The Bright Shawl Part 4

"We are all worried about Vincente," Andres proceeded, as they were descending the vault-like stairs; "there is a shadow on him like bad luck. But it may be no more than the fever. Our mother thinks he needs only her love and enough wine jelly." They were again in the drawing-room with the Escobars; and Charles momentarily resumed the seat he had left beside Narcisa.

Domingo and his wife were submerged in gloomy reflection, and Andres sat with his gaze fixed on the marble, patterned in white and black, of the floor. Suddenly Narcisa raised her head with an air of rebellion. "It's always like the church," she declared incredibly.

"Everything has got so old that I can't bear it--Vincente as good as dead and Andres resembling a Jesuit father! Must all my life go on in this funeral march?" The elder Escobars regarded her in a voiceless amazement; but Andres said severely:

"You are too young to understand the tragedy of Cuba or Vincente's heroic spirit. I am ashamed of you--before Charles Abbott."

Narcisa rose and walked swiftly out upon the balcony. They had been, it seemed to Charles, rather ridiculous with her; it was hard on Narcisa to have been thrust, at her age, into such a serious affair.

The Escobars, and particularly Vincente, took their responsibility a little too ponderously. Following a vague impulse, made up both of his own slightly damaged pride and a sympathy for Narcisa, he went out to the balcony where she stood with her hands lightly resting on the railing. Veiled in the night, her youth seemed more mysterious than immature; he was conscious of an unsteady flutter at her unformed breast; her face had an aspect of tears.

"You mustn't mind them," he told her; "they are tremendously bothered because they see a great deal farther than you can. The danger to Vincente, too, in Havana, spies--"

She interrupted him, looking away so that he could see only a trace of her cheek against the fragment fall of her hair. "It isn't that, but what Andres said about you."

This admission startled him, and he studied Narcisa--her hands now tightly clasping the iron railing--with a disturbed wonder. Was it possible that she cared for him? At home, ignored by a maturity such as his, she would have been absorbed in the trivial activities of girls of her own age. But Havana, the tropics, was different. It was significant, as well, that he was permitted to be with her, practically alone, beyond the sight and hearing of her mother; the Escobars, he thought, had hopes of such a consummation. It was useless, he was solely wedded to Cuba; he had already pictured the only dramatic accident of the heart that could touch him. Not little Narcisa! She was turned away from him completely: a lovely back, straight and narrow, virginal--Domingo Escobar had said this--as a white rose bud, yet with an impalpable and seductive scent. In other circ.u.mstances, a happier and more casual world, she would have been an adorable fate. An increasing awkwardness seized him, a conviction of impotence. "Narcisa," he whispered at her ear; but, before he could finish his sentence, her face was close to his, her eyes were shut and the tenderness of her lips unprotected.

Charles put an arm about her slim shoulders and pressed his cheek against hers. "Listen," he went on, in his lowered voice, patching the deficiencies of his Spanish with English words clear in their feeling if not in sound, "nothing could have shown me myself as well as you, for now I know that I can never give up a thought to anything outside what I have promised my life to. A great many men are quite happy with a loving wife and children and a home--a place to go back to always; and, in a way, since I have known you, I envy them. Their lives are full of happiness and usefulness and specially peace; but, dearest Narcisa, I can't be like that, it isn't for me. You see, I have chosen to love a country; instead of being devoted only to you, there are thousands of women, rich and poor and black and white, I must give myself for. I haven't any existence, any rights, of my own; I haven't any money or time or security to offer. I didn't choose it, no, it chose me--it's exactly as though I had been stopped on the street and conscripted. A bugle was blown in my ear. Love, you must realize, is selfish; it would be selfish to take you on a steamer, for myself, and go north. If I did that, if I forgot what I have sworn, I'd die. I should seem to the world to be alive, and I'd walk about and talk and go into the city on some business or other; but, in reality, I should be as dead as dust.

"There are men like that everywhere, Narcisa, perhaps the most of life is made up of them. They look all right and are generally respected; yet, at some time or other, they killed themselves, they avoided what they should have met, tried to save something not worth a thought. I don't doubt a lot never find it out, they think they are as good as ever--they don't remember how they once felt. But others discover it, or the people who love them discover it for them. And that would happen to me, to us."

