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THE
BRIGHT SHAWL
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
NEW YORK
ALFRED.A.KNOPF
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Published, October, 1922
Second Printing, October, 1922
Set up and electrotyped by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y.
Printed and bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For
Hamilton and Phoebe Gilkyson junior
in their fine drawing-room
at Mont Clare
The Works Of Joseph Hergesheimer
Novels
The Lay Anthony [1914]
Mountain Blood [1915]
The Three Black Pennys [1917]
Java Head [1918]
Linda Condon [1919]
Cytherea [1922]
The Bright Shawl [1922]
Shorter Stories
Wild Oranges [1918]
Tubal Cain [1918]
The Dark Fleece [1918]
The Happy End [1919]
Travel
San Cristobal de la Habana [1920]
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
THE BRIGHT SHAWL
When Howard Gage had gone, his mother's brother sat with his head
bowed in frowning thought. The frown, however, was one of perplexity
rather than disapproval: he was wholly unable to comprehend the
younger man's attitude toward his experiences in the late war. The
truth was, Charles Abbott acknowledged, that he understood nothing,
nothing at all, about the present young. Indeed, if it hadn't been for
the thoroughly absurd, the witless, things they constantly did,
dispensing with their actual years he would have considered them the
present aged. They were so--well, so gloomy.
Yet, in view of the gaiety of the current parties, the amounts of gin
consumed, it wasn't precisely gloom that enveloped them. Charles
Abbott searched his mind for a definition, for light on a subject dark
to a degree beyond any mere figure of speech. Yes, darkness
particularly described Howard. The satirical bitterness of his
references to the "glorious victory in France" was actually a little
unbalanced. The impression Abbott had received was of bestiality
choked in mud. His nephew was amazingly clear, vivid and logical, in
his memories and opinions; they couldn't, as he stated them in a kind
of frozen fury, be easily controverted.
What, above everything else, appeared to dominate Howard Gage was a
passion for reality, for truth--all the unequivocal facts--in
opposition to a conventional or idealized statement. Particularly, he
regarded the slightest sentiment with a suspicion that reached hatred.
Abbott's thoughts centered about the word idealized; there, he told
himself, a ray of perception might be cast into Howard's obscurity;
since the most evident fact of all was that he cherished no ideals, no
sustaining vision of an ultimate dignity behind men's lives.
The boy, for example, was without patriotism; or, at least, he hadn't
a trace of the emotional loyalty that had fired the youth of Abbott's
day. There was nothing sacrificial in Howard Gage's conception of life
and duty, no allegiance outside his immediate need. Selfish, Charles
Abbott decided. What upset him was the other's coldness: damn it, a
young man had no business to be so literal! Youth was a time for
generous transforming passions, for heroics. The qualities of absolute
justice and consistency should come only with increasing age--the
inconsiderable compensations for the other ability to be rapt in
uncritical enthusiasms.
Charles Abbott sighed and raised his head. He was sitting in the
formal narrow reception room of his city house. The street outside was
narrow, too; it ran for only a square, an old thoroughfare with old
brick houses, once no more than a service alley for the larger
dwellings back of which it ran. Now, perfectly retaining its quietude,
it had acquired a new dignity of residence: because of its favorable,
its exclusive, situation, it was occupied by young married people of
highly desirable connections. Abbott, well past sixty and single, was
the only person there of his age and condition.
October was advanced and, though it was hardly past four in the
afternoon, the golden sunlight falling the length of the street was
already darkling with the faded day. A warm glow enveloped the brick
facades and the window panes of aged, faintly iridescent glass; there
was a remote sound of automobile horns, the illusive murmur of a city
never, at its loudest, loud; and, through the walls, the notes of a
piano, charming and melancholy.
After a little he could distinguish the air--it was Liszt's
Spanish Rhapsody. The accent of its measure, the jota, was at once
perceptible and immaterial; and overwhelmingly, through its magic
of suggestion, a blinding vision of his own youth--so different from
Howard's--swept over Charles Abbott. It was exactly as though, again
twenty-three, he were standing in the incandescent sunlight of Havana;
in, to be precise, the Parque Isabel. This happened so suddenly, so
surprisingly, that it oppressed his heart; he breathed with a
sharpness which resembled a gasp; the actuality around him was
blurred as though his eyes were slightly dazzled.
The playing continued intermittently, while its power to stir him grew
in an overwhelming volume. He had had no idea that he was still
capable of such profound feeling, such emotion spun, apparently, from
the tunes only potent with the young. He was confused--even, alone,
embarrassed--at the tightness of his throat, and made a decided effort
to regain a reasonable mind. He turned again to the consideration of
Howard Gage, of his lack of ideals; and, still in the flood of the
re-created past, he saw, in the difference between Howard and the boy
in Havana, what, for himself anyhow, was the trouble with the
present.
Yes, his premonition had been right--the youth of today were without
the high and romantic causes the service of which had so brightly
colored his own early years. Not patriotism alone but love had
suffered; and friendship, he was certain, had all but disappeared;
such friendship as had bound him to Andres Escobar. Andres! Charles
Abbott hadn't thought of him consciously for months. Now, with the
refrain of the piano, the jota, running through his thoughts, Andres
was as real as he had been forty years ago.
