Front matter (continued 3)

It was, I realized, time for me to leave—I wasn't Rogelio Mola in his youth—and I paid the inconsequential price of the drinks I had ordered. There were adieux, as civil and impersonal as my welcome, and the door to the street was opened to let me, together with a breath of the scented powder, out. The arcade before me sounded for a moment with the smooth falling of a latch, and then all trace of the near presence of so much lightness was obliterated. In memory it seemed slightly unreal, a dangerous fantasy of murmurs and subdued, knife-like passions—the bleached soul of Africa with massed red hair; a frivolity of yellow ribbons against a silver tormented Christ; the inertia of the East in a heavy-eyed child; but, to balance this, I remembered the girl, like a harsh native wine, from Bilbao, an industrial city and very rich: she restored to the scene its ordinary normal reality.

* * *

The high empty austerity of my room enveloped me in a happy tranquillity; its effect was exactly that of increasing age, substituting for the violent contrasts of life an impersonal spacious whiteness. I very placidly prepared for the cool fresh linen of my bed, my mind filled with fresh cool thoughts. More definitely than ever before I was accepting and accommodating myself to the passage of time. I was not only reconciled to having left forty forever behind, but I welcomed a release from the earlier struggles of resentment and desire. The joys of youth, or anyhow in my case, had been out of proportion to their penalties: I had failed at school, at the academies of art, and, more conspicuously still, as a citizen. I was even incapable of supporting myself, a task so easy that it was successfully performed by three quarters of the fools on earth.

The failure as a painter was serious, but I had never had the least interest in those qualities included in the term a good citizen. I knew nothing about the government of the United States, and made no effort to find out; as an abstraction it had reality for me, but as a reality no substance. The priceless right of vote I neglected for whoever it was in the Republican machine that regularly discharged that responsibility for me. All that interested me, that I deeply cared for, was first the disposal of paint on stretched canvas and then the arrangement of words with a probable meaning and possible beauty.

An extremely bad period, that, when I tried to write without knowledge or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed to sell a scrap of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so immaterial, a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing peacefully into the dim expensive space of a room in the Hotel Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of what was called men's most valuable possession.

No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and body on pleasure.

Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace to the stars. It was constructed for night, like a lunar park of marble and palms and open flooding radiance; with, against that, streets packed with darkness and doors of mystery to which clung the faint breath of patchouli. The air was instinct with seduction, faintly touched by the pungency of Ron Bacardi and limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful cigars. The clothes, too—the white linens and flannels and silks of the men; the ruffled dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like white carnations, in the automobiles; the wide hats of Paris and the satin slippers tied about the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering fans—all, all were in the key of light sharp emotion, of challenge and invitation and surrender.

Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San Cristóbal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the moment for masked balls and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in the tropics. I was an onlooker and not a participant. But I had, as I have shown, no regret; I had become reconciled not only to the fleetness of time, but equally to the fact that my rôle was necessarily a spectator's. Hour after hour, year after year, I sat writing at the low window which looked out over my green terrace and clipped hedge, to the road, to life, beyond.

Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited—I was familiar with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go back to what I had found rather than discover the new—perhaps ten streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafés. Too much to get into a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further—if, indeed, I had ever possessed it—was a warm personal contact such as I should have had dancing with a lovely girl. I never danced, but remained outside, philosophically, gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.

At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not, practically, in consequence, get drunk.

The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well was idle—a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a limitation of passion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the influences, the promptings, of my heredity and strong first associations. What an amazing climax to my records of chiffon textures and moods of chiffon that would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots induration from the informal pulpits of the streets! Or I might publish, to the dismay of every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory sermonizing book. But what the subject was wouldn't matter, as it had not mattered with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with sufficient beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in spite of the accepted contrary belief, were always very highly esteemed.

* * *

It was easy enough to account for Jeremy Taylor by the vague generalization of beauty, and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of that term and my meaning. The words beauty and love, and a dozen others, like old shoes, had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear that they would stay on no foot. I tried to isolate some quality indisputably recognizable as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on intellectual courage. The thought of an undeviating mental integrity was as exhilarating as the crash of massed marching bands. Then, searching for another example, I recalled August nights at Dower House, with the moonlight lying like water between the black shadows of the trees on the lawn. There was a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and the echo—almost the feel rather than the sound—of thunder below the horizon. This, too, stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow transmutable into creative effort.

Another excursion found nothing but a boy and a girl, any boy and any girl, fired by shy uncomplicated passion.... A mental, a visual, and a natural incentive, each with the same effect, the identical pinching of the heart and thrust to a common hidden center. What had they each alike? Perhaps it was this: that they were the three great facts of existence, the primary earth, the act of creation, and the crowning dignity, the superiority of men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum of their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no intention of examining that. The fact was, for me, enough.

There was, however, another phase of beauty still, one peculiarly the property of novelists, which had to do not with life at all, but with death, with vain longing and memories and failure. All the novels which seemed to me of the first rank were constructed from these latter qualities; and while painting and music and lyrical poetry were affirmative, the novel was negative, built, where it was great, from great indignations. Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed to include or satisfy me; for there were many passages not recognizable as great in the broadest sense, both in literature and life, that filled me with supreme pleasure—there were pages of Turgenev spun out of the fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl with a soul in dusk, far more enthralling than, for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have been that there was the perception of a similitude between Turgenev's figure and myself; certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease of modernity, than to a sheep herder; and there was a possibility, for my own support, that the finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded as emotions in the grand key, would turn out to be our most highly justified preoccupation.

