CHRISTMAS AT ST. AUGUSTINE
Whoever has since discovered the North Pole, we know that Santa Claus
was the original settler and, to whatever land he may come, we think of
him as cheering his reindeer on over new fallen snow. Nor was frost to
be denied him here in St. Augustine where many people believe perpetual
summer reigns. The red-nosed morning sun looked forth in some
indignation on fields white with it, palm trees crisp, and broad banana
leaves wilted black under its keen touch. The gentle breeze that drifted
in from the north had ice in its touch and I do not know how the roses
that held up pink petals bravely and tossed their soft, tea scent over
the garden fences stood it without wilting. Most of them are planted
near shelter, which may account for it. But the tea roses are
essentially the ladies of their kind. They seem to have the feminine
trait of exposing pink and white beauty to the inclement winds without
growing goose flesh upon it. They stand brave and unconcerned in an
atmosphere where mere men and vegetables wilt, frostbitten. The day
after Christmas brought a stiff wind from the northwest, a wind that
fainted from its own rage during the night and left us for a few morning
hours a temperature of twenty-six degrees. This is somewhat
disconcerting to muslin-clad migrants.
Christmas came flying overseas to the quaint old town by way of the long
levels of Anastasia Island, which bars off the real ocean to the
eastward. Here I fancy Santa Claus landing for a moment to re-arrange
his pack before getting down chimney to business, and here he might well
feel at home on South Beach. Nowhere has nature more closely simulated
snowdrifts. The dazzling white sand is as fine grained as any blown snow
of a Canadian winter, and the north wind sent it drifting down leagues
of coast where it piled in hillocks that grow with one shift of wind and
shrink with the next. I had but to shut my eyes and listen to the silky
susurrus of these tiny crystals one upon another to hear the same song
that the New England pastures sing of a bright day in January when the
snow is deep and a zero wind steals from the top of one drift to build
bastions and frost fortifications on another.
With closed eyes the sibillant song was the fairy tenor to the bass of
the surf which was a memory of the roar of white pines, tossing in the
gale. I had but to open my eyes and see these white, scurrying films of
sandsnow to think myself really once more in Massachusetts. Inland the
pale drifts whelm red cedar and bayberry outposts of the forests that
are as flat-topped and wind-crippled as any shrubs that hold the outer
defenses of zero-bitten, northern hilltops, moated, portcullised, with
barbican and glacis in snow-mounded simulation of fortresses built by
man. Surely nature had hung Christmas decorations on the forefront of
St. Augustine in lavish profusion. I thought at one glance that Santa
Claus himself had arrived on all this make-believe snow landscape and
was resting his reindeer a moment behind the white drifts inland. I
heard stamping hoofs and saw shaggy brown coats that might well be those
of Prancer and Dancer, of Dunder and Blitzen. But a second look showed
long ears instead of caribou antlers, and a band of the curious little
half wild donkeys that roam the island trotted forth.
Getting back from the roar of the surf, I began to find the Christmas
decorations mingled with the warmer phase of Florida. There the sun
warmed all things in sheltered hollows till it seemed as if the almanac
had repented and Easter was trailing soft garments of spring through the
place to soothe all winter’s ailments. Scrub palmettos lifted their
heads from the sand
[Illustration: Court of “The Alcazar” at St. Augustine]
to wave palms, and in meadowy places the St. Andrew’s cross spread
yellow petals beneath holly berries. In December you find corners of
this land in Florida that are most perplexing. Out on the hard beach ran
by twos and threes the semi-palmated plover, which are birds of Labrador
and the Arctic coast, and just beyond them the great, gray pelicans
sailed in military ranks between the combers. Here were birds of the
arctic and birds of the tropic seas passing one another between a wind
of winter and a sun of summer. Ashore it was the same. Hermit thrushes,
born under cool hemlocks in the New Hampshire hills while yet the snow
lingered in the northern gullies, peered beneath the palmettos and
touched wing tips with fluttering mocking birds hatched while the June
sun scorched the temperature up along the nineties.
At nightfall on this cool Christmas Eve the round moon stood in the
eastern sky and shone as if all the Spanish doubloons and pieces of
eight that sank in wrecked treasure ships in this Spanish main had been
fused to one great, silver orb to make it. The keen wind must have blown
most of the tropic mists out of the sky, so plainly visible on its
surface was the man, his dog, and his bush which Shakespeare was wont to
see there. Thus both Spain and England, both fitfully lords of the soil
on which I stood, renewed their hold on it, for the moon made a broad
pathway of silver light across the Matanzas River to the walls of the
old coquina fort which for two hundred years was all St. Augustine, and
for the matter of that, all Florida, so far as white man’s dominion
went.
It was easy to fancy Santa Claus pricking his coursers from the old
coquina quarry on the island, along this silver road, bringing Christmas
cheer to the St. Augustine of to-day. In the shadows along either side
of the coruscating pathway it was easy to see other shades, the dark
forms of boats loaded with stone from the quarries, with motley crews
toiling at the oars, sinking beneath the tide with the painful years,
and others coming to take their places; convicts from Spain and Mexico,
political prisoners, Seminoles and slaves, all prodded by the relentless
steel of Spain to the building of the great fort that stands almost
unscarred to-day, an acme of mediæval fort building. All night it stood
in gray dignity, but the moonlight touched it lovingly and drew silver
from the pathway of toil and tipped the bastions with white fire and
drew gleaming edges all along the ramparts till it seemed as if the
haughty inquisitions of Spain, the bluff greed of ancient England, and
even the pagan myth of the good old saint of gifts were but gray
memories out of which glowed a clearer light, that of that star in the
east which the wise men followed. We do not know which star it is, out
of the incomputable number, but every Christmas Eve it swings the blue
arc of the sky and sends its white light down upon the things for which
men have toiled, master and slave alike, and glorifies them.
