*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 63102 ***

TWO YEARS
IN THE
FRENCH WEST INDIES

BY

LAFCADIO HEARN

_AUTHOR OF "CHITA" ETC._

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARTHUR W. RUSHMORE
AND DRAWINGS BY MARIE ROYLE

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1923


[Illustration: LA MONTAGNE PELÉE
"..._Its slopes undulating against the north sky,--and
the strange jagging of its ridges,... an extravaganza
of lava-shapes overpitching and cascading into sea
and plain._"]


À MON CHER AMI

LÉOPOLD ARNOUX

NOTAIRE À SAINT PIERRE, MARTINIQUE




_Souvenir de not promenades,--de nos voyages,--de nos causeries,--des
sympathies échangées,--de tout le charme d'une amitié
inaltérable et inoubliable,--de tout ce qui parle à
l'âme au doux Pays des Revenants._


[Illustration]

[Illustration]


CONTENTS

A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics
Martinique Sketches:--
I. Les Porteuses
II. La Grande Anse
III. Un Revenant
IV. La Guiablesse
V. La Vérette
VI. Les Blanchisseuses
VII. La Pelée
VIII. "Ti Canotié
IX. La Fille de Couleur
X. Bête-ni-pié
XI. Ma Bonne
XII. "Pa combiné, chè!"
XIII. Yé
XIV. Lys
XV. Appendix:--Some Creole Melodies


[Illustration]

[Illustration]


ILLUSTRATIONS

La Montagne Pelée
Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas
Old Sugar Mill, St. Kitts
Belle Fontaine, Martinique
St. Pierre To-day
Suzanne
Cimetière du Mouillage, St. Pierre
Road to Morne Rouge
St. Pierre--Street Among the Ruins
The Empress Josephine
The Quay, Bridgetown
Bridgetown, Barbadoes
Country Road, Barbadoes
The Lion or Gun Hill, Barbadoes
The Devil's Door, Martinique
The Road to St. Pierre
Fort-de-France
Les Porteuses
Cathedral, Fort-de-France
Home from Market, St. Pierre
Le Calvaire
A Wayside Shrine
Pitons du Carbet
Fort-de-France
Les Blanchisseuses
La Pelée
The Cathedral, St. Pierre
Ruins, St. Pierre
Armistice Day, Fort-de-France
Market, Fort-de-France
Creole Women
Didier Springs




[Illustration]




FOREWORD


"CA-ARMINE! Carmine!"

"Oui, madame!"

"Petit garçon, venez donc!"

The high piping quaver of Madame Hardy's voice followed by the soft
padding sound of bare feet on the tile flagging, the cooing of pigeons
in the cote in the court below, the ever-present cool gurgling sound of
the fountain splashing in the pool, are the only sounds that break the
somnolence of midday in Le Grand Hotel de la Paix. The soft caress of
the trade winds that careen the palm crests bears the breath of the
vanilla blossoms and bougainvillea that festoon the rail of the balcony.
A pair of lizards, flashes of green flame, chase each other in the white
noon sunshine, or freeze into immobility in a moment of alarm. The shops
are closed for siesta and the whole town dozes away the golden hours
from eleven till two. There is no hurry. To-morrow will be time enough.
_Le bon Dieu_ is prodigal with his sunshine and rain. Food is to be had
for the picking. A thatch is shelter enough and clothes are but a
convention, not a necessity. Surely there is no hurry! _Mais non,
missie!_

So we found life in Fort-de-France, Martinique. The same childlike,
care-free, laughing spirit that so wholly captivated the artist soul of
Hearn four decades since weaves its spell about the traveler of to-day.

Since those happy days a generation ago that he described with such
lyric grace the world at large has changed, become smaller, more
disillusioned, and in the island itself an occasional hurricane and the
terrible disaster of St. Pierre in 1902 have wrought havoc unspeakable;
yet the buoyant hearts of these Creole folk sing as of yore, among the
flower-decked ruins of the city that Hearn loved so well, the new St.
Pierre that lies under the brooding shadow of Mt. Pelée.

Change comes slowly in the tropics. Nature's prodigality is no great
incentive to ambition and one finds in this wrinkled emerald of an
island set in a sparkling sapphire sea welcome relief from the stress of
our northern life with its insistent activity. It is as though one were
in a great greenhouse; the crowding mountain sides are rank with
exuberant greenery. Every ravine has its bounding rivulet of crystal
water gleaming like a silver thread woven into the rich pattern of
verdure. Constant breezes temper the heat and frequent short showers
wash the air free of dust. The atmosphere is brilliant, as Hearn painted
it.

The same people are there--French, Madagascans, Caribs, Senegalese,
Chinese, Portuguese--all mingled in a Creole type different from any and
bearing qualities of all. Tall, slim, graceful, especially the women,
with lovely heads, thin lipped and deep eyed, with skins of every
conceivable shade of white, yellow, brown, and red. Long waving raven
hair tied smartly in their bright "madrases," with little clothing to
hamper them, they are the picture of grace. They still wear the
"Josephine" gown, the vast flowing skirts of which they gather up and
tuck under their arms to-day exactly as Hearn described.

We visited again and again the grim ruin of St. Pierre, now overgrown
with a rank growth of flowers and vines, a sorry spectacle. High on the
cliff above the town, dominating the scene of ruin, stands the lovely
marble statue of the Virgin, all that remained intact in the great
cathedral that fateful day.

The peculiar nature of the devastating wave of steam and red-hot gas
which wiped out thirty thousand people in a few minutes, left the front
and rear walls standing and crushed and demolished the side walls of the
stone buildings which made up the greater portion of the city. These
walls, battered and crumbling, still stand, mute evidence of the city's
size and former beauty. Within these standing walk new homes are
springing up, giving a weird effect as though in this fecund climate the
very houses were coming back to life.

The roads which thread the island like a net are constantly cared for.
Winding in and out and ever upward to dizzy heights, they lead through
impenetrable jungle, thickets of bamboo and giant tree ferns, affording
from occasional open spaces glimpses of shadowy ravines and bounding
torrents hemmed in by farther peaks in serried ranks that beggar
description, descending again toward the western side through mile upon
mile of soft gray-green waving cane, till one comes at last to the blue
Atlantic beating itself into froth upon the sands at Trinité.

French k the only language--a Creole French different from any on earth,
sweet and musical to listen to. The innate courtesy one meets
everywhere, even in the interior where strangers are rare, is most
delightful. One shakes hands with everyone one meets, though it be a
half dozen times in a forenoon, and even the smallest purchase cannot be
made without an exchange of courtesies that would do credit to a
diplomat. Along the country roads the women carriers with huge panniers
on their heads will always greet you in their soft, high-keyed voices
with, "Bon jou', missie," that lingers like a sweet savor and prejudices
one forever in favor of these pleasant folk.

The numerous illustrations and thumbnail sketches in the present volume
are from photographs taken during our wanderings in Martinique and other
islands of the Antilles. They give some hint of the alluring beauty that
greets one on every hand. The passing years seem powerless to change the
simple character of these ease-loving Creole folk or the green islets of
which they are so justly proud.

We sailed away eventually with our minds and hearts full of many new and
delightful friendships and a great yearning to stay, or at least to some
day be a "revenant" and come back to this lovely island that Hearn has
immortalized in the pages that follow.


ARTHUR W. RUSHMORE.

FORT-DE-FRANCE
Martinique, F. W. I.
_December, 1922_




PREFACE


During a trip to the Lesser Antilles in the summer of 1887, the writer
of the following pages, landing at Martinique, fell under the influence
of that singular spell which the island has always exercised upon
strangers, and by which it has earned its poetic name,--_Le Pays des
Revenants._ Even as many another before him, he left its charmed shores
only to know himself haunted by that irresistible regret,--unlike any
other,--which is the enchantment of the land upon all who wander away
from it. So he returned, intending to remain some months; but the
bewitchment prevailed, and he remained two years.

Some of the literary results of that sojourn form the bulk of the
present volume. Several, or portions of several, papers have been
published in HARPER'S MAGAZINE; but the majority of the sketches now
appear in print for the first time.

The introductory paper, entitled "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics,"
consists for the most part of notes taken upon a voyage of nearly three
thousand miles, accomplished in less than two months. During such hasty
journeying it is scarcely possible for a writer to attempt anything more
serious than a mere reflection of the personal experiences undergone;
and, in spite of sundry justifiable departures from simple note-making,
this paper is offered only as an effort to record the visual and
emotional impressions of the moment.

