A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS
W N H
kJAMES
A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS
Other Books by the Same aAuthor
BACHELOR BETTY PATRICIA BARING SATURDAY'S CHILDREN LETTERS TO MY SON MORE LETTERS TO MY SON LETTERS OF A SPINSTER A SWEEPING THE MULBERRY TREE
A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS
BY
WINIFRED JAMES
(Mrs. Henry De Jan)
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LONDON CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
PRCSERVATION COPY ADDED ORIGINAL TO BE RETAINED
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A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS
Dear Phillip a.
Your letter was one of the first of the waiting batch thai I opened, and glad indeed I was to see it ! Before leaving London I inquired many times at the Club for you, but was always told you had not arrived. It seems futile and absurd that you should land the very day that I sailed, when you think what few chances we ever have of meeting. For some reason or other, which seems to be nothing but chance, my flights are always in winter, and I have twice — through necessity — been guilty of the stupidity of turning up in England in November and leaving it in May, There is this about it to me, that after I have been away from it for any length of time there is no day of the year that is anything but beautiful on which to come home ; , and/: after a while, in the changeless and eternal summer, of this place, gas lamps and fires and dark days seem tike Paradise.
If it is really true as you say in your letter that you are interested to hear of everything that goes on,
B
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/ will write a little to you every day, for there are many times when I long for a woman to talk over and enjoy things with,
I have often had the courage to start a diary, hut never the perseverance to continue it past a week, or at most ten days. Keep the letters as you suggest, and in years to come, when this place will he nothing hut a dream, it will interest me to read them myself Shorn of the discomforts that attend the making of history, they will he amusing enough as a retrospect. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to know that I am alive. I will never any more say that there is anything I would not do. For as long as I care to remember I have said there were three things impossible to me : to marry an American, or a parson, and to live permanently out of England. And here I am, married to the Americanest American and living six thousand miles away from London in a place which is no more than a nigger camp with enough white people to break the ground and render it habitable. The only thing left to make my abdication complete is for William to turn parson. Please God that wonH happen yet awhile at any rate. Even if he Zi)anted to^k. would be a long time before they would dare it) trust Mrn in a pulpit on account of his " langwidge.'* ::J*w'guild\'waf'fi''£my fanatic who hoped to proselytize William that he would have to purge him of much else than his sins if he hoped to make an even fairly respectable shepherd of him.
The steamer is blowing, and a man is waiting to 2
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take this down to her, I shall post always to the Club so that wherever you are it will he forwarded to you, I suppose I am almost as near Singapore as you are now.
Yours always, WINIFRED JAMES.
Panama, Central America, June Ut, 1914.
Panama, June 2nd, 1914.
I POSTED the scrap I had written when the whistle blew, so that you might know that your letter had arrived safely. It is a long time waiting for an answer when the mail takes close on three weeks each way, and connections are sometimes missed. Yours had come from Singapore, and its delivery was dated three weeks before our return. Enough of mine have gone astray to make one a little uncertain about the arrival of any. I shall never forget the distress I was in once when William was here and I was in London. I had gone down to a little place called Burwash in Sussex to do some work quietly, and as I did nothing else but work, and eat, and sleep, the post was an event. Before leaving town I carefully wrote the address out for the club porter, and told him to forward everything. Suddenly William's letters, which came as a rule once a week in batches of threes and fours, ceased. I waited one mail patiently enough, thinking that they had missed a ship or had not been able to make connection ; but when it came to the second and then the third I began to worry ; and by the fourth 4
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I was panic stricken. I knew exactly what had happened. He had been having fever, and there was no one to look after him, and it had turned to blackwater, and he had died, and no one liked to tell me. To wait for a reply to a letter would take six weeks ; to cable would be useless, I knew by experience, for if he was alive he wouldn't think it worth while wasting the money on saying he was ; and if he was dead he wouldn't be able to. Feeling like something trapped I fled up to London to await the worst there. In the country each day seemed forty-eight hours long.
A mail was just coming in as I went through the hall. Four good hearty long letters from William, and not a word about fever or anything of its kind. I inquired of the porter. Yes, he had forwarded them regularly. He had the address and showed it to me written down quite correctly. Something must have happened to them between Piccadilly and Burwash. But what, no one knew.
Two months later, when William had himself arrived and put my fears to flight, a shower of travel-soiled letters came dropping at the club addressed and re-addressed, and then addressed again. And over them, stamped like the pattern on a piece of silk, the word Rangoon, Rangoon, Rangoon.
I saw it then. An intelligent official with his mind not on things of the Post Office had sent them to Burmah instead of Burwash.
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And if any one wants that to build a tragedy on he can have it with my compHments. For my part I would never think of using it. It's too true to be good.
The home-coming was more a plight than a home- coming, and I am aching all over with what I have had to do within the last twenty-four hours. As I told you, I left England the day you arrived on the Olympic. I had two days in New York, caught the steamer down to Panama and found William, who had left London a month earlier and gone across the States to New Orleans on business, waiting for me in Colon. There we bought some necessities ; a ham, a lottery ticket, a mixing basin and a lamp-shade, and started for home, a night's journey back along the coast towards Costa Rica.
We entered the lagoon before dawn, and lay off the ramshackle toy town of Bocas del Toro till the daylight should bring out the launches ; govern- ment, quarantine and ships' company. First the little captain of the port with his henchmen : coffee- coloured faces, blue and gold uniforms and Spanish tongues. Then the health officer, a thin wiry figure in khaki and Stetson hat, with Yankee drawl and an eternal cheerfulness born of seventeen years' residence among Chinese, niggers and half-casts. To stay seventeen years in such a place you would have to be either cheerful or dead. His cheerfulness is almost a vice. 6
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And on the Company's launch the Company's officials, Americans all, except the British Consul, a six-foot Canadian of fair complexion and pale blue eyes, who with fifteen years behind him seems to have cultivated even an affection for life on the tea-tray.
By breakfast time it was raining steadily. No- where in the world can it rain more thoroughly than it rains here when it gives its mind to it, and the only time that you can be sure of a really dry season is when something is being done to the water tank.
William, who is an American with the Americans, a Spaniard with the Panamanians, and can talk pidgin English to a Chinaman and Jamaican to a nigger as well as he talks American to an English- man, went off in one of the laimches to shake hands with the governor, the mayor and municipality of Bocas del Toro, and I sat on the deck and watched it rain till lunch time.
It was not till late in the afternoon that the ship left Bocas and picked her way for thirteen miles between the little islands of the lagoon, like a very dainty cat in a very crowded conservatory, to Al- mirante. This time she had to do it pretty well by guesswork, for the rain blotted out everything, mountains and mangroves and all ; and islands through which she had to pass, some no larger than a good-sized cheese, were at best no more than a
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faint stain on the grey curtain that shut out the world. Not that it would have mattered much if we had bumped into an island, we should only have broken it off and gone on again ; but it seems that it is one of those happenings that does not altogether tot up in favour of a captain, and also it takes some of the paint off the ship as well as off the captain.
The curtain lifted as we came within sight of the town, and revealed it — a dreary mud heap. Standing out upon the coral fill and close to the edge of the water were the principal buildings : the wharf, the mess house where the sixteen white men live, two other houses for married quarters and the commissary and warehouse. Beyond that, on the mainland, away behind the railway yard, and smeared with the smoke from the engines, the encampment of nigger houses and Chinamen's stores huddled together mournfully as if trying to escape some of the deluge. And behind that again the dump, that place which once had been a fern-tangled, lily-starred swamp in whose fastnesses water-fowl nestled and hid, and was now a naked clay morass and the only approach of any sort to the house on the hill.
The hill, which since the fill has been made has had its record lowered by five feet and now looks like a small basin turned upside down, with a doll's house sitting on its apex. But across that sinking clarty dump it looked a thousand miles away.
We slid alongside the wharf high up out of the 8
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water, our deck towering above the banana cars that were drawn up ready to unload into the hold. The grizzled old negro cook was there busy among his array of pots and little iron charcoal stoves, cooking the messes of rice and bananas and yam and yucca for the men who were going to load; and Tomlin and O'Dowd, the two custodians of the wharf. Tomlin, a witty little good-natured New Englander, and O'Dowd, who thrills me by the way he runs along the top of a train when it is going at full speed and drops down on to the engine as if he were sliding into an easy-chair. Mul- cahy, the young Irishman with a figure like a toby jug, who perspires twenty-four hours of the day to no purpose whatever, and who lives for two passions, to be a good Catholic, and to eat a good dinner ; he was not there, having been drafted to another division ; nor poor Jesse Grant, the professional revolution maker and good stevedore ; he was coughing his way to Arizona in the hope of holding on to the last bit of lung he had left. But Captain Macker was on the wharf, waiting to go to his table under the swing- ing lamp as soon as the gangway was lowered, and call the tally till the small hours ; sturdy, stalwart, sixty-four years old, with fourteen children living and another every year like clockwork : who could eat and swear with the best, but who drank nothing but water, and had a mania for buying everything second hand that came his way. And little Simpson,
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a Jamaican Jew of coloured extraction, with fair complexion and un Jewish features, although some- what large in the nose, who serves me earnestly and courteously when I go to replenish my stores, and who sometimes brings me a lard tin full of roses and jasmin from his friends in Bocas. Simpson has built up a reputation as a horse-fancier with a pair of shepherd's plaid trousers, two bandy legs, and a nag who also ran upon the sands at Bocas in what was called a race meeting ; and as a dog-fancier because he insists on biting off the tails of all the pups that come his way whether they be collies, pugs, fox-terriers or bull-dogs ; and who, when he looks at a dog in his shepherd's plaids, with his legs bowed out to match, and says appraisingly, " She's a pretty little bitch," makes me feel that I have to say " by gad " for him under my breath. Very much more English than the English are the Jamaicans.
And last, but not least, Lizzie, who attends all ships with the pertinacity of a seagull, who wears a wrist-watch, parts his hair in the middle and plays the piano from nine to eleven on every vessel that shows her nose by the wharf side. When he does not do that he adds up figures on a stool in the counting- house and walks in the manner of a miss in a hobble skirt. He gave notice when William was in charge because his grandmother wasn't well, but evidently his grandmother is better for he has not gone.
Tomlin greeted us as we stepped off the gangway. 10
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He had a box-car waiting with an engine hitched to it. As soon as our luggage was off he would run us and it together to the little wooden steps at the foot of the hill. To walk across the Dump as it was, would be impossible.
The conventions of a savage are past the under- standing of an ordinary person. William, who was born on Mississippi flats, and who, except for occasional tours in the States and the visits to New York, has lived his life on mountain-tops ; who found his way to Chile when he was not yet in his teens, who hobnobs with Indians in their own tongue, and to whom the fastnesses of Bolivia and Peru are as Piccadilly is to me, stopped suddenly and stared at me as we stood waiting for the luggage to come off.
" You're not going to carry that thing home like that ! " he said in a petrified voice.
I looked down at what I had in my hand, a cut- glass scent-bottle with a gold spray that once had not been ashamed to sun its graces in the windows of Morny Freres.
" Yes," I said ; " why not ? "
When he could get his breath he spoke :
" It looks like hell to carry a goddam syphon about without any paper on it," he said.
Quite simply, just like that. Then he moved off two or three paces in case any one should think I belonged to him.
I could feel it all. What in the name of
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self-respecting communities would Tomlin and O'Dowd and Lizzie and Simpson and the niggers on the wharf and the tourists on the ship think of him for having married a woman who did these things ? How was he going to get on at all with such a wife to pull him back ? What would the Dump say ? Truly a man's enemies are those of his own household.
We walked to the box-car in silence, I hugging the shameless thing to my breast, and pondering, as I picked my way over the banana trash, upon the mysteries of life and the difference between men and husbands.
Once, before I was married to William, I wanted to see a prize fight at Bocas. Feeling that I, as a stranger, might go to it without considering the consequences, yet could not expect a resident to take me to a place where he would not of his own free will go himself, I asked timidly if such an outing were possible. On my own ground I should have known ; on some one else's I was considerately different.
And William's reply, so severely and so clearly given, was one of my strongest reasons for marrying him.
" You can always do what you want in this world."
To one whose watchword that is, you don't wonder that I was ensnared. Then he became a husband — and so ! ... I shall have to teach William 12
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civilization as we know it in order that he may Hve a less conventional life.
The dusk was falling as the box-car turned off the main line and trembled and tottered along the shaky track that was thrown every day in a fresh place across the clay fill. Skirting the edge of the swamp we crawled over the disjointed rails slowly, perilously, till at last the car stopped. We were as near the steps — the little wooden steps with a hand- rail that led on to the hill — as we could get. Glad I was to be out of the lumbering truck that seemed as if it would at any moment heel over and fall with us into the swamp. I dropped off into a mud ditch, pulled myself out of it, and at last arrived with both feet planted on the wooden steps. The coconut leaves were dripping, the path up from the steps was greasy and steep, the whole place seemed a solid block of rain ; but behind the screens the light was shining, nice plain electric light without any wicks to trim or chimneys to break. That was a relief anyhow.
Inside the house nothing had been done. The rooms were stark and empty ; no furniture, bare unpolished wooden floors, hideous dingy paint. A crated bed, four cane rocking chairs shrouded in paper wrappings, and two or three tables littered up the narrow verandah. The floors had been scrubbed, but bats had been living in the house when the old patois nigger was in charge, and the
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boards were spotted and stained. In the kitchen there was a three-burner oil stove, a kettle, a frying- pan, a rack on the wall, and a narrow built-in table much too high, with a large hole in the middle where a sink had once been ; since carried off by the last residents as a valuable, on account of the impossi- bility of buying any in this part of the world.
Backwards and forwards came the niggers bearing the trunks and boxes. And finally, the most im- portant of all, a candle-box with precious contents : two bone-handled knives and forks, a pair of gaudy little cups and saucers with a pink band and " A Present " written on them in gold, a tin of milk, two tins of sardines, a packet of tea, a loaf of bread, and a box of matches. William having got a steak and a packet of butter from the ship, we need not go to bed hungry.
The bed was uncrated and put up, and the chairs stripped of their wrappings. I found a box with some linen in it, drove two nails I took out of the crate into the bathroom wall, and hung up two towels. Then when I had arranged one of the tables for a dressing-table, and set the things from the dressing-case upon it, I took the steak out into the kitchen and started on the supper. It was a hand- some steak of goodly proportions and a fine red colour, but it had not been quite long enough out of the freezing-chamber to be as tender as it might. Still a steak was a steak in such circumstances, and 14.
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not to be thrown on one side because it offered too valiant a resistance. We got to it.
" Pass the salt," I said to William, leaning back in the rocker and resting awhile before I began.
William searched the table with his eye, then he got up and went to the candle-box. " There isn't any," he said.
Do you know what it is like when you have been travelling for three weeks on end, to sit down in an empty house after a tedious day and a strenuous evening, to a dish on which you have banked every- thing, a dish whose fragrance has given promise of quiet happiness and of a contentment that comes from a mind and body well treated ? To look forward to a gentle after-drowse bom of work well done and its reward well digested ? And to find that dish tough and water-logged ? And again to be so master of one's desires that one can accept all this without flinching and say with a fine courage, " Pass the salt," and J or there to be no salt? Neither any mustard, nor Worcester, nor catsup.
The rain poured down steadily, solidly, upon the zinc roof and the sodden clay of the dmnp ; and the slippery darkness of the hill cut us off from all contact with the outside world where salt and an assortment of the fifty-seven varieties lived securely and remotely upon the Chinaman's shelving. William and I chewed desperately and despondently for a while,
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and then gave it up, staring at each other in silence across the table.
Suddenly the set look in William's face went. His eyes softened, an ineffable light of some dawning joy flooded his features. Without a word he got up, went over to his coat which was hanging over the back of a chair, and drew from it a bottle of rolled anchovies ! Forgotten by him in the stress of un- packing ; but with bread and butter and tea, a priceless substitute. I ate nearly half a bottle, six thick slices of bread and butter, and drank five cups of tea, never thinking of the steak again. William finished the bottle and the loaf, and looked at the place in the candle-box where the sardines were lying, but as there was no vinegar either, he left them alone. Then we shut up the steak and the dishes in the kitchen, and I don't remember anything more.
16
n
The House on the Hill, June. 1914.
I HAVE sat down many times to try and describe this place in a way that will bring it before the eyes of those at home, and never have I really succeeded. The look of it, perhaps, yes. One can use the word " tropics " and speak of coconut trees, bananas, blue sky and high mountains, and a picture will come. But nothing brings life as one lives it every day, with its incongruity of up-to-date comforts and its extraordinary privations, before the vision of those who belong to mature civilizations. To the older peoples, electric light, ice factories and shower baths came at the end of things, not at the beginning. They had their roads long before their railways. And so if one speaks of electric light and railways, and ice factories and shower baths one creates an impression of completeness that is absolutely fictitious. It is true that the things I speak of exist, and that life is made livable by them, but where to another part of the world they are but the crowning stones of the cairn, to us they are the first few pebbles of
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a foothold without which nothing would be possible at all.
In no part of the world where I have been before have I lived where one could not walk. In Australia where there is a community of any size there are at least surfaces, and accessible mountains, although the paths through them may be no more than rough trails. Often when I was in London last I would have to answer a thousand and one questions as to things here. What games did we play, tennis, golf ? We didn't play any. Why not ? There was no bit of ground big enough to play on. Then they supposed I walked ? No, I didn't walk, there wasn't any place to walk on. Then would come the wondering alternative ; well, I rode ? No, I did not ride. If there was no room for my two feet thdre would scarcely be any for a horse's fom'. Besides, there weren't any horses. Then they would give up in despair.
What did I do ? I paced backwards and forwards on a verandah that gave me a straight go of about two hundred feet. And sometimes when the launch could be spared we would have something under an hour's ride on the lagoon. Twice in five months we had had a bathing picnic to the nearest beach twelve miles away.
Imagine to yourself a little group of white people, about twenty in number, living among perhaps three hundred niggers and a handful of chinamen ; a camp — 18
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for one cannot call it a town — where all the houses were built on piles in the swamp, and linked together by a footway of boards, also on piling, a bare three feet wide ; and from the wharf out into the lagoon a single gauge railway line unwinding itself like an ever-lengthening thread through the jungle. Chan- guinola, on the broad breasted river of the same name, is the first white settlement along the line, and it is thirteen miles away. There live the conductors and their wives, and the head of that division. Twelve miles further on is another community of the same kind, and the banana plantations stretch out between with a mandador, or overseer, for each. Up and down the line from Changuinola to Sixaola, which till a little while ago was the end of the line, I believe there is a certain amount of social life, but very limited compared with that of an English com- munity of the same size, for the American pioneer is not hospitable to his kind as the Enghsh pioneer is. But here, there could be nothing, in the cir- cumstances, that existed before I went home. A year ago, when first I came out to live, I was the second white woman in the town. Sometimes we entertained one of the men who lived at the mess, and sometimes one or two of the officials on the line who were able to get up and down by reason of having their own official motors, which they could run at any time of the day or night provided they fitted in their journeys so as not to interfere with the regular
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fruit traffic. Every now and then people would arrive on the ships with letters to William, or perhaps a captain would come to lunch or dinner. That was the extent of our gaieties.
Sometimes we would go for a walk along the rail- way track. But it was a self-conscious form of exercise. The track was so laid that half the time you had to skip from tie to tie ; and as often as not it was under water. What with minding your step and listening for engines and trains that might be upon you at any moment, you were not inspired to the effort very often. And there is always the over- whelming and relaxing heat which makes an entire change of clothes necessary every time one exerts oneself to the extent of threading a needle or turning over the leaves of a book. People have left New York and New Orleans in the middle of summer, and come down here marvelling at the temperate climate. The cool breeze which rarely ever fails us at some time of the day or night, has been their envy. But they take their Turkish baths when they want them, or at least there is a season of the year when they do not have to have them. And we live in ours.
William does not respond so easily to treatment as I do. As for me, for a while I bear my condition with a certain amount of fortitude, thinking of the weight I must be losing every minute. Then suddenly Mulcahy comes up before my eyes and my hope flies. 20
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I am afraid that my dreams of a home of my own as I want it are going to be a long time crystallizing. It takes six months here to do what can be done in six days at home. Everybody puts off.
Before the town had begun to be filled, when there was no clay or coral to walk on, and the nice green tangle of ferns and swamp lilies and "little wild things," the generic name for everjrthing here, went right down to the edge of the creek where the tide rose and fell upon black mud and tin cans and swarming two-pronged crabs, the house we are in now seemed almost a country residence. To get to it from the coral-filled spit on which we lived (and the only bit of firm earth except the railway line) you had to walk no more than half a mile. But it was this sort of half mile : about one hundred yards of warehouse verandah, then a drop on to the car track that ran over the causeway connecting the mainland with the coral patch, a track more often than not half under water. After that had been negotiated you came out at the lumber yard upon the real railway lines and dodged the engines and banana cars for the distance up to the bridge over the creek. Crossing it you foimd yourself upon the famous board walk where the Chinese and native and Jamai- can population lived and moved and had their mercantile being. Here you trod carefully and took the inside if you could get it, lest on the outside, by reason of the walk being no more than thirty-six
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inches wide and rickety at that, you should fall over the edge and be lost for ever among the tin cans and the black mud and the two-pronged crabs.
Passing Mrs. Jacques', the first house upon the board walk, a twelve by twenty weather-bound shanty with corrugated iron roof and three-foot verandah, over which hung the sign —
BOARD AND LODGING RESTAURANT
Meals Served at all Hours,
you came to another verandah set out with plantains, green peppers, fried fish and trays of sickly, shiny- looking cakes such as the Jamaicans love. Then to the first big store kept by one named Jose Castro, originally known — before the subtleties of living in a Central American republic were revealed to him — as Chong Lee Wong, but now a true Panamanian citizen without the shadow of a pigtail and wearing the latest things in yellow American shoes with Cuban heels, broad sash ribbons, life-belt eyelet holes and bulldog toes. Further along on another verandah was the butcher, a seco-sodden native who exposed his doubtful meats for most part of the day to the proddings and pinchings of the populace and the faithful ministrations of flies both great and small. On the next verandah, a studious-looking Jamaican nigger tailor in spectacles, worked industriously at his 22
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sewing-machine, and some naked babies sprawled with a lotus-eared pup at his feet.
At the first corner, if, instead of finishing the parade through this High Street past more china- men's stores and along to the washerwoman's, you turned up another board walk, and, avoiding a row of small shacks — a place of dalliance where the ladies would need to be more frail than fair if they were to have any success at their profession — you made your way out across the open swamp, you would in your own good time, providing you were not careless enough to slip through the holes and had an instinct that kept you off the rotten boards, come to the house on the hill.
There was no fence round the hill, the swamp was guard enough ; but a door in a frame stood at the end of the board walk. On evenings that were fine, after the commercial doors had been closed, and all the little sardines and nail kegs and gent's underwear had been put to bed till the next day, William would get the key and we would do the journey together, William to see how his coconuts were growing, and I to moon round the empty house and plan what I would do with the four little boxes of rooms when the cockroaches and the spiders and the centipedes and the old nigger who was supposed to take care of the dogs and didn't, were all swept out and I could sweep in.
Four empty boxes with a roof to them is a promise of heaven to me always. One day, when WilUam
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decided to use his brains for himself instead of for a corporation, it would have to be our sole abiding place. The plans of its extension lay in a drawer, and the schemes of its decoration grew and blossomed in my brain. On paper, wide screened verandahs ran the whole way round the house. Downstairs — there was to^ be an upstairs added — two rooms thrown into one, made a long sitting room with French windows opening on to the verandah on three sides. For the rest, a guest-room, the house- keeper's room, and a bathroom. Upstairs, a long white bedroom with green shutters and a bath- room off it ; a little secluded green room for me to work in with no more in it than a desk and a chair ; and off that, another bedroom. All day I should be able to sit upstairs away from complications of food and niggers and household cares, and write beautiful books for a loving world. And in the evening I would come down to the lamp-lit room and take my place in life again with William and the housekeeper, and the piano, and the books and all the charming things that lived in the drawer with the plans or in my head with the decorations, and we would make the desert yield to us at least the roses that we planted there.
And here we are with two nails in the bathroom, some more on the bedroom door, and four chairs, a table and a bed. I washed the floors myself this morning because I could not wait any longer for the 24
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nigger who is coming to do it. I think of you with your trained servants and envy you them, idle and lazy as I dare say they are. But at any rate you have a choice of them. And your house is lovely, that I know. Still one must not grouse at experience, I suppose, whatever form it takes. If I am not, because of it, a doubly fascinating creature by the time I get back to my own again, I shall feel there must have been some mistake in the way I took the medicine.
It is still raining. There is no place to be but on the verandah. The screens enclose it, but they do not protect it from the rain when it blows from certain quarters. It is our dining place, living place, all but sleeping place. When the rain blows in too fiercely, we have to go into the little passage way that divides the two front rooms, and wait till it is over. There is a chair in each of the rooms, but the windows are screened again, and it is dark and dreary work to sit and look at a bed or a table. And the light is not available till six o'clock at night. Every time William comes on to the verandah the clay is brought in, inches thick, and stamped into the boards. It is impossible to keep them clean unless one scrubs them after each visit, and I am not equal to such a hopeless task as that. As well try to sweep up the waves on the seashore with a camel-hair paint brush.
We have bought a few plates and dishes, and borrowed some things from one of the bachelors ;
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and with those I manage to serve three meals a day. There are barrels of china and glass of our own in one of the empty rooms at the back, but I am not allowed to unpack them till the house is built. And all my books are stored. There is nothing to do but cook, wash up, try and keep the verandah clean, and watch the rain. I have the dogs for company. Yesterday a nigger girl turned up. I must try and train her into something of a servant. She at least knows how to hold a broom, and can boil water. Many of them cannot do even that, and on the strength of their inability they offer themselves as cooks or anything else you ask for.
The troubles of service are overwhelming. No native, e ither Panamanian or Columbian, will work at anything. When they are hungry they can go out into the lagoon and dynamite enough fish to feed themselves and sell to the white people, who are always ready to pay anjrthing for something that is not in a tin. With what they sell, they can buy more dynamite to put away till the next time their stomachs call. And the banana is always with them. Therefore all labour has to be imported. The Jamaican is brought over in large quantities and paid in good times far more than he knows how to appreciate. He is not used to money. In his own island he sees very little of it and is all the better for it. But here sixty miles of bananas have to be cut and carted, and loaded on to the ships four and 26
THE WILDERNESS
five, and sometimes as many as nine, times a week. The men have to be tempted out of other islands to do it, and money is the bait. It isn't any use to them, they don't invest it here or develop it ; they don't save it like the Chmamen and take it back to enrich their native land. They buy patent leather shoes that pinch them, and silk socks that go into holes ; and when the money is spent and the things are worn out, they go back contentedly to their rags. They are proud and happy in their patent leather shoes, they are gay and happy in their rags. But once having seen the dollar, they have no more use for the cent, although the dollar buys them no more in the long run. If they have ever been paid a dollar for work which at home would have brought them a quarter, they will never work again for less than a dollar. Ninety-nine cents ? No, there is always the banana and a cooking pot left over from dollar days, and plenty of wood to pick up and make a fire with, and perhaps a handful of rice from a friendly China- man, or twenty cents begged with a smile from a former employer.
As for the women they are worse than useless. There is one universal calling for old and young alike, and with that profession open to all, irrespective of age or ugliness or any of the arts, you are not going to have much choice of cooks and housemaids. To get one who was not eligible she would have to be either too young or too old to be able to lift a saucepan. Some-
27
A WOMAN IN
times one strays in, who for some reason or other, will condescend to combine the two professions ; or some- times there will come a week or two when the siren will be off with the old love before she is on with the new. But as a rule she is a transient being of an appalling ignorance and too vain to learn. The high officials of the company, being allowed service at high wages, employ chiefly men. Helpless young mandadors, overseers of the plantations, are glad enough to get their beds made and their meals cooked, without looking for " style," as the Jamaican calls it ; and an almost entire dependence on tinned food does not develop a cooking art anywhere. I have got to try and do my best with what the mandadors don't want. It will at any rate make a good domestic out oime.
The rain has stopped for a while and the sun is blazing. All the banana trees and coconut trees that stud the little hill, are brilliant shining green. Across the dump and only separated from it by a narrow strip of lagoon, the lower slopes of the Cordilleras rise up from the edge of the water, resting against the breasts of other ranges that are as the waves of the sea beyond. If it were not for the dump and the railway line and a peak that shows itself between a gap in the hills, one might be on the Cliveden reach. The dense wooding of the hills, the violet shadows lying in their folds, the still water at their feet, it is a strange small vision of 28
THE WILDERNESS
England in a land as unlike to England as a prize-fight is to a children's party. And close by, on this side of the lagoon, the town lies like a scar : a jumble of rough lumber huts and stores, of corrugated iron roofing and weather-beaten red and yellow and green paint. It is like a smack on the face of heaven.
To-day the hill has dried enough for me to go on a tour of investigation. The sides of it are so steep that it is difficult to walk anywhere. The house seems to occupy the only level part there is. Things do not grow too well on it, except at the foot where the swamp is. There the coconuts and bananas are twice the size they are higher up, and by the eternal law of cussedness they will have to die when the fill comes ; for it is to be completed with coral and not with clay, and I am afraid the salt water will kill them as soon as it gets to the roots. Buffalo grass covers most of the ground, but there are bad places where it will not grow. The slopes are too steep to hold the moisture properly, and all the good of the soil runs away in the deluges. If the hill belonged to an ItaUan or a China- man he would terrace it and make it yield what he asked of it. I am not wanting to change, but I wish William's agricultural and horticultural bump was more on the lines of theirs. As it is, the little orange trees and the papyas and the mangos struggle up slowly, expecially the orange trees. Of the planted things, only the pineapples look after themselves, and
29
A WOMAN IN
they are as the hairs of your head for number. They sprawl up and down the slopes and all round about, untidy, dishevelled and of an exceeding painfulness when you fall among them. A sudden slip and slither on the steeps when the grass is dry and you are up to your knees in pine shoots. A frantic grab to save your footing and the thing you find yourself holding on by is a tuft of suckers that cut like a double saw. But they are very good to eat, and the things that are good to eat here are not too many. And to be possessed of a hill instead of having to live on the surface of a clay pancake is to be uniquely blest, even though that hill be no more than thirty feet high and with breakneck sides. For perched up here, the dump and its atro- cities lie beneath us and not in our midst. And what- ever quarter the wind blows from, it reaches us sweet and clean and untarnished. And when the rain comes there is the patter of it on leaves, and the smell of wet earth. And the dogs chase each other and roll them- selves on the grass. The glory of carpentry that I left, was as nothing to this. There were spacious rooms, and wide enclosed verandahs, and a kitchen with a tiled floor and a real little white pantry and store cupboard, and porcelain baths and glass shelves and an ice chest that didn't break your back every time you opened it. But the night wind never touched us, and the only walk you could take close by was up and down a covered way outside the warehouse. And a coal ship came every few weeks and put off 8000 tons 30
THE WILDERNESS
of coal night and day, outside the windows. And when she went she made way for another that had to be gutted of her cargo of steel rails before she could say good-bye. And whoever has eaten his meals and dreamt his dreams and lived his life to the sound of steel rails being dropped on steel rails, from the height of a ship whose top deck is level with the roof of the wharf sheds by niggers who have no nerves and love a noise, will know in his bones and every part of him that has suffered, why a hut on a hill where peace is, is a happy exchange for model kitchens and porcelain baths and palatial halls where peace is not.
But I wish I could have a real cook instead of one of the mandadors leftovers.
There are two trees, only two trees left since the filling of the town began. Please God nothing will happen to them. One is at the back of the house at the foot of the hill, and the other is in the front. The one at the back stands in the swamp and is not ap- proachable, or else I would try to get some of its flower. From this distance, with its dark green leaves and scarlet berry-like bloom, it might be a big holly. Among the swamp and against the wooded hills that ring the confines of the town — or rather the place where the town is going to end when once it has begun — the red berries glow and burn, a rare spot of colour in the unending monotony of green. Later, the hills and valleys of the far side of the water will be
31
A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS
powdered a faint mauve, the colour of sea lavender. It is the bloom of the ebo tree. And once a year a tree on a hill near by will burst into a blaze of yellow gold. But for the rest there is no colour except from one little hibiscus bush that shakes its scarlet tassels outside the verandah.
The other tree stands sentinel before the house, a giant nispero with its feet in the clay and its head in the heavens. For a hundred feet the trunk of it rushes up grey and gaunt and stark, a towering shaft that pierces the air and there throws out its arms to the sky. In its clefts, ragged parasites, like orchids, cluster. And at evening, when the sun is going down, the vulture crows come wheeling and flapping home blackly, to roost in the branches. Sailing up the lagoon one can see the crest of it high over everything. It is the one landmark : the belfry of the little shambling unbuilt town. May heaven keep its feet strong in the earth while the hill is our abiding place.
32
in
The House on the Hill, June, 1914.
Mail day to-day and a sheaf of letters from England. Once a week there is that to look forward to. If the budget is a heavy one, I feel a Croesus ; if it is a thin one, I feel a pauper ; and if there isn't one at all, the bottom is out of my universe. Every afternoon the passenger launch comes from Bocas at the same time ; but only once a week, or twice at most, does it stir my pulses. On those days William goes over and waits for it and brings it to me. And on those days I go straight back home again for the afternoon. O Phil- lipa, for a woman here I It's awful to have to eat either all bread or all meat.
William's temporary office, a twelve by twenty signal box on legs, with a /\ shaped tin roof, grows in form and seeming. In one week, if the niggers don't get fever or the scantling doesn't run out, or the foreman doesn't put it up wrong and have to take it down again, he may hope to sit with his legs under a table and make his deals over the mats of rice and barrels of codfish and pigtails, and sugar, and shoes,
D S3
A WOMAN
and gin and pickles that he brings in, and the chickle and sarsaparilla and balata and chocolate, and turtle shell that he sends out. Waiting for that to happen, he walks round the town which belongs to him, inter- views his tenants, discusses the state of trade, and rolls his eye over the empty lots, losing himself in the vision of that which is going to be. I know by the trance in which he walks when I am with him, what is taking place in his mind. Boulevards are unfolding their broad ways before him, fine buildings are squar- ing their prosperous shoulders against the skyline : his boulevards and his buildings. Ships are unloading cargoes at his wharf with his name blazoned in bruns- wick black and turpentine lettering over the cases. Out in the lagoon, a schooner is unloading his lumber into his lighters. And His House, proudly lifted over all, and standing aloofly upon its elevation, is the first sight that strikes the eyes of admiring tourists. I feel there will be a flag pole.
We stop beside a mud puddle for a moment. Tin cans lie dosing in the oose and myriads of pipers per- forate the dry ground. Up above, the vultures are sitting in a mournful row upon an adjoining tin roof. A funny black duck with red attachment to its head is optimistically searching the slush for snacks of food.
" What is this ? " I asked.
" The Theatre," says William, looking at it as a mother looks at her sleeping babe ; and we walked 34.
IN THE WILDERNESS
on in silence to the Park, I balancing myself patiently on a lump of clay while William lolls in the shade of the great trees to be, and drinks in the music of the phantom band.
There is competition for sites. Hong Kee, not content with stores all the way up the line for fifty miles, is trying to grab the entire trade of the town from the other Chinamen. He got William to build him a store bigger than any other at the corner by the bridge. That was on the right-hand corner. The lot on the other corner becoming vacant, owing to the houses already there being picked up and put some- where else, a Spaniard came down, paid two hundred dollars for a deposit, then went away again. From that moment nothing would do Hong Kee but that he should have the Spaniard's lot. Chinatown, or William's town, as it is alternately called, is parallel with the railway line but is separated from it by a little creek along which the town is built. The only approach to Chinatown for tourists or any one from the other side, is by the bridge. Hong Kee's idea is that if he can have two stores guarding the bridge, left and right, he will get the whole of the trade and so thoroughly strip the tourist that it will not be worth any other Chinaman's while to wait for him up the town. He is rich enough to have a share in a hotel in Hong Kong, keep two wives in China, pay five thousand dollars for an unsuccessful divorce from a black lady here, and be the proprietor of half a dozen
35
A WOMAN
stores up the line. But that is not enough. Over the wresting of the lot from the Spaniard he neither slumbers nor sleeps. And Jos6 Castro and William Smith, otherwise Ah Fat and Kong Tai Mo, hate him like poison.
So far, I am the only one yet to have made any- thing over it. James, who thinks that whatever I say goes with William, is courting me assiduously and subtly. I have protested to William privately several times. I know that he won't go back on his word to the Spaniard, and I don't want him to, although if the Spaniard were to let his bargain fall through, I would, remembering the embroideries and the ivory, suggest Hong Kee as candidate. As it is, I cannot hurt his feelings by refusing that which is apparently nothing more than an oriental form of good-fellowship ; nor can I return his presents on the score of beng unable to do what is expected of me, for that would suggest bribery at once, and I would not imperil my own standard of fine feeling so much as to allow such a brutal, corrupt, and wholly unjust aspersion to have flowered in the garden of my mind. Certainly not in connection with the kind, thoughtful, disinterested, single-minded attentions of Mr. Hong Kee. I have had the two embroidered crepe de Chines made up, and they suit me very well. I am sorry I lost the piece of carved jade, but the ivory box is all right, and I have put the Canton linen embroidery away for use in the future. William remains staunch to the Spaniard's 86
IN THE WILDERNESS
deposit. I vow to Hong Kee that he can do nothing else. And still they come. In a little while, if he goes on at this rate, he will nearly have paid the price of the lot.
