Read Ebook: A Creature of the Night: An Italian Enigma by Hume Fergus

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Ebook has 1041 lines and 50676 words, and 21 pages

The Inglaterra, to which he had been directed, was a capital hotel, but outside the walls. Still, the Calle del Prado, the Paseo there, were quite gay; and before them was the sweep of the Parque Isabel, where the band played. At the Hotel St. Louis, next door, many of the Spanish officers had their rooms, but at the hour of dinner they gathered in the Caf? Dominica. The Noble Havana was celebrated for its camarones--shrimps, Charles learned--and the Tuileries, at the juncture of Consulado and San Rafael Streets, had a salon upstairs especially for women. Most of his dinners, however, he would get at the Restaurant Fran?ais, excellently kept by Fran?ois Gar?on on Cuba Street, number seventy-two.

There he would encounter the majority of his young fellow countrymen in Havana; the Caf? El Louvre would serve for sherbets after the theatre, and the Aguila de Oro.... The Plaza de Toros, of course, he would frequent: it was on Belascoin Street near the sea. The afternoon fights only were fashionable; the bulls killed in the morning were no more than toro del aguadiente. And the cockpit was at the Valla de Gallo.

There were other suggestions as well, put mostly in the form of ribald inquiry; but toward them Charles Abbott persisted in an attitude of uncommunicative disdain. His mind, his whole determination, had been singularly purified; he had a sensation of remoteness from the flesh; his purpose killed earthly desire. He thought of himself now as dedicated to that: Charles reviewed the comfortable amount of his letter of credit, his personal qualifications, the derringer mounted in mother-of-pearl, in the light of one end. It annoyed him that he couldn't, at once, plunge into this with Domingo Escobar; but, whenever he approached that ordinarily responsive gentleman with anything political, he grew morose and silent, or else, more maddening still, deliberately put Charles' interest aside. The derringer, however, brought out an unexpected and gratifying stir.

Escobar had stopped in Charles' cabin, and the latter, with a studied air of the casual, displayed the weapon on his berth. "You must throw it away," Escobar exclaimed dramatically; "at once, now, through the porthole."

"I can't do that," Charles explained; "it was a gift from my father; besides, I'm old enough for such things."

"A gift from your father, perhaps," the other echoed; "but did he tell you, I wonder, how you were going to get it into Cuba? Did he explain what the Spanish officials would do if they found you with a pistol? Dama de Caridad, do you suppose Cuba is New York! The best you could hope for would be deportation. Into the sea with it."

But this Charles Abbott refused to do, though he would, he agreed, conceal it beyond the ingenuity of Spain; and Escobar left him in a muttering anger. Charles felt decidedly encouraged: a palpable degree of excitement, of tense anticipation, had been granted him.

Yet his first actual breath of the tropics, of Cuba, was very different, charged and surcharged with magical peace: the steamer was enveloped in an evening of ineffable lovely blueness. The sun faded from the world of water and left an ultramarine undulating flood with depths of clear black, the sky was a tender gauze of color which, as night approached, was sewn with a glimmer that became curiously apparent, seemingly nearby, stars. The air that brushed Charles' cheek was slow and warm; its warmth was fuller, heavier with potency, than any summer he had known. Accelerating his imagination it dissipated his energies; he lounged supine in his chair, long past midnight, lulled by the slight rise and fall of the sea, gathered up benignly into the beauty above him.

Later he had to stir himself into the energy of packing, for the Morro Castle was docking early in the morning. He closed his bag thoughtfully, the derringer on a shelf. Escobar had spoken about it, warning him, again; and it was apparent that no obvious place of concealment would be sufficient. At last he hit on an excellent expedient--he would suspend it inside the leg of a trouser. He fell asleep, still saturated with the placid blue immensity without, and woke sharply, while it was still dark. But it was past four, and he rose and dressed. The deck was empty, deserted, and the light in the pilot house showed a solitary intent countenance under a glazed visor. There was, of course, no sign of Cuba.

A wind freshened, it blew steadily with no change of temperature, like none of the winds with which he was familiar. It appeared to blow the night away, astern. The caged light grew dull, there were rifts in the darkness, gleams over the tranquil sea, and the morning opened like a flower sparkling in dew. The limitless reach of the water flashed in silver planes; miniature rainbows cascaded in the spray at the steamer's bow; a flight of sailing fish skittered by the side. Far ahead there was a faint silhouette, like the print of a tenuous green-grey cloud, on the sea. It grew darker, bolder; and Charles Abbott realized that it was an island.