It was forty years almost to the month since they had gone to the
public ball, the danzon, in the Tacon Theatre. That, however, was at
the close of the period which had recurred to him like a flare in the
dusk of the past. After the danzon the blaze of his sheer fervency had
been reduced, cooled, to maturity. But not, even in the peculiarly
brutal circumstances of his transition, sharply; only now Charles
Abbott definitely realized that he had left in Cuba, lost there, the
illusions which were synonymous with his young intensity.
After that nothing much had absorbed him, very little had happened. In
comparison with the spectacular brilliancy of his beginning, the
remainder of life had seemed level if not actually drab. Certainly the
land to which he had returned was dull against the vivid south, the
tropics. But he couldn't go back to Havana, he had felt, even after
the Spanish Government was expelled, any more than he could find in
the Plaza de Armas his own earlier self. The whole desirable affair
had been one--the figures of his loves and detestations, the paseos
and glorietas and parques of the city, now, he had heard, so changed,
formed a unity destroyed by the missing of any single element.
He wasn't, though, specially considering himself, but rather the
sustaining beliefs that so clearly marked the divergence between
Howard's day and his own. This discovery, he felt, was of deep
importance, it explained so much that was apparently inexplicable.
Charles Abbott asserted silently, dogmatically, that a failure of
spirit had occurred ... there was no longer such supreme honor as
Andres Escobar's. The dance measure in the Spanish Rhapsody grew
louder and more insistent, and through it he heard the castanets of
La Clavel, he saw the superb flame of her body in the brutal
magnificence of the fringed manton like Andalusia incarnate.
* * * * *
He had a vision of the shawl itself, and, once more, seemed to feel
the smooth dragging heaviness of its embroidery. The burning square of
its colors unfolded before him, the incredible magentas, the night
blues and oranges and emerald and vermilion, worked into broad peonies
and roses wreathed in leaves. And suddenly he felt again that, not
only prefiguring Spain, it was symbolical of the youth, the time, that
had gone. Thus the past appeared to him, wrapped bright and precious
in the shawl of memory.
No woman that Howard Gage might dream of could have worn La Clavel's
manton; it would have consumed her like a breath of fire, leaving a
white ash hardly more than distinguishable from the present living
actuality. Women cast up a prodigious amount of smoke now, a most
noisy crackling, but Charles Abbott doubted the blaze within them.
Water had been thrown on it. Their grace, too, the dancing about
which they made such a stir,--not to compare it with La Clavel's but
with no better than Pilar's--was hardly more than a rapid clumsy
posturing. Where was the young man now who could dance for two hours
without stopping on a spot scarcely bigger than the rim of his silk
hat?
Where, indeed, was the silk hat!
Even men's clothes had suffered in the common decline: black satin and
gold, nicely cut trousers, the propriety of pumps, had all vanished.
Charles Abbott recalled distinctly the care with which he had
assembled the clothing to be taken to Cuba, the formal dress of
evening, with a plum-colored cape, and informal linens for the
tropical days. The shirt-maker had filled his box with the finest
procurable cambrics and tallest stocks. Trivialities, yet they
indicated what had once been breeding; but now, incredibly, that was
regarded as trivial.
The Spanish Rhapsody had ceased, and the sun was all but withdrawn
from the street; twilight was gathering, particularly in Charles
Abbott's reception room. The gilded eagle of the old American clock on
the over-mantel seemed almost to flutter its carved wings, the fragile
rose mahogany spinet held what light there was, but the pair of small
brocaded sofas had lost their severe definition. Charles Abbott's
emotion, as well, subsided, its place taken by a concentrated effort
to put together the details of a scene which had assumed, in his
perplexity about Howard, a present significance.
He heard, with a momentarily diverted attention, the closing of the
front door beyond, women's voices on the pavement and the changing
gears of a motor: Mrs. Vauxn and her daughter were going out early for
dinner. They lived together--the girl had married into the navy--and
it was the former who played the piano. The street, after their
departure, was silent again. How different it was from the clamorous
gaiety of Havana.
Not actual sickness, Charles Abbott proceeded, but the delicacy of his
lungs, following scarlet fever, had taken him south. A banking
associate of his father's, recommending Cuba, had, at the same time,
pointedly qualified his suggestion; and this secondary consideration
had determined Charles on Havana. The banker had added that Cuba was
the most healthful place he knew for anyone with no political
attachments. There political activity, more than an indiscretion, was
fatal. What did he mean? Charles Abbott had asked; and the other had
replied with a single ominous word, Spain.
There was, it was brought out, a growing and potent, but secretive,
spirit of rebellion against the Government, to which Seville was
retaliating with the utmost open violence. This was spread not so much
through the people, the country, at large, as it was concentrated in the
cities, in Santiago de Cuba and Havana; and there it was practically
limited to the younger members of aristocratic families. Every week
boys--they were no more for all their sounding pronunciamientos--were
being murdered in the fosses of Cabanas fortress. Women of the
greatest delicacy, suspected of sympathy with nationalistic ideals,
were thrown into the filthy pens of town prostitutes. Everywhere a
limitless system of espionage was combating the gathering of circles,
tertulias, for the planning of a Cuba liberated from a bloody and
intolerable tyranny.
