Days at Blue Hole

THE carriage waited: the postman was coming, and — thank heaven! — he had a letter for me. ‘Railway station, please!’ I called to the driver, and tore the letter open.

‘Dear Miss Smith,’ I read, while the carriage-top fringes flipped, and my neck jerked, and the driver jangled his chimes. ‘We are delighted to have you come to Blue Hole. Mr. Hairs, the plantation overseer, will meet you at the train. Cordially, Amy Taylor.’

‘Miss Smith! She is expecting a lady!’ I moaned, catching nervously at my bags. So this was the assurance of a welcome for which I had waited! And how, with my moustache, was Mr. Hairs to recognize ‘Miss Smith’ in a crowd of strangers? Oh, for the dear familiarity of the hotel I was leaving, with its bathtub in a coop on the upstairs verandah!

At last, that night, the lights of Montego Bay sparkled below in the dark; down the rails toward them the hot train rattled and hooted. Of course the station platform was absolutely packed — I knew it would be; every town along the way had turned out its entire population to welcome the mail. However, ‘You are Mr. Hairs?’ I said to a tall man who did n’t seem to be meeting anybody else, and Mr. Hairs it was.

‘Mr. Smith!’ cried a friendly lady in the back seat of the car, welcoming me and the bags. ‘Amy will be delighted! Women guests are such a bother. I know, for I have been one myself for ages. Your hostess has grown quite tired of me. In fact, I have been ready a week to go home to my own plantation at Cousins Cove, but how could Amy and I part until it had been settled which you were, a man or a woman? Such an odd name — “Glanville.” It had us no end puzzled. Rowland,’ she called to Mr. Hairs, ‘don’t forget to honk at the gate. You see,’she informed me, ‘if you turned out to be a man after all, we arranged to honk two longs and a short. Amy was too busy to come with us, but wanted a warning, so as to know which speech to recite as you came up the verandah steps: she of course has had to prepare two. My own name,’ she finished, leaning back, ‘is Hay.’

‘I suspect I shall like Blue Hole,’ I told her sincerely, and peered out at the fringe of sea waves dimly visible between the palm-tree boles among which we were riding.

‘It’s a great place,’ said Mrs. Hay. ‘Something always up! New kittens this morning, in Amy’s wardrobe. And last Thursday it was an earthquake. Oh, what a fright we had! Amy and I fell into each other’s arms; but Rowland, who is always so brave, said, “Be calm: it’s the donkeys fallen from the hill on to the dining-room roof.” You got them down, too, did n’t you, Rowland,’ she went on, ‘even if one of them did take the gutter with him.’

Here was the gate, and a Negro boy springing to open it. Two longs and a short! Here were terrace steps between croton hedges, verandah steps hooded in blossoming jasmine, and Miss Taylor at the top to greet me. And here, no less welcome, were the mosquito curtains closed around me at last, and my eyelids closed over travel-tired eyes. But I grinned before I went to sleep: I was well off, and I knew it.

I

The Jamaican mornings at Blue Hole seemed invariably to begin well. First came the hummingbirds, waiting for a touch of the sun to open the crimson hibiscus flowers outside the window. Then the tinkling grackles would begin to tinkle. And then the donkeys would make their daily experiment, reaching over the fence for a mouthful of bougainvillæa blossoms to learn if they still were prickly.

My bedroom opened into a bath, the bath into a fern garden cut into the hillside, and that garden into the main flower garden below the verandah; and since all the doors were always open, this was the way my friend Scamp came in, the plantation dog.

He was a big white kindly fellow, and every morning brought some gift or other, a bit of coral, or a gaudy leaf he had pulled out of the croton hedge. Pleased as Punch to be remembered, I would lift the mosquito curtain to let him in; whereupon he would drop his gift on my chest, then curl up on the foot of the bed, sigh, roll back his eyes for an affectionate and understanding look, and sink into a snooze.

Meanwhile the servants were beginning to stir. From the drawingroom into which my bedroom opened came a noise between a whistle and a swish, and through the keyhole I spied the cause of it: Rhoda was polishing the floor with a half coconut husk. After this process, she perfected the gloss by planting her two bare feet on two cloths and skating methodically to and fro.

At the same time ‘Lil the butler,’ as she was called, drew my bath for me. Miss Taylor had read in some novel that Americans take cold morning baths invariably, and a cold bath was what Lil the butler drew. The water was piped direct from a mountain spring; and since spring water is as cold in the tropics as it is in Minnesota, I could n’t bear the thought of getting into it.

