No Defense

Chapter 16

A LETTER

With a deep sigh, the planter raised his head from the table where he was

writing, and looked out upon the lands he had made his own. They lay on

the Thomas River, a few hours' horseback travelling from Spanish Town,

the capital, and they had the advantage of a plateau formation, with

mountains in the far distance and ravines everywhere.

It was Christmas Day, and he had done his duty to his slaves and the folk

on his plantation. He had given presents, had attended a seven o'clock

breakfast of his people, had seen festivities of his n*****s, and the

feast given by his manager in Creole style to all who came--planting

attorneys, buccras, overseers, bookkeepers, the subordinates of the local

provost-marshal, small planters, and a few junior officers of the army

and navy.

He had turned away with cynicism from the overladen table, with its

shoulder of stewed wild boar in the centre; with its chocolate, coffee,

tea, spruce-beer, cassava-cakes, pigeon-pies, tongues, round of beef,

barbecued hog, fried conchs, black crab pepper-pod, mountain mullet, and

acid fruits. It was so unlike what his past had known, so "damnable

luxurious!" Now his eyes wandered over the space where were the

grandilla, with its blossom like a passion-flower, the black Tahiti plum,

with its bright pink tassel-blossom, and the fine mango trees, loaded

half with fruit and half with bud. In the distance were the guinea

cornfields of brownish hue, the cotton-fields, the long ranges of negro

houses like thatched cottages, the penguin hedges, with their beautiful

red, blue, and white convolvuluses; the lime, logwood, and breadfruit

trees, the avocado-pear, the feathery bamboo, and the jack-fruit tree;

and between the mountains and his own sugar-estates, n***o settlements

and pens. He heard the flight of parrots chattering, he watched the

floating humming-bird, and at last he fixed his eyes upon the cabbage

tree down in the garden, and he had an instant desire for it. It was a

natural and human taste--the cabbage from the tree-top boiled for a

simple yet sumptuous meal.

He liked simplicity. He did not, as so many did in Jamaica, drink claret

or punch at breakfast soon after sunrise. In a land where all were

bon-vivants, where the lowest tradesmen drank wine after dinner, and rum,

brandy and water, or sangaree in the forenoon, a somewhat lightsome view

of table-virtues might have been expected of the young unmarried planter.

For such was he who, from the windows of his "castle," saw his domain

shimmering in the sun of a hot December day.

It was Dyck Calhoun.

With an impatient air he took up the sheets that he had been reading.

Christmas Day was on his nerves. The whole town of Kingston, with its

twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants, had but one church. If he entered

it, even to-day, he would have seen no more than a hundred and fifty to

two hundred people; mostly mulattoes--"bronze ornaments"--and peasants in

shag trousers, jackets of coarse blue cloth, and no waistcoats, with one

or two magistrates, a dozen gentlemen or so, and probably twice that

number of ladies. It was not an island given over to piety, or to

religious habits.

Not that this troubled Dyck Calhoun; nor, indeed, was he shocked by the

fact that nearly every unmarried white man in the island, and many

married white men, had black mistresses and families born to the black

women, and that the girls had no married future. They would become the

temporary wives of white men, to whom they were on the whole faithful and

devoted. It did not even vex him that a wretched mulatto might be whipped

in the market-square for laying his hands upon a white man, and that if

he was a n***o-slave he could be shot for the same liberty.

It all belonged to the abnormal conditions of an island where black and

white were in relations impossible in the countries from which the white

man had come. It did not even startle Dyck that all the planters, and the

people generally in the island, from the chief justice and custos

rotulorum down to the deckswabber, cultivated amplitude of living.

But let Dyck tell his own story. The papers he held were sheets of a

letter he was writing to one from whom he had heard nothing since the

night he enlisted in the navy, and that was nearly three years before.

This was the letter: