"I wake up at night, sometimes, with that tiresome pain at my heart, as though it were too full of you, and, for a little, I'm confused—it is all so strange. I think, for a moment, that I am still with William, and I can't imagine what has happened to the room. It frightens me dreadfully, and then I remember: it isn't William and the house on Sixty-sixth Street, but you, Lee, and Cuba. We're together with nothing in the world to spoil our joy. And, when we are old, we shall sit side by side at Etretat, I am sure, and watch the sea, and the young people in love under the gay marquees, and remember. Then we'll be married and more respectable than the weather-vanes. I want that on your account; I don't care; but you would worry, I am afraid. You are serious and a conscientious man, Lee.

"But, before that, I want to spend all my feeling, I don't want a thrill left, lost; I want to empty and exhaust myself." Her emotion was so strong that it drew her away from him, erect, with her bare arms reaching to their fullest quivering length. In the blue gloom of the room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thought recurred to him, too slender, fragile, to contain such a passion. Then, in a transition so sudden that it bewildered him, her mouth was against his, her hands straining him to her. She was ugly then, her face was unrecognizable in an expression of paralysed fury.

The heat, Lee protested, grew worse with evening; not a stir of air brought out the dry scraping rustle of the palms, a sound like the friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother; Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand moved, waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her in a caf at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the illumination and along the dim ceiling. When, later, he was on the bed, it was wet under his sweating body. In a passing sleep Savina gave one of the cries of her waking emotion. In a state of unconsciousness her fingers reached toward him. From the balcony beyond them drifted a woman's challenging laughter—one of the travelling beauties Daniel had mentioned—and he could hear the bursts of discordant sound on the street of Cobra, the combined efforts of rival bands hideous singly and together beyond description. What a hell of a night, what a night in hell!

The moths, defrauded in their hunger for light, blundered softly around the walls; when Lee rose to light a cigarette they would, he felt, gather at the match and beat it out with their desirous wings. Then he heard a shot, and uplifted clamoring voices; all as unreal, as withdrawn, as a simulated murder on a distant stage. He pictured the flaring restaurants, the banks with corrugated iron locked across their fronts; the faces of the negroes brought black and lurid out of the surrounding blackness. Savina, awake, demanded a drink, and he held a clay water monkey awkwardly to her lips. The faint double blast of a steam signal rose at the back of the hotel, beyond the town; he had heard it before and now connected it with Daniel's sugar mill.

His brother hadn't perceptibly changed in fifteen years. During that time Lee had seen him scarcely at all. Suddenly he was sorry for this: Daniel was what was generally known as a strong man. Men deep in the national finances of their country spoke to Lee admiringly of him; it was conceded that he was a force. Lee wasn't interested in that—in his brother's ability, it might be, to grip an industry by the throat. He envied, speculated about, the younger man's calmness, the Chinese quality of his silence, the revelations of his carefully few words. Daniel, in past years, had been often drunk, various women had been seriously or lightly associated with his name; but he appeared to have cast them, the Bacardi and the blandishments, entirely aside. He seemed as superior to the dragging and wearing of life as a figure carved in stone, a Buddha, any Eastern presentment of the aloof contempt of a serene wisdom at the mountain of its own flesh. Lee, beside his brother, resembled a whirlpool of dust temporarily formed by the wind in a road.

Daniel had never married, he had been too cunning for that fragrant trap, as well. What were his vices? But were habits, self-indulgences, held in the background, ruthlessly subordinated to primary activity, vices? Lee wished now that Daniel had seen Cytherea; he was certain that the other would have said something valuable about her. Through his long contact with the naked tropics Daniel understood many things hidden from him. He must know, for instance, about the Brujeria, the negro magic brought through Haiti from the depths of Africa. Everyone in Cuba caught rumors, hints, of ceremonials of abject horror. But of that Daniel could never be brought to speak. Lee could even visualize him taking part, in a cold perverse curiosity, in the dances about smothered fires.

He thought there was a glimmer of day at the windows, but it was only a flash across his staring eyeballs. From the plaza below came a low sibilant conversation. It went on and on, until Lee, in an irrepressible indignation, went out on the balcony and, in a voice like the clapping of a broken iron bell, cursed the talkers into silence.

