Part 25 (1/2)

”Divorces?” The single word was accompanied by a faint lifting of Daniel's eyebrows.

”She was married, too,” Lee explained. ”You will understand better when you talk to Savina. We are not young feather-heads, Daniel; this is serious, final. Really, we came to Cuba on your account, to see you.

When I tried to compose a telegram from Havana, telling you something of the situation, I couldn't--all the idiotic tourists hanging about! Well, here we are, or here I am, and Savina is upstairs, most anxious to meet you.”

”Certainly,” Daniel Randon agreed. He was silent for a moment in the consideration of what he had been told. Then, ”I can't have you on the batey,” he p.r.o.nounced. He lifted a silencing hand against an anger forming in instant unmeasured speech. ”Not for myself,” he particularized. ”You could have seven mistresses, of all colors, if the place were mine. Please remember that it isn't. It's the company's. That is quite different.” Daniel was making, Lee realized, what for him was a tremendous conversational effort. ”Even if I were alone, except for Cubans, it would be possible; but there is Mr. Stribling, with his wife and, at present, grown daughter, from Utica; he is the a.s.sistant Administrador. Then we have George Vincent and Katharine--the Chief Engineer with a very new bride from, I believe, Ohio. They are very particular in Ohio. And others. You must remember that I have a photograph of f.a.n.n.y with the children: it is much admired, well known. I couldn't explain your Mrs.--Mrs. Grove. Who could? We haven't a sister. Altogether I am sorry.” He stopped uncompromisingly; yet, Lee recognized, in all that Daniel had said there was no word of criticism or gratuitous advice. He had voiced the facts only as they related to him; to everything else he gave the effect of a ma.s.sive blankness.

Argument, Lee saw, was useless. Extended to the heart of a tropical island, the virtuous indignations of a hard propriety still bound their movements. ”All that I can suggest,” Daniel went on, ”is that you return to Havana tomorrow evening; the company has offices there, and it will be easier for me to see you. Camaguey is nearer, but gossip there would have you in the same bed no matter how far apart your rooms were.

Decidedly not Camaguey.”

There was no train for Havana, it developed, before tomorrow. ”And, in the meanwhile,” Lee inquired, ”must we stay here? Savina will be miserable.”

”Why not?” Daniel gazed about casually. ”I lived with Venalez a month.

It is good enough if you are not too strict about a travelling beauty or two who may be stopping as well.” His apologies to Savina, in the room above, were faultless. There was, simply, at the Cobra sugar estancia, no satisfactory arrangement for guests; except for an occasional party of directors, or a special mission, there were no guests. At his, Daniel's central, in Santa Clara on the sea, he hoped some day to offer them the hospitality of his own house.

When he left, Lee made no revelation of what had been said downstairs; Savina accepted the situation as it had been exposed to her. ”I can't allow myself to think of a night here,” she told him; ”it will be a horror.” She opened the slats of the long window shutters, and glowing bars of white heat fell in a ladder-like order across a blue wall; the segments of sunlight were as sharp and solid as incandescent metal. In the cobalt shadow Savina was robbed of her vitality; she seemed unreal; as she pa.s.sed through the vivid projected rays of midday it appeared as though they must s.h.i.+ne uninterruptedly through her body. Lee considered the advisability of taking her for a walk--there were, he had seen from the train, no roads here for driving--but, recalling the insolent staring and remarks she had met, he was forced to drop that possibility.

Weary from the prolonged wakefulness of the night, Savina made an effort to sleep; and, waiting until she was measurably quiet, Lee went out. The heat was blinding, it walled him in, pressed upon him with a feeling of suffocation, as though--between him and the freshness, the salvation, of any air--there were miles of it packed around him like grey cotton. To the left of the hotel, the bare plaza, half hidden in scrubby bushes, there was an extended shed with a number of doors and fragments of fence, heaped rusted tins and uncovered garbage; and, lounging in the openings, the door-frames often empty, the windows without sashes, were women, scantily covered, sounding every note in a scale from black to white. Yet, Lee observed, the whitest were, essentially, black. What amazed, disturbed, him was their indolent blinking indifference, their indecent imperviousness, in the full blaze of day.

They were, to Lee, significant, because from them he drew a knowledge of Cobra. He could not, without such a.s.sistance, have arrived at the instinctive understanding that interpreted the street into which he turned. It was the street of a delirium, running, perhaps, for half a mile; an irregular deeply rutted way formed by its double row of small unsubstantial buildings of raw or gaudily painted boards and galvanized sheet iron. They were all completely open at the front, with their remarkable contents, pandemoniums of merchandise, exposed upon a precarious sidewalk of uneven parallel boards elevated two or three feet above the road. Mostly cafes, restaurants, there was still an incredible number of banks--mere sh.e.l.ls with flat tarred roofs and high counters built from wall to wall. The receivers, the paying tellers, were many, with the mingled bloods, the heterogeneous characteristics, of China and Colonial Spain and Africa; and, back of their activity--there was a constant rush of deposited money and semi-confidential discussion--were safes so ponderous and ancient that they might have contained the treasure of a plate fleet of Peru.

