When I returned to the hotel I asked for a bath and found that they only had salt baths. As I wanted a good cleaning instead of an unclean salting, I gave it up and resolved to hunt a bath-house in the city, although so far I had not seen a house, excepting a few private ones, that looked clean enough for a bath.
I met Doctor Echeverría before dinner time, and we agreed to eat together during the week of waiting for the arrival of the medical congresistas. Doctor Echeverría was a Costa Rican and had been called from San José by the United Fruit Company to organize and develop their hospital and cemetery at Limón, and superintend all medical and mortuary matters pertaining to that port, which was the principal shipping place of the company.
The doctor, who had not heard from home since the washout at Colón, although he had sent a daily cablegram to his wife, invited me to take an appetizer and go to the cable office before having dinner—and I could not well refuse. While we were sipping our poison at one of the dozen or more tables of the spacious barroom, he told me that after coming down to Port Limón, whose lowland climate was tropical, from San José, whose highland climate was temperate, he at first drank no wine or liquor. But he soon found it more and more difficult to do his work; and after a time became depressed and morbid. His friends advised him to take a drink of liquor a short time before the eleven o’clock breakfast and another before dinner. He did so and his depression passed off, and he was again able to work with comfort. I do not know what effect it would have had on me not to take an appetizer before each meal while at Panama, for I had no negative experience. Either he and I, or some one else and I, were always lounging about before meals, and it was either my turn or that of the other one to treat.
In Doctor Echeverría’s case I suspect that he had become anemic and nervous from hard work, a common occurrence in the tropical lowlands, and the alcohol had produced a feeling of comfort in his mind and diminished his nervous tension, and had thus acted as medicine. A man who has a great deal of active physical work to do in the tropics, and gets up early and does a large part of it before eating anything except a roll and coffee, is apt to feel exhausted if he keeps on working during the heat of the forenoon, and to actually lose strength. The coffee and roll breakfast is for those whose work is not physically very active or prolonged, or is done later in the day. I am the more inclined to think the liquor relieved him by its anesthetic influence upon his nerves rather than by any curative action, because I have tried it faithfully on several occasions for indigestion, for loss of flesh, for insomnia and for debility, and have never experienced any beneficial results. In England I drank a bottle of Bass’ ale at my six o’clock dinner and another at bedtime for four months without deriving benefit, either by a recovery of the flesh I had lost or by rapid improvement of the debility of my overtaxed nervous system. I think that, with the rest I enjoyed, I would have recovered my usual health more quickly if I had not tasted the ale. In France I drank a pint bottle of claret at the noon and evening meals for several months, and perceived no benefit either in feelings or in appearance. In Panama I tried similar tactics, and when I arrived home was in a poorer condition in every way than when I left. Perhaps if I had eaten less, and drunk no liquor, I might have experienced benefit from my trip, but it would have meant social segregation. So I feel that I have now done my duty by alcoholic beverages. I have made a failure, but my conscience is clear. I can not make myself over again and must give them up, let come what may.
As an anesthetic, and therefore as a medicine in certain irritable conditions of the nerves, I have found it of temporary benefit, but not curative. My experience with sherry on the voyage back from Colón to Panama was good, but it did not prevent the seasickness from returning whenever the ship took a lively turn. Hence I would advise those who have no definite ideas about alcohol to consider it as a medicine to be prescribed by a first-class doctor; or a powerful poison to be taken as a means of dissipation while health lasts, but not as a salutary stimulant or a tonic. Liquors stimulate the stomach but also favor gastric fermentation and a tendency to inflammation; they bloat and fatten people sometimes, but do so temporarily by interfering with the destruction and excretion of the waste material of the body; they make people permanently rosy, but do so by dilating and weakening the superficial blood-vessels, and they betray the cause of the rosiness by producing a characteristic mottled marking of the cheeks and crimson rotundity of the nose, to say nothing of whiskey pimples. If taken in small quantities during active exercise alcohol may be burned up in the body for immediate use, but if taken at other times it burns the tissues and permanently injures them. Inflammation of the stomach, hobnail liver, Bright’s disease, heart-degeneration, dropsy, apoplexy and premature death from some acute diseases that would not prove fatal in a healthy being, are ordinary fates of those who have tried to improve on nature by the use of alcohol as a tonic or stimulant. Impaired brain power and transmission of such defect to the offspring, and thus the breeding of degenerates, is perhaps the worst result.
