This, naturally, had been influenced, strengthened, in Cuba by the climate, the breath of the tropics; even the winters were not conducive to violent exercise, aside from the fact that that was the prerogative of stolid temperaments. It was the deliberate, the unexcitable, who most excelled at trials of personal muscular skill; and neither of them were at home below certain latitudes. For myself, I was grateful, for I hadn't much in common with the exemplifications of field skill I had met. They were very apt to pay for their success by the absence of the attributes I particularly admired; often they were snobs of a very exasperating type—monuments of college beef with irreproachable hair, sacrosanct pins, and insensate conventional mentalities.
A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their saddles, trooped to the judges' stand to be weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened, preternaturally cunning faces. They were like pygmies of a strange breed in red and yellow and blue satins; faultless for their purpose, on the ground they were extraordinary, leather-skinned, with puckering eyes, drawn mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled among themselves in shrill or foggy voices—a very depressing specialization of humanity. But the horses were magnificent, slender and shining. I admired them from a distance, glad that it was no part of my responsibility to ride. Long ago, under the pressure of an untender emotion, I had learned to sit on a horse through his reasonable moments; but I had never become at ease, and I stopped riding when, on the country road of a May Sunday noon, a tall sorrel ran away with me so fast and so far that we passed three churches with their scattering congregations.
There were, on the veranda, drinks, and even they—the Scotch highballs—translated into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed sound. It was on my return, stopping at the Telegrafo Café, that I learned the delightful possibility of a Daiquiri cocktail. It was twice as large as ordinary, what in the north was called a double; but no Daiquiri out of Cuba could be thought of in comparison. Only one other drink might be considered—a Ramos gin-fizz. My extreme allegiance had been given to the latter. I was not willing, even in the Telegrafo, to depose it from first place; but the Telegrafo was a pleasanter spot than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see the beginning of the Prado, with the swirl of cars on their afternoon round to the Malecón. Some arc-lights, just turned on, were sources of color, like great symmetrical lemons, rather than of illumination. After another rain the bare flambeau trees would burst into fiery bloom.
I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra, through the gallery that had once been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower man, who advanced with a smile and a close nosegay of gardenias. A curious flower, I thought, getting water for them in a glass. They didn't wilt, as was usual, but turned brown and faded in the manner of a lovely pallid woman—a simile I had used in Linda Condon. A flower that belonged less to nature than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons and the opera loges of eighteen forty, and not at all to the present in the United States. But worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate to the black hair of the Cuban woman. Gold hair, the fair temperament, had no business with gardenias: bouquets of white sweet peas looped with pale green and silver ribbon, yes; and dark bunches of moss roses; the old bouquets of concentric rings of buds in lace paper! They were the property of the girls I had known, the frank girls with clear grey eyes and the appealing girls with eyes like forget-me-nots. Something more poignant, a heavier disturbing perfume, was necessary against a figure seen only from a balcony or with a vague fleetness behind a grille gracefully wrought out of iron.
My shutters now were opened, and I could make out, against the dimming sky, the languid folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance of the Centro Gallego—the standard that had conquered the western tropics, only, in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the wind mightier than His Most Catholic Majesty.
* * *
There was some question of where I'd go for dinner, for in Havana there were many cafés to explore—the Dos Hermanos, the Paris, the Florida, the Hotel de Luz, the Miramar; but, finally, I walked down to the Prado, to the sea and the Miramar, a little because of its situation, directly on the Malecón, but principally for the reason that it had one of the most beautiful names possible, a name which called up the image of a level tide so smooth that it held in shining replica the forts, the ships, and the clouds. Tables were prepared for dinner in the restaurant, while those on the terrace were without cloths; but there I determined to sit, and the waiter whose attention I captured, after a long delay, agreed.
A solitary couple had their heads together by the window, and they, with myself, were the only diners. It was, evidently, not now the place to go to at this hour. Beyond the dining-room, a patio, or rather an open court, was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces can be, deserted and half-lighted; but I saw that a considerable activity was expected much later.
I was glad that the terrace was empty, for, with the light now faded from the sea and its blueness merging into black, the remote tranquillity of evening was happier without a sharp chatter of voices. The Miramar, considering its place—the most advantageous in all Havana—and fame was surprisingly small: scarcely more than two stories high, the sombre maroon walls with their long windows hardly filled an angle of the Malecón. The dinner was slow in arriving, the silver made its appearance, a goblet was brought separately, a plate of French bread was later followed by its butter. The minute native oysters were no more than shreds adhering to their shells, but they had a notable flavor; a crawfish was at its brightest apogee; and an omelet browned in a delicate perfection of powdered sugar.
I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable Riscal, for champagne; for there was about an air of departed charm, the whisper of old waltzes and tarleton, that demanded commemoration. The Miramar had been the gay center of that mid-century life which had folded Havana in the lasting influence of its memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvantage compared to the feverish society of to-day! The bodices then had been no more than scraps of chambery gauze and Chinese ribbon below shoulders to the whiteness of which the entire feminine age had been devoted. The flounced bell skirts had swung airily on gracious silk clappers.