The Bright Shawl Part 7

The sweat streaming into his mouth turned thick and salt--blood, from his nose. There was a tumult in his head: his fencing now was the mere waving of a reed. Again and again the Spaniard's foil, as cruelly and vitally direct as at the first pa.s.s, struck within Charles' guard. The face of wood, of yellow wood, the eyes that were bits of coal, behind the mask, pursued him into the back of his brain. It stirred, there, a smothering instinct, a dormant memory, and Charles, with a wrenching effort, in a voice thin like a trickle of water from a spigot, said again, "--a most beautiful hand."

Sharply, incomprehensibly, it was over. Drooping forward upon his knees, dropping his foil from paralysed fingers, he saw de Vaca, with his mask on an arm, frowning.

"Now," Charles Abbott thought luxuriously, "I can faint and be d.a.m.ned to them."

The cloud of darkness which flowed over him was empty of the vileness of fear; rather, like the beneficence of night, it was an utterly peaceful remission of the flesh.

His physical exhaustion, the weariness of his mind, continued in a settled la.s.situde through the following day. He was to see Andres Escobar, give him what information he had had from La Clavel, the next morning at the baths of the Campos Eliseos; and meanwhile he scarcely stirred from the San Felipe. Charles, for the time, lacked the bravado necessary for the sustaining of his pretence. His thoughts, turned in upon his own acts and prospects, dwelt quietly on his determination.

He had changed appreciably during his stay in Havana; even his physiognomy was different how, he couldn't say, but he was aware that his expression had, well, hardened. The cure which had been the princ.i.p.ally hoped-for result of Cuba was complete. In spite of his collapse in the fencing school, he was more compactly strong than ever before. It occurred to him that, now, he might be described as a man.

This brought him a certain pleasure, and, in keeping with that state, he tried to simplify, to comprehend, the idealism which dominated him.

He didn't want to grasp vainly at rosy clouds. His first att.i.tude, one of hardly more than boyish excitement, had soon become a deep impersonal engagement--he had promised himself to Cuba. That will was stronger than ever; but the schooling of the past weeks, together with the stiffening of his spirit, had bred a new practicality in him, superior, he felt, to any sheer heroics. He vastly preferred the latter, he hadn't totally lost the inspiring mental picture of a glorious sacrifice; but he had come to the realization that it was more important to stay alive. What, in reality, he was trying to do was to see himself consecutively, logically.

In this, he recognized, his mind was different from the Escobars', from the blind fervor of the many Cuban patriots he knew. He could see that reflected in their manner toward him: no trace of Vincente's aloofness remained, they had come, forgetting his comparative youth, his alien blood, to regard him with almost an anxiety of respect.

When it was possible, men of the widest possible activities talked to him of their plans. In short, Charles Abbott felt that he might become a power; and this he coolly set himself to bring about. His heritage was that of success; there were distinguished men, who had carried alone heavy responsibilities to their justified end, no more than two or three generations behind him. His mother, he thought gladly, surveying her in the clearness of a full detachment, had an astonis.h.i.+ng courage of spirit. Charles told himself that he would have to become a politician; his undiminished idealism, without which his validity was nothing, must be shut into his heart, held purely for the communication of its force and for his own benefit.

The simple path of truth, of partisan enthusiasm, must be put aside.

The uncalculating bravery of the men gathered about General Agramonte was of indispensable value; but undirected, with no brain to make secure, to put into operation, the fire they created, that would come to little. He wished that his connection, his duty, with La Clavel was over, that he could delegate it elsewhere, but, obviously, for the moment, that was impossible. It merely remained for him, then, to take no unpondered chances, never again to be drawn into such a situation as he had faced with Gaspar Arco de Vaca.

Before such a sharp decision, a certain amount of his sheer joy evaporated: it was less inspiring to be cautious than daring. The Cubans themselves, always excepting Andres, had lost an appreciable amount of their glamour for him. They were, now, units, elements, to be managed, to be tranquilized, steadied, moved about. All this, of course, was yet to come; the recognition of him was instinctive rather than acknowledged. But, he repeated to himself, it was forming, spreading. That, then, was the shape, the actuality, of his vision--to establish himself indispensably at the fore of a Cuban liberty, incipient, dreamed of, and accomplished. All his thoughts dropped, almost with the audible smooth clicking of meshed steel gears, into place. The last degree of joy was replaced by a fresh calm maturity.

He would never, it was obvious, be a leader of soldiers, and he had no desire to become the visible head of government; no, his intention was other than that of Carlos de Cespedes. He viewed his future self rather as a powerful source of advice with a house on the Prado. It was curious how coldly, exactly, he planned so much; and he stopped to examine his ambition even more closely and to discover if it were merely absurd.

