So the Reverend and I had at last arrived at Hamilton, the principal
town in the Bermuda Islands.
We took a long afternoon walk, and soon found out that that exceedingly
white town was built of blocks of white coral. Bermuda is a coral
island, with a six-inch crust of soil on top of it, and every man has
a quarry on his own premises. Everywhere you go you see square recesses
cut into the hillsides, with perpendicular walls unmarred by crack
or crevice, and perhaps you fancy that a house grew out of the ground
there, and has been removed in a single piece from the mold. If you do,
you err. But the material for a house has been quarried there. They cut
right down through the coral, to any depth that is convenient--ten to
twenty feet--and take it out in great square blocks. This cutting is
done with a chisel that has a handle twelve or fifteen feet long, and is
used as one uses a crowbar when he is drilling a hole, or a dasher when
he is churning. Thus soft is this stone. Then with a common handsaw they
saw the great blocks into handsome, huge bricks that are two feet long,
a foot wide, and about six inches thick. These stand loosely piled
during a month to harden; then the work of building begins.
The house is built of these blocks; it is roofed with broad coral slabs
an inch thick, whose edges lap upon each other, so that the roof looks
like a succession of shallow steps or terraces; the chimneys are built
of the coral blocks, and sawed into graceful and picturesque patterns;
the ground-floor veranda is paved with coral blocks; also the walk to
the gate; the fence is built of coral blocks--built in massive panels,
with broad capstones and heavy gate-posts, and the whole trimmed into
easy lines and comely shape with the saw. Then they put a hard coat of
whitewash, as thick as your thumb-nail, on the fence and all over the
house, roof, chimneys, and all; the sun comes out and shines on this
spectacle, and it is time for you to shut your unaccustomed eyes, lest
they be put out. It is the whitest white you can conceive of, and the
blindingest. A Bermuda house does not look like marble; it is a much
intenser white than that; and, besides, there is a dainty, indefinable
something else about its look that is not marble-like. We put in a great
deal of solid talk and reflection over this matter of trying to find a
figure that would describe the unique white of a Bermuda house, and we
contrived to hit upon it at last. It is exactly the white of the icing
of a cake, and has the same unemphasized and scarcely perceptible
polish. The white of marble is modest and retiring compared with it.
After the house is cased in its hard scale of whitewash, not a crack, or
sign of a seam, or joining of the blocks is detectable, from base-stone
to chimney-top; the building looks as if it had been carved from a
single block of stone, and the doors and windows sawed out afterward. A
white marble house has a cold, tomb-like, unsociable look, and takes
the conversation out of a body and depresses him. Not so with a Bermuda
house. There is something exhilarating, even hilarious, about its vivid
whiteness when the sun plays upon it. If it be of picturesque shape and
graceful contour--and many of the Bermudian dwellings are--it will so
fascinate you that you will keep your eyes on it until they ache. One
of those clean-cut, fanciful chimneys--too pure and white for this
world--with one side glowing in the sun and the other touched with a
soft shadow, is an object that will charm one's gaze by the hour. I know
of no other country that has chimneys worthy to be gazed at and gloated
over. One of those snowy houses, half concealed and half glimpsed
through green foliage, is a pretty thing to see; and if it takes one by
surprise and suddenly, as he turns a sharp corner of a country road, it
will wring an exclamation from him, sure.
Wherever you go, in town or country, you find those snowy houses, and
always with masses of bright-colored flowers about them, but with no
vines climbing their walls; vines cannot take hold of the smooth, hard
whitewash. Wherever you go, in the town or along the country roads,
among little potato farms and patches or expensive country-seats, these
stainless white dwellings, gleaming out from flowers and foliage, meet
you at every turn. The least little bit of a cottage is as white and
blemishless as the stateliest mansion. Nowhere is there dirt or stench,
puddle or hog-wallow, neglect, disorder, or lack of trimness and
neatness. The roads, the streets, the dwellings, the people, the
clothes--this neatness extends to everything that falls under the eye.
It is the tidiest country in the world. And very much the tidiest, too.
Considering these things, the question came up, Where do the poor live?
No answer was arrived at. Therefore, we agreed to leave this conundrum
for future statesmen to wrangle over.
What a bright and startling spectacle one of those blazing white
country palaces, with its brown-tinted window-caps and ledges, and green
shutters, and its wealth of caressing flowers and foliage, would be in
black London! And what a gleaming surprise it would be in nearly any
American city one could mention, too!
Bermuda roads are made by cutting down a few inches into the solid white
coral--or a good many feet, where a hill intrudes itself--and smoothing
off the surface of the road-bed. It is a simple and easy process. The
grain of the coral is coarse and porous; the road-bed has the look of
being made of coarse white sugar. Its excessive cleanness and whiteness
are a trouble in one way: the sun is reflected into your eyes with
such energy as you walk along that you want to sneeze all the time. Old
Captain Tom Bowling found another difficulty. He joined us in our walk,
but kept wandering unrestfully to the roadside. Finally he explained.
