The hotel at St. Thomas is quite a thing of itself. There is no fair ground for complaint as regards the accommodation, considering where one is, and that people do not visit St. Thomas for pleasure; but the people that one meets there form as strange a collection as may perhaps be found anywhere. In the first place, all languages seem alike to them. One hears English, French, German, and Spanish spoken all around one, and apparently it is indifferent which. The waiters seem to speak them all.
The most of these guests I take it—certainly a large proportion of them—are residents of the place, who board at the inn. I have been there for a week at a time, and it seemed that all then around me were so. There were ladies among them, who always came punctually to their meals, and went through the long course of breakfast and long course of dinner with admirable perseverance. I never saw eating to equal that eating. When I was there the house was always full; but the landlord told me that he found it very hard to make money, and I can believe it.
A hot climate, it is generally thought, interferes with the appetite, affects the gastric juices with lassitude, gives to the stomach some of the apathy of the body, and lessens at any rate the consumption of animal food. That charge cannot be made against the air of St. Thomas. To whatever sudden changes the health may be subject, no lingering disinclination for food affects it. Men eat there as though it were the only solace of their life, and women also. Probably it is so.
They never talk at meals. A man and his wife may interchange a word or two as to the dishes; or men coming from the same store may whisper a syllable as to their culinary desires; but in an ordinary way there is no talking. I myself generally am not a mute person at my meals; and having dined at sundry tables d'hôte, have got over in a great degree that disinclination to speak to my neighbour which is attributed—I believe wrongly—to Englishmen. But at St. Thomas I took it into my head to wait till I was spoken to, and for a week I sat, twice daily, between the same persons without receiving or speaking a single word.
I shall not soon forget the stout lady who sat opposite to me, and who was married to a little hooked-nosed Jew, who always accompanied her. Soup, fish, and then meat is the ordinary rule at such banquets; but here the fashion is for the guests, having curried favour with the waiters, to get their plates of food brought in and put round before them in little circles; so that a man while taking his soup may contemplate his fish and his roast beef, his wing of fowl, his allotment of salad, his peas and potatoes, his pudding, pie, and custard, and whatever other good things a benevolent and well-fee'd waiter may be able to collect for him. This somewhat crowds the table, and occasionally it becomes necessary for the guest to guard his treasures with an eagle's eye;—hers also with an eagle's eye, and sometimes with an eagle's talon.
This stout lady was great on such occasions. "A bit of that," she would exclaim, with head half turned round, as a man would pass behind her with a dish, while she was in the very act of unloading within her throat a whole knifeful charged to the hilt. The efforts which at first affected me as almost ridiculous advanced to the sublime as dinner went on. There was no shirking, no half measures, no slackened pace as the breath became short. The work was daily done to the final half-pound of cheese.
Cheese and jelly, guava jelly, were always eaten together. This I found to be the general fashion of St. Thomas. Some men dipped their cheese in jelly; some ate a bit of jelly and then a bit of cheese; some topped up with jelly and some topped up with cheese, all having it on their plates together. But this lady—she must have spent years in acquiring the exercise—had a knack of involving her cheese in jelly, covering up by a rapid twirl of her knife a bit about an inch thick, so that no cheesy surface should touch her palate, and then depositing the parcel, oh, ever so far down, without dropping above a globule or two of the covering on her bosom.
Her lord, the Israelite, used to fight hard too; but the battle was always over with him long before the lady showed even a sign of distress. He was one of those flashy weedy animals that make good running for a few yards and are then choked off. She was game up to the winning-post. There were many animals running at those races, but she might have given all the others the odds of a pound of solid food, and yet have beaten them.
But then, to see her rise from the table! Well; pace and extra weight together will distress the best horse that ever was shod!
Over and above this I found nothing of any general interest at St. Thomas.