“Well, then, I’ll buy yours off you,” suggested the horseman; “there is no sense in having two owners to a tract that really belongs together. Let’s settle the matter and be done with it. I happen to have two thousand dollars with me. I was going to pay a debt with it”—the fishy smell was no olfactory illusion, you see—“but—”
The druggist jumped at the chance, the titles were transferred, and the horseman rode homeward—no doubt giving his creditor a wide berth. He built a shack beside the hot spring, carved out a bath in the rock, invited his friends, who also found the strange custom pleasant, and gradually there grew up around the place a hotel famous for its—gambling. Clients willingly slept in chairs by day, when rooms were full, if only they could lose their money by night. By the time the Americans came Coamo Springs was synonymous with the quick exchange of fortunes. A more modern hotel had been built, with a broad roofed stairway leading down to the baths, and rooms enough to ensure every gambler a morning siesta. Then one day—so the story goes, though I refuse to be hauled into court to vouch for it—an American governor who was particularly fond of the attraction of the place, betook too freely of the now forbidden nectars and ended by smashing up most of the furniture within reach, whereupon the proprietor sent him a bill for $1000 damages. Two days later the governor learned officially, to his unbounded surprise, that gambling was going on at Coamo Springs! The place was at once raided, and to-day the most model of old ladies may visit it without the slightest risk of having her sensibilities so much as pin-pricked.
I came near forgetting entirely, however, what is perhaps the most typical town of Porto Rico. Aguadilla, nestling in the curve of a wide bay on the northwest coast, where the foot-hills come almost down to the sea, and with a pretty little isle in the hazy offing, has much the same proportion between its favored few and its poverty-stricken many as the island itself. A monument a mile from town commemorates the landing of Columbus in 1493 to obtain water, though Aguada, a bit farther south, also claims that honor. The distinctly Spanish church, too, contains beautiful hand-carved reproductions in wood of Murillo’s “Assumption” and “Immaculate Conception,” noteworthy as the only unquestionably artistic church decorations in Porto Rico. The merely human traveler, however, will find these things of scant interest compared to the vast honeycomb of hovels that make up all but the heart of Aguadilla.
The hills, as I have said, come close down to the sea here, leaving little room for the pauperous people of all Porto Rican suburbs. Hence those of Aguadilla have stacked their tiny shacks together in the narrow rocky canyons between the mountain-flanking railroad and the sea-level. So closely are these hundreds of human nests crowded that in many places even a thin man can pass between them only by advancing sidewise. Built of weather-blackened bits of boxes, most of them from “the States,” with their addresses and trademarks still upon them, and of every conceivable piece of rubbish that can deflect a ray of sunshine or the gaze of passers-by, they look far less like dwellings than abandoned kennels thrown into one great garbage-heap. Of furnishing they have almost none, not even a chair to sit on in many cases. The occupants squat upon the floor, or at best take turns in the “hammock,” a ragged gunnysack tied at both ends and stretched from corner to corner of the usually single room. A few have one or two soiled and crippled cots, but never the suggestion of a mosquitero, though the mosquitos hold high revel even by day in this breathless amphitheater. For wash-tubs they use a strip of yagua pinned together at one end with a sliver and set on the sloping ground beneath the hut to keep the water from running away at the other. The families are usually large, in spite of an appalling infant mortality, and half a dozen children without clothing enough between them to properly cover the smallest are almost certain to be squalling, quarreling, and rolling about the pieced-together floor or on the ground beneath it.
For the hovels are always precariously set up on pillars of broken stone under their four corners, and the earth under them is the family playground and washroom. There is no provision whatever for sewerage; water must be lugged up the steep hillside from the better part of the town below. Break-neck ladder-steps, slippery with mud and with a broken rung or two, connect ground and doorway. The poverty of Haiti, where at least there is spaciousness, seems slight indeed compared to this.
Yet this is no negro quarter. Many of the inhabitants are of pure Caucasian blood, and the majority of them have only a tinge of African color. Features and characteristics that go with diligence and energy, with success in life, are to be seen on every hand. Nor is it a community of alms-seekers. It toils more steadily than you or I to be self-supporting; the difficulty is to find something at which to toil. Scores of the residents own their solar, or patch of rock on which their hut stands; many own the hut itself. Others pay their monthly rental, though they live for days on a handful of plantains—pathetic rentals of from twenty to thirty cents a month for the solar and as much for the hovel, many of which are owned by proud citizens down in the white-collar part of the town.
For all their abject poverty these hapless people are smiling and cheerful, sorry for their utter want, yet never ashamed of it, convinced that it is due to no fault of their own. That is a pleasing peculiarity of all the huddled masses of Porto Rico. They are quite ready to talk, too, on closely personal subjects that it is difficult to bring up in more urbane circles, and to discuss their condition in a quaintly impersonal manner, with never a hint of whining.
I talked with an old woman who was weaving hats. She lived alone, all her family having died, of under-nourishment, no doubt, though she called it something else. The hat she was at work upon would be sold to the wholesalers for thirty cents; it was almost the equal of the one I wore, which had cost five dollars,—and the material for two of them cost her twenty cents. She could barely make one a day, what with her cooking and housework. Cooking of what, for Heaven’s sake? Oh, yams and tubers, now and then a plantain from a kind friend she had. One really required very little for such labor. She smiled upon me as I descended her sagging ladder and wished me much prosperity.
A muscular fellow a bit farther on, white of skin as a Scandinavian, was “a peon by trade,” but there was seldom work to be had. He sold things in the streets. It was a lucky day when he made a profit of fifteen cents. His wife made hats, too. With three children there was no help for it, much as he would like to support his family unassisted. The house? No, it was not his—yet; though he owned the solar. The house would cost $32; meanwhile he was paying thirty cents a month for it.