The electric globe in the floor lamp was yellow; it was nearly burned

out and would have to be replaced. This had been his special corner,

the most comfortable in the pen. But the pig, he remembered, had

been slaughtered last week; and he wondered if the parallel he

had established would hold true to the end. In the main aspect, he

concluded, yes. But the pig had died without experiencing what was,

undoubtedly, both the fundamental duty and recompense of living. The

pig, happily or unhappily, had remained in ignorance of Cytherea and the

delights of love; but, perhaps, if only for the moment, he had better

call that passion; it was a word of clearer, more exact, definition.

He left the house walking, carrying his bag up the hill into Eastlake:

a train left for the city at eleven-fifty-eight. Lee turned, beyond his

property, and saw the light burning in what had been his and Fanny's

room; the rest of the house, except for the glimmer below, was dark.

The winter night was encrusted with stars. A piercing regret seized

him--that he was past the middle of forty and not in the early twenties.

To be young and to know Savina! To be young and free. To be young ...

the increasing rapidity with which he went forward had the aspect of an

endeavor to waste no more precious time.

V

The brief level voice of Savina Grove arranging over the telephone

an hour, very late in the afternoon, for him to call, gave Lee a

comparatively long time in which to examine his feelings, particularly

in connection with Savina. His state of mind, his intentions, he

realized, should be clear for the moment when he saw her. In general

they were; but the particulars, the details of any probable immediate

action, evaded him. He should have to consult her about them. What he

most firmly grasped of all was that he couldn't--what, in reality, he

breathed to himself was they--remain in New York. The comparatively

orderly and delayed legal arrangement projected by the Morrises and Mina

Raff seemed to have no application to the impetuosity of the situation

before him. However, he was advancing at a speed, to a position, for

which there was no warrant. None at all. Perhaps Savina, satisfied by

the one occasion which--he had been so careful to insist--must be the

last, would regard him as merely importunate.

Strictly held to discretion by the fact of Fanny, Savina might have

found him then--more available than when free--only the acceptable model

of an indiscreet man. Yet, he reminded himself, he hadn't left Eastlake,

broken wide open his home, on account of Savina. This, he again

insisted, would have happened independently of her; his life in Eastlake

had broken up of its own accord; its elements had been too tenuous for

the withstanding any longer of the stress of existence. But, he was

forced to add, the collapse had been hastened by his knowledge of

Savina. And this brought him to the examination of what, at bottom, she

meant to him. What was her significance, her bulk, in his life?

That could be approached only through an understanding of his feeling

for her, what it was now and what it might become; not conspicuously

easy of comprehension. Lee tried the old, the long inaccurately used,

word, love. He asked himself the question squarely--did he love Savina?

Damned if he knew! He might reply to that, he thought ruefully, if he

grasped what love was, what the blasted phrase meant. As it was, it

seemed to Lee, a dictionary of synonyms would be helpless to make all

its varied significances distinct. He tried a simpler approach--did he

want to be with Savina more than with anyone else? At last he had put

a question to himself that he could answer: he most assuredly preferred

being with Savina to anyone else he knew. But that alone would not have

taken him to her.

A simple desire on his part, naive like a daisy, could not have

overthrown the structure of his being. Yet the connection between the

two, the woman and the event, was undeniable, his impulse to go to her

now irresistible. That last word, as fully as any, expressed what lately

had happened to him. He was considering the occurrences logically while

the fact was that logic hadn't been touched on, summoned, once. He had

moved emotionally and not intellectually; he hadn't known, from hour

to hour, in what direction he would proceed. Certainly nothing could be

said in his defense on the score of common sense; that, though, didn't

disturb him; at a time when he might have been said to rely on it,

common sense had failed him utterly. He had thrown that over his

shoulder. Nor was he searching for an exterior justification of his

present anomalous position, for, briefly, an excuse; excuses were

the furthest of all things from his mind. The truth was that he was

decidedly exhilarated, as though he had left the hard narrow road for a

gallop over the green. He was merely dwelling on, analyzing, the present

as it was becoming the newly promising, the opening, future.

But he did need to understand--for an attitude, a choice of speech, if

nothing else--his feeling for Savina. It consisted principally in the

tyrannical desire to be with her, to sink in the immeasurable depths

of her passion, and there lose all consciousness of the trivial mundane

world. That, Lee felt, given the rest, the fact that he was here as he

was, was sufficient; but--again still--he had had no voice in it.

The passion had inundated him in the manner of an incoming tide and

a low-water rock. Abruptly, after a certain misleading appearance of

hesitation on the part of the waves, he had gone under. Well, it was

very pleasant. In his case the celebrated maxims were wrong.

He left this, for the moment, and returned to what, actually, lay ahead

of him. Would Savina go away with him, leave the correct William, the

safety of their New York house in the style of eighteen-eighty? Lee

considered in her two impulses, not alike--her overwhelming passion,

herself generally; and her admission, no, cry, that she loved him,

or the special part he had in her. It rather looked as though he'd be

successful. It did for a fact. He had not been idle through all the day,

but had drawn from the Harriman Bank twenty thousand dollars. So

much had not been necessary; it was very bad business to segregate in

idleness such a sum of money now; but he enjoyed the extravagance of it.

Prudence, frugality, was no longer a factor in his affairs.

His present personal liberty, more complete than it had ever

been before--than, he added lightly, it might ever be again--was

astonishingly soothing. Sitting comfortably in a room in his customary

hotel, there wasn't a pressure that could be brought to bear on him. It

was now twenty minutes past four, he was to go to Savina at a quarter to

six, and until then there was nothing, nothing, to force him this way

or that: no directors' meetings, gabbling East-lake figures,

responsibility, housewife or children. He hadn't realized the extent to

which he had been surrounded and confined, the imponderable mass of what

he had not only been indifferent to but actually disliked. He could lie

down--he had been up the entire past night--and be called in an hour;

he could sit as he was, in an unbuttoned waistcoat with his legs

comfortably spread out; he could motor or walk on Fifth Avenue; smoke;

drink--all in an inviolable security of being.

Or, going back to that moment when he had, so mistakenly, turned aside

from visionary promptings to a solid comfortable career, he might--what

was it?--write. Perhaps his sharp regret at the loss of his youth was

premature, youth itself comparatively unimportant. But no, that would

involve him in fresh distasteful efforts, imperceptibly it would build

up a whole new world of responsibilities: writing would be arduous,

editors captious, and articles, stories, books, tie him back again to

all that from which he had so miraculously escaped. Savina would be

enough. What a beautiful body, so unexpectedly full, she had; how

astounding, intoxicating, was the difference between what she seemed to

be and what she was. Lee Randon thought with amused pity of the files

of men who must have passed by her, with the most considerate bows, in

ignorance of the inner truth.

That discovery, while, naturally, it had not been entirely reserved

for him, had accumulated in a supreme delight, been kept back, like the

best of all presents, for the last. He was glad that it wasn't too

late for him to enjoy it. Here, suddenly, intervening in the midst of

a prosaic drudgery, a tepid and meaningless period, was a magnificent

relief. By God, would he take advantage of it! Would he! There was a

knock at the door, and the hotel valet hung a freshly pressed suit

in the closet; the shoes into which he intended to change were in a

perfection of readiness; laid out were a heavy blue silk shirt and a

dull yellow tie. Lee got these various carefully selected articles of

dress slowly, exactly, on. His pearl pin Fanny had given him! Well, it

was a good pearl, selected personally by a celebrated dealer; and Lee

was obliged to her, nothing more. He lighted a cigarette, collected his

hat and gloves, his overcoat and stick, and descended in the elevator in

a mood of unrestrained enjoyment.

The door attendant, who knew him, whistled for a taxi-cab, commenting

lightly on the visible accident to his jaw. But, in spite of it, Lee had

an appearance, as he phrased it, of good luck. The world, he said, was

evidently in favor of Mr. Randon. The latter agreed that it had such a

look. He was positively jovial. He dismissed the cab before the familiar

entrance on East Sixty-sixth Street, and was admitted immediately: the

servant caught his coat, and he went into the drawing-room. There had

been, he saw, a tea; the confusion lingering from a crowd was evident;

the cups, on all the available surfaces, had not been removed; in a

corner were the skeleton-like iron music racks of a small orchestra;

ash trays were overflowing; and a sealskin muff, with a bunch of violets

pinned to it, had been left.

Savina had gone upstairs, but she would be down at once. Lee was turned

away from the door when she entered; she was wearing a cloth dress of

dull red--hadn't he heard it called Cuba color?--with a heavy girdle of

grotesque intertwined silver figures. With a single glance behind her

she swept forward into Lee's arms, her mouth held up to his.

* * * * *

Listening closely to all that he had to say, she sat with her

hands quietly folded on crossed knees. Perhaps twice she nodded,

comprehendingly. “And so,” he ended, “that is what has occurred. We are

not to blame ourselves too much, as I've explained; the thing happened

within itself, died of its own accord. But the past doesn't need our

attention now. The future is the thing. What is it going to be? What,”

he hesitated, “can we make it? Maybe everything, or nothing.”

“Are you leaving that for me to decide?” she asked.

“To a great extent I have to; I don't want to appear to take so much for

granted. And then, only you can measure what I have to offer. I believe

what I have done is considered serious, if not ruinous; but that I can't

help thinking is exaggerated. I haven't been struck down yet. I don't,

candidly, now, expect to be. You ought to come to this through your

head, and not the heart, which I'd naturally prefer you to use. What,

in fact, I am asking you is to go away with me, to live with me. I shall

not, and you couldn't, very well, return. It's quite final, in other

words. I must find out, too, if the irregularity upsets you. That need

only be temporary. Grove and Fanny, I am sure, wouldn't persist in being

disagreeable. But, if they did, we'd have to face that as well, the

consequences of my--my impatience.

“No, don't answer so quickly. Do you know me, are you sure you'd be

happy, satisfied, with me? I have some money, not a great deal for

myself now; I should say fifteen thousand dollars a year. Fanny, very

rightfully--for herself and the children--will get most of what I have.

And then, are you wedded, if not to your individual life here, to New

York? We should have to go away to some place rather vague--”

“Cuba,” she broke in.

The irony of that suggestion carried him back to the many vainly

projected trips there with Fanny. His brother was in Cuba, it was true;

but that might turn out excellently: Daniel would be able to help

them in the difficult readjustments to follow. He was intelligent,

unprejudiced and calm and, Lee added, remote from the values, the

ponderous authority, of a northern hypocritical society. Then he forgot

that in the realization that Savina was going away with him, that

she was to be his, not for a solitary stolen night, but for years ...

openly, completely. He lost his self control and kissed her, heedless

of the open doors. Now she was cooler than Lee, and pushed him away.

“William will be in at any minute,” she explained:

“When shall we leave?”

“We might take a train tonight for Washington, since we'll need

passports and I have to have an income tax receipt, and we can manage

all that best there. Then Key West, Havana, anywhere. We will hope

to get off without trouble; but, if Grove interferes, accept the

consequences as they come.”

“Very well.” Savina grew still quieter as the march of events became

headlong. “I can live without a maid for a while. Tonight I won't dress

for dinner, this will do very nicely for the train; and come as soon

after as I can pack a bag. There will be literally nothing in it; my

summer things are all out of reach. Washington will be convenient for

me, too. Unless you want to see William again--” She rose.