In reply to all this she whispered that she loved him. Her arm slipped up across his shoulder and the tips of her fingers touched his left cheek. A momentary dizziness enveloped him at her immeasurable sweetness: it might be that she was a part of what he was to find, to do, in Cuba; and then his emotion perished in the bareness of his heart to physical pa.s.sion. Its place was taken by a deep pride in his aloofness from the flesh; that alone, he felt, dignified him, set him above the mischances of self-betrayal.

Charles Abbott kissed her softly and then took her hands. "You wouldn't want me, Narcisa," he continued; "if I failed in this, I should fail you absolutely. If I were unfaithful now I could never be faithful to you."

She drew her hands sharply away. "It's you who are young and not I,"

she declared; "you talk like a boy, like Andres. All you want is a kind of glory, like the gold lace the officers of Isabella wear.

Nothing could be more selfish."

"You don't understand," he replied patiently.

Narcisa, he felt, could never grasp what was such a profound part of his masculine necessity. Abstractions, the liberty, for example, of an alien people, would have little weight against her instinct for the realities in her own heart. Her emotion was tangible, compared with his it was deeply reasonable; it moved in the direction of their immediate good, of the happiness, the fullness, of their beings; while all his desire, his hope, was cloudy, of the sky. In the high silver radiance of his idealism, the warmer green of earth, the promise of Narcisa's delicate charm, the young desire in his blood, were, he felt, far away, dim ... below.

The conviction fastened upon him that this chance realization would determine, where women were concerned, the whole of his life. But that s.p.a.ce, he reminded himself, short at best, was, in him, to terminate almost at once. All his philosophy of resistance, of strength, was built upon the final dignity of a supreme giving. His thoughts went back to Narcisa as he sat in La Clavel's room in the St. Louis, watching a hairdresser skilfully build up the complicated edifice of the dancer's hair. Soon, he grasped, it would be ready for the camellia placed back of the lobe of an ear. A towel was pinned about her naked shoulders, she had on a black fringed petticoat and dangling slippers of red morocco leather. La Clavel was faced away from Charles, but, in the mirror before which she sat, he could see her features and vivid changing expressions.

The truth was that, close, he had found her disconcerting, almost appalling. Climbing the long stairs at the message that she would see him in her room, he had surrendered himself to the romantic devotion which had overwhelmed the small select circle of his intimates. This had nothing to do with the admirable sentiment of a practical all-inclusive love; it was aesthetic rather than social. They all wors.h.i.+pped La Clavel as a symbol of beauty, as fortunately unattainable in a small immediate measure; and, bowing inside the door of her chamber, he had been positively abashed at the strange actuality of her charm.

La Clavel was at once more essentially feminine than any other woman he had encountered and different from all the rest. A part of the impression she created was the result of her pallor, the even unnatural whiteness under the night of her hair. Her face was white, but her lips--a carmine stick lay close at her hands--were brutally red. She hurt him, struck savagely at the idealism of his image; indeed, in the room permeated with a dry powdered scent, at the woman redolent of vital flesh, he had been a little sickened. However, that had gone; and he watched the supple hands in the crisp coa.r.s.e ma.s.s of her hair with a sense of adventure lingering faintly from his earlier youth: he was, in very correct clothes, holding his hat and stick and gloves, idling through the toilet of a celebrated dancer and beauty.

Or, rather, he saw himself objectively, as he had been say a year ago, at which time his present situation would have surpa.s.sed his most splendid worldly hopes. It was strange, he thought, how life granted one by one every desire ... when it was no longer valued: the fragrance, the tender pa.s.sion, of Narcisa, the preference in La Clavel singling him out from a city for her interest!

She smiled at him over her shoulder, and, in return, he nodded seriously, busy with a cigarette; maintaining, in a difficult pa.s.s, his complete air of indifference, of experience. The hairdresser must have pulled roughly at a strand for, with a sudden harsh vulgarity, she described him as a blot on the virginity of his mother; in an instant every atom of her was charged with anger. It was, Charles told himself, exactly as though a shock of dried gra.s.s had caught fire; ignited gun powder rather than blood seemed to fill her veins.

