his masculine necessity. Abstractions, the liberty, for example, of an
alien people, would have little weight against her instinct for the
realities in her own heart. Her emotion was tangible, compared with
his it was deeply reasonable; it moved in the direction of their
immediate good, of the happiness, the fullness, of their beings; while
all his desire, his hope, was cloudy, of the sky. In the high silver
radiance of his idealism, the warmer green of earth, the promise of
Narcisa's delicate charm, the young desire in his blood, were, he
felt, far away, dim ... below.
* * * * *
The conviction fastened upon him that this chance realization would
determine, where women were concerned, the whole of his life. But that
space, he reminded himself, short at best, was, in him, to terminate
almost at once. All his philosophy of resistance, of strength, was
built upon the final dignity of a supreme giving. His thoughts went
back to Narcisa as he sat in La Clavel's room in the St. Louis,
watching a hairdresser skilfully build up the complicated edifice of
the dancer's hair. Soon, he grasped, it would be ready for the
camellia placed back of the lobe of an ear. A towel was pinned about
her naked shoulders, she had on a black fringed petticoat and dangling
slippers of red morocco leather. La Clavel was faced away from
Charles, but, in the mirror before which she sat, he could see her
features and vivid changing expressions.
The truth was that, close, he had found her disconcerting, almost
appalling. Climbing the long stairs at the message that she would
see him in her room, he had surrendered himself to the romantic
devotion which had overwhelmed the small select circle of his
intimates. This had nothing to do with the admirable sentiment of a
practical all-inclusive love; it was aesthetic rather than social. They
all worshipped La Clavel as a symbol of beauty, as fortunately
unattainable in a small immediate measure; and, bowing inside the
door of her chamber, he had been positively abashed at the strange
actuality of her charm.
La Clavel was at once more essentially feminine than any other woman
he had encountered and different from all the rest. A part of the
impression she created was the result of her pallor, the even
unnatural whiteness under the night of her hair. Her face was white,
but her lips--a carmine stick lay close at her hands--were brutally
red. She hurt him, struck savagely at the idealism of his image;
indeed, in the room permeated with a dry powdered scent, at the woman
redolent of vital flesh, he had been a little sickened. However, that
had gone; and he watched the supple hands in the crisp coarse mass of
her hair with a sense of adventure lingering faintly from his earlier
youth: he was, in very correct clothes, holding his hat and stick and
gloves, idling through the toilet of a celebrated dancer and beauty.
Or, rather, he saw himself objectively, as he had been say a year ago,
at which time his present situation would have surpassed his most
splendid worldly hopes. It was strange, he thought, how life granted
one by one every desire ... when it was no longer valued: the
fragrance, the tender passion, of Narcisa, the preference in La Clavel
singling him out from a city for her interest!
She smiled at him over her shoulder, and, in return, he nodded
seriously, busy with a cigarette; maintaining, in a difficult pass,
his complete air of indifference, of experience. The hairdresser must
have pulled roughly at a strand for, with a sudden harsh vulgarity,
she described him as a blot on the virginity of his mother; in an
instant every atom of her was charged with anger. It was, Charles told
himself, exactly as though a shock of dried grass had caught fire;
ignited gun powder rather than blood seemed to fill her veins.
Her ill-temper, tempestuous in its course, was over as quickly as it
had flared into being. She paid the hairdresser from a confusion of
silver and gold on her dressing-table and dismissed him with a good
nature flavored by a native proverb. Then, bending above a drawer, she
brought out the vivid shawl in which she had danced. La Clavel folded
its dragging brilliancy squarely along its length, laid it across her
breast, brought the fringed ends under and up over her arms, crossed
them in a swift twist, and she was wholly, magnificently, clothed. She
sat on the edge of a bed covered with gay oddments of attire--fans and
slippers with vermilion heels, lace mantillas, a domino in silver
tissue lined in carnation and a knife with a narrow blade and holder
of silk.
Charles offered her his cigarette case, but she declined in favor of
the long pale cigars Andres and he himself affected. With its smoke
drifting bluely across her pallid face, her eyes now interrogating
him, and now withdrawn in thought, she asked him about Tirso Labrador.
Charles Abbott quickly gathered that his presence was for that sole
purpose.
