CHAPTER X

I had been asleep for several hours, I fancy, that first night in Cuba, when I awoke to see the moonlight, like a living presence in my room. Across the floor it lay in long, level bars of light. Not the iron barriers at my window could keep it out. Silver it was, and never still, but quivering as if a heart shook it. The scent of flowers came to me, and far off in what was probably the native quarter, I heard a throbbing instrument touched very softly, and the sound of singing. It was all so strange, I could scarcely believe myself awake. And presently, in nightgown and bare feet, I went across the cool tiles to the windows and looked out.

The earth was silver under my eyes and the tall palms delicately feathered with light. The singing died away to half a sob. The smell of growing things was heavy and sweet on the air. It was all sheer beauty.

A little song began to weave itself in my brain. I had made songs before: almost too shy to set down on paper they were. But here, in Cuba, where everything seemed softness and release, I wondered if perhaps I could not sing with a stronger voice, and shape my songs with pen and ink. What was it Richard Warren had said about poets? And then, suddenly I knew that it was the thought of him which had taken me out of sleep and sent me trembling to the window, with my breast bare to the wonderful night. I knew that, once and for all, all beauty must be inextricably woven with the thought of him who had signed himself my "lover."

It was then that I became aware that something was hurting me cruelly--something cold and hard and forbidding. I crept back to bed with the marks of the bars across my breast.

In the morning I woke to find Peter sitting crosslegged on my bed saying solemnly,

"They're blue! They're grey! No, they're open and they're brown!"

Wide awake now, I caught him to me, cuddled him close and then asked wildly,

"Oh-h, Peter!--what's that?"

Not far from my window a raucous voice was saying, "Bring me my coffee! Coffee! Norah! Hurry up!"

"Perhaps it's Uncle Bill!" said Peter, open-mouthed.

"Of course it isn't, Peter," I said quite crossly, and climbed out of bed.

From my window, in the full, dazzling sunlight, I could see where the kitchen made an L, and the screened kitchen porch from which that terrifying voice emanated.

"Hurry!" it was saying. "Gol dern! Coffee! Coffee!"

"Why, Peter," I cried, "it's a macaw! A beauty! I've never seen one before--only pictures! Hurry and get dressed and let's go out and say good-morning to him!"

Sarah, apparently at home, and certainly composed, but rather too communicative as to the habits of "heathen," appeared, to help me dress and to hustle Peter into his own room. But before I was ready, a knock came at the door, and on its heels, Norah, bearing fragrant coffee and hot, brown rolls.

"Good morning, and it's never _up_ ye are!" she said in astonishment, setting the tray down on a little table which she spread with a white cloth.

"Doesn't one get up in Cuba?" I asked, laughing, as, in a negligée, I sat down to my breakfast.

"Not yet," she answered, "it's coffee ye have in bed, and then at eleven-thirty a real, big breakfast-lunch. Tea's at four, and dinner's at eight--unless ye'd rather it was different, ma'am," she added hastily.

"Not at all," I assured her, "I think it's a delightful arrangement. When in Cuba...." I began gaily.

"Smoke Cubebs!" finished another voice, and my husband's dark head appeared in the open doorway. "Good morning, Mavis. How did you sleep?"

"Beautifully," I told him, just a little bit embarrassed as his tall, bathrobed figure wandered unconcernedly in.

"Another cup," he said to Norah, with a side-glance at me and a careless, "with your permission."

I nodded--I couldn't very well do anything else, with Sarah there, and Norah beaming, and Peter dashing in to shriek loudly for milk.

In the general tumult, the macaw had started again,

"Norah!" it squawked. "Coffee! Coffee!"

"For heaven's sake," I said, "what sophisticated sort of a bird is that?"

"That's Arthur," said Norah proudly, and disappeared. Later, I left Bill and Peter exchanging pleasantries over the breakfast table and went to the kitchen porch to watch Arthur being fed bread, lavishly sopped in coffee, from a spoon. He was an utterly gorgeous bird, yellow and blue, and "a great talker," as Norah informed me. Me, however, he regarded for some time with a glassy eye, and merely reiterated his desire for strong drink.

Returning, I found my room empty and closing the door, proceeded, with mixed emotions, to dress.

Last night ... the moonlight and the surge of regret and longing which had threatened to drown me, seemed very far away. And it was mentally on tip-toe that I joined a white flannelled Bill for my first stroll about my temporary domain.

We were alone, Peter having long since appropriated the services of Silas and gone forth with him to view the country.