I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in its fascination, and when I came to write about it there would not be lacking those to say that I had been better occupied with simpler things. Hugh Walpole had warned me of the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion Chinese Chippendale; and I was certain that he would speak to me again in the same tone about idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating drink and marble touched by the gilder's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole—and Henry Mencken's keen friendly discernment—was right; but, damn it, my experience was deficient in material essentials; I was dangerously ignorant of current reality, and I doubted if my style was a suitable instrument for rugged facts.

What remained for me, an accomplishment spacious enough for anyone, was the effort to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face of imminent destruction. And in that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly. The thought of such a woman, the essence, the distillation, of an art of life superimposed on sheer economy, was more moving to me than the most heroic maternity. I couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge.

The setting of a woman in a dress by Cheruit; a part of the bravery of fragile soft paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds that would feed a starving village, on fingers that had done no more than wave a fan; the fan itself, on gold and ivory with tasselled silk—the things to which the longing of men, elevated a degree above hard circumstances, turned—were of equal weight with the whole; for it was not what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other æsthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter.

This, however wide apart it may seem, was closely bound to my presence in Havana, to my delight and purpose there. It was nothing more than a statement, a development, if not a final vindication, of my instant sense of pleasure and familiarity—a place already alive in my imagination. My special difficulty was the casting of it into a recognizable, adequate medium. There, in the plaiting of cobwebs instead of hemp rope, I particularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary that I should sustain anyone, but only that I should spread the illusion of the buried associations and image of a brain. That, if it were true, I held, would be beauty.

Here, at least, I was serious about the correct things, direct rather than conventional; all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion, the spectacle of what part of Havana I did know interpreted, realized, not in the spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient with reflected emotions. Otherwise the most weighty charges against me were absolutely justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond in the key of my intrinsic feelings, if I had no authentic feeling with which to invest it, my book, almost all my books, were a weariness and a mistake.

Novels of indignation or of melancholy, of a longing for the continuity of individual passion confronted with the inevitable—it was that, the perishability of all that was desirable, which gave to small things, a flower in the hair, their importance as symbols. The love story, once the exclusive province of fiction, had disappeared; it was now practically impossible for the slightest talent to fill a book in that manner. The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular heart, but the tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization of its inescapable loss. No man could love a woman, no woman could love a man, who was to live forever; a thousand years would be an insuperable burden. The higher a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more tragic was its breaking by death; the greater knowledge a mind held, the more humiliating was the illimitable ignorance, the profound night pressing in upon every feeble and temporary human lamp.

Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so much from among the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords; but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this, for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on earth—what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine, and there was no lease dependent on the good will—or on my subserviency—of any landlord.

* * *

Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished to see now remained—the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box; for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted—I had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent justification—but I could believe it possible if there was any violent discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame.

A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past eleven, the ball hadn't yet assumed an appearance of life. But just within the entrance a negro band began suddenly to play, and in the music alone I immediately found the potent actuality of danger. I was without the knowledge necessary to the disentangling of its elements: there were fiddles and horns and unnatural kettle drums, and an instrument made from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for the scrape of a stick. The music was first a shock, then an exasperation hardly to be borne, but finally it assumed a rhythm maddening beyond measure.

It was Africa and something else—notes taken from the Moors, splitting quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been the agonized voice of the first Cubeños; with an unspeakable distortion, a crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There was no pause, no beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting discord—the savage naked utterance of a naked savage lust; it was a music not of passion, but of the frenzy of rape. Nothing like it would have been possible in writing, allowed in painting; only music was free to express, to sound, such depths. Nothing but music could have conveyed the inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that flooded the marble space of the opera house. It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate years, the spring orgies in the clearings of early forests; time had made it hideously menacing, cynical, and corrupt.

At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale, their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored breasts and white kid gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered. Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure, I gazed down over the floored expanse of the auditorium:

The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic design—a scene that would have served equally Aïda or La Favorita: it towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-classic Havana, into the theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers. They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster, to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a leaden cast.

The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance of a sustained gravity: it was danced slowly, in very small space, following the music with arbitrary reverses, and pausing. There might have been, to the superficial view, a restraint almost approaching dignity had the dancers been other. The men, without exception, wore their stiff straw hats and smoked cigars through every evolution; and the dresses, the dressing, of the women were fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had copied the color and petals of a sunflower. As she revolved, her skirt flared out from legs like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow flapped across her grotesque ebony countenance.

The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the music played continuously and alternately by two orchestras occupying a box on either side of the stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly, a couple lost every restraint, and their maddened spinning and furious hips tore the illusion to shreds. And slowly I began to be conscious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as palpable as the odors and scents—the breath, the premonition, of the danger of which I had been warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped emotions that at any illogical accident might burst into the shrillness of a knife. It wasn't dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked—the deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that had better be kept buried. It was unimportant that the men below me were, in the daytime, commonplace clerks; the women could be anything chance had made them: here, to the spoiled magic of Carabalíe nights, they were evoking a ceremonial of horror.

