"Many yeeres since I had knowledge by
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY To SAN CRISTÓBAL THERE are certain cities, strange to the first view, nearer the heart than home. But it might be better to acknowledge that, perhaps, the word home has a wider and deeper significance than any mere geographical and family setting. Many men are alien in houses built from the traditions of their blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate parts of the earth have always been restlessly sought by individuals driven not so much by exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to inhabit a barren copper mountain, a fever coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost in a savage remoteness, hiding the secret of their unquenchable longing. Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching Havana in the early morning, nothing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching the silver greenness of Cuba rising from the Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the sea, the sky, and the hour in which they were set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind like a willful and contrarily exerted force, was so blue that its color was lost in the dark intensity of tone; while the veils of space were dissolved in arcs of expanding light. The island seemed unusually solid and isolated, At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable bay of Guatanago, where buccaneers careened their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and windows with projecting wooden grilles, drank and took for figureheads the sacred images of churches painted blue. On the shore, under a canopy of silk, a woman, naked but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in dyed shadow, a figure only less golden than the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the caulking malls and the harsh rustle of the palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what was evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana I considered the possibilities of such a story, such a character: She had her existence in the seventeenth The Cuban shore was now so close, Havana so imminent, that I lost my story in a new interest. I could see low against the water a line of white buildings, at that distance purely classic in implication. Then it was that I had my first premonition about the city toward which I was smoothly progressing—I was to find in it the classic spirit not of Greece but of a late period; it was the replica of those imagined cities painted and engraved in a wealth of marble cornices and set directly against the tranquil sea. There was already perceptible about it the air of unreality that marked the strand which saw the Embarkation for Cytherea. Nothing could have made me happier than this realization; an extension of the impression of a haunting dream turned into solid fact. The buildings multiplied to the sight, bathed in a glamorous radiance; and, suddenly, on the other hand, rose Morro Castle. That structure, small and compact and remarkably like its numerous pictures, gave me a distinct feeling of disappointment. Its importance Nothing, however, was more ingratiating than the long coraline limestone wall of the CabaÑas on its sere abrupt hill at the left; ponderous and stained brilliantly pink by time, it formed a miraculous complement to the pseudo-classic whiteness below. A sea-wall built into a wide promenade followed the shore, there was a circular pavilion on a flagged plaza piled with iron chairs, the docks were interspersed with small public gardens under royal palms, and everywhere the high windows had ornamental balconies empty in the morning sun. I heard, then, the voice of Havana, a remarkably active staccato voice, never, I was to learn, sinking to quiet, but What I tried to discover, rushed through broad avenues and streets hardly more than passageways, was the special characteristic of a city which had already possessed me. And, ignorant of the instantaneous process that formed the words, I told myself that it was a mid-Victorian Pompeii. This was a modification of my first impression, a truer approximation, for it expressed the totality of marble faÇades inadmissible architecturally, yet together holding a surprising and pleasant unity. No one, I thought excitedly, had ever rightly appreciated Havana; it required a very involved understanding, a feeling not entirely admirable. No, it wasn't Hellenic, not what might be called in the first manner; it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain touched everywhere by the tropics, the tropics—without a tradition—built into a semblance of the baroque. It was rococo, and I liked it; an admission, * * * To illustrate further the perversity of my impulses: I was so entirely captivated by the Hotel Inglaterra that, for the rest of the day, I was indifferent to whatever might be waiting outside. The deep entrance with its reflected planes of subdued light and servants in cool linen; the patio with water, its white arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room laid Yet the room itself, perhaps one of the most remarkable rooms in the world, easily surpassed what, until then, I had seen. There were slatted door screens, cream-colored with a sapphire-blue glass knob, topped in an elaborate Gothic scrolling; and the door beyond, inconceivably tall, opened on an interior that seemed to reach upward without any limit. It had, of course, a ceiling, heavily beamed in dark wood; and when, later, I speculated carefully on its height, I reached the conclusion that it was twenty-five feet above the grey-flowered tiling of the floor. The walls were bare, white; about their base was laid a line of green glazed tiles; and this, except for The window, too, towered with the dignity of an impressive entrance; there were two sets of shutters, the inner elaborately slatted; and over it was a semi-circular fanlight of intensely brilliant colors—carmine and orange and plum-purple, cobalt and yellow. It was extraordinarily vivid, like heaped gorgeous fruit: throughout the day it dominated the closed elusive interior; and not only from its place on high, for the sun, moving across that exposure, cast its exact replica on the floor, over the frigidity of the austere iron bed, down one wall and up another. It was fascinating merely to sit and watch that chromatic splash, the violent color, shift with the afternoon, to surrender the mind to its suggestions.... They, as well, were singularly bright and illogical. Such glass, such colors, had been discarded from present decorative schemes; but I recalled hints of them in the houses of eighteen seventy; I seemed to remember them in pagoda-like conservatories, Havana was identified as an authentic part of my inheritance. I was—in a purely inner manner—to understand it, to have for it the affectionate recognition, the sense of familiarity, of which I have already spoken. The city was wholly expressed by the fanlight sparkling with the shifting radiance of the blazing day. It was possible, without leaving the room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place so largely unseen. Then it occurred to me that, indeed, I had seen Havana, and that the wisest thing to do was to leave at once, to go back with my strong feeling uncontaminated by trivial facts; but a more commonplace impulse, a limiting materialism, pointed out that, since I had come away for a change of scene, I had best realize a semblance of my For the rest the furniture was scant—a walnut bureau with a long mirror, necessary chairs, and an adequate bathroom like a shaft with shining silver faucets at its bottom. From outside, even through the heat of noon, the sustained activity of sound floated up through the shutters—the incomplete blending of harsh traffic alarms and blurred cries announcing newspapers. It was later when I went out on my balcony: across the narrow depth of San Rafael Street the ornamented bulk of the Gallego Club—the Club and the opera house in one—opposed a corner against the sweep of the Parque Central; and to the right, between the glitter of shop windows, poured an unbroken procession of motors. A great pillar of the The sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered hills of Cuba, was sinking behind the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids of the Gallego Club and enveloped, in a diminished gold like a fine suffusion of precious dust, the circular avenue, the royal palms, the flambeau trees and Indian laurels, of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings, practically unbroken, everywhere took on the tone of every moment: now they were faintly aureate, as though they had been lightly touched by a gilder's brush; the diffused shadows were violet. The shadows slowly thickened and merged; they seemed to swell upward from the streets, the Parque; and the buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then, again, a glimmering white. Only the lifted A great many people appeared below, moving with an air of determination on definite ways. The faces of the men were darkened by the contrast of their linen; I couldn't see their features; but what struck me at once was the fact that there were, practically, no women along the streets. It was a tide of men. This, at first, gave me an impression of monotony, of stupidity—women were an absolute essential to the variety of any spectacle; and here, except for an occasional family group hurrying to a cafÉ, a rare stolid shape, they were utterly lacking. The reason, however, quickly followed the observed truth; this was, in spirit, Spain, and Spain was saturated with Morocco, a land where women, even the poorest, were never publicly exhibited. Havana was a city of balconies, of barred windows, of houses impenetrable, blank, to the streets, but open on the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly—while the moment before I had been impatient It was a society where a camellia caught in the hair, a brilliant glance across a powdered cheek, lace drawn over a vivid mouth, were not for nothing. In the world from which I had come these gestures, beauties, existed; but they were general, and meaningless, rather than special—the expression of a conventional vanity without warmth. There was an agreement that any one might look, the intensest gaze was invited, with the understanding that almost none should desire; and a cloak of hypocrisy had been the result; either that or the beauty was mechanical, the gesture furtive and hard. For Havana a woman was, in principle, a flower with delicate petals easily scattered, a perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately, spent; a rose, it was the implication, had its moment, its perfection of eager flushed loveliness, during which what man would not reach out his hand? After that ... but the seed pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And here, in addition to so much else, was another shared attitude drawing me toward Havana—an enormous preference for women who had the courage of their emotions over those completely circumspect except in situations morally and financially solid. * * * My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuriously, smoking the last Dimitrino cigarette found in a pocket, and leaving the wet prints of my feet on the polished tiles of the floor. I was glad that I had brought a trunk, variously filled, in place of merely a bag, as I might have done; for it was evident that Havana required many changes of clothes. It I debated comfortably the security of a dinner coat, slightly varied, perhaps, by white flannels; but in the end decided in favor of a more informal jacket of Chinese silk with the flannels. A shirt, the socks and scarf, were objects of separate importance; but when they were combined there was a prevailing shade of green.... I had no inclination to apologize for lingering over these details, but it might be necessary to warn the seekers after noble truisms that I had no part in their righteous purpose. Even noble truths, in their popular definitions, had never been a part of my concern: at the beginning I was hopelessly removed from them, and what was an instinct had become, in an experience of life not It was an undeniable fact that I was newly in a land of enormous interest, which, just then, held the most significant and valuable crop growing on earth. But that didn't detain my imagination for a moment. The Havana that delighted me, into which I found myself so happily projected, was a city of promenading and posted theatre programmes, of dinners and drinks and fragrant cigars. I was aware that from such things I might, in the end, profit; but I'd get nothing, nothing in the world, from stereotyped sentiments and places and solemn gabbled information. On top of this I had a fixed belief in the actual importance of, say, a necktie—for myself of course; I was not referring to the neckties of the novelists with a mission, lost in the dilemma The elevator going down was burdened with expensive women, their bodies delicately evident under clinging fragile materials, their Here were creatures, anatomically planned for the sole end of maternity, who had wilfully, wisely I felt, elevated the mere preliminary of their purpose to the position of its whole consummation. More intoxicated by sheer charm than by the bearing of children, resentful of the thickened ankles of their immemorial duty, they proclaimed by every enhanced and seductive curve that their intention was magnetic rather than economic. They were, however, women of my own land, secure in that convention which permitted them exposure with immunity, and here; in Havana, they failed to interest me; their voices, too, were sharp, irritable; and even in the contracted space of the elevator their elaborate backs were so brutally turned on the men with them—men correct enough except The lower hall, the patio and dining-room on the left, were brilliant with life, the wing-like flutter of fans; and it would be necessary, I saw, to have my cocktail in the patio; but before that, following a purely instinctive course, I walked out to the paseo in front of the hotel. The white buildings beyond the dark foliage of the Parque were coruscant with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose masked in an unfamiliar language, they shared with the alabaster of the faÇades, the high fronds of the royal palms and the monument to Marti, in the tropical, the classic, romanticism. Hardly had I appeared, gazing down the illuminated arcade, when a man approached me with a flat wide basket of flowers. There were, inevitably, roses, tea roses as pale as the yellow of champagne, gardenias, so smooth and white that they seemed unreal, heavy with It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra, with such a drink. It elevated my contentment to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached amusement, I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was formally in effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it held, in its shallow glass bowl slightly encrusted with undissolved Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared intoxicating drinks.... The word intoxicating adequately expressed their power, their menace to orderly monotonous resignation. A word, I thought further, debased by moralists from its primary ecstatic content. Intoxication with Ron Bacardi, with May, with passion, was a state threatening to privilege, abhorrent to authority. And, since the dull were so fatally in the majority, they had succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to whatever lay outside their lymphatic understanding. They had, as well, made the term gay an accusation before their Lord, confounding it with loose, so that now a gay girl—certainly the only girl worth a ribbon or the last devotion—was one bearing upon her graceful figure, for she was apt to be reprehensibly * * * The wisdom of the attention I had given to my appearance was at once evident in the table to which the head waiter conducted me. Small and reserved with a canted chair, it was directly at one of the long windows on the Parque Central. This, at first sight, on the part of its arbiter, would not have been merely an affair for money—he had his eye on the effect of the dining-room as a whole, as an expanse of the utmost decorative correctness, and there were a number of men with quite This was not, perhaps, true of characters more admirable than mine: but if I had been seated behind one of the pillars, buried in an obscure angle, my spirits would have suffered a sharp decline. I should have thought, temporarily, less of Havana, of myself, and of the world. The passionate interest in living, the sense of Æsthetic security, that resulted in my turning continually to the inconceivable slavery of writing, would have been absent. But seated in one of the most desirable spots in existence, a dining-room of copper glazed tiles open on the tropics, about to begin a dinner with shrimps in the pink—the veritable rose—of perfection, while a head waiter, a triumph of intelligent sympathy, conferred with The dinner, finally, as good dinners were apt to be, was small, simple, with—the result of a prolonged consideration—a bottle of Marquis de Riscal. All the while the kaleidoscope of the Parque was revolving in patterns of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Passersby were remarkably graphic and near: a short man with a severe expression and a thick grey beard suddenly appeared in the open window and demanded that I buy a whole lottery ticket; a sallow individual from without unfolded a bright glazed sheaf of unspeakably stupid American magazines; farther off, the crowd eddied through the lanes between the innumerable chairs drawn up companionably on the plaza. At a table close by, a family of Cubans were supplementing the courses of formal dining with an endless vivacious chatter, a warmth of interest charming to follow. The father, stout, with an impressive moustache of which not one hair seemed uncounted He had, at the same time, an indefinable air This Cuban's particular quality, it seemed to me, belonged to the past, to an age when men wore jewelled buckles and aristocracy was an advantage rather than a misfortune. He had about him the graceful fatality now so bitterly attacked by the widening power of what was heroically referred to as the people. He represented, from the crown of his Not much, in the way of benefit, could follow that. And women in starched linen collars, with starched theories of civic consciousness, would hardly be an improvement on fragrant memories of satin, moments of passion