Part 1 (1/2)
The Bright Shawl.
by Joseph Hergesheimer.
When Howard Gage had gone, his mother's brother sat with his head bowed in frowning thought. The frown, however, was one of perplexity rather than disapproval: he was wholly unable to comprehend the younger man's att.i.tude toward his experiences in the late war. The truth was, Charles Abbott acknowledged, that he understood nothing, nothing at all, about the present young. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the thoroughly absurd, the witless, things they constantly did, dispensing with their actual years he would have considered them the present aged. They were so--well, so gloomy.
Yet, in view of the gaiety of the current parties, the amounts of gin consumed, it wasn't precisely gloom that enveloped them. Charles Abbott searched his mind for a definition, for light on a subject dark to a degree beyond any mere figure of speech. Yes, darkness particularly described Howard. The satirical bitterness of his references to the ”glorious victory in France” was actually a little unbalanced. The impression Abbott had received was of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity choked in mud. His nephew was amazingly clear, vivid and logical, in his memories and opinions; they couldn't, as he stated them in a kind of frozen fury, be easily controverted.
What, above everything else, appeared to dominate Howard Gage was a pa.s.sion for reality, for truth--all the unequivocal facts--in opposition to a conventional or idealized statement. Particularly, he regarded the slightest sentiment with a suspicion that reached hatred.
Abbott's thoughts centered about the word idealized; there, he told himself, a ray of perception might be cast into Howard's obscurity; since the most evident fact of all was that he cherished no ideals, no sustaining vision of an ultimate dignity behind men's lives.
The boy, for example, was without patriotism; or, at least, he hadn't a trace of the emotional loyalty that had fired the youth of Abbott's day. There was nothing sacrificial in Howard Gage's conception of life and duty, no allegiance outside his immediate need. Selfish, Charles Abbott decided. What upset him was the other's coldness: d.a.m.n it, a young man had no business to be so literal! Youth was a time for generous transforming pa.s.sions, for heroics. The qualities of absolute justice and consistency should come only with increasing age--the inconsiderable compensations for the other ability to be rapt in uncritical enthusiasms.
Charles Abbott sighed and raised his head. He was sitting in the formal narrow reception room of his city house. The street outside was narrow, too; it ran for only a square, an old thoroughfare with old brick houses, once no more than a service alley for the larger dwellings back of which it ran. Now, perfectly retaining its quietude, it had acquired a new dignity of residence: because of its favorable, its exclusive, situation, it was occupied by young married people of highly desirable connections. Abbott, well past sixty and single, was the only person there of his age and condition.
October was advanced and, though it was hardly past four in the afternoon, the golden sunlight falling the length of the street was already darkling with the faded day. A warm glow enveloped the brick facades and the window panes of aged, faintly iridescent gla.s.s; there was a remote sound of automobile horns, the illusive murmur of a city never, at its loudest, loud; and, through the walls, the notes of a piano, charming and melancholy.
After a little he could distinguish the air--it was Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody. The accent of its measure, the jota, was at once perceptible and immaterial; and overwhelmingly, through its magic of suggestion, a blinding vision of his own youth--so different from Howard's--swept over Charles Abbott. It was exactly as though, again twenty-three, he were standing in the incandescent sunlight of Havana; in, to be precise, the Parque Isabel. This happened so suddenly, so surprisingly, that it oppressed his heart; he breathed with a sharpness which resembled a gasp; the actuality around him was blurred as though his eyes were slightly dazzled.
The playing continued intermittently, while its power to stir him grew in an overwhelming volume. He had had no idea that he was still capable of such profound feeling, such emotion spun, apparently, from the tunes only potent with the young. He was confused--even, alone, embarra.s.sed--at the tightness of his throat, and made a decided effort to regain a reasonable mind. He turned again to the consideration of Howard Gage, of his lack of ideals; and, still in the flood of the re-created past, he saw, in the difference between Howard and the boy in Havana, what, for himself anyhow, was the trouble with the present.
Yes, his premonition had been right--the youth of today were without the high and romantic causes the service of which had so brightly colored his own early years. Not patriotism alone but love had suffered; and friends.h.i.+p, he was certain, had all but disappeared; such friends.h.i.+p as had bound him to Andres Escobar. Andres! Charles Abbott hadn't thought of him consciously for months. Now, with the refrain of the piano, the jota, running through his thoughts, Andres was as real as he had been forty years ago.
It was forty years almost to the month since they had gone to the public ball, the danzon, in the Tacon Theatre. That, however, was at the close of the period which had recurred to him like a flare in the dusk of the past. After the danzon the blaze of his sheer fervency had been reduced, cooled, to maturity. But not, even in the peculiarly brutal circ.u.mstances of his transition, sharply; only now Charles Abbott definitely realized that he had left in Cuba, lost there, the illusions which were synonymous with his young intensity.
After that nothing much had absorbed him, very little had happened. In comparison with the spectacular brilliancy of his beginning, the remainder of life had seemed level if not actually drab. Certainly the land to which he had returned was dull against the vivid south, the tropics. But he couldn't go back to Havana, he had felt, even after the Spanish Government was expelled, any more than he could find in the Plaza de Armas his own earlier self. The whole desirable affair had been one--the figures of his loves and detestations, the paseos and glorietas and parques of the city, now, he had heard, so changed, formed a unity destroyed by the missing of any single element.
He wasn't, though, specially considering himself, but rather the sustaining beliefs that so clearly marked the divergence between Howard's day and his own. This discovery, he felt, was of deep importance, it explained so much that was apparently inexplicable.
Charles Abbott a.s.serted silently, dogmatically, that a failure of spirit had occurred ... there was no longer such supreme honor as Andres Escobar's. The dance measure in the Spanish Rhapsody grew louder and more insistent, and through it he heard the castanets of La Clavel, he saw the superb flame of her body in the brutal magnificence of the fringed manton like Andalusia incarnate.
He had a vision of the shawl itself, and, once more, seemed to feel the smooth dragging heaviness of its embroidery. The burning square of its colors unfolded before him, the incredible magentas, the night blues and oranges and emerald and vermilion, worked into broad peonies and roses wreathed in leaves. And suddenly he felt again that, not only prefiguring Spain, it was symbolical of the youth, the time, that had gone. Thus the past appeared to him, wrapped bright and precious in the shawl of memory.
No woman that Howard Gage might dream of could have worn La Clavel's manton; it would have consumed her like a breath of fire, leaving a white ash hardly more than distinguishable from the present living actuality. Women cast up a prodigious amount of smoke now, a most noisy crackling, but Charles Abbott doubted the blaze within them.
Water had been thrown on it. Their grace, too, the dancing about which they made such a stir,--not to compare it with La Clavel's but with no better than Pilar's--was hardly more than a rapid clumsy posturing. Where was the young man now who could dance for two hours without stopping on a spot scarcely bigger than the rim of his silk hat?
Where, indeed, was the silk hat!
Even men's clothes had suffered in the common decline: black satin and gold, nicely cut trousers, the propriety of pumps, had all vanished.
Charles Abbott recalled distinctly the care with which he had a.s.sembled the clothing to be taken to Cuba, the formal dress of evening, with a plum-colored cape, and informal linens for the tropical days. The s.h.i.+rt-maker had filled his box with the finest procurable cambrics and tallest stocks. Trivialities, yet they indicated what had once been breeding; but now, incredibly, that was regarded as trivial.
The Spanish Rhapsody had ceased, and the sun was all but withdrawn from the street; twilight was gathering, particularly in Charles Abbott's reception room. The gilded eagle of the old American clock on the over-mantel seemed almost to flutter its carved wings, the fragile rose mahogany spinet held what light there was, but the pair of small brocaded sofas had lost their severe definition. Charles Abbott's emotion, as well, subsided, its place taken by a concentrated effort to put together the details of a scene which had a.s.sumed, in his perplexity about Howard, a present significance.
He heard, with a momentarily diverted attention, the closing of the front door beyond, women's voices on the pavement and the changing gears of a motor: Mrs. Vauxn and her daughter were going out early for dinner. They lived together--the girl had married into the navy--and it was the former who played the piano. The street, after their departure, was silent again. How different it was from the clamorous gaiety of Havana.
Not actual sickness, Charles Abbott proceeded, but the delicacy of his lungs, following scarlet fever, had taken him south. A banking a.s.sociate of his father's, recommending Cuba, had, at the same time, pointedly qualified his suggestion; and this secondary consideration had determined Charles on Havana. The banker had added that Cuba was the most healthful place he knew for anyone with no political attachments. There political activity, more than an indiscretion, was fatal. What did he mean? Charles Abbott had asked; and the other had replied with a single ominous word, Spain.
There was, it was brought out, a growing and potent, but secretive, spirit of rebellion against the Government, to which Seville was retaliating with the utmost open violence. This was spread not so much through the people, the country, at large, as it was concentrated in the cities, in Santiago de Cuba and Havana; and there it was practically limited to the younger members of aristocratic families. Every week boys--they were no more for all their sounding p.r.o.nunciamientos--were being murdered in the fosses of Cabanas fortress. Women of the greatest delicacy, suspected of sympathy with nationalistic ideals, were thrown into the filthy pens of town prost.i.tutes. Everywhere a limitless system of espionage was combating the gathering of circles, tertulias, for the planning of a Cuba liberated from a b.l.o.o.d.y and intolerable tyranny.
Were these men, Charles pressed his query, really as young as himself?