Food is another problem here. Once h week we get two pieces of meat sent down to us from New Orleans. There was a time when we could buy things from the ships, but that has been stopped. Bread is baked every day, and milk and butter are to be had in tins. Sometimes we can with difficulty get eggs. Everything perishable has to kept in the ice chest. Little red ants and black ants devour everything that is not isolated. There is game in the mountains and the distant swamps, but except on rare occasions the natives are too lazy to go out after it. Turtle abound, but are all exported. Even if they weren't, no one with a small household could manage a hundred pound turtle — the size limit for catching — and the community is too scattered to divide one. Native meat is killed, but it is killed yesterday, exposed in the open market to-day, and what the niggers and China- men and " dagos " have not picked over, the flies get. Potatoes and onions are to be had, although they are often sprouting when we get them. And there are native things such as plantain and yam and ochra and cho-cho, but those come at the will of the people who bring them up the creek in their cyuchas. And if the weather is bad or the vendors would rather sleep, the market is an almost unknown quantity. I have learnt,
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A WOMAN
for those days when the cupboard is bare, to make a stew, which may be made of more, but contains nothing less, than spaghetti and browned onion and bacon and tomato, seasoned with pepper and salt and a pinch of sugar, and when I have it, bayleaf and clove, and a scrap of thyme. And if by luck a sealed tin of fresh oysters has been sent down to us from the States, they go in as the crowning glory. With that one need never starve. But it is not always to the great ad- vantage of the figure. A diet of bread and potatoes and bananas and maraconis does not exactly preserve la ligne when there is a suggestion if its being in jeopardy already. Still one has to live, and perhaps the bon Dieu, recognizing the straits to which we are put, will allow us other charms by which we may blind a world to our physical delinquencies. When the line is broken, there is still the fortification of the mind to retire into, and a shot or two left in the locker by which to compel the enemy. And in the meantime a healthy disregard of that which is not to be altered goes a long way to making any condition a success. The creature who feels that strongly enough would be able to impress himself upon the world as an Adonis with two noses and all his front teeth out. That is one of the truths the Christian Scientists have stumbled upon and tied a bow to. One sees it happen over and over again and curses the something that keeps one from being either big enough or little enough to let it happen to oneself. A great conceit
IN THE WILDERNESS
seems to be as effective as a great renouncing, but that is a gift, and not to be had by acquiring. And while we theorize, macaroni and its gang go on slowly but surely working their evil spells. So be it.
Noise is not an easy thing to get away from any- where. I had not finished congratulating myself on losing the coal ship and the steel rails, when the fill began again at the foot of the hill. Snort, snort, snort goes the wretched little engine — bought cheap from the canal zone — waggling its tail of empty dump cars over the hairpin track and up to the scar on the hill beyond where the steam shovel bites out earth by the ton and spits it on to the hungry trucks ; and snort, snort, snort, snort comes the engine labouring back again with the spreader pushing into the ditch the tons of earth that have been tipped there. And the Jamaican engine-driver, loving a din, screams his whistle without any need and belches out clouds of smoke that he should have consumed. And it all rises hke an oblation of the damned and fills the hill and the house with its horror. Noises such as these, in a disintegrating heat where your very bones seem to be dissolving in moisture, and at a time when you are trying to seize some sleep after a morning spent in chivvying a languid nigger out of her trance, doing all that she in her coma has left undone, and jockeying an attenuated larder into yielding three meals a day with as much variety as will keep one from hating the sight of them all, do not make either for peace of mind
A WOMAN
or serenity of nerve. Only a great control keeps me from over and over again rushing out hatless into the sun and beating the engine with my bare hands.
And the smell of the coal smoke ever in one's nostrils and crowding into the rooms, sickens one in the heat.
Out beyond the scramble and bustle that man is so busy making, lie the hills, lovely to look upon, but unapproachable ; and impenetrable except by those few trails that the Indians once made, but which have since been allowed to drop into disrepair. If you could get across the marshes and swamps that lie between, the terrors of the wild things that inhabit them are as nothing to other terrors which for me would make them eternally forbidden. By night and day one hears the monkeys crying near by in the woods. But one never sees them. In the more distant hills and mountains there are tapirs, small mountain lions, tiger cats, and hogs. Further in still are baboons. They have been known to attack men travelling alone ; but it is possible in company to cross the ranges quite safely along the trails.
For me, making such a journey, I would be pro- tected against known and legitimate dangers. But there is no protection against the mosquitos and sandflies and red-bugs and ticks that are as close as the motes one breathes. And added to those pests are ants both big and little ; and snakes. ... I am content to lift up no more than my eyes to the 40
IN THE WILDERNESS
mountains and to dream of other hills that I know, hills where the pine trees sing of the sea ; woods where the drifts of wild hyacinths are like pools of blue water, and forests that are the cathedrals of God, cool and green and silent, with none but his little feathered things for choristers.
As I sit and think, there are other pictures that come into my mind. Do you remember the time I went down to you at Aldershot for the review ? The brougham was just turning in at the gates and you came out of a glade with a paint box and a water-colour block in your hands. You had been painting foxgloves, and I can see the block now with the impression of pink and mauve and green wands. I remember the night ride to Farnborough when we went off out in the motor instead of going to bed, and you who had come home early from a dinner-party, found us gone. The drive in the dog-cart with the General round the barracks before breakfast, the drive again across hummocky grass lands with a gorse-sweetened breeze softly blowing in our faces. And then the perch on one of the waggons lined up in the carriage paddock, the rush of horses thudding furiously by ; the scatter of turf, the swirl of feathers and busbies, and the flash of steel. And the quiet-eyed old soldier who died so soon after his review, bunched a little wearily in his saddle, but fine and splendid with his white hair, in scarlet and trappings, and with the glamour of his honours like a halo round his gentle, kindly head. To me now,
41
A WOMAN
as I think of him gone, I see a sun sinking slowly and silently down to rest behind a rim of ocean. Many sunsets I have seen like that, with the waters glowing and burning with the warmth of the departed light. There can surely be no death, Phillipa.
Many other pictures I have, and many gratitudes I feel for them. By just shutting my eyes and for- getting the nigger in the kitchen and the meat in the ice-box and the nails on the walls and the mud on the floors, I can throw myself back.
A gay square by the sea with the water washing up on one side of it, and with people and shops and silly little trams that don't seem to hurt the place at all because of the names that are written on the sides of them. There are fruit shops with reed baskets of oranges, tangerines packed tight together and stuck all over with sprigs of orange blossom. At night the Neapoli- tan bands come out and lilt their music on the pave- ments under the arches. And the casino is open night and day. . . .
And a little white hotel set in a garden matted with pansies and English daisies. Every night when the sun had set behind rainbow mountains of snow, I would come home from my walk to the room whose shutters opened out upon the garden. Behind me the sea ; before, and towering above the rock at whose feet the inn is crouched, the grey castle of dead and gone Grimaldis, with the old town clinging to its perpendicular petticoats. If you came back along 42
IN THE WILDERNESS
the road, you passed the women washing clothes among the stones of the stream ; but if you had been up into the old town, you dropped down by the forge and came in at the back door of the hotel. And then up to the dusky bedroom in the troisieme Stage for a quiet two hours before dinner. The curtains drawn, a twist of dried vine leaves and some logs thrown upon the glowing handful of wood ashes, a little kettle upon the logs, bubbling up for tea ; and a Tauchnitz with your feet upon the fender.
And more and more. A straight village street, high up on a windy ridge ; pollarded trees and old flat brick cottages with little squat windows and stooping doorways. A flicker of firelight through the leaded panes, a row of geranium pots on the sill inside ; a shadow rocking in the firelight. On the other side of the street the homes of the " gentry." A low, long white house with french windows opening on to a strip of lawn : a fine old square William and Mary home with a carved stone pediment, and another next it with its bam turned into a garage. A door opens and the hght floods out into the wintry darkness, making the pavement and the wet laurels glisten. . . • A man goes in and the door is closed. But I know what is happening inside. A httle grey-haired lady waits by the tea-tray that is drawn close to the armchair near the fire. The light from the fire picks out the diamonds upon her fingers and dances in the silver on the tray. The China is Rockingham, the silver is James, and
43
A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS
the ancestors who bought it look down complacently from the walls. There is a rich pound cake, thin bread and butter, and a dish of peaches from South Africa. The man comes in dry-shod and comfortably tired, and sinks into the chair by the fire. While the tea is being made he sits looking into the fire and pulls the big black retriever's ears. It is a good world, the dog is part of himself, and he has seen the peaches. . . .
The little lady with the grey hair holds out the Rockingham cup into which she has just poured the finishing touch of cream, and the man turns his chair till he is facing the table ; the dog moves with him and waits patiently looking up into his eyes.
" A wonderful peach," says the man, taking the cup, " a wonderful peach, and who, of all people, do you think I met to-day, Lucilla ? "
In this land where it is always summer and where the only chimney you ever see is the chimney of the lamp or the oil-stove, I could write of firesides for ever and ever and ever.
44
IV
Panama, July, 1914.
The days go by unmarked except for the mails. I see by the calendar that we are in July.
Twice a day, in the morning and afternoon, the little passenger train emerges from the forest, runs out into the open along the line that cuts the fill in two, and pulls up at the passenger station on the edge of the lagoon. There she meets the passenger launch from Bocas del Toro, and exchanging loads, the launch turns back across the lagoon, and the train trots back over the fill and disappears into the forest. Some- times she runs into a banana train and smashes a coach, and sometimes the rains wash away the track. Then she is late. Sometimes among the natives a jealous husband will arise in his anger and shoot his rival or his wife or whoever happens to be nearest when the gun goes off. And sometimes, too, a white man will find himself in the same predicament, but as the amenities are as often as not mutual, each, re- membering the respect due to civilization, turns the other way and the gun does not go off.
45
A WOMAN
And true to the spirit of democracy in this back- water of democracy the question of caste is a burning one. Down here upon the dump the matter sleeps fairly peacefully. All are socially as well as geographically on pretty much the same level. The wife of the man who runs the sand pump hasn't anything over the wife of the man who guides the steam shovel, nor can the wife of the concrete mixers' presiding genius feel immensely superior to the wife of her husband's manager unless she is possessed of the inside knowledge that she herself came from Philadelphia, Pa., while the assistant's wife first saw the light at Memphis, Tenn. Of course on the fiat or in the hills there are always things that a lady cannot do without causing comment — be seen too often with the same gentleman, cough without putting her hand before her mouth and saying, " Pardon me " ; and speaking without being intro- duced. I know how to behave even though I don't do it. It may be a matter of choice whether you speak of your husband as Mr. Jones and sign your name as Mrs. Jones ; there can be no two ways about it that a woman is a lady friend, a man a gentleman friend, and a girl a young lady. On that we are all agreed. But it is a little too much to expect that a lady who once was a conductor's wife and is now the wife of one of the superintendents of the line (the same husband, but sprung to authority through the sad but opportune demise of his superior officer) should have her house in the same street with the conductors' wives. Call upon 46
IN THE WILDERNESS
them, yes, go to the same parties with them and dance with their husbands, yes ; but Hve in the same street with them, no ! The hot and haughty blood of a hundred newly elevated conductors' wives rises and surges in a just and righteous revolt. By our husbands' shedded caps and buttons, no ! no ! no !
The office is now finished, after the usual countless delays that attend any work done there. Nothing is ever done to-day ; everything is to-morrow, and the Americans are as bad as the natives. This is com- forting to me, a Britisher who has till now humbly accepted as a truth the fiat of the American upon English manners and customs of doing business. But after a little time spent in earnest study of the Ameri- can in and out of the States, I am beginning to see something of the true inwardness of those texts with which they hang their offices.
" This is my busy day."
"Get it over."
"Do you see the time ? "
and " If hot air were motor power you would be exceeding the speed limit."
did not come into being because there was no use for them, nor are they hung in just such a position as to catch the eye of the visitor because it is the visitor's habit to state his business in as few words as possible, and get out as quickly as he can. The American
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A WOMAN
arrives at his office at eight-thirty and leaves at six as against the EngHshman's ten to four-thirty or five. And, as far as I can see, both here and anywhere else, the difference between them is, that the American wastes his time in his office, and the Englishman wastes his outside. And if I belonged to a nation that managed somehow to be a nation and could still dig in its garden or play its game of tennis, or walk home through the park before dinner I would distinctly feel I had got the bulge on another nation that could only keep up by sitting in its office from eight-thirty till six, at the mercy of all the hot-airers who made those little axioms a most evident and pressing necessity.
At last I have got the hard broom for which I have been waiting so long. What an event that is no one who has not lived in this community can know. And after still more fervent pleadings a male nigger has been lent me to scrub the verandah. He found the broom too heavy. Finally he got a pail of water and began, dressed very suitably for a visit to his girl. I told him to take off his boots. He nearly wept. He would catch cold. I laughed at him, took my own shoes and stockings off, and, up to my ankles in water, started to scrub. I did about ten feet of it before I gave him the broom. He watched me for a while, then despairingly took off his boots, rolled up his trousers and put his hand out for the broom. He would die if he had to, but it would be murder, not 48
THE WILDERNESS
suicide. They have the most overpowering fears and anxieties about themselves and their health. While at the same time as the men will lie out in the open, rained upon at one time, baked by the sun the next, and go more then half the time barefoot, they are afraid to get their feet wet. As for the women, with the first drop of rain they swathe their heads in flannel, wear enormous thick flannel vests as hard as boards, and nothing will induce them to put their hands in cold water if they have at any time of the day had them in hot. They might be orchids at the North Pole instead of negroes on their native heath.
There seems to be some fatality in my loving. In order to console myself for the lack of companions at home, I took with me when I left New York, seven goldfish and three turtles the size of half-crowns. When the furniture and boxes arrived from England there would be the wherewith to build quite an ex- pensive miniature Japanese garden. In green shaded pools and on sun-warmed rocks the half-crown turtles should sport. And in a winding brook, pebbled to suit, the goldfish should wend their happy way. It was all settled.
Out of their apparently healthy but distinctly utilitarian tank-homes at Wanamaker's, I took them with a packet of fish food and many instructions as to their welfare. They would require careful nursing,
£ 49
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but I was ready and willing to give it. All they had to do was to lie back and be waited upon.
It is seven days' journey from New York to Colon. The last goldfish died the day we entered Colon Bay. There had been one funeral a day every day from New York. No reason, as far as I could see, unless it was perhaps some injudicious but very kindly meant bread crumbs. And everything was done to take their minds off the daily bereavement. Immediately upon the death of each, the corpse was removed, and fresh water, untainted with any thought of sorrow or disease, was substituted. Still there it was ; every day as the clock struck twenty-four hours, up went the heels of another goldfish.
I refused to allow my mind to dwell on my failures and concentrated all my hopes and aspirations on the turtles.
They arrived safe and well. Awaiting the build- ing of the garden, I housed them in a shallow china dish of water scattered with pebbles, and with a nice large stone for them to come out and dry themselves on. Assiduously I fed them with morsels of meat on the end of a hat pin. And William, who besides having such a fine business head, is also extraordi- narily clever at catching flies, would snare the delicacies for them every time one presented itself on the inside of the screen. The great art, it seems, lies in the placing yourself in such a position as shall allow you to remain hidden from the fly. Then you either drop from above 50
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or else make your hand into a scoop, and seizing the psychological moment, flash the scoop sideways before the fly can say knife. William, I think, must have spent his early life catching flies as an EngUsh boy would have spent his playing cricket, for he never misses one ; and if you think it's an easy thing to do, try it.
I have heard it is nothing for a turtle to live two hundred years. At that reckoning I didn't feel it would be demanding too much to expect mine to stay with me two years ; no more than asking a goldfish to put off dying till half an hour after you got it home.
For a while everything went well. Mr. P., Little Ann and William lived fairly harmoniously together, although I am bound to say that WilHam got its name through thinking itself the only turtle in the bowl, and taking the lion's share of the flies as its honourable and august right. But Little Ann and Mr. P (named out of courtesy after the friends who had first put minute turtles into my head) didn't seem to mind, so I left them to settle it between themselves. If one is not absolutely au courant with turtle or other foreign etiquette, it is better so.
Then a dreadful thing happened. Mr. P. fell out of the bowl and the cat got him. I had always been most careful in placing the rock well in the middle of the bowl so that there should be no chance of escape. But some one else — William the First probably; without knowing — must have shifted it. And so — the
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end of Mr. P., with nothing but William the Misan- thrope to wipe the tears of the widow, a poor con- solation, for I have never seen a turtle keep to himself as that turtle did — not even my own, from whom I have said he derives his name.
As in most happenings of the kind, things adjusted themselves. I concentrated my energies upon seeing that Little Ann got her meals reg'lar, for I knew that William would never pass her anything. And I did other things that I hoped would make her forget ; found a lovely bit of moss and spread it on the rock so that she could have a soft bed on which to sun herself, and put a piece of meat right under her nose, like the cold fowl that Louis the Fourteenth used to have at his bedside for an " in case." I couldn't make William attentive to her, it was not in him, but I wasn't watching all the time and I dare say that more went on than met the eye.
Then by degrees I discovered something. One of them was declining slowly. And it was not Little Ann, faithful and chaste spouse, doing suttee for her late lamented ; frail, fragile, and apparently holding on to life by the slenderest and most mournful of threads ; but William. No meat would he take, no flies could we tempt him with. He just reclined among the pebbles and died and died and died.
For quite a month Little Ann lay about, a semi- invalid. I used to go out every morning expecting to find her dead. Every morning I took her up and 52
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floated her in the basin to see ; every morning her legs moved feebly. Then I put it to her. Would she eat meat ? No. Would she eat flies ? No. Not even a little one ? No. Then would she be kind enough, as she couldn't live, to die and let me have the bowl for the dogs' water ? No. All right, it was up to me to call the tune. I fished her out of the dish put her on a fern tub and left her. By lunch time she was with William and Mr. P.
Now that they are all gone I cannot help wondering if I was mistaken about them in certain details. Was William Little Ann, and Little Ann WiUiam? or were they all Little Anns, or all Williams ? Did three bachelors die of boredom in the china bowl, or were the souls of three old maids yearned free of their earthly caskets on the moss-spread rock ?
Will you, when you get this, write and tell me if you ever kept goldfish ; what causes them to live ; and whether there is any way of making a half-crown turtle glad enough not to want to leave you ? I always have the stricken feeling when my gazelles die that it is because I am not interesting enough to hold their fancy. And if you can think of anything more abasing than a turtle or a goldfish deliberately giving up its life for the insulting purpose of getting away from you, tell me it so that I may regain some of my lost con- fidence.
53
The House on the Hill, July, 1914.
Before I get any further I would like to present to you the family. William, you have met. After him, it goes by order of seniority, Duke, Snuppy, Parson and Blanco ; and they are four of the worst dogs it is one's pleasure to meet, always excepting Tom and Nelly, a pair of English bull terriers who were the forebears of the dynasty and who have broken the laws of order and the republic so per- sistently and so frequently, that there is no one within fifty miles who will admit ownership. They have changed hands oftener than the days of the weeky and still by reason of their ways they know no sure abiding place.
Before my time they came down to William from the States. It is possible to sell " seconds " at such a distance without much fear of having them thrown back upon your hands. Tom, a bull terrier from the end of his nose to the tip of his tail ; blear eyed, alert eared, is as deaf as a post. Nelly, clever as a cat and cropped in the ears for a fiendish " style," is much too slender and graceful and small in the head 54
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for a bull terrier. Nobody would care tuppence about Tom's deafness if it didn't cost so much. Gentle as a lamb, a fine sport, obedient if you can make him understand by pantomime, and faithful as you want, he hates niggers with a fierce implacable hatred. To call him off is useless, for he can hear nothing, and if once he gets his teeth in his quarry, the quarry is done unless you can beat him off in time. Nelly, in her own clever graceful way, is just as bad, and as there are no fences or boundaries anywhere, the only thing to do was to tie them up. Obviously with such dogs it was cruel and absurd ; they were not lap dogs to live on the end of a ribbon.
So William started giving them away first to people near by, and then, as they kept on being returned, to others further and further up the line. They were always received with the same enthusiasm and always at the end of a week would be sent back with the same regrets. At last, after a pathetic life on the end of a chain for the period when nothing more could be thought of, Tom was borne off by Captain Macker to the island in the lagoon where all the little Mackers sprouted and grew. And Nelly, slightly handicapped in prowess by the breaking of the partnership, went to Schuyler, who took her with him to the water-works he was building some miles away and worked off her superfluous energy in legitimate hunting of tipiscuintle and iguanas.
Snuppy, the real heroine of this saga, is the
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daughter of Tom and Nelly. When I met her first she was no more than six months old. She went by the undoglike name of Margaret (after one of William's flames of the time I have no doubt, but have never inquired), and had been given to the night watchman, for whom she had an absorbing passion even though he was black, and she was, in her antipathies, the true child of her father and mother. William was at that time wrapped up in Duke, a showy-looking but lightly built bulldog who had been sent to him from the States. For Snuppy he had not a thought. She was one out of the large families that Nelly was constantly having, and belonged to the watchman. He wouldn't even bother to consider her. Once or twice I called his attention to her, but he gave no more than a rather surprised lift of his eyes that I should insist upon her, and went on playing with the bull.
Snuppy didn't care. She played her own game alone, frolicking round your feet to please herself and not you. And if the feet she frolicked round were resentful of her, she frolicked just the same. And if she had to take what was left over in the dogs' dish she took it as cheerfully and as gaily as she took her rebuffs. Every one else could be a curmudgeon if he pleased, but not she. That was not what she had come into the world for. Be as sour as you like, she did not need you. If you chose to be pleasant she would play with you ; if you 56
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didn't she would play without you. And if you changed your mind and came round she was always ready to give you of her best. To remember any- thing against you was to give your stupidities too much consideration. Some day you were going to know her at her true value. She was willing to wait.
As for Duke he hated her. He was madly jealous of everybody and everything. If a chance caress happened Snuppy's way when he was within sight, a bound would bring him from one end of the verandah to the other. With a growl and a snarl he would spring upon her, his teeth bared, his eyes glowing. And Snuppy ? At first I was in terror for her, but after the first I had no fear, for she had none. When the raging avalanche dropped from above, she would flatten herself out in such a way to receive it that, as often as not, the avalanche slid over and would pull up yards away gasping and bewildered. Where was the worm he would exterminate ? There, no more than a pace or two's distance, arisen from her plaster- like position and wagging her tail engagingly. He would get up, shake himself, and growl off to a corner as far away from the hussy as he could get.
Or, if he were successful in pinning her tight beneath him, she could baffle him that way too. What was the use of tearing to pieces a thing that first put you off by feigning dead and then sat up and licked your face ? It was poor game for a dog who was famed for fighting till he either killed or
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was killed. Nothing to do but glare down into the happy unflinching eyes and turn her loose in disgust.
And so Snuppy grew and prospered. Loving everybody and everything except niggers and cats, and pretending to care nothing if she were not loved in return. Pretence, I know now, because she is as jealous as Duke used to be, although in quite a different way. But she was clever enough to hide it till her position was assured ; and she had her own way of assuring it. Not by loving so abjectly that you were forced into returning something, and not by caring so little that you were piqued into making her care. But by being enough for you if you wanted her, and enough for herself if you didn't. She could say, " Bless you, good morning," and " Damn you, good-bye," so gaily that even William paused in his worship of Duke to watch her. And in the pausing he succumbed and is now Snuppy's so absolutely that she can do her worst and stir him to no greater indignation than a beating from which he emerges exhausted, but more hers than ever. She never gets a thrashing that she does not deserve half a dozen ; and fat and matronly as she has grown — ^the result of marrying early (Duke of course) and having had three families of eight each in one year and three months — she takes the fiercest beating that William fresh from the courthouse where he has had to pay a black lady for a torn sleeve, two days out of work, dispenser's attendance, and the chance of a premature 58
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confinement, could give her, with a mouth closed so tight that nothing but a gasp now and then will let you know she is breathing at all. And when she is liberated, which is when William feels himself beaten, she retires to a little distance and looks at him, wrinkling her brows and cocking her only ear that will stand up, her eyes saying gravely and dis- passionately, " That seems to me a very extraordinary thing for you to have done." But she's nothing like as winded as William, and always the stump of peace has to wag a few times just to show that she con- siders the incident closed.
Of her beauty I can say little, but to us she is more beautiful than all the dogs that ever won all the red tickets that ever have been printed. Once slim and slender, she is now a barrel, but barrel as she is, she can always keep a good six inches between her tail and the nose of the foremost of the pack that hunts her. Snow white when she leaves the tub, she is only so till the time it takes her to get to the nearest part of the swamp. With only one ear to do the signalling, for the other has never stood up in her lifetime, but eyes that compel you so that you have no reason left when she fixes you. And a tail — please a kind providence to station at least one guardian angel over what is left of it, for she can lose no more and have any. Twice she has escaped leaving the greater part of it on the railway line, and now the residue is so inconsiderable that she would
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have to lose some of her body for that to be able to leave her. That half the hairs have fled from it on one side may impair its beauty, but it does not take away from its intelligence. All that Snuppy fails to say with her eyes — for sometimes they are closed — she says with the hairless, graceless adorable stub that finishes off her nether end. May the gods guard it.
And Parson and Blanco are her sons, the same age as Snuppy was when I met her first, named obviously because Blanco is all white and Parson looks like one. Parson, a large solemn pup with a loop of black ever each brow, that makes him look as if he parted his hair in the middle every morning and brushed it back with water, and paws that foretell an elephant. Blanco, slender and graceful, like his grandmother Nelly, and with those sad, mournful eyes that make you feel he will be a devil when he comes to his own. But not " a one," as they say here, like Duke. Snuppy having impressed her personality upon a community, appears to be going to keep it up all round. Somehow I always seem to see Snuppy between Catherine of Russia and Queen Elizabeth.
Have you ever heard of Madame Lynch ? A fascinating sketch was made of the creature to me the other day by a man on one of the incoming ships, and it has set me agog to know more of her. In 1853 one Francisco Solano Lopez went to England, 60
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France and Italy, as minister for Paraguay. He began early, being commander-in-chief of the Paraguayan army at nineteen. When he goes to France he is no more than twenty-seven. Who is the most beautiful woman in Paris, for he must have her ? One and all they tell him the same thing. It is Madame Lynch — who is to be had. The Para- guayan throws himself at her feet, buys inaccessible diamonds for her, and carries her back to his republic, where she lives for years at his elbow helping to shape his destiny. And when it is his destiny to be defeated, she herself raises an army of women and goes forth to battle.
I want to meet her. They say she went back to France after his death. That was forty-five years ago. I am afraid I shall be too late.
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VI
July, 1914.
The community is in a state of pleasurable excite- ment, for a murder has been done and every one is waiting to see the outcome.
On the surface, and providing a genial enough fund of conversation among the niggers, is to be found the thing as it happened. Three Jamaicans broke into a Chinaman's store near the Costa Rican border. They looted the store, killed one of the Chinamen and left another nearly dead. Then they set fire to the store with the dead Chinaman in it, and escaped over the border into Costa Rica. There is no extradition treaty between Panama and Costa Rica.
But the interest to those with an inside knowledge lies deeper than this ; and to be inside things you need to have a smattering of the politics of the place, or at least an idea of what politics mean in a Central American Republic.
During the time that the Presidential election is going on nothing but heart's blood — and every drop of it — ^will satisfy the supporters of either side. Montagus and Capulets were passionate friends 62
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compared with Panamanians at election time. Men who in the days of peace are as Jonathan and David pass each other by in silence if they serve in opposite camps. Festivities are abandoned, entertaining is suspended ; everything is devoured in the fierce fire of hatred that blazes between the two parties.
Then the nimibers go up. The new President takes his seat, everybody goes to dinner with every- body else, festivities resume their normal course, and the parties start plotting again in readiness for the next election.
Now there is down here, as Governor of the province, quite a charming Panamanian whose name is Xavier Jimenez. About thirty-seven, dark, clean- shaven, with quiet voice and quiet manners, and a most excellent reputation. Sometimes he comes across from the Palace at Bocas to talk with William ; and once or twice he has lunched with us in the old quarters. I never made much headway with him verbally, because he speaks very little English, and the only Spanish I know consists of three words, one of which William won't let me say. But he always treats me with a deference very soothing to my sometimes rasped senses. And I respond by feeling for him all that interest which his wistful gravity and the silence imposed between us, stir within me.
In this matter of loot and murder, a strong hand was needed. It would be necessary for the future
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safety of others in the same isolated conditions that the men should be taken and made an example of. But also Costa Rica had no extradition treaty. When William came in to lunch I asked him the news, for I had seen the government launch crossing the lagoon.
" Jimenez has made up his mind to get them," said William.
" But what about the no extradition treaty ? " I asked.
" He isn't bothering about that," answered William, "he's going to have them, extradition or no extradition treaty. He's sent a body of armed men up the line and over the border to get them alive or dead, and if any opposition is offered by any one, Costa Rican or otherwise, they are to open fire and fight to a finish."
My respect and admiration for Jimenez overleapt the bounds of reason. I forgot that his speechlessness with me was a matter of compulsion. He was one of those strong silent men that robbed all other types of their interest for me. I forgot also how often I had exploded the strong silent man by finding that half the time he was silent, not because he was so full of strength, but because he really had nothing to say. This time it was different. Jimenez was proving his strength by acting when the moment came, and acting in defence of his duty whether he should suffer by so acting or not. It was all the same 64
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to him. I went about my work that day with a lighter foot because of one more righteous man.
Then very gently I was given to eat of the tree of knowledge. Jimenez wanted the Jamaicans, yes ; but more than anything he wanted something else, and here it seemed as if his chance had come to get it. Long time had that feud of politics between himself and the Chief of Police of Costa Rica been outstanding. Long time had he wanted to settle it. And now is mine enemy delivered into mine hand. The armed force cross the border and demand the bodies of the Jamaicans. The Chief of Police, defending the laws of his country, refuses. Zip ! Bang ! go the rifles of the armed force, faithful to their instructions to bring the men back alive or dead. And bang into the black political heart of the Chief of Police goes a bullet intended for one of the three Jamaicans. Nobody's fault, three murderers run to earth, and Jimenez sleeping the dreamless sleep of a man with his work well done.
We are awaiting the tally of corpses with interest.
This morning I learned how to make myself immune from the bites of scorpions and centipedes. Mrs. O'Brien, the washlady, came in from the yard holding a piece of board out before her. She is very black, very withered, and looks not far off the age limit set in the Bible for the inhabitants of this world. Great was her surprise when she discovered
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that I was younger than she. Now she has accepted the truth, but appears rather to resent it. Her working thesis seeming to be that as I weigh more I must naturally be older. She walked along the verandah towards me. On the piece of board was a villainous-looking scorpion, just killed.
" Indeed, mistress, but the Lard Jesus Christ must have been watching over you dis marnin', or else you certainly would not have escaped."
" Where did it come from ? " I asked.
" Out of the very clothes dat you bring to me dis marnin' from your room holding dem close to your breast so," she pressed her free arm against her chest, " and true to Card I don't know how it was that you were not bitten, for indeed you were most lucky, an' next time, mistress, dat one appear in your room you say before him get to you, ' Our Father ! Our Father ! Our Father ! ' quick like dat, an' him can't move at all any more for true, but if it get near dat it bite you before you catch it you mash him up an' take de fat and rub him on de brow " — she scrubbed at her forehead — " de hand an' de left foot an' no harm come to you from de bite." This rapidly all in one breath.
I have never died, but I can imagine that a well- chosen death were preferable to the anointing of one's head, hand, and left foot with the fat of a scorpion.
Poor Jimenez ! The deed was done yesterday. 66
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The Chief of Police simply lay down quite flat and said to the invading army, " Have the kindness to pass over my prostrate body and take whatever you will." And Jimenez's malefactors were returned to him tied up with ribbon, with the Costa Rican's compliments and best wishes.
I hope I may not see him for some little time. It seems almost indecent to have to intrude upon sorrow like that when it is raw and new.
I have been out spending the day. Not long ago William said, " We must get Gomez to make us a san coche.^^ Then, having said that, he went straight away and forgot all about it. And I, supposing it to have gone where all the plans and promises go here, allowed myself to forget all about it too.
Now a san coche, for the benefit of those who don't know, is simply a stew made of all the meats you can get, mixed with all the native products there are, and served steaming hot in a soup plate. Chicken, pork, beef, yucca, yam, rice, beans and what not. If you are white, you have a spoon for the broth and a knife and fork for the rest ; if you aren't, you eat it with your fingers. A meal for Eskimos more than for Caribs, but the custom of the country, and there it is.
And Gomez, he is a man of affairs. A native more black than white, but more brown than black. It is said that there are forty-eight different nation- alities loose in Panama. Of the forty-eight Gomez
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might stand for three ; Negro, Spaniard, and Indian. In some chance way, as fortunes are made and lost here, he found himself at thirty-seven with money to burn, a cattle farm up the line, another place down the lagoon on one of the outlets to the Caribbean sea, a house in the little tea-tray town of Bocas and a handful of stores scattered all over the country. Rumour put his fortune down at nearly two hundred thousand dollars, in our money a matter of fifty thousand pounds ; and rumour also had it that he was losing it with as great ease and swiftness as he had made it : but till the last dollar was gone he was a person to be reckoned with as one from whom the last dollar might be wrested.
In the days of his obscurity he lived pretty much as the black people live. He slung his hammock in his shack, took to himself a woman of deeper colour than his own, and raised up seed to the extent of one son who was happy among the coconuts and loved both parents with an equally filial love.
But as the dollars began to mount up, his re- sponsibilities took him travelling in neighbouring republics, and as his vision widened so his ambitions grew, and he began to see himself in other lights than those of a prosperous trader. The social bug had bitten him. He had got quite used to wearing shoes and was learning to sleep in a bed, although deep down under everything his heart never left the hammock. He began to open his eyes and look around. 68
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Now there is one of the Central American Republics that prides itself upon its white blood. For in- dustrial reasons the negro is admitted, but beyond a certain distance he may not go. Down on the low- lands by the sea and up for perhaps a thousand feet into the mountains, yes ; he is needed there for com- mercial purposes to produce the cent a bunch revenue which is one of the foundations of the republic. But up into the proud little capital that lies in the fast- nesses of the mountains, watched over by volcanoes, and approached only by a perilous railroad that trembles over torrents and gorges and canyons, no, except as a visitor and man of affairs.
Therefore the little capital has remained com- paratively white. And every generation produces regularly its meed of magnolia-skinned beauties. But not so generously and faithfully its complement of husbands. Nor do the fastnesses hold all that they make. Many there are that roam, and some who do not come back at all. And the isolation of the capital is such that it attracts few outsiders. It is right out of the world's high-road, and scarcely any but the man who goes on business and the tourist of a night pass that way.
And so some of the prettiest girls in the world sit up in the watch tower and yawn their heads off for the husband that is their sole chance of happiness in life; and in the meantime flirt through the open windows with the youthful ineligibles of the town,
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with an eye ever on the hope to come. For them there is nothing apart from marriage, and marriage good and early lest they shall lose their beauty and not be wanted any more. And with that fear in their hearts they begin to spoil it right away, chalking their lovely creamy skins almost from babyhood with powdered egg shell and painting their Hps unholy red. And the husband who comes has got to be pretty bad for a man before he isn't thought very good for a husband. It is here as everywhere else, where the woman is not taught anything but marriage; more honourable to be married to the weediest male than not to be married at all. And as that is also the custom of the country, one wishes the yearning little senoritas the very best there are to be had.
On this republic Gomez cast the eyes of desire, and upon this citadel he made his onslaught.
It happened that there lived in a quiet part of the town one Don Manuel de Baldia with his only daughter. He was about all that was left of the early Spanish occupation, and as he had little more than that to live upon, he made it serve as best he could, having grown old in years and well content with the tortillas and frijoles that his daughter, by long practice, had learnt to prepare so exactly to his liking. And if ever there came a day when the frijoles tasted less succulent than usual, all he had to do was to take down The Book that told of the 70
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doings of all the De Baldias since the twelfth century, and the balance was restored.
Not so with the daughter of Don Manuel. For her father, perhaps, who had seen something of the world and was glad to sit in his patio with his stomach well filled, and dream of the glory that was Spain. But for her, she was not yet old, nor was she young enough not to worry. She hated tortillas and frijoles and the cool quiet of the patio with an old man sleeping under his handkerchief in the corner of it. Proud of The Book undoubtedly, and jealous of her rights as a daughter of the Spanish Caesars. But that was windy fare for one who would not be twenty- five till Easter time, and whose blood still ran warm even though the clock had ticked away eight of her marriageable years, leaving her still a maid. There had been a man — she clenched her hands impotently in a rush of rage. But she had had no new clothes for the fiesta week, and it was on one of those nights that he had first met Conchita ; Conchita, the little devil who had taken him away from her ; Conchita, whom he had married. That was six years ago — her hand relaxed and she smiled a little — Conchita was fat now. His infidelities were as the seasons of the moon in number, and Conchita knew it — the knuckles whitened again — but his name was hers, and she had borne him two sons, and been with him out into the great places of the world, even as far as New York.
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And she ? What of her ? She had been as pretty as Conchita and was far better looking now, inas- much as she had not lost her figure. If she were to be happy, the strained look would go out of her eyes and she would get back some of her lost years. Nothing could make her happy but money and a man, and what chance had she of either ? Why, why, why ?
Into this came Gomez ; not the Gomez of the black manunee and the hammock, but Mr. Gomez with his environment behind him and rumours of increasing wealth before him ; Mr. Gomez in white linen and straw hat, his unmistakable mouth hidden under a big moustache and his colour barely deeper than a sunburnt Spaniard's ; a person, to the young senoritas of a husbandless republic, who had no Book to live up to and who wanted money, perhaps not to be swallowed at first gulp, but at any rate to be filed for future reference.