Her ill-temper, tempestuous in its course, was over as quickly as it had flared into being. She paid the hairdresser from a confusion of silver and gold on her dressing-table and dismissed him with a good nature flavored by a native proverb. Then, bending above a drawer, she brought out the vivid shawl in which she had danced. La Clavel folded its dragging brilliancy squarely along its length, laid it across her breast, brought the fringed ends under and up over her arms, crossed them in a swift twist, and she was wholly, magnificently, clothed. She sat on the edge of a bed covered with gay oddments of attire--fans and slippers with vermilion heels, lace mantillas, a domino in silver tissue lined in carnation and a knife with a narrow blade and holder of silk.

Charles offered her his cigarette case, but she declined in favor of the long pale cigars Andres and he himself affected. With its smoke drifting bluely across her pallid face, her eyes now interrogating him, and now withdrawn in thought, she asked him about Tirso Labrador.

Charles Abbott quickly gathered that his presence was for that sole purpose.

"I heard all that was said," she warned him; "and I don't want that repeated. Why did he try to garotte de Vaca with his hands? There was more in it than appeared. But all Ceaza will say is that he was a cursed traitor to the Crown. Signor American, I like Cuba, they have been very good to me here; I like you and your polite friends. But whenever I try to come closer to you, to leave the stage, as it were, for the audience, we are kept apart. The Spanish officers who take up so much of my time warn me that I must have nothing to do with disaffected Cubans; the Cubans, when I reach out my arms to them, are only polite.

"Certainly I know that there has been a rebellion; but it is stamped out, ended, now; there are no signs of it in Havana, when I dance the jota; so why isn't everyone sensible and social; why, if they are victorious, are not Gaspar Arco de Vaca and Ceaza y Santacilla easier?

If, as it must be, Cuba is subjected, why doesn't it ignore the unpleasant and take what the days and nights always offer? There can be no longer, so late in the history of the world, a need for the old Inquisition, the stabbers Philip commanded."

Charles Abbott had an impulse to reply that, far from being conquered, the spirit of liberty in Cuba was higher than ever before; he wanted to tell her, to cry out, that it was deathless; and that no horrors of the black past were more appalling than those practiced now by the Spanish soldiery. Instead of this he watched a curl of smoke mount through the height of the room to a small square window far up on the wall where it was struck gold by a shaft of sunlight.

"He was particularly a friend of yours?" she insisted, returning to Tirso. "You were always together, watching me dance from your box in the Tacon Theatre, and eating ices at the El Louvre or at the Tuileries."

He spoke slowly, indifferently, keeping his gaze elevated toward the ceiling. "Tirso Labrador was a braggard, he was always boasting about what he could do with his foolish muscles. What happened to him was unavoidable. We weren't sorry--a thorough bully. As for the others, that dandy, Quintara, and Remigio Florez, who looks like a coffee berry from their plantation at Vuelta Arriba, and Escobar, I am very much in their debt--I bring the gold and they provide the pleasures of Havana. They are my runners. I haven't the slightest interest in their politics; if they support the Revolution or Madrid, they keep all that out of my knowledge."

A prolonged silence followed, a period devoted to the two cigars.

"That Escobar," La Clavel said, "is a very beautiful boy. What you tell me is surprising; he, at any rate, seems quite different. And I have seen you time after time sitting together, the two or three or four of you, with affectionate glances and arms. I am sensitive to such things, and I think you are lying."

An air of amused surprise appeared on his countenance, "If you are so taken with Andres Escobar," he observed, "why did you make this appointment with me? May I have the pleasure of taking him a note from you? he is very fond of intrigues."

Leaning forward she laid a firm square palm on his knee. "You have told me all that I wanted--this Tirso, who was killed, he was your dear friend and his death an agony; the smaller, the coffee berry, you are devoted to his goodness and simplicity; beneath Quintara's waistcoats you find a heart of gold. But Escobar--is it Andres?--you love better than your life. They care nothing for your American dollars; it is evident they all have much more than you. What is it, then, you are united by? I shall tell you--Cuba. You are patriots, insurrectionists; Santacilla was right. And neither is your rebellion crushed, not with Agramonte alive." She leaned back with glimmering eyes and the cruel paint of her mouth smiling at him.

