Ponce, Andrés pronounced with satisfaction, was a great sword. The espada was about to kill: he moved as gracefully as though he were in the figure of a dance; his thrust, as direct as a flash of lightning, went73up to the hilt, and the vomiting bull fell in crashing death at his feet.
“Suppose, for a change, we go to the Aguila de Oro,” Andrés suggested; “the air is better there.” By that he meant that the café was relatively free from Spaniards. The throng moved shoulder to shoulder slowly to the doors; but Charles managed to work his way constantly nearer the conspicuous figure of La Clavel. He despaired, however, of getting close to her, when an unforeseen eddy of humanity separated the dancer from her companions and threw her into Charles’ path. She recognized him immediately: but, checking his formal salutation, she said, in a rapid lowered voice, that she would very much like to see him ... at the St. Louis late on the afternoon of tomorrow. They were separated immediately, leaving in Charles a sense of excited anticipation. He joined Andrés soon after and told him what had occurred.
“I suppose it is safe for you,” Andrés decided; “you are an American, no one has yet connected you with the cause of Cuba. But this woman—What do we know of her?—you’ll have to be prudent!”
Andrés Escobar had grown severe in the last week, he had hardened remarkably; his concentration,74Charles felt, his bitterness, even excluded his friends. Charles Abbott’s affection for him increased daily; his love, really, for Andrés was a part of all that was highest in him. Unlike the love of any woman, Andrés made no demand on him, what only mattered was what each intrinsically was: there were no pretence, no weary protestations, nothing beside the truth of their mutual regard, their friendship. What Charles possessed belonged equally, without demand, to Andrés; they had, aside from their great preoccupation, the same thoughts and prejudices, the same taste in refrescos and beauty and clothes. They discovered fresh identical tastes with a rush of happiness.
It was, like the absorbing rest, immaterial, the negation of ordinary aims and ideas of comfort and self-seeking. Charles would have died for Andrés, Andrés for Charles, without of a moment’s hesitation; indeed, the base of their feeling lay in the full recognition of that fact. This they admitted simply, with no accent of exaggeration or boasting: on the present plane of their being it was the most natural thing in the world.
At the Aguila de Oro, spinning the paddle of a molinillo, and individual chocolate mill, Andrés informed Charles that Vincente was home. “He75has told me everything,” Andrés Escobar continued with pride. “We are now more than Escobars—brother Cubans. He has been both shot and sabred and he has a malaria. But nearly all his friends are dead. Soon, he says, we, Jaime and Remigio—and, I added, you—will have to go out. He is to let us know when and how.”
“Do the police know he is in Havana?”
“We think not; they haven’t been about the house since the investigation of the de Vaca affair, and our servants are not spies. You must come and see Vincente this evening, for he may leave at any hour. It seems that he is celebrated for his bravery and the Spaniards have marked him for special attention. Papa and mama are dreadfully disturbed, and not only because of him; for if he is discovered, all of us, yes, little Narcisa, will be made to pay—to a horrible degree, I can tell you.”
There was, apparently, nothing unusual in the situation at the Escobars’ when Charles called in the evening. The family, exactly as he had known it, was assembled in the drawing-room, conversing under the icy flood of the crystal chandelier.76He found a chair by Narcisa, and listened studiously to the colloquial Spanish, running swiftly around the circle, alternating with small thoughtful silences. Soon, however, Charles Abbott could see that the atmosphere was not normal—the vivacity palpably was forced through the shadow of a secret apprehension. Domingo Escobar made sudden seemingly irrelevant gestures, Carmita sighed out of her rotundity. Only Narcisa was beyond the general subdued gloom: in her clear white dress, her clocked white silk stockings, and the spread densely black curtain of her hair, she was intent on a wondering thought of her own. Her gaze, as usual, was lowered to her loosely clasped hands; but, growing conscious of Charles’ regard, she looked up quickly, and, holding his eyes, smiled at him with an incomprehensible sweetness.
