The Bright Shawl Part 8

"Perhaps she has been murdered in one of the brujos cabildos," Charles suggested. "It is impossible to say where that frenzy stops." A happening quite different, the dancer told him, was in her mind.

"I could never get into the thoughts of Jobaba," she admitted. "And there is very little I miss. I suppose it's the negro. She is like cream, smooth and beautiful to look at, but turned by thunder." If she were going away, Charles reminded her, there were a number of things to be discussed and closed. And she told Charles how a Cuban, ostensibly attached to the national party, but in reality a Spanish secret agent, had been sent into Camaguey. His name was Rimblas.

Charles Abbott repeated that, and memorized such characteristics as La Clavel knew. There was an indefinite stir at the door, a short knock, and he moved to the window as Santacilla entered unceremoniously.

The Spaniard was a model of politeness, of consideration, and he listened, seated with his hands folded about the head of his officer's cane, to La Clavel's determination to go to South America. It was an excellent plan, he agreed; they would welcome her rapturously in Buenos Aires; but hadn't she put off her intention a little too long?

It was on account of the climate, the season, he hastened to add.

Although, of course, they would open the opera house for her, the smart world would come in from their estancias.

"But what will our young American do?" he demanded. "How will he live without his delight? But perhaps he is going to the Argentine with you. He will have a busy time, and a hatful of challenges there, where beauty is appreciated to the full."

Charles said, with an appearance of sullenness, that he hadn't been invited to go farther south; and Santacilla replied that, as a matter of fact, it might be necessary for him to remain, perhaps forever, in Havana. He spoke cheerfully, gazing amiably upon them, but a vague quality of his bearing, his voice, was disturbing, mocking. His words had the air of an underlying meaning different from their sound. An uneasiness, as well, was communicated to La Clavel: she watched Santacilla with an indirect puzzled gaze.

"Jobaba has gone," she announced abruptly.

The trace of a smile hovered about the officer's expression of regret.

"A personable clip of h.e.l.l," was his opinion of the strayed maid. "Do you remember the major who composed music?" he addressed La Clavel.

"Well, he was always a little touched in the brain, and he caught this negro hysteria, he became a brujos. He'd come home in the morning with his body marked in yellow chalk, and wrung out like a boatman's sponge; and he let drop a fact or two about your Jobaba screaming to an African drum rubbed with the fingers. In that state, he said, a great deal that was curious and valuable could be dragged from her. We encouraged his madness, at the Cabanas, for what it brought us. But it was unfortunate for him--he ties bright rags about his ankles and mumbles, when he thinks he is alone."

Charles Abbott's mind, sifting all that the other said, was abnormally active, sharp. Something, he couldn't quite grasp what, was acutely, threateningly, wrong. He had a sense of impending danger, a premonition of das.h.i.+ng sound, of discord. And, whatever developed, he must meet it, subdue and conquer it. Ceaza y Santacilla, he saw, was not visibly armed; but, probably, he would carry a small pistol. The one his father had given him was in Charles' pocket. The difficulty was that, in the event of a disturbance, no matter what the outcome here might happen to be, the dancer and he would bear the weight of any Spanish fury. And it was no part of his intention to be cut in half by bullets behind a fortress wall.

He could only delay, discover as soon as possible what was behind Santacilla's deceiving patience and good humor. Upon that he would have to act without hesitation and with no chance of failure. The regiment should, the dancer complained, send her maid back to her.

Manners were very much corrupted beyond the western ocean--in Sevilla the servant would have been dispatched in a bullock cart deep in roses. That, he answered, reminded him of another procession, a different cart; but it was more French than Castilian--the tumbril.

He was seated against a wall at a right angle from the door, and Charles left the vicinity of the window, lounging across the room. La Clavel said, "I know you so well, Ceaza, what is it; what is it you are saying and saying without speaking of? Your mind is like a locked metal box that shows only the flashes on the surface. But you must open it for us. It seems as though you were threatening me, and that, you best should realize, is useless."

His flickering eyes rested first on her and then upon Charles Abbott.

"You will never get to South America now," he a.s.serted; "for you are a conspirator against your King. Since you have shown such a love of Cuban soil you are to become a part of it forever."

Charles Abbott, now standing by the door, shot in the bolt which secured it, and, by a fortunate, a chance, twist, broke off the handle. Santacilla, undisturbed, remained seated, smiling while his fingers played with the plaited loop of his cane.

"This infatuation," he indicated them with a wave, "while it convinced Havana, never entirely satisfied me. I have been watching you, Jobaba has been listening, for days. You were very cunning, but, in the end, you failed; you were neither skilful nor patient enough. Yet, at the last, all that you heard were fairy tales--the spy that was sent to Camaguey, ha!"

