Читать книгу Roaming Through the West Indies - Harry Alverson Franck - Страница 5

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A constant procession of Fords, their mufflers wide open, were hiccoughing out the Carlos III Boulevard toward the Havana ball-park. The entrance-gate, at which they brought up with a snort and a sudden, bronco-like halt that all but jerked their passengers to their feet, was a seething hubbub. Ticket-speculators, renters of cushions, venders of everything that can be consumed on a summer afternoon, were bellowing their wares into the ears of the fanáticos who scrimmaged about the ticket-window. Men a trifle seedy in appearance wandered back and forth holding up half a dozen tiny envelopes, arranged in fan-shape, which they were evidently trying to sell or rent. The pink entradas I finally succeeded in snatching were not, of course, the only tickets needed. That would have been too simple a system for Spanish-America. They carried us as far as the grand stand, where another maelstrom was surging about the chicken-wire wicket behind which a hen-minded youth was dispensing permissions to sit down. He would have been more successful in the undertaking if he had not needed to thumb over a hundred or more seat-coupons reserved for special friends of the management or of himself every time he sought to serve a mere spectator.

We certainly could not complain, however, of the front-row places we obtained except that, in the free-for-all Spanish fashion, all the riffraff of venders crowded the foot-rests that were supposedly reserved for front-row occupants. Nine nimble Cubans were scattered about the flat expanse of Almendares Park, backed by Príncipe Hill, with its crown of university buildings. Royal palms waved their plumes languidly in the ocean breeze; a huge Cuban flag undulated beyond the outfielders; a score of vultures circled lazily overhead, as if awaiting a chance to pounce upon the “dead ones” which the wrathful “fans” announced every time a player failed to live up to their hopes. On a bench in the shade sat all but one of the invading team, our own “Pirates” from the Smoky City. The missing one was swinging his club alertly at the home plate, his eyes glued on the Cuban zurdo, or “south-paw,” who had just begun his contortions in the middle of the diamond. The scene itself was familiar enough, yet it seemed strangely out of place in this tropical setting. It was like coming upon a picture one had known since childhood, to find it inclosed in a brand new frame.

I reached for my kodak, then restrained the impulse. A camera is of little use at a Cuban ball game. Only a recording phonograph could catch its chief novelties. An uproar as incessant as that of a rolling-mill drowned every individual sound. It was not merely the venders of “El escor oficial,” of sandwiches, lottery-tickets, cigars, cigarettes, of bottled beer by the basketful, who created the hubbub; the spectators themselves made most of it. The long, two-story grandstand behind us was packed with Cubans of every shade from ebony black to the pasty white of the tropics, and every man of them seemed to be shouting at the top of his well-trained lungs. I say “man” advisedly, for with the exception of my wife there were just three women present, and they had the hangdog air of culprits. Scores of them were on their feet, screaming at their neighbors and waving their hands wildly in the air. An uninformed observer would have supposed that the entire throng was on the verge of a free-for-all fight, instead of enjoying themselves in the Cuban’s chief pastime.

“Which do you like best, baseball or bull-fights?” I shouted to my neighbor on the left. He was every inch a Cuban, by birth, environment, point of view, in his very gestures, and he spoke not a word of English. Generations of Spanish ancestry were plainly visible through his grayish features; I happened to know that he had applauded many a torero in the days before the rule of Spain and “the bulls” had been banished together. Yet he answered instantly:

“Baseball by far; and so do all Cubans.”

But baseball, strictly speaking, is not what the Cuban enjoys most. It is rather the gambling that goes with it. Like every sport of the Spanish-speaking race, with the single exception of bull-fighting, baseball to the great majority is merely a pretext for betting. The throng behind us was everywhere waving handsful of money, real American money, for Cuba has none of her own larger than the silver dollar. Small wonder the bills are always ragged and worn and half obliterated, for they were constantly passing, like crumpled waste-paper, from one sweaty hand to another. The Platt Amendment showed incomplete knowledge of Cuban conditions when it decreed the use of American money on the island; it should have gone further and ordered the bills destined for Cuba to be made of linoleum. Bets passed at the speed of sleight-of-hand performances. The fanáticos bet on every swing of the batter’s club, on every ball that rose into the air, on whether or not a runner would reach the next base, on how many fouls the inning would produce. Most of the wagers passed so quickly that there was no time for the actual exchange of money. A flip of the fingers or a nod of the head sufficed to arrange the deal. There were no dividing lines either of color or distance. Full-fledged Africans exchanged wagers with men of pure Spanish blood. Cabalistic signs passed between the grandstand and the sort of royal box high above. Across the field the crowded sol, as the Cuban calls the unshaded bleachers, in the vocabulary of the bull-ring, was engaged in the same money-waving turmoil. The curb market of New York is slow, noiseless, and phlegmatic compared with a ball-game in Havana.

Close in front of us other venders of the mysterious little envelopes wandered back and forth, seldom attempting to make themselves heard above the constant din. Here and there a spectator exchanged a crumpled, almost illegible dollar bill for one of the sealed sobres. My neighbor on the left bought one and held it for some time between his ringed fingers. When at last a runner reached first base he tore the envelope open. It contained a tiny slip of paper on which was typewritten “1a base; 1a carrera” (1st base; 1st run). The purchaser swore in Spanish with artistic fluency. I asked the reason for his wrath. He displayed the typewritten slip and grumbled “mala suerte”; then, noting my puzzled expression, explained his “bad luck” in the patient voice of a man who found it strange that an American should not understand his own national game.

“This envelope, which is bought and sold ‘blind’—that is, neither I nor the man who sold it to me knew what was in it—is a bet that the first run will be made by a first baseman, of either side. But the man who has just reached first base is the rrri’ fiel’, and the first baseman is the man who struck out just before him. If he had made the first run I should have won eight dollars. But you see what chance he has now to make the first carrera. Cursed bad luck!”

“Rrri’ fiel’,” however, “died” in a vain attempt to steal third base, and his partner from the opposite corner of the garden was the first man to cross the home-plate. Instantly a cry of “Lef’ fiel’” rose above the hubbub and the erstwhile venders of envelopes began paying the winners. A lath-like individual, half Chinaman, half negro, whom the fanáticos called “Chino,” took charge of the section about us, and handed eight greasy bills to all those whom luck had favored, tucking the winning slips of paper into a pocket of his linen coat. But these simple little wagers were only for “pikers.” There were men behind us who, though they looked scarcely capable of paying for their next meal, were stripping twenty and even fifty dollar bills off the rolls clutched in their sweaty hands and distributing them like so many handbills.

