Cytherea Part 24

When she returned she redressed her hair, drawing it back across her ears, put in at a provocative angle a fan-like carved sh.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+ning with the reflections of the lights strung along the sh.o.r.e; 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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, princ.i.p.ally, 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 c.o.c.ktails of Bacardi rum, fragrant with fresh limes and sweet with a crust of sugar that remained at the bottoms of the gla.s.ses. 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 a.s.sumed a potency, a naked reality, more profound than anything in his previous knowledge. It was the voice of a crazed and debased pa.s.sion. 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, b.e.s.t.i.a.l and exposed, in a ball room with gla.s.s-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 m.u.f.fled 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mferential 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.surances, 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 circ.u.mstance 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 att.i.tude toward him. She often repeated, in a voice no longer varying from her other impa.s.sioned speech, that she loved him; and, while this was a phrase, a rea.s.surance, 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 f.a.n.n.y, 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 f.a.n.n.y was more difficult.

From Havana, his approval of f.a.n.n.y 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 Camaguey, 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 a.s.semblage of Americans at the counter of a steams.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sistance.

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 a.s.surance 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 c.o.c.ktails. 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 a.s.sault 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sing 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed, 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 s.h.i.+rts 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 gra.s.s 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 Camaguey, 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 facades 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 a.s.sented, 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 st.u.r.dy rush-bottomed chairs.

Its princ.i.p.al 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sented.

Daniel Randon was both tall and fat, a slow impressive bulk in white linen with a smooth impa.s.sive face and considering brown eyes. "This,"

he said unremarkably, "is a surprise. But I am, of course, glad; particularly since Venalez reported that f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y, 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--"