It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra, with such a drink. It elevated my contentment to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached amusement, I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was formally in effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it held, in its shallow glass bowl slightly encrusted with undissolved sugar, the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and to-morrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal, fears.
Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared intoxicating drinks.... The word intoxicating adequately expressed their power, their menace to orderly monotonous resignation. A word, I thought further, debased by moralists from its primary ecstatic content. Intoxication with Ron Bacardi, with May, with passion, was a state threatening to privilege, abhorrent to authority. And, since the dull were so fatally in the majority, they had succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to whatever lay outside their lymphatic understanding. They had, as well, made the term gay an accusation before their Lord, confounding it with loose, so that now a gay girl—certainly the only girl worth a ribbon or the last devotion—was one bearing upon her graceful figure, for she was apt to be reprehensibly graceful, the censure of a society open to any charge other than that of gaiety in either of its meanings. A ridiculous, a tragic, conclusion, I told myself indifferently: but then, with a fresh Daiquiri and a sprig of orange blossoms in my buttonhole, it meant less than nothing. It grew cooler, and an augmented stir set in motion toward the dining-room, where the files of damask-spread tables held polished silver water-bottles and sugar in crystal jars with spouts.
* * *
The wisdom of the attention I had given to my appearance was at once evident in the table to which the head waiter conducted me. Small and reserved with a canted chair, it was directly at one of the long windows on the Parque Central. This, at first sight, on the part of its arbiter, would not have been merely an affair for money—he had his eye on the effect of the dining-room as a whole, as an expanse of the utmost decorative correctness, and there were a number of men with quite pretty women, a great asset publicly, who had been given places in the center of the room. Yes, where I was seated the ruffled curtains were swayed by the night breeze almost against my chair, a brilliant section of the plaza was directly at my shoulder, and I was pervaded by the essential feeling of having the best possible situation.
This was not, perhaps, true of characters more admirable than mine: but if I had been seated behind one of the pillars, buried in an obscure angle, my spirits would have suffered a sharp decline. I should have thought, temporarily, less of Havana, of myself, and of the world. The passionate interest in living, the sense of æsthetic security, that resulted in my turning continually to the inconceivable slavery of writing, would have been absent. But seated in one of the most desirable spots in existence, a dining-room of copper glazed tiles open on the tropics, about to begin a dinner with shrimps in the pink—the veritable rose—of perfection, while a head waiter, a triumph of intelligent sympathy, conferred with me on the delicate subject of wines, I felt equal to prose of matchless loveliness.
The dinner, finally, as good dinners were apt to be, was small, simple, with—the result of a prolonged consideration—a bottle of Marquis de Riscal. All the while the kaleidoscope of the Parque was revolving in patterns of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Passersby were remarkably graphic and near: a short man with a severe expression and a thick grey beard suddenly appeared in the open window and demanded that I buy a whole lottery ticket; a sallow individual from without unfolded a bright glazed sheaf of unspeakably stupid American magazines; farther off, the crowd eddied through the lanes between the innumerable chairs drawn up companionably on the plaza. At a table close by, a family of Cubans were supplementing the courses of formal dining with an endless vivacious chatter, a warmth of interest charming to follow.
The father, stout, with an impressive moustache of which not one hair seemed uncounted or mislaid, regarded his short fat wife, his tall slim son, and his two entrancing daughters with an impartially active and affectionate attention. The girls were young, one perhaps fifteen and the other not more than a year or so older, though they both managed lorgnons with an ease and impertinent frankness that an older woman might well have envied, while they talked in rushes of vivid Spanish with an emphases of delectable shrugged shoulders, and, recognizing an acquaintance, exhibited smiles as dazzling as only youth knew. The boy, however, engaged me more strongly; a tone darker than the others, in repose his face, delicate in feature, was grave, reflective; his smooth black hair grew into a peak on his brow, his gaze was considerate, direct, and his mouth sensitive. Cuba, I thought, at its best; and here that was very good indeed. Any such degree of mingled dignity and the highly impressionable, of reserve and flexibility, was absent from the cruder young of the north.
He had, at the same time, an indefinable air of melancholy, a bearing that, while not devoid of pride, belonged to a minor people, to an island the ultimate fate of which—in a political word of singular faithlessness—was hidden in shadow. An affair of mere simple courage, of execution for an ideal by Spanish rifles in a Cabañas foss, he would have borne with brilliant success; he'd have ornamented charmingly the security of a great coffee estate in Pinar del Rio; it was possible that he might be distinguished in finance; but there was not back of him the sense of sheer weight, of ponderous land, that gave, for example, the chance young Englishman his conscious security, the American his slightly shrill material confidence.
This Cuban's particular quality, it seemed to me, belonged to the past, to an age when men wore jewelled buckles and aristocracy was an advantage rather than a misfortune. He had about him the graceful fatality now so bitterly attacked by the widening power of what was heroically referred to as the people. He represented, from the crown of his lustrous hair to his narrow correct dancing shoes, in his shapely hands and dark fine skin, privilege and sequestered gold. Outrages, I had heard, soon to be forever overthrown! It was possible that both the charges and the threatened remedy were actualities, and that privilege would disappear ... from one hand to another, and great lawns be cut up into cabbage patches and Empire ball-rooms converted into communal halls for village rancor.
Not much, in the way of benefit, could follow that. And women in starched linen collars, with starched theories of civic consciousness, would hardly be an improvement on fragrant memories of satin, moments of passion and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness. A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was immeasurably disastrous. All of this I saw reflected in the boy with peaked hair at the next table. He took a cigarette from a black silk case, and I was immediately reminded of my cigar.