Some pictures stand out startlingly clear-cut in the memory. Such a one is the recollection of our first morning in Jamaica. The Guardsman, full of curiosity to see something of the mysterious tropical island into which we had been deposited after nightfall, awoke me at daybreak. After landing from the mail-steamer in the dark, we had had merely impressions of oven-like heat, and of a long, dim-lit drive in endless suburbs of flimsily built, wooden houses, through the spice-scented, hot, black-velvet night, enlivened with almost indecently intimate glimpses into humble interiors, where swarthy dark forms jabbered and gesticulated, cl.u.s.tered round smoky oil-lamps; and as the suburbs gave place to the open country, the vast leaves of unfamiliar growths stood out, momentarily silhouetted against the blackness by the gleam of our carriage lamps.
It being so early, the Guardsman and I went out as we were, in pyjamas and slippers, with, of course, sufficient head protection against the fierce sun. Just a fortnight before we had left England under snow, in the grip of a black frost; London had been veiled in incessant thick fogs for ten days, and we had fallen straight into the most exquisitely beautiful island on the face of the globe, bathed in perpetual summer.
When we had traversed the grove of orange trees, we came upon a lovely little sunk-garden, where beds of cannas, orange, sulphur, and scarlet, blazed round a marble fountain, with a silvery jet splashing and leaping into the sunshine. The sunk-garden was surrounded on three sides by a pergola, heavily draped with yellow alamandas, drifts of wine-coloured bougainvillaa, and pale-blue solanums, the size of saucers. In the clear morning light it really looked entrancingly lovely. On the fourth side the garden ended in a terrace dominating the entire Liguanea plain, with the city of Kingston, Kingston Harbour, Port Royal, and the hills on the far side spread out below us like a map. Those hills are now marked on the Ordnance Survey as the "Healthshire Hills." This is a modern euphemism, for the name originally given to those hills and the district round them by the soldiers stationed in the "Apostles" Battery," was "h.e.l.lshire," and any one who has had personal experience of the heat there, can hardly say that the t.i.tle is inappropriate. From our heights, even Kingston itself looked inviting, an impression not confirmed by subsequent visits to that unlovely town. The long, sickle-shape sandspit of the Palisadoes separated Kingston Harbour on one side from the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea; on the other side the mangrove swamps of the Rio Cobre made unnaturally vivid patches of emerald green against the background of hills. On railways a green flag denotes that caution must be observed; the vivid green of the mangroves is Nature"s caution-flag to the white man, for where the mangrove flourishes, there fever lurks.
The whole scene was so wonderfully beautiful under the blazing sunlight, and in the crystal-clear atmosphere, that the Guardsman refused to accept it as genuine. "It can"t be real!" he cried, "this is January. We have got somehow into a pantomime transformation scene.
In a minute it will go, and I shall wake up in Wellington Barracks to find it freezing like mad, with my owl of a servant telling me that I have to be on parade in five minutes." This lengthy warrior showed, too, a childish incredulity when I pointed out to him cocoa-nuts hanging on the palms; a field of growing pineapples below us, or great cl.u.s.ters of fruit on the banana trees. Pineapples, cocoanuts, and bananas were bought in shops; they did not grow on trees. He would insist that the great orange flowers, the size of cabbages, on the Brownea trees were artificial, as were the big blue trumpets of the Morning Glories. He was in reality quite intoxicated with the novelty and the glamour of his first peep into the tropics. By came fluttering a great, gorgeous b.u.t.terfly, the size of a saucer, and after it rushed the Guardsman, shedding slippers around him as his long legs bent to their task. He might just as well have attempted to catch the Scotch Express; but, as he returned to me dripping, he began to realise what the heat of Jamaica can do. All the remainder of that day the Guardsman remained under the spell of the entrancing beauty of his new surroundings, and I was dragged on foot for miles and miles; along country lanes, through the Hope Botanical Gardens, down into the deep ravine of the Hope River, then back again, both of us dripping wet in the fierce heat, in spite of our white drill suits, larding the ground as we walked, oozing from every pore, but always urged on and on by my enthusiastic young friend, who, suffering from a paucity of epithets, kept up monotonous e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of "How absolutely d----d lovely it all is!" every two minutes.
