Tom Cringle's Log

by Michael Scott

  Mr Bang here insisted on being paymaster, and tendered a sum that the black major thought so extravagantly great, considering the entertainment we had received, that he declined taking more than one-half. However, Mr Bang, after several unavailing attempts to press the money on the man—who, by the by, was simply a good-looking blackamoor, dressed in a check shirt, coarse but clean white trousers, with the omnipresent handkerchief bound round his head—and finding that he could not persist without giving offence, was about pocketing the same, when Pegtop audibly whispered him, “Massa, you ever shee black niger refuse money before? but don’t take it to heart, massa; me, Pegtop, will pocket him, if dat foolis black person won’t.”

  “Thank you for nothing, Master Pegtop,” said Aaron.

  We proceeded, and rode across the beautiful plain, gradually sloping up from the mangrove-covered beach, until it swelled into the first range of hills that formed the pedestal of the high precipitous ridge that intersected the southern prong of the island, winding our way through the ruins of sugar-plantations, with fragments of the machinery and implements employed in the manufacture scattered about, and half sunk into the soil of the fields, which were fast becoming impervious jungle, and interrupting our progress along the narrow bridle-paths. At length we began to ascend, and the comparative coolness of the climate soon evinced that we were rapidly leaving the hot plains as the air became purer and thinner at every turn. After a long, hot, hot ride, we reached the top of the ridge, and, turning back, had a most magnificent view of the whole Bight of Leogane, and of the Horseshoe, and Aaron’s Frog; even the tops of the mountains above the Mole, which could not have been nearer than seventy miles, were visible, floating like islands or blue clouds in the misty distance. Aaron took off his hat, reined up, and, turning the head of his Bucephalus towards the placid waters we had left, stretched forth his hand—

  “‘Ethereal air, and ye swift-winged winds,

  Ye rivers springing from fresh founts, ye waves

  That o’er th’ interminable ocean wreath

  Your crispèd smiles, thou all-producing Earth,

  And thee, bright Sun, I call, whose flaming orb

  Views the wide world beneath—See!’—

  Nearly got a stroke of the sun, Tom—what Whiffle would call a cul de sac—by taking off my chapeau in my poetical frenzy; so shove on.”

  We continued our journey through most magnificent defiles, and under long avenues of the most superb trees, until, deeply embosomed in the very heart of the eternal forest, we came to a shady clump of bamboos, overhanging, with their ostrich-feather-like plumes, a round pool of water, mantled or creamed over with a bright green coating, as if it had been vegetable velvet, but nothing akin to the noisome scum that ferments on a stagnant pool in England. It was about the time we had promised ourselves dinner, and in fact our black guide and Pegtop had dismounted to make their preparations.

  “Why, we surely cannot dine here? You don’t mean to drink of that stagnant pool, my dear sir?”

  “Siste paulisper, my boy,” said Mr Bang, as he stooped down and skimmed off the green covering with his hand, disclosing the water below, pure and limpid as a crystal-clear fountain. We dined on the brink, and discussed a bottle of vin-de-grave apiece, and then had a small pull at brandy-and-water; but we ate very little, although I was very hungry—but Mr Bang would not let me feed largely.

  “Now, Tom, you really do not understand things. When one rides a goodish journey on end—say seventy miles or so—on the same horse, one never feeds the trusty creature with half a bushel of oats; at least, if any wooden spoon does, the chances are he knocks him up. No, no; you give him a mouthful of corn, but plenty to drink—a little meal-and-water here, and a bottle of porter in water there, and he brings you in handsomely. Zounds! how would you yourself, Tom, like to dine on turtle soup and venison in the middle of a hissing hot ride of sixty miles, thirty of them to be covered after the feed? Lord! what between the rich food and the punch, you would have fermented like a brewer’s vat before you reached the end of the journey; and if you had not a boll imperial measure of carbonate of soda with you, the chances are you would explode like a catamaran—your head flying through some old woman’s window, and capsizing her teapot on the one hand, while on the other your four quarters are scattered north, south, east, and west. But gaudeamus—sweet is pleasure after pain, Tom, and all you sailors and tailors—I love to class you together— are tender—not hearted—creatures. Strange now that there should be three classes of his Majesty’s subjects who never can be taught to ride—to whom riding is, in fact, a physical impossibility; and these three are the aforesaid sailors, and tailors, and dragoon officers. However, hand me the brandy-bottle; and Pegtop, spare me that black jack that you are rinsing—so. Useful commodity a cup of this kind”—here our friend dashed in a large qualifier of cognac—”it not only conceals the quality of the water, for you can sometimes perceive the animalculæ hereabouts without a microscope, but also the strength of the libation. So—a piece of biscuit now, and the smallest morsel of that cold tongue—your health, Thomas”—a long pull—”speedy promotion to you, Thomas.” Here our friend rested the jug on his knee. “Were you ever at a gaudeamus of Presbyterian clergymen on the Monday after the Sacrament Sunday, Tom—that is, at the dinner at the manse?”

