Front matter (continued 2)

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 to save herself, she must go the popular way to obliteration. So much else had gone! But later, at the Hotel de Luz, untouched yet by the hand of imported cupidity, my happiness in Havana returned.

* * *

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 of, perhaps, ninety degrees, raised immense corridors paved in black and white marble blocks, down the long perspective of which moving figures were reduced to furtive mannikins and voices were lost in an upper murmur.

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: a very important inquiry, for it had to do with the secret, the unintelligible heart, of my writing. There was, obviously, in the Hotel de Luz nothing intrinsically terrifying, strange. My attitude toward it would be dismissed as absurd by the Canary Islanders. But the effect it produced on me was tangible, ponderable; it tyrannized over my imagination and drove it into corridors of thought as sombre as that in reality before me. I had seen the Piranesi engravings when I was very young and painfully susceptible to mental darkness and fears; and they had undoubtedly left their indelible mark ... now brought out by the black and white marble squares diminishing with the walls in parallel lines.

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 neither concrete nor subjective; yet, woven of these double threads, it was absolute. The individuality of places and hours absorbed me; there was no word in English to express my meaning—the perception of the inanimate moods of place. It belonged, rather than to the novel, to the painter, and possibly occupied too great a space in my pages. Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than the people in or out of them.

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 signally, both profoundly and superficially—it was impossible to picture the faith of John Fox under the frescoes of La Merced Church, a Methodist exuberance in St. Michael's at Richmond; the Roman ritual was as much a thing of its silver altars as the Episcopal Church in Virginia depended on historic communion services and austere box pews.

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 condemned to the loss of warm life.

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 called A Preface of Imperishable Trifles; but the realization that I had begun in that manner—a suspicious circumstance in a novel,—where no shadow of an explanation, a justification, was permissible, led me to put it away. It was the serious defect of the novel that it commonly resembled the mechanism of an ingenious lock in which the key turned smoothly for the flinging open, at the appropriate moment, of a door upon a tableau of justice. It lacked almost entirely the fatalities of sheer chance, of inconsiderable accidents, which gave life its characteristic insecurity.

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 to explain, bore upon me more deeply than my father; and, with that in view, it was perhaps as well that the story had remained unwritten.

* * *

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 sadness. That was all I wanted from her, the most indeed, she could give: apart from the balcony, hurrying along the street with the black lace drawn closely about her head, she would have been meaningless. The hour in which I saw her, too, the swiftly fading radiance, had its inevitable part in the effect she produced. I had, I realized, no wish to restore her to either youth or happiness, I didn't want to improve her, or the case of Spain, in any way; she was perfect for my purpose, so eminently selfish, as she was. In begging, in imagination, the women of Havana to remain on their balconies, I hadn't given a thought to their welfare or desires.

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 would be put off until I had returned to the land of the feminine free; I didn't want to be present when the balconies were definitely deserted for the publicity of the Sevilla. I should regret their loss heavily, those points of vantage gracefully ranged across the brilliant façades of Havana. For there was no other city where balconies were so universal, so varied, and so seductive. I recalled a balcony high over the Rond Point de Plain-palais, in Geneva, where, on the left, could be seen the blue line of the Jura and on the right, through the mounting Rue de Carouge, the abrupt green cliff of the Salve. Curiously, there were a great many balconies in Geneva giving on many beautiful prospects—the Promenade des Bastions and La Treille, the Cité and bridged water; but they were no more than pleasant, they had no deep significance whatever. The balconies of Charleston were rather galleries turned privately on gardens and not upon the streets; while those over the banquettes of New Orleans, of the vieux carré, had long ago been emptied of their flowered muslins.

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 whirling motor cars and the pedestrians in the rows of India laurels. Here the balconies through the early and late evening were crowded; the chatter, the gesticulations and smiles, evident on the street. The clothes, however, were no longer Spanish in characteristic detail, but Parisian; while the essential atmosphere, the color, of the balconies remained. In carnival—I had just missed it—they were hung with serpentine and exchanged bombardments of roses and compliments with the street; but now their fastness, except to the flutter of a hand, was absolute.