Were these men, Charles pressed his query, really as young as himself?
Younger, some of them, by five and six years. And they were shot by a
file of soldiers' muskets? Eight students at the university had been
executed at once for a disproved charge that they had scrawled an
insulting phrase on the glass door of the tomb of a Cuban Volunteer.
At this the elder Abbott had looked so dubious that Charles hastily
abandoned his questioning. Enough of that sort of thing had been
shown; already his mother was unalterably opposed to Cuba; and there
he intended at any price to go. But those tragedies and reprisals, the
champion of his determination insisted, were limited, as he had begun
by saying, to the politically involved. No more engaging or safer city
than Havana existed for the delight of young travelling Americans with
an equal amount of money and good sense. He had proceeded to indicate
the temperate pleasures of Havana; but, then, Charles Abbott had no
ear for sensuous enjoyment. His mind was filled by the other vision of
heroic youth dying for the ideal of liberty.
He had never before given Cuba, under Spanish rule, a thought; but at
a chance sentence it dominated him completely; all his being had been
tinder for the spark of its romantic spirit. This, naturally, he had
carefully concealed from his parents, for, during the days that
immediately followed, Cuba as a possibility was continuously argued.
Soon his father, basing his decision on Charles' gravity of character,
was in favor of the change; and in the end his mother, at whose
prescience he wondered, was overborne.
Well, he was for Havana! His cabin on the Morro Castle was secured,
that notable trunkful of personal effects packed; and his father,
greatly to Charles' surprise, outside all women's knowledge, gave him
a small derringer with a handle of mother-of-pearl. He was, now, the
elder told him, almost a man; and, while it was inconceivable that he
would have a use for the pistol, he must accustom himself to such
responsibility. He wouldn't need it; but if he did, there, with its
greased cartridges in their short ugly chambers, it was. "Never shoot
in a passion," the excellent advice went on; "only a cool hand is
steady, and remember that it hasn't much range." It was for desperate
necessity at a very short distance.
With the derringer lying newly in his grasp, his eyes steadily on his
father's slightly anxious gaze, Charles asseverated that he would
faithfully attend every instruction. At the identical moment of this
commitment he pictured himself firing into the braided tunic of a
beastly Spanish officer and supporting a youthful Cuban patriot, dying
pallidly of wounds, in his free arm. The Morro Castle hadn't left its
New York dock before he had determined just what part he would take
in the liberation of Cuba--he'd lead a hopeless demonstration in the
center of Havana, at the hour when the city was its brightest and the
band playing most gaily; his voice, sharp like a shot, so soon to be
stilled in death, would stop the insolence of music.
* * * * *
This was not a tableau of self-glorification or irresponsible youth,
he proceeded; it was more significant than a spirit of adventure. His
determination rested on the abstraction of liberty for an oppressed
people; he saw Cuba as a place which, after great travail, would
become the haunt of perfect peace. That, Charles felt, was not only a
possibility but inevitable; he saw the forces of life drawn up in such
a manner--the good on one side facing the bad on the other. There was
no mingling of the ranks, no grey; simply, conveniently, black and
white. And, in the end, the white would completely triumph; it would
be victorious for the reason that heaven must reign over hell. God was
supreme.
Charles wasn't at all religious, he came of a blood which delegated to
its women the rites and responsibilities of the church; but there was
no question in his mind, no doubt, of the Protestant theological map;
augustness lay concretely behind the sky; hell was no mere mediaeval
fantasy. He might ignore this in daily practice, yet it held him
within its potent if invisible barriers. Charles Abbott believed it.
The supremacy of God, suspended above the wickedness of Spain, would
descend and crush it.
Ranged, therefore, squarely on the side of the angels, mentally he
swept forward in confidence, sustained by the glitter of their
invincible pinions. The spending of his life, he thought, was a
necessary part of the consummation; somehow without that his
vision lost radiance. A great price would be required, but the
result--eternal happiness on that island to which he was taking
linen suits in winter! Charles had a subconscious conception of the
heroic doctrine of the destruction of the body for the soul's
salvation.
The Morro Castle, entering a wind like the slashing of a stupendous
dull grey sword, slowly and uncomfortably steamed along her course.
Most of the passengers at once were seasick, and either retired or
collapsed in a leaden row under the lee of the deck cabins. But this
indisposition didn't touch Charles, and it pleased his sense of
dignity. He appeared, erect and capable, at breakfast, and through the
morning promenaded the unsteady deck. He attended the gambling in the
smoking saloon, and listened gravely to the fragmentary hymns
attempted on Sunday.
These human activities were all definitely outside him; charged with a
higher purpose, he watched them comprehendingly, his lips bearing the
shadow of a saddened smile; essentially he was alone, isolated. Or at
least he was at the beginning of the four days' journey--he kept
colliding with the rotund figure of a man wrapped to the eyes in a
heavy cloak until, finally, from progressing in opposite directions,
they fell into step together. To Charles' delight, the other was a
Cuban, Domingo Escobar, who lived in Havana, on the Prado.