  “No, my dear sir; you know I am an Episcopalian.”

  “And I am a Roman Catholic. What then? I have been at a gaudeamus, and why might not you have been at one too? Oh, the fun of such a meeting! the feast of reason and the flow of Ferintosh, and the rich stories, ay, fatter than even I would venture on, and the cricket-like chirps of laughter of the probationer, and the loud independent guffaw of the placed minister, and the sly innuendos, when our freens get half foo. Oh, how I honour a gaudeamus! And why,” he continued,” should the excellent men not rejoice, Tom? Are they not the very men who should be happy? Is a minister to be for ever boxed up in his pulpit—for ever to be wagging his pow, bald, black, or grizzled, as it may be, beneath his sounding-board, like a bullfrog below a toadstool? And, like the aforesaid respectable quadruped or biped (it has always puzzled me which to call it), is he never to drink anything stronger than water? Hath not a minister eyes? hath not a minister hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, that another man is? If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? And shall we grudge them a gaudeamus now and then? Shall opera peracta ludemus be in the mouths of all mankind, from the dirty little greasy-faced schoolboy who wears a red gown, and learns the Humanities and Whiggery in the Nineveh of the West, as the Bailie glories to call it, to the King upon his throne, and a dead letter, as well as a dead language, to them, and them only? Forbid it, the Honourable the Lord Provost; forbid it, the Honourable the Lord Provost and all the Bailies; forbid it, the Honourable the Lord Provost and all the Bailies, and those who sit in Council with them! Forbid it, the whole august aggregate of terror to evil-doers and praise of them who do well! Forbid it, the devil and Dr Faustus!”

  By this time I had smuggled the jug out of our amigo’s claw and had done honour to his pledge. “Do you know, my dear Mr Bang, I have always been surprised that a man of your strong intellect, and clear views of most matters, should continue, in profession at least, a Roman Catholic?”

  Aaron looked at me with a seriousness, an unaffected seriousness, in his manner, that possessed me with the notion that I had taken an unwarrantable liberty. “Profession,” at length said he, slowly and deliberately, apparently weighing every word carefully as it fell from him, as one is apt to do when approaching an interesting subject on which you desire not to be misunder-stood—”Profession!—what right have you to assume this of me or any man, that my mode of faith is but profession?” and then the kind-hearted fellow, perceiving that his rebuke had mortified me, altering his tone, continu
ed, but still with a strong tinge of melancholy in his manner, “Alas! Tom, how often will weak man, in his great arrogance, assume the prerogative of his Maker, and attempt to judge—honestly, we will even allow, according to his conception— of the heart and secret things of another, but too often, in reality, by the evil scale of his own! Shall the potsherd say to his frail fellow, ‘Thou art weak, but I am strong?’ Shall the moudiewort say to his brother mole (I say, Quashie, mind that mule of yours don’t snort in the water, will ye?)—’Blind art thou, but lo, I see?’ All, Tom, I am a Roman Catholic! but is it thou who shalt venture down into the depths of my heart, and then say, whether I be so in profession only, or in stern, unswerving sincerity?”

  I found I had unwittingly touched a string that vibrated to his heart.

  “I am a Roman Catholic, but, I humbly trust, not a bigoted one; for were it not against the canons of both our churches, I fear I should incline to the doctrine of Pope—

  ‘He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.’

