Where the Clocks Chime Twice Read online

  Nor will the tourist feel out of things if he is not invited to parties at G.H. G.H. is not in any sense a social centre. I was surprised to find when I went to sign the book there that a column headed remarks was filled with testimonials like ‘Had a wonderful time’, ‘Everything splendid’, ‘Hope to come again’, as though His Excellency was less the President’s representative than a public-spirited hôtelier.

  In another respect, too, I found a considerable difference between the American and the British islands—in respect of the colour problem. As the United States have a domestic colour problem whereas Britain has not, I had expected that I should find this issue more acute in St. Thomas than in St. Lucia. I found the contrary.

  On my last evening but one, Jeanne Perkins Harman gave a party for me. It was an unusual party, as any party that she gave would be. Young, handsome, Amazonian, she had gone down to the Islands a year before as a Time-Life reporter to write up the Divorce Mill. Within a few hours of her arrival a proportionately outsize Lieutenant-Commander in the U.S. Navy fell in love with her. He pursued her across four islands, and on the twenty-fifth day of their acquaintance persuaded her to marry him. He retired from the Navy, she resigned from Time, and they acquired a yacht-type launch that they christened the Love Junk and anchored on the edge of French Town, beside a glass-bottomed boat in which he takes tourists round the harbour at two dollars a trip. Rarely can a more expansive and extensive couple have set up their menage within narrower confines.

  One would not expect an ordinary cocktail party from the Harmans, and I did not get it. It was staged in the grounds of a partially disused hotel. It began at half-past seven. The large courtyard was dimly lit with torches. A couple of largish tables were covered with small dishes. It was not light enough to see what you were eating; it was mainly shellfish, excellent and nourishing. The Commander moved among his thirty guests, carrying a pitcher of rum punch. It was powerful and fragrant, and cold enough to kill its sweetness. On a terrace behind the courtyard a vast cauldron was steaming above an open fire, against which long-skirted natives with broad-brimmed floppy hats moved in silhouette, like the witches in Macbeth. The cauldron contained a thick fish soup. It was not in the least like bouillabaisse; it had no saffron and no garlic and it was more substantial, but it was in its own way as pungent. We sat down when it was ready. Three tables were laid and there was no fixed seating. The soup was followed by a dessert and cheese. Liqueurs accompanied the coffee.

  Before the war, the Wine and Food Society issued in its quarterly journal a record of memorable meals. This party was certainly my most memorable meal in the Virgin Islands. But it was not so much the actual food, the rum punch, and the setting that made it memorable, as the guests themselves. Half of them were of African descent.

  I am very sure that such a party could not have taken place in a British island, except at Government House. G.H. does not recognise racial distinctions, but socially, at informal parties, a Governor has to respect the prejudices of his guests. The Administrator of an island once said to me when I was the guest of a planter, “I’m afraid that I can’t ask you to meet the most interesting people in the island, because they are coloured. I can’t ask you without asking the ___’s too, and except on official occasions I can only invite members of the club to meet them.”

  “I see,” I said. “But suppose I was staying in the hotel and got to know the local politicians, would the plantocracy want to meet me?”

  “No,” he said, “they wouldn’t.”

  It is a vicious circle. I remember a tennis party at G.H. on one of the smaller islands, at which the Administrator was at pains to arrange his doubles with partnerships of Africans and Europeans. As soon as each set was over, the partners regrouped themselves according to their colour. Late in the afternoon a heavy thunderstorm broke over the court and we scampered for shelter to the verandah. As a recently arrived visitor, it was easy for me to find in this change of plan an opportunity to gather round me over cocktails a mixed group of the younger people. We were some eight of us and had a pleasantly animated talk, the Europeans and Africans mixing naturally. When the party had broken up I asked the Administrator if he thought that those young people who had seemed so friendly together were likely to meet again. “Not till they come here next. Their parents will see to that,” he said.

  “The parents on both sides?” I asked.

  “The parents on both sides,” he answered.

  Even when they meet at official parties, the whites and the Africans try to keep apart; they are reserved and cautious, unnatural with each other. It was only because a thunderstorm had broken the pattern of that particular party, because the guests were young, and because I as a stranger had acted as a catalyst, that that easy talk took place.

  And that is why the Harmans’ party was for me so memorable. Though there was no fixed seating and no stage-management beyond general introductions on the part of the host and hostess, the guests of European and African descent mixed easily, grouping themselves at tables irrespective of colour. The conversation was spontaneous and general.

  I remember four of the guests particularly—a Federal Court judge, a minor local politician, a youngish married woman who had spent several years in Harlem, and the Chief of Police. They all behaved exactly as their opposite numbers would in Europe. The judge was urbane, relaxed, courtly, a little conscious of his importance. He was accorded the same kind of deference that in London at Pratt’s the Lord Chief Justice receives from his fellow members. The lady from Harlem was definitely more polished and better dressed than the others, whom she impressed in the way that an international socialite who is dressed by Hartnell dazzles a provincial gathering. The policeman was rather silent, as men who have had a security training invariably are. The politician talked just a little bit too much, as local politicians tend to do, arguing parochially on the need for federal funds to stimulate relief work and discourage the spread of communism in the islands. They all behaved in character. They were not different through being of African descent, whereas I have usually found in British and French colonies that certain types of behaviour are indicative of African descent. In a British or French island it is difficult for a man of European origin to be natural with a man of African descent. I did not find this difficulty in the Virgin Islands.

