The Sugar Islands Read online

  The casual traveller, with nothing definite to occupy him, finds his attention concentrated exclusively on the incessant noise. Only during the week-ends is there systematized entertainment.

  Every Sunday morning there was cock-fighting. It was worth seeing once. The Gallodrome was a circular wooden building, arranged in five galleries. On the top gallery there was a piano and a bar. You paid five francs at the door. The pit was about twenty feet across. For the first minute and a half a fight is thrilling. The cocks are introduced to one another by their owners: they are placed on the edge of a circle five feet apart. The instant they are let loose they fly at one another. Quite often in that first leap, with a single blow, one of them is killed. For a moment or two it is a whirlwind of blows and feathers. But after that minute it grows uninteresting. The cocks do not, as in the North of England, wear spurs. They peck wearily at the back of each other’s necks. The chief interest is in the audience: in the half-castes and negroes who bounce excitedly in their seats, who shriek encouragement to the animals, who shout their odds across the pit.

  Nominally the fight is to the death; actually it is as long as the cocks will fight. After a quarter of an hour or so they stand, blind and weary, gasping and indifferent, the fight forced out of them. Their owners take them by the wings and place them at the edge of the circle, facing each other, five feet apart. They make no movement. Inside that circle there is a smaller circle. Again the animals are lifted by their wings. They are within a few inches now of one another. They do not move. The crowd yells fiercely. Then suddenly one pecks forward. The other turns away its head. The fight is finished. Pandemonium is released. The negroes jump in their seats and shriek with excitement, waving the francs that they have lost or won, while the owners carry away the cocks, scrape the skins of their heads and legs with a small pocket knife, slit the congested flesh about the neck and crown, pour lemon juice over the wounds, and hope for equal or greater fortune in the following week.

  Within five minutes another fight has started.

  Cock-fighting is the chief sport in Martinique. Every district has its fight on Sunday.

  In the villages there are no cock-pits. The negroes form a rough circle round the cocks, and as the fight moves the circle follows up and down the length of the village street. From a distance it looks like a scrum in Rugby football. Children perch themselves on verandas and on the roofs of cabins; they shriek with laughter when the cocks fall into a gutter or stumble over a more than ordinarily misplaced cobblestone. It is a hilarious business. But to see cockfighting at its best you have to see it at the three big centres, at Trinité, St. Pierre, and Fort de France. In the same way that, although there is a festa of some sort in every village on the six or seven Sundays before Lent, to see carnival at its best you have got to go to Fort de France. [I wrote this before I had seen films of the carnival in Trinidad.]

  For the actual carnival I was at Dominica. And there it was a subdued affair. Two years earlier there had been trouble; a police officer had been beaten very nearly to death. Dominica is a curious place. Once a French possession and geographically a French possession still, it is in feeling more French than English. It is Roman Catholic. The natives speak Creole. Smuggling, that the police are powerless to check, is constantly carried on between Martinique and Guadeloupe. Dominica is the Ireland of the Antilles. It is the loveliest of the islands and it is the most difficult to manage. It should be prosperous but blight after blight has fallen on the crops. First coffee was destroyed. Then when the lime industry was established—Dominica is the centre of Rose’s lime juice—a disease struck that. The country is very mountainous. When Columbus was asked to describe the island he crumpled up a sheet of paper and tossed it on the table. The roads are so bad that fruit cannot be profitably marketed. Dominica is a constant drain on the Imperial Government’s exchequer. The more money that is spent there, the less settled does life become.

  Anything might have happened in Roseau during that wild week of carnival had not a gunboat providentially and unexpectedly arrived in harbour. Many stories are told in explanation of that gunboat’s presence. It is said that an admiral expressed a wish for grapefruit. There was no grapefruit, he was told. Where could grapefruit be got? Nowhere nearer than Dominica. Could any excuse be devised for sending a gunboat there? Papers were consulted; an American courier had passed two days before. There might be a mail there. That was sufficient excuse when an admiral was hungry. And so, at the very moment when Roseau was in the hands of the rebels, a gunboat appeared in the harbour. There was no fighting. The crowds dispersed; the sailors were not even aware that there had been any trouble. The sight of the gunboat was enough. In five minutes order had been restored. That evening the admiral ate grapefruit before consommé.

