amusement as his public dissipation--it was ascribed to the predicted
collapse of his love affair with La Clavel. She was, he was rallied,
growing tired of his attentions; and, in the United States Club, he
was requested not to drown himself, because of the trouble it would
cause his country. Captain Santacilla, however, studied him with a
growing ill-humor; his peculiar threats and small brutalities had
stopped, but his temper, Charles recognized, was becoming dangerous.
He declared frankly, in the Cafe Dominica, that Charles wasn't the
fool he appeared, and he repeated his assertions of the need for a
deportation or worse.
This was a condition which, sooner or later, must be met, and for
which Charles prepared himself. Both Cubans and Spaniards occasionally
disappeared forever--the former summarily shot by a file of muskets in
a fosse, and the latter, straying in the anonymous paths of
dissipation, quieted by a patriotic or vindictive knife. This, it
seemed to Charles Abbott, would be the wisest plan with Santacilla;
and he had another strange view of himself considering and plotting a
murder. The officer, who had an extraordinary sense of intangible
surrounding feelings and pressures, spoke again to Charles of the
efforts to dispose of him.
"The man doesn't draw breath who will do it," he proclaimed to
Charles, at the entrance to the Valla de Gallo. "It's a superstition,
but I'd back it with my last onza of gold. I've seen it in you very
lately, but give it up. Or don't give it up. Either way you are
unimportant. I can't understand why you are still here, why I permit
you to live. If I remember it I'll speak to my sergeant, Javier Gua:
he performs such an errand to a nicety. I have taken a dislike to you,
very unreasonably, for you are no more than a camarone. I believe, for
all your appearance of money, that La Clavel supports you; it is her
doblons, I am certain, you gamble away and spend for food."
Charles Abbott smiled at the insult:
"On one hand I hear that she has thrown me over and then you say that
she supports me. Which, I wonder, is to be preferred? But neither,
fortunately, is true. I can still buy her a bouquet of camellias and
she will still wear it. As for the money, I never lose at gambling,
Santacilla, I am always successful; the cards are in my favor. If I
bet on the black, it turns up; and when I choose the red, affairs are
red."
Santacilla's uneasy eyes shifted over him suspiciously. "Blood and
death, that is what black and red are," he said. "But you are not the
dispenser of fate." The peak of his cockaded hat threw a shadow over
his sanguine face to the chin. "A camarone," he repeated, "a stalk of
celery. Gua, and I'll remember to tell him, will part you from your
conceit." There was a metallic crowing of roosters as the officer
turned away.
* * * * *
La Clavel noticed a marked difference in Charles, but proclaimed that
it was no more than an increase in his natural propensity for
high-mindedness. It fatigued her, she declared, to be with him, made
her dizzy to gaze up at his altitude of mind. He was seated in her
room, the hairdresser was sweating in the attempt to produce an effect
she was describing to him with phrases as stinging as the whip of
foils, while Charles watched her with a degree of annoyance. Her
humors, where he was concerned, were unpredictable; and lately she had
found a special delight in attacks on his dignity. She said and did
things--an air of innocence hiding her malice--indecently ribald that
shook his firmest efforts to appear, to be, unconcerned.
At last, in a volatile rage, she dismissed the servant with his tongs
and pomatum and crimping leads, and swore to Charles Abbott that she
was going to the Argentine by the first boat that offered passage.
"I am sick of Cuba, and I've forgotten that I am an artist, and that
is bad. You are wrapped up in this liberty, and that is very well for
you, an ordinary person. You must have something like that, outside
you, to follow, for you've very little within. But me, I am not an
ordinary person; I am La Clavel. I am more valuable to the world than
pumpkins or republics. I stamp my heel," she stamped her heel, a clear
sharp sound, and her body swept into a line passionate and tense, "and
I create a people, a history." La Clavel secured the castanets lying
on her dressing-table--in answer to their irritable rhythmic clinking
she projected, for an instant, a vision of all desire.
"I can make men forget; I can draw them out of their sorrows and away
from their homes; I can put fever in their blood that will blind them
to memories and duty. Or I can be a drum, and lead them out, without a
regret, a fear, to death. That is more than a naranjada or a cigar or
an election. And, because of what I have given you, I have put that
out of my life; I have been living like the mistress of a bodega. To
be clear, Charles, I am tired of you and Cuba, and I have satisfied my
hatred of the officers with cologne on their handkerchiefs."
