IV.
We were in the Captain’s hands, and although Sister and Daddy were decorously unquestioning as to where we were going and what we were to do when we got there, Little Blue Ribbons and I couldn’t refrain from asking, when we found ourselves clattering out of San Juan to the tattoo of the hard little hoofs, if the Captain intended to drive us to Ponce? “Oh, hardly, this evening,” he laughingly replied. “I thought we would merely take a spin out a way on the military road to give you a glimpse of the country. The madam has planned a Puerto Rican dinner for you at the Colonial, and afterward there is to be a concert on the Plaza.” “Simply fine,” I said, “I do so enjoy trying the native bills of fare” (but alas, for their after effects!).
The military road, a beautiful macadamised highway, swept through a country whose surface was richly covered with broad pasture lands where many cattle were grazing. The plains were fairly peppered with palm-trees, which, owing to their long trunks and pluming tops, interfered but little with the pasture beneath. The military road is fringed by these noble trees, at least as far as we go, and although now to us a necessary feature in the West Indian landscape, I never weary of their aristocratic grace. We must have gone some miles when the madam suggested our return. A crack of the whip, a vociferous shouting to the mules, and the coach faces right about with military precision for San Juan. With many a bewildering twist and turn through the upper town, we reach the Morro headland, and are glad enough to leave the coach and throw ourselves into the deep grass, where we sit a long time looking out to sea.
Those of you who have been there know; those of you who have not, never can know the loveliness of that far-spreading vision. No, not if all the poets joined in one grand panegyric, you would never know what it all meant. You would need to feel the dull booming of the sea against the cliffs and hear the cool rattle of the palms crooning over the children in the Casa Blanca; you must run your hands through the stiff deep grass down to the earth which makes so sweet and so warm a bed; you must throw back your face to the uplifting Northeast Trade; then you will know what it means to sink down upon the green carpet of San Juan and look out to sea.
A veil dropped over the still water; the sea and sky melted into one substance; then we arouse sufficiently to realise that the madam is waiting. By this time San Juan had made ready for the night; we could see the fitful flicker of her electric lights down near the barracks, and here and there the dull red stare of an olden time street-lamp swinging midway between the dark lanes which intersect the upper town like long tentacles.
We ran down along the sea-wall, under the lattice of the stately Casa Blanca, and came into the city; turning abruptly to the left we were about to follow the Captain up the steep street, when I was stopped suddenly with my whole soul ablaze with wonder, for there on the top of the hill, as if on the very stones themselves, there rolled a great yellowish-green moon, and about it there fell a heaven splashed with emerald and gold. There were green and yellow and strange hues of blue all blending into a splendour which dazzled the senses and made one feel dumb. I am so thankful that we saw the moon before dinner. I couldn’t have looked in the face of a green moon afterward, no, I could never have done it.
I beg of you to be as considerate of me as possible in your judgment. I do not mean to be ungrateful to our dear hosts, or unkind or disagreeable; but after that dinner, planned for us with so much care and pride, all I could say was, “O Lord, have mercy upon us—miserable offenders!” We had things to eat I had never dreamed of, and may I be spared a recurrence of them in my future dreams! There were:
Tomatoes and peppers.
Pork chops, and peppers.
Codfish, vegetables and peppers.
Chicken and peas and more peppers and some black coffee and cheese, and the sweetest sweets I ever tasted, with a final dessert of beans with a sugar sauce. After dinner madam had chairs arranged on the balcony over the Plaza. She led the way, and said the concert would be delightful in the moonlight. But as the pepper and the various concoctions of grease and greens and sugar and beans began to make themselves felt, I turned my chair around, saying that I never could look at the moon any length of time, especially a green moon. Then Sister gave me a despairing look and turned her chair around too; gave my hand a hard squeeze, and leaning over, said: “Mother, it’s the peppers and sweet things; do you think Daddy could get me some Jamaica ginger?” A whispered consultation is held, after which the Captain and Daddy disappear, and then something warm and comforting is fixed up for Sister and me, and we decide that after all we will turn our chairs around to face the moon, but alas, the inconstant creature had slipped on her black hood and was scurrying off like a little fat nun. She was no more to be seen that night.
But her displeasure does not affect the humour of San Juan, for by this time the Plaza is filled with people making “el gran paseo” around and around the square in true Spanish fashion.
Meantime the Plaza is being filled with chairs—rocking-chairs—which seem to spring up out of nothing. I never saw or expect to see so many rocking-chairs in any one place. Here the “Four Hundred” sit, having paid a small fee for the use of the chairs, and here they rock back and forth and back and forth in endless waves until the music begins. Some rock with the elegant ease of the portly señora and others with the sprightly jerk of the laughing niñita, and as seen from the veranda of the Colonial, the eyes ache as they involuntarily follow the moving crowds circling countless times around the improvised barricade of oscillating chairs. But the music begins, the people are suddenly still, and out over the luminous night, still eloquent of the retreating moon, there fall the first notes. I know that it is rank heresy in me to acknowledge to any race but the Germans a preëminence in musical intuition; but I shall do so in spite of all the traditions of my youth. I believe that if the Spanish-American races could be given the skill and the knowledge to formulate their musical ideas to such an extent as has come to the painstaking Germans by generations of grinding, we would have greater music—and certainly more human music—than the world has ever heard. The Puerto Rican, as well as the Mexican, the Cuban, the Dominican, is the natural musician; he feels to his finger-tips every vibration of sound he utters, and he makes you feel what he does. His music is akin to that of the wild sea-bird, it is brother to the moaning of the winds, to the wan song of the dusky maidens in the dance—to dream sounds in cocoanut and palm-tree groves; it is life, moving, quickening, pulsating life their music speaks, and without life, what is the stuff we call music?
“Thank you, thank you, you have given us an evening we shall never forget. Shall we not see you in the morning? Buenas noches.”