I was sitting on the verandah of John Bard's bungalow, glancing through a two-months-old copy of The Sketch, I heard the clang of the iron gate below where I sat. I raised my eyes from the paper and looked down the gardens. At my feet was stretched a dark tangle of palms and luxuriant tropical verdure—beyond them in the distance the glass-like surface of the sea, on which a great lucent moon threw a gleaming patch of light.
The night was very tranquil. From the port at the foot of the hill on which my old friend, John Bard, had built his bungalow in this earthly paradise, the occasional screech of a winch was wafted with astonishing clearness over the warm air. Somewhere in the distance there was the faint and monotonous thrumming of guitars. To these night noises of the little Central American port the sea murmured faintly a ceaseless accompaniment.
I heard voices in the garden. Within the house a door swung to with a thud; there was the patter of slippered feet over the matting in the living-room, and Akawa, Bard's Japanese servant, was at my elbow. His snow-white drill stood out against the black shadows which the moon cast at the back of the verandah. He did not speak, but with his mask-like face waited for me to notice him.
“Well, Akawa?” said I; “what is it?”
“Doña Luisa ask for the Señor Comandante, excuse me!” announced the Japanese stolidly.
Comfortably stretched out in a cane chair, a cold drink frosting its long glass in the trough at my side, I turned and stared at the butler. I was undoubtedly the Señor Comandante, for thus, in the course of a lazy, aimless sort of holiday on the shores of the Pacific, had my rank of Major been hispaniolized.
But what lady wanted me? Who could possibly know me here, seeing that only the day before one of John Bard's fruit ships had landed me from San Salvador.
Doña Luisa! The name had an alluring, romantic ring, especially on this gorgeous night, the velvety sky powdered with glittering stars, the air heavy with perfumes exhaled from the scented gardens. That broad strain of romance in me (which makes so much trouble for us Celts) responded strongly to the appeal of my environment. Doña Luisa! The distant strains of music seemed to thrum that soft name into my brain.
I swung my feet to the ground, stood up and stretched myself.
“Where is the lady?” I demanded. “In the sitting-room?”
“No, sir,” replied the Japanese. “In the garden!”
More and more romantic! Had some lovely señorita, in high comb and mantilla, been inflamed by a chance sight of the Inglés as I walked through the grass-grown streets of the city with John Bard that morning, and pursued me to my host's gardens to declare her love? The thought amused me, and I smiled. Yet I don't mind admitting that, on my way through the sitting-room in Akawa's wake, I glanced at a mirror and noted with satisfaction that my white drill was spotless, and my hair smooth. I adjusted my tie and with that little touch of swagger which the prospect of a romantic rendezvous imparts to the gait of the most modest of us men, I passed out of the room to the corridor which led to the door into the gardens.
The passage was brightly lit, so that, on emerging into the darkness again, my eyes were dazzled. At first I could discern only a vast black shape. But presently I made out the generous proportions of an enormously stout, coal-black negress.
She was wearing a torn and filthy cotton dress and about her head was bound a spotted pink-and-white handkerchief. With her vast bosom and ample span of hip she looked almost as broad as she was long. On seeing me she bobbed.
“You'm Señor Comandante?” she asked in English in her soft negro voice.
“Yes,” I replied, rather taken aback by this droll apparition. “What did you want with me?”
“I has a letter for you, suh!”
She plunged a brown hand into the unfathomable depths of her opulent corsage.
“From Doña Luisa?” I asked expectantly.
The negress stopped her groping and grinned up at me with flashing teeth. Her eyeballs glistened white as her face lit up with a broad smile. Then she tapped herself with a grimy paw.
“I is Doña Luisa!” she announced with pride.
I staggered beneath the shock of this revelation. My vision of a sloe-eyed damsel in a mantilla vanished in smoke.
“I has a fine Spanish name,” remarked the lady, resuming her spasmodic searchings of her person, “but I wus riz in N'Awleans. That's how I talks English so good! Ah!”
With a grunt she fished out a folded sheet of dirty note-paper and handed it to me.