We arrived in Havana and went ashore about 10 A.M. Not having so far
made friends with anyone on board, Dick, I and Louise went off alone.
From the tugboat that brought us off our ship we stumbled on the quay
into the arms of a guide, who stood in wait. Unable to speak a word of
Spanish, we allowed him to attach himself to us. We were to have his
guideship and the services of a Ford car for three hours, $10 complete.
They were suffocating hours. The sun beat down on the canvas hood of
the little car which bumped and rattled through the uneven, narrow
streets. The guide, true to type (it recalled old days in Italy!)
was boring and garrulous. I wanted to get a general impression of
Havana, and my contemplation was rudely broken into when the Y. M. C.
A.‘s building was insistently pointed out to me, and similarly other
buildings of no interest.
The Cathedral where Columbus was buried alone stands out in my
memory as a thing of beauty, but we got no further than an inner
courtyard--the Cathedral itself was closed for repairs. The town
seemed to have innumerable, modern marble monuments, each one more in
ill taste than the other and each Cuban patriot thus commemorated had
to be described at length by our unshaven guide. As for the living
Havanians, they seemed to me to be a people asleep. Everywhere they
slept at full length on the ground in the squares; in the avenues or
leaning in doorways--even our chauffeur was asleep in the car when we
came out from stamping letters at the post office! People who walked
in the street looked at us wonderingly and sleepily, open-mouthed
and heavy-eyed. It may have been the siesta hour of the town. After
lunching at the Hotel Ingleterra we made for the quay, and there
chartering a motor boat explored the harbor before returning on board.
That was the part Dick liked best. He had been very bored with the
town, and was greatly relieved to hear that Havana was not Mexico, as
he has great expectations of our ultimate destination.
A few new passengers joined the ship in the evening, a few old ones
having left. Those that have been on board from New York, seem to have
done the usual ship trick, which is to break up into couples and walk
round the ship’s angles at dusk, arm round waist. One looks on almost
cynically, the thing is so inevitable. My cynicism and aloofness makes
me feel old. Dick, however, knows the whole ship--the youngest and the
oldest passengers are his devoted friends; the officers, the stewards
and the ship hands are his intimates. The captain, who teases him with
great earnestness, is taken very seriously and more respected by Dick
than loved. But the little girl passengers he treats with almost silent
contempt!
The only friend I have on board is the “reliable American,” and he
proves to be of the type that confirms all my views about American
men. He just _is_ reliable, and thoughtful and infinitely kind. Nor
is he a negligible personality. He is the president of an important
company--and was arrested and condemned to death by Villa during one
of the revolutions. Why he is alive to tell the tale is just a case
of luck. He has the simplicity and the national pride of the usual
American, but he can speak French, Spanish and Italian, and even read
them. It is he, and not the young Mexican architect, who promises to be
useful with the luggage at Vera Cruz!
We paused five miles out from Progresso, to unload some cargo and take
on some new passengers, all of which was done with infinite labor by
steam tug and barge. One of our fellow travelers is a Syrian Jew going
ashore at Progresso and invited me to go with him to see the town, but
the reliable American assured me the Syrian would delay me sightseeing
until after the departure of our ship, and he thought my adventures
need not begin quite so soon. Accordingly I remained on board.
I have learned something on the journey already, and that is, to
appreciate the sallow ivory complexions of the South Americans; both in
the men as in the women it seems to be infinitely more beautiful than
the best admired pink and white to which one is accustomed. I noticed
it particularly when a fresh fair complexioned man was talking with the
olive-skinned Syrian, the fair man looked so pink in comparison, that
one felt he had been skinned.
The journey has been perfect, only one night was it too hot, and I had
to carry Dick on deck to sleep. For the rest it has been cool and calm,
until about two hours from Vera Cruz when we ran into a storm. Then my
beautiful jeweled sea became angry and white capped and opaque, and
spat forth spray, but it had not long in which to do its worse, and at
four P.M. on Monday, June 27th, we landed.