Christ, it was hot!

Savina was sitting up. "Isn't it tomorrow night, or the one after that?" she asked. "This room is like a vault that I have been in a thousand thousand years. I can't tell you how it affects me; it seems as though I must stay here forever, that if I tried to get away I'd be forced back. And I dreamed that everything I owned had been turned blue—my nightgowns and nail files and travelling clock and the oranges. You wouldn't believe how depressing a blue orange could be. We will forget it as soon as possible, Lee. Do you remember how nice the room was at the Inglaterra? I wish you'd feel my head: isn't it hotter than usual?"

"Why shouldn't it be?" he asked impolitely.

"It wouldn't be possible, would it, Lee, to have the night go on forever, to have something happen to the scheme of things? Or perhaps I'm blind." Her voice was plainly terrified. "Light a match, please. Oh, thank you. What an idiot I am. Hold me closer; then I can forget, then nothing else matters. I can never get close enough; I wish I could pour myself into you."

"You'll be able to, if this keeps up," he observed, with a note of brutality. "They will find us, in the morning, in a bowl and two pitchers."

But there was no corresponding lightness in his spirit; periods like this extended into an infinity of torment beyond time. A thinning of the dark expanded through the room. A cerulean unnatural dawn crept about him: there was the muffled clatter of horses' hoofs in the dust outside; a locomotive whistled in a far universal key. Savina slowly became visible; asleep, her personality, her vividness, were gone; she was as featureless, as pallid, as a nameless marble of remote Greece. There were marks across her feet where the mules chafed her; the mules themselves were lying on the bare floor. He saw his clothes, the familiar habit of the day, with a sharp surprise.

* * * * *

It had been a night without rest, without the coolness and assuagement of a release from the fever of the day; and, Lee thought, he felt as haggard as Savina looked. A wind that was hardly more than an erratic stirring of super-heated dust agitated a loose slat in a shutter and deposited a fine dun film across the floor. Savina put as much as possible, so early, into her bags. Standing before a narrow mirror nailed to a wall, with her comb, she turned. "My hair is soaked," she wailed; "just putting my arms up is more than I can manage. Haven't you been thinking about all the cold things in the world?" She slipped into a chair, spent and dejected, with her hair clouding one shoulder. It would, he repeated, be over soon, and he gazed at her with a veiled inspection. Savina was so entirely unprepared for this, the least hardship so new, that he was uncertain about the temper of her resistance.

Aware of his gaze, she smiled slowly at him, and, seated, again took up her task with the comb. "I couldn't have you see me very often like this," she proceeded: "it would be fatal. I don't mean that when I'm finished I'm irresistible, but the process simply must go on in private. I don't want to be a wife, Lee—one of those creatures in a dressing sacque with hair pins in her mouth. I can't bear the thought of you and a flannel petticoat together. That is where married women make a serious mistake: they let their husbands see them while the maid is doing their hair, or when they're smeared with creams, or, maybe, with tonsilitis." She rose. "I won't be a wife," she chanted, "I won't be—"

Her voice broke suddenly. Lee thought she had tripped, he lunged forward, but she fell crumpling on the floor. "It's this hellish heat," he asserted, lifting her to the bed. Her lips were open and dry, and her eyes, without vision, stared at the ceiling. Lee wet a handkerchief, dabbling it over her face; he had never before, he realized, seen a woman faint. It was terrifying but not grave; they did it, he had heard, very often. No wonder, after such a night. She had been gone over a minute now; there must be someone in the place who would know what to do. He put off moving, however, both because of his reluctance to leave Savina alone and because of the difficulty of any explanation. He took her hand; it was cold and damp, and her forehead was glistening with minute globes of sweat. All the blood seemed to have been withdrawn from her body.

"I'll have to go for help," he said aloud, in a commonplace manner which yet struck curiously on his hearing. There was a faint quiver of her features, a scarcely perceptible sigh, and her fingers weakly closed on his grasp. "How foolish," Savina murmured. She made an effort to raise herself up from the pillow, but he restrained her; Lee commanded her to be absolutely still. "The spirits of ammonia is in the dressing-case," she whispered. He held the clouding aromatic liquid to her mouth and she took it laboriously. "Don't call anyone, Lee," she continued; "I'll be all right in a little. So much at once! You see, I haven't been used to happiness. No wonder I was dizzy. But I fainted, Lee, didn't I? That's unusual for me."

