My mother, Mr. Morris and I took rooms at the same hotel, the Clarendon.
We seemed to be the only guests there. We took our meals in a great hall on the first floor, upon which all the rooms opened.
Yet we were not the only guests, for suddenly a gentleman appeared on the scene.
At first we paid no particular attention to him, but gradually we observed that he seemed to be very much depressed. As it was excessively warm he was always dressed only in his pyjamas. This is a detail that I happen to remember, for Mr. Morris also wore nothing else. The heat was insufferable, but I have always liked heat by reason of the chronic tendency to colds that I have had since my birth.
One day I asked my mother and Mr. Morris to invite the newcomer to our table. I discovered with regret that conversation between us would be impossible because he spoke only French and we only English. By means, however, of pantomime and much good will on both sides, we managed to make him understand our intention.
Our polite intercourse consisted in nods and smiles and bows and in making our hands and arms go this way and that way. As soon, however, as we had become acquainted our relations were at once established on a very comfortable basis.
He went with us to the theatre every time we played, that was three times a week, and we took our meals together. During the three months in which we were in Jamaica, I never took the trouble to find out his name. As a general principle I am always less concerned with my friends’ names than with my friends themselves.
After Jamaica we returned to New York and I hardly ever thought of Kingston again.
Two years later, when I was dancing at the Folies-Bergère, an elegant gentleman, accompanied by a friend, asked for an interview. He turned out to be our Jamaica companion and his friend the Minister of Finance of Haiti.
In the meantime he had learned English and was able to tell me that the period at which we had seen him at Kingston was only a few months after the breaking out of a revolution in Haiti. Our friend’s father, one of the leading bankers of the island, had been assassinated, and he himself had been obliged to escape in a small boat. He had been rescued at sea and brought to Kingston. All the while he was in Jamaica he had been trying to communicate with his friends, by way of New York, and he had not been able to learn whether his mother, his brothers, and his sisters were dead or alive.