About a month after the murder affair William came to me and said, " We are to have the san coche on Sunday, and you'll be able to see the house that Gomez has got ready for his bride-to-be."
" And who is she ? " I asked, very much interested.
" Dona Lucia Ysabella de Baldia," said William.
" And the present Mrs. Gomez ? "
William shrugged. The Queen is dead, long live the Queen. The old order changeth, giving place to the new. Gomez with his woman and his boy, contented 72
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in his shack among the coconut trees, had passed; Mr. Gomez, man of affairs with a white wife and slick new furniture, ordered specially from the States, had taken his place. The contingency of the new Queen objecting to the old one did not present itself. If women were to make difficulties of that kind here they need never expect to get married at all.
We borrowed a launch and went thirteen miles across the sunlit lake to Bocas. Blue sky, wooded hills rising up out of the water so clear that you could see the grass and the starfish at the bottom, a flock of pelicans playing on the coral reefs through which we passed, and a little white-sailed schooner from San Andreas trailing slowly up to port with her cargo of chickens and mangoes and oranges for to-morrow's market. When we caught the cross tide that rolls in through the open mouth of Boca del Drago, seven miles away, we bucketed about a bit, but soon again came into the quiet harbour of Bocas del Toro, where we pulled into a rickety wooden landing stage and got off at the back of Gomez' house.
There was Mulcahy over on a few days' visit, Jimenez, a little pensive on account of his recent dis- appointment, and William and I. The house was a long narrow two-story place of weather-beaten wood, with one end of it jutting out over the water and the other facing the street. There was an unscreened verandah across the front and down the two sides, and an open staircase from the ground floor verandah led to Gomez'
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quarters which were on the second floor, the lower one being used as a store.
Gomez came down the staircase and welcomed us, leading us through the rooms to a door from which he stepped aside and bade us enter. It was the future bridal chamber.
The room was bare, as all rooms are the better for being in this part of the world ; wooden ceiling, wooden walls, wooden floor. In the middle of it, and almost the only furniture there, were two large, tall-headed high-footed brass bedsteads fresh and shining from the States. And in order that no evil should befall them, their heads and tails were almost completely encased in envelopes of Jaeger flannel. Above them, slung crossways, was a hammock.
Off the bedroom was the bathroom, another expensive concession to the new order of things ; a porcelain basin with nickel taps, a porcelain bath placed under the open window. And in the bath, cucumbers.
There was a good deal of delay in the arrival of the meal, and till it came we sat in the front parlour, which was furnished with a wicker table, four rockers, half a dozen spitoons, and some German oil paintings in curly gold frames set in black wooden boxes with glass fronts.
It seemed that the delay was due to a deadlock in domestic affairs, and accounted for Mulcahy's mysterious absence from the party in the parlour. 74
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The staff in the kitchen could cook a san coche, but they could not lay a table. Neither could Gomez. In desperation he took Mulcahy aside. And the period between our arrival and the ultimate service of the san cache was the time that it took Mulcahy to whip a basketful of cutlery into obedience to his wishes. At that moment when he hailed himself conqueror the message came, and we were bidden to the dining-room.
It was a small room almost filled by the dining- table in the centre. About the table were the chairs, semi-drawing-room affairs stained rosewood colour, of the very latest wood and design. Against the wall on one side stood a fumed oak sideboard, and against the wall on the other, a curly mahogany china cabinet with bow front of glass, and interior up- holstered in sage-green plush. Gomez took his place at the head of the table opposite the smoking tureen, and we all ranged ourselves round. Over the table was bestrewn a frantic shower of spoons and forks, the testimony to Mulcahy's effort at table laying. As well as the san coche was a gigantic meat dish of salad laid flat upon the platter till the dish was covered right up to its edges ; the salad, a beautiful mosaic of alternate slices of cucumber and hard- boiled egg intersected with spring onions. Near WiUiam stood a loaf of bread, which he seized upon and hacked vigorously into slices, while Gomez spooned out overflowing soup plates full of the stew,
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and we handed them on. I nearly caused another congestion by asking for salt, but some was at last found in a cigar-box and put upon the table. We were just beginning to settle down to things when the cook came in hugging two champagne bottles, and it was discovered that there were no glasses on the table.
It was William who traced them to their green plush lair, and put them out, virgin as they had left the straw of the packing-case, upon the table. Then, having no hampering delicacy as to the feelings of his host, he said, " These 'ud do with a wash," and went out into the kitchen to forage for a towel.
He had got two of them polished by the time the champagne was opened, the pouring out of which was left to the cook. The glasses having been found, the wine opened, everybody got to his soup plate again. And of course the nigger poured the first glass of wine into one of the glasses William hadrCl washed, and handed it to me. That's my luck always. Nobody saw, and I had to take it without saying anything, for I haven't yet acquired the sublime disregard that most white men here seem to have for the feelings of others. It reaches such a supreme altitude in William that it is far beyond the region of bad manners. It is god-like.
It was like a foretaste of Hades.
There we sat mid-day in the heat of the tropics. Mulcahy, whose table-laying act had induced in him 76
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a profuse and violent perspiration, was now franti- cally evaporating afresh under the influence of the second plate of stew. The sun blazed down on the roof, the smoke of the san coche rose up to the ceiling, and the cold sweet champagne was as oil upon the flames. I finished my plateful as well as I could, and leaned back gasping in my chair while the others battled on. When the cook came in and bore away the tureen the disappearance of it was as good as a draught of cool air. . . .
She came back bringing in a turkey.
I cannot tell you how large it was, but I can tell you this, that Gomez and Mulcahy and William and Jimenez and I all dined off one side of the breast, and copiously at that, for two plates of san coche are to Mulcahy no more than two sardines would be to the moderate diner — a very pleasant little hors d'oeuvre. And if the san coche was hot, the turkey was hotter, the heat from its crackling roasted brown skin giving off like the heat of a furnace till the very cucumber slices wilted and hung jadedly over the edge of the salad platter. And the champagne went round again, and I looked across the mountain of turkey at William and wondered whether he would take it badly if I were to get out of the difficulty by dying there and then.
Before we left I went into the bath-room again. It was the only room with a mirror, and I wanted to powder my nose. The cucumbers were out of the
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bath and all the dishes and spoons and forks and glasses were in.
Quite right. If one had bought an expensive bath too soon, one would expect it to begin paying for itself right away.
Until the bride, the cucumbers and dishes — unless you are a born squanderer and spendthrift.
7S
vn
August, 1914.
The war ! To think that at last it has come I It seems unbelievable.
One night I remember being out at dinner, with a man from the War Office beside me. He said, " It is bound to come ; I give it three years." That was six — seven years ago. One got so used to hearing it that one expected it without expecting it at all. When I was a child I used to feel the same way about the end of the world ; after a few of the fixed times had gone by without anything coming of it I used to hope God had forgotten about it altogether.
Everybody is stupefied and everything has stopped. On Sunday Marceau and Schuyler walked over to say that an order had come from headquarters to cease the filling of the town on account of company affairs. Marceau is watching the work for the Government and Schuyler is busy on the waterworks. It was a blow to the place, because it meant about four hundred out of work. Then next day came the staggering news that Germany and Russia were at war ; and the day after, crashing in upon the heels
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of that, came word that half the world is fighting ; Austria, Germany, England, Russia, France.
Folded away in this little pocket of the universe one cannot grasp it. The financial side of it comes to us quickly enough, for everything is paralysed already. Fresh orders have arrived to say that everything possible has to be closed down, and already preparations are being made for half the Jamaicans to return to their own island.
But all the people at home, what about them ? What are the women going to do who have to keep themselves, and who found it a hard enough matter in times of peace ? And waiting for news ; one just has to sit still and bear it as best one can, while news trickles in word by word, more than half the time unreliable. To be so far away, to know so little . . . it is like being locked in a room while your house is being ransacked.
And what are you doing ? What is happening to you and yours ? Are they moving all troops from all places, or will you still hold your station ? You surely had your share of waiting and watching through the Boer war. Yet I suppose no one has ever finished having his share till his breath stops ; it's tempting Providence to suggest it. Whatever it has to be, I wish with all my heart it may go well with you. If I could know soon that you are to be kept busy away from it all, I would have something to be glad over.
The Orinoco is coming up the lagoon now and 80
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we are impatiently awaiting the news she brings. She may possibly be the last big boat to call. If the worst comes to the worst we shall all have to eat bananas.
William went down to the ship last evening. No one could either come off or go on board, as she was quarantined on account of plague in New Orleans. The Captain came to the side and handed over the bulletin, and the latest papers he had brought from New Orleans and Colon. They have, sailing under the British flag, to run with lights out. It must be an uncanny feeling travelling so with enemies in ambush. The captains aren't liking it too much.
Of course in all the letters that I got yesterday from home there is no mention or suggestion of war. One woman I know, writes me that she has let her flat and gone to Brittany with her boy. Another I hear has just left for Turkey, and the B.'s are taking a much longed-for holiday in the Harz Mountains. One reads in the papers of the pHe-mele exodus out of all countries. I only hope that E. will be all right with her boy ; she is alone, and will have no one to help her.
The ship brought news of French and English victories. It is putting some heart of grace into the inhabitants, and they are beginning to hope a little for prospects in the future. It is just as if the little place had been struck by lightning. A week ago the encampment was a hideous din of growth. The
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steam shovel gnawed away at the side of the hill, and the little cars dragged their loads backwards and forwards over the fill. Away on the other side of the railway line the sand pump poured its never- ending flood of silt and coral. Beyond the red clay waste that on the plan is called the Park, Avenida Central, Seventh St., Eighth St., and so on, the coloured population swarmed and idled round the tin-roofed shanties that make up China Town. On the vacant lot opposite Hong Kee's store, the man with the shooting-gallery was doing a fine business. Every day fresh batches of niggers would come to William, importuning him for houses to live in, and the proprietor of the " movie " kicked his keels impatiently while the Star Theatre all too slowly covered its wooden ribs with a robe of corrugated iron sheeting. Even the black pastor was bitten with the desire for development. Saving souls was not a matter that took all his time, and feeling that the spare moments should be put to a profitable use he approached William on the subject of a little business for himself. He wanted a canteen.
Since the news, a sudden silence has fallen like a thunderclap. Smoke still comes out of the stack of the power station, and on a night when the wind blows this way you can hear the hum of the mixer at the bakery. Those things have to be where any sort of a community hangs together. And unless things grow desperate a certain amount of bananas 82
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must still be cut, and the ships — if they continue to call — still loaded. Occasionally trains run in from the plantations, and the tapping on iron roofing attests the fact that courage has not yet left the heart of the movie proprietor. For the rest, although the sand pump has not been closed down, everything is quiet except the rain. The steam shovel stands motionless by the cut, like some great black insect pinned against a red wall. The dump engines have been gathered into the yard, and Hong Kee has suddenly ceased desiring to own all the important lots in the unmade town. And the shooting-gallery is deserted. When I passed by yesterday, it was in charge of a weary-looking white American, who sat listlessly on a candle-box guarding an almost empty till. He is too systematically drunk to keep any job for long, and at this one only sober enough to see that whatever profits may dribble in during the absence of the owner, shall make their way down his throat.
This morning the man who brought the ice gave his opinion upon the war. He is a fine, lean, slender Jamaican, who was nine years a soldier in the 2nd West Indian Regiment, and served five of them in Africa : more like an East than a West Indian, and nicknamed Soldier, because of his profession. He asked gravely for the news, and I told him what I had heard ; the English were so far successful. He was glad of it, but that was the only thing that
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could happen. I said I hoped so, but there would be plenty of time for reverses. He went on putting the ice away serenely, shaming my buts and ifs with the superb faith of his eyes. When I had finished speaking he explained to me. The Lord was with us, who could be against us ? He said it in a manner utterly different from the ordinary Jamaican's exploding of texts on the flimsiest pretext. I repHed that the Germans were also counting on that. Then — more by expression than words he said it — the Germans must expect to be disappointed. The Lord his God was an English- man first and last, and blood is thicker than water. The English people were more loyal and faithful to God than any people on the earth. Therefore the victory would be ours. And France and Russia's also, by reason of our prestige with Heaven. Only wait and you will see. One prays that he is taking a short cut to the truth.
We got our meat yesterday. I have wiped and salted it very tenderly to make it last as long as possible ; the future only will tell when the next may come.
Marceau, who is a French Swiss, is wondering if he is going to be called.
I am sending this by the mail now. As far as we know the ships will still call, although fewer are coming to load. I hope it will reach you soon and find you safe and together, 84
vm
Tivoli Hotel, Panama City, August 17th.
I AM here by myself. The tropics has laid me by the heels and I have had to come over to see a doctor. Although it is no more than a hundred and ninety miles from my verandah to the Tivoli Hotel, yet it will be a week before I can be home again. You leave on Wednesday night after dinner and get to Colon early in the morning. By lunch-time you are in Panama City, the train journey across the Isthmus being no more than an hour and a half or an hour and three-quarters. But there is no return boat till Monday afternoon. A railway would allow you to do it all in one day if you were enterprising enough to want to. As it is, with plenty of time to spare, such a week makes a welcome break in the unending mono- tony of things. For the men here, life is different. They are busy all day at their work, and they are the kind who don't care about anything else. I could spend my time very happily with a house to interest me, but so far I haven't one, for we are still living in our boxes with nails on the walls. And even if the house were ready for the furniture, the furniture has
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not yet left England, and with the war no one knows when it will.
It is an odd feeling travelling in a dark ship. This time we left early. Dinner was served at six o'clock, and we ate it with the late sun pouring in at the port holes and all the electric lights turned on. Then the sun went down, and as it is here, the night fell quickly. And with its coming the lights suddenly went out.
Before sunset the stewardess called me to see the deckers. There is only one class of passengers carried on these ships ; but also there are the deckers, those for whom no sleeping or eating arrangements are made, but who can bring their own stretchers and make themselves as confortable as they are able on the lower deck and hatches. They are kept on the after part of the ship, an awning is stretched above to pro- tect them from the sun and rain, and sometimes they are given cans of coffee night and morning. Whatever food they have they bring with them.
We went along the carpeted alleyway down to a screen door that opened on to the deck. Already the deckers had settled themselves for the night, some on canvas stretchers, some with cushions, and some with their heads pillowed on their arms and their knees drawn up. Men, women, and children piled and huddled together, overlapping each other and sleeping as the negro can always sleep — ^anywhere, anyhow, and at any time.
At the far end of the hatch, and with a space 86
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cleared all round him, stood a man high above the others ; and near-by on the edge of the hatch, her chin propped in her hand, her unseeing eyes staring out across the water, sat a young Jamaican woman. Both were mad. They had been put on at Bocas, and were being taken away to be shut up. I could not be seen, and I stood watching them, unable to make my feet carry me from the sight. The man, a native, was young, and beautiful in his own way ; small, slight, with a wild tumble of black hair and great glittering eyes. He was barefoot, in cotton trousers and shirt open at the neck. Round his waist was a rope tied slackly to a beam above, giving just length enough for him to lie down. All the time without opening his lips, he fought and wrestled and strove with the thing that his mind saw. Sometimes he would sink down on his rope as if exhausted, but it was only a feint at the thing, and he would be up again rearing, recoiling and throwing himself upon it with a madder and more furious energy than ever.
He did not disturb any one. The negroes, safe from his reach by reason of the rope that held him, slept peacefully within a few inches of him. Some were mildly amused and sat up for a while watching, but it was not long before they dropped lazily down on to their backs and stared up into the awning or rolled over on to their arms and fell asleep. Two Chinamen standing together a little way off, gazed at him in an ecstasy of silent enjoyment. Every now and then a
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sailor passing, would stop and watch, and pass on again. And once or twice, when he had fallen into a momentary trance, one of the Chinamen went and prodded him gently to stir him up.
After dinner I went to find Marceau, who was going over on business, and who had undertaken to look after me. I groped my way upstairs and came upon him sitting inside the door of the companionway. We went on deck and talked for a while by the rail, looking out over the seething black water that we were churning through, and I wondered if a gun were sud- denly to boom out across the darkness whether I would have enough courage to behave fairly decently. Thank God it didn't, for I am in no hurry to have it proved to me exactly what degree of craven I am. Then a fine rain came on, and I said good night to Marceau and turned in, undressing in the dark and trying to read behind the curtains of the bunk by the spot of light that is allowed in the angle of wall.
I could not sleep. The remembrance of the deckers haunted me. At last I threw on a dressing-gown and went along the passage to the screen door. . . .
High over the hatch a shrouded lantern hung from the beam under the awning, throwing a dim light on to the strewn huddled figures below. No one moved or stirred. A sleep like death was upon them all. The Jamaican woman, chin in hand, stared out mourn- fully before her. Only the two Chinamen, still fascinated and absorbed, kept watch. 88
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And on the end of his rope, the poor mad thing jerked and twisted. . . .
I see him now, high above the sleeping figures, the upright beam that supported the lantern, behind him ; a tortured crucifix over a battlefield of dead.
I had an encounter at Colon in which I figured badly and which left me very wrung out. As you know, one doesn't travel nearly four hundred miles to see a doctor unless one is pretty badly in need of him. I had put off going as long as I could, hoping that I might get better without one. When I found myself depending on morphia for even half an hour's freedom from pain, and the box empty, I went. I should have gone while I still had enough left to carry me over, but I had trusted to things righting them- selves. They didn't for one moment. And so I had to go gasping, yet apparently better in health than many women who are quite well, as is my damnable habit, right up to the point of actual dissolution. I am like the rich person when the bank closes ; who still appears to be rich because his wardrobe has not failed at exactly the same moment as the bank. If it were not that to give up when I should would look like malingering, I would give up when I felt like it, and save quite a lot of trouble and a good deal of expense. But you can't very well go to bed, no matter what your unseen pain, just because you look a bit older or a bit uglier. That is all suffering does for me.
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I hate all thin pale women with large eyes. They can go to bed for a headache, with a trained nurse, while I have to do my own dusting in rigor mortis.
And so, having arrived just after daybreak in Colon, by eight o'clock I was at the end of my tether. The prospect of three hours waiting for the train and nearly two hours rattling across the isthmus in the heat was, with every nerve worn to fiddle strings and the pain never ceasing for an instant, an unsupportable terror, which a doctor, knowing the truth, could and would remove from me.
I inquired for one at the hotel.
" Go," said the clerk, a male, " to Major So-and- So. He's a perfectly lovely man."
I got into a coach and drove as quickly as it would take me, to the hospital. There I gave my name to a negro boy and sat in the little wooden room overlooking the sea, awaiting Major So-and-So.
He came after a while and stood, heels together, before me ; clean shaven face, bald head, and cold grey eyes that showed no interest and some dis- approval. That would probably be the best way to get rid of a garrulous nigger or a self-pitying soldier with the toothache. Obviously I had not been cut in pieces by a train nor blown to pieces by dynamite. Anything less pictorial than that, in a life where those things happen daily, was a waste of time.
" Yes, what did I want ? "
I explained as briefly as possible. I was - — 90
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from going to consult Doctor , whom he
would know. Such-and-such a thing was the matter. I was in great pain. Would he be kind enough to give me something that would enable me to bear the train journey across to Panama City? I had used all the morphia I had.
For the life of me I could not keep an apologetic note out of my voice. I felt inadequate without a broken leg to show him. Nobody knew about the pain but I. It didn't show.
He had gone to the table beside which I was sitting, to write a prescription. At the word " morphia " I saw his face stiffen. Without saying anything he went on writing. I knew he was not giving it to me. I waited a moment, and then I asked him. He continued writing the prescription without deigning to reply. When he had finished, he said —
" Take this at once in a little water."
I asked again, " Is it morphia ? "
His face darkened, and his voice was like a flint when he answered.
No, it was not morphia. It would have the desired effect. If I took it now, in an hour it would give me relief.
Then I did the wrong thing. I lost control. I remembered the weeks I had gone on enduring without giving in. The long days when the work had had to be got through somehow, and the nights each one more irritable and fretted with pain than the last, till one
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counted time by minutes and not by days or hours. The journey I had just done, bringing things to breaking-point, and the journey to come, so short, but by reason of the seconds of pain it held, unf aceable. And I thought of my own doctor at home who knew me well enough to give into my keeping the precious release with no more than a perfunctory, " You won't take it unless you're pretty bad." And of the hunt I had to find the box when the pretty bad time came.
And I wept and begged. I didn't cry because of the pain. Once before, when I pulled a kettle of boiling water over my hand, I remember crying in just the same way, surprised all the while I did it that I should be doing it. The hurt in my hand was not the reason. I seemed to have scalded my nerves, and I could feel my hand actually wondering what the fuss was about. Over this thing too, the real pain seemed surprised that while it had never been moved to tears, something else should crumple up and give away. Those are the tears one has no control over ; they seem as apart from oneself as some one else's tears.
Of course I can see it to a certain extent from the army doctor's point of view. An apparently healthy woman away from home appears before him with a story of suffering and a request for morphia. Ex- planations a little eagerly and apologetically given, that she has had it, but run out of it. Is put off with a legitimate substitute and becomes hysterical. Cries and implores; nothing else will do, she knows by 92
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experience. Has always had the use of it, but never takes it except in case of extreme pain. They are all alike, these morphia fiends. They will concoct any lie — and always the same old ones — and tell any story to get what they want. Poor husband ! Men have a lot to put up with in this world.
Phillipa, do you know what it is never to grow up ? After he had gone and I was waiting for his beastly little bottle of water, I sat in the chair staring out of the window and licking in the tears as they rolled down past my mouth, as forlorn as ever I was at eight years old with the whole world against me, and even the dolls not saying a word. As for the doctor, I could forgive him a good deal, for I admit on the face of it the case was against me : but are they always to remain without any knowledge except that which they get from books, this sex which rules our destiny ? Every woman who goes into a consulting room biting back the tears and asking for something to still the pain is not a morphia fiend, and it is the business of the intelligent craftsman to find out which is which. All he had to do was to ask me the size of the dose I was used to, and he would have arrived, for I haven't the least idea.
I carried the bottle back to the hotel and waited an hour and an half for the stuff to take effect. A cup of tea would have been just as beneficial. Desperately I took another coach and started down Front Street, searching the dusty, weatherbeaten faces of the shops
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for a chemist. I found one at last, who called himself French Pharmacy, and spoke a little pidgin Spanish. He fished out something from the case that wasn't morphia but was an equivalent of it.
I managed to get across with a fairly numbed dis-ease of body. To-day I am taking things quietly and fortifying myself against the fatigues of to-morrow, when the great marriage between the Pacific and the Atlantic is to be consummated. There have been several rehearsals, but to-morrow, for the first time, a ship goes through from sea to sea. At the rehearsals she has always stopped short and turned back before her feet touched the other side. To-morrow she is wedded for good and all.
I have seen my doctor, got enough morphia from him to make such a journey possible ; and instead of staying in bed, like a good dutiful sick person, I have instructed the hotel to call me at four o'clock. To have an invitation for such an event stuck in the glass and to stay in bed would be unpardonable.
It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in the dark and prepare yourself for a forty- nine mile journey to the spot where the party begins. But at the finish of the day, we who started from the Panama end had the pull over those in Colon, for by six o'clock we were home, and they still had their forty- nine miles to do.
The ship was to leave the Atlantic end at 94
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seven-thirty in the morning, and finish up at the Pacific. At five o'clock a special train took us across to the Atlantic. It was quite dark when we started, and not till we had gone some distance did the dawn begin to glimmer behind the trees and sheet the water with silver. The new line does not follow the canal all the way along, and before you get to the great lake you do not see more than fleeting glimpses of it. The day came quickly, as it goes quickly, here. And in the cold morning light we pulled into the different stations on the line, picked up the waiting groups on the plat- forms, and ran in beside the Christobal docks at a little after seven o'clock.
It is a perverse thing, but with its completion most of the glory of the Panama Canal has departed. Little more than a year ago one travelled alongside of an excavation that might have been a track worn by the ants that swarmed it. Down in hollow, myriads of miscroscopic creatures crawled tirelessly and incessantly till the very surfaces seemed a moving thing. Tiny trains darted about like so many water spiders. Strange beasts, wide mouthed and long necked, called steam shovels, gnawed patiently at the mountain- side, spitting out their giant mouthfuls into waiting lines of dump trains that hurried off to make room for others crowding on their heels. Little electric cars, guiding themselves gravely and sedately, carried food to the great concrete mixers that churned on and on unceasingly. Engines fussed and snorted
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and shrieked, chains rattled. And over everything, at uncertain intervals, came the boom of the blasting, with its shudder of earth ; that noise which has sent more wives back to the States to be mended than will ever be listed under " wear and tear '' in the records of the making of the canal.
Looking on at this fury of battle, the Suez Canal seemed by comparison no more than a furrow made in the sand by a careless finger. It ceased to be in one's imagination a considerable thing. Yet now, since the work of the other is over and the water has been let in, it is the furrow in the sand that holds and captivates. In the flooding of the Isthmian waterway one has lost sight completely of man as a factor. The story will be told and people will be stirred ; but the canal itself will not tell it. That which so short a time ago be- longed to man, and to man only, is his no more, except in the telling. He took up a fight against nature and he won. But in the final moments, after the flood- gates had been opened to demonstrate his indisputable victory, he lost again. All that remains to mark his battle is a serene waterway that might have been there since the beginning of time. There are locks and dredges, but locks and dredges are blossoms that float on many streams : there is the Culebra Cut, but what- ever its behaviour in the domestic circle may be, is to the eye merely a straight and narrow way with cliffs not very high. For the rest the waterway goes the way of natural waterways, sometimes straight, some- 96
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times deviating, and once losing itself in a lake so un- artifieial, that I, who have seen it many times in the making, was fooled to-day into thinking it had been there always. It's a deep and laborious grave that man has dug here for the interring of one of the greatest of his efforts. And nature, having lain meekly for the moment with his conquering foot upon her neck, suddenly and silently slips away from him like the artful hussy that she is, and to those who never saw the struggle, makes the honours seem her own.
As for Suez, it could never be anything but man's affair ; and for that reason and the reason of its con- trasts and strange juxtapositions it will quicken the pulses always. To be able to cross the desert in a ship I To move in a trench scarcely wider than a sheep-dip, through a country that, in the Sunday pews of childhood, seemed further away than the stars, and immeasurably vaguer than the jewel-studded streets of the New Jerusalem ; to be able to step from deck to land as you might step from 'bus to pavement ; to go bridge-playing through the land of Moses knowing that nothing but an athletic leap lies between you and the oldest part of the Old Testament — ^that is romance.
There were buccaneers who used this part of Panama as a haul-over for three hundred years before the canal was — not thought of — but hoped for. But even so there is not now the slightest chance in the world of a buccaneer in the dress of the period, swag- gering up from behind an Isthmian hill ; while Moses
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may be seen without even shading the eyes every journey one makes through Suez. It doesn't seem fair that the romance of the Panama Canal, full as it is of heroism and striving, should have to be drowned in the waters that made her, or lie buried and turned to stone in the dry dust of official history that may be all a future generation will have to draw from.
It was a long day and a hot day and an uneventful day. Everything went like clockwork. On board were all the foremost Panamanian citizens and politicians, headed by the President of the Republic and his pretty wife. The ministers and consuls of the different Powers stood in groups together talking of the war and to the ladies alternately. There were judges and officers of the Canal Zone in palm beech suits and panama hats. A Panamanian, with a not too intricate knowledge of the English tongue, was graciously presenting to a pretty girl the representative of a principal New York daily as " our most famous co-respondent." The Distinguished Visitor noted for the presence of his name in papers to do with the millennium of this part of the world, walked about with a camera in attendance and explained in trumpet-like tones that the day was a busy one for him. There was the usual dog on the parade ground, the unknown individual who takes the front of the picture when the man with the cinematograph begins to level his gun, and hold up a hat or a foot so that he shall be able to 98
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find himself again and show his friends. And we slid slowly up to the first lock and through it ; and everybody looked at his watch and wondered when it would be breakfast-time.
The thing I could not understand, and which de- pressed me in an undefinable way, was the silence of everything: The worst music on the water is to me better than no music at all. I remember it in so many places ; at Naples in the night, on Sydney Harbour, in the bay of Spezia : with always the water speeding away behind us and the lilt of the strings carrying us on. And it is always kind enough to tell me the same thing ; that instead of being stupid and ugly and full of mistakes, I am witty and beautiful and of unlimited power. And also I am courageous and kind and of great understanding, and I know the whole world truly loves and appreciates me as I truly love and appreciate it.
And it says to me, " Why are your eyes shining so ? " and " What beautiful hands you have I " with the voice of an eternal lover. La Paloma and The Pink Lady can do that if the band will only sit right in the middle of its note. And even when I get to be one hundred and eighty-five and a half years old, and my eyes can't see and my knuckles have to be wrapped in flannel — and red flannel at that — it will tell me the same thing ; and I shall rise up within my bhnd eyes and my knuckles and my flannel and answer.
There was no music. There were flags, and they
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fluttered sometimes a little painstakingly like people trying to raise a cheer that no one would take up. And when we passed through the locks we passed through in absolute silence. It was a curious feeling, oppressive and blank. People were crowded on each lock to watch us go through ; but there was never a sound from any. I asked the reason, and was told it was by command, so that nothing might interfere with the success of the journey. If that were true it would seem to be an excess of caution considering the two trial trips that had already been made. And certainly it robbed the event of all spontaneity. On the morning, a year ago, when we arrived in New York from Liverpool, the people who had come to the dock to meet their friends behaved as a naturally excited populace might have behaved when the Canal was opened. On the day that the Canal was opened, they behaved as we might behave if we were waiting at a level crossing for the train to go through from Reading. It is true that the onlookers were those principally who had washed and dressed and spanked the prodigious infant into well being ; but also very probably it would not be the first time that the people who came to meet the Mauretania had welcomed their friends and relatives back from a holiday abroad. Yet for that, hundreds of little stars and stripes fluttered from the hands of hundreds of frenzied mothers and fathers and young men and maidens. And before the tugs had nosed the great whale up to 100
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her moorings, the voices of hundreds, like beings possessed, had screamed and squeaked and roared their welcome down the breeze.
And when the actual meetings on the wharf took place, what kissings and huggings ! What slappings on the back and hats pushed awry and hair dishevelled ! If William had been restored to me after being totally lost on a desert island for innumerable months, I could not have knocked him to pieces more com- pletely and gratefully than did these inhabitants on receipt of their wanderers from the safe and encom- passing arms of a Cook's tour.
If that for the return of the tourist, where did they put their feelings yesterday ? What if they had worked and wearied so long, what if they had lived so close to the tapestry that all the knots and ends were mixed up with the beauty of the woven picture ? That very day the phantasy of four hundred years ago was by them made a reality. Johannes Schoner had dreamt it and turned over to sleep again. De Lesseps for France had fought and striven valiantly, and been beaten. And this day, a new nation after twelve years of battle had brought the dream and the failure to a superb issue. Was there not that in the youth of them which, when the ship left the road they had made for her and swept out into the open, would bring their hearts to their throats and make them, without knowing, break into sound ? Would not the drop of their Pilgrim Fathers* blood constrain them to kneel
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and uncover just for that moment when the new waters touched the vessel's breast ?
It did not. There are moments in Hfe so dramatic that one is either awed out of one's volubility into silence, or shaken from one's silence into speech. The only feeling abroad at that moment seemed to be relief at being so near the end of the journey.
I have no Pilgrim Fathers' blood in me, the country is not mine, the Canal is not ours : and I never go to church, but my heart dropped on its knees to the God who had made men and given them the powers that had done this ; the brains that conceived it, the fortitude and endurance that brought it to birth. All the coatless tourists who have come down here and repeated over and over again the incessant parrot cry, incorrect as it is boring, " Here you see, sir, one of the greatest engineering feats the world has ever known " ; all the stocking-legged bragging youngsters who tell you that " the world is afraid of t7<S," all the every- bodies who have never done a darned thing for the canal but boast about what it costs ; they drop out of sight and leave one alone with those men who gave it to their country, sometimes with their lives, and always with their strength, for the strain of the work has taken from them more than the years they sowed. " Lord, now lettest Thy servant depart in peace and prosperity," is not more than they have the right to ask.
But why, oh, why does the United States as a nation 102
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come to table in its shirt-sleeves ? Is it that it doesn't know what's what, or is it that it doesn't care ? I should think there never was a people that loved show more than the Americans. Yet as a nation it seems to care nothing that its prestige should be kept up in a world where pageantry is the handmaiden of prestige. And it lets its diplomatists' careers depend upon the grafter who puts them in and the next grafter who is going to put them out.
On the great and wonderful day when a dream four hundred years old had been by them realized, they signalized their victory without music, without uniforms, and with mugs of cold tea and dishes of broken meats.
It is only the very ignorant or the very stupid who could disregard pageantry. Even if in time all things monarchical had to go, a wise republicanism, rooted in feudalism, would retain much of it, knowing its cosmic and unalterable value. And a democracy rooted in nothing but self-aggrandisement would, as it grew older and learnt the need of co-ordination and co-operation, also learn the use of pageantry. It would know that pageantry was not something left over from a discarded form of government, but an absolute need of the people. It would know that scarlet was not chosen just because it suited the freckled complexion of the snub-nosed red-headed yokel that marches out to war, but because the sight of it makes the heart leap. And that music and the
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remembrance of music will take you where, without it, you mightn't have the heart to go. A living world must have something to vibrate to. The first kings, being wise men also, discerned that need early and made of their inconsiderable selves something that would please and dazzle the people. Knowing that they would of themselves inadequately satisfy, and wishing also to keep their billets as long as possible, they modestly and courteously gilded themselves over and stuck jewels in their hats : in a word, they gave their supporters a run for their money. And obviously that is why they have lasted as long as they have, and why they will still continue to satisfy when the soft-shirted presidents will go on causing a vacuum yet holding their places, because, while presidents are in fashion, there is a chance of every man being king.
It was a long day and a hot day. The Pana* manians, naturally a temperate people, having sprung from a race whose water is the vin du pays, were used to drinking when they wanted. And also this was a fiesta, and the greatest day the ten- year-old republic would ever be likely to know. Not so very late in the morning they began to inquire, and as early as that, knowledge came to them. There was nothing to drink on the ship. The heads of the United States Government, feeling that teetotalism was necessary to their own peace and well-being, had decreed it also necessary to the well-being of every one within their 104
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jurisdiction. No intoxicating beverages of any kind were included in their hospitality ; nor was it possible to buy any. The bar was closed.
The men bore it wonderfully. Quand on rCa pas ce qu'on aime, on doit aimer ce qu'on a, must have been the keystone of their philosophy for generations past, or else they could never have applied it as quickly and as ably as they did. After they had ceased taking out their watches to be sure that it was not quite yet time for the first drink, they began to take them out again in order to discern whether the time was about to arrive for the first breakfast. From four in the morning till five in the evening is a long time for men of generous temperament, making holiday to last on cold tea and water.
As the hours went by and the heat grew, the fiesta spirit wilted and wilted. Every now and then, one with more heart than the rest, would have a spasm of aborted gaiety and go round patting his friends on the shoulders and saying what a great day it was. But for all there was in it, he might have been con- gratulating them on their own obsequies, and after a while the silence was allowed to have its way.
At the end of the day when the tenders were lined up to take us all ashore, the fires burnt up a little, and the good-byes were affectionate. For were we not now upon our native asphalt, and would we not soon have the key of our own cellars within our hands, and something kind, and tinkling with ice at our elbows,
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while we kicked the shoes off our weary feet and lay back in the chair to enjoy ?
It may be very right and very just and very wise to stop the abuse of anything, but the truth that there is a time and a place for everything is not a new one.
From this effort at regeneration one carries away no more than the delightful picture of the Noncon- formist Prohibitionist from Little Puddleton corner- ing the creator of the Rubaiyat in a thirsty desert and keeping him alive on gingerbeer.
This afternoon all the Frenchmen called up from South and Central American Republics left for the war. They entrained from Panama City for Colon, from where they would take ship the next day. I was driving along the Avenida Central when a company of Martiniquans came marching down to the station, the tricolor waving above them and the Marseillaise playing them on. Beside them walked their women, the older ones wearing the gaudy bandana of the Martinique woman, which is the gayest of all the turbans. They were, men and women alike, smiling a little in a hypnotized way, caught up in the trance of the music and the flying colours. Probably none would come back. But that was nothing : the band was playing and they were going out to fight for their country.
It seems as if our gods must keep their faces veiled, 106
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if they are to be of any use to us or we to them. The negro goes out to fight for France and for England with a great deal more fervour than he would give to the defence of his own little yam patch.
I followed in my coach. As they wheeled out of the Avenida into the Plaza opposite the station and marched down to the platform, the skies fell. My driver, an old grizzled Jamaican who had been on the Zone since the French occupation, pulled up at the curb, let down the curtains, and buttoned himself in under the apron. And there we sat, huddled up in the coach while the rain splashed and dashed and the wind nearly blew us away. There was nothing to see but a crowd of heads behind the iron railings, but I would have let the rain rise to my chin rather than leave before the train did. Every now and then the band would strike up, and from the station came the sound of singing, for whenever they played the Marseillaise or Rentrons a la Patrie all the people sang.
And then, after a while, there was a cheer, and I saw the roofs of the carriages slowly sliding past the heads behind the railings.
They were on their way.
I am a cold beast often when I would like not to be, but the willing sacrifice of life gives me always tears in my throat, and a grip of exultation, not of sorrow.
" It is for our country too," I said to the driver.
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He took off his hat and bared his grey wool for an instant.
" Yes, Mistress," he said very gently, " for the Old Country." Then he put his hat on again and turn- ing his horse's head we went back to the hotel.
108
IX
Panama, August 28th, 1914.