Personally, since I had no hopes to save or plans to protect, I hadn't the desire, like Sampson, to pull down the pillars of the roof on their debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably; the more because I saw, scattered among the crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental beauty—a creamy magnificence in creamy satin with a silver band on her forehead; a yellow creature with oblique eyes in twenty white flounces and a natural garland of purple flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by an opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were incidental; and corrupt graces perfect in youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wisdom, of Sodom.

One o'clock passed, then two and three, but there was no abatement in the danzon. A middle-aged man, with an abstracted air, danced without stopping for an hour and fifty minutes. His partner, flushing through her dark skin, was expensively habited: her fingers and throat glittered coldly with diamonds and her hat was swept with long dipping plumes. She had a malignant mouth and eyes a thick muddy brown, and it was clear that she hated the man in whose arms she was turning. I wondered about her hatred and the patience, the indifference, of the other: how revolting she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly in the morning. He, probably, would then be standing at a high desk, counting dollars with integrity or adding columns of figures, precise and respectable in an alpaca coat. An older man still was dancing by himself, intent on the intricate stepping of his own feet. His agility soon won an admiring circle, and his violence increased with the applause: he jumped in the air, clapping his heels together, and his arms waved wildly—a marionette pulled convulsively by wires in strange merciless hands.

I imagined a fetish, a large god, on the stage, drooping over his swollen belly, with a hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His legs were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting smeared trunk of hideous service. Around him were the seated rows of worshippers, on either hand was his jangling praise; and before him revolved the dancers in his rite. The music throbbed in my brain like a madness that would have dragged me down to the floor. I speculated fleetly over such a surrender, the drop, through countless ages, of that possible descent.

* * *

It was, however, only just to add that the idol of Guinea suffered unduly from his surroundings and the age in which he was exposed; in his place, his time, he had been neither a monster nor unnatural, but nothing more than the current form of worship. He, Bongó, had had the misfortune to be catapulted, together with his congregation, through twenty, forty, centuries, in a breath, on the magic carpet of greed, and put down in a day where he was not only obsolete, but repudiated. Men saw him with the sense of horror generated by a blasting view of their own very much earlier selves. For the difference between the negro, the Carabalíes, or Macua, and the Spaniards of the sixteenth century in Cuba was, at heart, historical in time only. They were members—we were all members—of one family. The innocence of a bare black, torn like a creeper from the support of his native tree, tatooed with necessary charms, medicines, against jungle fears and fevers, had more to dread from Amador de Lares than any later Christians owed to an arbitrarily imported savagery. What, in reality, occurred, was implied on the wide floor of the opera house, was that the negroes, unable to change their simplicity as easily as they superficially diluted their skins, kept their innocent habits, their tastes in noise and religion and misconduct; but, in the dress of civilization, these took on the aspect of a grotesque defiled horror. With this, too, in an earnest effort to assimilate as much as possible of their enforced land, they caught such bright fragments of life as struck them—the glass beads and bits of gay cloth—and copied them prodigiously. The confusion which followed was a tragedy in the comic spirit—a discordant mingling that provoked laughter, quickly stopped by a deeper understanding and by pity. The past vital still: with the entrance of the African slave into the West, it was exactly as though a figure in the paint and feathers of voodoo had been thrust into a polite salon.

The spectacle had none of the comfortable features of a mere exhibition; for the revulsion came from a spiritual shudder in the beings of the onlookers; while the other injured individuals saw that, as clothes, the crude partial imitation of a rooster was insufficient. They, the latter, commendably hurried into trousers and pot hats, into satin trains and pink tulle and white kid gloves; but the transition was too hurried, too optimistic, and the resulting incongruity ... I was not a student of ethnology, I had no theory of races, but, gazing down from my box, it seemed to me that yesterday could not be instantly combined with to-day; it was evident that there was no short way by a long and painful business of evolution.

Nothing more unfortunate could well be imagined; for, in the retributive manner I had already mentioned, the Africa buried in the West, so long forgotten, took life again, and the danger to everyone had been acute through a long period of Havana's years. We, in temperate zones, in weathers that had no need of the protection of a special dark pigment, had been lucky; but we were trying our luck very severely by subjecting it to the old potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon was, actually, in a way beyond legislation, a masked ball in black and white, where the unmasking was involuntary and fateful.

One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an incomplete experiment in chemistry where nothing but an opaque liquid and an intolerable stench was evolved. Perhaps, with acute necessity, a successful clear result would reward the future with peace; but it wouldn't happen in my knowledge; I hadn't a thing in the world to do with it. What occurred to me then was the useful fact that the present scene afforded the right, the only, ending for my story, The Bright Shawl. It would have to be tragic, but only indirectly; nothing, I had decided, should happen to my principal character beyond a young moment of supreme romance. No, the mishap, death, must envelop his friend, the patriotic Cuban. He'd be killed by a Spanish officer, through a woman—a woman in the bright shawl of the dancer that had been preserved as a memento of tender regard.

Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a prostitute. Well—I had seen her, in virginal white muslin, with the weight of her head, its oval flattened by the hand of China, her heavy hair, inclined on its slender neck: a figure, in my pages, impassively fateful, remote as I had seen her seated in a gay company. That finished the story, for the youthful American, after a vain public effort to secure for himself the dignity of a heroic end, would be ignominiously deported from Cuba. I had been often asked how I arrived at my plots, but more often accused of never reaching an intelligible plan, and, until now, I'd been incapable of giving an explanation satisfactory even to myself; but here was one accounted for to a considerable degree. It had begun by an instinctive attachment to a city, to Havana; and the emotions brought into being had crystallized into a plan, for me, unusually concise.