  Probably the story is untrue. But the arrival of the gunboat was no less providential on that account. In the following year the carnival was forbidden. And when I was there, though the carnival took place, no sticks were carried, and at six o’clock the streets were cleared. It was an orderly affair. It lasted for two days. In the morning from the hour of nine the streets were patrolled by small groups of men and women with masks and costumes, a drum at their head, at their back a crowd of ecstatic urchins. The costumes were as various as the local store and local wit permitted. There were pierrots and pierrettes; there were sailors and there were cowboys; there were men dressed as women, padded with footballs to give their skirts the effect of a Victorian bustle. Some tried to make themselves appear attractive; the majority tried to make themselves as plain as possible. In Forte de France there were occasional satirists. One afternoon a group of men, dressed up as women in skirts five inches long, had paraded the streets singing ‘Malpropre baissez la robe’. Most of the songs that are sung at carnival are impromptu references to some local event. The chief song at Roseau commemorated an attempted suicide.

  ‘Sophia drink wine and iodine

  Why, Why, Sophia?’

  During the afternoon Roseau echoed the name Sophia. Every shop was shut. Half the population was ‘running mask’. The stray groups that had shouted down the streets during the morning had joined up into a solid phalanx, seventy yards in length, that marched backwards and forwards, singing and dancing, cracking whips; while separate bands of twenty to a dozen girls, dressed uniformly, marched with small orchestras to solicit alms. Each band represented something. One band dressed in yellow represented Colman’s mustard; another Tit-bits; a third, hung with red, white, and blue, carrying plates of oranges and maize and breadfruit, ‘Dominica Produce’. It was the Martinique carnival on a small scale, surpassed by it in the same way that in its turn Martinique is surpassed by Trinidad. If you want to see street carnival go to Port of Spain. But if you want to see that of which street carnival is the symbol you will stay in Fort de France. In white-run sections of the world I never expect to see a more astounding exhibition than the Bal Lou-Lou. [The Bal Lou-Lou exists no longer.]

  Twice a week, on Saturdays and Sundays, there is a ball, or rather there are several. There is the Palais and the Casino. But it is at the Select Tango that you will see it at its best. There is nothing to tell you that you are to see anything extraordinary. At the end of a quiet street facing a river there is a large tin building. You pay your twelve francs and you are in a long room hung with lanterns and paper streamers. A gallery runs round it, on which tables are set, and at each end of which there is a bar. It is rather like a drill-hall. And as you lean over the balcony you have the impression that you are at a typical provincial palais de danse. You see the kind of people that you would expect to see. On the gallery there are one or two family parties of white people. The white women will not dance. They will look on, and they will leave early. In the hall below are a certain number of young Frenchmen of good family with their dusky mistresses. There will be some white policemen and white soldiers; but for the most part it is a coloured audience of shop assistants, minor officials, small proprietors; a typical provincial dance hall.
And at first, in the dance itself, there is nothing that you would not expect to see in such a place. The music is more barbaric, more gesticulatory; but that you would expect to find. As the evening passes, as the custom at the bar grows busier, the volume of sound increases, but that, too, you would expect. That you have seen before. You grow tired and a little bored. You begin to wonder whether it is worth staying on. Then suddenly there is the wail of a clarionette. A whisper runs round the tables: ‘Danse du pays.’ In a moment the galleries are empty.