However, it never would do openly to admit that I was a softy, unable to enjoy a cold plunge like a true American; and so my habit was to splash the water awhile with one foot, then pull the plug and let the ice water shoot out into the fern garden. Thus to this day Lil the butler and Rhoda, whose ears probably were pressed in breathless horror to the far side of the palmwood wall, think that I actually took those baths.

In the tub one day — dry at the time — I found a lizard, doing his best to climb the porcelain side. Poor fellow, though he moved his legs so fast that they were invisible, he still got nowhere. I offered to help him with a towel, but his response to this was to pop down the drain.

More trustful was the toad, big as a flatiron, that lived under the tub. He was a peaceable wrinkled old codger. When, in the gorgeous tropical sunshine, I would set up the mirror in the fern-garden door and shave, he sometimes would take a half jump and unclose the little jewels of his eyes, and watch. Or he’d turn his back and sleep. We made no demands upon each other, and so got along very well.

Breakfast was at seven. The tropical day has a drowsy gap in the middle of it, and so must begin early. But for me the days at Blue Hole could not well be too long. I guessed that the first morning, when from the verandah I looked down on the glistening coconut groves and sea.

Near at hand the poinsettias flamed, allspice trees lifted towers of rich green. Ezekiel, the ‘boy,’ came and went with a tin on his head, watering the vegetable patch. And in the common at the foot of the hill, where the cattle and goats fed, the plantation laborers already were swinging their cutlasses, clearing the day’s allotted acre of the shrubby growths that had sprung up in it since the last rains.

II

After breakfast my habit was to spend the morning at the cove.

On some days, however, a norther blew from Cuba. When that happened, the villagers bandaged their heads in flannel to keep off the toothache, and I, pulling on a sweater, went not to the cove, but to the ragged coral shelf of Barbican, the next plantation, to watch the surf.

The rocks were too sharp to sit on, but I soon learned that a coconut husk eased that misery.

It was a rousing performance. The waves piled up, and exploded into sheaves of diamonds, and churned and spouted, and fell back in shawls of foamy lacework. Nor could I help admiring the crabs that sat calmly in the most exposed places and took all that buffeting: no shock could ruffle their dour decorum. They put me in mind of the Ziegfeld desperado who was so tough that in the electric chair he blew out the fuse.

Usually, however, the mornings were serene. Under the verandah hung a stem of ripe bananas from which Scamp, who was very neat about it, was permitted to help himself when hungry. I had the same liberty, and would fill my pockets and trudge down to the cove.

Before I had come to Jamaica I had formed a happy idea of the place. I had seen pictures of the waterfalls, and in The Sea and the Jungle had read that Jamaica was a jewel that smelled like a flower. But I had never guessed what a cove I should find waiting for me to revel in at Blue Hole.

There was a crescent of beach, with coconut trees leaning over it, and seagrape trees with leathery round leaves just right for picnic plates. There were ramparts of coral rock at the two ends, to dive from, and beyond them was the wickerwork of mangroves, where crabs went climbing. There was a pelican standing guard, and a reef to keep the sharks out.

In the arms of a crooked sea-grape tree I played the mouth organ, ate bananas, and read old Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As reading, this was not very up-to-date, and while I read it the problems of a distracted world went unsolved. Still, it suited: when I looked up from those hot and hard old stories, sometimes so beautiful, oftentimes so savage, and saw the palm leaves glint, and the long turquoise enamel of the sea swells, and the burning light of the sun on the white coral rock, I would stretch my near-naked self, and startle the pelican with a classic blast on the mouth organ.

On the cove sands lay a dugout canoe that I was free to use. Since a man from Minnesota is never so much at home as when he has a paddle in his hand, I spent much time in that canoe, striking out to sea, or exploring the shores. But the reef was the best fun. I coasted over it, hours at a time, stretched out with head over the prow.

Excitement heats me to this day when I remember those sand-paved caverns, fenced around with incredible mustard-colored antlers, gigantic mossgreen cauliflowers, lilac-tinted tubes, where the dissolving gray of weightless sea feathers nodded, and sea fans fanned in nets of burning purple. Pink anemones beamed, fantastic fish that I shall not tease myself by trying to describe swam in and out, like movable bright beds of flowers.

Sometimes a school of flying fish, like silver bullets, would come in about the canoe, ricocheting on the glassy water with the sound of a fountain. Or a Portuguese man-of-war would drift by, a clear blue gelatinous bubble as big as your fist, with a clear pink jelly frill on top, inflated to make a sail.