“Not particularly,” he acknowledged; “though I wouldn't drive around

the city to avoid him. Somehow--I may be blind--I can't think that I am

doing him an infamous wrong: that he lost you proves that. Why, under

the circumstances, should you, anyone, stay? I don't feel a particle

immoral, or even devilish. It's all so sensible and balanced and

superior. No, no, let William watch out for himself; his club, he's so

devoted to, won't fail him. Fanny and he will have their whole worlds to

sympathize with their injury. We don't need sympathy.”

Lee walked back to the hotel, the pig-skin wrapped walking stick

swinging from an arm, his bearing confident and relaxed. He stopped at

the desk for a conference with the porter--a basket of fruit from the

restaurant, and, if procurable regularly or irregularly, a drawing-room

on the Washington train. Then he went up and closed his bag: he had

time for dinner and several cigars afterwards; he wasn't hungry, but the

ceremony would kill the intervening two hours and more.

The porter found him later and delivered his tickets, including the

check for a drawing-room, secured as irregularly as possible from

the Pullman conductor. There were, it began to seem, to be no minor

annoyances. At a few minutes before ten he was standing, as he had

arranged with Savina, with his bag before the hotel; and, just past

the hour, the cab which held her turned in to the sidewalk. She had two

bags, but one was very small--her toilet things, she explained--and

she was carrying a jewel case. There wasn't a tremor in her voice or

bearing, the slightest indication that they were going farther than

a theatre in the vicinity of Forty-fourth Street. Internally, Lee was

excited, filled with the long strange sense of holiday.

“William went to the club,” Savina told him with a smile edged with

malice; “everything was as usual when he left, but when he gets back

it will be changed. I'm sorry to miss his expression when he reads the

letter I wrote; he won't show it to anyone.”

“That sounds as though you really disliked him,” Lee observed. Then he

remembered the hatred he had felt for Fanny. Matrimony had a brutal hand

for superficial relationships and conventions. He had spoken lightly

but, watching her, he saw the grimness of her passion strike the

animation from her face. The jewel case slid over the softness of her

wrap to the floor, her hand crept under his cuff, clinging to his arm.

Going immediately to their train, they found the fruit in the

drawing-room; the porter stopped to knock at the door and discover

if they were in need of his attendance. They heard dimly the train's

muffled boring under the river and were conscious of the swimming lights

of the Jersey plain, the confused illuminated darkness of cities,

the tranquility of open country, the ringing echo of bridges and

the sustained wail of their locomotive. They were, again, reaching

Washington, close in a taxi-cab; Savina's jewel case again fell

unheeded; and again, after the shortest halt possible, they

were whirling south in a drawing-room where night and day were

indistinguishable one from the other.

On the rear platform of the orange-painted train moving deliberately

along the Florida coast Lee was first aware of the still, saturating

heat; that, in itself, was enough to release him from the winter-like

grip of Eastlake. He lost all sense of time, of hurry, of the necessity

of occupation as opposed to idleness, of idleness contrasted with sleep.

The promise of satiation, of inevitability, steeped his being in a

pleasant lethargy. It was the same to him if they moved or stopped,

whether they arrived at the next destination or remained forever in a

sandy monotony of tomato fields or by a slow pass of water cutting the

harshness of palmettos. On the viaducts he gazed with half-closed eyes

across the sapphire and emerald green and purple water; or, directly

under him, he looked down incuriously into a tide so clear that it

seemed no more than a breath ruffling the sand beneath.

Savina, who had discarded cloth for dull white linen--she wished, she

explained, to make the transition as sharply as possible--was more

alertly interested in their constantly shifting surroundings; they were

significant to her as the milestones of her incredible escape. On the

steamer for Havana, marking their effects deposited in a cabin with a

double iron bed and unpleasantly ubiquitous basins, she explained to Lee

that she never got seasick; but he might have gathered that, she pointed

out, by her willingness to undertake Cuba. Admitting that he had missed

this feminine subtlety, he arranged two deck chairs in an advantageous

angle, and they sat enveloped in a mildness which, heavy with the odor

of water-soaked wood, was untroubled by any wind. When the steamer left

its pier Savina put a hand inside one of his. The harbor lights dropped,

pair by pair, back into the night; the vibration of the propeller

became a sub-conscious murmur; over the placid water astern a rippling

phosphorescence was stirred and subsided. A motion, increasing by

imperceptible degrees, affected the deck; there was a rise and fall,

regular and sleep-impelling: the uneasiness of the Gulf Stream. Havana

floated into their waking vision, a city of white marble set in lustrous

green, profound indigo, against the rosy veil of a morning sun.

* * * * *

The fortunate chance that took them to the Inglaterra Hotel--the disdain

of its runner was more persuasive than the clamor of all the others who

had boarded the steamer--found them a room, they soon discovered, in

what was at once the most desirable and the most unlikely place. They

might have the chamber until Tuesday, Lee was told, in an English

inflected with the tonal gravity of Spain. It was hardly past eight in

the morning, an awkward hour to arrive newly at a city, he thought,

as they were carried up in the elevator. The details of the floor, the

hall, they crossed, engaged his interest; not alone for the height of

the ceiling, which was excessive, but because of the palms, the pointed

Moorish arches filled with green painted wood lattices; the totality of

an effect different from anything else he had seen.

Their room, with the lift of the ceiling emphasized by the confined

space, was more engaging still: tall slatted doors opened on an iron

railed balcony, the bath-room was like a tunnel on end, and the floor an

expanse of polished mosaic in a pattern of yellow and grey. Lee walked

out on the balcony; directly below and across a narrow paved street

was a floridly impressive building obviously for the purpose of varied

assemblages, and on his left a park was laid in concrete walks, royal

palms on towering smooth dull trunks, unfamiliar trees with a graceful

dense foliage, and innumerable stacked iron chairs about the marble

statue of a man with a pointing hand. These details, however, were

slowly gathered from an effect the whole of which was bewilderingly

white, a whiteness intolerably luminous in the dazzling bath of the sun.

It was a scene, a city, Lee recognized, more foreign to his own than

any he knew in western Europe; a difference that existed mainly in the

tropical heat, visible in languorous waves rising from blanched walls

and streets already--so early--fervent. Savina was filled with delight;

a positive color glowed in place of the customary uniform pallor of her

cheeks; she opened her bags with an irresistible youthful energy. “Think

what we have been missing,” she called above the sound of the water

running into the tub; “and what we accepted so long for living. I

suppose the wonderful thing is that we escaped. Lee, do you realize that

almost no one does? They never never get away, but go from one grave,

from one winter, to another. Isn't it strange, when what we did is so

very easy.

“I'd like to tell a hundred people in New York that they could get away

too, unfreeze themselves. When we drove horses I used to be surprised

that they went along so quietly in blinders; they never seemed to learn

that one kick would break into splinters the thing dragging on them.

People are like that, I was and you were, too--in blinders. We've torn

ours off, Lee. Tell me that you are glad.” He was, without reserve.

Tranquilly finding his razors, he was aware of a permeating contentment

in what they had done. It was exactly as Savina had said--the forces

which had held them in a rigorous northern servitude had proved, upon

assault, to be no more than a defense of painted prejudices, the canvas

embrasures of hypocrisy.

“It is astonishing, what so many people put up with,” he agreed; “but

then,” Lee added, in a further understanding, “it isn't so much what you

knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside you. When an

arrangement like ours fails, that, mostly, I suspect, is the cause.

It needs a special sort of fitness. Take the hundred people you spoke

of--I'd be willing to bet not five of them could get away from the past,

or put out of their minds what they are brought up on. Privately they

would think they were wicked, damned, or some such truck; and, sure

enough, that alone would finish them.”

“I haven't a speck of that,” Savina admitted serenely; “I am happy.

And I don't even have to ignore the thought of your wife and children;

they'll get along just as well, maybe better, without you. William

doesn't need me; he hasn't for a number of years. But we had to have

each other.”

Lee Randon considered this in relation to his feeling that he had not

left Eastlake, Fanny, because of Savina. He was still convinced that

his life had fallen apart of itself; but he began to see that Savina had

been more deeply involved in his act of liberty than he had suspected.

Without her it was probable that he would have continued to the end in

the negative existence of Eastlake; yet no amount of mere assurance that

that was the only admirable, the only permissible, course was valid with

him unless he had a corroborating belief. And all that he might once

have possessed had left him at the final blow dealt by the passion of

Savina and himself.

She had been stronger than the assembled forces of heredity and precept

and experience; her strength was superhuman; it was incredible that her

slender body could hold such an impulse, a fury really, of vitality.

Women must have been like that in earlier ages of humanity; but they

were no longer; their passion had been wasted, spent, or turned aside

into exhausting by-paths of sensation. He had finished shaving and, when

they were dressed, they went down to breakfast in a dining-room with

a marble floor and walls lustrous with bronze tiling. They had tall

glasses of iced orange juice; and, with the last fragrant draught of

coffee, Lee lighted a long bland cigar.

“If you like,” he proceeded comfortably, “you may rush around and see

as much of the city as possible. There is a big omnibus at the door.

Personally, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I intend to sit and

smoke, and then--smoke and sit. I am done with the proper and expected

thing in every one of its forms. I have always hated churches; and the

spots where soldiers fell or martyrs were burned, monuments, just annoy

me; and picture galleries give me colds in the head. Above all else I

don't want to be improved; if I hear a fact of any sort I am going to

bed for the rest of the day.”

“I don't care about those, either,” Savina assented; “but the stores,

yes. I have to have a mantilla and a high comb right away, now; and--I

warn you--if it's only in our room I'm going to wear them. If I could

get you into it I'd bring back a shell jacket covered with green braid

and a wide scarlet sash, or whatever an espada wears.”

“A guitar and a carnation ought to do,” he responded. “Count on me for

nothing until the evening, when, if you care to, we'll drive along the

sea, one way and then the other, and have dinner where we happen to be.

I hope you will wear the most extravagant and holiday clothes--white,

and very ruffled and thin, would be nice, with emeralds.”

“It's a good thing I have a lot of money,” she observed; “you have some,

of course, but it wouldn't begin to support your ambitions.”

“I don't even care which of us has it,” he admitted; “so it's there.

A year ago I should have looked pained and insisted that I couldn't

accept, nor allow you to use, your own money. I don't exactly have to

ask you for a taxi-cab fare, though, luckily; but if you did bring

the emeralds I saw you wearing in New York don't throw them away on my

account.”

“They are here,” she assured him. “William gave them to me when we were

married.”

“Splendid, together with Fanny's pearl,” he replied placidly; “I was

afraid they had been a legacy from your mother. I much prefer them to

have been William's--it will give them such a Utopian sparkle.”

When Savina had gone, in a long brightly-painted car summoned from the

line backed at the plaza's edge, Lee Randon returned to their room. The

heat of the day, approaching noon, the ceaseless noise of Havana rose

diffused to the balcony where he sat until the circling sunlight

forced him to move inside. What amazing comfort! A curiously impersonal

admiration for Savina grew with the understanding of her exceptionally

perceptive being. She was what, above all else, he would have chosen for

a companion: her extraordinary feeling was sheathed, tempered, in the

satin of a faultless aesthetic sense; the delicacy of her body was

resembled by the fineness of her feminine mind; she was entirely,

deliciously, decorative. The black brocade mules by her bed were

characteristic of her--useless charming objects that had cost

twenty, thirty, dollars. Their sliding tap on the glazed floor was an

appreciable part of his happiness; Savina's bottles on a dressing-table

were engraved crystal with gold stoppers: it was all as it should be.