I had to remain a full hour in the swimming-bath after my exertions; and the Guardsman had quite determined by night-time to "send in his papers," and settle down as a coffee-planter in this enchanting island.
It is curious that although the Spaniards held Jamaica for one hundred and sixty-one years, no trace of the Spaniard in language, customs, or architecture is left in the island, for Spain has generally left her permanent impress on all countries occupied by her, and has planted her language and her customs definitely in them. The one exception as regards Jamaica is found in certain place-names such as Ocho Rios, Rio Grande, and Rio Cobre, but as these are all p.r.o.nounced in the English fashion, the music of the Spanish names is lost. Not one word of any language but English (of a sort) is now heard in the colony. When Columbus discovered the island in 1494, he called it Santiago, St. James being the patron saint of Spain, but the native name of Xaymaca (which being interpreted means "the land of springs") persisted somehow, and really there are enough Santiagos already dotted about in Spanish-speaking countries, without further additions to them. When Admiral Penn and General Venables were sent out by Cromwell to break the Spanish power in the West Indies, they succeeded in capturing Jamaica in 1655, and British the island has remained ever since. To this day the arms of Jamaica are Cromwell"s arms slightly modified, and George V is not King, but "Supreme Lord of Jamaica," the original t.i.tle a.s.sumed by Cromwell. The fine statue of Queen Victoria in Kingston is inscribed "Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, and Supreme Lady of Jamaica."
Venables found that the Spaniards, craving for yet another Santiago, had called the capital of the island Santiago de la Vega, "St. James of the Plain," and to this day the official name of Spanish Town, the old capital, is St. Jago de Vega, and as such is inscribed on all the milestones, only as it is p.r.o.nounced in the English fashion, it is now one of the ugliest names imaginable. The wonderfully beautiful gorge of the Rio Cobre, above Spanish Town, was called by the conquistadores "Spouting Waters," or Bocas de Agua. This has been Anglicised into the hideous name of Bog Walk, just as the "High Waters," Agua Alta, on the north side of the island, has become the Wagwater River. The Spanish forms seem preferable to me.
Some one has truly said that the old Spaniards shared all the coral insect"s mania for building. As soon as they had conquered a place, they set to work to build a great cathedral, and simultaneously, the church then being distinctly militant, a large and solid fort. They then proceeded to erect ma.s.sive walls and ramparts round their new settlement, and most of these ramparts are surviving to-day. We, in true British haphazard style, did not build for posterity, but allowed ramshackle towns to spring up anyhow without any attempt at design or plan. There are many things we could learn from the Spanish. Their solid, dignified cities of ma.s.sive stone houses with deep, heavy arcades into which the sun never penetrates; their broad plazas where cool fountains spout under great shade-trees; their imposing over-ornate churches, their general look of solid permanence, put to shame our flimsy, ephemeral, planless British West Indian towns of match-boarding and white paint. We seldom look ahead: they always did.
Added to which it would be, of course, too much trouble to lay out towns after definite designs; it is much easier to let them grow up anyhow. On the other hand, the British colonial towns have all good water supplies, and efficient systems of sewerage, which atones in some degree for their architectural shortcomings; whilst the Spaniard would never dream of bothering his head about sanitation, and would be content with a very inadequate water supply. Provided that he had sufficient water for the public fountains, the Spaniard would not trouble about a domestic supply. The Briton contrives an ugly town in which you can live in reasonable health and comfort; the Spaniard fashions a most picturesque city in which you are extremely like to die. Racial ideals differ.
CHAPTER V
An election meeting in Jamaica--Two family experiences at contested elections--Novel South African methods--Unattractive Kingston--A driving tour through the island--The Guardsman as orchid hunter--Derelict country houses--An attempt to reconstruct the past--The Fourth-Form Room at Harrow--Elizabethan Harrovians--I meet many friends of my youth--The "Sunday" books of the "sixties--"Black and White"--Arrival of the French Fleet--Its inner meaning--International courtesies--A delicate attention--Absent alligators--The mangrove swamp--A preposterous suggestion--The swamps do their work--Fever--A very gallant apprentice--What he did.
