There are good shops in Bridgetown—good, respectable, well-to-do shops, that sell everything, from a candle down to a coffin, including wedding-rings, corals, and widows' caps. But they are hot, fusty, crowded places, as are such places in third-rate English towns. But then the question of heat here is of such vital moment! A purchase of a pair of gloves in Barbados drives one at once into the ice-house.
And here it may be well to explain this very peculiar, delightful, but too dangerous West Indian institution. By-the-by, I do not know that there was any ice-house in Kingston, Jamaica. If there be one there, my friends were peculiarly backward, for I certainly was not made acquainted with it. But everywhere else—at Demerara, Trinidad, Barbados, and St. Thomas—I was duly introduced to the ice-house.
There is something cool and mild in the name, which makes one fancy that ladies would delight to frequent it. But, alas! a West Indian ice house is but a drinking-shop—a place where one goes to liquor, as the Americans call it, without the knowledge of the feminine creation. It is a drinking-shop, at which the draughts are all cool, are all iced, but at which, alas! they are also all strong. The brandy, I fear, is as essential as the ice. A man may, it is true, drink iced soda-water without any concomitant, or he may simply have a few drops of raspberry vinegar to flavour it. No doubt many an easy-tempered wife so imagines. But if so, I fear that they are deceived. Now the ice-house in Bridgetown seemed to me to be peculiarly well attended. I look upon this as the effect of the white streets and the fusty shops.
Barbados claims, I believe—but then it claims everything—to have a lower thermometer than any other West Indian island—to be, in fact, cooler than any of her sisters. As far as the thermometer goes, it may be possible; but as regards the human body, it is not the fact. Let any man walk from his hotel to morning church and back, and then judge.
There is a mystery about hotels in the British West Indies. They are always kept by fat, middle-aged coloured ladies, who have no husbands. I never found an exception except at Berbice, where my friend Paris Brittain keeps open doors in the city of the sleepers. These ladies are generally called Miss So-and-So; Miss Jenny This, or Miss Jessy That; but they invariably seemed to have a knowledge of the world, especially of the male hotel-frequenting world, hardly compatible with a retiring maiden state of life. I only mention this. I cannot solve the riddle. "Davus sum, non Œdipus." But it did strike me as singular that the profession should always be in the hands of these ladies, and that they should never get husbands.
As a rule, there is not much to be said against these hotels, though they will not come up to the ideas of a traveller who has been used to the inns of Switzerland. The table is always plentifully supplied, and the viands generally good. Of that at Barbados I can make no complaint, except this; that the people over the way kept a gray parrot which never ceased screaming day or night. I was deep in my Jamaica theory of races, and this wretched bird nearly drove me wild.
"Can anything be done to stop it, James?"
"No, massa."
"Nothing? Wouldn't they hang a cloth over it for a shilling?"
"No, massa; him only make him scream de more to speak to him."