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 French nor Spanish, but American. Some of them, I knew, had been at school in New York—probably Miss Spence's, where balconies were not cultivated—and I wondered what they thought about the Havana to which they had returned. Well, if the Cuban men, the fathers and suitors and husbands, preferred to keep the historic architecture of their society, of their climate, a convent of some Sacred Heart would be wiser than a celebrated American finishing school.

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 struggle, must conquer—the heredity of Cuba would be more powerful than an isolated feminine need. The other women, the elders, who surrounded her, would be as relentless as any husband, and in the end she'd become fat and listless.

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 imagine their use—for there was not only nothing to see, but no one to be seen by. The houses of Havana, admirable in the closeness of the city, possible in a bougainvillia-smothered suburb, were depressingly inappropriate to any contact with the country. They were lost, detached or strayed away from their fellows; for the happy plan of the country house was that of exposure to all the favorable winds that blew, to verandas and open halls rather than balconies and patios: it was merged into vistas and not relentlessly and jealously shut on every face.

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, were invariably empty, their purpose, it was plain, mistrusted.

* * *

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 imagine them dimly lighted and flooded with perfume, with the scent of magnolias and the whisper of the fountains.

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 vibration of resinous stopped strings, was the perfect accompaniment to that color visible and invisible. Invisible! Always that, first and most potent. The perpetuity of atmosphere through transmitted feeling was far more absorbing than the other chimera, of incorruption. It was tradition, more than moonlight, that steeped the patios with kindled obscure romantic longings. Within their formal squares they held the spirit of a great history and of two great races, two continents. They, the patios, were the East in the West, the Moroscos on the Peninsula.

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 of the Conde de Ricla, in the seventeen sixties when the British conquests under Albemarle were returned to the island. That was a period of building and prosperity, the fortifications of San Carlos and Atares were established, Morro and the Cabañas refashioned, and the streets and houses of Havana named and numbered. The decline of Spain, a long imperceptible crumbling, had already begun, but its effect was not visible in Cuba; there still was a Castilian arrogance burned more brown, more vivid, by the Caribbean.

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 trade, too, were repaying their chains to the last link of misery. But these counter influences were not perceptible yet in the patios, just as the French Revolution had still to scatter the polite pastorals only to survive in the canvases of Boucher and Watteau.

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 opera bouffe ... a danger constantly present in my thoughts. As it was, I should be accused again of avoiding the actual and the difficult for an easy unreality; but there was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid back in point of time—no one had charged me with an historical novel.

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 brilliantly blended as a rainbow. At first I had been entranced by the sudden colorful display, it had seemed to be in one marvellously high key; but now I recognized that it was composed of the entire scale, and that there were notes profoundly dark. I should have known that, for I had been, when I was much younger, a painter, and I had learned that surfaces which seemed to be in one tone were made up of a hundred. The city, of course, was an accumulation of the men who had made it, the women who had lived there; and it was possible that Havana had as intense and varied a foundation as any place that had existed.

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 of the Aztecs and Peru, incalculably richer, and the fatal dream of eternal youth in Florida, had robbed it of royal interest, of men, food, and ships. It had settled back, lost to most concern beyond a perfunctory colonial administration, into a region of agriculture, affected only indirectly by, and affecting not at all, the universal upheaval elsewhere. Within Havana itself, then, moulded by the burning sun, the cooling night winds, and the severing water, a peculiarly essential human development had taken place. And its history was, for this reason, elusive, most difficult to grasp; hopelessly concealed from a mere examination of bastions.

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 city, its paseos and plazas and buildings, and still influenced the social life. This, I finally decided, came from the fact that the architectural spirit which dominated Havana was of the period before Eastlake; or at least I was not familiar with any structures erected in such a style, so lavishly marble, since then.

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, except for the charming and illogical innovation of turbans; and they went about in sandals and gowns falling straight from their looped breasts. Such a figure, with her head bound in vermilion, must have been enticing in the great shaded bare rooms. There must have been, too, an extraordinary assemblage of negro pages and majordomos in ruby silks and canary and velvet.

