Charles Abbott said evenly: “I’d be very glad to fence with you, of course.”
When de Vaca, flawlessly appointed, returned, Charles rose steadily, and strapped on his mask, tightened the leather of the plastron. A murmur of subdued amusement followed their walking out together onto an unoccupied strip—de Vaca was a celebrated swordsman. Charles saluted acceptably, but the wielding of the other’s gesture of courtesy filled him with admiration. The foils struck together, there was a conventional pass and parry, and from that moment Charles Abbott lost control of his steel. At a touch from de Vaca, scarcely perceptible, his foil rose or fell, swept to one side or the other; a lunge would end in the button describing a whole arc, and pointing either to the matting or the 134 winged and cherubic cupids. The laughter from the chairs grew louder, more unguarded, and then settled into a constant stream of applause and merriment.
Disengaged, he said in tones which he tried in vain to make steady, “You have a beautiful hand.”
De Vaca, his eyes shining blackly through wire mesh, thanked him in the politest language known. He began, then, to make points, touches, wherever he chose—with a remarkably timed twist he tore the cloth heart from Charles’ wadding; he indicated, as though he were a teacher with a pointer, anatomical facts and regions; de Vaca seemed to be calling Charles’ attention, by sharp premonitory taps, to what he might have been saying. There were now a number of voices encouraging and applauding him; he was begged not to be so hard upon Gaspar; and it was hoped that he was not giving way to the venting of a secret spite. A nerveless parry in tierce brought out a tempestuous support—
His arm was as heavy, as numb, as lead, the conventional period had been ignored, and his torment went on and on. His chest, he thought, must burst under the strapped plastron, and sweat poured in a sheet across his eyes. The episode 135 seemed utterly meaningless, undemanded; the more remarkable because of de Vaca’s indifference to him, to all the trivialities of his Cuban duty. How yellow the face was, the eyes were like jet, through the mask. Then Charles Abbott grasped what, he was certain, was the purpose of such an apparently disproportionate attack. It was the result of a cold effort, a set determination, to destroy what courage he had. He gazed quickly about, and saw nothing but Spanish faces; the fencing master was in the far end of the room, intent upon a sheaf of foils. At any moment de Vaca could have disarmed him, sent his steel flying through air; but that he forebore to do. Instead he opposed his skill, his finesse, his strength, in the attack upon Charles Abbott’s fibre.
“If I collapse,” Charles told himself, “it will be for eternity.”
Any sense of time was disintegrated in a physical agony which required all his wasting being to combat. But, even worse than that, far more destructive, was the assault upon his mind. If he crumbled ... he thought of himself as dust, his brain a dry powder in his skull. The laughter around him, which had seemed to retreat farther and farther, had ceased, as though it had 136 been lost in the distance. The room, widening to an immensity of space, was silent, charged with a malignant expectancy. Soon, Charles felt, he would fall into unreckoned depths of corrupt shadows, among the obscene figures of the hideously lost.
The sweat streaming into his mouth turned thick and salt—blood, from his nose. There was a tumult in his head: his fencing now was the mere waving of a reed. Again and again the Spaniard’s foil, as cruelly and vitally direct as at the first pass, struck within Charles’ guard. The face of wood, of yellow wood, the eyes that were bits of coal, behind the mask, pursued him into the back of his brain. It stirred, there, a smothering instinct, a dormant memory, and Charles, with a wrenching effort, in a voice thin like a trickle of water from a spigot, said again, “—a most beautiful hand.”
Sharply, incomprehensibly, it was over. Drooping forward upon his knees, dropping his foil from paralysed fingers, he saw de Vaca, with his mask on an arm, frowning.
“Now,” Charles Abbott thought luxuriously, “I can faint and be damned to them.”