The game itself was little different from one at home. The Cuban players varied widely in color, from the jet-black third baseman to a shortstop of rice-powder complexion. Their playing was of high order, quite as “fast” as the average teams of our big leagues. Cubans hold several world championships in sports requiring a high degree of skill and swiftness. The umpire in his protective paraphernalia looked quite like his fellows of the North, yet behind his mask he was a rich mahogany brown. His official speech was English, but when a dispute arose he changed quickly to voluble Spanish. The “bucaneros,” as the present-day pirates who had descended upon the Cuban coast were best known locally, won the game on this occasion; but the day before they had not scored a run.

Baseball—commonly pronounced “bahseh-bahl” throughout the island—has won a firm foothold in Cuba. Boys of all colors play it on every vacant lot in Havana; it is the favorite sport of the youthful employees of every sugar estate or tobacco vega of the interior. The sporting page is as fixed a feature of the Havana newspapers as of our own dailies. Nor do the Cuban reporters yield to their fellows of the North in the use of base-ball slang. Most of their expressions are direct translations of our own vocabulary of the diamond; some of them are of local concoction. Those familiar with Spanish can find constant amusement in Havana’s sporting pages. “Fans” quite unfamiliar with the tongue would experience no great difficulty in catching the drift of the Cuban reporter, though it would be Greek to a Spaniard speaking no baseball, as a brief example will demonstrate:

EL HABANA DEJO EN BLANCO

A LOS PIRATAS

José del Carmen Rodríguez realizó varios doubleplays sensacionales

BRILLANTE PITCHING DE TUERO

El catcher rojo, Miguel Angel González, cerró con doble llave la segunda base a los corredores Americanos

Primer Inning

Bucaneros—Bigbee out en fly al center. Terry, rolling al short, out en primera. Carey struck out. No hit, no run.

Habana—Papo out en fly al catcher. Merito muere en rolling al pitcher. Cueto lo imita.

Segundo Inning

Bucaneros—Nickolson, rolling al tercera, es out al pretender robar la segunda. Cutshaw batea de plancha y es safe en primera. Barber out en rolling á la segunda, adelantando Cutshaw. Carlson out en fly al catcher. No hit, no run.

Habana—Juan de Angel Aragón out en linea al center. Hungo se pasea. Calvo hit y Hungo va a segunda. Torres se sacrifica. Acosta, con las bases llenas, es transferido y Hungo anota. González out en foul al pitcher. Un hit, una carrera.

Thus the Havanese “reporter de baseball” rattles on, but his reports are not snatched from the hands of newsboys with quite the same eagerness as in the North. For the Cuban fanático is not particularly interested in the outcome of the game itself. A bet on that would be too slowly decided for his quick southern temperament. He prefers to set a wager on each swing of the pitcher’s arm, and with the last “out” of the ninth inning his interest ceases as abruptly as does the unbroken boiler-factory uproar that rises to the blue tropical heavens from the first to the last swing of the batter’s club.

The visitor whose picture of Havana is still that of the drowsy tropical city of our school-books is due for a shock. He will be most surprised, perhaps, to find the place as swarming with automobiles as an open honey-pot with flies. A local paragrapher asserts that “a Havanese would rather die than walk four blocks.” There are several perfectly good reasons for this preference. The heat of Cuba is far less oppressive than that of our most northern states in mid-summer. Indeed, it is seldom unpleasant; but the slightest physical exertion quickly bathes the body in perspiration, and nowhere is a wilted collar in worse form than in Havana. Moreover, one must be exceedingly nimble-footed to trust to the prehistoric means of transportation. The custom of always riding has left no rights to the pedestrian in the Cuban capital. The chances of being run down are excellent, and the result is apt to be not merely broken ribs, but a bill for damages to the machine. Hence the expression “cojemos un For’” is synonymous with going a journey, however short, anywhere within the city. Your Havanese friend never says, “Let’s stroll around and see Perez,” but always, “Let’s catch a Ford,” and by the time you have succeeded in slamming the door really shut, there you are at Perez’s zaguan.

Fords scurry by thousands through the streets of Havana day and night, ever ready to pick up a passenger or two and set them down again in any part of the business section for a mere twenty-cent piece—a peseta in Cuban parlance. More expensive cars are now and then seen for hire; by dint of sleuth-like observation I did discover one Ford that was confined to the labor of carrying its owner. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule, and the rule is that the instant you catch sight of the familiar plebeian features of a “flivver” you know, even without waiting to see the hospitable “Se Alquila” (“Rents Itself”) on the wind-shield, that you need walk no farther, whatever your sex, complexion, or previous condition of pedestrianism. They are particularly suited to the narrow streets that the Spaniard, in his Arabic avoidance of the sun, bequeathed the Cuban capital. There is many a corner in the business section which larger cars can turn only by backing or by mounting one of the scanty sidewalks. The closed taxi of the North, too, would be as much out of place in Havana as overcoats at a Fourth of July celebration. A few of the horse carriages of olden days still offer their services; but as neither driver, carriage, nor steed seems to have been groomed or fed since the war of independence, even those in no haste are apt to think twice or thrice, and finally put their trust in gasolene. Hence the Ford has taken charge of Havana, like an army of occupation.

Unfortunately, a Ford and a Cuban chauffeur make a bad combination. The native temperament is quick-witted, but it is scantily gifted with patience. In the hands of a seeker after pesetas a “flivver” becomes a prancing, dancing steed, a snorting charger that knows no fear and yields to no rival. Apparently some Cuban Burbank has succeeded in crossing the laggard of our northern highways with the kangaroo. The whisper of your destination in the driver’s ear is followed by a leap that leaves the adjoining façades a mere blur upon the retina. A traffic jam ahead lends the snorting beast wings; it has a playful way of alighting on all fours in the very heart of any turmoil. If a pedestrian or a rival peseta-gatherer is crossing the street twenty feet beyond, your time for the next nineteen feet and eleven inches is a small fraction of a second over nothing. Brake linings seem to acquire a strangle hold from the Cuban climate. If the opening ahead is but the breadth of a hand, the Havana Ford has some secret of making itself still more slender. I have never yet seen one of them climb a palm-tree, but there is no reason to suppose that they would hesitate to undertake that simple feat, if a passenger’s destination were among the fronds.