There was a temptation, to be avoided, to tell it in the first person; a version that had come to be disliked almost as universally as a set of letters. Some celebrated stories had been written that way—Youth—but I felt that it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy. While the creation of character was no longer the tyrant it had been, a certain air of veracity was most desirable, and the limited scope of a single intelligence discussing, explaining, himself was too marked. The great trouble with the romantic novels up to the very present had been that there was never a doubt of the ultimate happiness of all who should be happy and the overwhelming misery of those who should be miserable. No peril was the father of a thrill, because from its inception it was plainly impotent to harm the lovely and the brave. The pleasure had from witnessing a dexterous job was lost in an artifice that seldom approached an art. But we'd improved that, an improvement expressed in the utter loss of the word hero; no man, or woman, was now entirely safe in the hands of his romantic author; the two manners had come creditably together.

I had become, subconsciously, interested in a girl pausing on the floor, and, in response to my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy smile. I gazed with instant celerity and fixedness at the ceiling, then at the upper boxes opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like a trail of powder, of explosive rice powder. There was no cutting in at that ball. She was more than charming, too, with her mixed blood evident in her carriage, her indolence, rather than in feature. She wore blue, a wisely simple dress that showed small feet, like butterflies in their lightness, and the instinctive note of a narrow black velvet band on her throat.

An air of sadness rested on her, on, principally, a superiority anyone could see. Her fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand. A maid, I told myself, reflecting the aristocracy of the closets of delicate clothes in her charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles of her mistress. She was another phase of what had been going on at such length through my mind—a different catastrophe, since she was denied the reward of the virtues in either of the races that had made her. In Boston she would have become a bluestocking, a poet singing in minor cadence to traditional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in Cuba, tormented by the strains of the danzon:

There, her flax burning in resentment and despair, she might be extinguished in the tide restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets of the Ñañigos: in the black cabildo of that society, provision was made for a woman.

* * *

It was significant that the first organization of ñañiguismo in Cuba was purely African, for the hatred of its members, Carabalíes, for the white race made the admission of even mulattos impossible. This society—tierra or juego—was formed during the administration of General Tacón, in the village of Regla, and called Apapá Efí. It was, against the protests of its originators at sharing the secret with too many, enlarged, and spread through the outskirts of Havana. There the mulattos greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they formed a society of their own, its oath sworn in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efó Macarará. They insisted on a common brotherhood and their right of entering the fambás, the ceremonial rooms; but there was a determined opposition, open battle and murder in Perserverancia and Lagunas Streets. After this there was a general meeting at Marianao, the early bar to color, as distinguished from black, removed, and the infusion of the dark ritual of Efi into white blood began. When, ten years after, an indiscriminate society, the Ecobio Efó, was terminated by the authorities, Spanish nobles and professional men were assisting in the rites.

What had started upon the African river Oldan as a tribal religion took on, in Havana, a debased version of Rome, and the veneration of Santa Barbara was added to the supreme worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely parallel to the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a sacred drum. And what, equally, in the Carabalíe Bricamó was Dibó, God, became in Cuba an organization of criminals and finally, when its more obvious aspects were stamped out, a corrupt political influence. There, in the clearest possible manner, was traced the eventual effect of so much heralded superiority, such enormous advantages, on native belief.

There could be no doubt, though, of the fact that, in any pretence of civilization, the ñañigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable that they should have degenerated into a savage menace, not only in overt acts, which were not lacking, but in practices of mental and emotional horror. Their ceremony, with its strange vocables and distortions of meaning; the obscene words that were but symbols for obscenities beyond imagination; the character of their dance, which gave them the name arrastrados, men who dragged themselves, reptilian, on the ground—all combined in a poison like a gas sweeping from the morass of the past. It held, beneath its refuge and defiance of society, the appeal of a portentous secret, bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism, of orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger still, delirious barbarity.

Its legend was not different from the others which formed the primitive bases of subsequent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an attending baptism, was consummated by a woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying fish—the fish was a sacred Christian sign—in her jar of water. In recognition of this she was sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use, and the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the fingers, used in his praise. Here Ecue, the divine, was baptized by Efó in the Oldan, who in turn signed his disciple. And about that tradition, guarded—with its instrument—in the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements and characters of modern ñañíguismo gathered. There were, necessarily, changes in the Cuban form of worship—the skin of a goat was substituted for the unprocurable variety of fish, and the timbre of the original drum secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of finding another anointment than human blood, difficult to procure in Havana, led to the sacrifice of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had a crucifix, with the profession that God, Dibó, must be over everything, and a sacramental singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes ... Efore sisí llamba, and the reply Ho Isueribó éngomo ... Mocongo! while the Empegó, the clerk of the service, shifted brightly colored curtains and enveloping handkerchiefs and marked with yellow chalk the head and body and palms of the initiates.

A diablito had in charge the offices of the catechism—Come with me; where did you leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter where Bongó is and cry with your brother! Look at your brother because they want to choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the goat, which, in a memorial of Guinea, was eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba, made from sugar-cane rum and bitter broom. A strange procession followed, led by the Insué, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue, and the diablito skipping backward. The sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers, was carried, and later the remains of the feast were thrown into a cemetery.

