figures of two pale, melancholy-looking young priests, moving about like
spectres in the chancel, arranging images and ornaments, and, though
unconscious of our presence, always kneeling and making the sign of the
cross when passing the image of the Virgin.
_Thursday, March 29th._--Again _guirappa_-seeking at the plantation, for
our morning cordial. Young Mr. D----, who brought it, poured out the
great pitcher nearly full that was left upon the ground. I exclaimed at
his wastefulness, when he replied that it is free as water. The negroes
and dogs all drink what they choose, and invariably grow fat in sugar
time. Seeing close by a great black heap resembling a coal-pit, I
inquired its nature. He said it was the animal charcoal with which the
sugar is discolorized; that it comes only from Europe and nothing else
can take its place. Thus the greatest whiteness and purity is obtained
only by means of the blackest substance, as the whitest souls have grown
fair through the darkest suffering, and sometimes, it may be, sin.
Directly a Chinese servant came from the house with the incomparable
coffee and milk always used to pacify Cuban hunger until the late
breakfast hour arrives. We swallowed their coffee, and they our thanks,
with an equal appearance of pleasure.
In bowing ourselves away from the shadow of the building, where our
horses had been standing, we turned upon a curious spectacle,--one of
those skeleton horses that one so often sees moving mechanically about
here under their enormous burdens. The horses pass for living, but I
have more than once inclined to the supposition that it is the galvanic
life which may be given to animals after death. As I was saying, one of
these posthumous nags was slowly coming up the road, with a
comfortable-visaged tin-pedlar mounted astride the roof of the edifice
of which the horse was the basement, and between the two, and branching
out each side of them, a huge pannier, plethoric with all the
paraphernalia appertaining to a tin-pedlar. Over the top were dangling
strings of tin basins and baking pans; long-handled dippers were hitting
the poor animal’s ears at every step he took; and as he turned up to the
house of one of the under overseers, I saw the man pull out from unknown
depths wooden spoons, sticks of tape, molasses candy, yards of calico,
china dolls, and tin boxes of shoe-blacking.
Mr. S---- is gone to Havana, and we are left quite at the mercy of our
French, and the little Spanish we manage to extract from the grammar and
dictionary. Nobody but our host understands a word of French, and in his
absence you can imagine our mute helplessness. If anybody were to come
in at that open door and ask permission to cut my throat, I should
hardly be able to decline the civility or to express any opinion of my
own on the subject. B----, however, as you know, is admirably ingenious
in pantomime, so when we wish any thing I stand in the door, repeating
by rote words I have just picked out of the dictionary, while he is
stationed near talking with nose, eyes, hands, and feet, by way of
explanation; as you remember, in the infancy of the drama among the
Greeks, one performer stood out in the front of the stage repeating the
words while the actors in the background gesticulated the play in
pantomime. All this, as you may imagine, is infinitely amusing to the
always-present retinue of staring servants (there are at least two and a
baby to every guest). These darkeys take great pride in my success in
making my wants known, by using the hissing whistling “ps-s-s-s-s-t,”
with the tongue between the teeth, which always and everywhere answers
in place of bells to call servants, and which I can do like a native.
I had nearly forgotten to mention a little incident that occurred the
day of our arrival, and has since been frequently repeated. Dinner had
just gone out, and we were sitting enjoying our exclusive knowledge of
the English language, which makes us almost as much isolated as if we
had the luxury of a separate table and house, and keeps the curiosity of
the rest of the company in an absolutely abnormal condition of
activity,--thus we were sitting and talking while waiting for the
supplement, the amen to our dinner, viz., the cup of _caffé noir_ (and,
mind you, this word _noir_ is by no means figurative: this after-dinner
coffee is so black and opaque that if an elephant were in the bottom of
the cup you could not see him). Well, as was I trying to say, we were
sitting waiting and talking, when an unaccustomed noise was heard upon
the brick pavement of the parlor; we looked, and lo! what should we see
walking majestically through the parlor, through the doors, through our
piazza, dining-room, through the walk of the courtyard, but the very
fine, well-kept American horse of Monsieur, mine host. B---- and I were
of course sufficiently amused, and the rest of the company sufficiently
astonished at our amusement: the only novelty to them was that the horse
came alone, without the volante.