The newspapers run a daily column for those who have been “Ford-ed” to hospitals or cemeteries. What are a few casualties a day in a city of nearly half a million, with prolific tendencies? There are voluminous traffic and speed rules, but he would be a friendless fellow who could not find a compadre with sufficient political power to “fix it up.” Death corners—billboards or street-hugging house-walls from behind which he may dart without warning—are the joy of the Cuban chauffeur. Courtesy in personal intercourse stands on a high plane in Havana, but automobile politeness has not yet reached the stage of consideration for others. Traffic policemen, soldierly fellows widely varied in complexion, looking like bandsmen in their blue denim uniforms, are efficient, and accustomed to be obeyed; but they cannot be everywhere at once, and the automobile is. They confine their efforts, therefore, to a few seething corners, and humanity trusts to its own lucky star in the no-man’s-lands between.

The private machines alone would give Havana a busy appearance. All day long and far into the night the big central plaza is completely fenced in by splendid cars parked compactly ends to curb. Toward sunset, especially on the days when a military band plays the retreta in the kiosk facing Morro Castle and the harbor entrance, an endless procession of seven-passenger motors files up and down the wide Prado and along the sea-washed Malecón, two, or at most three, haughty beings, not infrequently with kinky hair, lolling in every capacious tonneau. Liveried chauffeurs are the almost universal rule. The caballero who drives his own car would arouse the wonder, possibly the scorn, of his fellow-citizens; once and once only did we see a woman at the wheel. There is good reason for this. The man who would learn to pilot his own machine through the automobile maelstrom of Havana would have little time or energy left for the pursuit of his profession. Moreover, the Latin-American is seldom mechanic-minded. The cheaper grades of cars are not in favor for private use. Wire wheels are almost universal; luxurious fittings are seldom lacking. Even the unexclusive Ford is certain to be decked out in expensive vestiduras,—slip-covers of embossed leather that remind one of a Mexican peon in silver-mounted sombrero.

The cost of a car in Havana is from twenty to thirty per cent. higher than in the States, which supplies virtually all of them. A dollar barely pays for two gallons of gasolene. Licenses are a serious item, particularly to private owners in Havana, for the fee depends on the use to which the car is put. Fords for hire carry a white tag with black figures and pay $12.50 a year. Private cars bear a pink chapa at a cost of $62.50. Tags with blue figures announce the occupant a government official or a physician. Then, every driver must be supplied with a personal license, at a cost of $25. In theory that is all, except a day or two of waiting in line at the municipal license bureau. In practice there are many little political wheels to be oiled if one would see the car free to go its way the same year it is purchased.

Once the visitor has learned to distinguish the tag that announces government ownership, he will be astounded to note its extraordinary prevalence in Havana. Even Washington was never like this. Government property means public ownership indeed in Cuba. If one may believe the newspapers of the Liberal party,—the “outs” under the present administration,—the explanation is simple. “Every government employee,” they shriek, “down to the last post-office clerk who is in personal favor, has his own private car, free of cost; not only that, but he may use it to give his babies an airing, to carry his cook to market, or to take the future novio of his daughter on a joy ride.”

The new-comer’s impressions of Havana will depend largely upon his previous travels. If this is his first contact with the Iberian or the Latin-American civilization, he will find the Cuban capital of great interest. If he is familiar with the cities of old Spain, particularly if he has already seen her farthest-flung descendants, such as Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz, he will probably call Havana “tame.” The most incorrigible traveler will certainly not consider a visit to this most accessible of foreign capitals time wasted. But his chief amusement will be, in all likelihood, that of tracing the curious dovetailing of Spanish and American influences which makes up its present-day aspect.

Both by situation and history the capital of Cuba is a natural place for this intermingling of two essentially different civilizations, but the mixture is more like that of oil and water than of two related elements. The ways of Spain and of America—by which, of course, I mean the United States—are recognizable in every block of Havana, yet there has been but slight blending together, however close the contact. Immigrants from old Spain tramp the streets all day under their strings of garlic, or jingle the cymbals that mean sweetmeats for sale to all Spanish-speaking children. Venders of lottery-tickets sing their numbers in every public gathering-place. On Saturdays a long procession of beggars of both sexes file through the stores and offices demanding almost as a right the cent each which ancient Iberian custom allots them. The places where men gather are wide-open cafés without front walls, rather than the hidden dens of the North. Havana’s cooking, her modes of greeting and parting, her patience with individual nuisance, her very table manners are Spanish. Like all Spanish-America, her sons and daughters are highly proficient in the use of the toothpick; like them they are exceedingly courteous in the forms of social intercourse, irrespective of class. As in Spain, life increases in its intensity with sunset: babies have no fixed hour of retirement; midnight is everywhere the “shank of the evening”; lovers are sternly separated by iron bars, or their soft nothings strictly censored by ever vigilant duennas.

Vendors of lottery tickets in rural Cuba

The winning numbers of the lottery

Pigeons are kept to clear the tobacco fields of insects

Ploughing for tobacco in the famous Vuelta Abaja district. The large building is a tobacco barn, the small ones are residences of the planters

The very Government cannot shake off the habits of its forebears, despite the tutelage of a more practical race. Public office is more apt than not to be considered a legitimate source of personal gain. As in Spain, a general amnesty is ever smiling hopefully at imprisoned malefactors. The Spanish tendency to forgive crime, combined with the interrelationship of miscreants and the powers that be, has not merely abolished, in practice, all capital punishment; it tends to release evil-doers long before they have found time to repent and change their ways. Men who shoot down in cold blood—and this they do even in the heart of Havana—have only to prove that the deed was done “in the heat of the moment” to have their punishment reduced to a mere fraction of that for stealing a mule. The pardoning power is wielded with such Castilian generosity that the genial editor of Havana’s American newspaper wrathfully suggests the “loosing of all our distinguished assassins,” that the enormous cárcel facing the harbor entrance may be replaced by one of the hotels sadly needed to house Havana’s “distinguished visitors.”

Amid all this the island capital is deeply marked, too, with the influence of what Latin-America calls “the Colossus of the North.” One sees it in the strenuous pace of business, in the manners and methods of commerce. The dignified lethargy of Spain has largely given way to the business-first teachings of the Yankee gospel. Billboards are almost as constant eyesores in Havana and her suburbs as in New York; huge electric figures flash the alleged virtues of wares far into the soft summer nights. Blocks of office buildings, modern in every particular, shoulder their way upward into the tropical sky. With few exceptions the sons of proud old Cuban families scorn to dally away their lives, Castilian fashion, on the riches and reputations of their ancestors, but descend into the commercial fray.