The war goes on and we know nothing. One day a message dribbles through, and the next day it is con- tradicted. Now they say that the wireless is not to pass anything more at all. The first papers since the war began have arrived, but they are three weeks old and no more than the breaking of the storm comes with them. Three weeks is a long time. So many things may have happened at home with the trouble so close. The thought of England attacked does not take shape in one's mind, which seems by the papers to be the general feeling. Perhaps such arrogance is bad for a people to start a war on, but there it is, and it may be a good thing to have after the war has begun.
What is going to happen to the women, the ones that you and I know, who find life difficult enough to support in peace time ? I think and think and I cannot imagine. There is E. with a courage as fine as her body is frail. Working incessantly, she is able to give her boy the education he needs and herself nothing. So, she has worked for him always, supporting herself and him dauntlessly since before
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the day when I first met her with him in her arms, a squirming little bundle just four weeks old. And he will be twelve next birthday.
I wish the methods of suffragistic warfare were not so unbecoming. I wish that all the wonderful enduring things that women have done and are doing, could reach the public consciousness through a more magnetic channel than they so often do ; for in the face of them nothing could in reason be denied to those who asked. But the medium is bad except for those already convinced. Joan of Arc, on a milk- white steed, in mesh of steel and with no voice but that of her emotional eyes, could call a world to arms. But Joan of Arc, in a badly cut coat and skirt, on foot, and perspiring under a banner that sometimes knocks her hat crooked ; Joan of Arc, in spectacles on a candle-box, pounding her palm with her fist, and shouting lustily to overcome the tumult, is something which hurts more of one than the senses. You may argue all you like that the one is the same as the other because the motives are the same, but it is no use. One stimulates, the other antagonizes. I wish it were not so, but it is, and therefore must be reckoned with.
Women dishevel sooner than men. To overcome the difficulty, many of them have adopted aggres- sively masculine attire. And it's only half good. They are tidy, but they have lost their individuality of sex, which in all honour should be retained. The 110
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nearest a woman may get to masculinity is to remind one of a very charming boy : anything more than that is amorphous and cuts the current. And if a woman is short-sighted enough to hold such con- siderations as these in contempt, she should not be allowed a place in the campaign ; certainly not a place of generalship. Men do not any more fight with arquebuses nor we with vapours and twitters. But the woman who throws away her arms instead of bringing them up to date, is an enemy to her side.
The woman who vapours and twitters to-day has perhaps, a little more chance than the man with the arquebus because there are still some males left in the world who think such habits the true test of femininity ; but she doesn't really count one way or the other. And the woman who either omits sex from her calculations because she regards it as a neghgible quantity, or, resenting it, deliberately casts it away as something without which she is more valuable, has only chosen another way of being just as stupid. It is she who, with all her earnestness and all her sincerity, helps to " hold up " the thing she is trying to bring about. She antagonizes the man who is afraid of her, she antagonizes the man who dislikes her, and she antago- nizes the man who knows life from more scientific standpoints than his own wishes and desires.
That the thing itself is right and just and has to come, is included in one's belief that truth must prevail, not as a matter of sentiment, but as a matter
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of values. In the matter of intrinsic fairness almost every woman should have the right to a voice in things because almost every man has : and if a male imbecile has it, there is no reason why a female one shouldn't have it too. On qualifications alone, I and innumerable others also should have it, for we are over twenty-one, have paid rates and taxes for years, have made our way without ever having been a charge upon public charity, and have respected and evaded the laws sufficiently to keep out of jail.
It's an odd topsy-turvy world in which a unit who drinks his wages and beats his wife should have greater power than a unit who lives soberly, is self-supporting, and thus subscribes to the general welfare of the State, for no other reason than that one is a male and the other isn't. If there could be such a thing as sex in coinage how much would a bad male six- pence count against a good female one, or the other way round ? It is all very stupid. What one wants is not a bestowed equality, but standards which have nothing to do with sex, a qualifying of intelligence for the right to a say in things ; a test that all must pass before they may take part.
As far as the vote now is concerned, I don't suppose the granting of it would make very much difference, unless it were to dislocate things rather. It would give power into the hands of some wise women who should have had it long ago, and into the hands of 112
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some quite foolish ones who should never have it at all. That would only be repeating a mistake that was made in the first place. Where I feel it would be useful would be in the matter of putting, not the male, but the male blitherer, into his place. Just as there is the social snob with whom one stands or falls by the houses that are open to one, so there is the snobbery of sex by which a certain kind of man believes himself to be superior to his women because to his sex belongs a privilege which is denied to hers. It exists more among navvies and bus- conductors than among those of a higher standard of education, but it is to be found in patches all through the male persuasion. It would not count two cents with the ordinary intelligent man, for any human being out of pothooks and hangers knows how much it is worth in itself. But if the extension of such privilege to our own sex were to take away the monopoly of that which, to the navvy and his kind, is such a proof of superiority, perhaps the loss of that superiority might rob him, in time, of his power to bully and beat. That wouldn't be at all a bad result for the bestowal of, in itself, such an unappreciable gift. I wouldn't mind having the bother of a vote myself and even giving to the study of it some of the few minutes of spare time I find the males of my family chipping off their day as they ride to and fro to business, if it would reduce my friend the hodman and the bus-conductor to a less inflated sense of his
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own importance. As it is, I am content to be as I am, and take what I am strong enough to get.
It was the thought of E. that started me. I think of her with her twelve years of struggle behind her, and — for she is an artist and not a purveyor — with some others still before her. Educated for marriage, making her throw and losing. Delicately bred, used to a houseful of servants to wait upon her ; and stranded thousands of miles away from home with a constitution broken by repeated illnesses, a baby coming, and nothing but the few pounds she had in her purse to give her any foothold at all.
The part of the world from which I come is full of men who are called " remittance men." Gentlemen whose passages are paid out as far as the ship can take them ; and who receive, at regular intervals, just enough money to keep them there, from relatives who are either put to shame by their doings at home or are tired of trying to hold them up on their feet any longer.
E. was not a remittance man. She was a woman who had made a bad investment, and she had to " make good " the best way possible. The bulk of the educational funds of the family had gone to fit out the boys for their future. She had had the usual schooling that is necessary for the girl who is expected to make marriage her profession, and being trained to nothing else, she had nothing to lay off on when the crash came. 114
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Up to the last moment she worked at anjrthing and everything she could find to do. Writing all the time, she took orders for copper work, decorated rooms, painted children's furniture for the big shops. And when the last moment arrived she laid down her work and went to a public hospital for her baby to be born. Twice after his birth she was in hospital, too ill to do anything for herself or the child ; and twice all her little household sticks had to go.
And now she is in London, working just as daunt- lessly, with the beloved burden pressing a little more heavily upon her resources each year as he grows older. And if there is a measle to get the beloved burden gets it ; or an arm to be broken, it is his. And instead of a new hat for her it is medicine or a doctor's bill for him. She doesn't grumble, but once, talking over things in the roof-top she always has to inhabit, the roof-top she always makes into the charming home of a gentle-woman, she straightened herself up on the sofa and clasped her hands.
" Oh," she said breathlessly, " if only I could buy something wicked and extravagant and wrong for once ! "
There are others. I know a girl. She is a free- lance journalist, and she and her mother and sister all live together in a small home made by her. All day and every day she is busy watching an opportunity here, making another there. Sometimes it is adver- tisements for the shops, sometimes an article, some-
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times press-agenting. She organizes, and the sister helps. I used to see her every now and then, dropping in at the club for a cup of tea, to look up something, or to write out something else in a quiet corner : always trim, sometimes a little worried and tired- looking, for in work of that kind there is not much time to slumber or sleep or let the grass grow. If you don't do it, whatever it may be, at eleven o'clock, somebody else will have done it at twelve. And over and over again you do it, and nothing comes of it. That is all in a day's work. Still, there has got to be time and courage too, because after some of the days that happen it is not the easiest thing to rake together, to go home and slip into the chiffon gown that has had to be thought out so carefully, the success of which means so much, and be back under the chandeliers to play after the work is done. And if the touch of rouge and the little black patch just under the right eye will blot out the shadows painted by the article that was returned this afternoon, God bless them and on with the dance.
I could go on for ever, and so could you, for although your life is not lived among them as mine has been, yet you, of your will and because of your gift, have thrown yourself among them. The women who are growing grey and tired, who have not the courage of the hare's-foot and the little patch, yet who have to keep going just the same, women who can barely make enough this week for what is needed 116
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next, and for whom, with the first stroke of the war clock, the ground would be cut away from beneath their feet. For them would be the next week's needs, but not the next week's money. Yet they cannot cease to live because there is nothing for them to live on. Who is going to give advertisements now ? Who will take outside articles on dress when the staff itself may have to be cut down and the papers made smaller ? How many people will continue to buy books ?
There will be war funds and guilds and other funds for distressed everybodies, but this is a different matter, and I am afraid all that is being done may not touch the women I am thinking of. I am afraid they are going to be lost in the scramble. Those whose pro- fession it was to be distressed in good times will be doubly distressed now. They will seek, but the women I know would have to be sought. They have been proud enough and sensitive enough to prefer support- ing themselves with difficulty, to allowing others to keep them in idleness ; and the feeling that would make them do that would make asking an anguish or an impossibility.
Indeed, they should not have to ask, these women who are self-educated to their tasks and who have had to make so often their bricks without straw. They have had to be the brothers and fathers and husbands of their manless households : they have had to work like men to make their homes, and like women to
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keep them. They have gone out each day to battle without music or banners to help their warfare, seeking no reward but the right to pay their way and the power to do it. They do not belong to organized charities ; they are an asset of the State. They stand for law and order and industry by which alone the State can live. And to them should be said : " In the days that were well you upheld us : in the days that are evil you shall not fear."
Some golden day, Phillipa, I shall go back home again. And the first thing I shall do will be to look up " Who's Who " for the kindest and richest million- aire there is in it. And I will drive to his golden gates and take his golden hand and say to him in my golden voice —
" Stop giving people things they don't want and listen to me for a moment. If you will let me have a pocketful of pennies to dip into whenever I want I will poke holes in the sky for you and show you little bits of heaven."
And if he looks haughty and says " My secretary " — ^I will shake his golden dust from off my feet and never let him hear my voice again. But if he says, " You look an honest woman, I don't mind letting you have five minutes," I bet I'll get my pocket. For what ? Not indeed for public baths or public libraries or museums of stuffed owls and pachyderms. But for
a golf subscription for who is shut up in an office
every day, but who would have time to play once a 118
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week if she could afford it ; a telephone for , who
has lost work through the editor not being able to
speak with her in time ; a new frock for , who
has to look well whatever the state of the exchequer or else she will lose her job ; a course of sanatogen
for , who can't leave her post, but who thinks
she could pull herself together with it if it didn't
cost so much ; a week in the country for to
save her from throwing the inkbottle in her em- ployer's face. Theatre tickets for , who never
gets them given her and who is too tired too often to take her chance at the cheap seats : club fees for
, who may have to give up her subscription
and who only has a bedroom to live in.
Postal orders, so that they might have no more address than the gentle rain from heaven, dropping in through those letter-boxes, would give some moments that would be worth begetting. For myself, knowing the lives I speak of, I ask the great pleasure of being the invisible sage femme to bring those moments to birth, and ask it humbly knowing that I should be seeking the lion's share of the pleasure. One of the greatest extra vagancestheworldsees is the large amount of good money that is wasted on sensible things. When I get my millionaire I will teach him How to Fritter Exquisitely.
A letter has come from you, but dated too early to give me any news of you since the war began. You evidently wrote it directly after you arrived,
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and a stupid club official sent it to an address that should have been scratched off the book long before I left — some temporary rooms in Halfmoon Street from which house apparently the landady has departed also, for it says, " Not known at this address." From there it seems to have gone the rounds, and I got it at last two months and ten days old, brought to me by William, who, whenever he visits Bocas, has a good search through the post-office for anything that may have got stuck in the cracks.
It is a thing I have often thought over, that which you speak of. I believe I could count on the fingers of one hand the times that you and I have met. There was the first time, in Paris, when we were a few days together under the same roof, and met only, I think, at meal-times. Again at the club, where you were staying while your flat was being opened. Next when I went down to you at Aldershot and spent the night, and perhaps twice since, when you were at the club again. Oh, and one afternoon at either the Stage Society or a charity matinee, I forget which ; but I know it was an occasion on which you offered to lend me some money because you thought I might be in a fix. That of itself is something that I would not forget in a lifetime. You thought nothing of it, and I, as it happened, did not need it. But I shall always remember that you had the mind to wish to make something easy for me ; and you, by time, scarcely knowing me at all. 120
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It is true that the real things have nothing to do with time whatever. It is eight years since Paris, and in the time that has elapsed we have not met once a year. Yet the feeling those meetings have left with me is that of there never having been a time when I didn't know you. You are one of the fires I look forward to find burning on the hearthstone when I come home again.
The formal invitation to the wedding that came with the latter I am not answering, for the wedding will be long over by now. I am glad you are so happy about it, and that the beloved has chosen the right beloved in your eyes. I think every woman with a daughter must suffer the tortures of the damned over the fear of the daughter's choice. One makes one's own mistakes as boldly as she is ready to make hers, but that is different ; one doesn't see it from the same angle.
The portrait is charming, but I wish you were in it too. The Chows are darlings. I have always wanted one, but of course here they are impossible : no thick-coated dog could stand the ticks even if he could stand the climate.
It is my great joy and relief, that with this dreadful war on none of the people I know — except yoiu*selves, who I hope are safely stationed away from it — are implicated. And also that the people I care about are honourably outside the bounds of service. It seems strange that it should be so, but there it is.
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They are all doing what there is for them to do, but, so far, that does not bring them into immediate danger. D., eager as he is, young and alert as he looks, is over the age for enlisting, but he is doing his share at home. F. W. is expecting a post as inter- preter. They have, thank God, all offered themselves, it seems ; but I thank God again that I shall not lose them, at least yet. For you it must be dreadful. Ethel wrote by this mail saying that already there were gaps in her circle. My intimate circle is so small and means so much that it could not carry many losses without taking from me all.
The wireless reports are still coming through, and a copy is sent every day to William on the passenger launch. Every afternoon the same crowd congregates on the wharf to await its arrival. There is Marceau, the Swiss engineer, who is waiting in readiness to be called home. He is worrying about his mother's letters, for the mails have brought him nothing lately. And von Schneider, who came to this part of the world twenty years ago with his wife one night in a canoe, and has supported life ever since by trading a little cacao every now and then to the Chinamen. When first William told me of him I felt myself to be on the heels of a famous mystery. Once, said William, he had been at loggerheads with a trading company down here. They seemed to be wanting to " put it over on him." The argument was finally brought to a close by the appearance of a foreign warship, 122
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sent to attend to the matter. To me the fact of Johann Orth being an Austrian, and this man a German, seemed no more than a part of the anony- mity. But I have given up that idea now. I am afraid it is not Johann Orth. It was a stirring moment, though, when the possibility presented itself.
And a handful, or as they themselves would say, " a bunch " of Americans who are more practical and less emotional in their outlook. It is not their country, only their inconvenience. Those doggoned Germans are holding up trade. We want zinc roofing from Wolverhampton, sardines from Norway, and a score of things from Germany itself : and we can't have them because a goddam Dutchman can't keep his head shut. It's the limit.
Captain Hart gave his views the other morning as he measured out the space where some day the new verandah is expected to be. Once the captain of a schooner, he is now a fever-stricken shadow of a man drowsing out his life as an incapable foreman of lotus-eating niggers, with a wife as black as any. " I'd like to see the French licked," he said in his soft shaking whisper of a voice.
I asked why.
" For what they've done to the Church," he said huskily, with a gentle smile.
On the days that the ships come in, you can see von Schneider crossing the dump and coming up the hill, a slight, frail figure with peering eyes, for he is
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nearly blind. If the weather is bad he wears withered leggings over his faded khaki, roofs in his old wide- awake felt hat with an enormous umbrella. If it is fine the umbrella is furled and his feet are clothed in alpargates, the striped cotton shoes the Spaniards wear. Nearly always he carries a little flour sack full of oranges or limes or guavas. The fruit is for me, and haf I any papers I would be so kind as to let him see. He scans them closely.
" If I were not so olt," he says to himself, " if I could see," and I know he is thinking of going home to fight. Then he comes upon a German reverse and pulls himself up.
" It iss not true," he says eagerly. " I assure you it iss not true. It iss only what they put in the papers."
I ask what is true, and he explains enthusiastically. The Germans have taken Mauberge with the whole of the English army shut up inside. That is true.
" How do you know ? -' I ask again, quite respect- fully.
" Because it iss in the papers," he says, and I feel how stupid I must seem, to have asked, with proof like that.
The Jamaican has no doubts, and the reverses on our side do not worry him. George, who is what they call down here a yellow nigger, came on to the verandah this morning with a message, and as usual stopped to speak of the war. 124
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" Of course it's going to be all right," he said with a smile and the light of unquenchable faith in his eyes. " We've got the mother-country behind us ! "
What do you think of that ? I began to feel my head for the place where the wool ought to grow. But it's a good sound.
A domestic impasse again. I came back to find all the dishes unwashed and the maid gone. William, with the assistance of the washer-woman, had got for himself enough to eat and occasionally had had his bed made. I shut myself up in the kitchen and scoured everything, then started on the house. One or two women came up the hill, stayed a day, and went, not because they would not have been quite content to stay and watch me do things, but because I did not wish that they should. There was one Ethel who lasted two days. If it had not been that I was so tired and desperate, she would not have lasted two minutes. Six feet tall or over, black as your hat, with enormous incapable hands and feet and staring eyes like an imitation cow's. She had the figure and flexibility of a boom, and when she moved, which was not often, she did it as if she were on wheels and was acting only under the influence of the words. " Go — ^there " meant two movements, and if two movements did not take her there you had to say "go there," "go there," "go there" till you had created enough force to propel her. As a rule, her movements
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did not in any way fit in with the text, and sometimes she stuck altogether. Finding that she did not know how to sweep and could not wash up, I did not trust her with the more intricate operations of peeling the potatoes. I did them myself, put them into a sauce- pan, and told her to take them off when they were done. She did it, and was just about to put them in the dish, with the water in which they were boiled, when I arrived and stopped her. I don't think that once in the two days she opened her mouth. When I spoke to her, reducing speech to as few and as small words as possible, she just fixed her imitation cow's eyes on me and turned to stone. At the end of the second day I knew if she came once again I would kill her, hack her to pieces with dinner knives, and count the pieces as I did it. So I gave her her two silver dollars and told her she must not come any more. She just stared and stood and stood and stared, and at last when the words, repeated several times over, had reached her, and the dollars had illustrated the words, she silently wheeled away and dropped down over the hill.
The next was pretty capable-looking and the mother of a girl of thirteen whom she would like to bring with her and have trained. That would suit me very well. She had arrived from Bocas on the afternoon launch and was prepared to begin at once. She could cook and wash and clean. I gave her the fowl to draw while I made the stuffing and prepared 126
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the rest of the dinner. She spent two hours drawing it and didn't know how to truss it. I got everything ready, and after dinner washed up with her so that she should know how I wanted the things done. Then I went to bed. She would be there in the morning at least to light the stove and boil the water. And also she was going to make some biscuits, or scones as we call them. She had said she could.
At seven the next morning I went into the kitchen to see how she was getting on. She was busy stirring a bowl of batter ; a pan of lard stood on the fire. It did not look promising for scones, but she was too far gone for me to suggest anything. I wondered if they were going to be the hot-water scones of my childhood, a delicious concoction as I remembered them — and I waited.
After she had pounded the mixture well in the basin she dropped dobbles of it into the lard, and when they had set, began to hit them in the pan. Furiously and unrelentingly she smote. If in one corner of the poor smitten dough there arose a faint desire to lift itself into a semblance of the thing it had been created for, she was after it like a hare and had it prone again. I made the tea and the toast, fried some eggs, and carried in the breakfast. When I went back to the kitchen, she was dressed for traveUing. Cheer- fully she unfolded her plans. She must catch the morning launch back to Bocas to get her belongings. If she might have a few of the paving stones to take
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with her she would not wait for her breakfast. I gave her them all.
She was never seen again. I have always hoped she died by her own hand — the paving-stones — but I am afraid not. I think she simply changed her mind.
Later, on a Sunday morning before lunch, a man who works for William came into the yard and said, " I bring de female." Before him fluttered a light brown will-o'-the-wisp in a floating white garment with short sleeves and low neck. She looked about seventeen years old and she came from the States. Her name was Ramola, and she said sure she knew how to sweep or anything. I gave her a broom, which she had a waltz with and brought back to me like a debutante to its chaperon. I was glad she had not disturbed any of the dust, as it happened to be quite near lunch-time. I had only given her the broom because I was intent upon the food in the kitchen and didn't want at the moment to be disturbed. She stood and watched me for a while, very interested in what I was preparing for her, and, by request, carried in some dishes. When we had had lunch she carried them out again, and after eating all that was left, she dried up for me, and I let her go, telling her to come back at six o'clock in time to get the cold supper ready. She smiled, blew out as she had blown in, and that was all of Ramola. She saw where we lived, had a very nice little lunch, and I suppose went on somewhere else for tea. 128
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There was another lady who came in evening dress, was engaged for six a.m. and arrived at eight. Her I dismissed without allowing entrance to the verandah at all. She was very surprised ; said that even though she had overslept herself, the past we were unable to recall, and all were liable to make mistakes. I pointed out that she had made hers and must be content. She argued it for half an hour with the man who was cutting the grass, and finally disappeared, a very bewildered person indeed, for up to that moment, I can believe, she had never suffered a reverse. The coloured servants have the white people in their pockets here.
I am trying to put the remembrance of the little flat tucked away among the chimney-pots at home out of my mind. There is nothing to do but go on accept- ing and rejecting the coloured ladies until something turns up that will combine possibility with a certain degree of perseverance. And in the meantime, damn them, damn them, damn them.
129
The House on the Hill, Jan. 1915.
I HAVE paid for four months' virtuous diary-keeping by a lapse of the same length. But the time that has slipped away without record was not of much use to anybody, and of much weariness to me. Let it lose itself. I will begin to be good again from now. I think the relief of knowing you and yours to be kept out of the general horror, coming also at a time when I was submerged in discomfort, made me drop out for a while. You were safe, whether you liked it or not ; I was on edge and at sixes and sevens, and therefore unable to concentrate. So you have it.
The things that have happened on this side since September are quite a number when they are all put together. Parson and Blanco, poor darlings, are dead, and Snuppy has had a new litter of eight ; her fourth, giving her a family of thirty-one children in two and a half years. Dreadful, but what are you to do about it ? William has moved from his twelve by twenty to his permanent office, a large red bungalow on the creek, filled with barrels of evil-smelling codfish beloved of the nigger, mats of rice, sacks of corn, 130
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beans, coffee, and other food stuffs that keep a com- munity together. We have a launch for trading purposes ; the Star Theatre, a good-sized corrugated iron shed with corrugated iron roof and a platform and gallery inside, is now for hire; a native school shouts its lessons from the little wooden house on the dump twenty yards away from the foot of the hill ; and last and greatest, the furniture has arrived from home.
It took me a long time to do it, but finally and with much difficulty, I got William to see that it would be better to make the four rooms that are, habitable rather than go on living on bare boards with the thought of the spacious place we would have some day when the war was over. I can exist on dreams as well as most, but the nebulous promise of a castle will not keep me content in a hut that is unnecessarily uncomfortable. If one says good-bye cheerfully to the castle one has a right to the hut made perfect.
My hut is not made perfect, but it is made habitable, and I no longer suffer the misery of waking to dingy walls and hideous trunks, nor are my new towels measle-marked from rusty nail-heads. Little by little reforms are bringing the ramshackle place into line as a white man's dwelling ; and little by little my self-respect is sprouting again and a certain contentment returning to me. I am not a hotel or apartment person, and to live in ugly surroundings or without a home of some sort is the same discomfort to
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me as a toothache which is better and worse in turns, but which is always there.
For months the sight of the house made me ill. It is an inoffensive enough little box in itself, and with proper treatment, possible, even in its present form — or lack of it. Two little front rooms twelve by fifteen, two little back rooms twelve by eight, a six- foot passage way down the middle, with ten feet of it cut off for the bathroom does not exactly let the imagination run riot. But one has to learn to adjust very quickly in these parts. I ceased looking forward to a commodious house, and only longed unutterably for fresh paint.
There is a universal colour scheme here for small houses which fills one with curiosity. Baby blue, pale apple-green, chocolate, and iron dark grey, with a grudging allowance of white to show up the originality of the rest. I suppose it to be symbolic of sky, grass, earth, and atmosphere ; but may the inventor of it, if he does not burn eternally for that and other sins, come back again to the world he has helped debase, and live an impotent aesthete among his previous paint -pots.
You can see it. The verandah with chipped and discoloured railing and battered screening, and ceiled with the abominable and accursed blue, over which runs the unpainted casing of the electric wires ; the blue-grey walls broken with faded yellowy- green shutters. Inside, blue ceilings again, dingy 132
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white walls, the same bilious shutters, and a chocolate skirting-board.
Only the two front rooms were white, and only the two front rooms were cased. The others were bare boards and scantling, and blue from top to bottom.
I used to open my eyes every morning on this dowdy debauch and wonder that I did not go blind with misery. One could bear it with the prospect of immediate alteration to keep one up. But the hours and days and weeks and months went by and nothing happened. "Some day when the war was over." That being so it was sheer waste to do any- thing till then.
It did not hurt William. He ate in it and slept in it. For the rest his soul lived and had its whole being in the red bungalow with the codfish barrels. The war has complicated things immeasurably, and he is having to give his whole energy to business. And also, though he himself denies it strenuously, I suspect him of being the author of the chocolate and blue and green and grey ; not on the grounds that his taste is bad, but because he himself, being the owner of half the town, would naturally paint it the colour he wanted.
At last I could bear it no longer. My body was ill with it. That and the heat and the isolation and the niggers we couldn't get, and the ones we got who wouldn't work, the monotony and the eternal
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difficulties with food ; and the insistent ugHness of everything to do with mankind, made me unable to see anything straight. If I could have kept shop like William, I should have been interested all day too. To sit and chaffer with the niggers and the Chinamen who come to buy ; to have a little wharf of your own to which the Indians slid up with their canoes full of balata and sarsaparilla and palm-nuts for your august and honourable inspection ; to be on the line of communication with every white man who has nothing to do and who drops in to discuss the affairs of the day : that could not be dull. But to live all day on a hill-top without books, without people, in a house without furniture, and often without service. To scrub the hours away, to clean the hours away, and to cook the hours away, in a temperature that makes even a nigger melt ; and to drop down at the end of the day too dog-tired to eat or sleep ; that is not easy at twenty when all the world is new, and it is certainly no easier when one goes to it later. And so in the interests of sanity I fought for the obliteration of the green and grey and chocolate and blue. I did not want a big house when the war was over. I wanted a clean house now. We might all be gone or bankrupt or dead by the time the war was over : and we were alive and full of discomfort now. The war would not be over to-morrow or next week or next month, and probably not even next year. It was stupidity to wait for it. 134
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I got my way. Reluctantly and slowly the hut we have was allowed to take the place of the castle we haven't, and I set to work bit by bit. First one of the little back rooms was cased ; then some towel- racks made to replace the nails in the bathroom. Then I asked for two of the rooms to be painted. It was aUowed ; but I must wait till the painter was free.
I waited and waited, and while I was waiting went away for a few days. While I was away they were done : in the same old green as before with a white that was every shade of linseed oil, and which had been put on so thickly that it ran down the grooves of the casing in rivulets of blobby tears. William had left the painter to do his worst, and did not criticise till all was over. He admitted it would have to be done again. In the meantime, I got the carpenter who had put up the towel-racks to make me a cupboard in one of the front rooms. In the days when the war should be over it would be a guest room. I drew a very nice cupboard ; five drawers on the right, with a little hat cupboard over them, and a hanging cupboard on the left. We sent to Panama for the hooks and hinges and handles, and I watched him without ceasing till it was finished. At least almost without ceasing. There was one moment when I left him, and in that moment William came in and ordered him to hang the doors the other way. It opens all wrong now, but it is a fine piece of furniture and a great solace.
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Then, by a lucky chance, a very good painter drifted in from Costa Rica. I fished out an old paint-box, sent for Marceau, who knows something about colours, and together we made the green I wanted for the shutters. Then I showed it to the painter, who couldn't speak English any more than I can speak Spanish, and he copied it.
But I wasn't allowed to have more than the two rooms and some of the shutters done. I managed to squeeze in the bathroom and have the skirting-board of the passage-way painted green, as well as a lovely big solignum tub, in which I have a splendid plant growing. So the painter was sent away with half the house still to do. But no more for a while. We never got him again. Once when William wanted him for something in the office, he sought him out. It was too late : the spell was broken. He was not hungry and had enough to take him back to Costa Rica. So we lost him.
It went on like that for some months more. Nothing happened except that I had the verandah polished, and opened, at the point of the sword, a china barrel and a box of pictures. When things were done William was always glad ; but till they were done he would defend with the whole of his man- hood the right to keep them undone. And also " to-morrow " is the sacred term here, for black and white alike.
After a period of inactivity I reopened hostilities : 136
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this time to effect the painting of another room, the passage-way, and the rest of the shutters. No general seeing his plans mature ever felt greater satisfaction than I, as slowly, and with infinite labour and pains, the darned little cubby hole grew into the shape and seeming of a home. No chorus girl ever accumulated her diamonds with greater ecstasy than I my altera- tions. And when I wasn't working I sat and dreamt of chicken-coops and paint as she would dream of solitaires and chains. To me the thought of a covered way to the kitchen and the mending of the wash- house door were, unaccomplished, the summit of my longing. Those peaks scaled, others would reveal themselves ; but they were enough till then.
I watched the painter, the original bad one, till he hated the sight of me. I robbed him of his linseed oil and took away his freedom. While he painted for me he painted as I wished, and hated it so that he would rather eat bananas till the end of his days than ever paint for me again. But I got done what I wanted, not as badly as it was done before ; and I am no longer ashamed before myself. The verandah rails are still shabby, but they are clean, for I have had them scrubbed : the time for painting them has not yet arrived unless I steal the paint and do it myself. And scrubbed also are the grey walls and the azure blue ceiling. And I sneaked a coat of paint for the bathroom, and I am clean, Phillipa, clean, clean, clean ! And my heart is like a singing bird because
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my cage has been done out. I never knew in all my life what it was like to yearn for paint as I have yearned for it here.
I think I could write a whole book on the arrival of the furniture and the setting of it out. Down in this part of the world one does not give a thought to old masters and true Jacobean. The great thing is to have furniture that will not fall to pieces too soon. To have anything of value would be wicked. But if one can strike a middle course and avoid also the pitch pine, glue, and varnish that comes into the Isthmus from the States, one is lucky. Pitch pine and glue and varnish is as expensive here as imitation Jacobean from London is with freight and duties and everything else added. And cheap English furniture is better than more expensive American, and beats it to a frazzle in design. William said that himself, and he is American. I would have said it, only it's more valuable coming from him.
Into the clean little rooms, white from head to foot, with green shutters and polished floors, went the candid imitations of the Tottenham Court Road. There was not a great deal, but quite enough for two small rooms and a passage. For the bedroom a lovely white Sheraton bed, a big white chest of drawers of no design at all, a little white dressing-table with an oval swing glass and a little spindle-legged table to stand beside the bed.
For the sitting-room a small piano, plain and 188
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unnoticeable, a desk and three little tables; all oak, and of a beautiful dark sixteenth-century colour right out of a bottle. And for the passage-way, a dresser the same colour, put there because there was no other place for it, and like so many things done for convenience, a great success.
That sounds bald and bare, but it is not so bald and bare as all that. To my bedroom first if you will. We have no flowers here, and remembering that in London, I went into a shop where hung a substitute in cotton and ordered the salesman to give me of it enough to embower me. There is nothing like a chintz or a wallpaper for turning on you ; but this was not of that kind. Clear white, unglazed like a print, it was strewn extravagantly and riotously with great bunches of pink and crimson roses tied with ribbons of blue, in which was tucked quite inconse- quently and adorably, a little golden guitar. In the days and the places where we are all seeking geometrical emotions that sounds trite. But for everything a time and a place.
At home the chequers of black and white, the splashes of purple and crimson, fed me. Here they are as ridiculous as a top hat on the river and stir no emotions at all. The roses that grow in a white garden with a silly little golden guitar hanging from a blue sash are what bring life to an eye a-weary with green, and vitality to a brain fagged with machinery. In a corner of the room was a little hanging cupboard
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— ^forgive me for not mentioning it when I spoke of the carpenter. For that the curtains of chintz, as also for the bed, a valance of roses. And for the table tops I cut out bunches of roses and set them in borders of cluny lace. Over the bed I put a fringed shawl of » white silk crepe heavy with Chinese embroidery, one of the fruits of the Nabothian vineyard, now because of the war, unwanted by any one. On the top of the chest of drawers another in miniature, and flowery as the chintz, in which I keep laces and pins and buttons and tapes and ribbons. A little mother-of-pearl tea- caddy used as a money-box ; and a gay crinolined lady of the early Victorian period, flounced and jacketed and flat -hatted, with a King-Charles in her arms and a hiatus in her middle that allows you to fill her up with whatever form of odds and ends you wish hidden.
On the table the pretty latticed silver that William gave me ; the glass and the china powder-boxes, and the little garlanded pin-trays. And on the walls a picture here and there gold-framed and light ; a pale hand-coloured print of a trousered darling in a poke bonnet, a little print of a Fragonard, and Gains- borough's portrait of Queen Charlotte. I do not wake so reluctantly now.
I have got my books out of storage and they stand in a narrow glass-fronted bookcase in the passage. Books die very easily here. What the cock- roach does not eat the mildew mottles and in time destroys. On the other side is the dark oak dresser, 140
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I have filled its shelves with the lovely Staffordshire cups and saucers and plates and eggcups that pretty Ann sent me from New York ; and in the niches down the sides are some engraved glass goblets brought from home.
The sitting-room is a cheerful hotch-potch. The little prim oak desk, tall and with leaded panes to its small bookcase, fits exactly in between two windows. Next that, on one side and flat against the wall as most of the furniture has to be, is a low narrow Jacobean table with a drawer and dear little drop handles. On the other side is one of a nest of red lacquer tables on which stands a gold lacquer cabinet William once bought for me in Colon. In the corner — I will go straight round the walls with you — a square oak table with barley-sugar legs, that holds a lamp, rather a beauty, of dull green bronze with twisted stem and four small turtles for feet. Next another lacquer table made invisible by the news- papers piled upon it ; then another writing-table, then the smallest of the lacquer tables just big enough to hold a work-box, and after that the gramophone, that instrument accursed in cities and fanatically worshipped here, with reason. Of good mahogany, chippendalish in appearance, and of inestimable boon and blessing to a household, I have found for it the right place. For, much as one reveres it and is grateful to it for its life-giving properties, it is in a small house like an elephant in a partridge nest.
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In the corner where it stands, the open door shuts it in on one side, the wall on two sides, and the third is no more than is necessary for its opening and shutting and turning of the handle.
" Here," as they say, slightly altered in the Blue Book and the suburban directory, " comes the door " ; after that the homely but unornate piano, which takes up most of the wall. And along the next wall, fitting in just exactly at the end of the future guest's future wardrobe cabinet, is my masterpiece: a low, soft, couch covered in dull blue and strewn with blue and green silk cushions : all made by me out of a clean new nigger spring cot with its legs shortened, and a cheap cretonne found in the town, some extra pillows, and some genuine Tottenham Court Road sofa cushions of cool, soft, apple-green silk. When William saw the well-known nigger cot coming up the hill with its cheap, thin mattress, he blew like a turtle. That rubbish in his house ! I let him blow and took absolutely no notice, for my great scene was in the second act. I carried it. William would never say anything more than, " Yes, it's all right," but the scoffer has remained to prey, and it is only on nights when his lordship is not very tired that one may enjoy the encircling arms of the home-made chester- field.
This is where you must get off the elephant or pay for another ride ; for the guest's wardrobe cabinet brings us back to the first table. But in the open is 142
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another dear little cotton reel gate leg, brown and slender, and on it books, a Persian candlestick lamp, and a red and black and gold lacquer jewel-box given me by Ethel M. and one of my very greatest treasures. There are some cane chairs and some books and a picture of the exquisite Pavlova in the swan dance ; a bronze water- jar from Fiesole, and ever so much more in detail that I cannot write now, for the lunch- bell has rung, and William is stamping.
Good-bye till to-morrow, dear Phillipa ; I am feel- ing very much better for the talk with you.
143
XI
Panama,
Jan. 1915.
The household grows. A Miss X. has come out from England to bear me company in the wilderness. It makes a great deal of difference having some one from home to talk about home to. And we read and sew together when there is time.
And one of the desires of my life has been gratified. Thousands of years ago in the existence of childhood I lived with a grandmother whose whole life seemed to centre round a sewing-machine. From before the time I was old enough to remember anything, to the year before her death at eighty-four, everything I wore was conjured out of that machine at her wonder- ful bidding. She made everything for me but my stockings and shoes. And not only for me but for half a score of others as well ! It was like the prestidigitator's hat. Everything poured from it unceasingly. From the skin up, a household was clothed. Into it went prints and muslins and calicos and damasks and cashmeres and velvets and silks and gauzes; and flannel and linen and lace, and
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sackcloth for kitchen use, and ashes of sisters' glories to be turned into garments for me. And out of it would come underclothes and over-clothes, night- dresses and day-dresses; and outdoor frocks and indoor frocks, and ball gowns and dressing-gowns. For grandfather and the boys, my brothers, night- shirts and new shirts and shirts recuffed and banded. For the house, towels hemmed, new sheets made, old sheets gone in the middle, split and turned to give them longer life. For the girls that married and did the right thing, little frocks of tuckings and nickings and gaugings and frillings ; tiny satin cot-covers, quilted and lace-edged ; and bonnets for bald heads and thatched ones alike. She sewed for grandsons and granddaughters, and then for great-grandsons and great-granddaughters. For the girls who came to tell her the thrilling news before they married and the secret news after. And when she wasn't at the machine she was making prim little housewives of ribbon and flannel, things that every woman was glad to have in her basket : a little pocket at one end for extra packets of needles, a little flat bolster at the other end for a pincushion, and the strip between lined with flannel, feather-stitched and chain-stitched into compartments marked 6, 7, 8, 9 ; and stocked with sixes, sevens, eights, and nines. Then a button in the psychological spot and a silk loop at the end to go over it, and you were provided with needles for the years to come. If they didn't last you a
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lifetime it was your carelessness, not her lack of generosity.