Charles Abbott learned this from the flourishing card given in return
for his own. Escobar he found to be a man with a pleasant and
considerate disposition; indeed, he maintained a scrupulous courtesy
toward Charles far transcending any he would have had, from a man so
much older, at home. Domingo Escobar, it developed, had a grown son,
Vincente, twenty-eight years old; a boy perhaps Charles' own age--no,
Andres would be two, three, years younger; and Narcisa. The latter,
his daughter, Escobar, unashamed, described as a budding white rose.
Charles wasn't interested in that, his thoughts were definitely turned
from girls, however flower-like; but he was engaged by Vincente and
Andres. He asked a great many questions about them, all tending to
discover, if possible, the activity of their patriotism. This, though,
was a subject which Domingo Escobar resolutely ignored.
Once, when Charles put a direct query with relation to Spain in Cuba,
the older man, abruptly replying at a tangent, ignored his question.
It would be necessary to ask Andres Escobar himself. That he would
have an opportunity to do this was assured, for Andres' parent, who
knew the Abbotts' banking friend intimately, had told Charles with
flattering sincerity how welcome he would be at the Escobar dwelling
on the Prado.
The Prado, it began to be clear, of all the possible places of
residence in Havana, was the best; the Escobars went to Paris when
they willed; and, altogether, Charles told himself, he had made a very
fortunate beginning. He picked up, from various sources on the
steamer, useful tags of knowledge about his destination:
The Inglaterra, to which he had been directed, was a capital hotel,
but outside the walls. Still, the Calle del Prado, the Paseo there,
were quite gay; and before them was the sweep of the Parque Isabel,
where the band played. At the Hotel St. Louis, next door, many of the
Spanish officers had their rooms, but at the hour of dinner they
gathered in the Cafe Dominica. The Noble Havana was celebrated for its
camarones--shrimps, Charles learned--and the Tuileries, at the
juncture of Consulado and San Rafael Streets, had a salon upstairs
especially for women. Most of his dinners, however, he would get at
the Restaurant Francais, excellently kept by Francois Garcon on Cuba
Street, number seventy-two.
There he would encounter the majority of his young fellow countrymen
in Havana; the Cafe El Louvre would serve for sherbets after the
theatre, and the Aguila de Oro.... The Plaza de Toros, of course, he
would frequent: it was on Belascoin Street near the sea. The afternoon
fights only were fashionable; the bulls killed in the morning were no
more than toro del aguadiente. And the cockpit was at the Valla de
Gallo.
There were other suggestions as well, put mostly in the form of ribald
inquiry; but toward them Charles Abbott persisted in an attitude of
uncommunicative disdain. His mind, his whole determination, had been
singularly purified; he had a sensation of remoteness from the flesh;
his purpose killed earthly desire. He thought of himself now as
dedicated to that: Charles reviewed the comfortable amount of his
letter of credit, his personal qualifications, the derringer mounted
in mother-of-pearl, in the light of one end. It annoyed him that he
couldn't, at once, plunge into this with Domingo Escobar; but,
whenever he approached that ordinarily responsive gentleman with
anything political, he grew morose and silent, or else, more maddening
still, deliberately put Charles' interest aside. The derringer,
however, brought out an unexpected and gratifying stir.
Escobar had stopped in Charles' cabin, and the latter, with a studied
air of the casual, displayed the weapon on his berth. "You must throw
it away," Escobar exclaimed dramatically; "at once, now, through the
porthole."
"I can't do that," Charles explained; "it was a gift from my father;
besides, I'm old enough for such things."
"A gift from your father, perhaps," the other echoed; "but did he tell
you, I wonder, how you were going to get it into Cuba? Did he explain
what the Spanish officials would do if they found you with a pistol?
Dama de Caridad, do you suppose Cuba is New York! The best you could
hope for would be deportation. Into the sea with it."
But this Charles Abbott refused to do, though he would, he agreed,
conceal it beyond the ingenuity of Spain; and Escobar left him in a
muttering anger. Charles felt decidedly encouraged: a palpable degree
of excitement, of tense anticipation, had been granted him.
* * * * *
Yet his first actual breath of the tropics, of Cuba, was very
different, charged and surcharged with magical peace: the steamer was
enveloped in an evening of ineffable lovely blueness. The sun faded
from the world of water and left an ultramarine undulating flood with
depths of clear black, the sky was a tender gauze of color which, as
night approached, was sewn with a glimmer that became curiously
apparent, seemingly nearby, stars. The air that brushed Charles'
cheek was slow and warm; its warmth was fuller, heavier with potency,
than any summer he had known. Accelerating his imagination it
dissipated his energies; he lounged supine in his chair, long past
midnight, lulled by the slight rise and fall of the sea, gathered up
benignly into the beauty above him.
Later he had to stir himself into the energy of packing, for the
Morro Castle was docking early in the morning. He closed his bag
thoughtfully, the derringer on a shelf. Escobar had spoken about it,
warning him, again; and it was apparent that no obvious place of
concealment would be sufficient. At last he hit on an excellent
expedient--he would suspend it inside the leg of a trouser. He fell
asleep, still saturated with the placid blue immensity without, and
woke sharply, while it was still dark. But it was past four, and
he rose and dressed. The deck was empty, deserted, and the light in
the pilot house showed a solitary intent countenance under a glazed
visor. There was, of course, no sign of Cuba.