One sees the American influence in many amusing little details. The Cuban mail-boxes are exact copies of our own, except that the lettering is Spanish. Postage-stamps may be had in booklet form, which can be said of no other foreign land. Street-car fares are five cents for any distance, with free transfers, rather than varying by zones, as in Europe. Barbers dally over their clients in the private-valet manner of their fellows to the north. Department stores operate as nearly as possible on the American plan, despite the Spanish tendency of their clerks to seek tips. Cuban advertisers struggle to imitate in their newspaper and poster announcements the aggressive, inviting American manner, often with ludicrous results, for they are rarely gifted with what might be called the advertising imagination. In a word, Havana is Spain with a modern American virility, tinged with a generous dash of the tropics.

I have said that the two opposing influences do not mix, and in the main that rule strictly holds. A glance at any detail of the city’s life, her customs, appearance, or point of view, suffices to determine whether it is of Castilian or Yankee origin. But here and there a fusing of the two has produced a quaint mongrel of local color. Havana bakes its bread in the long loaves of Europe, but an American squeamishness has evolved a slender paper bag to cover them. The language of gestures makes a crossing of two figures, a hiss at the conductor, and a nod to right or left, sufficient request for a street-car transfer. The man who occupies the center of a baseball diamond may be called either a pitcher or a lanzador, but the verb that expresses his activity is pitchear. Shoe-shining establishments in the shade of the long, pillared arcades are arranged in Spanish style, yet the methods and the prices of the polishers are American.

Barely had we stepped ashore in Havana when I spied a man in the familiar uniform of the American Army, his upper sleeve decorated with three broad chevrons. I had a hazy notion that our intervention in Cuba had ceased some time before, yet it would have been nothing strange if some of our troops had been left on the island.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” I greeted him. “Do you know this town? How do I get to—”

But he was staring at me with a puzzled air, and before I could finish he had sidestepped and hurried on. I must have been dense that morning, after a night of uproar on the steamer from Key West, for a score of his fellows had passed before I awoke to the fact that they were not American soldiers at all. Cuba has copied nothing more exactly than our army uniform. Cotton khaki survives in place of olive drab, of course, as befits the Cuban climate; frequent washings have turned most of the canvas leggings a creamy white. Otherwise there is little to distinguish the Cuban soldier from our own until he opens his mouth in a spurt of fluent Spanish. He wears the same cow-boy sombrero, with similar hat-cords for each branch of the service. He shoulders the same rifle, carries his cartridges in the old familiar web-belt, wears his revolver on the right, as distinct from the left-handed fashion of all the rest of Latin-America. He salutes, mounts guard, drills, stands at attention precisely in the American manner, for his “I. D. R.” differs from our own only in tongue. The same chevrons indicate non-commissioned rank, though they have not yet disappeared from the left sleeve. His officers are indistinguishable, at any distance, from our own; they are in many cases graduates of West Point. An angle in their shoulder-bars, with the Cuban seal in bronze above them, and the native coat of arms on their caps in place of the spread eagle, are the only differences that a close inspection of lieutenants or captains brings to light. From majors upward, however, the insignia becomes a series of stars, perhaps because the absence of generals in the Cuban Army leaves no other chance for such ostentation.

The question naturally suggests itself, “Why does Cuba need an army?” The native answer is apt to be the Spanish version of “Huh, we’re a free country, aren’t we? Why shouldn’t we have an army, like any other sovereign people? Poor Estrada Palma, our first president, had no army, with the result that the first bunch of hoodlums to start a revolution had him at their mercy.”

These are the two reasons why one sees the streets of Havana, and all Cuba, for that matter, khaki-dotted with soldiers. She has no designs on a trembling world, but an army is to her what long trousers are to a youth of sixteen, proof of his manhood; and she has very real need of one to keep the internal peace within the country, particularly under a Government that was not legally elected and which enjoys little popularity.

There were some fourteen thousand “regulars” in the Cuban Army before the European War, a number that was more than tripled under compulsory service after the island republic joined the Allies. To-day, despite posters idealizing the soldier’s life and assuring all Cubans that it is their duty to enlist, despite a scale of pay equalling our own, their land force numbers barely five thousand. Many of these are veterans of the great European war,—as fought in Pensacola, Florida. Some wear fifteen to eighteen years’ worth of service stripes diagonally across their lower sleeves; a few played their part in the guerilla warfare against the Spaniards before the days of independence, and have many a thrilling anecdote with which to overawe each new group of “rookies.” In short, they have nearly everything in common with our own permanent soldiers—except the color-line. I have yet to see a squad of white, or partly white, American soldiers march away to duty under a jet-black corporal, a sight so commonplace in Havana as not even to attract a passing attention.

Havana has just celebrated her four-hundredth birthday. She confesses herself the oldest city of European origin in the western hemisphere. Her name was familiar to ocean wayfarers before Cortés penetrated to the Vale of Anáhuac, before Pizarro had heard the first rumors of the mysterious land of the Incas. When the Pilgrim Fathers sighted Plymouth Rock, Havana had begun the second century of her existence. In view of all this, and of the harried career she led clear down to days within the memory of men who still consider themselves youthful, she is somewhat disappointing to the mere tourist for her lack of historical relics. This impression, however, gradually wears off. Her background is certainly not to be compared with that of Cuzco or of the City of Mexico, stretching away into the prehistoric days of legend; yet many reminders of the times that are gone peer through the mantle of modernity in which she has wrapped herself. From the age-worn stones of La Fuerza the bustle of the city of to-day seems a fantasy from dreamland. In the underground passages of old Morro, in the musty dungeons of massive Cabaña, the khaki-clad soldiers of Cuba’s new army look as out of place as motor-cars in a Roman arena. The stroller who catches a sudden unexpected glimpse of the cathedral façade is carried back in a twinkling to the days of the Inquisition; Spain herself can show no closer link with the Middle Ages than the venerable stone face of San Francisco de Paula. The ghosts of monks gone to their reward centuries ago hover about the post-office where the modern visitor files his telegram or stamps his picture postals. The British occupied it as a barracks when they captured Havana in the middle of the last century, whereby the ancient monastery was considered desecrated, and has served in turn various government purposes; yet the shades of the past still linger in its flowery patio and flit about the corners of its capacious, leisurely old stairways.

