V.
IT might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain
class of invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful
stimulant,—a tonic medicine which may produce astonishing
results within a fixed time,—but which if taken beyond that time
will prove dangerous. After
a certain number of months, your
first enthusiasm with your new surroundings dies out;—even
Nature ceases to affect the senses in the same way: the
frisson
ceases to come to you. Meanwhile you may have striven to become
as much as possible a part of the exotic life into which you have
entered,—may have adopted its customs, learned its language.
But you cannot mix with it mentally;—You circulate only as an
oil-drop in its current. You still feel yourself alone.
The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six
minutes;—perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the
brevity of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all
activity ceases with sundown: there is no going outside of the
city after dark, because of snakes;—club life here ends at the
hour it only begins abroad;—there is no visiting of evenings;
after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone prepares to retire.
And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time for social
intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself to
this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European
or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,—at least
some interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours
during the suspension of business after noon, or those following
the closing of offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy
men may find time for such relaxation; and these very hours have
been always devoted to restorative sleep by the native population
ever since the colony began. Naturally, therefore, the stranger
dreads the coming of the darkness, the inevitable isolation of
long sleepless hours. And if he seek those solaces for loneliness
which he was wont to seek at home,—reading, study,—he is made
to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of all
libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter,
means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad
to obtain even a review, and
wait months for its coming. And
this mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one
feels less inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that
single enjoyment, which at first rendered a man indifferent to
other pleasures,—the delight of being alone with tropical
Nature,—becomes more difficult to indulge. When lethargy has
totally mastered habit and purpose, and you must at last confess
yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber, or at best
from a carriage window,—then, indeed, the want of all
literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to
discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,—from climate
as well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see
young girls passing to walk right across the island and back
before sunset, under burdens difficult for a strong man to lift
to his shoulder;—the same journey on horseback would now weary
you for days. You wonder of what flesh and blood can these
people be made,—what wonderful vitality lies in those slender
woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and despite their
astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight and
touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this
savage strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand
better how mighty the working of those powers which temper races
and shape race habits in accordance with environment.
… Ultimately, if destined for acclimatation, you will cease to
suffer from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long
period of nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must
thin the blood, soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint
of health to a dead brown. You will have to learn that
intellectual pursuits can be persisted in only at risk of life;—
that in this part of the world there is nothing to do but to
plant cane and cocoa, and make rum, and cultivate tobacco,—or
open a magazine for the sale of Madras handkerchiefs and foulards,
—and eat, drink, sleep, perspire. You will understand
why the tropics settled by European races produce no sciences,
arts, or literature,—why the habits and the thoughts of other
centuries still prevail where Time itself moves slowly as though
enfeebled by the heat.
And with the compulsory indolence of your life, the long exacerbation
of the nervous system, will come the first pain of nostalgia,—the
first weariness of the tropics. It is not that Nature can become ever
less lovely to your sight; but that the tantalization of her dangerous
beauty, which you may enjoy only at a safe distance, exasperates at last.
The colors that at first bewitched will vex your eyes by their
violence;—the creole life that appeared so simple, so gentle, will reveal
dulnesses and discomforts undreamed of. You will ask yourself
how much longer can you endure the prodigious light, and the
furnace heat of blinding blue days, and the void misery of
sleepless nights, and the curse of insects, and the sound of the
mandibles of enormous roaches devouring the few books in your
possession. You will grow weary of the grace of the palms, of
the gemmy colors of the ever-clouded peaks, of the sight of the
high woods made impenetrable by lianas and vines and serpents.
You will weary even of the tepid sea, because to enjoy it as a
swimmer you must rise and go out at hours while the morning air
is still chill and heavy with miasma;—you will weary, above all,
of tropic fruits, and feel that you would gladly pay a hundred
francs for the momentary pleasure of biting into one rosy juicy
Northern apple.
