The Sugar Islands Page 19

  Her voice was soft, and her French had that unslurred purity of accent which is for those only to whom it comes as a taught language.

  From the adjacent flank of the veranda came the sound of voices, of a gramophone, of ice rattled against glass. Below, many feet below, the gentle waters of the Caribbean were breaking upon the beach. From the encircling hills the murmur of innumerable crickets ebbed and throbbed. But for the two young people crouched on the long flight of steps there existed beneath that velvet sky no sound but their own voices, no being but themselves.

  ‘And all this time,’ she went on, ‘you’ve been missing me, really and truly missing me?’

  ‘From that first instant, beautiful. Do you remember?’

  She nodded her head slowly. ‘How should I forget?’

  That first instant. It had been within an hour of his arrival at Martinique to take up a post there as a minor Government official. He was frightened and he was excited. He had never seen the tropics before. He had never left home even. He had never had any responsibility. He was only twenty-one. He was frightened and he was homesick. It was so new, so strange. And yet it was so lovely, the green square with its palm trees and its statue, its flanking of blue sea and shuttered houses. And it was so friendly. He had been welcomed enthusiastically, he had been taken to the Club, had been stood rum punches. He had sat looking down over the balcony when suddenly in the street below. . . .

  ‘There you were,’ he said, ‘in that mauve-coloured frock of yours. And you looked up at me. And oh, my dear, for six months I’ve not been thinking of anything but that.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, silly?’

  ‘How was I to? I didn’t know even who you were.’

  He had been shy of asking: shy with the inexperience of twenty-one and with the exaggerated sense of dignity that he felt was due to his position. Even when he had discovered who she was, the daughter of a Frenchman and a native, killed, both of them, in the disaster of St. Pierre, living with cousins in Fort de France, supporting herself with her needle, he had felt no nearer to meeting her. She went out little. He knew none of her friends. There was no link between them. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he told himself as the months went by. ‘You won’t meet her. You’d far better stop thinking about her.’

  He had not been able to. He could not believe that that look, that had seemed on her side as on his an utter admission of surrender, could be an end as well as a beginning. For six months the memory of that look had held him back when the moment and the mood had flung in his way the opportunities that inevitably come to a young man, handsome and well-placed.

  ‘No, no,’ he had thought. ‘I must keep free. One day I’ll be meeting her again. One day all of a sudden it’ll happen.’

  As it had happened. Never had he felt further from meeting her than he had that afternoon as he walked down from his office to the Club. Five o’clock, he had thought. For an hour I’ll play bridge or billiards, make or lose some three or four hundred sous, then it’ll be sundown and I’ll be sitting on the big veranda looking out over the savannah. There’ll be five or six of us. And we’ll discuss the things one does discuss in a place like Fort de France: the price of rum, the price of sugar, the rival merits of various kinds of car. And we’ll go on talking there till seven or half-past; till it’s time to go back to dinner. And I’ll be at the hotel, at my table, by myself, with the exhilaration of the punch subsiding, and I’ll be sleepy and a little lonely, and I’ll feel that it should be all different, that there should be some other use to make of the early twenties. I’ll be thinking how different she could make it for me.

  That was how he felt as he had walked down the Rue Perin-non towards the Club. And then, just as he had turned to the right at the street’s foot, a voice from a car had hailed him.

  ‘What are you doing? Nothing? Well, come out with us to bathe at Founigaut. Yes, of course you can. There are three carloads of us. Just room for you in this. Jump in.’

  It was from a man he did not know well, a mulatto of no particular account who directed a small photographic establishment, that the invitation had come. Ordinarily he would have refused it. No sooner, indeed, had he accepted it than he began to wish he hadn’t. In no French colony is the colour line drawn strictly. But there were many people in Fort de France whom he felt it would be better for him, as an official, not to know. ‘What am I doing here?’ he thought as the car, with its load of shrieking, laughing half-castes, rattled round the sharp corners of the uneven, mounting road; as he stood, nervous and silent, trying not to look superior, on the fringe of the chattering crowd that was splashing about the water’s edge. He felt embarrassed, self-conscious, out of place. ‘What am I doing here,’ he thought, ‘among these people?’

  And then suddenly he saw her. And instantly he was unconscious of the silly, noisy crowd. The slim, erect figure, the black eyes, the sleek skin whose dark colouring betrayed its origin. ‘You,’ he whispered. And the dark eyes smiled and she stretched out her hand to him. ‘Let’s swim,’ she said. They ran into the water, to swim side by side with slow, even strokes as the sun, red and largening, sank into the Caribbean, and the first stars in the violet sky behind the hills began to glimmer. They said nothing: there was no need for words. Not yet. It was enough, after these months, to be together. In silence they swam back to shore, followed the rest of the party to the bungalow, where on the veranda a gramophone was playing. In silence at the head of the long flight of steps they turned into each other’s arms to dance. And it was as though all their lives they had danced together. It was an utter harmony, so that afterwards, with the record finished, when they walked away to sit side by side on the veranda steps, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he who was so nervous, should without nervousness speak to her of all the things he had thought and felt during those dividing months.