Cuba came rapidly nearer; he could see now that it wasn't pale; its foliage was heavy, glossy, almost sombre. The Morro Castle bore to the left, but he was unable to make out an opening, a possible city, on the coast. The water regained its intense blue, at once transparent, clear, and dyed with pigment. The other travellers were all on deck: Charles moved toward Domingo Escobar, but he eluded him. Undoubtedly Escobar had the conjunction of the derringer and the Spanish customs in mind. A general uneasiness permeated the small throng; they conversed with a forced triviality, or, sunk in thought, said nothing.

Then, with the sudden drama of a crash of brass, of an abruptly lifting curtain, they swung into Havana harbor. Charles was simultaneously amazed at a great many things--the narrowness of the entrance, the crowded ships in what was no more than a rift of the sea, a long pink fortress above him at the left, and the city, Havana itself, immediately before him. His utmost desire was satisfied by that first glimpse. Why, he cried mentally, hadn't he been told that it was a city of white marble? That was the impression it gave him--a miraculous whiteness, a dream city, crowning the shining blue tide.

Every house was hung with balconies on long shuttered windows, and everywhere were parks and palms, tall palms with smooth pewter-like trunks and short palms profusely leaved. Here, then, white and green, was the place of his dedication; he was a little dashed at its size and vigor and brilliancy.

The steamer was scarcely moving when the customs officials came on board; and, as the drift ceased, a swarm of boats like scows with awnings aft clustered about them. Hotel runners clambered up the sides, and in an instant there was a pandemonium of Spanish and disjointed English. A man whose cap bore the sign Hotel Tel?grafo clutched Charles Abbott's arm, but he sharply drew away, repeating the single word, "Inglaterra!" The porter of that hotel soon discovered him, and, with a fixed reassuring smile, got together all the baggage for his guests.

Charles, instructed by Domingo Escobar, ignored the demand for passports, and proceeded to the boat indicated as the Inglaterra's. It was piled with luggage, practically awash; yet the boatmen urged it ashore, to the custom house, in a mad racing with the whole churning flotilla. The rigor of the landing examination, Charles thought impatiently, had been ridiculously exaggerated; but, stepping into a hack, two men in finely striped linen, carrying canes with green tassels, peremptorily stopped him. Charles was unable to grasp the intent of their rapid Spanish, when one ran his hands dexterously over his body. He explored the pockets, tapped Charles' back, and then drew aside. When, at last, he was seated in the hack, the position of the derringer was awkward, and carefully he shifted it.

An intimate view of Havana increased rather than diminished its evident charms. The heat, Charles found, though extreme, was less oppressive than the dazzling light; the sun blazing on white walls, on walls of primrose and cobalt, in the wide verdant openings, positively blinded him. He passed narrow streets over which awnings were hung from house to house, statues, fountains, a broad way with files of unfamiliar trees, and stopped with a clatter before the Inglaterra.

It faced on a broad covered pavement, an arcade, along which, farther down, were companies of small iron tables and chairs; and it was so foreign to Charles, so fascinating, that he stood lost in gazing. A hotel servant in white, at his elbow, recalled the necessity of immediate arrangements, and he went on into a high cool corridor set with a marble flooring. At the office he exchanged his passport for a solemn printed warning and interminable succession of directions; and then, climbing an impressive stair, he was ushered into a room where the ceiling was so far above him that once more he was overcome by strangeness and surprise.

Charles Abbott's confidence left him little by little; what had seemed so easy in New York, so apparent, was uncertain with Havana about him. The careless insolence of the inspectors with the green-tasseled canes at once filled him with indignation and depression. How was he to begin his mission? Without a word of Spanish he couldn't even make it known. There was Andr?s Escobar to consider: his father had told Charles that he knew a few words of English. Meanwhile, hungry, he went down to the eleven o'clock breakfast.

A ceremonious head waiter led him to a small table by a long window on the Parque, where, gazing hastily at the breakfasts around him, he managed, with the assistance of his waiter's limited English, to repeat their principal features. These were fruit and salads, coffee flavored with salt, and French bread. Clear white curtains swung at the window in a barely perceptible current of air, and he had glimpses of the expanse without, now veiled and now intolerably brilliant. His dissatisfaction, doubts, vanished in an extraordinary sense of well-being, or settled importance and elegance. There were many people in the dining-room, it was filled with the unfamiliar sound of Spanish; the men, dark, bearded and brilliant-eyed, in white linens, with their excitable hands, specially engaged his attention, for it was to them he was addressed.

The women he glanced over with a detached and indulgent manner: they were, on the whole, a little fatter than necessary; but their voices were soft and their dress and jewels, even so early in the day, nicely elaborate. All his interest was directed to the Cubans present; other travellers, like--or, rather, unlike--himself, Americans, French and English, planning in their loud several tongues the day's excursions, or breakfasting with gazes fastened on Hingray's English and Spanish Conversations, Charles carefully ignored.

He felt, because of the depth of his own implication, his passionate self-commitment, here, infinitely superior to more casual, to blinder, journeyings. He disliked the English arrogance, the American clothes, and the suspicious parsimony of the French. Outside, in the main corridor of the hotel, he paused undecided; practically no one, he saw, in the Parque Isabel, was walking; there was an unending broad stream of single horse victorias for hire; but he couldn't ask any driver he saw to conduct him to the heart of the Cuban party of liberty.

The strongest of all his recognitions was the fact that he had no desire--but a marked distaste--for sightseeing; he didn't want to be identified, in the eyes of Havana, with the circulating throng of the superficially curious. In the end he strolled away from the Inglaterra, to the left, and discovered the Prado. It was a wide avenue with the promenade in the center shaded by rows of trees with small burnished leaves. There, he remembered, was where the Escobars lived, and he wondered which of the imposing dwellings, blue or white, with sweeping pillars and carved balconies and great iron-bound doors, was theirs. He passed a fencing school and gymnasium; a dilapidated theatre of wood pasted with old French playbills; fountains with lions' heads; and came to the sea. It reached in an idyllic and unstirred blue away to the flawless horizon, with, on the rocks of its shore, a company of parti-colored bath-houses. There was an old fort, a gate--which, he could see, once formed part of the city wall--bearing on its top a row of rusted and antiquated cannon. Slopes of earth led down from the battery, and beyond he entered a covered stone way with a parapet dropping to the tranquil tide. After an open space, the Maestranza, he came to a pretty walk; it was the Paseo de Valdez, with trees, stone seats and a rippling breeze.

Charles Abbott indolently examined an arch, fallen into disrepair, erected, its tablet informed him, by the corps of Royal Engineers. He sat on a bench, saturated by the hot vivid peace; before him reached the narrow entrance of the bay with, on the farther hand, the long pink wall of the Caba?as. A drift of military music came to him from the fortress.... A great love for Havana stirred in his heart; already, after only a few hours, he was familiar, contented, there. It seemed to Charles that he understood its spirit; the beauty of palms and marble was what, in the bleak north, all his life he had longed for. The constriction of his breathing had vanished.

The necessity for an immediate and violent action had lessened; he would, when the time came, act; he was practically unlimited in days and money. Charles decided, however, to begin at once the study of Spanish; and he'd arrange for lessons at the Fencing School. Both of those accomplishments were imperative to his final intention. He lingered on the beach without an inclination to move--he had been lower physically than he realized. The heat increased, the breeze and band stopped, and finally he rose and returned to the Inglaterra. There the high cool shadow of his room was so soothing that he fell into a sound slumber and was waked only by a pounding at his door past the middle of afternoon.

A servant tendered him a card that bore engraved the name Andr?s Escobar. He would see Mr. Escobar, he sent word, as soon as he could be dressed. And, choosing his garb in a mingling of haste and particular care, he was permeated by an indefinable excitement. Facing Andr?s, he had a sensation of his own clumsiness, his inept attitude; for the other, younger than he in appearance, was faultless in bearing: in immaculately ironed linen, a lavender tie and sprig of mimosa, he was an impressive figure of the best fashion. But Andr?s Escobar was far more than that: his sensitive delicately modelled dark face, the clear brown eyes and level lips, were stamped with a superfine personality.

His English, as his father had said, was halting, confined to the merest formal phrases, but his tones were warm with hospitality.

"It was polite of you to come so soon," Charles replied; "and your father was splendid to me on the steamer."

"How do you like Havana?" Andr?s asked.

"I love it!" Charles Abbott exclaimed, in a burst of enthusiasm, but of which, immediately after, he was ashamed. "I was thinking this morning," he continued more stiffly, "when I had hardly got here, how much at home I felt. That's funny, too; for it's entirely different from all I have known."

"You like it!" Andr?s Escobar reflected his unreserved tone. "That's good; I am very, very glad. You must come to our house, Papa sends you this." He smiled delightfully.

They were standing, and Charles waved toward the dining-room. "Suppose we go in there and have a drink." In Havana he continually found himself in situations of the most gratifying maturity--here he was, in the dining-room of the Inglaterra Hotel, with a tall rum punch before him, and a mature looking cigar. He was a little doubtful about the latter, its length was formidable; and he delayed lighting it until Andr?s had partly eclipsed himself in smoke. But, to his private satisfaction, Charles enjoyed the cigar completely.

He liked his companion enormously, noticing, as they sat in a comfortable silence, fresh details: Andr?s' hair, ink-black, grew in a peak on his forehead; the silk case which held his cigars was bound in gold; his narrow shoes were patent leather with high heels. But what, above all else, impressed Charles, was his evidently worldly poise, the palpable air of experience that clung to him. Andr?s was at once younger and much older than himself.

"How are you interested?" Andr?s asked, "in ... girls? I know some very nice ones."

"Not in the least," Charles Abbott replied decidedly; "the only thing I care for is politics and the cause of justice and freedom."

Charles explained his intention of learning Spanish, of fencing; and the other promised his unreserved assistance. He would have a teacher of languages sent to the hotel and himself take Charles to the Fencing School. "Tomorrow," he promised. The drinks were finished, the cigars consumed in long ashes, and Andr?s Escobar rose to go. As they walked toward the Paseo the Cuban said, "You must be very careful, liberty is a dangerous word; it is discussed only in private; in our tertulia you may speak." He held out a straight forward palm. "We shall be friends."

Again in his room, Charles dwelt on Andr?s, conscious of the birth of a great liking, the friendship the other had put into words. He wanted to be like Andr?s, as slender and graceful, with his hair in a peak and a worldly, contained manner. Charles was thin, rather than slender, more awkward than not; decidedly fragile in appearance. And his experience of life had been less than nothing. Yet he would make up for this lack by the fervor of his attachment to the cause of Cuba. He recalled all the stories he knew of foreign soldiers heroic in an adopted cause; that was an even more ideal form of service than the natural attachment to a land of birth.

He moved a chair out on his balcony, and sat above the extended irregular roof of the Tacon Theatre, watching the dusk flood the white marble ways. The lengthening shadows of the Parque blurred, joined in one; the fa?ades were golden and then dimly violet; the Gate of Montserrat lost its boldness of outline. Cries rose from the streets, "Cuidado! Cuidado!" and "Narranjas, narranjas dulces." The evening news sheets were called in long falling inflections.

What surprised him was that, although he had more than an ordinary affection for his home, his father and mother, now, here, they were of no importance, no reality, to him. He never, except by an objective effort, gave the north, the past, a thought. He was carried above personal relationships and familiar regard; at a blow his old ties had been severed; the new held him in the grip of their infinite possibilities. All the petty things of self were obscured in the same way that the individual aspects of the city below him were being merged into one dignity of tone.

Yet, at the same time, his mood had a charming reality--the suaveness of Andr?s Escobar. His, Charles Abbott's, would be a select, an aristocratic, fate; the end, when it overtook him, would find him in beautiful snowy linens, dignified, exclusive, to the last. His would be no pot-house brawling. That was his double necessity, the highest form of good in circumstances of the first breeding. One, perhaps, to his aesthetic fibre, was as important as the other. And, dressing for dinner, he spoiled three shirts in the exact right fixing of his studs.

In the dining-room, he pressed a liberal sum of American money on the head waiter, and was conducted to the table he had occupied at breakfast. Everyone, practically, except some unspeakable tourists, was in formal clothes; and the conversations, the sparkling light, were like the champagne everywhere evident. Charles chose a Spanish wine, the Marquis de Riscal; and prolonged his sitting over coffee and a cigar, a Partagas, like those in Andr?s' silk case. He had never before tasted coffee with such a rich thick savor, its fragrance alone, blending with the blue smoke of his cigar, filled him with pleasure.

The room was long, tiled, and had, against the far wall, a great mirror which held in reverse the gay sweep of the tables, the heavily powdered shoulders of women, the prismatic flashes of diamonds and men's animated faces. The reflections were almost as fascinating as the reality, and Charles gazed from one to the other.

Drinking, he saw, was universal, but none of the Cubans were drunk; and for that reason his attention was held by two men at the table next to his: the waiter had left a bottle of brandy, and the individual facing Charles, with a sallow face from which depended, like a curtain, a square-cut black beard, was filling and refilling his thimble-sized glass. He was watching, with a shifting intentness of gaze, all who entered; and suddenly, as Charles' eyes were on him, he put down his half-lifted brandy and a hand went under the fold of his coat.

