The Sugar Islands Page 21

  Spite came first. There was one person in his life that he had hated—his wife. I had never seen her. No one in England had. But everybody in New York knew that he owed his success to her: that her money had carried him through his early years. She was older than he was, considerably: she was neither clever nor smart nor handsome. But people liked her; had done things for Max because of her; had let him know it. He never forgave her that. He wanted to believe that he had done it all himself. When the chance for revenge came he took it.

  It was the summer of’29. He sold his contracts and goodwill— at a typical boom figure. He handed his wife a tenth. For fifteen years, he told her, she had made life a hell for him. He had only stayed with her because a scandal would have done him harm. Now he did not care. He was going to clear right out. She could send detectives after him if she liked, but the law worked slowly. By the time she had got the machinery of the law in motion, he would not be in the world to worry.

  Spite had its innings first, then vanity. Most of us have one point on which our vanity is raw. Max could not forget his personal obscurity. However successful he might be, no one outside his immediate circle could ever hear of him. He was the middleman pocketing his commission. His name meant nothing, never could mean anything across any column, in any paper. He had no news value. It was a fact that never ceased to rankle.

  If most of us have one point on which our vanity is raw, most of us also have one person we are jealous of. Max had two: George Doran, the publisher, and Ray Long, the editor. Year after year through the nineteen-twenties they crossed to London to ‘contact’ authors. They held the field. English authors owed more to those two men than to any twenty others in ‘the racket’. It was not their success but their prominence that Max resented. There was no bookshelf in the world on which the name Doran could not be read among its covers. The name Ray Long stood big on every copy of the two million copies of Cosmopolitan that month after month were scattered across the world. Everyone knew who Long and Doran were; nobody knew who Weston was. All three, in their separate ways, were doing the same thing, introducing and establishing English authorship into and in America. All three successfully. But while two were ‘figures’, one was not. When the doctors gave Weston his year to live, he saw his chance, not only of getting even with his wife, but of making himself a ‘figure’.

  He saw that chance, as one should have known he would, in terms of swagger. He had a year to live. He would make a legend of that year. Every dollar he could command would be spent on it. His plan had the simplicity that is said to be the half of genius. Fortnight after fortnight he staged in the house that now was Wilding’s a succession of house parties. He knew practically everyone on Broadway. His guests’ fares were paid. On such a basis, it was not difficult to make the pattern of those parties read like a Cholly Knickerbocker column. And on each party he invited one first-class journalist. As each fortnight passed, he read in his imagination the obituaries that would be starring the New York Press within a year. No journalist, wearily looking for fresh copy, could fail to make Weston’s last months in Dominica the subject of his column. Weston’s eyes glittered as he looked ahead. His ‘year to live’ would become a legend. He himself would become a legend. Whenever the literary background of the nineteen-twenties was discussed or written of, his name would be linked with Doran’s and Ray Long’s.

  I smiled to myself as I listened to Wilding’s account of that year of parties. I looked forward to hearing other accounts from other residents. Max was a cad. But he was in character. I could not help admiring anyone who could carry through an act so thoroughly.

  ‘And then . . .?’ I asked.

  Wilding smiled, then shrugged.

  ‘Doctors aren’t always right.’

  He chuckled as he said that. I stared, not understanding for a moment. He laughed as the truth came to me.

  ‘That’s it. You’ve got it. He got well again. They thought he had an organic ailment. But he hadn’t. It was simply drink. And drugs. When he was down here, in a decent climate, with no money left to buy a drink with, he was as fit as he’d ever been within a fortnight.’

  ‘But . . .’ I paused, visualizing the incredibly impossible position in which Max had found himself. His money gone, his boats burnt. The depression in full flood. No business, no chance of starting one. Hated by his wife’s friends; discredited. A laughing-stock because a doctor’d fooled him. He could not go back to New York. There was nothing he could do in London. There was no opening for him, anywhere.

  ‘What on earth did he do?’ I asked.