The Guardsman"s enthusiasm about Jamaica remaining unabated, I determined to hire a buggy and pair and to make a fortnight"s leisurely tour of the North Coast and centre of the island. Though not peculiarly expeditious, this is a very satisfactory mode of travel; no engine troubles, no burst tyres, and no worries about petrol supplies.
A new country can be seen and absorbed far more easily from a horse-drawn vehicle than from a hurrying motor-car, and the little country inns in Jamaica, though very plainly equipped, are, as a rule, excellent, with surprisingly good if somewhat novel food.
As the member for St. Andrews in the local Legislative Council had just died, an election was being held in Kingston. Curious as to what an election-meeting in Jamaica might be like, we attended one. The hall was very small, and densely packed with people, and the suffocating heat drove us away after a quarter of an hour; but never have I, in so short a s.p.a.ce of time, heard such violent personalities hurled from a public platform, although I have had a certain amount of experience of contested elections. In 1868, when I was eleven years old, I was in Londonderry City when my brother Claud, the sitting member, was opposed by Mr. Serjeant Dowse, afterwards Baron Dowse, the last of the Irish "Barons of the Exchequer." Party feeling ran very high indeed; whenever a body of Dowse"s supporters met my brother in the street, they commenced singing in chorus, to a popular tune of the day:
"Dowse for iver! Claud in the river!
With a skiver through his liver."
Whilst my brother"s adherents greeted Dowse in public with a sort of monotonous chant to these elegant words:
"Dowse! Dowse! you"re a dirty louse, And ye"ll niver sit in the Commons" House."
It will be noticed that this is in the same rhythm that Mark Twain made so popular some twenty years later in his conductor"s song.
"Punch, brothers, punch with care, Punch in the presence of the pa.s.sen-jare."
In spite of the confident predictions of my brother"s followers, Dowse won the seat by a small majority, nor did my brother succeed in unseating him afterwards on Pet.i.tion.
Another occasion on which feeling ran very high was in Middles.e.x during the 1874 election. Here my brother George was the Conservative candidate, and owing to his having played cricket for Harrow at Lord"s, he was supported enthusiastically by the whole school, the Harrow masters being at that time Liberals almost to a man. My tutor, a prominent local Liberal, must have been enormously gratified at finding the exterior of his house literally plastered from top to bottom with crimson placards (crimson is the Conservative colour in Middles.e.x) all urging the electors to "vote for Hamilton the proved Friend of the People." Possibly fraternal affection may have had something to do with this crimson outburst. My youngest brother took, as far as his limited opportunities allowed him, an energetic part in this election. He got indeed into some little trouble, for being only fifteen years old and not yet versed in the niceties of political controversy, he endeavoured to give weight and point to one of his arguments with the aid of the sharp end of a football goal-post. My brother George was returned by an enormous majority.
The most original electioneering poster I ever saw was in Capetown in March, 1914. It was an admirably got-up enlargement of a funeral card, with a deep black border, adorned with a realistic picture of a hea.r.s.e, and was worded "Unionist Opposition dead. Government dying.
Electors of the Liesbeck Division drive your big nails into the coffin by voting for Tom Maginess on Sat.u.r.day." Whether it was due to this novel form of electioneering or not, I cannot say, but Maginess won the seat by two thousand votes. I still have a copy of that poster.
Neither Londonderry nor Capetown are in Jamaica, but oddly enough, Middles.e.x is, for the island is divided into three counties, Cornwall, Middles.e.x, and Surrey. The local geography is a little confusing, for it is a surprise to find (in Jamaica at all events) that Westmoreland is in Cornwall, and Manchester in Middles.e.x.
