The Bright Shawl Part 11

He glanced around, as though to see if anyone had observed his humiliation; and Charles Abbott instinctively drew back into the box.

As he did this he cursed himself with an utter loathing. Every natural feeling impelled him below, to go blindly to the support of Andres.

There must be some way--a quick s.h.i.+fting of masks and escape through a side door--to get him safely out of the hands of Spain. This, of course, would involve, endanger, himself, but he would welcome the necessity of that acceptance. Gaspar de Vaca had indicated the price he might well pay for such a course--the end, at the same time, of himself; not only the death of his body but the ruin of his hopes and high plans. Nothing, he had told himself a thousand times, should be allowed to a.s.sail them. Indeed, he had discussed just such a contingency as this with Andres. Theoretically there had been no question of the propriety of an utter seeming selfishness; the way, across a restaurant table, had been clear.

In the box the other Americans maintained a steady absorbed commenting on the whirling color of the danzon. One, finally, attracted by the manton on Pilar de Lima, called the attention of the others to her Chinese characteristics. They all leaned forward, engaged by the total pallor of her immobility above the blazing silk. They exclaimed when she left the Spanish officer and resumed her place by Andres Escobar's side. "Isn't that peculiar?" Charles was asked. "You are supposed to know all about these dark affairs. Isn't it understood that the women keep to their own men? And that Cuban, Abbott, you know him; we often used to see you with him!"

"Yes," Charles Abbott acknowledged, "partners seldom leave each other.

That is Andres Escobar."

He paid no more heed to the voices about him, but sat with his gaze, his hopes and fears, fastened on Andres and Pilar. Back again, she was, as usual, silent, dragging her fingers through the knotted magenta fringe of the shawl. Andres, though, was speaking in short tense phrases that alternated with concentrated angry pauses. She lifted her arms to him, and they began to dance. They remained, however, characteristic of the danzon, where they were, turning slowly and reversing in a remarkably small s.p.a.ce. They were a notably graceful couple, and they varied, with an intricate stepping, the general monotony of the measure.

Charles had an insane impulse to call down to Andres, to attract his attention, and to wave him away from the inimical forces gathering about him. Instead of this he lighted a cigarette, with hands the reverse of steady, and concentrated all his thoughts upon the fact of Cuban independence. That, he told himself, was the only thing of importance in his life, in the world. And it wasn't Cuba--alone, but the freedom of life at large, that rested, in part at least, on the foundation he might help to lay, the beginning solidity of human liberty, superiority. He forced himself to gaze with an air of indifference at the dancing below him; but, it seemed, wherever he looked, the manton floated into his vision. He saw, now, nothing else, neither Pilar nor Andres, but only the savage challenging fire of silks. The shawl's old familiar significance had been entirely lost--here he hated and feared it, it was synonymous with all that threatened his success. It gathered into its folded and draped square the evil of the danzon, the spoiled mustiness of joined and debased bloods, the license under a grotesque similitude of restraint.

This was obliterated by a wave of affection for Andres so strong that it had the effect of an intolerable physical pressure within his body: his love had the aspect of a tangible power bound to a.s.sert itself or to destroy him. With clenched hands he fought it back, he drove it away before the memory of the other. Voices addressed him, but he paid no attention, the words were mere sounds from a casual sphere with which he had nothing in common. He must succeed in his endeavor, put into actuality at this supreme moment his selfless projection of duty, responsibility. For it was, in spite of his preoccupation with its personal possibilities, an ideal to which he, as an ent.i.ty, was subordinated. He recalled the increasing number of destinies in which he was involved, that were being thrust upon him, and for which, at best, he would become accountable. So much more lay in the immediate future than was promised--justified--in the present.

Here, too, Andres was at fault--precisely the accident had happened to him that he was so strict in facing for others. His absorption wouldn't, as an infatuation, continue; or, rather, it could not have lasted ... long. But already it had been long enough to finish, to kill, Andres. Charles rose uncontrollably to his feet; he would save his friend from the menace of the whole Spanish army. But de Vaca, whose every accent carried conviction, had been explicit: he particularly would not have spoken under any other circ.u.mstance. He had, in reality, been tremendously flattering in depending to such a degree on Charles' coolness and intellect. Gaspar de Vaca would have taken no interest in a sentimentalist. The officer without question had found in Charles Abbott a strain of character, a resolution, which he understood, approved; to a certain extent built on. He had, in effect, concluded that Charles and himself would act similarly in similar positions.

It was, Charles decided, at an end; he must go on as he had begun. A strange numb species of calm settled over him. The vast crowded floor, the boxes on either hand, sweeping tier on tier to the far hidden ceiling, surrounding the immense chandelier glittering with crystal l.u.s.tres, were all removed, distant, from him. The Tacon Theatre took on the appearance of a limitless pit into which all human life had been poured, arbitrarily thrown together, and, in the semblance of masquerading gaiety, made to whirl in a time that had in its measure the rattle of bones, a drumming on skulls. This conception sickened him, he could, he felt, no longer breathe in a closeness which he imagined as fetid; and Charles realized that, at least, there was no need for him to remain. Indeed, it would be better in every way to avoid the impending, the immediate, catastrophe.