It struck him that it might be he had lost too much, that already he had become selfish, ambitious for himself, and he recalled the religious aspect so quickly gone. No, he decided, his effort was to bridge that s.p.a.ce, already recognized, between desire and realization. Anyhow, he determined to speak of this as well to Andres during their bath. The April temporale lay in an even heat over the city, and the end of the Paseo Isabel was crowded by the quitrins of women, the caleseros, in their brilliant livery, sleeping in whatever shade offered. The Escobars had a private bath, but Andres preferred the larger bano publico, where it was possible to swim, and there Charles found him. The basin had been hollowed from the coral rock; it was perhaps eighteen or twenty feet square, and the height of the water, with a pa.s.sage for a fresh circulation cut in the front wall, was level with the calm reach of the sea.

The pool, as clear as slightly congealed and cooled air, open to the horizon, was roofed, with a railed ledge and steps descending into the water, and Andres Escobar sat with his legs half immersed. He greeted Charles conventionally, concealing the pleasure which shone in his eyes.

"I stopped at your dressing-room," Charles Abbott told him; "anything might be taken from the pockets of your coat."

The converse of this possibility, that something had been put into a pocket, he conveyed. Andres nodded indifferently. The other slid into the water, sinking and swimming beneath the surface to the farther end. It was delicious. Swimming was his only finished active accomplishment; and, with a half concealed pride, he exhibited it in skilful variations. Even the public bath, he felt, was too contracted for the full expression of his ability. In addition to this, it was necessary to talk confidentially to Andres. And so, with a wave of his arm, he indicated the freedom of the sea beyond.

Andres Escobar followed him over the stone barrier, and together they swam steadily out into the blue. Finally, they rested, floating, and Charles diffidently related what was in his heart. His friend, less secure in the water, listened with a gravity occasionally marred by a mouthful of sea.

"You are right," he agreed, when Charles had finished. "Although you have put it modestly, I think--many of us admit--that you may be a strong man in Cuba. Indeed, I have heard it said that you should go back to America, and put more intensity into the Junta. Naturally I should regret that, but we must all do what, in the end, is best.

Charles, there is a great deal of water under and around us, and I should feel better nearer the Campos Eliseos."

"Wait," Charles Abbott replied with a touch of impatience; "you are quite safe, there is no tide at present." Floating in the calm immensity, his arms outspread, his face, at once burned by the sun and lapped by water, turned to the opposed azure above, he drew in accession after accession of a determination like peace. Nothing should upset what he had planned. There was a stir beside him--Andre Escobar was returning to the sh.o.r.e, and lazily, thoughtfully, he swam back. The Cuban left immediately, for breakfast; but Charles lingered in the pool, lounging upon the wooden grilling with a cigarette. One by one the bathers went away. The sky, the sea, were a blaze of blue.

The clatter of hoofs, the caleseros' departing cries, sounded from the Paseo. "Charles Abbott," he repeated his own name aloud with an accent of surprise. What, whom, did it describe? He gazed down over his drying body. This, then, was he--the two legs, thin but sufficiently muscular, the trunk in a swimming suit, the arms and hands! His hidden brain, his invisible mind, was himself as well; and, of the two, the mind and the body, the unseen was overwhelmingly the more important.

He remembered how, fencing with de Vaca, the body had failed him utterly; de Vaca, attacking his will, was contemptuous of the other ... and his will had survived. Rising, he felt that he commanded himself absolutely; he had no sympathy, no patience, for frailty, for a failure through the celebrated weaknesses of humanity: hardness was the indispensable trait of success.

The whole of reasonably intelligent life, Charles discovered, was disrupted by the ceaseless clash of two utterly opposed ideas, emotions. There was, first, the need in the individual to serve, to justify, himself, to maintain his integrity; and, as well, there was the duty--at least, it was universally called a duty--of a self-sacrifice for love. The failures of superior men came largely, he was certain, in the breaking down of the first through the second.

A man, for example, put into motion the accomplishment of his own demand, and then was appalled by the incidental price, but more to others than to himself. Yes, love betrayed men. The Escobars were, inseparably, Cuba, they were happily merged, lost, in one supreme cause; yet the superiority of their hearts over the head endangered their dearest preoccupation. They saw symbols as realities, they wrongly valued emotion more highly than reasoning.

