The Sugar Islands Page 5

  It was the first time that I had seen such a fight. There is not actually a great deal to see. It is darkish inside the building, the pit itself is netted over, and through the mesh of wire it is hard to distinguish against the brown sanded floor the movements of the small dark forms. You see a brown line along the sand and a brown shadow hovering. Then suddenly there is a gleam of white; the thrashing of the snake’s white belly. For a few moments the brown shadow is flecked with the twisting and writhing of the white whip. Then the brown shadow slinks away. The fer de lance, the most hostile small snake in the world, is still. There is not a great deal to see. But it is thrilling. There is a taut, tense atmosphere, not only through the fight but afterwards, when the snake has been lifted out of the pit while its head is cut open and the poison poured into a phial. During a cockfight there is an incessant noise. Everyone shouts and gesticulates. But there is complete silence during the snake’s silent battle. It has a sinister quality. And it is with a feeling of exhaustion and of relief that you come out into the street, into the declining sunlight. You are grateful for the sound of voices.

  Longer than usual that evening we sat on the veranda of the club. It was completely dark when we came down its stairs into the savannah. Never had the cool and quiet of the hills been more welcome. Never had a bathe seemed a more complete banishment of every harassing circumstance that the day had brought. Low in the sky there was a moon, a baby moon. As we swam it was half moonshine and half phosphorus, the splintered silver that was about us. And even in the north of Siam, after a day of marching over precipitous mountain paths and above flooded paddy fields, I have known no greater peace than the lying out on the veranda after dinner, watching the moon and the Southern Cross sink side by side into the sea, hearing from every bush and shrub the murmur of innumerable crickets.

  Once we went to St. Pierre.

  From Fond Lahaye it is a three hours’ sail in a canoe, along a coast indented with green valleys that run back climbingly through fields of sugar cane. At the foot of most of these valleys, between the stems of the coconut palms, you see the outline of wooden cabins. So concealed are these cabins behind that façade of greenery that were it not for the fishing nets hung out along the beach on poles to dry you would scarcely suspect that there was a village there. Nor, as you approach St. Pierre, would you suspect that in that semicircle of hills under the cloud-hung shadow of Mont Pelé are hidden the ruins of a city for which history can find no parallel.

  At first sight it is nothing but a third-rate, decrepit shipping port, not unlike Manzanillo or La Libertad. It has its pier, its warehouses, its market; its single cobbled street contains the usual dockside features. A café or two, a restaurant, a small wooden shanty labelled ‘Cercle’, a somewhat larger shanty labelled ‘Select Tango’. A hairdresser, a universal store. At first sight it is one of many thousand places. It is not till you step out of that main street into the tangled jungle at the back of it that you realize that St. Pierre is, as it has always been, unique.

  Even then you do not at first realize it. At first you see nothing but greenery, wild shrubbery, the great ragged leaves of the banana plant, with here and there the brown showing of a thatched roof. It is not till you have wandered a little through those twisted paths that you see that it is in the angles of old walls that those thatched cottages are built, that it is over broken masonry, over old stairways and porticoes, that those trailing creepers are festooned; that empty windows are shadowed by those ragged leaves. At odd corners you will come upon signs of that old life: a marble slab that was once the doorstep of a colonial bungalow; a fountain that splashed coolly through siestaed summers; a shrine with the bronze body broken at its foot. Everywhere you will come upon signs of that old life; ‘le Pays des Revenants’ they called it. With what grim irony has chance played upon the word.

  But it is not till you have left the town and have climbed to the top of one of the hills that were thought to shelter it, till you look down into the basin of the amphitheatre that contained St. Pierre and, looking down, see through the screen of foliage the outline of house after ruined house, that you realize the extent and nature of the disaster. No place that I have ever seen has moved me in quite that way.