With a hasty incoherent remark he secured his hat and left the box.

Outside, in the bare corridor, he paused and his lips automatically formed the name Andres Escobar. In a flash he saw the gathering disintegration of the Escobar family--Vincente dead, his body dishonored; Narcisa, ineffable, flower-like, sacrificed to dull inept.i.tude; Domingo, who had been so cheerfully round, furrowed with care, his spirit dead before his body; Carmita sorrowing; and Andres, Andres the beautiful, the young and proud, betrayed, murdered in a brawl at a negro dance. What disaster! And where, in the power of accomplishment, they had failed, where, fatally, they had been vulnerable, was at their hearts, in their love each for the other, or in the fallibility of such an emotion as Andres felt for Pilar. He, Charles Abbott, must keep free from that entanglement. This rea.s.surance, however, was not new; all the while it had supported him.

He made his way down the broad shallow steps, pa.s.sing extraordinary figures--men black and twisted like the carvings of roots in the garb of holiday minstrels; women coffee-colored and lovely like Jobaba, their faces pearly with rice powder, in yellow satin or black or raw purple, their feet in high-heeled white kid slippers. Where they stood in his way he brushed them unceremoniously, hastily, aside, and he was followed by low threatening murmurs, witless laughter. A man, loyal to the Cuban cause, attempted to stop him, to repeat something which, he a.s.sured Charles, was of grave weight; but he went on heedlessly.

His pa.s.sage became, against his reasoning mind, a flight; and he cursed, with an unbalanced rage, in a minor frenzy, when he saw that he would have to walk through a greater part of the body of the theatre before he could escape. The dancers had, momentarily, thinned out, and he went directly across the floor. There was a flame before his eye, the illusion of a s.h.i.+fting screen of blood; and he found himself facing Pilar de Lima and Andres; beyond, the Spanish officer, tall and lank and young, was peering at them with an aggressive spite. Charles turned aside, avoiding the tableau. Then he heard Andres' exasperated voice ordering the girl to come with him to the promenade. Instead of that her glimmering eyes, with lights like the reflection of polished green stones, evading Andres, sought and found the officer.

Charles Abbott's legs were paralysed, he was held stationary, as though he were helpless in a dream. His heart pounded and burned, and a great strangling impulse shook him like a flag in the wind.

"Andres!" he cried, "Andres, let her go, she is nothing! Quickly, before it is too late. Remember--" There was a surging concentration so rapid that Charles saw it as a constricting menace rather than the offensive of a group of men. Pilar stooped, her hand at her knee.

Charles threw an arm about Andres, but he was dragged, struggling, away. She was icy in the h.e.l.l of the manton. There was a suspension of breathing, of sound, through which a fragile hand with a knife searched and searched. Then a shocking blow fell on Charles Abbott's head and the Tacon Theatre rocked and collapsed in darkness.

The sharp closing of a door brought him, a man advanced in middle age, abruptly to his feet. He was confused, and swayed dizzily, with out-stretched arms as though he were grasping vainly for the dissolving fragments of a s.h.i.+ning mirage of youth. They left him, forever, and he stood regaining his strayed sense of immediacy. He was surprisingly weary, in a gloom made evident by the indirect illumination of an arc light across and farther up the street.

Fumbling over the wall he encountered the light switch, and flooded his small drawing-room with brilliance. The clock on the mantle, crowned by an eagle with lifted gilded wings, pointed to the first quarter past eleven: when he had sunk into his abstraction from the present, wandered back into the sunlight of Havana and his days of promise, it had been no more than late afternoon; and now Mrs. Vauxn and her daughter, his neighbors, had returned from their dinner engagement. He wondered, momentarily, why that hour and ceremony had pa.s.sed unattended for him, and then recalled that Bruton and his wife, who kept his house, had gone to the funeral of a relative, leaving on the dining-room table, carefully covered, some cuts of cold meat, a salad of lettuce, bran bread and fresh b.u.t.ter, and the coffee percolator with its attachment for a plug in the floor.

To the rest, he had faithfully told Mrs. Bruton, who was severe with him, he'd attend. In place of that he had wandered into an amazing memory of his beginning manhood. The beginning, he told himself, and, in many ways the end--since then he had done little or nothing. After the ignominy of his deportation from Cuba--impending satisfactory negotiations between the United States and Spain, he gathered later, had preserved him from the dignity of political martyrdom--a drabness of life had caught him from which he could perceive no escape. Not, he was bound to add, that he had actively looked for one. No, his partic.i.p.ation in further events had been interfered with by a doubt, his life had been drawn into an endless question. If he had walked steadily past Andres Escobar, left him to a murder which, after all, he, Charles Abbott, had been powerless to stop, would he have gone on to the triumph of his ideal?