My thanks are due to Mr. William Lawless, British Consul at St. Pierre,
for several beautiful photographs, taken by himself, which have been
used in the preparation of the illustrations.

L.H.

_Philadelphia, 1889._




[Illustration]



A TRIP TO
THE TROPICS

[Illustration]


[Illustration: Sketch Map showing
the places mentioned,
in TWO YEARS IN THE
FRENCH WEST INDIES
by Lafcadio Hearn]




A MIDSUMMER TRIP TO
THE TROPICS


I


A long, narrow, graceful steel steamer, with two masts and an orange-yellow
chimney,--taking on cargo at Pier 49 East River. Through her yawning
hatchways a mountainous piling up of barrels is visible below;--there is
much rumbling and rattling of steam-winches, creaking of derrick-booms,
groaning of pulleys as the freight is being lowered in. A breezeless July
morning, and a dead heat,--87° already.

The saloon-deck gives one suggestion of past and of coming voyages.
Under the white awnings long lounge-chairs sprawl here and there,--each
with an occupant, smoking in silence, or dozing with head drooping to
one side. A young man, awaking as I pass to my cabin, turns upon me a
pair of peculiarly luminous black eyes,--creole eyes. Evidently a West
Indian....

The morning is still gray, but the sun is dissolving the haze. Gradually
the gray vanishes, and a beautiful, pale, vapory blue--a spiritualized
Northern blue--colors water and sky. A cannon-shot suddenly shakes the
heavy air: it is our farewell to the American shore;--we move. Back
floats the wharf, and becomes vapory with a bluish tinge. Diaphanous
mists seem to have caught the sky color; and even the great red
storehouses take a faint blue tint as they recede. The horizon now has a
greenish glow. Everywhere else the effect is that of looking through
very light-blue glasses....

We steam under the colossal span of the mighty bridge; then for a little
while Liberty towers above our passing,--seeming first to turn towards
us, then to turn away from us, the solemn beauty of her passionless face
of bronze. Tints brighten:--the heaven is growing a little bluer. A
breeze springs up....

Then the water takes on another hue: pale-green lights play through it.
It has begun to sound. Little waves lift up their heads as though to
look at us,--patting the flanks of the vessel, and whispering to one
another.

Far off the surface begins to show quick white flashes here and there,
and the steamer begins to swing.... We are hearing Atlantic waters. The
sun is high up now, almost overhead: there are a few thin clouds in the
tender-colored sky,--flossy, long-drawn-out, white things. The horizon
has lost its greenish glow: it is a spectral blue. Masts, spars,
rigging,--the white boats and the orange chimney,--the bright
deck-lines, and the snowy rail,--cut against the colored light in almost
dazzling relief. Though the sun shines hot the wind is cold: its strong
irregular blowing fans one into drowsiness. Also the somnolent chant of
the engines--_do-do, hey! do-do, hey!_--lulls to sleep.

... Towards evening the glaucous sea-tint vanishes,--the water becomes
blue. It is full of great flashes, as of seams opening and reclosing
over a white surface. It spits spray in a ceaseless drizzle. Sometimes
it reaches up and slaps the side of the steamer with a sound as of a
great naked hand. The wind waxes boisterous. Swinging ends of cordage
crack like whips. There is an immense humming that drowns speech,--a
humming made up of many sounds: whining of pulleys, whistling of
riggings, flapping and fluttering of canvas, roar of nettings in the
wind. And this sonorous medley, ever growing louder, has rhythm,--a
_crescendo_ and _diminuendo_ timed by the steamer's regular swinging:
like a great Voice crying out, "Whoh-oh-oh! whoh-oh-oh!" We are nearing
the life-centres of winds and currents. One can hardly walk on deck
against the ever-increasing breath;--yet now the whole world is
blue,--not the least cloud is visible; and the perfect transparency and
voidness about us make the immense power of this invisible medium seem
something ghostly and awful.... The log, at every revolution, whines
exactly like a little puppy;--one can hear it through all the roar fully
forty feet away.

... It is nearly sunset. Across the whole circle of the Day we have been
steaming south. Now the horizon is gold green. All about the falling
sun, this gold-green light takes vast expansion.... Right on the edge of
the sea is a tall, gracious ship, sailing sunset ward. Catching the
vapory fire, she seems to become a phantom,--a ship of gold mist: all
her spars and sails are luminous, and look like things seen in dreams.

Crimsoning more and more, the sun drops to the sea. The phantom ship
approaches him,--touches the curve of his glowing face, sails right
athwart it! Oh, the spectral splendor of that vision! The whole great
ship in full sail instantly makes an acute silhouette against the
monstrous disk,--rests there in the very middle of the vermilion sun.
His face crimsons high above her top-masts,--broadens far beyond helm
and bowsprit. Against this weird magnificence, her whole shape changes
color: hull, masts, and sails turn black--a greenish black.

Sun and ship vanish together in another minute. Violet the night comes;
and the rigging of the foremast cuts a cross upon the face of the moon.




II


Morning: the second day. The sea is an extraordinary blue,--looks to me
something like violet ink. Close by the ship, where the foam-clouds are,
it is beautifully mottled,--looks like blue marble with exquisite
veinings and nebulosities... Tepid wind, and cottony white
clouds,--cirri climbing up over the edge of the sea all around. The sky
is still pale blue, and the horizon is full of a whitish haze.

... A nice old French gentleman from Guadeloupe presumes to say this is
not blue water;--he declares it greenish (_verdâtre_). Because I cannot
discern the green, he tells me I do not yet know what blue water is.
_Attendez un peu!_...

... The sky tone deepens as the sun ascends,--deepens deliciously. The
warm wind proves soporific. I drop asleep with the blue light in my
face,--the strong bright blue of the noonday sky. As I doze it seems to
burn like a cold fire right through my eyelids. Waking up with a start,
I fancy that everything is turning blue, myself included. "Do you not
call this the real tropical blue?" I cry to my French fellow-traveller.
"_Mon Dieu! non_," he exclaims, as in astonishment at the
question;--"this is not blue!"... What can be his idea of blue, I
wonder!

Clots of sargasso float by,--light-yellow sea-weed. We are nearing the
Sargasso-sea,--entering the path of the trade-winds. There is a long
ground-swell, the steamer rocks and rolls, and the tumbling water always
seems to me growing bluer; but my friend from Guadeloupe says that this
color "which I call blue" is only darkness--only the shadow of
prodigious depth.

Nothing now but blue sky and what I persist in calling blue sea. The
clouds have melted away in the bright glow. There is no sign of life in
the azure gulf above, nor in the abyss beneath;--there are no wings or
fins to be seen. Towards evening, under the slanting gold light, the
color of the sea deepens into ultramarine; then the sun sinks down
behind a bank of copper-colored cloud.




III


Morning of the third day. Same mild, warm wind. Bright blue sky, with
some very thin clouds in the horizon,--like puffs of steam. The glow of
the sea-light through the open ports of my cabin makes them seem filled
with thick blue glass... It is becoming too warm for New York
clothing...

Certainly the sea has become much bluer. It gives one the idea of
liquefied sky: the foam might be formed of cirrus clouds compressed,--so
extravagantly white it looks to-day, like snow in the sun. Nevertheless,
the old gentleman from Guadeloupe still maintains this is not the true
blue of the tropics!

... The sky does not deepen its hue to-day: it brightens it;--the blue
glows as if it were taking fire throughout. Perhaps the sea may deepen
its hue;--I do not believe it can take more luminous color without being
set aflame... I ask the ship's doctor whether it is really true that the
West Indian waters are any bluer than these. He looks a moment at the
sea, and replies, "yes!" There is such a tone of surprise in his "oh" as
might indicate that I had asked a very foolish question; and his look
seems to express doubt whether I am quite in earnest... I think,
nevertheless, that this water is extravagantly, nonsensically blue!

... I read for an hour or two; fall asleep in the chair; wake up
suddenly; look at the sea,--and cry out! This sea is impossibly blue!
The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a
lunatic... Yet it is transparent; the foam-clouds, as they sink down,
turn sky-blue,--a sky-blue which now looks white by contrast with the
strange and violent splendor of the sea color. It seems as if one were
looking into an immeasurable dyeing vat, or as though the whole ocean
had been thickened with indigo. To say this is a mere reflection of the
sky is nonsense!--the sky is too pale by a hundred shades for that! This
must be the natural color of the water,--a blazing azure,--magnificent,
impossible to describe.

