When Bill came home that night, I harkened politely to his account of his outing, and then went early to my room. The poem which had made itself mine during my first night in Cuba was clamoring to be written. And so I wrote it, at my table under the window, conscious that no words in so unskilled a hand could set down my feeling of imprisonment and regret.
Finished, I laid it in the drawer where my diary and the letters from Richard Warren were. It was a childish thing, but I had made it, and it belonged to me ... and to one other.
Nocturne
The moonlight slips in silence through the bars,
The iron bars which lend a strange romance To my wide windows, open to the stars, Which, like gold fire-flies, imprisoned, dance Caught in the dark mantilla of the Night; That flowing veil of jewelled, enchanting lace From careless, faery finger-tips flung light To veil the tropic Moon's pale, ardent face.
My windows give on gardens dim, a-gleam
And freshly fragrant with night-growing things, On gardens where the sleeping flowers dream Till, cradled on the errant wind's cool wings Their little souls are wafted to far lands, While all their dreams like incense, float and rise To where some garden goddess with white hands, Gems with bright dew her nurslings' sleep-kissed eyes.
In shadowed groves, with brilliant moon, blood-stained,
A bird is sobbing for a distant star, In golden longing for the Unattained.... While at some window, pleading, a guitar Touched by brown fingers, throbs in serenade. And still the moonbeams fling a silvern dart, Straight through my window's iron barricade.... Thus Love steals, silent, to the prisoned heart, And, smiling, with a mockery divine Slips softly to some unguessed, secret shrine, To set the Altar Fires flaming high!
I closed the drawer—spent, unsatisfied. The thing was halting and superficial. It did not seem possible that there were people who could find release in words, or peace in beauty.
I had not reread Richard Warren's letters since my marriage. And this was a night I dared not read them, for all that my resolve weakened. For, in some inexplicable way, he had become very real to me—in Cuba. And I knew that he could not be anyone save himself, could not be anything save strong and fine and understanding.
I took my trouble into Peter's room and sat with it for a long time, by his bedside. But it was Dawn, before, in my cool, deep alcove, I had ceased tossing and slept.