  I would not, however, dismiss this difference with the explanation that Americans are more democratic than Europeans. The reason lies, I think, in the history of the islands. An American, an Englishman, a Frenchman, and an Italian can meet, at a normal time, at dinner on equal terms. But if they meet in war-time on neutral territory, when one is a non-belligerent and another a potential enemy, there would be embarrassment. In the British and the French islands there is still a certain war-time element. The planters were once slave-owners who distrusted and feared their slaves. There were revolts and massacres. All that is a long time ago, but the white landowners are the heirs of the men who once lived on terms of enmity with their labourers. The atmosphere is not yet wholly cleared.

  The landed proprietors in the Virgin Islands are not, however, the heirs of slave-owners. They are Americans who have come down from the north to make their homes here, in the same spirit that New Yorkers moved north into Connecticut and Iowans moved west to California. They have no ingrained, inherited feeling of distrust; they have no sense of guilt; nor equally have they any sense, as many planters in the British islands have, that an injustice was done them at the time of emancipation, and that their case has been misrepresented by the abolitionists. The American residents in St. Thomas and St. Croix have not those particular reasons for feeling ill at ease with men and women of African descent. The Africans equally need not on those grounds feel ill at ease with them.

  America has many problems to face in the Virgin Islands, but she seems to me to have been spared that headache. If friction ever arises between the natives and the continentals, as some think it may, the cause is likelier to lie in the resentment that is invaria
bly felt in a small community when ‘strangers from the north’ buy up its property.

  2. The Wicked Baronet

  I Spent ten days in St. Thomas, a fortnight in St. Croix, a week in St. John. At the end I was left with three spare days. I spent them in St. Thomas, not at the 1829 but at the Harbor View Hotel.

  The Harbor View is run by a youngish American woman whose acquaintance I had made eighteen months earlier in Connecticut —she had come down to ‘take the cure’, had liked the island and stayed on—and I can recommend it to anyone who prefers a certain elasticity in his time-table.

  It has, from its long, wide verandah, one of the best views in the island, and it is run on the European plan. Lunch is not served, and although those who have to catch an early plane can rely upon being fed before they leave, there is no fixed hour for breakfast. There are a few small tables and a long central one. At the large table breakfasts are still being served when it is time for the first rum swizzle. In the evening, when there are sufficient guests to justify the serving of a dinner, there is an air of parade, with tables tastefully appointed and long dresses worn. But for the most part the atmosphere is one of a casually and friendlily run country house, with someone always on the verandah, reading or playing Canasta, darning a stocking or sipping a highball. It is the right kind of place for people who prefer to leave their plans vague till they can see what the day is like and how competent they feel to face it.

  At the back of the verandah is a large courtyard kind of hall, built on the Arab plan with bedrooms opening off it and a staircase leading to the upper storey. On my last afternoon, as I was crossing this hall on my way upstairs, I was checked by the sound of a long, loud, masculine guffaw. I paused. I had heard only one man laugh in quite that way. I was in a hurry. I had my packing to get done, but I had to make certain first. On rubber-soled shoes I moved across the hall. I stood in the shadow of the entrance; and there, at the far end of the verandah, seated on the balustrade with one knee drawn up, with his hands clasped round it, was a large, heavily built man, florid with blue-veined cheeks and a handlebar moustache. He was wearing white shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt. A yachting cap was tilted over his left eye. He was in the middle fifties. It was over ten years since I had seen him, but no, there was no doubt about it—he was Reggie Thayne.

  Some years ago the New Yorker magazine, in the course of a ‘Where are they now?’ article, printed a list of thirty names, each of which had made the headlines, in a sensational manner, in the last thirty years. How many of these names, it asked, would have any concrete significance to the contemporary reader? Personally I remembered four; and I would doubt if there is a single American, and not more than two or three Englishmen, who would to-day connect anything definite with the name of Thayne. Yet for a few weeks in the summer of 1938 Colonel Sir Reginald Thayne, Bart., was as much discussed as anyone in England.

  ‘Grave charge against a Wessex Squire’, that was how the headlines ran, with the letter-press below double-column photographs explaining that a seventeen-year-old village schoolmistress had pulled the alarm-bell of a railway carriage to defend her honour against an alleged assault by the owner of Winchborough Hall, a man of forty, an M.F.H., the husband of Lord Wilmot’s daughter, and the father of two daughters and a son. It was as big a scandal as the neighbourhood had ever known.

  Personally, I was especially interested in the case because I had been in the habit for several years of going down into that part of the country and working in a small hotel. I knew the Thaynes quite well, and I was as much surprised as anyone. The whole thing seemed to me, and to everybody else there, inconceivable.

