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“Wait,” Charles Abbott replied with a touch of impatience; “you are quite safe, there is no tide at present.” Floating in the calm immensity, his arms outspread, his face, at once burned by the sun and lapped by water, turned to the opposed azure above, he drew in accession after accession of a determination like peace. Nothing should upset what he had planned. There was a stir beside him—André Escobar was returning to the shore, and lazily, thoughtfully, he swam back. The Cuban left immediately, for breakfast; but Charles lingered in the pool, lounging upon the wooden grilling with a cigarette. One by one the bathers went away. The sky, the sea, were a blaze of blue. The clatter of hoofs, the caleseros’ departing cries, sounded from the Paseo. “Charles Abbott,” he repeated his own name aloud with an accent of surprise. What, whom, did it describe? He gazed down over his drying body. This, then, was he—the two legs, thin but sufficiently muscular, the trunk in a swimming suit, the arms and hands! His hidden brain, his invisible mind, was himself as well; and, of the two, the mind and the body, the unseen was overwhelmingly the more important. He remembered how, fencing with de Vaca, the body had failed him utterly; de Vaca, attacking144his will, was contemptuous of the other ... and his will had survived. Rising, he felt that he commanded himself absolutely; he had no sympathy, no patience, for frailty, for a failure through the celebrated weaknesses of humanity: hardness was the indispensable trait of success.
The whole of reasonably intelligent life, Charles discovered, was disrupted by the ceaseless clash of two utterly opposed ideas, emotions. There was, first, the need in the individual to serve, to justify, himself, to maintain his integrity; and, as well, there was the duty—at least, it was universally called a duty—of a self-sacrifice for love. The failures of superior men came largely, he was certain, in the breaking down of the first through the second. A man, for example, put into motion the accomplishment of his own demand, and then was appalled by the incidental price, but more to others than to himself. Yes, love betrayed men. The Escobars were, inseparably, Cuba, they were happily merged, lost, in one supreme cause; yet the superiority of their hearts over the head endangered their dearest preoccupation. They saw symbols as realities, they145wrongly valued emotion more highly than reasoning.
And further, Charles returned to himself, if he had consulted and listened to his parents, if his love of home had outweighed his singular vision, he would be nothing now but an unimportant drifting figure. His parents had had more knowledge of life than he; undoubtedly their counsel, in the main, was correct, safe. That word, safe, was it specially. The instinct of his mother was to preserve, to spare, him; to win for him as smooth a passage through life as was procurable. She had her particular feminine idea of what, in her son, spelled solid accomplishment; and, with all her spirit, it was material in so far as it was visible: position in a settled community, the money necessary for an existence both dignified and ornamental, a “nice” wife—another devoted sheltering soul such as herself—and well-behaved handsome children. The inner qualities she demanded for him were faith, honesty, and fidelity.
Her vision of a broad close-cut lawn and grey stone house with pillars and a port-cochère, his wife, in silks and chaste jewels, receiving a polite company in the drawing-room, was admirable. In it he would be gray-haired and, together146with an increasing stoutness, of an assured dignity. His children would worship his wisdom and paternal benevolence, and the world of affairs would listen to him with attentive respect. It was, unquestionably, an impressive conception. Every detail was excellent, but he cared for, revered, none of them.
He didn’t want to be safe, to decline softly to a soft old age, a death smothered in feathers. More than anything else his desire was to live intensely, to ride, upright, the crest of a thunderous wave. He hated, now, every phase of a decent suburban smugness. Someone else was welcome to the girl designated, by his mother, to be his wife. Someone other than himself might sit across the dinner-table from her, week after week, month after month, year after year, and watch her stereotyped face beyond the cut flowers; another might listen to the interminable gabble about servants and neighbors and dresses and cards. The children would be differently, more appropriately, fathered; his, Charles Abbott’s, potential children were gathered into an ideal that was, too, an idea. It must be served, realized, within the dimensions of his own bone and fibre; it was exclusively his, his the danger, the penalty and the reward. Charles would not have147had it different, even if, although none existed, he had any choice.
He must, however, prepare himself against the betrayal he was able to trace so clearly in others; there could be no faltering, no remorse; he was cut off from the ordinary solaces, the comfortable compactness, of general living. But, already, temperamentally, he liked, preferred, this; alone, never for a minute was he lonely. The inattention to home, primarily the result of a new scene and of exciting circumstances, had grown into an impersonal fondness for his family; he failed to miss them, to wish for their presence. The only element that remained from the past was his love for Andrés Escobar; he confronted it valorously, deposed it from his mind, but it clung around his heart. How fortunate it was that Andrés could not detach him from his resolve; it was unthinkable that one should stand in the way of the other.
These reflections occupied his mind at various times and places: one day in the American Consulate on Obispo Street; again at the steamship office on Mercaderes; over his cigarette and cheese and jelly at the Noble Havana; strolling along Ricla Street where the principal shops were congregated; at a dinner party in the Palace of148the Conde de Santovernia. He was aloof. All the activity that absorbed the people among whom he went was to him trivial, utterly of no consequence. Sometimes he would walk through the stalls of the Mercado de Cristina, on the Plaza Vieja, or in through the Honradez factory on Sol Street, where a handful of cigars was courteously given to any appreciative visitor. He would return along the Paseo de Valdez to the park where he had sat when he was first in Cuba, and, as then, the strains of the military band of the Cabañas drifted across the bay.