"I understand that perfectly," Charles Abbott assured her; "and I
cannot beg you to stay. Whatever your motive was, your value to us has
been beyond any payment. If our movement had a saint, you would fill
that place."
She laughed, "A strange saint in a manton and slippers with painted
heels."
"Much better," Charles replied, "than many of those in sanctified
robes. I had the feeling, too," he proceeded, "that our usefulness
together was coming to an end." It seemed to him that again she had
become the glorified figure of the stage, his dislike for her
actuality, her flesh, vanished, leaving only profound admiration.
"I am amazed," she said, in a lingering half humorous resentment,
"that you never loved me, I never brought you a regret or a longing or
made any trouble in your heart."
"That was because I put you so high," he explained. She raised her
shoulders and objected that it was late for compliments.
"Be honest--you didn't care for me. You ought to be very successful,
you have things surprising in the so young. Will you," she demanded
suddenly, totally changing the subject, "be my maid?" He hastened to
inform her, vehemently, that he would not. "Jobaba hasn't come today,"
La Clavel continued; "and she wasn't here to dress me for dinner last
evening. That is unusual in her: I have a feeling she is not coming
back."
"Perhaps she has been murdered in one of the brujos cabildos," Charles
suggested. "It is impossible to say where that frenzy stops." A
happening quite different, the dancer told him, was in her mind.
"I could never get into the thoughts of Jobaba," she admitted. "And
there is very little I miss. I suppose it's the negro. She is like
cream, smooth and beautiful to look at, but turned by thunder." If she
were going away, Charles reminded her, there were a number of things
to be discussed and closed. And she told Charles how a Cuban,
ostensibly attached to the national party, but in reality a Spanish
secret agent, had been sent into Camagueey. His name was Rimblas.
Charles Abbott repeated that, and memorized such characteristics as La
Clavel knew. There was an indefinite stir at the door, a short knock,
and he moved to the window as Santacilla entered unceremoniously.
The Spaniard was a model of politeness, of consideration, and he
listened, seated with his hands folded about the head of his officer's
cane, to La Clavel's determination to go to South America. It was an
excellent plan, he agreed; they would welcome her rapturously in
Buenos Aires; but hadn't she put off her intention a little too long?
It was on account of the climate, the season, he hastened to add.
Although, of course, they would open the opera house for her, the
smart world would come in from their estancias.
"But what will our young American do?" he demanded. "How will he live
without his delight? But perhaps he is going to the Argentine with
you. He will have a busy time, and a hatful of challenges there, where
beauty is appreciated to the full."
Charles said, with an appearance of sullenness, that he hadn't been
invited to go farther south; and Santacilla replied that, as a matter
of fact, it might be necessary for him to remain, perhaps forever, in
Havana. He spoke cheerfully, gazing amiably upon them, but a vague
quality of his bearing, his voice, was disturbing, mocking. His words
had the air of an underlying meaning different from their sound. An
uneasiness, as well, was communicated to La Clavel: she watched
Santacilla with an indirect puzzled gaze.
"Jobaba has gone," she announced abruptly.
The trace of a smile hovered about the officer's expression of regret.
"A personable clip of hell," was his opinion of the strayed maid. "Do
you remember the major who composed music?" he addressed La Clavel.
"Well, he was always a little touched in the brain, and he caught this
negro hysteria, he became a brujos. He'd come home in the morning with
his body marked in yellow chalk, and wrung out like a boatman's
sponge; and he let drop a fact or two about your Jobaba screaming to
an African drum rubbed with the fingers. In that state, he said, a
great deal that was curious and valuable could be dragged from her. We
encouraged his madness, at the Cabanas, for what it brought us. But it
was unfortunate for him--he ties bright rags about his ankles and
mumbles, when he thinks he is alone."
Charles Abbott's mind, sifting all that the other said, was abnormally
active, sharp. Something, he couldn't quite grasp what, was acutely,
threateningly, wrong. He had a sense of impending danger, a
premonition of dashing sound, of discord. And, whatever developed, he
must meet it, subdue and conquer it. Ceaza y Santacilla, he saw, was
not visibly armed; but, probably, he would carry a small pistol. The
one his father had given him was in Charles' pocket. The difficulty
was that, in the event of a disturbance, no matter what the outcome
here might happen to be, the dancer and he would bear the weight of
any Spanish fury. And it was no part of his intention to be cut in
half by bullets behind a fortress wall.