Old Havana may be likened in shape to the head of a bulldog, with the mark of the former city wall, which inclosed it like a muzzle, still visible. The part thus protected in olden days contains most of Havana’s antiquity. Beyond it the streets grow wider, the buildings more modern, as one advances to the newer residential suburbs. Amusing contrasts catch the eye at every turn within the muzzled portion. Calle Obispo, still the principal business street, is a scant eighteen feet wide, inclusive of its two pathetically narrow sidewalks. The Spanish builders did not foresee the day when it would be an impassable river of clamoring automobiles. They would be struck dumb with astonishment to see these strange devil-wagons housed in the tiled passageways behind the massive carved or brass-studded doors of the regal mansions of colonial days, as their fair ladies would be horrified to find the family chapels turned into bath-rooms by desecrating barbarians from the North. Office buildings that seem to have been bodily transported from New York shoulder age-crumbled Spanish churches and convents; crowds as business-bent as those of Wall Street hurry through narrow callejones that seem still to be thinking of Columbus and the buccaneers of the Spanish main. Long rows of massive pillars upholding projecting second stories and half concealing the den-like shops behind them have a picturesque appearance and afford a needed protection from the Cuban sun, but they are little short of a nuisance under modern traffic conditions. Old Colón market is as dark and unsanitary as when mistresses sent a trusted slave to make the day’s purchases. Its long lines of cackling fowls, of meat barely dead, of tropical fruits and strange Cuban vegetables, are still the center of the old bartering hubbub, but beside them are the very latest factory products. One may buy a chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot for a real by deep-eyed old women who seem to have been left behind by a receding generation, or one may carry home canned food which colonial Havana never tasted.

The city is as brilliantly lighted as any of our own, by dusky men who come at sunset, laboriously carrying long ladders, from the tops of which they touch off each gas jet as in the days of Tacón. Ferries as modern as those bridging the Hudson ply between the Muelle de Luz and the fortresses and towns across the harbor; but they still have as competitors the heavy old Havana rowboats, equipped, when the sun is high, with awnings at the rear, and manned by oarsmen as stout-armed and weather-tanned as the gondoliers of Venice. Automobiles of the latest model snort in continual procession around the Malecón on Sunday afternoons, yet here and there a quaint old family carriage, with its liveried footmen, jogs along between them. Many a street has changed its name since the days of independence, but still clings to its old Spanish title in popular parlance. A new system of house numbering, too, has been adopted, but this has not superseded the old; it has merely been superimposed upon it, until it is a wise door indeed that knows its own number. To make things worse for the puzzled stranger, the two sides of the street have nothing in common, so that it is nothing unusual to find house No. 7 opposite No. 114.

Havana is most beautiful at night. Its walls are light in color, yellow, orange, pink, pale-blue, and the like prevailing, and the witchery of moonlight, falling upon them, gives many a quaint corner or narrow street of the old city a resemblance to fairyland. But when one hurries back to catch them with a kodak in the morning, it is only to find that the chief charm has fled before the grueling light of day.

The architecture of the city is overwhelmingly Spanish, with only here and there a detail brought from the North. The change from the wooden houses of Key West, with their steep shingled roofs, to the plaster-faced edifices of Havana, covered by the flat azoteas of Arab-Iberian origin often the family sitting-room after sunset, is sharp and decided. Among them the visitor feels himself in a foreign land indeed, whatever suggestions of his own he may find in the life of the city. The tendency for low structures, the prevalence of sumptuous dwellings of a single story, the preference for the ground floor as a place of residence, show at a glance that this is no American city. Yet the single story is almost as lofty as two of our own; the Cuban insists on high ceilings, and the longest rooms of the average residence would be still longer if they were laid on their sides. To our Northern eyes it is a heavy architecture, but it is a natural development in the Cuban climate. Coolness is the first and prime requisite. Massive outer walls, half their surfaces taken up by immense doors and windows, protected by gratings in every manner of artistic scroll, defy the heat of perpetual summer, and at the same time give free play to the all but constant sea breezes. The openness of living which this style of dwelling brings with it would not appeal to the American sense of privacy in family life. Through the iron-barred rejas, flush with the sidewalk, the passer-by may look deep back into the tile-floored parlor, with its forest of chairs, and often into the living-rooms beyond. At midday they look particularly cool and inviting from the sun-drenched street; in the evening the stroller has a sense of sauntering unmolested through the very heart of a hundred family circles.

Old residents tell us that Havana is a far different city from the one from which the Spanish flag was banished twenty years ago. Its best streets, they say, were then mere lanes of mud, or their cobbled pavements so far down beneath the filth of generations that the uncovering of them resembled a mining operation. Along the sea, where a boulevard second only to the peerless Beira Mar of Rio runs to-day, the last century left a stenching city garbage-heap. The broad, laurel-shaded Prado leading from the beautiful central plaza to the headland facing Morro Castle was a labyrinthian cluster of unsavory hovels. All this, if one may be pardoned a suggestion of boasting, was accomplished by the first American governor. But the Cubans themselves have continued the good work. Once cleaned and paved, the streets have remained so. Buildings of which any city might be proud have been erected without foreign assistance. In their sudden spurt of ambition the Cubans have sometimes overreached themselves. A former administration began the erection of a presidential palace destined to rival the best of Europe. About the same time the provincial governor concluded to build himself a simple little marble cabin. Election day came, and the new president, after the spendthrift manner of Latin-American executives, repudiated the undertaking of his predecessor, which lies to-day the abandoned grave of several million pesos. The governor of the province was convinced by irrefutable arguments that this half-finished little cabin was out of proportion to his importance, and yielded it to his political superior. It is nearing completion now, a thing of beauty that should, for a time at least, satisfy the artistic longings even of great Cuba. For it has nothing of the inexpensive Jeffersonian simplicity of our own White House, fit only for such plebeian occupants as our Lincolns and Garfields, but is worthy a Cuban president—during the few months of the year when he is not occupying his suburban or his summer palace.