"I heard all that was said," she warned him; "and I don't want that
repeated. Why did he try to garotte de Vaca with his hands? There was
more in it than appeared. But all Ceaza will say is that he was a
cursed traitor to the Crown. Signor American, I like Cuba, they have
been very good to me here; I like you and your polite friends. But
whenever I try to come closer to you, to leave the stage, as it were,
for the audience, we are kept apart. The Spanish officers who take up
so much of my time warn me that I must have nothing to do with
disaffected Cubans; the Cubans, when I reach out my arms to them, are
only polite.
"Certainly I know that there has been a rebellion; but it is stamped
out, ended, now; there are no signs of it in Havana, when I dance the
jota; so why isn't everyone sensible and social; why, if they are
victorious, are not Gaspar Arco de Vaca and Ceaza y Santacilla easier?
If, as it must be, Cuba is subjected, why doesn't it ignore the
unpleasant and take what the days and nights always offer? There can
be no longer, so late in the history of the world, a need for the old
Inquisition, the stabbers Philip commanded."
Charles Abbott had an impulse to reply that, far from being conquered,
the spirit of liberty in Cuba was higher than ever before; he wanted
to tell her, to cry out, that it was deathless; and that no horrors of
the black past were more appalling than those practiced now by the
Spanish soldiery. Instead of this he watched a curl of smoke mount
through the height of the room to a small square window far up on the
wall where it was struck gold by a shaft of sunlight.
"He was particularly a friend of yours?" she insisted, returning to
Tirso. "You were always together, watching me dance from your box in
the Tacon Theatre, and eating ices at the El Louvre or at the
Tuileries."
He spoke slowly, indifferently, keeping his gaze elevated toward the
ceiling. "Tirso Labrador was a braggard, he was always boasting about
what he could do with his foolish muscles. What happened to him was
unavoidable. We weren't sorry--a thorough bully. As for the others,
that dandy, Quintara, and Remigio Florez, who looks like a coffee
berry from their plantation at Vuelta Arriba, and Escobar, I am very
much in their debt--I bring the gold and they provide the pleasures of
Havana. They are my runners. I haven't the slightest interest in their
politics; if they support the Revolution or Madrid, they keep all that
out of my knowledge."
A prolonged silence followed, a period devoted to the two cigars.
"That Escobar," La Clavel said, "is a very beautiful boy. What you
tell me is surprising; he, at any rate, seems quite different. And I
have seen you time after time sitting together, the two or three or
four of you, with affectionate glances and arms. I am sensitive to
such things, and I think you are lying."
An air of amused surprise appeared on his countenance, "If you are so
taken with Andres Escobar," he observed, "why did you make this
appointment with me? May I have the pleasure of taking him a note from
you? he is very fond of intrigues."
Leaning forward she laid a firm square palm on his knee. "You have
told me all that I wanted--this Tirso, who was killed, he was your
dear friend and his death an agony; the smaller, the coffee berry, you
are devoted to his goodness and simplicity; beneath Quintara's
waistcoats you find a heart of gold. But Escobar--is it Andres?--you
love better than your life. They care nothing for your American
dollars; it is evident they all have much more than you. What is it,
then, you are united by? I shall tell you--Cuba. You are patriots,
insurrectionists; Santacilla was right. And neither is your rebellion
crushed, not with Agramonte alive." She leaned back with glimmering
eyes and the cruel paint of her mouth smiling at him.
* * * * *
She was, then, Charles Abbott reflected, an agent of Spain's; calmly
he rehearsed all they had said to each other, he examined every
sentence, every inflection of voice. He could not have been more
circumspect; the position he had taken, of a pleasure-loving young
American, was so natural that it was inevitable. No, La Clavel knew
nothing, she was simply adopting another method in her task of getting
information for Santacilla. At this, remembering the adoration of his
circle for her, he was brushed by a swift sorrow. For them she had
been the symbol, the embodiment, of beauty; the fire and grace of her
dancing had intensified, made richer, their sense of life. She had
been the utmost flashing peak of their desire; and now it was clear to
him that she was rotten at the core, La Clavel was merely a spy; what
had engaged them was nothing more than a brilliant flowery surface, a
bright shawl.
"You are wasting your efforts," he assured her, with an appearance of
complete comfort. "Even if you were right, I mean about the others,
what, do you think, would make them confide in me, almost a stranger?