He could only delay, discover as soon as possible what was behind
Santacilla's deceiving patience and good humor. Upon that he would
have to act without hesitation and with no chance of failure. The
regiment should, the dancer complained, send her maid back to her.
Manners were very much corrupted beyond the western ocean--in Sevilla
the servant would have been dispatched in a bullock cart deep in
roses. That, he answered, reminded him of another procession, a
different cart; but it was more French than Castilian--the tumbril.
He was seated against a wall at a right angle from the door, and
Charles left the vicinity of the window, lounging across the room. La
Clavel said, "I know you so well, Ceaza, what is it; what is it you
are saying and saying without speaking of? Your mind is like a locked
metal box that shows only the flashes on the surface. But you must
open it for us. It seems as though you were threatening me, and that,
you best should realize, is useless."
His flickering eyes rested first on her and then upon Charles Abbott.
"You will never get to South America now," he asserted; "for you are a
conspirator against your King. Since you have shown such a love of
Cuban soil you are to become a part of it forever."
* * * * *
Charles Abbott, now standing by the door, shot in the bolt which
secured it, and, by a fortunate, a chance, twist, broke off the
handle. Santacilla, undisturbed, remained seated, smiling while his
fingers played with the plaited loop of his cane.
"This infatuation," he indicated them with a wave, "while it convinced
Havana, never entirely satisfied me. I have been watching you, Jobaba
has been listening, for days. You were very cunning, but, in the end,
you failed; you were neither skilful nor patient enough. Yet, at the
last, all that you heard were fairy tales--the spy that was sent to
Camagueey, ha!"
La Clavel faced him calmly, but, Charles saw, she was pale. He was
revolving a hundred impractical schemes: they had only one end, the
death of Santacilla, but how that was to be brought about with safety
to Cuba evaded him.
"I am not a traitor in the way you mean," she declared; "what your
conceit never allowed you to note was that, in Spain and here, I have
always detested you; and what I did was the result of that. I struck
at you and not at our country, for the court and church and army are
no longer our strength--if we still have any except the knife and
cord--but our weakness."
"Fools," he asserted, unmoved.
"And now you are the fool," she added.
"No, you are wrong; I am only enjoying myself before the show is over.
I wanted to see you, and your young devotee, twist and turn before the
fact of death. I have killed, and seen executed, a number of people,
men and women; but I was still curious--a great dancer and a rich
young American. That is an unusual day."
It was best, Charles Abbott decided, to bring about as much as
possible with no more delay; the prime necessary act accomplished,
they could face the problems of the immediate future steadily. He
quietly produced his pistol and levelled it. The dry click which alone
followed the pulling of the trigger made the officer aware of the
attempt upon his life. A dark angry surge invaded his face, and then
receded. "No man will ever kill me," he repeated. "It is my star." A
hand left the cane and produced a small gold whistle.
Charles stared dully at the useless weapon, with its mounting of
mother-of-pearl, which he still held.
"The cartridges have been too long in their barrels," Santacilla
explained; "they have dried and shifted. You should have greased them
every week."
La Clavel stood, lost in thought, like a woman in a dream. Her hair,
over which she had spent such time and curses, was an elaborate
silhouette against the light. "Ceaza, Ceaza," she implored, going to
him, "you must let me go and dance in Buenos Aires, they have never
seen me there, it is necessary to my career." She was close beside
him, when he rose suddenly, pushing the chair between them.
"You Andalusian devil!" he cried, and put the whistle to his lips.
Before he could blow, the dancer had flung herself on him, with an arm
bound about his neck, a hand dragging at his throat. The whistle fell,
the chair was brushed aside, and the man and woman, in a straining
desperate grip, swayed into the middle of the floor.
Charles, driven by an inherited instinct to protect La Clavel, to
replace her in such a struggle, caught at either of the locked
shoulders; but, whirling in the passion of their strife, they struck
him aside. He made another effort to pull Santacilla to the floor,
without success; and then, with a small stout chair in his hands, he
waited for an opportunity to bring it crashing on the officer's head.