_Friday, March 30th._--This morning, as every morning, I was not
awakened by the bells and clocks of Guiness; though, for the matter of a
capacity to rupture sleep, they might have been invented by all the imps
of discord. You can no more comprehend than you can describe them. It
would be interesting to know where can have been found metal so base to
produce sounds so execrable that “sweet bells jangled out of tune” would
be heavenly harmony compared with them. You would suppose they been
tuned by an earthquake. If I had to manage to endure them, I should see
to it and have my hours longer, or farther apart. But yet, as I said, it
was not the “braying, horrible discord” of the bells that sent Queen Mab
off in a hysteric fit; it was, alas! the earlier five o’clock sounds of
washings and scrubbings in the next rooms. Such scourings and pourings
and dashings of walls and floors, and of all supposable things, were
surely never heard out of Holland, where, Leigh Hunt tells us, the women
wash everything but the water.
Much as I doat on cleanliness, I find it a poor exchange to pay for it
in the more precious commodity of sleep, and I record myself to you as a
wretched victim to this diurnal deluge of neatness.
On our way to the _ingenio_ I mustered Spanish enough to beg a
cane-stalk of the negresses who were cutting it down with great rapidity
in the fields, using huge sharp knives that I could scarcely lift. They
eagerly gave us more than we could carry, enough to keep us _sucking_
all the way home, and a six weeks to come. Willis says, “Nobody can
starve here: the cane-fields are all open; and if hungry, one has only
to cut a stick and suck.” We discovered this morning still another sugar
plantation, but distrusting the availability of our Spanish, only rode
past the sugar-house without asking for _guirappa_. As we passed a gate
near which groups of women were at work, one of them came up with
outstretched hand, begging countenance, and some sort of a jumble, and
all the rest started to follow her example; but being purseless, and
with no great mind to use a purse if I had had it, I shook my head and
said, “_No hablo Espagnol_,” emphasizing the remark by a decided
application of my horsewhip to the horse.
_Saturday, 31st._--This evening we promised ourselves another visit to
our mountain, but an unusual amount of heat and exhaustion forbade the
ascent, and very soon found me reclining under the irresistible shadow
of trees that knew how to make shade, while B---- galloped off to
reconnoitre. But I soon found myself comparing myself to Gulliver when
he became populated with Liliputians, so many insects shared in my taste
for shade and solitude; and I was glad enough when B---- made his
perspiring appearance.
This being market-day, we found great amusement in watching the peasants
astride their panniers which bestrode the horses. In addition to being
stuffed monstrously with vegetables, over the edge of most of the
panniers were dangling chickens, ducks, and Guinea-hens, tied together
by their feet, feathers ruffled, wings flapping backwards, heads
dangling downwards, and an expression on their faces of pious
resignation adapted to the study of bigger bipeds. All the poor things
were alive, but one was sure must die of vertigo or apoplexy, before
they could by any possibility reach the town. Here we noticed
particularly the tethering of the horses and cattle, a custom
indispensable in a country where there are no fences and rarely hedges.
One end of the rope being tied around the animal’s neck, the other is
fastened to a tree or shrub or stake driven in the ground, or sometimes
to the long, strong grass. Thus localized, they are allowed food and
exercise to the full capacity of the rope, but no farther. Each one is
made a hermit, ruminating round and round in his solitude and his
circle, which, instead of increasing, is sure to diminish, for the rope
gets tangled in knots, or twisted around sticks, or the animal’s own
legs, so that prudence soon forces a sedentary life upon him. Not
unfrequently these ropes were lying in ambush across our path, often so
hidden by the grass that neither ourselves nor our horses discovered
them until we were nearly caught in the snare. Imagine the interesting
frights and ingenious summersaults that we escaped!