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 books, had been steeped in an ugliness from which the world had not recovered. Indeed, while it was now fashionable to deride them, the present was, in some ways, perceptibly worse: Literature was, perhaps, bolder in scope, but it showed hardly more than a surprise at the sound of its comparative liberty of speech. The art of painting had burst into frantic fragments that might or might not later be assembled into meaning; the architecture had degenerated into nothing more than skilful or stupid adaptation.

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 Havana; and Havana had missed little enough. Its monuments and statues, where they were complacently innocent of art, had been brought into harmony of tone by the atmosphere vivid like the flambeau trees, the inconceivable blueness of its sea. The colors of the houses, glaringly or palely inappropriate, were melted and bound into inevitable rightness. Even the cemetery, frosted with tombs like a monstrous iced cake, its shafts that might have been the crystallized stalagmites of the caves of death, resembled nothing more disturbing than the lacy pantalets of the time it celebrated. It was the final accomplishment of mid-Victorian horror, with its pit of mouldering bones and solemn ritualistic nonsense; yet the thought of the ponderous gold and black catafalques rolling in procession between the horizontal white slabs, of the winking candles—all the ghastly appendages of religious undertaking—and the clergy in purple and fine cambric, with amethyst rings on their fat or their thin fingers, gave it the feeling of a remote mummery.

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 sensations were not reducible to the simplest demand. A woman passed with a copy of an ultra popular novel, and this recalled the long struggle of my early books for the smallest recognition. If that dark frame of mind had fastened on me in the north, it would have burdened me for a day; but in Havana, with the Marquis de Riscal and a Por Larrañaga, I envied no mediocre novelist her stereotyped laurels. It was impossible to get anywhere a better wine or a cigar that changed more soothingly from the brown of fact to blue fancy.

* * *

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 exception of a few hotels and clubs it was not procurable. There was a merchant on the Zulueta with a large assortment of Cuban cigarettes, made in every conceivable shape and paper, hebra and arroz and pectoral. They had tips of gilt or silver paper, cork, straw, and colored silks, and were packed in enticing ways and odd numbers. But, after trying their apparent variety, they all seemed alike, as coarse and black in flavor as their tobacco.

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 linens, and the brown cigarette casting a pungent line of smoke from his long sensitive fingers, he was the image of a Spanish colonial gentleman.

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; an act, in women, condemned from the associations in men's minds, synonymous with that gaiety they so painstakingly kept out of their homes. Yet, in spite of them, women smoking had become a commonplace in the United States. In Havana men were still paramount ... and Victorian. On the Obispo cigarette-cases from Toledo, of steel inlaid with gold, were for sale; but I'd had experience with Toledo work—the steel rusted. For years I'd bought cigarette cases and holders before I finally learned that the former were a nuisance and that the latter destroyed the flavor of tobacco. I had owned cases in metal and leather and silk, patented and plain, and one by one they were mislaid and given away. I had smoked with holders of ivory and jet and tortoise shell, wood and amber and quills, and they, too, had disappeared. All that could be said for them was that they looked well and saved the fingers from nicotine stains.

The Turkish cigarettes in Havana were unremarkable, yet, for the Cuban youth, the sign of worldliness. They disdained the local brands, but even Cuba was powerless to depreciate her cigars, the best of all countries and all times. Here was an accomplishment, a possession, of unique importance and excellence, for tobacco belonged to the irreducible number of necessities. I had survived prohibition, with the assistance of a forethought unhappily limited in execution; but if the absurdity of my country abolished tobacco, I should be forced to move to England; that would be too much. I could imagine, in this case, what comments would appear in the press, reminding the virtuous and patriotic that my books had always been chargeable with immorality and a blindness to the splendor of our national ideals.

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 was, in many ways, a very deleterious habit; but life itself was a bad habit condemned to the worst of ends. I was, as well, very apt to have little in common with men who didn't smoke, or, I should say, with men who had never smoked. They were, with practically no exceptions, precisians, and ate, lived, for their health rather than for the tang of delicate sauces and sensations. And a long while ago a wise and charming woman had lamented to me the fact that all the generosity and attractiveness she met in men belonged to what were colloquially called drunks.... Her feeling was the same as mine.

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 hurt someone else failed to excite me—why should I bother with him when I wasn't concerned about myself! There was too much officious paternalism in the air, too many admonitions and not enough lightness of heart—of tobacco heart if necessary.