He was appalled by the fury of the woman silently trying to choke her
enemy; her other hand, grasping the thin glimmer of the knife always
convenient in her stocking, the officer held away from them. Her years
of dancing, her early hardening life in the mountains, had given her a
strength and litheness now tearing at the weight, the masculinity, of
Santacilla. He was trying, in vain, to break her wrist, to close his
fingers into her throat; and, bending, the fragility of her clothes
ripped across her sinuous back. Shifting and evading the thrust of his
power, she was sending the blood in purple waves over his neck and
thick cheeks. Neither of them cried out, spoke; there was only the
sound of hoarse breathing, inarticulate expressions of unendurable
strain. Charles Abbott, raising, holding poised, the chair, and
lowering it, was choked with the grappling horror before him.
La Clavel's face was as blanched as the officer's was dark, her eyes
were wide-open and set, as though she were in a galvanic trance. Again
and again Santacilla tried to tear away her arms, to release himself
from the constriction at his neck. His fingers dug red furrows through
her flesh, they tormented and outraged her. A palm closed upon her
countenance, and blood ran from under it. But there was no weakening
of her force, no slackening in her superb body. She seemed curiously
impersonal; robbed of all traits of women; she was like a symbolical
fate, the figure from a shield, from an emblem, dragging him to
death.
Then, suddenly, in an inadequate muffled voice burdened with a
shuddering echo of fear, he cried for her to release him. It was so
unexpected, he became so inexplicably limp, that La Clavel backed away
instinctively. Charles started forward, the chair lifted high; but he
was stopped by the expression, the color, of Ceazy Santacilla's face.
The officer turned, with his hands at his throat, toward the window.
He took an uncertain step, and then stood wavering, strangely
helpless, pathetically stricken.
"The air," he whispered; "hot as wine." He pitched abruptly face
forward upon the floor.
La Clavel tried to speak against the labored heaving of her breast,
but what she attempted to say was unintelligible. Charles, slipping
back the broken bolt with a finger in its orifice, listened intently
at the door. The Hotel St. Louis was wrapped undisturbed in its
siesta; no alarm had been created. Santacilla lay as he had fallen, an
arm loosely outspread, a leg doubled unnaturally under its fellow. He
bore the laxness, the emptiness, of death. He had spoken truly that it
wasn't in his star to be killed by a man. Finding that he was still
holding the chair, Charles put it softly down. "Well," he said, "the
revolution is through with him."
He glanced suddenly at La Clavel. She was drooping, disheveled and
hideous; her hair lay on her bare shoulders in coarse strands; her
face was swollen with bruises. Now, he realized, she would never see
the Argentine; she would never again hear the shouted oles that
greeted, rewarded, the brilliancy of her jota. His thoughts shifted to
Cuba and himself--if it were a crime of passion that had been
committed in her room, the cause, there, would be freed from
suspicion. He had, as customary, come directly, unostentatiously, to
her room, and he was certain that he had not been observed. A duty,
hard in the extreme, was before him.
"Why did you bring about Santacilla's death?" he demanded. She gazed
at him dully, uncomprehendingly. "It was because he was jealous," he
proceeded; "you must hold to that." She nodded, dazed. "When they come
into the room and find him you must show what he did to you. And,
after all, you didn't kill him. Perhaps that will save you," his voice
was without conviction. "They won't believe you, and they may try
measures to get at the truth; but you will be faithful. You will keep
your secret, and--and I must go. I shall ask for you downstairs, make
them send up a servant, and shout as loudly as any."
She held up her battered countenance dumbly and, with a feeling of
transcendent reverence, he kissed her cut lips. Thrown across the end
of the bed, the shawl she had danced in, blazing with gay color, cast
the reflection of its carmines and yellows on the calcimined wall. It
was like a burst of the music which accompanied her dancing. The
castanets lay on the floor. The blessed saint of Cuban independence!
Then the caution that had become a part of his necessity rode
uppermost: he proceeded silently to the door, and, closing it behind
him, went, meeting no one, to the ground floor, where he pulled
irritably at the wire hanging from a bell under the ceiling. The raw
jangle brought a servant, a rosy-cheeked Gallego boy, heavy with
sleep, who went stumbling up the stairs on Charles' errand.
