been more ironical than the phase of life he entered upon the
acceptance of La Clavel into the party of independence. The entire
success of this dangerous arrangement depended on his ability to
create an impression, where he was concerned, of unrelieved vapidity.
He was supposed to be infatuated with the dancer; and he lingered,
not wholly sober, about the fashionable resorts. Charles sent her
flowers; and, sitting in his room on the roof of the San Felipe, he
composed, in a cold distaste, innumerable short variations on the
theme of a fluid and fatuous attachment. In reality, he had been
repelled by the actuality of La Clavel; he had an unconquerable
aversion for her room with its tumbled vivid finery, the powdered
scents mingling with the odors of her body and of the brandy always
standing in a glass beside her. Yet the discrepancy between the woman
herself and the vision she had bred continued to puzzle and disconcert
him.
When they were together it was this he preferred to talk about. At
times she answered his questioning with a like interest; but all,
practically, that she understood about herself, her dancing, had been
expressed in their first conversation upon that topic. The rest, at
best, was no more than a childlike curiosity and vanity. She had an
insatiable appetite for compliment; and, sincere in his admiration for
her impersonal aspect, Charles was content to gratify her; except
when, in spite of her promise, she kissed him ardently. This never
failed to seriously annoy him; and afterwards she would offer him a
mock apology. It detracted, he felt, from his dignity, assaulted,
insidiously, the elevation of his purpose in life.
He cherished a dislike, part cultivated and part subconscious, for
women. All his thoughts and emotions were celibate, chaste. Such a
scene had just ended, La Clavel was at her glass, busy with a rouge
pot and a scrap of soft leather; and Charles was standing stiffly by
the door. She had used, in describing him, a Spanish word about the
meaning of which he was not quite clear, but he had an idea that it
bore a close resemblance to prig. That specially upset him. At the
moment his dislike for her almost broke down his necessary diplomacy.
In an island of men desirous of her least favor--her fame transcended
seas and reached from coast to coast--he only, thinking less than
nothing of his privilege, had an instant unchallenged access to her.
He knew, carefully watched, all her various dependents: Calixto Sola,
the hairdresser, a creature with a sterile face constantly twisted
into painful grimaces; he was an employee in a barbering shop on
Neptune Street, too volatile for any convictions, but because of a
spiteful, injured disposition, not to be trusted. Then there was La
Clavel's maid, Jobaba, a girl with an alabaster beauty indefinitely
tainted by Africa. She was, Charles decided, the most corrupt being he
had ever encountered. Her life away from the St. Louis was incredibly,
wildly, debauched. Among other things, she danced, as the mulata, the
rumba, an indescribable affair; and she had connections with the rites
of brujeria, the degraded black magic of the Carabale in Cuba. She was
beautiful, with a perfection of grace, except for the direct gaze of
her brown eyes, which revealed an opacity, a dullness, like mud. She
was, even more than to La Clavel, the servant of Santacilla; she
reported, the dancer told Charles, every possible act and speech of
her mistress to the Spaniards, who, in return, supplied her with a
little money and a load of biting curses.
The chambermaid who attended La Clavel's room had lost a lover with
the forces of General Agramonte, and was of use to Charles; without
knowledge of the hidden actuality she yet brought him, unread,
communications for the patriotic party; and she warned him of
Santacilla's presence and uncertain humors. The laundress had been, in
her youth, an actress in the cheap local theatres, and, when she was
not sodden with drink, showed an admirable devotion to her famous
patron by the most delicate feats imaginable in ironing. She was
almost purely Spanish and had only a contempt for the Cubenos.
While Charles Abbott's duty was, on the surface, direct and easy, it was
complicated by the need for a constant watchfulness, a wit in countless
small details. Supporting, well enough, the boredom of his public
role, he had to manage with an unfailing dexterity the transmission of
the information that came to the insurrectionists through La Clavel.
These facts she gathered through the unguarded moments of Ceaza y
Santacilla's talk--he was close to the Captain-General and had
important connections at Madrid--and, at prolonged parties, from the
conversation of his intimates. Charles put these communications into
contracted written English sentences; in that way, even as against the
accidental chance of being, at any time, searched, he could better
convey their import; and gave them in carefully planned, apparently
incidental encounters, to any one of a score of correctly gloved and
boutonniered young men he had come to know by adroitly managed
assurances.