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 Daiquiri cocktail, I proposed to enjoy it at the expense of a problematic month or year more of life always open to the little accidents of pneumonia or spoiled milk or motors.

* * *

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 in a smooth and debased universal coin.

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 was bad, but a revista—I could think of nothing else to call it—at the Marti was, because it was so much better, worse. There I had an ordinary palco, enclosed by a railing from the promenade and elevated above the body of an audience composed of every possible shade from fairest noon to unrelieved midnight. The evening was divided into two performances, for the second of which, Arco-Iris, a largely increased price was demanded. This was, again, Vienna and Broadway, but with, in addition, an elaboration of color and lighting ultra-modern in intent.

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 mass. The display, the extravagant settings and costumes, of Arco-Iris, were, throughout, mechanical; the coryphées were painfully aware of their dazzlements; and an Andalusian number, looked forward to with weary eagerness, had been deprived of every rude and vigorous suggestion of its origin.

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. To-morrow I should hear the Salvation Army bawling in Obispo Street. In a state of indifference I went to Carmelo, a dancing pavilion with an American cabaret, and drifted to the table where the singing and dancing profession were having their inevitable sandwiches and beer. A metallic young person with brass hair, a tin voice, and a leaden mind, conversed with me in the special social accent of her kind, ready in advance with a withering retort for any licentious proposals. Beside her sat a Mexican with an easy courtesy and an enigmatic past. He was, I gathered, the son of an official who, in one of the exterminating changes of government, had escaped over a wall in his pearl studs and dinner coat but little else.

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 sake of Christ. Her companion immediately returned to his engagement, and I watched the Americans more or less proficient in that dance the name of which had been borrowed from a woman's undergarment. It had begun as a chemise, but what it would end in was problematic.

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 companies. The presidents, the managers and brokers, were invariably accompanied by their wives, who, for the most part, endeavored to re-create the illusions and fervors of earlier days; but heaven knew from where came the women for whom the representatives of Yankee merchandise were responsible.

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—the granite women on the wall of the Gallego Club.

* * *

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 which I secured with a sense of treasure—they were in the shop of a woman who sold embroidered linen from Madeira and the Canary Islands, lying haphazard in the lid of a paste-board box. The patio opened directly from the front room, the store, an informal assemblage of dull white folded cloths and frothy underclothes, and outside a very large family indeed was eating the noon breakfast while a pinkly naked pointer dog lay on the cool tiles with his feet extended stiffly upward.

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 as a lemon—one pair of open circles an inch in diameter, with seed pearls; the other the shape of small delicate leaves, with pearls and topazes.

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, and which had given me, perhaps, as great pleasure as anything I had seen on the stage. But not so much for the singing—it had been the dancer, Doloretes, who captivated me, a woman as brilliant as the orange-red shawl draped before me over a chair, and suddenly, tragically, dead in New York.

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 their heavy folds when a third mantone was produced burning with all the gorgeous and violent colors imaginable.

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 Orient and Spain, brutal in its superbness and as exasperating, as audible, as castanets. However I might act, hesitate, visibly, I knew that I'd buy it—in an instant it had become as imperative to me as a consuming vice. It belonged, rightfully, to the mistress of a Zuluoga or of a Portuguese king, to someone for whom money was not even an incident; I couldn't afford it even if I wove it into a story with a trace, a glimmer, of its splendor; but the next day the shawl was in my room.

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. Yes, my young figure and his fellows would go nightly to see her dance.

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 told myself, a wide margin of chance; but, in writing, uncomfortable necessities often turned up in the course of narrative—I could leave them out, and damn myself, or keep them and, maybe, damn the story in the sense of its making possible my writing at all. Not that Mr. Lorimer personally had any regard for emasculated chapters, but he was addressed primarily to another integrity than mine; our purposes were not invariably coincident. A fact which he, with his energetic candor scoring pretentiousness, had made clear in his generous recognition of where our paths met.

* * *

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 I chose without reference to any ulterior purpose; and when, on a Sunday morning with the heat tempered by a breeze lingering from the night, I started for the cock-fighting at the suburb of Jesus del Monte, I was completely at ease. I had decided in favor of the cock-pit both because it was essentially Cuban and because I had always detested chickens, particularly roosters.