  Not so much by the thought of the twenty-eight thousand people killed within that narrow span: to the actual fact of death most of us are, I think, now a little callous. Nor by the sentiment that attaches itself to any ruin, the sentiment with which during the war one walked through the deserted villages of Northern France, the feeling that here a life that was the scene of many lives has been abandoned; that here, at the corners of these streets, men had stood gossiping on summer evenings, watching the sky darken over the unchanging hills, musing on the permanence, the unhurrying continuity of the life they were a part of. It is not that sentiment that makes the sight of St. Pierre so profoundly solemn. It is the knowledge rather that here existed a life that should be existing still, that existed nowhere else, that was the outcome of a combination of circumstances that now have vanished from the world for ever. Even Pompeii cannot give you quite that feeling. There were many Pompeiis, after all. Pompeii exists for us as a symbol, as an explanation of Roman culture. It has not that personal, that localized appeal of a flower that has blossomed once only, in one place: that no eye will ever see again.

  St. Pierre was the loveliest city in the West Indies. The loveliest and the gayest.

  All day its narrow streets were bright with colour; in sharp anglings of light the amber sunshine streamed over the red-tiled roofs, the lemon-coloured walls, the green shutters, the green verandas. The streets ran steeply, ‘breaking into steps as streams break into waterfalls’. Moss grew between the stones. In the runnel was the sound of water. There was no such thing as silence in St. Pierre. There was always the sound of water, of fountains in the hidden gardens, of rain water in the runnels, and through the music of that water, the water that kept the town cool during the long noon heat, came ceaselessly from the hills beyond the murmur of the lizard and the cricket. A lovely city, with its theatre, its lamplit avenues, its Jardín des Plantes, its schooners drawn circlewise along the harbour. Life was comely there; the life that had been built up by the old French émigré. It was a city of carnival. There was a culture there, a love of art among those people who had made their home there, who had not come to Martinique to make money that they could spend in Paris. The culture of Versailles was transposed there to mingle with the Carib stock and the dark mysteries of imported Africa. St. Pierre was never seen without emotion. It laid hold of the imagination. It had something to say, not only to the romantic intellectual like Hearn or Stacpool, but to the sailors and the traders, to all those whom the routine of livelihood brought within the limit of its sway. Incomparable,’ they would say as they waved farewell to the Pays des Revenants, knowing that if they did not return they would carry all their lives a regret for it in their hearts.

  History has no parallel for St. Pierre.

  And within forty-five seconds the stir and colour of that life had been wiped out.

  The story of the disaster is too familiar, has been told too many times to need any retelling here. The story of those last days when Pelé was scattering cinders daily over Martinique; when the vegetables that the women brought down from the hills to market were dark with ashes; when the Riviére Blanche was swollen with boiling mud; when day after day was darkened by heavy clouds: it has been told so often, the story of that last morning that dawned clear after a night of storm for the grande fête of an Ascension Day: of the two immense explosions that were heard clearly in Guadeloupe, of the voice over a telephone abruptly silenced, of the ship that struggled with charred and corpse-strewn deck into the harbour of St. Lucia, the ship that two years later was to be crushed by ice: of the voice that cried back to the questioner on the wharf, ‘We come from Hell. You can cable the world that Saint Pierre exists no longer.’ It has been told so many times.

  At eight o’clock a gay and gallant peopl
e was preparing on a sunlit morning busily for its jour de fête. Forty-five seconds later, of all that gaiety and courage there was nothing left. Not anything. Certain legends linger. They say that four days later, when the process of excavation was begun, there was found in the vault of the prison a negro criminal, the sole survivor. They say that in a waistcoat pocket a watch was found, its hands pointing to half-past nine, a watch that had recorded ninety useless minutes in a timeless tomb. And there are other stories. The stories of fishermen who set sail early in the morning to return for their déjeuner, to find ruin there; of servants whom their mistresses had sent out of the town on messages; of officials and business men who left the town on the 7th or 6th of May for Fort de France. They are very like the war stories you will hear of men who returned after a five minutes’ patrolling of a trench to find nothing left of their dugout nor the people in it. They are probably exaggerated when they are not untrue. And yet it was these stories, more than even the sight of St. Pierre itself, that made that tragedy actual to me.