* * * * *

When she returned she redressed her hair, drawing it back across her

ears, put in at a provocative angle a fan-like carved shell comb, and

twisted a shawl of flame-colored silk--it was a manton, she instructed

him--about her shoulders. The guise of Andalusia was very becoming to

her. For a dinner, Savina wore the filmy white and emeralds; they went

to a restaurant like a pavilion on a roof, their table, by a low masonry

wall, overlooking the harbor entrance. The heat of the day, cloaked in

night, was cooled by the trade wind moving softly across the sea; the

water of the harbor was black, like jet shining with the reflections of

the lights strung along the shore; the lighthouse at Morro Castle marked

the rocky thrust of the land. The restaurant was crowded: beyond Lee

were four officers of the Spanish navy in snowy linen and corded gilt;

in the subdued light the faces of women, under wide flowery hats, were

illusive and fascinating; everywhere the deep crimson of Castilian wines

was set against the amber radiance of champagne.

Directly below, shadowy trees hid the stone margin of the bay, and

an enormous tripod, such as might be used for removing the cargoes of

ships, raised its primitive simplicity. “Look, Lee!” Savina laid a hand

on his wrist. A steamer, incredibly large and near, was moving slowly

out through the narrow channel to the sea. Rows of golden lights shone

on its decks and from the port-holes, and a drift of music reached

him. “Some day soon,” she went on, “we'll take a boat like that, and

go--where? It doesn't matter: to a far strange land. Hills scented with

tea flowers. Streets with lacquered houses. Villages with silver bells

hung along the eaves. Valleys of primroses under mountains of ice.

We'll see them all from little windows, and then it will be night. But,

principally, we will never go back--never! never! never! We will be

together for years. Let's go to the hotel now; Lee. I am rather tired;

it's the heat, don't you think? I am worn, and, because I am so happy,

a trifle dizzy. Not much. Nothing to worry about. But I only want you,

Lee; in my heart I don't care for the valleys and bells and scents.”

Yet, before they reached the hotel they stopped, Savina insisted, for

cocktails of Bacardi rum, fragrant with fresh limes and sweet with

a crust of sugar that remained at the bottoms of the glasses. In the

night--their beds were separated by the width of the balcony doors--she

called for him, acute with fright. “What is it?” she cried. “Hark,

Lee, that horrible sound.” The air was filled with a drumming wail,

a dislocated savage music, that affected him like a nightmare grown

audible.

“It's coming from across the street, from the Opera House,” he told her;

“some kind of a dance, I'm certain.” Patently it was an orchestra,

but the instruments that composed it, the measures woven of frantic

screaming notes and dull stale iterations, he had no means of

identifying. “Bedlam in the jungle,” he said soothingly. She wished it

would stop. Soon he agreed with her; without pause, without variation,

with an insistence which became cruel, and then unbearable, it went

on. Lee Randon, after an uneasiness which culminated in an exasperated

wrath, found a degree of exactness in his description: it was,

undoubtedly, the jungle, Africa, debased into a peculiarly harrowing

travesty of later civilized emotions. Finally he lost the impression of

a meaninglessness; it assumed a potency, a naked reality, more profound

than anything in his previous knowledge. It was the voice of a crazed

and debased passion. To Lee, it seemed to strip him of his whiteness,

his continence, his integrity, to flay him of every particle of

restraint and decency, and set him, bestial and exposed, in a ball room

with glass-hung chandeliers.

Incomprehensibly the fluctuating clamor--he could distinguish low

pitched drums--brought him the vision, pale and remote and mysteriously

smiling, of Cytherea. He thought of that torrential discord rising

around her belled purple skirt, the cool yellow of her waist crossed

with fragile lace, beating past her lifted slender hand, the nails

stained with vermilion, to the pointed oval of her face against the

black hair and streaming gold of the headdress. Nothing, it appeared,

could be farther apart than the muffled furious strains escaping in

bursts through the opened windows beyond and the still apparition

from the tranquility of his Eastlake house. He would have said,

unhesitatingly, that the formal melody of the eighteenth century,

of Scarlatti and harpsichords, was the music that best accompanied

Cytherea. But she dominated, haunted with her grace, the infernal

dinning sound of unspeakable defilements. Savina was racked beyond

endurance:

“I can't stand it any longer,” she told Lee hysterically, risen with

her palms pressed to her ears. “I can hear it with every nerve. It will

never go out of my brain. You must stop it. Can't you understand that it

is driving me mad!” Her voice grew so shrill, she trembled so violently,

that he had to hold her forcibly in his arms. When, toward dawn, it

ceased, Savina was exhausted; she lay limp and white on her bed;

and, across the room, he could hear the shallowness of her irregular

breathing. As a grey light diluted the darkness, the trade wind, the

night wind, dropped, and the heat palpably increased. Instantaneously

the sun-flooded morning was born, a morning that lost its freshness,

its pearly iridescence, immediately. He closed the slats of the balcony

doors: Savina at last was sleeping, with her countenance, utterly spent,

turned to him. The sharp cries of the newsboys, the street vendors,

were drowned in the full sweep of a traffic moving to the blasts of

multitudinous horns. When she woke, past ten, drinking the small cup of

black coffee which locally accompanied dressing, she was still shaken.

“That's the most cursed racket anyone ever had to endure!” A growing

irritation made harsh his voice. “You couldn't torment a worse sound

out of a thousand cats.” She smiled wanly. “If we were like that in the

past,” he added, “I'm glad we changed, even if we are worse in other

ways.”

“I could hear myself screaming and screaming,” Savina said. In the

heated room she had an uncontrollable chill. “Lee, I can't bring myself

to tell you: something black and dreadful ... had me. There was no one

else. It was like a woods. The hands ripping at me--” With her face

buried in her embroidered pillow, half clothed in web-like garments

threaded with black ribbons, she cowered in an abject and pitiful agony.

Later, he discovered that, within the scope of his possible knowledge,

his conjecture had been right: a danzon, a native Cuban ball--not,

the director of the Inglaterra gave him to understand, entirely

respectable--had been held in the Opera House. “But there won't be

another until after we leave,” Lee reassured Savina; “they are rather

rare except at carnival.” She shuddered. It was evident that the

distressing effect on her of the music lingered through the day;

her energy gave way to a passive contentment hardly removed from

listlessness.

They drove, at the end of afternoon, on the Malecon, following the

curving sea wall from La Punta to the scattered villas of Vedado. The

sea and sky were grey; or was it blue? At the horizon they met without

a perceptible change; the water became the air, the air water, with

a transition as gradual as the edge of dusk. The tropical evening was

accomplished rapidly, as dramatically as the uprush of the sun: they

were gazing into the distance over a tide like a smooth undulating mist

... and there were lights crowning the Cabanas fortress; the passing

cars made the familiar geometrical patterns with the cold bars of their

lamps; they were wrapped in darkness; night had come.

Savina didn't want to go back to the hotel, their room; and, after

dinner at the Paris, they went to Carmelo, where they alternated

northern dances with the stridor of a northern cabaret and drinks.

Savina's spirits revived slowly. To Lee she seemed to have changed in

appearance since she left New York--here, losing her air of a constant

reserve, she looked younger, daring. Her sharp grace, exposed in the

films of summer dress, had an aspect of belonging, rather than to the

character she had deserted, to a woman at once conscious of its effect

and not unwilling to have it measured by the appraising gaze of the

masculine public. In a way, without losing her distinction, she had

become evident; another woman, one less admirably balanced, would have

been conspicuous. Havana was like a, stage on which Savina--with a

considered bravado they had kept the Randon--tried with intoxicating

success a part she had long and secretly desired.

* * * * *

What, Lee found, he most enjoyed was the personal liberty he had first

experienced in New York, waiting to see Savina after he had definitely

left Eastlake. All the aspects of his circumferential existence,

island-like in the dividing indigo of a magic sea, pleased him equally.

Of course, without Savina Cuba would have been an impossibility; she

was the center, the motive, of the design of his emotions; but it was

surprising how contented he was strolling in the outskirts, in the

minor parks and glorietas and paseos, of the world of his passionate

adventure. He sat placidly in the Cortina de Valdez, looking across the

narrow water to the long pink wall of the Cabanas, while Savina

drove and shopped and rested. Carefully avoiding the Americans at the

Inglaterra, on the streets, he had no burden of empty mutual assurances,

the forced stupidities of conversations, to support. His days all had

the look of a period of rest after a strain of long duration.

The strain, he realized, unknown to him at the time, had existed

negatively through years before he had grown openly rebellious. A

quality within him, in spite of him, had risen and swept him, under

the eyes of Cytherea, beyond every circumstance of his former life.

The resemblance between her and Savina he caught in fleet glances

which defied his efforts to summon them; and, where that similitude was

concerned, he was aware of a disconcerting, almost humiliating, shifting

of balance. At first, recognizing aspects of Cytherea in Savina, now in

Cytherea he merely found certain qualities of the woman. The doll, it

seemed, had not been absorbed in Savina; the distant inanimate object

was more real than the actual straining arms about his neck, the

insatiable murmur at his ear. Yet his happiness with Savina was

absolute, secure; and still totally different from her attitude toward

him. She often repeated, in a voice no longer varying from her other

impassioned speech, that she loved him; and, while this was a phrase, a

reassurance, no man in his situation could escape, he returned it in a

manner not wholly ringing with conviction.

It was the old difficulty--he wasn't sure, he couldn't satisfy himself,

about its meaning. He was not, for example, lost beyond knowledge or

perception in his feeling for Savina; carried along in the tempestuous

flood of her emotion, he yet had time to linger over and enjoy the

occurrences by the way. He liked each day for itself, and she regarded

it only as an insignificant detail of their unity. All her planning, her

dress and ardor and moods, were directed to one never-lost-sight-of end;

but he disposed his attention in a hundred channels. Lee began to be

aware of the tremendous single economy of women, the constant bending

back of their instincts to a single preeminent purpose.

Yet everywhere, now, women had concentrated in a denial of that: the men

he knew hadn't a monopoly of restlessness. Even Fanny, in the parading

of all her rings, had not been oblivious of it. But it wasn't so much

that women denied their fundamental urgency as it was that they wanted

it exercised under other, more rapturous, conditions. Inexplicably, and

a great many at once, women had grown aware of the appalling difference

between what they might demand and what they had been receiving. In

consequence of this the world of masculine complacency was being dealt

some rude blows. But Lee Randon couldn't hope to go into this; the

problem was sufficiently complicated from his side of the fence. There

were, immediately, the practical developments of his undertaking to be

met. He served nothing by putting them off. He must write, but through

his lawyers, to William Grove and find out what action he proposed

to take, what arrangements for divorce could be facilitated. A

letter--there could be no saving impersonality here--to Fanny was more

difficult.

From Havana, his approval of Fanny was very complete; he understood

her, made allowances, now better than at any time during their marriage;

given what, together, they were, her conduct had been admirable. A

remarkably attractive and faithful woman, he told himself; it was a pity

that, in her estimation, her good qualities had come to so little. The

thing for him to do was to see his brother, and move part of the burden

of his decisions over to Daniel's heavy frame.

