EASTER TIME AT PALM BEACH
Man has set Palm Beach as a gem in a jungle, which is itself as
beautiful in its way as the nacre of the oyster in which we find the
pearl. The gem is cut and polished till all its facets and angles flash
forth not only their own brilliancy but the reflected glory of all
around them. These blaze upon you from afar and draw you with a promise
of all delights till you stand in their midst bewildered with them. The
beauty of the surrounding jungle you must learn little by little, for it
does not seek you, rather it withdraws and only subtly tempts. Yet when
you come away you do not know which to love most, the gem or its
setting. And all this you find upon a ribbon of island between the muddy
blue of Lake Worth and the unbelievable colors of the transparent sea
beyond. Unlimited resources of wealth have brought from the ends of the
earth tropical trees and shrubs and set them in bewildering profusion.
Wild nature in the setting, the landscape gardener in the gem, have done
it all.
Not so long has man been banished from Eden that he need feel lonesome
on returning. Here is the air that breathed over that place in the old
time floating in over the miraculous sea, seemingly transmuting its
swift-changing coloration into a symphony of perfume that now soothes in
dreamy languor and again stimulates to the delight of action. Bloom of
palm and of pine are in it and the smell of miles of pink and white
oleanders that grow by wayside paths. There, too, is the mingling of a
score of wee, wild scents from the jungle, and beneath it all the good,
salty aroma distilled by the fervent sun of late March from crisping
leagues of sapphire sea. It prompts you to breathe deep and long and
look about with proprietary gladness as Adam and Eve might could they
return for Old Home Week and tread again the well remembered primrose
paths.
To appreciate fully this garden redivivus one must not dwell in its
midst too long. Had Eve been permitted to come only occasionally, there
had been no dallying with the serpent. I dare say those unfortunates who
reach the place in December and do not leave it until April get to look
upon its beauties with as lack-luster an eye as that with which the
home-tied New Yorker looks upon Fifth Avenue. I have known Bostonians to
pass the gilded dome of their State House, and go by way of the Common
and Public
[Illustration: “There, too, is the mingling of a score of wee, wild
scents from the jungle”]
Garden through Copley Square into the Public Library without looking
about and expanding the chest. Such a condition does familiarity breed.
There is a fortunate refuge from too much Eden at West Palm Beach. You
may on the outskirts of this now beautiful hamlet see how little aid the
earth may give in the building of a beauty spot. Here is the same
barren, sandy ridge which one learns to expect on his first progress
inland from any point on the East coast. Here grow rough-barked, dwarf
pines of small stature, all bent westward in regular arcs from root to
top as if yearning inland from their birth. Thus has the steady force of
the easterly trades inclined them. The everlasting saw palmetto grows
about their roots, and little else. Yet, so pervasive is the spirit of
good example that the West Palm Beachers, going back to their barren
land from across Lake Worth, have taken heart, and seeds and slips of
blossoming shrub and vine, have brought or made soil, one scarcely knows
whence or how, and made their West Palm Beach wilderness blossom in
miniature like the Palm Beach rose.
Here are tiny fenced-in gardens all about little unpretentious houses,
gardens which are soft with turf underfoot, stately with palms overhead,
and all between bowered with purple bougainvillea and violet bohenia,
and passion vine and allamanda, almost, indeed, all the beauties of The
Garden over yonder. There is none of the stateliness that space alone
can give, but the shrubs and vines crowd lovingly together, till one
might well wonder if Adam and Eve did not plant something of this sort
just beyond the flash of that flaming sword and perhaps learn to love
the home they had found better than the Eden they had lost.
You may, if you will, go westward still from this ridge and get into
another land of enchantment, the borderland of the Everglades. Here a
road winds from one saw-grass island to another across Clearwater Lake.
It is a region of marsh plants, of cat-tail and pipewort, of purple
bladderwort and wild grasses and sedges, where nestling blackbirds make
love with a boldness that might put the flower-margined walks of The
Garden to the blush, and where you may look into the wayside ditch and
see big-mouthed bass waving their square tails as they move leisurely
off into deeper water. To plunge from the barren ridge into the marsh
district is like going from the sackcloth and ashes of Lent into the
full awakening joy of Easter. Here the Florida wilderness itself marks
the season of the revival of life and joy, and with nothing more vividly
than the cypress.
[Illustration: The “traveler’s tree” in a Palm Beach garden]
On the farther margin of Clearwater Lake the ground rises a bit into
cypress swamp. All winter these close-set, gnarled trees have held bare
and knotted, writhing arms to Heaven in mute repentance for misdeeds.
Gray Spanish moss alone has draped them, waving in the winds most
lugubriously. The water has been warm about their roots, the sun has
steeped them in its heat that has kept the water gay with bloom of
bladderwort and sagittaria and pickerel weed, yet the cypresses have
held aloft their sackcloth moss and stretched their arms skyward,
unforgiven, while the trade winds mumbled prayers in the gray gloom of
their twining limbs. Now--it seems all of a sudden--the richest and
softest drapery of green has hidden all their bareness as if they had
taken off the sackcloth and put on the joy of forgiveness and new life.
Spring green is always beautiful. It seems to me as if the cypresses
must have picked their shade from the softest and richest of colors that
soothe the eye in the shoaling sea outside. They are vivid indeed
against the rising land beyond, where flatwoods pines and saw palmetto
hold sway again in grim monotony.
A day of this and you are ready again to pass the gateways and seek The
Garden with senses once again hungry for its delights. One’s self seems
to belong in this scheme which simulates the primitive joy of the
earlier, happier days of the world. Often one cannot be so sure of the
rest of mankind. The animal creation takes it as a matter of course. The
black and white “raft” ducks that are common on the Indian River, yet
fly before you get within gunshot of them, here in Lake Worth linger
boldly about the docks and hardly move aside for chugging motorboats. I
look daily for some fascinating descendant of Eve to call them up to eat
out of her hand. Why should they here fear a gun? Adam never had one. In
all my wanderings in palm-shaded walk and flower-scented jungle I saw no
predatory bird or beast. It is easy to fancy that the serpent was
banished with our first parents. Tiny lizards only, dash like scurrying
brown flashes along the hot sand from one thicket to another in the
denser part of the tangles of wild growth. A thousand glittering
dragonfly fays flit on silver wings along the paths which the
blue-throated, scurrying swifts cross.
Benevolent Afreets frequent The Garden and the jungle path at all
points. In the days of Haroun-al-Raschid these used to gather princes up
in mantles and bear them noiselessly from point to point. Here the
mantle has become a wicker-basket wheel-chair, but the Afreets are in
the business still and all along paths you see them passing, silently
bearing one or two passengers. A dollar wish will bring a bronze
magician to your service for an hour and you glide majestically on air
the while. You may be irreverent of tradition if you will and dub the
Afreet and his conveyance an Afromobile, and say the air on which you
glide majestically is but so much as is included in the inner tube of
pneumatic tires, but the effect is the same.
But man! the sentence of banishment must still be heavy upon him, for he
seems to me to tread The Garden somewhat fearfully, his glance over his
shoulder expectant of another writ of ejectment. Often he pokes about
with a grim solemnity which is much at variance with the laughing face
of all nature. Very likely these are the newcomers who have not yet
learned that from Paradise are barred all vengeful spirits. Man has been
out so long that the habit of watchfulness and distrust is not to be
lost in a day. You see none of this on the faces of children. They are
from Paradise too recently to have forgotten.
Over on the bathing beach where beryl waves break on the amber sand
these children play like fluffy sprites of foam blown inland from the
spent waves, as much a part of the place as the fleets of rainbow-tinted
nautilus that have made port on the same sands. Youth too belongs.
Stretched in the shadow of a boat lie two, as lithe and keen of outline
as the sea gulls that swoop outside the line of breakers, they two a
part of Paradise, soothed into immobility with the gentle spell of the
place, reminding one for a fleeting moment of a paragraph from “Ben
Hur.” Yet the throng which must represent Mankind, with a capital M,
melts in no such harmonious way into the symphony of sea and sky. These
old ones have been away too long to fit into the place when they come
back. Shorn of the world glamour of the tailor and haberdasher, the
hall-marks of pelf and power, they are as grotesque as the satyrs of the
time of Pan might be. Here is incongruity personified. Fingy Conners in
fluffy ruffles and tights, Fairbanks in fleshings, or if not these some
others just as good, go down to the sea in skips, and the breakers roar.