I must not forget a remarkable tree we discovered across the fields,
which attracted so much our fancy that we immediately turned off,
overleaping hedges and ditches (small ones) to examine it. Its outward
proportions were on the most magnificent scale, eclipsing in size all
its neighbors and all the trees we have before seen, but the trunk
proved to be nearly or quite hollow. B---- rode in through the gothic
opening, turned his horse around inside, and came out again, and I might
have done the same thing at the same time. It would make a dwelling
absolutely larger than some of the inhabited huts I have seen here. That
admirable disciplinarian, the old woman who lived in her shoe, etc.,
would here have found “ample room and verge enough” for all her surplus
of light infantry, while those who had to go to bed without molasses or
bread could have amused themselves with the echoes of their own
squallings, for the cavity sounded hollow, like a great unfurnished
room. But at the time I only thought how much the tree resembled those
magnificent lives spreading out so fair and grandly, reaching so near
their kindred blue that in the eyes of the world they are fulfilling all
of a high and happy destiny. You must approach very near, perhaps
penetrate the abysses of their being, to find that the great heart is
gone; its place is only supplied by hollow echoes and aching void.
_April 1st._--Palm Sunday--like all the other Cuban Sundays, except that
two, or at most three, men have passed on horseback, with long palm
branches in their hands.
A south wind again, more enervating than can well be imagined by those
who have never felt it come hot and hissing from the equator. It is an
incipient sirocco, and always sends the Italians to bed. Of course, too
languid for the early, and only mass, coming as it does, before
breakfast: the rest of the day we have only to endure with the aid of a
fan, and to watch the altitudes of the thermometer.
I have not yet recovered from the uncomfortable sensation of living in a
Sundayless world,--a world which being so elaborate in its upholstery,
is supposed to have required the full seven days to complete it, leaving
no rest or hallowing for anybody.
You can well understand that writing to you, or anybody, on these hot
but heavenly days, is simply a contrivance for inking over my dulness.
As you suspect, I am getting to live quietly here, dreaming away life,
without much help of books, it is true, but, what is better still,
without much hindrance from them either.
After all, why not take a little time to dream a few little dreams in
this large dream of life? Death will come soon enough to tap us on the
forehead, or it may be to shake us rudely, and then we shall be wide
awake, and for a long time. Besides, if it takes a long time to dream
one’s dreams, it takes as long time to undream them; and you know--who
does not?--that they are a kind of atmosphere which penetrates where
everything _is_ as much as where everything _is not_.
I also assure you that pen and ink have no natural, or so far as I am
concerned, acquired relations with these transcendent tropical nights we
are having now; nights when you can feel this wonderful moonlight,
creeping in its slippers of silence, over all the longing darkness,
through all the sleeping lids of this softly breathing nature,
sprinkling them all the time with its white juice-of-love-in-idleness.
Sometimes, you lie its willing and helpless victim, until all your
unpastured emotions come to be swayed by it, as by a shepherd’s voice.
Again you can think of it only as growing, growing, more and more, wider
and deeper, all over the world, like a blanched and intangible parasite,
which no morning will ever dare with profane fingers to pull up by the
roots.
_Tuesday, April 3d._--Yesterday we remembered the invitation of the
major domo of the sugar plantation, where oxen instead of steam get the
saccharineness out of sugar-cane, as we do out of babies--by squeezing.
The consequence was that the rough Creole saw the sun and us dawning
upon him at the same distinguished moment; that we dismounted to be
conducted over the establishment; that the trampling feet of oxen, the
monotonous and endless cries of their female drivers, rang in my ears as
repulsively as they did at first, and still keep doing, in spite of all
my efforts to banish them; that we stood beside the boiling cauldron,
where two withered old men were stationed to skim off the scum, and
remind one of the witches in Macbeth bent over their cauldron to catch
the scum, the “Bubble, bubble, Toil and trouble” of human destiny. While
I stood looking at this strange scene, our conductor, with great
_empressment_, drew from his pocket two fine cigars, offering one to me,
and the other to B----, and was sorely chagrined and puzzled that I
declined it. I was obliged to resort to the plea of invalidism to pacify
him. From this we went to the refining house, where little inverted tin
pyramids, full of sugar, were setting all over the floors, with thick
layers of black clay spread over their heads, and little tubs, to catch
the molasses, set under the opening in their feet. This apartment opened
into the one for drying in which these little vessels had been emptied;
the whitened sugar lay evenly all over the floor, and a fat negress
walked over it with a rake in her hand, and the shoes she was born in on
her feet.
