The Bright Shawl Part 2

Domingo Escobar finished what was evidently a satirical period with a decisive clearing of his throat--a-ha! He was a small rotund man with a gigantic moustache laid without a brown hair misplaced over a mouth kindly and petulant. His wife, Carmita, obese with indulgent indolence, her placid expression faintly acid, waved a little hand, like a blanched almond, indicative of her endless surprise at the clamor of men. Andres was silent, immobile, faultless in a severity of black and white.

Charles had begun to admire him inordinately: above everything, Andres possessed a simple warmness of heart, a generosity of emotion, together with a fastidious mind. Fortunate combination. And his person, his gestures and flas.h.i.+ng speech, his brooding, were invested by an intangible quality of romance; whatever he did was absorbing, dramatic and--and fateful. He was a trifle aloof, in spite of his impulsive humanity, a thought withdrawn as though by a shadow that might have been but his unfailing dignity.

Charles' gaze wandered from him to Narcisa, who, Domingo Escobar had said, resembled a flower bud. As she sat in pale yellow ruffles, with her slim hands clasped and her composed face framed in a wide dense stream of hair, she was decidedly fetching. Or, rather, she gave promise of charm; at present, she was too young to engage him in any considerable degree. Narcisa, he concluded, was fourteen. At very long intervals she looked up and he caught a l.u.s.trous, momentary interrogation of big black eyes. A very satisfactory sister for Andres Escobar to have; and, wondering at the absence of Vincente, the eldest son, Charles asked Andres about his brother.

A marked constraint was immediately visible in the family around him.

Vincente, he was informed abruptly, was out of Havana, he had had to go to Matanzas. Later, on the balcony over the Prado, Andres added an absorbing detail. "Vincente, we think, is in the Party of Liberation.

But you must say nothing. I do not know, Vincente will not speak; but mama has noticed the gendarmes in front of the house, and when she drives."

"I should like to talk to him," Charles Abbott declared; "you must arrange it for me. Look here, there's n.o.body around, I might as well tell you that's why I came to Cuba, to fight the cursed Spanish.

I'm--I'm serious, there's nothing I wouldn't do; and if I have to be killed, why, I am ready for that. It's all worked out in my head, except some petty little details. Cuba ought to be free; this oppression is horrible, like a spell on you--you're all afraid to more than whisper--that must be broken. It must! I have a good little bit of money and I can get more. You've got to help me."

Andres clasped his hand. "That is wonderful!" His lowered exclamation vibrated with feeling. "How can you have such n.o.bility! I am given to it, and Jaime and Remigio Florez and Tirso. But we are going to wait, we think that is better; Spain shall pay us when the time comes.

Those students, eight of them, who were shot, were well known to us.

They put them against a wall by the prison and fired. You could hear it clearly. But, when we are ready, the Spanish Volunteers--" hatred closed his throat, drew him up rigidly. "Not yet," he insisted; "this shall be different, forever. Perhaps your country will help us then."

Charles was increasingly impatient; he couldn't, he felt, wait, delay his gesture for freedom. He conceived the idea that he might kill the Captain-General of Spain in Cuba, shoot him from the step of his carriage and cry that it was a memorial of the innocent boys he had murdered. Andres dissuaded him; it would, he said, only make the conditions of living more difficult, harsh, put off the other, the final, consummation.

Below, on the promenade, the rows of gas lamps shone wanly through the close leaves of the India laurels; there was a ceaseless sauntering throng of men; then, from the Plaza de Armas, there was the hollow rattat of drums, of tattoo. It was nine o'clock. The night was magnificent, and Charles Abbott was choked by his emotions; it seemed to him that his heart must burst with its expanding desire of heroic good. He had left the earth for cloudy glories, his blood turned to a silver essence distilled in ethereal honor; he was no longer a body, but a vow, a purpose.

One thing, in a surpa.s.sing humility, he decided, and turned to Andres.

"Very well, if you think the other is best. Listen to me: I swear never to leave Cuba, never to have a different thought or a hope, never to consider myself at all, until you are free."

The intent face of Andres Escobar, dim in the gloom of the balcony, was like a holy seal upon his dedication. A clatter of hoofs rose from below--the pa.s.sage of a squad of the gendarmes on grey horses, their white coats a chalky glimmer in the night. Andres and Charles watched them until they vanished toward the Parque Isabel; then Andres swore, softly.

Again in his room at the Inglaterra Charles speculated about the complications of his determination to stay in Cuba until it was liberated from Spain. That, he began to realize, might require years.