The effort to end ñañiguismo in Havana began in eighteen hundred and seventy-five, when its gatherings were forbidden; but, deeply traditional, it flourished in hidden places, in the jail where ñañigos were confined and the cellars of Jesús María. Long before that the poet Placido had been killed; within a few years the Llamba named Hand on the Ground was judicially executed; and following the assassinations during the carnival of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweeping deportations were enforced. In Maloja Street a juego, Acaniran Efó Primero, with officers drawn from reputable quarters, was surprised; the next year the Abacuá Efó was exterminated; a public clash of diablitos resulted in apprehensions; and twenty-five ñañigos were taken on Vista Hermosa Street.

It was, in reality, Africa in Havana, brought against its wish and to its tragic misfortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but among a common genus, the mysteries of religion, it grew into an aberration of all that gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance, for me, lay in its amazing language, an idiom, specifically, composed of the Carabalíe Bricamó and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions, equally incapable of exact images and the expression of abstract thought. But taking the place of its omissions, was a congealing power of suggestion, of creating, through, apparently, no more than the jumbling of common terms and sounds, sensations of abject dread. The four bishops of the ritual, in their order, were Insué, Illamba, Mocongo, Empegó. In ñañiguismo man was momban, an idiot was sansgueré, a knife icuá rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality embigüí, the night erufie, war ochangana, the sun fansón, and worms cocorico. The language took short rigid forms, phrases; it had little if any plasticity: Amandido amanllurube, The day goes and the night comes. Efiquefi que buton efique Ename onton Ellego Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico sanga quimagua sanga ñampé, ñampé sanga mariba, The owl drinks the blood of the dead and flies to the sea.

The terms of the acts of worship were particularly heavy, sultry, and held in their sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes as black as the night from which they were shaped. The minister of death to Sinanecua, a ceremony which became traditional, was named Cuañon-Araferrobré, and the act of sacrifice the Acuá Meropó. The singers before the altar, making visible the sacred stick, Bastón Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Machevere, Mosongo moto cumbaba eribo, and Erendio basi Bome, I believe in God and God is great; with, at the last, silencing the profession of faith, the voice of the drum, tarinibongó.

The ñañigos had been driven from the streets through which, at first, on King's Day, Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year, to parade with native costumes and instruments—atables and marugas and ecous, a flattened bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambás were destroyed and hysteria cooled; but I wondered about both the secretiveness and the persistence of the primitive spirit and the delicate melancholy that veiled the girl so faintly tinged with carabalíe, resting below my box through the rasping strains of the danzon. Had her gain been greater than the loss, the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged abruptly from saurian shadows, been made white by an arbitrary papal sun?

* * *

A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the presence of the sea, was evident in the Parque Central when I walked the short distance, not more than a few steps, from the opera house to the Inglaterra, my head filled with the resonant bos and bongos of ñañiguismo. Havana, for a moment, seemed like a cemetery—its own marble cemetery of Colon—where a black spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked and would not be still. I speculated about that same spirit in another connection—in its influence on painting and music, on Western literature. It had affected dancing profoundly, making it, in the United States, almost wholly its own; and the Spanish, with whom, in the richness of a tradition and perfect expression, no others could compete, owed a great debt to Africa. Our music, too, it had influenced to such a degree that it was doubtful if we had any outside the beat of negro strains.

Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he had enclosed the whole sentiment of an age within his medium, was often but a paraphrase of a darker melody. Foster, like Havana, was Victorian, a period that dreamed of marble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and yet, curiously, charged for an unsympathetic world with significant beauty. This negro contribution was in a melancholy and minor key, the invariable tone of all primitive song; in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly approaching music, there was an analogous coloring between the race and its shadowed measures.

The reminiscent emotions that, with us, were mainly personal, in the negro were tribal; he had not been individualized, brought to a separate consciousness; and, in consequence, his song, practically lacking in intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings. Growing shrill with passion and sinking to the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it belonged equally to all the men, the women, who heard it—it was their voice and comprehensible triumph or pain; without artifice it wasn't artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a means of gold, a medium for lies, it had no existence. The voice of all, an instrument of natural beauty, shared by villages, its pure quality, brought in slave ships that rotted with their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and vitiated West a fresh earthen tonic chord.

The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more cheerful in his new imposed setting; and it was possible that his music had gained an added depth, at any rate for our perception, from the weight of banishment and shackles. He had not turned with any success to creative accomplishment that needed mental independence and courage, or to forms, like the novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the novel, with all its trumpeted young freedom, had never, with even relative truth, expressed the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of appalling splendor, had, in the United States, been turned over to the comic spirit and short impressions—stories, superficially, falsely, pathetic. The fact was that we had enormously harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the familiar process of human self-esteem, nationally we were uneasy, resentful in his presence. We saw him, when we escaped from absolute hatred, as a figure, a subject, without dignity: we lacked there the penetrative sympathy which was the soul of imaginative fiction. Such a novel, I thought, was perhaps of everything that offered the best worth writing.