Charles turned, involuntarily, and saw a small immaculate Cuban with grey hair and a ribband in his buttonhole advancing among the tables. He was a man of distinguished appearance, important it was evident, for a marked number of people bowed as he passed. When he had gone on, the bearded individual rose, swaying slightly, and, with his hand still in his coat rapidly overtook the other.

Charles Abbott had an impulse to cry out; but, oppressed by a sense of helpless dread, impending disaster, without a sound or power of movement he followed the course of the second figure. The two were now at the end of the dining-room, close to the mirror, when the man with the decoration stopped and turned sharply. There was the sudden stabbing report of a pistol, and, immediately following, a loud splintering crash. Charles had the crazy illusion that a man who had been shot was made of china, and would be found in broken bits on the floor.

There was an instantaneous hysterical uproar, dominated by the screams of women; in the panic which rose there was a rush for the entrance, a swirl of tearing satin and black dress coats. Then, even before he heard the concerted derisive amazement, Charles realized that, dazed by the brandy, the intended murderer had fired at the reflection of his mark in the glass.

What an utterly ridiculous error; and yet his hands were wet and cold, his heart pounding. Something of the masking gaiety, the appearance of innocent high spirits, was stripped from the dining-room of the Inglaterra, from Havana. There was an imperative need for Andr?s Escobar's caution. Charles' equanimity returned: with a steady hand he poured out more coffee. He was ashamed of his emotion; but, by heaven, that was the first of such violence he had witnessed; he knew that it happened, to a large degree its possibility had brought him to Cuba; yet directly before him, in a square beard and a decorating ribband!... On the floor were the torn painted gauze and broken ivory sticks of a woman's fan.

The echo of that futile shot followed Charles Abbott to the Escobars', where, because of the often repeated names of its principals, he recognized that the affair was being minutely discussed. The room in which they sat was octagonal, with the high panels of its walls no more than frames for towering glass doors set in dark wood; above were serrated openings, Eastern in form, and the doors were supported by paired columns of glacial white marble. It was entered through a long corridor of pillars capped in black onyx with wicker chairs, a tiling laid in arabesques and potted palms; and opposite was the balcony over the Prado. A chandelier of crystal, hanging by a chain from the remote ceiling, with a frosted sparkle like an illuminated wedding cake, unaffected by prismatic green and red flashes, filled the interior with a chilly brightness. The chairs of pale gilt set in a circle, the marble pattern of the floor, the dark heads of the Escobars, looked as though they were bathed in a vitreous fluid preserving them in a hard pallor forever.

But it was cool; the beginning constant night breeze fluttered the window curtains and swayed the pennants of smoke from the cigars. Domingo Escobar finished what was evidently a satirical period with a decisive clearing of his throat--a-ha! He was a small rotund man with a gigantic moustache laid without a brown hair misplaced over a mouth kindly and petulant. His wife, Carmita, obese with indulgent indolence, her placid expression faintly acid, waved a little hand, like a blanched almond, indicative of her endless surprise at the clamor of men. Andr?s was silent, immobile, faultless in a severity of black and white.

Charles had begun to admire him inordinately: above everything, Andr?s possessed a simple warmness of heart, a generosity of emotion, together with a fastidious mind. Fortunate combination. And his person, his gestures and flashing speech, his brooding, were invested by an intangible quality of romance; whatever he did was absorbing, dramatic and--and fateful. He was a trifle aloof, in spite of his impulsive humanity, a thought withdrawn as though by a shadow that might have been but his unfailing dignity.

Charles' gaze wandered from him to Narcisa, who, Domingo Escobar had said, resembled a flower bud. As she sat in pale yellow ruffles, with her slim hands clasped and her composed face framed in a wide dense stream of hair, she was decidedly fetching. Or, rather, she gave promise of charm; at present, she was too young to engage him in any considerable degree. Narcisa, he concluded, was fourteen. At very long intervals she looked up and he caught a lustrous, momentary interrogation of big black eyes. A very satisfactory sister for Andr?s Escobar to have; and, wondering at the absence of Vincente, the eldest son, Charles asked Andr?s about his brother.

A marked constraint was immediately visible in the family around him. Vincente, he was informed abruptly, was out of Havana, he had had to go to Matanzas. Later, on the balcony over the Prado, Andr?s added an absorbing detail. "Vincente, we think, is in the Party of Liberation. But you must say nothing. I do not know, Vincente will not speak; but mama has noticed the gendarmes in front of the house, and when she drives."

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