Before midnight the northern chill left the place, the wind ceased, and
a sweet-aired calm fell upon all things. The rustics of old England long
ago brought to New England a tale which I love to believe, that at
midnight before Christmas the cattle kneel in adoration in their stalls.
So in this town of strange contrasts, which is so old and so new, it
seemed to me as if at midnight all nature knelt in adoration. Of what
went on within palace or hovel I know little, but without the air
renewed its kindly warmth and from every garden rose upon the air a
gentle incense of flowers. Here poinsettias flaunted red involucres that
were brave with the color of the season and there the dark green of
English ivy fretted the walls with close-set leaves. Chrysanthemums held
up pink and yellow and white blooms to the silver light and sent out the
medicinal smell of their leaves as you brushed by them.
You could not see the blue of the English violets in their dark green
beds and borders, but the odor of them subtended the scent of the tea
roses and the Marechal Neils climbing high on their trellises lost
their yellow tint and were as white as the light that shone on them.
Tiny ferns, the southern polypodys, which you shall hardly know from
those of the north by their appearance, seem to have little of the
rock-climbing proclivities of their northern prototypes. These love a
tree. Often you will find the level limbs of live-oaks made into ribbon
borders with them and they nestle in the crevices between the
criss-crossed stubs of palmetto leaves along the trunks whence the
leaves themselves have fallen. Here in St. Augustine they seem to love
the roofs of old houses, garlanding them with a most delicate beauty. If
the northern polypody grew here I should expect to find the crevices
between the stones of the old fort green with it and the bluff old
sergeant custodian would have trouble in keeping it from making a fairy
greensward of all slopes and levels on the parapets.
The southern polypody barely touches the fort. It seems to demand wood
for its rooting surface and it makes the old-time roofs lovely with its
tiny pinnate fronds. I dare say every moonlit night these soft aërial
gardens entangle the light and are silvered by it, but it seemed as if
on this night of nights the radiance was softer and glowed with a
clearer fire. Over in the new part of the town where wealth has built
huge domes and pinnacled minarets and fretted the walls and
[Illustration: Cathedral Place, St. Augustine]
arches of great stone buildings with every cunning device of the
builder’s art, the gentle feet of this home-loving fern refuse to climb
and walls and towers and copings and minarets seemed bare and garish in
all their architectural beauty, by contrast.
It was by way of such scenes as these under the round moon of midnight
that Christmas day first touched St. Augustine. And yet, for all the
wonder beauty of the town in this white radiance it seems to me the
wonder of all lay that night within the bare walls of a northerly,
long-neglected casemate of the old gray fort. The open court of the
place is not unlike that of an Eastern khan. The casemate is a
high-walled, bare room which opens from it, its barred window letting in
a narrow rectangle of the midday sun. What gentle-souled soldier dwelt
within this room in the days of Spanish domination no one can tell me,
nor what lover of shady English lanes, babbling brooks and cool, mossy
retreats succeeded him with the coming of the English flag to wave its
St. George and St. Andrew’s crosses proudly above the ramparts. Only it
seems as if some lover of ferny woodlands must have dwelt there and
thought long of such places, for out of the rough rock wall itself grows
to-day the finest specimen of Venus’ hair fern I have ever seen, its
cool, translucent, beautifully lobed pinnules dripping from fronds of
rich beauty that form a soft green cradle on the floor and pillow their
pure sweetness against the wall itself.
It may be that some conscripted Spanish peasant brought with his aching
heart to the far distant American garrison a fertile spore from some
shady glen that he loved in Andalusia, or perhaps the seed ripened in a
Devonshire lane and came thence with the besieging and conquering
English, or yet again it may have been Florida born and carried thither
on some soft wind of winter or in the blanket of an imprisoned Seminole.
Centuries go by and bring a thousand accidents caught in the trailing
garments of the years. I know only that the plant is there, wondrously
beautiful by day, and that as the first hour of Christmas glided over
the old fort the full light of the moon poured in at the barred window
and built its exquisite texture into a mystic cradle veiled in the
velvety purple darkness of the ancient cell.
Without was the open court flooded with the full radiance of the great
Southern moon, the same that looked down upon the miracle of birth in
Bethlehem more than nineteen hundred years ago. Within was the still
darkness of the manger-like place, and this cradle of a texture such as
no human hands might make, all strangely lighted and glorified by the
beams from high
[Illustration: “The fort that waits in crumbling beauty the obliterating
hand of the coming centuries”]
heaven. Not millions in money nor trained architects nor the most
skilled artisans of the day, all of which have been lavished upon the
building of the new St. Augustine, have produced one spot so mystically
beautiful as was at that hour the angle of that dark cell in the
casement of the fort that was once the whole of the old town, the fort
that waits in crumbling beauty, neglected but dignified still, the
obliterating hand of the coming centuries.
Dawn brought out of the white stillness of the night a cloud from the
southeast, and soon the tepid air of the Gulf of Mexico was spilling
rain upon all things and hushing the barbaric greeting of guns and
firecrackers with which the Southern negro delights to hail Christmas
morn. Then as April had driven December from the sky, so came October
with a westerly wind and golden sunshine that merged in a nightfall
whose sky was of amber with a green gold moon rounding up once more in
it. Over in the west hung a yellow, shining star of evening, and as the
lights flashed out one by one in the great hotels and their careful
shrubbery glowed with fairy lamps, it seemed as if this star shed upon
them some of the kindly light that led Balthazar and his companions of
old, a star hanging in the west, for a sign that the day, now grown old
with us, was dawning with new people in new lands.