La Clavel faced him calmly, but, Charles saw, she was pale. He was revolving a hundred impractical schemes: they had only one end, the death of Santacilla, but how that was to be brought about with safety to Cuba evaded him.

"I am not a traitor in the way you mean," she declared; "what your conceit never allowed you to note was that, in Spain and here, I have always detested you; and what I did was the result of that. I struck at you and not at our country, for the court and church and army are no longer our strength--if we still have any except the knife and cord--but our weakness."

"Fools," he a.s.serted, unmoved.

"And now you are the fool," she added.

"No, you are wrong; I am only enjoying myself before the show is over.

I wanted to see you, and your young devotee, twist and turn before the fact of death. I have killed, and seen executed, a number of people, men and women; but I was still curious--a great dancer and a rich young American. That is an unusual day."

It was best, Charles Abbott decided, to bring about as much as possible with no more delay; the prime necessary act accomplished, they could face the problems of the immediate future steadily. He quietly produced his pistol and levelled it. The dry click which alone followed the pulling of the trigger made the officer aware of the attempt upon his life. A dark angry surge invaded his face, and then receded. "No man will ever kill me," he repeated. "It is my star." A hand left the cane and produced a small gold whistle.

Charles stared dully at the useless weapon, with its mounting of mother-of-pearl, which he still held.

"The cartridges have been too long in their barrels," Santacilla explained; "they have dried and s.h.i.+fted. You should have greased them every week."

La Clavel stood, lost in thought, like a woman in a dream. Her hair, over which she had spent such time and curses, was an elaborate silhouette against the light. "Ceaza, Ceaza," she implored, going to him, "you must let me go and dance in Buenos Aires, they have never seen me there, it is necessary to my career." She was close beside him, when he rose suddenly, pus.h.i.+ng the chair between them.

"You Andalusian devil!" he cried, and put the whistle to his lips.

Before he could blow, the dancer had flung herself on him, with an arm bound about his neck, a hand dragging at his throat. The whistle fell, the chair was brushed aside, and the man and woman, in a straining desperate grip, swayed into the middle of the floor.

Charles, driven by an inherited instinct to protect La Clavel, to replace her in such a struggle, caught at either of the locked shoulders; but, whirling in the pa.s.sion of their strife, they struck him aside. He made another effort to pull Santacilla to the floor, without success; and then, with a small stout chair in his hands, he waited for an opportunity to bring it cras.h.i.+ng on the officer's head.

He was appalled by the fury of the woman silently trying to choke her enemy; her other hand, grasping the thin glimmer of the knife always convenient in her stocking, the officer held away from them. Her years of dancing, her early hardening life in the mountains, had given her a strength and litheness now tearing at the weight, the masculinity, of Santacilla. He was trying, in vain, to break her wrist, to close his fingers into her throat; and, bending, the fragility of her clothes ripped across her sinuous back. s.h.i.+fting and evading the thrust of his power, she was sending the blood in purple waves over his neck and thick cheeks. Neither of them cried out, spoke; there was only the sound of hoa.r.s.e breathing, inarticulate expressions of unendurable strain. Charles Abbott, raising, holding poised, the chair, and lowering it, was choked with the grappling horror before him.

La Clavel's face was as blanched as the officer's was dark, her eyes were wide-open and set, as though she were in a galvanic trance. Again and again Santacilla tried to tear away her arms, to release himself from the constriction at his neck. His fingers dug red furrows through her flesh, they tormented and outraged her. A palm closed upon her countenance, and blood ran from under it. But there was no weakening of her force, no slackening in her superb body. She seemed curiously impersonal; robbed of all traits of women; she was like a symbolical fate, the figure from a s.h.i.+eld, from an emblem, dragging him to death.

Then, suddenly, in an inadequate m.u.f.fled voice burdened with a shuddering echo of fear, he cried for her to release him. It was so unexpected, he became so inexplicably limp, that La Clavel backed away instinctively. Charles started forward, the chair lifted high; but he was stopped by the expression, the color, of Ceazy Santacilla's face.

The officer turned, with his hands at his throat, toward the window.

He took an uncertain step, and then stood wavering, strangely helpless, pathetically stricken.

"The air," he whispered; "hot as wine." He pitched abruptly face forward upon the floor.

La Clavel tried to speak against the labored heaving of her breast, but what she attempted to say was unintelligible. Charles, slipping back the broken bolt with a finger in its orifice, listened intently at the door. The Hotel St. Louis was wrapped undisturbed in its siesta; no alarm had been created. Santacilla lay as he had fallen, an arm loosely outspread, a leg doubled unnaturally under its fellow. He bore the laxness, the emptiness, of death. He had spoken truly that it wasn't in his star to be killed by a man. Finding that he was still holding the chair, Charles put it softly down. "Well," he said, "the revolution is through with him."