Kingston owes its position as capital to the misfortunes of its two neighbours, Port Royal and Spanish Town. When Port Royal was totally destroyed by an earthquake in 1692, the few survivors crossed the bay and founded a new town on the sandy Liguanea plain. Owing to its splendid harbour, Kingston soon became a place of great importance, though the seat of Government remained in sleepy Spanish Town, but the latter lying inland, and close to the swamps of the Rio Cobre, was so persistently unhealthy that in 1870 the Government was transferred to Kingston. Though very prosperous, its most fervent admirer could not call it beautiful, and, owing to its sandy soil, it is an intensely hot place, but in compensation it receives the full sea breeze. Every morning about nine, the sea breeze (locally known as "the Doctor") sets in. Gentle at first, by noon it is rushing and roaring through the town in a perfect gale, to drop and die away entirely by 4 p.m. By a most convenient arrangement, the land breeze, disagreeably known as "the Undertaker," drops down from the Liguanea Mountains on to the sweltering town about 11 p.m., and continues all through the night. It is this double breeze, from sea by day, from land by night, that renders life in Kingston tolerable. Owing to the sea breeze invariably blowing from the same direction, Jamaicans have the puzzling habit of using "Windward" and "Leeward" as synonyms for East and West. To be told that such-and-such a place is "two miles to Windward of you"
seems lacking in definiteness to a new arrival.
As we rolled slowly along in our buggy, the Guardsman was in a state of perpetual bewilderment at having growing sugar, coffee, cocoa, and rice pointed out to him by the driver. "I thought that it was an island," he murmured; "it turns out to be nothing but a blessed growing grocer"s shop." Half-way between Kingston and Spanish Town is the Old Ferry Inn, the oldest inn in the New World. It stands in a ma.s.s of luxuriant greenery on the very edge of the Rio Cobre swamps, and is a place to be avoided at nightfall on that account. This fever trap of an inn, being just half-way between Kingston and Spanish Town, was, of all places in the island to select, the chosen meeting-place of the young bloods of both towns in the eighteenth century. Here they drove out to dine and carouse, and as they probably all got drunk, many of them must have slept here, on the very edge of the swamp, to die of yellow fever shortly afterwards.
Sleepy Spanish Town, the old capital, has a decayed dignity of its own. The public square, with its stately eighteenth-century buildings, is the only architectural feature I ever saw in the British West Indies. Our national lack of imagination is typically exemplified in the King"s House, now deserted, which occupies one side of the square.
When it was finished in 1760, it was considered a sumptuous building.
The architect, Craskell, in that scorching climate, designed exactly the sort of red-brick and white stone Georgian house that he would have erected at, say, Richmond. With limitless s.p.a.ce at his disposal, he surrounded his house with streets on all four sides of it, without one yard of garden, or one sc.r.a.p of shade. No wonder that poor little Lady Nugent detested this oven of an official residence. The interior, though, contains some s.p.a.cious, stately Georgian rooms; the temperature being that of a Turkish bath.
Rodney"s monument is a graceful, admirably designed little temple, and the cathedral of a vague Gothic, is s.p.a.cious and dignified. Spanish Town cathedral claims to have been built in 1541, in spite of an inscription over the door recording that "this church was thrown downe by ye dreadfull hurricane of August ye 28, 1712, and was rebuilt in 1714." It contains a great collection of elaborate and splendid monuments, all sent out from England, and erected to various island worthies. The amazing arrogance of an inscription on a tombstone of 1690, in the south transept, struck me as original. It commemorates some Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, and after the usual eulogistic category of his unparalleled good qualities, ends "so in the fifty-fifth year of his age he appeared with great applause before his G.o.d."
There is a peculiarly beautiful tree, the _Petraea_, which seems to flourish particularly well in Spanish Town. When in flower in February, neither trunk, leaves, nor branches can be seen for its dense cl.u.s.ters of bright blue blossoms, which are unfortunately very short-lived.