The dwelling of the Captain-General, with the Royal Lottery on the ground floor, had before it sentries in red and white; the Quay de Caballeria, reached through the Plaza of San Francisco, was tempered and pleasant in the early dusk, and at the Quay de Machina was a small garden with grotesque rosy flamingoes and gold-fish in the fountain. He sat, as well, lonely, considering and content, in the Alameda de Paula, where, by the glorieta, it was called the Salon O’Donnell. The moats, filled with earth, truck gardens, the shore covered with sugar pans, engaged his absent-minded interest. With the improvement of his Spanish, he deserted the better known cafés and restaurants, the insolence of the Castilian149officers, for modest Cuban places of food, where he drank Catalan wine, and smoked the Vegueros, the rough excellent plantation cigars.
This new mood, he was relieved to find, gave his acquaintances as much amusement as his public dissipation—it was ascribed to the predicted collapse of his love affair with La Clavel. She was, he was rallied, growing tired of his attentions; and, in the United States Club, he was requested not to drown himself, because of the trouble it would cause his country. Captain Santacilla, however, studied him with a growing ill-humor; his peculiar threats and small brutalities had stopped, but his temper, Charles recognized, was becoming dangerous. He declared frankly, in the Café Dominica, that Charles wasn’t the fool he appeared, and he repeated his assertions of the need for a deportation or worse.
This was a condition which, sooner or later, must be met, and for which Charles prepared himself. Both Cubans and Spaniards occasionally disappeared forever—the former summarily shot by a file of muskets in a fosse, and the latter, straying in the anonymous paths of dissipation, quieted by a patriotic or vindictive knife. This, it seemed to Charles Abbott, would be the wisest plan with Santacilla; and he had another strange150view of himself considering and plotting a murder. The officer, who had an extraordinary sense of intangible surrounding feelings and pressures, spoke again to Charles of the efforts to dispose of him.
“The man doesn’t draw breath who will do it,” he proclaimed to Charles, at the entrance to the Valla de Gallo. “It’s a superstition, but I’d back it with my last onza of gold. I’ve seen it in you very lately, but give it up. Or don’t give it up. Either way you are unimportant. I can’t understand why you are still here, why I permit you to live. If I remember it I’ll speak to my sergeant, Javier Gua: he performs such an errand to a nicety. I have taken a dislike to you, very unreasonably, for you are no more than a camarone. I believe, for all your appearance of money, that La Clavel supports you; it is her doblons, I am certain, you gamble away and spend for food.”
Charles Abbott smiled at the insult:
“On one hand I hear that she has thrown me over and then you say that she supports me. Which, I wonder, is to be preferred? But neither, fortunately, is true. I can still buy her a bouquet of camellias and she will still wear it. As for the money, I never lose at gambling, Santacilla,151I am always successful; the cards are in my favor. If I bet on the black, it turns up; and when I choose the red, affairs are red.”
Santacilla’s uneasy eyes shifted over him suspiciously. “Blood and death, that is what black and red are,” he said. “But you are not the dispenser of fate.” The peak of his cockaded hat threw a shadow over his sanguine face to the chin. “A camarone,” he repeated, “a stalk of celery. Gua, and I’ll remember to tell him, will part you from your conceit.” There was a metallic crowing of roosters as the officer turned away.
La Clavel noticed a marked difference in Charles, but proclaimed that it was no more than an increase in his natural propensity for high-mindedness. It fatigued her, she declared, to be with him, made her dizzy to gaze up at his altitude of mind. He was seated in her room, the hairdresser was sweating in the attempt to produce an effect she was describing to him with phrases as stinging as the whip of foils, while Charles watched her with a degree of annoyance. Her humors, where he was concerned, were unpredictable; and lately she had found a special152delight in attacks on his dignity. She said and did things—an air of innocence hiding her malice—indecently ribald that shook his firmest efforts to appear, to be, unconcerned.
At last, in a volatile rage, she dismissed the servant with his tongs and pomatum and crimping leads, and swore to Charles Abbott that she was going to the Argentine by the first boat that offered passage.
“I am sick of Cuba, and I’ve forgotten that I am an artist, and that is bad. You are wrapped up in this liberty, and that is very well for you, an ordinary person. You must have something like that, outside you, to follow, for you’ve very little within. But me, I am not an ordinary person; I am La Clavel. I am more valuable to the world than pumpkins or republics. I stamp my heel,” she stamped her heel, a clear sharp sound, and her body swept into a line passionate and tense, “and I create a people, a history.” La Clavel secured the castanets lying on her dressing-table—in answer to their irritable rhythmic clinking she projected, for an instant, a vision of all desire.
“I can make men forget; I can draw them out of their sorrows and away from their homes; I can put fever in their blood that will blind them153to memories and duty. Or I can be a drum, and lead them out, without a regret, a fear, to death. That is more than a naranjada or a cigar or an election. And, because of what I have given you, I have put that out of my life; I have been living like the mistress of a bodega. To be clear, Charles, I am tired of you and Cuba, and I have satisfied my hatred of the officers with cologne on their handkerchiefs.”
“I understand that perfectly,” Charles Abbott assured her; “and I cannot beg you to stay. Whatever your motive was, your value to us has been beyond any payment. If our movement had a saint, you would fill that place.”
She laughed, “A strange saint in a mantón and slippers with painted heels.”
