Ever After (29 page)

“You are a cat, Eden. All women are cats. That girl can’t see straight for being in love with Fitz. She’d feel the same if he was nothing but a leg-man and couldn’t play a note. I thought you might be more charitable in your old age and in the light of your own experience. Or did you marry me for my money?”

“And why else do you think I married you?” They were safe to joke like that, after thirty years together.

“It’s Bracken I don’t like the look of,” he added after a moment, playing with her rings as they sat hand in hand before the fire. “He wasn’t keen to go to Cuba. He went in the line of duty and he won’t spare himself, but he
wasn’t
keen
. Must we take that girl in
England
seriously, d’you think?”

Eden brooded at the fire.

“He’s been very silent about her. But he’s different from what he was last spring, he’s more—lighthearted. As though Lisl was wearing off. We should be grateful for that, in any case.”

“He didn’t say so—but I know he would rather have gone back
to London than to Cuba,” Cabot ruminated unhappily. “That in itself is a terrible state of affairs, at his age!”

“Perhaps it’s just the delay on the divorce that upset him. He says they can’t get on with that until he is back there living in London. Sally wants to rush right over and swear before the Queen’s Proctor or whoever it is that she saw Lisl and the Hutchinson person living together at Cannes. But Bracken says that isn’t the way it’s done.”

“The mills of the English legal gods grind slowly,” Cabot said. “But he seems to think an English divorce, if he can get one, will have weight with the Earl.
Must
we have a ladyship for a
daughter-in
-law next, I wonder? Why can’t he fall in love with an American? I did!”

“At least she sounds very different from Lisl,” Eden murmured.

“Oh, anything but Lisl!” he agreed, yawning, and somehow
comforted
, they put out the lights and went to bed.

W
HEN
Bracken reached New York again the second week in February, he was the complete correspondent with nothing on his mind but a story. He had written feverishly all the way up in the train from Tampa and was sleepless and unshaven. He handed over a thick sheaf of manuscript in his neat longhand with the request that Cabot have it typewritten at once, fell into a hot bath with groans of joy, dropped into bed and slept all day till nearly dinner time.

Around seven o’clock Cabot couldn’t bear it any longer and invaded the room, the typed story in his hand.

“Wake up, you young son-of-a-gun, and tell me more!” he shouted, landing heavily on the edge of the bed. “How did you get this stuff about the shooting of bound men? Where have you been? What else did you see? Wake up, I say, and go on from here!”

Bracken, who was a light sleeper and always woke up all there, opened one eye, grinned, and burrowed deeper into the pillow.

“Got a cup of coffee on you?” he wanted to know.

Cabot stripped back the covers with a ruthless hand and then, lest his favourite Special catch pneumonia, went to close the window and toss a dressing gown at the bed.

“Come out of that,” he said. “Who was the man in the café? Did you ever find out?”

“Mm-hm. He’d been jailed for photographing Morro Castle, and escaped, and was hiding. He was in cahoots with the A.P. man, whose real name
nobody
knows. Except me. I saw him. It’s
Hilgert
. But don’t tell. He didn’t see me. Mind if I have another bath?” He drifted away towards the bathroom, Cabot at his heels,

By the time Bracken had shaved and dressed for dinner, at which there were several guests, Cabot’s curiosity had been a little appeased. Yes, said Bracken, the insurgents
had
shot a Spanish colonel under flag of truce. Women and children
were
starving by the hundreds because the Spanish did burn whole villages of homes in order to drive the population into the concentration camps where they could be exterminated by hunger and disease. Yes, there had been a riot in Havana while he was there. But it was a strictly Spanish riot against the native advocates of autonomy, and there was no
particular
anti-American feeling in it, except that all the Havanese blamed the American newspapers—with cause—for fanning the flame of rebellion. During the rioting the American Consul, a not very
even-tempered
man, had gone right off the handle and started cabling the State Department for battleships. Yet Bracken himself had accompanied General Lee through the streets of Havana unmolested that same evening, and had seen him dining publicly at his usual table in a window at the Hotel Inglaterra. The old gentleman put up a magnificent front, and the Spaniards were impressed. Things cooled off. Ten days later the
Maine
had arrived from Key West and dropped anchor in
Havana harbour. Her presence there was intended to suggest to the Spanish Captain-General that it would be well in the interests of American life and property to keep order in the city. There was no demonstration against her as she passed sedately in under the guns of Morro Castle, but there was no denying she wasn’t welcome. Looks can’t kill, though, said Bracken, and when Captain Sigsbee of the
Maine
came ashore to render his compliments to the Captain-General the manners of the Spanish officers, as well as their Spanish caution, had been impeccable.