And further, Charles returned to himself, if he had consulted and listened to his parents, if his love of home had outweighed his singular vision, he would be nothing now but an unimportant drifting figure. His parents had had more knowledge of life than he; undoubtedly their counsel, in the main, was correct, safe. That word, safe, was it specially. The instinct of his mother was to preserve, to spare, him; to win for him as smooth a pa.s.sage through life as was procurable. She had her particular feminine idea of what, in her son, spelled solid accomplishment; and, with all her spirit, it was material in so far as it was visible: position in a settled community, the money necessary for an existence both dignified and ornamental, a "nice" wife--another devoted sheltering soul such as herself--and well-behaved handsome children. The inner qualities she demanded for him were faith, honesty, and fidelity.

Her vision of a broad close-cut lawn and grey stone house with pillars and a port-cochere, his wife, in silks and chaste jewels, receiving a polite company in the drawing-room, was admirable. In it he would be gray-haired and, together with an increasing stoutness, of an a.s.sured dignity. His children would wors.h.i.+p his wisdom and paternal benevolence, and the world of affairs would listen to him with attentive respect. It was, unquestionably, an impressive conception.

Every detail was excellent, but he cared for, revered, none of them.

He didn't want to be safe, to decline softly to a soft old age, a death smothered in feathers. More than anything else his desire was to live intensely, to ride, upright, the crest of a thunderous wave. He hated, now, every phase of a decent suburban smugness. Someone else was welcome to the girl designated, by his mother, to be his wife.

Someone other than himself might sit across the dinner-table from her, week after week, month after month, year after year, and watch her stereotyped face beyond the cut flowers; another might listen to the interminable gabble about servants and neighbors and dresses and cards. The children would be differently, more appropriately, fathered; his, Charles Abbott's, potential children were gathered into an ideal that was, too, an idea. It must be served, realized, within the dimensions of his own bone and fibre; it was exclusively his, his the danger, the penalty and the reward. Charles would not have had it different, even if, although none existed, he had any choice.

He must, however, prepare himself against the betrayal he was able to trace so clearly in others; there could be no faltering, no remorse; he was cut off from the ordinary solaces, the comfortable compactness, of general living. But, already, temperamentally, he liked, preferred, this; alone, never for a minute was he lonely.

The inattention to home, primarily the result of a new scene and of exciting circ.u.mstances, had grown into an impersonal fondness for his family; he failed to miss them, to wish for their presence. The only element that remained from the past was his love for Andres Escobar; he confronted it valorously, deposed it from his mind, but it clung around his heart. How fortunate it was that Andres could not detach him from his resolve; it was unthinkable that one should stand in the way of the other.

These reflections occupied his mind at various times and places: one day in the American Consulate on Obispo Street; again at the steams.h.i.+p office on Mercaderes; over his cigarette and cheese and jelly at the n.o.ble Havana; strolling along Ricla Street where the princ.i.p.al shops were congregated; at a dinner party in the Palace of the Conde de Santovernia. He was aloof. All the activity that absorbed the people among whom he went was to him trivial, utterly of no consequence.

Sometimes he would walk through the stalls of the Mercado de Cristina, on the Plaza Vieja, or in through the Honradez factory on Sol Street, where a handful of cigars was courteously given to any appreciative visitor. He would return along the Paseo de Valdez to the park where he had sat when he was first in Cuba, and, as then, the strains of the military band of the Cabanas drifted across the bay.

The dwelling of the Captain-General, with the Royal Lottery on the ground floor, had before it sentries in red and white; the Quay de Caballeria, reached through the Plaza of San Francisco, was tempered and pleasant in the early dusk, and at the Quay de Machina was a small garden with grotesque rosy flamingoes and gold-fish in the fountain.

He sat, as well, lonely, considering and content, in the Alameda de Paula, where, by the glorieta, it was called the Salon O'Donnell. The moats, filled with earth, truck gardens, the sh.o.r.e covered with sugar pans, engaged his absent-minded interest. With the improvement of his Spanish, he deserted the better known cafes and restaurants, the insolence of the Castilian officers, for modest Cuban places of food, where he drank Catalan wine, and smoked the Vegueros, the rough excellent plantation cigars.

This new mood, he was relieved to find, gave his acquaintances as much amus.e.m.e.nt as his public dissipation--it was ascribed to the predicted collapse of his love affair with La Clavel. She was, he was rallied, growing tired of his attentions; and, in the United States Club, he was requested not to drown himself, because of the trouble it would cause his country. Captain Santacilla, however, studied him with a growing ill-humor; his peculiar threats and small brutalities had stopped, but his temper, Charles recognized, was becoming dangerous.

He declared frankly, in the Cafe Dominica, that Charles wasn't the fool he appeared, and he repeated his a.s.sertions of the need for a deportation or worse.