“Much better,” Charles replied, “than many of those in sanctified robes. I had the feeling, too,” he proceeded, “that our usefulness together was coming to an end.” It seemed to him that again she had become the glorified figure of the stage, his dislike for her actuality, her flesh, vanished, leaving only profound admiration.
“I am amazed,” she said, in a lingering half humorous resentment, “that you never loved me, I never brought you a regret or a longing or made any trouble in your heart.”
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“That was because I put you so high,” he explained. She raised her shoulders and objected that it was late for compliments.
“Be honest—you didn’t care for me. You ought to be very successful, you have things surprising in the so young. Will you,” she demanded suddenly, totally changing the subject, “be my maid?” He hastened to inform her, vehemently, that he would not. “Jobaba hasn’t come today,” La Clavel continued; “and she wasn’t here to dress me for dinner last evening. That is unusual in her: I have a feeling she is not coming back.”
“Perhaps she has been murdered in one of the brujos cabildos,” Charles suggested. “It is impossible to say where that frenzy stops.” A happening quite different, the dancer told him, was in her mind.
“I could never get into the thoughts of Jobaba,” she admitted. “And there is very little I miss. I suppose it’s the negro. She is like cream, smooth and beautiful to look at, but turned by thunder.” If she were going away, Charles reminded her, there were a number of things to be discussed and closed. And she told Charles how a Cuban, ostensibly attached to the national party, but in reality a Spanish secret155agent, had been sent into Camagüey. His name was Rimblas.
Charles Abbott repeated that, and memorized such characteristics as La Clavel knew. There was an indefinite stir at the door, a short knock, and he moved to the window as Santacilla entered unceremoniously.
The Spaniard was a model of politeness, of consideration, and he listened, seated with his hands folded about the head of his officer’s cane, to La Clavel’s determination to go to South America. It was an excellent plan, he agreed; they would welcome her rapturously in Buenos Aires; but hadn’t she put off her intention a little too long? It was on account of the climate, the season, he hastened to add. Although, of course, they would open the opera house for her, the smart world would come in from their estancias.
“But what will our young American do?” he demanded. “How will he live without his delight? But perhaps he is going to the Argentine with you. He will have a busy time, and a hatful of challenges there, where beauty is appreciated to the full.”
Charles said, with an appearance of sullenness, that he hadn’t been invited to go farther156south; and Santacilla replied that, as a matter of fact, it might be necessary for him to remain, perhaps forever, in Havana. He spoke cheerfully, gazing amiably upon them, but a vague quality of his bearing, his voice, was disturbing, mocking. His words had the air of an underlying meaning different from their sound. An uneasiness, as well, was communicated to La Clavel: she watched Santacilla with an indirect puzzled gaze.
“Jobaba has gone,” she announced abruptly.
The trace of a smile hovered about the officer’s expression of regret. “A personable clip of hell,” was his opinion of the strayed maid. “Do you remember the major who composed music?” he addressed La Clavel. “Well, he was always a little touched in the brain, and he caught this negro hysteria, he became a brujos. He’d come home in the morning with his body marked in yellow chalk, and wrung out like a boatman’s sponge; and he let drop a fact or two about your Jobaba screaming to an African drum rubbed with the fingers. In that state, he said, a great deal that was curious and valuable could be dragged from her. We encouraged his madness, at the Cabañas, for what it brought us. But it was unfortunate for him—he ties bright rags157about his ankles and mumbles, when he thinks he is alone.”
Charles Abbott’s mind, sifting all that the other said, was abnormally active, sharp. Something, he couldn’t quite grasp what, was acutely, threateningly, wrong. He had a sense of impending danger, a premonition of dashing sound, of discord. And, whatever developed, he must meet it, subdue and conquer it. Ceaza y Santacilla, he saw, was not visibly armed; but, probably, he would carry a small pistol. The one his father had given him was in Charles’ pocket. The difficulty was that, in the event of a disturbance, no matter what the outcome here might happen to be, the dancer and he would bear the weight of any Spanish fury. And it was no part of his intention to be cut in half by bullets behind a fortress wall.
He could only delay, discover as soon as possible what was behind Santacilla’s deceiving patience and good humor. Upon that he would have to act without hesitation and with no chance of failure. The regiment should, the dancer complained, send her maid back to her. Manners were very much corrupted beyond the western ocean—in Sevilla the servant would have been dispatched in a bullock cart deep in roses. That,158he answered, reminded him of another procession, a different cart; but it was more French than Castilian—the tumbril.
He was seated against a wall at a right angle from the door, and Charles left the vicinity of the window, lounging across the room. La Clavel said, “I know you so well, Ceaza, what is it; what is it you are saying and saying without speaking of? Your mind is like a locked metal box that shows only the flashes on the surface. But you must open it for us. It seems as though you were threatening me, and that, you best should realize, is useless.”
His flickering eyes rested first on her and then upon Charles Abbott. “You will never get to South America now,” he asserted; “for you are a conspirator against your King. Since you have shown such a love of Cuban soil you are to become a part of it forever.”
Charles Abbott, now standing by the door, shot in the bolt which secured it, and, by a fortunate, a chance, twist, broke off the handle. Santacilla, undisturbed, remained seated, smiling while his fingers played with the plaited loop of his cane.
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“This infatuation,” he indicated them with a wave, “while it convinced Havana, never entirely satisfied me. I have been watching you, Jobaba has been listening, for days. You were very cunning, but, in the end, you failed; you were neither skilful nor patient enough. Yet, at the last, all that you heard were fairy tales—the spy that was sent to Camagüey, ha!”