  ‘The only thing he could do: stayed on here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘He looks after the electric plant. I kept him on because you can’t trust a native with machinery: too ticklish for them. He does his job quite well. As a matter of fact, you’ve seen him. He met you on the wharf this morning. It’s the kind of thing,’ he added, ‘that would happen in Dominica.’

  A Creole Crooner

  from THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

  Written in 1939

  I Met him first in London in the spring of 1927. Though he did not know it, he was then at the peak of his success. The bright-young-people period was at its flood, and the bright young people ‘had a thing’ about coloured artists. Florence Mills and Robeson were in London. Layton and Johnston were at the Café. In Grafton Street ‘Hutch’ was singing his nursery rhymes series at Chez Victor. The Black Birds were playing to packed houses. Nigger Heaven was heading the best-seller lists. The Black Crow records had just arrived. It was not only an artistic but a social craze. No party was a party without its Black Birds. A lift was going up: any number of people contrived to climb on it. Louis was one of the first ones in.

  He was young, tallish, supple; with bright, bold eyes, very white teeth, and a voice that was amply adequate at a time when that kind of voice was essential, not only to every restaurateur s, but to every hostess’s success. He was a bare twenty-three. Two years back he had been an obscure singer in Montmartre. It turned his head, inevitably. His swagger became a challenge, his bold eyes grew insolent. At Henri’s he would sing his songs directly at some girl in the audience in such a way that his singing appeared a courtship. On the least appropriate occasions he would display an initialled cigarette case. ‘Mary gave me this: charming of her, don’t you think? You know her, of course: Lady Mary Rocheford. A most agreeable lady.’ And his eyelids would lower; not a wink, no: but as though he had withdrawn into an intimate, recollective trance. Even those who were least restrained in their enthusiasm for Black Birds admitted that Louis was nearly too much of a good thing.

  At the time of our first meeting, I had just returned from the South Seas. My host had asked me a question about Tahiti. Louis listened for a minute or two with a show of interest, then interrupted.

  ‘Tahiti, yes. It’s well enough. But you should see my island. You should see Saint Lucia.’

  I had not then been to the West Indies, and I asked him where St. Lucia was. He laughed, patronizingly. St. Lucia, he explained, was the northernmost of the Windward Islands, within sight of Martinique. In the days of the great admirals, Rodney, Nelson, Hood, it had been the key to naval power. It was high and green. ‘It must be lovelier, far lovelier than your Tahiti,’ he insisted. ‘In Tahiti, so you tell us, there is only that one road round the island. The interior is so overgrown that you can follow the streams a bare mile or so. But my island is cut by valleys. Every inch of valley is planted thick with sugar cane. It is so green; you cannot imagine how green it is. And there are coconut palms along the beaches: just as you described them in Tahiti. Tahiti cannot have anything we have not too. And then our fishing villages: little clumps of huts where the streams run out into the bays. And it’s all so French. They still speak patois. I don’t know how many times the island didn’t change hands before it became English finally. The fishermen have French names for their boats: such funny little boats too, with square sails.’

  His voice began to
glow. It is impossible to reproduce the quality of a West Indian voice: it is not a question of words, of phrases, of the turning of a sentence. It is a question of tone, of a life and pitch of voice: a sing-song quality peculiar, not only to the West Indies, but to each separate West Indian island; so that the Creole can always tell after a few minutes from which island the voice comes.

  ‘They call Saint Lucia the pearl of the West Indies. But very few people ever see it,’ he went on. ‘Many ships may call there. But only for an hour or two. The tourist drives up into the hills: the Morne we call it. He’ll bathe at Vigie, lunch or dine at the Saint Antoine. They’ll serve him Creole dishes; there is a fine view of the harbour from the terrace; and as likely as not he’ll say, as his ship sails eastward to Barbados, “Yes, I certainly would like to come and stay here.” He may say that. But he’ll never have seen Saint Lucia.’

