Cytherea Part 26

Waves of rebellion pa.s.sed over him, an anger at his impotence, at the arbitrary removal of Savina from the sphere of his help. His coat was off, his collar unb.u.t.toned, and he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, wet with sweat and the bathing of her head.

To Lee, Savina appeared sunken; her cheeks, certainly, were hollower; there was a shadow, like the dust over the floor, in each one; she had ceased to open her eyes but they had retreated. A dreadful twenty-four, thirty, hours; how brutally hard it had been on her. She hadn't complained; he had been more upset, impatient, than Savina. What a splendid companion! But that, he irritably felt, was a cold word of description for her. What a force! She was that, magnificently, above everything else. Beside her, other people--the rest of life--were flat, tepid.

There was a thin far vibration which grew into a flowing throb; Lee identified it as the rail car. Perhaps the doctor had been absent.

However, Daniel would know what to do. The footfalls approaching the door were multiplied: it was his brother and an elderly wasted man with a vermilion sprig of geranium in the lapel of a white coat. He nodded to Lee, pressed his hand, and went quickly to the bed. In the stillness while Dr. Fancett took Savina's pulse Lee again caught the shallow rapidity of her breathing. Daniel Randon stood with a broad planter's hat held with the lightness of touch characteristic of him. The man at the bed turned a speculative gaze upon Lee.

"Your wife has an acute dilatation of the heart," he p.r.o.nounced. The significance of his unguarded tone shocked Lee immeasurably.

"But I don't understand that," Lee protested; "she has never had any serious trouble with her heart before." He was halted by Daniel's brief peculiar scrutiny. The doctor replied that this was not organic. "It may be the result of unaccustomed and excessive heat; an acc.u.mulation of the excessive," he added concisely. "Excesses." The single word followed after a hesitation in which Fancett was plainly at a loss. His frowning gaze was still bent upon Lee. "I know so little of Mrs. Randon's history," he finally said. Daniel naturally had inferred, or perhaps the doctor deduced, that Savina and he were married. They would be, in a very short while, Lee told himself stubbornly. "You have ice on the batey? Yes, at once, please. And a nurse can come from my office on the Havana train this evening." Daniel nodded once, in acknowledgment. He moved closer to Lee:

"This is serious. You can't, of course, think of going on. I will see that she is as comfortable here as she would be with me; everything shall be done."

Lee answered that he was certain of that. A feeling of helplessness fastened on him, together with the incongruous speculation about the propriety of a cable to William Grove. The absurd idea occurred to him that Savina had two husbands; each with the right, if he desired, to be at a side of her bed, each holding one of her limp hands. He dismissed the elaborated thought in a rage at the triviality of his mind. Fancett and Daniel had gone temporarily: Lee had heard the former making arrangements to stay over night at the sugar estate. Savina's fast superficial breathing now dominated the room. He was again seated beside her, leaden-hearted and blank.

It was so useless--this illness and suffering, now! The doctor had seemed to insinuate that it might be traced to him, Lee Randon. What the devil did he mean by that? It was the fault of Daniel, the immobile, as much as anyone. In an airy room, under comfortable conditions, probably it wouldn't have happened. Savina's suit, her shoes, the bags, hadn't been disturbed. There was a faint tightening of her grasp, and he bent close, but he distinguished only random words.

"--not sorry. Willing ... with you. Don't be unhappy."

It required an enormous effort, the sound was at once all but imperceptible and burdened with an agony of labor. As he watched her he saw what, he thought, was an illusion--the blueness of the room, of the walls, seemed to settle on her countenance. It increased, her face was in tone with the color that had so disturbed her, a vitreous blue too intense for realization. He was startled: like a sponge, sopping up the atmosphere, she darkened. It was so brutal, so hideous, that he spoke involuntarily:

"No one can live blue like that."

Then, with a glance instinct with dread, he saw that he was right--Savina had died.

