He landed twenty minutes after us. A salvo of twenty-two guns from his battleship in the bay sent as many gasps of excitement and delight through the eager multitude. The subconscious thought came to us that it might be better to pay outstanding war debts than to squander so much powder and coal, but it ill behooves an American of these days to criticize our neighbors for squandering public funds. Besides, it is no easy matter to keep up this loyalty-to-the-king business nowadays, though England, surely, need have no fear of changes. Then a white launch dashed up the cheering inner harbor, a curiously boyish-faced young man in a gleaming white helmet stepped briskly out on the landing-stage into a group of black policemen in speckless girlish sailor suits, who seemed to lack an ostrich feather on their round white straw hats, the governor in full-dress uniform and the lord mayor in purple and red robes bowed low over the hand that was proffered, and the prince and his suite were whisked away.
Black as it was, we were struck by the orderliness of the throng—what a pandemonium such an event would have caused in the temperamental French islands!—and its politeness, compared to the other British West Indies. But if the excitement was suppressed with British sternness, it was not voiceless. The brief glimpse of the fêted youth had aroused a thousand exclamations like that of the ragged old negro woman behind us, “Oh, my God! Dat’s he himself! Oh Christ!” On the outskirts of the crowd another who had been so far away as to have caught, at best, a glimpse of the top of the royal helmet was still confiding to her surroundings, “My Jesus, but him good lookin’!” An old negro in a battered derby through which his whitening wool peered here and there elbowed his way through the dispersing crowd mumbling to himself, “No use talkin’, it’s de British flag nowadays!” Farther on a breathless market-woman was asking with the anxious tone of a master of ceremonies who had missed his train and feared the worst, “Has my gentleman landed yet?” But the enthusiasm was not unanimous, for still another woman, who fell in with us down the street, asserted, “Even if de prince landing, it all de same for we workin’ people. De Prince Albert him landed fifty year ago, an’ de school-girls dat fall wid de grandstand still hobblin’ about on dey broken legs.”
The prince spent a whole day in the ancient and loyal colony before continuing his journey to Australia, most of it in the isolation of the governor’s residence, but if he carried away an imperfect picture of this isolated fragment of the empire, he could at least report to his “august father” that it still retains its extraordinary loyalty to the crown.
Bridgetown is very English, despite its complexion and dazzling sunshine. Broken bottles embedded in the tops of plaster walls, which everywhere shut in private property, shows that this, too, is an overcrowded country where the few who have must take stern precautions against the many who have not. The streets bear such ultra-English names as “Cheapside,” “Philadelphia Lane,” “Literary Row,” “Lightfoot’s Passage,” “Whitepark Road.” The very signboards carry the mind back to England—“Grog Shop—The Rose of Devon,” “Coals for Sale,” “Try Ward’s Influenza Rum—Best Tonic”; the tin placard of some “Assurance Company” decorates every other façade. Even the little shingle shacks in the far outskirts bear some unromantic name painted above their doors; shopkeepers are as insistent in giving their full qualifications as the clamoring boatmen in the bay. “O. B. Lawless—American Tailor—Late of Panama” announces a tiny one-room hovel. There is a British orderliness of public demeanor even among the naturally disorderly negroes; the women have neither the color sense nor the dignified carriage of their sisters of Martinique, rather the gracelessness of the English women of the lower classes. Yet in one thing Barbados is not English. It is hospitable, quite ready to enter into conversation even with strangers.
When it is not silent and deserted under the spell of a holiday or its deadly Sabbath, Bridgetown pulsates with life. Its wharves are as busy as all those of the rest of the Lesser Antilles put together, as busy as our St. Thomas was before Barbados became the focal point of the eastern Caribbean. Bales and bundles and barrels and boatloads of produce pour into it as continuously as if every one of its 160,000 were wealthy consumers of everything the world has to offer. Its own product is constantly being trundled down to waiting lighters—great hogsheads of sugar or molasses carried on specially designed iron frames on wheels, each operated by three negroes who have not lost the amusing childishness of their race for all their competition-bred industry, for they invariably take turns in riding the contrivance back to the warehouse, though the clinging to it must require far more physical exertion than walking. Steamers, schooners, lighters, rowboats, mule-trucks, auto-“lorries” are incessantly carrying the world’s goods to and fro. Innumerable horse-carriages, scores of automobiles, ply for hire. Excellent electric-lights banish the darkness from all but the poorer class of houses. Yet despite the constant struggle for livelihood,—or perhaps because of it,—Bridgetown has little of the insolence of the other British West Indies. Applicants for odd jobs swarm and beggars are plentiful, but the latter are unoffensive and the former approach each possible client with a “Do you want me, my gentleman?” so courteous that one feels inclined to think up some imaginary errand on which to send them. They seem to recognize that politeness is an important asset in their constant battle against hunger, which gives them also a responsibility, a reliability in any task assigned them, and a moderation in their demands that is attained by few other West Indians.
