“Try landscape, my boy; you have a rare hand for landscapes—good flaming landscapes, full of yellow and vermillion, you know!”
Although there was no one in the room, I can swear to a distinct slap on the back, after the emphatic “you know” of the tempter. It was a true diabolical suggestion, the yellow and vermillion, but not so sulphurous as what followed:—
“Go to the tropics boy, the glorious tropics, where the sun is supreme, and never shares his dominion with blue-nosed, leaden-colored, rheumy-eyed frost-gods; go there, and catch the matchless tints of the skies, the living emerald of the forests, and the light-giving azure of the waters; go where the birds are rainbow-hued, and the very fish are golden; where—”
But I had heard enough; I was blinded by the dazzling panorama which Fancy swept past my vision, and cried, with enthusiastic energy,
“Hold; I’ll go to the glorious tropics!”
And I went—more’s the pity—in a little dirty schooner, full of pork and flour; and that is the way I came to be in Jamaica, dear reader, if you want to know. I had been there a month or more, and had wandered all over the really magnificent interior, and filled my portfolio with sketches. But that did not satisfy me; there were other tropical lands, where Nature had grander aspects, where there were broad lakes and high and snow-crowned volcanoes, which waved their plumes of smoke in mid-heaven, defiantly, in the very face of the sun; lands through whose ever-leaved forests Cortez, Balboa, and Alvarado, and Cordova had led their mailed followers, and in whose depths frowned the strange gods of aboriginal superstition, beside the deserted altars and unmarked graves of a departed and mysterious people. Jamaica was beautiful certainly, but I longed for what the transcendentalists call the sublimely-beautiful, or, in plain English, the combined sublime and beautiful—for, in short, an equatorial Switzerland. And, although Jamaica was fine in scenery, its dilapidated plantations, and filthy, lazy negroes, already more than half relapsed into native and congenial barbarism, were repugnant to my American notions and tastes. They grinned around me, those negroes, when I ate, and scratched their heads over my paper when I drew. They followed me every where, like black jackals, and jabbered their incomprehensive lingo in my ears until they deafened me. And then their odor under tropical heats! Faugh! “’Twas rank, and smelt to heaven!”
I had, therefore, come down from the interior to set up my easel in Kingston, paint a few views, and thereby raise the wind for a trip to the mainland. Of course, I did not fly from painting red-faced portraits in the United States, to paint ebony ones in Jamaica. My scruples, however, did not apply to customers. There was a “brown man,” which is genteel Jamaican for mulatto, who was an Assembly-man, or something of the kind, and wanted a view of the edifice at Spanish-town, wherein he legislated for the “emancipated island.” I had agreed to paint it for the liberal compensation of twenty pounds. But one hot, murky morning, my brown lawgiver took the cholera, and before noon was not only dead, but buried—and my picture only half-finished! Mem. As people have a practice of dying, always get your pay beforehand.
Voltaire, I believe, has said, that if a toad were asked his ideal of beauty, he would, most likely, describe himself, and dwell complacently on a cold, clammy, yellow belly, a brown, warty, corrugated back, and become ecstatic on the subject of goggle eyes. And, I verily believe, that if my landlady had been asked the same question, she would have coquettishly patted up her woolly curls over each oleaginous cheek, and glanced toward the mirror, by way of reply. Black, glossy black, and fat, marvelously fat, yet she was possessed, even she, of her full share of feminine vanity. There was no mistaking, from the first day of my arrival, that her head was running on a portrait of herself. She was fond of money and penurious, and careful, therefore, not to venture upon a proposition until she had got some kind of a clew as to what her immortality would be likely to cost. I had, however, diplomatically evaded all of her approaches, up to the unfortunate day when my Assembly-man died. She brought me the news herself, and saw that it annoyed rather than shocked me, and that I stopped painting with the air of a man abandoning a bad job. She evidently thought the time favorable for a coup de main; there was a gleam of cunning in her little, round, half-buried eyes, and the very ebony of her cheek lightened palpably, as she said:
“So your picture will be no good for nothing?”
No!