There was one day a week when she sinned. It was Sunday. In her youth her parents had turned Methodist. She had married a Methodist, and to have doubted that Methodism was anything but the direct road to heaven would have been, not an affront to Methodism — I don't think that ever occurred to her — but an impertinence towards her parents and a disloyalty towards her husband. She and grandfather were both sincere subscribers to the Church. They attended regularly, gave to the funds generously, and before he became too ill, grandfather was all the things to do with it that a good Churchman should be. But beyond that they were no more Methodists than I. It was the form they had been brought up to, and they subscribed to it obediently ; remaining Methodist not because they were Methodists, but because they were faithful son and daughter.
And as Methodism did not allow machines to be worked on Sunday, grandmother locked hers and sat outside it and watched the cover and sinned. More than anything she longed to fill in the tedious Sunday afternoon as she filled in every other afternoon. Often she said wistfully, " If only it were not wrong. I feel so lost without it," . . . but she would have been lost if she had used it, and one of the articles of the faith was to flagellate oneself here, to make the 146
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glorious inheritance of hereafter surer. " Six days shalt thou labour " was turned upside down for her. Six days did she play, and the seventh she laboured, laboured hard to keep her wicked, sinful mind off the evil that was tempting her.
When I was too small to go to school I used to sit with her day after day playing shop, tidying out the cotton basket, making dolls* clothes with a skewer and a pair of scissors. Without shutting my eyes I can see it all now as plainly as if I were back again. The little low-ceilinged dining-room, the starched Nottingham lace curtains drawn back from the window in which stood the machine. And grand- mother in a white muslin cap with her work lying all around her, stitching, stitching, stitching.
Sometimes the gentle humming of the quiet machine would stop, and then I knew that she was sleeping. And in five minutes the hum would begin again and the work go on. By nothing else than that would you know that she slept, for she sat bolt upright on her stool and did not even move her hand from the work. And when she woke she spoke as if she had never been asleep at all. So, she would refresh herself now and then through every afternoon. And I would wait impatiently till I could speak to her again. She never seemed to need more sleep than that, and only in the evening after dinner have I known her lie back in the armchair and give herself up to it altogether.
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And sometimes visitors would come and talk with her as she sewed. They would look at the work and praise the machine ; the quietness and simplicity of it, the beauty of the stitch. And grandmother would glow with the same pride as she might have felt if her child was being lauded. She loved it and she loved any one to see its beauties. And she suffered the same tortures when a clumsy hand " drove it " as she would suffer if her child's hair had been pulled.
There were times when I was not interested to watch. I hated the boys' shirts and the house linen. The big sisters' evening dresses gave me the thrill next highest to the dolls' clothes. And once, oh once ! I had a lady doll with a figure. And grand- mother bought real stuff especially for her and dressed her. She was French, slender, and sweet, with biscuit hands and legs and face, pale gold hair that could be done up in a bob ; and a body of pale pink stockinette with the loveliest bust and the hippiest hips and the narrowest waist that any French doll-maker of that period could, with his thoughts on his beloved, give to the work of his hands.
A kind aunt brought her to me, and grandmother dressed her. Beside the correct but invisible clothes of a lady of fashion, she had a wine-coloured satin gown with a jacket bodice that hooked down the front and a flared skirt with a waterfall back. My throat hurts a little this moment with the same pleasure as I felt when I saw the creation taking shape and form, 148
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and slowly but exquisitely being spirited out of the machine by the wonderful old withered hands that did such wonderful things.
Of course, then I was a little beast and took the doing of such things for granted, being possibly very impatient and ungracious because they didn't happen as quickly as I wanted them to. But old people are kind inasmuch as they do not look for much gratitude in the very young animal.
In time I was allowed to work it myself, and grew fairly proficient, although grandmother would come every now and then and overlook it anxiously. And I learnt to be grateful to it for more reasons than dolls' clothes. As I stretched out, the grown-ups' cast-offs were turned and cut down for me, and I had to unpick them and get them ready. If you've had to wear your sisters' old things you will know the difference between a chain-stitch and a lock-stitch machine. Pick, pick, pick, almost every fraction of the lock-stitch has to be gone over. A finding of the right thread, a drawing through of the loop, and r-r-r-r-rip goes the chain-stitch to the end of the seam. There are its enemies who say that may happen without your wishing it, and at any moment, but the times that it has happened to me could be counted on the thumbs of both hands, and the times I have had to unpick the garments of the elders have been as the seasons of the year in number and regularity.
And so when my needs turned machineward, they
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sought the friend of childhood. Any other seemed a heresy ; only that would do, for it was not only a machine, it was part of one's lifetime.
I have it here. This morning I was oiling it and brushing it and polishing it generally. The cotton was beginning to run out, and I put on a new reel. There are no stupid bobbins to wind ; only a reel, and you treadle aWay uninterruptedly till the end of it. On the empty reel the label, where the number is printed, was loose. I pulled it off, and then I laughed out loud, for across the distance of space and time came the voice of grandmother reprovingly, as close in my ear as if I were in the usual place at the end of the table, and she on her stool before the machine. " You're a very trying child ; you've been pulling these numbers off again."
There are now two servants attached to the household. The woman, Dora, is a long virginal yellow Jamaican, with a figure like a whipping post and a funny little insignificant-featured child's face at the top of it. She looks seventeen and admits to thirty. She has a baby called Vera and a devilish bad temper. The baby she leaves at home and the temper she as a rule brings with her. Vera was a gift from her " illegitimate husband," now dead. Whenever she gets toothache or fever or " pain in me head," she says it is " de Lard punish me for having a bastard child." When she is well again, the 150
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bastardy of it is forgotten. She works not at all badly, and beside laying a table and keeping the house clean, she can make a rice pudding like mine, pancakes, and quite a decent omelette. If she were to leave to-morrow she would forget next day how to boil a potato, but while she stays she does it like a parrot, and that is enough for us.
Honduras is the man. He comes every morning to feed the chickens, empty the rubbish, clean the shoes, and buy the bread, beside whatever else is wanted from the China shop. Twice a week he polishes the verandah, and in the evening he comes to shut the chickens up and cut a little grass.
It seems that his father was a Costa Rican, his mother a Jamaican, and he himself was born in Nicaragua. Naturally he is called Honduras. What his real baptismal name on the register is I have never known, nor do I want to. The reason why he is called Honduras makes me feel the name is his honour- ably enough, and I prefer to give it him. He is night-watchman for William, sleeps soundly most of the time, gets drunk at least once a week, and has an aunt at One Mile who washes his clothes not too often.
He is an odd creature, different from the run of niggers round about. And like Dora, at times curiously young and virginal, considering the facts that he is getting on for fifty, has children in Costa Rica, and is a seco-drinking reprobate. There are
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days when you'd hate to put him in the dustbin out of respect to the dustbin ; there are days when he is quite decent, but crawls and creeps like an old man ; and there are days when not only the youth of him is the one thing apparent, but the Greek youth. I can't tell why that comes into my head when I look at him sometimes, but it does. If, after hearing that, you were to see him, as likely as not you would have every reason to laugh at me for a fool, and in watching him patiently, to go on laughing at me. But the thing must be there if it came before my eyes unbidden. As a bird flies past a window and is gone, so I have seen it.
There is this one charming thing I find in almost all the negroes I have had to do with here. Whatever degree of licence they are allowed and take, it never degenerates into familiarity. The women will be insolent and jabber back when they get into rages, but neither men nor women ever abuse the freedom with which they are treated. If you jest with them, they are glad of the jest and have humour enough rarely to miss it, but they don't shift their ground because of it. I talk with them in a way I would not dream of talking with white servants because I know I shall not be misunderstood. With them freedom means ease, not familiarity, and there is respect without servility. If they weren't so confoundedly lazy they would be far preferable to deal with than the white, because they have what the white has not, 152
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a feeling for class distinction without the consciousness of it.
Honduras is friends with the fowls in a way that stirs Miss X. to exasperation. " I call and call and call," she says, " and they won't come near me. And that wretch goes into the yard and stretches out his hand and they flock."
Two days ago, a squirrel came with a piece of broken wire round its neck. It took up its abode upon the roof and squinted down at us from a safe distance. Yesterday we enticed it with some pecan nuts. It took one and fled away to safety again. This morning Honduras was out on the stoop, a roofed-in platform between the house and the kitchen, cleaning the shoes. On his shoulder sat the squirrel. I can't do that ; no squirrel comes to me.
With his own kind he is of a quarrelsome dis- position. Feeling himself to be the custodian of the family fortunes, he, when he is awake, will insult furiously any innocent wayfarer who passes along the footpath by the bungalow which he is supposed to guard.
Sometimes he will come up at night, lantern in hand. " Baas," he says earnestly in his slow, staccato, laboriously chosen speech, with equal emphasis upon each word alike : " dere is — a — fella — lurking — suspiciously — around — the — stoah. I tell him dat it is private property and he must get off. And he tro' some big stones at me."
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He pulls up a ragged shirt-sleeve and shows blood on his arm. William examines it from a distance with a certain perfunctory interest.
" You know, Baas, you will have to give me a gun to de-fend myself with ; for dat said fella he is a very contentious man."
" Well, blow your whistle," says William, ignoring the petition, " and give him over to the policeman if he bothers you again."
" Yes, Baas," says Honduras obediently. Then he picks up his lantern and disappears down the hill in the dark, content. He will blow his whistle if even he see dat said fella again. And some day he will have a gun.
It is a strange kaleidoscopic life that lies behind an ignorant, illiterate man like that. Fireman in a ship for years, he has seen places that his white brother on a stool in some dreary office never dreams of. The other morning when he was polishing the verandah, I led him on to talk, which he did in the same slow, precise tones, all the while pushing his mop back and forth in measured leisurely fashion.
He had been in Kansas City and Warrington and Liverpool and Portland Maine and San Pedro, and once he had had rooms at 117 and 118, Cheapside. " San Pedro ? Fourteen day leave Panama before you hit dere, man, but when Mexican Gulf bahd it take you eighteen day." He acknowledge de British flag and he never go back to New Orleans because de 154
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Chinamen he would have to travel with on de ship would kill him. Dey angry wid him for speaking Spanish to de Philippine fellas. He have land in
Costa Rica on which de said children live and
" Marm ? "
" Yes, Honduras ? "
" You will have to get a new mop, Marm, for dis one it ahlmost wear out."
" Very well, Honduras, you shall have one next time you go to the commissary."
" Yes, Mistress. And, Mistress ? " reflectively.
" Yes, Honduras."
*' De diseffective have nearly finish, an' de fella at de solitary department say dey got no more."
" Well, we shall just have to do without it till they get it. Be careful with what you have."
" Yes, Mistress." And he goes on with his polishing.
And the farm is growing. Beside Duke and Snuppy and Duchess, the blessed little pup we kept out of the last litter, and the cat and the fowls and the squirrel who seems to have adopted us, we have two ducks and a pig and a turkey. The pig is young and doesn't know what lies before it : if she did she would start squealing now. But as our fate is with- held from us by the powers that be, so we keep, from those whose destiny we make, their fate from them. If the pig had any sense, it would know by all the attention it is getting. No pig has early morning
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tea, breakfast, beef-tea at eleven, a hearty lunch, a four-o'clock spread, and supper before it goes to bed, for any but a sinister reason. Still, it is too young to be cynical, and it takes all in perfect faith and simplicity. I never look at it more than I can help, because the happy trustingness of it makes me feel too Bluebeardish.
I did not tell you that the Gomez affair has come to naught. The story is that Gomez, respecting his son's sorrow at the deposition of his mother, gave up his dream of a social triumph. Whether it is that, or whether the Castilian at the last moment feared the leap from The Book to the hammock, only those with inner knowledge could say. All round, I should think things are better so. At any rate, the old mammie won't be made unhappy, and Gomez won't have to remember to keep his fingers out of the dish. It's all right wearing tight boots for an occasion, but to have to be in them every day and all day . . .
And for the pretty Lucia one will wish her a marido more within the limits of The Book.
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XII
The House on the Hill, Jan. 1915.
More dreadful news from the war. I long very much to be at home. Even William, who is not English, was stirred the other night into the thought of throwing up everything to go. Of course he couldn't, and of course when the morning came we knew it. He has other's money as well as his own invested, and to leave a business just begun to look after itself at such a time as this, would be to take all the money and throw it into the sea. If we like to do that with our own we are at liberty to do it, but there could be no question that he owes it to those who have put their faith in him to the extent of giving him their savings to play with, to stay and see that they should not lose. And of course, again, I could not ask to go by myself. If I were really needed, yes, but not just for my own wish. And so we stay and listen to the news as it comes in, trying to sift the false from the true, and trying not to believe too easily the things we wish to believe. At this distance, and away from the sight and sound of things, the mind cannot grasp more than a certain
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amount. It is all so gigantic and enormous, that after a while it ceases to have any effect. It is like some dreadful shadow dance, some soundless horror happening in a closed room, and watched from outside silhouetting and jigging upon the window blind. The newspapers throw it upon the screen for us, but we hear nothing. And we read of it on a drowsy afternoon with the shutters closed, or out on the verandah with a complacent tea-table set. Only every now and then comes something like the blast from a furnace, the thought of the holocausts of dead bodies that once were men, the hideous, savage blowing up of hundreds and thousands in one breath .... One doesn't know what will take the place of war, but there must be something. Something that will show to a world the courage and heroism and splendour that war shows, without the annihila- tion that follows on its heels — or rather that is following on the heels of this war. When it will be over, the thought of the readjusting is outside the limits of one's understanding.
Except for a handful of Germans the sympathy here is all for the Allies. A few of the Germans are quite decent and do not come to gloat over you every time their country achieves a victory ; but the rest are not so delicate. Of all the offenders old von Schneider is the worst. He comes to William regu- larly for the bulletins, takes whatever papers he can get beside, and having got all he can, turns round 158
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and blackguards the English. This morning he went into the office and found a bulletin rather well seasoned with British reverses. Not content with that, he stood and poured out his joy and hatred till his breath was spent.
" And I hope they vill go on till not von Britisher iss left," he said.
William came up to lunch irate.
" The Jehovah-condemned son of an illicit union," he said, only a little more concisely ; "he comes to me for what he wants, and then stands up and hands that out to me. I was going to give him some quinine, but I am durned if I'll do it any more."
It is odd about them, that personal individual animosity they have. While England and other nations seem to fight for something, the Germans seem to fight against somebody. Of course it must be that in such a game as this every one plays to win, but the Germans have the appearance of not taking joy in winning, but in beating the other fellow whom they hate because he fights or because he wins, and whom they crow over when he loses.
I have never been in Germany, but the few German men I have met abroad have all been the same. Pleasant enough when there was no opposi- tion, but no use at keeping their end up with any degree of tranquillity or courtesy when they were put to it. If you argued with them and won, you could see them hating you fiercely for having dared to
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discomfit them ; if you argued and lost, they stamped you into the ground with happy excited ferocity. I have in my mind a beautiful evening on the river once, spoilt because the big good-looking Herr Pro- fessor thought he was being laughed at. And again the rage of another, because he had for a moment the table against him. While he was saying, in an English community, that the Germans were the finest race on earth and could eat up the English at one mouthful, he was calm and judicial. But at the exact moment when one of the despised English dared, not to call him a liar or a boaster, but to ask mildly and unruffiedly how he arrived at that, he blew up. One swallow doesn't make a summer I dare say, but one swallow is commonly regarded as the harbinger of spring. I have never met a German I would have liked to play a game with.
Last night there was great excitement on the dump. Sitting on the verandah after dinner, we heard a hullabaloo, and looking out through the screening, saw a crowd of people rushing hither and thither shouting. William lighted his lantern and we went down to see what it was. Two trunks full of money and nigger belongings had been stolen out of TuUey's saloon, and the robbery just discovered, had sent the whole population of the dump searching for the thief.
The Jamaican nigger is a confiding creature 160
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among his own. He will not trust his money to a white man's bank, but rather give it to another black man to keep for him.
Tulley, the consumptive Jamaican, who has a canteen a few hundred yards away from the foot of the hill, was evidently the banker for a number of his compatriots, and for safety's sake put the trunks containing the valuables in a small room, the door of which stood open on to the dump all day long. Last night just before the shouting began, it was found that the trunks had gone.
On the verandah of the saloon, Mrs. Tulley sat rocking and praying and shrieking. A little way away, the crowd of niggers jabbered and shouted and gesticulated, waving their machettes and doing nothing ; on the edge of the crowd, but aloof from it, stood the Chinamen, sallow, curious and silent, peering at the rabble, over whose faces the light from the waving lanterns flickered and danced.
William pushed his way into the throng while I stood near by on the skirts of it. Suddenly a shot was fired, and they all blazed up afresh. It was nothing but a random pistol whipped out and let off in the excitement of things, but potent enough to be the end of any one who happened to have his vitals in the way. No one had, so no one died.
" Beat the bushes," said William, and they all started madly to beat the bushes. There was a cry which grew into a yell of satisfaction. A man had
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been found. Whistles blew furiously, and reluctantly a straggler from the police force appeared. The Jamaicans jabbered and gesticulated afresh as they flung themselves on the man.
He stood among them, dazed ; one of the de- generate Spaniards, with scarcely enough vitality to hunt bananas, who slept about on the lumber pile and shivered with fever day in, day out. Probably dropped asleep, stupid with the seco the most starving of them seem able to procure. Pulled roughly out of his sleep, obviously innocent of the cause of the racket, he stood blinking at the light of the lanterns turned upon him. Questioned, turned about, and shrugging stupid shoulders, he was released and shambled off to a quiet spot in the bushes again.
Then they began a diligent search. I went back on to the hill and watched them winding like a long black serpent with flickering spots round the edge of the dump and out to the excavated hill behind ours.
And there, at last, the trunks were found, rifled, empty ; a triumph great enough to send them home victorious and happy to bed. That would keep them going long enough till the consciousness of the real loss came upon them. Then there would be a fresh emotion for to-morrow.
Soldier, the man who brings the ice four times a week and gets fivepence a time for doing it, had sixty- seven pounds ten shillings and eightpence in the 162
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trunks. About the only Jamaican who knows how to save, and he has lost it !
The pig was killed last week. I hated seeing the little thing trotting off on the end of a string contentedly like an obedient poodle going out for a walk. Hon- duras killed him. He has been looking forward to the affair for some time, and was about to do it under our noses when I stopped him. He came to ask me for an old knife, and I, forgetting the pig, told him where he would find one.
" What do you want it for ? " I asked him.
" To kill de pig. Mistress."
" Where are you going to kill it ? "
*' Here, marm."
" Indeed you're not. You take it as far away from the hill as you can, and don't let me hear a sound."
He smiled indulgently ; these women have to be humoured, the poor fools. Then he laid the knife down and went to get a piece of string, and in a few minutes I saw him going do^vn the hill with the dear little thing trotting unsuspiciously at his heels and swishing its tail gaily as if it were going out to begin life instead of to end it.
CJ course we heard every squeal. It would take a town bigger than this to muffle the protests of a pig fighting against its destiny. All Honduras did was to take it down to a shed on the dump and
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butcher it at the foot of the hill instead of on the top of it. At least we didn't see it ; I had that to be grateful for.
Honduras' wages were the chitterlings, which I understand to be the interior workings of a pig and other animals. Mrs. Jacques cooked it, using two loaves of bread and many other things to stuff it. And just before dinner, Rambey, her man, arrived bearing it roasted whole, and lying on its side in the dish in which it was cooked. I made him cut the head off and take it back to Mrs. Jacques. It didn't look so intimate with its head off.
We haven't a dish that was big enough to hold it altogether, so I carved a leg and shoulder and sent that inside while the rest remained in the kitchen. Dora being away with fever, Miss X. and I had to see to the serving of it.
Morrison and Harvey, two of William's former staff, were invited to eat it with us. It was a small pig, but an enormous amount of meat for a family of three to wear down. I suggested that we should send Marceau one of the other legs. William will give no end of things away, but he doesn't like me to do it. He turned and rated me soundly. I was always trying to get rid of things. Food was too hard to get for me to go shoving legs of pork on men who could very well look after themselves. I agreed with him ; on ordinary occasions it would be foolish to give away what we needed for ourselves, but this 164
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was different. If we were to have six meals a day instead of three we would never be able to keep up with the pig as I saw it. And even if we could eat it we would get sick of it. William was deaf. No matter, he could eat it all right. Nothing should be given away and nothing should be wasted ; he would see to that. Just
There was a clatter and a clash. Miss X. started to her feet and ran towards the kitchen. William sat petrified in his chair for a moment and then bounded out in the same direction. I sat like a perfect lady and chatted with the guests. I knew what it was. The dogs had found the pig.
William and Miss X. came back after a while. William was a little breathless and not at all com- municative. Presently he yielded a certain amount of information, very heavily censored. No, the dogs hadn't got it, at least not much of it. He had arrived in time. To stop them ? Well, not quite to stop them. But it was all right. They hadn't done any damage.
After a while Duke and Snuppy dropped in. They showed no interest in what was on the table, but sat aloof, unstirred by the savoury smell that circulated round about the atmosphere. Every now and then they would lick their chops richly and reminiscently, and in a very short time they were both wrapped in heavy porcine slumber.
I didn't ask too much. After, when I visited the
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scene of the disaster, everything had been straightened and made tidy. There was still a redundant amount of pork on dishes, calm and demure and ready for the ice-chest. How much of it had been investigated by Duke and Snuppy I did not wish to know. It looked all right, and that is as far as one should ever go in circumstances such as we are hampered by. We have been eating it ever since. Two days ago I spirited a leg away to some one who, I knew, would be glad of it. Last night we had more of it fricassed. And to-day William said, quite quietly for him, but quite definitely and decisively, " If you put that pork on the table again I will walk straight out of the house and go to the mess."
I am not sorry myself that the last and absolutely final appearance of it will be to-night at five o'clock when the dogs get their daily bowl of rice.
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XIII
Panama, Feb. 16th, 1915.
We have a new dog. Last week Marceau and William had to go to an Indian village called Talamanca about seventy miles away from here. Miss X. and I went with them as far as the Sixaola River, and got off the train there to wait at the W.'s till their return. The rest of the journey they did walking and in canoes. They were away four days and came back bringing the pup with them.
I've never seen a dog like it before. It reminds you of everything but a dog. It has enormous ears like leaves, that it whisks and flaps every time a thought passes through its head ; and it is thinking all the time. Its body is long and tubular and raised from the ground by legs very little longer than a lizard's. There is a legend here that once upon a time a dach- shund inhabited these parts. Looking at Ginger one is sure of it. It has the hair of a fox terrier with liver-coloured spots and a strange upstanding tuft perhaps one-sixth of an inch in length in that place where an ordinary dog keeps its tail. One minute she sets you thinking of a new art paper-weight made in
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Germany, and another, of those sand sausages they have in cottages to keep the draught out. And somehow oddly all the time she reminds me of dress- makers who live a long way out in Camden Town or somewhere like that where you have to go for days in 'buses, and run them to earth in a small room with a very large wall paper, a Brussels carpet, a round table in the middle, and enlargements of their parents' photographs over the sofa. Very virtuous, with nothing more incriminating in the matter of male connections than a promising nephew in the Territorials, whose cabinet portrait in an antimony frame stands upon the art-serge cover of the chiffoneer under the vase of honesty and pampas. There is also another of a niece standing upon a rustic bridge with a vioUn in her hand, which is framed in shells from Southend and is placed on the mantelpiece on the right of the wooden clock that has a glass door painted with flowers and shows the pendulum swing- ing behind.
That is what Ginger's parloiu* would be like if she had one. And she would have very neat black hair with a small fringe not " marcelled " or " hinded," but done as she had done it since she was a girl, just rolled round ordinary hairpins for half an hour before she dressed. That makes the curl smaller. She would be so virtuous that vice would not be able to horrify her, for she would not understand it. She would know everything and feel nothing. That's 168
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what, when she isn't being a funny dear little scrap of a dog, Ginger reminds me of.
Originally she was called Chinga, which means "bob- tailed." That quickly degenerated into "Chincha," which isn't half as pretty when you know the English of it. And as William, whose own accent is a fusion of Louisiana French, youthful German, and Spanish, American, Jamaican, and Chinese English, always says " Chincha " for " Ginger," naturally he says " ginger " for *' Chincha," and she has quickly become ** Ginger." There is the evolution of a name.
She makes a good playmate for Duchess, who herself is picturesque enough as a pup to have been nicknamed Cowface when she isn't called the Mock- turtle. If you pick her up after a good feed of rice and sit her on her tail in your lap in a way that lets her figure spread properly, she is more like the Mock- turtle than the Mockturtle is. Some day, to do her justice, she will be a very presentable mixture of Duke and Snuppy, which isn't a freakish mixture, although it mightn't draw a prize every time at the Crystal Palace. But just now she is an adorable fat baby of a mockturtle, and I love her with my teeth shut every time I get my hands upon her.
The birds are beginning to build in the trees upon the hill. They come in from the woods close by and seem to like the domesticity of a homestead better than the freedom of the bush. When I get
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within a 'bus ride of the Zoo or the Natural History Museum I am going to find out something about them, for nobody here knows the name of anything. Some of them are magnificent. There is one raven black with a rose-coloured breast, and another black with a yellow breast : both big birds about the size of an English crow. Then there is one like a green canary, and another little black bird no bigger than a wren, and a tiny grey-brown thing that looks like a wren but is about half the size : the loveliest and wonderfulest of all, the humming birds with their miraculous feathers, darting, trembling, poising, but seldom alighting. I watch them sometimes quivering round the brink of a big hibiscus cup. And sometimes the poor little things stick their long pinlike beaks into the wire of the screening. They can't get free, and they have to stay so until they die. Yesterday morning I found one struggling in the wire above the icebox, in a minute it would have been dead. I pushed the beak through and it flew away. When I pointed it out to Dora, who had seen it and done nothing to release it, all she said was, " Yes, marm," and smiled unconcernedly. Yet a few days before, when I was exasperated with a rooster that crows and squawks every morning when I work and every afternoon when I sleep, and told her to kill it, she was most indignant with me. I could see the horror in her eyes at my cruelty.
We are gradually growing civilized. I have four 170
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big tubs painted green, standing two on either end of the verandah, filled with fine strong ferns and varigated leaves. There is no chance of our making a real garden outside on account of the leaf-cutting ant, which, since the other hills have been rased have come to live on ours. The only thing that kept them down was a machine William had for pumping poison into the ground. When he had killed them all, he foolishly got rid of his machine. Now they have come back and the garden is being devastated. In no time they have stripped the hibiscus bushes as bare as the trees are at home in the depth of winter. If it were not that they stood between one and the pleasure of a garden they would be quite worth having for themselves. They are magnificent as an organiza- tion. WiUiam is trying to destroy them now by finding the end of each trail and filling up the holes with cyanide of potassium. Before the chickens came, they used to work openly in the daytime, and you could see them moving rapidly along in armies, each ant carrying a green banner five times as big as himself. They travelled through the long grass over logs, and across the turf, until a pathway was worn as bare as the palm of your hand, one procession going loaded and the other returning empty, like the coaling of the ships at Port Said : all with their overseers marshalling and keeping them in line. They stripped the mangoes and the hibiscus and the papayas and the little orange trees and some of the
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Cretans. And sometimes they would work on a fallen coconut palm. Then you could hear their tiny scissors grinding in multitudes on the stringy leaves. When William found the nest, he would put very carefully a lump of cyanide just inside the entrance ; and we would watch. It meant instant death to those there. You would see the returning armies come up to the mouth of the cave, stop, and then run about panic-stricken. As they got close by, they too would fall dead ; and more and more until the pile at the entrance looked like a heap of teased tobacco. The poor things would go in and try to get the dead out. When the fumes were spent a little, you could see them staggering out with their burdens and falling dead themselves as they flung them upon the heap. They would not rest until they had cleaned the hole although they died in the doing of it.
When the chickens came, they ceased working and travelling in the day-time. Not till the fowls had gone to roost would they begin ; and to find them William would have to go out with his electric torch and hunt till he came upon them, an unending procession of tiny green banners moving rapidly and tirelessly all through the night.
It seems wicked, when one watches them, to ruthlessly destroy so much courage and fortitude and perseverance. Of course when you see the havoc they work upon all things beautiful and green, you 172
THE WILDERNESS
want to rush and buy all the poison there is, to make an end of them without quarter. But why that passion of industry for nothing ? All the time I don't spend being sorry for myself, I spend being sorry for the leaf-cutter.
I have in the meantime a Japanese garden. Mary H. sent me down a big box of things from New York from the fascinating Japanese shops in the far end of Broadway, and I have had the dish for the garden made here.
It is a concrete box twenty-two by thirty-three inches ; and three inches high in the front and six at the back, to allow for building up hills in the dis- tance. In the centre is an irregular rim of concrete that shuts in the water for the lake, and all the rest of the box is filled up with earth.
It is growing very interesting. I have no dwarf trees, but we hunt about for ferns and grass and " little wild things " that are small enough and yet have the shapes that simulate the giants of the real world. There are minute ferns to plant in crannies, larger ones for clumps, and grass seed for the crops of industrious peasants. One day I found a tuft of umbrella-shaped grass that looks like a jungle palm, and another time William brought in a sprig of something which has grown into a fine shady acacia.
The trouble is to find earth fine enough and rocks the exact shape. But by degrees everything is coming right, and although William scoffs when I go
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out on to the railway line and grub about for stones, he is not above giving a look now and then to the crops that come up rotatively in the husbandman's corner.
The garden isn't exactly a garden ; it's a piece of world. There's a farm and a private house and a lake ; and a pleasure garden in course of construc- tion, and a ravine and a halfway house up the mountain, and another far away at the top with a wind-blown pine sheltering it. The wind-blown pines you can buy any amount of in the five and ten cent stores in New York. They are two for five cents, although in the Japanese shops in Broadway they charge you five cents each. Mary sent me down bridges and houses and little fences and lych gates and gates with pigeon roosts on them, and cranes and ducks and goldfish that don't die, and pagodas and Tori gates and ladies with umbrellas and peasants with bundles and street lamps and people fishing in boats and all the things that go to make a contented and happy world of Japanese.
It's rather like painting, this building of toy gardens. You take a paint box and brushes, and I take a dinner-knife and trowel. I spent a whole morning the other day trying to get the house on the edge of the ravine into perspective, and then had to pull the ravine to pieces to fit the house. And yesterday evening, not having enough bought fences to do all I wanted, I built one myself. Round the 174
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farm, this one is, and much more hke a real farm fence than any I could have bought. It is just ragged enough to distinguish it from the fence of the private lady who lives next door in the cottage with the shady acacia tree. Partly worm-eaten posts and partly posts of brown rose stems split in two, it gives the appearance of having been put there by the present owner's great-grandfather. It is not so high as the fence of the private lady's house. Hers is a good two inches, while the farmer's is little more than one ; but the level of the farm land is higher than that of the private lady's, therefore a low fence is high enough. Her chickens can't fly up and his cows aren't likely to fly down, so the whole thing is as it should be for both parties.
If you don't mind walking a little I will take you over it. In the foreground, on a level with the lake, is the pleasure garden, an open space not yet laid out. Turning to the right we take a sandy path by some rocks in which ferns are growing. From there the ground begins to rise at once, and it's a pretty hard pull up to the bridge. On the way you pass a little thatched summer-house hung with lanterns, and a tall red pagoda. Giant flax waves overhead, and seated in the shade of it is an old man resting on his bundle of grass. The last bit of the climb is the stiff est, and up here there is very little shade, but once across the bridge you have no more climbing unless you choose. You could, if you liked, turn up towards
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the mountains and visit, first the halfway house on the edge of the ravine and then the hut under the wind-blown pines far away above it ; but I wouldn't do it if I were you. You would need an alpine stock and special boots, and also you should start early, well before sunrise. There is no made road, and the rocks are some of them so steep and smooth that there is scarcely any foothold.
Higher up and just under the cliff where the last hut is, a tiny Httle bridge spans the gorge. Standing on that you can look down into the chasm where, hundreds of feet below, the torrent rushes over its rocky bed, under the first bridge you have crossed so long ago, and down into the little lake, that from this height looks to be no more than a bit of broken looking-glass. The torrent isn't rushing just at present because the mechanical contrivance which would make it rush has not yet left the mind of the man who suggested it ; but that place I have told you of is where it would rush if it could rush.
Leaving these aspirations for another day, we will cross the lower bridge over the gorge and go gently down under the shadow of the rocks into the garden of the private lady.
There is a gay little bamboo fence, with a rustic gate and a pigeon house above it at one side ; and below that the ground goes down in terraces to the lake. That is the official entrance, but as I know 176
THE WILDERNESS
her very well, I can take you in at the place where there is no fence, and across under the acacia tree to where she stands eternally in the garden in her bright blue kimono with a black-and-white umbrella shading her pretty shiny head from the sun. She has not much else in her garden yet beside the acacia tree and a beehive, because it is extremely difficult to find plants small enough to fit it ; but a tiny green coating is coming over the earth of the terraces, and I am hoping it will cover the garden and make, for her, velvet lawns. There is nothing else that could do it ; ordinary grass is a hundred times too coarse, and this strange green, so minute and so fine, is like a gift from heaven.
By rights we should bid her good-bye sedately, and go out of the rustic gate down the terraces, along the edge of the lake and up a winding road to the farm. But there is a gap in the fence behind some ferns and boulders ; and being not only a landlord, but a landlord who spends time and money in developing his lands and who respects always the efforts and wishes of his tenants, I may take you through the gap and save you a toilsome and circumlocutory journey.
The two fields have just been turned, and the earth is bare and brown. On one side of the pathway up to the house were, first oats, then flax, and now rice, which is the first seed that has not rushed up into a luxuriant crop within a few days. A little apart
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from the house is a covered well with two buckets, under a shady tree ; and another tree with a white flower stands sentinel over the little thatched cottage. But it is growing so quickly and getting to be so disproportionate that it will have to be pulled out and another found to take its place.
It is a busy and peaceful corner. By the open door sits an old withered man warming his chilly bones in the sun. Up the path comes briskly the farmer in shady hat and with a bundle over his shoulder. He will tell the old man the gossip of the market when he gets to him; and perhaps, in the bundle, has for him a fresh bit of betel or tobacco or coco or whatever it is he chews and dreams over. You can see by the way the farmer strides that he is cheerful enough to give the gossip, and industrious enough to get to his crops as soon as he has given it. I shall take out that rice and put in something else so as not to fret him too much. That is no more than I would expect an over-ruling Providence to do by me if I had shown my diligence over a sterile thing.
Out through the gate we go, and down the winding road we meet a pack-mule, laden and on its way home to the farm. The road drops gently to the lake. Past a cottage, the roof of which is level with the road, past a great rock by the side of which grows a towering palm (the grass tuft I told you I found the other day), and down on to the level of the pleasure ground that is to be. A lady in a yellow gown with a blue umbrella 178
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is taking her after-sundown ride in a rickshaw. Another lady in blue and scarlet is loitering on the gaudy little bridge that spans the lake. And in the lake under the rocks, in the shelter of the tall horse- radish, the little red goldfish that can't die evade the lineless fishing-rods of the happy punters.
And you water the whole thing with a laborious dessert spoon every evening, and empty the lake by means of a cork with a medicine corkscrew for a handle.
179
XIV
The House on the Hill, Feb. 1915.
Some of the mornings here are adorable. This is one of them. We have had coffee. The table has been cleared, William has gone down to his office with Snuppy at his heels, and the verandah is mine.
Of course it is hot. It is always hot ; but the value of this morning is that it is not so hot. The sun is shining as usual, but there is a cool breeze stirring among the coconut leaves. It is the freshness of things, before the middle age of the tropical day has overtaken them. The dew is sparkling on the grass, dragonflies are flighting like a covey of minute and miraculous aeroplanes, the pups are foraging round the garden ; and down on the dump the little nigger kids are playing truant round the schoolhouse. Overhead
a blue sky is bunched with white clouds, and the
Cordilleras rise up behind the silver lake.
It is a wonderful affair that schoolhouse. The
schoolmistress, a very dark coffee-coloured senorita of
apparently sixteen years of age, is in entire charge.
She is an arrogant young person ; short, of African
features, with sturdy calves that spring straight out
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A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS
of her ankle-bones. They are what my grandfather used to call stuns'le booms. She wears white open- work stockings and short skirts, and ties her silken wool up with an enormous bunch of scarlet ribbons. The school being too much for her to manage alone, a policeman has been sent over to help keep order. Now she sits in a rocker on the verandah and flirts with the policeman while the school does as it pleases inside. Every now and then she has an epileptic fit, and the school has to be closed until she is better. If she has it during school hours, the children assist at the affair, you can imagine with what pleasure and interest. Multiplication tables and " A-B, AB " must come wearisomely after that.
