“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 assured 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 passion. 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 assurance, bequeathed to him in the very hush of death, was of massive 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 Fanny 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 noble memories of your affair—was it of love or honor?—no, an admirable pretence must assist 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 passage 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 bagasse—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 Assistant 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.