In addition to this there was the eternal speculation over the relation, in human destiny, of the heart to the head--which, in the end, would, must, triumph? There was no necessity in his final philosophy for the optimism, where men are concerned, that had been his first stay. He wasn't so sure now--but was he certain of anything?--of the coming victory of right, of the spreading, from land to land, of freedom. Did life reach upward or down, or was it merely the circling of a carrousel, the whirling of the danzon? Nothing, for him, could be settled, definite. He was inclined to the belief that the blow of the scabbard on his head.... That, however, like the rest, was indeterminate. He came back eternally to the same query--had he, as for so long, so wearily, he had insisted to himself, failed, proved weak for the contentions of existence on a positive plane? Had he become a part, a member, of the nameless, the individually impotent, throng? His sympathies were, by birth, aristocratic rather than humane; he preferred strength to acquiescence; but there were times now, perhaps, when he was aging, when there was a relief in sinking into the sea of humility.

Then his thoughts centered again on Howard Gage; who, before leaving that afternoon, had unpleasantly impressed Charles Abbott by his inelasticity, the fixity of his gaze upon the ground. Howard had been involved in a war of a magnitude that swamped every vestige of the long-sustained Cuban struggle. And he admitted his relation to this had been one of bitter necessity:

"I had to go, we all did," Howard Gage had said. "There wasn't any music about it, any romance. It had to be done, that was all, and it was. Don't expect me to be poetic."

Yes, the youth of today were, to Charles' way of thinking, badly off.

Anyone who could not be poetic, who wouldn't be if he had the chance, was unfortunate, limited, cramped. Visions, ideals, were indispensable for youth. Why, d.a.m.n it, love was dependent on dreams, unreality. He had never known it; but he was able to appreciate what it might be in a man's life. He no longer scorned love, or the woman he was able to imagine--a tender loveliness never out of a slightly formal beauty.

For her the service parts of the house would have no existence; and, strangely, he gave no consideration to children.

It wasn't that he minded loneliness; that was not an unmixed evil, especially for a man whose existence was chiefly spun from memories, speculations, and conditioned by the knowledge that he had had the best of life, its fullest measure, at the beginning. He had never again seen a woman like La Clavel, a friend who could compare with Andres, wickedness such as Pilar's, days and players as brilliant as those of Havana before, well--before he had pa.s.sed fifty. If the trade winds still blew, tempering the magnificence of the Cuban nights, they no longer blew for him. But Havana, as well, had changed.

The piano next door took up, where it had been dropped, the jota from Liszt's Rhapsody Espagnol. It rippled and sang for a moment and then ended definitely for the night. Other dancers, Charles reasonably supposed, continued the pa.s.sionate art of that lyric pa.s.sage; he read of them, coming from Spain to the United States for no other purpose.

He had no doubt about their capability, and no wish to see them. They would do for Howard Gage. What if he, instead of Charles Abbott, had been at the Tacon Theatre the night Andres had died? That was an interesting variation of the old question--what, in his predicament, would Howard Gage have done? Walked away, probably, holding his purpose undamaged! But Andres could never have loved Howard Gage; Andres, for his attachment, required warmth, intensity, the ornamental forms of honor; poetry, briefly. That lost romantic time, that day in immaculate white linen with a spray of mimosa in its b.u.t.tonhole!

There were some flowers, Charles recalled, standing on the table in the hall, dahlias; and he walked out and drew one into the lapel of his coat. It was without scent, just as, now, life was unscented; yet, surveying himself in the mirror over the vase, he saw that the sombreness of his attire was lightened by the spot of red. Nothing, though, could give vividness to his countenance, that was dry and dull, scored with lines that resembled traces of dust. The moustache across his upper lip was faded and brittle. It was of no account; if he had lacked ultimately the courage, the stamina, to face and command life, he was serene at the threat of death.

Suddenly hungry, he went into the dining-room and removed the napkins, turned the electricity into the percolator. Then, with a key from under the edge of the cloth on a console-table, he opened a door of the sideboard, and produced a tall dark bottle of Marquis de Riscal wine, and methodically drew the cork. Charles Abbott wiped the gla.s.s throat and, seated, poured out a goblet full of the translucent crimson liquid. It brought a slight flush to his cheeks, a light in his eyes, and the shadow of a vital humor, a past challenge, to his lips. He had lifted many toasts in that vintage, his gla.s.s striking with a clear vibration against other eagerly held gla.s.ses. More often than not they--Tirso, the guardsman in statue, Remigio, Jaime, Andres and himself--had drunk to La Clavel. He drank to her, probably the sole repository of her memory, her splendor, on earth, now. "La Clavel," he said her name aloud. And then, "Andres."

A sharp gladness seized him that Andres had, almost at the last, heard his voice, his shouted warning and apprehension and love. If liberty, justice, were to come, one life, two, could make no difference; a hundred years, a hundred hundred, were small measures of time. And if all were doomed, impossible, open to the knife of a fateful Pilar, why, then, they had had their companions.h.i.+p, their warmth, a period of unalloyed fidelity to a need that broke ideals like reeds. Perhaps what they had found was, after all, within them, that for which they had swept the sky.

THE END