By eleven the sea breeze was lolloping in. It was time for a swim, and to apply cooling grease to a sun-smitten back.

III

After luncheon, a siesta, and then tea.

In the West Indies the Negroes think it a burden to carry things in their hands. They carry everything balanced on their heads. I had soon got used to seeing them do this, though at first, when a woman came down the street in Port Antonio with a writing desk on her head, I had set people laughing by asking innocently, ‘Is she a public stenographer?’ No, I had got used to seeing the school children balance their spelling books up there, and the laundresses their clothesbaskets. But when, after tea, Lil the butler would clap the tea tray on her head and skip for the kitchen, I never ceased to be surprised.

A Jamaican tea is something to brag about. Wistfully I recall the cashew biscuits, the crisp buttery lacework of toasted cassava wafers. And since Blue Hole is a coconut plantation where two hundred thousand nuts are harvested every year, coconut cake was a luxury Miss Taylor frequently could afford. After such teas I really could not do justice to the delights of dinner, however, unless I went mountain climbing first.

The house, as the story of the previous week’s earthquake had forewarned me, is built into a hillside. This makes for safety in the event of a hurricane; indeed the old house more than once has had to stand that chief of West Indian scourges. Miss Taylor liked to recall one storm, when the piano blew out the front door with a rumble and a pop, which ended her music lessons forever. But Jamaican hills are likely to be mountains, and such they were at Blue Hole. Thus I could go mountain climbing as readily after tea as I went reef cruising after breakfast, and every day I did it. Sometimes Mrs. Hay would grasp a stick and come along.

A favorite climb was the Mango Walk. This was the villagers’ path to their hilltop gardens where they grew shallots and yams and cocoa lilies in a cooler altitude. It led through steep hillside groves of mangoes and bamboos, and then came out grandly into the open gardens at last. On the way I would meet villagers coming down with yams they had dug. ‘Respects to you, my master!’ would boom a stately Negro woman, curtsying in spite of the heavy basket on her head; her bright turban and cutlass would make her look most picturesque. Upon hearing such a greeting the little Northern republican would beam with pleasure.

Near the top was a spring in a hollow of the rock, with maidenhair ferns growing all around it. This made my destination. Sitting there to catch my wind, I would look down into the golden afternoon world, past the cocky plumes of the breadfruit trees, and featherduster bamboo clumps, and dense balls of mango greenery, to the coconut flats by the sea, and watch the steamers, blunt and busy, and the white sails of beautiful becalmed sailing ships.

It was a peaceable world, and, best of all, its peaceableness seemed a part of myself. My soul, usually just of the peanut size, swelled out in pygmy grandeur, and all the dear works of the Creator, spread out so beautifully below, filled it with calm and happiness.

At dinnertime usually came a sudden sunset: the mountains blackened, the clouds turned a dreadful red. In the silence all at once the lapping of waves would rise to us from the black sands of Barbican Bay. But distant sounds soon were smothered in the thick din of night insects; and the Muscovy ducks with their heads under their wings slept perched on the cannons sunk in the terrace turf. No pirates these nights, to set that old battery to barking!

The tropical darkness came with a rush, overwhelming, velvet-black. But in the middle of it, bravely gay, was the verandah dinner table with its old silver and flowered china, fringed napkins standing in the glasses, little nosegays of hibiscus and jasmine, and beaming lamp.

Overhead strange moths flitted, praying mantises jumped into the salad, but nobody minded. Mr. Hairs sat at my left, Miss Taylor dealt at my right. Opposite sat Mrs. Hay, looking humorous and charming, and Mrs. Ranklne, Miss Taylor’s aunt.

IV

Mrs. Rankine, years before, after a long life of industry and self-sacrifice, had decided to grow old. So she shrank down to the mosquito size, and lost her wits, and never afterward bothered to do much work or talk sensibly. From her own plantation in the mountains her bed had been fetched, — a huge black structure in native mahogany, carved with pineapples and scrolls, — and this was all she needed for a comfort. She did very strange sewing, whose purpose nobody could make out, and said cryptic things in a merry voice, and in general lived a life of mysterious privacy. But she liked the American visitor well enough, and enjoyed being tapped impudently on the arm or winked at now and then. And though she never said anything herself at table, she laughed more gayly than anybody when some one of the rest of us was witty.

Mrs. Hay was full of puns and drolleries. After she had said something especially good she had the habit of covering her face with her hand in mock embarrassment; but since one finger was lost from that hand, she could peep through slyly, and enjoy our laughter. For all her puns and jollity, however, she lived a life of sadness. Her husband, who had been a princely, hospitable sort of man, was dead; their daughter, who was a beauty, had gone off to New York; and Cousins Cove, for lack of money, was falling into ruin.