The sugar estate of which he was Administrador was in the Province of

Camagüey, at Cobra; an overnight trip from Havana, Lee had learned. It

was Sunday evening now, and they would have to give up their room at the

Inglaterra Tuesday. Obviously there wasn't time to write Daniel and

have a reply by then. The other desirable hotels were as full as the

Inglaterra. He must wire, but the composition of his telegram presented

an unexpected difficulty:

Lee didn't know how to explain the presence with him of Savina; he

couldn't determine how much or how little to say; and it was probable

that Daniel had had a cable from Eastlake. The mere putting down of the

necessary words of his message, under the concerned gaze of a clerk,

with a limited comprehension of English, was hazardous. The clerk,

he had discovered, would read in a loud voice of misplaced linguistic

confidence whatever Lee wrote, and there was a small assemblage of

Americans at the counter of a steamship company across the office. What,

it began to appear, they'd have to do would be to take the train

for Cobra on Tuesday. Yet they couldn't quite come down on Daniel so

unexpectedly; he lived, Lee recalled, on a batey, the central dominating

point of a sugar estate; and--unmarried--what accommodations he might

offer were problematic. Lee, from the heading of a letter, could not

build the proportions of a Casa Vivienda. Well, there would be a hotel

at Cobra! That answered his doubts--Savina and he would go to Cobra and

there communicate with Daniel. It would be easy to talk privately with

him. Lee didn't want his approval, but only his careful opinions and

reasonable assistance.

He, Lee, would not produce Savina with the triumphant indication that

her resistless charm explained everything. He was no such fatuous fool!

But, studying her, he got a solid assurance from the superiority of her

person. Daniel would see at once that this wasn't the usual flight south

of an indulgence headed for paresis. Savina, his entire affair, demanded

a dignified reception. They were seated in the patio of the hotel, by a

pool and the heroic bronze statue of a dancing girl in a manton; on the

table between them was, at that hour, the inevitable small pitcher of

Daiquiri cocktails. He told Savina what had been in his thoughts, and

she nodded her approval:

“I agree that we ought to see your brother, and, through him,

communicate with New York. At present things are much too uncertain. If

William, or your wife, were different they could have us held on a very

unpleasant-sounding charge. I know you detest conventions, but I must

say I am glad other people live by them; it makes it so comfortable for

us. Imagine, if William were a vulgar man, the fuss! But,” she admitted,

“at bottom I shouldn't have cared. You are not half as disreputable as I

am, Lee. You have a proper look at this minute.”

“Really,” he protested, “there is no reason for you to be insulting,

when I deliberately led you astray.”

“You do flatter yourself,” Savina replied; “when it was I all the time:

I broke up your home.”

“You needn't boast so loudly and pain everyone about us,” he protested

cheerfully. She gazed contemptuously at the surrounding tables:

“The scheming presidents of concessions and their fat wives. Have you

noticed the men hurrying away apologetically in the evening, Lee? The

places on Sol and Gloria Streets! And, just as you meant, if they knew

who, what, we were, they'd want to have us arrested. You see, I am

infringing on the privileges sacred to men. It's all right for them to

do this, to go out to an appointment after ten o'clock and come back at

two satisfied--”

“Savina,” he interrupted her, “I know all that you were going to say, I

could repeat it to you in your own words. You were about to assault the

double standard. Consider it done. You are right. Everyone with sense

is right there. But if I hear it again I'll think I am at Aeolian Hall

listening to an English author lecture. I'll put you in your car on

Forty-second Street and send you home.”

“You can't send me home,” she reminded him; “you are too proper and

have too many scruples. You'll have to stay with me now for life. I am

ruined.” They laughed happily.

“You are,” he echoed her.

“Isn't it nice?”

“Nothing better could be invented.”

She investigated the pitcher. “The last drop.”

Lee Randon signalled for the waiter, but she stopped him; the strained

intensity of her face, the shining darkness of her eyes, set his heart

pounding.

* * * * *

They left for Cobra without even the formality of a telegraphed

announcement to Daniel Randon. Their compartment, in the middle of the

car, with the more casual open accommodations at either end, resolute

in its bare varnished coolness, indicated what degree of heat they might

expect in the interior. The progress of the train through the length of

the island was slow and irregular: Lee had a sense of insecure tracks,

of an insufficient attention to details of transportation that required

an endless, untiring oversight. Naturally they slept badly; and the

morning showed them a wide plain scattered with royal palms which

thickened in the distance. Such vast groves, Lee thought, robbed them

of the stateliness so impressive in parks and cities. The landscape,

tangled with lianas or open about massive and isolated ceiba trees, was

without the luxuriance of color he had expected. It was evident that

there had been no rain for a long period; and the crowded growths, grey

rather than green, were monotonous, oppressive. Other than Apollinaris

and the conventional black coffee of the train, and oranges bought

by Lee at a junction, no breakfast was possible; and they watched

uninterruptedly the leisurely passing land. Marks of sugar planting

multiplied, the cane, often higher than Lee's head, was cut into

sections by wide lanes; and announced by a sickly odor of fermentation,

he saw, with a feeling of disappointment, the high corrugated iron sides

of a grinding mill. It was without any saving picturesque quality; and

the noise of its machinery, a heavy crushing rumble, was perceptible on

the train.

However, Savina was attracted by the high carts, on two solid wheels,

and drawn by four or six oxen, hauling the cut cane. But the villages

they passed, single streets of unrelieved squalor in a dusty waste, they

decided were immeasurably depressing. No one who could avoid it walked;

lank men in broad straw hats and coat-like shirts rode meagre horses

with the sheaths of long formidable blades slapping their miserable

hides. Groups of fantastically saddled horses drooped their heads tied

in the vicinity of a hands-breadth of shade by general stores. “I could

burst into tears,” Savina declared. But he showed her pastures of rich

tufted grass with herds of well-conditioned cattle. “I wish we were

there,” she said. But, when the train stopped at Cobra, Savina,

hesitating on the step, proposed that they go on into Camagüey, hardly

more than an hour distant.

Their bags, put off, the rapid incomprehensible speech of the guard,

left them, with the train moving doubtfully on, at Cobra. It was, on

examination, more dismal than, from the detachment of the compartment,

they had realized. The usual baked ground, the dusty underbrush, the

blank façades of the low buildings that faced them from either side

of the tracks, had--in addition to a supreme ugliness--an indefinably

threatening air. The rawness, the machetes hanging about the booted

heels of soiled idlers, the presence everywhere of negroes with an

unrestrained curiosity in Lee and his companion, filled him with an

instinctive antagonism. “Do you think that can be the hotel?” he asked,

indicating a long plaster building with a shallow upper porch supported

on iron-footed wooden columns. Above its closely-shuttered windows, in

letters faded and blistered by the sun, reached the description, “Hotel

de Cobra.”

“We can't stay there,” he continued decidedly; “I'll send for Daniel at

once.”

Without available help he carried their bags to the entrance of the

hotel, and went into a darkened room with a cement floor which had the

thick dampness of an interior saturated with spilled acid wine. There

he found a man, not different from those outside, who, incapable of

understanding English, managed to grasp the fact that Lee wished to see

Daniel Randon immediately. The proprietor assented, and urged them up

a stair. “I won't have you wait out here,” Lee told Savina; “it will be

only for an hour or so.” The room into which they were ushered had,

at least, the advantage of bareness: there was a wardrobe of mahogany

leaning precariously forward, a double bed deeply sagged with a

grey-white covering, a wash stand and tin basin and pitcher, and some

short sturdy rush-bottomed chairs.

Its principal feature, however, was the blue paint that covered the

walls, a blue of a particularly insistent shade which, in the solidity

of its expanse, seemed to make all the enclosed space and objects livid.

The tall shutters on one side, Lee discovered, opened on the upper porch

and a prospect of the tracks beyond. “If I stayed here a night I'd

be raving,” Savina declared. “Lee, such a color! And the place, the

people--did you notice that carriageful of black women that went by us

along the street? There were only three, but they were so loosely fat

that they filled every inch. Their faces were drenched with powder and

you could see their revolting breasts through their muslin dresses;

terrible creatures reeking with unspeakable cologne. They laughed at me,

cursed us, I am sure.”

“We'll have to put up with it till Daniel comes,” he observed

philosophically; and, on the low straight chairs, they gazed around so

disgustedly that they both laughed. “I suppose he is out somewhere in

the cane.” Savina asked what they would do if he were away. He might

be in Santiago. The company had other estates. “Not now,” Lee decided;

“what they call the grinding season has just begun, and every hour is

important. The least thing gone wrong might cost thousands of dollars.”

The correctness of his assumption was upheld by an announcement

unintelligible except for the comforting fact that Daniel was below.

“Perhaps I had better see him first,” Lee suggested diplomatically, and

Savina assented.

Daniel Randon was both tall and fat, a slow impressive bulk in white

linen with a smooth impassive face and considering brown eyes. “This,”

he said unremarkably, “is a surprise. But I am, of course, glad;

particularly since Venalez reported that Fanny was with you.”

“She isn't,” Lee replied tersely; there had been no cable from Eastlake,

he saw, and he must plunge boldly into what he had to say. “I am sorry

to tell you that she is at home. But I'm here, and not by myself.”

A slight expression of annoyance twitched at his brother's contained

mouth. “No, you are making a mistake. I have left Fanny, Daniel. I

thought perhaps you would have heard.”

“Our telegraph system is undependable,” was all that the other, the

younger, Randon answered.

“You don't know, then. A Mrs. Grove is with me; but she is that only

until the divorces can be arranged; and I counted on you--”

“Divorces?” The single word was accompanied by a faint lifting of

Daniel's eyebrows.

“She was married, too,” Lee explained. “You will understand better when

you talk to Savina. We are not young feather-heads, Daniel; this is

serious, final. Really, we came to Cuba on your account, to see you.

When I tried to compose a telegram from Havana, telling you something of

the situation, I couldn't--all the idiotic tourists hanging about! Well,

here we are, or here I am, and Savina is upstairs, most anxious to meet

you.”

“Certainly,” Daniel Randon agreed. He was silent for a moment in the

consideration of what he had been told. Then, “I can't have you on

the batey,” he pronounced. He lifted a silencing hand against an

anger forming in instant unmeasured speech. “Not for myself,” he

particularized. “You could have seven mistresses, of all colors, if the

place were mine. Please remember that it isn't. It's the company's. That

is quite different.” Daniel was making, Lee realized, what for him was

a tremendous conversational effort. “Even if I were alone, except for

Cubans, it would be possible; but there is Mr. Stribling, with his

wife and, at present, grown daughter, from Utica; he is the Assistant

Administrador. Then we have George Vincent and Katharine--the Chief

Engineer with a very new bride from, I believe, Ohio. They are very

particular in Ohio. And others. You must remember that I have a

photograph of Fanny with the children: it is much admired, well known. I

couldn't explain your Mrs.--Mrs. Grove. Who could? We haven't a

sister. Altogether I am sorry.” He stopped uncompromisingly; yet, Lee

recognized, in all that Daniel had said there was no word of criticism

or gratuitous advice. He had voiced the facts only as they related to

him; to everything else he gave the effect of a massive blankness.

* * * * *

Argument, Lee saw, was useless. Extended to the heart of a tropical

island, the virtuous indignations of a hard propriety still bound their

movements. “All that I can suggest,” Daniel went on, “is that you return

to Havana tomorrow evening; the company has offices there, and it will

be easier for me to see you. Camagüey is nearer, but gossip there

would have you in the same bed no matter how far apart your rooms were.

