Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 126, vol. III, May 29, 1886

‘He lunched with us to-day at Orange Grove!’ Harry answered, puckering his brow a little. ‘And her father actually wants her to marry that fellow! By Jove, what a desecration!’

‘Then you don’t like what you’ve seen so far of Mr Tom?’ Marian asked with a smile.

Harry rose and leaned against the piazza pillar with his hands behind him. ‘The man’s a cad,’ he answered briefly.

‘If we were in Piccadilly again,’ Edward Hawthorn said quietly, ‘I should say that was probably a piece of pure class prejudice, Noel; but as we are in Trinidad, and as I happen to know Mr Tom Dupuy by two or three pieces of personal adventure, I don’t mind telling you in strict confidence, I cordially agree with you.’

‘Ah!’ Harry Noel cried with much amusement, clapping him heartily on his broad shoulder. ‘So coming to Trinidad has knocked some of that radical humbug and nonsense clean out of you, has it, Teddy? I knew it would, my dear fellow; I knew you’d get rid of it!’

‘On the contrary, Mr Noel,’ Marian answered with quiet dignity, ‘I think it has really made us a great deal more confirmed in our own opinions than we were to begin with. We have suffered a great deal ourselves, you know, since we came to Trinidad.’

Harry flushed in the face a little. ‘You needn’t tell me all about it, Mrs Hawthorn,’ he said uneasily. ‘I’ve heard something about the matter already from the two Dupuys, and all I can say is, I never heard before such a foolish, ridiculous, nonsensical, cock-and-bull prejudice as the one they told me about, in the whole course of my precious existence. If it hadn’t been for Nora’s sake—I mean for Miss Dupuy’s’—and he checked himself suddenly—‘upon my word, I really think I should have knocked the fellow down in his uncle’s dining-room the very first moment he began to speak about it.’

‘Mr Noel,’ Marian said, ‘I know how absurd it must seem to you, but you can’t imagine how much Edward and I have suffered about it since we’ve been in this island.’

‘I can,’ Harry answered. ‘I can understand it easily. I had a specimen of it myself from those fellows at lunch this morning. I kept as calm as I could outwardly; but, by Jove, Mrs Hawthorn, it made my blood boil over within me to hear the way they spoke of your husband.—Upon my honour, if it weren’t for—for Miss Dupuy,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘I wouldn’t stop now a single night to accept that man’s hospitality after the way he spoke about you.’

‘No, no; do stop,’ Marian answered simply. ‘We want you so much to marry Nora; and we want to save her from that horrid man her father has chosen for her.’

And then they began unburdening their hearts to Harry Noel with the long arrears of twelve months’ continuous confidences. It was such a relief to get a little fresh external sympathy, to be able to talk about it all to somebody just come from England, and entirely free from the taint of West Indian prejudice. They told Harry everything, without reserve; and Harry listened, growing more and more indignant every minute, to the long story of petty slights and undeserved insults. At last he could restrain his wrath no longer. ‘It’s preposterous,’ he cried, walking up and down the piazza angrily, by way of giving vent to his suppressed emotion; ‘it’s abominable! it’s outrageous! it’s not to be borne with! The idea of these people, these hole-and-corner nobodies, these miserable, stupid, ignorant noodles, with no more education or manners than an English ploughboy—O yes, my dear fellow, I know what they are—I’ve seen them in Barbadoes—setting themselves up to be better than you are—there, upon my word I’ve really no patience with it. I shall flog some of them soundly, some day, before I’ve done with them; I know I shall. I can’t avoid it. But what on earth can have induced you to stop here, my dear Teddy, when you might have gone back again comfortably to England, and have mixed properly in the sort of society you’re naturally fitted for?’

‘_I_ did,’ Marian answered firmly; ‘I induced him, Mr Noel. I wouldn’t let him run away from these miserable people. And besides, you know, he’s been able to do such a lot of good here. All the negroes love him dearly, because he’s protected them from so much injustice. He’s the most popular man in the island with the black people; he’s been so good to them, and so useful to them, and such a help against the planters, who are always trying their hardest to oppress them. And isn’t that something worth staying for, in spite of everything?’

Harry Noel paused and hesitated. ‘Tastes differ, Mrs Hawthorn,’ he answered more soberly. ‘For my part, I can’t say I feel myself very profoundly interested in the eternal nigger question; though, if a man feels it’s his duty to stop and see the thing out to the bitter end, why, of course he ought in that case to stop and see it. But what does rile me is the idea that these wretched Dupuy people should venture to talk in the way they do about such a man as your husband—confound them!’