Questions far more difficult rose than any created by a mere immediate sacrifice; the att.i.tude of his father, for example; he, conceivably, would try to force him home, shut off the supply of money. Meanwhile, since the Inglaterra was quite expensive, he would move to a less pretentious place. And, in the morning, Charles installed himself at the Hotel San Felipe, kept on Ancha del Norte Street, near the bay, by a German woman.

His room was on the top floor, on, really, a gallery leading to the open roof that was much frequented after dinner in a cooling air which bore the restrained masculine chords of guitars. On the right he could see the flares of Morro Castle, and, farther, the western coast lying black on the sea. He had his room there, and the first breakfast, but his formal breakfast and dinner he took at the Restaurant Francais, the Aguila d'Oro, or the Cafe Dominica. Late, with Andres and their circle, their tertulia, Charles would idle at the El Louvre over ice-cream or the sherbets called helados in Havana. On such occasions they talked with a studied audible care of the most frivolous things; while Charles cherished close at heart the sensation of their dangerous secret and patient wisdom, the a.s.surance that some day their sacred resolution would like lightning shatter their pretence of docility.

Yet, in spite of the dark texture of their minds, they were, at times, casually happy, intent, together, on mundane affairs. They were, all five, inseparable: Jaime Quintara, the eldest, was even more of an exquisite than Andres; he imported his lemon-colored gloves by the box from Paris, where they were made to his measure; and in them, it was the common jest, he went to bed. He was almost fat, with absurdly small feet and a perceptible moustache. In addition, he was in love with a public girl who lived on Gloria Street; altogether he was a man of the world. Remigio Florez was absolutely different: the son of a great coffee estate in Pinar del Rio, of limitless riches, he was still simple and unaffected, short, with a round cheerful face and innocent lips. Tirso Labrador was tall and heavy, he had the carriage of a cavalry officer, a dragoon; and, slow mentally, his chief characteristic was a remarkable steadfastness, a loyalty of friends.h.i.+p, admiration, for his more brilliant companions. Tirso Labrador was very strong, and it was his boast, when they were alone, that he intended to choke a Spaniard slowly to death with his naked hands.

Except, however, for the evening, Charles was rarely idle; upheld by his fervor he studied Spanish with an instructor through most of the morning, and rode or fenced in the sala in the afternoon. His knowledge of Spanish, supplemented by his friends, grew rapidly; he had, his teacher declared, a very special apt.i.tude for the language.

Domingo Escobar got great delight from throwing sentences, queries, at him with inconceivable rapidity, and in pretending that every reply Charles attempted was senseless.

Narcisa, when he was present, contrived to sit with her gaze on her hands folded in her ruffled lap and to lift her widely opened eyes for breathless interrogations. She was, Charles was forced to admit, notably pretty; in fact, for a little girl, she was a beauty. Now if she had been thirty he might have had a hopeless pa.s.sion for her, hopeless not because she failed to return it, but for the reason that he was a man without a future--some day, they both knew, he would desert love for stark death.

They went, Charles and Andres, Tirso and Remigio and Jaime, to the Tacon Theatre for every play, where they occupied a box in the first row, the primer piso, and lounged, between the acts, on the velvet rail with their high silk hats and canes and boutonnieres. At times there were capital troupes of players and dancers from Andalusia, and the evening was well spent. They liked, too, the zarzuelas, the operettas of one act, largely improvised with local allusions. But they most warmly applauded the dancers.

One, La Clavel, from Seville, had been announced by posters all over the city; and, at the moment she appeared on the Tacon stage, Tirso had his heavy arm about Remigio's shoulders, Jaime's gloved hands were draped over his cane, and Charles was sitting in the rear of the box with Andres. The orchestra began a sharply accented dance measure--it was a jota--and a lithe figure in a manton of blazing silks and a raked black felt hat made a sultry bow.

La Clavel was indolent; she tapped a heel and sounded her castanets experimentally; a reminiscent smile hovered on the sombre beauty of her face. Suddenly Charles' attention was wholly captured by the dancer; he leaned forward, gazing over Remigio's shoulder, vaguely conscious of the sound of guitars and suppressed drums, the insistent ring of a triangle. She stamped her foot now, and the castanets were sharp, exasperated. Then slowly she began to dance.

She wove a design of simple grace with her hips still and her arms lifted and swaying; she leaned back, her eyes, under the slanted brim of her hat, half closed; and her movements, the rhythm, grew more p.r.o.nounced. Through the music Charles could hear the stamp of her heels, the augmented shrilling of the castanets. Her fire increased; there were great scarlet peonies on her shawl, and they fluttered as though they were troubled by a rising wind. La Clavel swept in a widening circle on her hips, and her arms were now extended and now thrust down rigidly behind her.