The French passenger from Guadeloupe observes that the sea is "beginning
to become blue."




IV


And the fourth day. One awakens unspeakably lazy;--this must be the West
Indian languor. Same sky, with a few more bright clouds than
yesterday;--always the warm wind blowing. There is a long swell. Under
this trade-breeze, warm like a human breath, the ocean seems to
pulse,--to rise and fall as with a vast inspiration and expiration.
Alternately its blue circle lifts and falls before us and behind us;--we
rise very high; we sink very low,--but always with a slow long motion.
Nevertheless the water looks smooth, perfectly smooth; the billowings
which lift us cannot be seen;--it is because the summits of these swells
are mile-broad,--too broad to be discerned from the level of our deck.

... Ten A.M.--Under the sun the sea is a flaming, dazzling lazulite. My
French friend from Guadeloupe kindly confesses this is _almost_ the
color of tropical water.... Weeds floating by, a little below the
surface, are azured. But the Guadeloupe gentleman says he has seen water
still more blue. I am sorry,--I cannot believe him.

Mid-day.--The splendor of the sky is weird! No clouds above--only blue
fire! Up from the warm deep color of the sea-circle the edge of the
heaven glows as if bathed in greenish flame. The swaying circle of the
resplendent sea seems to flash its jewel-color to the zenith.

Clothing feels now almost too heavy to endure; and the warm wind brings
a languor with it as of temptation.... One feels an irresistible desire
to drowse on deck;--the rushing speech of waves, the long rocking of the
ship, the lukewarm caress of the wind, urge to slumber;--but the light
is too vast to permit of sleep. Its blue power compels wakefulness. And
the brain is wearied at last by this duplicated azure splendor of sky
and sea. How gratefully comes the evening to us,--with its violet glooms
and promises of coolness!

All this sensuous blending of warmth and force in winds and waters more
and more suggests an idea of the spiritualism of elements--a sense of
world-life. In all these soft sleepy swayings, these caresses of wind
and sobbing of waters, Nature seems to confess some passional mood.
Passengers converse of pleasant tempting things,--tropical fruits,
tropical beverages, tropical mountain-breezes, tropical women.... It is
a time for dreams--those day-dreams that come gently as a mist with
ghostly realization of hopes, desires, ambitions.... Men sailing to the
mines of Guiana dream of gold.

The wind seems to grow continually warmer; the spray feels warm like
blood. Awnings have to be clewed up, and wind-sails taken in;--still,
there are no whitecaps,--only the enormous swells, too broad to see, as
the ocean falls and rises like a dreamer's breast....

The sunset comes with a great burning yellow glow, fading up through
faint greens to lose itself in violet light;--there is no gloaming. The
days have already become shorter.... Through the open ports, as we lie
down to sleep, comes a great whispering,--the whispering of the seas:
sounds as of articulate speech under the breath,--as of women telling
secrets....




V


Fifth day out. Trade-winds from the south-east; a huge tumbling of
mountain-purple waves;--the steamer careens under a full spread of
canvas. There is a sense of spring in the wind to-day,--something that
makes one think of the bourgeoning of Northern woods, when naked trees
first cover themselves with a mist of tender green,--something that
recalls the first bird-songs, the first climbings of sap to sun, and
gives a sense of vital plenitude.

... Evening fills the west with aureate woolly clouds,--the wool of the
Fleece of Gold. Then Hesperus beams like another moon, and the stars
burn very brightly. Still the ship bends under the even pressure of the
warm wind in her sails; and her wake becomes a trail of fire. Large
sparks dash up through it continuously, like an effervescence of
flame;--and queer broad clouds of pale fire swirl by. Far out, where the
water is black as pitch, there are no lights: it seems as if the steamer
were only grinding out sparks with her keel, striking fire with her
propeller.




VI


Sixth day out. Wind tepid and still stronger, but sky very clear. An
indigo sea, with beautiful white-caps. The ocean color is deepening: it
is very rich now, but I think less wonderful than before;--it is an
opulent pansy hue. Close by the ship it looks black-blue,--the color
that bewitches in certain Celtic eyes.


[Illustration]


There is a feverishness in the air;--the heat is growing heavy; the
least exertion provokes perspiration; below-decks the air is like the
air of an oven. Above-deck, however, the effect of all this light and
heat is not altogether disagreeable;--one feels that vast elemental
powers are near at hand, and that the blood is already aware of their
approach.

All day the pure sky, the deepening of sea-color, the lukewarm wind.
Then comes a superb sunset! There is a painting in the west wrought of
cloud-colors,--a dream of high carmine cliffs and rocks outlying in a
green sea, which lashes their bases with a foam of gold....

Even after dark the touch of the wind has the warmth of flesh. There is
no moon; the sea-circle is black as Acheron; and our phosphor wake
reappears quivering across it,--seeming to reach back to the very
horizon. It is brighter to-night,--looks like another _Via
Lactea_,--with points breaking through it like stars in a nebula. From
our prow ripples rimmed with fire keep fleeing away to right and left
into the night,--brightening as they run, then vanishing suddenly as if
they had passed over a precipice. Crests of swells seem to burst into
showers of sparks, and great patches of spume catch flame, smoulder
through, and disappear.... The Southern Cross is visible,--sloping
backward and sidewise, as if propped against the vault of the sky: it is
not readily discovered by the unfamiliarized eye; it is only after if
has been well pointed out to you that you discern its position. Then you
find it is only the _suggestion_ of a cross--four stars set almost
quadrangularly, some brighter than others.

For two days there has been little conversation on board. It may be due
in part to the somnolent influence of the warm wind,--in part to the
ceaseless booming of waters and roar of rigging, which drown men's
voices; but I fancy it is much more due to the impressions of space and
depth and vastness,--the impressions of sea and sky, which compel
something akin to awe.




VII


Morning over the Caribbean Sea,--a calm, extremely dark-blue sea. There
are lands in sight,--high lands, with sharp, peaked, unfamiliar
outlines.

We passed other lands in the darkness: they no doubt resembled the
shapes towering up around us now; for these are evidently volcanic
creations,--jagged, coned, truncated, eccentric. Far off they first
looked a very pale gray; now, as the light increases, they change hue a
little,--showing misty greens and smoky blues. They rise very sharply
from the sea to great heights--the highest point always with a cloud
upon it;--they thrust out singular long spurs, push up mountain shapes
that have an odd scooped-out look. Some, extremely far away, seem, as
they catch the sun, to be made of gold vapor; others have a madderish
tone: these are colors of clouds. The closer we approach them, the more
do tints of green make themselves visible. Purplish or bluish masses of
coast slowly develop green surfaces; folds and wrinkles of land turn
brightly verdant. Still, the color gleams as through a thin fog.

... The first tropical visitor has just boarded our ship: a wonderful
fly, shaped like a common fly, but at least five times larger. His body
is a beautiful shining black; his wings seem ribbed and jointed with
silver, his head is jewel-green, with exquisitely cut emeralds for eyes.

Islands pass and disappear behind us. The sun has now risen well; the
sky is a rich blue, and the tardy moon still hangs in it. Lilac tones
show through the water. In the south there are a few straggling small
white clouds,--like a long flight of birds. A great gray mountain shape
looms up before us. We are steaming on Santa Cruz.

The island has a true volcanic outline, sharp and high: the cliffs sheer
down almost perpendicularly. The shape is still vapory, varying in
coloring from purplish to bright gray; but wherever peaks and spurs
fully catch the sun they edge themselves with a beautiful green glow,
while interlying ravines seem filled with foggy blue.

As we approach, sunlighted surfaces come out still more luminously
green. Glens and sheltered valleys still hold blues and grays; but
points fairly illuminated by the solar glow show just such a fiery green
as burns in the plumage of certain humming-birds. And just as the
lustrous colors of these birds shift according to changes of light, so
the island shifts colors here and there,--from emerald to blue, and blue
to gray.... But now we are near: it shows us a lovely heaping of high
bright hills in front,--with a further coast-line very low and long and
verdant, fringed with a white beach, and tufted with spidery
palm-crests. Immediately opposite, other palms are poised; their trunks
look like pillars of unpolished silver, their leaves shimmer like
bronze.

