(THE SCENE)
Yet to be poor on that island did not compel a sordid narrowing of
life. You would have found our living-room furnished in mahogany rich
and old. In a corner where the airs came in by a great window stood a
jar big enough to hide in, into which trickled a cool thread of water
from a huge dripping-stone, while above these a shelf held native
waterpots whose yellow and crimson surfaces were constantly pearled
with dew oozing through the porous ware. On a low press near by was
piled the remnant of father's library, and on the ancient sideboard
were silver candlesticks, snuffers, and crystal shades.
But it was neither these things nor cherished traditions that gave the
room its finest charm. It was filled with the glory of the sea. There
was no need of painted pictures. Living nature hung framed in wide
high windows through which drifted in the distant boom of surf on the
rocks, and salt breezes perfumed with cassia.
Outside, round about, there was far more. A broad door led by a flight
of stone steps to the couchlike roots of a gigantic turpentine-tree
whose deep shade harbored birds of every hue. To me, sitting there,
the island's old Carib name of Aye-Aye seemed the eternal consent of
God to some seraph asking for this ocean pearl. All that poet or
prophet had ever said of heaven became comprehensible in its daily
transfigurations of light and color scintillated between wave,
landscape, and cloud--its sea like unto crystal, and the trees bearing
all manner of fruits. Grace and fragrance everywhere: fruits crimson,
gold, and purple; fishes blue, orange, pink; shells of rose and pearl.
Distant hills, clouds of sunset and dawn, sky and stream, leaf and
flower, bird and butterfly, repeated the splendor, while round all
palpitated the wooing rhythm of the sea's mysterious tides.
The beach! Along its landward edge the plumed palms stood sentinel,
rustling to the lipping waters and to the curious note of the
Thibet-trees, sounding their long dry pods like castanets in the
evening breeze. By the water's margin, and in its shoals and depths,
what treasures of the underworld! Here a sponge, with stem bearing
five cups; there a sea-fan, large enough for a Titan's use yet delicate
enough to be a mermaid's. Red-lipped shells; mystical eye-stones;
shell petals heaped in rocky nooks like rose leaves; and, moving among
these in grotesque leisure, crabs of a brilliance and variety to tax
the painter. All the rector told of a fallen world seemed but idle
words when the sunset glory was too much for human vision and the young
heart trembled before its ineffable suggestions.
I often rode a pony. If we turned inland our way was on a road
double-lined with cocoa palms, or up some tangled dell where a silvery
cascade leaped through the deep verdure. On one side the tall mahogany
dropped its woody pears. On another, sand-box and calabash trees
rattled their huge fruit like warring savages. Here the banyan hung
its ropes and yonder the tamarind waved its feathery streamers. Here
was the rubber-tree, here the breadfruit. Now and then a clump of the
manchineel weighted the air with the fragrance of its poisonous apples,
the banana rustled, or the bamboo tossed its graceful canes. Beside
some stream we might espy black washerwomen beetling their washing.
Or, reaching the summit of Blue Mountain, we might look down, eleven
hundred feet, on the vast Caribbean dotted with islands, and, nearer
by, on breakers curling in noble bays or foaming under rocky cliffs.
Northward, the wilderness; eastward, green fields of sugar-cane paling
and darkling in the breeze; southward, the wide harbor of
Fredericksted, the town, and the black, red-shirted boatmen pushing
about the harbor; westward, the setting sun; and presently, everywhere,
the swift fall of the tropical night, with lights beginning to twinkle
in the town and the boats in the roadstead to leave long wakes of
phosphorescent light.
Of course nature had also her bad habits. There were sharks in the
sea, and venomous things ashore, and there were the earthquake and the
hurricane. Every window and door had heavy shutters armed with bars,
rings, and ropes that came swiftly into use whenever between July and
October the word ran through the town, "The barometer's falling." Then
candles and lamps were lighted indoors, and there was happy excitement
for a courageous child. I would beg hard to have a single pair of
shutters held slightly open by two persons ready to shut them in a
second, and so snatched glimpses of the tortured, flying clouds and
writhing trees, while old Si' Myra, one of the freed slaves who never
had left us, crouched in a corner and muttered:
"Lo'd sabe us! Lo'd sabe us!"
Once I saw a handsome brig which had failed to leave the harbor soon
enough stagger in upon the rocks where it seemed her masts might fall
into our own grounds, and grandmamma told me that thus my father,
though born in the island, had first met my mother.