Said he, “Well, I chew, you know, and the road's so plagued clean.”
We walked several miles that afternoon in the bewildering glare of the
sun, the white roads, and the white buildings. Our eyes got to paining
us a good deal. By and by a soothing, blessed twilight spread its cool
balm around. We looked up in pleased surprise and saw that it proceeded
from an intensely black negro who was going by. We answered his military
salute in the grateful gloom of his near presence, and then passed on
into the pitiless white glare again.
The colored women whom we met usually bowed and spoke; so did the
children. The colored men commonly gave the military salute. They borrow
this fashion from the soldiers, no doubt; England has kept a garrison
here for generations. The younger men's custom of carrying small canes
is also borrowed from the soldiers, I suppose, who always carry a cane,
in Bermuda as everywhere else in Britain's broad dominions.
The country roads curve and wind hither and thither in the delightfulest
way, unfolding pretty surprises at every turn: billowy masses of
oleander that seem to float out from behind distant projections like the
pink cloud-banks of sunset; sudden plunges among cottages and gardens,
life and activity, followed by as sudden plunges into the somber
twilight and stillness of the woods; flitting visions of white
fortresses and beacon towers pictured against the sky on remote
hilltops; glimpses of shining green sea caught for a moment through
opening headlands, then lost again; more woods and solitude; and by and
by another turn lays bare, without warning, the full sweep of the
inland ocean, enriched with its bars of soft color and graced with its
wandering sails.
Take any road you please, you may depend upon it you will not stay in
it half a mile. Your road is everything that a road ought to be: it is
bordered with trees, and with strange plants and flowers; it is shady
and pleasant, or sunny and still pleasant; it carries you by the
prettiest and peacefulest and most homelike of homes, and through
stretches of forest that lie in a deep hush sometimes, and sometimes are
alive with the music of birds; it curves always, which is a continual
promise, whereas straight roads reveal everything at a glance and kill
interest. Your road is all this, and yet you will not stay in it half a
mile, for the reason that little seductive, mysterious roads are always
branching out from it on either hand, and as these curve sharply also
and hide what is beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your
own chosen road and explore them. You are usually paid for your trouble;
consequently, your walk inland always turns out to be one of the most
crooked, involved, purposeless, and interesting experiences a body can
imagine. There is enough of variety. Sometimes you are in the level
open, with marshes thick grown with flag-lances that are ten feet high
on the one hand, and potato and onion orchards on the other; next, you
are on a hilltop, with the ocean and the islands spread around you;
presently the road winds through a deep cut, shut in by perpendicular
walls thirty or forty feet high, marked with the oddest and abruptest
stratum lines, suggestive of sudden and eccentric old upheavals, and
garnished with here and there a clinging adventurous flower, and here
and there a dangling vine; and by and by your way is along the sea edge,
and you may look down a fathom or two through the transparent water and
watch the diamond-like flash and play of the light upon the rocks and
sands on the bottom until you are tired of it--if you are so constituted
as to be able to get tired of it.
You may march the country roads in maiden meditation, fancy free, by
field and farm, for no dog will plunge out at you from unsuspected gate,
with breath-taking surprise of ferocious bark, notwithstanding it is
a Christian land and a civilized. We saw upward of a million cats in
Bermuda, but the people are very abstemious in the matter of dogs. Two
or three nights we prowled the country far and wide, and never once were
accosted by a dog. It is a great privilege to visit such a land. The
cats were no offense when properly distributed, but when piled they
obstructed travel.
As we entered the edge of the town that Sunday afternoon, we stopped
at a cottage to get a drink of water. The proprietor, a middle-aged
man with a good face, asked us to sit down and rest. His dame brought
chairs, and we grouped ourselves in the shade of the trees by the door.
Mr. Smith--that was not his name, but it will answer--questioned us
about ourselves and our country, and we answered him truthfully, as a
general thing, and questioned him in return. It was all very simple
and pleasant and sociable. Rural, too; for there was a pig and a small
donkey and a hen anchored out, close at hand, by cords to their legs, on
a spot that purported to be grassy. Presently, a woman passed along, and
although she coldly said nothing she changed the drift of our talk. Said
Smith:
“She didn't look this way, you noticed? Well, she is our next neighbor
on one side, and there's another family that's our next neighbors on the
other side; but there's a general coolness all around now, and we don't
speak. Yet these three families, one generation and another, have lived
here side by side and been as friendly as weavers for a hundred and
fifty years, till about a year ago.”
