“It's a good thing I have a lot of money,” she observed; “you have some, of course, but it wouldn't begin to support your ambitions.”
“I don't even care which of us has it,” he admitted; “so it's there. A year ago I should have looked pained and insisted that I couldn't accept, nor allow you to use, your own money. I don't exactly have to ask you for a taxi-cab fare, though, luckily; but if you did bring the emeralds I saw you wearing in New York don't throw them away on my account.”
“They are here,” she assured him. “William gave them to me when we were married.”
“Splendid, together with Fanny's pearl,” he replied placidly; “I was afraid they had been a legacy from your mother. I much prefer them to have been William's—it will give them such a Utopian sparkle.”
When Savina had gone, in a long brightly-painted car summoned from the line backed at the plaza's edge, Lee Randon returned to their room. The heat of the day, approaching noon, the ceaseless noise of Havana rose diffused to the balcony where he sat until the circling sunlight forced him to move inside. What amazing comfort! A curiously impersonal admiration for Savina grew with the understanding of her exceptionally perceptive being. She was what, above all else, he would have chosen for a companion: her extraordinary feeling was sheathed, tempered, in the satin of a faultless aesthetic sense; the delicacy of her body was resembled by the fineness of her feminine mind; she was entirely, deliciously, decorative. The black brocade mules by her bed were characteristic of her—useless charming objects that had cost twenty, thirty, dollars. Their sliding tap on the glazed floor was an appreciable part of his happiness; Savina's bottles on a dressing-table were engraved crystal with gold stoppers: it was all as it should be.
When she returned she redressed her hair, drawing it back across her ears, put in at a provocative angle a fan-like carved shell comb, and twisted a shawl of flame-colored silk—it was a manton, she instructed him—about her shoulders. The guise of Andalusia was very becoming to her. For a dinner, Savina wore the filmy white and emeralds; they went to a restaurant like a pavilion on a roof, their table, by a low masonry wall, overlooking the harbor entrance. The heat of the day, cloaked in night, was cooled by the trade wind moving softly across the sea; the water of the harbor was black, like jet shining with the reflections of the lights strung along the shore; the lighthouse at Morro Castle marked the rocky thrust of the land. The restaurant was crowded: beyond Lee were four officers of the Spanish navy in snowy linen and corded gilt; in the subdued light the faces of women, under wide flowery hats, were illusive and fascinating; everywhere the deep crimson of Castilian wines was set against the amber radiance of champagne.
Directly below, shadowy trees hid the stone margin of the bay, and an enormous tripod, such as might be used for removing the cargoes of ships, raised its primitive simplicity. “Look, Lee!” Savina laid a hand on his wrist. A steamer, incredibly large and near, was moving slowly out through the narrow channel to the sea. Rows of golden lights shone on its decks and from the port-holes, and a drift of music reached him. “Some day soon,” she went on, “we'll take a boat like that, and go—where? It doesn't matter: to a far strange land. Hills scented with tea flowers. Streets with lacquered houses. Villages with silver bells hung along the eaves. Valleys of primroses under mountains of ice. We'll see them all from little windows, and then it will be night. But, principally, we will never go back—never! never! never! We will be together for years. Let's go to the hotel now; Lee. I am rather tired; it's the heat, don't you think? I am worn, and, because I am so happy, a trifle dizzy. Not much. Nothing to worry about. But I only want you, Lee; in my heart I don't care for the valleys and bells and scents.”
Yet, before they reached the hotel they stopped, Savina insisted, for cocktails of Bacardi rum, fragrant with fresh limes and sweet with a crust of sugar that remained at the bottoms of the glasses. In the night—their beds were separated by the width of the balcony doors—she called for him, acute with fright. “What is it?” she cried. “Hark, Lee, that horrible sound.” The air was filled with a drumming wail, a dislocated savage music, that affected him like a nightmare grown audible.
“It's coming from across the street, from the Opera House,” he told her; “some kind of a dance, I'm certain.” Patently it was an orchestra, but the instruments that composed it, the measures woven of frantic screaming notes and dull stale iterations, he had no means of identifying. “Bedlam in the jungle,” he said soothingly. She wished it would stop. Soon he agreed with her; without pause, without variation, with an insistence which became cruel, and then unbearable, it went on. Lee Randon, after an uneasiness which culminated in an exasperated wrath, found a degree of exactness in his description: it was, undoubtedly, the jungle, Africa, debased into a peculiarly harrowing travesty of later civilized emotions. Finally he lost the impression of a meaninglessness; it assumed a potency, a naked reality, more profound than anything in his previous knowledge. It was the voice of a crazed and debased passion. To Lee, it seemed to strip him of his whiteness, his continence, his integrity, to flay him of every particle of restraint and decency, and set him, bestial and exposed, in a ball room with glass-hung chandeliers.