and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness. A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was immeasurably disastrous. All of this I saw reflected in the boy with peaked hair at It had been chosen with immense care in the Inglaterra cafÉ for bonbons and souvenirs, liqueurs and cigars. How remarkable it was, I had thought, hovering above the case, which contained a bewildering choice of shapes and colors, to be in a land where all the cigars were, in the sense I knew, imported. I hesitated for a minute or more between a LarraÑaga and a banquet Corona, and finally decided on the former. It was as long as the cigar called Fancy Tales, but slightly thicker and rolled to a point at either end; and the first breath of its smoke, drifting in a blue cloud away from the window, told me that until then I had known but little of tobacco. Coffee so black that it stained the white shell of its cup; a diminutive glass of Grand Marnier, the distilled last saturation of oranges and fin champagne; and the LarraÑaga, the color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in a transcending magic of contentment. The point was—my special inhibition as a traveler—that I didn't want to move; I had no wish to speak to anyone or see what, particularly, I should have hurried away to view. That impatience I had served when I was twenty-one, in Naples; a city uniquely planned for morbid and natural curiosity. There the animated frescoes of Pompeii had been posed, at two lire a figure, before my assumption of mature experience. But now, past forty, I was without the ambition and desire to follow the cabs of the American business men who, in the company of patient and fatigued Cubans, were, in the interest of vague appointments, bidding their families elaborate good evenings. Later it was inevitable that I should get to the theatres, hear whatever music offered, and see all the dancing, Spanish and Cuban, in the city of Havana, but not to-night. My present pleasure was not to be wasted in the bother of movement and a probable mistake. The cigar continued to veil me in its reflective smoke for another half hour, there was more coffee * * * The weather, the temperature and special atmospheric envelopment of Havana, was, I was certain, different from any other, its heat modified by the winds that moved across the island at night, at least from this shore, and the days flooded with an incandescent sunlight like burning magnesium. Stirring slowly about my room before breakfast, the slatted shutters bowed against the already blazing day, a thread of cigarette smoke climbing hopelessly toward the far ceiling, I thought of the idiotic popular conviction that the weather was a topic for stupid minds. The reverse, certainly, was true, since, inbound with all the settings of life, all nature, the It had been the great discovery of imaginative prose—the novel for which we care most had been largely the result of that gained appreciation; and its absence in older books, placed in a vacuum, entirely accounted for their dry unreality. What, for instance, were the novels of Thomas Hardy but splendid records of the countryside weather, for nature and weather were one. This, more than any other force, conditioned men, stamping them out with an ice age, burning them black in Africa ... setting royal palms by the doors of the Hotel Inglaterra and willows along my lower lawn. The difference between Havana and West Chester was exactly that difference in their foliage, in the low April green of one and the harsh high fronds of the other. The quality, the weather, that made the trees made equally the men, just as it dictated their lives, the houses they lived in, their industries and The slightest impression of Havana must be founded on a sensitive recognition of the crystal light and printed shadows which, in addition to its architecture of fact, brought another of sweeping illusion. In the morning the plazas glittered in a complete revelation of every hard carving and leaf and painted kiosk, but later the detail merged in airy diagonal structures of shade. Modified, infrequently, by the gorgeous cumulous clouds drifting from the upward thrust, the anchorage, of the Andes, the entire process of the hours was upset. This was not simply a variation of inanimate surface, it had an exact counterpart in the emotions: bowed by an insuperable For myself, my entire attitude was different in the room I now inhabited from the inherent feeling, in New York, of the Algonquin. I was, in white flannels and brown Holland, with roses against the mirror of the bureau, another man; not only my mentality but my physical bearing was changed. Here I was an individual who, moving about for an hour or so in the morning, spent the day until late afternoon in some quiet and cool inner spaciousness. That, I appreciated at once, was one of the comfortable peculiarities of Havana: it was always possible to be cool—in a cafÉ with the marble floor sprinkled with water; at the entrance of the Inglaterra, where, however, the chairs were the most uncomfortable in the world; or, better yet, with a book, a naranjada, and pajamas, transiently at home. For the iced refrescos of Cuba I had been prepared; and at breakfast, though that, I found later, was not its hour, I chose, rather than a naranjada, a piÑa colado—a glass, nearly as large and quite as thin as possible, of It was doubtless part of the hypnotism of my liking for Havana that reconciled me to the coffee, poured simultaneously with hot salted milk into the cup. I accepted it at once, together with a cut French roll ingeniously buttered. Other efforts were made, through a window, to sell a wallpaper of lottery tickets; the vendor of magazines now put forward the Havana Post, printed in English; the curtains hung motionless, a transparent film on the bright space beyond. There was nothing I had to do, or see, no duty to myself to fulfill; and, watching the stir of tourist departure, I was thankful for A state not innocent of danger to the Puritan tradition—lately assaulted with useless vigor—of suppression; for to the Latin acceptance of the whole of life had been added Havana, in common with other foreign countries, and with so many golden reasons to the contrary, had no general liking for Americans. The few who had understood Cuba, either living there or journeying with discretion, were most warmly appreciated; and, characteristically, it was they more than the natives who were principally disconcerted by the released waggishness of Maine and Ohio and Illinois. But the majority were merely exploited. There was, certainly, something on the other side of the fence, for the Cubans * * * As, in a temporary stoppage of its circular traffic, I walked across the Parque Central, its limits seemed to extend indefinitely, as if it had become a Sahara of pavement exposed to the white core of the sun; and I passed with a feeling of immense relief into the shade of a book-shop at the head of Obispo Street, where the intolerable glare slowly faded from my vision as I fingered the heaps of volumes paper-bound in a variegated brightness of color and design. In any book-shop I was entirely at home, contented; and here specially They had a freedom of cruelty, a brutality of statement, of truth, absent in American sentimentality: where women were without clothes they were naked, anatomically accounted for, as were the men; and the symbolical representations of labor and injustice were instinct with blood and anguish. A surprising number of stories by Blasco IbÁÑez were evident; and it struck me that if I had read him in those casual bright copies, without the ponderous weight of his American volumes and uncritical reputation, I might have found a degree of enjoyment. There were a great Though I had been on narrow streets before, I had never seen one with the dramatic quality of Obispo. Hands might almost have touched across its paved way, and the sidewalks, no more than amplified curbs, hardly allowed for the width of a skirt. It was cooled by shadow, except for a narrow brilliant strip, and the open shops were like caverns. The windows were particularly notable, for they held the wealth, the choice, of what was offered within: diamonds and Panama hats, tortoise shell, Canary Island embroidery, and perfumery. There were cafÉs that specialized in minute cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste set out in rows of surprisingly delicate workmanship, and shallow cafÉs whose shelves were banked with cordials and rons, gin, These stores had little zinc-topped bars, and there were always groups of men sipping and conversing in their rapid intent manner. The street was crowded and, invariably allowing the women the wall, it was necessary to step again and again from the sidewalk. They were mostly Americans: the Cuban women abroad were in glittering automobiles, already elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping hats, and drenched in powder. They were, occasionally, when young, extremely beautiful, with a dark haughtiness that I had always found irresistible. In my early impressionable years it had continually been my fate to be entranced by lovely disagreeable girls with cloudy black A marked, not to say sensational, transformation of my own person had been a conspicuous part of that young imaginary business; for, though I was fat and clumsy, I managed to see myself tall and engaging, and dark, too; or, anyhow, a figure to beguile a charming girl. Something of that hopeless process had taken place in me once more, now the vainer for the fact that even my youth had gone. The quality which called back a past illusion was very positive in Havana, and my feeling for the city was greatly enriched, further defined. The Obispo under its striped awnings, with its merchandise of coral and high combs and pineapple cloths; the women magnetic with a Spain that had slept with the East, the South; the bright blank walls, lemon yellow, blue, rose; the palms borne against the sky on trunks like dulled pewter; the palpable sense of withdrawn dark mystery, all created an atmosphere of a too potent seductiveness. The street ended in the Plaza de Armas, with the ultramarine sea beyond; and as I sat, facing the arched low buff faÇade of the President's Palace, my brain was filled with vivid fragments of emotion. What suddenly I realized about Havana, the particular triumph of its miraculous vitality, was that it had never, like so much of Italy, degenerated into a museum of the past, it was not in any aspect mortuary. Its relics of the conquistadores were swept over by the The gin rickey proved to be an immediate reality, in the patio of the Inglaterra—a stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where an emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had no intention of going out again until the shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened far toward the white front of the Gomez-Mena building across the plaza; and after lunch I went up to the quiet of my room. I should, certainly, write no letters, read—idly—none of the few books published about Cuba, which were on my table; and I began The day wheeled from south to west. I was perfectly contented to linger doing nothing, scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened heat. There was a heavy passage of trunks through the echoing hall without, the melancholy calling of the evening papers rose on the air; I was enveloped in the isolation of a strange tongue. To sit as still as possible, as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly, watch indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct in my situation. Nothing could be planned or provided for. The thing was to get enjoyment from what I did and saw; what benefit I should receive, I knew from long experience, would be largely subconscious. I had been in Havana scarcely more than a day, and already I had collected a hundred impressions * * * However, the tranquillity of the afternoon was sharply interrupted by my going, unexpectedly, to the races at Oriental Park. I had to dress with the utmost rapidity, leaving the choice of a tie to chance, for the dun car of the United States Military AttachÉ was waiting for me. The AttachÉ, handsomely bearing the brown seal of Philippine campaigns, abstracted in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable military chauffeur, while the back of the car was flooded by the affable speech of a Castilian marquis whose variety of experience in the realms of expert and dangerous games had been limited only by their known forms. It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace Presbyterian blood and incurable habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction in my surroundings. I was glad that The race track seemed to me long—was it a mile?—and, with the horses at a starting post across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell one from another. The grandstand was on the right, and beyond the park were low monotonous lines of stables. It had been raining, the track was heavy, and the race that followed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk of the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as always, slowly subsided at the persistent intrusion of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably the racing, the horses lining fretfully and scrambling through the muddy pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey Club, too, was comparatively empty of interest; the spectators there, though they were The Cuban women present, elaborately dressed for shaded lawns and salons de thÉ, were largely foreign to the wide-spread open spectacle. I remembered English races where groups of dukes with ruddy features, in rough tweeds, sat through drizzling afternoons on their iron-shod seat ricks, and women of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues, tramped through the sloshing turf ... an attitude far removed from Havana. A group of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance, alone gave the races an exotic air; though they were, of course, promoted and ridden by Americans, and their mechanics were quite those which operated in New Orleans and Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed because I had, thoughtlessly, come; I might as well have gone to the baseball game in what had formerly been the bull ring. Yet I could retire to my speculations for This, naturally, had been influenced, strengthened, in Cuba by the climate, the breath of the tropics; even the winters were not conducive to violent exercise, aside from the fact that that was the prerogative of stolid A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their saddles, trooped to the judges' stand to be weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened, preternaturally cunning faces. They were like pygmies of a strange breed in red and yellow and blue satins; faultless for their purpose, on the ground they were extraordinary, leather-skinned, with puckering eyes, drawn mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled among themselves in shrill or foggy voices—a very depressing specialization of humanity. There were, on the veranda, drinks, and even they—the Scotch highballs—translated into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed sound. It was on my return, stopping at the Telegrafo CafÉ, that I learned the delightful possibility of a Daiquiri cocktail. It was twice as large as ordinary, what in the north was called a double; but no Daiquiri out of Cuba could be thought of in comparison. Only one other drink might be considered—a Ramos gin-fizz. My extreme allegiance had been given to the latter. I was not willing, even in the Telegrafo, to depose it from first I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra, through the gallery that had once been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower man, who advanced with a smile and a close nosegay of gardenias. A curious flower, I thought, getting water for them in a glass. They didn't wilt, as was usual, but turned brown and faded in the manner of a lovely pallid woman—a simile I had used in Linda Condon. A flower that belonged less to nature than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons and the opera loges of eighteen forty, and not at all to the present in the United States. But worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate to the black hair of the Cuban woman. My shutters now were opened, and I could make out, against the dimming sky, the languid folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance of the Centro Gallego—the standard that had conquered the western tropics, only, in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the wind mightier than His Most Catholic Majesty. * * * There was some question of where I'd go for dinner, for in Havana there were many A solitary couple had their heads together by the window, and they, with myself, were the only diners. It was, evidently, not now the place to go to at this hour. Beyond the dining-room, a patio, or rather an open court, was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces can be, deserted and half-lighted; but I saw that a considerable activity was expected much later. I was glad that the terrace was empty, for, I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable Riscal, for champagne; for there was about an air of departed charm, the whisper of old waltzes and tarleton, that demanded commemoration. The Miramar had been the gay center of that mid-century life which had folded Havana in the lasting influence of its The automobiles on the MalecÓn multiplied, for the night was hot; soon there was a solid double opposed procession on the broad sweeping drive. This was a triumph of American engineering and, I had no doubt, an improvement on the informality of rocks and dÉbris that had existed before. Yet I should liked to have seen it when the promenade had not yet been laid down with mechanical precision, in, perhaps, the early seventies. Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock at the end of the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos Eliseos, where the water was like a cooler liquid green air, and where, after storms, a foaming surf poured over the barriers. There were no motors then, but volantes and the modern Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely finer—five rows there were in fifty-seven—when the clamor of the city was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me, to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay hardly behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the Risorgimento, at farthest the villeggiatura of Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of Cimarosa in churches. And now, drinking my champagne on the empty flagged terrace of the Miramar, facing, across the parade of automobiles, the blank curtain of the night, starred on the right by the lights of castellated forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no longer heard outside the faint distilled sweetness of music boxes. As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected At the total destruction of my pleasure I cursed the pretentious stupidity of the band-master and a great deal else of modern Cuba. I remembered particularly some regrets, locally expressed, that the Spanish domination was no more. Things, it was said, were better ordered then. But this was a position the vainness of which I couldn't join: it was no part of my disposition to combat, or even regret, the inevitable. My course—quite other—was to project myself into periods whose very loss formed most of their charm. Gone, they took on the tender memories of the dead, Two girls were now seated at a table by the entrance, and, though they were alone for the moment, it was evident that they had no intention of remaining in that unprofitable state longer than necessary. Their fleet appraising glances rested on me and the silver bucket by my chair, and one permitted the shadow of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a flowery summer stuff, but she was as gold in coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana I seriously deplored. The other was dark, but she was, at the same time, disagreeable; something had annoyed her excessively, and I made no move. Such company was occasionally entertaining, in a superficial conversational sense; but, I was obliged to add, not often. I went over all the informal girls I could recall who had been worth the effort to cultivate them, either charming or wise or sensitive, and my bag, unlike Chopin's or what George Unfortunately I had been born into the most rigid of all societies—a prosperous and Presbyterian middle-class; an influence that succeeded in making religion hideous before I was fifteen, planting in me, too, the belief that man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew the latter, but never the first; and now, looking back, I could recognize how that * * * Walking generally in the direction of my room, I left the Prado for an especially dramatic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare walls and iron bolted doors were made startling by the white glare of electric lights. Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the wrought-iron brackets of the earlier lanterns, converted, it might be, for the period before the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination These precautions had been long discarded, but the passages themselves were unchanged, not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly at night, the Middle Ages. And it was as though a sudden blaze had been created by unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance, throwing into intolerable clearness the decent reticence of the time. The arc lights gave the streets an absolute air of unreality and tragic strangeness. Moving in them, I had the feeling of blundering awake into a dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion of potential horror. An open door with It was quite natural, a commonplace of Havana; but rather than a picture of familiar life, it resembled the memento mori of a grotto. My thoughts turned to the symbols and representations of the Catholic Church—a business of blood and torment and flame, of Sebastian torn with arrows and a canonized girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs in a hand. Curiously enough, the spirit which had given birth to this suffering had been popularly lost, together with any conception of the ages in which it occurred; and all that remained was a pathological horror. Italy and Spain were saturated by it—Italy in the revolting wax spectacles of Easter, and Spain with the veritable crucifixions of to-day. It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable That was a period, a conquest, when a violent death was a greater blessing than living in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between the saving of their souls and the loss of It was, possibly, a mental imperfection which gave impressions, emotions, such a great suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra, I had no intention of losing myself in the mazes of applied theology; and I speedily dropped such a sombre topic from my thoughts. Turning back to the Prado, I found the walks filled with men, progressing slowly or seated on the flat marble benches along the sides. Whenever a woman did pass on foot, their interest and speculations were endless: heads turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged, The Telegrafo and the Louvre were crowded, with more refrescos and ices on the table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes of the discursive throngs in the Parque Central were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading abroad the audiences of their second evening shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well filled, and I stopped there; not, however, for a naranjada. Some late suppers were still occupying the dining-room, and a drunken American was gravely addressing a table and meeting with a mechanical politeness that I admired for its sustained patience. He left, finally, and wandered unsteadily, a subject of I should have liked to be at either table—their attractions were equal; but, forced to remain alone, I thought of how rude the English would have been had I moved over to them. The English would have been boorish, and the French would have met me with an impenetrable polite reserve. Both would regard me as an idiot or an agent; to have spoken to them would have been an affront. And yet I was confident that we should have got on very well: I was not without a name in London, and the French were delightfully sensitive to any practising of the arts. The English, I gathered from their unguarded talk, were cruising on a yacht now lying in Havana I had always liked worldly pomp and settings, marble Georgian houses with the long windows open directly on closed greens and statues of lead; and to linger, before going down to dinner, on a minstrel's gallery above a stone hall and gathered company. I'd rather be on a yacht than on an excursion boat; yet I infinitely preferred reading about the latter. For some hidden or half perceived reason, yachts were not impressive in creative prose; there the concerns and pleasures of aristocracy frequently appeared tawdry and unimportant. Even its heroism, in the valor of battle and imperturbable sacrifice, was less moving to me than simpler affairs. Yet there was no doubt but that I was personally inclined to the extremes of luxury; and this apparent contradiction * * * The following day, hot and still, with the exception of capricious movements of air in paved shaded places, was overcast, the brilliancy of Havana, of the white and green plazas, subdued. And this softening of sharp lines and blazing faÇades seemed to influence, too, the noises, the calls, of the streets, so that it was all apparently insubstantial, like the ultimate romantic mirage of a city. I wandered along Neptuno Street to Belascoin, and then to the Parque Maceo, where I ignored the massed bronze and granite of its statue for the slightly undulating shimmering tide. In the distance the sea was lost in the sky—a nebulous gray expanse such as might have existed The vivid spectacle of Cuba, for example, contracted to a palm's breadth, the island became nothing more than the glimmer of a torch in illimitable dusk. It had been discovered by Columbus, a presumptuous term used arrogantly in the sense of created; an Arcadian shore where, because food grew without cultivation, without effort, and the gold was soft for beating into bracelets, the natives lived easily and ornamentally and in peace. They wore, rather than steel and the harsh shirts of the Inquisition, the feathers of birds with woven dyed quills and fragrant grasses. They sang, they danced with a notable grace, loved and died in the simplicity of bohios of palm board and thatch under nine Caciques. Then, in the drawing of a breath, they were all destroyed, gone, killed by slavery, in the name of God on the points of swords, by the There remained now the indefinite sea and a city withdrawn, secretive, made vaguely beautiful by intangible voices, all its voices In any other case I should have cheated myself, not only of pleasure, the relaxation possible to honesty of mind, but of any hope of future material. The creative habit was the most tireless and frugal in existence: there was nothing—no experience, person, disillusionment, or pain—not endlessly sounded for its every note and meaning. No one could predict This, however, was beyond spoiling—a history so picturesque, as I have intimated, that its very vividness, its commonest phases, had become the threadbare material of obvious romance. But, outside of all that, the other Havana, the mid-Victorian Pompeii, a city that none could have predicted or told me of, offered the incentive of its particular and rare charm. In the Parque Maceo, on the sea wall, my imagination stirred with the first beginnings of a story: it would take place in the period when the avaricious grip of Spain was loosening, a story of secret patriotism and the idealism of youth, set in marble salons, at There it would be different from The Arrow of Gold and DoÑa Rita; no peignoirs, thank you, but a formality, a passionate propriety, in keeping with the social gravity and impersonal devotion of the very young. There must be crinoline—would I never escape from that!—and candelabra with glittering prisms; Spanish soldiers in striped linen and officials with green-tasselled canes. My youth, he'd come from the United States, would have his little dinners at the Restaurant FranÇaise, in Cuba Street number seventy-two, and his refrescos at the CafÉ Dominica. In the end he'd leave Havana, having accomplished nothing but the loss of his illusions for the gain of a memory like a dream, but his friend, a Cuban—I had seen him that first night at dinner in the Inglaterra—would be killed. How.... It was time to go back to the hotel, and the This was not a complaint against The Velvet Glove except as it equally applied to me; but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an I decided to do something positive that evening, to go to the theatre, or, if it were playing, to see the Jai Alai. The latter was possible, and, by way of the Telegrafo, I reached the Hotel Florida for dinner; a restaurant which, because of the windows looking down on it, had the pleasant individual air of a courtyard. The music played, diners came and went, and I gazed up at the shallow balconies in the hopefulness of an incorrigible imagination. The Fronton Jai Alai—in Havana the game, pelota, had taken the title of its court—was a long way from Obispo Street, but I knew when we had reached it by the solid volume of shouting that escaped from * * * Inside, the court was an immense expanse with granite-laid walls, a long rectangle, one side of which was formed by the steeply banked rows of spectators. Regular spaces were marked by white lines on the playing floor, and at one end the score was hung against the names of the players, now two teams—the Azules and the Blancos. The boxes were above the cement ledges packed with standing men, by a promenade, where the betting was conducted, cigars sold, and a small active bar maintained. It was the night of a gala benefit, for the Damas de Caridad, and I had been fortunate in getting a single box seat. I was late, though, and the game progressing; still, I was the first in our railed space; but the others, who proved to be Americans, soon followed—three prosperous men, manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom native good taste had been given the opportunities of large resources. One of the women—who, in the arrangement of the box, sat beside me—smiled with a magnetism that had easily survived the loss of her youth; she was rather silent than not, but the rest swept into a conversation in their best public manner. A man accompanying them, it developed, knew Cuba and Jai Alai, and he secured for the amusement of the others a cesta, the basket-like racquet worn strapped to the arm. It was from him I discovered that the court was two hundred and ten feet long and thirty-six feet wide; while the service consisted in dropping the ball and, on its rebound, catching it in the cesta and throwing it against the far end wall. From there, with a sharp smack audible all over the Fronton, the ball shot back, if not a fault, within a marked area, and one of the opposing side caught it, in the air or on the first bounce, and returned it against the end wall. At first I could see nothing but the violent activity of the players, frozen into statuesque attitudes of throwing; vigorous figures in, mostly, white, with soft red silk sashes. I heard the ball hit, and saw There had never been, I was certain, another game in which instantaneous judgment, skill, and endurance had been carried to such a far point. There was seldom a fault or error; the ball, flying like a bullet, was caught and flung with a single gesture; again and again it carried from one end wall to the other, from which it was hurled on. Angles of flight were calculated and controlled, the long side wall was utilized.... Then a player of the Azules was hit in the ankle, and the abruptness with which he went down showed me a possibility I had ignored. During this the clamor of the audience was indescribable, made up, for the most part, of the difficulties of constantly shifting odds and betting. The odds changed practically with every passage of the ball: opening at, say, five to three against the favorites, as they drew steadily ahead in a game of twenty-five points There was, however, toward what should have been the end, an unlooked-for development—the team apparently hopelessly behind crept up. An astounded pause followed, and then an uproar rose that cast the former sound into insignificance. Soon the score was practically tied: there were shrill entreaties, basso curses, a storm of indiscriminate insults. Now the backers of the lesser couple scrambled vocally to take advantage of the betting opportunities forever lost—the odds were even, then depressed on the other side. When the game was over the noise died instantly: The majority of the boxes were occupied by Cuban families, but yet there was an appreciable number of foreigners. A slender girl, in a low dinner dress, was sitting on the railing of her box, swinging a graceful slipper and smoking a cigarette—New York was indelibly stamped on her—and, among the masculine world of Spanish antecedents, she created a frank center of interest. For her part, she studied the crowd quite blocking the way below her with a cold indifference, the personification of young assured arrogance. A quiniela followed, with six contestants, one against the other in successive pairs; but my eyes were now definitely exhausted by the A painful situation, a shocking waste, from which, for her, there was no escape, for she had patently what was known as character. She at once was conscious of the absolute need She smiled at me again, later, her narrow slightly wasting hands clasped about a knee—a smile of sympathetic comprehension and unquenchable woman. She would have been happier chattering in the obvious strain of stupidity behind her: any special beauty was always paid for in the imposed loneliness of a spoken or unspoken surrounding resentment. To be content with a facile compliment, the majority of tricks at auction bridge, mechanical * * * The pelota immediately vanished from my mind before the infinitely more fundamental and interesting problem of marriage; and—remembering the ominous sign of a woman's club on the MalecÓn—I wondered if the Cuban women were contented with the tradition as it had been handed down to them. In the life that I knew in the north, an infinitesimal grain of sand irritating in the body of the United States, the sacredness of matrimony had waned very seriously; it would, of course, go on, probably for ever, since no other arrangement could be thought of conciliating the necessities of both dreams and property; but, subjected to the scrutiny of intelligence They expressed the conviction that the purely masculine aphorism to the effect that home was the place for women meant nothing more than a clearing of the decks for unrestricted action. This was beautifully displayed, confirmed, in Havana, where decks were without a single impediment; and I speculated about the attitude of the Cuban women in houses barred with both actual and metaphorical iron. Tradition weighed heavily on My thoughts returned abruptly to the point where they had started, to marriage, and I hoped that Cuba wouldn't be disorganized by the present ferment; that the feminine element, discovering their wrongs, wouldn't leave their balconies and patios for the dusty publicity of the street. Already a decline had been suffered, first in the loss of mantillas and combs, next in the passing of single-horse victorias for unrestrained tin locomotives, and then in the hideous flood of electric lighting. Still, a great deal of the charm, the empire, of Havana women remained; while nothing but utter disaster approached them from the north. This was no new position for me, and it had never failed to be attacked, usually with the insinuation that, spiritually, I was part of Turkey in Asia ... a place of gardens where it was not inconceivable that I'd be happy: certainly the politics there were no worse than those to which I had been inured from birth, Gathering, in imagination, all the feminine world of Havana into a fragrant assembly, I begged them not to separate themselves from their privileges; I implored them even—against my personal inclination, for there, at least, I was no Turk—not to grow slender, if that meant agile excursions into loud spheres of lesser influence. Those others, I proceeded, would rapturously exchange a ballot for a seductive ankle, a graceful breast, or a flawless complexion. Complexion, or rather its absence, brought immeasurably more supporting votes to the women's party than convictions. The audience melted away—I was unable to discover if they were flattered or annoyed—and I found myself actually seated at one of the small tables on the fringe of the thÉ dansant at the Sevilla. The Cascade Orchestra from