He sat beside her, at once moved and detached from her weakness, gently holding her supine hand. She mustn't worry, he told her at short intervals. "Don't worry, this is nothing."

"You'll give me time to dress for the train," she insisted. "As soon as we get away from here I shall be better. We will, won't we?"

"Get away? What nonsense! Of course. You will be up by noon, but there is no good in your stirring before you have to. If Daniel comes, you can see him here, in your bed. Or you needn't see him at all. It's just as you feel."

Even as she lay, prostrate, on the bed, he could see her collapse; the strength, animation, interest, drained away from her; it seemed to Lee that momentarily she was again in a coma. He leaned over and placed a hand on her brow. Savina's eye-lids fluttered. Under her breast her heart was scarcely discernible. Suddenly he didn't like it; abruptly an apprehension, from which he was obliged to bar a breath of panic, possessed him. Lee covered her lightly with a sheet, and went out, softly closing the door. Before the hotel he caught the proprietor by a shoulder and pointed up to his room. "Sick, sick," he repeated the term with increasing emphasis, not successful in banishing his vagueness of dismay. The proprietor smiled uncertainly, edging from under the weight of Lee's hand. Then, "Get my brother, Mr. Daniel Randon, at once," he commanded; "soon. Mr. Randon; the sugar—" Lee waved in the direction of the mill.

This the other again comprehended, and Lee saw a youth swing a bare leg over a convenient horse and vanish behind the Cobra Hotel. He went back to the room: Savina hadn't moved while he had been gone. She seemed even weaker—a thing he would have declared impossible—than before. He bathed her face and throat in water, and there was a murmur of gratitude, of love, so low that, with his ear against her lips, the individual words were lost. His disturbance increased and, when the heavy firm steps of Daniel Randon had approached on the cement of the corridor without, and he had knocked and entered, Lee pointed to the bed with an unconcealed anxiety.

Daniel bent over Savina with a comprehensive unmoved regard; he touched a cheek, with a surprising delicacy, and then turned and faced Lee. The latter said sharply, "She has fainted, but it's only the heat. She'll be all right after a rest." As he spoke, more to himself than to Daniel, in an effort of private encouragement, what confidence he had dissolved before his brother's impassive negation.

"It is more serious than that," Daniel Randon told him. "There is no doctor here we can trust, but I'll send a gas rail car into Camagey for Fancett. It will take three hours or worse." He left promptly, closing the door soundlessly; and Lee heard his voice from the plaza, not raised but intolerantly domineering, issuing orders in a Spanish at once fluent and curt.

In the long-dragging succeeding period there was no visible change in Savina; at intervals she spoke faintly, there was the dim trace, the effort, of a smile; her hand, whenever he released it, slipped away. The heat in the room thickened; the barred sunlight cut like white knives at the opposite wall; a pungent odor of cooking peppers came in under the door. Savina's bags, nearly packed, stood open on chairs; the linen suit in which she travelled, the small hat and swathing brown veil, were ready by her low darkly polished tan shoes; gloves, still in their printed tissue paper, the comb, a small gold bag with an attached chased powder box, a handkerchief with a monogram in mauve, were gathered on the chest of drawers.

Lee had heard the rail car leave for Camagey: there had been a series of short explosions, first scattered and then blending in a regular pulsation soon lost over the vanishing tracks. The interminable clip- clip of horses, dreary staccato voices, rose and fell, advanced and retreated, outside. But, through all his attentiveness to Savina, his crowding thoughts, he listened for the return of the car with the doctor. What was his name? Foster, Faucett—no, it was Fancett. An American, evidently. "The doctor is coming," he told Savina gently. "Daniel felt that he had better see you. From Camagey. A good man. I want to get you out of here at once, and he will give us something." Waves of rebellion passed over him, an anger at his impotence, at the arbitrary removal of Savina from the sphere of his help. His coat was off, his collar unbuttoned, and he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, wet with sweat and the bathing of her head.