  My fathers, Tom, were all Catholics before me; they may have been wrong; but I am only my father’s son—not a better, and, I fear, I fear, not so wise a man. Pray, Tom, did you ever hear of even a good Jew, who, being converted, did not become a bad Christian? Have you not all your life had a repugnance to consort with a sinner converted from the faith of his fathers, whether they were Jews or Gentiles, Hindoos or Mohammedans, dwellers in Mesopotamia, or beyond Jordan? You have such a repugnance, Tom, I know; and I have it too.”

  “Well,” I proceeded, on the strength of the brandy grog, “in the case of an unenlightened, or ignorant, or half-educated man, I might, indeed, suspect duplicity, or even hypocrisy, at the bottom of the abjuration of his fathers’ creed; but in a gentleman of your acquirements and knowledge—”

  “There again now, Cringle, you are wrong. The clodhopper might be conscientious in a change of creed; but as to the advantage I have over him from superior knowledge!—Knowledge, Tom! what do I know—what does the greatest and the best of us know—to venture on a saying somewhat of the tritest—but that he knows nothing? Oh, my dear boy, you and I have hitherto consorted together on the deck of life, so to speak, with the bright joyous sun sparkling, and the blue heavens laughing overhead, and the clear green sea dancing under foot, and the merry breeze buzzing past us right cheerily. We have seen but the fair-weather side of each other, Thomas, without considering that all men have their deep feelings, that lie far, far down in the hold of their hearts, were they but stirred up. Ay, you smile at my figures, but I repeat it—in the deep hold of their hearts; and may I not follow out the image with verity and modesty, and say that those feelings, often too deep for tears, are the ballast that keeps the whole ship in trim, and without which we should be every hour of our existence liable to be driven out of our heavenward course, yea, to broach to, and founder, and sink for ever, under one of the many squalls in this world of storms? And here, in this most beautiful spot, with the deep, dark, crystal-clear pool at our feet, fringed with that velvet grass, and the green quivering leaf above flickering between us and the bright blue cloudless sky—and the everlasting rocks, with those diamond-like tears trickling down their rugged cheeks impending over us—and those gigantic gnarled trees, with their tracery of black withes fantastically tangled, whose naked roots twist and twine amongst the fissures, like serpents trying to shelter themselves from the scorching rays of the vertical sun—and those feather-like bamboos high arching overhead, and screening us under their noble canopy—and the cool plantains, their broad ragged leaves bending under the weight of dew-spangles, and the half-opened wild-flowers—yea, even here, the ardent noontide sleeping on the hill, when even the quick-eyed lizard lies still, and no longer rustles through the dry grass, and there is not a breath of air strong enough out of heaven to stir the gossamer that floats before us, or to wave that wild-flower on its hair-like stem, or to ruffle the fairy plumage of the humming-bird, which, against the custom of its kind, is now quietly perched thereon; and while the bills of the chattering paroquets, that are peering at us from the branches above, are closed, and the woodpecker interrupts his tapping to look down upon us, and the only sound we hear is the moaning of the wood-pigeon, and the lulling buzz of myriads of happy insects booming on the ear, loud as the rushing of a distant waterfall—(Confound these mosquitoes, though!) Even here, on this

  ‘So sweet a spot of earth, you might, I ween,

  Have guessed some congregation of the elves,

  To sport by summer moons, had shaped it for themselves.’

  Even in such a place could I look forward without a shudder to set up my everlasting rest, to lay my weary bones in the earth, and to mingle my clay with that whereout it was moulded. No fear of being houcked here, Thomas, and preserved in a glass case, like a stuffed woodcock, in Surgeon’s Hall. I am a barbarian, Tom, in these respects; I am a barbarian, and nothing of a philosopher. Quiero Paz is to be my epitaph. Quiero Paz—’Cursed be he who stirs these bones.’ Did not even Shakespeare write it? What poetry in this spot, Thomas! Oh,

  ‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

  There is society, where none intrudes,

  By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

  I love not man the less, but nature more,

  From these our interviews, in which I steal

  From all I may be, or have been before,

  To mingle with the universe, and feel

  What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.’

  Yes, even here, where nature is all beautiful and everything, and man abject and nothing—even here, Tom, amidst the loneliness of earth, rugged and half-mad as you must sometimes have thought me, a fellow wholly made up of quips and jests,—even I at this moment could, like an aboriginal Charib of the land, ‘lift up my voice to the Great Spirit,’ and kneel, and weep, and pray.”