the Biltmore, their necks hung with the imitation wreaths of Hawaii, were playing a musical pastiche of many lands and a single purpose; and there, foxtrotting intently among girls from the New York Follies and girls on follies of their own, colliding with race track touts from Jefferson Park and suave predatory They returned, in the intermissions, to chaperons complacent or secretly disturbed, where they had, principally, refrescos; but their attitude was one of progress and conscious, patronizing superiority to old-fashioned customs. The daughters of what, in many aspects, was the Spanish-Cuban aristocracy of the island, were dancing publicly in a hotel. Here, already, was an example of emancipation. I disliked it, naturally, not on moral grounds, but because it foreshadowed the destruction of individuality, the loss, eventually, of Havana, of Cuba, of Spain ... of everything distinguished that saved the world from monotony. They danced—the Cuban youth—with notable facility, adding to the hesitation waltz something specially their own, a more intense rhythm, a greater potentiality; their bodies were at once more fluid and positive; they were swept up into a mood unknown to the adamant ornaments of Country Club verandas In the end the waiter was more forceful than my determination to remain until my drink and thoughts were at an end, and I rose with them uncompleted, in a very ill temper. If Cuba hadn't enough innate taste and nationality * * * The Hotel de Luz, inimitably Cuban, with the shipping lying vaguely behind an orderly foliage at the Muelle outside, had a dining-room partly divided by wooden screens that merged informally into the surrounding halls and spaces, and an air that was an accumulation of tradition, like an invisible film lying over everything. A multiplication of unexpected adventitious detail accomplished, in its entity, the strangeness, at once enticing and a little sinister, characteristic of Havana. There was, lurking about, in the darker corners and passages, a feeling almost of dread, uncomfortable to meet. And, exploring, I passed a room without windows, largely the color of dried blood, the quintessence of a nightmare. The third floor, laid in a triangle I sat, for a while, in a walnut rocking chair at an end of the sweep, which amazed me by an architecture, the impressiveness of which approached oppression. A wall was broken by a file of slatted doors, and from one of these came the minute irritable clatter of a typewriter; the bell at the finish of a line sounded like the shiver of a tapped glass, and a child spoke. It was difficult to think of the Hotel de Luz as a place of normal residence, as existing at all except in the mental fantasias of Piranesi—it resembled exactly one of his sere vertiginous engravings. Yet it was, I knew, the favorite hotel of travelers from the Canary Islands. Continuing to rock slightly and smoke, I pursued the extremely recondite subject of just such impressions as I had there received: The reality of what I felt, then, lay in the combining of the surroundings and my imagination—a condition, a result, if not unique, at least unlikely to be often repeated. The sum of another emotional experience and the Hotel de Luz would be totally different, but equally true with my own; and from that confusion misunderstanding arose. The actuality was But it was no longer possible, if it had ever been, to disentangle one from the other, the personal from what seemed the impersonal; for, while nature was carelessly free from beauty and sentiment and morals, it had been invested with each of these qualities in turn by a differently developing intelligence. The elements of nature, partly in hand, were arbitrarily and subconsciously projected in set forms. I stopped to think how the mobility of mind perpetually solidified, like cement, about itself; how fluid ideas, aspirations, always hardened into institutions, then prisons, then mortuary vaults. Religion had done this Not only was I specially intent on these values: my inability to see men as free from them, as spiritual conquistadores, had been a cause of difficulty in the popularity and sale of my books. I lacked both the conceptions of man as an Atlas, holding up the painted globe, or an individual mounting securely into perpetuity. If the latter were true, if there were no death, the dignity of all the great tragic moments of life and art, the splendor of sacrifice, was cheapened to nothing. I would have gladly surrendered these for the privilege of continued existence—in a sphere not dominated by hymnology—but, skeptical of the future, all I possessed, my sole ideal, was a passionate admiration for the courage of a humanity I had grown more serious than I intended, than, in Havana, was necessary; what I had set out to discover was simply the explanation of my feeling about the Hotel de Luz; but undoubtedly it was better for me to accept emotions, merely to record them, than attempt analysis. I had had very little schooling in processes of exact thought, practically no mental gymnastics. But this was not an imposed hardship on which I looked back with regret—I had been free to fill my life with scholastic routine, but balked absolutely: in class rooms a blankness like a fog had settled over me, from which, after a short half-hearted struggle, I emerged to follow what, namelessly, interested me. That, for example, was precisely the manner of my stay in Havana. A course for which the worst was predicted, specially since I persisted in writing. And I could see how I'd be censured by the frugal-minded for such a book as I was more than likely to bring to San CristÓbal de la Habana. There was, in reality, no practical reason to write about it at all, since it had been admirably and thoroughly described, the sights, pleasures, and sounds, in reputable and laudatory paragraphs, a source of pride to the natives. Here no one could predict, in my search, what would seem important, to be transcribed—the colored glass above a window, the sugar at the bottom of a cocktail—and my moral sense, of course, would be as impotent as my political position was negligible. Yet the qualities ignored by a more solemn intelligence than mine were precisely what formed the spirit of Havana; their comprehension was necessary to that perception of an inanimate mood of place. I was constantly in a disagreement with the accepted opinion of what were, at bottom, the more serious facts, the determining pressures of existence; and it had always been at the back of my head to write a novel built from just such trivialities as, it seemed to me, enormously affected human fate. A very absorbing idea that had gone as far as an introduction I had left the Hotel de Luz for echoing stone galleries and streets and empty paved plazas when I told myself that mine would have simply been a story of shifted emphasis, for which I should have used my own memories, since I recalled the wallpaper of a music room after thirty years more clearly than the details of my father's death, happening when I was practically mature. The unavoidable conclusion of this was that the paper, in a way I made no pretence * * * Some of these considerations returned to my mind the following afternoon, when my fancy had been captured by a woman on a balcony of the MalecÓn. The house was small, crushed between two imposing structures that had been residences but were now apartments, scarcely two stories and set back of the line, with the balcony at a lower window. The woman was neither young nor lovely, but, folded in a shawl, it might have been one of the lost mantillas, she was invested with a melancholy dignity. It was possible, in the briefest passage, to see not only her history but the story of a decade, of a vanished greatness lingering through a last afternoon before extinction—a gesture of Spain finally submerged in the western seas of skepticism. I was extraordinarily grateful to her for standing wrapped with the shawl in immobile The truth was that I regarded them as a part of their iron grilling, figures on a canvas, the balconies and women inseparable from each other. It might well be that this was no more than the intolerable oppression of the past incongruously thrust upon the present, and that at any minute the women, in righteous indignation and revolt, would step down into life. But if they were to do that, I hoped it The popularity of balconies, their purpose, had remained, until now at least, largely unchanged in Havana. On Sol Street, in the neighborhood of Oficios and where it met the harbor, they solidly terminated their tall windows, reached the heights of discreet tradition. There the way was so narrow that a head above must be bent forward to see what was passing, affording a clear view of high comb and bright lips, provocative in the intimacy of their suggestion. The balconies of the MalecÓn looked out, conversely, across the unbroken tide of the sea—in the afternoon, when it was fair, a magical sweep of unutterable blue. Yet they had suffered a decline—as though the constant noise of automobiles had rent an evanescent spirit. The women there might see, as they chose, either the parade of fashion or the grey walls and the far horizon; but from the balconies of the Prado only the former was visible, the I saw a group of girls at an impressive window of the Prado, on the corner of either Trocadero or Colon Street, all in white except for the clear scarlet of one, like a blazing camellia among gardenias; and, for a day after, their dark loveliness stayed in my mind. They had had tea, probably, in the corner of a high cool room with a marble floor, furnished in pale gilt. I had no doubt that a piano had been played for a brief explanatory dancing, the trial of new steps neither The New York scene, however carefully veiled and chaperoned, was a disquieting preparation for the Prado, or even Vedado. What the life on an estancia was, I couldn't imagine; I had been told that, for a woman, oftener than not, it was still a model of Castilian rigidity. It had, in fact, been suggested to me that I write the story of such a girl, shut away from everything that she had been permitted to see and desire. Unquestionably a splendid subject, one of the vessels that would hold everything an ability could pour into it. I realized at once which, in that individual Widely different balconies held my attention—on one, flooded with the morning sun, two women with carnation cheeks and elaborately dressed hair, but for the rest strikingly informal, laughed an invitation to me that took no account of the hour. They were, I suppose, tawdry, the cheap familiars of a cheap street; but the gay orange wall where they lounged like the painted actors of a zarzuela, their yellow satin slippers and shoulders impudently bare above chemises pink and blue, all gave them a certain distinction. Again, in the section of Jesus del Monte, there were buildings brilliantly and impossibly painted, usually with cafÉs on the ground, whose balconies, exposed to an intolerable heat, overlooked dingy sun-baked fields. They were always empty.... I could never A fact that had nothing to do with the tropics or the outskirts of Havana, where wide dusty stone avenues dropped abruptly in soft roads, and the balconies were added purely from habit. My own balcony, at the Hotel Inglaterra, was ideally placed, with its command of an angle of the Parque Central. I often sat there before dinner, or past the middle of night; there was always, then, a wind stirring over San Rafael Street; but the balconies on either side of me, above and below, * * * The patios of Havana, turned so uncompromisingly from the street, were, perhaps for that reason, even more engaging than the balconies. I saw them, except those of the government buildings and others semi-public, through opening or half open doors, or sometimes I looked down into them from superior heights. They, too, were countless in variety, from the merest kitchen areas and places of heaped refuse to lovely garden rooms of flowers and glazed tiling and fountains. This sense of privacy, of enclosure, in a garden was their most charming feature; and the possibilities and implications of a patio created a whole social life with which I was necessarily unfamiliar. They were, usually, in the hours I knew them, empty but for passing servants ... obviously their time was late afternoon or evening: fixed to the inner walls were the iron brackets of lamps, and it was easy to These details, separately, were not rare, but shut into the masonry of Havana, their beauty shown in momentary glimpses on streets of blank walls, their fragrance drooping into unexpected barren places, the patios stirred my inherent desires. As usual, I didn't want to be gazing at them from without, but to be a part of their existence: I wanted to sleep on one, in a room nothing but a stone gallery, or watch the moonlight slip over the leaves of the crape myrtles and the tiles and sink into the water. But not to-day, for there were discordant sounds through the arches with slender twisted Moorish pillars—the subdued harshness of mechanical music, the echoes of that dissatisfaction which was everywhere now recognized as improvement. I demanded guitars. The masculine chords of the guitar, the least sentimental of instruments, as the Spaniards were the least sentimental of people, the deep The dress of the present, even the floating films of the women, was misplaced; these were, in reality, the courtyards of the Orient, and they needed the dignity of grave robes and gestures, bearded serenity. In them, initially, women had been flowers lightly clasped with bands of rubies and dyed illusory veils; there had been no guitars then, but silver flutes. However, I had no desire to be a part of that time; it was Spain that possessed me, and not in Grenada but Cuba, during the Captain-generalship A little late for the plate ships sailing in cloudy companies and filling Havana with the swords of Mexico and Peru; but my mind and inclinations were not heroic; I could dispense with Pizarro's soldiers, fanciful with the ornaments of the Incas, for the quiet of walled gardens, the hooped brocades of court dresses; all the transplanted grace of the city and hour. Climate was greater than man, and the first CubeÑos, dead in the mines of Cobre, were being revenged for the usurpation of their happiness and land; the negroes of the slave It was, in Havana as well as Seville, the farewell of true formality, for after that it became only a form. No one, afterwards, was to bow instinctively as he left a room or dance to the measures of Beethoven and Mozart. A useless plant cut down by a rusty scythe! The elegance of Cuba, however, changing into later Victorianism, was, in the time of de Ricla, greatly enhanced by its surrounding, by the day before yesterday when there had been only thatched bohios where now were patios of marble. Those quiet spaces were sentient with all this, just as the patios of the churches held the sibilant whisper of the sandals of the Inquisition, an order already malodorous and expelled from the island by Antonio Maria Bucarely, the following Captain-general. But even yet it would be possible, with the details carefully arranged, to find an emotional situation in a patio undisturbed since the middle eighteenth century; for the revenge of the CubeÑos and of Africa, of the red and the black slaves, was that, with the faint or full infusion of their bloods into their conquerors, dwindled unintelligible desires and dreamlike passions entered as well. A discoloration of the mind as actual as the darkening of the skin! And I pictured an obscure impulse buried in the personality of a sensitive and reserved man, such a trait as, at moments of extreme pressure, would betray him into a hateful savagery; or it might be better brought out by a galling secret barbarity of taste. The Spain of Philip, primitive Africa, and a virginal island race constrained into one body and spirit must be richly dramatic. It was imperative to regard the patios in such a light, with a strong infusion of reality, for, half apprehended, they produced that thin tinkling note of sham romance; they evoked, for a ready susceptibility, the impressions of There was another, perhaps safer, attitude toward the balconies and patios of Havana: to regard them in an unrelieved mood of realism, to show them livid with blue paint and echoing with shrill misery, typhoid fever, and poverty. If I did that, automatically a number of serious critical intellects would give me their withheld support, they would no longer regard me as a bright cork floating thoughtlessly over the opaque depths of life. Well, they could—they'd have to—go to the devil; for I had my own honesty to serve, my own plot to tend—a plot, as I have said, where, knowing the effort hopeless, I tried only to grow a flower spray. If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of the apples. Or, in Havana, of the oranges. In the meanwhile the patios gave me an inexhaustible pleasure. Sometimes the walls were glazed with tiles and the octagonal surface of the fountain held the reflected tracery of bamboo, while a royal palm towered over the balusters of the roof and hanging lamps were crowned with fretted metal. Another, with its flags broken and the basin dry, was deserted except for the soundless flame-like passage of chromatic lizards; still another was bare, with solid deep arcades and shadows on the ground and a second gallery of gracefully light arches. There was, in one, a lawn-parasol in candy-colored stripes with low wicker chairs and gay cushions; on a table some tall glasses elbowed a syphon, English gin, and a silver dish of limes, and a blue-and-yellow macaw was secured to a black lacquer stand. * * * That, evidently, was not characteristic of Havana, and yet the city absorbed it, made it a part of a complex richness, a complexity as Not in the sense, the historical importance of, for example, Athens; I had already said that Havana was a city without history, which was true in the cumulative, inter-human meaning of that term. But it had, within its limits, on its island like a flower in air, an amazing and absorbing past. In the beginning, where Spain was concerned, Cuba, a fabulous land, had promised fabulous gold; but the empires One by one the colors of its fantastic design grew clearer to me; period by period the streets and people became intelligible, until they reached the middle-century era to which I was so susceptible. To arrive, with the ingredients of a tropical Spain and the pirates of the world, at an early Victorianism was a mystery which demanded a close investigation. That air enveloped all the center of the