A wind freshened, it blew steadily with no change of temperature, like
none of the winds with which he was familiar. It appeared to blow the
night away, astern. The caged light grew dull, there were rifts in
the darkness, gleams over the tranquil sea, and the morning opened
like a flower sparkling in dew. The limitless reach of the water
flashed in silver planes; miniature rainbows cascaded in the spray at
the steamer's bow; a flight of sailing fish skittered by the side. Far
ahead there was a faint silhouette, like the print of a tenuous
green-grey cloud, on the sea. It grew darker, bolder; and Charles
Abbott realized that it was an island.
Cuba came rapidly nearer; he could see now that it wasn't pale; its
foliage was heavy, glossy, almost sombre. The Morro Castle bore to the
left, but he was unable to make out an opening, a possible city, on
the coast. The water regained its intense blue, at once transparent,
clear, and dyed with pigment. The other travellers were all on deck:
Charles moved toward Domingo Escobar, but he eluded him. Undoubtedly
Escobar had the conjunction of the derringer and the Spanish customs
in mind. A general uneasiness permeated the small throng; they
conversed with a forced triviality, or, sunk in thought, said
nothing.
Then, with the sudden drama of a crash of brass, of an abruptly
lifting curtain, they swung into Havana harbor. Charles was
simultaneously amazed at a great many things--the narrowness of the
entrance, the crowded ships in what was no more than a rift of the
sea, a long pink fortress above him at the left, and the city, Havana
itself, immediately before him. His utmost desire was satisfied by
that first glimpse. Why, he cried mentally, hadn't he been told that
it was a city of white marble? That was the impression it gave him--a
miraculous whiteness, a dream city, crowning the shining blue tide.
Every house was hung with balconies on long shuttered windows, and
everywhere were parks and palms, tall palms with smooth pewter-like
trunks and short palms profusely leaved. Here, then, white and green,
was the place of his dedication; he was a little dashed at its size
and vigor and brilliancy.
The steamer was scarcely moving when the customs officials came on
board; and, as the drift ceased, a swarm of boats like scows with
awnings aft clustered about them. Hotel runners clambered up the
sides, and in an instant there was a pandemonium of Spanish and
disjointed English. A man whose cap bore the sign Hotel Telegrafo
clutched Charles Abbott's arm, but he sharply drew away, repeating the
single word, "Inglaterra!" The porter of that hotel soon discovered
him, and, with a fixed reassuring smile, got together all the baggage
for his guests.
Charles, instructed by Domingo Escobar, ignored the demand for
passports, and proceeded to the boat indicated as the Inglaterra's. It
was piled with luggage, practically awash; yet the boatmen urged it
ashore, to the custom house, in a mad racing with the whole churning
flotilla. The rigor of the landing examination, Charles thought
impatiently, had been ridiculously exaggerated; but, stepping into a
hack, two men in finely striped linen, carrying canes with green
tassels, peremptorily stopped him. Charles was unable to grasp the
intent of their rapid Spanish, when one ran his hands dexterously over
his body. He explored the pockets, tapped Charles' back, and then drew
aside. When, at last, he was seated in the hack, the position of the
derringer was awkward, and carefully he shifted it.
An intimate view of Havana increased rather than diminished its
evident charms. The heat, Charles found, though extreme, was less
oppressive than the dazzling light; the sun blazing on white walls, on
walls of primrose and cobalt, in the wide verdant openings, positively
blinded him. He passed narrow streets over which awnings were hung
from house to house, statues, fountains, a broad way with files of
unfamiliar trees, and stopped with a clatter before the Inglaterra.
It faced on a broad covered pavement, an arcade, along which, farther
down, were companies of small iron tables and chairs; and it was so
foreign to Charles, so fascinating, that he stood lost in gazing. A
hotel servant in white, at his elbow, recalled the necessity of
immediate arrangements, and he went on into a high cool corridor set
with a marble flooring. At the office he exchanged his passport for a
solemn printed warning and interminable succession of directions; and
then, climbing an impressive stair, he was ushered into a room where
the ceiling was so far above him that once more he was overcome by
strangeness and surprise.
He unpacked slowly, with a gratifying sense of the mature significance
of his every gesture; and, in the stone tub hidden by a curtain in a
corner, had a refreshing bath. There was a single window rising from
the tiled floor eight or ten feet, and he opened double shutters,
discovering a shallow iron-railed balcony. Before him was a squat
yellow building with a wide complicated facade; it reached back for a
square, and Charles decided that it was the Tacon Theatre. On the
left was the Parque de Isabel, with its grass plots and gravel walks,
its trees and iron settees, gathered about the statue of Isabel II.
Charles Abbott's confidence left him little by little; what had seemed
so easy in New York, so apparent, was uncertain with Havana about him.
The careless insolence of the inspectors with the green-tasseled canes
at once filled him with indignation and depression. How was he to
begin his mission? Without a word of Spanish he couldn't even make it
known. There was Andres Escobar to consider: his father had told
Charles that he knew a few words of English. Meanwhile, hungry, he
went down to the eleven o'clock breakfast.