La Clavel faced him calmly, but, Charles saw, she was pale. He was revolving a hundred impractical schemes: they had only one end, the death of Santacilla, but how that was to be brought about with safety to Cuba evaded him.
“I am not a traitor in the way you mean,” she declared; “what your conceit never allowed you to note was that, in Spain and here, I have always detested you; and what I did was the result of that. I struck at you and not at our country, for the court and church and army are no longer our strength—if we still have any except the knife and cord—but our weakness.”
“Fools,” he asserted, unmoved.
“And now you are the fool,” she added.
“No, you are wrong; I am only enjoying myself before the show is over. I wanted to see you, and your young devotee, twist and turn before the fact of death. I have killed, and seen160executed, a number of people, men and women; but I was still curious—a great dancer and a rich young American. That is an unusual day.”
It was best, Charles Abbott decided, to bring about as much as possible with no more delay; the prime necessary act accomplished, they could face the problems of the immediate future steadily. He quietly produced his pistol and levelled it. The dry click which alone followed the pulling of the trigger made the officer aware of the attempt upon his life. A dark angry surge invaded his face, and then receded. “No man will ever kill me,” he repeated. “It is my star.” A hand left the cane and produced a small gold whistle.
Charles stared dully at the useless weapon, with its mounting of mother-of-pearl, which he still held.
“The cartridges have been too long in their barrels,” Santacilla explained; “they have dried and shifted. You should have greased them every week.”
La Clavel stood, lost in thought, like a woman in a dream. Her hair, over which she had spent such time and curses, was an elaborate silhouette against the light. “Ceaza, Ceaza,” she implored, going to him, “you must let me go161and dance in Buenos Aires, they have never seen me there, it is necessary to my career.” She was close beside him, when he rose suddenly, pushing the chair between them.
“You Andalusian devil!” he cried, and put the whistle to his lips. Before he could blow, the dancer had flung herself on him, with an arm bound about his neck, a hand dragging at his throat. The whistle fell, the chair was brushed aside, and the man and woman, in a straining desperate grip, swayed into the middle of the floor.
Charles, driven by an inherited instinct to protect La Clavel, to replace her in such a struggle, caught at either of the locked shoulders; but, whirling in the passion of their strife, they struck him aside. He made another effort to pull Santacilla to the floor, without success; and then, with a small stout chair in his hands, he waited for an opportunity to bring it crashing on the officer’s head. He was appalled by the fury of the woman silently trying to choke her enemy; her other hand, grasping the thin glimmer of the knife always convenient in her stocking, the officer held away from them. Her years of dancing, her early hardening life in the mountains, had given her a strength and litheness now tearing162at the weight, the masculinity, of Santacilla. He was trying, in vain, to break her wrist, to close his fingers into her throat; and, bending, the fragility of her clothes ripped across her sinuous back. Shifting and evading the thrust of his power, she was sending the blood in purple waves over his neck and thick cheeks. Neither of them cried out, spoke; there was only the sound of hoarse breathing, inarticulate expressions of unendurable strain. Charles Abbott, raising, holding poised, the chair, and lowering it, was choked with the grappling horror before him.
La Clavel’s face was as blanched as the officer’s was dark, her eyes were wide-open and set, as though she were in a galvanic trance. Again and again Santacilla tried to tear away her arms, to release himself from the constriction at his neck. His fingers dug red furrows through her flesh, they tormented and outraged her. A palm closed upon her countenance, and blood ran from under it. But there was no weakening of her force, no slackening in her superb body. She seemed curiously impersonal; robbed of all traits of women; she was like a symbolical fate, the figure from a shield, from an emblem, dragging him to death.
Then, suddenly, in an inadequate muffled163voice burdened with a shuddering echo of fear, he cried for her to release him. It was so unexpected, he became so inexplicably limp, that La Clavel backed away instinctively. Charles started forward, the chair lifted high; but he was stopped by the expression, the color, of Ceazy Santacilla’s face. The officer turned, with his hands at his throat, toward the window. He took an uncertain step, and then stood wavering, strangely helpless, pathetically stricken.
“The air,” he whispered; “hot as wine.” He pitched abruptly face forward upon the floor.
La Clavel tried to speak against the labored heaving of her breast, but what she attempted to say was unintelligible. Charles, slipping back the broken bolt with a finger in its orifice, listened intently at the door. The Hotel St. Louis was wrapped undisturbed in its siesta; no alarm had been created. Santacilla lay as he had fallen, an arm loosely outspread, a leg doubled unnaturally under its fellow. He bore the laxness, the emptiness, of death. He had spoken truly that it wasn’t in his star to be killed by a man. Finding that he was still holding the chair, Charles put it softly down. “Well,” he said, “the revolution is through with him.”
He glanced suddenly at La Clavel. She was164drooping, disheveled and hideous; her hair lay on her bare shoulders in coarse strands; her face was swollen with bruises. Now, he realized, she would never see the Argentine; she would never again hear the shouted olés that greeted, rewarded, the brilliancy of her jota. His thoughts shifted to Cuba and himself—if it were a crime of passion that had been committed in her room, the cause, there, would be freed from suspicion. He had, as customary, come directly, unostentatiously, to her room, and he was certain that he had not been observed. A duty, hard in the extreme, was before him.
