Kitabı oku: «A Confession of St. Augustine», sayfa 3

[TO BE CONCLUDED.]

PART II

THOUGH it was in 1513 that Ponce de Leon came sailing from Puerto Rico to find the waters of youth, it was not till 1565 that the terrible, the cruel (yet no more responsibly cruel or terrible than a tiger) Pedro Menendez de Aviles came in sight of those sands, and fell upon the weak-minded, fever-wasted Huguenots whom he found in possession and captured and slaughtered these heretics, and put Spain and God in keeping of their own again. The tale need hardly be repeated here; once for all the pious, pitiless Pedro has told it for himself to his king, the pious, pitiless Philip, in a letter found among the colonial archives at Seville and included among other curious documents in The Unknown History of Our Country, as it is entitled by the lady of St. Augustine who compiled it. The Lutherans, as Menendez, like all the Spaniards of his time, called the Huguenots, were by the laws and usage of the time illegally there, and it was his duty as a loyal subject and a good Christian to destroy them. He was much concerned besides in saving the souls of the savages from these Lutherans who had the gift of insinuating affection for themselves among the Indians along with their heretical instruction.

There is something wonderful in the moral security of the murderer’s account of his crime, which was not a private or personal murder so much as a political act duly avenged on the Spaniards by the French, when their turn came. For the present the French were miserably officered; they were spent by hunger and sickness; the winds and waves were leagued with the Spaniards against them; and they gave themselves up to Menendez, as he had fairly stipulated, without any promise of mercy. Then he took them out from their comrades’ sight by tens till he had put them all to death, except a few who proved to be of the true faith just in time, and other few who were such excellent artificers that their skill could not be spared by the captors who spared their lives. There is a touch in the fashion of their taking off by Menendez worthy of an hidalgo who was born in Granada and who knew how a gentleman should behave in such a matter. He had their hands bound, and led them aside, and then, to spare their feelings, he had them stabbed in the back.

There was bloodshed of this sort or that pretty well everywhere along these white sands, but death had so long died out of the dead that one day when we motored down Anastasia Island to a point where there had been a battle, we lunched on the table stretched under the trees of a pleasant farm, and used a half-petrified skull to keep down our Japanese paper table-spread without molestation from its terrible memories. It does not sound very pleasant, but we were no more aware of the petrifaction’s human quality than it was of ours, and in the farm-yard near by the peach-trees kept on with their leisurely blossoming as if there had never been slaughter of French or Spaniards in the shade where we ate our sandwiches with the sweet, small oysters from the shore, and drained our thermos-bottles of their coffee. In fact, after the Spaniards were with comparatively little wanton bloodshed secure in their hold of Florida, life at St. Augustine went on in the paternal terms which the obedient children of their fatherly kings found kindly enough. During those three hundred years, one Philip followed another from the Second till the Fourth, and St. Augustine drowsed under their rule till some successor of them ceded it to the British in exchange for Cuba, which the British had somehow (it does not matter how) come by. Meanwhile, as the papers from the Sevillian archives testify, the bond between the prince and his far-off subjects was close if not tender. When any of them was in trouble he wrote to the king; a priest who fancied himself wronged in his duties or privileges wrote; the families of old soldiers wrote, dunning for their pensions; any one who had a grievance against any other, or a pull of his own, wrote to the king. Sometimes the king wrote back, or seemed to write, for perhaps he did not personally read all those letters. When, in due course, his faithful lieges began to build him that beautiful fort of San Marco they wrote so pressingly and constantly for money that the kings made its cost their joke. One Philip said he thought they must have now got it so high that he ought to see its bastions from Madrid; another asked if they were making its curtains of solid silver.

By that time, from one cause or another, the royal funds had begun to run low; the English buccaneers had long since learned to tap them at their sources in the galleons bringing the gold and silver ingots up the Spanish Main from South America. When the authorities of St. Augustine had got the lofty bastions of San Marco finally up and the solid-silver curtains down, General Oglethorpe, who had meanwhile settled Georgia, marched a force of Englishmen through the forests and morasses to Anastasia and sat down before the stronghold, and began to bombard it. But in their season there are clouds of mosquitoes and myriads of sand-flies in that island and they bit his sick and homesick soldiers fearfully. Still he held on, and he might have reduced the stronghold and the starving population of three thousand civilian refugees within its walls if one day a relief of Spanish ships had not come sailing up from Havana. Then the British general struck his tents and led his bitten and baffled forces home through the forests and morasses.

