The Bright Shawl Part 6

"That is enough for the present," he decided.

"My choice infant," she retorted, "your air of being my director is comic. And I could wish you were not so immaculate, so unworldly--you are tiresome more often than not. I could scream with laughing when I think you are supposed to be my servant of love." The striking of a silvery bell interrupted her with the necessity for a reverence. The mutter of prayer was instantly lost in echoless s.p.a.ce. The genuflexions of the priests and acolytes were rapid.

"This secrecy," she went on, "is against my disposition, unnatural.

I am a woman in whom the complete expression of every feeling is not only a good but a necessity. There are times when I must, it seems, give way to my hatred of those perfumed captains. I sit beside Santacilla, with his hand on my knee, and, hidden by my skirt, my fingers are wedded to the knife in my stocking. A turn, a sweep of the arm ... there is a tearing cut I learned in the mountains."

The prayers, the Latin invocations, grew louder with the symbolized miracle of transubstantiation, the turning back of the bread and wine into the humility and forbearance of Christ.

Charles Abbott was still, pale and remote; and the heat of La Clavel's words died before the vision of an eternal empire of souls irrevocably judged. She sank forward again, the knotted fringe of her manton spread out beyond the rug, upon the stone. After a little he told her that her courage, her daring and patience, were magnificent. But she replied that they were cold virtues. "All virtues are cold," Charles a.s.sured her seriously. If that were so, La Clavel whispered, her cheek close to his, she was lost to virtue. Anyhow, she didn't believe him, he could not, at his age, know so much. Yet not, G.o.d comprehended, that he wasn't both virtuous and cold; any other man in the world, not a heathen, would have flung himself at her. Charles said wearily:

"We have been over this before, and you know that I do not care for women. What I was a few years ago--"

"A baby," she informed him.

"What I was a few years ago," he repeated with dignity, "is no longer true of me. I belong body and spirit to the cause of which you are aware. And if I didn't it would be, in many respects, no different--science and the liberation of a people are all one, selfless."

"I left the knife out of my present toilet," she sighed. "It would be a charity to free you from the shape you hate so dearly."

"I must go back to the San Felipe and write what you told me,"

he proceeded. "I understand that Santacilla has gone out on a slaughtering party, and I'll have to take you around in the evening. There are zarzuelas in the Tacon Theatre this evening, and afterwards, I suppose, dulces upstairs at the Tuileries.

It's no good, though, expecting me for Retreta--I've got to have some time to recover and sleep: four o'clock last night, with a pack of imbeciles, and three the night before. The smell of Jamaica rum and limes makes me sick."

The ma.s.s was over, the people scattering, and, once more cheerful, she laughed at him. "You might wear a hair s.h.i.+rt," she suggested; "they are splendid for the soul." He handed her, without reply, into the small victoria, one of the first in Havana, which had taken the place of her volanta. In the sun, her shawl, her smile, were dazzling. A knot of men gathered, gazing at her with longing, regarding Charles Abbott with insolent resentment and wonder; how, their expressions made clear the thought, could that insignificant and colorless foreigner, that tepid American, engage and hold La Clavel, the glory of Cuba and Spain?

She drove away, s.h.i.+elding her eyes with the fan, and Charles returned slowly, on foot, to the hotel, reaching it in time for the eleven o'clock breakfast. Bolting his door, closing the high shutters of his gla.s.sless window, he lay down tired and feverish. The vendors of oranges cried, far off, their naranjes, naranjes dulces. The bed, which had no mattress, its sacking covered by a single sheet, the pillow stuffed hard with cotton, offered him little rest. His body, wet with sweat, twisted and turned continually, and sleep evaded him; its peace almost within his grasp, it fled before the hot insistence of his thoughts. The uncomfortable flesh mocked and dragged at the spirit. It occurred to him suddenly, devastatingly, that he might fail in his purpose; the armor of his conviction of invincibility fell from him with the semblance of a loud ringing.

Of all the disturbing elements in Charles Abbott's present life the one which, it had seemed, must prove most difficult, Santacilla and his friends, troubled him least. There was, in their jeering, a positive quality to be met; his own necessary restraint furnished him with a sustaining feeling of triumph, stability; in his control, the sacrifice of his dignity, his actual pride, damaged by La Clavel, was restored. He acted the part of the infatuated, ubiquitous youth, he thought, with entire success. It had been hardest at first--Santacilla, who pretended to find Charles under his feet like a dog, threatened, if he didn't stay away from the St. Louis, to fling him down the long flight of stairs descending from the dancer's room.