* * * * *
In his own room a wave of physical horror swept over Charles Abbott;
he was obliged to sit down, and the chair, the floor, seemed to rock
at the giddy sickness of the memory of Santacilla, stumbling with a
wine-colored face toward the window in a vain gasping for air, for
life. He recovered slowly: notwithstanding the death of Tirso
Labrador, the wasted shape of Andres' brother, all the tragedies he
had heard reported, it was not until now that he realized the entire
grimness of the undertaking against Spain. The last possibility of the
spectacular departed, leaving him with a new sense of the imminence of
death. He had considered this, under certain circumstances welcoming
it, or dismissing it with a creditable calmness, many times before;
but then his attitude had been softened by the detachment, the
impersonality, of his view. But at last the feeling of death was
tangibly at his own throat; not today, nor tomorrow, probably; but
inescapably. Well, he assured himself, he wouldn't, at that intense
moment, fail an inner necessity; but his understanding gave him an
additional feeling of the accidental aspects of life and of the Cuban
revolution.
Until then he had, sub-consciously, except for one short depression,
been certain of the ultimate triumph of right; he had thought it must
succeed through its mere rightness; and he had pictured justice as a
condition dropped beneficently from the clouds, wrought with the
thunder of angels' wings. But accomplishment on earth, with men, he
now saw, was neither safe, easy nor assured. It was the result of
bitter struggle, a strife open to the most appalling mischances. A
necessity of the spirit, it must be executed in the flesh, and flesh
was a treacherous, unstable substance; it was capable not only of
traitorous betrayals, but equally of honest, and no less fatal,
failures. With this in his thoughts he went to the door, in answer to
a knock, and received a heavy carefully tied parcel.
He opened it, and, dripping in dazzling color from the wrapping paper,
was La Clavel's manton, the one in which he had first seen her
insolently dancing the jota. Charles, with a stirred heart, searched
carefully for a note, a scrap of revealing paper; but there was none.
She had sent it to him silently, before she had been taken away, in a
sentiment the delicacy of which deeply moved him. He laid the shawl
over the bed, where its cruel brilliancy filled the white-walled room,
darkened against the heat, with flashes of magenta and orange and
burning blue. La Clavel had worn it dancing, where it emphasized her
grace and perversity and stark passion; it had been, in Charles
Abbott's mind, synonymous with her, with the vision she created; but,
suddenly, it lost that significance, and he saw it as the revealed
outspread pattern of his own existence.
The shawl was a map, a representation, of the country of the spirit
through which he passed; such emotions, such heat, and such golden
roses, all had been, were, his against that background of perilous
endeavor. It seemed to float up from the bed and to reach from coast
to coast, from end to end, of Cuba; its flowers took root and grew,
casting about splendor and perfume; the blue widened into the sky, the
tenderness of the clasping sea; the dark greens were the shadows of
the great ceiba trees, the gloom of the jungles, the massed royal
palms of the plains. And not only was it the setting, the country, its
violent dissonances became cries, victorious or hopeless, the sweep of
reddened swords, the explosions of muskets. There was the blood that
had welled into the Laurel Ditch of Cabanas; and, as well, the sultry
mysterious presence of Africa in the West--the buzzing madness of the
music of the danzon, the hysterics of brujeria.
Charles, at the heart of this, stood enveloped, surrounded, by a drama
like the sharp clash of cymbals. It was easy to be overwhelmed,
strangled, blinded, by the savage color; briefly to be obliterated.
That possibility had been, lately, very much in his mind; and he
wondered, against all his recent change, if, in the surrender of his
idealism, he had lost his amulet, his safety. While he had, to a large
extent, solved, for himself, the philosophy of conduct, cleared the
motives of his acts, a great deal was inexplicable still. He saw,
dimly, that there could be little hope of justice on any island except
as the projection, the replica, of a fundamental universal integrity
of justice. Perfection like that couldn't begin on the rim of being
and extend inward; it must be at the center of all life, obscured,
delayed, but, in an end not computable in the span of human existence,
certain and inevitable. Charles Abbott now had the feeling that,
parallel with the maintaining of his grasp on materialism, his
recognition of the means at his hand, there should be an allegiance to
a supremacy of the immeasurable whole.