“Why did you bring about Santacilla’s death?” he demanded. She gazed at him dully, uncomprehendingly. “It was because he was jealous,” he proceeded; “you must hold to that.” She nodded, dazed. “When they come into the room and find him you must show what he did to you. And, after all, you didn’t kill him. Perhaps that will save you,” his voice was without conviction. “They won’t believe you, and they may try measures to get at the truth; but you will be faithful. You will keep your secret, and—and I must go. I shall ask for you downstairs, make them send up a servant, and shout as loudly as any.”
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She held up her battered countenance dumbly and, with a feeling of transcendent reverence, he kissed her cut lips. Thrown across the end of the bed, the shawl she had danced in, blazing with gay color, cast the reflection of its carmines and yellows on the calcimined wall. It was like a burst of the music which accompanied her dancing. The castanets lay on the floor. The blessed saint of Cuban independence! Then the caution that had become a part of his necessity rode uppermost: he proceeded silently to the door, and, closing it behind him, went, meeting no one, to the ground floor, where he pulled irritably at the wire hanging from a bell under the ceiling. The raw jangle brought a servant, a rosy-cheeked Gallego boy, heavy with sleep, who went stumbling up the stairs on Charles’ errand.
In his own room a wave of physical horror swept over Charles Abbott; he was obliged to sit down, and the chair, the floor, seemed to rock at the giddy sickness of the memory of Santacilla, stumbling with a wine-colored face toward the window in a vain gasping for air, for life. He recovered slowly: notwithstanding the166death of Tirso Labrador, the wasted shape of Andrés’ brother, all the tragedies he had heard reported, it was not until now that he realized the entire grimness of the undertaking against Spain. The last possibility of the spectacular departed, leaving him with a new sense of the imminence of death. He had considered this, under certain circumstances welcoming it, or dismissing it with a creditable calmness, many times before; but then his attitude had been softened by the detachment, the impersonality, of his view. But at last the feeling of death was tangibly at his own throat; not today, nor tomorrow, probably; but inescapably. Well, he assured himself, he wouldn’t, at that intense moment, fail an inner necessity; but his understanding gave him an additional feeling of the accidental aspects of life and of the Cuban revolution.
Until then he had, sub-consciously, except for one short depression, been certain of the ultimate triumph of right; he had thought it must succeed through its mere rightness; and he had pictured justice as a condition dropped beneficently from the clouds, wrought with the thunder of angels’ wings. But accomplishment on earth, with men, he now saw, was neither safe, easy nor assured. It was the result of bitter struggle, a167strife open to the most appalling mischances. A necessity of the spirit, it must be executed in the flesh, and flesh was a treacherous, unstable substance; it was capable not only of traitorous betrayals, but equally of honest, and no less fatal, failures. With this in his thoughts he went to the door, in answer to a knock, and received a heavy carefully tied parcel.
He opened it, and, dripping in dazzling color from the wrapping paper, was La Clavel’s mantón, the one in which he had first seen her insolently dancing the jota. Charles, with a stirred heart, searched carefully for a note, a scrap of revealing paper; but there was none. She had sent it to him silently, before she had been taken away, in a sentiment the delicacy of which deeply moved him. He laid the shawl over the bed, where its cruel brilliancy filled the white-walled room, darkened against the heat, with flashes of magenta and orange and burning blue. La Clavel had worn it dancing, where it emphasized her grace and perversity and stark passion; it had been, in Charles Abbott’s mind, synonymous with her, with the vision she created; but, suddenly, it lost that significance, and he saw it as the revealed outspread pattern of his own existence.
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The shawl was a map, a representation, of the country of the spirit through which he passed; such emotions, such heat, and such golden roses, all had been, were, his against that background of perilous endeavor. It seemed to float up from the bed and to reach from coast to coast, from end to end, of Cuba; its flowers took root and grew, casting about splendor and perfume; the blue widened into the sky, the tenderness of the clasping sea; the dark greens were the shadows of the great ceiba trees, the gloom of the jungles, the massed royal palms of the plains. And not only was it the setting, the country, its violent dissonances became cries, victorious or hopeless, the sweep of reddened swords, the explosions of muskets. There was the blood that had welled into the Laurel Ditch of Cabañas; and, as well, the sultry mysterious presence of Africa in the West—the buzzing madness of the music of the danzón, the hysterics of brujeria.
Charles, at the heart of this, stood enveloped, surrounded, by a drama like the sharp clash of cymbals. It was easy to be overwhelmed, strangled, blinded, by the savage color; briefly to be obliterated. That possibility had been, lately, very much in his mind; and he wondered, against all his recent change, if, in the surrender169of his idealism, he had lost his amulet, his safety. While he had, to a large extent, solved, for himself, the philosophy of conduct, cleared the motives of his acts, a great deal was inexplicable still. He saw, dimly, that there could be little hope of justice on any island except as the projection, the replica, of a fundamental universal integrity of justice. Perfection like that couldn’t begin on the rim of being and extend inward; it must be at the center of all life, obscured, delayed, but, in an end not computable in the span of human existence, certain and inevitable. Charles Abbott now had the feeling that, parallel with the maintaining of his grasp on materialism, his recognition of the means at his hand, there should be an allegiance to a supremacy of the immeasurable whole.