  I was much moved.

  “You have spoken of knowledge, Tom. Knowledge! what do I know? Of myself I know as little as I do of any other grub that crawls on the surface of this world of sin and suffering; and what I do know, adds little to my self-esteem, Tom, and affords small encouragement to inquire farther. Knowledge, say you? How is that particle of sand here? I cannot tell. How grew that blade of grass? I do not know. Even when I look into that jug of brandy grog (I’ll trouble you for it, Thomas), all that I know is, that if I drink it, it will make me drunk, and a more desperately wicked creature, if that were possible, than I am already. And when I look forth on the higher and more noble objects of the visible creation, abroad on this beautiful earth, above on the glorious universe studded with shining orbs, without number numberless, what can I make of them? Nothing—absolutely nothing; yet they are all creatures like myself. But if I try—audaciously try—to strain my finite faculties in the futile attempt to take in what is infinite—if I aspiringly, but hopelessly, grapple with the idea of the immensity of space, for instance, which my reason yet tells me must of necessity be boundless—do I not fall fluttering to the earth again, like an owl flying against the noontide sun? Again, when I venture to think of eternity—ay, when, reptile as I feel myself to be, I even look up towards heaven, and bend my erring thoughts towards the Most High, the Maker of all things, who was, and is, and is to come; whose flaming minister, even while I speak, is pouring down a flood of intolerable day on one-half of the dry earth, and all that therein is; and when I reflect on what this tremendous, this inscrutable Being has done for me and my sinful race, so beautifully shown forth in both our creeds, what I do I know? but that I am a poor miserable worm, crushed before the moth, whose only song should be the miserere, whose only prayer ‘God be merciful to me a sinner!’”

  There was a long pause, and I began to fear that my friend was shaken in his mind, for he continued to look steadfastly into the clear black water, where he had skimmed off the green velvet coating with his stick.

  “Ay, and is it even so? and is it Tom Cri
ngle who thinks and says that I am a man likely to profess to believe what he knows in his heart to be a lie? A Roman Catholic! Had I lived before the Roman Conquest I would have been a Druid, for it is not under the echoing domes of our magnificent cathedrals, with all the grandeur of our ritual, the flaming tapers, and bands of choristers, and the pealing organ, and smoking censers, and silver-toned bells, and white-robed priests, that the depths of my heart are stirred up. It is here, and not in a temple made with hands however gorgeous—here, in the secret places of the everlasting forest; it is in such a place as this that I feel the immortal spark within me kindling into a flame, and wavering up heavenward. I am superstitious, Thomas, I am superstitious, when left alone in such a scene as this. I can walk through a country churchyard at midnight, and stumble amongst the rank grass that covers the graves of those I have lived with and loved, even if the be ‘green in death, and festering in their shrouds,’ with the wind moaning amongst the stunted yew-trees, and the rain splashing and scattering on the moss-covered tombstones, and the blinding blue lightning flashing, while the headstones glance like an array of sheeted ghosts, and the thunder is grumbling overhead, without a qualm; direness of this kind cannot once daunt me. It is here and now, when all nature sleeps in the ardent noontide, that I become superstitious, and would not willingly be left alone. Thoughts too deep for tears!—ay, indeed, and there be such thoughts, that, long after time has allowed them to subside, and when, to the cold eye of the world, all is clear and smooth above, will, when stirred up, like the sediment of this fountain of the wood, discolour and embitter the whole stream of life once more, even after the lapse of long long years. When my heart-crushing loss was recent—when the wound was green, I could not walk abroad at this to me witching time of day, without a stock or a stone, a distant mark on the hill-side, or the outline of the grey cliff above, taking the very fashion of her face, or figure, on which I would gaze, and gaze, as if spell-bound, until I knew not whether to call it a grouping of the imagination, or a reality from without—of her with whom I fondly hoped to have travelled the weary road of life. Friends approved—fortune smiled— one little month, and we should have been one; but it pleased Him, to whom in my present frame of mind I dare not look up, to blight my beautiful flower, to canker my rose-bud, to change the fair countenance of my Elizabeth, and send her away. She drooped and died, even like that pale flower under the scorching sun; and I was driven forth to worship Mammon in these sweltering climes; but the sting remains, the barbed arrow sticks fast.”