* * * * *
A ceremonious head waiter led him to a small table by a long window on
the Parque, where, gazing hastily at the breakfasts around him, he
managed, with the assistance of his waiter's limited English, to
repeat their principal features. These were fruit and salads, coffee
flavored with salt, and French bread. Clear white curtains swung at
the window in a barely perceptible current of air, and he had glimpses
of the expanse without, now veiled and now intolerably brilliant. His
dissatisfaction, doubts, vanished in an extraordinary sense of
well-being, or settled importance and elegance. There were many people
in the dining-room, it was filled with the unfamiliar sound of
Spanish; the men, dark, bearded and brilliant-eyed, in white linens,
with their excitable hands, specially engaged his attention, for it
was to them he was addressed.
The women he glanced over with a detached and indulgent manner: they
were, on the whole, a little fatter than necessary; but their voices
were soft and their dress and jewels, even so early in the day, nicely
elaborate. All his interest was directed to the Cubans present; other
travellers, like--or, rather, unlike--himself, Americans, French and
English, planning in their loud several tongues the day's excursions,
or breakfasting with gazes fastened on Hingray's English and Spanish
Conversations, Charles carefully ignored.
He felt, because of the depth of his own implication, his passionate
self-commitment, here, infinitely superior to more casual, to blinder,
journeyings. He disliked the English arrogance, the American clothes,
and the suspicious parsimony of the French. Outside, in the main
corridor of the hotel, he paused undecided; practically no one, he
saw, in the Parque Isabel, was walking; there was an unending broad
stream of single horse victorias for hire; but he couldn't ask any
driver he saw to conduct him to the heart of the Cuban party of
liberty.
The strongest of all his recognitions was the fact that he had no
desire--but a marked distaste--for sightseeing; he didn't want to be
identified, in the eyes of Havana, with the circulating throng of
the superficially curious. In the end he strolled away from the
Inglaterra, to the left, and discovered the Prado. It was a wide
avenue with the promenade in the center shaded by rows of trees
with small burnished leaves. There, he remembered, was where the
Escobars lived, and he wondered which of the imposing dwellings, blue
or white, with sweeping pillars and carved balconies and great
iron-bound doors, was theirs. He passed a fencing school and
gymnasium; a dilapidated theatre of wood pasted with old French
playbills; fountains with lions' heads; and came to the sea. It
reached in an idyllic and unstirred blue away to the flawless
horizon, with, on the rocks of its shore, a company of parti-colored
bath-houses. There was an old fort, a gate--which, he could see,
once formed part of the city wall--bearing on its top a row of
rusted and antiquated cannon. Slopes of earth led down from the
battery, and beyond he entered a covered stone way with a parapet
dropping to the tranquil tide. After an open space, the Maestranza,
he came to a pretty walk; it was the Paseo de Valdez, with trees,
stone seats and a rippling breeze.
Charles Abbott indolently examined an arch, fallen into disrepair,
erected, its tablet informed him, by the corps of Royal Engineers. He
sat on a bench, saturated by the hot vivid peace; before him reached
the narrow entrance of the bay with, on the farther hand, the long
pink wall of the Cabanas. A drift of military music came to him from
the fortress.... A great love for Havana stirred in his heart;
already, after only a few hours, he was familiar, contented, there. It
seemed to Charles that he understood its spirit; the beauty of palms
and marble was what, in the bleak north, all his life he had longed
for. The constriction of his breathing had vanished.
The necessity for an immediate and violent action had lessened; he
would, when the time came, act; he was practically unlimited in days
and money. Charles decided, however, to begin at once the study of
Spanish; and he'd arrange for lessons at the Fencing School. Both of
those accomplishments were imperative to his final intention. He
lingered on the beach without an inclination to move--he had been
lower physically than he realized. The heat increased, the breeze and
band stopped, and finally he rose and returned to the Inglaterra.
There the high cool shadow of his room was so soothing that he fell
into a sound slumber and was waked only by a pounding at his door past
the middle of afternoon.
A servant tendered him a card that bore engraved the name Andres
Escobar. He would see Mr. Escobar, he sent word, as soon as he could
be dressed. And, choosing his garb in a mingling of haste and
particular care, he was permeated by an indefinable excitement. Facing
Andres, he had a sensation of his own clumsiness, his inept attitude;
for the other, younger than he in appearance, was faultless in
bearing: in immaculately ironed linen, a lavender tie and sprig of
mimosa, he was an impressive figure of the best fashion. But Andres
Escobar was far more than that: his sensitive delicately modelled dark
face, the clear brown eyes and level lips, were stamped with a
superfine personality.
His English, as his father had said, was halting, confined to the
merest formal phrases, but his tones were warm with hospitality.
"It was polite of you to come so soon," Charles replied; "and your
father was splendid to me on the steamer."
"How do you like Havana?" Andres asked.
"I love it!" Charles Abbott exclaimed, in a burst of enthusiasm, but
of which, immediately after, he was ashamed. "I was thinking this
morning," he continued more stiffly, "when I had hardly got here, how
much at home I felt. That's funny, too; for it's entirely different
from all I have known."
