Louis Philip

“ While on the subject of mulatto hostesses — we had a treasure in our Miss Susie at Paramaribo. The most surprising dinners in the most surprisingly short time could that talented manageress send you in. Her house was perfect. The polished floors were an invitation to vanity. The huge beds, with their multitudinous down pillows and ample mosquito-net, were castles of indolence. No doctor could surpass Miss Susie in the knowledge and treatment of diseases peculiar to the colony. The colored women used to be vastly learned in simples. ”

“ Here was a thunderbolt fallen in the midst of us slave-owners. One white man — slave owner, too, jointly, to the tune of some five hundred souls, proposing a negro dance over the grave of another white man ”

“ A million birds wheeled and flittered and plunged, screaming their shrill, vext cries as they hovered and grouped and darted again across the dream landscape that quivered through the shimmer of the hot, vaporous haze. To me it was as the border tract that lay without the hedge which guarded the enchanted land of Sleeping Beauty. Only, I no more, but the tossing, trembling sea waves from beyond, were to penetrate this mystic garden of sleep. ”

“ But after the great day had come and gone, the majority of our people stayed with us as trusted servants. Very occasionally, while emancipation was yet ahead, evil communications from the negroes of other plantations would corrupt the good manners of one or two of the gang. Once, on my way from the canal jetty to the house, after a few days' absence, I encountered a much bedizened big toad, a very loudly got-up creature, indeed, gay in old ribbon and many-hued calico rags. ”

“ Theirs was a very big plantation, working a gang nearly double ours — but a dull, underfed, scurvy lot. It was part of the programme that these people were to have a dance. Such a thing had never been heard of in "old masra's" time, and I don't believe a single pair of legs in that black company knew how to set about kicking out — nigger legs though they were. Poor souls! their days, as long as they could remember, had been passed from earliest morn till latest eve, dragging everlastingly across and across these monotonous cocoa-grounds, in constant dread of the cut of the overseer's whip. ”

“ In my early days planters lived more on the plantations than they do now. One feature of the Paramaribo of half a century ago has almost disappeared from the scene — the stores, which used to fringe the plain for a considerable distance. Of course we had to have big supplies on hand on plantation, both for the gang and for the house; and all our wants were supplied from those stores. They were "universal providers." As the wife of a long-dead governor told me when I was new to it, they sent out "everything from a ball-gown to a coffin." ”

“ These, I was informed, were the patrols — gentlemen of Paramaribo who, in relays, guarded the streets a certain number of hours in the night. I began to see that a slave colony had its drawbacks. Precaution of that sort is troublesome. A few days later I had another surprise — a more revolting one. I had gathered from stray gossip an inkling of what I guessed to be a sort of tragedy coming off. But my bad Dutch misled me. Early one morning, however, an appalling din of drums, tom-toms, and kettles awoke me and my curiosity together. My boy informed me: " One ningere be raati, inasra." ”

“ Every here and there a vista of canal opens up a fresh avenue of floral magnificence and variety of foliage. Through the tropical haze of the lime-perfumed atmosphere the brilliant bodies of the scarlet flamingoes rock and sway in the marshy shallows amid the blinding sunshine, for in the distance their legs are discernible. ”

“ My hostess, a mulatto woman (freed mulatto women used to be great at hotel-keeping in the three Guianas) at once let me know the reason. There was a plague of smallpox in the town. People had it by hundreds and were dying by scores. I ruminated a little while in the shade of the hotel gallery. Presently the clinking of a glass or something drew my attention to the verandah opposite. There, seated at one of the small tables, rum-besotted and repulsive, was the most fearful case of elephantiasis I ever saw. The limbs were of an awfulness beyond description; the trunk a bloated mass. ”

“ There were also some half score watchmen, whose duty it was to attend to the sluice-gates which regulated the irrigation of the cotton-fields and held in check the stealthy waters of the vast mud-flats of the Surinam coast; those slow, hungry waters that creep onward and onward, and rise ever higher and higher with the incoming tide, longing to lave all vegetation with their brackish, weedy waves. ”

“ The Dutch government was formerly very severe in its sentences. These are now, of course, very much moderated, emancipation having put an end to much of the necessity for the old condition of things. Shortly before my arrival in the colony, three men were condemned to be burnt in presence of the governor and suite. They were the ringleaders of a band of colored conspirators who had attempted to set fire to some stoves on the plain with the object of putting Paramaribo in conflagration, and had thus earned the penalty imposed by the Dutch law against incendiaries. ”

“ Nowadays big planters get such supplies as they want direct from the States and Europe; the ladies' millinery comes out from Amsterdam and Paris; and the few stores are but relics of the past. Government House, one of the first conspicuous objects that meets the eye from the river, is little changed. It is a fine structure of the kind, with, perhaps, more of an English than a Dutch look. A pleasant, airy ballroom has been added to it. The other houses in the neighborhood were and are mostly owned by planters down river, and by official people. ”

“ Slave-owner though I was myself, it did make a man feel proud to think that his was the country under whose flag every human creature was free. I was thinking how I should tell this luckless negro that, by the laws under which I held my land, I was bound to give him up to the authorities, when George appeared, looking savage enough, and wanting to speak to masra. ”

“ I was a very young fellow when I first went out to Surinam. I have not been what I call "a very young fellow" for, anyhow, fifty years now, so that the survey I am taking is a fairly comprehensive one. Plantation life did not then hold out anything very seductive to my imagination. I considered cotton one of the planet's least romantic necessities. But it had been decided in family council, firstly, that some one ought to go out and work the place; secondly, that this some one ought to be myself. So I shipped from Hull to Rotterdam, and thence, per Hollander to Paramaribo. ”

“ The world outlives both, so it's hard to say which has the advantage. The laws anent vagabondism are daily being more strictly enforced in both hemispheres; and we elder Bohemians look back somewhat regretfully on the old days when we roamed pretty well at our own sweet will over certain parts of the newer continent; when we did not do the herring-pond in six days; when alien legislation was as yet unborn and when the British public still consumed sugar which was not conjured out of rags and bones and all their next of kin. ”

“ We had more than once our own contribution of putrefying living humanity to send to that lovely garden land. On one occasion I noticed one of the women of the gang lounging about the quarters with her hand wrapped in raw cotton, and remarked upon it to one of the overseers. ”

“ While Fles, the clerk, and I aired our linguistic attainments, George did interpreter every now and then in Negro-English, until I found I understood him better than anybody, and that he and I got along beautifully. ”

“ Ever and always they "bring the eternal note of sadness in." The last time I saw Santa Santa it had become a wilderness whereon the foot of man never trod. The estate had been abandoned some years previously, the hands being wanted for a more money-bringing cocoa plantation ”

“ Possibly something more gratifying might result than the tiny nuggets, which do certainly make pretty lace-pins for the wives and daughters of subscribers, but do as certainly not induce a rush of shareholders. ”