Chapter 22

“Perhaps. It may be.” A troubled expression settled over Lee's eyes. “There is something I should like to explain to you, Daniel, to ask you about, but it would take a great many words?” He cast this in the tone of a query, and palpably waited for the encouragement to proceed fully; but Daniel Randon was persistently non-committal. He had no intention, he said, of urging Lee to any speech he might later regret and wish unpronounced. “It's about my attitude toward Savina,” Lee proceeded; “or it may be about a doll; I don't know. No, Savina and the doll weren't as distinct as you'd suppose; they were, in the beginning and at the end, one: Savina and Cytherea. That has given me some wretched hours; because, when it was over, I didn't miss Savina, I couldn't even call her individually back to my mind; and the inhumanity of that, the sheer ingratitude, was contemptible.

“I can explain it best by saying that Cytherea had always represented something unknown that I wanted, that always disturbed me and made me dissatisfied. She was more fascinating than any living woman; and her charm, what she seemed to hint at, to promise, filled me with the need to find it and have it for my own. That desire grew until it was stronger than anything else, it came between everything else and me and blinded me to all my life--to Fanny and the children and my companies. But, before I saw Cytherea, I was ready for her:

“Because of the conventions you uphold as being necessary to--to comfort, nothing greater. My life with Fanny had fallen into a succession of small wearing falsehoods, pretences. I had made a mistake in the choice of a career; and, instead of dropping that blunder, I spent my energy and time in holding it up, supporting it, assuring myself that it was necessary. The most I would acknowledge, even privately, was that, like the majority of men, I hated work. Like so many men I was certain that my home, my wife, were absorbing as possible. Wherever I looked, other lives were built of the same labored and flimsy materials. Mine was no worse; it was, actually, far better than most. But only better in degree, not in kind. It occupied about a fifth of my existence, and the rest was made up of hours, engagements, that were a total waste.

“At one time I had enjoyed them, I couldn't have thought of more splendid things; but the spirit of that period was not the same, and it was the spirit which made them desirable. I suppose that could be called my love for Fanny. I was glad to sit and discuss the hem of her skirt with her. It was enough just to be coming home to the house where she was waiting. I tell you, Daniel, my life then was transfigured. How long did it last--four years, six, eight? I can't be exact; but if I speak of its duration you will guess that it went. It went slowly, so slowly that for a long while I was ignorant of what was happening. It left in the vanishing of the little lubrications you insist are as needful for society as for your machinery. They began as lubrications, evasions, to keep the wheels turning smoothly, and they ended as grains of sand in the bearings.

“First there was Fanny's convention of modesty--it had been put into her before birth--which amounted to the secret idea that the reality of love was disgusting. She could endure it only when feeling swept her from her essential being. When that had passed she gathered her decency around her like Susanna surprised. Positively she had the look of a temporary betrayal. So that, you see, was hidden in a cloak of hypocrisy. Then she had the impracticable conviction that I existed solely in her, that she was a prism through which every feeling and thought I had must be deflected. Fanny didn't express this openly, it had too silly a sound, but underneath, savagely, she fought and schemed and lied--more conventions--for it. And, when the children were born, she was ready for them with such a mountain of pretty gestures and ideas that I gave them up: I couldn't fight their mother and the nurses and the maids in the kitchen--the whole bloody nice world. For one thing I wasn't home enough; when I got in for dinner they were either in bed or starched for their curtesies and kisses. They are superior children, Daniel; yet what they were taught to say sounds like the infantile sentimentalities of the stage.”

* * * * *

The capataz of the batey gang, a tall flushed Jamaican negro, passed on a cantering white pony. The American wives, the flowers of Utica and Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green palmetto hat, wearing a grotesquely large revolver, saluted Daniel from the open. “Trouble at the cantina barracon,” he called cheerfully.

“It was then,” Lee specified, “that all my loose ends were gathered up in Cytherea. I have, I think, explained her. She was a doll, but it is more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that at first: I took her to be an individual, the image of a happy personal fate that, somehow, I had missed, but might still catch up with.

“The wildest kind of a dream,” Lee Randon proclaimed. “But when I became aware of Savina, or rather of her passion, I was sure I had been completely justified. She was, I believed, Cytherea. They looked alike. They were the same! However, I mistook that sameness. I can understand now, very clearly; it seems incredible that I had been so blind, so fatuous, Daniel. I actually thought that there was a choice, a special graciousness, existing and reserved for me.” He laughed, not bitterly, but in a wonderment that bordered on dismay. “I felt that I had found it in Savina. I did get a lot there--more than I should have hoped for--but not precisely that. At last I know.” His voice was grave, and he paused that Daniel might grasp the weight of what was to follow. “I had made the mistake of thinking that I, as an individual, had any importance. In my insane belief that a heavenly beauty, a celestial chorus girl, was kept for me, I pictured myself as an object of tender universal consideration.

“Damned anthropomorfic rot!

“It was a principle all the while,” he cried; “a principle that would fill the sky, as vast as space; and ignorant, careless, of me, it was moving to its own end. And that--do you see, Daniel?--had grown destructive. It had begun differently, naturally, in the healthy fertility of animals and simple lives; but the conceit of men, men like me, had opposed and antagonized it. Magnifying our sensibilities, we had come to demand the dignity of separate immortalities. Separate worms! We thought that the vitality in us was for the warming of our own hearts and the seduction of our nerves. And so I left the safety of a species, of Fanny and children, for the barrenness of Cytherea.