  It was not so much that Reggie himself was the last person whom you could imagine in that kind of mess. On the contrary, he was a healthy full-blooded creature, a sportsman, a man’s man, a moderate drinker but a heavy eater, loud-voiced and always laughing, whether anything particularly amusing had been said or not. And even though he had been for twelve stolid years the champion of law and order, Winchborough’s hereditary figure-head, captaining its cricket side, opening its bazaars, reading the lessons in church, presiding over its committees, serving as Lord-Lieutenant of the county, forty is a dangerous age. No one can count himself immune. It was something altogether else that made Reggie’s predicament so astonishing—the fact that he was Sybil’s husband.

  As that he was something special, very special; or rather it was Sybil herself that made him special. It was not just that she was singularly lovely, slim and small with corn-coloured hair and cornflower blue eyes, a peachbloom complexion and a voice that lilted —there are, after all, a number of lovely women in the world— it was an interior intrinsic quality, a quality that I can only define obliquely.

  It is easy to explain why we dislike a person. It is easy to make a catalogue of unpleasant traits. But how are you to indicate what it is about a woman that gives you when you are in her company the sense of having been transported into another country, another climate, where the sun is warmer, the breezes softer, the colours brighter? That is the effect that Sybil had on you. The moment she came into the room the world seemed a more pleasant place.

  You could imagine Reggie Thayne, but you could not imagine Sybil’s husband making a pounce at a village schoolmistress. Poor Sybil, we thought, I wonder how she’ll take it.

  We had not to wait that answer long. Every summer on the last Saturday in June the Duke of Wessex entertained the County. It was the biggest social function of the year. His impressive terraces welcomed some five hundred guests. Most of us imagined that Sybil would stay away.

  She did not. Nor could she have been less abashed.

  It was a hot, almost too hot, a day, but she looked very cool in flowered muslin under a floppy hat, so cool that you felt a breeze was blowing.

  “What a heavenly day,” she said. “Isn’t Francis lucky! He always has this weather for his parties. We were so sure that it would be fine this week-end that we’d arranged to go over to Le Touquet, and now of course we can’t, owing to this absurd mess of Reggie’s. I suppose you saw about it in the papers? Yes, of course you did. One always does see that kind of paragraph. So instead of sun-bathing on some lovely beach, we’ve got to spend the weekend with the lawyers. Aren’t you a nuisance, darling!”

  He laughed one of his loud, hearty laughs. She raised her hand and patted him playfully upon the cheek.

  “We’ve briefed Patrick Forrester,” she said. “I do hope that you are all coming over to hear the case. It ought to be quite amusing. Sir Patrick is such a pet.”

  I was in court on Wednesday. The old oak hall where, on so many occasions in the past, Reggie had officiated as Lord-Lieutenant gave a curious dramatic irony to the whole affair. This friendly and familiar room, with its time-stained panelling, its tattered banners, its gilt-framed portraits, had been the scene of many of his proudest moments. Was it now to prove the setting of his disgrace?

  It was, indeed, in its own way one of the most dramatic mornings I can remember. I had watched so many court scenes on the screen that it was an odd experience to meet one in real life. It was all so leisurely, so casual, it was hard to believe that there was so much at stake.

  Nor could anyone have looked less like a screen character than Patrick Forrester. Tall, thin, tired, he was more like a family doctor than a barrister. His appearance was, in fact, his greatest asset, his chief skill as a cross-examiner lying in his capacity to lull a witness into a state of false security. He never bullied a witness. He never rounded on a witness. It was not until his final speech that a witness realised the extent and nature of the admissions that had been drawn from him.

  I shall always consider Forrester’s handling of that case a masterpiece.

  The schoolmistress looked, I must say, the last kind of girl whom you would expect to inspire that kind of enterprise. She had come with her parents, and she had put on, presumably under their instructions, a tailored dark-blue coat and skirt that would have been more suitable
to a November than an August morning. It made her look uncomfortable. She was of medium height, with a featureless, pudgy face. No doubt when she was in a cheerful mood she had the natural prettiness of youth. But she had no distinction of line and feature. She looked glum and sulky. She gave her evidence in a toneless voice.

  She had gone into the town on market-day, she said. She had meant to get home for lunch. She had reached the station early and all the carriages in the back coach were empty. Her carriage had remained empty until, just before the train started, Sir Reginald got in. She of course knew Sir Reginald well by sight, she had often talked to him at village fêtes. They said good morning to one another. As is not uncommon in local railway lines in England, there was no corridor to the train. He had sat across the narrow compartment, in the opposite corner, facing her. They exchanged a conventional comment about the weather. Then he opened out his Times. She had a book and she resumed her reading of it. After a little while, Sir Reginald put down his paper. “It’s rather warm,” he said. “Do you mind if I let down the window?”

  “Of course not.”

  He rose to his feet. He crossed the carriage. He stood by the window. He paused. He turned round towards her. He stared at her. His eyes became very bright. His face got hot. Suddenly he pounced at her with his hands spread out. She was terrified. She wriggled free. She ran to the other side of the compartment. She pulled on the alarm cord. She put her head out of the window. She shrieked for help. She didn’t know what she said.