“The ship was cleared,
The harbor cleared,
Merrily we did drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top,”
and we began to plunge in darkness and the broad ocean; and then one little hour more for the moon to rise out of this black sepulchre like its guardian ghost; we wait for it to say its say of beauty, and to brighten the farewell we take of Mr. S——, who leaves in the morning before we are awake, and whose constant kindness has been beyond return.
Now at last we really go; and what think you is the way to the ladies’ cabin? None other than directly through the gentlemen’s saloon, where the occupants all lie in open berths, and in most ghostly states of attire. I catch one glimpse of horizontal whiteness, draw my veil, seize B——’s arm, eventuate at the farther end. Here numerous nasal ebullitions (why will nobody submit to calling the thing snoring, if he himself is the offender?
“All men think all men” snorers “but themselves”)
are exchanged for intimations of equally fabulous sea-sickness, and I find myself safely arrived in the ladies’ cabin, where babies are prevailing to a sleepless extent.
Here my mattress, sheets, counterpane, are utterly ignored or forsworn in a cane-bottomed berth. Without any unpinning or unhooking delay, I follow the example of the groups of shady-faced ladies around me, not of Christabel when
“Her gentle limbs she did undress,
And lay down in her loveliness.”
This morning, after a delightful slumber all the sweeter because unexpected, I was awakened at daylight by a rattling of spoons, cups, and saucers. It is my companions taking their cup of coffee,—that inevitable potion without which you could never convince newly awakened Cuban men and women of their personal identity, or of the possibility of the world wagging one step farther.
We had already been lying an hour or more in the bay of Havana. Very soon all the passengers are gone but ourselves; we, the only foreigners, are left alone to wait the hour when a volante can be obtained. B—— goes as fast as possible to secure rooms at the hotel. One Chinese waiter offers me milkless coffee; another bushy-headed antipode stands in the door, with pail and mop in hand, waiting for me to go. At last, with patience in a precarious condition, I rush out on one side of the vessel to get out of the way, and I am driven thence by the observing disposition of a swarthy man lying in his berth in a little vessel moored next to our own: he leans on his coatless elbow with an air of cool curiosity that is unendurable. Then I go to the other side, where dirty drippings from the upper deck, suggest anew the superfluity of my presence and drive me, this time fluctuating on the precincts of ill-temper, out to the gentlemen’s cabin. Here I met B—— tired out with looking for a volante, and the disappointment of not finding rooms at Mrs. A——’s where we hoped to go for a change.
At last, after a deal of English and Spanish nobody understands, and of pantomimes that would have enlightened “blocks, and stones, and worse,” etc., we find ourselves re-established at Queen’s Hotel, in a room which, it is plain to see, if there were light enough in it to see anything, was made for some uncompleted individual,—one in whom had never been breathed the breath of life, or who had breathed it all out again, with little hope of a second respiratory experiment.