This, Charles wholly realized, was not an idle boasting. Seated, it might be, quietly against the wall, outside the immediate circle about La Clavel, the officers, the Spanish grandees in Cuba for pleasure or for the supervision of their copper mines at Cobra, Charles would watch, study, Ceaza y Santacilla, finding in him the epitome of the Spain he himself hated. What, princ.i.p.ally, was evident about the officer with the heavy short neck, the surprising red hair, and small restless blue eyes, was cruelty of an extraordinary refined persistence. He had, unexpectedly in his sheer brutal bulk, a tormenting spirit, a mental abnormality, rather than the to-be-looked-for mere insensate weight of his fist.

He was, Charles discovered, the victim of disordered nerves, his gaze, his thick hands or shoulders, were never still, and his lips had a trick of movement as if in the p.r.o.nunciation of soundless periods.

He spoke, even to La Clavel, abruptly, mockingly; his tenderest words, addressed to her with a sweeping disregard of whoever could overhear, were hasty, introspective rather than generous. More frequently he was silent, redly brooding. It was evident to the most casual understanding that Santacilla was, by birth, a.s.sociation and ideas, an aristocrat of the absolute type fast disappearing. It was his power that, in a world largely affected by the ideal of Christianity, he was ruthless; in an era of comparative humanity he was inhuman. There was, about him, the smell of the slow fires of the Inquisition, of languid murder, curious instruments of pain.

Charles recalled a story of the Spanish occupation of Cuba--how the soldiers in armor cut and stabbed their way through a village of naked, unprepared and peaceable bodies.

That, until he had known Santacilla, had been incomprehensible--a page of old history; but now Charles understood: he could see the heavy figure with a darkly suffused face hacking with a sword. He was insane, Charles Abbott told himself; in other circ.u.mstances he'd be soon convicted of a sensational murder, quickly hanged or put in an asylum. But in Havana, as an officer of the Crown quartered on a people he held in less esteem than the cattle whose slaughter he applauded in the bull ring, nothing, practically, limited his mad humors. Yes, here, in the West, he was Spain, the old insufferable despotism, and Charles thought of Santacilla's necessary end as coldly as though the soldier were no more than a figment of the doomed old injustice.

La Clavel was seated with Charles Abbott in the upper room of the Tuileries, when Santacilla slid into an unoccupied chair beside them.

They were eating mantecados, frozen sweetened cream, and Santacilla dropped a number of battered Cuban coins, small in denomination, into Charles' half consumed ice.

"If you were a man," he said, "you could break them up with your teeth."

The other quietly put the plate away and lighted a cigarette. He smiled, as if in appreciation of his humor, at the officer.

"But I'll bet you twenty doblons you can't break one," he added.

Santacilla replied that he was considering having Charles Abbott deported.

"You are so dangerous," he explained, with the grimace that served him as a smile. "I often consult with our Captain-General. 'This Abbott,'

he says; 'Agramonte is nothing, but I am afraid of him. He is wise, he is deep.' And then we think what can be done with you--a tap on the head, not too hard and not far from the ear, would make you as gentle as a kitten. I have had it done; really it is a favor, since then you would forget all your trouble, the problems of state. You'd cry if I raised a finger at you." La Clavel interrupted him to swear at his degraded imagination. "And the figure in the jota!" he turned to her.

"You know that the Spaniards of birth have, as well as their own, the blood of the Moriscos. What they were, what the East is, with women, I beg you to remember.

"This new treatment of women is very regrettable. I am a little late for absolute happiness; too late, for example, to fasten your tongue with a copper wire to the tongue across the table from you. Lovers, you see, joined at last." He talked while he ate, in a manner wholly delicate, minute fragile dulces, cakes, glazed in green and pink, and ornamental confections of almond paste. Unperturbed, La Clavel found him comparable to a number of appalling objects and states. Coa.r.s.e, was all that he replied.

"You are a peasant, a beast, and what you say is merely stupid. There this Abbott is your superior--he has a trace, a suspicion, of blood. I am wondering," he was addressing Charles again. "It seems impossible that you are as dull as you appear; there is more, perhaps, than meets the eye. Your friends.h.i.+p with the Escobars broke up very suddenly; and you never see Floret and Quintara with his borrowed French airs. They are nothing, it is true, yet they have a little Castilian, they are better than the avaricious fools at the United States Club. Of course, if you are in love with this cow gone mad, a great deal is accounted for." He wiped his fingers first on a serviette and then on a sheer web of linen marked with a coronet and his cipher.