There was no absence of modernity in the wharfs and streets, but that loud impetuous tide poured through the ways of a quieter water, and in the side passages the sound diminished. Havana was a great port, but the steam shipping along its waterfront was incongruous with the low tranquil whiteness, the pseudo-classicism, of the buildings that held along the bay. The latter particular, elaborated from my first impression, carried the city back to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. I had no intention of examining the dates of numerous structures, but the stamp of their time was on the Ionic entablatures. Then women, as well, had copied in their dress the symbol of the Greek column, of sculpture instead of painting, The feminine silhouette changed remarkably in thirty years, from a column to a cone, from the ultimate in flowing lines to a bouquet-like rigidity; and the severity of furnishings, of incidentals, expanded in queer elaborations. It was, notably, a period of prudery, of all which, objectively, I disliked; while at the same time there had been the undercurrent of license that always accompanied an oppressive hypocrisy. This, I could see, was true of its age in Havana: men—the real prudes—had been heavily whiskered at home with a repressed morality, and betrayed in another quarter by heredity and the climate. Two periods that, except for some beautiful In the large disasters that were sweeping the world, the mad confusion of injustice and revolt, of contending privilege, the serene primness of Havana, its starched formality of appearance, offered a priceless quietude. It was, at once, static and mobile, a place of countless moods that merged at the turning of a corner, the shifting of a glance from La Punta to the circular bandstand at the foot of the Prado. Never pedantic, it was a city more for the emotions than the intellect; intellect, in its astigmatic conceit, had largely overlooked The cemetery from which I escaped with relief and the cafÉ that I entered with pleasure—again the Telegrafo—flowed together in the city's general impression. I could see the statue of Marti, and, as I looked, it changed into the statue of Isabel; then that, too, vanished. The broad paved avenue, the flagged walks, became a gravelled plaza about which the girls promenaded in one direction to pass constantly the youths circling in the other. The vision flickered and died, and I went on to lunch through the Havana of so many days smoothly packed into one. I felt that my first sense of instinctive familiarity had been justified; yet, in the corridor of the Inglaterra, asked by a traveler how to get to a restaurant, the Dos Hermanos, I was unable to reply; and a third American, brushing me aside, gave him voluble instructions. It ended by his being taken out and seated in a hack, while the other, in angry execrable and fluent Spanish, told the driver where to proceed. Whatever I had learned, it seemed, was of no practical value; my multiple * * * The Cuban cigarettes, however, were too strong for pleasure; for, while the preference for a strong cigar was admissible, cigarettes should be mild. All those famous were. Strangely enough, good cigarettes had never been smoked in the United States, a land with an overwhelming preference for the cheap drugged tobacco called Virginia. No one would pay for a pure Turkish leaf; with the There were, of course, men who disagreed with me—though women never liked a CabaÑas or Henry Clay cigarette—and a connection of mine, a judge, long imported from Cuba, through Novotny of New York, the Honoradez tobacco for his cigarettes. He had been in Havana during the Spanish occupation, and later; and, recalling him, I could see that he, like myself, possessed an ineradicable fondness for it. In his case, even, his memories might have affected his exterior, for he had a lean darkness more appropriate to the Calzada del Cerro than to Chester County. In summer particularly, with his immaculate He had known Havana at a better time than now, when it was more provincial, simpler; the hotels then were uncompromisingly locked at ten in the evening, and if he returned later he was forced to call the negro sleeping in the hall. I don't remember where he stayed—probably at the Inglaterra. I was young and ignorant of Cuba when I saw him, with a certain frequency, before he died; and I heard his talk about the Parque Central with no greater interest than his discussions of salmon fishing, of Sun and Planet reels and rods split and glued. I realized sharply what I had missed, both in the way of detail—the detail most important to a mental picture and always missing—and in intimate understanding of Cuban affairs. For he had a tonic mind, rare in America, unsentimental and courageous, and touched with a satirical quality disastrous to sham, social, religious, or political. The cigarettes came to him in bright tin boxes of a hundred; and, after his death, I bought seven from Novotny and smoked the contents almost by way of memorial; for he was a personality of a type almost gone. Judges of County Courts no longer wore immaculate high hats to the Bench, with the vivid corner of a bandanna handkerchief visible in the formality of their coat tails. The silk-tipped cigarettes were for women, but the silk was principally a villainous carmine, a color fatal to the delicate charm of lips, and I hoped that I should see none so thoughtless as to smoke them; while the cigarettes all of tobacco were, frankly, impossible. Why, I couldn't say; they simply wouldn't do. What women I saw smoking in public, in the cafÉs and at the races, were not Cubans. They, on view, neither smoked nor drank anything but refrescos. But a different feminine world, at their doors or over the counters of bodegas, enjoyed long formidable cigars. An amusing convention, a prejudice really; The Turkish cigarettes in Havana were unremarkable, yet, for the Cuban youth, the sign of worldliness. They disdained the local In the past I had suffered a particularly wretched nervous breakdown—it hit me like a bullet in the Piazza della Principe in Florence; and when I had politely been sent to Switzerland to die, an English doctor at Geneva cured me, for most practical purposes, by impatience, black coffee, and Shepherd's Hotel cigarettes. I had no doubt that smoking I wasn't defending drunkenness or attacking the statistics against smokers; what I felt, I think, in such men was the presence of a fallibility to which, at awkward or tragic moments, they yielded and so became companions of sorrow and charity, the great temperers of humanity. At any rate, I demanded enough liberty, at least, to fill my system with smoke if I willed. The possibility that my act might In addition, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be perfectly sanitary in mind and body, any more than I was certain of the complete desirability of a perfected world, of heaven. At once, there, my lifelong occupation would be gone—novelists never stopped to think what would happen to them if all the reforms for which they shouted should go into effect; and I had a disturbing idea that a great deal of my pleasure in life came from feelings not always admissible in, shall I say, magazines of a general character. A clean mind and a pure heart were not without chilling suggestions of emotional sterility. Since men had hopelessly and forever departed from the decency of simple animals, I wanted to enjoy the silken and tulle husks that remained. If there was a sedative in cigars, an illusion in a * * * What might be called the minor pleasures of life, though in their bulk were vastly more important than the great moments, Havana had carried to a high state of perfection; yet with, where I was concerned, an exception not in favor of the theatre. I went, as I had determined, to whatever offered, swept along by the anticipation of Spanish dancing and music: the first was immeasurably the best in existence, and I liked the harsh measures of Spanish melody, both the native songs of the countryside and the sophisticated arrangements by Valverde. A great many skilful writers had described the dancing, and their accounts were well enough, but, politely, they all lacked the fundamental brutality of the jota and malagueÑa, just as the foreign operatic variations on Spanish themes were reminted I purchased a ridiculously flimsy scrap of paper, which, I was assured, made me the possessor of a grille principal at the Pairet Theatre—a box, as huge as it was bare, within the stage. I could see, under the hood, the long dramatic hand of the prompter waving to the droning monotony of his voice through the stupidest performance I remembered. It was, by turn, a comedy, a farce, a pantomime, and a comic opera, and a complete illustration of the evils of departing from national tradition and genius—a dreary attempt at the fusion of Vienna and New York, planned, obviously, for a cosmopolitan public superior to the rude familiar strains of gypsies. At intervals a chorus of young women, whose shrill excitement belied their patent solidity, made an incongruous appearance and declamation; they grouped themselves in feeble designs, held for a moment of scattered applause, and went off with a labored lightness that threatened even their ankles. This I had seen the same effort ten years before in Paris, and the failure was as marked in Spanish as in French. Mr. Ziegfield, assisted by the glittering beauty of the girls he was able to secure, had made such spectacles brilliantly and inimitably his own. The Latins knew nothing, really, about legs: they showed them with what was no more than a perfunctory bravado, while it was a peculiarity of shoulders—the art of which they so daringly comprehended—that their effect was lost in When I returned to the Inglaterra I demanded of a clerk where I could find a vulgar performance of, for instance, the habanera, but he shook his head doubtfully. At intervals, he admitted, Spanish dancers came to the National Theatre; but—his manner brightened—Caruso was expected in May. I had no intention of staying in Havana through May; and, had I been there, I'd have avoided Caruso ... a singer murdered by the Victrola. Already the seats for his concerts were a subject for speculation, and it was clear that they would reach a gigantic price, between forty and sixty dollars for a single place in the orchestra. In this depressing manner Havana made it evident that it was a city both fashionable and rich. There had been a time, too, I was informed, when all the uncensored moving pictures of the world found a home in Cuba; pictures where embraces were not limited to a meagre number of feet, nor layettes, the entire ramifications of procreation, prohibited. But these were gone from the general view. The films, though, had not been destroyed, and for some hundreds of dollars a private performance might be arranged. But this I declined. The moving picture industry had been brought entirely from America, the theatres plastered with Douglas Fairbanks' set grin, William Farnum's pasty heroics, and Mary Pickford's invaluable aspect of innocence. Never, in the time I was in Cuba, did I see a Spanish actor or film announced; although a picture, appropriate to Lent, of the Passion, hinted at a different spirit. I became, then, discouraged by the formal entertainments. As usual, I was too late; the process of improvement had everywhere marched slightly ahead of me, substituting for the genuine note a borrowed false emphasis. I liked everything about him but his indulgence for soda blondes; yet in the serious conversation we at once opened—connected with a projected trip of mine to the City of Mexico—we forgot the girl until, exasperated by our neglect, she lost some of her manner in an inane exclamation made, she announced, for the Was it a healthy rebellion against the prudery of repression or the adventitious excitation of imminent impotence? Whatever had brought it about, it was stupid, an insensate jiggling of the body without frankness or grace. I hadn't yet seen the Cuban rumba, with its black grotesque negrito and sensual mulata; but I was confident that if a rumba were started at Carmelo, the shimmy would resemble the spasmodic vibrations of a frigid St. Vitus dance. The men and women doing it, galvanized by drink and the distance from their responsibilities, animated by the Cuban air, were prodigiously abandoned. They were, mostly, commercial gentlemen and stiff brokers investigating sugar securities, or the genial obese presidents and managers of steamship Their origins were as mysterious as their age—strange feminine derelicts stranded by temperament and mischance, caught in the destructive web of the tropics. The dresses they wore were either creations or makeshifts, but their urbanity was as solidly enamelled as their hair was waved or marcelled. There was still another variety—I had seen them before at expensive fishing camps—tightly skirted, permanently yellow-haired, with stony faces and superfine diamonds. Drunk or sober, their calmness was never changed by so much as a flicker; they caught sail fish in the Gulf Stream, danced, ate, talked, and now, certainly, were flying, with the same hard imperturbability and display, in gold mesh bags, of their unlimited crisp money in high denominations * * * My interest, however, in the American in Havana had vanished, my position in life, avoidance rather than protest, and I surrendered him to the hospitality of Cuba and the gambling concessions. I wanted, from then on, only the local scene: there were cities where the foreigners, the travelers, made an inseparable part of the whole, but this was not true of Havana; it remained, in spite of the alien clamor, singularly undisturbed, intact, in essence. But a few streets, a plaza or two, knew the sound of English, and beyond these the voices, the stores, the preoccupations, were without any recognition of other people or needs. I began to wander farther from the cafÉs of the Parque Central, the open familiarity of the sea, and found myself in situations where, in my lack of Spanish, I was limited to the simplest, most plastic, desires. It was in this manner that I found ear-rings I was paying for some towels, and regretting—in a singular composite of inappropriate words and banal smiles—the interruption of the meal, when I saw the ear-rings; and immediately, in the face of all the warning and advice wasted on me, I exclaimed that I wanted them. At this they were laid on the counter, a reasonable price murmured, and the transaction was over. I gathered that they had been left for sale by some member of an old Cuban house, perhaps by a Baeza y Carvajal or NuÑez: they were of pale hand-carved and drawn gold, aged gold as yellow A store unmarked in exterior but surprising within attracted me by some Chinese-Spanish shawls, mantones, in a dusty show-case; and I discovered a short, heavily-built Spaniard stringing the hair of a wig against a background of scintillating costumes for the carnivals, balls, and masques. We were unable to understand each other, his wife wrinkled her forehead in desperation over my Spanish; and then, gesticulating violently, she vanished to reappear with a neighbor, a woman who seemed to have suffered all the personal misfortunes reserved for school teachers, who made intelligible a small part of what we said. They had, it developed, other shawls, shawls worth my attention; one, in particular, finer even than any of Maria Marco's. This engaged me at once, for Maria Marco was the prima donna of a Madrid company which had sung in the United States two years before, The wig-maker had had charge of the wardrobe of The Land of Joy, and he assured me again that not Maria Marco.... Abruptly there was spread the sinuous fringed expanse of a blazing green shawl heavily embroidered in white flowers. I had never encountered a clearer, more intense green or a whiter white; and, before I had recovered from the delightful shock of that, a second shawl of zenith blue was flung beside it. The body of the crÊpe-de-chine, the weight of its embroidery, the beautiful knotting of the short fringe—long fringe was an error—and their sheer loveliness, made them more desirable than jewels; and, prepared to buy them at once at the price of whatever fiction anyone wanted me to write and would pay absurdly for, I was lifting It was, I suppose, magenta—a magenta of a depth and wickedness impossible for any but Eastern dye; the magenta of a great blossom of hell—and it was embroidered with flowers like peonies, four spans across, in a rose that was vermilion, a vermilion that was scarlet; and the calyxes were orange and gamboge, emerald and peacock blue and yellow. There were, too, golden roses, already heavy and drooping with scent in the bud, small primitive blossoms with red hearts, dark green leaves, and dense maroon coronals starred in white. The dripping fringe was tied in four different designs.... I asked its price at once, in order to dispose of what couldn't help being painful in the extreme, and he told me with an admirable appearance of ease and inconsequence. The shop, that had been only half lighted by the door, was now tumultuous with color, with China and Andalusia; the shawl was the Oppressed by a sense of monetary insanity not unfamiliar to me—I was very apt to buy an Airedale terrier or a consol table with the sum carefully gathered for an absolute necessity—I set about turning my new possession into paragraphs and chapters; and it occurred to me that it had a justified place in the Havana story I had already, mentally, begun. The polite young men of the time, the decorative youth of all times, were apt to have collectively a passion for a fascinating or celebrated actress; and I saw that such a person—Doloretes—would be important to my plan. Afterward, crowded about a marble-topped table and helados, they would discuss her every point with fervent admiration. Yet she would be too vivid, too special, to take the foreground—I had wanted no paramount women in the first place—and I decided ... to kill her almost at once, to have her as a memory. My boy, most certainly, would find her shawl exactly as I had; and, bringing it to his room, solemnly exhibit it to his circle. More than that, I realized, it had given me a title, The Bright Shawl. I instantly determined to cast the story in the form of a memory told me by an old man of his youth; and that time, torn by unhappiness, indecision, and hopeless aspirations, should be made, in remembrance, brilliant and desirable, wrapped in the bright shawl which transformed the lost past. A remarkably good story, I thought enthusiastically; and I fell to speculating if George Lorimer would print it. He would give it, I * * * What was noticeable in The Bright Shawl was that I hadn't gone out for material, but it had come to me, scene by scene, emotion by emotion. I had never been able deliberately to set about collecting the facts for a proposed story; I could never tell what impulse, need, would be strong enough to overcome the laborious effort demanded for its realization in words. For this reason I was free to see what It was a thing of total indifference to me what—with steel spurs or without—roosters did to each other. Alive, they were a constant galling caricature, a crude illuminative projection, of men at their ridiculous worst. Their feathered tails, their crowing, their propensity to search for bits in the dung, their sheer roosterness, together with the sly hypocrisy of hens, had always annoyed me individually. And, rather than not, I looked forward to seeing them victimized by their own belligerent conceit. I had to leave my cab for an informal way behind some buildings and across grass, and, as I approached a false stucco faÇade, a determined A main had just been finished, and there was a temporary lull in the noise inseparable, in Cuba, from sport. The sawdust was being freshly sprinkled when a negro entered the It was deafening—a solid shouting of bets offered in a voice of fury, together with acceptances, repudiations, personalities, and the frenzied waving in air of handfuls of money. The two men with the roosters advanced toward each other and wooden lines laid in the pit, prodding and otherwise increasing the natural ill humor of their birds, and held the shorn heads close for a vicious preliminary peck. The roosters' legs, shaved to an indecent crimson, were bare of hold, every superficial feather had been clipped; and when This, it seemed to me, was totally unnecessary, for a wickeder rooster I was convinced never lived. He was deliberate in his tactics, unwilling to be robbed of his pleasure by a chance coup de grace, and confined himself to the beak. Soon his opponent leaned helplessly against the wall of the pit, while the victor methodically pecked him to death in small bloody pieces. The negro's face, couched on a charcoal-black palm, was as immobile as green bronze; but the white was positively epileptic with triumph. And, The execrations, the screams, that followed the retreating bird were beyond belief; the entire banked audience was swept by a passion that left some individuals speechlessly lifting impotent fists. Unaffected by this, the rooster, slightly leaned toward the center of gravity, He had no will to fight, and, personally understanding and sympathizing with him completely, I hoped his wish would be respected: while he had provided no main, he had faithfully substituted a most unlooked-for and thrilling race; making for all time and nations and breeds of chickens a record for a thousand times around a cock-pit. In some places he would, perhaps, have been released, returned to the eminence of a barn-yard; but not in Cuba. When it had been thoroughly demonstrated that he was uncatchable by his rival, I saw him go with regret; he deserved a greater consideration, and I hoped that, metaphorically in a corner, he would turn and be victorious. A new individual, a small brown man in soiled linen, had entered the box, and he at once, in a slow, painful, but intelligible English, opened a conversation with me. He had, he said, a consuming admiration for Americans, and as an earnest of his good will he proposed to let me in on what, in the North, was called a good thing. It was no less than the cautious information that in the next fight a dark chicken, a chicken carrying a betting end as long as the Prado, had been entered by President Menocal's brother. I could, with a wave of the hand, make a small fortune: for himself, he was unfortunate—he possessed but eleven dollars and odd pesetas. * * * I made some non-committal remark and turned a shoulder on his friendliness for Americans, conscious of a distinct annoyance at having been mistaken for, well—a tourist. There was no inherent inferiority in that transient state of being; but it was a characteristic of the settlers of any given place—settlers of at least forty-eight hours—that they should regard with tolerant amusement the new and the uninformed. He did, I thought, my clothes, my cigar, my whole air of sophisticated comprehension, an injustice; he should have recognized that I was not an individual to accept readily public confidential information. The birds were brought in and weighed, and the person in the box with me and the billowing white embroidery and carpet slippers excitedly indicated a lean cream-colored rooster with brown points. I fancied the other more, and thought something of betting on him when the main began—the brown bird of the brother of Menocal flashed forward, launched himself into the air with a clash, and drove Money won at sheer gambling, at games of chance which involved no personal skill or effort, always seemed hardly short of miraculous to me—magical sums produced at the waving of a hand. Their possession gave me a disproportionate pleasure and glow of well being; they seemed to be the mark of a special favor; the visible gesture, the approbation, of fortune and chance. I had had a lucky night at the Kursaal in Geneva, playing baccarat, and the changier, a silver chain about his neck, had reconverted my bowl of chips into heaped There were, certainly, numerous places in Havana for roulette, and always the American Club for auction bridge and poker; but I found my way to none of these: there were men who could hear the soundless turn of a wheel, soundless but for the fillip of the pith ball on the wood and metal, through the streets and walls of a city; and there were others who, merely pausing in a hotel or club corridor, would immediately form about them all the adjuncts of poker—the cards, the blue and yellow and white chips, the bank president, the shifty polite individual with pink silk sleeves and a rippling shuffle, the rich youth.... But, indebted, I suppose, to my spectacled benevolent appearance, such occasions let me pass unnotified. I made, however, some effort to find a billiard The types of women lingering outside, waiting patiently on convenient benches, were far different from the Latins. Occasionally a youth would put up his cue, dust the chalk from his fingers, assume his accurately fitted coat, his soft brown hat, and go out to some girl with whom he would plunge into a subdued council marked by a note of expostulation. But the men of Havana, it seemed, were quite contented to talk, to sit in a cafÉ over refrescos or in a parque with nothing at all but cigars, and discuss eternally, with a passionate interest, the details of their politics and city. Their contact with life at every point was vivid and, in expression anyhow, forceful; they argued in a positive tone to which compromise, agreement, appeared hopelessly lost; and there was in the background the possibility of death by quarreling. That, in itself, gave their whole bearing a difference from the conduct of a land where a drubbing with fists was the worst evil to be ordinarily expected. They looked with contempt on a blow, the retaliation of stevedores, and we regarded with disgust a concealed weapon. But where we might still, in simpler places, defend what was locally called purity with pistols, Politics, in the United States, was looked on with cynical indifference, where it was not a profession, but in Cuba it was invariably the cause of fiery oratory and high tempers. This had been true of America; even in my own memory, in the Virginia Highlands, shotguns had been out for a difference of principals; but patriotism of that stamp had fallen away before civilization, as it was optimistically termed—the end finally brought about by prohibition. Discussion in general, that rose in such volume on the Cuban night, had little part farther north; my own friends, the men specially, almost never said anything except as a direct statement; we never met to talk. They had a particular, a concrete, interest in living, but no general. Further than that, there was almost no individuality of opinion; the subjects which made good conversation were definitely and arbitrarily settled, closed. To open them, to challenge public opinion, was not to invite argument, but to send men away to the greater safety, the solidity, of the I imagined myself suddenly and completely changed into a Cuban, slight and dark, in white linen, with my hat, a stiff English straw, carefully laid beside me on a ledge of the paving, smoking a cigar of rough shape but excellent tobacco. Not rich, certainly, but securely placed in life! I was, in fancy, the proprietor of a small yet thoroughly responsible oculist's establishment on Neptuno Street. Since I was no longer young, and a member of organized society, with a patron or two from the Prado, I was conservative, but little heated by patriotism; and in favor, rather than not, of annexation to the United States. My private view was that Cuba hadn't been conspicuously worse off under Spain than liberated. The politics of the present, when office-seekers * * * How significant it was, I thought, that, in imagination, I had pictured myself at fifty. I saw the Havana oculist clearly; his name, by all means, was Rogelio, Rogelio Mola, and he had a heavy grey moustache across his lean brown face which gave him an air of gravity that largely masked the humor, the satire, in his quick black eyes: Spanish eyes with no perceptible trace of the soft iris of Africa. It was past one o'clock when his tertulia scattered, and I accompanied him toward his home—walking to get rid of the stiffness of The approved style was white plaster, a story and a half high, with an impressive portico—a portico, attached to a small private residence, that would have done honor to a capitol building. There was but little ground, principally extended in a lawn across the front, and banked, against the house, with the spotted leaves of croton plants, purple climbing Fausto, and Mar-Pacifico flowers deeply crimson. He had, it was plain from his walk, a touch of rheumatism, of sciatica really, and he halted in the Plaza de Dragones to press his thin hand to a leg and curse, by the Sacred Lady of Caridad, the old age overtaking him. That, it seemed to me, would not carry his mind toward his dwelling, his wife grown inordinately It was sad, and, for a moment, there was a debate, a conflict, in his mind: though his age was beyond denial, and his hip troubled him—but only after he spent an evening on the cold If he wasn't careful, the young men of his establishment, over whom he kept a strict parent-like discipline, would laugh at him behind his back. They were inclined to be wild as it was, and he suspected them of going to the carnival balls, the danzons, in the opera house. God knew that he had seen them in the company of no better than the girls from the cigar factories. When he was younger—young—that dangerous company had given a dance on the last Thursday of every month, except when The girls of those days had a—a quality, a manner, lacking in the present. Their hearts had been warmer, they were less mercenary. Rogelio Mola detested mercenary women. Now, as far as he could make out, nothing was possible but rounds of the expensive cafÉs: the fact was, the girls only wanted to be taken to the Dos Hermanos, or the Little Club, where the Americans could see them, and, perhaps.... Then, in about eighteen eighty, there was some fidelity, some honor, some generosity. There was romance—that had disappeared more utterly than anything else: he was more At that time, in such discussions as had passed this evening, he had been on the side of revolution, of expeditions to the Trocha, secret associations; but simply because his blood was hot, his age appropriate to revolt. He had been, without doubt, difficult; his elders had predicted a cell in CabaÑas as an ante-room, a sort of immediate purgatory, to hell. He raised expressive shoulders slightly at the thought of the holy legends: a business for women and priests. The Church, temporarily, had had some rare pasturage; but the fathers were a shade too greedy; they had gobbled up so much that it was necessary to drive them out. Women and priests, priests and women! The latter had suffered no diminution of their privileges; they had too much for which the young men, for all their self-opinion, got nothing or next to nothing in return. Rogelio Mola wondered if the old houses of pleasure were unchanged. He had not thought of them for years, and he was contemptuous of men of his age who did, still, consider them. Not that he was puritanical and condemned all such institutions, though he had a strong suspicion that they had deteriorated. For the youth of his day they had been very largely places of meeting and conspiracy, where traditionally the sentiment supported attacks on authority. Yet a girl from Lima had betrayed MarÍo Turafa, his friend, in hiding, to the Spanish Government. It was said that MarÍo had been deported, perhaps to the very Peru from which came his Delilah, but it was more probable that he had been shot. There had been one whom he, Rogelio, had liked.... Her name came back to him, Ana, and the fact that she sang quite beautifully ... nothing else. The words of a song formed from the melody for a moment audible among his memories:
It was evident from this that she had come from Andalusia. Thirty years ago! He wished her the best of luck. Hadn't they been young together, with at least the innocence of true affection? His thoughts turned guiltily to his wife, to his daughters white like flowers of the Copa de Nieva. The twinge in his leg resembled a hot wire; and resolutely he marshalled his attention forward. How dark, how depressing, certain reaches of Havana were, and he pictured the cemetery ghostly, icy, in the night; women, with their confessional, their faith in the forgiveness of sins, were fortunate. Yet no one must say of him that he was a coward, that, at the last, he had been borne into oblivion on the oil of the priests he had disregarded in life. Deep under his skepticism, however, a low inextinguishable hereditary flame of hope burned, independent of his intelligence. * * * My mind returned once more to Rogelio Mola as I was standing outside an impassive What was before me, in a world where the pure and the impure were inexplicably mixed in one flesh, was inevitable; its ugliness lay A slide opened mysteriously on the blank darkness before me, a bolt was drawn; and immediately I had left the street for a little entresol filled with lamplight, the breath of scented powder, and the notes of a piano played by a girl whose cigarette burned furiously on the scarred ebonized top of the instrument. This led to the patio, larger and more entrancing than any I had before seen; it was paved in blocks of marble, and the white walls, warmly and fully illuminated, made a sharp contrast with the night, the sky and stars, above. There was a tree growing at one side; what it was I didn't know, but it hung large intensely green leaves into the light before climbing to obscurity. A great many people, it seemed to me, were present; and, as I found a seat on an ornamental iron bench, the formality of a civil greeting was scrupulously observed. The company was, to every outer regard, decorous to the point of stiffness. Opposite, two officers of the Spanish navy, in immaculate white with gilt epaulettes, were drinking naranjadas and conversing with two A row of doors, I then saw, filled one side of the patio, the interiors closed by swinging slatted screens; the wall at my back was blank, an exit at the rear, while on the right was the entrance. Scattered about, with the benches and chairs, small tables held a variety of glasses and drinks ... the entire atmosphere was pervaded, characterized, by utter ease. That was, to me, the most notable of the effects of that enclosure—an amazing freedom from superficial obligations, from the burdensome conventions which, so largely a part of existence, had come to be accepted either subconsciously or as a necessary evil. I realized for the first time the inanity of imposed pretences, There were present, of course, all the poses of humanity, and a great many of its conventions; the girls were not hippogriffs, but girls—timid, bold, religious, skeptical, feminine, sentimental, happy and unhappy, hopeful and hopeless. Yet, in contradiction to this, the air offered a complete release from a thousand small irritating pressures. It came, partly, from the sense that here I was outside the order, the legality, the explicit purpose, of the forces organizing the world. I had stepped, as it were, from time, immediacy, to timelessness. The patio into which I was shut might have been on that earth the ancients conceived of as round and flat as a plate. No discovery, no wisdom accumulated by centuries and supreme sacrifices, had any bearing, any importance, in my circumstances now. I was contemporaneous with the lives precariously spent between the ebb and flood of the ice ages. The animals knew as much. But if I The conversation fluctuated about me, the glasses were carried away and brought back refilled; the smoke of cigars and cigarettes floated tranquilly up and was lost above the illumination, and I completely dropped the embarrassment which came from an uncertainty in such minor customs as existed. I was, in fact, extremely comfortable when I understood that I was left entirely to my own desires. These included the offer, in clumsy Spanish, of a general order of drinks; and there was a revival of polite phrases. Not all, by a half, accepted; the others bowed, gravely or cheerfully; and I retired again to my speculations. These were mainly gathered about the regret that the scene before me was practically forbidden to American novels. It had, in reality, no place in the United States, and, therefore, could claim no legitimate page in American My mind reverted to Jurgen, the remarkable narrative of James Cabell's, that had been suppressed; a summary act of disturbing irony. For Mr. Cabell had spent a life, practically, reaching from the imagination of childhood to the performance of maturity, in a mental preoccupation * * * The ladies of pleasure—the merest identifying phrase, since, in the first place, they were practically all at the age of immaturity—were dressed in evening satins, cut generally with an effective simplicity, or the lacy whiteness still better adapted to the young person. In the tropical patio with its canopy of broad green leaves and night, the marble pavement There was, for example, a girl