Certainly nothing more difficult could be well attempted; my knowledge, in Havana and through the ñañigos, had been perceptibly enlarged, and I was not unfamiliar with the state in which, I decided, the story must be laid—not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach of Louisiana, cut by tideless bayous and saturated with the fever of cane and cypress brakes. A bitter novel like the broom herb put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba, pages from which it would be hard to exclude a fury of hopelessness! And what an angry disturbed wasplike hum it would provoke! No magazine, of course, would touch it—it would be sold, for a week or ten days, from under counters, and then we, my novel and myself, metaphorically burned. A magnificent project:

A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of black pines beyond a deep ruined field—but perhaps this was South Carolina—infinitesimal ragged patches of corn, a sandy trail lost abruptly in the close forest, and half-naked portentous shapes. There would be a town back in the country with a desolate red square of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in hanging moss, a place at once old and raw, and ugly with vindictive ignorance.... The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the Moors. Havana made some denial of this, and prided itself, with entire justice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian blood; but the other was perceptible in the gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal city—the whitest walls on earth. This didn't bother me; I liked Havana from its farthest view to its most intimate façade, and I was grateful to whatever had made it.

In my room the negro, with the danzon, faded from my mind; and I only paused to speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference, where a choice existed, for the Protestant religions instead of Roman Catholicism. I should have thought that the color, the imagery and incense, of the Catholic Church would be irresistible. Yet there were, in the United States, thousands of colored Methodists and Baptists for one adherent of Rome. It might be that the hymns of Methodism, sufficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure, God knew, were the reason—the character of the hymns and congregational singing, the loud pictorial shouts. The later religion of the negroes, in addition to what I had already considered, was a subject to be avoided; but running through my mind was the memory that in Richmond, not long ago, it was common in the evenings of spring for bands of negroes to go through the streets singing spirituals and constantly gathering others who dropped their work, their responsibilities, to join the passing chorus of hope.

That was lost now, I understood, a vanished custom, killed by self-consciousness; but it would have been a fine thing to hear approaching and receding through the dusk, a stirring resinous volume or a mere vibrant echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying whisper, would be the solving of the whole tragic difficulty—disease and winter and relentless natural laws. The latter moved with great deliberation through unlimited centuries, but the impatience of men demanded instant release from trouble. They wanted black black and white white, with no transition, no blurring of the edges; this was their dream, but they constantly defeated it, betrayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that the humility of that defeat, in the far future, would accomplish a universally white city. Only one other way offered: a different humanity from any which had yet appeared outside rare individuals ... but that vision seemed, to me, as fantastic as the sentence in Carabalíe Bricamó that gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comunbairán abasí otete alleri pongó—We of this world are all together. The truth was, honestly at heart, that I couldn't commit myself to all, or even a quarter, of what this would have demanded. Impersonally I was able to see that, as an idea, it was superb, I realized that something of it must inform my pages; but it was useless to pretend that I could begin to carry it out or that I was, in practice, a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts grew confused, but dimly in my mind was again the consciousness of the remote fate of the creative writer, an individual without even the desire to be a part of that for which he cried.

* * *

Certainly I had no marked love of humanity the following morning, caught with a small mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where I was waiting to board the steamer for Key West. I was between the water and a wooden partition, the heat was savage, and a number of youthful marines, returning home from Camagüey, were indulging in a characteristic humor—the dealing of unsuspected blows, of jarring force, among themselves. They shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to shoulder, disregarding entirely the indirect results of their vigor, and exchanged threats of fulminating violence. They were not more annoying than the others, but only more evident; and, as the advertised time of departure was past by an hour, and then a second hour, and the sun found its way into our walled space, even the marines subsided. Every trace of dignity, in that heat, ran away from the people about me. While, on the whole, they were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate of others' discomforts, wondering, with weary smiles, when the boat would be off, I had no such kindly promptings.... I hated them all, the ugliness of the women and the men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an intensity that wasn't normal. When I was very young indeed, scarcely past two, I had been nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesquicentennial parade in Philadelphia; long afterward I had been, to all practical purposes, asphyxiated in a train that broke down in an Apennine tunnel; as a result, I had an unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited space; and this dread, before long, on the Havana wharf, turned into an acute aversion for every individual and thing about me.

The surrounding insistent good nature developed in flashes of exchanged homely wit, varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of them both, I couldn't tell which I resented more. The present position of the waiting people, the long exposure to the intolerable sun, was the result of their patience; of that and their personal inefficiency reflected in their official management. All the bad governments in the world, the dishonesty and universal muddles, were nothing more than monuments to the immeasurable stupidity and greed of the people; they were betrayed politically not by powerful and unscrupulous parties and men, but by themselves; perpetually and always by their own laziness and superstition and jealousy.

The Cubeños, the original inhabitants of Cuba, were parcelled in the bondage of encomiendas, exterminated by the passion of the Spanish Crown for gold; when they had been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers for labor in the mines and planting; beneath every movement, instigated by hope or supported by returns, riches were the incentive and power. Men had never, within history and their secret hearts, cared for anything else: an ineradicable desire. There was a facile public gabble about the qualities of the spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of money, both as an abstraction and what conspicuously it brought, was what the people worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or stole for, or in the service of which they performed the most heroic toil.