Decidedly not Camagüey.”

There was no train for Havana, it developed, before tomorrow. “And,

in the meanwhile,” Lee inquired, “must we stay here? Savina will be

miserable.”

“Why not?” Daniel gazed about casually. “I lived with Venalez a month.

It is good enough if you are not too strict about a travelling beauty or

two who may be stopping as well.” His apologies to Savina, in the room

above, were faultless. There was, simply, at the Cobra sugar estancia,

no satisfactory arrangement for guests; except for an occasional party

of directors, or a special mission, there were no guests. At his,

Daniel's central, in Santa Clara on the sea, he hoped some day to offer

them the hospitality of his own house.

When he left, Lee made no revelation of what had been said downstairs;

Savina accepted the situation as it had been exposed to her. “I can't

allow myself to think of a night here,” she told him; “it will be a

horror.” She opened the slats of the long window shutters, and glowing

bars of white heat fell in a ladder-like order across a blue wall; the

segments of sunlight were as sharp and solid as incandescent metal. In

the cobalt shadow Savina was robbed of her vitality; she seemed unreal;

as she passed through the vivid projected rays of midday it appeared as

though they must shine uninterruptedly through her body. Lee considered

the advisability of taking her for a walk--there were, he had seen

from the train, no roads here for driving--but, recalling the insolent

staring and remarks she had met, he was forced to drop that possibility.

Weary from the prolonged wakefulness of the night, Savina made an effort

to sleep; and, waiting until she was measurably quiet, Lee went out. The

heat was blinding, it walled him in, pressed upon him with a feeling of

suffocation, as though--between him and the freshness, the salvation, of

any air--there were miles of it packed around him like grey cotton. To

the left of the hotel, the bare plaza, half hidden in scrubby bushes,

there was an extended shed with a number of doors and fragments of

fence, heaped rusted tins and uncovered garbage; and, lounging in the

openings, the door-frames often empty, the windows without sashes, were

women, scantily covered, sounding every note in a scale from black to

white. Yet, Lee observed, the whitest were, essentially, black. What

amazed, disturbed, him was their indolent blinking indifference, their

indecent imperviousness, in the full blaze of day.

They were, to Lee, significant, because from them he drew a knowledge

of Cobra. He could not, without such assistance, have arrived at the

instinctive understanding that interpreted the street into which he

turned. It was the street of a delirium, running, perhaps, for half a

mile; an irregular deeply rutted way formed by its double row of small

unsubstantial buildings of raw or gaudily painted boards and galvanized

sheet iron. They were all completely open at the front, with their

remarkable contents, pandemoniums of merchandise, exposed upon a

precarious sidewalk of uneven parallel boards elevated two or three feet

above the road. Mostly cafés, restaurants, there was still an incredible

number of banks--mere shells with flat tarred roofs and high counters

built from wall to wall. The receivers, the paying tellers, were many,

with the mingled bloods, the heterogeneous characteristics, of China

and Colonial Spain and Africa; and, back of their activity--there was a

constant rush of deposited money and semi-confidential discussion--were

safes so ponderous and ancient that they might have contained the

treasure of a plate fleet of Peru.

Crowding in on them, challenging each other from opposite sides, the

restaurants were longer and shallow, with their groups of tables ranged

against walls decorated in appallingly primitive and savage designs:

palms like crawling spiders of verdigris set on columns of chocolate

rose from shores, from seas, of liquid bright muds in which grotesque

caricatures of men, barbarously clad or, swollen headed, in travesties

of civilized garb, faced women with exaggerated and obscene anatomies.

They, like the banks, were crowded; companies of negroes sat over dishes

of mucous consistency and drank, with thick lips, liquors of vicious

dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking with

them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on

their sere crinkled masses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of

calculated or emotionally demented excitement.

A flat wagon passed, holding, on precarious chairs, a band furiously

playing an infernal jumbled music which, as it swelled, filled all the

occupants of the cafés with a twitching hysteria. Subdued masculine

shouts were pierced by shameless feminine cries; lust and rage and

nameless intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust

on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin,

of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowing with a subcutaneous redness,

thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned indeterminate

superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to the steel of

their machetes revolvers strapped on their long thighs.

What, mainly, occupied Lee Randon was the nakedness of the passion

everywhere surcharging the surface of life. There was, in the sense

familiar to him, no restraint, no cover beyond the casual screens at the

backs of the restaurants; no accident to which the uncertain material of

life was subject was improbable; murder rasped, like the finger of death

on wire strings, at the exasperated sensibilities of organisms exposed,

without preparation, to an incomprehensible state of life a million

years beyond their grasp. It fascinated and disturbed Lee: it had a

definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this that Savina had

turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the duty typified by

Fanny left such a morass as he saw about him? Was he, Lee Randon,

instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than coherent

speech? Nothing, he asserted, could be further from his intention and

hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial of order, of

disciplined feeling; and, flatly, it terrified him.

Lee insisted, hastily, that what he wanted--no, demanded--was not this

destruction of responsibility, a chaos, mentally and sensually, but the

removal of it as a rigid mob imposition on the higher discretion of his

individuality. The thing which, with Savina, he had assaulted was, in

its way, as unfortunate as the single reeking street of Cobra. Again,

the scene around him wasn't hypocritical, its intention was as

thickly evident as the rice powder on the black sweating faces of the

prostitutes. Hypocrisy was peculiarly the vice of civilization. His

necessity was an escape from either fate--the defilement of a pandering

to the flesh and the waste of a negation with neither courage nor

rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the

other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently

the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to

go down into the bottoms, the mire.

He regarded himself curiously as, to a large extent, the result of all

the ages that had multiplied since the heated tropics held the early

fecundity of human life. A Haitian lunged by with out-turned palms

hanging at his knees, a loose jaw dropped on a livid gullet flecked

with white, and a sultry inner consciousness no more than a germinal

superstition visible in fixed blood--suffused eyes. He had an odor, Lee

fantastically thought, of stale mud. Well--there he was and there

was Lee Randon, and the difference between them was the sum of almost

countless centuries of religions and states and sacrifice and slaughter

He had a feeling that the accomplishment was ludicrously out of

proportion to all that had gone into it. For the only thing of value,

the security of a little knowledge, was still denied him. What, so

tragically long ago, Africa begged from the mystery of night, from idols

painted indifferently with ochre or blood, he was demanding from a power

which had lost even the advantage of visibility. His superiority was

negligible. It was confined relatively to unimportant things--such as

an abstract conception of a universe partly solid and partly composed of

ignited gases revolving in an infinity of time and space. He was aware

of sensations, flavors, champagnes, more delicate than the brutality of

a rape conceived in strangling gulps of sugar cane rum. On the outside

he had been bleached, deodorized, made conformable with chairs rather

than allowed to retain the proportions, powers, designed for the

comfortable holding to branches. But in his heart, in what he thought of

as his spirit, what had he gained, where--further than being temporarily

with Savina in the beastly hotel of Cobra--was he?

* * * * *

His thoughts had become so inappropriate to his purpose, his presence,

here that he banished them and returned to Savina. She was notably more

cheerful than when he had left her, and was engaged with an omelet,

rough bread, Scotch preserved strawberries, and a bottle of Marquis de

Riscal; most of which, she told him, had been sent, together with

other pleasant things, by Daniel Randon. She was unusually seductive in

appearance, with, over the sheer embroidered beauty of her underclothes,

her graceful silken knees, a floating unsubstantial wrap like crushed

handfuls of lilacs. “This room kills anything I might put on,” she

replied to the expression of his pleasure. “After all, we shall soon be

gone. I got Daniel's servant to telegraph the Inglaterra we were coming

back. They'll have to watch out for us. After we see your brother there,

and make a beginning of our rearrangements, we will go on, I think. Do

you mind? South, Guadeloupe, perhaps, because it's so difficult to get

to, and then Brazil. I have an idea we won't stay there long, either,

but travel on toward the East. I do like islands, and there are

quantities, quarts, to see in the Pacific.” She put her arms, from which

the wide sleeves fell back, around his neck, drew him close to her. “It

doesn't matter where I am, if it is with you. I love you, Lee, and I am

happy because I know we'll always have each other. We are not so very

young, you see, and there isn't a great deal of time left, not enough to

grow tired, to change in.

“I wake up at night, sometimes, with that tiresome pain at my heart, as

though it were too full of you, and, for a little, I'm confused--it is

all so strange. I think, for a moment, that I am still with William,

and I can't imagine what has happened to the room. It frightens me

dreadfully, and then I remember: it isn't William and the house on

Sixty-sixth Street, but you, Lee, and Cuba. We're together with nothing

in the world to spoil our joy. And, when we are old, we shall sit side

by side at Etretat, I am sure, and watch the sea, and the young people

in love under the gay marquees, and remember. Then we'll be married and

more respectable than the weather-vanes. I want that on your account;

I don't care; but you would worry, I am afraid. You are serious and a

conscientious man, Lee.

“But, before that, I want to spend all my feeling, I don't want a thrill

left, lost; I want to empty and exhaust myself.” Her emotion was

so strong that it drew her away from him, erect, with her bare arms

reaching to their fullest quivering length. In the blue gloom of the

room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of

lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in

subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an

appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thought recurred to him,

too slender, fragile, to contain such a passion. Then, in a transition

so sudden that it bewildered him, her mouth was against his, her hands

straining him to her. She was ugly then, her face was unrecognizable in

an expression of paralysed fury.

The heat, Lee protested, grew worse with evening; not a stir of air

brought out the dry scraping rustle of the palms, a sound like the

friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than

their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother;

Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand moved,

waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her in a

café at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense

of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally

lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed

stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the illumination and

along the dim ceiling. When, later, he was on the bed, it was wet under

his sweating body. In a passing sleep Savina gave one of the cries of

her waking emotion. In a state of unconsciousness her fingers reached

toward him. From the balcony beyond them drifted a woman's challenging

laughter--one of the travelling beauties Daniel had mentioned--and he

could hear the bursts of discordant sound on the street of Cobra, the

combined efforts of rival bands hideous singly and together beyond

description. What a hell of a night, what a night in hell!

The moths, defrauded in their hunger for light, blundered softly around

the walls; when Lee rose to light a cigarette they would, he felt,

gather at the match and beat it out with their desirous wings. Then

he heard a shot, and uplifted clamoring voices; all as unreal, as

withdrawn, as a simulated murder on a distant stage. He pictured the

flaring restaurants, the banks with corrugated iron locked across their

fronts; the faces of the negroes brought black and lurid out of the

surrounding blackness. Savina, awake, demanded a drink, and he held a

clay water monkey awkwardly to her lips. The faint double blast of a

steam signal rose at the back of the hotel, beyond the town; he had

heard it before and now connected it with Daniel's sugar mill.

His brother hadn't perceptibly changed in fifteen years. During that

time Lee had seen him scarcely at all. Suddenly he was sorry for this:

Daniel was what was generally known as a strong man. Men deep in the

national finances of their country spoke to Lee admiringly of him; it

was conceded that he was a force. Lee wasn't interested in that--in his

brother's ability, it might be, to grip an industry by the throat.

He envied, speculated about, the younger man's calmness, the Chinese

quality of his silence, the revelations of his carefully few words.