Barbados has a tramway and a railroad, the only ones between Porto Rico and Trinidad. True, they are modest little affairs, the tramcars being drawn by mules. Yet the latter step along so lively, the employees and most of the passengers are so courteous, and overcrowding is so sternly forbidden that one comes to like them, especially those lines which rumble along the edge of the sea in the never-failing breeze, above all in the delightfully soft air of morning or evening. It would be difficult in these modern days of indifferent labor to find more courtesy, more earnest efficiency, and stricter living up to the rules than among Bridgetown’s tram-drivers and conductors, yet their highest wage is sixty-four cents a day. But for the war, the system would long since have been electrified; the new rails have already arrived. There is no real reason, except civic pride, however, that the mule-cars should be abolished. They are more reliable than many an electric-line in larger cities; they are a pleasant change to the speed-weary traveler; and the perfection with which their extra mule is hitched on at the bottom of the one hill in town and unhitched again at its summit without the loss of a single trot is a never-ending source of amusement.
Sojourners in Barbados are certain to make the acquaintance of at least the long tram-line to St. Lawrence. There are plenty of hotels in the town proper, but they are habitually crowded with gentlemen of color. White visitors dwell out Hastings way, some two miles from Trafalgar Square. Unlike the French and Spanish towns of tropical America, the downtown section of the Barbadian capital is almost wholly given over to business—and negroes. The numerous white inhabitants and most of the darker ones of any standing dwell in the outskirts. There one may find parks shaded by mahogany and palm-trees, splendid avenues lined by one or both of these species, comfortable residences ranging all the way from tiny “villas” draped with an ivy-like vine or gorgeous masses of the bougainvillea to luxurious estates in their own private parks. Even the poorer classes in another stratum still farther from the center of town dwell in neat little toy-houses of real comfort, compared with the huts of the masses of Haiti or Porto Rico. For miles along the sea beside this longest tram-line one passes a constant succession of comfortable, light-colored houses with boxed verandas, wooden shutters that raise from the bottom, and a sort of cap visor over the windows. In many cases these boast tropically unnecessary panes of glass through which one can make out of an evening interiors of perfect neatness, homelike, well lighted, furnished and decorated in taste, with none of the gaudy and crowded bric-a-brac to be seen behind Spanish rejas in the larger islands.
The night life of Bridgetown is worth a ride behind the now weary mules, if only to see a negro urchin diligently striving to light a candle in a tin box on the end of his soap-box cart, lest he be hauled up for violation of the ordinance forbidding vehicles to circulate after dark without lamps. Promptly at sunset the black policemen have changed their white helmets and jackets for German looking caps and capes. On the way downtown one passes half a dozen wide-open churches and chapels in which black preachers are vociferously exhorting their nightly congregations to “walk in de way of de Lard”; one is certain to rumble past the shrieking hubbub of a Salvation Army meeting or two. There are crowds of loafers on many a corner—jolly, inoffensive, black idlers with the spirit of rollicking fun in their ebony faces, bursting into howls of laughter at the slightest incident that seems comical to their primitive minds. The filthy street-habits of the French and Spanish islands are little in evidence, for the police of Barbados are as vigilant as they are heavy-handed.
Downtown the activities of the day have departed. The larger stores have closed at four, the small shops at sundown. Only a scattered score of negro women squat in Trafalgar Square before their little trays of peanuts, bananas, and home-made sweets, a wick torch burning on a corner of them whether they are deposited on the ground or are seeking lack of competition elsewhere on top of their owners’ heads. There is no theater in Bridgetown; the cinema is as sad a parody on amusement as it is everywhere, but the audience is worth seeing, once. The negroes sit in the “pit,” the élite, chiefly yellow of tint, in a kind of church gallery. Shouts, screams, roof-raising roars of primitive laughter, deafening applause whenever the frock-coated villain is undone, mark the unwinding of the film from beginning to end; it is a scene far different from the comparative dignity of a black French audience. In the French and Spanish West Indies the cinemas begin after nine and end around midnight; in Barbados they start sharply at seven and terminate at ten with a rush for the last mule-cars, with all but the swift out of luck, and Bridgetown settles down to deathly Sunday stillness while the weary mules are still crawling toward the end of their laborious day.