This was not, necessarily, an ignoble or negligible pursuit, but it was corrupted by an attending hypocrisy which forced a fervent denial, the pretense of an utterly different purpose, to be worn like a cloak. It was possible that, admitted, the sovereignty of gold would be the most beneficial rule applicable to man. It was preëminently the symbol, the signature, of power; with the late sugar crops it had revolutionized Cuba. Havana was for the moment, in a very strong sense, the capital of the world, and the visible mark of that was the stream of automobiles on the Prado and Malecón; individually, money was counted by the million—the recognition, the desired reward, of the fact that Cuba controlled a necessity of life. The instinct to profit by such turns of fortune was deeper than any charitable impulse; there was a tendency to speculate in wheat more general than the impulse to give loaves to the starving.

There was a sudden surge toward the gang plank of the City of Miami, and I was borne onto the steamer, away from Havana, in an exasperated and bitter spirit. I had entered the harbor happily, saturated by its beauty, but I was leaving blind to the marble walls on the blue water. However, it was cooler on an upper deck; and with my back uncompromisingly turned on humanity, on my fellow passengers over a sea like a tranquil illusion of respite between stubborn realities, I picked out from the panorama of the city across the harbor, diminishing in its narrow entrance, familiar buildings and marks. Havana vanished, I thought, far more rapidly than it had come into view; soon nothing of Cuba could be seen but the dark green hills and thinly printed silhouettes of mountains. I had it, though, in my memory; Havana was now woven into the fibre of my being.

The Inglaterra Hotel took its place with all the remembered spots where I had lived: the bare pine-sealed room in the Virginia mountains, the tall narrow house in Geneva, the courtyard in the Via San Gallo, the brick house in a suburb from which, in a rebellion against every circumstance of my life, I had escaped. I recalled days on end when I had tried to write without the ability to form a single acceptable sentence, when the floor was heaped and littered with pages crushed and flung away. Then, it had seemed, I should get nowhere, and see, do, nothing.... Havana was a singularly lovely city. A rush of small mementos of its life flooded my mind—the aroma of the cigars, the coolness of the Telegrafo Café and the savor of its Daiquiri cocktails, the burning strip of sunlight that, at noon, found its way into Obispo Street. It was still possible to get Ron Bacardi in the United States. I was carrying back a large provision of exceedingly fine cigars, not from the Larrañaga factory, but a slender Corona, a shape specially rolled for a discrimination as delicate as any in Cuba. Yet, away from Havana, they wouldn't taste the same; in the United States they'd deteriorate; and, where I lived, there were no fresh, no emerald-green limes, and without them a Daiquiri was robbed of its inimitable flavor.

But what, more than those, I should miss was the atmosphere of Havana itself, the gay urbanity and festive lightness of tone. It had almost wholly escaped the modern passion for reform changing America, pretty much all the western world, into a desert of precept and correction; in many senses Havana was an oasis in an aridity spreading day by day. Any improvement wouldn't occur during my life—the habit of lies and self-delusion had become a fundamental part of society—and all I could hope for was the discovery of rare individuals and cities in which existence was more than a penalty for having been born. I wanted them as a relaxation, as short escapes from a tyranny from which, really, I was powerless to turn:

I didn't want to live in Havana, nor to be surrounded by exceptional people; for they were both enemies of what, above everything, I wanted to do—to write into paper and ink some permanence of beauty. For that, Chester County and the solid stone block of my house were necessary, a temperate climate indispensable. At heart, in spite of my constant fault-finding, my threats of leaving, I was bound by associations deeper than mere intelligence. No, nothing so powerful as an obsession had overtaken me approaching Havana; I was not, in actuality, an adventurer, but only a seeker for charm, for memories, to carry back to the low window to which I had already referred. The charm of Havana was its strangeness, the vividness of its sudden impression on me, the temporary freedom, grace, it offered. It was characteristic of freedom, too, that, in the end, it became slavery; while slavery had, at times, extraordinarily the appearance of freedom. Not a month ago I had dropped, with a sigh, a gasp of relief, a pen heavier than anything else on earth, and now I could scarcely restrain the eagerness—the confidence, at last, of success—with which I wanted to take it up again.

* * *

When I turned, looking back, Cuba had vanished, sunk below the line of the sea. The Gulf Stream was indigo; along the side of the steamer, foam hissed with a sharp whiteness, and at the bow miniature rainbows hung shimmering in the spray. The perpetual soft clouds of the Gulf Stream were very high and faint. In my imagination Havana assumed a magic, a mythical, state—a vision that, I was certain, had no absolute ponderable existence. It was a city created on a level bright tide, under lustrous green hills, for the reward of cherished and unworldly dreams. It was the etherealized spectacle of the sanguine hopes of all the conquistadores who had set sail for the rubies of Cipango; they had had great desires of white marble cities in which the women were lovely and dark, and gold was worked into the forms of every day.

They, different from the frugal Dutch, making, with no less daring, the Eastern Passage in the interest of associated merchants and of commonwealths, sailed, in a more picturesque phrase, for their Catholic Majesties and for Spain. The Dutch names, Bonteke and Schouten and Roggeveen, had a solid bartering sound compared with Francesco de Cordoba and Miruelo and Angel de Villafañe. Holland had its deathless tradition of the sea, sufficiently colored with extravagant adventure; but its spirit was sober, the visions of its navigators would never have lingered in a marble city.