Daniel, in past years, had been often drunk, various women had been

seriously or lightly associated with his name; but he appeared to have

cast them, the Bacardi and the blandishments, entirely aside. He seemed

as superior to the dragging and wearing of life as a figure carved in

stone, a Buddha, any Eastern presentment of the aloof contempt of a

serene wisdom at the mountain of its own flesh. Lee, beside his brother,

resembled a whirlpool of dust temporarily formed by the wind in a road.

Daniel had never married, he had been too cunning for that fragrant

trap, as well. What were his vices? But were habits, self-indulgences,

held in the background, ruthlessly subordinated to primary activity,

vices? Lee wished now that Daniel had seen Cytherea; he was certain that

the other would have said something valuable about her. Through his long

contact with the naked tropics Daniel understood many things hidden from

him. He must know, for instance, about the Brujeria, the negro magic

brought through Haiti from the depths of Africa. Everyone in Cuba caught

rumors, hints, of ceremonials of abject horror. But of that Daniel could

never be brought to speak. Lee could even visualize him taking part, in

a cold perverse curiosity, in the dances about smothered fires.

He thought there was a glimmer of day at the windows, but it was only

a flash across his staring eyeballs. From the plaza below came a low

sibilant conversation. It went on and on, until Lee, in an irrepressible

indignation, went out on the balcony and, in a voice like the clapping

of a broken iron bell, cursed the talkers into silence.

Christ, it was hot!

Savina was sitting up. “Isn't it tomorrow night, or the one after that?”

she asked. “This room is like a vault that I have been in a thousand

thousand years. I can't tell you how it affects me; it seems as though I

must stay here forever, that if I tried to get away I'd be forced

back. And I dreamed that everything I owned had been turned blue--my

nightgowns and nail files and travelling clock and the oranges. You

wouldn't believe how depressing a blue orange could be. We will forget

it as soon as possible, Lee. Do you remember how nice the room was at

the Inglaterra? I wish you'd feel my head: isn't it hotter than usual?”

“Why shouldn't it be?” he asked impolitely.

“It wouldn't be possible, would it, Lee, to have the night go on

forever, to have something happen to the scheme of things? Or perhaps

I'm blind.” Her voice was plainly terrified. “Light a match, please. Oh,

thank you. What an idiot I am. Hold me closer; then I can forget, then

nothing else matters. I can never get close enough; I wish I could pour

myself into you.”

“You'll be able to, if this keeps up,” he observed, with a note of

brutality. “They will find us, in the morning, in a bowl and two

pitchers.”

But there was no corresponding lightness in his spirit; periods like

this extended into an infinity of torment beyond time. A thinning of the

dark expanded through the room. A cerulean unnatural dawn crept about

him: there was the muffled clatter of horses' hoofs in the dust outside;

a locomotive whistled in a far universal key. Savina slowly became

visible; asleep, her personality, her vividness, were gone; she was as

featureless, as pallid, as a nameless marble of remote Greece. There

were marks across her feet where the mules chafed her; the mules

themselves were lying on the bare floor. He saw his clothes, the

familiar habit of the day, with a sharp surprise.

* * * * *

It had been a night without rest, without the coolness and assuagement

of a release from the fever of the day; and, Lee thought, he felt as

haggard as Savina looked. A wind that was hardly more than an erratic

stirring of super-heated dust agitated a loose slat in a shutter and

deposited a fine dun film across the floor. Savina put as much as

possible, so early, into her bags. Standing before a narrow mirror

nailed to a wall, with her comb, she turned. “My hair is soaked,” she

wailed; “just putting my arms up is more than I can manage. Haven't you

been thinking about all the cold things in the world?” She slipped into

a chair, spent and dejected, with her hair clouding one shoulder. It

would, he repeated, be over soon, and he gazed at her with a veiled

inspection. Savina was so entirely unprepared for this, the least

hardship so new, that he was uncertain about the temper of her

resistance.

Aware of his gaze, she smiled slowly at him, and, seated, again took

up her task with the comb. “I couldn't have you see me very often like

this,” she proceeded: “it would be fatal. I don't mean that when I'm

finished I'm irresistible, but the process simply must go on in private.

I don't want to be a wife, Lee--one of those creatures in a dressing

sacque with hair pins in her mouth. I can't bear the thought of you and

a flannel petticoat together. That is where married women make a serious

mistake: they let their husbands see them while the maid is doing their

hair, or when they're smeared with creams, or, maybe, with tonsilitis.”

She rose. “I won't be a wife,” she chanted, “I won't be--”

Her voice broke suddenly. Lee thought she had tripped, he lunged

forward, but she fell crumpling on the floor. “It's this hellish heat,”

he asserted, lifting her to the bed. Her lips were open and dry, and

her eyes, without vision, stared at the ceiling. Lee wet a handkerchief,

dabbling it over her face; he had never before, he realized, seen a

woman faint. It was terrifying but not grave; they did it, he had heard,

very often. No wonder, after such a night. She had been gone over a

minute now; there must be someone in the place who would know what to

do. He put off moving, however, both because of his reluctance to leave

Savina alone and because of the difficulty of any explanation. He took

her hand; it was cold and damp, and her forehead was glistening with

minute globes of sweat. All the blood seemed to have been withdrawn from

her body.

“I'll have to go for help,” he said aloud, in a commonplace manner which

yet struck curiously on his hearing. There was a faint quiver of her

features, a scarcely perceptible sigh, and her fingers weakly closed on

his grasp. “How foolish,” Savina murmured. She made an effort to raise

herself up from the pillow, but he restrained her; Lee commanded her to

be absolutely still. “The spirits of ammonia is in the dressing-case,”

she whispered. He held the clouding aromatic liquid to her mouth and she

took it laboriously. “Don't call anyone, Lee,” she continued; “I'll be

all right in a little. So much at once! You see, I haven't been used to

happiness. No wonder I was dizzy. But I fainted, Lee, didn't I? That's

unusual for me.”

He sat beside her, at once moved and detached from her weakness,

gently holding her supine hand. She mustn't worry, he told her at short

intervals. “Don't worry, this is nothing.”

“You'll give me time to dress for the train,” she insisted. “As soon as

we get away from here I shall be better. We will, won't we?”

“Get away? What nonsense! Of course. You will be up by noon, but there

is no good in your stirring before you have to. If Daniel comes, you can

see him here, in your bed. Or you needn't see him at all. It's just as

you feel.”

Even as she lay, prostrate, on the bed, he could see her collapse; the

strength, animation, interest, drained away from her; it seemed to Lee

that momentarily she was again in a coma. He leaned over and placed

a hand on her brow. Savina's eye-lids fluttered. Under her breast her

heart was scarcely discernible. Suddenly he didn't like it; abruptly

an apprehension, from which he was obliged to bar a breath of panic,

possessed him. Lee covered her lightly with a sheet, and went out,

softly closing the door. Before the hotel he caught the proprietor by a

shoulder and pointed up to his room. “Sick, sick,” he repeated the term

with increasing emphasis, not successful in banishing his vagueness of

dismay. The proprietor smiled uncertainly, edging from under the weight

of Lee's hand. Then, “Get my brother, Mr. Daniel Randon, at once,” he

commanded; “soon. Mr. Randon; the sugar--” Lee waved in the direction of

the mill.

This the other again comprehended, and Lee saw a youth swing a bare leg

over a convenient horse and vanish behind the Cobra Hotel. He went back

to the room: Savina hadn't moved while he had been gone. She seemed

even weaker--a thing he would have declared impossible--than before.

He bathed her face and throat in water, and there was a murmur of

gratitude, of love, so low that, with his ear against her lips, the

individual words were lost. His disturbance increased and, when the

heavy firm steps of Daniel Randon had approached on the cement of the

corridor without, and he had knocked and entered, Lee pointed to the bed

with an unconcealed anxiety.

Daniel bent over Savina with a comprehensive unmoved regard; he touched

a cheek, with a surprising delicacy, and then turned and faced Lee. The

latter said sharply, “She has fainted, but it's only the heat. She'll be

all right after a rest.” As he spoke, more to himself than to Daniel,

in an effort of private encouragement, what confidence he had dissolved

before his brother's impassive negation.

“It is more serious than that,” Daniel Randon told him. “There is no

doctor here we can trust, but I'll send a gas rail car into Camagüey for

Fancett. It will take three hours or worse.” He left promptly, closing

the door soundlessly; and Lee heard his voice from the plaza, not raised

but intolerantly domineering, issuing orders in a Spanish at once fluent

and curt.

In the long-dragging succeeding period there was no visible change in

Savina; at intervals she spoke faintly, there was the dim trace, the

effort, of a smile; her hand, whenever he released it, slipped away. The

heat in the room thickened; the barred sunlight cut like white knives at

the opposite wall; a pungent odor of cooking peppers came in under the

door. Savina's bags, nearly packed, stood open on chairs; the linen

suit in which she travelled, the small hat and swathing brown veil,

were ready by her low darkly polished tan shoes; gloves, still in their

printed tissue paper, the comb, a small gold bag with an attached chased

powder box, a handkerchief with a monogram in mauve, were gathered on

the chest of drawers.

Lee had heard the rail car leave for Camagüey: there had been a series

of short explosions, first scattered and then blending in a regular

pulsation soon lost over the vanishing tracks. The interminable

clip-clip of horses, dreary staccato voices, rose and fell, advanced and

retreated, outside. But, through all his attentiveness to Savina,

his crowding thoughts, he listened for the return of the car with the

doctor. What was his name? Foster, Faucett--no, it was Fancett. An

American, evidently. “The doctor is coming,” he told Savina gently.

“Daniel felt that he had better see you. From Camagüey. A good man. I

want to get you out of here at once, and he will give us something.”

Waves of rebellion passed over him, an anger at his impotence, at the

arbitrary removal of Savina from the sphere of his help. His coat was

off, his collar unbuttoned, and he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt,

wet with sweat and the bathing of her head.

To Lee, Savina appeared sunken; her cheeks, certainly, were hollower;

there was a shadow, like the dust over the floor, in each one; she had

ceased to open her eyes but they had retreated. A dreadful twenty-four,

thirty, hours; how brutally hard it had been on her. She hadn't

complained; he had been more upset, impatient, than Savina. What a

splendid companion! But that, he irritably felt, was a cold word of

description for her. What a force! She was that, magnificently, above

everything else. Beside her, other people--the rest of life--were flat,

tepid.

There was a thin far vibration which grew into a flowing throb; Lee

identified it as the rail car. Perhaps the doctor had been absent.

However, Daniel would know what to do. The footfalls approaching the

door were multiplied: it was his brother and an elderly wasted man with

a vermilion sprig of geranium in the lapel of a white coat. He nodded

to Lee, pressed his hand, and went quickly to the bed. In the stillness

while Dr. Fancett took Savina's pulse Lee again caught the shallow

rapidity of her breathing. Daniel Randon stood with a broad planter's

hat held with the lightness of touch characteristic of him. The man at

the bed turned a speculative gaze upon Lee.

“Your wife has an acute dilatation of the heart,” he pronounced. The

significance of his unguarded tone shocked Lee immeasurably.

