“Not particularly,” he acknowledged; “though I wouldn't drive around the city to avoid him. Somehow—I may be blind—I can't think that I am doing him an infamous wrong: that he lost you proves that. Why, under the circumstances, should you, anyone, stay? I don't feel a particle immoral, or even devilish. It's all so sensible and balanced and superior. No, no, let William watch out for himself; his club, he's so devoted to, won't fail him. Fanny and he will have their whole worlds to sympathize with their injury. We don't need sympathy.”
Lee walked back to the hotel, the pig-skin wrapped walking stick swinging from an arm, his bearing confident and relaxed. He stopped at the desk for a conference with the porter—a basket of fruit from the restaurant, and, if procurable regularly or irregularly, a drawing-room on the Washington train. Then he went up and closed his bag: he had time for dinner and several cigars afterwards; he wasn't hungry, but the ceremony would kill the intervening two hours and more.
The porter found him later and delivered his tickets, including the check for a drawing-room, secured as irregularly as possible from the Pullman conductor. There were, it began to seem, to be no minor annoyances. At a few minutes before ten he was standing, as he had arranged with Savina, with his bag before the hotel; and, just past the hour, the cab which held her turned in to the sidewalk. She had two bags, but one was very small—her toilet things, she explained—and she was carrying a jewel case. There wasn't a tremor in her voice or bearing, the slightest indication that they were going farther than a theatre in the vicinity of Forty-fourth Street. Internally, Lee was excited, filled with the long strange sense of holiday.
“William went to the club,” Savina told him with a smile edged with malice; “everything was as usual when he left, but when he gets back it will be changed. I'm sorry to miss his expression when he reads the letter I wrote; he won't show it to anyone.”
“That sounds as though you really disliked him,” Lee observed. Then he remembered the hatred he had felt for Fanny. Matrimony had a brutal hand for superficial relationships and conventions. He had spoken lightly but, watching her, he saw the grimness of her passion strike the animation from her face. The jewel case slid over the softness of her wrap to the floor, her hand crept under his cuff, clinging to his arm.
Going immediately to their train, they found the fruit in the drawing-room; the porter stopped to knock at the door and discover if they were in need of his attendance. They heard dimly the train's muffled boring under the river and were conscious of the swimming lights of the Jersey plain, the confused illuminated darkness of cities, the tranquility of open country, the ringing echo of bridges and the sustained wail of their locomotive. They were, again, reaching Washington, close in a taxi-cab; Savina's jewel case again fell unheeded; and again, after the shortest halt possible, they were whirling south in a drawing-room where night and day were indistinguishable one from the other.
On the rear platform of the orange-painted train moving deliberately along the Florida coast Lee was first aware of the still, saturating heat; that, in itself, was enough to release him from the winter-like grip of Eastlake. He lost all sense of time, of hurry, of the necessity of occupation as opposed to idleness, of idleness contrasted with sleep. The promise of satiation, of inevitability, steeped his being in a pleasant lethargy. It was the same to him if they moved or stopped, whether they arrived at the next destination or remained forever in a sandy monotony of tomato fields or by a slow pass of water cutting the harshness of palmettos. On the viaducts he gazed with half-closed eyes across the sapphire and emerald green and purple water; or, directly under him, he looked down incuriously into a tide so clear that it seemed no more than a breath ruffling the sand beneath.
Savina, who had discarded cloth for dull white linen—she wished, she explained, to make the transition as sharply as possible—was more alertly interested in their constantly shifting surroundings; they were significant to her as the milestones of her incredible escape. On the steamer for Havana, marking their effects deposited in a cabin with a double iron bed and unpleasantly ubiquitous basins, she explained to Lee that she never got seasick; but he might have gathered that, she pointed out, by her willingness to undertake Cuba. Admitting that he had missed this feminine subtlety, he arranged two deck chairs in an advantageous angle, and they sat enveloped in a mildness which, heavy with the odor of water-soaked wood, was untroubled by any wind. When the steamer left its pier Savina put a hand inside one of his. The harbor lights dropped, pair by pair, back into the night; the vibration of the propeller became a sub-conscious murmur; over the placid water astern a rippling phosphorescence was stirred and subsided. A motion, increasing by imperceptible degrees, affected the deck; there was a rise and fall, regular and sleep-impelling: the uneasiness of the Gulf Stream. Havana floated into their waking vision, a city of white marble set in lustrous green, profound indigo, against the rosy veil of a morning sun.
The fortunate chance that took them to the Inglaterra Hotel—the disdain of its runner was more persuasive than the clamor of all the others who had boarded the steamer—found them a room, they soon discovered, in what was at once the most desirable and the most unlikely place. They might have the chamber until Tuesday, Lee was told, in an English inflected with the tonal gravity of Spain. It was hardly past eight in the morning, an awkward hour to arrive newly at a city, he thought, as they were carried up in the elevator. The details of the floor, the hall, they crossed, engaged his interest; not alone for the height of the ceiling, which was excessive, but because of the palms, the pointed Moorish arches filled with green painted wood lattices; the totality of an effect different from anything else he had seen.