Charles had formed, as well, principally in the Cafe Dominica, a
superficial familiarity with other Americans in Havana for
banking or commercial purposes. They, regarding him as immensely
rich and dissipated, were half contemptuous and half eager for the
associations, the pleasures, of his mode of life. He went, as often
as it seemed necessary, to the United States Club on Virtudes Street,
where, together with his patriots, but different from them in a hidden
contempt, he gambled, moderately and successfully. His luck became
proverbial, and, coupled with La Clavel's name, his reputation soon
grew into what he intrigued for. Often, alone on the hotel roof,
he regarded himself with an objective amazement: everything was
precisely as he had planned, hoped for, on the steamer Morro
Castle--and entirely different.
It was probable that the death he had not, in imagination, shrunk
from, would crush him at any unexpected moment, an unpredictable slip;
but how could he have foreseen the trivial guise he would wear?
Charles was forced, it seemed to him, to ape every single quality he
hated. The spending of his money, as legitimately as though it were
exchanged for guns, on casual acquaintances and rum punches, on
gardenias that wilted and entertainment that choked him by its vulgar
banality, gradually embittered him. The insincerity of the
compliments he paid, the lying compliments to which he listened with
an ingenuous smile and an entire comprehension of their worthlessness,
steadily robbed his ideal of its radiant aloofness.
His enthusiasm, he discovered, his high ardor, must be changed to
patience and fortitude, the qualities which belonged to his
temperament and years had to give place to those of an accomplished
maturity; the romance of his circumstance deserted the surface to
linger hidden, cherished, beneath all the practical and immediate
rest. He began to perceive the inescapable disappointing difference
between an idea, a conception of the mind, and its execution. The
realization of that, he told himself, the seduction of the lofty, the
aerial, to earth, constituted success, power. The spirit and the
flesh! And the flesh constantly betrayed the highest determinations.
How he resented, distrusted, the mechanics, the traps and illusions,
of an existence on an animal plane!
His fervor, turned in upon itself, began to assume an aspect of the
religious; his imposed revolt from the mundane world turned his
thoughts to an intangible heaven, a spotless and immaterial hereafter.
The white facades of Havana, intolerably gold under the sun and
glimmering in the tropical nights, the procession and clamor of the
Dia des Reyes, the crowded theatres, the restaurants where, with no
appetite, he ate as little as possible--began to appear vague,
unsubstantial. What, so intently, was on every hand being done he
thought meaningless. Where, originally, he had been absorbed in
bringing relief to countless specific Cubans, he now only dwelt on a
possible tranquility of souls, a state, like that promised in the
Bible, without corruption and injustice and tears.
* * * * *
These considerations particularly occupied Charles Abbott waiting
inside the door of Santa Clara Church for La Clavel, who was coming to
the eight o'clock morning mass. Outside, the day was still and very
hot, intolerably blazing, but the darkened interior of the church, the
air heavy with incense, was cool. An intermittent stream of people
entered--the white and gilt of a Spanish naval uniform was followed by
gay silks, a priest passed noiselessly, like a shadow; an old woman
with a rippling fire of jewels made her way forward, across the wide
stone floor, with the regular subdued tap of a cane. The impending
celebration of the mass gathered its activity, its white and black
figures, about an altar. Suddenly Charles envied the priests in their
service of an ideal embodied in a spiritual Trinity. Even Cuba
vanished from the foreground of his thoughts at the conception of a
devotion not alone to an island, a nation, but to all the world of
men. His interest, measured with this, was merely temporal, limited.