Havana has grown in breadth as well as character since it became the capital of a free country. While the population of the island has nearly doubled, that of the metropolis has trebled. Víbora, Cerro, and Jesús del Monte have changed from outlying country villages of thatched huts to thriving suburbs; Vedado, the abode of a few scattered farmers when the Treaty of Paris was signed, has become a great residential region where sugar-millionaires and successful politicians vie with one another in the erection of private palaces, not to mention the occasional perpetration of architectural monstrosities. Under the impulse of an ever-increasing and ever-wealthier population, abetted by energetic young Cubans who have copied American real-estate methods, Havana is already leaping like a prairie fire to the crests of new fields, which will soon be wholly embraced in the conflagration of prosperity.

One of the purposes of Cuba’s revolt against Spain was the suppression of the lottery. For years the new republic sternly frowned down any tendency toward a return of this particular form of vice. To this day it is unlawful to bring the tickets of the Spanish lottery into the island. But blood will tell, and the mere winning of political freedom could not cure the Cuban of his love for gambling. Private games of chance increased in number and spread throughout the island. The Government saw itself losing millions of revenue yearly, while enterprising persons enriched themselves; for to all rulers of Iberian ancestry the exploitation of a people’s gambling instinct seems a legitimate source of state income. New palaces and boulevards cost money, independence brings with it unexpected expenditures. By the end of the second intervention the free Cubans were looking with favor upon a system which they had professed to abhor as Spanish subjects. The law of July 7, 1909, decreed a public revenue under the name of “Lotería Nacional,” and to-day the lottery is as firmly established a function of the Government as the postal service.

There are two advantages in a state lottery—to the government. It is not only an unfailing source of revenue; it is a splendid means of rewarding political henchmen. Colectorías, the privilege of dispensing lottery-tickets within a given district, are to the Cuban congressman what postmasterships are to our own. The possession of one is a botella (bottle), Cuban slang for sinecure; the lucky possessor is called a botellero. He in turn distributes his patronage to the lesser fry and becomes a political power within his district. The whole makes a splendidly compact machine that can be turned to any purpose by the chauffeur at the political wheel.

The first and indispensable requisite of a state lottery is that the drawings shall be honest. Your Spanish-minded citizen will no more do without his gambling than he will drink water with his meals; but let him for a moment suspect that “the game is crooked” and he will abandon the purchase of government tickets for some other means of snatching sudden fortune. The drawing of the Cuban lottery is surrounded by every possible check on dishonesty. By no conceivable chance could the inmost circle of the inner lottery councils guess the winning number an instant before it is publicly drawn. But there is another way in which the game is not a “fair shake” to the players, though the simpler type of Cuban does not recognise the unfairness. The average lottery, for instance, offers $420,000 in prizes. The legal price of the tickets is $20, divided into a hundred “pieces” for the convenience of small gamblers, at a peseta each. Thirty thousand tickets are sold, of which 30% of the proceeds, or $180,000, goes to the government or its favorite henchmen. That leaves to begin with only fourteen of his twenty cents that can come back to the player. Then the law allows the vender 5% as his profit, bringing the fractional ticket up to twenty-one cents. If that were all, the players would still have even chances of a reasonable return. But the “pieces” are never sold at that price, despite the law and its threat of dire punishment, printed on the ticket itself. From one end of the island to the other the billeteros demand at least $30 a billete; in other words the public is taxed one half as much as it puts into the lottery itself to support thousands of utterly useless members of society, the ticket-sellers, and instead of getting two-thirds of its money back it has a chance of rewinning less than half the sum hazarded. The most optimistic negro deckhand on a Mississippi steamboat would hardly enter a crap game in which the “bones” were so palpably “loaded.” Yet Cubans of high and low degree, from big merchants to bootblacks, pay their tribute regularly to the Lotería Nacional.

Barely had we arrived in Havana when the rumor reached me that the billeteros could be compelled to sell their tickets at the legal price, if one “had the nerve” to insist. I abhor a financial dispute, but I have as little use for hearsay evidence. I concluded to test the great question personally. Having purchased two “pieces” at the customary price, to forestall any charge of miserliness, I set out to buy one at the lawful rate. A booth on a busy corner of Calle Obispo, a large choice of numbers fluttering from its ticket-racks, seemed the most promising scene for my nefarious project, because a traffic policeman stood close by. I chose a “piece” and, having tucked it away in a pocket, handed the vender a peseta.

“It is thirty cents,” he announced politely, smiling at what he took to be my American innocence.

“Not at all,” I answered, blushing at my own pettiness. “The price is twenty cents; it is printed on the ticket.”

“I sell them only at thirty,” he replied, with a gesture that invited me to return the ticket.

“The legal price is all I pay,” I retorted. “If you don’t like that, call the policeman,” and I strolled slowly on. In an instant both the vender and the officer were hurrying after me. The latter demanded why I had not paid the amount asked.

“The law sets the price at twenty cents,” I explained. “As a guardian of order, you surely do not mean to help this man collect an illegal sum.”

The policeman gave me a look of scorn such as he might have turned upon a millionaire caught stealing chickens, and answered with a sneer:

“He is entitled to one cent profit.”

“But not to ten cents,” I added triumphantly.

The guardian of law and order grunted an unwilling affirmative, casting a pitying glance up and down my person, and turned away with another audible sneer only when I had produced a cent. The vender snatched the coin with an expression of disgust, and retains to this day, I suppose, a much lower opinion of Americans.

This silly ordeal, which I have never since had the courage to repeat, proved the assertion that the Cubans may buy their lottery-tickets at the legal price, but it demonstrated at the same time why few of them do so. Pride is the chief ally of the profiteer. The difference between twenty cents and thirty is not worth a dispute, but the failure of the individual Cuban to insist upon his rights, and of his Government to protect them, constitutes a serious tax upon the nation and enriches many a worthless loafer. With some forty lottery drawings a year, this extra, illegal ten cents a “piece” costs the Cuban people the neat little sum of at least $12,000,000 a year, or four dollars per capita.

The drawings take place every ten days, besides a few loterías extraordinarias, with prizes several times larger, on the principal holidays. They are conducted in the old treasury building down near the end of Calle Obispo. We reached there soon after seven of the morning named on our tickets. A crowd of two hundred or more heavy-mouthed negroes, poorly clad mestizos, and ragged, emaciated old Chinamen for the most part, were huddled together in the shade at the edge of the porch-like room. A policeman—not the one whose scorn I had aroused—beckoned us to step inside and take one of the seats of honor along the wall, not, evidently, because we were Americans, but because our clothing was not patched or our collars missing. At the back a long table stretched the entire length of the room. A dozen solemn officials, resembling a jury or an election board, lolled in their seats behind it, a huge ledger, a sheath of papers, an ink-well and several pens and pencils before each of them. At the edge of the room, just clear of the standing crowd of hopeful riffraff, was a similar table on which another group of solemn-faced men were busily scribbling in as many large blank-books, with the sophisticated air of court or congressional reporters. Between the tables were two globes of open-work brass, one perhaps six feet in diameter, the other several times smaller. The larger was filled with balls the size of marbles, each engraved with a number; the smaller one contained several thousand others, representing varying sums of money.