That double vision, the acceptance of a general good together with the possibility of extreme ill to the individual, puzzled him. He was required to put faith in a power seemingly indifferent to him, to discharge a responsibility in return for which nothing that he could weigh was promised. Charles recalled what had overtaken the dancer, La Clavel, in payment for a heroic effort against an insupportable oppression. Disaster had met the body, the flesh; what occurred170in the spirit he was unable to grasp; but this, suddenly, breathlessly, he saw:
La Clavel’s bitter defiance, her mountain-born hatred of oppression, her beaten but undefiled body, had communicated to him something of her own valor. It was as though she had given him a palm, a shielded flame, to add to his own fortitude. In all probability she would, soon, be dead; Charles correctly gauged the Spanish animosity; and yet she was alive, strong, in him. She would be living; it was Ceaza y Santacilla who had died, been vanquished; his abnormal refinement dropping so easily into the bestial, the measure of evil, in him, for which he stood, had been slain, dissipated, ended. The shawl contracted, became a thing magnificent but silk, a mantón invested with a significance brave andsurprisinglytender. It was, now, the standard of La Clavel, the mantle of the saintliness he had proclaimed. His doubts, his questioning, were resolved into the conviction that the act of the dancer was her spirit made visible, created tangibly for a tangible purpose, and that, there, she was indestructible.
With that conclusion to serve as a stay and a belief, a philosophy of conduct, he returned from the extra-mundane to the world. Charles171thought of La Clavel’s desire to dance in Buenos Aires, for South America. He wondered how old she was; he had never before considered her in any connection with age; she had seemed neither old nor young, but as invested with the timeless quality of her art. She had spoken often of her girlhood, but no picture of her as a girl had formed in his mind. It was conceivable that, in more stable circumstances, she would have grown old, become withered with the peculiar ugliness of aged Spanish women; but that, too, he could not realize. Somehow, La Clavel’s being was her dancing, and what had gone before, or what might have followed, were irrelevant, unreal; they were not she. He understood, now, her protest against being absorbed, involved, in anything but her profession.
He became conscious of the sustained gravity of his thoughts, how his activity had been forced from the body to his mind; and that recalled to him the necessity for a contrary appearance. It would be wise for him to go to the Café Dominica that evening, in an obvious facile excitement at his connection, at once close and remote, with the death of Santacilla in the dancer’s room. But, beyond the fact that it was known he had dispatched the servant upstairs, and the usual wild,172thin speculations, nothing had been allowed to appear. Santacilla, it was announced, had died naturally. La Clavel wasn’t mentioned. She had spoken to others than Charles of her determination to go to the Argentine; and it was probable, rumor said, principally in Spanish mouths, that she would go quietly south. At the United States Club, the idlers and gamblers surveyed Charles with dubious looks; and, over a rum punch, he adopted a sullen uncommunicative air. It would not do to drop his widely advertised habits too suddenly; he could not, in a day, change from a rake to a serious student of such books as Machiavelli’s Prince; and he prepared, with utter disgust, for his final bow in the cloak of dissipation.
Purely by accident he met, at the Plaza de Toros, Jaime Quintara, Remigio Florez and Andrés. It was so fortunately, evidently, haphazard, that they continued together while Charles related the circumstances of the tragedy in La Clavel’s room. The others were filled with wonder, bravos, at her strength and courage. Someday, Remigio swore, when Cuba was free, he173would put up a monument to her in India Park. It would be of heroic size, the bronze figure of a dancer, in a mantón, on a block of stone, with an appropriate inscription.
“The trouble with that,” Andrés objected, “is if we should live and put up a monument to everyone who deserved it, the parks would be too crowded with bronzes for walking. All of Cuba might have to be commemorated in metal.”
At Neptuno Street and the Paseo Isabel they parted. Charles proceeded alone toward the sea; and, with the knowledge that Andrés had not gone home, but would be evident in public elsewhere, he stopped to see the other members of the Escobar family. Carmita Escobar had faded perceptibly since Vincente’s death; still riven by sorrow she ceaselessly regretted the unhappy, the blasphemous, necessity which made the wearing of mourning for him inadmissible. Domingo Escobar, as well, showed the effects of continuous strain; his vein of humor was exhausted, he no longer provoked Charles’ inadequate Spanish; he avoided any direct reference to Cuba. He was, he said, considering moving to Paris, he was getting old and no one could complain, now, since—. He broke off, evidently at the point of referring to Vincente and the Escobar local patriotism.
174
But Narcisa, Charles was told, had become promised to Hector Carmache, an admirable gentleman with large sugar interests; luckily, for Narcisa, unconnected with any political dreams.
“She will be very happy,” her mother proclaimed.
Narcisa narrowed her eyes. “He lives on an estancia,” she added, “where there will be banana trees and Haitians to watch; and the conversation will be about the number of arrobas the mill grinds.” She relapsed again into silence; but, from her lowered countenance, he caught a quick significant glance toward the balcony. She rose, presently, and walked out. Charles gazed at Domingo and Carmita Escobar; they were sunk in thought, inattentive, and he quietly joined Narcisa.
“Andrés has told me a great deal about you,” she proceeded; “I made him. He loves you too, and he says that you are very strong and respected everywhere. I have had to hear it like that, for you never come here now. And I hear other things, too, but from my maid, about the dancer, La Clavel. You gamble, it seems, and drink as well.”
That, he replied, was no more than half true; it was often necessary for him to appear other175than he was. He studied her at length: she had grown more lovely, positively beautiful, in the past month; the maturity of her engagement to marry had already intensified her. Narcisa’s skirt had been lowered and her hair, which had hung like a black fan, was tied with a ribbon.