... The water of the harbor is transparent and pale green. One can see
many fish, and some small sharks. White butterflies are fluttering about
us in the blue air. Naked black boys are bathing on the beach;--they
swim well, but will not venture out far because of the sharks. A boat
puts off to bring colored girls on board. They are tall, and not
uncomely, although very dark;--they coax us, with all sorts of endearing
words, to purchase bay rum, fruits, Florida water.... We go ashore in
boats. The water of the harbor has a slightly fetid odor.




VIII


Viewed from the bay, under the green shadow of the hills overlooking it,
Frederiksted has the appearance of a beautiful Spanish town, with its
Romanesque piazzas, churches, many arched buildings peeping through
breaks in a line of mahogany, bread-fruit, mango, tamarind, and palm
trees,--an irregular mass of at least fifty different tints, from a
fiery emerald to a sombre bluish-green. But on entering the streets the
illusion of beauty passes: you find yourself in a crumbling, decaying
town, with buildings only two stories high. The lower part, of arched
Spanish design, is usually of lava rock or of brick, painted a light,
warm yellow; the upper stories are most commonly left unpainted, and are
rudely constructed of light timber. There are many heavy arcades and
courts opening on the streets with large archways. Lava blocks have been
used in paving as well as in building; and more than one of the narrow
streets, as it slopes up the hill through the great light, is seen to
cut its way through craggy masses of volcanic stone.


[Illustration 07: CHARLOTTE AMALIE, ST. THOMAS
_All red and white against the green hillside; reflected
as in a mirror by the azure sea._]


But all the buildings look dilapidated; the stucco and paint are falling
or peeling everywhere; there are fissures in the walls, crumbling
façades, tumbling roofs. The first stories, built with solidity worthy
of an earthquake region, seem extravagantly heavy by contrast with the
frail wooden superstructures. One reason may be that the city was burned
and sacked during a negro revolt in 1878;--the Spanish basements
resisted the fire well, and it was found necessary to rebuild only the
second stories of the buildings; but the work was done cheaply and
flimsily, not massively and enduringly, as by the first colonial
builders.

There is great wealth of verdure. Cabbage and cocoa-palms overlook all
the streets, bending above almost every structure, whether hut or public
building;--everywhere you see the splitted green of banana leaves. In
the court-yards you may occasionally catch sight of some splendid palm
with silver-gray stem so barred as to look jointed, like the body of an
annelid.

In the market-place--a broad paved square, crossed by two rows of
tamarind-trees, and bounded on one side by a Spanish piazza--you can
study a spectacle of savage picturesqueness. There are no benches, no
stalls, no booths; the dealers stand, sit, or squat upon the ground
under the sun, or upon the steps of the neighboring arcade. Their wares
are piled up at their feet, for the most part. Some few have little
tables, but as a rule the eatables are simply laid on the dusty ground
or heaped upon the steps of the piazza--reddish-yellow mangoes, that
look like great apples squeezed out of shape, bunches of bananas,
pyramids of bright-green cocoanuts, immense golden-green oranges, and
various other fruits and vegetables totally unfamiliar to Northern
eyes.... It is no use to ask questions--the black dealers speak no
dialect comprehensible outside of the Antilles: it is a negro-English
that sounds like some African tongue,--a rolling current of vowels and
consonants, pouring so rapidly that the inexperienced ear cannot detach
one intelligible word. A friendly white coming up enabled me to learn
one phrase: "Massa, youwancocknerfoobuy?" (Master, do you want to buy a
cocoanut?)

The market is quite crowded,--full of bright color under the tremendous
noon light. Buyers and dealers are generally black;--very few yellow or
brown people are visible in the gathering. The greater number present
are women; they are very simply, almost savagely, garbed--only a skirt
or petticoat, over which is worn a sort of calico short dress, which
scarcely descends two inches below the hips, and is confined about the
waist with a belt or a string. The skirt bells out like the skirt of a
dancer, leaving the feet and bare legs well exposed; and the head is
covered with a white handkerchief, twisted so as to look like a turban.
Multitudes of these barelegged black women are walking past
us,--carrying bundles or baskets upon their heads, and smoking very long
cigars.

They are generally short and thick-set, and walk with surprising
erectness, and with long, firm steps, carrying the bosom well forward.
Their limbs are strong and finely rounded. Whether walking or standing,
their poise is admirable,--might be called graceful, were it not for the
absence of real grace of form in such compact, powerful little figures.
All wear brightly colored cottonade stuffs, and the general effect of
the costume in a large gathering is very agreeable, the dominant hues
being pink, white, and blue. Half the women are smoking. All chatter
loudly, speaking their English jargon with a pitch of voice totally
unlike the English timbre: it sometimes sounds as if they were trying to
pronounce English rapidly according to French pronunciation and pitch of
voice.

These green oranges have a delicious scent and amazing juiciness.
Feeling one of them is sufficient to perfume the skin of the hands for
the rest of the day, however often one may use soap and water.... We
smoke Porto Rico cigars, and drink West Indian lemonades, strongly
flavored with rum. The tobacco has a rich, sweet taste; the rum is
velvety, sugary, with a pleasant, soothing effect: both have a rich
aroma. There is a wholesome originality about the flavor of these
products, a uniqueness which certifies to their _naïf_ purity:
something as opulent and frank as the juices and odors of tropical
fruits and flowers.

The streets leading from the plaza glare violently in the strong
sunlight;--the ground, almost dead-white, dazzles the eyes.... There are
few comely faces visible,--in the streets all are black who pass. But
through open shop-doors one occasionally catches glimpses of a pretty
quadroon face,--with immense black eyes,--a face yellow like a ripe
banana.

... It is now after mid-day. Looking up to the hills, or along sloping
streets towards the shore, wonderful variations of foliage-color meet
the eye: gold-greens, sap-greens, bluish and metallic greens of many
tints, reddish-greens, yellowish-greens. The cane-fields are broad
sheets of beautiful gold-green; and nearly as bright are the masses of
_pomme-cannelle_ frondescence, the groves of lemon and orange; while
tamarind and mahoganies are heavily sombre. Everywhere palm-crests soar
above the wood-lines, and tremble with a metallic shimmering in the blue
light. Up through a ponderous thickness of tamarind arises the spire of
the church; a skeleton of open stone-work, without glasses or lattices
or shutters of any sort for its naked apertures: it is all open to the
winds of heaven; it seems to be gasping with all its granite mouths for
breath--panting in this azure heat. In the bay the water looks greener
than ever: it is so clear that the light passes under every boat and
ship to the very bottom; the vessels cast only very thin green
shadows,--so transparent that fish can be distinctly seen passing
through from sunlight to sunlight.

The sunset offers a splendid spectacle of pure color; there is only an
immense yellow glow in the west,--a lemon-colored blaze; but when it
melts into the blue there is an exquisite green fight.... We leave
to-morrow.

... Morning: the green hills are looming in a bluish vapor: the long
faint-yellow slope of beach to the left of the town, under the mangoes
and tamarinds, is already thronged with bathers,--all men or boys, and
all naked: black, brown, yellow, and white. The white bathers are Danish
soldiers from the barracks; the Northern brightness of their skins forms
an almost startling contrast with the deep colors of the nature about
them, and with the dark complexions of the natives. Some very slender,
graceful brown lads are bathing with them,--lightly built as deer: these
are probably creoles. Some of the black bathers are clumsy-looking, and
have astonishingly long legs.... Then little boys come down, leading
horses;--they strip, leap naked on the animals' backs, and ride into the
sea,--yelling, screaming, splashing, in the morning light. Some are a
fine brown color, like old bronze. Nothing could be more statuesque than
the unconscious attitudes of these bronze bodies in leaping, wrestling,
running, pitching shells. Their simple grace is in admirable harmony
with that of Nature's green creations about them,--rhymes faultlessly
with the perfect self-balance of the palms that poise along the
shore....

Boom! and a thunder-rolling of echoes. We move slowly out of the harbor,
then swiftly towards the southeast.... The island seems to turn slowly
half round; then to retreat from us. Across our way appears a long band
of green light, reaching over the sea like a thin protraction of color
from the extended spur of verdure in which the western wind of the
island terminates. That is a sunken reef, and a dangerous one. Lying
high upon it, in very sharp relief against the blue light, is a wrecked
vessel on her beam-ends,--the carcass of a brig. Her decks have been
broken in; the roofs of her cabins are gone; her masts are splintered
off short; her empty hold yawns naked to the sun; all her upper parts
have taken a yellowish-white color,--the color of sun-bleached bone.

