Then, in the drawing of a breath, they were all destroyed, gone, killed by slavery, in the name of God on the points of swords, by the rapacity, the corruption, the diseases, of civilization. A Spanish Cuba rose—Iberian and yet singularly different—a business of Captain-General and Teniente Rey, of alcalde and alcaide, of Santiago de Cuba and San Cristóbal de la Habana. The French under Jacques Sores, and the English under Drake, sailed over the horizon. In less than a second, the expiration of a sigh, Diego de Velasquez and Narvaez, Isabel de Bobadilla, Rojas and Guzman, the merchant Diego Perez in vain laying the guns of the Magdalena in defense of the past, had gone. The Cedula from Madrid, in eighteen hundred and twenty-five, began the conspiracies, Tacón came and went, the fiscals beat free colored men to death and entertained the negro women naked at balls. The Lopez rebellion was followed by the ten years' war of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight and the peace of Zanjon, the great rebellion and Weyler.

There remained now the indefinite sea and a city withdrawn, secretive, made vaguely beautiful by intangible voices, all its voices that had laughed and shouted, whispered and cried; and by the towers and walls merged in a single pattern, the old and the new drawn together by an aspect of impermanence, freed from the deceptive appearance of solidity. Suddenly its history had been shown to me in a flash of emotion, a mood of feeling. I hadn't come to Cuba ignorant of the land, but I had determined to slight what was but written inanimate fact. I had no disposition for instruction: books were powerless to create La Punta for me, it must bear its own credentials ... it might become, to my uncertain advantage, as important as a Daiquiri cocktail, as a Larrañaga cigar, but hardly more.

In any other case I should have cheated myself, not only of pleasure, the relaxation possible to honesty of mind, but of any hope of future material. The creative habit was the most tireless and frugal in existence: there was nothing—no experience, person, disillusionment, or pain—not endlessly sounded for its every note and meaning. No one could predict what would be indispensable, just as it was impossible to foresee, in the projection of a novel, where its fine moments occurred. And, returning to the descriptive and historical books on Cuba, left so largely unread at the Inglaterra, it was probable that they had omitted, in their effort for literal and conventional emphasis, what might in their subject be vivifying to me.

This, however, was beyond spoiling—a history so picturesque, as I have intimated, that its very vividness, its commonest phases, had become the threadbare material of obvious romance. But, outside of all that, the other Havana, the mid-Victorian Pompeii, a city that none could have predicted or told me of, offered the incentive of its particular and rare charm. In the Parque Maceo, on the sea wall, my imagination stirred with the first beginnings of a story: it would take place in the period when the avaricious grip of Spain was loosening, a story of secret patriotism and the idealism of youth, set in marble salons, at the opera and the cafés. It would not concern itself with any love except the fidelity between two men, a story of friendship.

There it would be different from The Arrow of Gold and Doña Rita; no peignoirs, thank you, but a formality, a passionate propriety, in keeping with the social gravity and impersonal devotion of the very young. There must be crinoline—would I never escape from that!—and candelabra with glittering prisms; Spanish soldiers in striped linen and officials with green-tasselled canes. My youth, he'd come from the United States, would have his little dinners at the Restaurant Française, in Cuba Street number seventy-two, and his refrescos at the Café Dominica. In the end he'd leave Havana, having accomplished nothing but the loss of his illusions for the gain of a memory like a dream, but his friend, a Cuban—I had seen him that first night at dinner in the Inglaterra—would be killed. How....

It was time to go back to the hotel, and the story receded. I walked too far on Belascoin Street, all the way to Salud; and, past the Tacón Market, came out on the Parque de Colon, where now there was a hot dusty wind, like a localized sirocco, and I was glad to reach my room. The reflection of the colored glass above the window was hardly discernible on the tiles; the interior was permeated by a shadow which made the ceiling appear high beyond computation; and my wardrobe trunk, standing open, exhibited a rack of limp neckties. I turned again to the novels on the table and again let them drop, unattended, from a listless hand. Tepid water! And I wondered—a constant subject with me—when we should have a new vigorous American literature, a literature absolutely native, by men who had not, like myself, been to school to Turgenev and the English lyrical poetry. Henry James had found the United States lacking in background; the lack was evident, but not in the country of his birth.

This was not a complaint against The Velvet Glove except as it equally applied to me; but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an ability to which we could, without reserve, take off our hats. The fact hit me that I was forty, although it was still the fashion among reviewers to speak of me as a promising young man, and that there were patches of grey hair on my temples. Yet I had been, everything considered, remarkably successful; there was no need for sentimental regret, a trait of mental feebleness.

I decided to do something positive that evening, to go to the theatre, or, if it were playing, to see the Jai Alai. The latter was possible, and, by way of the Telegrafo, I reached the Hotel Florida for dinner; a restaurant which, because of the windows looking down on it, had the pleasant individual air of a courtyard. The music played, diners came and went, and I gazed up at the shallow balconies in the hopefulness of an incorrigible imagination. The Fronton Jai Alai—in Havana the game, pelota, had taken the title of its court—was a long way from Obispo Street, but I knew when we had reached it by the solid volume of shouting that escaped from the high concrete building into the dim neighborhood.

* * *

Inside, the court was an immense expanse with granite-laid walls, a long rectangle, one side of which was formed by the steeply banked rows of spectators. Regular spaces were marked by white lines on the playing floor, and at one end the score was hung against the names of the players, now two teams—the Azules and the Blancos. The boxes were above the cement ledges packed with standing men, by a promenade, where the betting was conducted, cigars sold, and a small active bar maintained. It was the night of a gala benefit, for the Damas de Caridad, and I had been fortunate in getting a single box seat. I was late, though, and the game progressing; still, I was the first in our railed space; but the others, who proved to be Americans, soon followed—three prosperous men, manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom native good taste had been given the opportunities of large resources.