"Pah!" he exclaimed, looking at the dancer, "your neck is dirty again."

Sick with disgust, his blood racing with a pa.s.sionate detestation, Charles Abbott laughed loudly. But he was relieved that Santacilla's attention had been s.h.i.+fted from him. Another officer, a major of the Isabel regiment, tall and dark and melancholy, joined them. He ignored Charles completely, and talked to La Clavel about her dances--the Arragonese jota and those of the other provinces of Spain. He had, it developed, written an opera on the subject of de Gama and a fabulous Florida. Santacilla grew restive at this and gazed about the room maliciously. Then, suddenly, he rose and walked to the table where a young Cuban exquisite was sitting with a girl slender and darkly lovely. Santacilla leaned over, with his hands planted on their table, and made a remark that drove the blood in a scarlet tide to the civilian's face. Then the Spaniard amazingly produced from his sleeve a ball of lamb's wool such as women use to powder their faces, and touched the girl's nose lightly. He went to another table and repeated his act, to another and another, brus.h.i.+ng all the feminine noses, and returned, unchallenged, to his place.

"If I had been with any of those women," he related comfortably, "and the King had done that, there would have been a new king and a new infanta."

The musical Spaniard, inappropriately in uniform, remonstrated, "A lot of them will kill you some night in the Paseo de Valdez or on the quays."

Santacilla agreed with him. "No doubt it will overtake me--if not here, then on the Peninsula. A hundred deaths, all distressing, have been sworn upon me." Charles Abbott's expression was inane, but, correcting that statement, he said to himself, "A hundred and one."

La Clavel yawned, opening to their fullest extent her lips on superb teeth and a healthy throat.

"I have, at least, a sponge, a basin of water," she proclaimed indirectly.

Santacilla replied, "You think nothing can cleanse me, and, in your chattering way, you are right; except, it may be, that last twist of steel or ounce of lead. Some of my soldiers are planning to manage it; I know them well, and I gave one an opportunity today: I stood with my back to him in the parapet of the Twelve Apostles for three, five, minutes, while he tramped and fiddled with his musket, and then I put him in a hole in the stone for a year."

The other Spanish officer, Gaspar Arco de Vaca, Santacilla's closest companion, observed toward Charles an air of profound civility, and his pretence was more galling than Santacilla's morbid threats and exposed contempt. De Vaca was, in temperament and appearance, purely Iberian: he was of middle height, he carried his slender body with an a.s.sured insulting grace, and had a narrow high-boned face, a bigoted nose and a moustache like a scrolling of India ink on a repressed and secretive mouth. Charles often encountered him in the Fencing School on the Prado, across from the Villa Nueva Theatre. The officers of Isabella congregated there late in the afternoon, where they occupied all the chairs and filled the bare room with the soft stamp of their heels and the harsh grinding of engaged b.u.t.toned steel. The foils, however, were not always covered: there had been some fatalities from duelling in the sala de Armas since Charles Abbott had been in Havana; a Cuban gentleman past sixty had been slain by a subaltern of seventeen; two officers, quarreling over a crillo girl, had sustained punctured lungs, from which one had bled to death.

The Cubans, it was made evident, were there by sufferance, and the fencing master, Galope Hormiguero, an officer who had been retired from a Castilian regiment under the shadow of an unprovoked murder, made little effort to conceal his disdain of the Islanders. Charles he regarded without interest: he was a faithful student, and made all the required pa.s.ses, engaged the other beginning students, with regularity; but even he saw that he would never be notably skilful with the foil or rapier or broadsword. Charles had a delicate sense of touch, he bore himself firmly, his eye was true; he had the appearance of mastery, but the essence of it was not in him. His heart, Hormiguero frequently told him, was like a sponge; he wasn't tempered to the commanding of death.