He glanced suddenly at La Clavel. She was drooping, disheveled and hideous; her hair lay on her bare shoulders in coa.r.s.e strands; her face was swollen with bruises. Now, he realized, she would never see the Argentine; she would never again hear the shouted oles that greeted, rewarded, the brilliancy of her jota. His thoughts s.h.i.+fted to Cuba and himself--if it were a crime of pa.s.sion that had been committed in her room, the cause, there, would be freed from suspicion. He had, as customary, come directly, unostentatiously, to her room, and he was certain that he had not been observed. A duty, hard in the extreme, was before him.

"Why did you bring about Santacilla's death?" he demanded. She gazed at him dully, uncomprehendingly. "It was because he was jealous," he proceeded; "you must hold to that." She nodded, dazed. "When they come into the room and find him you must show what he did to you. And, after all, you didn't kill him. Perhaps that will save you," his voice was without conviction. "They won't believe you, and they may try measures to get at the truth; but you will be faithful. You will keep your secret, and--and I must go. I shall ask for you downstairs, make them send up a servant, and shout as loudly as any."

She held up her battered countenance dumbly and, with a feeling of transcendent reverence, he kissed her cut lips. Thrown across the end of the bed, the shawl she had danced in, blazing with gay color, cast the reflection of its carmines and yellows on the calcimined wall. It was like a burst of the music which accompanied her dancing. The castanets lay on the floor. The blessed saint of Cuban independence!

Then the caution that had become a part of his necessity rode uppermost: he proceeded silently to the door, and, closing it behind him, went, meeting no one, to the ground floor, where he pulled irritably at the wire hanging from a bell under the ceiling. The raw jangle brought a servant, a rosy-cheeked Gallego boy, heavy with sleep, who went stumbling up the stairs on Charles' errand.

In his own room a wave of physical horror swept over Charles Abbott; he was obliged to sit down, and the chair, the floor, seemed to rock at the giddy sickness of the memory of Santacilla, stumbling with a wine-colored face toward the window in a vain gasping for air, for life. He recovered slowly: notwithstanding the death of Tirso Labrador, the wasted shape of Andres' brother, all the tragedies he had heard reported, it was not until now that he realized the entire grimness of the undertaking against Spain. The last possibility of the spectacular departed, leaving him with a new sense of the imminence of death. He had considered this, under certain circ.u.mstances welcoming it, or dismissing it with a creditable calmness, many times before; but then his att.i.tude had been softened by the detachment, the impersonality, of his view. But at last the feeling of death was tangibly at his own throat; not today, nor tomorrow, probably; but inescapably. Well, he a.s.sured himself, he wouldn't, at that intense moment, fail an inner necessity; but his understanding gave him an additional feeling of the accidental aspects of life and of the Cuban revolution.

Until then he had, sub-consciously, except for one short depression, been certain of the ultimate triumph of right; he had thought it must succeed through its mere rightness; and he had pictured justice as a condition dropped beneficently from the clouds, wrought with the thunder of angels' wings. But accomplishment on earth, with men, he now saw, was neither safe, easy nor a.s.sured. It was the result of bitter struggle, a strife open to the most appalling mischances. A necessity of the spirit, it must be executed in the flesh, and flesh was a treacherous, unstable substance; it was capable not only of traitorous betrayals, but equally of honest, and no less fatal, failures. With this in his thoughts he went to the door, in answer to a knock, and received a heavy carefully tied parcel.

He opened it, and, dripping in dazzling color from the wrapping paper, was La Clavel's manton, the one in which he had first seen her insolently dancing the jota. Charles, with a stirred heart, searched carefully for a note, a sc.r.a.p of revealing paper; but there was none.

She had sent it to him silently, before she had been taken away, in a sentiment the delicacy of which deeply moved him. He laid the shawl over the bed, where its cruel brilliancy filled the white-walled room, darkened against the heat, with flashes of magenta and orange and burning blue. La Clavel had worn it dancing, where it emphasized her grace and perversity and stark pa.s.sion; it had been, in Charles Abbott's mind, synonymous with her, with the vision she created; but, suddenly, it lost that significance, and he saw it as the revealed outspread pattern of his own existence.