She was, then, Charles Abbott reflected, an agent of Spain's; calmly he rehea.r.s.ed all they had said to each other, he examined every sentence, every inflection of voice. He could not have been more circ.u.mspect; the position he had taken, of a pleasure-loving young American, was so natural that it was inevitable. No, La Clavel knew nothing, she was simply adopting another method in her task of getting information for Santacilla. At this, remembering the adoration of his circle for her, he was brushed by a swift sorrow. For them she had been the symbol, the embodiment, of beauty; the fire and grace of her dancing had intensified, made richer, their sense of life. She had been the utmost flas.h.i.+ng peak of their desire; and now it was clear to him that she was rotten at the core, La Clavel was merely a spy; what had engaged them was nothing more than a brilliant flowery surface, a bright shawl.

"You are wasting your efforts," he a.s.sured her, with an appearance of complete comfort. "Even if you were right, I mean about the others, what, do you think, would make them confide in me, almost a stranger?

You understand this so much better than I that, instead of questioning me, you ought to explain the whole Cuban situation. Women like yourself, with genius, know everything."

She utterly disconcerted Charles by enveloping him in a rapid gesture, her odorous lips were pressed against his cheek. "You are as sweet as a lime flower," La Clavel declared. "After the others--" her expression of disgust was singularly valid. "That is what I love about you," she cried suddenly, "your youth and freshness and courage. Tirso Labrador dying so gallantly ... all your beardless intent faces. The revolt in Cuba, I've felt it ever since I landed at Havana, it's in the air like wine. I am sick of officers: look, ever since I was a child the army has forced itself upon me. I had to have their patronage when I was dancing and their company when I went to the cafes; and when it wasn't the cavalry it was the gentlemen. They were always superior, condescending; and always, inside me, I hated them.

They thought, because I was peasant born, that their attentions filled me with joy, that I should be grateful for their aristocratic presences. But, because I was what I was, I held them, with their ladies' hands and sugared voices, in contempt. There isn't one of them with the entrails to demand my love.

"I tell you I was smothering in the air about me. My dancing isn't like the posturing of the court, it's the dancing of the people, my people, pa.s.sionate like a knife. I am from the Morena, and there we are not the human sheep who live in the valleys, along the empty rivers. How shall I explain? But how can you explain yourself? You are not a Cuban; this rebellion, in which you may so easily be killed almost before you begin to live, it isn't yours. What drew you into it? You must make it plain, for I, too, am caught."

"Men are different from women," he replied, putting into words his newly acquired wisdom; "whatever happened to me would be useless for you, you couldn't be helped by it." Yet he was forced to admit to himself that all she had said was reasonable; at bottom it didn't contradict his generalization, for it was based on a reality, on La Clavel's long resentment, on indignities to her pride, on, as she had said, the innate freedom of the mountain spirit. If she were honest, any possible attachment to Cuba might result from her hatred of Spain, of Sevilla and Madrid. Hers, then, would be the motive of revenge.

"You are right about the difference in our experiences," she agreed; "I was dancing for a living at six; at ten I had another accomplishment. I have lived in rooms inlaid with gold, and in cellars with men where murder would have been a gracious virtue. Yes, lime flower, there is little you know that could be any a.s.sistance to me. But the other, your purity, your effort of n.o.bility, that I must learn from you."

He explained his meaning more fully to her, and she listened intently.

"You think," she interrupted, "that a woman must be attached to something real, like your arm or a pot of gold. You know them, and that at your age, at any age, is a marvel enough in itself. The wisest men in Europe have tried to understand the first movement of my dancing--how, in it, a race, the whole history of a nation, is expressed in the stamp of a heel, the turn of a hip. They wonder what, in me, had happened to the maternal instinct, why I chose to reflect life, as though I were a mirror, rather than experience it. And now, it seems, you see everything, all is clear to you. You have put a label, such as are in museums, on women; good!"

She smiled at him, mocking but not unkind.

"However," he told her crossly, "that is of very little importance.

How did we begin? I have forgotten already."

"In this way," she said coolly; "I asked if it would be of any interest to--let us say, your friends, to learn that the United States, in spite of the Administration, will not recognize a Republican Cuba. Fish is unchangeably opposed to the insurgents. You may expect no help there."

"That might be important to the insurgents," he admitted; "but where are they to be found--in the cabildos of Los Egidos?"

"At least repeat what you have heard to Escobar: is it Andres or Vincente?"

The name of Andres' brother was spoken so unexpectedly, the faintest knowledge of Vincente on the part of the dancer of such grave importance, that Charles Abbott momentarily lost his composure.

"Vincente!" he exclaimed awkwardly. "Was that the other brother? But he is dead."