“How do you like me?” she demanded. But when he told her very much, she shook her head in denial. “I ought to be ashamed,” she added, “but I am not. Did you realize that, when we were out here before, I made you a proposal? You ignored it, of course.... I am not ashamed of what I did then, either. Afterwards, standing here, I wanted to throw myself to the street; but, you see, I hadn’t the courage. It’s better now, that time has gone—I’ll get fat and frightful.”
“This Carmache,” Charles Abbott asked, “don’t you like, no, love him?” She answered:
“He is, perhaps, fifty—I am fifteen—and quite deaf on one side, I can never remember which; and he smells like bagasse. I’ve only seen him once, for a minute, alone, and then he wanted me to sit on his knees. I said if he made me I’d kill him some night when he was asleep. But he only laughed and tried to catch me. You should have heard him breathing; he couldn’t. He176called me his Carmencita. But, I suppose, I shall come to forget that, as well. I wanted you to know all about it; so, when you hear of my marriage, you will understand what to look for.”
“That is all very wrong!” Charles exclaimed.
In reply she said, hurriedly, “Kiss me.”
That was wrong, too, he repeated, afterward. Her warmth and tender fragrance clung to him like the touch of flower petals. She turned away, standing at the front of the balcony, her arms, bare under elbow ruffles, resting on the railing. The flambeau trees in the Parque Isabel were like conflagrations. Her head drooped on her slender neck until it almost rested, despairingly, on the support before her. “I hate your northern way of living,” her voice was suppressed, disturbingly mature; “I hate their bringing you into the house, only to break my heart. Charles,” she laid an appealing hand on his sleeve, “could you do this—help me to run away? We have cousins in New York who would receive me. If you could just get me on a steamer!”
“No,” he said decidedly, “I could not; I wouldn’t even if it were possible. What would Andrés, my friend, think? It would ruin me here.”
“If you had,” she admitted, after a little, “as177soon as we reached the street, I would have locked myself about your neck like my crystal beads. Once when I was supposed to be going with a servant to the sea baths, I had the quitrin stop at the San Felipe, and I went up the stair, to the roof, to your room, but you were out. You see, I am a very evil girl.”
He agreed to the extent that she was a very foolish girl. In turn she studied him carefully.
“You seem to have no heart,” she announced finally; “not because you don’t love me, but in affairs generally; but I can tell you a secret—you have! It’s as plain as water. What you think you are—poof!” She blew across the open palm of her hand.
“I hope not,” he returned anxiously. “But you are too young, even if you are to be married, to know about or to discuss such things. As Andrés’ best friend I must caution you—”
“Why did you kiss me?” she interrupted.
He was, now, genuinely sorry that he had, but he replied that it had been no more than the salute of a brother. “You had better go in,” he continued; “when they realize we are out here there will be a stir, perhaps you will be put to bed.”
“I might make a scandal,” she deliberated, “throw myself on you and cry as loudly as possible.”178A smile appeared upon her fresh charming lips at his expression of dismay. “Then you would have to marry me.”
“I’d have to spank you,” he retorted.
“I shall never speak directly to you again,” she concluded; “so you must remember what I say, that you are not what you’d like to be.”
She was, he thought, in spite of her loveliness, a very disagreeable little girl. That designation, ludicrously inadequate, he forced upon himself. With a flutter of her skirts she was gone. The afternoon was so still that he could hear the drilling of soldiers by the shore, the faint guttural commands and the concerted grounding of muskets. Narcisa and her unpleasant prediction faded from his mind. Standing on the balcony he imagined a vast concourse gathered below with upturned faces, waiting for him to speak. He heard the round periods, the sonorous Spanish, he delivered, welcoming, in the name of the people, their newly gained independence, and extending to them the applause and reassurances of the United States.
“You have won this for yourselves,” he proclaimed, “by your valor and faith and patience; and no alien, myself least of all, could have been179indispensable to you. What I was privileged to do was merely to hold together some of the more inglorious but necessary parts of your struggle; to bring, perhaps, some understanding, some good will, from the world outside. You have added Cuba to the invaluable, the priceless, parts of the earth where men are free; a deed wrought by the sacrifice of the best among you. Liberty, as always, is watered by blood—” he hesitated, frowning, something was wrong about that last phrase, of, yes—the watered with blood part; sprinkled, nourished, given birth in? That last was the correct, the inevitable, form. The hollow disembodied voice of the drill sergeant floated up and then was lost in the beginning afternoon procession of carriages.
With a larger boutonnière than he would have cared to wear at home, a tea rose, he was making his way through the El Louvre, when Gaspar Arco de Vaca rose from a gay table and signalled for him. It was after Retreta, the trade wind was even more refreshing than customary, and the spirit of Havana, in the parques and paseos and restaurants, was high. The Louvre was180crowded, a dense mass of feminine color against the white linen of the men, and an animated chatter, like the bubbles of champagne made articulate, eddied about the tables laden with dulces and the cold sweet brightness of ices. He hesitated, but de Vaca was insistent, and Charles approached the table.
“If you think you can remain by yourself,” the Spaniard said pleasantly, “you are mistaken. For women now, because of the dancer, you are a figure of enormous interest.”
He presented Charles to a petulant woman with a long nose, a seductive mouth, and black hair low in the French manner; then to a small woman in a dinner dress everywhere glittering with clear glass beads, and eyes in which, as he gazed briefly into them, Charles found bottomless wells of interrogation and promise. He met a girl to whom, then, he paid little attention, and a man past middle age with cropped grey hair on a uniformly brown head and the gilt floriations of a general. A place was made for Charles into which, against his intention, he was forced by a light insistence. It was, he discovered, beside the girl; and, because of their proximity, he turned to her.