Compared with the Protestant influences of his birth and experience,
the separation of religion from society, the all-absorbing gesture and
the mysticism of the Roman church offered a complete escape, an
obliteration, of the individual. But, as he dwelt upon this, he
realized that, for him, it was an impossibility. He might be a
Franciscan, begging his way, in brown bagging and sandals, through a
callous world for which he ceaselessly prayed; or one of the heroic
Jesuits of the early French occupation of the Mississippi Valley. Yet
these, as well, were no more than pictures, designs in a kaleidoscope
which, immediately turned, would be destroyed in a fresh pattern. He
was brought back to reality by the swinging of the heavy curtain at
the door; a segment of day, like a white explosion of powder, was
visible, and La Clavel proceeded to the font of holy water. As he
joined her she complained:
"You should have held it for me in your palm; what barbarians the
Americans and English are." She was, characteristically, dressed as
brightly as possible, in a mauve skirt with an elaborately cut flounce
swaying about yellow silk stockings, a manton of white crepe de Chine
embroidered with immense emerald green blossoms; her hair piled about
its tall comb was covered with a mantilla falling in scallops across
her brilliant cheeks. In the church, that reduced so much, she was
startling in her bold color and presence.
A negro, whom Charles recognized as a servant at the St. Louis,
followed her with a heavy roll and a small unpainted chair with a
caned seat. Before the altar, under the low pointed arches of the
transept, he spread out a deep-piled Persian rug--where La Clavel
promptly kneeled--and set the chair conveniently for her. Her devotion
at an end, the dancer rose and disposed herself comfortably. The
constant flutter of a fan with sandal wood sticks stirred the edge of
her mantilla. After she had scrutinized the worshippers about them,
she turned to Charles, speaking in a guarded voice.
He listened with an intense concentration, in the careful preliminaries
of a difficult act of memory, asking her, when it could not be
avoided, to repeat facts or names. They were, now, concerned with the
New York Junta, involved tables of costs, and La Clavel was palpably
annoyed by the unaccustomed necessity of a strict mental effort. She
raised her eyebrows, shot an inviting glance at an interested man of
middle age, and shut and opened her fan by an irritable twist of the
wrist. Watching, weighing, her mood, Charles abruptly brought her
recital to an end.
"That is enough for the present," he decided.
"My choice infant," she retorted, "your air of being my director is
comic. And I could wish you were not so immaculate, so unworldly--you
are tiresome more often than not. I could scream with laughing
when I think you are supposed to be my servant of love." The
striking of a silvery bell interrupted her with the necessity for a
reverence. The mutter of prayer was instantly lost in echoless
space. The genuflexions of the priests and acolytes were rapid.
"This secrecy," she went on, "is against my disposition, unnatural.
I am a woman in whom the complete expression of every feeling is
not only a good but a necessity. There are times when I must, it
seems, give way to my hatred of those perfumed captains. I sit beside
Santacilla, with his hand on my knee, and, hidden by my skirt, my
fingers are wedded to the knife in my stocking. A turn, a sweep of
the arm ... there is a tearing cut I learned in the mountains."
The prayers, the Latin invocations, grew louder with the symbolized
miracle of transubstantiation, the turning back of the bread and wine
into the humility and forbearance of Christ.
Charles Abbott was still, pale and remote; and the heat of La Clavel's
words died before the vision of an eternal empire of souls irrevocably
judged. She sank forward again, the knotted fringe of her manton
spread out beyond the rug, upon the stone. After a little he told her
that her courage, her daring and patience, were magnificent. But she
replied that they were cold virtues. "All virtues are cold," Charles
assured her seriously. If that were so, La Clavel whispered, her cheek
close to his, she was lost to virtue. Anyhow, she didn't believe him,
he could not, at his age, know so much. Yet not, God comprehended,
that he wasn't both virtuous and cold; any other man in the world, not
a heathen, would have flung himself at her. Charles said wearily:
"We have been over this before, and you know that I do not care for
women. What I was a few years ago--"
"A baby," she informed him.
"What I was a few years ago," he repeated with dignity, "is no
longer true of me. I belong body and spirit to the cause of which
you are aware. And if I didn't it would be, in many respects, no
different--science and the liberation of a people are all one,
selfless."
"I left the knife out of my present toilet," she sighed. "It would be
a charity to free you from the shape you hate so dearly."
"I must go back to the San Felipe and write what you told me,"
he proceeded. "I understand that Santacilla has gone out on a
slaughtering party, and I'll have to take you around in the
evening. There are zarzuelas in the Tacon Theatre this evening,
and afterwards, I suppose, dulces upstairs at the Tuileries.