She dominated the cruel colors of her shawl with a savage intensity that made them but the expressions of her feelings--the scarlet and magenta and burning orange and blue were her visible moods, her capriciousness and contempt and variability and searing pa.s.sion. Her hat was flung across the stage, and, with her bound hair shaking loose from its high sh.e.l.l comb, she swept into an appalling fury, a tormented human flame, of ecstasy. When Charles Abbott felt that he could support it no longer, suddenly she was, apparently, frozen in the immobility of a stone; the knotted fringe of her manton hung without a quiver.

An uproar of applause rose from the theatre, a confusion of cries, of Ole! Ole! Anda! Anda! Chiquella! A flight of men's hats sailed like birds around her. Jaime Quintara pounded his cane until it broke, and, with the others, Charles shouted his unrestrained Spanish approbation.

They crowded into the front of the box, intent on every movement, every aspect, of the dancer. Afterwards, at the Tuileries, Andres expressed their concerted feeling:

"The most magnificent woman alive!"

Jaime went across the cafe to speak to a man who had a connection with the Tacon Theatre. He returned with an a.s.sortment of information--La Clavel was staying at the St. Louis; she would be in Havana for a month; and she had been seen with Captain Ceaza y Santacilla, of the regiment of Isabel II. This latter fact cast them into a gloom; and Remigio Florez so far broke the ban of sustained caution as to swear, in the name of the Lady of Caridad, at Santacilla and his kind.

Nothing, though, could reduce their enthusiasm for La Clavel; they wors.h.i.+pped her severally and together, discussing to the last shading her every characteristic. She was young, but already the greatest dancer the world had--would ever have, Charles added. And Andres was instructed to secure the box for her every appearance in Havana; they must learn, they decided, if she were to dance in Santiago de Cuba, in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, in Cathay. They, if it were mortally possible, would be present. Meanwhile none of them was to take advantage of the others in the contingency that she should miraculously come to love him. That incredible happiness the individual must sacrifice to his friends.h.i.+p, to his oath above all other oaths--Cuba. The country's name was not spoken, but it was entirely understood.

They were seated on the lower floor, by the stairs which led up to the salon for women; and, sharply, Charles grasped Andres' arm. Pa.s.sing them was a slender woman m.u.f.fled in a black silk capote, with no hat to cover the intricate ma.s.s of her hair piled against a high comb.

Behind her strode a Spanish officer of cavalry, his burnished scabbard hooked on his belt against its silver chain; short, with a thick sanguine neck above the band of his tunic, he had morose pale blue eyes and the red hair of compounded but distinct bloods.

"La Clavel," Charles whispered; "and it must be that filthy captain, Santacilla, with her."

Seated on the roof of the Hotel San Felipe, the night's trade wind faintly vibrant with steel strings, Charles Abbott thought at length about La Clavel. Two weeks had pa.s.sed since she first danced at the Tacon Theatre; she had appeared on the stage three times afterward; and she was a great success, a prodigious favorite, in Havana. Charles and Andres, Jaime and Remigio and Tirso Labrador, had, frankly, become infatuated with her; and it was this feeling which Charles, at present, was examining. If it endangered the other, his dedication to an ordeal of right, he had decided, he must resolutely put the dancer wholly outside his consideration.

This, he hoped, would not be necessary: his feeling for La Clavel lay in the realm of the impersonal. It was, in fact, parallel with the other supreme cause. La Clavel was a glittering thing of beauty, the perfection of all that in a happier world, an Elysium--life and romance might be. He regarded her in a mood of decided melancholy as something greatly desirable and never to be grasped. When she danced his every sensibility was intensified; life, for the moment, was immeasurably lovely, flooded with lyrical splendor, vivid with gorgeous color and aching happiness. Charles' pleasure in every circ.u.mstance of being was acutely expanded--his affection for Andres, the charm of Havana, the dignity of his impending fate.

Ordinarily he would not have been content with this; he would have striven to turn such abstractions into the concrete of an actual experience. But now an unusual wisdom held him intent on the vision; that, he recognized, was real; but what the reality, the woman herself, was, who could be sure? No, he wasn't in love with La Clavel in the accepted sense of that indefinite term; he was the slave of the illusion, the emotions, she spun; he adored her as the G.o.ddess of his youth and aspirations.

He tried to explain this, in halting and inadequate Spanish, to his tertulia; and because of his spirit rather than his words, his friends understood him. They were standing by the marble statue of Ferdinand VII in the Plaza de Armas, waiting for the ceremony of Retrata, to begin in a few moments. The square was made of four gardens, separated by formal walks, with a circular glorieta; and the gardens, the royal palms and banyans and flambeau trees, were palely lighted by gas lamps which showed, too, the circling procession of carriages about the Plaza. The square itself was filled with sauntering men, a s.h.i.+fting pattern of white linens, broad hats and glimmering cigars, diversified by the uniforms of Spain.