Four miles above Spanish Town the hideously named Bog Walk, the famous gorge of the Rio Cobre, commences. I do not believe that there is a more exquisitely beautiful glen in the whole world. The clear stream rushes down the centre, whilst the rocky walls tower up almost perpendicularly for five or six hundred feet on either side, and these rocks, precipitous as they are, are clothed with a dense growth of tropical forest. The bread-fruit tree with its broad, scalloped leaves, the showy star-apple, glossy green above deep gold below, mahoganies, oranges, and bananas, all seem to grow wild. The bread-fruit was introduced into Jamaica from the South Sea Islands, and the first attempt to transplant it was made by the ill-fated _Bounty_, and led to the historical mutiny on board, as a result of which the mutineers established themselves on Pitcairn Island, where their descendants remain to this day. Whatever adventures marked its original advent, the bread-fruit has made itself thoroughly at home in the West Indies, and forms the staple food of the negroes.
When carefully prepared it really might pa.s.s for under-done bread, prepared from very indifferent flour by an inexperienced and unskilled baker. It is the immense variety of the foliage and the constantly changing panorama that gives Bog Walk its charm, together with the red, pink, and fawn-coloured trumpets of the hibiscus, dotting the precipitous ramparts of rock over the rushing blue river. Bog Walk is distinctly one of those places which no one with opportunities for seeing it should miss. It opens out into an equally beautiful basin, St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, of which Michael Scott gives an admirable description in _Tom Cringle_. I should hardly select that steamy cup in the hills as a place of residence, but as a natural forcing-house and a sample of riotous vegetation, it is worth seeing.
The native orchids of Jamaica are mostly oncidiums, with insignificant little brown and yellow flowers, and have no commercial value whatever. The Guardsman, however, was obsessed with the idea that he would discover some peerless bloom for which he would be paid hundreds of pounds by a London dealer. Every silk-cotton tree is covered with what Jamaicans term "wild pines," air-plants, orchids, and other epiphytes, and every silk-cotton was to him a potential Golconda, so whenever we came across one he wanted the buggy stopped, and up the tree he went like a lamp lighter. I am bound to admit that he was an admirable tree climber, but I objected on the score of delicacy to the large rents that these aerial rambles occasioned in his white ducks.
On regaining the ground he loaded the buggy with his spoils, despite the driver"s a.s.sertion that "dat all trash." Unfortunately with his epiphytes he brought down whole colonies of ants, and the Jamaican ant is a most pugnacious insect with abnormal biting powers. After I had been forced to disrobe behind some convenient greenery in order to rid myself of these aggressive little creatures, I was compelled to put a stern veto on further tree exploration.
The ascent from Ewarton, over the Monte Diavolo, is so splendid that I have made it five times for sheer delight in the view. Below lies St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, a splendid riot of palms, orange, and forest trees, and above it towers hill after hill, dominated by the lofty peaks of the Blue Mountains. It is a gorgeously vivid panorama, all in greens, gold, and vivid blues. Monte Diavolo is the only part of Jamaica where there are wild parrots; it is also the home of the allspice tree, or pimento, as it is called in the island. This curious tree cannot be raised from seed or cutting, neither can it be layered; it can only propagate itself in Nature"s own fashion, and the seed must pa.s.s through the body of a bird before it will germinate. So it is fortunate, being the important article of commerce it is, that the supply of trees is not failing. Bay rum is made from the leaves of the allspice tree.
Once over the Monte Diavolo, quite a different Jamaica unrolls itself.
Broad pasture-lands replace the tropical house at Kew; rolling, well-kept fields of guinea-gra.s.s, surrounded with neat, dry-stone walls and with trim gates, give an impression of a long-settled land.
We were amongst the "pen-keepers," or stock-raisers here. This part of the colony certainly has a home-like look; a little spoilt as regards resemblance by the luxuriance with which creepers and plants, which at home we cultivate with immense care in stove-houses, here riot wild in lavish ma.s.ses over the stone walls. If the cherished rarities of one country are unnoticed weeds in another land, plenty of a.n.a.logies in other respects spring to the mind. I could wish though, for aesthetic reasons, that our English lanes grew tropical Begonias, Coraline, and a peculiarly attractive Polypody fern, similar to ours, except for the young growths being rose-pink. Between Dry Harbour and Brown"s Town there is one succession of fine country-places, derelict for the most part now, but remnants of the great days before King Sugar was dethroned. Here the opulent sugar planters built themselves lordly pleasure houses on the high limestone formation. Sugar grows best on swampy ground, but swamps breed fever, so these magnates wisely made their homes on the limestone, and so increased their days.