  It is danced face to face. The girl clasps her arms round the man’s neck. The man holds her by the hips. The music is slow and tense. ‘Le talent pour la danseuse,’ wrote Moreau St. Méry, ‘est dans la perfection avec laquelle elle peut faire mouvoir ses hanches et la partie inférieure de ses reins en conservant tout le reste du corps dans une espèce d’immobilité.’ The couples appear scarcely to move. In a dance of twenty minutes they will not make more than one revolution of the room. They stand, close clasped and swaying. The music does not grow louder or more fast. It grows fiercer, more barbaric. The mouths of the dancers grow lax; their eyes are clouded, their movements exceed symbol. ‘La danseuse arrive et bientôt elle offre un tableau dont tous les traits d’abord voluptueux deviennent ensuite lascifs. Il serait impossible de peindre la chica1 avec son véritable caractère et je me bornerai à dire que l’impression qu’elle fait est si puissante que l’ Africain ou le Créole de Nil Error’importe quelle nuance qui le verrait danser sans émotion passer ait pour avoir perdu iusquaux dernières étincelles de la sensibilité.’

  That is on ordinary evenings. During carnival it is fantastic. A stranger arriving at the Select Tango at one o’clock in the morning would imagine himself mad. He would not believe it possible that in a white-run community the payment of twelve francs at a public turnstile would admit him to such a bedlam. He would imagine that such spectacles were held behind doors as rigidly guarded as those of the Bal des Quatre Arts. The noise is deafening. The galleries and hall are crowded. Most of the girls are masked. They wear gloves and stockings so that not an inch of dark skin appears. Some of them, it is whispered, are white women in disguise. They might well be. It is a dance in which caste and blood are alike forgotten. Everyone is drunk; not with alcohol but with music. People are dancing by themselves. They shriek and wave their arms. They seize a partner, dance with her for a moment, then break away. A girl will be dancing by herself. ‘Un danseur s’approche d’elle, s’élance tout à coup et tombe au mesure presque à la toucher. Il recule. Il s‘élance encore, et la provoque à la lutte la plus séduisante.’ The young Frenchmen in the arms of their mulatto mistresses will parody and exaggerate the antics of the negroes. A woman embraced between two men will be shrieking to friends up on the gallery. In the thronged centre of the ball couples close-clasped will stand swaying, their feet and shoulders motionless, a look of unutterable ecstasy upon their faces.

  But it is not possible to describe the Bal Lou-Lou. The only phrases that would describe it are incompatible with censorship.

  Once every five days or so we went into Fort de France, and it was always with a feeling of excitement that we began the day. It was fun after five days of bare legs and open throats to put on trousers and arrange a tie. The seven-kilometre drive assumed the proportion of high adventure; which in point of fact, with a chauffeur such as ours, it was. We felt very like country cousins coming up for a day’s shopping as we deposited with the head waiter of the Hôtel de la Paix a list of groceries and a vast wooden box in which to store them. There was the excitement of discovering at the photographer’s how many of the snapshots we had taken during the previous weeks were recognizable comments on the landscape. And by the time that was finished it would be half-past eleven.

  ‘The club,’ Eldred would remark, ‘will probably not be empty now.’

  There was a delightfully welcoming friendliness about the club. There would certainly be four or five of our friends on the wide, airy veranda looking out over the savannah. We would draw our chairs up into the circle. Hands would be clasped, decanters would be set upon the table. There would be silence while the waitress performed the ritual of mixing a Creole punch: quarter of a finger’s height of sugar, two fingers’ high of rum, the paring of a lime, the rattling of ice. Then talk would begin, friendly, unexacting gossip, the exchange of comment and reminiscence, till the hands of the clock were pointing at half-past twelve, with the world, after a couple of rum punches, appearing a pretty companionable place.