He regarded her with a gravity no more than half actual—his mind was set upon Vincente—and her even pallor was invaded by a slow soft color. Charles nodded, entirely friendly, and she turned away, so abruptly that her hair swung out and momentarily hid her profile. He forgot her immediately, for he had overheard, half understood, an allusion to the Escobars’ elder son. With a growing impatience he interrogated77Andrés, and the latter nodded a reassurance. Then Andrés Escobar rose, punctiliously facing his father—he would, with permission, take Charles to the upper balconies, the wide view from which he had never seen. Domingo was plainly uneasy, displeased; but, after a long frowning pause, gave his reluctant consent. Charles Abbott was acutely aware of his heels striking against the marble steps which, broad, imposing and dark, led above. Vincente, it developed, without actually being in hiding, was limited to the scope of the upper hall, where, partly screened in growing palms, its end formed a small salon.
There was a glimmer of light though sword-like leaves, and a lamp on an alabaster table set in ormolu cast up its illumination on a face from which every emotion had been banished by a supreme weariness. Undoubtedly at one time Vincente Escobar had been as handsome as Andrés; more arbitrary, perhaps, with a touch of impatience resembling petulance; the carriage, the air, of a youth spoiled by unrestrained inclination and society. The ghost of this still lingered over him, in the movement of his slender hands, the sharp upflinging of his chin; but it was no more than a memento of a gay and utterly78lost past. The weariness, Charles began to realize, was the result of more than a spent physical and mental being—Vincente was ill. He had acquired a fever, it was brought out, in the jungles of Camagüey.
At first he was wholly indifferent to Charles; at the end of Andrés’ enthusiastic introduction, after a flawless but perfunctory courtesy, Vincente said:
“The United States is very important to us; we have had to depend almost entirely on the New York Junta for our life. We have hope, too, in General Grant. Finally your country, that was so successful in its liberation, will understand us completely, and sweep Spain over the sea. But, until that comes, we need only money and courage in our, in Cuban, hearts. You are, I understand from Andrés, rich; and you are generous, you will give?”
That direct question, together with its hint at the personal unimportance of his attachment to a cause of pure justice, filled Charles with both resentment and discomfort. He replied stiffly, in halting but adequate Spanish, that there had been a misunderstanding: “I am not rich; the money I have you would think nothing—it might buy a stand or two of rifles, but no more. What79I had wanted to spend was myself, my belief in Cuba. It seemed to me that might be worth something—” he stopped, in the difficulty of giving expression to his deep convictions; and Andrés warmly grasped his hand. He held Charles’ palm and addressed his brother in a passionate flood of protest and assertion: Charles Abbott, his dear friend, was as good a patriot as any Escobar, and they should all embrace him in gratitude and welcome; he was, if not the gold of the United States, its unselfish and devoted heart; his presence here, his belief in them, was an indication of what must follow.
“If he were killed,” Andrés explained. “That alone would bring us an army; the indignation of his land would fall like a mountain on our enemies.”
This, giving Charles a fresh view of his usefulness, slightly cooled his ardor; he was willing to accept it, in his exalted state he would make any sacrifice for the ideal that had possessed him; but there was an acceptance of brutal unsentimental fact in the Latin fibre of the Escobars foreign to his own more romantic conceptions. Vincente wasn’t much carried away by the possibility Andrés revealed.
“He’d be got out of the way privately,” he explained80in his drained voice; “polite letters and no more, regrets, would be exchanged. The politicians of Washington are not different from those of Cuba. If he is wise he will see Havana as an idler. Even you, Andrés, do not know yet what is waiting for you. It is one thing to conspire in a balcony on the Prado and another to lie in the marshes of Camagüey. You cannot realize how desperate Spain is with the debt left from her wars with Morocco and Chile and Peru. Cuba, for a number of years, has been her richest possession. While the Spaniards were paying taxes of three dollars and twenty some cents, we, in Cuba, were paying six dollars and sixty-nine. After our declaration of independence at Manzanillo—” an eloquent pause left his hearers to the contemplation of what had followed.
