Their room, with the lift of the ceiling emphasized by the confined space, was more engaging still: tall slatted doors opened on an iron railed balcony, the bath-room was like a tunnel on end, and the floor an expanse of polished mosaic in a pattern of yellow and grey. Lee walked out on the balcony; directly below and across a narrow paved street was a floridly impressive building obviously for the purpose of varied assemblages, and on his left a park was laid in concrete walks, royal palms on towering smooth dull trunks, unfamiliar trees with a graceful dense foliage, and innumerable stacked iron chairs about the marble statue of a man with a pointing hand. These details, however, were slowly gathered from an effect the whole of which was bewilderingly white, a whiteness intolerably luminous in the dazzling bath of the sun.
It was a scene, a city, Lee recognized, more foreign to his own than any he knew in western Europe; a difference that existed mainly in the tropical heat, visible in languorous waves rising from blanched walls and streets already—so early—fervent. Savina was filled with delight; a positive color glowed in place of the customary uniform pallor of her cheeks; she opened her bags with an irresistible youthful energy. “Think what we have been missing,” she called above the sound of the water running into the tub; “and what we accepted so long for living. I suppose the wonderful thing is that we escaped. Lee, do you realize that almost no one does? They never never get away, but go from one grave, from one winter, to another. Isn't it strange, when what we did is so very easy.
“I'd like to tell a hundred people in New York that they could get away too, unfreeze themselves. When we drove horses I used to be surprised that they went along so quietly in blinders; they never seemed to learn that one kick would break into splinters the thing dragging on them. People are like that, I was and you were, too—in blinders. We've torn ours off, Lee. Tell me that you are glad.” He was, without reserve. Tranquilly finding his razors, he was aware of a permeating contentment in what they had done. It was exactly as Savina had said—the forces which had held them in a rigorous northern servitude had proved, upon assault, to be no more than a defense of painted prejudices, the canvas embrasures of hypocrisy.
“It is astonishing, what so many people put up with,” he agreed; “but then,” Lee added, in a further understanding, “it isn't so much what you knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside you. When an arrangement like ours fails, that, mostly, I suspect, is the cause. It needs a special sort of fitness. Take the hundred people you spoke of—I'd be willing to bet not five of them could get away from the past, or put out of their minds what they are brought up on. Privately they would think they were wicked, damned, or some such truck; and, sure enough, that alone would finish them.”
“I haven't a speck of that,” Savina admitted serenely; “I am happy. And I don't even have to ignore the thought of your wife and children; they'll get along just as well, maybe better, without you. William doesn't need me; he hasn't for a number of years. But we had to have each other.”
Lee Randon considered this in relation to his feeling that he had not left Eastlake, Fanny, because of Savina. He was still convinced that his life had fallen apart of itself; but he began to see that Savina had been more deeply involved in his act of liberty than he had suspected. Without her it was probable that he would have continued to the end in the negative existence of Eastlake; yet no amount of mere assurance that that was the only admirable, the only permissible, course was valid with him unless he had a corroborating belief. And all that he might once have possessed had left him at the final blow dealt by the passion of Savina and himself.
She had been stronger than the assembled forces of heredity and precept and experience; her strength was superhuman; it was incredible that her slender body could hold such an impulse, a fury really, of vitality. Women must have been like that in earlier ages of humanity; but they were no longer; their passion had been wasted, spent, or turned aside into exhausting by-paths of sensation. He had finished shaving and, when they were dressed, they went down to breakfast in a dining-room with a marble floor and walls lustrous with bronze tiling. They had tall glasses of iced orange juice; and, with the last fragrant draught of coffee, Lee lighted a long bland cigar.
“If you like,” he proceeded comfortably, “you may rush around and see as much of the city as possible. There is a big omnibus at the door. Personally, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I intend to sit and smoke, and then—smoke and sit. I am done with the proper and expected thing in every one of its forms. I have always hated churches; and the spots where soldiers fell or martyrs were burned, monuments, just annoy me; and picture galleries give me colds in the head. Above all else I don't want to be improved; if I hear a fact of any sort I am going to bed for the rest of the day.”
“I don't care about those, either,” Savina assented; “but the stores, yes. I have to have a mantilla and a high comb right away, now; and—I warn you—if it's only in our room I'm going to wear them. If I could get you into it I'd bring back a shell jacket covered with green braid and a wide scarlet sash, or whatever an espada wears.”
“A guitar and a carnation ought to do,” he responded. “Count on me for nothing until the evening, when, if you care to, we'll drive along the sea, one way and then the other, and have dinner where we happen to be. I hope you will wear the most extravagant and holiday clothes—white, and very ruffled and thin, would be nice, with emeralds.”