A calm of desperation swept over him. He must tell Daniel and the doctor. But they would still need the ice. The revolting details! And what had Fancett meant? It must all come out now--his presence in Cuba with Savina--in a storm of publicity and condemnation. He regretted this, because of Savina, dead. Alive she would have smiled her contempt; but death was different. Anyone would acknowledge that. The dead should be protected from slurs and scandal and obscene comments. A confusion of small facts poured through him, and broke into trivial fragments any single dignity of emotion; no generous sorrow saved him from the petty actuality of his situation; even his sense of loss, he realized dismayed, was dull.

Savina was rapidly growing, at last, cold; her arm was stiffening in the position in which he had left it; in a necessary forcible gentleness he composed her body. But he didn't hide her--not yet--with a sheet.

That would follow soon enough. The blueness was receding, leaving her pinched, but white. She had always been pale.... By G.o.d, he had forgotten to tell them. Lee, stumbling down the stairs, found Daniel, the doctor, and the proprietor of the hotel, Venalez, talking together.

As he approached there was a flash of premonition on his brother's broad unstirring face. Lee said humbly:

"She is dead."

Fancett, with Daniel Randon, went up at once, but he lingered, facing the Cuban. Venalez had a long brown countenance, with a disordered moustache. His trousers were thrust into the customary dingy boots, but his shirt was confined at the waist, and he had dispensed with a machete. He grew uneasy under Lee's stare, and shuffled his feet; then, behind a soiled thin hand, he coughed. It was clear that he wished intensely to escape, but was held by his conceptions of the obligations of conduct. "The suddenness--" Lee said, and then paused with a furrowed brow; "that's what surprises me. She was as well as you, and singing, yes--singing, that she didn't want to be a wife. I thought she had tripped on the loose silk thing she wore; and then I was certain that she had fainted from your heat." He bore heavily on the word your, and then proceeded to curse the atmosphere, in a heavy manner suggesting that it were a property, a condition, under the direction of the hotel proprietor. From that he proceeded to d.a.m.n Utica and the state of Ohio.

"But you can't understand me," he added, illogically angry at that, too.

Daniel was again at his side, speaking. "There is nothing for you to do here, and you may as well come to the batey with me. There are some accidents that cannot be provided against. This is one of them. She will be attended to; but you must explain about the cables."

"I had better get her things," Lee replied. He couldn't leave the delicate and beautiful trifles of Savina's living in the blue vault above. "They were scattered about the room." That, as well, Daniel a.s.sured him, had not been neglected. Her effects were to go over in the wagon with them. Lee, jolting on a springless contrivance over an informal road, kept his hand on the bags beside him. They were in Holland cases which hid the sets of initials ending in G. A revolver was shoved under the leather seat at the driver's left. There were the negro women, half naked, lounging in their doorways.

Telling himself that Savina was dead, he lingered over that term, at once so definite and obscure. There had been a pain in her heart at the Dos Hermanos, while they were having dinner, after the steamer, blazing with lights and with music on the upper deck, had swept out of the harbor. And, since then, at night, she had cried out. That, he had thought, was the expression of her consuming pa.s.sion. He hadn't killed her; he would correct Fancett there. The doctor's glance, almost suspicious, had been intolerable. Savina had whispered to him, at the end, that she was sorry for nothing; she had begged him to be happy.

He roused himself and asked Daniel if they had far to go, and learned that they had almost reached the batey. Where, Lee added silently, Daniel wouldn't have us. It might well have saved Savina. The same ideas persisted in his mind. He wondered if, in the hurried packing, her handkerchief had been neglected? It was one of a number that Savina had bought in Havana. He had stayed outside, in the motor, smoking; and, when she had rejoined him, after a long wait, she had displayed her purchases. Her voice had been animated with pleasure at their reasonable price. Things small and unimportant! His brain worked mechanically, like a circling toy that had been tightly wound up and must continue until its spring was expanded.