The high-road runs past one stately entrance-gate after another; entrances with high Georgian, carved stone gateposts surmounted with vases, probably sent out ready-made from England; Adam entrances, with sphinxes and the stereotyped Adam semi-circular railings, all very imposing, and all alike derelict. Beyond the florid wrought-iron gates the gravel drives disappear under a uniform sea of gra.s.s; the once neatly shaved lawns are covered with dense "bush." All gone! Planters and their fine houses alike! King Sugar has been for long dethroned.
The names of these places, "Amity," "Concord," "Orange Grove,"
"Harmony Hall," "Friendship," and "Fellowship Hall," all rather suggest the names of Masonic Lodges, and seem to point to a certain amount of conviviality. The houses themselves are hardly up to the standard of their ambitious entrance-gates, for they are mostly of the stereotyped Jamaican "Great House" type; plain, gabled buildings surrounded by verandahs, looking rather like gigantic meat safes; but, as they say in Ireland, any beggar can see the gatehouse, but few people see the house itself, and I imagine that skilled craftsmen were rare in Jamaica in the eighteenth century.
The attempt to reconstruct the life of one, two, or three hundred years ago has always appealed to me, especially amidst very familiar scenes. The stage-setting, so to speak, is much as it must have appeared to our predecessors, but the actual drama played on the stage must have been so very different. I should have liked to have seen these planters" houses a hundred years ago, swarming with guests, whilst the cookhouses smoked bravely as armies of black slaves busied themselves in preparing one of the gigantic repasts described by Lady Nugent. Unfortunately to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, one would have been forced, in her words, "to eat like a cormorant, and to drink like a porpoise," with the certainty of a liver attack to follow.
Talking of bygone days, the Fourth-Form Room at Harrow has been unchanged since Queen Elizabeth"s time, and still retains all its Elizabethan fittings: heavy, clumsy, solid oak armchairs for the masters, each one equipped with a stout, iron-bound, oak table, and strong oak benches for the boys. As a youngster, I liked to think that I was sitting on the identical benches occupied, more than three hundred years earlier, by Elizabethan youths in trunk hose and doublets. In my youth I was much impressed in Canterbury Cathedral by the sight of the deep grooves worn by the knees of countless thousands of pilgrims to Thomas a Beckett"s shrine in the solid stone of the steps leading from the Choir to the retro-Choir, steps only to be ascended by pilgrims on their knees. At Harrow the inch-thick oak planks of the Elizabethan benches have been completely worn through in places by the perpetual fidgeting of hundreds of generations of schoolboys, which is as remarkable in its way as the knee grooves at Canterbury, though the attrition is due to a different portion of the human anatomy. As a boy I used to wonder how the trunk-hosed Elizabethan Harrovians addressed each other, and whether they found it very difficult to avoid palpable anachronisms in every sentence.
Their conversations would probably have been something like this: "Come hither, young Smith; I would fain speak with thee. Only one semester hast thou been here, and thy place in the school is but lowly, yet are thy hose cross-gartered, and thy doublet is of silk.
Thou sw.a.n.kest, and that is not seemly, therefore shall I trounce thee right l.u.s.tily to teach thee what a sorry young knave thou art." "Nay, good Master Brown, hearken to me. This morn too late I kept my bed, and finding not my buff jerkin, did don in haste my Sunday doublet of changeable taffeta, for thou wottest the ills that do befall those late for school. Neither by my halidom knew I, that being yet of tender years, it was not meet for me to go cross-gartered, so prithee, gentle youth, cease belabouring me with thy feet."
Incidentally, I suppose that Christopher Columbus and his adventurers all landed in the West Indies in 1492, clad in full armour, after the fashion of the age, and I cannot imagine how they escaped being baked alive in the scorching heat. Every suit of armour must have been a portable Dutch-oven, inflicting tortures on its unfortunate wearer.