Behind us the mountains still float back. Their shining green has
changed to a less vivid hue; they are taking bluish tones here and
there; but their outlines are still sharp, and along their high soft
slopes there are white specklings, which are villages and towns. These
white specks diminish swiftly,--dwindle to the dimensions of
salt-grains,--finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it
becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;--it turns at last gray as
smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage.

Another yellow sunset, made weird by extraordinary black, dense,
fantastic shapes of cloud. Night darkens, and again the Southern Cross
glimmers before our prow, and the two Milky Ways reveal
themselves,--that of the Cosmos and that ghostlier one which stretches
over the black deep behind us. This alternately broadens and narrows at
regular intervals, concomitantly with the rhythmical swing of the
steamer. Before us the bows spout fire; behind us there is a flaming and
roaring as of Phlegethon; and the voices of wind and sea become so loud
that we cannot talk to one another,--cannot make our words heard even by
shouting.




IX


Early morning: the eighth day. Moored in another blue harbor,--a great
semicircular basin, bounded by a high billowing of hills all green from
the fringe of yellow beach up to their loftiest clouded summit. The land
has that up-tossed look which tells a volcanic origin. There are
curiously scalloped heights, which, though emerald from base to crest,
still retain all the physiognomy of volcanoes: their ribbed sides must
be lava under that verdure. Out of sight westward--in successions of
bright green, pale green, bluish-green, and vapory gray--stretches a
long chain of crater shapes. Truncated, jagged, or rounded, all these
elevations are interunited by their curving hollows of land or by
filaments,--very low valleys. And as they grade away in varying color
through distance, these hill-chains take a curious segmented, jointed
appearance, like insect forms, enormous ant-bodies.... This is St.
Kitt's.

We row ashore over a tossing dark-blue water, and leaving the long
wharf, pass under a great arch and over a sort of bridge into the town
of Basse-Terre, through a concourse of brown and black people.

It is very tropical-looking; but more sombre than Frederiksted. There
are palms everywhere,--cocoa, fan, and cabbage palms; many bread-fruit
trees, tamarinds, bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes, and unfamiliar
things the negroes call by incomprehensible names,--"sapsaps,
dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less reflection of light than in
Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness; no Spanish buildings, no
canary-colored arcades. All the narrow streets are gray or
neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen tone. Most of the dwellings
are timber, resting on brick props, or elevated upon blocks of lava
rock. It seems almost as if some breath from the enormous and always
clouded mountain overlooking the town had begrimed everything, darkening
even the colors of vegetation.

The population is not picturesque. The costumes are commonplace; the
tints of the women's attire are dull. Browns and sombre blues and grays
are commoner than pinks, yellows, and violets. Occasionally you observe
a fine half-breed type--some tall brown girl walking by with a swaying
grace like that of a sloop at sea;--but such spectacles are not
frequent. Most of those you meet are black or a blackish brown. Many
stores are kept by yellowmen with intensely black hair and eyes,--men
who do not smile. These are Portuguese. There are some few fine
buildings; but the most pleasing sight the little town can offer the
visitors is the pretty Botanical Garden, with its banyans and its palms,
its monstrous lilies and extraordinary fruit-trees, and its beautiful
little fountains. From some of these trees a peculiar tillandsia streams
down, much like our Spanish moss,--but it is black!

... As we move away southwardly, the receding outlines of the island
look more and more volcanic. A chain of hills and cones, all very green,
and connected by strips of valley-land so low that the edge of the
sea-circle on the other side of the island can be seen through the gaps.
We steam past truncated hills, past heights that have the look of the
stumps of peaks cut half down,--ancient fire-mouths choked by tropical
verdure.

Southward, above and beyond the deep-green chain, tower other volcanic
forms,--very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like clouds. Those
are the heights of Nevis,--another creation of the subterranean fires.

It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great mountain
flanked by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest, with clouds
packed high upon it, still seems to smoke;--the second highest displays
the most symmetrical crater-form I have yet seen. All are still
grayish-blue or gray. Gradually through the blues break long high gleams
of green.

As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to sky;
the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial green. On
the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in white, red, and
brown: houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high chimneys are
distinguishable;--cane-plantations unfold gold-green surfaces.


[Illustration: OLD SUGAR MILL, ST. KITTS
_As the steamer threads its way among the islands one
sees these old mills dotting the cane fields like abandoned
watchtowers._]


We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but to become
a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little while it continues
green;--but it is a hazy, spectral green, as of colored vapor. The sea
to-day looks almost black: the south-west wind has filled the day with
luminous mist; and the phantom of Nevis melts in the vast glow,
dissolves utterly.... Once more we are out of sight of land,--in the
centre of a blue-black circle of sea. The water-line cuts blackly
against the immense light of the horizon,--a huge white glory that
flames up very high before it fades and melts into the eternal blue.




X


Then a high white shape like a cloud appears before us,--on the
purplish-dark edge of the sea. The cloud-shape enlarges, heightens
without changing contour. It is not a cloud, but an island! Its outlines
begin to sharpen,--with faintest pencillings of color. Shadowy valleys
appear, spectral hollows, phantom slopes of pallid blue or green. The
apparition is so like a mirage that it is difficult to persuade oneself
one is looking at real land,--that it is not a dream. It seems to have
shaped itself all suddenly out of the glowing haze. We pass many miles
beyond it; and it vanishes into mist again.

... Another and a larger ghost; but we steam straight upon it until it
materializes,--Montserrat. It bears a family likeness to the islands we
have already passed--one dominant height, with massing of bright crater
shapes about it, and ranges of green hills linked together by low
valleys. About its highest summit also hovers a flock of clouds. At the
foot of the vast hill nestles the little white and red town of Plymouth.
The single salute of our gun is answered by a stupendous broadside of
echoes.

Plymouth is more than half hidden in the rich foliage that fringes the
wonderfully wrinkled green of the hills at their base;--it has a curtain
of palms before it. Approaching, you discern only one or two façades
above the sea-wall, and the long wharf projecting through an opening in
the masonry, over which young palms stand thick as canes on a sugar
plantation. But on reaching the street that descends towards the heavily
bowldered shore you find yourself in a delightfully drowsy little
burgh,--a miniature tropical town,--with very narrow paved ways,--steep,
irregular, full of odd curves and angles,--and likewise of tiny courts
everywhere sending up jets of palm-plumes, or displaying above their
stone enclosures great candelabra-shapes of cacti. All is old-fashioned
and quiet and queer and small. Even the palms are diminutive,--slim and
delicate; there is a something in their poise and slenderness like the
charm of young girls who have not yet ceased to be children, though soon
to become women....

There is a glorious sunset,--a fervid orange splendor, shading starward
into delicate roses and greens. Then black boatmen come astern and
quarrel furiously for the privilege of carrying one passenger ashore;
and as they scream and gesticulate, half naked, their silhouettes
against the sunset seem forms of great black apes.

... Under steam and sail we are making south again, with a warm wind
blowing south-east,--a wind very moist, very powerful, and soporific.
Facing it, one feels almost cool; but the moment one is sheltered from
it profuse perspiration bursts out. The ship rocks over immense swells;
night falls very blackly; and there are surprising displays of
phosphorescence.




XI


... Morning. A gold sunrise over an indigo sea. The wind is a great warm
caress; the sky a spotless blue. We are steaming on Dominica,--the
loftiest of the lesser Antilles. While the silhouette is yet all violet
in distance, nothing more solemnly beautiful can well be imagined: a
vast cathedral shape, whose spires are mountain peaks, towering in the
horizon, sheer up from the sea.

We stay at Roseau only long enough to land the mails, and wonder at the
loveliness of the island. A beautifully wrinkled mass of green and blue
and gray;--a strangely abrupt peaking and heaping of the land. Behind
the green heights loom the blues; behind these the grays--all pinnacled
against the sky-glow--thrusting up through gaps or behind promontories.
Indescribably exquisite the foldings and hollowings of the emerald
coast. In glen and vale the color of cane-fields shines like a pooling
of fluid bronze, as if the luminous essence of the hill tints had been
dripping down and clarifying there. Far to our left, a bright green spur
pierces into the now turquoise sea; and beyond it, a beautiful mountain
form, blue and curved like a hip, slopes seaward, showing lighted
wrinkles here and there, of green. And from the foreground, against the
blue of the softly outlined shape, cocoa-palms are curving,--all sharp
and shining in the sun.

