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absolute mystification. All these routs and cotillions, these mazurkas and schottisches and quadrilles in
these splendid ballrooms! These chandeliers glittering with hundreds of wax candles, and the brilliant
performances of the comedies of Crebillon and Beaumarchais and Scribe—where did they take place? In
dozens of houses apparently. The equipages and crinolines, the witty local press, the quarrels about pre-
cedence, the duels—why, it might be Regency London or Paris of Napoleon III! This is the sort of know-
ledge my brain is absolutely unable to deal with. It is not disbelief, for it is obviously true (though Mr.
Breen may have piled it on a bit), but a sort of mental disability, like the attempt to conjure up powdered
wigs in the Guadeloupean town of Moule. One bit of Etruscan pottery, about which I know nothing, can,
in a dark, vague and instinctive fashion, bring Lars Porsena of Clusium and all the ranks of Tuscany to
life for me. But here? I got up and looked out of the hotel window at the miserable, rain-soaked street that
straggled away into the trees. This glittering world existed only a hundred years ago, and there is noth-
ing, not a grain of corroborative evidence, not the remotest clue to prove that it once existed. Absolutely
nothing.
The climate of Castries may be relaxing in the normal sense of the word, but for patients suffering
from the languors of over-imaginativeness it must be the most bracing and astringent place in the world.
Soufrière for rheumatics, the island might announce on its tourist advertisements, Castries for romantics.
Wandering along the main street after dinner, I stopped in front of the cinema. But there was no perform-
ance that night, the posters said; the building had been taken over for the Speech Day and Prize Giving of
St. Mary's College, a school justly famous throughout the Antilles. The door was open, so I went in and
found a seat at the back of the dress circle.
Here, at any rate, I soon saw, was a completely English atmosphere, of a very familiar and sympathetic
sort. On the stage were the Headmaster, a few of the masters, and Mrs. Stow, who was giving the prizes
away. The names were shouted out, and each time a boy got up and climbed on to the stage, smoothing
his hair, pulling down the back of his jacket and straightening his tie with a sort of stumbling gravity.
Then the topic, the bow, the handshake, stumble-stumble, and down. From the very rare occasions I ever
had to go through this performance I remembered the agony. They had my sympathy. The inter-House
trophies came next: Rodney had won the cricket and football, Abercromby the aquatics. The Swots, thin,
spectacled boys, made way for the Bloods, who seized the handles of the great cups with a muscular grip.
Abercromby had also carried off the Davidson-Houston House Championship. Then came the presenta-
tion of the new Colours: Bloods again. I noticed with interest that the island fashions had remained faith-
ful to Oxford bags. These obsolete trousers were especially noticeable because they are the exact reverse
of the Trinidadian mode.
When the last of the colours and prizes had been carried away, the curtain came down and, after a
minute or two, rose again on the Forum scene in
Julius Cæsar
. Brutus and Antony left less of an impres-
sion on the mind than the citizens, who were wonderfully violent. Bellowing for the Will, they galloped
across the stage in a body, with their left hands upheld in a uniform gesture, suddenly stopping dead and
silent in their tracks. Then, swayed by Antony's rhetoric, they slowly recoiled again, all snarling with
scorn and hatred of the Senate; and finally, when the peroration reached its climax, they milled round and
round as though Antony from the height of the rostrum were stirring them up with a spoon. A real uproar,
and a thoroughly spirited performance.
The loudspeaker announced His Honour the Administrator, and Mr. Stow, an elegantly dinner-jacketed
figure in the blinding spotlight, rose and made an excellent speech, which was answered by the Head Pre-
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