You understand this so much better than I that, instead of questioning
me, you ought to explain the whole Cuban situation. Women like
yourself, with genius, know everything."
She utterly disconcerted Charles by enveloping him in a rapid gesture,
her odorous lips were pressed against his cheek. "You are as sweet as
a lime flower," La Clavel declared. "After the others--" her
expression of disgust was singularly valid. "That is what I love about
you," she cried suddenly, "your youth and freshness and courage. Tirso
Labrador dying so gallantly ... all your beardless intent faces. The
revolt in Cuba, I've felt it ever since I landed at Havana, it's in
the air like wine. I am sick of officers: look, ever since I was a
child the army has forced itself upon me. I had to have their
patronage when I was dancing and their company when I went to the
cafes; and when it wasn't the cavalry it was the gentlemen. They were
always superior, condescending; and always, inside me, I hated them.
They thought, because I was peasant born, that their attentions filled
me with joy, that I should be grateful for their aristocratic
presences. But, because I was what I was, I held them, with their
ladies' hands and sugared voices, in contempt. There isn't one of them
with the entrails to demand my love.
"I tell you I was smothering in the air about me. My dancing isn't
like the posturing of the court, it's the dancing of the people, my
people, passionate like a knife. I am from the Morena, and there we
are not the human sheep who live in the valleys, along the empty
rivers. How shall I explain? But how can you explain yourself? You are
not a Cuban; this rebellion, in which you may so easily be killed
almost before you begin to live, it isn't yours. What drew you into
it? You must make it plain, for I, too, am caught."
"Men are different from women," he replied, putting into words his
newly acquired wisdom; "whatever happened to me would be useless for
you, you couldn't be helped by it." Yet he was forced to admit to
himself that all she had said was reasonable; at bottom it didn't
contradict his generalization, for it was based on a reality, on La
Clavel's long resentment, on indignities to her pride, on, as she had
said, the innate freedom of the mountain spirit. If she were honest,
any possible attachment to Cuba might result from her hatred of
Spain, of Sevilla and Madrid. Hers, then, would be the motive of
revenge.
"You are right about the difference in our experiences," she
agreed; "I was dancing for a living at six; at ten I had another
accomplishment. I have lived in rooms inlaid with gold, and in cellars
with men where murder would have been a gracious virtue. Yes, lime
flower, there is little you know that could be any assistance to
me. But the other, your purity, your effort of nobility, that I must
learn from you."
He explained his meaning more fully to her, and she listened intently.
"You think," she interrupted, "that a woman must be attached to
something real, like your arm or a pot of gold. You know them, and
that at your age, at any age, is a marvel enough in itself. The wisest
men in Europe have tried to understand the first movement of my
dancing--how, in it, a race, the whole history of a nation, is
expressed in the stamp of a heel, the turn of a hip. They wonder what,
in me, had happened to the maternal instinct, why I chose to reflect
life, as though I were a mirror, rather than experience it. And now,
it seems, you see everything, all is clear to you. You have put a
label, such as are in museums, on women; good!"
She smiled at him, mocking but not unkind.
"However," he told her crossly, "that is of very little importance.
How did we begin? I have forgotten already."
"In this way," she said coolly; "I asked if it would be of any
interest to--let us say, your friends, to learn that the United
States, in spite of the Administration, will not recognize a
Republican Cuba. Fish is unchangeably opposed to the insurgents. You
may expect no help there."
"That might be important to the insurgents," he admitted; "but where
are they to be found--in the cabildos of Los Egidos?"
"At least repeat what you have heard to Escobar: is it Andres or
Vincente?"
The name of Andres' brother was spoken so unexpectedly, the faintest
knowledge of Vincente on the part of the dancer of such grave
importance, that Charles Abbott momentarily lost his composure.
"Vincente!" he exclaimed awkwardly. "Was that the other brother? But
he is dead."
"Not yet," she replied. "It is planned for tonight, after dinner, when
he is smoking in the little upper salon."
Agitated, at a loss for further protest, he rose. He must go at once
to the Escobars, warn them. "You will admit now that I have been of
use," La Clavel was standing beside him. "And it is possible, if
Vincente Escobar isn't found, and Ceaza discovers that you were here,
that--" she paused significantly. "I am the victim of a madness," she
declared, "of a Cuban fever." But there was no time now to analyse the
processes of her mind and sex.