She left Blue Hole before I did. I shall never forget the night ride when we took her home, now humping over a white bridge, with the sea rushing in beneath, now skirting a bay where the fishermen brandished enormous flaming torches on the rocks. Never did anything make night seem so black as those torches. Then Cousins Cove at last, with the dogs jumping on the dining table in the rapture of having their mistress home again.

But it was a far, lonely, decrepit place to leave that good Scotswoman, and so I am glad to say that she came back to Blue Hole the following Tuesday, and is there yet for all I know. Miss Taylor craved company, too; and in Jamaica, as was true in our own Old South, plantation visitors come often and stay a long time.

Mr. Hairs was a very quiet man, whose British habit of speaking without moving his lips was exaggerated to a point where I could understand but little of what he said. But he was very patient about repeating, and about instructing me in the names of things. ‘It’s a Betsy-kickup, that bird,’ he would say, and break into a smile, for the darky names for things he thought very funny. He looked well on a horse, and wore the oldest, droopiest, most comfortable hat you can imagine.

Coconut day was his busy day, as it was Mrs. Rankine’s. She stood on the verandah watching the sale, and murmuring ‘Coc’nut, coc’nut,’ and nodding and smiling, while he, down below, dickered with the dozen buyers. But at noon the sale was over. He would retire into his office under the verandah; and the buyers, each man with a fire of his own by the old ‘ breeze-mill,’ would cook their dozen lunches of yams and fish.

Of Miss Taylor’s perfections as a hostess it is a pleasure to speak. She was easy, entertaining, and thoughtful. But sometimes she was a bit absentminded, as you will understand when I tell you how her bathing suit was lost.

We all were going to Orchard, three or four plantations away, to swim. There was a hulk of a wrecked steamer lying on the beach there, to dress in, and it was going to be a frolic.

But when all was ready Miss Taylor’s bathing suit was gone. Not ten minutes before it had been on a chair, where several of us had seen it. Now it was nowhere, as an exhaustive search proved. Even Scamp was accused of having run off with it. Poor Miss Taylor was desperate, until Rhoda gasped: ‘Lord a-matty, Miss Amy! You got it on!’ Sure enough, she had put it on under her frock, in order to make changing simpler when we got to the beach.

Thus it was the aptness rather than the absent-mindedness of her remark at dinner one evening that made it memorable. We were having roast pig, — the Blue Hole porkers, by the way, are fed on breadfruit, coconut, and bananas, — and midway through the meal she turned politely to me and murmured: ‘Won’t you have more of the filling, Mr. Stuffing?’

At this, Mrs. Hay in a paroxysm retired behind her four-fingered hand; Mrs. Rankine fetched out a high cackle; and Mr. Hairs, who seldom got beyond a sad grin, had to laugh too. ‘Mr. Stuffing’ was my name henceforward at Blue Hole, and I never bothered to be undeserving of it.

Miss Taylor, in fact, had sensed from the first that, devoted though I might be to the dear dishes of the dear homeland, what I wanted in Jamaica was Jamaican dishes. So she sent her ranger into the bush for native fruit, star apples with purple flesh, rusty brown naseberries, granadillas whose seeds I drank in their own liquor, soursops for sherbet.

There were cocoa-bud soup and pumpkin soup, fried plantain, steamed breadfruit, akee on toast. There were stuffed chochos, and delicious Caribbean fish brought on the run fresh every noon from Barbican Bay; guava preserves, and puddings made of sweet potatoes and ginger. There was coconut water in a tall pitcher with a weighted lace cover over the top, and coffee from the Blue Mountains. And the way I not merely sampled but gorged upon all these good things earned me very legitimately the name Miss Taylor’s slip of the tongue had given me.

V

After dinner the mail would be brought by William, who came whistling in the dark. Letters I seldom got, and so I would beg to be excused, and walk down to the sea.

At Blue Hole the night world in some ways is more beautiful than the world by day. When a leaf falls from a coconut palm, as constantly is happening, it is fifteen feet long and a yard wide, and so makes something of a blot on the lawn. But at night you do not see it, whereas the palm leaves overhead, in crisp black silhouette, look finer than ever. I had early become an ardent coconut palmist, and now would stand enraptured under a not-too-tall tree, with the wigwam of its interweaving lattice pattern about me and the tropical stars blinking through above — until the sound of a nut dropping from some other tree would pull my head into its collarbone socket like a turtle’s, and send me skipping into the open.