The pupils vary very much in age and size. The biggest, a great hefty nigger, who ought to be at work loading bananas and who looks anything from twenty on, although he may be no more than fifteen, in spite of his short trousers and his diligence in the singing games they play every day upon the dump. The youngest, Dora's pickney aged two and a half, who went yesterday for the first time to Dora's great joy and excitement.
And in between come girls and boys of all ages. Three of the girls, from perhaps eleven to thirteen, and carrying their slates and satchels demurely, William pointed out to me as being three of the most successful ladies of the town. The other day the schoolmistress was beating one as he passed. He said
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that the Spanish the schoolmistress let loose upon the girl, and the Jamaican the girl poured over the school- mistress, included everything known in the cursing vernacular of the two countries. Then when they had exhausted themselves they would go back to their places and the schoolmistress would say the Spanish for " a-b, ab " to the little Jamaican daughter of joy, and the little Jamaican daughter of joy would say "a-b, ab" in Spanish dutifully after the school- mistress, till the bell rang for dismissal.
We are having a plague of mosquitoes. They are especially bad in the kitchen, where the door is always open. Yesterday morning. Miss X., who was doing something there before dinner said, d propos of the mosquitoes :
" * Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them ' "
"* Cannon in front of them volleyed and tundered,' " said Dora, dreamily over the potatoes. What do you think of that ? Dora's pickney will be quoting Omar when her turn comes.
I listened to a conversation the other evening when I went down to call for William. It was between him and Tom. Tom, a modest, retiring-looking nigger of almost middle age, with a faded gentle voice and of no appearance at all compared with the bucks of his kind, is a good sarsaparilla baler. It needs a knack, I find. You make a rope sling in such a way that if one of the bundles comes loose, all the others will not fall out. 182
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Then you make a loop in the rope and sew up the whole bale in canvas, leaving the loop sticking out of the canvas. A bad baler will do it so that everything tumbles to pieces at the least provocation. Tom was sitting on a box stitching gently. William was put- ting away his papers.
William : " Where Ve you got your family now, Tom ? »
Tom, rather reticently : " Day live with my wife, Sah."
William : " Where does your wife live ? With you ? "
Tom: "No, Sah; she live at One Mile, Sah."
William : " Well, who are you living with now, some one else ? *'
Tom : " Yes, Sah ; I married dis tree years now."
William : " And who does your wife live with ? "
Tom : " Campbell, Sah."
William : " That no-count yellow nigger Camp- beU ? "
Tom, obviously pleased : " Yes, Sah."
William : " And has she got some of those ugly kids of yours living with her ? "
Tom : " Yes, Sah, tree, Sah."
I, trying to change the subject : " Has Tom any new ones ? "
William : " No, he's too old now."
Tom, defending himself : "I got a baby four months old."
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William, sceptically : " Do you know it's yours ? "
I : " You mustn't let him speak so to you, Tom."
Tom laughs mildly, not at all resentful.
William, to me : " Tom stole a man's daughter
and had to run over the border because her father
threatened to shoot him. How old that girl, Tom, you
steal ? "
Tom : " Seventeen, Sah."
William : " Seventeen, nothing ! She wasn't any older than twelve."
Tom : " Yes, Sah, she older than dat, Sah." I : " Tom seems to have been a devil in his time." William, reflectively, tying up a sack of silver dollars : " Yes, and no matter how many durned women he lived with or what they were like to look at, he had a whole lot of ugly kids exactly like himself. Isn't that right, Tom ? "
Tom : " No, Sah, not quite right dere, Sah."
As the war progresses business goes on being more and more difficult. But it has made two things better. The servants are not so ready to throw up their jobs, and also we are getting more food to eat. Fish is caught oftener, and we are being almost plentifully supplied with mountain hens, a delicious game that abounds here. It is a bird a little larger than a partridge. And it has such a wonderful breast that five of us have dined off one bird without stint. Some- times the natives will bring in wild turkey, but although 184
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we are grateful enough to get it, we don't greet it with much joy. It is large and tough, and one has had to be very near the tins and right down to sardines for dinner to welcome it with any degree of real enthusiasm.
The only part of the community that hasn't suffered is the colony of Spaniards that lives under the houses. They came down from one of the other republics to work on the line or on the fill. Arrived, they refused to work anywhere and settled down among the lumber on the pile outside the Company's lumber shed. They had their women with them and a cooking pot or two. Any time you walked along the line you would see them sitting and lying about on the planks. One couldn't help feeling desperately sorry for the women. No place for them to shelter in, and as often as not the poor things burning and shivering with fever, with the rain and the sun pouring down upon them. But you couldn't do anything for them. Nothing would induce the men to work. William offered one or two of them jobs. They would work for about an hour and then ask for their money and be off. After a while they decided it would be more comfortable to sleep under the houses than on the lumber pile, and they all migrated. Their crisis came when William drove them out and enclosed the piling of his place with barbed wire. They went in a body to the chief of police and complained. If the piling was closed to them where were they to sleep ?
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It was suggested that being able-bodied men they should do a little work and get a little money for it. Not too much, but enough to enable them to hire a room and pay for it. That they dismissed as absurd, fantastic, impossible ; and finding no redress from their grievance, they quickly adapted themselves to circumstances. Somebody else's piling was still available, perhaps at no greater cost than the fatigue of looking for it. It just happened that William's corner was a more social centre. The food was cooked round about it, and where the Colombian or the Nicaraguan or the Honduranian dined, there he also wished to sleep. The change was worth a shrug and no more.
So they went along to Hong Kee, who didn't mind and who didn't trouble to think of all that the unclean spigoty * took with him besides his hammock and his cooking pot. And until they were shipped away from the town altogether there they remained crawling in and out of their three-foot-high abodes and sleeping with their heads among the spiders and their feet in the slush.
Who would be bothered with civilization when it is possible to be content so ! We who ask for clean sheets three times a week, certainly do complicate life for ourselves, with washerwomen the devils that they are.
186
The cold storage carrot has died. One of the ship's
* Half-caste, applies to natives and money alike.
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stewards gave it me for my garden, and for a while it threw up lovely feathery fronds and filled the corner of the lake with beauty. If you don't know how to extract the whole loveliness from a carrot I will tell you. Either you scoop it out, carefully fill its middle with water, and suspend it from a roof or a nail or something else highly placed, or else you cut it off just below the place where the green ought to grow and put it, butt end, into a saucer. If it is a good carrot it will respond equally well to both treatments. Nobody would expect the same from a cold storage carrot as from a carrot that had lived a wild free life in a garden and come to you straight from its earthy bed. The steward's carrot went very well for a while, and I wondered if it had been strong enough to resist the influences of its incarceration in the regions of the icily null. But this morning it suddenly collapsed, and died without a groan.
Do you notice the influence of Maude running like a silver streak through the latter part of that history ? I don't know why.
In spite of the advent of the Star Theatre, of which we are the sole proprietors, the drama does not prosper here. The Movie man has given it up. I dare say he meant well, but he never seemed quite to get the hang of his instrument. After advertising a Stirring Story of Love and Passion in which a Fair Young Girl's Destiny was Entangled and Immeshed, it was a Httle
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disappointing to sit in the dark and watch what looked Hke intermittent showers of half-crown pieces spasmodically and at long intervals bestrewing the sheet. It was not enough for the coloured people who had paid their dimes and quarters to be thrilled, and although the management was reasonable and returned the money every time, yet nothing could stand a continued strain like that but State Endow- ment. Therefore Mr. Cornelius P. Tucker, who is really an enterprising young man, but who knows nothing about the mechanism of movies except what his operator tells him, was forced reluctantly to close until he could discover what was wrong with the voltage.
As theatre proprietors I am afraid we are not going to get rich. Before the bond fide theatre was built and when there was a certain amount of money circulating in the town, two separate companies drifted in and tried to spirit the dollars out of the inhabitants' pockets. The first was a troupe of entertainers. The only place available for a show was Hong Kee's store, then barely completed. One afternoon a quiet well-spoken nigger waited upon William in his office. He wished to give a perfor- mance with his troupe. How much would William rent him the building for ? William told him how much, and he promptly closed the bargain by present- ing us there and then with two complimentary tickets at one dollar gold each for the orchestra seats, advising us at the same time to bring our chairs with us. 188
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We went and took our seats. While we were waiting for the performance to begin I studied the audience hoping the best for the man. There was httle Simpson on the front bench with half a dozen others from the Commissary, one or two black ladies with their beaux, and a very large family sitting together on two benches. A lot of young niggers stood at the back of the room near the door, and there was a policeman by himself under a window. Up and down and in and out strolled Beckford, the always semi-drunk coloured man who rowed William and me round the creek once when the railway track was under water, and who calls us " King and Queen," and bows low when he sees me. He has a plantation somewhere over the water with an orange tree on it, and evidently had made a successful bid for the refreshment con- cession, for he had a basket of oranges on his arm.
" It doesn't look so empty,'* I said to William, counting heads.
William explained. Simpson and his lot were about all there was in actual money in the house. A new man had arrived two or three days before. They had tossed that afternoon for a theatre party and the new man had lost. The Polida was there to keep order, and of course he wouldn't pay. The large family belonged to the chief of the police, who, wishing to give his children a little pleasure, and also desirous of attending the performance himself, had, on arrival of the troupe, promptly arrested two of them and only
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released them on condition of being supplied with free passes for himself and his household.
I didn't know anything could be so bad. I have never imagined anything so bad. From behind the strip of art muslin hung over the doorway at the back of the stage came four women and three men. The women were all dressed in turkey red, with butter- coloured lace ; their black noses powdered pink, their black cheeks painted carmine. The men were in ordinary clothes except the comedian, whom you knew to be the comedian by an umbrella and a hat without a crown. There was a little street har- monium at which the accompanist sat, vamping diligently at the music he never failed to set up before him, but which William declared afterwards was nothing but the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies^ Home Companion put there to give true seeming to his art.
He vamped, and the seven sang altogether in unison and faithfully and industriously out of tune. They did some passes with their feet, one step right, one step left, sang some more, and then filed out, disap- pearing behind the curtain, three under one selvedge and four under the other.
Then each one of the seven appeared separately and in turn, except the bell-wether, a respectable black lady of middle age with jaunty ankle skirts, gold spectacles, and a strip of sequined trimming round her head to distinguish her above the others. 190
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Solemnly they would each come forward and squawk, and solemnly they would retire across the stage and disappear behind the art muslin. Twice the comedian burst through the centre and ran down to the rope that decided where the stage ended and the auditorium began. Then, when he had hit something that wasn't there, taken out his watch and looked at it, said the word " station " a few times, yelled with laughter and hit once more with his umbrella, he too retired. At last, when they had done the Swiss clock act for about three turns each, they all appeared again together and sang, each in his separate key, a grand finale with a double shuffle that sent the carmine streaming in awful and gory globules down the glistening cheeks of the jigging houris.
When we got up to go William leaned across the rope and spoke to the manager. " You needn't bother about the rent," he said, and the man looked as if he had handed him a purse. Poor devils !
The next arrivals were a Mexican and his wife with two wild cats. They billed themselves as — SeNor Antonio Jovane
with his
Two Trained Tigers !
assisted by
CARMENCITA!
The World-Famed Vocalist and Spanish Dancer ! !
Up in the corner of the hand-painted bill done by Senor Antonio himself, was a drawing of a tiger's
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head with all his teeth showing, a terrifying snarl in black, chrome yellow and scarlet. In the dusk of the evening, well before the performance was to begin, William took me down to call. This time they were showing in a building next to Hong Kee's store, a place put up for him in the days when he wanted to own everything, and vacated quickly by him after the panic. We went through the theatre to the green- room. In the green-room, late kitchen of the vacated cook-shop, Carmencita, the world-famed vocalist and Spanish Dancer, stood at an ironing board, a little, slim, dark-browed thing, with melting eyes, dressed in a loose cotton jacket, with her bare feet stuck into heel- less slippers. William introduced us. I bowed and smiled, she bowed and smiled, and that was the end of it. William sat on a box and talked to her in Spanish, and she went on ironing placidly, a marmoset clinging to her shoulder as she worked, and looking at us defiantly out of resentful little beady eyes. Close by, in boxes, with wire netting over the front of them, lay the cats asleep ; and in a far corner was a stretcher bed, a bundle or two, and some clothes hanging by nails on the wall. We looked at the cats, tried to make friends with the marmoset, and withdrew to allow Carmencita to continue her ironing uninter- rupted. Two hours later she came before us, an exotic dream in silk and spangles, such a vision as in the circus day makes small boys want to run away from home and enlist with the sawdust. 192
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There wasn't any money there, except perhaps a dollar or two for cat's meat, and William and I could never descend to eating that unless we were really put to it.
Later on, after the movie man gave up, there came a series of prize fights. They paid their rent without any trouble whatever, and gave Miss X. and me an evening away from home now and then, for we attend them regularly, in spite of the fact that the young gentlemen of the town think it is not quite the thing. Why, I do not altogether know, for anything more careful and delicate than the way the Colon Pets and the Almirante Chickens stroke and pat and caress and evade one another, I have never seen, unless it were two babies in two perambulators invited to kiss at a distance of half the pavement.
What has brought it all into my mind again is a large board full of information which stands on the verandah of Hong Kce's store announcing the appear- ance in the Star Theatre of one Ericson, a prestidigi- tator of unrivalled skill. Pasted into the corner of the bill is a printed slip to the effect that the above- mentioned gentleman has performed in England, France, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, the United States, Turkey, Spain, South America, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Australia, and many other well-known places. " Dear friends," he says, " I find myself now in your town without enough money to get home. I pray for your own sakes that you may never find yourselves
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in foreign countries. Come to-night and see my marvellous performance. If you do you will never regret it. And bring with you all your children so that I may make enough to go home and see my dear father and mother."
It doesn't look too good for William's rent again.
I am afraid the prestidigitator is not going to see his dear father and mother on the proceeds of his per- formances in this here town. He played two nights, he was going to play three. The takings the first night were six dollars silver, just the price of his light for the evening ; the second night they were sixty cents. Of course William let him off his rent. It worked out as a sort of benefit performance for the electric light company, which, on account of the size of its engines, has to make a certain amount of light every night whether it is used or not. Naturally the poor beggar had to have the light, and naturally the company, being the only source of supply, charged what it liked.
We went over the second night to see what was happening. The prestidigitator, a short thick-set Swede or Norwegian, in a singlet and trousers, was standing at the door. Some niggers were hanging about on the step, but no one seemed to be going in. We were for retiring when he caught sight of us and came out to lay violent hands upon us. 194
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" Come in, come in ! " he urged, in an eager, husky whisper ; and we went in.
The room was empty but for half a dozen niggers, one Chinaman and the local band, which consists of an accordion, two guitars and a cornet. The cornet did what he pleased, the accordianist what he pleased, and the other two simply filed their nails till further notice upon the strings of the guitars. Up on the platform a stage had been made with an arrangement of flags. When the conjuror arrived at the moment of abandon- ing all hope of a larger audience, he left the door closed it, and ran up the steps to the platform, dis- appearing behind the flags with a Chinaman following, his assistant and the glass-washer at Hong Kee's. Through a crack in the flags I watched him get ready. I saw him kick off his boots, fold a thing like a pillow case about his neck as if he were going to have his hair cut, and take a coat off a box. After that he moved away from the crack and I saw no more till the cur- tains were pulled apart and he stood, correct and bowing, in the centre of the stage, in swallow tail and knee breeches, as near like the real thing as a man could get without a shirt, without knee breeches and without shoes.
It was really very clever of him. That which I imagined to be a pillow-case, he had folded round his neck in such a manner as to make stock and shirt front both. He must have had a waistcoat to tuck it under, but I don't remember. The tail coat was
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genuine enough, but the knee breeches were arrived at by pulling a pair of black stockings over his long ones. As he had no thin patent courtly shoes he wore none at all ; a matter one would not have noticed if he had not had unfortunately to turn round occasionally and show the holes in the heels of his stockings.
That was the best part of his conjuring. He had no patter, no adroitness, no art of any kind, unless it were the art of supporting life in such conditions with a superhuman hopefulness. All his tricks were obvious ones obviously done, all his properties were ragged and tawdry. Twice I left my seat for him, once to accept a pink peppermint out of a nigger's dirty hat, and once to be presented with a reel of imitation green sewing silk drawn from the same source. The pepper- mint I bestowed upon Planes' baby, an infant Atlas who carries what looks like the world on a large scale within its stomach ; the reel of cotton silk I thanked him for gratefully, but insisted upon his taking back at the end of the performance as being more essential to his needs than to my own at a time and in a place where all my garments were white.
He has gone, I don't know where. Perhaps he has begged a ride on a banana train and taken his magic up the line to spirit the fare home from the pockets of the Guabitans or the Changuinolans : or perhaps he has had to walk. As we left the theatre he rushed out and whispered something to William. 196
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He was asking him to interest the other white men in getting him away. William did not answer to the suggestion. He had given him his theatre for nothing. If the white men were to begin to help the dead-beats out of the country, every dead-beat from every other republic would find its way here for no other purpose than to be helped out.
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XV
The House on the Hill, March, 1915.
This morning I feel as if I had come to the end of things. My brain won't move and I am sick of every- thing : of glaring sunshine and train smoke and raw lumber and painted tin and railway lines and banana- cars and small rooms and lazy niggers and tanks that have run dry and inefficiency and delay and stagnation and blazing white coral and sandflies and mosquitoes and holes in the screening and noise and lack of exercise and heat spots and washerwomen who don't bring the clothes back, and books that have to be written in the middle of it all. And to make matters more pleasant, I have a sore tongue and it catches on a large hind tooth every time I move it. Talk about the plagues of Egypt !
I have left the verandah and come into the little sitting-room where we so rarely ever sit. It is not so cool inside because the breeze can't sweep through as it does through the verandah, but it is cool enough and there is no sun. And from where I sit with my back to the windows that look out over the dump, I can't see the shanties and I only hear the train. 198
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There have been times when I have been very much hampered by the possession of Httle things, and I have often wished myself strong-minded enough to make a clean sweep of everything I had, and to determine to accumulate nothing more. If I could have done that I could have packed my bag and gone off every time I felt like it. As it was I often had to stay at home because I couldn't afford a home and a journey both.
On a morning like this I thank my stars for my weakness of character. In the words of the advertise- ment, every picture tells a story, and sitting here with my back to the world, all I have to do is to throw my eye on to this, that, or the other thing and I am instantly in the place from where it came from.
There is the copper water-jar with the brass handle and rim, standing on the top of the cupboard. That was Fiesole, the time when I went up there from Florence and stayed at the hotel that hangs on the hillside with its terraces overlooking the plain where Florence lies. I see the women now, walking down the village street with the bronze vases on their heads, clustering round the well awaiting their turn. And one Sunday morning, as they were all out in their finery and on their way to church, a lovely creature in black silk with a lace scarf over her head came down the centre of the street, her man beside her. He, beautiful in face and form, but
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hideous in felt hat and broadcloth ; she beautiful in every way and with the poise of generations of water- jars in the set of her head and the balance of her body. It seemed as if the others drew aside un- consciously to give her way. And she took it, not arrogantly nor demanding it, but largely, finely, as an army with banners might take it. I always see her whenever my eye catches the water-jar.
There is a faded photograph, poor when I bought it, and only kept in existence at all by its frame and glass. But it means another time in Italy and a day wandering in a little steamer round the Bay of Spezia. Porto Venere, with a temple to Venus when she counted, and ruined now, with a tablet stuck in the floor recording a fabulous swim of the great Lord Byron. It means Lerici and lizards in the sun, and a luncheon-basket packed with red wine and oranges and little rolls split and wedged with pate, and eaten under the shade of a tree on some stone steps in the quiet noon when all the village sat indoors at meat. And Shelley's house, shuttered, but gay with the flaunting rags of somebody's washing.
The little Bartolozzi print stands for the first time I went to York, only for the day, from Harrogate, where I was trying to grow well and beautiful on the unspeakable waters, but it was also the first time I went into the Minster and the first time a church has taken my breath away.
And the etching of Cheyne Row that B. gave me, 200
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with the stooping figure of the old man who made it famous in the distance, set among the trees of the Embankment gardens ; that gives me back six years of my life in a flash.
On the top of the bookcase is a little petticoated figure. I was had over that in Wardour Street, one Saturday afternoon after I had lunched with M. B. in Soho. Seeing it makes me think of her and the nightly prowls we would sometimes do after a pit at a theatre. Hungry from three hours' watching and listening, we would go into the nearest delicatessen shop, have a dish of leberwurst and potato salad with a gerkin on it, and a long glass of yellow beer. Then slowly in the lovely night air we would walk through deserted by-streets. There is something enchanting and enthralling about a walk in London streets at midnight. Safe as your own house, yet dim and full of mystery. In Jermyn Street, I remember we stood a long time one night trying to make a cat in an empty fish-shop unbend. There it sat among the shadows of its cold white desolate palace on a cold white desolate slab of marble, erect and gazing out through the plate glass wall into the deserted street. But not a flicker of its tail or the ghost of a meow could we get out of it. So we gave it up and went on, finding, as we walked, shop faces that had never shown themselves in daylight, or else had shown them- selves quite differently. On a corner we stopped again. Here in this most expensive district, where
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flourished or struggled the most expensive and select chambers and the most expensive and select restaurants, was a little shop, the windows of which were filled with the smaller articles that go to the keeping up of the village store : a card of lead pencils, two or three boxes of nibs, some cheap note-books, a bottle of ink, some picture post-cards. . . . And down an alley way through an entrance at the back of a small public-house M. discovered a club she had lately joined and which had almost as recently come into existence. The lights were burning and we went in to inspect : a tiny place with a basement, a ground floor, and a floor above ; newly upholstered and presenting a clean, smiling little face to its members. Only a little face, but a nice little face.
And out again up the narrow street into Jermyn Street and across St. James' to Arlington Street where my room was. So much for the little fake of War dour Street.
I will keep the rest of the ornaments for another bad day.
What do you think of this for a pretty little custom ?
There is a minute male creature here who at one time was in William's employ. One could not call him a man, he is too small. Still he has, as you will see by some details of the following story, proved himself man as any, for all his lack of inches. Of 202
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the kind called in these parts, Spigoty ; and of a certain standing owing to his father's position under government.
Now this little thing, aged perhaps twenty-one or over, found himself about to become a father ; and wishing to do the thing handsomely, bade the priest unite him and his inamorata in the bonds of holy matrimony a good twenty -four hours before the event took place.
In due time the infant arrived and was hailed with acclamation ; and for a week after, little Morales wore his pencil in his ear in a manner that made you think of the Black Prince the day he got his spurs. Even after the excitement of the first week was over, the pencil did not go back to its pre-parental angle ; there was a cock about it somehow, an ineradicable thing like the kink in the niggers' wool.
The baby lasted just five weeks ; then it snuffed out. Life was a whirl of excitement and entertain- ments to Morales every day of his five weeks of marriage. First the wedding, which no matter how quietly it may be performed, is always an event. And close upon its heels the arrival of the heir, no indifferent matter anywhere. After that, as soon as the lady's health would permit, a combination festival of marriage and birth together ; a celebrating not to be got rid of in one paltry evening of cake and candles.
And then the hasty and hurried exit of the baby,
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and all the invitations to be sent out again ! No wonder that this man of affairs was absent many times from his place of business. No wonder there was a new face every time you bought a tin of jam or ran out of matches !
After the obsequies there was a lull, and Morales began to be regular in his attendance again. And that night, when his work was over, he came down to see William, carrying tenderly in his hand a flat brown paper parcel which he placed on the table and began to untie most carefully. He had something to show. I happened to be there, and you could see it increased his pleasure for it doubled his audience. Standing expectantly at attention we waited while he solemnly and portentously took the thing from its wrappings, and with a final and dramatic flinging back of its tissue curtain, revealed the secret to us.
The dead baby, photographed in high glaze, dressed in all its finery with long and bunchy cashmere cloak and bonnet ruffled with lace and tufted with ribbons, propped up painstakingly so that you might see the whole of it. And beside it, the coffin also standing up, and open to show off its well-stuffed and buttoned interior with head pillows and pinked frill inclusive ; most expensive, no doubt, and conveying to the minds of people well up in coffins, the social status of those who required that degree of luxury and fashion for their post-mortem existence. •204
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William and I didn't look at each other. We stared solemnly at the picture while little Morales stared at us, his eyes bulging frog-like in his intensity of pride. Then I pulled myself together and said what by instinct I knew I ought to say ; what a good photograph and how nice the baby looked and what a pretty coffin. Then when we had gazed our fill and I had said the things all over again, he took the photograph out of our hands, wrapped it up carefully and bowed himself out. He was going to take it on somewhere else.
It is evidently one of the local photographer's chief sources of income. Simpson, whose fox terrier died mysteriously and without known cause, not only had her photographed before her interment, but enlarged and framed. It's as good to be a dead dog in some parts of the world as a live lion in others.
I am wondering what Honduras will do about the turkey. It is his great friend, and although he does not yet know, is to be killed for my birthday ten days from now. As there is no photographer on this side of the lagoon, I think I ought to give him time to have its portrait painted if he wants it.
There was a great skirmish this morning between the dogs and a Chinaman. As usual the Mock Turtle went off on an early morning prowl. While I was dressing I heard a commotion and went out on to
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the verandah to see what was happening. Over the dump and up the hill flew the Mock Turtle, carrying in her mouth something large and heavy ; and after her the Chinaman from the cook shop, his arms going like a windmill and execrations streaming in the wind. The Mock Turtle gained the top of the hill, and the Chinaman, heedless of boundaries, was about to gain it too. Then as his head appeared above the curve out strolled Duke from nowhere, let the Mock Turtle pass with the calf's foot — it was a calf's foot — and stationed himself ready to hold up the Chinaman. At which the approaching head wavered, stopped and disappeared. Duke watched him retrace his steps across the dump, and then rose up and strolled off again. The Mock Turtle got nothing out of it but the chase. Honduras, arriving upon the hill a moment after, took the calf's foot away, stuck it up on the fence so high that she couldn't reach it, and when he departed bore it off to cook for his own supper.
He has been told of the pending death of the turkey and is weltering in gloom, devising at the same time all sorts of plans for the creature's escape. The turkey, a male, has always by Honduras been alluded to as Tom. Just now he came to the part of the verandah where I was working, and peering through the screening to see if I was there, addressed me.
" Marm ? "
" Yes, Honduras." 206
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" About de said turkey. De baas say you going to kill him ? "
"Yes, Honduras."
"No, mistress, you can't kill Tahm."
" Why not ? "
" Him a beautiful bird, mistress."
" I know, that's one of the reasons why we're going to eat him."
" No, mistress, him a beautiful bird to look at."
" I dare say, but that won't keep us from being hungry. He's going to give us a dinner party."
There was a pause. Honduras sucked at an old corn-cob pipe and gave a swish at the grass with his machete, that long curved blade without which no man moves in this country, and which is used to cut everything, from bread to coconut trees, including pigs and turtles and at times man himself. You wipe the knife well each time, not because you are finnicky, but because steel has to be extra well taken care of in a country where rust grows even in linen cupboards.
Then he began again.
" Mistress."
" Yes, Honduras."
" De Tahm very old."
" I hope not."
A gleam in his eye ; he has got me
" Yes, mistress, he very old."
" How do you know ? "
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" I tink so, mistress." " Well, we'll know all about it soon." A longer silence and a spell of grass cutting. Then : " Perhaps he run away, mistress." The old villain ! I see we shall have to watch my birthday dinner.
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XVI
The House on the Hill, March. 1915.
It is not often that we have a picnic such as we had last Sunday. Never the time and the place and the vessel all together. A launch seems to be very much like a pair of horses. Ours, when we want it for a pleasure-going, is always either away on a trading expedition or in the machine-shop getting mended. And when we may have her, the weather steps in and interferes with the picnicking place. There are no beaches nearer than Boca del Drago, an opening twelve miles away into the Caribbean Sea ; and the best is just outside the mouth. On days when the sea is heavy, the waves come rolling through, barring the way out, and even making a landing at the village inside an impossibility.
Last Sunday everything conspired for us. Even the steering gear, as temperamental and tricky a factor as a prima donna on opening night, con- ducted itself with the circumspection of a school miss at a prize-giving.
We started at about nine o'clock in the morning. First went Honduras with the food. In one box a
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dish full of cold mountain hen, another of potato salad and mayonnaise, a tin of little cakes, and half a dozen loaves of bread. In the next box a block of ice packed up tight with beer and whisky and Stretton water ; and in the last, knives and forks and tin plates and glasses and bathing gowns. And the thermos of tea for Miss X. and me, the sight of which always arouses in William such extraordinary and inexplicable animosity. I have never packed the thermos flask for a picnic that William has not fought furiously and outrageously for its ejectment. He doesn't want the flask for anything else, there is plenty of room in the box, but still the same poison of hate floods his veins at the sight of it. It isn't the flask, it's the dreadful liquor within. If he could do an irreparable injury to the tea without hurting the thermos we would never get our five o'clock. What saves us is that the flask belongs to him. It's the most curious antagonism. He does not drink beer or whisky, but he packs the box of it most amicably ; he never touches cocktails, but he makes as good a one for us as I've ever tasted regularly every night. But tea, no ! never on your life, sir. If he were a northerner instead of a southerner I should be convinced that a female progenitor had at a critical period of her health been abnormally influenced by the Boston affair. As it is I give it up.
I packed the thermos under his riveted eyes while he danced about on the stoop watching. Then 210
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when it was hidden among the bathing gowns and towels, he slacked his saraband and went through on to the verandah, cursing in Spanish and breathing heavily, to seek for his consolation, a four-pound tin of boiled sweets and his one form of alcoholism. I wish I could draw William, but it's too much for me. A creature who looks like an innocent young picador when he is smiling and an aged and irascible Dante when he isn't ; who drinks water himself and grudges no man his wine ; who is as just as any man I know and more unjust than any I have ever dreamed of ; who hasn't a single illusion about anybody or any- thing, who swears and curses like a regiment of troopers, and who consumes cake and lemonade with the undisguised pleasure of a boy let loose in a tuck shop.
I have always wanted to go to a fancy-dress ball with him so that for once he might appear in his life suitably clothed. There are people who never should wear anything else than fancy dress. William in clothes from Madox Street is just ordinary, but William in the bull ring, William steering his gondola on the Grand Canal, William in a cowl with a knotted cord about his waist would make every one who saw him want to buy him and take him straight home.
The first ball that happens when we are in London again I shall take tickets for and we will all go. If William is in a good temper he shall be a picador ;
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if he's in a bad one he shall go as Savanarola. And I will be a beautiful Russian peasant in gala dress with a fender round my head and beads and beads and beads around my neck ; and the wrinkled scarlet boots that I have always longed to wear. I don't know whether the fender and the boots go together, but I want to wear them together. William doesn't dance, but he will love to dress up. I know that by the quiet contented way he stands when I try my hats on him.
When Honduras had taken the boxes round in the skiff and packed them in the launch we started forth. Across the dump, over the little bridge that spans the creek and along the railway track to the wharf by the station. The Betty lay alongside. She's a nice little thing, with a cabin that's also an engine- room, a place in the bows where you can sit half a dozen together, and a quite capacious deck space sunk two feet to allow of carrying supplies.
There was Morrison and Harvey and Marceau and Schuyler and the doctor and two officers from the flock of submarines that is here on torpedo practice ; and Miss X. and William and I ; and Duke, who is never really well behaved except on a launch and who enjoys every moment of it so wholeheartedly that it would be a shame to leave him behind. He's a funny old thing ; surly, sensitive, content to be left to his own devices, yet jealous as can be, punishing William for any punishment he gives him, yet never 212
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wavering in his allegiance. In the recurring seasons of his courtships so devoted to Snuppy that he will not let her out of his sight, and weeping and moaning when one of us so much as strokes her head. Watch- ing her, shielding her, shepherding her, and hating his pups like poison.
On to the launch he steps like a king upon his barge. Quiet, self-contained, unobtrusive, he chooses his place and keeps himself aloof until we arrive. Then after the first skiff load has started for the shore he jumps into the water and follows.
We slip gently down the landlocked strip, each turn of the engine pushing the ugly little camp further and further behind us. Down past the small green house that stands on piles in the water, past the charcoal-burner's hut among the mangroves, through the narrow pass between Ponsett Point and the Sister Cays and out into the more open waters of the lagoon where the sea comes freshening up from the mouth of the Dragon. There is no swell, only the green surface is scattered with a million little white feathers that toss and tumble and sparkle in the sunlight. The pelicans are squatting lazily on the edges of the mangroves ; further out a bird is riding on a piece of driftwood.
As we get away from the shelter of the hills, the ranges of the Cordilleras rise up, fold after fold behind them. Little tufts of cloud lie in the hollows of the near hills ; away in the blue distance a white scarf
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has wound itself about the towering head of Pico Blanco.
As the launch gets nearer to this gateway of the sea, she goes more bumpily, but not much, for the sea is as the day, calm and serene and happy ; only the cross tides make the difference. On one side is the town of Boca del Drago, a cluster of weather-beaten huts and houses, stretched along the beach. Under the wild almonds and the giant coconuts the in- habitants sit in the shade, weaving lazily their lobster pots or painting their cyuchas. If you walk along the sandy path between the houses you will meet a little grunting pig nosing among the hibiscus and the scented spidery white lilies that spring up under your feet and around you ; and chickens and funny little elephant-eared curs, the like of which no one at home could imagine. I have often thought of the sensation I could make with Ginger one Sunday morning in the Park. And for all that sanitation has not troubled it, the scanty village is cleaner than a committee of the finest experts could make it. Washed by the rain, dried by the sun, and swept by the four winds, with the salt sea for ever fretting its yellow beaches, it lives fresh and sweet under the blue eyes of heaven.
There are no mosquitoes, no one ever gets fever, and the inhabitants are so well satisfied with things as they come to them, that they won't even be bothered to knock down coconuts for the visitors 214
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who are willing and anxious to pay five cents a piece for them.
On the other side is Phillip Ogilvie's place, a coconut plantation that marches down to the very edge of the shining sands. We have picnicked there before with the hearty welcome of Phillip, who is another Gomez, although a less aspiring one. But the water is shallow and full of sea-thorns, those invisible splinters that so hurt the feet. Where we are going, we have found a spot in which, if the weather will let us through, we can paddle and swim and lie in the surf and then dip in a fresh-water pool, ice cold and clear, that lies cupped in the very sands of the beach itself.
To-day the sea is as calm as the lagoon. Through the mouth of the Dragon, with a sharp turn to the right, we follow the beach — well out, for the tide is low — till we can see the spot where the old bleached tree-trunks are lying. Then the launch is swung round and we run shoreward, getting slower and slower till the engine stops. The Betty is in as far as she can go.
We get into the cockleshell of a skiff that is in- adequately built for two, five of us, and Archibald, who rows us, with Duke following. One powder-puff more in our pockets and she would go right under, but the sea is a floor of smooth pale emerald, and Archibald has the oars. Archibald, without whom I do not care to go ; who could row a boat upside
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down and swim with his hands tied behind his back, a tall, nice-looking yellow native who does the Betty^s business upon her trading expeditions and buys and sells for William on a commission basis, so that a good trip for William is a good trip for Archibald, and no money for William is also no money for Archibald.
The nose of the skiff grinds upon the beach. He tucks up his trousers, jumps out, and hauls her up ; the men jump out and they haul her still further so that we may land dry-shod. Then she is pushed off with Archibald in her, and goes back to the launch for the next load. And Duke comes blowing and snorting from his swim and shakes himself over us all.
It is hot, blazing hot, but there is a cool breeze and shade for the interlacing arms of great trees. Where these boughs are thickest we make our resting place. There are no mosquitoes, no sandflies, no ants. One can drop down on the shady sands, prop oneself up in the clefts of the forked trunks and dream away the day, if it were not that the sea called so urgingly. But one doesn't come twelve miles to do what we might do at home. So it is to the baskets as quickly as possible, that we may waste no time out of the water.
There is only the one food for everybody, which simplifies the choosing and the serving both. In the days when we used to get meat from New Orleans, it was a leg of lamb and a potato salad. In these 216
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days of dependence upon native products it is a mountain hen and potato salad. I stand by the improvised table with the dish of game, the bowl of salad and an enamel plate for each. Somebody else is cutting bread, and William and an aide-de-camp are looking after the cellar. On each plate I put the same thing ; the bird and the salad. Miss X. takes it, adds a knife and fork, and hands it to the first one up. He takes it and adds for himself the bread. He is also supposed to pass himself the salt. Then he goes and another comes till each one is finished. William and the aide-de-camp pass the drinks, and after that there is a profound silence, only broken by the occasional scratching of knives and forks upon enamel plates. There is another round of bird and salad and we grow a little more communicative, but no one talks unless he has something to say, and no one cares what time it is.
Wouldn't it be a lovely world, Phillipa, if we all did the first and never had to do the second ? People would give up reminding themselves how old they were and worrying about how young they weren't ; and the bore would almost go out of commission. Has it ever occurred to you what slavery lies in the calendar and what bondage three meals a day mean ? If we had no calendar we would learn to take to-day as we found it and to enjoy it as it deserved. We would see the country instead of unconsciously watch- ing for the mile-posts. We would do what we felt like
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doing instead of regarding certain manners and customs and habits and acts as being applicable to certain sections of the journey and quite unfit for others. The prophet who cried " too old at forty " would not be able any longer to hypnotize the hale and hearty thirty-niner with his fearsome death song, nor weaken his will and fibres with a relentless premonition of oncoming doom.
And if we did things because we felt young and not because we wanted to seem young, it would be right whatever age we were. Years ago I saw a little old lady with snow-white hair and a lovely chestnut brown plait pinned on as a bob behind. She was copying pictures at one of the galleries and so rapt was she in her work that you knew at a glance how the chestnut bob came there. Life was so much to her that she had forgotten time. Once the chestnut bob had matched. Since then she had lost herself in something greater than herself. And the chestnut bob and the old eyes peering at the masterpiece told you.