It's no good, though, expecting me for Retreta--I've got to have
some time to recover and sleep: four o'clock last night, with a
pack of imbeciles, and three the night before. The smell of
Jamaica rum and limes makes me sick."
The mass was over, the people scattering, and, once more cheerful, she
laughed at him. "You might wear a hair shirt," she suggested; "they
are splendid for the soul." He handed her, without reply, into the
small victoria, one of the first in Havana, which had taken the place
of her volanta. In the sun, her shawl, her smile, were dazzling. A
knot of men gathered, gazing at her with longing, regarding Charles
Abbott with insolent resentment and wonder; how, their expressions
made clear the thought, could that insignificant and colorless
foreigner, that tepid American, engage and hold La Clavel, the glory
of Cuba and Spain?
She drove away, shielding her eyes with the fan, and Charles returned
slowly, on foot, to the hotel, reaching it in time for the eleven
o'clock breakfast. Bolting his door, closing the high shutters of his
glassless window, he lay down tired and feverish. The vendors of
oranges cried, far off, their naranjes, naranjes dulces. The bed,
which had no mattress, its sacking covered by a single sheet, the
pillow stuffed hard with cotton, offered him little rest. His body,
wet with sweat, twisted and turned continually, and sleep evaded him;
its peace almost within his grasp, it fled before the hot insistence
of his thoughts. The uncomfortable flesh mocked and dragged at the
spirit. It occurred to him suddenly, devastatingly, that he might fail
in his purpose; the armor of his conviction of invincibility fell
from him with the semblance of a loud ringing.
* * * * *
Of all the disturbing elements in Charles Abbott's present life the
one which, it had seemed, must prove most difficult, Santacilla and
his friends, troubled him least. There was, in their jeering, a
positive quality to be met; his own necessary restraint furnished him
with a sustaining feeling of triumph, stability; in his control, the
sacrifice of his dignity, his actual pride, damaged by La Clavel,
was restored. He acted the part of the infatuated, ubiquitous
youth, he thought, with entire success. It had been hardest at
first--Santacilla, who pretended to find Charles under his feet like
a dog, threatened, if he didn't stay away from the St. Louis, to
fling him down the long flight of stairs descending from the
dancer's room.
This, Charles wholly realized, was not an idle boasting. Seated,
it might be, quietly against the wall, outside the immediate
circle about La Clavel, the officers, the Spanish grandees in
Cuba for pleasure or for the supervision of their copper mines at
Cobra, Charles would watch, study, Ceaza y Santacilla, finding in
him the epitome of the Spain he himself hated. What, principally,
was evident about the officer with the heavy short neck, the
surprising red hair, and small restless blue eyes, was cruelty of
an extraordinary refined persistence. He had, unexpectedly in his
sheer brutal bulk, a tormenting spirit, a mental abnormality,
rather than the to-be-looked-for mere insensate weight of his fist.
He was, Charles discovered, the victim of disordered nerves, his
gaze, his thick hands or shoulders, were never still, and his lips
had a trick of movement as if in the pronunciation of soundless
periods.
He spoke, even to La Clavel, abruptly, mockingly; his tenderest
words, addressed to her with a sweeping disregard of whoever could
overhear, were hasty, introspective rather than generous. More
frequently he was silent, redly brooding. It was evident to the most
casual understanding that Santacilla was, by birth, association and
ideas, an aristocrat of the absolute type fast disappearing. It was
his power that, in a world largely affected by the ideal of
Christianity, he was ruthless; in an era of comparative humanity he
was inhuman. There was, about him, the smell of the slow fires of
the Inquisition, of languid murder, curious instruments of pain.
Charles recalled a story of the Spanish occupation of Cuba--how the
soldiers in armor cut and stabbed their way through a village of
naked, unprepared and peaceable bodies.
That, until he had known Santacilla, had been incomprehensible--a page
of old history; but now Charles understood: he could see the heavy
figure with a darkly suffused face hacking with a sword. He was
insane, Charles Abbott told himself; in other circumstances he'd be
soon convicted of a sensational murder, quickly hanged or put in an
asylum. But in Havana, as an officer of the Crown quartered on a
people he held in less esteem than the cattle whose slaughter he
applauded in the bull ring, nothing, practically, limited his mad
humors. Yes, here, in the West, he was Spain, the old insufferable
despotism, and Charles thought of Santacilla's necessary end as coldly
as though the soldier were no more than a figment of the doomed old
injustice.