The Spanish army in Cuba, Bracken went on, had pretty light blue and white uniforms made out of bed-ticking, with red and yellow cockades. Their personal habits and condition
were a disgrace to any so-called civilized nation, and none of them had ever heard of sanitation in any form. “Forgive me for sounding like a Hearst man,” Bracken said gravely, sitting in the tub soaping himself while his father leaned against the wash-basin firing questions at him every time he paused for breath, “but it’s got to stop, down there. I’m convinced, even though it means lining up alongside the yellow-kid press and screaming our heads off for intervention. Not because I have any shining belief in the holy democratic destiny of Cuba. But the place is a garbage heap on our doorstep, breeding
future ills. We’ve got to go in and clean it up. What we will do with it then remains to be seen. Somebody said once that only the Anglo-Saxon nations were capable of governing themselves democratically. I must look up who that was.”

Cabot nodded in encouraging silence, waiting for more. Richard was himself again, he thought, and then groped ruefully for the rest of the quotation, which was something about the shrill trumpet sounding, to horse, away, my soul’s in arms and eager for the fray. Whatever hold that girl in England might have over him, Bracken was first and last his father’s son, and had been weaned, the story went, on printer’s ink.

Long after midnight, when the guests had gone, the family was still sitting around the drawing room fire listening to Bracken’s stories. Johnny was there too, drinking whisky and pumping Bracken enviously. Fitz was thinking how nice it would have been if only Johnny could have brought Gwen along with him, to make one more in the comfortable family circle.

“You don’t have to believe more than half you hear down there to be converted,” Bracken was saying. “I heard what were apparently the muffled volleys of execution squads in the Cabañas fortress from where I sat drinking coffee at a table on the Prado. But I
saw
the bodies of forty unarmed villagers who had been dragged out and shot at the roadside without trial because one of them was supposed to have given shelter to insurgents. The local Spanish military commander had drawn up a formal report of a ‘skirmish’ with an estimate of ‘enemy dead.’ That night a Cuban patriot took me out there, at some risk to both of us, and we went to work with spades by lantern light. It wasn’t a pretty sight we uncovered, and the men had been killed with their hands tied behind them. The whole island is a slaughter-house and pest-hole. The churches are fortresses with barricades at the doorways and hammocks hung from the altars. Many of the Cuban patriot soldiers are children hardly taller than the Mausers they are almost too weak to carry. The babies are wizened skeletons that never stop mewing. They haven’t got the strength to cry. Non-combatants are herded into filthy stockades with no shelter and no sanitation and left there to rot.”

“Then our worthy New York competitors don’t make up the atrocity stories,” Johnny said, still a little unbelieving. “You saw just as good or better. Is that right?”

“There’s no need to make up atrocity stories. They happen all the time, better than Hearst’s gang can invent ’em,” Bracken said impatiently. “But don’t let’s forget, either, that it was their precious Gomez who devised the idea of burning the food and the cane-fields and the industries in order to force the Cuban patriots to join him in the fight for their own freedom from Spanish misrule.
Well, naturally the Spanish caught on. It works both ways. And so now the island is devastated by both sides. Don’t let’s overlook that most of these so-called American citizens whose wrongs must be avenged, bear Spanish names and have always lived in Cuba. On top of that, let’s remember that the patriot agitation, and the funds,
and
the ammunition, originate in the good old U.S.A. That’s largely furnished by professional enthusiasts for liberty who never go
near Cuba themselves. They take it out in attending meetings in New York and Jacksonville. From there they egg on professional guerrilla fighters like Gomez. Everybody has forgotten that he comes from San Domingo!”