Almost at the moment we entered a gong sounded. Four muscular negroes rushed forth from behind the scenes and, grasping two handles projecting at the rear, turned the big globe over and over, its myriad of little balls rattling like a stage wind-storm. At the same time an individual of as certain, if less decided, African ancestry, solemnly shuffled the contents of the smaller sphere in the same manner. Then the interrupted drawing began again. Four boys, averaging eight years of age, stood in pairs at either globe. At intervals of about thirty seconds two of them pulled levers that released one marble from each sphere, and which long brass troughs or runways deposited in cut-glass bowls in front of the other two boys. The urchin on the big globe side snatched up his marble, called out a long number—in most cases running into the tens of thousands—and as his voice ceased, his companion opposite announced the amount of the prize. Then the two balls were spitted side by side on a sort of Chinese reckoning-board manipulated by another solemn-faced adult, who now and again corrected a misreading by the boy calling the numbers.

For the hour we remained this monotonous formality went steadily on, as it does every ten days from seven in the morning until nearly noon, ceasing only when all the balls in the smaller sphere have been withdrawn. Each of these represents a prize, but as considerably more than a thousand of them are of one hundred dollars each—or a dollar a “piece”—the almost constant “con cien pesos” of the prize-boy grew wearisome in the extreme. The men at the reporters’ table scribbled every number feverishly with their sputtering steel pens, but the “jury” at the back yielded to the soporific drone of childish voices and dozed half-open-eyed in their chairs—except when one of the major prizes was announced. Then they sat up alertly at attention, and inscribed one after another on their massive ledgers the number on the ball which an official held before each of their noses in turn, while the patch-clad gathering outside the room shifted excitedly on their weary feet and scanned the “pieces” in their sweaty hands with varying expressions of disgust and disappointment. Now and then the boys changed places, but only one of them, of dull-brown complexion and already gifted with the shifty eye of the half-caste, performed his task to the general satisfaction. The others were frequently interrupted by a protest from one of the recorders, whereupon the number that had just been called was emphatically reread by an adult, amid much scratching of pens in the leather-bound ledgers. If the monotony of the scene was wearisome, its solemnity made it correspondingly amusing. An uninformed observer would probably have taken it for at least a presidential election. Rachel asserted that it reminded her of Alice in Wonderland, but as my education was neglected I cannot confirm this impression. What aroused my own wonder was the fact that some two score more-or-less-high officials of a national government should be engaged in so ridiculous a formality, and that a sovereign republic should indulge in the nefarious profession of the bookmaker. But to every people its own customs.

If I had fancied it the fault of my own ear that I had not caught all the numbers, the impression would have been corrected by the afternoon papers. All of them carried a column or more of protest against the “absurd inefficiency” of the boys who had served that morning; most of them made the complaint the chief subject of their editorial pages. The Casa de Beneficencia—an institution corresponding roughly to our orphan asylums—was solemnly warned that it must thereafter furnish more capable inmates to cantar las bolas (“sing the balls”) on pain of losing the privilege entirely. Not only had the “uninstructed urchins” of that morning made mistakes in reading the numbers—a dastardly thing from the Cuban point of view—but had pronounced many of them in so slovenly a manner that “our special reporters were unable to supply our readers with correct information on a subject of prime importance to the entire republic.” Beware that it never happened again! It was easy to picture the poor overworked nuns of the asylum toiling far into the night to impress upon a multi-complexioned group of fatherless gamins the urgent necessity of learning to read figures quickly and accurately, if they ever hoped to become normal, full-grown men and perhaps win the big prize some day themselves.

Winning tickets may be cashed at any official colectoría at any time within a year, but such delays are rare. Barely is the drawing ended when the venders, armed with the billetes of the next sorteo, hurry forth over their accustomed beats to pay the winners and establish a reputation not so much for promptitude as for the ability to offer lucky numbers. The capital prize, $100,000 in most cases, is perhaps won now and then by some favorite of fortune, instead of falling to the Government, collector of all unsold winners, though I have never personally known of such a stroke of luck during all my wanderings in lottery-infested lands. Smaller causes for momentary happiness are more frequent, for with 1741 prizes, divisible into a hundred “pieces” each, it would be strange if a persistent player did not now and then “make a killing.” But even these must be rare in comparison to the optimistic multitude that pursues the goddess Chance, for on the morning following a drawing the streets of Havana are everywhere littered with worthless billetes cast off by wrathy purchasers. Wherefore an incorrigible moralist has deduced a motto that may be worth passing on to future travelers in Cuba:

“Buy a ‘piece’ or two that you may know the sneer of Fortune, but don’t get the habit.”

Three days before the wedding of my sister, mama, she and I went to the house of my future brother-in-law to put Alice’s things in order. The novio was not there. He had discreetly withdrawn to a hotel and only came home now and then for a few moments to give orders to the servants. If he found us there he greeted us in the hall and did not enter the rooms except as we invited him. As there were no women in his family we had to occupy ourselves with all these matters.

“Listen, my daughter,” said mama, one night, after the novio had gone, “when to-morrow you take leave of your fiancé do not pass beyond the line marked on the floor by the light of the hall lamp.” My sister started to protest, “But, mama, what is there wrong in that?” “Nothing, daughter, but it is not proper. Do as I tell you.” Alice, though slightly displeased with the order, always obeyed it thereafter.

These two quotations from one of Cuba’s latest novels give in a nutshell the position of women in Cuba. Like all Latin-American countries, especially of the tropics, it is essentially a man’s country. One of the great surprises of Havana is the scarcity of women on the streets, even at times when they swarm with promenading men. The Cuban believes as firmly as the old Spaniard that the woman’s sphere is strictly behind the grill of the front window, and with few exceptions the women agree with him. The result is that her interest in life beyond her own household is virtually nil. The “Woman Suffrage Party of Cuba” recently issued a pompous manifesto, but it seems to have won about as much support on the island as would a missionary of the prohibition movement. In the words of the militants of the sex in Anglo-Saxon lands, “the Cuban woman has not yet reached emancipation.”