La Clavel was seated with Charles Abbott in the upper room of the
Tuileries, when Santacilla slid into an unoccupied chair beside them.
They were eating mantecados, frozen sweetened cream, and Santacilla
dropped a number of battered Cuban coins, small in denomination, into
Charles' half consumed ice.
"If you were a man," he said, "you could break them up with your
teeth."
The other quietly put the plate away and lighted a cigarette. He
smiled, as if in appreciation of his humor, at the officer.
"But I'll bet you twenty doblons you can't break one," he added.
Santacilla replied that he was considering having Charles Abbott
deported.
"You are so dangerous," he explained, with the grimace that served him
as a smile. "I often consult with our Captain-General. 'This Abbott,'
he says; 'Agramonte is nothing, but I am afraid of him. He is wise, he
is deep.' And then we think what can be done with you--a tap on the
head, not too hard and not far from the ear, would make you as gentle
as a kitten. I have had it done; really it is a favor, since then you
would forget all your trouble, the problems of state. You'd cry if I
raised a finger at you." La Clavel interrupted him to swear at his
degraded imagination. "And the figure in the jota!" he turned to her.
"You know that the Spaniards of birth have, as well as their own, the
blood of the Moriscos. What they were, what the East is, with women,
I beg you to remember.
"This new treatment of women is very regrettable. I am a little late
for absolute happiness; too late, for example, to fasten your tongue
with a copper wire to the tongue across the table from you. Lovers,
you see, joined at last." He talked while he ate, in a manner wholly
delicate, minute fragile dulces, cakes, glazed in green and pink, and
ornamental confections of almond paste. Unperturbed, La Clavel found
him comparable to a number of appalling objects and states. Coarse,
was all that he replied.
"You are a peasant, a beast, and what you say is merely stupid. There
this Abbott is your superior--he has a trace, a suspicion, of blood. I
am wondering," he was addressing Charles again. "It seems impossible
that you are as dull as you appear; there is more, perhaps, than meets
the eye. Your friendship with the Escobars broke up very suddenly; and
you never see Floret and Quintara with his borrowed French airs. They
are nothing, it is true, yet they have a little Castilian, they are
better than the avaricious fools at the United States Club. Of course,
if you are in love with this cow gone mad, a great deal is accounted
for." He wiped his fingers first on a serviette and then on a sheer
web of linen marked with a coronet and his cipher.
"Pah!" he exclaimed, looking at the dancer, "your neck is dirty
again."
Sick with disgust, his blood racing with a passionate detestation,
Charles Abbott laughed loudly. But he was relieved that Santacilla's
attention had been shifted from him. Another officer, a major of the
Isabel regiment, tall and dark and melancholy, joined them. He ignored
Charles completely, and talked to La Clavel about her dances--the
Arragonese jota and those of the other provinces of Spain. He had, it
developed, written an opera on the subject of de Gama and a fabulous
Florida. Santacilla grew restive at this and gazed about the room
maliciously. Then, suddenly, he rose and walked to the table where a
young Cuban exquisite was sitting with a girl slender and darkly
lovely. Santacilla leaned over, with his hands planted on their table,
and made a remark that drove the blood in a scarlet tide to the
civilian's face. Then the Spaniard amazingly produced from his sleeve
a ball of lamb's wool such as women use to powder their faces, and
touched the girl's nose lightly. He went to another table and repeated
his act, to another and another, brushing all the feminine noses, and
returned, unchallenged, to his place.
"If I had been with any of those women," he related comfortably, "and
the King had done that, there would have been a new king and a new
infanta."
The musical Spaniard, inappropriately in uniform, remonstrated, "A lot
of them will kill you some night in the Paseo de Valdez or on the
quays."
Santacilla agreed with him. "No doubt it will overtake me--if not
here, then on the Peninsula. A hundred deaths, all distressing, have
been sworn upon me." Charles Abbott's expression was inane, but,
correcting that statement, he said to himself, "A hundred and one."
La Clavel yawned, opening to their fullest extent her lips on superb
teeth and a healthy throat.