“You know how it has gone with us,” Vincente continued, almost exclusively to the younger Escobar. “Carlos Cespedes left his practice of the law at Bayamo for a desperate effort with less than a hundred and thirty men. But they were successful, and in a few weeks we had fifteen thousand, with the constitution of a republican government drawn. We ended slavery,” here, for a breath, he addressed Charles Abbott. “But in that,” he specified, “we were different from81you. In the United States slavery was considered as only a moral wrong. Your Civil War was, after all, an affair of philanthropy; while we freed the slaves for economic reasons.
“Well, our struggle went on,” he returned to Andrés, “and we were victorious, with, at the most, fifty thousand men against how many? One, two, hundred thousand. And we began to be recognized abroad, by Bolivia and Columbia and the Mexican Congress. The best Cubans, those like ourselves, were in sympathy with the insurrection. Everything was bright, the climate, too, was fighting for us; and then, Andrés, we lost man after man, the bravest, the youngest, first: they were murdered, as I may be tonight, killed among the lianas, overtaken in the villages, smothered in small detachments by great forces, until now. And it is for that I have said so much, when it is unnecessary to pronounce a word. What do you think is our present situation? What do you think I left of our splendid effort in the interior? General Agramonte and thirty-five men. That and no more!
“Their condition you may see in me—wasted, hardly stronger than pigeons, and less than half armed. What, do you think, one boy from Pennsylvania is worth to that? Can he live without82food more than half the time, without solid land under his feet, without protection against the mosquitoes and heat and tropical rains? And in Havana: but remember your friend, Tirso Labrador! You, Andrés, have no alternative; but your Charles Abbott he would be a danger rather than an assistance.” Charles, with a prodigious effort at a calm self-control, answered him.
“You are very thoughtful, and it is right to be cautious, but what you say is useless. Andrés understands! I’d never be satisfied to be anything except a Cuban patriot. It isn’t necessary for you to understand that in a minute, an evening. I might be no good in Camagüey, but I am not as young as Tirso; I am more bitter and patient. By heaven, I will do something, I will be a part of your bravery! Not only the soldiers in the field, not only Agramonte, but sacrifice—”
Charles’ throat was closed, his words stopped, by the intensity of his feeling; his longing to be identified, lost, in the spirit of General Agramonte and the faithful thirty-five burned into a83desperation of unhappiness. Vincente Escobar, it was evident, thought that he wasn’t capable of sustaining such a trust. Still there was nothing to be gained by protests, hot asseverations; with difficulty he suppressed his resentment, and sat, to all appearances, calm, engaged with a cigar and attending Vincente’s irregular vehement speech. Andrés was silent, dark and serious; but the gaze he turned upon Charles was warm with affection and admiration. Nothing, Vincente insisted, could be done now; they must wait and draw into their cause every possible ultimate assistance and understanding. If the truth were known, he repeated again and again, the world would be at their feet.
Finally, his enthusiasm, his power, ebbed; his yellow pinched face sank forward: he was so spent, so delivered to a loose indifference of body, that he might well have been dead. Charles rose with a formal Spanish period voicing the appreciation of the honor that had been his.
“We are all worried about Vincente,” Andrés proceeded, as they were descending the vault-like stairs; “there is a shadow on him like bad luck. But it may be no more than the fever. Our mother thinks he needs only her love and enough wine jelly.” They were again in the84drawing-room with the Escobars; and Charles momentarily resumed the seat he had left beside Narcisa.
