We shall meet on that beautiful shore.
Jennings: Fellow members of the Recluse Club, the shore which I select for our meeting is one you come to as you sail south from Galveston, fleeing from the bloodhounds of the law. Our great master of literature, Bill Porter, has described it in one of his immortal compositions, which I have this day been privileged to read. (takes manuscript from pocket and reads) “A clump of banana plants interposed their broad shields between him and the sun. The gentle slope from the consulate to the sea was covered with the dark-green foliage of lemon-trees and orange-trees just bursting into bloom. A lagoon pierced the land like a dark, jagged crystal, and above it a pale ceiba-tree rose almost to the clouds. The waving cocoanut palms on the beach flared their decorative green leaves against the slate of an almost quiescent sea. His senses were cognizant of brilliant scarlet and ochres amid the vert of the coppice, of odors of fruit and bloom and the smoke from Chanca’s clay oven under the calabash-tree; of the treble laughter of the native women in their huts, the song of the robin, the salt taste of the breeze, the diminuendo of the faint surf running along the shore.”
Such is the coast of Honduras after you have had a sufficient inoculation of the native aguardiente; otherwise it seems as I have jotted down on the margin of this manuscript: “Take a lot of Filipino huts and a couple of hundred brick-kilns and arrange ’em in squares in a cemetery. Cart down all the conservatory plants in the Astor and Vanderbilt greenhouses, and stick ’em about wherever there’s room. Turn all the Bellevue patients and the barbers’ convention and the Tuskegee school loose in the streets, and run the thermometer up to 120 in the shade. Set a fringe of the Rocky Mountains around the rear, let it rain, and set the whole business on Rockaway Beach in the middle of January.”
Fellow members of the Recluse Club, the day that Bill Porter and I first met on that beautiful shore, I was a wonderful object for the eye to behold. I had been attending a dinner-dance in the best society of Galveston, when I got the tip that the minions of the law had the house surrounded. I made my escape by a stratagem, and got aboard a steamer in the Gulf of Mexico, clad in a silk hat and dress-suit; in which costume I sailed for two weeks, battered in storms, and losing one tail off my coat. So I was dumped out in the little town of Trojillo, where I first saw our genial master of letters, seated in front of the consulate, clad in spotless white. Recognizing our common condition of fugitivity, we pooled our fates; I had thirty thousand dollars sewed up in my belt which I had got with the help of two sticks of dynamite, from the Wells-Fargo express car on a Santa Fe train. Together we went to worship at the shrine of the reigning divinity of Central America, a lady called Espiritu de la Vina, to whom they chant hymns by day and especially by night—(he sings)
A beber, a beber, a apurar
Las Copas de licor
Que el vino hara olvidar
(Espiritu de la Vina enters, dancing and singing; Jennings joins in dance with her)
De este sabroso jugo, la blanca espuma