Doctor Echeverría was about forty years old, had received his medical education at New York, had practiced several years at San José and, after being called down to Port Limón by the United Fruit Company, had been sent by them to London to study tropical diseases. How much his student life in the United States and his sojourn in England had affected his character I do not know, but he had that gentleness of speech and quietness of demeanor which had always seemed to me to be found only in the Anglo-Saxon countries. And he had also that Spanish courtesy which we seldom see among Anglo-Saxons in its best form. Altogether he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I had met, and it was a great treat to sit tête-à-tête at table with him twice daily. He greatly admired our government, and thought that the faith it had kept with Cuba was a sign of true greatness. We are the only nation whose government lives up to the requirements of a Christian nation.
I was agreeably surprised at the hotel dinners, for I had been told that I should not like the hotel. I suspect that this somewhat prevalent bad impression had been made by the fact that when great crowds visit Panama, the hotel becomes crowded and the service is for the time insufficient. The provisions then become scanty, and canned salmon and canned vegetables intrude themselves disagreeably and perhaps unpardonably, although good food canned is better than poor food that has not been canned.
After dinner we met Señor McGill, who was the political representative and local “chip-bearer” of Venezuela, that intrepid and warlike South American republic that is not afraid of anybody, and would rather take a thrashing than refuse to fight; and which by means of its pugnacity and pertinacity has won the respect of the world. However, Señor McGill was everything but what I expected to see. He did not inspire me with terror. He was a slender, soft-voiced, mild-mannered, agreeable young bachelor whose bulging hip-pocket contained nothing but cigarets, who liked soft drinks and who seemed to be seeking anything rather than a quarrel. And I suspect that President Castro is not as black as he has been painted, and that during the recent political crises all he desired of the great powers was to be let alone. From his patronym, I should infer that Señor McGill was a descendant of one of those scions of Highland or Hibernian nobility who, in earlier days, either with or without letters of marque from the English government, ravaged the Spanish main, plundered Spaniards by preference and others without reference, and finally settled down as Venezuelan nabobs. But he was not that kind of a murderer; he was only a lady-killer. It seemed strange to see a McGill who could not speak English or Gaelic or Hibernian. Yet, he did speak English—not that fluent, eloquent, consonant crowded variation that we in the United States are accustomed to hear from Macs and Mc’s, nor the rough-and-ready dissonance of the naturalized Kaiser-Wilhelmite; but the soft disarticulation of the Spaniard who knows English until he begins to talk it, when the difficulties and duplicities of its pronunciation and his Iberic infirmity in sounding consonants bring to naught all of his knowledge of its phonology and construction.
After we had conversed awhile in a sort of crazy-quilted, downy mixture of Anglo-Spanish, he put the polished chip on his shoulder and invited us to knock it off, or take something. So we took something. It was the tyrannic custom of the country, to be fighting to kill your enemy or “taking something” to kill yourself. Taking something was about the only entertainment (?) available in the evening except cigaret smoking, which was mostly a solitary vice in Panama, and exempt from the sociable treating habit; for every man carried his own package of favorite cigarets and was smoking them, or supposed to be smoking them, all of the time. Games of cards were of course popular at the clubs, but were an expensive entertainment for people of ordinary financial resources who cared to have money for use in other ways.
Doctor Echeverría had several acquaintances in the city and offered to introduce me to some of them. Accordingly after an hour of conversation with Señor McGill, we left him to his cigarets and “treating” friends, and walked and mopped foreheads for three blocks down the street to call upon Señor Arango, a prominent young engineer of the place. The heat had forced the señor, who, like myself, looked as if his fat had already been melted and run off, to remove his coat, vest and collar. He, of course, put them on when we arrived and was thus prepared to liquefy with us. I sympathized with him for having to live in a country where, all the year around, collars, vests and coats were physical encumbrances yet social necessities. Clothing is supposed to protect and comfort the body, not to punish and injure it. The negroes have an advantage over the whites in this respect, for they adapt their clothing to the climate rather than to convention. But we cannot all be negroes, and there are drawbacks to being either white or black.