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.”
V.
It was high noon as Little Blue Ribbons and I left the empty Plaza and started out with grim determination to do our duty. The streets were silent as the sun crept over our heads and sent its burning, perpendicular rays through the white umbrella. But that was of no consequence. We two had made up our minds to accomplish a certain purpose, and when we make up our minds neither man nor weather can prevail against us. We had been idle long enough. Time and time again we had drifted to the time-ripened Morro. Days had gone by and we lacked the energy to begrudge their inconsequential passing, but now a time of reckoning had come. We would have no more such idleness. Little Blue Ribbons and I had awakened on this particular day to a realisation of our unperformed duty, and although detained through one pretext and another all the morning, by noon we forswore further procrastination and hurriedly left the Plaza before our good intentions could again be lulled by inaction.