This was a condition which, sooner or later, must be met, and for which Charles prepared himself. Both Cubans and Spaniards occasionally disappeared forever--the former summarily shot by a file of muskets in a fosse, and the latter, straying in the anonymous paths of dissipation, quieted by a patriotic or vindictive knife. This, it seemed to Charles Abbott, would be the wisest plan with Santacilla; and he had another strange view of himself considering and plotting a murder. The officer, who had an extraordinary sense of intangible surrounding feelings and pressures, spoke again to Charles of the efforts to dispose of him.

"The man doesn't draw breath who will do it," he proclaimed to Charles, at the entrance to the Valla de Gallo. "It's a superst.i.tion, but I'd back it with my last onza of gold. I've seen it in you very lately, but give it up. Or don't give it up. Either way you are unimportant. I can't understand why you are still here, why I permit you to live. If I remember it I'll speak to my sergeant, Javier Gua: he performs such an errand to a nicety. I have taken a dislike to you, very unreasonably, for you are no more than a camarone. I believe, for all your appearance of money, that La Clavel supports you; it is her doblons, I am certain, you gamble away and spend for food."

Charles Abbott smiled at the insult:

"On one hand I hear that she has thrown me over and then you say that she supports me. Which, I wonder, is to be preferred? But neither, fortunately, is true. I can still buy her a bouquet of camellias and she will still wear it. As for the money, I never lose at gambling, Santacilla, I am always successful; the cards are in my favor. If I bet on the black, it turns up; and when I choose the red, affairs are red."

Santacilla's uneasy eyes s.h.i.+fted over him suspiciously. "Blood and death, that is what black and red are," he said. "But you are not the dispenser of fate." The peak of his c.o.c.kaded hat threw a shadow over his sanguine face to the chin. "A camarone," he repeated, "a stalk of celery. Gua, and I'll remember to tell him, will part you from your conceit." There was a metallic crowing of roosters as the officer turned away.

La Clavel noticed a marked difference in Charles, but proclaimed that it was no more than an increase in his natural propensity for high-mindedness. It fatigued her, she declared, to be with him, made her dizzy to gaze up at his alt.i.tude of mind. He was seated in her room, the hairdresser was sweating in the attempt to produce an effect she was describing to him with phrases as stinging as the whip of foils, while Charles watched her with a degree of annoyance. Her humors, where he was concerned, were unpredictable; and lately she had found a special delight in attacks on his dignity. She said and did things--an air of innocence hiding her malice--indecently ribald that shook his firmest efforts to appear, to be, unconcerned.

At last, in a volatile rage, she dismissed the servant with his tongs and pomatum and crimping leads, and swore to Charles Abbott that she was going to the Argentine by the first boat that offered pa.s.sage.

"I am sick of Cuba, and I've forgotten that I am an artist, and that is bad. You are wrapped up in this liberty, and that is very well for you, an ordinary person. You must have something like that, outside you, to follow, for you've very little within. But me, I am not an ordinary person; I am La Clavel. I am more valuable to the world than pumpkins or republics. I stamp my heel," she stamped her heel, a clear sharp sound, and her body swept into a line pa.s.sionate and tense, "and I create a people, a history." La Clavel secured the castanets lying on her dressing-table--in answer to their irritable rhythmic clinking she projected, for an instant, a vision of all desire.

"I can make men forget; I can draw them out of their sorrows and away from their homes; I can put fever in their blood that will blind them to memories and duty. Or I can be a drum, and lead them out, without a regret, a fear, to death. That is more than a naranjada or a cigar or an election. And, because of what I have given you, I have put that out of my life; I have been living like the mistress of a bodega. To be clear, Charles, I am tired of you and Cuba, and I have satisfied my hatred of the officers with cologne on their handkerchiefs."

"I understand that perfectly," Charles Abbott a.s.sured her; "and I cannot beg you to stay. Whatever your motive was, your value to us has been beyond any payment. If our movement had a saint, you would fill that place."

She laughed, "A strange saint in a manton and slippers with painted heels."

"Much better," Charles replied, "than many of those in sanctified robes. I had the feeling, too," he proceeded, "that our usefulness together was coming to an end." It seemed to him that again she had become the glorified figure of the stage, his dislike for her actuality, her flesh, vanished, leaving only profound admiration.

"I am amazed," she said, in a lingering half humorous resentment, "that you never loved me, I never brought you a regret or a longing or made any trouble in your heart."

"That was because I put you so high," he explained. She raised her shoulders and objected that it was late for compliments.

"Be honest--you didn't care for me. You ought to be very successful, you have things surprising in the so young. Will you," she demanded suddenly, totally changing the subject, "be my maid?" He hastened to inform her, vehemently, that he would not. "Jobaba hasn't come today,"

La Clavel continued; "and she wasn't here to dress me for dinner last evening. That is unusual in her: I have a feeling she is not coming back."