At once he recognized that she was unusual,181strange: he had dismissed her as plain, if not actually ugly, and that judgment he was forced to recall. The truth was that she possessed a rare fascination; but where, exactly, did it lie? She was, he thought, even younger than Narcisa, yet, at the same time, she had the balanced calm of absolute maturity. Then he realized that a large part of her enigmatic charm came from the fact that she was, to a marked degree, Chinese. Her face, evenly, opaquely, pale, was flat, an oval which held eyes with full, ivory-like lids, narrow eye brows, a straight small nose and lips heavily coated with a carmine that failed utterly to disguise their level strength. Her lustreless hair, which might have been soot metamorphosed into straight broad strands, was drawn back severely, without ornament or visible pins, over her shapely skull. She wore no jewelry, no gold bands nor rings nor pendants; and her dress, cut squarely open at her slim round throat, was the fragile essence of virginity. She attracted Charles, although he could think of nothing in the world to say to her; he was powerless to imagine what interested her; a girl, she had no flavor of the conceits of her years; feminine, she was without the slightest indication of appropriate sentiments, little facile interests or enthusiasms.182From time to time she looked at him, he caught a glimpse of eyes, blue, grey or green, oblique and disturbing; she said nothing and ate in infinitesimal amounts the frozen concoction of sapote before her.
Charles Abbott hadn’t grasped her name, and in reply to his further query, she told him in a low voice that it was Pilar, Pilar de Lima. Yes, she had been born in Peru. No, she had never been to China, although she had traveled as far as Portugal and London. His interest in her increased, she was so wholly outside his—any conceivable—life; and, without words, in a manner which defied his analysis, she managed to convey to him the assurance that he was not impossible to her.
He found, at intervals, fresh qualities to engage him: she had unmistakably the ease which came from the command of money; the pointed grace of her hands—for an instant her palm had sought his—hid an unexpected firmness; she was contemptuous of the other vivacious women at the table; and not a change of expression crossed the placidity of a countenance no more than a mask for what, mysterious and not placid, was back of it. Then, in an undertone during a burst of conversation, she said, “I like you.” She was183half turned from him, in profile, and her lips had not seemed to move. Seen that way her nose was minute, the upward twist of her eye emphasized, her mouth no more than a painted sardonic curl. She was as slender as a boy of a race unknown to Charles—without warmth, without impulses, fashioned delicately for rooms hung in peacock silks and courtyards of fretted alabaster and burnished cedar.
He wanted to reply that he liked her, but, in prospect, that seemed awkward, banal; and a lull in the conversation discouraged him. Instead he examined his feelings in regard to this Pilar from Lima. It was obvious that she had nothing in common with the women he had dismissed from his present and future; she was more detached, even, than La Clavel on the stage. And when, abruptly, she began to talk to him, in an even flow of incomprehensible vowels and sibilants, he was startled. Gaspar de Vaca spoke to her in a peremptory tone, and then he addressed Charles, “She’ll hardly say a word in a Christian tongue, but, when it suits her, she will sail on in Chinese for a quarter of an hour. It may be her sense of humor, it may be a prayer, perhaps what she says, if it could be understood, would blast your brain, and perhaps she merely184has a stomach ache.” But his remonstrance had the effect designed; and after animperturbablesilence, she said again that she liked Charles Abbott.
The General regretfully pushed back his chair, rose, and held out an arm in formal gallantry, and Charles was left to follow with Pilar. She lingered, while the others went on, and asked him if, tomorrow, he would take her driving to Los Molinos. He hesitated, uncertain of the wisdom of such a proceeding, when her hand again stole into his. What, anyhow, in the face of that direct request, could he do but agree? They must have, she proceeded, since he hadn’t a private equipage, the newest quitrin he could procure, and a calesero more brilliant than any they should pass on the Calzada de la Reina. After all he would be but keeping up the useful pretence of his worldliness; yet, looking forward to the drive with her, an hour in the scented shade of the Captain-General’s gardens, he was aware of an anticipated pleasure.
The need for caution was reduced to a minimum, it shrank from existence; naturally he wouldn’t talk to Pilar de Lima of politics, he could not be drawn into the mention of his friends, of any names connected in the slightest way with a national independence. It was185possible that she had been selected, thrown with him, for that very purpose; but there his intelligence, he thought, his knowledge of intrigue, had been underestimated, insulted. No—Pilar, de Vaca, Spain, would gain nothing, and he would have a very pleasant, an oddly stimulating and exciting, afternoon. The excitement came from her extraordinary personality, an intensity tempered with a remoteness, an indifference, which he specially enjoyed after the last few tempestuous days. Being with her resembled floating in a barge on a fabulous Celestial river between banks of high green bamboo. It had no ulterior significance. She was positively inhuman.
He met her, with an impressive glittering carriage and rider, according to her appointment, at the end of the Paseo Tacon, past the heat of afternoon. She was accompanied by a duenna with rustling silk on a tall gaunt frame, and a harsh countenance, the upper lip marred by a bluish shadow, swathed in a heavy black mantilla. Pilar was exactly the same as she had been the evening before. The diminished but still bright day showed no flaw on the evenness of her pallor, the artificial carmine of her lips was like the applied petals of a geranium, her narrow sexless body was upright in its film of clear white.