To Lee, Savina appeared sunken; her cheeks, certainly, were hollower; there was a shadow, like the dust over the floor, in each one; she had ceased to open her eyes but they had retreated. A dreadful twenty-four, thirty, hours; how brutally hard it had been on her. She hadn't complained; he had been more upset, impatient, than Savina. What a splendid companion! But that, he irritably felt, was a cold word of description for her. What a force! She was that, magnificently, above everything else. Beside her, other people—the rest of life—were flat, tepid.

There was a thin far vibration which grew into a flowing throb; Lee identified it as the rail car. Perhaps the doctor had been absent. However, Daniel would know what to do. The footfalls approaching the door were multiplied: it was his brother and an elderly wasted man with a vermilion sprig of geranium in the lapel of a white coat. He nodded to Lee, pressed his hand, and went quickly to the bed. In the stillness while Dr. Fancett took Savina's pulse Lee again caught the shallow rapidity of her breathing. Daniel Randon stood with a broad planter's hat held with the lightness of touch characteristic of him. The man at the bed turned a speculative gaze upon Lee.

"Your wife has an acute dilatation of the heart," he pronounced. The significance of his unguarded tone shocked Lee immeasurably.

* * * * *

"But I don't understand that," Lee protested; "she has never had any serious trouble with her heart before." He was halted by Daniel's brief peculiar scrutiny. The doctor replied that this was not organic. "It may be the result of unaccustomed and excessive heat; an accumulation of the excessive," he added concisely. "Excesses." The single word followed after a hesitation in which Fancett was plainly at a loss. His frowning gaze was still bent upon Lee. "I know so little of Mrs. Randon's history," he finally said. Daniel naturally had inferred, or perhaps the doctor deduced, that Savina and he were married. They would be, in a very short while, Lee told himself stubbornly. "You have ice on the batey? Yes, at once, please. And a nurse can come from my office on the Havana train this evening." Daniel nodded once, in acknowledgment. He moved closer to Lee:

"This is serious. You can't, of course, think of going on. I will see that she is as comfortable here as she would be with me; everything shall be done."

Lee answered that he was certain of that. A feeling of helplessness fastened on him, together with the incongruous speculation about the propriety of a cable to William Grove. The absurd idea occurred to him that Savina had two husbands; each with the right, if he desired, to be at a side of her bed, each holding one of her limp hands. He dismissed the elaborated thought in a rage at the triviality of his mind. Fancett and Daniel had gone temporarily: Lee had heard the former making arrangements to stay over night at the sugar estate. Savina's fast superficial breathing now dominated the room. He was again seated beside her, leaden-hearted and blank.

It was so useless—this illness and suffering, now! The doctor had seemed to insinuate that it might be traced to him, Lee Randon. What the devil did he mean by that? It was the fault of Daniel, the immobile, as much as anyone. In an airy room, under comfortable conditions, probably it wouldn't have happened. Savina's suit, her shoes, the bags, hadn't been disturbed. There was a faint tightening of her grasp, and he bent close, but he distinguished only random words.

"—not sorry. Willing ... with you. Don't be unhappy."

It required an enormous effort, the sound was at once all but imperceptible and burdened with an agony of labor. As he watched her he saw what, he thought, was an illusion—the blueness of the room, of the walls, seemed to settle on her countenance. It increased, her face was in tone with the color that had so disturbed her, a vitreous blue too intense for realization. He was startled: like a sponge, sopping up the atmosphere, she darkened. It was so brutal, so hideous, that he spoke involuntarily:

"No one can live blue like that."

Then, with a glance instinct with dread, he saw that he was right— Savina had died.

A calm of desperation swept over him. He must tell Daniel and the doctor. But they would still need the ice. The revolting details! And what had Fancett meant? It must all come out now—his presence in Cuba with Savina—in a storm of publicity and condemnation. He regretted this, because of Savina, dead. Alive she would have smiled her contempt; but death was different. Anyone would acknowledge that. The dead should be protected from slurs and scandal and obscene comments. A confusion of small facts poured through him, and broke into trivial fragments any single dignity of emotion; no generous sorrow saved him from the petty actuality of his situation; even his sense of loss, he realized dismayed, was dull.