“That's her secret, what she's forever smiling at--her power, through men's vanity, to conquer the earth. She's the reward of all our fineness and visions and pleasure, the idol of our supreme accomplishment: the privilege of escaping from slavery into impotence, the doubtful privilege of repaying the indignities of our birth.” His rigid strained face was drenched with sweat. “We made her out of our longing and discontent, an idol of silk and gilt and perverse fingers, and put her above the other, above everything. She rewarded us, oh, yes--with promises of her loveliness. Why shouldn't she be lovely eternally in the dreams of men?

“Then, finally, Savina and Cytherea were merged again. In Savina her passion, always abnormal, hadn't been spent; there she was younger than the youngest girl I knew; incomparably more dangerous. She, too, had been constrained by the artificial, by conventionality; and when the moment of reality came it broke William Grove, Fanny, Helena and Gregory--all the threads that precariously held us. She was stronger than I, Savina was the goal and I was only the seeker--that was the difference between us--and in absorbing me she was content.”

“That is very ingenious,” Daniel told him. “Do you notice that the smoke is thicker in the east?”

“Not more in one direction than in another,” Lee answered indirectly; “in the east and south, the north and west, up above and underneath. It's a good thing for our comfort that there's so much of it we can't see the fires. If the books of physics are to be credited, the center of the earth is liquid flame; certainly it is hot enough here to suggest something of the sort.”

“It is worse in Oriente,” Daniel informed him.

“What I have said,” Lee Randon continued, “came from my remark, the one you disagreed with, about the need of an understanding everywhere! Isolated, in a chance individual like me, it is worse than useless, fatal. It destroys the support of a common cause with a humanity only less resentful than sentimental. And this has brought me to the reason why--in spite of her splendid proposal--I can't go back to Fanny: I have grown too detached to give her effort a possibility of success, of happiness for her.”

“If you are so cursed abstract, you may as well be in Eastlake as at La Quinta,” his brother asserted.

“Your saying that is curious,” Lee replied, “for it is exactly what I told a man, in circumstances remarkably like my own, not long ago. I explained that life was all monotonously alike; and that, therefore, it didn't really matter where he changed to. I still think that most of it is inexcusable, perhaps hopeless, but I can't subscribe to it. What Fanny wants is contrition and the return to a time forever lost. I shouldn't be able to persuade her that I hadn't been in a temporary fever which, if she were sufficiently careful, would go and leave things very much as they were. That is her strength, her necessity, and she must uphold it until farthest old age and death.”

Daniel Randon rose and went to the railing of the veranda, gazing intently into the hidden east. “You are right,” he said, crediting Lee with a contention he hadn't made; “that is the refuse on Jagües.”

“Helena and Gregory don't need me,” Lee went on and on; “or, if you prefer--I am no longer afraid of words--I don't need them. I believe, in nature, that the length of paternity is measured by the helplessness of the young. An elephant is more devoted than a crow. My obligation was soon ended.”

“Bring it down to this,” Daniel's brevity was explicit: “what in the devil are you going to do?”

“I haven't any idea beyond the realization that I can't stay here taking up your room and Juan's time. It seems to me that for a month he has done nothing but concern himself with my comfort. I did, in Havana, while Savina was living, think of writing; but I have given it up because it would involve me in so much that is disagreeable. The amazing fact is that, since I have acquired a degree of wisdom, there is nothing for me to do, nowhere to go. The truth, I have always heard, will make you free; but for what, Daniel? What is it the truth will make you free for except to live in the solitude of public hatred? When I refuse, as I certainly shall, to return to Fanny the world where I might accomplish something will be closed to me.

“I could be a farmer if it weren't for the impossibility of my sleeping through the early part of the night; my hands are too stiff to learn a trade. I don't want to learn a trade!” he exclaimed. “And as for starting more stock companies, rolling greater quantities of refuse into cigarettes or bottling harmless colored water, or controlling a news sheet in the interest of my other interests--” he could think of no term sufficiently descriptive of his remoteness from all that. “I shall have to be what a universal Eastlake will prefer to call me. I'd stay here, at La Quinta, if you could find something for me to do--like picking the limes fresh for the Daiquiri cocktails. Do you think your company would carry me on its rolls for that? I could gather them in the morning and evening, when it was cooler. Thank God, I haven't any material ambition. I like the clothes, the life, of that nigger, the capataz, who rode by, as well as most. I'd sit up on the mirador and keep--what do you call it?--the veija, for months on end.”

The servant, Juan, small and dark in his white house coat, appeared with a tray on which two glasses with stems held a fragrant amber liquid.

“That is perfection,” Lee murmured; “where else could it be found? Advise me, Daniel,” his voice was both light and serious. “You have never been known to give advice, but certainly my case is unusual enough to warrant extraordinary pains. Shall I make a neat hole at the proper point in my skull; or, better yet, put half a grain of a drug that will occur to you on my tongue and close my mouth on further indiscretions? That has its aspects. But not so strongly after one of Juan's drinks; they are distilled illusions, vain dreams still of hope. They have all the brave ring of accomplishment without its effort. But I can see the end even of them--atrophy. Soon Cytherea will go into the attic, have her nose broken, and the rats will eat the clothes from her indifferent body. Cytherea on a pearl shell in the Ionic Sea... I was one of her train, Daniel.” He leaned sharply forward--

Daniel Randon was asleep.