“Why, what calamity could have been powerful enough to break up so old a
friendship?”
“Well, it was too bad, but it couldn't be helped. It happened like this:
About a year or more ago, the rats got to pestering my place a good
deal, and I set up a steel trap in my back yard. Both of these neighbors
run considerable to cats, and so I warned them about the trap, because
their cats were pretty sociable around here nights, and they might get
into trouble without my intending it. Well, they shut up their cats for
a while, but you know how it is with people; they got careless, and sure
enough one night the trap took Mrs. Jones's principal tomcat into camp
and finished him up. In the morning Mrs. Jones comes here with the
corpse in her arms, and cries and takes on the same as if it was a
child. It was a cat by the name of Yelverton--Hector G. Yelverton--a
troublesome old rip, with no more principle than an Injun, though you
couldn't make her believe it. I said all a man could to comfort her, but
no, nothing would do but I must pay for him. Finally, I said I warn't
investing in cats now as much as I was, and with that she walked off in
a huff, carrying the remains with her. That closed our intercourse with
the Joneses. Mrs. Jones joined another church and took her tribe with
her. She said she would not hold fellowship with assassins. Well, by and
by comes Mrs. Brown's turn--she that went by here a minute ago. She had
a disgraceful old yellow cat that she thought as much of as if he was
twins, and one night he tried that trap on his neck, and it fitted him
so, and was so sort of satisfactory, that he laid down and curled up and
stayed with it. Such was the end of Sir John Baldwin.”
“Was that the name of the cat?”
“The same. There's cats around here with names that would surprise
you. Maria” (to his wife), “what was that cat's name that eat a keg of
ratsbane by mistake over at Hooper's, and started home and got struck by
lightning and took the blind staggers and fell in the well and was 'most
drowned before they could fish him out?”
“That was that colored Deacon Jackson's cat. I only remember the last
end of its name, which was Hold-The-Fort-For-I-Am-Coming Jackson.”
“Sho! that ain't the one. That's the one that eat up an entire box of
Seidlitz powders, and then hadn't any more judgment than to go and take
a drink. He was considered to be a great loss, but I never could see it.
Well, no matter about the names. Mrs. Brown wanted to be reasonable, but
Mrs. Jones wouldn't let her. She put her up to going to law for damages.
So to law she went, and had the face to claim seven shillings and
sixpence. It made a great stir. All the neighbors went to court.
Everybody took sides. It got hotter and hotter, and broke up all the
friendships for three hundred yards around--friendships that had lasted
for generations and generations.
“Well, I proved by eleven witnesses that the cat was of a low character
and very ornery, and warn't worth a canceled postage-stamp, anyway,
taking the average of cats here; but I lost the case. What could I
expect? The system is all wrong here, and is bound to make revolution
and bloodshed some day. You see, they give the magistrate a poor little
starvation salary, and then turn him loose on the public to gouge for
fees and costs to live on. What is the natural result? Why, he never
looks into the justice of a case--never once. All he looks at is which
client has got the money. So this one piled the fees and costs and
everything on to me. I could pay specie, don't you see? and he knew
mighty well that if he put the verdict on to Mrs. Brown, where it
belonged, he'd have to take his swag in currency.”
“Currency? Why, has Bermuda a currency?”
“Yes--onions. And they were forty per cent. discount, too, then, because
the season had been over as much as three months. So I lost my case. I
had to pay for that cat. But the general trouble the case made was the
worst thing about it. Broke up so much good feeling. The neighbors don't
speak to each other now. Mrs. Brown had named a child after me. But she
changed its name right away. She is a Baptist. Well, in the course of
baptizing it over again it got drowned. I was hoping we might get to be
friendly again some time or other, but of course this drowning the child
knocked that all out of the question. It would have saved a world of
heartbreak and ill blood if she had named it dry.”
I knew by the sigh that this was honest. All this trouble and all this
destruction of confidence in the purity of the bench on account of a
seven-shilling lawsuit about a cat! Somehow, it seemed to “size” the
country.
At this point we observed that an English flag had just been placed at
half-mast on a building a hundred yards away. I and my friends were
busy in an instant trying to imagine whose death, among the island
dignitaries, could command such a mark of respect as this. Then a
shudder shook them and me at the same moment, and I knew that we
had jumped to one and the same conclusion: “The governor has gone to
England; it is for the British admiral!”
At this moment Mr. Smith noticed the flag. He said with emotion:
“That's on a boarding-house. I judge there's a boarder dead.”
A dozen other flags within view went to half-mast.
“It's a boarder, sure,” said Smith.
“But would they half-mast the flags here for a boarder, Mr. Smith?”
“Why, certainly they would, if he was dead.”
That seemed to size the country again.