At eight o'clock a sergeant's guard and the band marched smartly into position before the Governor-General's palace, where they stood at rest until the drums of the barracks announced retreat. Then, at attention, the gun of El Morro sounded, and the band swept into the strains of Philemon et Baucis.

Jaime Quintara smiled sceptically at Charles' periods: Platonic sentiments might satisfy Abbott, he declared, but for himself.... At this, Remigio insisted on their moving out to inspect the carriages.

They were, for the most part, quitrins, drawn with two horses, one outside the shafts ridden by a calesero in crimson velvet laced with gold and a glazed hat. The quitrins had two wheels, a leather hood strapped back, and held three pa.s.sengers by means of a small additional seat, called, Andres explained, la nina bonita, where the prettiest woman was invariably placed. None of the women wore hats, but they were nearly all veiled, and the carriages were burdened with seductive figures in wide dresses of perfumed white waving slow fans.

There was, however, little conversation between the men on foot and the women carefully cultivating expressions of remote unconcern.

Rarely, if she were accompanied by a masculine member of her family, a woman came to earth for a short stroll in the gardens. Charles was absolutely inattentive to them, but his companions, particularly Tirso and Jaime, noted and, with dismaying freedom, commented on every feminine detail that struck their fancy. It was Tirso who excitedly called their attention to one of the new volantas in which sat La Clavel. Ceaza y Santacilla was not with her; the place at her side was occupied by the man to whom Jaime had spoken about the dancer in the Tuileries. Quintara, capturing his attention, spoke in his profoundest manner. There was a halt in the movement of carriages, and La Clavel was directly before them.

She wore the high comb and a mantilla of black lace falling in scalloped folds around the vivid flower of her face--her beauty, at least to Charles, was so extraordinary, her dark loveliness was so flaming, that the scarlet camellia in her hair seemed wan. They were, all four, presented to the dancer; and four extreme bows, four fervid and sonorous acknowledgments, rose to the grace, the divinity, above.

It seemed to Charles that, perhaps because he was an American, La Clavel noticed him more than the others: certainly she smiled at him and the brilliancy of her gaze was veiled, made enigmatic, by the lowering of her sweeping eyelashes.

The checked restlessness of the horses was again released in a deliberate progress, but, as La Clavel was carried on, the man with her added that, after Retreta, they would stop at the El Louvre for an ice cream, a mantecado. Remigio Florez drew in a deep breath which he allowed to escape in the form of a sigh; Jaime smoothed the wrists of his bright yellow gloves; Tirso Labrador settled his guardsman's shoulders into his coat. "She won't get out of the volanta," Charles said thoughtfully; "and someone will have to bring out her refresco.

We'd better get there early and stand at the door."

"No hurry," the suave Jaime put in; "no one will leave here until after tattoo."

At nine o'clock the drums and bugles sounded from various parts of the city. There was one more tune played directly under the palace windows, after which the band and its guards left briskly to the measure of a quickstep. Charles led the way through the crowd to the Prado and the Parque Isabel. A number of carriages were there before them, the occupants mostly eating ices, and the cafe was being rapidly filled. Waiting keen-eyed at the entrance, they saw the volante with La Clavel before it drew up, and the calesero had scarcely dismounted from his horse when the dancer was offered her choice of the available sweets. She preferred, rather than an ice, an orchata, and sipped it slowly with an air of complete enjoyment. Her every movement, Charles Abbott saw, the turn of the hand holding the gla.s.s, her chin and throat against the black film of lace, her slender body's poise, was utterly and strongly graceful: it was, more than any other quality, the vigor of her beauty that impressed him. It seemed as though she must be superbly young, and dance magnificently, forever.

As Charles was considering this he was unceremoniously thrust aside for the pa.s.sage of Captain Santacilla with another cavalry officer whose cinnamon colored face was stamped with sultry ill-humor.

Santacilla addressed the dancer aggressively with the query of why she misspent her evening with the cursed Cuban negroes.

La Clavel made no reply, but tended her empty gla.s.s to Andres; then she glanced indifferently at the captains. "Their manners," she said, "are very pretty; and as for the negro--" she shrugged her delectable shoulders.

"My blood is as pure, as Castilian, as your own," Tirso Labrador began hotly; but Remigio stilled him with a hand on his arm. In an uncolored voice he begged the dancer to excuse them; and, sweeping off their hats, they were leaving when Santacilla's companion stepped forward in a flash of ungoverned anger like an exposed knife: