Did I understand you to say that the carriages were all gone when you came ashore? Come in with us! There, the front seat with the driver is just waiting for you, and really, to walk is hardly safe under this vertical sun. Would you mind if we make a stop or two on the way out to the village, for the man of the family must have some fresh white ducks to wear in South America; let us wait for him here in the carriage.
It seems pleasant to-day not to make any exertion. I’ve no doubt we can get a lot of information from the driver, if we question him. He responds, oh! yes, he responds with great ardour, but with what result? One word in ten, we recognise. He thinks, of course, he’s speaking English, and I suppose we might better let him think so, but, bless you, if that’s English, what are we speaking? It’s just another of the West Indian surprises. You come to a country which has been under the beneficent English rule for over one hundred years, and you find the natives—the men who drive for you, who row you ashore, who carry your plunder, the women in the market—all speaking an almost unintelligible jargon of French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, with a little Hindustani and Chinese thrown in. Try the native on your best French, and at every five or six words he brightens up with understanding. Take any of the other languages and you have the same result; for your Trinidadian understands when he wants to, but woe betide you when you ask a question and want to know the answer. The native in Trinidad is bright and quick; he is not like his big lazy lout of a brother down in our Southland. He is a mix-up of many people, intelligent and active, and his language tells what a conglomerate he is, and what a happy-go-lucky life he leads.
III.
What can be keeping the shoppers so long? We shall certainly have to hunt them up; let us look inside.
I have often wondered what our mammoth cheap stores of the North do with their leftover plush albums, china shepherdesses, antiquated ready-made clothing, tin jewelry, their untold unnumbered tons of clap-traps; and now I know. It’s all dumped right here in the West Indies. From South America to Cuba, there is one vast collection of trash imported to catch the pennies of these long-suffering people. It is always difficult to obtain any of the native work; we have to go among the natives themselves for that. One glance at Port of Spain’s emporium, the Great Colonial Stores of Blank and Co. Limited, is enough!
“Mother,” said Sister, “I have an idea! Let’s try the deaf and dumb sign-language on the cabby.” And she does. It works like a charm. Off we swing for the savannah, a great, green, grassy plain, the playground for the Trinidadians. Here, they have their horse-racing and golf and cricket and polo under the fierce, tropical sun; here, the merry-go-round and pop-stands burst forth every Saturday afternoon; here the inevitable “picnic” is held, and as we happen here on a festival day, we see the children—big and little—gathering from every direction. There is something indestructible about the customs of an Englishman. He does not change his methods of living, as do other races, but, wherever he goes, he carries from pole to equator the customs and habits of his own country. So he plays golf and cricket and polo in Trinidad, when, at its mildest, the heat is about equal to our August.
It is on this savannah that we have our first good opportunity of viewing the mighty ceiba tree near at hand. You remember it was a great ceiba to which Columbus made fast his ships on the bank of the Ozama River in Santo Domingo? The ceiba may not be the largest tree in the tropics. I do not wish to say it is, for it would seem then that one was limiting to a given scale the grandeur of the tropical tree. There is apparently no limit to anything in the way of size or beauty under these skies. There may be greater trees in the “High Wood” than the ceiba, but, in our experience, it was by far the most wide-stretching of anything we had yet seen. One stands before it awed, stupefied by its immensity, its age, its strange manner of growing. And we think over all the words we know to express its size and beauty, and we feel so poor and powerless in expression.