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 ringing crowing filled the air. Beyond the arched entrance there was an area of pavement with tables and a limited café service; and, seated near, was a grave individual with a shovel beard and a thoroughly irritated rooster upside down in his lap. He was cementing a natural spur over one that had been injured, and drinking, now and again, from a cup of coffee at his hand. Beyond was the pit, like, as much as anything, a tall circular corn-crib, painted white, with a cupola. There was place for about three hundred, with box-like seats whose low hinged doors opened directly on the sawdust of the arena, more casual chairs, and—as at the pelota—space for standing on the middle tiers. There was a box above the entrance, and another opposite, and this an enormous woman in white embroidery and carpet slippers, and I occupied.

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 ring with an animated bag; and, noting the elaborate polished brass scales that hung from the center of the roof, I gathered that the birds were to be weighed. The second was produced, tightly bagged, by a highly respectable-appearing man of unimpeachable whiteness and side whiskers, and the roosters were left to dangle from the yard. It was to be a battle al peso, by weight and equal spurs; the first condition satisfied, the spurs were measured, by a graduated set of pewter tallies; and the uproar was released.

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 they hit the sawdust there was a clash as of metal. The methods of their backers were different—the negro, in one of the local coat-like shirts with a multiplicity of useless pockets and plaits, squatted on his heels, impassive, fateful, and African; but the man with the orthodox side-whiskers became at once the victim of a hoarse whispering excitement. As the other's bird reeled drunkenly about—they were badly matched and the main no affair at all—his pallid face flushed and he suggested new atrocities to his champion.

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, when the defeated bird sank in a spoiled dead knot, he picked his up and, with expressions of endearment, sucked clear its angry eyes. The preliminaries were again gone through with, and two large handsome roosters were confronted by each other. As the surging clamor beat about them I saw that one was undecided in his opinion of what promised. He flapped his wings doubtfully; and then, as the other made a short rush forward, he turned and ran as fast as his shorn legs could carry him. This, considering the contracted round space of his course, was very fast indeed; the second, pursuing him with the utmost energy, was unable to get closer than a fleet dab at the stripped tail. It was a flight not without a desperate humor; but this, it was clear, was appreciated by no one besides me.

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, went around and around the pit with an unflagging speed that should have commanded an independent admiration for itself. Occasionally the pursuer, in a feat of intelligence, cut directly across the sawdust, and a collision threatened ... but it never quite arrived. I lost interest in the hurled curses, the hats twisted in excesses of rage, in everything but the duration of the running rooster. It was remarkable; he had settled down to putting all he had of strength and reserve into his single purpose.

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, he was incontinently seized and both roosters were carried, panting and bald-eyed, to a subsidiary ring beyond, not half the size of the principal pit, where running, or any discretion, was an impossibility.

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 both spurs through the head before him. It had occupied something more than five but less than ten seconds. Too bad, a deferential voice murmured in my ear, that I hadn't taken advantage of such an excellent opportunity to get the better of all the too-wise ones. With but eleven dollars and some silver he had been cramped.... My interest in cock-fighting faded before an annoyance that drove me away from the Puente de Agua Dulce, calculating how much, at the odds I missed, I should have gained.

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 gold and treasury paper. But with that exception, and for some small amounts, I was unlucky. The occasion just past was an illustration—I was never really disastrously overtaken, but equally I never reached sensational heights.

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 academy, with the hope of seeing the professional games and their audiences built up on the four sides of the tables, common to the Continent; but if there were any in Havana, they, too, eluded me. I hoped to see bearded champions embrace each other after chalking their cues and then drive the ivory balls in red and white angles across the deep green or nurse them about the intersections of the balk lines. It was very different in America, where the billiard parlors were a part of hotel life—great rooms with the level green of the tables fogged in smoke through which the lights resembled the diminished moons of Saturn; the audience, entirely masculine, seated on the high chairs about the walls.

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. Strange youth and unpredictable girl! A term of endearment would escape, there'd be a quick clinging of hands; and, from an imitation gold purse, some money would be transferred to an engulfing pocket.

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, no one, to-day, took his politics seriously.

