Crowding in on them, challenging each other from opposite sides, the restaurants were longer and shallow, with their groups of tables ranged against walls decorated in appallingly primitive and savage designs: palms like crawling spiders of verdigris set on columns of chocolate rose from shores, from seas, of liquid bright muds in which grotesque caricatures of men, barbarously clad or, swollen headed, in travesties of civilized garb, faced women with exaggerated and obscene anatomies. They, like the banks, were crowded; companies of negroes sat over dishes of mucous consistency and drank, with thick lips, liquors of vicious dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking with them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on their sere crinkled masses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of calculated or emotionally demented excitement.
A flat wagon passed, holding, on precarious chairs, a band furiously playing an infernal jumbled music which, as it swelled, filled all the occupants of the cafés with a twitching hysteria. Subdued masculine shouts were pierced by shameless feminine cries; lust and rage and nameless intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin, of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowing with a subcutaneous redness, thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned indeterminate superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to the steel of their machetes revolvers strapped on their long thighs.
What, mainly, occupied Lee Randon was the nakedness of the passion everywhere surcharging the surface of life. There was, in the sense familiar to him, no restraint, no cover beyond the casual screens at the backs of the restaurants; no accident to which the uncertain material of life was subject was improbable; murder rasped, like the finger of death on wire strings, at the exasperated sensibilities of organisms exposed, without preparation, to an incomprehensible state of life a million years beyond their grasp. It fascinated and disturbed Lee: it had a definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this that Savina had turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the duty typified by Fanny left such a morass as he saw about him? Was he, Lee Randon, instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than coherent speech? Nothing, he asserted, could be further from his intention and hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial of order, of disciplined feeling; and, flatly, it terrified him.
Lee insisted, hastily, that what he wanted—no, demanded—was not this destruction of responsibility, a chaos, mentally and sensually, but the removal of it as a rigid mob imposition on the higher discretion of his individuality. The thing which, with Savina, he had assaulted was, in its way, as unfortunate as the single reeking street of Cobra. Again, the scene around him wasn't hypocritical, its intention was as thickly evident as the rice powder on the black sweating faces of the prostitutes. Hypocrisy was peculiarly the vice of civilization. His necessity was an escape from either fate—the defilement of a pandering to the flesh and the waste of a negation with neither courage nor rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to go down into the bottoms, the mire.
He regarded himself curiously as, to a large extent, the result of all the ages that had multiplied since the heated tropics held the early fecundity of human life. A Haitian lunged by with out-turned palms hanging at his knees, a loose jaw dropped on a livid gullet flecked with white, and a sultry inner consciousness no more than a germinal superstition visible in fixed blood—suffused eyes. He had an odor, Lee fantastically thought, of stale mud. Well—there he was and there was Lee Randon, and the difference between them was the sum of almost countless centuries of religions and states and sacrifice and slaughter He had a feeling that the accomplishment was ludicrously out of proportion to all that had gone into it. For the only thing of value, the security of a little knowledge, was still denied him. What, so tragically long ago, Africa begged from the mystery of night, from idols painted indifferently with ochre or blood, he was demanding from a power which had lost even the advantage of visibility. His superiority was negligible. It was confined relatively to unimportant things—such as an abstract conception of a universe partly solid and partly composed of ignited gases revolving in an infinity of time and space. He was aware of sensations, flavors, champagnes, more delicate than the brutality of a rape conceived in strangling gulps of sugar cane rum. On the outside he had been bleached, deodorized, made conformable with chairs rather than allowed to retain the proportions, powers, designed for the comfortable holding to branches. But in his heart, in what he thought of as his spirit, what had he gained, where—further than being temporarily with Savina in the beastly hotel of Cobra—was he?
His thoughts had become so inappropriate to his purpose, his presence, here that he banished them and returned to Savina. She was notably more cheerful than when he had left her, and was engaged with an omelet, rough bread, Scotch preserved strawberries, and a bottle of Marquis de Riscal; most of which, she told him, had been sent, together with other pleasant things, by Daniel Randon. She was unusually seductive in appearance, with, over the sheer embroidered beauty of her underclothes, her graceful silken knees, a floating unsubstantial wrap like crushed handfuls of lilacs. “This room kills anything I might put on,” she replied to the expression of his pleasure. “After all, we shall soon be gone. I got Daniel's servant to telegraph the Inglaterra we were coming back. They'll have to watch out for us. After we see your brother there, and make a beginning of our rearrangements, we will go on, I think. Do you mind? South, Guadeloupe, perhaps, because it's so difficult to get to, and then Brazil. I have an idea we won't stay there long, either, but travel on toward the East. I do like islands, and there are quantities, quarts, to see in the Pacific.” She put her arms, from which the wide sleeves fell back, around his neck, drew him close to her. “It doesn't matter where I am, if it is with you. I love you, Lee, and I am happy because I know we'll always have each other. We are not so very young, you see, and there isn't a great deal of time left, not enough to grow tired, to change in.
“I wake up at night, sometimes, with that tiresome pain at my heart, as though it were too full of you, and, for a little, I'm confused—it is all so strange. I think, for a moment, that I am still with William, and I can't imagine what has happened to the room. It frightens me dreadfully, and then I remember: it isn't William and the house on Sixty-sixth Street, but you, Lee, and Cuba. We're together with nothing in the world to spoil our joy. And, when we are old, we shall sit side by side at Etretat, I am sure, and watch the sea, and the young people in love under the gay marquees, and remember. Then we'll be married and more respectable than the weather-vanes. I want that on your account; I don't care; but you would worry, I am afraid. You are serious and a conscientious man, Lee.
“But, before that, I want to spend all my feeling, I don't want a thrill left, lost; I want to empty and exhaust myself.” Her emotion was so strong that it drew her away from him, erect, with her bare arms reaching to their fullest quivering length. In the blue gloom of the room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thought recurred to him, too slender, fragile, to contain such a passion. Then, in a transition so sudden that it bewildered him, her mouth was against his, her hands straining him to her. She was ugly then, her face was unrecognizable in an expression of paralysed fury.
The heat, Lee protested, grew worse with evening; not a stir of air brought out the dry scraping rustle of the palms, a sound like the friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother; Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand moved, waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her in a café at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the illumination and along the dim ceiling. When, later, he was on the bed, it was wet under his sweating body. In a passing sleep Savina gave one of the cries of her waking emotion. In a state of unconsciousness her fingers reached toward him. From the balcony beyond them drifted a woman's challenging laughter—one of the travelling beauties Daniel had mentioned—and he could hear the bursts of discordant sound on the street of Cobra, the combined efforts of rival bands hideous singly and together beyond description. What a hell of a night, what a night in hell!