The sun was very hot, and I tilted my parasol low over my face. Through avenues of palms we walked to the big, red-roofed garage, and on to the little orange grove behind the out-buildings. Beyond, the cane fields stretched, green and tall and waving. Figures, stunted, wiry, moved in the fields ... far off I saw a patient donkey stand, his back loaded with long lengths of cane tips. It was all hot and still, clear-cut and unreal to look at.

Silas, Peter and one of the natives came toward us, Peter rapt at the tremendous flow of Cuban-Spanish which surged above his small blonde head. They stopped to speak to us, Bill growing suddenly foreign and gesticulating as he answered the bent brown man's greetings.

"That's Juan," he told me, as we moved off. "Great old character. He has a daughter whom he adores, a girl who must be sixteen now, I should judge. He used to beat her unmercifully...."

"Horrible creature!" I said, with a shudder, my mind flashing back to that beautiful, sinister fortress rising, towered, from the sea, a symbol and a reminder....

Bill pushed his panama back from his broad forehead and whistled.

"I don't know," he said thoughtfully.... "After all, he beat her to keep her good."

A peacock, tail unfurled, minced colorfully toward us, down the white pathway.

"To keep her good!" I repeated scornfully, "with whipping?"

"I'm not advocating it," he answered quickly, "but his motives are unquestionably admirable. And there's a Spanish proverb, you may recall--it runs, tersely, 'A woman, a dog, and a chestnut-tree, the more you beat them, the better they be!'"

Wiggles, his eyes on the stately departing peacock, pranced down the path toward us, and, deflected by my whistle from his original, doubtless destructive purpose, leaped gaily at my ruffles.

"Did you hear that, Wiggles?" I asked him. "This is decidedly no place for you!"

But Wiggles, rolling happily in the grass, merely snorted.

A gong sounded from the house, and we went in to lunch.

About two o'clock, I was attacked by an overpowering languor. Twice, no less, I yawned in Peter's face, in the midst of his thrilling description of "babies an' ladies an' gentlemen, all brown, Aunt Mavis!"

"Siesta, now!" remarked my husband briskly. "Both of you! Off to bed!"

"Bed!" I said, "in the middle of the day!" Peter, but recently released from the burden of an afternoon nap, protested.

"Custom of the country," said Bill. "No getting around it. Couldn't if you wanted to. Even Arthur is asleep."

I listened. We were on the verandah, and all about us was a stillness which was almost audible. On the white road beyond our gates I saw a pair of oxen, toiling patiently up the hill. Even the birds were quiet, only now and then a sleepy chirping drifted down the hot air. It seemed as if a veil had been drawn over the land. My eyelids felt freighted, and I was very tired.

"Bed!" said Bill firmly.

I left Peter to his tender mercies and went indoors. My room was cool, and sweet with flower perfume. Sarah, yawning, came when I rang, and unhooked my frock. As I lay down on the bed, I heard her say something, bitterly, about "an unhealthy climate," but if she said more, I do not know what it was, for I was fast and dreamlessly asleep.

It was Arthur who woke me, making the day hideous with his laughter. "Mother's darling!" he announced, unctuously. "Pretty Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!"

I turned over and felt for my watch. Four o'clock! It was incredible. And equally beyond belief, the fact that I was hungry again!

I bathed and dressed, and then, wonderfully rested, went out on the verandah. Fong and Wing appeared as if by magic and laid the tea-table with iced tea, tiny round tomato sandwiches, and delectable frosted cakes. And also, as if answering some compelling summons, Peter, bright-eyed and red-cheeked, strolled out from the direction of Bill's room. It was quite apparent that both of them had been asleep.

"Tea?" I asked my husband, as his tall figure loomed up behind Peter.

"Certainly!" he said. "It's a necessity in Cuba, not a mere excuse for sociability."

All about us the birds were singing again, and the palms looked new washed.

"It looks as if it had rained," I said in amazement.

"Probably has," said Bill lazily, "Often does afternoons."

What a country!

That night, I made my first little song. There was a thought somewhere, back in my brain, a thought of moonlight and bars and a far-off singing. But it was not clear yet. So, instead, I set to paper the first eight lines that Cuba had made for me.

_Fantasie_

The palms are listening to Pan Across the Terrace of the Night, A Peacock-Moon, aloof and white, Spreads wide a silver fan.

The gilded stars with laughter pass, For I have caught an eerie sound, The Peacock droops ... just now, I found A silver feather in the grass!

And so the days passed in blur of color and scent: of sun and sleep.

Peter grew tanned, and so did I. It was life in a fairy tale, and would have seemed quite perfect--if--. But I had grown to believe that nothing was ever perfect. Perhaps it were wise so, else we should all be loath even more to leave life. And the rift in the lute could not wholly ruin the music.