The fundamental calamity was too close for any grasp of its tragic proportions: Savina dead was far more a set of unpredictable consequences than a personality. Alive she had drawn him into herself; she had, with her body, shut out the world of reality if not of mental query. Even the fervor of Cuba had seemed to pale before her burning spirit. What, without knowing it, Dr. Fancett had meant--a thing Lee himself had foreseen--was that Savina had killed herself, she had been consumed by her own flame. But she hadn't regretted it. That a.s.surance, bequeathed to him in the very hush of death, was of ma.s.sive importance.

Nothing else mattered--she had been happy with him. At last, forgetful of the ending, he had brought her freedom from a life not different from a long dreary servitude. He would need to recall this, to remind himself of it, often in the years that would leadenly follow; for he must be regarded as a murderer--the man who, betraying William Grove, had debauched and killed his wife.

That, of course, was false; but what in the world that would judge, condemn, him wasn't? He had his memories, Savina's words. A sharper sense of deprivation stabbed at him. Why, she was gone; Savina was dead.

Her arms would never again go around his neck. The marks of the mules across her narrow feet! He put out a shaking hand, and Daniel Randon met it, enveloped it, in a steady grasp that braced him against the lurching of the wagon.

On the veranda of Daniel Randon's house Lee sat pondering over his brother's emphatic disconnected sentences. "This conventionality, that you have been so severe with, is exceedingly useful. It's not too much to say indispensable. Under its cover a certain limited freedom is occasionally possible. And where women are concerned--" he evidently didn't think it necessary even to find words there. "The conventions, for example, stronger in William Grove than his feelings, saved the reputation of his wife; they kept f.a.n.n.y alive and, with her heroic and instinctive pride, made it possible for you to go back to Eastlake. If you choose, of course. I can't enter into that. But, if you decide to return, you won't be supported by n.o.ble memories of your affair--was it of love or honor?--no, an admirable pretence must a.s.sist you. The other, if you will forgive me, is no more than the desire for a cheap publicity, a form of self-glorification. Expensive. The proper clothes, you see--invaluable! The body and the intentions underneath are separate. It is only the thoughtless, the hasty and the possessed who get them confused."

The veranda occupied all four sides of Daniel Randon's low, wide-roofed dwelling, continuous except for the break where an open pa.s.sage led to a detached kitchen. Seated in an angle which might be expected to catch the first movement of the trade winds sweeping, together with night, from the sea, practically the whole of the batey was laid out before Lee. The sun was still apparent in a rayless diffusion above a horizon obliterated in smoke, a stationary cloud-like opacity only thinning where the buildings began: the objects in the foreground were sharp; but, as the distance increased, they were blurred as though seen through a swimming of the vision. The great bulk of the sugar mill, at the left, like--on the flatness of the land--a rectangular mountain shaken by a constant rumbling, was indistinct below, but the mirador lifted against the sky, the man there on look-out, were discernible. The mill, netted in railroad tracks, was further extended by the storage house for baga.s.se--the dry pulpy remnant of the crushed cane--and across its front stood a file of empty cars with high skeleton sides. There was a noisy backing and shifting of locomotives among the trains which, filled with sugar cane, reached in a double row out of sight.

The cars were severally hauled to the scales shed, weighed, and then shoved upon a section of track that, after they were chained, sharply tilted and discharged the loads into a pit from which the endless belt of a cane carrier wound into the invisible roller crushers. The heavy air was charged with the smooth oiled tumult of machinery, the blast whistles of varied signals, and the harshness of escaping steam. Other houses, smaller than Daniel's but for the rest resembling it, were strung along the open--the dwellings of the a.s.sistant Administrador, the Chief Electrician, a Superintendent, and two or three more that Lee hadn't identified. He had been, now, nearly four weeks with Daniel, and the details of La Quinta, the procedure of the sugar, were generally familiar to him.