I noticed here, as often before, deep scars on the women’s necks,
cheeks, and arms, frightfully disfiguring, and painfully suggestive, but
I was relieved to find it is only the effects of their favorite custom
of tattooing. I thought before, that nature and the most servile of
drudgery had carried the ugliness of these poor wretches to the
extremest verge of possibility, but I find that, in that “deep,” as
well as in all others, there is still a “lower deep.”
We were also puzzled to divine the import of immense round cushions
fastened securely upon nearly all the women’s heads, but soon discovered
they were to make a comfortable seat for the immense burdens of sugar
going from one house to another; for all the ordinary burdens we had
before seen, carried on the head (negroes here have no idea that their
heads were made for any other use) had been simply with the aid and
comfort of the woolly padding of nature.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VIII.
_Dear old Mr. R---- -- Chess and Whist and Life--Good Friday--A
Religious Procession--The silence of the Town--The Miserere--To
Matanazas--Company in the Cave--Father M----’s approach to
Matanzas--The Bay--Valley of the Yumuri--The Plaza--The
Dominica--The Ensor House--Easter Sunday--The Paseo--Steamer to
Havana--A Night on board--“Queen’s Hotel”--Tricks on a Travelling
Author--Theft on the Almanac._
THURSDAY, April 5th.
Yesterday the train brought dear old Mr. R---- to see us. In addition to
our former chess and conversations on literature and art, he reads
French, gives me lessons in Spanish, and occupies all the time that
would otherwise have made this a bigger if not a wiser or a better
letter.
I have often suggested to you the resemblance between the game of chess
and the game of life. It occurs to me at this moment, that, if this be
true, fatalism must also be true. These inhabitants of chessdom are
forced about by an inevitable will; their success and ruin are equally
beyond their own let or hindrance. They are created as we are, with
certain powers and spheres for action and being; with certain
possibilities which, whether they will or not, may become
impossibilities, but with, alas! impossibilities which must remain such.
From an inevitable force of circumstances, the great and powerful in
chess may become weak; the insignificant may have a greatness thrust
upon them. The humble pawn can at times act with the dignity of a queen;
the queen is often less powerful than the little plebeian beside her.
The bishops, in their attempts to serve royalty, often sacrifice
themselves; the knights sometimes ruin the queen they are sworn to
protect. The queen has the position many other women would like,--she is
the only female in her empire. But, alas! this dizzying distinction
sometimes spoils her wits: in trying to rule her allies and conquer her
enemies, she is too apt to destroy herself and her kingdom. Her king and
lord lives mostly in _statu quo_-ism. He would be her admiring imbecile
except that he has found out the secret of endless life: “The king never
dies.” He may at times, it is true, be a wandering Jew, but he is an
immortal one; he can well afford to be besotted with inertia, for he is
too wise to die. But this wisdom is also his fatality. All that he and
his queen or subjects do or refrain from doing is foreordained; their
entire existence seems to me an admirable illustration of the doctrine
of predestination.
If, however, you wish to find an example of life as it is, of man as he
is in these strugglings between the inevitable providence (which in
this other game we call chance) and his own free will, between
circumstances and character, ability and materials, we must go to the
game of whist. Here you are always balancing the _must be_ with the _may
be_; you are recalling the past, and from it foreseeing the future. You
are calculating the chances, you are making desperate and uncertain
ventures, which may result in disappointing success or brilliant
failure. And here is life, this unfathomable life of ours; this
wrestling with hidden and unprecedented elements, this combating an
unguessed destiny; more than all, this yielding with an equal grace to
its fondness or its hate. Here, as in life, honor is for the successful;
but true greatness is for him who uses most wisely and most valiantly
the much or the little that is given him.