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 herd. A good story, the humor of the latrine, was a better key to respectability than an honest doubt. For those reasons I wanted to join the arguments, the orations really, flooding the circles of green-painted iron chairs on the Havana plazas; and, solitary, I passed envying the ingenuous welding dissent.

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 descended to the ñañigos.... Here was the substance of violent argument and recriminations; the voices, the ideals, of young men beat on me in a high indignant storm; the names of Cuban patriots, martyred students, and Spanish butchers were shouted in my ears. Sacred blood flowed again in retrospect, which should never be allowed to sink infertile; but when the words Free Cuba were pronounced I waved my cigar with hopeless derision.

* * *

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 long sitting—over Dragones Street, in the direction of Vedado. Not yet, never now, would he have a house in Vedado itself; that was reserved for the bankers, planters, and Americans; but he was nicely situated in a new white dwelling of the approved style, overlooking a common that in turn commanded the sea.

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 fat, and their three daughters, all long ago asleep; no, it would send his thoughts backward, over the way he had come—not from the Parque Central, but from youth. He would brush his moustache reminiscently, I was confident, at a train of gallant memories, chiefly of New York, where, on the pier of a fruit importing house, he had spent some tremendous months. That experience had given him an advantage, an authority, in everything that touched the great republic, and lent his politics an additional sagacity, his cynicism an edge difficult to turn. He had intended to stay in America, a journey to Havana was to have been but a temporary affair; but there he had attached himself to a wife, the daughter of a grinder of lenses.... And here he was at fifty, going back, after listening to a lot of nonsense in the Parque, to his family—in the general direction, too, of the cemetery.

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 iron chair of a plaza—he showed no signs of having passed the middle of his life. The grey hair was distinguished; Madame Nazabal, who was a Frenchwoman, had assured him of that. The handsome girl in El Corazón de Jesus, the Vedado bakery where English was spoken, flushed when their hands accidentally met over the counter. But this mood, his courage, was fictitious; it sank and left him limping palpably, with an oppressed heart. He was, simply, an old fool, he told himself, vindicating the humorous comprehension of his gaze.

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 it fell in Lent, and he had held his place there with the most agile among them, once even pressing an argument with a man who was reputed to have been an espada of Castile. A knife had grazed his throat and slit the left shoulder of his coat through to the skin; the mark remained, a livid welt under his collar, but the assailant had vanished before he could kill him. All memory of the girl had gone; but she was beautiful, he was certain of that, or else why should he have noticed her?

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 than a little vague in meaning; his romance was an indefinite state; the glow, in reality, of his own youth.

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:

"Clavales, clavales

de mi Andalucía!

Mujeres, mujeres—

de la Patria mia!"

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 door, waiting for admittance, not far from the Arsenal. It was the entrance to what he had called a house of pleasure, and, long established in Havana, unknown to America, one that he might easily have frequented in the reprehensible period of youth. I had adequate abstract reasons for my presence, but Rogelio, correctly insistent on a saving generosity of emotion, had needed no ponderous explanation. Indeed, I was there in his interest, since, after all, I had imagined him; I wanted very much to have completely the material of his setting, of the surrounding from which his friend, betrayed by the Peru that had centuries before despoiled Cuba, had been led out to be, doubtless, shot. Not that, pressingly, I felt the need for an excuse, or that I was essentially making a descent. The very bitterness, the revilement in solemn terms, of my early instructions, had, reacting, defeated itself.

What was before me, in a world where the pure and the impure were inexplicably mixed in one flesh, was inevitable; its ugliness lay not with it, but in a society which, constantly tearing it down, as constantly projected again the penalty, the shadow, of a perfunctory and material estate. In addition, as long as the age of marriage, of love, was so tragically different in society and in nature, an informal interlude was unavoidable. But I had no need to apologize for anything. I had been spared the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of existence. What, pretentiously, was called the moral must shift for itself; that depended on what, beneath consciousness, I was—the justice and sympathy, the comprehension, of my being.

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. She half turned, scanning me indifferently, and went on with her unelaborate music. The woman who had admitted me, a figure whose instant scrutiny resembled the unsparing accuracy of a photograph by flashlight, after a polite greeting, ignored me absolutely, and I was left to follow my fancy.