Tea interrupted his flow of indignation.

But when Harry Noel had ridden away again towards Orange Grove on Mr Dupuy’s pony, Hawthorn and his wife stood looking at one another in dubious silence for a few minutes. Neither of them liked to utter the thought that had been uppermost in both their minds from the first moment they saw him in Trinidad.

At last Edward broke the ominous stillness. ‘Harry Noel’s awfully dark, isn’t he, Marian?’ he said uneasily.

‘Very,’ Marian answered in as unconcerned a voice as she could well summon up. ‘And so extremely handsome, too, Edward,’ she added after a moment’s faint pause, as if to turn the current of the conversation.

Neither of them had ever observed in England how exceedingly olive-coloured Harry Noel’s complexion really was—in England, to be as dark as a gipsy is of no importance; but now in Trinidad, girt round by all that curiously suspicious and genealogically inquiring society, they couldn’t help noticing to themselves what a very dark skin and what curly hair he happened to have inherited.

‘And his mother’s a Barbadian lady,’ Edward went on uncomfortably, pretending to play with a book and a paper-knife.

‘She is,’ Marian answered, hardly daring to look up at her husband’s face in her natural confusion. ‘He—he always seems so very fond of his mother, Edward, darling.’

Edward went on cutting the pages of his newly-arrived magazine in grim silence for a few minutes longer; then he said: ‘I wish to goodness he could get engaged and married offhand to Nora Dupuy very soon, Marian, and then clear out at once and for ever from this detestable island as quickly as possible.’

‘It would be better if he could, perhaps,’ Marian answered, sighing deeply. ‘Poor dear Nora! I wish she’d take him. She could never be happy with that horrid Dupuy man.’

They didn’t dare to speak, one to the other, the doubt that was agitating them; but they both agreed in that half-unspoken fashion that it would be well if Harry pressed his suit soon, before any sudden thunderbolt had time to fall unexpectedly upon his head and mar his chance with poor little Nora.

As Harry Noel rode back to Orange Grove alone, along the level bridle-path, he chanced to drop his short riding-whip at a turn of the road by a broad canepiece. A tall negro was hoeing vigorously among the luxuriant rows of cane close by. The young Englishman called out to him carelessly, as he would have done to a labourer at home: ‘Here you, hi, sir, come and pick up my whip, will you!’

The tall negro turned and stared at him. ‘Who you callin’ to come an’ pick up your whip, me fren’?’ he answered somewhat savagely.

Noel glanced back at the man with an angry glare. ‘You!’ he said, pointing with an imperious gesture to the whip on the ground. ‘I called you to pick it up for me. Don’t you understand English?’

‘You is rude gentleman for true,’ the old negro responded quietly, continuing his task of hoeing in the canepiece, without any attempt to pick up the whip for the unrecognised stranger. ‘If you want de whip picked up, what for you doan’t speak to naygur decently? Ole-time folk has proverb, “Please am a good dog, an’ him keep doan’t cost nuffin.” Get down yourself, sah, an’ pick up your own whip for you-self if you want him.’

Harry was just on the point of dismounting and following the old negro’s advice, with some remote idea of applying the whip immediately after to the back of his adviser, when a younger black man, stepping out hastily from behind a row of canes that had hitherto concealed him, took up the whip and handed it back to him with a respectful salutation. The old man looked on disdainfully while Harry took it; then, as the rider went on with a parting angry glance, he muttered sulkily: ‘Who dat man dat you gib de whip to? An’ what for you want to gib it him dere, Peter?’

The younger man answered apologetically: ‘Dat Mr Noel, buckra from Englan’; him come to stop at Orange Grobe along ob de massa.’

‘Buckra from Englan’!’ Louis Delgado cried incredulously. ‘Him doan’t no buckra from Englan’, I tellin’ you, me brudder; him Trinidad brown man as sure as de gospel. You doan’t see him is brown man, Peter, de minnit you look at him?’

Peter shook his head and grinned solemnly. ‘No, Mistah Delgado, him doan’t no brown man,’ he answered, laughing. ‘Him is dark for true, but still him real buckra. Him stoppin’ up at house along ob de massa!’