Another woman I remember. Her figure had frankly and candidly gone. She wore loose clothes for her own comfort and she did not dye her hair. She was witty and amusing, nearer seventy than sixty, and made no secret of the truth. As for me I never saw her, never think of her now, without being reminded of a dare-devil gamin with his hands on the pavement and his feet against the wall. 218
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I suppose you can't take away the calendar any more than you can take away the franchise. And a house run without a clock and three meals a day at stated times, would be horrible. But like lots of other necessities they are a very great nuisance.
We sit long enough not to incur the chance of a fit in the water and then go in, there to stay till it is time to dress and go home. Along the beach and round the next rocky point is a cave and a tiny bay where the surf rolls up on to smooth sands. To play with the surf is to play with something that likes the game as well as you do ; something that chases while you dodge, fools you by keeping you waiting and gets you unawares with as much glee as you feel at being taken.
There are two places where your years and your cares can never follow you, on to a Swiss peak in winter-time and into the sea water when you are dodging waves. Even William for a short time is untrue to his cod-fish barrels and account books when the sea is making love to him.
Far out, Harvey is teaching Miss X. to float and turn over. She can float, but she can't turn over. I can't swim a stroke. Marceau pulls me out beyond my depth and proceeds to teach me. Every time the wrong end of me gets too light and I go end down and feet up, yelling with anguish as I feel myself sinking. This is considered to be a joke and is done several times before I can make my escape and struggle
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back to a level where I can feel the sand safe beneath my feet. On the way I pass the doctor and push him under. He does not come up again. I wait, and still he does not come up. I call to William to hurry. I don't know him well and I am afraid he may have heart disease or has caught cramp. William does not come. No one ever does in the water until it's too late. I call again, and suddenly I feel my ankles grabbed ; then I stop calling. The next time I won't worry ; and it will be true.
We sit for a while in the surf, letting the waves roll up, break on us, and wash us on to the beach. Away beyond the waves where the sea is smooth and deep, three shining seals' heads and a bathing cap stick up out of the water. And far out beyond them again two rocks stand out against the blue of the sky. Pigeon Rock, the big one, where the men go shooting, and Sail Rock, which at first sight is like a little fishing smack lying in the lee of the big one. We are all alone on the Caribbean Sea. No trippers, no trains, no steamers passing. A calm sea stretches away to a clear blue sky. The sun still shines, but the day is slipping by. Round a distant point and over the still sparkling waters of the bay a little boat comes stealing. It is the Betty. She is coming from Boca del Drago, where the engineer has his home* and she is coming to take us to ours.
" Let's go," says William, his hands full of pieces of lichen-covered rock that he has gathered for the 220
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Japanese garden ; and we turn and walk back slowly, over the rocks, in the water, and along the sands. In one of the scallops of the bay under the spreading shelter of trees are two fishing huts. In the shade of an enormous sea-grape, the branches of which stretch out across the beach and make a canopy over the water, two fishermen in battered felt hats and dungaree shirts are sitting on a wooden bench. One is weaving a lobster pot, the other is lazily rubbing away at a piece of tortoise shell. William buys tortoise shell, and he stops to speak to him and to look at the shell. Then on again to where the stream of fresh water has cupped itself in the sands, clear, icy cold, and fresh as the morning, after the warm salt sea.
At the last moment Duke is not to be found. Nor Miss X.'s umbrella. William goes off in search of Duke, and Harvey in search of the parasol. Both return together victorious. Duke, left to his own devices, strolled along till he saw the parasol. Then he sat down beside it, and would be there now if William had not gone to find him. Harvey, knowing where it had been left, arrived first, but was not allowed to approach. William coming later released Duke from his self-imposed duty and gave the umbrella to Harvey. He is always surprising one, that dog. No one would ever have set him to guard anything. If one had he would, more likely than not, have growled and deliberately got up and left it. He's
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a cussed beast. He spends his time in getting himself disHked and then when he has thoroughly alienated everybody's sympathies he suddenly does something quite captivating. For an ordinary dog, trained to it, to find an umbrella and to spend the afternoon guarding it would be no more than a return for labour spent. But for a surly devil like Duke, who goes out of his way to convince you of his baseness, to take upon himself such a duty of his own accord, that is interesting.
The sun has gone down as we enter the lagoon, and the pelicans are fishing for their evening meal. By the time we reach the landlocked water it is quite dark. Round the point nearest home the town comes into sight. The buildings have disappeared. Nothing is to be seen but dim outlines and the dots of the electric lights. It might be anywhere that was beautiful. Overhead a velvet darkness strewn with stars ; beneath, the stars again, and in the distance, long shimmering points of light quivering in the water from the rows of lamps along the wharf. Even the mess house, the new concrete one just finished and called profanely the Biscuit Factory, becomes a thing of honour girdled as it is with strings of jewels.
As we approach the passenger station, a bell can be heard. It is the call to evening service, which is held on the little wharf, for the Baptists, until their church on the dump is completed. The black 222
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pastor is there in glossy broadcloth before a wooden desk, arranging his lessons. A little later and we should have landed in the midst of the congregation and had to pass through it, but it is too early yet, and as we walk down the line we meet the people on their way.
Far across the dump the dogs locked up on the verandah hear our voices and begin to bark, throwing themselves against the screening with excitement. The Mock Turtle, who is growing a bark like the bull of Bashan, Snuppy the fat, the lawless, the youngest of all her own pups, who can kill a zorra quicker than you can wink, and who can flash her barrel of a body through the air four paces faster than the pack that hunts her, with a bark like an asthmatic old poodle. And Ginger hysterically shrieking and yapping in turn ; all gone mad with joy to know that we are home again after the long perplexing day without us. Dora appears on the verandah, opens the door for them, and they come tumbling down the hill to meet us, to lick us, to claw us, and to tell us we must never leave them again from morn till eve or else they will die of grief.
Truly this day the Lord has blessed our going out and our coming in.
XVII
The House on the Hill, March, 1915.
A GRAND party for my birthday, with all the leaves let into the table and William doing great stunts — I am an American citizen by marriage — with the electric light. We have to make our affairs here out of the material there is at hand, and the less material the greater the zest there is in doing it. I sat down yesterday morning and thought it out, with the result that the little ramshackle verandah on the Hill be- came, for the time being, the part of the Savoy dining-room that overlooks the Embankment. For that compliment the part of the Savoy dining-room that overlooks the Embankment could afford to take its cut glass and candle-shaded hat off to me, con- sidering all things.
You do it this way. If you haven't carved crystal and mahogany and Venetian point, you take your moulded glass and good strong double damask, and honour it so that the spirit of the desired perfection shines out unmistakably from their modest surfaces. Our plate is good and plain, our one tablecloth that is big enough for the table at full length — with its twelve 224
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table-napkins to match — is of excellent damask ; our wine-glasses — the only available ones till the barrel of beauty is opened — are quite decent enough not to be noticed. And our tumblers are the very best that can be bought in the place, top price eight cents each for the size we have, and nothing to do but be grateful that the maker eschewed ornamentation as an un- necessary addition to the cost of production.
Still the male mind is always adjusted more for the taking in of the whole than the criticizing of detail, and I don't think anyone who came let me down for the tumblers, at least if they did, not to the extent of mentioning them, which was quite delicate.
The foundations provided, one had to search out something for decorations. Not a flower in the place and everybody sick of crotans and hibiscus. My mind dived down into two trunks, opened a drawer, and rummaged in a lace box. Years ago I had bought in Paris a handful of laburnum, not because I could ever wear it, not because I approve of anything but real flowers in a room ; but because it was so lovely and so wonderful and so truly laburnum that I couldn't resist it. In the drawer were two little octagonal candleshades of fluted yellow with a tiny bunch of crimson chintz roses on each : and in the lace box a long piece of Cluny, waiting for a middle. Miss X. found it one of pale primrose satin and I set to work. At lunch William came in. I showed him the shades and said I wished I could put the glass
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candlesticks on the table, but felt it wouldn't be much use unless they were lighted. He said quite airily, " That's easy enough, wait till five o'clock," and I waited, and in the meantime got the table ready.
He came in at five, and tinkered and hammered and fitted on nozzles and carried wires, and suddenly after many refusals the light blazed out under the candle- shades. Then we all washed our faces, put on wedding garments, and sat on the bit of the verandah that wasn't being taken up by the table, to await the guests.
They were as usual, Morrison and Harvey and Marceau and Schuyler. And they came all spotless in beautiful white linen from head to foot, wearing coats, which is the true sign and seal of a dinner party here of the more serious kind. As for Miss X. and me, if we had had some feathers in our hair and a long- enough tail we could have gone to court exactly as we were. She wore pearls in her ears and I wore coral drops in mine, and I brushed up my lovely bit of old Spanish paste till it blazed, and hung it in the lace of me, and altogether William had cause to be proud of his house that day.
When the guests were assembled, an Ethiopian garbed in white appeared bearing a salver of cock- tails ; Marceau's Kelly, borrowed for the evening to leave Dora free in the kitchen. And when the cock- tail had entered into the heart of man — it is the heart that the cocktail enters into chiefly — we rose and took our seats at the board. Then was the top light 226
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extinguished and then did my chief of works show forth in all its beauty. On the lace-edged primrose strip a glass bowl of plumy golden laburnum stood between the glass candlesticks, a tawny golden glow from the yellow shades suffused the primrose and lighted up the little gilded glass dishes of olives and almonds. And final touch, every man was bidden to his place by a name card on which blossomed a big yellow rose : a lucky find when I was himting for the laburnum, and most certainly placed in my way by a providence that sometimes rewards virtuous ladies for desiring to live cheerfully and make the best of things not always too good.
Perhaps it wasn't quite the Embankment or quite the Savoy, but it wasn't bad. There were the yellow candle shades and the verandah overlooking the coconut palms and showing no more of the dump than its electric lights, like fireflies in a void. And what about this for a superb effort of the bush ? —
Martini Cocktails Cavair
Potage points d'asperges
Dinde des Etats Unis
Pomines de terre rotis
Petits pois
Trifle Ananas f rapp6e
Caf^ noir
Pousse caf^ Spanish olives Salted Ebo nuts
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And the last two bottles of Heidsieck left of the case : a big and a little, and never — one feels — either in this time or place, to be renewed. I do think we may be said to be of an ingenuity and resourcefulness not too despicable.
A sequel to the dinner happened the night after. William has said all along that the love of Honduras for his amigo the turkey, would not prevent him eating some portion of it if it were offered him. I did not think so. I believed that I was right in my feeling that his passion was real and that he would be af- fronted by such an offer. On the morning of the execution a stranger was hired to do the deed, and to save the feelings of Honduras, the turkey was hung in the wash house where it wouldn't be seen unless you went to look for it. Up to the last I am sure that Honduras was expecting a reprieve. When I went out on to the stoop I saw him standing in the yard holding something in his hand and regarding it with a look of stupefaction on his face. He had just emptied the rubbish tin.
" What is dat ? " he said still staring at it.
It was the turkey's bloody head.
I watched him till he spoke again.
" Who kill Tahm ? " he asked stupidly, getting no reply, and requiring none, for he was too wrapt in the sight to have heard it if any had been given.
'* Tahm dead," he said again to himself.
Then he went slowly away carrying the head with 228
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him, and soon after I heard him digging. He was burying it deep, to hide it from the manraudings of impious pups.
Later on, the evening of the dinner, he came to William.
" Baas," he said laboriously, " you naht give de Tahm bones to de dargs."
" All right," said William. " Do you want to eat 'em yourself, Honduras ? "
" No, Baas, I keep dem all together and bury dem."
William laughed. " I don't believe it," he said ; " you'll eat 'em when no one's looking."
" No, Bass," said Honduras patiently. " I no eat Tahm."
The next night after he had completed his arduous duties of shutting up the chicken coop, and the dusk was falling, I in the house heard a noise I had never heard before ; a repetition of three or four notes mourn- ful, plaintive, insistent. I opened the jalousie of one of the back rooms to find out where it was coming from, and saw William standing in the middle of the yard watching. He beckoned.
" Come here," he whispered, and I shut the jalousie and went out as quietly as I could.
Down on the steep side of the hill below the kitchen, the dusk almost obscuring him, the coconut palms rustling faintly over his head in the night breeze, sat Honduras, piping softly on a tin whistle. William and I, unknown to him, crept closer.
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At his feet was a deep hole newly dug. And in it lay a little heap of something covered over with hibiscus blooms. It was the last of the Tahm.
And this morning what do you think I saw ? The fat Miss Duchess pup stravaiging about on the lawn in the early hours when the dew was still sparkling on the grass. Racing, jumping, chasing, darting forward and doubling back, tossing high in the air one of the many toys that she is always finding for herself and bringing so proudly and joyously on to the front steps ; a shoe, an old cod-fish tail once from Dora's private cupboard, and more permanent than any of the later importations, a sheep's head that gets lost for weeks at a time but never fails to come back at such moments as governors of provinces with their entourage and other persons of high lineage may honour the hill with their presence.
This time it was none of those. I opened the door and called to the Mock Turtle ; she paused in her play, and in that moment her plaything lay revealed. Our old friend the Tahm head.
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XVIII
The House on the Hill, AprU, 1915.
We have been having trouble with the staff, and changes. Dora, after being away several times with fever, came back and was no sooner in training again than she developed an affliction, extremely homely, extremely biblical, and extremely painful : namely ; a boil. By a searching through, not of the Scriptures, but of the medical dictionary, I learnt that these plagues generally took the form of a sequence of three. Dora, who in matters of distressfulness denies herself nothing, had the whole three, and then with true Jamaican fervour, looked round for a reason for her sorrows. As usual it was, " De Lard am angry with me for having a bastard child," rocking herself in misery. I told her not to be stupid. That it was a nice little bastard and she'd be very sorry to lose it. Then she laughed. A happy look stole into her eyes as she thought of it, and she transferred her boils to another of her misdemeanours. She adores the pickney, a funny little scrap as they all are when they are young ; quite spoilt and in great need of some salutary spankings.
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At the beginning of the second of the sequence Providence sent a long-legged, quiet -voiced creature up, asking for work, which we gave her then and there, and to which she responded with an industry and adaptability very seldom found in these parts. When the third made its appearance, and Dora collapsed again, an extraordinary coincidence brought Elizabeth wandering up on the chance of our having something more for her to do. With difficulty we restrained ourselves from kissing her and told her, as unemo- tionally as the circumstances allowed, that she would find the kitchen in the same place.
About the time that Dora was taken with her first, Honduras grew so insufferably lazy and was drunk with such unfailing regularity that I finally sent him off and told him he was not to come back again. I put off the dismissal as long as possible, because, lazy as he was, he had grown to be part of the place. And also others would not amuse me as he did. But still in times like these one may not indulge in a court jester unless he does something for his salary in between the jokes. Honduras' wages remained the same, but he had reduced his activities to such a minimum that he even ceased shutting the door of the chicken coop with any certainty at all. As that was the only thing he did in the evening, I do not think I could be called exacting when I expected it not to be forgotten. Particularly, when the neglect of such task, not in itself an op- pressive one, means that forty raucous- voiced birds 232
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of different sexes all with a damnable flair for self- advertisement and, among the males, an overwhelming pride in their prowess, surround the house from day- break to sunset, and make the air hideous with their boastings. One more occasion on which the chicken coop should be left open and Honduras should go for ever. The occasion arrived in due time, and Hon- duras went. If you could have found a more sur- prised nigger than Honduras was at the moment of going I would like to have seen him.
Just about this time I was out walking with William before dinner. As we passed Tulley's, a big black buccaneer was suddenly hurled off the porch and landed in the mud an inch or two away from us. He picked himself up, swearing horribly and vowing vengeance on- his enemies. There was a great to do, Tulley blowing his little police whistle furiously and puffing out his thin, consumptive cheeks until they looked almost healthy. No policeman came, and after many mutterings the nigger brushed himself and flung off.
"It's Morgan," said William. "J. P. He's always drunk and they're always throwing him out of somewhere."
Two evenings after, William said, " I've had a visit from Morgan and he's coming up to see you."
I asked why.
" He's heard you want a gardener, and he says he's coming to offer himself. He thinks the man
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you've had "working is not a fit and proper man to be about the place. That you are an English lady and English ladies are not used to dealing with such creatures as Honduras. He was gardener for Plough- man in New Orleans and he knows all about it." William repeated it dutifully.
We didn't want a gardener half as badly as we wanted a " come around " man, but still we might use him as that first and let him garden after. With a sinking at my heart I told William to send him up.
He came, rocking a little as he mounted the hill. Then he pulled up at the steps that led to the verandah and stood holding on to the post. I went to the door and spoke to him through the screening.
" Yes, what is it ? "
Morgan tugged his moustaches until they stuck out with their own ferocity. For all the buccaneerishness of him he seemed to need some moral support. He was getting it as so many men do, from his moustaches. He had heard I wanted a gardener, and he was a good one. He had — and so on, and so on. ... I listened, looking at him hard as he talked. When he had finished, I said, without moving my eyes from his face —
" Yes, Morgan, that is all very well, but I was going past Tulley's the other night when you were thrown out. What have you to say about it ? "
There was a slight collapse in the bulky frame of Mr. Morgan, but he righted himself quickly.
" Yes, Mistress, I know dat happen sometimes, but 234
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wat a man to do when dese contentious people trubble him ? He got to say something."
" Perhaps, but I hear you get drunk very often, and I won't have a man who does that on the hill."
Morgan stiffened himself up, reared his head proudly, and made what looked to be a necessary grab at the post. The eyes that he turned on me were filled with a pained surprise.
" No, Mistress," he said, " dat not true, not true, indeed."
" I am glad to hear it," I said, and asking no more than that he might stay sober long enough for us to find some one more reliable, I took him.
Poor Morgan ! He thought he was going to spend the whole of his day every day in pursuance of his art. When he found that there really were other duties as well, he grew very depressed. He was going to make a garden. Yes, but first the shoes must be cleaned, the errands done, and twice a week the verandah polished. As soon as he could escape, he did, slashing and dashing away at the long grass with his machete. There were to be beds here and beds there. I knew there could be no garden until all the hill was dug and tons of new earth were laid upon the barren ground. Still there was no harm in cutting the grass, and that would keep him going some time. Morgan went each morning about his early tasks dispiritedly, drawing his only comfort from a pipe so appalling that, for all our sakes, I had to
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interfere. I did it reluctantly, feeling that any one who could hold such a thing between his teeth must have for it an inordinate and surpassing love. And I do not like interfering with inordinate and surpassing loves.
One morning I called to him from the verandah, compelled to it by the sufferings of an anguished nose.
" Morgan."
" Yes, Mistress."
" You'll either have to stop smoking or get a new pipe. I can't stand that one any longer."
Through the balustrading of the verandah I saw him look up stupefied, pull the pipe out of his mouth, gaze at it, and then slowly put it in his pocket. I felt as Herod ought to have felt when he killed the babies. Morgan went on with his work with a bowed head ; and the thought of the pain I had caused made me unable to concentrate decently for the rest of the morning.
All this while the battle between him and Honduras was being waged fiercely. Honduras having grown to believe the hill his own, was three times furious. First because he had been dismissed, second because he had been superseded, and third because Morgan was the man who had superseded him. In his deter- mination to make Morgan appear worse, he got up early, was always to be seen in a state of waiting activity round about the store, and not only did he begin to dress himself with care and precision but he 236
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seemed to have given up drinking altogether. Every time he could invent an excuse for coming on to the hill he did, and when he came he was all the angels of meekness, sobriety, and gentleness. On his way back he would twit Morgan. Then he would call in upon William.
" Baas ? "
" Well ? "
" Dat said Morgan, he a low fellah. It naht good he work arn de hill."
" No ? "
" No, Baas. It naht right for de Mistress to have such fellah around."
" No ? " says William, undisturbed.
" No, Baas," says Honduras, shaking his head and walking away, content with having sown the seed.
Then he tried me. Under the verandah, where I always work in the morning, he came and stood meekly, reverently, unobtrusively, waiting till I should notice him there.
" Yes, Honduras. What is it ? "
" Mistress."
" Well ? "
" You like me to do de floor for you dis morning ? "
I look at him through the screening, answering aloofly and with surprise—
" No, thank you. Why should you do the floor ? Morgan is working here now."
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" Yes, Mistress." Then the grass rustles, and he is gone.
Next day no Morgan. WiUiam says he is pro- bably in jail, and sends up Tom, the gentle sarsaparilla baler and ex-Lochinvar. He lasts four days, then he ceases. He has upset a cargo of merchandise out of the skiff and refuses to go in after the things because he will get his feet wet. William, in a paroxysm of righteous anger, beats him and turns him out. And so we lose our " come around " man, and he his sar- saparilla baler. Honduras, ever watchful, is on the spot, rescues the merchandise and is a tower of strength in a moment of need.
William comes up that evening and says —
" You know, Betty, he seems to have turned over a new leaf. He hasn't been drunk since you sent him away, and I think he misses the hill very much."
There is a conference. It is decided. He shall be given another chance. Next morning he comes to the verandah, the same meek Lord-do-with-me-what- Thou-wilst look upon his face.
" Well, Honduras, do you want to come back again ? "
He does not alter his expression. The knowledge that his is the victory does not for one fraction of a second get into a feature of his face.
" Yes, Mistress."
" You understand that if you come back you come back to do as we please, and not as you please ? That 238
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you arrive at the proper time in the morning and the evening, and that you do what you are given to do without grumbling ? "
" Yes, Mistress."
" Well, get to work."
For exactly two days he was irreproachable. Then began again his feud with Dora. That was the beginning of the rot. To quarrel with her has always been the one thing that he has done with any degree of regularity and might. There have been few days when the battle has not raged furiously at some hour. There have been some, certainly, when one might imagine a truce had been made ; but those were merely the days of exhaustion ; the days when they were recoiling to jimap better. On one of those days I heard Honduras deliver himself to Miss X. upon the subject of the female. He was mopping the verandah outside the box-room. Miss X. was putting away the linen.
" Dat Dor-ah," he said reflectively, and apparently without any anger, " she very ignorant. I don't know if you ever notice it, Marm."
Getting no answer, he went on with his mopping contentedly. Dora had heard, he knew, by the excited gabbling that had suddenly begun in the kitchen and was wafting itself across the stoop. It was all he wanted.
At the beginning of the third day he came late. On the evening of the third day he came later. Next
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day the chicken coop was left unlocked. That even- ing I wanted the grass cut. He grumbled. The next, he left his machete behind. For three days I stood over him while he cut. On the fourth he crawled up the hill with a drawn face and said he was sick, recounting the nature of his diseases with such vivid and relentless detail that I fled before he had finished. For a week of days I watched him hopping agilely about the dump when he thought he was unobserved and changing his gear adroitly as he came up the hill. Holding myself in check, I inquire how much longer he expected to be ill.
" It take seven to nine days, Marm."
I waited a full ten, and then I descended. Where was his machete ?
He no bring it.
Why not ?
He leave it in his room.
Why?
He forget it, Marm.
Very well, there was a machete in the box-room. He might use that. A bowing to the immediate inevitable and a small patch of hill laid bare ; I work- ing all the while upon the shaven parts with a lawn mower and keeping a hawk eye on him, in the long grass. The next night he comes without the machete again and I send him back for it. While he is away I go out on to the stoop and see one of his morning tasks still undone. I point it out to Dora, tell her to 240
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show it him when he comes back, and go into my bed- room to get ready for my walk. He comes back while I am there, and Dora tells him, quite decently.
She does not get to the end of a sentence, before, like a fiend let loose, he turns and rends her. And he does not get to the end of many of his before I have flung open the shutters and am overpowering him with a superior invective. I believe, Phillipa, that I, who used to have a sick headache every time a char- woman spoke crossly to me, could now hold my own with any twenty Billingsgaters you care to name. I have listened to William and watched his results, and I know now that his is the only way. And despera- tion has given me strength. I do not use the words he uses, but if I only said cat, dog, mouse, my way over and over again it would be almost as good. I raved and raged and stormed. If he lifted his head or his voice the least fraction of an atom during the second it took me to refill my lungs, I got him again with such fury that you could almost see him duck before it. All the bother of things undone and things to he done, all the heat and the mosquitoes and the sandflies and the worry of food to be found for three meals a day ; and the niggers that can work and won't, and the laziness, the slackness, the indifference ; all the bouts of fever one has had, the humours of the blood, the monotony, the ugliness ; they came together in my brain and made a broth in which I stewed that son of Ham.
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And once when he paused in his flight from the hill and turned as if about to come back I also turned, on my way to the drawer of the dressing-table where William's revolver is kept. I am frightened out of my wits of it. I am even afraid of the drawer where it lies. But I was wrought up to such a pitch by that black shirker and his ways, that if he had defied me, the pistol would have held no more terrors for me than a garden hose. Whether he felt that in his bones, I don't know ; but he turned again and went down the hill very slowly but quite surely. The same evening he returned with some message. He was sent away. Two days later he was up again. Oil for his lamp. He must go somewhere else for his oil. A few days after that, Joe, who is the present " come around " man, called during siesta time. The nature of his visit was inquired into. Honduras had sent him to pick some peppers to cook with his stew. Joe received a very definite impression that there were no peppers nor any kind of perquisites for Honduras since he had been sent from the hill, and that the house was sacred at siesta time if at no other.
Yesterday Miss X. was approached by Joe, who bore petition from Honduras to her. He would like some old papers. Miss X. may please herself what she does with her papers, but the papers of the house are the reward of industry, and go to those who are labouring on the hill. Honduras is beginning to feel the pinch. The dollars he made were not all. There 242
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were the peppers for the stew and the dildo leaves for balm when you are sick, and some nice ripe bananas now and then and coffee in the marnin', and picture papers, all for good little nigs who do not shirk too often and who are willing to keep up to a certain standard of inefficiency, with a certain minimum of slackness.
Down on the dump Honduras had begun qualify- ing again. He has stopped drinking, wears clean clothes, and drops in every now and then to tell William what a no count fellah dat Joe is.
And Morgan. When he went to William to collect for his brief service on the hill he explained the situation to Archibald outside the store, William hearing it all from the inside. The mistress ? he shook his head. She not qualified much as a gardener. And she want him to do without his pipe and his seco. How could he do without his pipe and his seco? One thing mystified him. The mistress, she say him lazy. Now, how she know dat ?
I met him one evening. He had a large broad- brimmed felt hat on, very battered, and three coats, the top one a long-tailed broadcloth that hung in ribbons and showed the other two through it. He was carrying two dinner pails, one in each hand, and he was very drunk. When he saw me, he stopped zig-zagging along the path, and, dropping his dinner pails, pulled himself up very straight. Then he took off his wide-awake and made a low sweeping
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bow with it, nearly upsetting himself among the pails.
" Good evening, Mistress."
" Good evening, Morgan."
He stood rocking dangerously and looking very solemn.
" Mistress, I very sorry not to come back, but my sister very ill. When she better I come back."
" No, I think not."
" No, Mistress, why not ? " The surprise in his eyes said, " Here is your good abstemious, faithful henchman hanging on your bidding, waiting upon your lightest wish, and you will not any of him. With this woman what can be the matter ? '!
" I don't think I'll tell you this evening. Good night, Morgan."
He saluted.
" Good night, Mistress." Then he stooped warily for the pails and zig-zagged away in the dusk. Always the gentleman, Mr. Morgan, even when twice submerged.
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XIX
Tlie House on the Hill, May, 1915.
Another letter from you has come. It brings things a little closer, but even then they are vague and shadowy. We are so set aside here, so pushed away in a corner. We get no sight or sound of anything except in the papers or through the sheet of con- tradictions that is issued every day from the wireless station, and we can rely on nothing. The war grows at times to seem no more than a game of chess : hideous and awful when one can grasp it or visualize it, and just monotonous when the imagination fails.
We do not suffer through it as you are doing. We may go to bed at night without the thought of Zeppelins overhead, and the fear of coastal raids does not trouble us. But we are in the backwash of it badly. A little settlement such as this is instantaneously affected by the condition of the rest of the world. It is one industry, and if that industry is disabled the whole community collapses.
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Business still goes on, but it is a sorry state of things compared with what used to be. That it continues at all seems rather wonderful in the face of things. William is not used to adversity, and removed from the sight of troubles beside which ours must appear to be nothing, he has not acquired a philosophy which would make him feel rich with three meals a day and a roof over his head.
One hears of the war and feels there is nothing to compare with it, but the shoe that is on the foot is the one that pinches. There is a dreadful inferno raging somewhere, and up to a certain point the story horrifies. But beyond that point the imagina- tion ceases to work. In our midst stores are closing, houses are empty, men are going away, and how to keep things together is the urge of the moment. And although the American can hold on, he can't hold on gaily ; for this reason. If anything goes wrong with his business the bottom is out of his universe. He has not taught himself the value of play, and so he has nothing to lay off on, nothing to relieve the pressure of his brain or stiffen up his courage for the next day. He shuts the door upon his affairs in time to bring an over-wrought nervous system to the eating of his food, he goes badly nourished to bed, with his brain seething ; and gets up with no thought in his mind but to hurry back to the trouble as quickly as possible. If things are good, the effect is just as bad in another way. He loses all care, all appetite, 246
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all enjoyment for any but one pleasure, and if you take his drug away from him for ever so short a time, he ceases for that time to exist ; or at any rate, he exists so unhappily that it seems better to let him have his drug back and be happy again. It is going to make some more very rich men, but it isn't going to make a nation.
In an English camp of this size there would, by this time, have been at least a tennis-court beaten out of the mud or the coral. The dump itself is no more than a year old, but the spit is four, and there have been for nearly two years now seven or eight white women needing, one would think, some relief from the monotony.
But the American man of this world does not think for his women-kind very much. And whether as a result of this, or because she in herself isn't interested in anything, I don't know, but there is little spirit of fraternity among the women here. As for the unmarried men, they, a few of them, play bridge or poker occasionally, but their chief pleasure seems to lie in drinking round the bars of the town and exalting for periods short or long, the coloured ladies above their wash-tubs. We keep open house, and certainly there is nothing very rigid about our forms of enjoy- ment. To read, to discuss what is going on, comes as a matter of course, but that is not all. A gramo- phone with rag-time for dancing, roulette, and ping- pong, are not high above the tastes of the ordinary
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person. Yet I always feel that any pleasure we could offer would have no chance against the superior attractions of Solomon Wing's back room and the shanty over the way that calls itself the Little Wonder Bar.
Such a world does not supply all one's needs. And on extra hot days, when the sandflies are more than usually bad, and the mud that is pouring out of the sandpump into the swamp and driving the mosquitoes up on to the hill lets loose its infernal gases and makes the air almost unbreathable, I feel as if I would put my fingers in my ears and run till I couldn't run any longer. Anything to get away. And the knowledge that there is nowhere to run, that there is no road that leads anywhere, and that to run would mean to get deeper into all the things one was running from, does not help to make things as they are more bearable.
Looking back to less than a year ago, it seems impossible to believe that this is the same world. The horror of things that have been, the horror of things that have still to be ; the shames, the miseries, the torments ; the devils of lust and fury that are trampling a universe to death and destruction ; there surely can't be any worse hell than is loosened now. And so short a time ago it was a world, orderly, habitable ; of seed-time and harvest : of industry, apparently of reciprocity, and of tolerance. We were buying and selling, eating, drinking, and making merry together ; living and letting live. We threw open the doors of 248
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our countries to each other, we made holiday in one another's mountains, we passed to and fro without
harm. And now
Out here, with nothing to take one's mind off it, one has got to stop thinking when the thought of the future grows too overwhelming. Whatever happens, for those who remain there is a future, and whatever it brings with it, we have got to meet it decently. The trouble with many of us is that, too early, we are trained to keep our eyes too far ahead ; to think more of the life to come than of the life that is. I have to make for myself the exercise of keeping fairly within the bounds of to-day ; and when I can get myself to that I know to-morrow will be all the better for it. In a place like this, where to-day means heat and monotony and lazy niggers and sandflies and abeyance of all the big interests as well as most of the small ones, it is difficult to make to-day seem a desirable thing, but relentlessly one has to tell oneself that it's a poor workman who quarrels with his tools. But I tell you there ain't much to it in the way of stay and support, Phillipa. There's something majestic and heroic and epoch-making in arming yourself against a formidable foe, but to be fretted and stung unceasingly by a lot of durned little midges no bigger than a speck of dust, to have them at you day and night both, and to feel them gnawing at the very nerve threads of you ; that isn't a warfare of any honour or one that fills you with
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the joy of overcoming. And a bout or two of fever on the top of it with your thermometer at 103 and 104 is apt to reduce your powers of resistance pretty considerably. When we are good and cheerful and brave and strong here it means we are very good and cheerful and brave and strong. William doesn't count, for he would rather have it than the most interesting, insectless, and unmalarial place you could find for him anywhere else on earth.
It's a bad workman who quarrels with his tools, but one could never be counted out for quarrelling with his sandflies. As I write to you the surfaces of my skin are a-quiver with irritation from an accumulation of days and nights of persecution. To protect myself against the invisible armies that are floating round me now I am wrapped up as if I were making the channel crossing on a chilly day, except that it is a sheet and not a rug that girds me round. I have silk stockings on my arms pulled over my hands like mittens, and still they are getting at me. One might well believe they are the souls of the lost come back to torture as they are tortured. I have just given three of them a lift into another world. If it does them any good it will be something accomplished, but it certainly hasn't done me any. They are as the sands of the sea in number and of an indestructible perseverance. I shall some day ask to see one under a microscope, for how such an infinitesimal thing has power to inflict such an amount 250
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of misery, I cannot make out. Where does it keep its apparatus ?
A letter came in the same mail that fills me with self-abasement. Not for itself, for I have not yet had time to err over this one so far, but as a reminder of sins of omission already committed ; and benefits, not forgot, but put aside in a busy moment for the sake of greater attention afterwards, and still, for want of both the mood and the moment together, unacknowledged. I don't suppose there is any writer who could be unpleased with letters that tell him how he has stirred or touched or interested some human being whom he has never seen or heard of. If it were only that it flattered one's vanity, one would have to be grateful to the flatterer. But sometimes it is very much more than that. One learns quickly to differentiate between the autograph hunter and the rest. Autograph-hunters are usually very young girls who write in a large or small round hand and enclose a penny stamp. Those have generally had from me a quick reply for two reasons : I know exactly the satisfaction and sometimes the thrill that will come with the response, for I haven't yet forgotten what it was to be a youngster myself; and also I am hung up with the penny stamp. To have a penny stamp thrust upon you in such a way might be an injustice against which you would have the right to revolt, but to remain in possession of the penny stamp
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would cause you to carry about within you the dreadful feeling that you had stolen the canary's seed. For your own self-respect you would have to get rid of it somehow, and if you had to do that there could be only one way.
So the misses were answered while those to whom one's eternal gratitude was due were put in a box. And the place where the box stands is now to me like a wheelbarrow in the road is to a nervous horse. My eye begins to roll directly I come within sight of it. I am all on edge with the discomfort of remorse and self-flagellation it stirs within me. There are still some letters that may be answered — but others — I am afraid not. One is from Mexico, and where are the white people in Mexico now ? One from Egypt, and another from a hotel in London — a visitor passing. By the time the letter got to me he might have been gone many weeks and by the time I could reply, months.
It is not always slackness that makes me put off the doing of what in itself would be a pleasure. The letters come perhaps when I am in the middle of a piece of work. I have seen it said somewhere that Mrs. Lynn Lynton never wrote better than when the little Lynn Lyntons were pressing round her chair. If that was so, she was much favoured above other writers. As for me, I would like a sound-proof box quite empty but for a chair and table, to have music at any moment I needed it, three excellent 252
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and unthought-of meals a day, and some one to dance with every night for exercise. Under those con- ditions, I think I could write a very good book.
There is talk of a road to be cut through the mountains which would connect us on the Atlantic in a roundabout way with the Pacific. It may be that William will have to go next week to Panama City on account of it. The thought of such a road fills us all with an ineffable hope and longing. If it were so it would open up a lovely country and make it possible for us to get into a climate as fresh and beautiful as an English spring. At a distance of no more than forty miles and at an elevation of six thousand feet, we could get away from the heat and the insects to the cool and the quiet of the mountain-tops. William talks of a cottage there, where we could grow vegetables and have cows and a garden with real flowers. We would keep this for a town house and go there to recuperate. It sounds too good to be possible.
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XX
The House on the Hill, May, 1915.
It never does to congratulate oneself on anything. Seeking consolation a little while ago for the lack of a flower-garden, I picked out some of the finest coconut- trees and fixed my eyes in gratitude upon them. Any- how we had those, and they were growing finer all the time. And when all the roofs were red and all the walls were white and all the shutters green, we would look very desirable indeed perched up on our little lump of clay, sheltered among our coconut palms and with the wooded limits of the town for a back- ground.