Domingo and his wife were submerged in gloomy reflection, and Andrés sat with his gaze fixed on the marble, patterned in white and black, of the floor. Suddenly Narcisa raised her head with an air of rebellion. “It’s always like the church,” she declared incredibly. “Everything has got so old that I can’t bear it—Vincente as good as dead and Andrés resembling a Jesuit father! Must all my life go on in this funeral march?” The elder Escobars regarded her in a voiceless amazement; but Andrés said severely:
“You are too young to understand the tragedy of Cuba or Vincente’s heroic spirit. I am ashamed of you—before Charles Abbott.”
Narcisa rose and walked swiftly out upon the balcony. They had been, it seemed to Charles, rather ridiculous with her; it was hard on Narcisa to have been thrust, at her age, into such a serious affair. The Escobars, and particularly Vincente, took their responsibility a little too ponderously. Following a vague impulse, made up both of his own slightly damaged pride and a sympathy for Narcisa, he went out to the balcony where she stood with her hands lightly resting85on the railing. Veiled in the night, her youth seemed more mysterious than immature; he was conscious of an unsteady flutter at her unformed breast; her face had an aspect of tears.
“You mustn’t mind them,” he told her; “they are tremendously bothered because they see a great deal farther than you can. The danger to Vincente, too, in Havana, spies—”
She interrupted him, looking away so that he could see only a trace of her cheek against the fragment fall of her hair. “It isn’t that, but what Andrés said about you.”
This admission startled him, and he studied Narcisa—her hands now tightly clasping the iron railing—with a disturbed wonder. Was it possible that she cared for him? At home, ignored by a maturity such as his, she would have been absorbed in the trivial activities of girls of her own age. But Havana, the tropics, was different. It was significant, as well, that he was permitted to be with her, practically alone, beyond the sight and hearing of her mother; the Escobars, he thought, had hopes of such a consummation. It was useless, he was solely wedded to Cuba; he had already pictured the only dramatic accident of the heart that could touch him. Not little Narcisa! She was turned away from86him completely: a lovely back, straight and narrow, virginal—Domingo Escobar had said this—as a white rose bud, yet with an impalpable and seductive scent. In other circumstances, a happier and more casual world, she would have been an adorable fate. An increasing awkwardness seized him, a conviction of impotence. “Narcisa,” he whispered at her ear; but, before he could finish his sentence, her face was close to his, her eyes were shut and the tenderness of her lips unprotected.
Charles put an arm about her slim shoulders and pressed his cheek against hers. “Listen,” he went on, in his lowered voice, patching the deficiencies of his Spanish with English words clear in their feeling if not in sound, “nothing could have shown me myself as well as you, for now I know that I can never give up a thought to anything outside what I have promised my life to. A great many men are quite happy with a loving wife and children and a home—a place to go back to always; and, in a way, since I have known you, I envy them. Their lives are full of happiness and usefulness and specially peace; but, dearest Narcisa, I can’t be like that, it isn’t for me. You see, I have chosen to love a country; instead of being devoted only to you,87there are thousands of women, rich and poor and black and white, I must give myself for. I haven’t any existence, any rights, of my own; I haven’t any money or time or security to offer. I didn’t choose it, no, it chose me—it’s exactly as though I had been stopped on the street and conscripted. A bugle was blown in my ear. Love, you must realize, is selfish; it would be selfish to take you on a steamer, for myself, and go north. If I did that, if I forgot what I have sworn, I’d die. I should seem to the world to be alive, and I’d walk about and talk and go into the city on some business or other; but, in reality, I should be as dead as dust.
“There are men like that everywhere, Narcisa, perhaps the most of life is made up of them. They look all right and are generally respected; yet, at some time or other, they killed themselves, they avoided what they should have met, tried to save something not worth a thought. I don’t doubt a lot never find it out, they think they are as good as ever—they don’t remember how they once felt. But others discover it, or the people who love them discover it for them. And that would happen to me, to us.”