We had been there a week, I imagine, before Mercedes Howell descended upon us. She came apparelled marvellously, in a highly horse-powered chariot, and brought with her, as was eminently proper, her parents.

Mrs. Howell, née Dolores Maria Cortez, was that pathetic thing, a woman who had once been very beautiful. It was not hard to trace that beauty now, in the high, clean-cut nose, the great languid eyes, the tiny, full, red mouth. But her beauty was clouded with flesh, and her face a mask of powder. She sat on the verandah drinking "pina fria," with her tiny, arched feet on a footstool, and murmured polite accented thanks for the care we had taken of her dear child. I glanced at Bill, over a tray of cakes, but he was looking at Mercedes. So I turned, with a quickened heartbeat, to Mr. Howell. I found him charming, a tall, silent man, brown from the sun, and very lined. He listened eagerly, I fancied, to my chatter of home and snow and the quiet ebb and flow of life in a New England village. But Cuba had marked him for her own. One saw that. And one saw, too, his restless eyes moving from wife to daughter, questioning and troubled.

Mrs. Howell, before she left, asked us to some day attend the races with her. I told her I was not well, not yet up to the excitement of crowds.... But Bill, looking up quickly from his low-voiced conversation with Mercedes, said,

"Perhaps I can persuade Mrs. Denton, dear lady. It is something she surely should not miss."

Our glances met--crossed blades and stayed. Mine was hurt, I know. It was cruel of him, in that insufferably self-assured tone, to brush aside my wishes. When our guests had gone, I told him so.

"But," he said, at the doorway, "what you need more than anything, is contact with people, and to be taken out of yourself. You have never seen anything of the sort before, and you will not have the opportunity again. And the Howells are very good people to tie up to. They have lived here many years and have not wholly discarded the picturesque viewpoints and customs of the country, while at the same time, entering into the life of the American set."

"I didn't come here for society," I said, "and I don't want to be bothered ... by anyone. Go alone to the races, if you will, but I shall not."

He shrugged.

"Very well," he said.

Two days later, Bill drove the car into Havana, where he joined the Howells in a luncheon party and went afterwards to the races with them. I wondered if they would not think it very strange ... under the circumstances. And then I reflected that an extra man, married or bachelor, is welcome almost anywhere. And during my brief betrothal Bill had declared himself "quite free."

I didn't care, of course, where he went or with whom. It was none of my business. And it was the loneliness and the longing for things that could never be mine, which oppressed me and made me spend my sleepless afternoon siesta on a tear-damp pillow.

When Bill came home that night, I harkened politely to his account of his outing, and then went early to my room. The poem which had made itself mine during my first night in Cuba was clamoring to be written. And so I wrote it, at my table under the window, conscious that no words in so unskilled a hand could set down my feeling of imprisonment and regret.

Finished, I laid it in the drawer where my diary and the letters from Richard Warren were. It was a childish thing, but I had made it, and it belonged to me ... and to one other.

_Nocturne_

The moonlight slips in silence through the bars, The iron bars which lend a strange romance To my wide windows, open to the stars, Which, like gold fire-flies, imprisoned, dance Caught in the dark mantilla of the Night; That flowing veil of jewelled, enchanting lace From careless, faery finger-tips flung light To veil the tropic Moon's pale, ardent face.

My windows give on gardens dim, a-gleam And freshly fragrant with night-growing things, On gardens where the sleeping flowers dream Till, cradled on the errant wind's cool wings Their little souls are wafted to far lands, While all their dreams like incense, float and rise To where some garden goddess with white hands, Gems with bright dew her nurslings' sleep-kissed eyes.

In shadowed groves, with brilliant moon, blood-stained, A bird is sobbing for a distant star, In golden longing for the Unattained.... While at some window, pleading, a guitar Touched by brown fingers, throbs in serenade. And still the moonbeams fling a silvern dart, Straight through my window's iron barricade.... Thus Love steals, silent, to the prisoned heart, And, smiling, with a mockery divine Slips softly to some unguessed, secret shrine, To set the Altar Fires flaming high!

* * * * *

I closed the drawer--spent, unsatisfied. The thing was halting and superficial. It did not seem possible that there were people who could find release in words, or peace in beauty.

I had not reread Richard Warren's letters since my marriage. And this was a night I dared not read them, for all that my resolve weakened. For, in some inexplicable way, he had become very real to me--in Cuba. And I knew that he could not be anyone save himself, could not be anything save strong and fine and understanding.

I took my trouble into Peter's room and sat with it for a long time, by his bedside. But it was Dawn, before, in my cool, deep alcove, I had ceased tossing and slept.