But the drawback upon all goings forward, the voluminous reiteration of feminine folking, must be performed; and we must again test the frailty of tropical locomotive veracity and steamboat protestations.
Tuesday, 20th.—We simply didn’t go last night because the steamer didn’t; reason not yet transpired. I am becoming so used to these failures of plans and probabilities, that I think nothing would disappoint me now, but a want of disappointment. However, I was not sorry that this last detention gave me an opportunity to witness a very interesting spectacle. A torchlight procession of priests and friars and mourners and friends, to say mass over a dying person. We were first drawn to the balcony by the incessant singing of a peculiarly toned bell, and then we saw them slowly and solemnly marching far below us, down the dark and narrow street, heralded by the strange bell in the hands of one of the novices, and going with devout faith in its absolute efficacy to shrive a human soul—its last earthly help in its last earthly extremity. The effect was much like that of the Misericordia in the cities of Italy, except that you miss here the quaintness and impressiveness of the black or white dominos. I did not care for the superstition; I only felt a profound awe, a solemn sense of mystery and fitness; I only marvelled that people can ever scorn or ridicule any faith that is sincere in heart.
At half-past ten we retired, just as the watchman was commencing his round of duty. Few things are more novel to us than this. The curious whistle is a kind of prelude to the monotonous tone with which he, every half-hour, slowly pacing up and down, lantern and spear in hand, announces the hour of the night and the state of the weather. He keeps a sharp lookout on the weather as well as other vagrants, and clearly feels a responsibility in the matter. I have learned all the words he uses to tell us that the moon is shining, or clouds are obscuring it; if it is cold enough to encourage an extra blanket, or if a norther or sérocco is getting the upper hand of things; which hour is giving up the ghost, or which is like a soul “rolling from out the vast.” But I can never comprehend what he says, the words are so drawled and twisted to suit the tune, which my English ears understand to be musical and not unsuited to a lullaby, and at the same time so many other watchmen in neighboring streets are mingling their echoes and refrains.
Guiness, Wednesday, March 21st.—At last! With the earliest dawning of the dawn we found ourselves actually leaving Havana, and that not by the boat, which it had become our turn to disappoint. How tired the watchmen looked as we passed them! lantern lights burnt out, long ancient looking spears carried listlessly by their sides, the guardianship of the weather left in the hands of the coming Apollo. The busy markets are already open; shopmen unfastening shutters; life beginning to awake and throb through the great body of Havana. Its soul, whether great or small, is scarcely yet awakened into any circulation through the channels of art or literature. The bells are ringing, drums beating, and guns firing, for it is five o’clock. The day is up betimes. The morning and evening here are the first day, and every day. Noon is but a shorter panting, gilded, interluding night, when all sleep who can, and all long for sleep who cannot. But the carriage stops in the midst of an articulating human mass. How it hurries and bustles! how many faces it has, and every one a different variety of brown or a new invention in the shades of black.
Presently the gentlemen come with tickets, separate ones for baggage and passage, and obtained with much difficulty and circumlocution, as the rule is that baggage must be sent the night before—which ours was not. No sooner are we settled in the cool cane seats than—will you believe it?—a whistle, the modern screech of a steam-whistle, is heard, and we start precisely punctual to the minute. Therefore, I assert, and will maintain that it is conceivable, it is not contrary to all the laws of nature, it is possible for a promise to be kept this side the Tropic of Cancer. But how am I to become reconciled to all this comfort and speed, this steam-engine, this trail insinuating itself so complacently through these celestial plains, snorting and blowing and smoking through these orange-groves, past these waving royal palms, in the midst of sights and sounds such as lulled Eve into slumber upon the bridal night of her birth! O insatiate Yankeedom! with all the lurid sins you have to answer for, will not this alone secure you a life lease in Purgatory? But I have no time for unpatriotic indignation. Fields of belligerent looking pineapples; orchards of bananas twenty feet high, with immense leaves all torn into rags by the wind; groves of cocoa-nuts that look like sentimental palms in delicate health, with the green clustered fruit hanging round their necks like an affectionate necklace; cacti, the prickly pear growing fifteen feet high, and fences of the kinds I have cultivated in pots with so much care; vegetables, familiar and unfamiliar, for the Havana market; everywhere trees of gayest plumage, the blossoms so large and brilliant, that you grow incredulous and wonder if your eyes are not become telescopic. As you approach the interior, immense corn-fields greet you with their sweetened breath, looking like corn-fields of the Southern States grown delicate and pale from close confinement, a thickened growth that excludes the air.
At nine o’clock the train stops at a village named Bejucal. But for some reason it does not start again. B—— inquires to find we are to remain three hours—some failure in the engine. So we do what nobody else does, walk half a mile under our umbrellas to examine the town and get a breakfast. See if you do not think this a droll sight for American eyes. A village containing over a thousand inhabitants, every house in it, except the church, of one high story, roofed with large red earthen tiles, built of stone covered with clay or plaster, and painted in all possible colors that are bright. Not a pane of glass visible, all the immense windows being only grated and then filled with idle, staring women and naked children. Every house opens directly upon the sidewalk; and in the whole extent of streets, gardens, and courtyards, here in this land of miraculous vegetation, not a tree to be seen. But I have no eyes or curiosity left. I am one huge unreconciled appetite.
We stop at a house with larger rooms, larger windows, and larger basements than the rest; where rows of breakfast-tables, each with a caster in the centre and a tall black wine-bottle on either side, promise a drop, possibly a mouthful, of comfort to the perishing inner woman. But the tablecloths! Even my great hunger hasn’t stomach for them all, overlaid and underlaid as they are
“With food-prints that perhaps another,
Sitting o’er their various stain,
A forlorn and famished sister
Seeing still might eat again.”
Not so I. Consequently a private room is ordered with a breakfast in it, and while preparing to fill up the vaccuum, not of the within, we sally out for a reconnoitre. Just at the back door, we stumble upon—you do not guess?—a veritable theatre,—boxes, galleries, pit, stage with decorations for scenes, painted curtains, trap-door opening upon the prompter’s den, and niches properly placed for footlights. But the boxes are only stalls with rough board partitions, the seats are wooden benches, the galleries are an upper loft still retaining remnants of former hay, the floor is of mother earth unmodified by pavement or broom, and in fact we have every evidence that this temple is devoted to horses and oxen by day, and to the muse of the histrionic art by night. But this aching void which nature has the good sense to abhor! “Will breakfast never be ready? It is eleven o’clock! I wish I hadn’t seen the tablecloths.” Ah, here comes an agile quadroon announcing it in Spanish, which does not get itself translated. We go to a little bedroom from which a cot has been hastily ejected, and sit down to a table loaded with fresh fruits of great variety and abundance, in addition to the usual bountiful breakfast of the country, and, best of all, clean linen under them. You are right: we revel, we luxuriate, and to this hour I sit and think of that breakfast with a gastronomic satisfaction none the less because we paid five dollars for it. We are now ready for any adventure at the disposal of the remaining hour, and set out for the ruins of an old castle said to have been built by the Marquis de San Phillippi and honored by the presence of King Ferdinand VII. at a ball, while he was incognito in this country. Now the walls are crumbling to dust; one or two window-shutters flap disconsolately in the wind, parasitic plants grow over the mouldering arches where a dead past sleeps its sleeps and dreams its dreams.
The church, Moorish in architecture, is just across the Plaza, and invites, but the sun threatens, and we decide for a tempting grove near the railway station.