... Another hour; and Martinique looms before us. At first it appears
all gray, a vapory gray; then it becomes bluish-gray; then all green.

It is another of the beautiful volcanic family: it owns the same hill
shapes with which we have already become acquainted; its uppermost
height is hooded with the familiar cloud; we see the same gold-yellow
plains, the same wonderful varieties of verdancy, the same long green
spins reaching out into the sea,--doubtless formed by old lava torrents.
But all this is now repeated for us more imposingly, more
grandiosely;--it is wrought upon a larger scale than anything we have
yet seen. The semicircular sweep of the harbor, dominated by the
eternally veiled summit of the Montagne Pelée (misnamed, since it is
green to the very clouds), from which the land slopes down on either
hand to the sea by gigantic undulations, is one of the fairest sights
that human eye can gaze upon. Thus viewed, the whole island shape is a
mass of green, with purplish streaks and shadowings here and there:
glooms of forest-hollows, or moving umbrages of cloud. The city of St.
Pierre, on the edge of the land, looks as if it had slid down the hill
behind it, so strangely do the streets come tumbling to the port in
cascades of masonry,--with a red billowing of tiled roofs over all, and
enormous palms poking up through it,--higher even than the creamy white
twin towers of its cathedral.

We anchor in limpid blue water; the cannon-shot is answered by a
prolonged thunder-dapping of mountain echo.


[Illustration: BELLE FONTAINE, MARTINIQUE
_In every cove tiny villages nestle. Nets ere drying
in the sun. There is no sound. Utter peace broods
in the shadows._]


Then from the shore a curious flotilla bears down upon us. There is one
boat, two or three canoes; but the bulk of the craft are simply wooden
frames,--flat-bottomed structures, made from shipping-cases or
lard-boxes, with triangular ends. In these sit naked boys,--boys between
ten and fourteen years of age,--varying in color from a fine clear
yellow to a deep reddish-brown or chocolate tint. They row with two
little square, flat pieces of wood for paddles, clutched in each hand;
and these lid-shaped things are dipped into the water on either side
with absolute precision, in perfect time,--all the pairs of little naked
arms seeming moved by a single impulse. There is much unconscious grace
in this paddling, as well as skill. Then all about the ship these
ridiculous little boats begin to describe circles,--crossing and
intercrossing so closely as almost to bring them into collision, yet
never touching. The boys have simply come out to dive for coins they
expect passengers to fling to them. All are chattering creole, laughing
and screaming shrilly; every eye, quick and bright as a bird's, watches
the faces of the passengers on deck. "'Tention-là!" shriek a dozen
soprani. Some passenger's fingers have entered his vest-pocket, and the
boys are on the alert. Through the air, twirling and glittering, tumbles
an English shilling, and drops into the deep water beyond the little
fleet. Instantly all the lads leap, scramble, topple headforemost out of
their little tubs, and dive in pursuit. In the blue water their lithe
figures look perfectly red,--all but the soles of their upturned feet,
which show nearly white. Almost immediately they all rise again: one
holds up at arm's length above the water the recovered coin, and then
puts it into his mouth for safe-keeping. Coin after coin is thrown in,
and as speedily brought up; a shower of small silver follows, and not a
piece is lost. These lads move through the water without apparent
effort, with the suppleness of fishes. Most are decidedly fine-looking
boys, with admirably rounded limbs, delicately formed extremities. The
best diver and swiftest swimmer, however, is a red lad;--his face is
rather commonplace, but his slim body has the grace of an antique
bronze.


... We are ashore in St. Pierre, the quaintest, queerest, and the
prettiest withal, among West Indian cities: all stone-built and
stone-flagged, with very narrow streets, wooden or zinc awnings, and
peaked roofs of red tile, pierced by gabled dormers. Most of the
buildings are painted in a clear yellow tone, which contrasts
delightfully with the burning blue ribbon of tropical sky above; and no
street is absolutely level; nearly all of them climb hills, descend into
hollows, curve, twist, describe sudden angles. There is everywhere a
loud murmur of running Water,--pouring through the deep gutters
contrived between the paved thoroughfare and the absurd little
sidewalks, varying in width from one to three feet. The architecture is
quite old: it is seventeenth century, probably; and it reminds one a
great deal of that characterizing the antiquated French quarter of New
Orleans. All the tints, the forms, the vistas, would seem to have been
especially selected or designed for aquarelle studies,--just to please
the whim of some extravagant artist. The windows are frameless openings
without glass; some have iron bars; all have heavy wooden shutters with
movable slats, through which light and air can enter as through Venetian
blinds. These are usually painted green or bright bluish-gray.

So steep are the streets descending to the harbor,--by flights of old
mossy stone steps,--that looking down them to the azure water you have
the sensation of gazing from a cliff. From certain openings in the main
street--the Rue Victor Hugo--you can get something like a bird's-eye
view of the harbor with its shipping. The roofs of the street below are
under your feet, and other streets are rising behind you to meet the
mountain roads. They climb at a very steep angle, occasionally breaking
into stairs of lava rock, all grass-tufted and moss-lined.

The town has an aspect of great solidity: it is a creation of
crag--looks almost as if it had been hewn out of one mountain fragment,
instead of having been constructed stone by stone. Although commonly
consisting of two stories and an attic only, the dwellings have walls
three feet in thickness;--on one street, facing the sea, they are even
heavier, and slope outward like ramparts, so that the perpendicular
recesses of windows and doors have the appearance of being opened
between buttresses. It may have been partly as a precaution against
earthquakes, and partly for the sake of coolness, that the early
colonial architects built thus;--giving the city a physiognomy so well
worthy of its name,--the name of the Saint of the Rock.

And everywhere rushes mountain water,--cool and crystal clear, washing
the streets;--from time to time you come to some public fountain
flinging a silvery column to the sun, or showering bright spray over a
group of black bronze tritons or bronze swarms. The Tritons on the Place
Bertin you will not readily forget;--their curving torsos might have
been modelled from the forms of those ebon men who toil there tirelessly
all day in the great heat, rolling hogsheads of sugar or casks of rum.
And often you will note, in the course of a walk, little
drinking-fountains contrived at the angle of a building, or in the thick
walls bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares: glittering
threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone. Some mountain
torrent, skilfully directed and divided, is thus perpetually refreshing
the city,--supplying its fountains and cooling its courts.... This is
called the Gouyave water: it is not the same stream which sweeps and
purifies the streets.


[Illustration: ST. PIERRE--THE CUT TO-DAY
_The new town is slowly growing in the sinister shadow
of La Montagne, which seems innocent enough in its
cap of clouds._]


Picturesqueness and color: these are the particular and the unrivalled
charms of St. Pierre. As you pursue the Grande Rue, or Rue Victor
Hugo,--which traverses the town through all its length, undulating over
hill-slopes and into hollows and over a bridge,--you become more and
more enchanted by the contrast of the yellow-glowing walls to right and
left with the jagged strip of gentian-blue sky overhead. Charming also
it is to watch the cross-streets climbing up to the fiery green of the
mountains behind the town. On the lower side of the main thoroughfare
other streets open in wonderful bursts of blue--warm blue of horizon
and sea. The steps by which these ways descend towards the bay are black
with age, and slightly mossed close to the wall on either side: they
have an alarming steepness,--one might easily stumble from the upper
into the lower street. Looking towards the water through these openings
from the Grande Rue, you will notice that the sea-line cuts across the
blue space just at the level of the upper story of the house on the
lower street-corner. Sometimes, a hundred feet below, you see a ship
resting in the azure aperture,--seemingly suspended there in sky-color,
floating in blue light. And everywhere and always, through sunshine or
shadow, comes to you the scent of the city,--the characteristic odor of
St. Pierre;--a compound odor suggesting the intermingling of sugar and
garlic in those strange tropical dishes which creoles love....




XII


... A population fantastic, astonishing,--a population of the Arabian
Nights. It is many-colored; but the general dominant tint is yellow,
like that of the town itself--yellow in the interblending of all the
hues characterizing _mulâtresse, capresse, griffe, quarteronne,
métisse, chabine_,--a general effect of rich brownish yellow. You are
among a people of half-breeds,--the finest mixed race of the West
Indies.

Straight as palms, and supple and tall, these colored women and men
impress one powerfully by their dignified carriage and easy elegance of
movement. They walk without swinging of the shoulders;--the perfectly
set torso seems to remain rigid; yet the step is a long full stride, and
the whole weight is springily poised on the very tip of the bare foot.
All, or nearly all, are without shoes: the treading of many naked feet
over the heated pavement makes a continuous whispering sound.