Crowding in on them, challenging each other from opposite sides, the restaurants were longer and shallow, with their groups of tables ranged against walls decorated in appallingly primitive and savage designs: palms like crawling spiders of verdigris set on columns of chocolate rose from sh.o.r.es, from seas, of liquid bright muds in which grotesque caricatures of men, barbarously clad or, swollen headed, in travesties of civilized garb, faced women with exaggerated and obscene anatomies.

They, like the banks, were crowded; companies of negroes sat over dishes of mucous consistency and drank, with thick lips, liquors of vicious dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking with them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on their sere crinkled ma.s.ses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of calculated or emotionally demented excitement.

A flat wagon pa.s.sed, holding, on precarious chairs, a band furiously playing an infernal jumbled music which, as it swelled, filled all the occupants of the cafes with a twitching hysteria. Subdued masculine shouts were pierced by shameless feminine cries; l.u.s.t and rage and nameless intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin, of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowing with a subcutaneous redness, thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned indeterminate superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to the steel of their machetes revolvers strapped on their long thighs.

What, mainly, occupied Lee Randon was the nakedness of the pa.s.sion everywhere surcharging the surface of life. There was, in the sense familiar to him, no restraint, no cover beyond the casual screens at the backs of the restaurants; no accident to which the uncertain material of life was subject was improbable; murder rasped, like the finger of death on wire strings, at the exasperated sensibilities of organisms exposed, without preparation, to an incomprehensible state of life a million years beyond their grasp. It fascinated and disturbed Lee: it had a definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this that Savina had turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the duty typified by f.a.n.n.y left such a mora.s.s as he saw about him? Was he, Lee Randon, instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than coherent speech? Nothing, he a.s.serted, could be further from his intention and hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial of order, of disciplined feeling; and, flatly, it terrified him.

Lee insisted, hastily, that what he wanted--no, demanded--was not this destruction of responsibility, a chaos, mentally and sensually, but the removal of it as a rigid mob imposition on the higher discretion of his individuality. The thing which, with Savina, he had a.s.saulted was, in its way, as unfortunate as the single reeking street of Cobra. Again, the scene around him wasn't hypocritical, its intention was as thickly evident as the rice powder on the black sweating faces of the prost.i.tutes. Hypocrisy was peculiarly the vice of civilization. His necessity was an escape from either fate--the defilement of a pandering to the flesh and the waste of a negation with neither courage nor rapture. d.a.m.n it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to go down into the bottoms, the mire.

He regarded himself curiously as, to a large extent, the result of all the ages that had multiplied since the heated tropics held the early fecundity of human life. A Haitian lunged by with out-turned palms hanging at his knees, a loose jaw dropped on a livid gullet flecked with white, and a sultry inner consciousness no more than a germinal superst.i.tion visible in fixed blood--suffused eyes. He had an odor, Lee fantastically thought, of stale mud. Well--there he was and there was Lee Randon, and the difference between them was the sum of almost countless centuries of religions and states and sacrifice and slaughter He had a feeling that the accomplishment was ludicrously out of proportion to all that had gone into it. For the only thing of value, the security of a little knowledge, was still denied him. What, so tragically long ago, Africa begged from the mystery of night, from idols painted indifferently with ochre or blood, he was demanding from a power which had lost even the advantage of visibility. His superiority was negligible. It was confined relatively to unimportant things--such as an abstract conception of a universe partly solid and partly composed of ignited gases revolving in an infinity of time and s.p.a.ce. He was aware of sensations, flavors, champagnes, more delicate than the brutality of a rape conceived in strangling gulps of sugar cane rum. On the outside he had been bleached, deodorized, made conformable with chairs rather than allowed to retain the proportions, powers, designed for the comfortable holding to branches. But in his heart, in what he thought of as his spirit, what had he gained, where--further than being temporarily with Savina in the beastly hotel of Cobra--was he?

His thoughts had become so inappropriate to his purpose, his presence, here that he banished them and returned to Savina. She was notably more cheerful than when he had left her, and was engaged with an omelet, rough bread, Scotch preserved strawberries, and a bottle of Marquis de Riscal; most of which, she told him, had been sent, together with other pleasant things, by Daniel Randon. She was unusually seductive in appearance, with, over the sheer embroidered beauty of her underclothes, her graceful silken knees, a floating unsubstantial wrap like crushed handfuls of lilacs. ”This room kills anything I might put on,” she replied to the expression of his pleasure. ”After all, we shall soon be gone. I got Daniel's servant to telegraph the Inglaterra we were coming back. They'll have to watch out for us. After we see your brother there, and make a beginning of our rearrangements, we will go on, I think. Do you mind? South, Guadeloupe, perhaps, because it's so difficult to get to, and then Brazil. I have an idea we won't stay there long, either, but travel on toward the East. I do like islands, and there are quant.i.ties, quarts, to see in the Pacific.” She put her arms, from which the wide sleeves fell back, around his neck, drew him close to her. ”It doesn't matter where I am, if it is with you. I love you, Lee, and I am happy because I know we'll always have each other. We are not so very young, you see, and there isn't a great deal of time left, not enough to grow tired, to change in.