San Marco has never been attacked since, for when our revolution broke out, Florida did not join the other colonies in their revolt against the British, who remained peaceably enough in possession till they ceded the province back to Spain. Then the old city resumed its slumbers in her keeping, till Spain in her turn ceded Florida, with its Seminole War, to the United States, when the name of the fort was changed, fatuously enough, from San Marco to Fort Marion, in honor of a hero whose side Florida had not taken in our revolt. It is devoted now mainly to rousing and allaying the curiosity of the swarming tourists who haunt its medieval fastnesses, and for the first time in their lives realize what a past they had no part in was like. In this way it serves the best possible use, but otherwise it is employed as the scene of rehearsals for the more populous events of the picture-plays. On a single occasion last year a company of three hundred combatants – white and black, men, women, and children, hired overnight for the purpose – thronged the noble place and repelled each other in an invasion by the Japanese, with a constant explosion of old-fashioned musketry which sounded like the detonations of the unmuffled motors of a fleet of such boats as infest all our inland or coastwise waters. These, no longer in the force of former years, make themselves heard over the still waters of the bay at St. Augustine any especially fine evening, when they madden the echoes with their infernal racketing. No longer as in their former years, I say, but they are still in such force as to keep frightened away the sail-boats which used to flock there, but now linger only in a sad two or three. Otherwise the bay is not crowded with any sort of craft: a few yachts of houseboat model; the little steamers which ply between St. Augustine and Daytona, the fishing craft which bring the inexhaustible oysters and their multifarious finny kindred to the excellent fish-market; and, on stated days, the great, swelling stern-wheel steamboat arriving from Jacksonville as from the Western rivers of sixty years ago formed the pleasure and business of the port; though I must not forget the two gasolene packets running to the North beaches, at hours which it took them the whole of January to ascertain and specify.

Otherwise the port offered a good reproduction of the two centuries of calm which it must have enjoyed during the Spanish rule; to be sure there was now the rattling of the trolley-car over the extortionate toll-bridge to the island which could not have been heard then, or even imagined. I like to fancy that time as one of entire peacefulness for all not of the New Religion who after the time of the devout Menendez are scarcely imaginable there. The spirit of the time lingers yet in a few half-dozen old coquina houses standing flush upon the streets. One of them stood next to our own, covered, roof and wall, with ivy and with roses and yellow bignonia flowers, where Prince Murat, the Bonapartist heir of the Neapolitan throne, lived and died in a long, unmolested exile. We found it a charmingly simple interior, much like that of the little house so lately owned and occupied by a gentle, elderly Spanish lady who received us like friends upon fit introduction, but had to keep her street door locked against the tourists apt to make themselves at home by walking in without ceremony. The door was overhung by a true Spanish balcony, and behind the house reposed an old garden of trees and flowers and vegetables, with the only staircase of the house climbing the outer wall from it. The gentle lady was proud of the age of her house, which she held as great as that of the oldest house in St. Augustine in the same street, or even greater. There is a rivalry between oldest houses in St. Augustine, but after making friends with her we would admit no competition. We always looked for her in the quaint garden as we passed, and we were always hoping to go into it again, when one day suddenly, as such things seem to come to one in St. Augustine, we heard that she was dead of pneumonia. By chance also we saw her funeral starting from the cathedral, and then, keeping our own course, we fell in behind the sad train by another chance, and followed till it left us to keep its way to the arid and sandy new cemetery of her church.

The old Spanish cemetery, now disused, lies far away on the edge of the marshes to the northwest, where it was sweet one morning to find it basking in the sun, under its wilding cedars, in the keeping of the cows which made it their pasturage. When I wandered a little way among its forgotten and neglected graves, I found no name Spanisher than Burns on one of the stones. There might have been Spanisher names; I only say I did not happen on them then, though later, following the wandering cowpaths, I did find such a name as, say, Lopez. But at the worst the old Spanish cemetery is not so all misnamed as the old Huguenot burial-ground, where no Huguenot was ever buried, and where you cannot read a solitary name of French accent or denomination. The Old Religion, as distinguished from the New Religion which the Huguenots professed, is the faith which now perhaps not unfitly prevails in St. Augustine, but there is a great variety in the Protestant faiths, let alone that difference of white and black which is of such marked emphasis that I do not suppose any one could get to heaven from a church where he was not properly segregated. The colored churches, divided from the white, are again divided by such a nice distinction, for example, as Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal. Many of the colored people, however, are broadly Roman Catholic, but they also have their own churches apart from the white.