However, he had had very little opportunity to talk to his brother: the difficulties, in Cobra and Havana, of shipping Savina's body back to New York--William Grove, persuaded that it was unnecessary, hadn't come to Cuba; a fire in one of the out-lying colonias of the La Quinta estate, that had destroyed three caballerias of ratoon; the sheer tyranny of an intricate process which, for seven months in the year, was not allowed to pause, had kept Lee from any satisfactory communication of his feelings or convictions. But, at last, returning hot and fatigued from the clearing, by fire, of a tumba, Daniel had been sitting with him for more than an hour, and he showed no signs of immediate change or activity.

"What you say is clear enough," Lee Randon admitted; "and yet--but I can't see where--there is a sophistry in it." Daniel made a gesture both curt and indifferent. "I tell you it would be better, even at the destruction of the entire present world, to establish honesty. Since you have referred to me--what we, Savina and I, did was, simply, honest; but, again as you pointed out, its effect around us, for bad or very possibly good, was brought to nothing by the way it was drawn back into the victorious conspiring of sham. Even I don't know which, commendable or fatal, it was; I haven't been able to find out; I hadn't time. But Savina preferred the two weeks we had together to an infinity of the other. Fancett may call it an acute dilatation of the heart, but it was happiness that killed her. It's possible for me to say that because, fundamentally, I didn't bring it to her. Savina found it, created it, for herself. Through that time--was it long or short? The two weeks seemed a life--she was herself, superior."

"How about you?"

"I was absolutely contented," Lee replied.

"Isn't that a pale word for an act of pa.s.sion?"

"Perhaps. It may be." A troubled expression settled over Lee's eyes.

"There is something I should like to explain to you, Daniel, to ask you about, but it would take a great many words?" He cast this in the tone of a query, and palpably waited for the encouragement to proceed fully; but Daniel Randon was persistently non-committal. He had no intention, he said, of urging Lee to any speech he might later regret and wish unp.r.o.nounced. "It's about my att.i.tude toward Savina," Lee proceeded; "or it may be about a doll; I don't know. No, Savina and the doll weren't as distinct as you'd suppose; they were, in the beginning and at the end, one: Savina and Cytherea. That has given me some wretched hours; because, when it was over, I didn't miss Savina, I couldn't even call her individually back to my mind; and the inhumanity of that, the sheer ingrat.i.tude, was contemptible.

"I can explain it best by saying that Cytherea had always represented something unknown that I wanted, that always disturbed me and made me dissatisfied. She was more fascinating than any living woman; and her charm, what she seemed to hint at, to promise, filled me with the need to find it and have it for my own. That desire grew until it was stronger than anything else, it came between everything else and me and blinded me to all my life--to f.a.n.n.y and the children and my companies.

But, before I saw Cytherea, I was ready for her:

"Because of the conventions you uphold as being necessary to--to comfort, nothing greater. My life with f.a.n.n.y had fallen into a succession of small wearing falsehoods, pretences. I had made a mistake in the choice of a career; and, instead of dropping that blunder, I spent my energy and time in holding it up, supporting it, a.s.suring myself that it was necessary. The most I would acknowledge, even privately, was that, like the majority of men, I hated work. Like so many men I was certain that my home, my wife, were absorbing as possible. Wherever I looked, other lives were built of the same labored and flimsy materials. Mine was no worse; it was, actually, far better than most. But only better in degree, not in kind. It occupied about a fifth of my existence, and the rest was made up of hours, engagements, that were a total waste.

"At one time I had enjoyed them, I couldn't have thought of more splendid things; but the spirit of that period was not the same, and it was the spirit which made them desirable. I suppose that could be called my love for f.a.n.n.y. I was glad to sit and discuss the hem of her skirt with her. It was enough just to be coming home to the house where she was waiting. I tell you, Daniel, my life then was transfigured. How long did it last--four years, six, eight? I can't be exact; but if I speak of its duration you will guess that it went. It went slowly, so slowly that for a long while I was ignorant of what was happening. It left in the vanishing of the little lubrications you insist are as needful for society as for your machinery. They began as lubrications, evasions, to keep the wheels turning smoothly, and they ended as grains of sand in the bearings.