  Louis paused, shrugged, went on. ‘The beach at Vigie, yes, that’s well enough. But it’s always crowded. And that row of bathing huts. No one would go to Vigie who’s seen Réduit. That’s the perfect beach: a great curve of yellow sand; not a hut along it, a mountain at the back of you; and to the right at the end of the curve, Gros Ilet, the model fishing village. In front there’s Pidgeon Island, where Rodney waited for the French fleet before the Battle of the Saints; and across the forty miles of water there’s Martinique. You’ll search the world and never find a beach like Réduit. And Castries. It’s all right when you’re looking down on it; but when you’re actually down there, it’s hot and noisy and there’s the smell of petrol. And as for those Creole dishes at the Saint Antoine, they’re good enough. But you should eat Creole cooking in a Creole household. While, as for that view of the harbour from the Morne—it’s wonderful, I’m not denying that; but it’s too domestic. To see the real Saint Lucia you should go where there aren’t wharves and houses. You should go where the country’s wild. You should go to my part of the island, to the south, to Soufrière.’

  Not only his voice was glowing, but his eyes. He reminded me of Josephine Baker: ‘J’ai deux amours: mon pays et Paris.’

  ‘No tourist ever goes there,’ he continued. ‘It’s under the Pitons; you must have read of them. Those two great cone-shaped mountains that rise sheer out of the sea. It’s half a village— a fishing village, with its small boats and its nets hanging out to dry. But it’s a town as well, with a cobbled square by the jetty, with a great banyan tree to shade it; and there’s a church at the end of the main street. And it’s all very clean and neat. That’s where I was born: Soufrière. We had a house on the waterfront. We had a clock handed down by my great-grandfather: it had a little soldier in red uniform who came out and struck the hours on a drum. The square was always crowded with fishermen, with peasants coming down from the hills to ship their fruit. I had an accordion. In the evenings I would sing; the boys would join in the choruses. The women worked on the men’s nets. The girls would dance: they’d be wearing their native costume, the French madras. The sun would be setting and the air’d be cool. That is the real Saint Lucia.’

  He paused; his voice had taken on a deeper, richer tone—a tone that explained not only his success, but the nature of his success. I could understand how at certain moments to certain people he could be irresistible. He was not only a satyr; he was Pan as well.

  ‘Sometimes, when I’m singing at my restaurant’—and I smiled, wondering how Henri would like to hear Louis talking of ‘my restaurant’—’sometimes, when it’s late, and the air’s hot and smoky, I close my eyes, I think myself back again on to my door-step, in the cool of the evening, with the fishermen and the peasant girls: I think myself back among them. My heart is in my singing then.’

  He had actually closed his eyes while he was speaking. I too closed mine. Behind the darkness of their lids I relived a Tahitian evening; at Taravoa; a Chrysler parked beside a Chinese store. The strumming on a banjo. The wash of water on a reef. The glint of moonlight on the palm fronds. The soft Polynesian voices. The sweet, heavy scent of the tiare. From my knowledge of other islands, I could picture his. One day I’m going to St. Lucia, I told myself.

  But it was twelve years before I did.

  Eighteen months later, as I have already told, I was to take a longish trip to the West Indies. In Martinique, from the beach below my bungalow, I was to see morning after morning the outline of the Pitons faint and misty across the water. But inter-island communication is not easy. In the end I was to find myself doing what Louis had assured me every tourist did—spending a mere four hours there on my way between Dominica and Barbados.

  They were, I am gratefully ready to concede, four very pleasant hours. Charles Doorly was Administrator then. A car was waiting for me at the wharf. On the high terrace of Government House, we sat, he and his wife and pretty daughters, talking of his schemes, his many schemes to restore to the island the prosperity that it had known before the opening of the Panama Canal had ruined its coaling trade. We sat, looking out over the harbour till the network of lights spangled the long, straight streets, till the siren of the Lady Hawkins sounded in the harbour: till the time came for me to leave St. Lucia, as ninety-nine tourists in a hundred leave it, with a vivid, superficial memory. It was twelve years before I was to carry my suitcase through the Customs. And in those twelve years much had happened.