"You like it!" Andres Escobar reflected his unreserved tone. "That's
good; I am very, very glad. You must come to our house, Papa sends you
this." He smiled delightfully.
They were standing, and Charles waved toward the dining-room. "Suppose
we go in there and have a drink." In Havana he continually found
himself in situations of the most gratifying maturity--here he was, in
the dining-room of the Inglaterra Hotel, with a tall rum punch before
him, and a mature looking cigar. He was a little doubtful about the
latter, its length was formidable; and he delayed lighting it until
Andres had partly eclipsed himself in smoke. But, to his private
satisfaction, Charles enjoyed the cigar completely.
He liked his companion enormously, noticing, as they sat in a
comfortable silence, fresh details: Andres' hair, ink-black, grew in a
peak on his forehead; the silk case which held his cigars was bound in
gold; his narrow shoes were patent leather with high heels. But what,
above all else, impressed Charles, was his evidently worldly poise,
the palpable air of experience that clung to him. Andres was at once
younger and much older than himself.
"How are you interested?" Andres asked, "in ... girls? I know some
very nice ones."
"Not in the least," Charles Abbott replied decidedly; "the only thing
I care for is politics and the cause of justice and freedom."
* * * * *
Andres Escobar gazed swiftly at the occupied tables around them; not
far away there was a party of Spanish officers in loose short
tunics and blue trousers. Then, without commenting on Charles'
assertion, he drank from his glass of punch. "Some very nice
girls," he repeated. Charles was overwhelmed with chagrin at his
indiscretion; Andres would think that he was a babbling idiot. At
the same time he was slightly impatient: his faith in the dangers of
Havana had been shaken by the city's aspect of profound placidity,
its air of unalloyed pleasure. "You should know my friends," Andres
went on conversationally; "Remigio Florez, they are great coffee
planters, and Jaime--Jaime Quintara--and Tirso Labrador. They will
welcome you, as I."
Charles explained his intention of learning Spanish, of fencing; and
the other promised his unreserved assistance. He would have a teacher
of languages sent to the hotel and himself take Charles to the Fencing
School. "Tomorrow," he promised. The drinks were finished, the cigars
consumed in long ashes, and Andres Escobar rose to go. As they walked
toward the Paseo the Cuban said, "You must be very careful, liberty is
a dangerous word; it is discussed only in private; in our tertulia you
may speak." He held out a straight forward palm. "We shall be
friends."
Again in his room, Charles dwelt on Andres, conscious of the birth of
a great liking, the friendship the other had put into words. He wanted
to be like Andres, as slender and graceful, with his hair in a peak
and a worldly, contained manner. Charles was thin, rather than
slender, more awkward than not; decidedly fragile in appearance. And
his experience of life had been less than nothing. Yet he would make
up for this lack by the fervor of his attachment to the cause of Cuba.
He recalled all the stories he knew of foreign soldiers heroic in an
adopted cause; that was an even more ideal form of service than the
natural attachment to a land of birth.
He moved a chair out on his balcony, and sat above the extended
irregular roof of the Tacon Theatre, watching the dusk flood the white
marble ways. The lengthening shadows of the Parque blurred, joined in
one; the facades were golden and then dimly violet; the Gate of
Montserrat lost its boldness of outline. Cries rose from the streets,
"Cuidado! Cuidado!" and "Narranjas, narranjas dulces." The evening
news sheets were called in long falling inflections.
What surprised him was that, although he had more than an ordinary
affection for his home, his father and mother, now, here, they were of
no importance, no reality, to him. He never, except by an objective
effort, gave the north, the past, a thought. He was carried above
personal relationships and familiar regard; at a blow his old ties
had been severed; the new held him in the grip of their infinite
possibilities. All the petty things of self were obscured in the same
way that the individual aspects of the city below him were being
merged into one dignity of tone.
Yet, at the same time, his mood had a charming reality--the suaveness
of Andres Escobar. His, Charles Abbott's, would be a select, an
aristocratic, fate; the end, when it overtook him, would find him in
beautiful snowy linens, dignified, exclusive, to the last. His would
be no pot-house brawling. That was his double necessity, the highest
form of good in circumstances of the first breeding. One, perhaps, to
his aesthetic fibre, was as important as the other. And, dressing for
dinner, he spoiled three shirts in the exact right fixing of his
studs.
In the dining-room, he pressed a liberal sum of American money on the
head waiter, and was conducted to the table he had occupied at
breakfast. Everyone, practically, except some unspeakable tourists,
was in formal clothes; and the conversations, the sparkling light,
were like the champagne everywhere evident. Charles chose a Spanish
wine, the Marquis de Riscal; and prolonged his sitting over coffee and
a cigar, a Partagas, like those in Andres' silk case. He had never
before tasted coffee with such a rich thick savor, its fragrance
alone, blending with the blue smoke of his cigar, filled him with
pleasure.
The room was long, tiled, and had, against the far wall, a great
mirror which held in reverse the gay sweep of the tables, the heavily
powdered shoulders of women, the prismatic flashes of diamonds and
men's animated faces. The reflections were almost as fascinating as
the reality, and Charles gazed from one to the other.