"First there was f.a.n.n.y's convention of modesty--it had been put into her before birth--which amounted to the secret idea that the reality of love was disgusting. She could endure it only when feeling swept her from her essential being. When that had pa.s.sed she gathered her decency around her like Susanna surprised. Positively she had the look of a temporary betrayal. So that, you see, was hidden in a cloak of hypocrisy. Then she had the impracticable conviction that I existed solely in her, that she was a prism through which every feeling and thought I had must be deflected. f.a.n.n.y didn't express this openly, it had too silly a sound, but underneath, savagely, she fought and schemed and lied--more conventions--for it. And, when the children were born, she was ready for them with such a mountain of pretty gestures and ideas that I gave them up: I couldn't fight their mother and the nurses and the maids in the kitchen--the whole b.l.o.o.d.y nice world. For one thing I wasn't home enough; when I got in for dinner they were either in bed or starched for their curtesies and kisses. They are superior children, Daniel; yet what they were taught to say sounds like the infantile sentimentalities of the stage."

The capataz of the batey gang, a tall flushed Jamaican negro, pa.s.sed on a cantering white pony. The American wives, the flowers of Utica and Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green palmetto hat, wearing a grotesquely large revolver, saluted Daniel from the open.

"Trouble at the cantina barracon," he called cheerfully.

"It was then," Lee specified, "that all my loose ends were gathered up in Cytherea. I have, I think, explained her. She was a doll, but it is more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that at first: I took her to be an individual, the image of a happy personal fate that, somehow, I had missed, but might still catch up with.

"The wildest kind of a dream," Lee Randon proclaimed. "But when I became aware of Savina, or rather of her pa.s.sion, I was sure I had been completely justified. She was, I believed, Cytherea. They looked alike.

They were the same! However, I mistook that sameness. I can understand now, very clearly; it seems incredible that I had been so blind, so fatuous, Daniel. I actually thought that there was a choice, a special graciousness, existing and reserved for me." He laughed, not bitterly, but in a wonderment that bordered on dismay. "I felt that I had found it in Savina. I did get a lot there--more than I should have hoped for--but not precisely that. At last I know." His voice was grave, and he paused that Daniel might grasp the weight of what was to follow. "I had made the mistake of thinking that I, as an individual, had any importance.

In my insane belief that a heavenly beauty, a celestial chorus girl, was kept for me, I pictured myself as an object of tender universal consideration.

"d.a.m.ned anthropomorfic rot!

"It was a principle all the while," he cried; "a principle that would fill the sky, as vast as s.p.a.ce; and ignorant, careless, of me, it was moving to its own end. And that--do you see, Daniel?--had grown destructive. It had begun differently, naturally, in the healthy fertility of animals and simple lives; but the conceit of men, men like me, had opposed and antagonized it. Magnifying our sensibilities, we had come to demand the dignity of separate immortalities. Separate worms!

We thought that the vitality in us was for the warming of our own hearts and the seduction of our nerves. And so I left the safety of a species, of f.a.n.n.y and children, for the barrenness of Cytherea.

"That's her secret, what she's forever smiling at--her power, through men's vanity, to conquer the earth. She's the reward of all our fineness and visions and pleasure, the idol of our supreme accomplishment: the privilege of escaping from slavery into impotence, the doubtful privilege of repaying the indignities of our birth." His rigid strained face was drenched with sweat. "We made her out of our longing and discontent, an idol of silk and gilt and perverse fingers, and put her above the other, above everything. She rewarded us, oh, yes--with promises of her loveliness. Why shouldn't she be lovely eternally in the dreams of men?