Savina was rapidly growing, at last, cold; her arm was stiffening in the position in which he had left it; in a necessary forcible gentleness he composed her body. But he didn't hide her—not yet—with a sheet. That would follow soon enough. The blueness was receding, leaving her pinched, but white. She had always been pale.... By God, he had forgotten to tell them. Lee, stumbling down the stairs, found Daniel, the doctor, and the proprietor of the hotel, Venalez, talking together. As he approached there was a flash of premonition on his brother's broad unstirring face. Lee said humbly:

"She is dead."

Fancett, with Daniel Randon, went up at once, but he lingered, facing the Cuban. Venalez had a long brown countenance, with a disordered moustache. His trousers were thrust into the customary dingy boots, but his shirt was confined at the waist, and he had dispensed with a machete. He grew uneasy under Lee's stare, and shuffled his feet; then, behind a soiled thin hand, he coughed. It was clear that he wished intensely to escape, but was held by his conceptions of the obligations of conduct. "The suddenness—" Lee said, and then paused with a furrowed brow; "that's what surprises me. She was as well as you, and singing, yes—singing, that she didn't want to be a wife. I thought she had tripped on the loose silk thing she wore; and then I was certain that she had fainted from your heat." He bore heavily on the word your, and then proceeded to curse the atmosphere, in a heavy manner suggesting that it were a property, a condition, under the direction of the hotel proprietor. From that he proceeded to damn Utica and the state of Ohio.

"But you can't understand me," he added, illogically angry at that, too. Daniel was again at his side, speaking. "There is nothing for you to do here, and you may as well come to the batey with me. There are some accidents that cannot be provided against. This is one of them. She will be attended to; but you must explain about the cables."

"I had better get her things," Lee replied. He couldn't leave the delicate and beautiful trifles of Savina's living in the blue vault above. "They were scattered about the room." That, as well, Daniel assured him, had not been neglected. Her effects were to go over in the wagon with them. Lee, jolting on a springless contrivance over an informal road, kept his hand on the bags beside him. They were in Holland cases which hid the sets of initials ending in G. A revolver was shoved under the leather seat at the driver's left. There were the negro women, half naked, lounging in their doorways.

Telling himself that Savina was dead, he lingered over that term, at once so definite and obscure. There had been a pain in her heart at the Dos Hermanos, while they were having dinner, after the steamer, blazing with lights and with music on the upper deck, had swept out of the harbor. And, since then, at night, she had cried out. That, he had thought, was the expression of her consuming passion. He hadn't killed her; he would correct Fancett there. The doctor's glance, almost suspicious, had been intolerable. Savina had whispered to him, at the end, that she was sorry for nothing; she had begged him to be happy.

He roused himself and asked Daniel if they had far to go, and learned that they had almost reached the batey. Where, Lee added silently, Daniel wouldn't have us. It might well have saved Savina. The same ideas persisted in his mind. He wondered if, in the hurried packing, her handkerchief had been neglected? It was one of a number that Savina had bought in Havana. He had stayed outside, in the motor, smoking; and, when she had rejoined him, after a long wait, she had displayed her purchases. Her voice had been animated with pleasure at their reasonable price. Things small and unimportant! His brain worked mechanically, like a circling toy that had been tightly wound up and must continue until its spring was expanded.

The fundamental calamity was too close for any grasp of its tragic proportions: Savina dead was far more a set of unpredictable consequences than a personality. Alive she had drawn him into herself; she had, with her body, shut out the world of reality if not of mental query. Even the fervor of Cuba had seemed to pale before her burning spirit. What, without knowing it, Dr. Fancett had meant—a thing Lee himself had foreseen—was that Savina had killed herself, she had been consumed by her own flame. But she hadn't regretted it. That assurance, bequeathed to him in the very hush of death, was of massive importance. Nothing else mattered—she had been happy with him. At last, forgetful of the ending, he had brought her freedom from a life not different from a long dreary servitude. He would need to recall this, to remind himself of it, often in the years that would leadenly follow; for he must be regarded as a murderer—the man who, betraying William Grove, had debauched and killed his wife.

That, of course, was false; but what in the world that would judge, condemn, him wasn't? He had his memories, Savina's words. A sharper sense of deprivation stabbed at him. Why, she was gone; Savina was dead. Her arms would never again go around his neck. The marks of the mules across her narrow feet! He put out a shaking hand, and Daniel Randon met it, enveloped it, in a steady grasp that braced him against the lurching of the wagon.