"I'll be going," he said abruptly.
"Naturally," she returned; "but what about your coming back? That will
be more difficult, and yet it is necessary. Ah, yes, you must pretend
to be in love with me; it will be hard, but what else is there? A
dancer has always a number of youths at her loose heels.
"You will be laughed at, of course; the officers, Santacilla and
Gaspar, will be unbearable. You will have to play the infatuated fool,
and send me bouquets of gardenias and three-cornered notes, and give
me money. That won't be so hard, because we can use the same sum over
and over; but I shall have to read the notes to my protectors in the
army."
"I'll be going," he repeated, gathering his stick and gloves from the
floor. She asked, with a breath of wistfulness, if he could manage a
touch of affection for her? Charles Abbott replied that this was not
the hour for such questions. "The young," she sighed, "are glacial."
But that, she proceeded, was exactly what drew her to them. They were
like the pure wind along the eaves under which she had been born. "I
promise never to kiss you again, or, if I must, solely as the mark of
brotherhood. And now go back to--to Andres."
She backed away from him, superb in the shawl, and again she was rayed
in the superlative beauty of her first appearance. The woman was lost
in the dancer, the flesh in the vision, the art.
"You could be a goddess," Charles told her, "the shrine of thousands
of hearts." The declaration of his entire secret was on his lips; but,
after all, it wasn't his. There was a possibility that she had lied
about Vincente, and at this second he might be dead, the Volunteers
waiting for him, Charles Abbott, below.
* * * * *
Hurrying through the Paseo Isabel to the Prado, Charles, looking at
his watch, found that it was nearly six. Carmita Escobar and Narcisa,
and probably Domingo, were driving perhaps by the sea or perhaps
toward Los Molinos, the park of the Captain-General. At any rate the
women would be away from the house, and that, in the situation which
faced the Escobars, was fortunate. If what La Clavel said were true,
and Charles Abbott now believed her implicitly, the agents of the
Crown would be already watching in the Prado. Vincente must be
smuggled away; how, he didn't yet see; but a consultation would result
in a plan for his escape. The servant who opened the small door in the
great iron-studded double gate, though he knew Charles Abbott well,
was uncommunicative to the point of rudeness. He refused to say who of
the family were at home; he intimated that, in any case, Charles would
not be seen, and he attempted to close him out.
Charles, however, ignoring the other's protests, forced his way into
the arch on the patio. He went up the wide stairs unceremoniously to
the suite of formal rooms along the street, where, to his amazement,
he found the Escobar family seated in the sombreness of drawn
curtains, and all of them with their faces marked with tears.
Surprised by his abrupt appearance they showed no emotion other than
a dull indifference. Then Andres rose and put his hand on Charles'
shoulder, speaking in a level grave voice:
"My dear Abbott, Vincente, our brother, has made the last sacrifice
possible to men. He died at noon, sitting in his chair, as a result of
the fever."
This was tragic, but, with a deeper knowledge of the dilemma facing
them, Charles was actually impatient. "What," he demanded, "are you
going to do with the body?"
"It is placed in dignity on a couch, and we have sent to Matanzas for
a priest we can trust. He'll be here early in the morning, and then,
and then, we must forget our love."
"You must do that now, without a minute's loss," Charles urged them.
"You can wait for no priest. The Spanish Government knows he is here;
tonight, after dinner, he was to have been taken. The house will be
stood on its roof, every inch investigated. You spoke, once, of
Narcisa, what might horribly swallow you all. Well, it has almost
come."
Andres' grip tightened; he was pale but quiet. "You are right," he
asserted; "but how did you find this out, and save us?" That, Charles
replied, was of no importance now. What could they do with Vincente's
body? Carmita, his mother, began to cry again, noiselessly; Narcisa,
as frigid as a statue in marble, sat with her wide gaze fastened on
Charles Abbott. "What?" Domingo echoed desperately. It was no longer a
question of the dignity, the blessing, of the dead, but of the
salvation of the living. Vincente's corpse, revered a few minutes
before, now became a hideous menace; it seemed to have grown to
monumental proportions, a thing impossible to put out of sight.
