What was before me, in a world where the pure and the impure were inexplicably mixed in one flesh, was inevitable; its ugliness lay not with it, but in a society which, constantly tearing it down, as constantly projected again the penalty, the shadow, of a perfunctory and material estate. In addition, as long as the age of marriage, of love, was so tragically different in society and in nature, an informal interlude was unavoidable. But I had no need to apologize for anything. I had been spared the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of existence. What, pretentiously, was called the moral must shift for itself; that depended on what, beneath consciousness, I was—the justice and sympathy, the comprehension, of my being.
A slide opened mysteriously on the blank darkness before me, a bolt was drawn; and immediately I had left the street for a little entresol filled with lamplight, the breath of scented powder, and the notes of a piano played by a girl whose cigarette burned furiously on the scarred ebonized top of the instrument. She half turned, scanning me indifferently, and went on with her unelaborate music. The woman who had admitted me, a figure whose instant scrutiny resembled the unsparing accuracy of a photograph by flashlight, after a polite greeting, ignored me absolutely, and I was left to follow my fancy.
This led to the patio, larger and more entrancing than any I had before seen; it was paved in blocks of marble, and the white walls, warmly and fully illuminated, made a sharp contrast with the night, the sky and stars, above. There was a tree growing at one side; what it was I didn't know, but it hung large intensely green leaves into the light before climbing to obscurity. A great many people, it seemed to me, were present; and, as I found a seat on an ornamental iron bench, the formality of a civil greeting was scrupulously observed. The company was, to every outer regard, decorous to the point of stiffness. Opposite, two officers of the Spanish navy, in immaculate white with gilt epaulettes, were drinking naranjadas and conversing with two girls who nodded in appropriate sympathy. Farther on, a Cuban exquisite, his hands, in spite of the heat, cased in lavender grey gloves, was staring fixedly at the shining toes of his shoes. Others—yes, Rogelio in his youth—their hair faultlessly glossy, were more animated; their gestures and voices rose irrepressibly and sank in confidences to ears close beside them.
A row of doors, I then saw, filled one side of the patio, the interiors closed by swinging slatted screens; the wall at my back was blank, an exit at the rear, while on the right was the entrance. Scattered about, with the benches and chairs, small tables held a variety of glasses and drinks ... the entire atmosphere was pervaded, characterized, by utter ease. That was, to me, the most notable of the effects of that enclosure—an amazing freedom from superficial obligations, from the burdensome conventions which, so largely a part of existence, had come to be accepted either subconsciously or as a necessary evil. I realized for the first time the inanity of imposed pretences, the thick, the suffocating armor of triviality that criminally and ludicrously muffled life.
There were present, of course, all the poses of humanity, and a great many of its conventions; the girls were not hippogriffs, but girls—timid, bold, religious, skeptical, feminine, sentimental, happy and unhappy, hopeful and hopeless. Yet, in contradiction to this, the air offered a complete release from a thousand small irritating pressures. It came, partly, from the sense that here I was outside the order, the legality, the explicit purpose, of the forces organizing the world. I had stepped, as it were, from time, immediacy, to timelessness. The patio into which I was shut might have been on that earth the ancients conceived of as round and flat as a plate. No discovery, no wisdom accumulated by centuries and supreme sacrifices, had any bearing, any importance, in my circumstances now. I was contemporaneous with the lives precariously spent between the ebb and flood of the ice ages. The animals knew as much. But if I had nothing to gain from all that was successively admirable, nothing was lost that had been implicit in the beginning, nothing at the last end would be changed.
The conversation fluctuated about me, the glasses were carried away and brought back refilled; the smoke of cigars and cigarettes floated tranquilly up and was lost above the illumination, and I completely dropped the embarrassment which came from an uncertainty in such minor customs as existed. I was, in fact, extremely comfortable when I understood that I was left entirely to my own desires. These included the offer, in clumsy Spanish, of a general order of drinks; and there was a revival of polite phrases. Not all, by a half, accepted; the others bowed, gravely or cheerfully; and I retired again to my speculations.
These were mainly gathered about the regret that the scene before me was practically forbidden to American novels. It had, in reality, no place in the United States, and, therefore, could claim no legitimate page in American literature. There, anyhow, it could be said for public morals, such things were nearly all that the word vice implied. What, exactly, I was lamenting, was the old fundamental lack of candor in the American attitude. This, beyond question, proceeded from the people themselves, and not from commissions; an enormous majority, except for that national whispered currency of obscenity, was prudish beyond reclamation. For them, it was probable, the innocence of the body had been branded eternally. And I was neither a martyr nor a reformer. The loss to me was considerable—as it was, dealing with only the outer garments of fact, I had been accused of lasciviousness or something of the kind—and I envied the French the cool logic of their mentality, the cultivation of the French audience.
My mind reverted to Jurgen, the remarkable narrative of James Cabell's, that had been suppressed; a summary act of disturbing irony. For Mr. Cabell had spent a life, practically, reaching from the imagination of childhood to the performance of maturity, in a mental preoccupation with disembodied purity. He had set up, in his heart and in his books, the high altar of mediæval Platonism—an image of desire never to be clasped, reached, from earth; a consolation, really, for the earth-bound. But that, in the mind, the characteristic mind, of America, had not had the weight, the value, of a dandelion's gossamer seed. It was, definitely, a land that cared nothing for literature, the casting of transient life into the permanence of beautiful form. As the world advanced in years, the general importance of literature, it seemed to me, diminished; the truth was that people didn't care for it.
* * *
The ladies of pleasure—the merest identifying phrase, since, in the first place, they were practically all at the age of immaturity—were dressed in evening satins, cut generally with an effective simplicity, or the lacy whiteness still better adapted to the young person. In the tropical patio with its canopy of broad green leaves and night, the marble pavement and alabaster walls, they were brilliantly effective; it was only after an extended regard, carefully casual, that I appreciated the amazing diversity of their individuality, the gamut of bloods run. There were no Anglo-Saxons—they were faithful to the traditions of their latitude—and there was no positive Africa; but there was Africa in faint dilutions, in attenuations traced from lands remote as Tartary: