The shawl was a map, a representation, of the country of the spirit through which he passed; such emotions, such heat, and such golden roses, all had been, were, his against that background of perilous endeavor. It seemed to float up from the bed and to reach from coast to coast, from end to end, of Cuba; its flowers took root and grew, casting about splendor and perfume; the blue widened into the sky, the tenderness of the clasping sea; the dark greens were the shadows of the great ceiba trees, the gloom of the jungles, the massed royal palms of the plains. And not only was it the setting, the country, its violent dissonances became cries, victorious or hopeless, the sweep of reddened swords, the explosions of muskets. There was the blood that had welled into the Laurel Ditch of Cabañas; and, as well, the sultry mysterious presence of Africa in the West—the buzzing madness of the music of the danzón, the hysterics of brujeria.
Charles, at the heart of this, stood enveloped, surrounded, by a drama like the sharp clash of cymbals. It was easy to be overwhelmed, strangled, blinded, by the savage color; briefly to be obliterated. That possibility had been, lately, very much in his mind; and he wondered, against all his recent change, if, in the surrender 169 of his idealism, he had lost his amulet, his safety. While he had, to a large extent, solved, for himself, the philosophy of conduct, cleared the motives of his acts, a great deal was inexplicable still. He saw, dimly, that there could be little hope of justice on any island except as the projection, the replica, of a fundamental universal integrity of justice. Perfection like that couldn’t begin on the rim of being and extend inward; it must be at the center of all life, obscured, delayed, but, in an end not computable in the span of human existence, certain and inevitable. Charles Abbott now had the feeling that, parallel with the maintaining of his grasp on materialism, his recognition of the means at his hand, there should be an allegiance to a supremacy of the immeasurable whole.
That double vision, the acceptance of a general good together with the possibility of extreme ill to the individual, puzzled him. He was required to put faith in a power seemingly indifferent to him, to discharge a responsibility in return for which nothing that he could weigh was promised. Charles recalled what had overtaken the dancer, La Clavel, in payment for a heroic effort against an insupportable oppression. Disaster had met the body, the flesh; what occurred 170 in the spirit he was unable to grasp; but this, suddenly, breathlessly, he saw:
La Clavel’s bitter defiance, her mountain-born hatred of oppression, her beaten but undefiled body, had communicated to him something of her own valor. It was as though she had given him a palm, a shielded flame, to add to his own fortitude. In all probability she would, soon, be dead; Charles correctly gauged the Spanish animosity; and yet she was alive, strong, in him. She would be living; it was Ceaza y Santacilla who had died, been vanquished; his abnormal refinement dropping so easily into the bestial, the measure of evil, in him, for which he stood, had been slain, dissipated, ended. The shawl contracted, became a thing magnificent but silk, a mantón invested with a significance brave and surprisingly tender. It was, now, the standard of La Clavel, the mantle of the saintliness he had proclaimed. His doubts, his questioning, were resolved into the conviction that the act of the dancer was her spirit made visible, created tangibly for a tangible purpose, and that, there, she was indestructible.
With that conclusion to serve as a stay and a belief, a philosophy of conduct, he returned from the extra-mundane to the world. Charles 171 thought of La Clavel’s desire to dance in Buenos Aires, for South America. He wondered how old she was; he had never before considered her in any connection with age; she had seemed neither old nor young, but as invested with the timeless quality of her art. She had spoken often of her girlhood, but no picture of her as a girl had formed in his mind. It was conceivable that, in more stable circumstances, she would have grown old, become withered with the peculiar ugliness of aged Spanish women; but that, too, he could not realize. Somehow, La Clavel’s being was her dancing, and what had gone before, or what might have followed, were irrelevant, unreal; they were not she. He understood, now, her protest against being absorbed, involved, in anything but her profession.
He became conscious of the sustained gravity of his thoughts, how his activity had been forced from the body to his mind; and that recalled to him the necessity for a contrary appearance. It would be wise for him to go to the Café Dominica that evening, in an obvious facile excitement at his connection, at once close and remote, with the death of Santacilla in the dancer’s room. But, beyond the fact that it was known he had dispatched the servant upstairs, and the usual wild, 172 thin speculations, nothing had been allowed to appear. Santacilla, it was announced, had died naturally. La Clavel wasn’t mentioned. She had spoken to others than Charles of her determination to go to the Argentine; and it was probable, rumor said, principally in Spanish mouths, that she would go quietly south. At the United States Club, the idlers and gamblers surveyed Charles with dubious looks; and, over a rum punch, he adopted a sullen uncommunicative air. It would not do to drop his widely advertised habits too suddenly; he could not, in a day, change from a rake to a serious student of such books as Machiavelli’s Prince; and he prepared, with utter disgust, for his final bow in the cloak of dissipation.
Purely by accident he met, at the Plaza de Toros, Jaime Quintara, Remigio Florez and Andrés. It was so fortunately, evidently, haphazard, that they continued together while Charles related the circumstances of the tragedy in La Clavel’s room. The others were filled with wonder, bravos, at her strength and courage. Someday, Remigio swore, when Cuba was free, he 173 would put up a monument to her in India Park. It would be of heroic size, the bronze figure of a dancer, in a mantón, on a block of stone, with an appropriate inscription.
“The trouble with that,” Andrés objected, “is if we should live and put up a monument to everyone who deserved it, the parks would be too crowded with bronzes for walking. All of Cuba might have to be commemorated in metal.”