Delgado turned to his work once more, doggedly. ‘If him buckra, an’ if him stoppin’ up wit dem Dupuy,’ he said half aloud, but so that the wondering Peter could easily overhear it, ‘when de great an’ terrible day come, he will be cut off wit all de household. An’ de day doan’t gwine to be delayed long now, neider.’ A mumbled Arabic sentence, which Peter of course could not understand, gave point and terror to this last prediction. Peter turned away, thinking to himself that Louis Delgado was a terrible obeah man and sorcerer for certain, and that whoever crossed his path, had better think twice before he offended so powerful an antagonist.

Meanwhile, Harry Noel was still riding on to Orange Grove. As he reached the garden gate, Tom Dupuy met him, out for a walk in the cool of the evening with big Slot, his great Cuban bloodhound. As Harry drew near, Slot burst away suddenly with a leap from his master, and before Harry could foresee what was going to happen, the huge brute had sprung up at him fiercely, and was attacking him with his mighty teeth and paws, as though about to drag him from his seat forcibly with his slobbering canines. Harry hit out at the beast a vicious blow from the butt-end of his riding-whip, and at the same moment Tom Dupuy, sauntering up somewhat more lazily than politeness or even common humanity perhaps demanded, caught the dog steadily by the neck and held him back by main force, still struggling vehemently and pulling at the collar. His great slobbering jaws opened hungrily towards the angry Englishman, and his eyes gleamed with the fierce light of a starving carnivore in sight and smell of his natural prey.

‘Precious vicious dog you keep, Mr Dupuy,’ Harry exclaimed, not over good-humouredly, for the brute had made its teeth meet through the flap of his coat lappets: ‘you oughtn’t to let him go at large, I fancy.’

Tom Dupuy stooped and patted his huge favourite lovingly on the head with very little hypocritical show of penitence or apology. ‘He don’t often go off this way,’ he answered coolly. ‘He’s a Cuban bloodhound, Slot is; pure-blooded—the same kind we used to train in the good old days to hunt up the runaway niggers; and they often go at a black man or a brown man—that’s what they’re meant for. The moment they smell African blood, they’re after it, like a greyhound after a hare, as quick as lightning. But I never knew Slot before go for a white man! It’s very singular—ex-cessively singular. I never before knew him go for a real white man.’

‘If he was my dog,’ Harry Noel answered, walking his pony up to the door with a sharp lookout on the ugly mouth of the straining and quivering bloodhound, ‘he’d never have the chance again, I can tell you, to go for another. The brute’s most dangerous—a most bloodthirsty creature. And indeed, I’m not sentimental myself on the matter of niggers; but I don’t know that in a country where there are so many niggers knocking about casually everywhere, any man has got a right to keep a dog that darts straight at them as a greyhound darts at a hare, according to your own confession. It doesn’t seem to me exactly right or proper somehow.’

Tom Dupuy glanced carelessly at the struggling brute and answered with a coarse laugh: ‘I see, Mr Noel, you’ve been taking counsel already with your friend Hawthorn. Well, well, in my opinion, I expect there’s just about a pair of you!’

(_To be continued._)

TOBACCO CULTIVATION.

The question of the cultivation of tobacco has recently been brought within the range of practical agriculture. In both Houses of Parliament the government has announced that permission will be given to grow this plant, and cure it in proper manner, as experiments, in various parts of the country, and more especially in Ireland. The Council of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in the chair, determined to help the government in the matter, provided the government gave a grant towards the experiments. The subject thus becomes one of special moment. It is very doubtful, however, whether any experiments that can be made will give us much more information than we at present have regarding this crop. That it can be grown in this country is certain. To take up the first seed catalogue that comes to our hand—that of Messrs Carter & Co.—we find that for a long series of years past, the seed of no fewer than seven varieties of Nicotiana is announced as for sale. The plants are grown in many gardens, and the leaves are dried and used as fumigants against insects. In fact, so simple is the growth of the plant, that the only directions given are to ‘Sow on heat, and transplant to good, rich, loamy soil, or sow out of doors in May.’ That the plant can be grown is certain; but if grown on an agricultural scale, it will have to bear with the usual effects of climate, injurious insects, and the thousand-and-one ills which plant-life is heir to. That is, so far as the plant is concerned. The great difficulty in every country will begin with the curing, and is the cause of the tobacco crop being gradually given up.

