him that he was so strict in facing for others. His absorption
wouldn't, as an infatuation, continue; or, rather, it could not have
lasted ... long. But already it had been long enough to finish, to
kill, Andres. Charles rose uncontrollably to his feet; he would save
his friend from the menace of the whole Spanish army. But de Vaca,
whose every accent carried conviction, had been explicit: he
particularly would not have spoken under any other circumstance. He
had, in reality, been tremendously flattering in depending to such a
degree on Charles' coolness and intellect. Gaspar de Vaca would have
taken no interest in a sentimentalist. The officer without question
had found in Charles Abbott a strain of character, a resolution, which
he understood, approved; to a certain extent built on. He had, in
effect, concluded that Charles and himself would act similarly in
similar positions.
It was, Charles decided, at an end; he must go on as he had begun. A
strange numb species of calm settled over him. The vast crowded floor,
the boxes on either hand, sweeping tier on tier to the far hidden
ceiling, surrounding the immense chandelier glittering with crystal
lustres, were all removed, distant, from him. The Tacon Theatre took
on the appearance of a limitless pit into which all human life had
been poured, arbitrarily thrown together, and, in the semblance of
masquerading gaiety, made to whirl in a time that had in its measure
the rattle of bones, a drumming on skulls. This conception sickened
him, he could, he felt, no longer breathe in a closeness which he
imagined as fetid; and Charles realized that, at least, there was no
need for him to remain. Indeed, it would be better in every way to
avoid the impending, the immediate, catastrophe.
With a hasty incoherent remark he secured his hat and left the box.
Outside, in the bare corridor, he paused and his lips automatically
formed the name Andres Escobar. In a flash he saw the gathering
disintegration of the Escobar family--Vincente dead, his body
dishonored; Narcisa, ineffable, flower-like, sacrificed to dull
ineptitude; Domingo, who had been so cheerfully round, furrowed with
care, his spirit dead before his body; Carmita sorrowing; and Andres,
Andres the beautiful, the young and proud, betrayed, murdered in a
brawl at a negro dance. What disaster! And where, in the power of
accomplishment, they had failed, where, fatally, they had been
vulnerable, was at their hearts, in their love each for the other, or
in the fallibility of such an emotion as Andres felt for Pilar. He,
Charles Abbott, must keep free from that entanglement. This
reassurance, however, was not new; all the while it had supported
him.
He made his way down the broad shallow steps, passing extraordinary
figures--men black and twisted like the carvings of roots in the garb
of holiday minstrels; women coffee-colored and lovely like Jobaba,
their faces pearly with rice powder, in yellow satin or black or raw
purple, their feet in high-heeled white kid slippers. Where they stood
in his way he brushed them unceremoniously, hastily, aside, and he was
followed by low threatening murmurs, witless laughter. A man, loyal to
the Cuban cause, attempted to stop him, to repeat something which, he
assured Charles, was of grave weight; but he went on heedlessly.
His passage became, against his reasoning mind, a flight; and he
cursed, with an unbalanced rage, in a minor frenzy, when he saw that
he would have to walk through a greater part of the body of the
theatre before he could escape. The dancers had, momentarily, thinned
out, and he went directly across the floor. There was a flame before
his eye, the illusion of a shifting screen of blood; and he found
himself facing Pilar de Lima and Andres; beyond, the Spanish officer,
tall and lank and young, was peering at them with an aggressive
spite. Charles turned aside, avoiding the tableau. Then he heard
Andres' exasperated voice ordering the girl to come with him to the
promenade. Instead of that her glimmering eyes, with lights like the
reflection of polished green stones, evading Andres, sought and found
the officer.
Charles Abbott's legs were paralysed, he was held stationary, as
though he were helpless in a dream. His heart pounded and burned, and
a great strangling impulse shook him like a flag in the wind.
"Andres!" he cried, "Andres, let her go, she is nothing! Quickly,
before it is too late. Remember--" There was a surging concentration
so rapid that Charles saw it as a constricting menace rather than the
offensive of a group of men. Pilar stooped, her hand at her knee.
Charles threw an arm about Andres, but he was dragged, struggling,
away. She was icy in the hell of the manton. There was a suspension of
breathing, of sound, through which a fragile hand with a knife
searched and searched. Then a shocking blow fell on Charles Abbott's
head and the Tacon Theatre rocked and collapsed in darkness.
* * * * *
The sharp closing of a door brought him, a man advanced in middle age,
abruptly to his feet. He was confused, and swayed dizzily, with
out-stretched arms as though he were grasping vainly for the
dissolving fragments of a shining mirage of youth. They left him,
forever, and he stood regaining his strayed sense of immediacy. He was
surprisingly weary, in a gloom made evident by the indirect
illumination of an arc light across and farther up the street.
Fumbling over the wall he encountered the light switch, and flooded
his small drawing-room with brilliance. The clock on the mantle,
crowned by an eagle with lifted gilded wings, pointed to the first
quarter past eleven: when he had sunk into his abstraction from the
present, wandered back into the sunlight of Havana and his days of
promise, it had been no more than late afternoon; and now Mrs. Vauxn
and her daughter, his neighbors, had returned from their dinner
engagement. He wondered, momentarily, why that hour and ceremony had
passed unattended for him, and then recalled that Bruton and his wife,
who kept his house, had gone to the funeral of a relative, leaving on
the dining-room table, carefully covered, some cuts of cold meat, a
salad of lettuce, bran bread and fresh butter, and the coffee
percolator with its attachment for a plug in the floor.
To the rest, he had faithfully told Mrs. Bruton, who was severe with
him, he'd attend. In place of that he had wandered into an amazing
memory of his beginning manhood. The beginning, he told himself, and,
in many ways the end--since then he had done little or nothing. After
the ignominy of his deportation from Cuba--impending satisfactory
negotiations between the United States and Spain, he gathered later,
had preserved him from the dignity of political martyrdom--a drabness
of life had caught him from which he could perceive no escape. Not, he
was bound to add, that he had actively looked for one. No, his
participation in further events had been interfered with by a doubt,
his life had been drawn into an endless question. If he had walked
steadily past Andres Escobar, left him to a murder which, after all,
he, Charles Abbott, had been powerless to stop, would he have gone on
to the triumph of his ideal?
In addition to this there was the eternal speculation over the
relation, in human destiny, of the heart to the head--which, in the
end, would, must, triumph? There was no necessity in his final
philosophy for the optimism, where men are concerned, that had been
his first stay. He wasn't so sure now--but was he certain of
anything?--of the coming victory of right, of the spreading, from land
to land, of freedom. Did life reach upward or down, or was it merely
the circling of a carrousel, the whirling of the danzon? Nothing, for
him, could be settled, definite. He was inclined to the belief that
the blow of the scabbard on his head.... That, however, like the rest,
was indeterminate. He came back eternally to the same query--had he,
as for so long, so wearily, he had insisted to himself, failed, proved
weak for the contentions of existence on a positive plane? Had he
become a part, a member, of the nameless, the individually impotent,
throng? His sympathies were, by birth, aristocratic rather than
humane; he preferred strength to acquiescence; but there were times
now, perhaps, when he was aging, when there was a relief in sinking
into the sea of humility.
Then his thoughts centered again on Howard Gage; who, before leaving
that afternoon, had unpleasantly impressed Charles Abbott by his
inelasticity, the fixity of his gaze upon the ground. Howard had been
involved in a war of a magnitude that swamped every vestige of the
long-sustained Cuban struggle. And he admitted his relation to this
had been one of bitter necessity:
"I had to go, we all did," Howard Gage had said. "There wasn't any
music about it, any romance. It had to be done, that was all, and it
was. Don't expect me to be poetic."
Yes, the youth of today were, to Charles' way of thinking, badly off.
Anyone who could not be poetic, who wouldn't be if he had the chance,
was unfortunate, limited, cramped. Visions, ideals, were indispensable
for youth. Why, damn it, love was dependent on dreams, unreality. He
had never known it; but he was able to appreciate what it might be in
a man's life. He no longer scorned love, or the woman he was able to
imagine--a tender loveliness never out of a slightly formal beauty.
For her the service parts of the house would have no existence; and,
strangely, he gave no consideration to children.
It wasn't that he minded loneliness; that was not an unmixed evil,
especially for a man whose existence was chiefly spun from memories,
speculations, and conditioned by the knowledge that he had had the
best of life, its fullest measure, at the beginning. He had never
again seen a woman like La Clavel, a friend who could compare with
Andres, wickedness such as Pilar's, days and players as brilliant as
those of Havana before, well--before he had passed fifty. If the trade
winds still blew, tempering the magnificence of the Cuban nights, they
no longer blew for him. But Havana, as well, had changed.
The piano next door took up, where it had been dropped, the jota from
Liszt's Rhapsody Espagnol. It rippled and sang for a moment and then
ended definitely for the night. Other dancers, Charles reasonably
supposed, continued the passionate art of that lyric passage; he read
of them, coming from Spain to the United States for no other purpose.
He had no doubt about their capability, and no wish to see them. They
would do for Howard Gage. What if he, instead of Charles Abbott, had
been at the Tacon Theatre the night Andres had died? That was an
interesting variation of the old question--what, in his predicament,
would Howard Gage have done? Walked away, probably, holding his
purpose undamaged! But Andres could never have loved Howard Gage;
Andres, for his attachment, required warmth, intensity, the ornamental
forms of honor; poetry, briefly. That lost romantic time, that day in
immaculate white linen with a spray of mimosa in its buttonhole!
There were some flowers, Charles recalled, standing on the table in
the hall, dahlias; and he walked out and drew one into the lapel of
his coat. It was without scent, just as, now, life was unscented; yet,
surveying himself in the mirror over the vase, he saw that the
sombreness of his attire was lightened by the spot of red. Nothing,
though, could give vividness to his countenance, that was dry and
dull, scored with lines that resembled traces of dust. The moustache
across his upper lip was faded and brittle. It was of no account; if
he had lacked ultimately the courage, the stamina, to face and command
life, he was serene at the threat of death.
Suddenly hungry, he went into the dining-room and removed the napkins,
turned the electricity into the percolator. Then, with a key from
under the edge of the cloth on a console-table, he opened a door of
the sideboard, and produced a tall dark bottle of Marquis de Riscal
wine, and methodically drew the cork. Charles Abbott wiped the glass
throat and, seated, poured out a goblet full of the translucent
crimson liquid. It brought a slight flush to his cheeks, a light in
his eyes, and the shadow of a vital humor, a past challenge, to his
lips. He had lifted many toasts in that vintage, his glass striking
with a clear vibration against other eagerly held glasses. More often
than not they--Tirso, the guardsman in statue, Remigio, Jaime, Andres
and himself--had drunk to La Clavel. He drank to her, probably the
sole repository of her memory, her splendor, on earth, now. "La
Clavel," he said her name aloud. And then, "Andres."
A sharp gladness seized him that Andres had, almost at the last, heard
his voice, his shouted warning and apprehension and love. If liberty,
justice, were to come, one life, two, could make no difference; a
hundred years, a hundred hundred, were small measures of time. And if
all were doomed, impossible, open to the knife of a fateful Pilar,
why, then, they had had their companionship, their warmth, a period of
unalloyed fidelity to a need that broke ideals like reeds. Perhaps
what they had found was, after all, within them, that for which they
had swept the sky.
THE END
* * * * *