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 girls who nodded in appropriate sympathy. Farther on, a Cuban exquisite, his hands, in spite of the heat, cased in lavender grey gloves, was staring fixedly at the shining toes of his shoes. Others—yes, Rogelio in his youth—their hair faultlessly glossy, were more animated; their gestures and voices rose irrepressibly and sank in confidences to ears close beside them.

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, the thick, the suffocating armor of triviality that criminally and ludicrously muffled life.

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 had nothing to gain from all that was successively admirable, nothing was lost that had been implicit in the beginning, nothing at the last end would be changed.

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 literature. There, anyhow, it could be said for public morals, such things were nearly all that the word vice implied. What, exactly, I was lamenting, was the old fundamental lack of candor in the American attitude. This, beyond question, proceeded from the people themselves, and not from commissions; an enormous majority, except for that national whispered currency of obscenity, was prudish beyond reclamation. For them, it was probable, the innocence of the body had been branded eternally. And I was neither a martyr nor a reformer. The loss to me was considerable—as it was, dealing with only the outer garments of fact, I had been accused of lasciviousness or something of the kind—and I envied the French the cool logic of their mentality, the cultivation of the French audience.

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 with disembodied purity. He had set up, in his heart and in his books, the high altar of mediæval Platonism—an image of desire never to be clasped, reached, from earth; a consolation, really, for the earth-bound. But that, in the mind, the characteristic mind, of America, had not had the weight, the value, of a dandelion's gossamer seed. It was, definitely, a land that cared nothing for literature, the casting of transient life into the permanence of beautiful form. As the world advanced in years, the general importance of literature, it seemed to me, diminished; the truth was that people didn't care for it.

* * *

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 and alabaster walls, they were brilliantly effective; it was only after an extended regard, carefully casual, that I appreciated the amazing diversity of their individuality, the gamut of bloods run. There were no Anglo-Saxons—they were faithful to the traditions of their latitude—and there was no positive Africa; but there was Africa in faint dilutions, in attenuations traced from lands remote as Tartary:

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 imagination could have pictured such a striking figure nor placed her so exactly in the ultimate setting:

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 wrist, she drained a glass of brandy, an act of revealing incongruity. She was, I recognized from her speech, Spanish, from the Peninsula; and another, who told me that her city was Bilbao, dispassionately, for a little, occupied my bench. Bilbao, she explained, was not beautiful ... a place of industry and money. Nor was she charming, she was too harsh; but her personality had an unmistakable national flavor, like that of Castell de Remey wine. I was relieved when she rose abruptly and disappeared into the entresol, where the piano was still being intermittently played.

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 ebony and the figure in a silver-like metal, the Passion portrayed by a gaunt rigidity of suffering. The screen closed on the tableau of contrast, and the patio resumed its appearance of a vaguely distorted formal occasion.

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 wisdom of the Inglaterra manager, in the corridor of American salesmen, among the wives of the vice-presidents of steamship companies, and explaining that I was delivering my companion from the wage of death. I should have been, and very properly, put under restraint and Dr. Lainé hurriedly summoned. In all probability, and with the utmost discretion, they'd have sent Pilar, or Manuelita, back to the patio with the doors, explaining to her that I was demented.

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 heavy black hair, as severe as a metal casing, redolent with fascination. She sat withdrawn from the others with her hands clasped in the lap of a fine white dress. She was delicate, but not thin, though her neck was so slender that the weight of her head seemed bent a little forward. I had never before seen skin so faintly and evenly golden; there wasn't a flush, a differently shaded surface, anywhere visible. A sultry air hung about her mouth, the under lip brushed with carmine. Her eyes, lowered and almost shut, were large, and their lids were as smooth as ivory. But she wasn't, otherwise, suggestive of that; she more nearly resembled the magic glow of an apple of Hesperides.

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 asked of her hardly more than, at present, she was, sitting quite a distance from me and fundamentally unaware of my existence. I debated whether she would be more attractive in the sleeve coat and jade pins of China or in her virginal white muslin.... That now was the circumference of my duty toward her—to put her in such colors, such surroundings, as would infinitely multiply her mystery.