  From that immediately pre-war world of 1938, with its revolution, its civil wars and threats of war, its pogroms and concentration camps, its swastikas and sickles—from that shadowed, overcast world of the late nineteen-thirties, the bright-young-people period of the ’twenties seemed centuries remote. But even before that period had closed, torpedoed by the Wall Street crash, the craze for coloured singers had been superseded by other crazes; by the craze for eccentric parties—parties in swimming baths, parties in anchored yachts, by the whole Vile Bodies period. Long before that dark October of 1929, the boom as far as Louis was concerned had ended.

  I would sometimes wonder what had happened to him.

  What had happened in general I knew. That which does invariably happen in a ‘craze’. For a while certain artists of true merit are valued above their worth: then through the exposure of their imitators they are written down. There is an interval, a readjustment, a pause, and merit finds its level. Layton, Johnston, Leslie Hutchinson—they had all got back where they belonged. Real merit was re-established. But for the others, those who like Louis had done no more than clamber on to a lift when it was going up, what had happened to them? I wondered.

  I made inquiries, but no one knew. Shoulders were shrugged He was working in some cabaret. He was back in Paris. He was in New York. He had gone off terribly. He was fat and gross. He was ignored by that part of London that for a dozen months had made an idol of him. He had been sold short like the small fry in New York who had imagined themselves millionaires during that one wild summer. No one knew where he was. And no one cared.

  It was by the merest chance that I came across him a few days before I sailed for the West Indies, in a Soho night club called the Alcove. It was a place of which I had not heard, to which I was taken by a taxi-driver; the kind of place that you could only find in a city such as London, where drink regulations make it impossible for any reputable restaurant to stay open after two o’clock; the kind of place to which the average Londoner would never think of going more than once a year; of which he will say next morning, with a heavy head, ‘I can’t think why on earth I went.’

  The Alcove was like all those places: a single long room on a basement floor; some twenty tables drawn along a wall; a small square of polished boarding; a piano at one end; no band; the air thick with smoke; a few tinselly decorations; at the head of the stairs a military-looking man in a tail coat proffering a form to the effect that you had been invited by Captain Ferguson to a bottle party and had contributed five shillings to its cost. Whisky was on sale at two pounds a quart, to be purchased by the bottle. A drab and dreary spot.

  Louis was its chief attraction. He ha
d ‘gone off’ all right. He had not probably in actual weight put on more than a dozen pounds, but he had lost his lean, panther look. And there is a camel-hair’s difference between ugliness and beauty: a milligram less, a millimetre more. He was Pan no longer. He was a satyr, gross and heavy-footed. He could not have faced the hard spotlights of a restaurant. Only in such a place as this, ill-lit and smoky, could he retain his glamour. Even his voice seemed throaty.

  I had met him a bare half-dozen times. I half hoped that he would not remember me. It would embarrass him, I felt, to be reminded by the presence of an old acquaintance, of his days of prominence. But it was with a brazen grin displaying his fine row of teeth that he came across. He grasped me by the hand. He brought his left hand heavily upon my shoulder.

  ‘This is swell. This certainly is swell. Why haven’t we seen you here before? Everyone comes here now. It’s nice, isn’t it? Intimate? Not like those big, noisy places. You must bring your friends along. We always have good fun here. Tonight . . .’ He paused, looked round him, shook his head. ‘No, there’s not much here tonight. But sometimes, you should see . . .’ He half-closed his eyes, in that way of his.

  Across the smoky room, he caught a summoning glance: a female glance. With the old arrogance, he took his leave of me. With the old insolence, he swaggered across the room. I watched him as he leant across the table, his neck creased in a heavy roll above his collar. As I foresaw the inevitable stages by which he must drop from one shoddy platform to another, I could not but remember the old Greek theme of retribution, of those who invite the gods’ wrath by likening themselves to gods.

  Six weeks later, on an afternoon of blinding rain, the Nerissa docked at Castries.

  During the next fortnight I was to realize what Louis had meant about the half-day tourist never seeing the real St. Lucia.