so blanched that I saw she wasn't white at all; her face, even without its drenching of powder, was the color of the rice-paper cigarette she smoked, walking indolently by; and her hair was a blazing mass of undyed red. Her features, her nose, and the pinched blue corners of her eyes, the crinkling tendency of her piled hair—its authenticity unmistakable in a strong vivid sheen—showed the secret that lay back of her exotic appalling splendor. Her progress across the patio was a slender undulation, and her gaze was fixed, her attention lost, in an abstraction to which there was no key. No Here she was artificial—there were long jet ear-rings against her neck—and savage. In her silk stocking, I had every reason to suspect, there was a knife's thin steel leaf; but who could predict the emotions, no—instincts, to which it was servant? Who, trivial with the trivialities of to-day, could foretell, trifling with her, what incentive might drive the steel deep up under his arm? Hers would be a dreadful face to see, in its flaming corona, in the last agonizing wrench of consciousness. Seated, and talking earnestly to a Cuban with worried eyes, was a small round brown girl in candy green, whose feet in childish kid slippers and soft hands bore an expression of flawless innocence. Clasped above an elbow was an enamelled gold band, such as youth no longer wore, with a hinge and fine gold chain securing the lock. She touched it once, absent-mindedly, and I wondered what was its potency of association; when, at a turn of her The screen door to a room swung open, and a large rosy creature; negligent and sleepy, appeared momentarily, gazing with a yawn, a flash of faultless teeth, over the assemblage. She was without a dress, but her hair was intricately up, and a froth of underclothes with knots of canary yellow ribbons and yellow clocked stockings made a surprising foreground for the painfully realistic Crucifixion hanging on the wall within. The cross was Whatever my feelings should have been, there was no doubt that—if for the extreme pictorial quality alone—my interest was highly engaged. My interest and not my indignations! I was not, it must be admitted, commendably outraged, or filled with the impulse to rescue, to save, anyone, however young. I seriously questioned my ability to offer salvation, since I lacked the distinctly sustaining conviction of superiority; I couldn't, offhand, guarantee anything. Suppose, for argument, I took one—the youngest—and haled her away from her deplorable situation: what was open to her, to us? Would she have preferred, stayed for an hour in, any of the tepid conventional Magdalen homes, if there were such establishments in Havana? I had a vision of appearing with her wrapped in a frivolous cloak, before the experienced There were, undoubtedly, better places for girls of fifteen, and they would have been the first to choose them if a choice had been possible—some would have been wives and some opera singers and all, with wishing so free, uncommonly beautiful. I had an idea that a number of them would have gone no further than the last, and, as well they might, left the rest to chance. But their ideas of beauty must have been stupid compared to what they actually possessed. There was a girl with a trace of Chinese in the flattened oval of her countenance, and If I had encountered her twenty years earlier, my experience would have been richer by a glimpse of her involved image-like charm. She was, conceivably, to the superficial West, dull: it was evident that she almost never talked—the girls about were not her friends—but she had qualities, aspects, infinitely preferable to a flow of words. I should have It was, I realized, time for me to leave—I wasn't Rogelio Mola in his youth—and I paid the inconsequential price of the drinks I had ordered. There were adieux, as civil and impersonal as my welcome, and the door to the street was opened to let me, together with a breath of the scented powder, out. The arcade before me sounded for a moment with the smooth falling of a latch, and then all trace of the near presence of so much lightness was obliterated. In memory it seemed slightly unreal, a dangerous fantasy of murmurs and subdued, knife-like passions—the bleached soul of Africa with massed red hair; a frivolity of yellow ribbons against a silver tormented * * * The high empty austerity of my room enveloped me in a happy tranquillity; its effect was exactly that of increasing age, substituting for the violent contrasts of life an impersonal spacious whiteness. I very placidly prepared for the cool fresh linen of my bed, my mind filled with fresh cool thoughts. More definitely than ever before I was accepting and accommodating myself to the passage of time. I was not only reconciled to having left forty forever behind, but I welcomed a release from the earlier struggles of resentment and desire. The joys of youth, or anyhow in my case, had been out of proportion to their penalties: I had failed at school, at the academies of art, and, more conspicuously still, as a citizen. I was even incapable of supporting myself, a The failure as a painter was serious, but I had never had the least interest in those qualities included in the term a good citizen. I knew nothing about the government of the United States, and made no effort to find out; as an abstraction it had reality for me, but as a reality no substance. The priceless right of vote I neglected for whoever it was in the Republican machine that regularly discharged that responsibility for me. All that interested me, that I deeply cared for, was first the disposal of paint on stretched canvas and then the arrangement of words with a probable meaning and possible beauty. An extremely bad period, that, when I tried to write without knowledge or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed to sell a scrap of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so immaterial, No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and body on pleasure. Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in hand. I was suffered to come and go Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited—I was familiar with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go back to what I had found rather than discover the new—perhaps ten streets and a handful of houses, At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not, practically, in consequence, get drunk. The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well was idle—a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a limitation of passion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the influences, the promptings, of * * * It was easy enough to account for Jeremy Taylor by the vague generalization of beauty, and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of that term and my meaning. The words beauty and love, and a dozen others, like old shoes, had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear that they would stay on no foot. I tried to isolate some quality indisputably recognizable as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on Another excursion found nothing but a boy and a girl, any boy and any girl, fired by shy uncomplicated passion.... A mental, a visual, and a natural incentive, each with the same effect, the identical pinching of the heart and thrust to a common hidden center. What had they each alike? Perhaps it was this: that they were the three great facts of existence, the primary earth, the act of creation, and the crowning dignity, the superiority of men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum of their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no There was, however, another phase of beauty still, one peculiarly the property of novelists, which had to do not with life at all, but with death, with vain longing and memories and failure. All the novels which seemed to me of the first rank were constructed from these latter qualities; and while painting and music and lyrical poetry were affirmative, the novel was negative, built, where it was great, from great indignations. Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed to include or satisfy me; for there were many passages not recognizable as great in the broadest sense, both in literature and life, that filled me with supreme pleasure—there were pages of Turgenev spun out of the fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl with a soul in dusk, far more enthralling than, for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have been that there was the perception of a similitude between Turgenev's figure and myself; certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in its fascination, and when I came to write about it there would not be lacking those to say that I had been better occupied with simpler things. Hugh Walpole had warned me of the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion Chinese Chippendale; and I was certain that he would speak to me again in the same tone about idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating drink and marble touched by the gilder's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole—and Henry Mencken's keen friendly discernment—was right; but, damn it, my experience was deficient in material essentials; I was dangerously ignorant of current reality, and I doubted if my style was a suitable instrument for rugged facts. What remained for me, an accomplishment spacious enough for anyone, was the effort to The setting of a woman in a dress by Cheruit; a part of the bravery of fragile soft paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds that would feed a starving village, on fingers that had done no more than wave a fan; the fan itself, on gold and ivory with tasselled silk—the things to which the longing of men, elevated a degree above hard circumstances, This, however wide apart it may seem, was closely bound to my presence in Havana, to my delight and purpose there. It was nothing more than a statement, a development, if not a final vindication, of my instant sense of pleasure and familiarity—a place already alive in my imagination. My special difficulty was the casting of it into a recognizable, adequate medium. There, in the plaiting of cobwebs instead of hemp rope, I particularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary that I should sustain anyone, but only that I should spread the illusion of the buried associations and image of a brain. That, if it were true, I held, would be beauty. Here, at least, I was serious about the correct things, direct rather than conventional; all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion, Novels of indignation or of melancholy, of a longing for the continuity of individual passion confronted with the inevitable—it was that, the perishability of all that was desirable, which gave to small things, a flower in the hair, their importance as symbols. The love story, once the exclusive province of fiction, had disappeared; it was now practically impossible for the slightest talent to fill a book in that manner. The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular heart, but the Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so much from among the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords; but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this, for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on earth—what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine, and there was no * * * Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished to see now remained—the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box; for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted—I had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent justification—but I could believe it possible if there was any violent discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame. A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past It was Africa and something else—notes taken from the Moors, splitting quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been the agonized voice of the first CubeÑos; with an unspeakable distortion, a crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There was no pause, no beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting discord—the savage naked utterance At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale, their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored breasts and white kid gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered. The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic design—a scene that would have served equally AÏda or La Favorita: it towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-classic Havana, into the theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers. They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster, to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a leaden cast. The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance of a sustained gravity: it was danced slowly, in very small space, following the music with arbitrary reverses, and pausing. There might have been, to the superficial view, a restraint almost approaching dignity had the dancers been other. The men, without exception, wore their stiff straw hats and smoked cigars through every evolution; and the dresses, the dressing, of the women were fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had copied the color and petals of a sunflower. As she revolved, her skirt flared out from legs like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow flapped across her grotesque ebony countenance. The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the music played continuously and alternately by two orchestras occupying a box on either side of the stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly, a couple lost every restraint, and their maddened spinning and furious hips tore the illusion to shreds. And slowly I began to be conscious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as palpable Personally, since I had no hopes to save or plans to protect, I hadn't the desire, like Sampson, to pull down the pillars of the roof on their debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably; the more because I saw, scattered among the crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental beauty—a creamy magnificence in creamy satin with a silver band on her forehead; a yellow creature with oblique eyes in twenty white flounces and a natural garland of purple flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by an One o'clock passed, then two and three, but there was no abatement in the danzon. A middle-aged man, with an abstracted air, danced without stopping for an hour and fifty minutes. His partner, flushing through her dark skin, was expensively habited: her fingers and throat glittered coldly with diamonds and her hat was swept with long dipping plumes. She had a malignant mouth and eyes a thick muddy brown, and it was clear that she hated the man in whose arms she was turning. I wondered about her hatred and the patience, the indifference, of the other: how revolting she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly in the morning. He, probably, would then be standing at a high desk, counting dollars with integrity or adding columns of figures, precise and respectable in an alpaca coat. An older man still was dancing by himself, intent on the intricate stepping of his own feet. His agility I imagined a fetish, a large god, on the stage, drooping over his swollen belly, with a hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His legs were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting smeared trunk of hideous service. Around him were the seated rows of worshippers, on either hand was his jangling praise; and before him revolved the dancers in his rite. The music throbbed in my brain like a madness that would have dragged me down to the floor. I speculated fleetly over such a surrender, the drop, through countless ages, of that possible descent. * * * It was, however, only just to add that the idol of Guinea suffered unduly from his surroundings and the age in which he was exposed; in his place, his time, he had been neither a monster nor unnatural, but nothing The spectacle had none of the comfortable features of a mere exhibition; for the revulsion came from a spiritual shudder in the beings of the onlookers; while the other injured individuals saw that, as clothes, the crude partial imitation of a rooster was insufficient. They, the latter, commendably hurried into trousers Nothing more unfortunate could well be imagined; for, in the retributive manner I had already mentioned, the Africa buried in the West, so long forgotten, took life again, and the danger to everyone had been acute through a long period of Havana's years. We, in temperate zones, in weathers that had no need of the protection of a special dark pigment, had been lucky; but we were trying our luck very severely by subjecting it to the old potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon was, actually, in a way beyond legislation, a masked ball in black and white, where the unmasking was involuntary and fateful. One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a prostitute. Well—I had seen her, in virginal white muslin, with the weight of her head, its oval flattened by the hand of China, her heavy hair, inclined on its slender neck: a figure, in There was a temptation, to be avoided, to tell it in the first person; a version that had come to be disliked almost as universally as a set of letters. Some celebrated stories had been written that way—Youth—but I felt that it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy. While the creation of character was no longer the tyrant it had been, a certain air of veracity was most desirable, and the limited scope of a I had become, subconsciously, interested in a girl pausing on the floor, and, in response to my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy smile. I gazed with instant celerity and fixedness at the ceiling, then at the upper boxes opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like a trail of powder, of explosive rice powder. An air of sadness rested on her, on, principally, a superiority anyone could see. Her fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand. A maid, I told myself, reflecting the aristocracy of the closets of delicate clothes in her charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles of her mistress. She was another phase of what had been going on at such length through my mind—a different catastrophe, since she was denied the reward of the virtues