  ‘We were,’ I was told, ‘twenty-four of us young people one Sunday on a picnic. We would have another picnic on the following Sunday, we decided. When that Sunday came there were only three of us alive.’

  A European cannot picture in terms of any tragedy that is likely to come to him what that tragedy meant for the survivors of Martinique. It did not mean simply the death of twenty-eight thousand people; the loss of property and possession; the curtain for many years upon the prosperity of the island. It meant the cutting of their lives in half more completely than would mean for me the destruction of every stone and every inhabitant in London. It meant the loss of half their friends, half their families, half their possessions, half their lives.

  ‘I left Saint Pierre on the seventh,’ a man told me. ‘I was to be married on the ninth. I had come into Fort de France, leaving my fiancée behind to make some last arrangements. I cannot express the excitement with which I woke on that morning of the eighth. I was twenty-four. She was three years younger. It was the first time that either of us had been in love. And that was the last whole day, I told myself, that I should ever spend alone. It was so lovely a morning, too. Bright and clear. And after one of the worst nights that there can have ever been. Thunder and lightning and unceasing rain. The sunlight was a happy omen. Never had I known, never shall I know, anything like the happiness with which I dressed and bathed and shaved that morning. And then, just as I was finishing my coffee, there came those two explosions. They were terrific. They shook the entire island. But I wasn’t frightened. Why should I be? What was there to connect them with Pelé ? I went on, as the rest of us did, with what we had to do.

  ‘For a while that morning life went on in Fort de France in its ordinary way. But soon you had begun to notice a worried look on people’s faces. The sky was dark; a thin dust in which pebbles were mingled was falling over the town. Rumour had started. There was no news coming through from Saint Pierre. The telephone line had been cut suddenly in the middle of a message, at the instant of the two explosions. Since then there had been silence.

  ‘You know how it is when a rumour starts in a small place. The most fantastic stories get about. A porteuse from Carbet had reported that a fisherman had seen flames behind Saint Pierre, and no one asked themselves how even a porteuse could have done the twenty-eight kilometres from Carbet in two hours.

  ‘I tried not to feel frightened. It was absurd to be frightened. No one had been frightened in Saint Pierre the afternoon before, when I had left it. Earlier they had been frightened, yes; when those cinders had been falling in the streets, when lightning was flickering about the crater’s mouth; when the day was dark with clouds; when the sugar factory by the Riviére Blanche was being swept away by boiling mud. They had been frightened then. But the scientists had told them there was no need to be afraid. The Governor and his wife had come out there themselves. The cinders had practically stopped falling. It was only old Pelé amusing himself again.

  ‘That was what I told myself. But you know how it is when panic catches hold of a place. By eleven o’clock our nerves had gone. Three hours and still no news, with the wildest rumours flying round, not one of us could work. We sat in the club, forgetting our rum punches, one thought only in our minds. I shall never forget that morning: the suspense, the terror, the uncertainty. Midday and still no message had come through. The boat that had been sent out to make inquiries had not returned. We sat and waited. It was not till one o’clock that we knew.’

  He paused and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It’s twenty-six years ago,’ he said. ‘That’s a long time. One can forget most things in that time. One thinks one’s heart broken. But it mends. One thinks one’s life is over. But it isn’t. One goes on living. One makes the best out of what’s left. I’ve not had a bad best, either. I’ve had a happy marriage. I’m proud of my children. I’ve made a position. But,’ he again shrugged his shoulders, ‘I don’t know that since that day I’ve felt that anything mattered in particular.’

  I think that in that anecdote is expressed what life has been for the whole of Martinique, for the whole of his generation of Martinique. The carrying on with life in face of the feeling that nothing really matters.

