Argument, Lee saw, was useless. Extended to the heart of a tropical island, the virtuous indignations of a hard propriety still bound their movements. “All that I can suggest,” Daniel went on, “is that you return to Havana tomorrow evening; the company has offices there, and it will be easier for me to see you. Camagüey is nearer, but gossip there would have you in the same bed no matter how far apart your rooms were. Decidedly not Camagüey.”
There was no train for Havana, it developed, before tomorrow. “And, in the meanwhile,” Lee inquired, “must we stay here? Savina will be miserable.”
“Why not?” Daniel gazed about casually. “I lived with Venalez a month. It is good enough if you are not too strict about a travelling beauty or two who may be stopping as well.” His apologies to Savina, in the room above, were faultless. There was, simply, at the Cobra sugar estancia, no satisfactory arrangement for guests; except for an occasional party of directors, or a special mission, there were no guests. At his, Daniel's central, in Santa Clara on the sea, he hoped some day to offer them the hospitality of his own house.
When he left, Lee made no revelation of what had been said downstairs; Savina accepted the situation as it had been exposed to her. “I can't allow myself to think of a night here,” she told him; “it will be a horror.” She opened the slats of the long window shutters, and glowing bars of white heat fell in a ladder-like order across a blue wall; the segments of sunlight were as sharp and solid as incandescent metal. In the cobalt shadow Savina was robbed of her vitality; she seemed unreal; as she passed through the vivid projected rays of midday it appeared as though they must shine uninterruptedly through her body. Lee considered the advisability of taking her for a walk--there were, he had seen from the train, no roads here for driving--but, recalling the insolent staring and remarks she had met, he was forced to drop that possibility.
Weary from the prolonged wakefulness of the night, Savina made an effort to sleep; and, waiting until she was measurably quiet, Lee went out. The heat was blinding, it walled him in, pressed upon him with a feeling of suffocation, as though--between him and the freshness, the salvation, of any air--there were miles of it packed around him like grey cotton. To the left of the hotel, the bare plaza, half hidden in scrubby bushes, there was an extended shed with a number of doors and fragments of fence, heaped rusted tins and uncovered garbage; and, lounging in the openings, the door-frames often empty, the windows without sashes, were women, scantily covered, sounding every note in a scale from black to white. Yet, Lee observed, the whitest were, essentially, black. What amazed, disturbed, him was their indolent blinking indifference, their indecent imperviousness, in the full blaze of day.