... Perhaps the most novel impression of all is that produced by the
singularity and brilliancy of certain of the women's costumes. These
developed, at least a hundred years ago, by some curious sumptuary law
regulating the dress of slaves and colored people of free condition,--a
law which allowed considerable liberty as to material and tint,
prescribing chiefly form. But some of these fashions suggest the Orient:
they offer beautiful audacities of color contrast; and the full-dress
coiffure, above all, is so strikingly Eastern that one might be tempted
to believe it was first introduced into the colony by some Mohammedan
slave. It is merely an immense Madras handkerchief, which is folded
about the head with admirable art, like a turban;--one bright end pushed
through at the top in front, being left sticking up like a plume. Then
this turban, always full of bright canary-color, is fastened with golden
brooches,--one in front and one at either side. As for the remainder of
the dress, it is simple enough: an embroidered, low-cut chemise with
sleeves; a skirt or jupe, very long behind, but caught up and fastened
in front below the breasts so as to bring the hem everywhere to a level
with the end of the long chemise; and finally a _foulard_, or silken
kerchief, thrown over the shoulders. These _jupes_ and _foulards_,
however, are exquisite in pattern and color: bright crimson, bright
yellow, bright blue, bright green,--lilac, violet, rose,--sometimes
mingled in plaidings or checkerings or stripings: black with orange,
sky-blue with purple. And whatever be the colors of the costume, which
vary astonishingly, the coiffure must be yellow--brilliant, flashing
yellow: the turban is certain to have yellow stripes or yellow squares.
To this display add the effect of costly and curious jewellry: immense
ear-rings, each pendant being formed of five gold cylinders joined
together (cylinders sometimes two inches long, and an inch at least in
circumference);--a necklace of double, triple, quadruple, or quintuple
rows of large hollow gold beads (sometimes smooth, but generally
graven)--the wonderful _collier-choux._ Now, this glowing jewellry is
not a mere imitation of pure metal: the ear-rings are worth one hundred
and seventy-five francs a pair; the necklace of a Martinique quadroon
may cost five hundred or even one thousand francs.... It may be the gift
of her lover, her _doudoux_; but such articles are usually purchased
either on time by small payments, or bead by bead singly until the
requisite number is made up.

But few are thus richly attired: the greater number of the women
carrying burdens on their heads,--peddling vegetables, cakes, fruit,
ready-cooked food, from door to door,--are very simply dressed in a
single plain robe of vivid colors ( douillette) reaching from neck to
feet, and made with a train, but generally girded well up so as to sit
dose to the figure and leave the lower limbs partly bare and perfectly
free. These women can walk all day long up and down hill in the hot sun,
without shoes, carrying loads of from one hundred to one hundred and
fifty pounds on their heads; and if their little stock sometimes fails
to come up to the accustomed weight stones are added to make it heavy
enough. Doubtless the habit of carrying everything in this way from
childhood has much to do with the remarkable vigor and erectness of the
population.... I have seen a grand-piano carried on the heads of four
men. With the women the load is very seldom steadied with the hand after
having been once placed in position. The head remains almost motionless;
but the black, quick, piercing eyes flash into every window and door-way
to watch for a customer's signal. And the creole street-cries, uttered
in a sonorous, far-reaching high key, interblend and produce random
harmonies very pleasant to hear.

... "_Çé moune-là, ça qui lè bel mango?_" Her basket of mangoes
certainly weighs as much as herself.... "_Ça qui lè bel avocat?_" The
alligator-pear--cuts and tastes like beautiful green cheese.... "_Ça
qui lè escargot?_" Call her, if you like snails.... "_Ça qui lè
titiri?_" Minuscule fish, of which a thousand would scarcely fill a
teacup;--one of the most delicate of Martinique dishes.... "_Ça qui lè
cannà?--Ça qui lè charbon?--Ça qui lè di pain aubè?_" (Who wants
ducks, charcoal, or pretty little loaves shaped like cucumbers?)...
"_Ça qui lè pain-mi?_" A sweet maize cake in the form of a tiny
sugar-loaf, wrapped in a piece of banana leaf.... "_Ça qui lè
fromassé_" (_pharmacie_) "_lapotécai créole?_" She deals in creole
roots and herbs, and all the leaves that make tisanes or poultices or
medicines: _matriquin, feuill-corossol, balai-doux, manioc-chapelle,
Marie-Perrine, graine-enba-feuill, zhèbe-gras, bonnet-carré,
zhèbe-codeinne, zhèbe-à-femme, zhèbe-à-châtte, canne-dleau, poque,
fleu-papillon, laleigne_, and a score of others you never saw or heard
of before.... "_Ça qui lè dicaments?_" (overalls for laboring-men)....
"_Çé moune-là, si ou pa lè acheté canari-à dans lanmain main, moin
ké crazé y._" The vender of red clay cooking-pots;--she has only one
left, if you do not buy it she will break it!

"_Hé! zenfants-lal--en deho'!_" Run out to meet her, little children,
if you like the sweet rice-cakes.... "_Hé! gens pa' enho', gens pa'
enbas, gens di galtas, moin ni bel gououôs poisson!_" Ho! people
up-stairs, people down-stairs, and all ye good folks who dwell in the
attics,--know that she has very big and very beautiful fish to sell!...
"_Hé! ça qui lé mangé yonne?_"--those are "akras,"--flat
yellow-brown cakes, made of pounded codfish, or beans, or both, seasoned
with pepper and fried in butter.... And then comes the pastry-seller,
black as ebony, but dressed all in white, and white-aproned and
white-capped like a French cook, and chanting half in French, half in
creole, with a voice like clarinet:


"C'est louvouier de la pâtisserie qui passe,
Qui té ka veillé pou' gagner son existence,
Toujours content,
Toujours joyeux.
Oh, qu'ils sont bons!--
Oh, qu'ils sont doux!"


It is the pastryman passing by, who has been up all night to gain his
livelihood,--always content,--always happy.... Oh, how good they are
(the pies)!--Oh, how sweet they are!

... The quaint stores bordering both sides of the street bear no names
and no signs over their huge arched doors;--you must look well inside to
know what business is being done. Even then you will scarcely be able to
satisfy yourself as to the nature of the commerce;--for they are selling
gridirons and frying-pans in the dry goods stores, holy images and
rosaries in the notion stores, sweet-cakes and confectionery in the
crockery stores, coffee and stationery in the millinery stores, cigars
and tobacco in the china stores, cravats and laces and ribbons in the
jewellry stores, sugar and guava jelly in the tobacco stores! But of
all the objects exposed for sale the most attractive, because the most
exotic, is a doll,--the Martinique _poupée._ There are two kinds,--the
_poupée-capresse_, of which the body is covered with smooth
reddish-brown leather, to imitate the tint of the _capresse_ race; and
the _poupée-négresse_, covered with black leather. When dressed, these
dolls range in price from eleven to thirty-five francs,--some, dressed
to order, may cost even more; and a good _poupée-capresse_ is a
delightful curiosity. Both varieties of dolls are attired in the costume
of the people; but the _négresse_ is usually dressed the more simply.
Each doll has a broidered chemise, a tastefully arranged _jupe_ of
bright hues, a silk _foulard_, a _collier-choux_, ear-rings of five
cylinders (_zanneaux-à-clous_), and a charming little yellow-banded
Madras turban. Such a doll is a perfect costume-model,--a perfect
miniature of Martinique fashions, to the smallest details of material
and color: it is almost too artistic for a toy.


These old costume-colors of Martinique--always relieved by brilliant
yellow stripings or checkerings, except in the special violet dresses
worn on certain religious occasions--have an indescribable
luminosity,--a wonderful power of bringing out the fine warm tints of
this tropical flesh. Such are the hues of those rich costumes Nature
gives to her nearest of kin and her dearest,--her honey-lovers--her
insects: these are wasp-colors. I do not know whether the fact ever
occurred to the childish fancy of this strange race; but there is a
creole expression which first suggested it to me;--in the patois,
_pouend guêpe_, "to catch a wasp," signifies making love to a pretty
colored girl.... And the more one observes these costumes, the more one
feels that only Nature could have taught such rare comprehension of
powers and harmonies among colors,--such knowledge of chromatic
witchcrafts and chromatic laws.