In reply to all this she whispered that she loved him. Her arm slipped up across his88shoulder and the tips of her fingers touched his left cheek. A momentary dizziness enveloped him at her immeasurable sweetness: it might be that she was a part of what he was to find, to do, in Cuba; and then his emotion perished in the bareness of his heart to physical passion. Its place was taken by a deep pride in his aloofness from the flesh; that alone, he felt, dignified him, set him above the mischances of self-betrayal.
Charles Abbott kissed her softly and then took her hands. “You wouldn’t want me, Narcisa,” he continued; “if I failed in this, I should fail you absolutely. If I were unfaithful now I could never be faithful to you.”
She drew her hands sharply away. “It’s you who are young and not I,” she declared; “you talk like a boy, like Andrés. All you want is a kind of glory, like the gold lace the officers of Isabella wear. Nothing could be more selfish.”
“You don’t understand,” he replied patiently.
Narcisa, he felt, could never grasp what was such a profound part of his masculine necessity. Abstractions, the liberty, for example, of an alien people, would have little weight against her instinct for the realities in her own heart. Her emotion was tangible, compared with his it was89deeply reasonable; it moved in the direction of their immediate good, of the happiness, the fullness, of their beings; while all his desire, his hope, was cloudy, of the sky. In the high silver radiance of his idealism, the warmer green of earth, the promise of Narcisa’s delicate charm, the young desire in his blood, were, he felt, far away, dim ... below.
The conviction fastened upon him that this chance realization would determine, where women were concerned, the whole of his life. But that space, he reminded himself, short at best, was, in him, to terminate almost at once. All his philosophy of resistance, of strength, was built upon the final dignity of a supreme giving. His thoughts went back to Narcisa as he sat in La Clavel’s room in the St. Louis, watching a hairdresser skilfully build up the complicated edifice of the dancer’s hair. Soon, he grasped, it would be ready for the camellia placed back of the lobe of an ear. A towel was pinned about her naked shoulders, she had on a black fringed petticoat and dangling slippers of red morocco leather. La Clavel was faced away from Charles, but, in the mirror before which she sat,90he could see her features and vivid changing expressions.
The truth was that, close, he had found her disconcerting, almost appalling. Climbing the long stairs at the message that she would see him in her room, he had surrendered himself to the romantic devotion which had overwhelmed the small select circle of his intimates. This had nothing to do with the admirable sentiment of a practical all-inclusive love; it was æsthetic rather than social. They all worshipped La Clavel as a symbol of beauty, as fortunately unattainable in a small immediate measure; and, bowing inside the door of her chamber, he had been positively abashed at the strange actuality of her charm.
La Clavel was at once more essentially feminine than any other woman he had encountered and different from all the rest. A part of the impression she created was the result of her pallor, the even unnatural whiteness under the night of her hair. Her face was white, but her lips—a carmine stick lay close at her hands—were brutally red. She hurt him, struck savagely at the idealism of his image; indeed, in the room permeated with a dry powdered scent, at the woman redolent of vital flesh, he had been a little sickened. However, that had gone; and he91watched the supple hands in the crisp coarse mass of her hair with a sense of adventure lingering faintly from his earlier youth: he was, in very correct clothes, holding his hat and stick and gloves, idling through the toilet of a celebrated dancer and beauty.
Or, rather, he saw himself objectively, as he had been say a year ago, at which time his present situation would have surpassed his most splendid worldly hopes. It was strange, he thought, how life granted one by one every desire ... when it was no longer valued: the fragrance, the tender passion, of Narcisa, the preference in La Clavel singling him out from a city for her interest!
She smiled at him over her shoulder, and, in return, he nodded seriously, busy with a cigarette; maintaining, in a difficult pass, his complete air of indifference, of experience. The hairdresser must have pulled roughly at a strand for, with a sudden harsh vulgarity, she described him as a blot on the virginity of his mother; in an instant every atom of her was charged with anger. It was, Charles told himself, exactly as though a shock of dried grass had caught fire; ignited gun powder rather than blood seemed to fill her veins.