* * * * *

“But I don't understand that,” Lee protested; “she has never had any

serious trouble with her heart before.” He was halted by Daniel's brief

peculiar scrutiny. The doctor replied that this was not organic. “It may

be the result of unaccustomed and excessive heat; an accumulation of

the excessive,” he added concisely. “Excesses.” The single word followed

after a hesitation in which Fancett was plainly at a loss. His frowning

gaze was still bent upon Lee. “I know so little of Mrs. Randon's

history,” he finally said. Daniel naturally had inferred, or perhaps

the doctor deduced, that Savina and he were married. They would be, in

a very short while, Lee told himself stubbornly. “You have ice on the

batey? Yes, at once, please. And a nurse can come from my office on the

Havana train this evening.” Daniel nodded once, in acknowledgment. He

moved closer to Lee:

“This is serious. You can't, of course, think of going on. I will see

that she is as comfortable here as she would be with me; everything

shall be done.”

Lee answered that he was certain of that. A feeling of helplessness

fastened on him, together with the incongruous speculation about the

propriety of a cable to William Grove. The absurd idea occurred to him

that Savina had two husbands; each with the right, if he desired, to be

at a side of her bed, each holding one of her limp hands. He dismissed

the elaborated thought in a rage at the triviality of his mind. Fancett

and Daniel had gone temporarily: Lee had heard the former making

arrangements to stay over night at the sugar estate. Savina's fast

superficial breathing now dominated the room. He was again seated beside

her, leaden-hearted and blank.

It was so useless--this illness and suffering, now! The doctor had

seemed to insinuate that it might be traced to him, Lee Randon. What the

devil did he mean by that? It was the fault of Daniel, the immobile, as

much as anyone. In an airy room, under comfortable conditions, probably

it wouldn't have happened. Savina's suit, her shoes, the bags, hadn't

been disturbed. There was a faint tightening of her grasp, and he bent

close, but he distinguished only random words.

“--not sorry. Willing ... with you. Don't be unhappy.”

It required an enormous effort, the sound was at once all but

imperceptible and burdened with an agony of labor. As he watched her he

saw what, he thought, was an illusion--the blueness of the room, of the

walls, seemed to settle on her countenance. It increased, her face was

in tone with the color that had so disturbed her, a vitreous blue too

intense for realization. He was startled: like a sponge, sopping up the

atmosphere, she darkened. It was so brutal, so hideous, that he spoke

involuntarily:

“No one can live blue like that.”

Then, with a glance instinct with dread, he saw that he was

right--Savina had died.

A calm of desperation swept over him. He must tell Daniel and the

doctor. But they would still need the ice. The revolting details! And

what had Fancett meant? It must all come out now--his presence in Cuba

with Savina--in a storm of publicity and condemnation. He regretted

this, because of Savina, dead. Alive she would have smiled her contempt;

but death was different. Anyone would acknowledge that. The dead should

be protected from slurs and scandal and obscene comments. A confusion

of small facts poured through him, and broke into trivial fragments any

single dignity of emotion; no generous sorrow saved him from the

petty actuality of his situation; even his sense of loss, he realized

dismayed, was dull.

Savina was rapidly growing, at last, cold; her arm was stiffening in the

position in which he had left it; in a necessary forcible gentleness he

composed her body. But he didn't hide her--not yet--with a sheet.

That would follow soon enough. The blueness was receding, leaving

her pinched, but white. She had always been pale.... By God, he had

forgotten to tell them. Lee, stumbling down the stairs, found Daniel,

the doctor, and the proprietor of the hotel, Venalez, talking together.

As he approached there was a flash of premonition on his brother's broad

unstirring face. Lee said humbly:

“She is dead.”

Fancett, with Daniel Randon, went up at once, but he lingered, facing

the Cuban. Venalez had a long brown countenance, with a disordered

moustache. His trousers were thrust into the customary dingy boots,

but his shirt was confined at the waist, and he had dispensed with a

machete. He grew uneasy under Lee's stare, and shuffled his feet; then,

behind a soiled thin hand, he coughed. It was clear that he wished

intensely to escape, but was held by his conceptions of the obligations

of conduct. “The suddenness--” Lee said, and then paused with a furrowed

brow; “that's what surprises me. She was as well as you, and singing,

yes--singing, that she didn't want to be a wife. I thought she had

tripped on the loose silk thing she wore; and then I was certain that

she had fainted from your heat.” He bore heavily on the word your, and

then proceeded to curse the atmosphere, in a heavy manner suggesting

that it were a property, a condition, under the direction of the hotel

proprietor. From that he proceeded to damn Utica and the state of Ohio.

“But you can't understand me,” he added, illogically angry at that, too.

Daniel was again at his side, speaking. “There is nothing for you to

do here, and you may as well come to the batey with me. There are some

accidents that cannot be provided against. This is one of them. She will

be attended to; but you must explain about the cables.”

“I had better get her things,” Lee replied. He couldn't leave the

delicate and beautiful trifles of Savina's living in the blue vault

above. “They were scattered about the room.” That, as well, Daniel

assured him, had not been neglected. Her effects were to go over in

the wagon with them. Lee, jolting on a springless contrivance over

an informal road, kept his hand on the bags beside him. They were in

Holland cases which hid the sets of initials ending in G. A revolver was

shoved under the leather seat at the driver's left. There were the negro

women, half naked, lounging in their doorways.

Telling himself that Savina was dead, he lingered over that term, at

once so definite and obscure. There had been a pain in her heart at the

Dos Hermanos, while they were having dinner, after the steamer, blazing

with lights and with music on the upper deck, had swept out of the

harbor. And, since then, at night, she had cried out. That, he had

thought, was the expression of her consuming passion. He hadn't killed

her; he would correct Fancett there. The doctor's glance, almost

suspicious, had been intolerable. Savina had whispered to him, at the

end, that she was sorry for nothing; she had begged him to be happy.

He roused himself and asked Daniel if they had far to go, and learned

that they had almost reached the batey. Where, Lee added silently,

Daniel wouldn't have us. It might well have saved Savina. The same

ideas persisted in his mind. He wondered if, in the hurried packing, her

handkerchief had been neglected? It was one of a number that Savina had

bought in Havana. He had stayed outside, in the motor, smoking; and,

when she had rejoined him, after a long wait, she had displayed her

purchases. Her voice had been animated with pleasure at their reasonable

price. Things small and unimportant! His brain worked mechanically, like

a circling toy that had been tightly wound up and must continue until

its spring was expanded.

The fundamental calamity was too close for any grasp of its tragic

proportions: Savina dead was far more a set of unpredictable

consequences than a personality. Alive she had drawn him into herself;

she had, with her body, shut out the world of reality if not of mental

query. Even the fervor of Cuba had seemed to pale before her burning

spirit. What, without knowing it, Dr. Fancett had meant--a thing Lee

himself had foreseen--was that Savina had killed herself, she had been

consumed by her own flame. But she hadn't regretted it. That assurance,

bequeathed to him in the very hush of death, was of massive importance.

Nothing else mattered--she had been happy with him. At last, forgetful

of the ending, he had brought her freedom from a life not different from

a long dreary servitude. He would need to recall this, to remind himself

of it, often in the years that would leadenly follow; for he must

be regarded as a murderer--the man who, betraying William Grove, had

debauched and killed his wife.

That, of course, was false; but what in the world that would judge,

condemn, him wasn't? He had his memories, Savina's words. A sharper

sense of deprivation stabbed at him. Why, she was gone; Savina was dead.

Her arms would never again go around his neck. The marks of the mules

across her narrow feet! He put out a shaking hand, and Daniel Randon met

it, enveloped it, in a steady grasp that braced him against the lurching

of the wagon.

* * * * *

On the veranda of Daniel Randon's house Lee sat pondering over his

brother's emphatic disconnected sentences. “This conventionality, that

you have been so severe with, is exceedingly useful. It's not too much

to say indispensable. Under its cover a certain limited freedom is

occasionally possible. And where women are concerned--” he evidently

didn't think it necessary even to find words there. “The conventions,

for example, stronger in William Grove than his feelings, saved the

reputation of his wife; they kept Fanny alive and, with her heroic and

instinctive pride, made it possible for you to go back to Eastlake. If

you choose, of course. I can't enter into that. But, if you decide to

return, you won't be supported by noble memories of your affair--was it

of love or honor?--no, an admirable pretence must assist you. The

other, if you will forgive me, is no more than the desire for a cheap

publicity, a form of self-glorification. Expensive. The proper clothes,

you see--invaluable! The body and the intentions underneath are

separate. It is only the thoughtless, the hasty and the possessed who

get them confused.”

The veranda occupied all four sides of Daniel Randon's low, wide-roofed

dwelling, continuous except for the break where an open passage led to

a detached kitchen. Seated in an angle which might be expected to catch

the first movement of the trade winds sweeping, together with night,

from the sea, practically the whole of the batey was laid out before

Lee. The sun was still apparent in a rayless diffusion above a horizon

obliterated in smoke, a stationary cloud-like opacity only thinning

where the buildings began: the objects in the foreground were sharp;

but, as the distance increased, they were blurred as though seen through

a swimming of the vision. The great bulk of the sugar mill, at the left,

like--on the flatness of the land--a rectangular mountain shaken by a

constant rumbling, was indistinct below, but the mirador lifted against

the sky, the man there on look-out, were discernible. The mill, netted

in railroad tracks, was further extended by the storage house for

bagasse--the dry pulpy remnant of the crushed cane--and across its front

stood a file of empty cars with high skeleton sides. There was a noisy

backing and shifting of locomotives among the trains which, filled with

sugar cane, reached in a double row out of sight.

The cars were severally hauled to the scales shed, weighed, and then

shoved upon a section of track that, after they were chained, sharply

tilted and discharged the loads into a pit from which the endless belt

of a cane carrier wound into the invisible roller crushers. The heavy

air was charged with the smooth oiled tumult of machinery, the blast

whistles of varied signals, and the harshness of escaping steam. Other

houses, smaller than Daniel's but for the rest resembling it, were

strung along the open--the dwellings of the Assistant Administrador,

the Chief Electrician, a Superintendent, and two or three more that Lee

hadn't identified. He had been, now, nearly four weeks with Daniel, and

the details of La Quinta, the procedure of the sugar, were generally

familiar to him.

However, he had had very little opportunity to talk to his brother: the

difficulties, in Cobra and Havana, of shipping Savina's body back to New

York--William Grove, persuaded that it was unnecessary, hadn't come to

Cuba; a fire in one of the out-lying colonias of the La Quinta estate,

that had destroyed three caballerias of ratoon; the sheer tyranny of an

intricate process which, for seven months in the year, was not allowed

to pause, had kept Lee from any satisfactory communication of his

feelings or convictions. But, at last, returning hot and fatigued from

the clearing, by fire, of a tumba, Daniel had been sitting with him

for more than an hour, and he showed no signs of immediate change or

activity.

“What you say is clear enough,” Lee Randon admitted; “and yet--but I

can't see where--there is a sophistry in it.” Daniel made a gesture

both curt and indifferent. “I tell you it would be better, even at the

destruction of the entire present world, to establish honesty. Since

you have referred to me--what we, Savina and I, did was, simply, honest;

but, again as you pointed out, its effect around us, for bad or very

possibly good, was brought to nothing by the way it was drawn back into

the victorious conspiring of sham. Even I don't know which, commendable

or fatal, it was; I haven't been able to find out; I hadn't time. But

Savina preferred the two weeks we had together to an infinity of the

other. Fancett may call it an acute dilatation of the heart, but it was

happiness that killed her. It's possible for me to say that because,

fundamentally, I didn't bring it to her. Savina found it, created it,

for herself. Through that time--was it long or short? The two weeks

seemed a life--she was herself, superior.”