The clerks, even in shops that deal only in female apparel, are almost exclusively male. The offices that employ stenographers or assistants from the ranks of the fair sex are rare, and those usually recruit such help in the United States. Except on gala occasions, it is extremely seldom that a Cuban girl of the better class is seen in public, and even then only in company with a duenna or a male member of her immediate family, and few married women consider it proper to appear unaccompanied by their husbands, despite American example. As another Cuban waiter has put it, “One of our greatest defects is the little or entire lack of genuine respect for women. Though we are outwardly extremely gallant in society and sticklers for the finer points of etiquette and courtesy, we almost always look upon a woman merely as a female and our first thought of at least a young and beautiful woman is to imagine all her hidden perfections. The instant a lady comes within sight of the average Cuban gathering all eyes are fixed upon her with a stare that in Anglo-Saxon countries would be more than impertinent, which pretends to be flattering, but which at bottom is truly insulting.” He does not add that the women rather invite this attention and feel themselves slighted, their attractions unappreciated, if it is not given. Yet of open offenses against her modesty the Cuban lady is freer than on the streets of our own large cities. Even in restaurants and gatherings where those of the land never appear, an American woman is treated, except in the matter of staring, with genuine courtesy by all classes.

The custom of living almost exclusively in the privacy of her own home has given the Cuban woman a tendency to spend the day in disreputable undress. Their hair dishevelled, their forms loosely enveloped in a bata or in a slatternly petticoat and dressing-sack, usually torn and seldom clean, their toes thrust into slippers that slap at every step, they slouch about the house all the endless day. Unless there are guests they never dress for lunch, seldom for dinner, but don instead earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and an astonishing collection of finger rings, powdering their faces rather than washing them. During meals the favorite topics of conversation are food and digestion; if one of them has had any of the numerous minor ailments natural to a life of non-exertion, it is sure to be the subject of a cacophonous discussion that lasts until the appearance of the inevitable toothpicks. Servants, with whom they associate with a familiarity unknown in Northern homes, are numerous, and leave little occupation for the mothers and daughters. The women never read, not even the newspapers, and their minds, poorly trained to begin with in the nun-taught “finishing schools,” go to seed early, so that by late youth or early middle age their faces show the effects of a selfish, idle existence and a life of continual boredom. But lest I be accused of being over-critical, let me quote once more the native writer already introduced:

In one of the interior habitations a piano sounded, beaten by a clumsy hand that repeated the same immature exercise without cessation. There was general discussion in the dining-room at all hours of the day, mingled with the shrieks of a parrot which swung on a perch suspended from the ceiling and the constant disputes of the children, who were snatching playthings from one another, heaping upon each other every class of verbal injury. The mother sewed and the older children tortured the piano during entire hours, or polished their nails with much care, rubbing them with several kinds of powders. When they had finished these occupations they slouched from one end of the house to the other, throwing themselves in turn upon all the divans or into the cushioned rocking-chairs and yawning with ennui. Their skirts fell from their belts, loosened by the languid and lazy gait. The mother did not want the girls to do anything in the house for fear they would spoil their hands and lose their chances of marriage. On the other hand, in the afternoon when the hour of visits drew near the time was always too short to distribute harmoniously the color on their cheeks and lips and to take off the little hair papers with which they artificially formed their waves or curls during the day.

This continual hubbub seems to be customary to every household; all intercourse, be it orders to servants or admonitions to the insufferable children, being carried on by yelling. And there are no worse voices in the world than those of the Cuban women. Whether it is due to the climate or to the custom of reciting in chorus at school, they have a timbre that tortures the ear-drums like the sharpening of a saw, and all day long they exercise them to the full capacity of their lungs. Under no circumstances is one of them given the floor alone, but the slightest morsel of gossip is threshed to bits in a free-for-all whirlwind of incomprehensible shrieking.

On the other hand, the Cuban woman accepts many children willingly, and in accordance with her lights is an excellent wife and mother. Indeed, she is inclined to be over-affectionate, and given to serving her children where they should serve themselves, with a consequent lack of development in their characters. The boys in particular are “spoiled” by being granted every whim. The men are much less often at home than is the case with us, and seldom inclined to exert a masculine influence on their obstreperous sons. The result is a lack of self-control that makes itself felt through all Cuban manhood, a “touchiness,” an inclination to stand on their dignity instead of yielding to the dictates of common sense.

But if she is slouchy in the privacy of her own household, the Cuban woman is quite the opposite in public. The grande toilette is essential for the briefest appearance on the streets. American women assert that there is no definite style in feminine garb in Cuba, and I should not dream of questioning such authority, though to the mere masculine eye they always seem “dressed within an inch of their lives” whenever they emerge into the sunlight. But it does not need even the intuition of the sometimes unfair sex to recognise that a life of physical indolence leaves their figures somewhat dumpy and ungraceful, seldom able to appear to advantage even in the best of gowns. Nor is it hard to detect a sense of discomfort in their unaccustomed full dress, which makes them eager to hurry home again to the negligée of bata and slippers.

If the men monopolize other places of public gathering, the churches at least belong to the women. There are few places of worship in Havana, or in all Cuba, for that matter, that merit a visit for their own sake. Though most of them are overfilled with ambitious attempts at decoration, none of these is very successful. A single painting of worth here and there, an occasional side chapel, one or two carved choir-stalls, are the only real artistic attractions. But several of them are well worth visiting for the side-lights they throw on Cuban customs. As in Spain, every variety of diseased beggar squats in an appealing attitude against the façades of the more fashionable religious edifices during the hours of general concourse. Luxurious automobiles, with negro chauffeurs in dazzling white liveries, sweep up to the foot of the broad stone steps in as continual procession as the narrow streets permit, but the passengers who alight are overwhelmingly of the gown-clad gender. Within, the perfume of the worshipers drowns out the incense. A glance across the sea of kneeling figures discloses astonishingly few bare heads. The Cuban men, of course, are “good Catholics,” too, but they are apt to confine their church attendance to special personal occasions. The church has no such influence in public affairs in Cuba as in many parts of the continent to the southward; so little indeed, that public religious processions are forbidden by law, though sometimes permitted in practice. If the Jesuits are still a power to be reckoned with, so are los masones, and the mere proof of irreligion is no effective bar to governmental or commercial preferment.