The mass was over, the people scattering, and, once more cheerful, she laughed at him. “You might wear a hair shirt,” she suggested; “they are 122 splendid for the soul.” He handed her, without reply, into the small victoria, one of the first in Havana, which had taken the place of her volanta. In the sun, her shawl, her smile, were dazzling. A knot of men gathered, gazing at her with longing, regarding Charles Abbott with insolent resentment and wonder; how, their expressions made clear the thought, could that insignificant and colorless foreigner, that tepid American, engage and hold La Clavel, the glory of Cuba and Spain?
She drove away, shielding her eyes with the fan, and Charles returned slowly, on foot, to the hotel, reaching it in time for the eleven o’clock breakfast. Bolting his door, closing the high shutters of his glassless window, he lay down tired and feverish. The vendors of oranges cried, far off, their naranjes, naranjes dulces. The bed, which had no mattress, its sacking covered by a single sheet, the pillow stuffed hard with cotton, offered him little rest. His body, wet with sweat, twisted and turned continually, and sleep evaded him; its peace almost within his grasp, it fled before the hot insistence of his thoughts. The uncomfortable flesh mocked and dragged at the spirit. It occurred to him suddenly, devastatingly, that he might fail in his 123 purpose; the armor of his conviction of invincibility fell from him with the semblance of a loud ringing.
Of all the disturbing elements in Charles Abbott’s present life the one which, it had seemed, must prove most difficult, Santacilla and his friends, troubled him least. There was, in their jeering, a positive quality to be met; his own necessary restraint furnished him with a sustaining feeling of triumph, stability; in his control, the sacrifice of his dignity, his actual pride, damaged by La Clavel, was restored. He acted the part of the infatuated, ubiquitous youth, he thought, with entire success. It had been hardest at first—Santacilla, who pretended to find Charles under his feet like a dog, threatened, if he didn’t stay away from the St. Louis, to fling him down the long flight of stairs descending from the dancer’s room.
This, Charles wholly realized, was not an idle boasting. Seated, it might be, quietly against the wall, outside the immediate circle about La Clavel, the officers, the Spanish grandees in Cuba for pleasure or for the supervision of their copper 124 mines at Cobra, Charles would watch, study, Ceaza y Santacilla, finding in him the epitome of the Spain he himself hated. What, principally, was evident about the officer with the heavy short neck, the surprising red hair, and small restless blue eyes, was cruelty of an extraordinary refined persistence. He had, unexpectedly in his sheer brutal bulk, a tormenting spirit, a mental abnormality, rather than the to-be-looked-for mere insensate weight of his fist. He was, Charles discovered, the victim of disordered nerves, his gaze, his thick hands or shoulders, were never still, and his lips had a trick of movement as if in the pronunciation of soundless periods.
He spoke, even to La Clavel, abruptly, mockingly; his tenderest words, addressed to her with a sweeping disregard of whoever could overhear, were hasty, introspective rather than generous. More frequently he was silent, redly brooding. It was evident to the most casual understanding that Santacilla was, by birth, association and ideas, an aristocrat of the absolute type fast disappearing. It was his power that, in a world largely affected by the ideal of Christianity, he was ruthless; in an era of comparative humanity he was inhuman. There was, about him, the 125 smell of the slow fires of the Inquisition, of languid murder, curious instruments of pain. Charles recalled a story of the Spanish occupation of Cuba—how the soldiers in armor cut and stabbed their way through a village of naked, unprepared and peaceable bodies.
That, until he had known Santacilla, had been incomprehensible—a page of old history; but now Charles understood: he could see the heavy figure with a darkly suffused face hacking with a sword. He was insane, Charles Abbott told himself; in other circumstances he’d be soon convicted of a sensational murder, quickly hanged or put in an asylum. But in Havana, as an officer of the Crown quartered on a people he held in less esteem than the cattle whose slaughter he applauded in the bull ring, nothing, practically, limited his mad humors. Yes, here, in the West, he was Spain, the old insufferable despotism, and Charles thought of Santacilla’s necessary end as coldly as though the soldier were no more than a figment of the doomed old injustice.
La Clavel was seated with Charles Abbott in the upper room of the Tuileries, when Santacilla slid into an unoccupied chair beside them. They were eating mantecados, frozen sweetened cream, and Santacilla dropped a number of battered 126 Cuban coins, small in denomination, into Charles’ half consumed ice.
“If you were a man,” he said, “you could break them up with your teeth.”
The other quietly put the plate away and lighted a cigarette. He smiled, as if in appreciation of his humor, at the officer.