Undoubtedly soldiers were watching, guarding the house: a number of
men in nondescript clothes were lounging persistently under the rows
of Indian laurels below. A hundred practical objections immediately
rose to confront every proposal. Carmita and Narcisa had been sent
from the room, and a discussion was in progress of the possibility of
cutting the body into minute fragments. "If that is decided on,"
Domingo Escobar declared, with sweat rolling over his forehead, "I
must do it; my darling and heroic son would approve; he would wish me
to be his butcher."
Andres, harder, more mature, than the elder, stopped such expressions
of sentiment. It would make such a mess, he reminded them; and then,
how far could the servants, the hysterical negroes, be depended upon?
They would soon discover the progress of such an operation.
Charles suggested fire, but the Spanish stoves, with shallow cups for
charcoal, were useless, and the ovens were cold; it would create
suspicion to set them to burning so late in the day. "Since we can't
get rid of it," Charles declared, "we must accept it. The body is
there, but whose is it? Did you send a servant to Matanzas?"
Two had gone, riding, once they were beyond Havana, furiously. A
Jamaican negro, huge and black, totally unlike Vincente, and a Cuban
newly in the city, a mestizo, brought in from the Escobars' small
sugar estate near Madriga. Andres at once appropriated Charles' idea.
Their mother and Narcisa, he proclaimed, must go out as usual for
their afternoon drive, and he would secure some clothes that belonged
to Juan Roman, the servant. No one in the back of the house, luckily,
had seen the riders leave. Judged more faithful than the rest, they
had been sent away as secretly as possible.
"What," Charles Abbott asked, "caused his death?" Andres faced him
coldly. "This pig of a countryman I killed," he said. "The Spanish
will understand that. They have killed a multitude of us, for
nothing, for neglect in polishing the back of a boot. It will be
more difficult with the servants,--they are used to kindness,
consideration, here; but they, too, in other places, have had their
lesson. And I was drunk."
In spite of Charles' insistence, he was not permitted to assist in the
carrying out of the details that followed. He sat, walked about, alone
in the drawing-room. After an interminable wait he heard the report,
faint and muffled by walls, of a pistol, and then running feet passed
the door. Domingo appeared first, a glass of brandy in his shaking
hand:
"He has gone, in a sack, to be thrown into the sea ... the blood hid
his face. Ah, Jesu! But it was successful--a corporal looked, with the
hundred doblons I pressed into his hand. He kicked the body three
times, thrust a knife into it, and said that there, anyhow, was one
less Cuban." Andres entered the room and, without speech, embraced
Charles, kissing him on either cheek; and soon Carmita Escobar and
Narcisa, with their parasols and embroidered gloves, returned from
their drive.
They could do nothing but wait for what impended, and Charles Abbott
related to Andres the entire scene with La Clavel. "I believe in
her," he concluded. Andres agreed with him. "Her plan is excellent,"
he pronounced; "it will be very hard on you, though. You will be fed
on insults." That, Charles protested, was nothing. "And, worse still,
it will end our companionship. You will be able no longer to go about
with Jaime and Remigio and me. Yes, that, so soon, is over. What was
left of our happiness together has been taken away. We are nothing now
in ourselves. How quickly, Charles, we have aged; when I look in the
glass I half expect to see grey hair. It is sad, this. Why did you
leave your comfort and safety and come to us? But, thank God, you did.
It was you who saved us for the present. And that, now, is enough; you
must go back to the San Felipe. Put on your best clothes, with a rose
in your buttonhole, and get drunk in all the cafes; tell anyone who
will listen that La Clavel is more superb than Helen of the Greeks,
and buy every Spanish officer you see what he may fancy."
As Charles Abbott left the Escobar dwelling a detachment of Cuban
Volunteers on horse, and a file of infantry, their uniform of brown
drilling dressed with red collars and cuffs, had gathered across its
face. "Quien vive?" a harsh voice stopped him. "Forastero," Charles
answered sullenly. He was subjected to a long insolent scrutiny, a
whangee cane smote him sharply across the back. He regarded the men
about him stolidly; while an officer, who had some English, advised
him to keep away from suspected Cubans. But, at last, he was released,
directed to proceed at once to Anche del Norte Street, where his
passport would be again examined. Charles prepared slowly for dinner
at the Dominica; and, when he was ready to go out, he was the pattern
of a fashionable and idle young tourist. But what filled his mind was
the speculation whether or not the Escobars would remember to prevent
the return of Juan Roman with the priest from Matanzas.
* * * * *