Drinking, he saw, was universal, but none of the Cubans were drunk;
and for that reason his attention was held by two men at the table
next to his: the waiter had left a bottle of brandy, and the
individual facing Charles, with a sallow face from which depended,
like a curtain, a square-cut black beard, was filling and refilling
his thimble-sized glass. He was watching, with a shifting intentness
of gaze, all who entered; and suddenly, as Charles' eyes were on him,
he put down his half-lifted brandy and a hand went under the fold of
his coat.
Charles turned, involuntarily, and saw a small immaculate Cuban with
grey hair and a ribband in his buttonhole advancing among the tables.
He was a man of distinguished appearance, important it was evident,
for a marked number of people bowed as he passed. When he had gone on,
the bearded individual rose, swaying slightly, and, with his hand
still in his coat rapidly overtook the other.
Charles Abbott had an impulse to cry out; but, oppressed by a sense of
helpless dread, impending disaster, without a sound or power of
movement he followed the course of the second figure. The two were now
at the end of the dining-room, close to the mirror, when the man with
the decoration stopped and turned sharply. There was the sudden
stabbing report of a pistol, and, immediately following, a loud
splintering crash. Charles had the crazy illusion that a man who had
been shot was made of china, and would be found in broken bits on the
floor.
There was an instantaneous hysterical uproar, dominated by the screams
of women; in the panic which rose there was a rush for the entrance, a
swirl of tearing satin and black dress coats. Then, even before he
heard the concerted derisive amazement, Charles realized that, dazed
by the brandy, the intended murderer had fired at the reflection of
his mark in the glass.
What an utterly ridiculous error; and yet his hands were wet and cold,
his heart pounding. Something of the masking gaiety, the appearance
of innocent high spirits, was stripped from the dining-room of the
Inglaterra, from Havana. There was an imperative need for Andres
Escobar's caution. Charles' equanimity returned: with a steady hand he
poured out more coffee. He was ashamed of his emotion; but, by heaven,
that was the first of such violence he had witnessed; he knew that it
happened, to a large degree its possibility had brought him to Cuba;
yet directly before him, in a square beard and a decorating
ribband!... On the floor were the torn painted gauze and broken ivory
sticks of a woman's fan.
* * * * *
The echo of that futile shot followed Charles Abbott to the Escobars',
where, because of the often repeated names of its principals, he
recognized that the affair was being minutely discussed. The room in
which they sat was octagonal, with the high panels of its walls no
more than frames for towering glass doors set in dark wood; above were
serrated openings, Eastern in form, and the doors were supported by
paired columns of glacial white marble. It was entered through a long
corridor of pillars capped in black onyx with wicker chairs, a tiling
laid in arabesques and potted palms; and opposite was the balcony over
the Prado. A chandelier of crystal, hanging by a chain from the remote
ceiling, with a frosted sparkle like an illuminated wedding cake,
unaffected by prismatic green and red flashes, filled the interior
with a chilly brightness. The chairs of pale gilt set in a circle, the
marble pattern of the floor, the dark heads of the Escobars, looked as
though they were bathed in a vitreous fluid preserving them in a hard
pallor forever.
But it was cool; the beginning constant night breeze fluttered the
window curtains and swayed the pennants of smoke from the cigars.
Domingo Escobar finished what was evidently a satirical period with a
decisive clearing of his throat--a-ha! He was a small rotund man with
a gigantic moustache laid without a brown hair misplaced over a mouth
kindly and petulant. His wife, Carmita, obese with indulgent
indolence, her placid expression faintly acid, waved a little hand,
like a blanched almond, indicative of her endless surprise at the
clamor of men. Andres was silent, immobile, faultless in a severity of
black and white.
Charles had begun to admire him inordinately: above everything,
Andres possessed a simple warmness of heart, a generosity of emotion,
together with a fastidious mind. Fortunate combination. And his
person, his gestures and flashing speech, his brooding, were invested
by an intangible quality of romance; whatever he did was absorbing,
dramatic and--and fateful. He was a trifle aloof, in spite of his
impulsive humanity, a thought withdrawn as though by a shadow that
might have been but his unfailing dignity.
Charles' gaze wandered from him to Narcisa, who, Domingo Escobar had
said, resembled a flower bud. As she sat in pale yellow ruffles, with
her slim hands clasped and her composed face framed in a wide dense
stream of hair, she was decidedly fetching. Or, rather, she gave
promise of charm; at present, she was too young to engage him in any
considerable degree. Narcisa, he concluded, was fourteen. At very long
intervals she looked up and he caught a lustrous, momentary
interrogation of big black eyes. A very satisfactory sister for Andres
Escobar to have; and, wondering at the absence of Vincente, the eldest
son, Charles asked Andres about his brother.
A marked constraint was immediately visible in the family around him.
Vincente, he was informed abruptly, was out of Havana, he had had to
go to Matanzas. Later, on the balcony over the Prado, Andres added an
absorbing detail. "Vincente, we think, is in the Party of Liberation.
But you must say nothing. I do not know, Vincente will not speak; but
mama has noticed the gendarmes in front of the house, and when she
drives."