Beyond the gate was the bridge. Blue Hole’s Blue Hole is a spring, of an agate color, broad and shallow; and from it a surprisingly large stream flows through banks of watercress and Job’s-tears to the sea.

In daytime, in the water by the bridge, stand the Negro women of Barbican and Sandy Bay, doing their washing. Miss Taylor regarded the custom as most uncouth, but immemorial use had established it as one of the villagers’ British rights before she was born, and so she could do nothing about it.

The girls’ skirts were certainly tucked up shockingly high. ‘Oh, what a pretty gentleman! Good enough to eat!’ they would call when I went by for stamps. Or, ‘Wonder why gentleman don’t carry a cane?’ Then they would smack their wet clothes and laugh uproariously.

But at night the stream and the bridge were still as a grave. If a Negro did come galloping on his mule, he would sing to keep himself company in the dark, and would wheel in fright at the glimmer of my white trousers before calling a relieved ‘Evening, sir!’

Beyond the bridge was a palmy bit of shore, neat and narrow: here I walked. It was the dark of the moon; there was no horizon; the stars overhead ran down into new mirrorwise constellations under my feet while I paced on this shelf among them.

On such nights, or even more when the moon returned and swamped the world in radiance, there would be music from across the water. Sandy Bay would fall to singing.

Sandy Bay is no great place. When I bought stamps there, the postmistress would put down the peas she was shelling and pass the time of day. Above her office and bedroom was the district court, a bare clean room where Mrs. Hay and I one day heard a young Negro arraigned for ‘furious driving.’ Thirtyfive miles an hour was his speed, but he had come around a corner on the wrong side of the road, which had caused the mischief. His witness, a healthy black boy, kissed the Bible with a report like a pistol shot, whereupon the young Irish inspector, to whom things Jamaican were as new as they were to me, could not help laughing, even though he was seated by the magistrate. And when the trial was over, here were the school children outside screaming their multiplication tables under a calabash tree, and the fishermen bringing in their catch.

But at night Sandy Bay broke out in music, and across the water I would sit on a palm log and listen.

First there would be drum music, a big drum and a tom-tom contrasting their slow and rapid rhythms; this soon passed into a grand vocal concert of Moody and Sankey hymns. Stanza upon stanza, the tramp, tramp, tramp of chords would march across the mirror of the sea, rich, swelling, and full.

One night’s music I remember with special gratitude. A fisherman setting his nets between the singers’ side of the bay and mine, unseen and alone on the starlit water, invented melodies of his own, weaving them into the village harmony. He had the ear for it, a fine voice, and a heart that was too full for hems and haws.

VI

Such were the days at Blue Hole.

Of course there were interruptions: church, for example, where the lizards in the cornice set up a heathen chant while the black choirboys in the white surplices raised their eyebrows very high, at their Christian chanting, in an effort to reach the top notes. People came in to tea, and we went several times to town.

In town there were no end of errands: ice to be got, invariably; cotton prints for Rhoda, three yards of rickrack for Lil the butler; and the mistress of Orchard wanted needles, and would have a man at the gate on horseback to pick them up when we came by.

We swam at the Doctor’s Cave, with a cold tongue in a basket to slice afterward for a snack; and picnicked at our own cove, with Ezekiel running back to the house for napkins, or walking up a tree to cut down green coconuts for us to drink from.

However, the final interruption came at last. We breakfasted gloomily indoors that morning. Cooped in the dining room, with the heavy ladles and blue finger glasses glowering from the sideboard, I felt the end already upon me. Mrs. Rankine had got up in the middle of the night to be present, and put on her best dress.

But here were the servants, — Rhoda, and Lil the butler, Ezekiel and William, and the cook whom I had seldom seen, but was most indebted to of any, — all wishing me health and good fortune and a speedy return, while the jasmine leaves over their heads began to show color in the first chilly light of morning. Good-bye, good-bye! And down the steps I went, and down the croton walk, and so after a very long day to Kingston again, where, after all, I was well off, too.

The next letter I got from Miss Taylor began, not ‘Dear Miss Smith,’ but ‘Dear Mr. Stuffing.’ It told how Scamp, the day after my departure, had come in with a hunk of coral in his mouth as usual. But then he saw the bed was empty, and was disgusted, and dropped the coral on the floor with a thump. Then he went out through the fern garden, down through the big garden, and so under the verandah, and ate a banana.

I hope to go back to Blue Hole some day, as you can well imagine. If I do, I hope Scamp will be still alive.