He agreed, silently, that he wasn't a butcher; and as for his heart--time would show its material. Meanwhile he kept up the waist and forearm exercises, the indicated breathing, gaining, if not a different spirit, a harder and cured body. The room was large, with the usual high windows on a balcony, and strips of coco-matting over the tiled floor. A light wooden part.i.tion provided dressing s.p.a.ce, the chairs were carried about hither and there, and the racks of foils against the walls reflected the brightness of day in sudden long s.h.i.+vers like other and immaterial blades. It had been, originally, a drawing-room, the cornice was elaborate, and painted on the ceiling were flying cupids and azure and cornucopias of spilling flowers.

At moments of rest, his chest laboring and arms limp at his sides, Charles Abbott would stare up at the remote pastoral of love and Venus and roses. Then the clamor, the wicked sc.r.a.pe of steel, the sharp breaths, the sibilant cries that accompanied the lunges, would appear wholly incomprehensible to him, a business in a mad-house; he'd want to tear the plastron, with its scarlet heart sewn high on the left, from his chest, and fling it, with his gauntlet and mask, across the floor; he'd want to break all the foils, and banish Galope Hormiguero to live among the wild beasts he resembled. He was deep in such a mood when de Vaca's considerate tones roused him. "Positively," he said, "you are like one of the heroes who held Mexico on the point of his sword or who swept the coast of Peru of its gold. And you are idle, for you see no one who can hold the mat with you."

"In reality," Charles replied, "I fence very awkwardly. But you have often seen me, I haven't any need to tell you that."

"That can never be established without experience," the Spaniard a.s.serted; "I should have to feel your wrist against mine. If you will be patient, if you will wait for me, I'll risk a public humiliation."

Charles Abbott said evenly: "I'd be very glad to fence with you, of course."

When de Vaca, flawlessly appointed, returned, Charles rose steadily, and strapped on his mask, tightened the leather of the plastron. A murmur of subdued amus.e.m.e.nt followed their walking out together onto an unoccupied strip--de Vaca was a celebrated swordsman. Charles saluted acceptably, but the wielding of the other's gesture of courtesy filled him with admiration. The foils struck together, there was a conventional pa.s.s and parry, and from that moment Charles Abbott lost control of his steel. At a touch from de Vaca, scarcely perceptible, his foil rose or fell, swept to one side or the other; a lunge would end in the b.u.t.ton describing a whole arc, and pointing either to the matting or the winged and cherubic cupids. The laughter from the chairs grew louder, more unguarded, and then settled into a constant stream of applause and merriment.

Disengaged, he said in tones which he tried in vain to make steady, "You have a beautiful hand."

De Vaca, his eyes s.h.i.+ning blackly through wire mesh, thanked him in the politest language known. He began, then, to make points, touches, wherever he chose--with a remarkably timed twist he tore the cloth heart from Charles' wadding; he indicated, as though he were a teacher with a pointer, anatomical facts and regions; de Vaca seemed to be calling Charles' attention, by sharp premonitory taps, to what he might have been saying. There were now a number of voices encouraging and applauding him; he was begged not to be so hard upon Gaspar; and it was hoped that he was not giving way to the venting of a secret spite. A nerveless parry in tierce brought out a tempestuous support--

His arm was as heavy, as numb, as lead, the conventional period had been ignored, and his torment went on and on. His chest, he thought, must burst under the strapped plastron, and sweat poured in a sheet across his eyes. The episode seemed utterly meaningless, undemanded; the more remarkable because of de Vaca's indifference to him, to all the trivialities of his Cuban duty. How yellow the face was, the eyes were like jet, through the mask. Then Charles Abbott grasped what, he was certain, was the purpose of such an apparently disproportionate attack. It was the result of a cold effort, a set determination, to destroy what courage he had. He gazed quickly about, and saw nothing but Spanish faces; the fencing master was in the far end of the room, intent upon a sheaf of foils. At any moment de Vaca could have disarmed him, sent his steel flying through air; but that he forebore to do. Instead he opposed his skill, his finesse, his strength, in the attack upon Charles Abbott's fibre.

"If I collapse," Charles told himself, "it will be for eternity."

Any sense of time was disintegrated in a physical agony which required all his wasting being to combat. But, even worse than that, far more destructive, was the a.s.sault upon his mind. If he crumbled ... he thought of himself as dust, his brain a dry powder in his skull. The laughter around him, which had seemed to retreat farther and farther, had ceased, as though it had been lost in the distance. The room, widening to an immensity of s.p.a.ce, was silent, charged with a malignant expectancy. Soon, Charles felt, he would fall into unreckoned depths of corrupt shadows, among the obscene figures of the hideously lost.