The little bay near Brown"s Town where Columbus landed in Jamaica, on his third voyage, is still called "Don Christopher"s Cove," though the Spanish form of his name is, of course, Cristobal Colon.
Brown"s Town is the most beautiful little spot imaginable, glowing with colour from its wealth of flowers. It had, though, another attraction for me. The hotel was kept by a white lady of most "serious" views, and in the hotel dining-room I found a bookshelf containing all the books given me as a child for Sunday reading. There they all were! _Little Henry and his Bearer_, _Anna Ross the Orphan of Waterloo_, _Agathos_, and many, many more, including a well-remembered American book, _Melbourne House_. The heroine of the last-named work, an odiously priggish child called Daisy Randolph, refused to sing on a Sunday when desired to do so by her mother. For this, most properly, she was whipped. A devoted black maid who shared Daisy"s religious views, comforted her little mistress by bringing her a supper of fried oysters, ice-cream and waffles. As a child I used to think how gladly I would undergo a whipping every Sunday were it only to be followed by a supper of fried oysters, ice-cream and waffles, the latter a comestible unknown to me, but suggesting infinitely delicious possibilities.
Unfortunately I can never remember having been asked to sing on Sunday, or indeed on any other day.
Speaking seriously, I do not believe that these emotionally pietistic little books produced any good effect on the children into whose hands they were put. I remember as a child feeling exasperated against the ultra-righteous little heroines of all these works. I say heroine, because no boy was ever given a chance as a household-reformer, unless he had happened to have been born a hopeless cripple, or were suffering from an incurable spinal complaint. In the latter case, experience induced the certainty that the author would be unable to resist the temptation of introducing a pathetic death-bed scene.
Accordingly, when the little hero"s spine grew increasingly painful and he began to waste away, the two next chapters were carefully skipped in order to be spared the harrowing details of the young martyr"s demise. Girls, not being so invariably doomed to an early death, were alone qualified to act as family evangelists, and one knew that the sweet child"s influence was bound, slowly but surely, to permeate the entire household. Her mother would cease to care only for "the world and its fine things," and would even endeavour to curb her inordinate love of dress. Her father would practically abandon betting, and, should he have been fortunate enough to have backed a winner, would at once rush on conscience-stricken feet to pour the whole of his gains into the nearest missionary collecting-box. Even the cynical old bachelor uncle, who habitually scoffed at his niece"s precocious piety, became gradually influenced by her shining example, and would awake one morning to find himself the amazed, yet gratified, possessor of "a new heart."
In order to renew my acquaintance with the whole of these friends of my youth, I remained two days longer in Brown"s Town, with the a.s.sent of the good-natured Guardsman.
Joss, the Guardsman, had a fine baritone voice, and the English rector of Brown"s Town, after hearing him sing in the hotel, at once commandeered him for his church on Sunday, though warning him that he would be the only white member of the choir. My services were also requisitioned for the organ. That church at Brown"s Town is, by the way, the most astonishingly s.p.a.cious and handsome building to find in an inland country parish in Jamaica. On the Sunday, seeing the Guardsman in conversation with the local tenor, a gentleman of absolutely ebony-black complexion, at the vestry door, both of them in their ca.s.socks and surplices, I went to fetch my camera, for here at last was a chance of satisfying the Guardsman"s mania for turning his trip to the West Indies to profitable account. Every one is familiar with the ingenious advertis.e.m.e.nts of the proprietors of a certain well-known brand of whisky. My photograph would, unquestionably, be a picture in "Black and White," both as regards complexion and costume, but on second thoughts, the likenesses of two choir-men in ca.s.socks and surplices seemed to me inappropriate as an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a whisky, however excellent it might be, though they had both unquestionably been engaged in singing spiritual songs.
It was Archbishop Magee who, when Bishop of Peterborough, encountered a drunken navvy one day as he was walking through the poorer quarters of that town. The navvy staggered out of a public-house, diffusing a powerful aroma of gin all round him; when he saw his Chief Pastor he raised his hand in a gesture of mock benediction and called jeeringly to the Bishop, "The Lord be with you!" "And with thy _spirits_,"