So far as Europe is concerned, there has been a great decrease in tobacco cultivation during recent years. In the Netherlands, the acreage is at present something like half what it was ten or twelve years ago. In Belgium, the decrease in area has been considerable, but not to so great an extent. In Austro-Hungary the acreage under tobacco was in 1884 less by 8768 acres than two years previously. In Germany, the area of the crop fell from 1881 to 1883 by over 12,000 acres. Italy, with its magnificent climate, grows only 8202 acres; while in France, where the government purchase the crop, only 32,800 acres were grown last year. It is to America, however, that we must turn for our best information as to the growth of tobacco. In the last four census years, this crop was grown to the following extent: 1850, crop of 199,752,655 pounds; 1860, crop of 434,209,461 pounds; 1870, 262,735,341 pounds; and 1880, crop of 472,661,117 pounds, grown on 638,841 acres. Here we find that although there was a great decrease in the growth of this crop after the war, it gradually picked up again, and the crop is now as large as ever. In 1883, 451,545,641 pounds were grown on an area of 638,739 acres. Its total value was £8,091,072.

The method of cultivation adopted in the United States cannot fail to be of use to the English or Irish grower. In the first place, a word should be said upon the position of tobacco in crop rotations. Travellers in South America have often noticed the desolate appearance of some portions of the country. This is due to the exhaustion of the soil by continuous tobacco-growing. A very large proportion of what was known as tobacco land has thus been reduced to a condition of poverty, and has been left to itself, and is covered with weeds. A good authority declares that this fault can be easily remedied, and that by growing tobacco as a rotation crop. After two crops of tobacco have been taken from the land, and after this a crop of corn, and then a crop of clover or vetches, after the latter have been cut or fed off, the land may be again prepared for another crop of tobacco. A word may be said here also on manures. In the best tobacco plantations, two hundred pounds of nitrate of soda and two hundred and fifty pounds of superphosphate per acre are used—the former bringing up a heavier crop, and the latter improving its quality. Besides these, large applications of farmyard manure are made. Taking Wisconsin as the State more particularly to be treated of, we find that the seed-beds are burned lightly, and a liberal allowance of manure worked in, to the depth of six inches, with a hoe or spade. This work of preparation begins in July, when the manure is applied. The bed is reworked in August, and again in September, for the purpose of keeping down any weeds or grass that may spring up; and finally, in November, it is hoed and raked and prepared to receive the seed, which is either sown in the Fall or early in the succeeding spring. When sown in the Fall, the seed is not previously sprouted. After sowing, the bed is compacted by rolling, tramping, or clapping with a board. The plants are carefully nursed by liquid manuring and by weeding. The young plants are generally large enough for transplanting by the 1st of June.

The land for the main crop—that is, into which the plants are transplanted from the seed-bed—is ploughed in the Fall after the crop of the previous year, and twice in the spring—in May, and just before the 1st of June. Coarse and rough manures are applied with the autumn ploughing, and finer well-rotted sorts in May. After the last ploughing, the land is thoroughly pulverised by harrows or drags, and marked off for the plant. The varieties of tobacco grown are either the seed-leaf or the Spanish. If the former, the plants are placed two and a half feet by three feet apart; but if the latter, three feet by a foot and a half. Thus, if the seed-leaf variety, some five thousand five hundred plants are used to the acre; and if the Spanish, nine thousand six hundred. As soon as the soil is in proper condition to work after the plants have been set out, a cultivator with five teeth is run between the rows, and this is kept up once or twice a week, until the field has been gone over five or six times. The crop is hoed twice—once after the cultivator has been run through the first time. Very little earth is put round the plant, level cultivation being preferred. In some portions of the district, a horse-hoe is used in cultivating the crop; this implement, from its peculiar construction, enables the operator to go very near each plant and stir every portion of the soil. In very small patches, the cultivation is done entirely with the hoe, which is kept up every week until the plants are so large that they cannot be worked without breaking the leaves.

The next operations are termed ‘topping’ and ‘suckering.’ In about forty-eight or fifty days after the plants are set, if the crop has been well cultivated and the weather seasonable, the flower-buds make their appearance, and are pinched out, leaving from fourteen to sixteen leaves on each plant. None of the bottom leaves are taken off, but all are left to mature, or dry up, serving as a protection against the dirt. Fields, however, are often seen in full blossom before the tobacco is topped, and this results in great damage to the crop. Tobacco is suckered twice—once in about a week after it is topped, and again just before it is cut, which is generally about two weeks after topping. ‘Suckering’ consists in the removal of young suckers, which at this time make their appearance in large numbers. As has been noted, tobacco is generally ready for harvesting in two weeks after being topped; but there is considerable variation in the time on various soils. On warm sandy loams, the plant will be as ripe in twelve days as it will be on heavy clayey soils in eighteen days. This is one of the reasons why sandy loams are preferred.