“Well, then what are we all crying about?” Fitz wanted to know. “What’s all this fudge about the-same-fine-old-American-war-against-European-tyranny?”

“The Spanish
are
tyrants, particularly nasty ones,” Bracken told him seriously. “The
insurrectos,
no doubt, are mostly brigands. But the Spanish are behaving like medieval barbarians, and they’ve got to learn that we’ve outgrown their way of thinking, over here. If they can’t administrate their colonies decently, with a minimum amount of bloodshed, as the British do, they must get out–at least out of the Western Hemisphere. And that, my dears, is how much I give for the sacred cause of Cuba Libre! Taken by and large, it’s about as bogus as Hearst and Pulitzer put together!”

“But still we do back the Cubans against the Spanish,” Cabot said keenly.

“I do, from now on,” Bracken nodded. “For one thing, I just don’t like the Spaniards. They seem to stand for all the things we have got rid of on this side of the world. Besides, a Spanish officer calmly told me across a dinner table at the Hotel Inglaterra in Havana that if we should declare war on Spain because of Cuba they would invade us.”

“Oh, they would, would they!” said Johnny.

“They are convinced their navy can lick ours, and they have more than twice as many men in Cuba right now as we have in our whole regular army scattered all over the United States. They have a solemn, carefully considered plan to land at Charleston, cut us in two, and take New York in no time at all!”

“Well, of all the gall!” cried Johnny angrily.

“Well, they have got a fleet, damn it all,” said Bracken. “And they’ve got colossal nerve and impudence. Of course they couldn’t take New York, but they might try. Even as it is, they are playing hell with our West Indian trade and prestige. There is going to be no place in the twentieth century,” he wound up firmly, “for the pompous militaristic nonsense Spain believes in. All this parade of fleets and armies and big guns and two-for-a-nickel officers in fancy
uniforms rattling sabres is out of date. Spain has got to learn that it’s a civilized world we live in nowadays. If we have to beat her up to prove it, that, by a species of Irish logic, is what we’ve got to do!”

“Listen,” said Cabot suddenly, lifting one hand. Faintly through the quiet house came the persistent shrilling of the telephone on his desk in the library. He rose and streaked out of the room, Bracken just behind him.

It was the briefest kind of message that came down the wire before he was yelling, “
What?
Say that again!” and reaching for a pad and pencil. “Go on—
go
on,
what happened?—yes—how?—
I
said
How?
—” And meanwhile the pencil in his fingers wrote excitedly for Bracken, hanging over his shoulder:
The
Maine
has
blown
up
in
Havana
Harbour
….

T
HE
Maine
sank within a few minutes of the explosion, with the loss of two hundred and fifty-three lives. It seemed only logical to assume that she had not blown herself up, but a cautious administration in Washington refused to be stampeded into a declaration of war until it received evidence that the Spanish authorities were guilty of her death. The White House sent out word that there were no grounds (as yet) for suspecting any kind of Spanish plot. Captain Sigsbee, who survived, had included in his first cable a level-headed sentence which read:
Public
opinion
should
be
suspended
until
further
report.

But the column of flame which shot up from the
Maine
that night sparked a slow fuse which ran all the way to Washington and New York and westward, to touch off the sentimentalists and the idealists and the jingoes, along with the honest patriots—the politicians in opposition to the administration policy and the people who wanted to sell more newspapers—the professional intriguers and fire-eaters—all America, according to its lights, was swept away by a wave of belligerency. The
New
York
Journal
offered a reward of $50,000 to any man who, presumably for a much smaller sum, had been involved in the supposed conspiracy at Havana and would come forward, confess, and implicate his colleagues. The circulation of the
Journal
promptly passed the million mark, and a flood of “war extras” poured from rival publications with great black type running all the way across the front page like a banner.

While Washington tried to stress the idea of an accident on board the
Maine,
the Navy was naturally reluctant to countenance a theory
which convicted itself of carelessness, to say the least. A Naval Board of Inquiry was immediately appointed and sent to Havana to interview the survivors and hand down an official opinion, while the country seethed with righteous anger.