  ‘All these weeks I’ve been longing for you,’ he said. ‘I can’t really believe that we’ve met at last.’

  ‘And now that you have?’

  ‘It’s more of a dream than ever I dreamed it could be.’

  Slowly the short, thin fingers that work had roughened stroked his hair.

  ‘And for how long will you think that? For how long, my very dear one? For a month, for two months, for a year: for longer than a year? For two years, longer than that even? For how long, then? For ever? Because that’s what it must be: for ever, or for nothing. No, no. Don’t interrupt me. Listen. That is what it has got to be. That is the only way that I can love you— that way or not at all. We can love, the women of my race, lightly, many times. But to love really, that comes once only to us, and when it comes it is for the ages. Are you ready for it to be like that?’

  The short fingers were vibrant in his hair; the dark face was very close to his. The dark eyes through the dusk were very bright. Seated there at her feet, with the awning of the eternal sky above him, ‘for ever’ seemed a very little word. She would not let him pronounce it, though.

  ‘No, no,’ she cried, ‘not yet. Think well. You have only to say the word “Come” and I will follow. But if I do come it will be for ever. My love will be a chain about you: a chain between you and me: a chain that will hold you fast, hold you for ever to this little island. That is what the word “Come” will mean. Have you the courage, my very sweet, to say it?’

  She spoke slowly; her voice, whose French had the precision of an earlier age, gave to her words the feeling and volume of Biblical utterance: it was like some prophecy, some warning out of the Old Testament.

  It was with a sense of awe rather than of triumph that he whispered, ‘Come.’

  Past Schoelcher on the road to Case Navire there was a bungalow; not a large bungalow. You do not need in the tropics more than two rooms with a veranda round them. And it was a wide veranda with the red of the hibiscus and the purple of the bougainvillea strung in profusion about its porches. It was through a flowered shrubbery that the steps ran steep from the veranda to the beach. And all day
long as he worked at his office, as he played billiards in the Club, as he lunched at his solitary table in the Pension Galliat, the young French official counted the minutes till five o’clock should come, till he should be free to drive out to that bungalow along the mounting, curving road. All day his thoughts would wander from his task and papers, picturing the moment when he could climb the veranda steps, when from a long rattan chair a slim, erect figure would leap to greet him, when dark arms would be flung round his neck, when a face like a dark flower would be pressed to his. And ‘What have you been doing all day?’ she’d ask. ‘Counting the minutes till I could see you again,’ he’d answer. And they’d laugh and run down to the beach to swim side by side through the sunset-reddened water; and afterwards while he sipped slowly at his rum punch she would sit curled beside him, his hand held against her cheek; and she would sing to him in a low voice. For half an hour they would sit there, savouring, after the heat of the long day, the unutterable peace of dusk. Then she would jump to her feet. ‘Supper-time,’ she would say. And she would scamper to the kitchen, to reappear a few minutes later with some simple but exquisitely flavoured dish of eggs and fish and vegetables. After supper they would bring the gramophone out to the veranda, and dance to it. As they danced, they kissed.

  It was an idyll too perfect to be compact of details. They never quarrelled. She was never moody, never difficult, never jealous. At times he would surprise on her face a strange and brooding look, as though she were looking at things—dark things that were many miles, many centuries away. But he had only to touch her on the shoulder, and she would turn round with a shiver and a start, blink quickly, and with a laugh become once again the merry, the adorable companion who asked no more of life than to be in love and loved.

  They lived very much to themselves. Though everyone in Fort de France was well aware of the bungalow on the road past Schoelcher, its existence was tacitly ignored. Officially he was still living at the Pension Galliat, where he lunched and, for the sake of appearances and the occasions when his duties forced him to remain in town, he kept on a room. No French family would visit him in the country, and though he would have been himself received and welcomed everywhere he wished to go, he had no wish to go where he could not take her with him. Their only visitors were in consequence her cousins and an occasional man friend of his who would drop in on Saturday or Sunday for a rum punch on his way back to town. For the most part they were alone and were content to be.

  ‘You’re very wise,’ said to him the only man, a middle-aged doctor, who had lived all his life in Martinique, with whom he had cared to discuss the situation more than casually. ‘You’re very wise. Make the best of it while you’ve got it. It won’t come twice. And it couldn’t last. It’s lucky for you that you’re going. It’ll be an exquisite memory for you. You’re young enough to get over it, both of you.’

  He looked quickly and intently at the doctor.

  ‘You’re sure of that? It’s true, is it, what they say about having one’s place taken within a week of sailing ?’

  ‘Ninety-nine times in a hundred. It’s a country of quick forgettings.’

  ‘But the hundredth time?’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about that hundredth time, if I were you.’

  He could not help worrying, however. The time for his leave was drawing close: the leave during which his parents would insist almost certainly on his applying for a transfer. He did not know how he was to break the news to her. He did not know how she would take the news. Were the Martiniquaises really as casual-hearted as the Frenchman would have him think? It was only with a half of himself that he hoped they were. He knew how long it would take him to forget the little bungalow at Schoelcher. And he would have in France so many things to help him to forget: his career, his friends, his interest in the stir of life; whereas she, what medicine would she have whose life was absorbed so utterly in his? How was he to break the news to her?