Havana was, perhaps, a Saragossa of souls, with the acts and thoughts of its early vivid years, of Careñas, forever held in the atmosphere, audible in the restless volume of sound that was never still. Its history had flashed through my mind with the turn of a wheel, its duration seeming no more than the opening and shutting of a hand; but now I had an impression not of the transient, not of walls and names and voices, but of qualities impersonal and permanent, of something which, while individual men died, resisted death. It had existence, that was, as long as humanity drew a continuous thread of memory through time. Havana had, outwardly, changed from its first huddle of bohios and fortified tower; but the form it had taken, so different from the discovered reality, had beyond any question that odd similitude to Marco Polo's reports of the Grand Khanate. Its final architecture, pseudo-classic, was more abstract than any other imaginable order: all the dress that had ever paraded through the successive stages of the city—the Cacquies, girdled in feathers, the brocades of Maria de Toledo and her lady-in-waiting, Captain Godoy in steel and lace, the floating crinoline of the Prince of Anglona's year, painted black ñañigos—was equally possible against a background at once fantastic and restrained.

There was never a more complex spirit than Havana's, no stranger mingling of chance and climate and race had ever occurred; but, remarkably, a unity of effect had been the result, such a singleness as that possessed by an opera, in which, above the orchestra and the settings and the voices, there was perceptible a transcending emotion created from an artificial and illogical means. For while Havana had a record dignified in its sweep, it could never be long dominant either as a city or in its men; it had ruled an island but not the world, it had never been—in that latitude—a Captain-general of a hemisphere. No, it wasn't symphonic, but the lesser, more pictorial, performance; it had, I thought, very much the appearance of a stage.

This, however was not a denial of the reality of the blood it shed, nor of the sharpness and danger of its emotions; it had been a profusely bloody city with tropical passions often reaching ideals of sacrifice. It had, too, suffered the iron of oppression, spoken its word for liberty, the state which, never to be realized, by its bare conception elevated life. Now, in addition, it was a great port ... and yet, though it might have been the fault of my limitations, I continued to see Havana as more dramatic than essential; I heard persistently the overture with the themes of Seville, the crying native airs, the drums of Guinea played with the fingers. The shining crooked bay was filled by the plate ships of Mexico and Peru, with their high-decked sterns and yellow cannon. The curtain fell to rise again on Don Miguel Tacón!

It was impossible to determine what I had seen of Havana and what was merely my reflected self; even hard to decide if I had seen Havana objectively at all, since my attitude toward it had been so purely personal. My memory was composed of what I'd experienced and the reflections, the thoughts, that had given birth to; and, of them, the latter were the more real, solider than the Prado, more tangible than the dining-room of the Inglaterra. Without them Havana would have been meaningless, sterile, simply a museum about which nothing could be written but a catalogue. It was its special charm to be charged with sensations rather than facts; a place where facts—not, of a kind, absent—could be safely ignored. Further than that, ignoring them was, for any measure of pleasure, absolutely needful: the pedantic spirit in Havana was fatal.

What, almost entirely, I had been told to view, expected to enjoy, I had avoided; yet not that, for it implied a deliberate will, and such a planning or triumph of character had been as far as possible from my drifting: I had seen what I preferred and done what I was; anyone, following me in Havana, could have judged me with exactitude. I had spent money lavishly—as though I were rich instead of extravagant—for visible returns that would have only provoked the other passengers on the City of Miami. They, where they were not driven to staterooms by the dipping of the steamer, were vociferous with knowledge about Cuba, their bags were heavy with souvenirs—the Coty perfumes from France and the table-linen of the Canary Islands. The pervasive salesmen, flushed with success and Scotch whisky, smoking the cigars long familiar to them in northern hotels, hinted together of the Parisian girls and criollos, to whom they referred as creoles in the meaning and vocabulary of American burlesque. Some officials of transportation and sugar manipulators sat aside, with double Coronas, exchanging in short sentences their hardness of knowledge, speaking of Cuba as an estancia of which they were absentee owners. A flight of winged fish skittered over the sea, and the clouds following the Gulf Stream turned rose with the dropping of the sun; the horizon bore a suggestion of Florida. Once Cuba, regarded as the shore of India, had been the center of the West, and Florida no more than a chimera: how ironic such errors and reversals were! Now it was Juana that was legendary, and Florida resembled the significant hooked finger of an imponderable power. The day slid rapidly into water that had lost its blueness for expanses of chalky shallow green, and the flat roofs of Key West and masoned arches became slowly visible across the sea, and a stir of departure filled the decks.

I was, for a moment, depressed at the definite leaving behind of Havana—for the tranquil passage had seemed only an extension of its spirit—and by the imminent reshouldering of my burden of responsibility. I had never wanted that, but, without choice, it had been abruptly thrust on me—a responsibility, impossible of fulfilment, which I couldn't put down. When I was young I had looked in vain for a perpetual Havana, hoping for nothing more; and now, when my youth was dead, I had found the perfection of my desire. But, as always, the discovery was too late; I couldn't stay in the covered paseos, the plazas with flambeau trees and royal palms or idle in a room of Moorish tiles with a dripping fountain, over a magic drink; my time for the actualities of charming liberty, the possession of uncounted days, was gone. But this mood was nothing more than a gesture, a sentiment, thrown back to romance.

No normalization or correction has been made in the spelling of Spanish contained in the book; The following typographical errors were corrected by the etext transcriber:

beginninng of the Prado=>beginning of the Prado

like a harsh native wine, from Balbao=>like a harsh native wine, from Bilbao