There suddenly came news. A cloud of locusts seven miles long, five miles wide, and one mile deep (I am not quite sure about the figures) was sweeping over Costa Rica clearing up everything as it went. In so many days it would be here. Its progress was reported daily and almost hourly. Travelling steadily it reached the Sixaola River thirty miles away. Then to the relief of all, yet the disappointed curiosity of those who had never seen one, it was said to have turned back. After that the interest died down and we forgot about it. 254
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One afternoon when I was busy tidying out a chest of drawers I heard Miss X. caUing excitedly — " The locusts," she said ; " they've come ! " I ran out on to the verandah. Overhead, around, as far as we could see, the air was full of what looked like brown snow, whirling, scattering, flying as snow- flakes fly when a high wind is blowing ; and the noise of their wings was like the rustling of dry leaves in a storm. On and on they came in their millions, not in the solid block we had heard of, but scattered like snow-flakes, and at last settling as the snow settles until not a thing in the garden could be seen but this brown veil. We heard too late the way of fighting them. In countries where these scourges come often, the whole populace go to meet it, marching out beating tin cans and whatever else they can make a noise with. If we had known it earlier we might have saved our coconut-trees. And now a fortnight later they are still here. And our hill is stripped, stripped bare and stark. The grass lawn I was making with so much difficulty and such enduring patience, is brown and rusty where it is not pure clay. The little orange trees have not only lost their leaves, but the bark is eaten too. And the lovely coconuts, my one hope and consolation, stretch up gaunt, tattered arms to the sky. They have been four years growing for this ! I shall begin to feel like Dora soon. Wat am de Lard crass wid me for dis time ?
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William has a macaw for a friend down in his office. Vicente, the old native, who is coming to clean the hill when he is sober enough, brought it up one morning during a lucid interval. They are gorgeous birds, but destructive, and with voices like a police- man's rattle and an unoiled saw-mill combined. We have quite enough noises on the hill already. I declined it with many thanks, and Vicente took it down to William.
William, who unites the instincts of a magpie and the proprietor of a junk-shop with a sincere love of birds and beasts, never can let anything like that pass him. He gave Vicente five silver dollars for it, nailed up some half-dozen perches, and now Jose is his close friend and sleeps at night on terms of great amiability with Duke in the warehouse.
He's a funny old bird ; old, old, older than the hills by the look of him, but they all look like that. He is a green macaw, not so beautiful as the red ones, but supposed to be capable of speech, which the red and blue ones are not. William has high hopes of him as a linguist, but does not worry him yet with much English, for Spanish is his native tongue. The other morning he came up to breakfast to tell us of the wonderful doings of Jose.
" I'm sure he'll be able to talk soon," said William, his eyes shining. " He was up in the balsa tree outside the door when I wanted to shut up, and I called him. I said ' Venga, Jose ! ' and what do you think he did ? '! 256
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" What ? " we asked breathlessly.
" He said ' Quawk ! ' " said William proudly.
We listened respectfully. It was a beginning, it's true, and no one would want to damp William's pleasure, but we didn't feel there was any immediate necessity for us to improve our vocabulary to keep up with the bird.
William reported again next morning.
" He knows me like anything," he announced. " As I was turning to come out of the door he said, * Quawk, Quawk ! ' "
" Fancy," I said, " that's the same thing he told you the other day." I sat pondering over the sagacity of the creature, and William went on with a sudden interest in his grape fruit.
This morning at breakfast, I asked if there was any news.
" What news ? " said William, rather surprised.
" Has Jos6 told you anything more ? "
" Stop it," said William.
June, 1915.
Another letter from you. It is terrible, but what a wonderful world ! And to think that only a little while ago people were shaking their heads over things as they seemed to be and bemoaning the disappearance of the stouter virtues. The men were growing soft, the women hard. And now this comes. The lie couldn't be given more magnificently. But the cost of
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it ! When one thinks, not of the dead, but of those to whom the dead belong, and of those who have not died but who remain to make the best of their Hves with shattered bodies and shattered nerves, it seems an insult to speak of a philosophy that will help us knit what is left of the world together and make of it something of value and of beauty. Before the parents mourning their sons, before the sons bereft of their powers, before the childless, husbandless women for whom the world must seem to have ended, one stands silent, not even daring to raise the eyes. But a way has got to be found for us to reconstruct, and not only to reconstruct, but to reconstruct greatly and with a new zest. Looking forward, I, who, so far, have lost no one, and to whom the grief of the war is a cosmic and not an individual thing, feel my heart fail me at the thought of what the future holds. The chaos, the confusion, the piecing together of a universe torn and ravelled to shreds, of nations impoverished and depleted, of lands laid waste. And of women unmated, fending for themselves, and unfitted for the struggle. Sometimes here in the monotony of things the thought takes me and works and works within me till I feel as if I had got lost over the edge of the world. There is not the everyday excitement of things happening to blur the intensity of things visualized. Then I pull myself back. To look forward at all is wrong when it leads to fear. And that is why more often than not since the war 258
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I have written to you of trivial things that are going on around us rather than of the stupendous things that are happening elsewhere. I cannot help the future by opening the door and peering in till I frighten myself. I may be able to help it by looking into it, closing the door resolutely, and seeing forward no further than to-day, hoping that if my time should come to do, I should not be wanting. To train oneself not to look at things is, for some of us, wiser and more necessary than to do the other thing.
If anything could fling us on to 6ur feet again, breast forward, it is the thought of the deeds that are being done to-day, every day, and every minute of the day. When I was a youngster at school I learnt, like the little parrot I was, something that was commonly called a " piece." There was one, I remember, that stuck in my head, not because I was deeply stirred by it then, even though a certain pictorial quality of some of the verses captured me, but because I had to learn it hard to learn it at all. It comes back to me now, but differently —
" Whene'er a noble deed is wrought. Whene'er is spoke a noble thought. Our hearts in glad surprise To higher levels rise."
Not the war but the splendours it has revealed make one lift up one's head. One is ashamed of one's doubts, of one's forgetfulness of the beauties that
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are always for us if we could only keep our vision right. And ashamed not to sadness but to gladness. It is as if a mighty rushing wind were sweeping the world clean.
There are two pictures that come to my eyes as I write. And the remembrance of them gives to me the same feeling that I get with the smell of a garden and the sound of martial music. The first is of two men, officers wounded in the Boer War, one with his arms blown off and the other with his eyes shot out. Returned home, made well, they took up their life quite cheerfully, and next summer saw them at their old sport again together, a fishing-rod between them ; the one with the arms holding the rod, the one with the eyes telling him where to cast. It's a great game, life, when it's played so. Such men as that don't need help, they give it.
And the other also after the Boer War. A man I know was walking along Piccadilly and looking for a hansom. One pulled up opportunely at the curb near by. He waited while the man who was in got out. He was close enough to see him take out his fare from a vest-pocket and hand it to the cabman. The cabman looked at the coin, then at the retreating figure of the man, then at the coin again, and at last with a smile put it in his pocket. The coin was a penny.
My man paused on the step of the cab watching the face of the cabman : and the cabman explained. 260
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" It's orl right, sir, 'es mide a mistake. I bring 'im every dy to 'is club. 'Es blind, lorst 'is eyes in the war, an' 'is wife puts 'arf-crowns into one pocket for 'is fare an' pennies into the other for 'is pipers. I couldn't werry well tell 'im, could I ? Were to, sir ? "
When one thinks of war one sees it as myriads of men in uniform trained to nothing else but warfare and acting according to orders. To the ordinary outsider like me it appears to be a vast kaleidoscopic design of men and machines moved geometrically by invisible hands. That is, until some small and human thing brings it home to one. Nothing has made the war seem as real to me as the thought of the hall- porter at the club in the trenches : and at the same time nothing seems so absurd and so incongruous. I think of him as I remember him for the last eight years, a dark, slender Frenchman, quiet, unassuming, much better looking than most of the visitors who came inside the doors, with a courteous manner that never held the least trace of obsequiousness in it ; a little worried with the nursery of pages it was his work to lick into shape ; very much beset by, but always ready for, the scores of ladies who besieged his office windows to ask which bus went where or what the postage was to Honolulu, and how much you could send for that : not very strong, and with a family of four growing Bertins to be fed and placed in th« world ; in appearance more the master than
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the equal at the servants' ball to which he took every year the pretty daughter who was doing so well at Harrod's. And suddenly this quiet man, who every now and then has had to leave his post on account of illness, is called to his place in the trenches. I have written home several times to find out if he is still alive or if it is known what has happened to him, but I have never heard. He is only one of thousands of the same kind, but I know him and I don't know the others. The club when Bert in went for his holidays was never quite the same thing, and one always felt a certain comfort the day one went in and found him in his accustomed place. Please God he may come back in safety when the war is over. Being French he will have that much more chance than he would if he were English, that is, supposing, of course, he has been taken prisoner.
June, 1915.
I have been sitting this morning thinking over things that happened in a time so far back that it seems like an earlier incarnation. They say it is one of the signs of approaching senility to see very clearly those things that belonged to one's extreme youth. If that is so, I ought to have been sewing my shroud long ago. But I am not worrying. I am sure it is true that the beginning of life returns with extraordinary clearness towards the end of it. But also with some of us it is that the remembrance
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of one's childhood never goes, no matter what else may happen after. If you want very badly when you are a child, and don't get, the desires of you are 'bitten into the heart of you. Your mind is a clean little slate on which everything is written distinctly. Everything is an event. The buying of a pair of shoes, the opening day at school, the closing day, a new wall-paper, making jam, the cat having kittens.
There are certain things that will have the power to please me, I believe, to the end of my days : hymns, Swiss roll, Mrs. Henry Wood, the smell of a wax doll, and Love's old Sweet Song. What has made me think of it all this morning is a New York paper I was reading in which a subscriber asks if it is possible to get the works of Mrs. Henry Wood, and where. The question brought a flood of remembrance sweeping over me. I could tell him where he could have got some of them — once. In the drawing-room of that incarnation, on either side of the fireplace that stood at the end of it, there were two cupboards curtained with crimson damask, and over them, built into the wall, book-shelves that filled the alcoves up to the ceiling. If he would go to the left-hand cupboard, pull out the old horsehair armchair that blocked the way, and put his hand into the left-hand corner of the top shelf, he would find a pile of monthly maga- zines, yellow-backed and tattered, and tied up care- fully with stout string. And in these papers he
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would get the whole and complete story of Anne Hereford, with illustrations in each number. One of Anne driving out through the Hall-gates in an equipage — Mrs. Henry Wood's carriages were always that — drawn by prancing horses and boxed by powdered footmen in breeches and silk stockings. The ladies sat with the breeze fluttering the silken fringe of the little dome-shaped parasols, and their haughty shoulders pressed against the luxurious cushions of the equipage. I remember that picture well, and another of Selina the great lady, hiding in the woods with the knowledge of guilt in her heart.
That cupboard was a treasure hole full of unexpected things. There were Family Heralds, too, for which as an apology for reading them, grandmother's assurance that they were full of very useful information, one knew afterwards to be an excuse to her dear unmethodistic old heart. And an accordion with ivory keys, painted and inlaid with mother of pearl. The other cupboard, where you had to dodge the coal-scuttle instead of moving the chair, could not have been very interesting, for I remember nothing about it. But up on the shelves, again, there were more treasures. On the right side — ^the coal-scuttle side — ^were the Shakespeares, leather-covered, mostly full of pictures of strange people who wore strange clothes and talked a jargon bewildering and unnatural to my ears, and the pages were gritty with dust. No need to bother about 264
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them. I believe I am unable to read Shakespeare now because of the discomfort my fingers felt when they handled that first edition I ever saw.
Beside the Shakespeares, there were a hundred books, all equally unnoticeable. Paley's " Evidences," *' Advice to a Young Mechanic," " Young's Night Thoughts," Somebody's Sermons, in six volumes. And as an oasis in that desert " Enquire Within Upon Everything," a fascinating volume bound in blue imitation morocco and decorated with ferny golden squiggles that were very much in evidence in book-binding about 185-.
And the Argosies. The titles on the backs of other books told you what to avoid, the titles on these held you wondering. What was an Argosy ? I have heard since the original meaning of the word, but to me then, now and forever, an Argosy has but one meaning. It is a black cloth-covered book with curly gold lettering on the outside and nice smooth paper inside. The pictures were of ordinary people ; people who didn't say " prithee " or " marry " or " on't," but who talked as the grown-ups of one's own household talked, who wore the clothes one vowed passionately to wear when one became a grown-up oneself, and who did the things that in embryonic years one saw oneself doing in the years of power and majesty to be. And the whole of life lay between its boards. Life thrilling, dazzling, gay, sad, terrifying : life personal, domestic, eternal,
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above stairs, below stairs ; life according to the wonderful gospel of that indefatigable story-teller, Mrs. Henry Wood.
Looking back, from the point of view of making books oneself, upon the busy moving company of lords and ladies, ghosts, squires, murderers, young men, maidens, wenches, cottagers, schemers, intriguers, country doctors, lawyers, one marvels how in the first place she had the courage to call up such a multitude, and in the second, the vitality to see them through. For no matter how thickly she populates her stories, no one character is allowed to suffer that another may spread itself. If the lord of the manor does get most of the limelight, the little under-housemaid at the Hall is as much the little under-housemaid at the Hall as the lord is a lord, the lawyer is a lawyer, and the lady is a lady.
Into this enthralling company I stumbled. I had cried myself sick over " John Halifax Gentleman," " Old Transom," " Christy's Old Organ," and all those painful stories with which the heart of my generation was anguished. But here was something different. I wasn't asked to weep unless I wanted to. Life tremendous, palpitating, mysterious, was happening all around me. And I was seeing it without any one noticing I was there. By some extraordinary chance those of my own world left me alone. And in that other world they were far too interested in their own affairs to pay attention to the spell-bound shadow 266
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that was peering round the covers of a book at them. Possibly they didn't see me.
But I saw them, and they are my close friends to this day. Unheeded, I walked in the grounds of Pomeroy Abbey and saw Rupert meet Alice, wife of Guy-Lord-of-Pomeroy with the harelip ; Alice with the fringed parasol and the glamour of Rupert over her. Rupert careless of his brother's honour (what that meant I did not know, but it thrilled me with a sense of trouble to come) ; and Guy, who, because he had won his wife with a lie, must by all the laws and orders of the Pomeroy Curse, die.
*' When Pomeroy's heir goes forth to win. And Pomeroy's heir wins with » he. And something something, something, something. Then Pomeroy's heir must die."
I could quote better if I had not lost sight of the Argosies, or were nearer the place where publishers live and move and have their houses ; but no matter.
How about that for promise when in addition the horses bolt on the wedding-day, and Alice — ^with whom I went a month later to the cupboard where her things were hanging — finds her wedding-dress streaked with blood ? The tragedy comes and the ghost of Guy-Lord-of-Pomeroy haunts the keep and frightens the servants with his ghostliness and his harelip till well on to the end of the book. But it is not all tragedy. The weaver of these romances was too clever a woman to give you nothing but chains
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and dungeons. Life is not so, and she knew it. The sun shone, the children went to school, the priest shrived souls and laughed and ate beans and bacon for breakfast with as great a zest as Guy-Lord- of-Pomeroy terrorized the keep. Leolin, who is something at the Embassy, marries Anna, who wears a sprigged muslin and ties her hair enchantingly with a lavender ribbon ; and one gets a hint of tragedy again, for by some strange happening all the babies born to them sicken mysteriously and die. But Leolin at last gives up repudiating Sybilla's child, who is the rightful heir but of humble station on his mother's side, and immediately all is well with the remaining little Leolins. I have stood many times with bated breath beside Leolin at the crib when the last little Leolin nearly went.
And if you did not wish continuously to move in the upper circles, Johnny Ludlow, that sweet-natured and incomparable little gossip, would take you to his Worcestershire market town. There was Squire Todhetley and his wife and the fire-eating Tod, his eldest son ; the Whitney family. Old Duffham the lawyer. Miss Catley, who always went to evening service when there was a new curate ; Miss Deveen and her emerald studs, the suspiciously somnolent Lady Jenkins, whose life is just saved in the nick of time, and a hundred more : people who were my intimate friends in the days when, suddenly, the elders, noticing my presence in the room, would 268
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continue their conversation in French or in a peculiar verbal cypher invented by them for the purpose of protecting themselves against what they slightingly and vulgarly called kids with long ears.
The friends of one's pariah years must be one's friends forever. To these people who never shut me out of a room or lowered their voices wKen I went in; or, most shameful and galling of all hurts and slights, said I was too young, I owe an overlasting fealty. And to the woman who breathed her own extraordinary vitality into their clay, I would like to give my homage as a craftswoman. Those who know her only through the medium of East Lynne as it is presented periodically at the Elephant and Castle, do not know her very well. If you would know how good a companion she can be, go to whoever publishes for her heirs, executors and assigns, and ask for all the Johnny Ludlows she ever wrote. Then if the scheme for statues to famous women ever comes through you will ask also that to the list of Jane Austins and Mrs. Gaskells may be added the name of Mrs. Henry Wood.
And the Argosies ? I would give my head to get them, but they are scattered like the sands of the Australian desert, blown by the wind of the auctioneer into the four corners of second-hand antipodean book-shops ; or still worse, carted off by the dustman to that mysterious place where he tips his unwanted burden out over the edge of nowhere.
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If I could see them again in that binding, with the picture of Guy-Lord frightening the servants in the keep, the same that had the power of making my hair rise in broad dayhght, I beUeve I would go off my head with joy.
And yet, I don't know that I shouldn't feel a little as if I had seen a real ghost.
We are not going to Panama ; the road has fallen through : so good-bye to our house in the hills and our English vegetables.
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The House on the Hill, June. 1915.
We are growing in ugliness. The filling of the town is sending the overflow of salt water and mud into the swamp that made a thicket of green on our right and left wing. The old fill had left untouched two long triangles, in the middle of which stood the hill for all the world like an eye in its socket. In one day the encroaching of the salt water has left it brown and stark. It has at the same time driven the mosquitoes that were lurking in the vegetation up on to the hill in clouds, until they, with the sandflies loosed with the filling, are making day and night unbearable. When the work is done, the trouble will be over ; but until it is over, Heaven help us !
And to make one's sorrows, I dare not say complete, lest another plague shall fall, the sulphurous gases that exist in pockets in the bed of the creek from which the fill is being pumped have turned my beautiful clean white paint into an orgy of black and brown smudges. The bathroom, newly done, is a horror ; the woodwork of the verandah, just made spotless
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after days of labour, looks as if an evil spirit with a passion for detail had smeared all crevices and crannies and surfaces and edges with the malice of its wicked mind. The only present joys that are left to us are Miss Duchess and Miss Ginger and Snuppy ; the only future ones, that some day the mosquitoes and the sandflies and the sulphur will be gone, and any day Snuppy may have puppies.
There was a little excitement last night. It seems that yesterday two men went out fishing. One was a breakman and perhaps not used to water exploits. Anyway he fell over and was drowned. His com- panion succeeded in recovering the body and brought it home. Whereupon there was a wake in the house of the widow, a house not passed by the County Council for the holding of meetings, and at a stretch able to accommodate perhaps six or seven persons. It was one of the old houses on piling by the side of the creek. Perhaps the breakman was a favourite, or perhaps a wake is a form of entertainment that always draws a crowd. About one hundred and fifty people turned up to celebrate. When emotion was at its zenith — a bad time for places not passed by the County Council — the house slid off its posts and fell into the water. That would have been dramatic enough by itself, but, to add to the interest, a lady of the party chose that moment to have a baby ; and the corpse, taking advantage of the general commotion, escaped through an open window and 272
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was retrieved with much trouble as it was floating out to sea.
This morning the occupants called early upon William, whose house it is, to make a claim upon him for damages. He settled it quickly by telling them he was going to make them put the house back on the piles again, and was in the meantime assessing the amount due to him for destruction to his property. They left, busy with the problem of evading both counts and quite content in so doing. Of course William will have to put the house back himself, and we, who got no fim out of the wake, will be the ones who pay for the entertainment. So be it. It is all in a Central American day's march.
Let it never be said I am not resourceful. Do you remember me telling you about a sheep's head that has belonged to the pups' toy-box for close on twelve months and that keeps on coming back to the hill at long intervals ? Well, it isn't a sheep's head, it's a cow's one, and it's come back again. We have some home-made shoe scrapers, one at the front steps and one at the back, fashioned out of a double piece of hoop-iron attached to the step at one end, and at the other wedged into a stake that is driven into the ground. They are not bad, but they have their limitations, for the double hoop iron is given to dividing slightly in the middle and letting the mud remain between. Looking for something with which to clean it, my eye fell upon a forked white thing
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lying there : the jawbone of the cow separated from its moorings by the attentions of a too ardent pup. A most excellent device, and, until Miss Duchess finds that she has been robbed, and resumes the possession of her belongings, a discovery for which to be sincerely grateful in a shopless land. You may not be able to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but if you can make a scraper comb out of a cow's teeth it isn't a bad attempt at the impossible.
Our present substitute for Honduras is a thick, pudding-faced nigger of about twenty or so with a mouth like a corner man, and of a laziness surpassing all we have had yet. He is only to be with us " tempomirily " as they say here, for next Sunday we are all going for a picnic down the big Lagoon to Bluefields, where there is an Indian settlement, and William is to bring back an Indian boy who will live with us and work all day. We shall have to train him, but so long as he is not infernally lazy and no one has spoilt him before, that is not the worst that can happen. Joe, who works for William and shoulders two-hundred-pound sacks with no more than the murmur which is the running accompaniment to most of his labours, breaks here into open revolt if he has to carry two eggs instead of one. The other morning I had an encounter with him. He was doing the verandah. I told him to rub with the wax cloth a place where there was no polish at all. He stood up and began to jabber. He didn't want to put on 274
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the wax ; he hadn't done it last time and he didn't want to do it this. I told him that he was doing the floor to please me and not to please himself. He still jabbered. I stamped my foot in a rage. He would stop talking and do as I told him. With that he jabbered more, ran out on to the stoop and began to put on his shoes.
I watched him for a moment, not knowing what he was about, for half the time I do not understand what they are saying. Then I saw he was refusing to go on. In a moment or two he had left the stoop and was making his way down the hill. I was getting over a go of fever, but I dressed quickly and put on my hat to go and see William. If the devil wouldn't work here, he certainly shouldn't work there.
On my way down the steps I met him returning. I stopped him as he began to climb the hill.
" Where are you going ? "
" To work, mistress."
*' Where have you been ? "
He was like a pot of ointment.
" I only go away for a moment, mistress ; I not go altogether."
" Where have you been ? "
" I go for something and come back again."
" What did you go for ? "
Cornered, he gave in.
" I go to tell de master dat you stamp de foot at me."
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I nearly laughed, but not quite. " All right, you don't go on to the hill, you come with me."
" Yes, mistress."
I marched into the office, Joe at my heels. If Joe left the hill he should also leave the store. And if he came back to the hill he should come back on my terms and not on his own. This I told William as briefly as possible.
William recapitulated the complaint laid by Joe, and Joe propped himself up against the open door listening. I had stamped the foot at him, and his mammy had told him that that was the greatest insult a man could have.
" Hit him over the head with a club if he annoys you," said William, and Joe listened and nodded in acquiescence.
I explained my reluctance. I could hit William over the head with a club when he annoyed me, but not a servant. For him, to him, I should always stamp the foot when he exasperated me. If he didn't like that, he needn't come back again. And if he came back he came back to do as he was told and not to jabber at me. Did he understand ?
" Yes, mistress." A sorrowing dove was a tumult compared to him. Well, he could go back.
I stayed with William to get cool again, and he went back and worked with the docility of a mine- pony. 276
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But these emotional crises are bad for me. I shall perforce be living on the slops I despise in a very short time, unless I can find more peaceful and industrious servitors.
Old Sam Machore came the other day to see William on a matter of business. He is the head of a family of pilots down here, a big, broad-shouldered, grizzled negro of sixty, with tufts of white hair in his ears and a set of real teeth like the guinea ad- vertisements. There is young Sam his son, and several other Sams as well, and between them they make close on a thousand pounds a year. It seems that they pool the money ; and old Sam, feeling that the younger Sams were dipping too freely into the pool, devised a way of putting a stop to the leakage. They had been signing too many cheques, and Sam was getting uneasy. He asked William to order him a rubber stamp which should belong to him exclusively.
William wrote down the order ; but before letting Sam go, he pointed out that a rubber stamp was not a difficult thing to manipulate, and it might be likely that the young Sams would find this out early. But he was not to be convinced. They might sign his cheques with a pen, but they would never dare to do it with a rubber stamp. Old Sam has his fingers crossed successfully this time.
The great event of next week is the opening of
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the Baptist chapel down on the dump. It is the usual weatherboard structure with a tin roof. It has a door at the front, a door at the back, and a double door at the side, and a sprinkling of windows. The Reverend Watkinson, a Jamaican educated at the famous Tuskegee College of Booker Washington, coal black, with a magnificent mouthful of teeth and a quite simple unaffected address, went to Jamaica a little while ago and brought back a wife and twenty- six pounds eleven shillings worth of stained glass. Special trains are to be run to bring the people down from the line, and Dora is having a new dress and a new hat for the opening. The dress was to have been green velvet, because in coloured circles velvet is the last word in style and the supreme tribute to a great occasion, but at the final moment the money was sent her instead of the dress, and now she has chosen one of pink embroidery bought from the coolie man. Miss X. lent her a fashion book, out of which she has picked a design that both Miss X. and I, poring over for our own use, rejected as being only possible in the brain of the artist. Still I am sure it will hold no terrors for the local dressmaker. With this she is to wear a white hat, white silk stockings, and white shoes, and she beg some scent to trow over herself when she is all dressed.
A delicious development of the church opening. Mrs. Jacques' place is next door to the church, and at one time was the centre of attraction as a house of 278
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entertainment. There was a nice cleanly kept bar, a gramophone, and some rooms at the back. Mrs. Jacques herself is a very excellent cook. But in time business drifted away from the Hotel Transit, as the flag proudly proclaimed it. The China shops were nearer ; and then came the Little Wonder Bar, impudently and riotously constraining the pleasure-seekers. Mrs. Jacques still lives at the Hotel Transit (our Hotel Transit), but it is some time since she has been able to pay any rent. She is a nice quiet woman, a Martiniquan, industrious and quite willing to pay if she were able. Ajid with her as barman and helper and many other things besides lives Rambey, a short, thick-set active Jamaican, one of the best men there has ever been here, and before his alliance with Mrs. Jacques, high on the pay rolls of the white officials.
Yesterday Rambey went to William and made request. Would he let him have a barrel of beer and six bottles of whisky ? Being so close to the church they hoped to be able to make quite a little money with refreshments. People would have come from a long distance and would need something to sustain them. Also they were expecting some to stay the night. And Rambey, neglecting nothing, was bringing up five or six " girls " from Bocas.
Was there ever such a church opening before ? Not in my life, and I am sure not in yours. And the beauty of it cannot reveal itself to you in the
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bald telling as it does to us here who see it as it is. In Rambey's mind there was not an ounce of wicked- ness or guile, simply the earnest desire to make the best of things, and to allow no grass to grow beneath his feet. I can see him now making his request seriously, with a purely detached mind, untouched heart, and the charming naivete of a child. All that would be in his face, for I know Rambey. He would not lower his voice as if ashamed, not leer as if traffick- ing in forbidden things. He would ask as an in- dustrious urchin would ask for papers to sell ; and my feeling for his endeavour is such that I hope with all my heart he may have a successful day. It is the Maison Tellier reversed and coloured black.
The Movie man has taken possession of the Star Theatre again and gives two performances a week, this time victoriously as far as the working is con- cerned. Every now and then the operator gets careless and shows the feet of one film with the heads of the next, but taking it all in all it is quite good, and a most exciting break for us. The film he opened with, and over which he expected to make no end of money, was the Johnson- Willard fight in Havana. But it was a piece of bad judgment. The venture was a fiasco because the nigger didn't win. Since then he has been holding us all together with a most ridiculous serial of a girl who left a devoted young husband on the first day of her honeymoon because 280
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he handed her a roll of dollar bills in the train, a strange and unaccountable reason for antipathy, one would think, but I suppose the writer must have some sort of a peg to hang his episodes on ; and to many of the movie purveyers one seems as good as another. Anyhow, poor as it is and contemptible as we all think it, we've got to go on to the finish, which is about all that those who draw their salaries from it need to worry themselves over.
281
XXII
The House on the Hill, July, 1915.
A BALM has come upon our harried souls so soft, so restful, and so altogether lovely, that it seems too good to be true. If I speak to you of it I am afraid that the very voicing of it will make it vanish. Yet you have had to listen to my woes, and in honour I cannot keep it from you. It is the little Indian boy. The great fat Joe with the straw always in his mouth and the complaints always out of it has gone, and we have now with us all day at our beck and call the quietest, most biddable and most intelligent thing that it has ever been, in a black or white country, my good fortune to teach.
When William said that he was going to bring up a boy on the Sunday of the picnic I was first glad and then in despair. Nothing but one new thing after another to be instructed and whipped into action and then sacked. It was one person's work from dawn till dark to watch and urge such incompe- tents ; to stand over them and make them do the thing you could so much better do yourself. And this boy was a Valiente, not a Quichuan, and William 282
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could only speak Quichuan. I grew exhausted just thinking about it.
On the day of the picnic I had fever and couldn't go. It was a long trip through the two lagoons. They left at half-past four in the morning and didn't get back till nearly nine at night. As the time drew near for their arriving I watched for the moving lights that would tell me the launch had rounded the bend. When I saw it, I went down to the passenger station to meet them. Every one slipped ashore, but there was no Indian boy. I began to be relieved ; they had not been able to get him. I was glad. The devil we knew was better than the devil we didn't know.
Then William dived into the launch again and hauled out something.
" Here is your boy," he said, and left him to me.
A short, square creature with a brown face and long blue-black hair, coarse as a horse's tail. In a shirt and short trousers, bare-legged, he stood there on the wharf, impassive and silent. On his head was a cap with a peak to it, and in his hand he carried a bag of coloured string of the kind made by the Indians and holding all his little belongings. I asked him in English his name, and he answered me unintelligibly ; at last I made out something.
" 'Martin,' did you say ? " after futile attempts at understanding.
" Yes, marm." Thank Heaven he speaks English.
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O'Dowd was standing by and explained.
" No, it isn't," he said ; " it's Notley ; that's what they call him down there, isn't it, Notley ? "
" Yes," he said, turning the same impassive face to O'Dowd.
Dora, several days after, interpreted finally. His name was Nepthali and no other. There has been an attempt made to call him John as less of an effort, but I am sticking to Nepthali. I have never had a servant called Nepthali, and I never expect to have another. There are days when I get it mixed up with the stuff you use in motor-cars, and it worries me a little. I always have to think first.
We took him home and put him to sleep on the floor of the screened summer-house. Next morning I made him sweep it out, and I put a stretcher-bed into it for him. Then I bought him a basin, which I put out on a box in the yard, gave him a piece of soap and a towel, and told him he must wash himself every morning when he got up. After which we had his hair cut off, and now he is the tidiest, quietest little Japanese that ever was ; much more like a Japanese than many who really are.
I don't know how old he is. He may be a big twelve or a small fourteen, but he is quite childlike in his ways. Soft -footed as a cat, and, so far, rarely ever speaks. He would seem to take little interest, but that cannot be so, because one never has to tell him the same thing twice. And of his own accord 284
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he will do things that none of the others ever thought of doing without being told. Yesterday I saw him go and cut down a banana stem that was hanging under the framework of the tank. There was no fruit on it and it was only rotting ; but he is the first who has seen anything without having it pointed out. We still have dreadful struggles understanding him, and he us, but Dora can always interpret. And she seems to take much pleasure in mothering him. The other night she gave him a bath in a wash- tub in the yard; and although we kept discreetly away from the sphere of action, I heard her say, " Put your foot up ; now the other," in the old familiar way.
His wardrobe is scanty, and we are adding to it. One day he is to be taken up to Bocas and measured by the Chinese tailor there. In the meantime we have made him some little working aprons and cut down an old pair of William's white linen trousers for him. I stood him up on a box and fitted him, and Miss X. sewed them. We are going to keep him barefooted. Soon he is to be taught to wait at table, and then he is to have white shirts, white knickers, and, I think, a scarlet sash. He will love a scarlet sash if he is a good little Indian and a real little Indian.
I may not give myself the pleasure of writing to you any more for a little while on account of a piece of work that I must finish by a certain time, and which will take a concentrated thought and energy to
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accomplish, but I must tell you the sequel to the church opening.
Of Rambey's success or failure we have not heard ; but Dora in all her grandeur I have seen for myself. She was allowed off from ten till four, and suffered much disappointment that when she came to show herself at three, before she disrobed for the day, Miss X. was not there to see her.
Sitting on the verandah after breakfast with a pair of field glasses I watched the congregation pick its way across the dump, which, because the rain had fallen in torrents for an hour before, was a morass of clay and mud. The Salvation Army Band was valiantly conducting them to the strains of " Onward, Christian Soldiers." Dora I recognized by the pink dress, and the deep belt on which she had laid such stress in the making of her wedding garment. In one hand she carried a fan, and in the other a mysteri- ous fluttering thing of blue that might have been an etherealized wrap or else the frock of Vera the pickney, washed too late for the attendance of that imp at divine service. Later, when Dora came to call, minc- ing up the hill in a way that was really reverential regard for the habit she wore, the wrap was revealed to me.
But our beautiful lanky Dora of the spindle- shanks and plaited wool, who as a rule wears a turban on her head and elastic side boots (here called Romeos) on her generously fashioned feet, was disguised out 286
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of all recognition. On her wool, unplaited and teazed out to fine size, with an enormous black bow and an entrenchment of jewelled combs, sat a cream hat of phantom straw decorated with rucked chiffon of a good strong horsehair texture. In her ears two golden bees ; round her neck three strings of coral and a golden chain ; and on her breast a golden brooch.
There was a slight variation in the manner of her dress according to what she had told us about the original scheme, and a very noticeable one in the deviation from the fashion plate. For instance, she had been going to wear white silk stockings, but at the last moment had changed them for pink cotton. And a cream belt had been substituted for the pink one, by the dressmaker's advice. But it was a deep belt coming a good six inches over the hips, and held in its place top and bottom at close intervals by a multitude of different-coloured glass-headed pins.
And the pale blue fluttering thing that I had taken in the distance to be the pickney's frock, was no other than a bed- jacket of mine ! A thing of blue satin and swansdown given to Dora one day when I was turning out a box because it was, for me, too warm a garment in this place. Khowing that the Jamaican woman wears the thickest flannel next her skin always, I felt that she might make a robe of state for the little nig without the little nig suffering
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any inconvenience from the cosiness of the swans- down. Dora, instead, was using it for the final touch of elegance that made holding her own an easy matter in a gathering where every man, woman, and child Was trying to outdo the other in splendour.
It was a quaint procession that wended its way across the dump to the little wooden chapel. Whores and wantons, washerwomen that rag your clothes on week days, brawlers, shirkers, prize-fighters, and a leaven of the respectable and industrious all walking with the same meek yet proud air to the little taber- nacle where they would in gorgeous raiment take dignified stand in pew and choir and bathe their souls in sanctity and singing and stained glass for an uplifted hour and a half. I am not jeering ; it only gives one to laugh joyously, for it makes a picture such as no amount of real virtue could ever produce.
And the sight of them was good. The women, beatified travesties of the fashionable world, silent with the silence of children who pin the tablecloth round them and become thereby queens and princesses ; the men omnipotent in the strength given them by high white linen collars, new straw hats, and expensive tweed suits (no Jamaican negro will look at a piece of cloth that isn't of the finest English manufacture), not to mention the gold-rimmed glasses, and the ubiquitous umbrella, the last sign and seal of a flaw- less respectability.
Later in the evening, as I came back from a walk 288
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lip the railway line with the dogs, I met a score of them returning to One Mile from the afternoon service. Of the styles in dress nothing but the very last cry could be seen ; pleated skirts, hip sashes, tunics, everything that the highest authorities have decreed shall prohibit the possibility of an old garment being made to look like new. I saw the train coming in the distance, the special that was carrying the visitors back to their homes. Till it passed I stepped off the line taking the dogs with me, and some of the black ladies and gentlemen followed suit. There was one woman, quite light, slender, and with hair not so kinky as the others : she was all in black, a swathed and folded gown of some flimsy stuff with a small black hat and long gold earrings. Another, black as Brunswick and slender also, had on a transparent white chiffony garment through which her arms showed like ink.
And another I met nearer home. She was mag- nificent. Weighing no less than two hundred pounds, ebony coloured and with a tea zed-out halo of the kinkiest wool that grows, she was robed from head to foot in a pink that turned all others to a sickly pallor. Around her ample form, and below the waist line, was folded a broad emerald green ribbon which crossed in front abdominally and was carried round to the rear again to finish in a flowing bow. It looked like a Hibernian order that had lost its way. And well back on the woolly halo sat another halo of
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white feathers that sprouted out of an excrescence of still more emerald green. She had friends with her, but she walked alone, some paces ahead of her companions, who seemed to know their place too truly to wish to keep up with her. As I watched her I felt a pang of something like jealousy. Since the first day when my short frocks had the hems let down, I have never, unless it was with the first tail, had such thrills as she was getting with every step along the track. I think it is dreadful that our simple pleasures have to go.
No more for a little while until my lessons are done. As I say my good-byes to you the rain has begun to pour in torrents and the Mock Turtle is racing up the hill for the refuge of the top step by the door, which is nearly always dry. The little Indian is out buying the bread, and I am afraid lest he shall get caught in the rain, for he has only two shirts until we can get him some more.
There is a gaudy black and yellow bird singing among the tattered leaves of one of the coconut trees. The sand-pump is slowly and surely making dry land of the swamp, and the mosquitoes are slowly and mercifully getting less. And Snuppy has two lovely fat puppies out in the box room. Two instead of the usual eight ! And so fat that their legs, although fifteen days old to-day, spread out on either side like the legs of a tortoise. But I believe the little beggars know me already. I've been 290
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calling on them regularly for the last three days, and when I go in now they begin to rustle about in the box and roll a bleary blue eye out of their fatness at me. While there are puppies, the world can never be quite all wrong, can it, Phillipa ? My love and thoughts to you always.
THE END
PKISTED BX WIUJAM CLOWXS A«0 SONS, LIMITHO, LOHDON AND BK0ULK3
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