  The Buccaneer

  from NO QUARTER

  Hot Countries was published in 1930. In England it had a warm reception from the Press, but very few members of the public invested fifteen shillings in it. In the U.S.A., however, it was a Literary Guild choice. This lucky break reorientated my life and writing. For the next few years my time was divided between New York and London. Hot Countries did not, however, sever my link with the West Indies. It brought me a commission to write, in the form of a novel, A History of Piracy, showing how the pirates of Tortuga became the gangsters of Chicago. It was published in 1932 under the title No Quarter. It did not do very well; in fact it did rather badly. It suffered from a fatal deficiency; it had no continuity of interest. It covered three hundred years and the only link between one set of characters and the next was one of blood. But I think that the first section—the story of how a seventeenth-century Frenchman became a buccaneer—can stand by itself, and that its historical background helps to interpret the West Indian scene.

  Written in 1930

  She was comely after the manner of Provençal women in the third decade of the seventeenth century.

  Her figure under the blue-laced bodice was firm and supple. The black hair was heavy under the knotted handkerchief. A morning’s labour in the terraced vineyards had flushed her cheeks. Her breath came slowly between lips that parted over straight white teeth. The dark eyes were bold and bright as they met the glance, casual at first, then searching, of the young gallant who cantered by, the buckles and buttons of his green doublet a-glitter in the April sun, down the mountain pathway to Marseilles.

  The young man made no particular bones about his courtship.

  When the nature of its success became apparent, her father shrugged his shoulders. Then, as an example to her sisters, unhitched his belt and thrashed her soundly. Her mother wept and supposed that she might just as well now marry Françis. François lifted his eyebrows and said, ‘What would you?’ anticipated thirty sous of his bethrothed’s dowry, stood treat uproariously at Gustave’s cabaret, murmuring as his guests escorted him homewards up the sun-parched gutter that was the village’s main street: ‘Farm hands. One can always do with another farm hand. I’ll find good use for him some day. You wait.’

  He was long in waiting.

  From the start the bastard son of the Chevalier de Monterey, whose name in the parish register was entered as Roger Vaisseau, proved intractable. As an infant he howled at all such times as his howling was certain to be a nuisance; howled not with the querulous bleating of the weak, but with the full-lunged indignation of the wronged. His howls were a protest, not a plea; they were an assertion of independence. His parents caressed him, and he bellowed. They beat him and his bellowing achieved a lusti
er note. They ignored him and his screams were jubilant.

  ‘If only one could find out what he wants,’ his mother said.

  ‘He doesn’t want anything,’ grumbled his foster-father, ‘that’s the trouble. A fellow with a chip on his shoulder, that’s what he is.’

  As an infant he was a pest. As a small boy he was little better. On Sunday after the morning service when the village worthies assembled for their discussion of tithes and taxes, when the young matrons in their bright, padded clothes and flower-girdled hats sauntered back towards their houses, when the young people danced, wrestled, and played ball, he would sit apart, a surly disdainful look in his brown eyes. Only occasionally would he join in the games of the other children, and when he did it was ill-temperedly. They would be playing ‘monsieur le curà’: it would be his turn to pay the forfeit: ‘Of three things you must do one,’ they would demand of him. ‘You must fly in the air, or you must take the moon between your teeth, or you must kiss Lisette.’ As likely as not he would turn away with a curled lip and a contemptuous ‘No, thank you, not Lisette.’

  One evening as he sat in the shadow of the house looking out over the blue Mediterranean, he overheard his mother and grandmother discussing him.

  ‘He’s different from the others,’ his mother said. ‘I suppose you couldn’t expect him not to be, seeing who his father was.’ His grandmother nodded her head.

  ‘Blood always comes out,’ she said. ‘He’s got his father’s eyes. He has your mouth, but it looks as though he was going to have his father’s nose. However you bring him up, he’ll be his father’s son.’

  Eagerly the small boy listened.

  On the following Sunday his lips curled haughtily when the other children invited him to play.