”I wake up at night, sometimes, with that tiresome pain at my heart, as though it were too full of you, and, for a little, I'm confused--it is all so strange. I think, for a moment, that I am still with William, and I can't imagine what has happened to the room. It frightens me dreadfully, and then I remember: it isn't William and the house on Sixty-sixth Street, but you, Lee, and Cuba. We're together with nothing in the world to spoil our joy. And, when we are old, we shall sit side by side at Etretat, I am sure, and watch the sea, and the young people in love under the gay marquees, and remember. Then we'll be married and more respectable than the weather-vanes. I want that on your account; I don't care; but you would worry, I am afraid. You are serious and a conscientious man, Lee.

”But, before that, I want to spend all my feeling, I don't want a thrill left, lost; I want to empty and exhaust myself.” Her emotion was so strong that it drew her away from him, erect, with her bare arms reaching to their fullest quivering length. In the blue gloom of the room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thought recurred to him, too slender, fragile, to contain such a pa.s.sion. Then, in a transition so sudden that it bewildered him, her mouth was against his, her hands straining him to her. She was ugly then, her face was unrecognizable in an expression of paralysed fury.

The heat, Lee protested, grew worse with evening; not a stir of air brought out the dry sc.r.a.ping rustle of the palms, a sound like the friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother; Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand moved, waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her in a cafe at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in f.a.n.n.y. Lee finally lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the illumination and along the dim ceiling. When, later, he was on the bed, it was wet under his sweating body. In a pa.s.sing sleep Savina gave one of the cries of her waking emotion. In a state of unconsciousness her fingers reached toward him. From the balcony beyond them drifted a woman's challenging laughter--one of the travelling beauties Daniel had mentioned--and he could hear the bursts of discordant sound on the street of Cobra, the combined efforts of rival bands hideous singly and together beyond description. What a h.e.l.l of a night, what a night in h.e.l.l!

The moths, defrauded in their hunger for light, blundered softly around the walls; when Lee rose to light a cigarette they would, he felt, gather at the match and beat it out with their desirous wings. Then he heard a shot, and uplifted clamoring voices; all as unreal, as withdrawn, as a simulated murder on a distant stage. He pictured the flaring restaurants, the banks with corrugated iron locked across their fronts; the faces of the negroes brought black and lurid out of the surrounding blackness. Savina, awake, demanded a drink, and he held a clay water monkey awkwardly to her lips. The faint double blast of a steam signal rose at the back of the hotel, beyond the town; he had heard it before and now connected it with Daniel's sugar mill.

His brother hadn't perceptibly changed in fifteen years. During that time Lee had seen him scarcely at all. Suddenly he was sorry for this: Daniel was what was generally known as a strong man. Men deep in the national finances of their country spoke to Lee admiringly of him; it was conceded that he was a force. Lee wasn't interested in that--in his brother's ability, it might be, to grip an industry by the throat.

He envied, speculated about, the younger man's calmness, the Chinese quality of his silence, the revelations of his carefully few words.

Daniel, in past years, had been often drunk, various women had been seriously or lightly a.s.sociated with his name; but he appeared to have cast them, the Bacardi and the blandishments, entirely aside. He seemed as superior to the dragging and wearing of life as a figure carved in stone, a Buddha, any Eastern presentment of the aloof contempt of a serene wisdom at the mountain of its own flesh. Lee, beside his brother, resembled a whirlpool of dust temporarily formed by the wind in a road.

Daniel had never married, he had been too cunning for that fragrant trap, as well. What were his vices? But were habits, self-indulgences, held in the background, ruthlessly subordinated to primary activity, vices? Lee wished now that Daniel had seen Cytherea; he was certain that the other would have said something valuable about her. Through his long contact with the naked tropics Daniel understood many things hidden from him. He must know, for instance, about the Brujeria, the negro magic brought through Haiti from the depths of Africa. Everyone in Cuba caught rumors, hints, of ceremonials of abject horror. But of that Daniel could never be brought to speak. Lee could even visualize him taking part, in a cold perverse curiosity, in the dances about smothered fires.

He thought there was a glimmer of day at the windows, but it was only a flash across his staring eyeb.a.l.l.s. From the plaza below came a low sibilant conversation. It went on and on, until Lee, in an irrepressible indignation, went out on the balcony and, in a voice like the clapping of a broken iron bell, cursed the talkers into silence.