The shawl was a map, a representation, of the country of the spirit through which he pa.s.sed; such emotions, such heat, and such golden roses, all had been, were, his against that background of perilous endeavor. It seemed to float up from the bed and to reach from coast to coast, from end to end, of Cuba; its flowers took root and grew, casting about splendor and perfume; the blue widened into the sky, the tenderness of the clasping sea; the dark greens were the shadows of the great ceiba trees, the gloom of the jungles, the ma.s.sed royal palms of the plains. And not only was it the setting, the country, its violent dissonances became cries, victorious or hopeless, the sweep of reddened swords, the explosions of muskets. There was the blood that had welled into the Laurel Ditch of Cabanas; and, as well, the sultry mysterious presence of Africa in the West--the buzzing madness of the music of the danzon, the hysterics of brujeria.

Charles, at the heart of this, stood enveloped, surrounded, by a drama like the sharp clash of cymbals. It was easy to be overwhelmed, strangled, blinded, by the savage color; briefly to be obliterated.

That possibility had been, lately, very much in his mind; and he wondered, against all his recent change, if, in the surrender of his idealism, he had lost his amulet, his safety. While he had, to a large extent, solved, for himself, the philosophy of conduct, cleared the motives of his acts, a great deal was inexplicable still. He saw, dimly, that there could be little hope of justice on any island except as the projection, the replica, of a fundamental universal integrity of justice. Perfection like that couldn't begin on the rim of being and extend inward; it must be at the center of all life, obscured, delayed, but, in an end not computable in the span of human existence, certain and inevitable. Charles Abbott now had the feeling that, parallel with the maintaining of his grasp on materialism, his recognition of the means at his hand, there should be an allegiance to a supremacy of the immeasurable whole.

That double vision, the acceptance of a general good together with the possibility of extreme ill to the individual, puzzled him. He was required to put faith in a power seemingly indifferent to him, to discharge a responsibility in return for which nothing that he could weigh was promised. Charles recalled what had overtaken the dancer, La Clavel, in payment for a heroic effort against an insupportable oppression. Disaster had met the body, the flesh; what occurred in the spirit he was unable to grasp; but this, suddenly, breathlessly, he saw:

La Clavel's bitter defiance, her mountain-born hatred of oppression, her beaten but undefiled body, had communicated to him something of her own valor. It was as though she had given him a palm, a s.h.i.+elded flame, to add to his own fort.i.tude. In all probability she would, soon, be dead; Charles correctly gauged the Spanish animosity; and yet she was alive, strong, in him. She would be living; it was Ceaza y Santacilla who had died, been vanquished; his abnormal refinement dropping so easily into the b.e.s.t.i.a.l, the measure of evil, in him, for which he stood, had been slain, dissipated, ended. The shawl contracted, became a thing magnificent but silk, a manton invested with a significance brave and surprisingly tender. It was, now, the standard of La Clavel, the mantle of the saintliness he had proclaimed. His doubts, his questioning, were resolved into the conviction that the act of the dancer was her spirit made visible, created tangibly for a tangible purpose, and that, there, she was indestructible.

With that conclusion to serve as a stay and a belief, a philosophy of conduct, he returned from the extra-mundane to the world. Charles thought of La Clavel's desire to dance in Buenos Aires, for South America. He wondered how old she was; he had never before considered her in any connection with age; she had seemed neither old nor young, but as invested with the timeless quality of her art. She had spoken often of her girlhood, but no picture of her as a girl had formed in his mind. It was conceivable that, in more stable circ.u.mstances, she would have grown old, become withered with the peculiar ugliness of aged Spanish women; but that, too, he could not realize. Somehow, La Clavel's being was her dancing, and what had gone before, or what might have followed, were irrelevant, unreal; they were not she. He understood, now, her protest against being absorbed, involved, in anything but her profession.

He became conscious of the sustained gravity of his thoughts, how his activity had been forced from the body to his mind; and that recalled to him the necessity for a contrary appearance. It would be wise for him to go to the Cafe Dominica that evening, in an obvious facile excitement at his connection, at once close and remote, with the death of Santacilla in the dancer's room. But, beyond the fact that it was known he had dispatched the servant upstairs, and the usual wild, thin speculations, nothing had been allowed to appear. Santacilla, it was announced, had died naturally. La Clavel wasn't mentioned. She had spoken to others than Charles of her determination to go to the Argentine; and it was probable, rumor said, princ.i.p.ally in Spanish mouths, that she would go quietly south. At the United States Club, the idlers and gamblers surveyed Charles with dubious looks; and, over a rum punch, he adopted a sullen uncommunicative air. It would not do to drop his widely advertised habits too suddenly; he could not, in a day, change from a rake to a serious student of such books as Machiavelli's Prince; and he prepared, with utter disgust, for his final bow in the cloak of dissipation.