Chapter IV: Part 4

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 cafe 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 nanigos.... 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 Corazon 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 cafes: 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 Cabanas 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 Mario Turafa, his friend, in hiding, to the Spanish Government. It was said that Mario 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 Andalucia!
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 mediaeval 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. Laine 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.

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 Cristobal 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 role 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 cafes. 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 aesthetic; 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 Cubenos; 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 Aida 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.