  ‘We ought to come into town more often,’ we would say as we hurried lunchwards, down the Rue Perignon. And after five days of eggs and lobster and native vegetables it was fun to eat a châteaubriant that you would certainly not be grateful for in London, and drink a vin ordinaire with which even in a New York speakeasy the management would hesitate to serve you. And, ‘Certainly, we must come in more often,’ we would say as we sat over our coffee afterwards on the terrace of the hotel. But it would be no more than half-past one when we would be saying that. And the sun was beating fiercely upon the corrugated iron of the roof. In the street below the cars were honking merrily. For three and a half hours the club was certain to be empty. There was nothing for us to do. We could go to the gramophone shop, of course, and play some tunes. But you cannot stay more than an hour in a shop where you are only going to buy one record and the last two numbers of ‘La Sourire’. And even an hour leaves you with two and a half hours to be killed. There is the library, of course, and it is a good library. But the heat and the noise make concentration difficult. Usually it ended in a visit to the Délices du Lido.

  ‘At any rate,’ we’d say, ‘it’ll be cool and quiet there.’ Whatever the Délices might not be, on days when there was no boat in it was that.

  The actual town of Fort de France is about half a mile from the coaling station; a road shadowed by a tent of trees curves round an inlet of the bay to the savannah; on the left of the road, on boat days, are innumerable vendors of fruit and cakes; on the right a collection of two-story wooden houses. It is to this that sailors refer when they tell you that Martinique is the loveliest island they have ever seen. It is the only part of the island that most of them ever do see. It is the red-light district.

  And it is, beyond question, the most picturesque part of the town. [A wall has now been built in front of the Délices du Lido and the section is a very squalid one.] At sunset the view across the bay is the loveliest thing I have seen this side of the canal. And in the afternoon even, the Délices du Lido was about the most pleasant place in the town to sit about in. By the time we left the island we had come to know the majority of the girls there. They were mulattoes—when they were not pure negresses—simple, smiling, friendly, and improvident; laughing and chattering, quarrelling and crying. The kind of girls that one would expect to find in such a place. There was one girl, however, whose presence there was inexplicable. She was one of the ten loveliest women that I have ever seen. She was very young; she could not have been more than twenty. Seeing her in Martinique, one knew that she must have coloured blood in her; but if one had met her in Paris or London one would not have suspected it. She was of the Spanish type. Her features had genuine refinement. Good clothes and a good hairdresser would have made her the kind of woman whose entrance into a London restaurant would have meant the turning of twenty heads. I do not see how in any big town a girl with her appearance would not have been a big success. Yet, here she was in this wretched stew, the associate of no matter whom.

  What was she doing there? How had she got there? Why was she staying there? They were questions to which I could find no answer. As long as she remained there she was futureless. No man would run the risk of taking her away from such an atmosphere. Sometimes I wondered whether she did not enjoy the sense of superiority that she could exert in such a place. She was by no means an agreeable person. She was arrogant and disdainful; she never hid her contempt for the other girls, about whom she was constantly making cruel and cuttin
g remarks. Such a one might relish the sense of empire that such a setting gave her. Probably, though, that is too involved an explanation. Probably her presence in that one-way street meant nothing more than that she was lazy. It was a problem with a fascination that led us most afternoons to the ordering of a series of lime squashes in the Délices du Lido. But though Fort de France could offer no better entertainment to the tourist, it was an unsatisfactory one.

  For soft drinks do you no more good than rum does in the afternoon. You are better without either. I have never spent an afternoon in Fort de France without envying those who had offices and telephones, letters to be dictated and strings of agents trying to ship their sugar crops. I have never at the day’s end, without a feeling of unutterable relief, looked down from the climbing road on to the lighted streets and the lights of the ships at anchor.

  One such day in particular I remember. We had come into Fort de France one afternoon, in the mistaken belief that a friend of Eldred’s was on the Flandre. We had spent a hot and profitless half-hour walking round an oven-like ship. Coaling was in progress and the coal dust had blown into our eyes and mouths. We were hot, fractious, and uncomfortable. ‘Let’s go and have an orangeade and then get out of this as quickly as possible,’ we said. On the steps of the club, however, we ran into the son of its President, Edouard Boulenger.

  ‘What, you fellows here?’ he said. ‘You’re just in time. Jump in quick. We’re going up to the pit. There’s a fight on. A snake and a mongoose.’