“How about you?”

“I was absolutely contented,” Lee replied.

“Isn't that a pale word for an act of passion?”

“Perhaps. It may be.” A troubled expression settled over Lee's eyes.

“There is something I should like to explain to you, Daniel, to ask you

about, but it would take a great many words?” He cast this in the tone

of a query, and palpably waited for the encouragement to proceed fully;

but Daniel Randon was persistently non-committal. He had no intention,

he said, of urging Lee to any speech he might later regret and wish

unpronounced. “It's about my attitude toward Savina,” Lee proceeded; “or

it may be about a doll; I don't know. No, Savina and the doll weren't as

distinct as you'd suppose; they were, in the beginning and at the

end, one: Savina and Cytherea. That has given me some wretched hours;

because, when it was over, I didn't miss Savina, I couldn't even call

her individually back to my mind; and the inhumanity of that, the sheer

ingratitude, was contemptible.

“I can explain it best by saying that Cytherea had always represented

something unknown that I wanted, that always disturbed me and made me

dissatisfied. She was more fascinating than any living woman; and her

charm, what she seemed to hint at, to promise, filled me with the

need to find it and have it for my own. That desire grew until it was

stronger than anything else, it came between everything else and me and

blinded me to all my life--to Fanny and the children and my companies.

But, before I saw Cytherea, I was ready for her:

“Because of the conventions you uphold as being necessary to--to

comfort, nothing greater. My life with Fanny had fallen into a

succession of small wearing falsehoods, pretences. I had made a mistake

in the choice of a career; and, instead of dropping that blunder, I

spent my energy and time in holding it up, supporting it, assuring

myself that it was necessary. The most I would acknowledge, even

privately, was that, like the majority of men, I hated work. Like

so many men I was certain that my home, my wife, were absorbing as

possible. Wherever I looked, other lives were built of the same labored

and flimsy materials. Mine was no worse; it was, actually, far better

than most. But only better in degree, not in kind. It occupied about a

fifth of my existence, and the rest was made up of hours, engagements,

that were a total waste.

“At one time I had enjoyed them, I couldn't have thought of more

splendid things; but the spirit of that period was not the same, and it

was the spirit which made them desirable. I suppose that could be called

my love for Fanny. I was glad to sit and discuss the hem of her skirt

with her. It was enough just to be coming home to the house where she

was waiting. I tell you, Daniel, my life then was transfigured. How long

did it last--four years, six, eight? I can't be exact; but if I speak of

its duration you will guess that it went. It went slowly, so slowly that

for a long while I was ignorant of what was happening. It left in the

vanishing of the little lubrications you insist are as needful for

society as for your machinery. They began as lubrications, evasions, to

keep the wheels turning smoothly, and they ended as grains of sand in

the bearings.

“First there was Fanny's convention of modesty--it had been put into her

before birth--which amounted to the secret idea that the reality of love

was disgusting. She could endure it only when feeling swept her from her

essential being. When that had passed she gathered her decency around

her like Susanna surprised. Positively she had the look of a temporary

betrayal. So that, you see, was hidden in a cloak of hypocrisy. Then she

had the impracticable conviction that I existed solely in her, that

she was a prism through which every feeling and thought I had must be

deflected. Fanny didn't express this openly, it had too silly a

sound, but underneath, savagely, she fought and schemed and lied--more

conventions--for it. And, when the children were born, she was ready for

them with such a mountain of pretty gestures and ideas that I gave them

up: I couldn't fight their mother and the nurses and the maids in

the kitchen--the whole bloody nice world. For one thing I wasn't home

enough; when I got in for dinner they were either in bed or starched for

their curtesies and kisses. They are superior children, Daniel; yet what

they were taught to say sounds like the infantile sentimentalities of

the stage.”

* * * * *

The capataz of the batey gang, a tall flushed Jamaican negro, passed

on a cantering white pony. The American wives, the flowers of Utica and

Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a

cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green palmetto

hat, wearing a grotesquely large revolver, saluted Daniel from the open.

“Trouble at the cantina barracon,” he called cheerfully.

“It was then,” Lee specified, “that all my loose ends were gathered up

in Cytherea. I have, I think, explained her. She was a doll, but it is

more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that

at first: I took her to be an individual, the image of a happy personal

fate that, somehow, I had missed, but might still catch up with.

“The wildest kind of a dream,” Lee Randon proclaimed. “But when I

became aware of Savina, or rather of her passion, I was sure I had been

completely justified. She was, I believed, Cytherea. They looked alike.

They were the same! However, I mistook that sameness. I can understand

now, very clearly; it seems incredible that I had been so blind, so

fatuous, Daniel. I actually thought that there was a choice, a special

graciousness, existing and reserved for me.” He laughed, not bitterly,

but in a wonderment that bordered on dismay. “I felt that I had found it

in Savina. I did get a lot there--more than I should have hoped for--but

not precisely that. At last I know.” His voice was grave, and he paused

that Daniel might grasp the weight of what was to follow. “I had made

the mistake of thinking that I, as an individual, had any importance.

In my insane belief that a heavenly beauty, a celestial chorus girl,

was kept for me, I pictured myself as an object of tender universal

consideration.

“Damned anthropomorfic rot!

“It was a principle all the while,” he cried; “a principle that would

fill the sky, as vast as space; and ignorant, careless, of me, it

was moving to its own end. And that--do you see, Daniel?--had grown

destructive. It had begun differently, naturally, in the healthy

fertility of animals and simple lives; but the conceit of men, men like

me, had opposed and antagonized it. Magnifying our sensibilities, we had

come to demand the dignity of separate immortalities. Separate worms!

We thought that the vitality in us was for the warming of our own hearts

and the seduction of our nerves. And so I left the safety of a species,

of Fanny and children, for the barrenness of Cytherea.

“That's her secret, what she's forever smiling at--her power, through

men's vanity, to conquer the earth. She's the reward of all our fineness

and visions and pleasure, the idol of our supreme accomplishment:

the privilege of escaping from slavery into impotence, the doubtful

privilege of repaying the indignities of our birth.” His rigid strained

face was drenched with sweat. “We made her out of our longing and

discontent, an idol of silk and gilt and perverse fingers, and put

her above the other, above everything. She rewarded us, oh, yes--with

promises of her loveliness. Why shouldn't she be lovely eternally in the

dreams of men?

“Then, finally, Savina and Cytherea were merged again. In Savina her

passion, always abnormal, hadn't been spent; there she was younger than

the youngest girl I knew; incomparably more dangerous. She, too, had

been constrained by the artificial, by conventionality; and when

the moment of reality came it broke William Grove, Fanny, Helena and

Gregory--all the threads that precariously held us. She was stronger

than I, Savina was the goal and I was only the seeker--that was the

difference between us--and in absorbing me she was content.”

“That is very ingenious,” Daniel told him. “Do you notice that the smoke

is thicker in the east?”

“Not more in one direction than in another,” Lee answered indirectly;

“in the east and south, the north and west, up above and underneath.

It's a good thing for our comfort that there's so much of it we can't

see the fires. If the books of physics are to be credited, the center

of the earth is liquid flame; certainly it is hot enough here to suggest

something of the sort.”

“It is worse in Oriente,” Daniel informed him.

“What I have said,” Lee Randon continued, “came from my remark, the

one you disagreed with, about the need of an understanding everywhere!

Isolated, in a chance individual like me, it is worse than useless,

fatal. It destroys the support of a common cause with a humanity only

less resentful than sentimental. And this has brought me to the reason

why--in spite of her splendid proposal--I can't go back to Fanny: I

have grown too detached to give her effort a possibility of success, of

happiness for her.”

“If you are so cursed abstract, you may as well be in Eastlake as at La

Quinta,” his brother asserted.

“Your saying that is curious,” Lee replied, “for it is exactly what I

told a man, in circumstances remarkably like my own, not long ago. I

explained that life was all monotonously alike; and that, therefore, it

didn't really matter where he changed to. I still think that most of

it is inexcusable, perhaps hopeless, but I can't subscribe to it. What

Fanny wants is contrition and the return to a time forever lost. I

shouldn't be able to persuade her that I hadn't been in a temporary

fever which, if she were sufficiently careful, would go and leave things

very much as they were. That is her strength, her necessity, and she

must uphold it until farthest old age and death.”

Daniel Randon rose and went to the railing of the veranda, gazing

intently into the hidden east. “You are right,” he said, crediting Lee

with a contention he hadn't made; “that is the refuse on Jagües.”

“Helena and Gregory don't need me,” Lee went on and on; “or, if you

prefer--I am no longer afraid of words--I don't need them. I believe, in

nature, that the length of paternity is measured by the helplessness of

the young. An elephant is more devoted than a crow. My obligation was

soon ended.”

“Bring it down to this,” Daniel's brevity was explicit: “what in the

devil are you going to do?”

“I haven't any idea beyond the realization that I can't stay here taking

up your room and Juan's time. It seems to me that for a month he has

done nothing but concern himself with my comfort. I did, in Havana,

while Savina was living, think of writing; but I have given it up

because it would involve me in so much that is disagreeable. The amazing

fact is that, since I have acquired a degree of wisdom, there is nothing

for me to do, nowhere to go. The truth, I have always heard, will make

you free; but for what, Daniel? What is it the truth will make you free

for except to live in the solitude of public hatred? When I refuse, as

I certainly shall, to return to Fanny the world where I might accomplish

something will be closed to me.

“I could be a farmer if it weren't for the impossibility of my sleeping

through the early part of the night; my hands are too stiff to learn

a trade. I don't want to learn a trade!” he exclaimed. “And as for

starting more stock companies, rolling greater quantities of refuse into

cigarettes or bottling harmless colored water, or controlling a news

sheet in the interest of my other interests--” he could think of no term

sufficiently descriptive of his remoteness from all that. “I shall have

to be what a universal Eastlake will prefer to call me. I'd stay here,

at La Quinta, if you could find something for me to do--like picking the

limes fresh for the Daiquiri cocktails. Do you think your company would

carry me on its rolls for that? I could gather them in the morning and

evening, when it was cooler. Thank God, I haven't any material ambition.

I like the clothes, the life, of that nigger, the capataz, who rode by,

as well as most. I'd sit up on the mirador and keep--what do you call

it?--the veija, for months on end.”

The servant, Juan, small and dark in his white house coat, appeared with

a tray on which two glasses with stems held a fragrant amber liquid.

“That is perfection,” Lee murmured; “where else could it be found?

Advise me, Daniel,” his voice was both light and serious. “You have

never been known to give advice, but certainly my case is unusual enough

to warrant extraordinary pains. Shall I make a neat hole at the proper

point in my skull; or, better yet, put half a grain of a drug that will

occur to you on my tongue and close my mouth on further indiscretions?

That has its aspects. But not so strongly after one of Juan's drinks;

they are distilled illusions, vain dreams still of hope. They have all

the brave ring of accomplishment without its effort. But I can see the

end even of them--atrophy. Soon Cytherea will go into the attic, have

her nose broken, and the rats will eat the clothes from her indifferent

body. Cytherea on a pearl shell in the Ionic Sea... I was one of her

train, Daniel.” He leaned sharply forward--

Daniel Randon was asleep.