_Friday, 6th_, has brought back Mr. S----, with intelligence that the
steamer leaves for Nassau on the 14th inst. So we must be off at once to
Matanzas, if at all; and Trinidad, and all other places must, alas! be
given up, from the lateness of the season and the excess of heat.
This evening was celebrated by a grand religious procession, one of the
ceremonies of Good Friday. At five o’clock, low, muffled sounds of music
were heard approaching. Presently the band appeared, draped in mourning;
following it, drawn by black horses, came a great hearse, with heavy
pall and waving plumes, and on the top of this, under a white shroud,
was plainly visible the sharp outline of a human figure; blood spots
were on the edge of the shroud, and above them, drooping on one side,
with matted and stained hair, lay the agonized, ghastly face, in wax, of
the crucified Saviour. It was horrible!
I felt myself grow sick and faint, but looked around in vain for a
corresponding horror in the faces of the other spectators. They stared
on with only a little less than their usual gayety and indifference, and
turned with curiosity, as I did for relief, to the remainder of the
procession. Next came a line of priests in sable robes, and officers of
government with crape on their arms, all with uncovered heads, and
carrying in their hands immense wax candles that flickered and paled
before the light of the receding sun. The procession paused a few
minutes before each of the principal houses, while the dead march kept
beating on. But now they have passed, and here comes an august, standing
figure, mounted upon a high carriage: we soon discover it to be the
Virgin following her son to the grave.
Her dress is of long, trailing black velvet; upon her head is a faded
crown; the face is horribly wan and white, with an expression in it of
excruciating torture and despair, and, alas! what is this carried, high
in the pale, uplifted hand! We shudder, we are faint, we look again; it
is--a deeply flounced, elegantly embroidered white pocket-handkerchief!
Behind all this follows an indiscriminate mass of men, women, and
children; but I have seen enough, and go back to the house, wondering
over the strange things in heaven and earth and our philosophies.
Mr. S---- tells us so much of the elaborate celebrations and ceremonies
in Havana, during these Easter days, that we regret not having gone back
to witness them. Yesterday, the streets in all parts of the city were
filled by ladies walking to and from all the different churches; the
great ambition and proof of piety being, to visit as many as possible
during the day. All were dressed in deep black. This is the only day of
the year when dainty Havanese female feet press the pavements. Not a
sound was to be heard over the entire city. All shops closed, carriages
and vehicles of all kinds forbidden to stir, as was the case in Guiness;
profound silence reigns because Christ is dead, and no profane sound
must disturb his slumbers. In most of the churches an image of the dead
Christ lay in a tomb surrounded by burning tapers, and all the signs of
burial. Even some of the private houses, opening as they do on the
streets, discovered in the principal room, to passers by, the same
ghostly image partly covered by a black pall, while the family and
guests sit around it in deep mourning, which is, or should be, enlivened
only by occasional sobs.
_Friday evening, 10 o’clock._--We are just returned from the Cathedral.
As we entered, the _Miserere_ was being sung by two young priests and
our friend Father M----; the organ accompaniment played by a young
priest. The pathetic strains, here mournful as the sob of a broken
heart, there subdued into the tones of resignation, then suddenly
struggling out in an energy like despair, seemed to thrill all the
hearts of the kneeling worshippers. They were composed entirely of
black-robed women; for you must know, devotion here is entirely a
feminine accomplishment: the men only stand around against the wall to
admire the performer, apparently quite forgetting the performance.
I perceived on one side a regularly arranged pyramid of wax candles. At
certain periods of the ceremony one of the lights was extinguished, then
another and another; when all were out the services were to close; but
finding my strength waning faster than the lights, I came home to make a
hurried note of sounds and scenes that I do not attempt to describe, of
ceremonies that have all the grotesqueness and absurdity of those of
Rome without their dignity and grandeur. The piety of Cuba seems to
think that the next best thing to being in Rome and doing as the Romans
do, is to be out of Rome and do more than Romans do.