Although the bath-house was accessible from the ground floor only, we had a shower bath on our floor that was very convenient and very popular. Every morning soon after daybreak and every evening before retiring, the guests put on bath-robes or overcoats, whichever they happened to possess, stole along the veranda to the shower room and had a refreshing time under the shower. The water which was rainwater, was not cold enough to be chilly and could be enjoyed for an almost indefinite time, or until one was obliged to give place to “next.”
As a roommate I had Doctor Morrow of San Francisco, a genial young man of wholesale proportions, who had a ready laugh and knew a thing or two about bubonic plague, leprosy and other interesting curiosities. I was more than satisfied.
But not so Doctor Frank. The stranger who shared the hot air of the one-sided, three-bedded room with him and Doctor Newman, was a bachelor and a dude who filled the place with toilet articles and perfumes, and spent most of his time undressing and dressing. His best and most constant, possibly his only, friend was the looking-glass. Doctor Frank pointed him out to me in the afternoon as he came sauntering along the walk in front of the veranda: an immaculately dressed, red-whiskered, delicate-skinned dandy who had polished the hair off the top of his head and was proud of the incandescent horseshoe fringe that connected his beard with the back of his head. As he sauntered along beaming with self-satisfaction and shining with bare-headed brightness, we gazed at him; and he seemed to think that we were admiring him, and was apparently not displeased. Moral: Be vain and you will be happy.—Vanity had at least made something out of him. Those who have no vanity live in darkness, undiscovered and unappreciated.
I did not feel compelled to take siestas here and preferred to stroll about along the breezy beach hunting shells, or sitting on the veranda smoking and talking with Doctors Waite, Senn, Newman, Frank and Morrow, and with others who came to visit us from the other camp.
While we were there the negroes gathered the cocoanuts and trimmed the cocoa palms that fringed the beach. This was a very interesting sight. A bare-footed negro would put a hatchet in his belt, catch hold of a tree trunk with his hands and rapidly walk up the tree just as a man with spikes fastened on his ankles walks up a telegraph pole, except that he used his bare toes with which to cling to the corrugated bark. A monkey could not have done better, nor looked better. The cocoa palm that grows on the seashore, although tall, is always slender and somewhat inclined, and is thus favorable for climbing. Nevertheless the climber must have the great strength of his remote ancestors in his toes, as well as a steady head, to climb so high in that way. Upon arriving at the top he chops off the branches that bear nuts and then trims the tree by removing those that hang downward. In less than ten minutes he is down and toes up the next tree. When all trees were trimmed, the negroes cut off the end of several of the cocoanuts, drank the milk and threw them into the sea. Most of the nuts, however, were left lying around, for nobody seemed to want them.
PATH LEADING ACROSS THE LAWN FROM
WASHINGTON HOTEL TO THE BEACH
Showing One of the Cocoa Palms that Bordered
What a place this would be for a row of windmills to be kept going by this steady seabreeze! I wondered why I had not seen any windmills in Panama. But the negroes did not seem to have much to do but gather cocoanuts and drink the milk and be fanned by the breezes; and as windmills can neither gather the cocoanuts nor drink the milk they would be quite useless and superfluous. Perhaps as the years pass on the canal will be finished and the 20,000 laborers and the high-salaried employees be discharged and the stores that feed, clothe and saloon them be closed; and it may then become necessary to work the land and develop the industries and build windmills and factories. But that time is a long way off. Millions of dollars must find their way to Panama, and thousands of deaths be died while windmills wait. Neither windmills nor factories are tropical institutions.
On Sunday morning Doctor Morrow stumbled audibly out of bed at five o’clock and went hunting up the river. But he came back safe and sound in the afternoon, without having gotten anything but plenty of exercise and a few pounds of alligator mud upon his clothes. Not being deaf, I was wide awake when he left, and embraced the opportunity to take an early shower bath and thus turned annoyance into pleasure. Returning from the bath I witnessed the shower bath he was caught in, and wondered if it looked as beautiful to him in the swamps as it did to me on the covered veranda. It was a tremendous, I might say terrific, downpour of water. It darkened the heavens and lasted about twenty minutes, administering the greatest Colonic flushing on record. It started suddenly, soon after sunrise, and when it began to pass off the sun shone through it with great brilliancy, developing a heaven full of aurora tints which turned rapidly into deep blue and finally brightened into a glorious, cooled-off, tropical morning.