* * * * *

On the veranda of Daniel Randon's house Lee sat pondering over his brother's emphatic disconnected sentences. "This conventionality, that you have been so severe with, is exceedingly useful. It's not too much to say indispensable. Under its cover a certain limited freedom is occasionally possible. And where women are concerned—" he evidently didn't think it necessary even to find words there. "The conventions, for example, stronger in William Grove than his feelings, saved the reputation of his wife; they kept Fanny alive and, with her heroic and instinctive pride, made it possible for you to go back to Eastlake. If you choose, of course. I can't enter into that. But, if you decide to return, you won't be supported by noble memories of your affair—was it of love or honor?—no, an admirable pretence must assist you. The other, if you will forgive me, is no more than the desire for a cheap publicity, a form of self-glorification. Expensive. The proper clothes, you see—invaluable! The body and the intentions underneath are separate. It is only the thoughtless, the hasty and the possessed who get them confused."

The veranda occupied all four sides of Daniel Randon's low, wide-roofed dwelling, continuous except for the break where an open passage led to a detached kitchen. Seated in an angle which might be expected to catch the first movement of the trade winds sweeping, together with night, from the sea, practically the whole of the batey was laid out before Lee. The sun was still apparent in a rayless diffusion above a horizon obliterated in smoke, a stationary cloud-like opacity only thinning where the buildings began: the objects in the foreground were sharp; but, as the distance increased, they were blurred as though seen through a swimming of the vision. The great bulk of the sugar mill, at the left, like—on the flatness of the land—a rectangular mountain shaken by a constant rumbling, was indistinct below, but the mirador lifted against the sky, the man there on look-out, were discernible. The mill, netted in railroad tracks, was further extended by the storage house for bagasse—the dry pulpy remnant of the crushed cane— and across its front stood a file of empty cars with high skeleton sides. There was a noisy backing and shifting of locomotives among the trains which, filled with sugar cane, reached in a double row out of sight.

The cars were severally hauled to the scales shed, weighed, and then shoved upon a section of track that, after they were chained, sharply tilted and discharged the loads into a pit from which the endless belt of a cane carrier wound into the invisible roller crushers. The heavy air was charged with the smooth oiled tumult of machinery, the blast whistles of varied signals, and the harshness of escaping steam. Other houses, smaller than Daniel's but for the rest resembling it, were strung along the open—the dwellings of the Assistant Administrador, the Chief Electrician, a Superintendent, and two or three more that Lee hadn't identified. He had been, now, nearly four weeks with Daniel, and the details of La Quinta, the procedure of the sugar, were generally familiar to him.

However, he had had very little opportunity to talk to his brother: the difficulties, in Cobra and Havana, of shipping Savina's body back to New York—William Grove, persuaded that it was unnecessary, hadn't come to Cuba; a fire in one of the out-lying colonias of the La Quinta estate, that had destroyed three caballerias of ratoon; the sheer tyranny of an intricate process which, for seven months in the year, was not allowed to pause, had kept Lee from any satisfactory communication of his feelings or convictions. But, at last, returning hot and fatigued from the clearing, by fire, of a tumba, Daniel had been sitting with him for more than an hour, and he showed no signs of immediate change or activity.

"What you say is clear enough," Lee Randon admitted; "and yet—but I can't see where—there is a sophistry in it." Daniel made a gesture both curt and indifferent. "I tell you it would be better, even at the destruction of the entire present world, to establish honesty. Since you have referred to me—what we, Savina and I, did was, simply, honest; but, again as you pointed out, its effect around us, for bad or very possibly good, was brought to nothing by the way it was drawn back into the victorious conspiring of sham. Even I don't know which, commendable or fatal, it was; I haven't been able to find out; I hadn't time. But Savina preferred the two weeks we had together to an infinity of the other. Fancett may call it an acute dilatation of the heart, but it was happiness that killed her. It's possible for me to say that because, fundamentally, I didn't bring it to her. Savina found it, created it, for herself. Through that time—was it long or short? The two weeks seemed a life—she was herself, superior."

"How about you?"

"I was absolutely contented," Lee replied.

"Isn't that a pale word for an act of passion?"

"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 Jages."

"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.