  The letter from Paris authorizing his leave arrived. For the first time in three years he walked slowly up the long, steep flight of steps, and for the first time in three years the slim, erect figure did not leap from the long rattan chair to greet him.

  For the first time the low voice did not ask, ‘What have you been doing with yourself all day?’ Instead, the dark eyes met his not angrily, not suspiciously, not self-pityingly, but thoughtfully, as though it were from vast distance of wisdom that that slow look came. ‘She knows,’ he thought. ‘She knows already.’ And, walking across to her, he put his hand upon her shoulder.

  ‘Pretty one, I’ve heard from Paris. I’m going on leave in March.’

  She nodded her head, slowly.

  ‘How long will your leave last?’

  ‘Nine months.’

  ‘And you will come back here after it?’

  He hesitated. It would have been easy to have promised her, as would the majority of men in his position, that he would. But to her he could not lie; not completely he, at least. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Darling, how can I tell?’ he said. ‘If it were my own choice I would. You don’t need telling that. I shall try to; try my hardest. But my parents—you know what parents are, they have ambition—they’ll want me to apply for a transfer, to go somewhere where there’s more scope. I don’t know. I can’t tell what’ll happen. Perhaps’—again he hesitated—’perhaps it would be better for us to act as though I weren’t going to return.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, there are certain arrangements to be made.’

  ‘Arrangements? What arrangements? I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I can’t leave you unprovided for.’

  She looked thoughtfully at him.

  Is it money that you’re trying to talk to me about? Because if it is, you needn’t. There’ll be no need to worry about that. Let’s go and bathe.’

  For the first time in three years they did not speak as they walked down the steps to the little beach, as they swam side by side together. And afterwards it was not at his feet but on the arm of his chair that she sat as he sipped at his rum punch. And it was not his hand that she held against her cheek, but his hair that her fingers stroked as she sang to him in the tongue that he had never learnt. Tonight there was a new temper to her singing: it was less crooning, more barbaric, almost terrifying.

  ‘What are you singing?’ he asked abruptly. ‘What are those things?’

  ‘They are the songs of my people. They are very old.’

  Next morning she was once again the laughing, light-hearted comrade that she had been to him through their three shared years. They danced and bathed and swam and kissed just as they always had, and just as though every night were not bringing them nearer to the hour when his steamer sailed. Sometimes he looked wonderingly at her: for all that they had shared, did he know her any better now than he had on that first evening so many moons ago? What was she thinking? What was she feeling? Had she as so many maintained the child’s mind that could see no further than tomorrow, that could not picture to itself in advance the actuality of separation? Would she at the last moment break down into a fever of tears and passion? He did not know. But increasingly as the days passed he dreaded what that last night might hold.

  When it came, however, it was very different from what he had expected. There was not the angry, hysterical outburst that he had dreaded. Instead, it was with an almost maternally protecting tenderness that she drew down his head upon her shoulder to repeat against his ear the low words he would never hear again: a tenderness more painful than any torrent of anger would have been.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he thought. ‘I don’t know how I shall have the courage to see it through.’

  But when the morrow came it brought with it the merciful medicine of haste; there were bags to be packed, trunks to be labelled, good-byes to be said. There was a farewell lunch party for him at the Hotel de France. It was not till he was seated on the balcony of the Club over a last liqueur that he had time to rea
lize what was happening. Then suddenly it flashed on him. This balcony on which he had sat on that first morning three and a half years back, from which he had seen for the first time the green square of the savannah, from which he had met that dark glance looking up at him. Never again would he sit on it, looking out on to the calm white statue. Never again would he drive out from it at the day’s end along the curving, mounting road. Never again would that slim, erect figure leap with dark, shining eyes out of a rattan chair to welcome him. Never again. Clear in front of him his future stretched—the future of the average competent young official. There would be a couple more colonial posts: North Africa, perhaps, or Indo-China. Then in the early thirties influence would secure him a post in Paris; and with Paris would begin the process of settling down: marriage, a prudent marriage, children and the safeguarding of the future. That was what lay ahead: cares, responsibilities, the end of the unknown. While at the back of him was youth and freedom and romance. What could life hold for him sweeter than that bungalow at Schoelcher, that love so true and careless, so uncomplicated by the maladies of vanity and profit? What had life to offer in compensation for his loss?

  His heart was heavy. And suddenly as he sat looking out over the square there was a pain across his eyes, a pain so excruciating that he screamed out loud.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said someone. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m ill. I’m going to die, I think.’

  In an instant a little crowd had gathered round him.

  ‘This is what often happens after a farewell lunch,’ laughed someone.

  But a second glance was sufficient to prove that that was not what was wrong with him. Wine could not have brought that livid pallor to the cheeks, that drawn misery across the eyes.

  ‘He’s ill. Get a doctor quickly.’

  The middle-aged doctor who had lived all his life in Martinique looked thoughtfully for a moment at his young friend, lifted an eyelid, felt the heart, then scribbled some words on a piece of paper. ‘Take that round to the chemist. It may do some good.’