It is the cocoanut palms that put the touch of picturesque adventure on
the place. Here are the bold beach-combers of the tropic world come to
add storm-tossed beauty to The Garden. The cocoanut is the adventurer of
all seas, born of salt and sand on the wave-worn shore it matures, clad
in a brown, elastic, water-defying husk that will bear its live germ
whithersoever the waters will take it. The storms that tear it from the
yielding stem and toss it in the brine send it on through scud and spin
drift, to currents that drift lazily to all shores. The breakers that
roll it up
[Illustration: “It is the cocoanut palms that put the touch of
picturesque adventure on the place”]
the beach and bury it under driftwood are but planting it, and when in
its own good time it germinates the tough fiber of its endogenous stem
defies all but the fiercest hurricane. Here at maturity it will bear two
hundred nuts a year to adventure further on all tides.
It is these trees that give the place its rightful name. They spring in
stately, swaying rows along all the shore. They line the paths on either
side with the gray columns of their trunks. The mighty fronds touch
above your head and make swaying shadows on the way, as the leaves
rustle in the easterly trades and the rich nuts fall to the ground for
all. As Adam may have done, so you may do, pick the ripe fruit from the
ground, beat the husk from it, bore a hole in the one soft spot at the
stem end and drink the cool and delicious milk for your refreshment.
Thousands of these nuts lie on the ground ungarnered save by the thirsty
passer. Seed time and harvest are one with them and young fruit,
acorn-like in size and appearance, grows at the same time that the ripe
nuts are falling. You may find any size between at any time.
The cocoanut trees are beautiful, picturesque and romantic. You might
well call them stately, yet there is a touch of the swashbuckler about
each that forbids you to call them dignified. They should be the patron
tree of buccaneers and wild sea rovers, and one cannot look upon them
without peopling the strand beneath them with such gentry. The lawless,
sea-roving life of the South Seas is theirs as it was that of Bluebeard
and Teach and Morgan and Pizarro. They add to Eden a spice of
dare-deviltry that makes it doubly dear.
Far different are the royal palms, the trees of kings’ courtyards. I saw
but four of these in The Garden. They stood apart, erect columns as
smooth as if built out of gray masonry for fifty feet in height. You
would sooner think this smooth but unpolished gray granite than wood.
Miraculously from the top of this stone column, which swells outward as
it progresses upward, then recedes as slightly, grows a green stem for a
distance of a fathom, from the top of which spread the majestic, leafy
fronds. Such columns should grace the stone palaces of the Pharaohs. So
stately and impressive are these that I never see them but I fancy that
they stood thus as pillars to the gateway by which stood the angel with
the flaming sword, while our first parents fled with averted faces,
outward.
At Easter time The Garden blossomed with white stems of femininity,
bearing aloft Easter flowers of gorgeous millinery. The violet of
bohenia blooms, the purple of bougainvillea, the soft pink and pure
white of blooming oleanders were all outdone and the butterfly-like
flowers of hibiscus nodded and poised unnoticed as these passed by. Yet
I saw three things outside The Garden that typified Easter to me with
far more potentiality than these. One was the green of repentant
cypresses in the gray swamp at the back of Clearwater Lake. Another was
a cactus in the jungle on the outer rim of The Garden. Here was a
stubborn thing, its oval, dusty, lifeless joints hideous with thorns.
Seemingly nothing could give this thing life or beauty. It stood in arid
sand, and rough, dusty ridges to seaward shut off even the reviving,
purifying winds. Yet the time came and out of the very thorns sprang a
wondrous, yellow bloom of satiny-cupped petals that was more lovely than
any flower of sweetest wood in any rose garden in the world. Butterfly
and bee that had so long passed by came to this and caressed it, nor
could anyone remember the thorns or the hideous crooked joints for love
of the beauty of this Easter bloom.
Best of all I remember, over in the flatwoods, a young, long-leaf pine
that had for a week been growing altar candles for the season as is the
way of such trees. Only this tree in its love could not stop there. From
every spike it grew on the right and the left exultant buds that made of
each candle a little cross of pale bloom, lighting the little lonely
tree in the level waste with a glorification and chaste beauty that
made the worshipful onlooker forget all else. Nor in The Garden, nor in
churches, nor even in the hearts of men has there grown, I believe, a
lovelier or more acceptable Easter offering.