in either of the races that had made her. In Boston she would have become a bluestocking, a poet singing in minor cadence to traditional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in Cuba, tormented by the strains of the danzon: There, her flax burning in resentment and despair, she might be extinguished in the tide restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets of the ÑaÑigos: in the black cabildo of that society, provision was made for a woman. * * * It was significant that the first organization of ÑaÑiguismo in Cuba was purely African, for the hatred of its members, CarabalÍes, for the white race made the admission of even mulattos impossible. This society—tierra or juego—was formed during the administration of General TacÓn, in the village of Regla, and called ApapÁ EfÍ. It was, against the protests of its originators at sharing the secret with too many, enlarged, and spread through the outskirts of Havana. There the mulattos greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they formed a society of their own, its oath sworn in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio EfÓ MacararÁ. They insisted on a common brotherhood and their right of entering the What had started upon the African river Oldan as a tribal religion took on, in Havana, a debased version of Rome, and the veneration of Santa Barbara was added to the supreme worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely parallel to the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a sacred drum. And what, equally, in the CarabalÍe BricamÓ was DibÓ, God, became in Cuba an organization of criminals and finally, when its more obvious aspects were stamped out, a corrupt political influence. There, in the clearest possible manner, was traced the eventual effect of so much heralded superiority, There could be no doubt, though, of the fact that, in any pretence of civilization, the ÑaÑigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable that they should have degenerated into a savage menace, not only in overt acts, which were not lacking, but in practices of mental and emotional horror. Their ceremony, with its strange vocables and distortions of meaning; the obscene words that were but symbols for obscenities beyond imagination; the character of their dance, which gave them the name arrastrados, men who dragged themselves, reptilian, on the ground—all combined in a poison like a gas sweeping from the morass of the past. It held, beneath its refuge and defiance of society, the appeal of a portentous secret, bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism, of orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger still, delirious barbarity. Its legend was not different from the others which formed the primitive bases of subsequent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an A diablito had in charge the offices of the catechism—Come with me; where did you leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter where BongÓ is and cry with your brother! Look at your brother because they want to choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the goat, which, in a memorial of Guinea, was eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba, made from sugar-cane rum and bitter broom. A strange procession followed, led by the InsuÉ, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue, and the diablito skipping backward. The sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers, was carried, and later the remains of the feast were thrown into a cemetery. The effort to end ÑaÑiguismo in Havana began in eighteen hundred and seventy-five, when its gatherings were forbidden; but, deeply traditional, it flourished in hidden It was, in reality, Africa in Havana, brought against its wish and to its tragic misfortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but among a common genus, the mysteries of religion, it grew into an aberration of all that gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance, for me, lay in its amazing language, an idiom, specifically, composed of the CarabalÍe BricamÓ and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions, equally incapable of exact images The terms of the acts of worship were particularly heavy, sultry, and held in their sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes as black as the night from which they The ÑaÑigos had been driven from the streets through which, at first, on King's Day, Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year, to parade with native costumes and instruments—atables and marugas and ecous, a flattened bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambÁs were destroyed and hysteria cooled; but I wondered about both the secretiveness and the persistence of the primitive spirit and the delicate melancholy that veiled the girl so faintly tinged with carabalÍe, resting below my box through the rasping strains of the danzon. Had her gain been greater than the loss, * * * A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the presence of the sea, was evident in the Parque Central when I walked the short distance, not more than a few steps, from the opera house to the Inglaterra, my head filled with the resonant bos and bongos of ÑaÑiguismo. Havana, for a moment, seemed like a cemetery—its own marble cemetery of Colon—where a black spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked and would not be still. I speculated about that same spirit in another connection—in its influence on painting and music, on Western literature. It had affected dancing profoundly, making it, in the United States, almost wholly its own; and the Spanish, with whom, in the richness of a tradition and perfect expression, no others could compete, owed a great debt to Africa. Our music, too, it had influenced to such a degree that it was Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he had enclosed the whole sentiment of an age within his medium, was often but a paraphrase of a darker melody. Foster, like Havana, was Victorian, a period that dreamed of marble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and yet, curiously, charged for an unsympathetic world with significant beauty. This negro contribution was in a melancholy and minor key, the invariable tone of all primitive song; in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly approaching music, there was an analogous coloring between the race and its shadowed measures. The reminiscent emotions that, with us, were mainly personal, in the negro were tribal; he had not been individualized, brought to a separate consciousness; and, in consequence, his song, practically lacking in intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings. Growing shrill with passion and sinking to the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more cheerful in his new imposed setting; and it was possible that his music had gained an added depth, at any rate for our perception, from the weight of banishment and shackles. He had not turned with any success to creative accomplishment that needed mental independence and courage, or to forms, like the novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the novel, with all its trumpeted young freedom, had never, with even relative truth, expressed the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of appalling splendor, had, in the United States, been turned over to the comic spirit and short Certainly nothing more difficult could be well attempted; my knowledge, in Havana and through the ÑaÑigos, had been perceptibly enlarged, and I was not unfamiliar with the state in which, I decided, the story must be laid—not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach of Louisiana, cut by tideless bayous and saturated with the fever of cane and cypress brakes. A bitter novel like the broom herb put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba, pages from which it would be hard to exclude a fury of hopelessness! And what an angry disturbed A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of black pines beyond a deep ruined field—but perhaps this was South Carolina—infinitesimal ragged patches of corn, a sandy trail lost abruptly in the close forest, and half-naked portentous shapes. There would be a town back in the country with a desolate red square of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in hanging moss, a place at once old and raw, and ugly with vindictive ignorance.... The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the Moors. Havana made some denial In my room the negro, with the danzon, faded from my mind; and I only paused to speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference, where a choice existed, for the Protestant religions instead of Roman Catholicism. I should have thought that the color, the imagery and incense, of the Catholic Church would be irresistible. Yet there were, in the United States, thousands of colored Methodists and Baptists for one adherent of Rome. It might be that the hymns of Methodism, sufficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure, God knew, were the reason—the character of the hymns and congregational singing, the loud pictorial shouts. The later religion of the negroes, in addition to what I had already That was lost now, I understood, a vanished custom, killed by self-consciousness; but it would have been a fine thing to hear approaching and receding through the dusk, a stirring resinous volume or a mere vibrant echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying whisper, would be the solving of the whole tragic difficulty—disease and winter and relentless natural laws. The latter moved with great deliberation through unlimited centuries, but the impatience of men demanded instant release from trouble. They wanted black black and white white, with no transition, no blurring of the edges; this was their dream, but they constantly defeated it, betrayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that * * * Certainly I had no marked love of humanity the following morning, caught with a small mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where I was waiting to board the steamer for Key West. I was between the water and a wooden partition, the heat was savage, and a number of youthful marines, returning home from CamagÜey, were indulging in a characteristic humor—the dealing of unsuspected blows, of jarring force, among themselves. They shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to shoulder, disregarding entirely the indirect results of their vigor, and exchanged threats of fulminating violence. They were not more annoying than the others, but only more evident; and, as the advertised time of departure was past by an hour, and then a second hour, and the sun found its way into our walled space, even the marines subsided. Every trace of dignity, in that heat, ran away from the people about me. While, on the whole, they were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate of others' discomforts, wondering, with weary smiles, when the boat would be off, I The surrounding insistent good nature developed in flashes of exchanged homely wit, varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of them both, I couldn't tell which I resented more. The present position of the waiting people, the long exposure to the intolerable sun, was the result of their patience; of that and their personal inefficiency reflected in their official management. All the bad governments in the world, the dishonesty and universal The CubeÑos, the original inhabitants of Cuba, were parcelled in the bondage of encomiendas, exterminated by the passion of the Spanish Crown for gold; when they had been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers for labor in the mines and planting; beneath every movement, instigated by hope or supported by returns, riches were the incentive and power. Men had never, within history and their secret hearts, cared for anything else: an ineradicable desire. There was a facile public gabble about the qualities of the spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of money, both as an abstraction and what conspicuously it brought, was what the people worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or This was not, necessarily, an ignoble or negligible pursuit, but it was corrupted by an attending hypocrisy which forced a fervent denial, the pretense of an utterly different purpose, to be worn like a cloak. It was possible that, admitted, the sovereignty of gold would be the most beneficial rule applicable to man. It was preËminently the symbol, the signature, of power; with the late sugar crops it had revolutionized Cuba. Havana was for the moment, in a very strong sense, the capital of the world, and the visible mark of that was the stream of automobiles on the Prado and MalecÓn; individually, money was counted by the million—the recognition, the desired reward, of the fact that Cuba controlled a necessity of life. The instinct to profit by such turns of fortune was deeper than any charitable impulse; there was a tendency to speculate in wheat more general than the impulse to give loaves to the starving. There was a sudden surge toward the gang plank of the City of Miami, and I was borne onto the steamer, away from Havana, in an exasperated and bitter spirit. I had entered the harbor happily, saturated by its beauty, but I was leaving blind to the marble walls on the blue water. However, it was cooler on an upper deck; and with my back uncompromisingly turned on humanity, on my fellow passengers over a sea like a tranquil illusion of respite between stubborn realities, I picked out from the panorama of the city across the harbor, diminishing in its narrow entrance, familiar buildings and marks. Havana vanished, I thought, far more rapidly than it had come into view; soon nothing of Cuba could be seen but the dark green hills and thinly printed silhouettes of mountains. I had it, though, in my memory; Havana was now woven into the fibre of my being. The Inglaterra Hotel took its place with all the remembered spots where I had lived: the bare pine-sealed room in the Virginia mountains, the tall narrow house in Geneva, But what, more than those, I should miss was the atmosphere of Havana itself, the gay urbanity and festive lightness of tone. It had almost wholly escaped the modern passion for reform changing America, pretty much all the western world, into a desert of precept and correction; in many senses Havana was an oasis in an aridity spreading day by day. Any improvement wouldn't occur during my life—the habit of lies and self-delusion had become a fundamental part of society—and all I could hope for was the discovery of rare individuals and cities in which existence was more than a penalty for having been born. I wanted them as a relaxation, as short escapes from a tyranny from which, really, I was powerless to turn: I didn't want to live in Havana, nor to be surrounded by exceptional people; for they were both enemies of what, above everything, I wanted to do—to write into paper and ink some permanence of beauty. For that, Chester * * * When I turned, looking back, Cuba had They, different from the frugal Dutch, making, with no less daring, the Eastern Passage in the interest of associated merchants and of commonwealths, sailed, in a more picturesque phrase, for their Catholic Majesties and for Spain. The Dutch names, Bonteke Havana was, perhaps, a Saragossa of souls, with the acts and thoughts of its early vivid years, of CareÑas, forever held in the atmosphere, audible in the restless volume of sound that was never still. Its history had flashed through my mind with the turn of a wheel, its duration seeming no more than the opening and shutting of a hand; but now I had an impression not of the transient, not of walls and names and voices, but of qualities impersonal and permanent, of something which, while individual men died, resisted death. It had existence, that was, as long as humanity drew a continuous thread of memory through time. Havana had, outwardly, changed from its first huddle of bohios and fortified tower; but the There was never a more complex spirit than Havana's, no stranger mingling of chance and climate and race had ever occurred; but, remarkably, a unity of effect had been the result, such a singleness as that possessed by an opera, in which, above the orchestra and the settings and the voices, there was perceptible a transcending emotion created from an artificial and illogical means. For while Havana had a record dignified in its sweep, it could never This, however was not a denial of the reality of the blood it shed, nor of the sharpness and danger of its emotions; it had been a profusely bloody city with tropical passions often reaching ideals of sacrifice. It had, too, suffered the iron of oppression, spoken its word for liberty, the state which, never to be realized, by its bare conception elevated life. Now, in addition, it was a great port ... and yet, though it might have been the fault of my limitations, I continued to see Havana as more dramatic than essential; I heard persistently the overture with the themes of Seville, the crying native airs, the drums of Guinea played with the fingers. The shining crooked bay was filled by the plate ships of Mexico and Peru, with their high-decked sterns and It was impossible to determine what I had seen of Havana and what was merely my reflected self; even hard to decide if I had seen Havana objectively at all, since my attitude toward it had been so purely personal. My memory was composed of what I'd experienced and the reflections, the thoughts, that had given birth to; and, of them, the latter were the more real, solider than the Prado, more tangible than the dining-room of the Inglaterra. Without them Havana would have been meaningless, sterile, simply a museum about which nothing could be written but a catalogue. It was its special charm to be charged with sensations rather than facts; a place where facts—not, of a kind, absent—could be safely ignored. Further than that, ignoring them was, for any measure of pleasure, absolutely needful: the pedantic spirit in Havana was fatal. What, almost entirely, I had been told to view, expected to enjoy, I had avoided; yet not I was, for a moment, depressed at the definite leaving behind of Havana—for the tranquil passage had seemed only an extension of its spirit—and by the imminent reshouldering of my burden of responsibility. I had never wanted that, but, without choice, it had been abruptly thrust on me—a responsibility, impossible image of the book's back cover
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