... This evening, as I write, La Pelée is more heavily coiffed than is
her wont. Of purple and lilac cloud the coiffure is,--a magnificent
Madras, yellow-banded by the sinking sun. La Pelée is in _costume de
fête_, like a _capresse_ attired for a baptism or a ball; and in her
phantom turban one great star glimmers for a brooch.




XIII


Following the Rue Victor Hugo in the direction of the Fort,--crossing
the Rivière Roxelane, or Rivière des Blanchisseuses, whose rocky bed
is white with unsoaped linen far as the eye can reach,--you descend
through some tortuous narrow streets into the principal market-place.[1]
A square--well paved and well shaded--with a fountain in the midst. Here
the dealers are seated in rows;--one half of the market is devoted to
fruits and vegetables; the other to the sale of fresh fish and meats. On
first entering you are confused by the press and deafened by the storm
of creole chatter;--then you begin to discern some order in this chaos,
and to observe curious things.

In the middle of the paved square, about the market fountain, are lying
boats filled with fish, which have been carried up from the water upon
men's shoulders,--or, if very heavy, conveyed on rollers.... Such
fish!--blue, rosy, green, lilac, scarlet, gold: no spectral tints these,
but luminous and strong like fire. Here also you see heaps of long thin
fish looking like piled bars of silver,--absolutely dazzling,--of almost
equal thickness from head to tail;--near by are heaps of flat pink
creatures;--beyond these, again, a mass of azure backs and golden
bellies. Among the stalls you can study the monsters,--twelve or fifteen
feet long,--the shark, the _vierge_, the sword-fish, the _tonne_;--or
the eccentricities. Some are very thin round disks, with long,
brilliant, wormy feelers in lieu of fins, flickering in all directions
like a moving pendant silver fringe;--others bristle with
spines;--others, serpent-bodied, are so speckled as to resemble shapes
of red polished granite. These are _moringues._ The _balaou, coulio,
macriau, tazard, tcha-tcha, bonnique_, and _zorphi_ severally represent
almost all possible tints of blue and violet. The _souri_ is rose-color
and yellow; the _cirurgien_ is black, with yellow and red stripes; the
_patate_, black and yellow; the _gros-zié_ is vermilion; the
_couronné_, red and black. Their names are not less unfamiliar than
their shapes and tints;--the _aiguille-de-mer_, or sea-needle, long and
thin as a pencil;--the _Bon-Dié-manié-moin_ ("the Good-God handled
me"), which has something like finger-marks upon it;--the _lambi_, a
huge sea-snail;--the _pisquette_, the _laline_ (the Moon);--the
_crapaud-de-mer_, or sea-toad, with a dangerous dorsal fin;--the
_vermeil_, the _jacquot_, the _chaponne_, and fifty others.... As the
sun gets higher, banana or balisier leaves are laid over the fish.

Even more puzzling, perhaps, are the astonishing varieties of green,
yellow, and parti-colored vegetables,--and fruits of all hues and
forms,--out of which display you retain only a confused general memory
of sweet smells and luscious colors. But there are some oddities which
impress the recollection in a particular way. One is a great cylindrical
ivory-colored thing,--shaped like an elephant's tusk, except that it is
not curved: this is the head of the cabbage-palm, or palmiste,--the
brain of one of the noblest trees in the tropics, which must be totally
destroyed to obtain it. Raw or cooked, it is eaten in a great variety of
ways,--in salads, stews, fritters, or _akras._ Soon after this compact
cylinder of young germinating leaves has been removed, large worms begin
to appear in the hollow of the dead tree,--the _vers-palmiste._ You may
see these for sale in the market, crawling about in bowls or cans: they
are said, when fried alive, to taste like almonds, and are esteemed as a
great luxury.


[Illustration: SUZANNE
_A creole type, pretty, graceful, raven haired, with
lovely olive golden skin and wholly likable._]


... Then you begin to look about you at the faces of the black, brown,
and yellow people who are watching you curiously from beneath their
Madras turbans, or from under the shade of mushroom-shaped hats as large
as umbrellas. And as you observe the bare backs, bare shoulders, bare
legs and arms and feet, you will find that the colors of flesh are even
more varied and surprising than the colors of fruit. Nevertheless, it is
only with fruit-colors that many of these skin-tints can be correctly
compared: the only terms of comparison used by the colored people
themselves being terms of this kind,--such as _peau-chapotille_,
"sapota-skin." The _sapota_ or _sapotille_ is a juicy brown fruit with a
rind satiny like a human cuticle, and just the color, when flushed and
ripe, of certain half-breed skins. But among the brighter half-breeds,
the colors, I think, are much more fruit-like;--there are banana-tints,
lemon-tones, orange-hues, with sometimes such a mingling of ruddiness as
in the pink ripening of a mango. Agreeable to the eye the darker skins
certainly are, and often very remarkable--all clear tones of bronze
being represented; but the brighter tints are absolutely beautiful.
Standing perfectly naked at door-ways, or playing naked in the sun,
astonishing children may sometimes be seen,--banana-colored or orange
babies. There is one rare race-type, totally unlike the rest: the skin
has a perfect gold-tone, an exquisite metallic yellow; the eyes are
long, and have long silky lashes;--the hair is a mass of thick, rich,
glossy curls that show blue lights in the sun. What mingling of races
produced this beautiful type?--there is some strange blood in the
blending,--not of coolie, nor of African, nor of Chinese, although there
are Chinese types here of indubitable beauty.[2]

... All this population is vigorous, graceful, healthy: all you see
passing by are well made--there are no sickly faces, ho scrawny limbs.
If by some rare chance you encounter a person who has lost an arm or a
leg, you can be almost certain you are looking at a victim of the
fer-de-lance,--the serpent whose venom putrefies living tissue....
Without fear of exaggerating facts, I can venture to say that the
muscular development of the working-men here is something which must be
seen in order to be believed;--to study fine displays of it, one should
watch the blacks and half-breeds working naked to the waist,--on the
landings, in the gas-houses and slaughter-houses, or on the nearest
plantations. They are not generally large men, perhaps not
extraordinarily powerful; but they have the aspect of sculptural or even
of anatomical models; they seem absolutely devoid of adipose tissue;
their muscles stand out with a saliency that astonishes the eye. At a
tanning-yard, while I was watching a dozen blacks at work, a young
mulatto with the mischievous face of a faun walked by, wearing nothing
but a clout (_lantcho_) about his loins; and never, not even in bronze,
did I see so beautiful a play of muscles. A demonstrator of anatomy
could have used him for a class-model;--a sculptor wishing to shape a
fine Mercury would have been satisfied to take a cast of such a body
without thinking of making one modification from neck to heel. "Frugal
diet is the cause of this physical condition," a young French professor
assures me; "all these men," he says, "live upon salt codfish and
fruit." But frugal living alone could new produce such symmetry and
saliency of muscles: race-crossing, climate, perpetual exercise, healthy
labor--many conditions must have combined to cause it. Also it is
certain that this tropical sun has a tendency to dissolve spare flesh,
to melt away all superfluous tissue, leaving the muscular fibre dense
and solid as mahogany.


At the _mouillage_, below a green _morne_, is the bathing-place. A rocky
beach rounding away under heights of tropical wood;--palms curving out
above the sand, or bending half-way across it. Ships at anchor in blue
water, against golden-yellow horizon. A vast blue glow. Water clear as
diamond, and lukewarm.

It is about one hour after sunrise; and the higher parts of Montagne
Pelée are still misty blue. Under the palms and among the lava rocks,
and also in little cabins farther up the slope, bathers are dressing or
undressing: the water is also dotted with heads of swimmers. Women and
girls enter it well robed from feet to shoulders;--men go in very
sparsely clad;--there are lads wearing nothing. Young boys--yellow and
brown little fellows--run in naked, and swim out to pointed rocks that
jut up black above the bright water. They climb up one at a time to dive
down. Poised for the leap upon the black lava crag, and against the blue
light of the sky, each lithe figure, gilded by the morning sun, has a
statuesqueness and a luminosity impossible to paint in words. These
bodies seem to radiate color; and the azure light intensifies the hue:
it is idyllic, incredible;--Coomans used paler colors in his Pompeiian
studies, and his figures were never so symmetrical. This flesh does not
look like flesh, but like fruit-pulp....


[Footnote 1: Since this was written the market has been removed to the
Savane,--to allow of the erection of a large new market-building on the
old rite; and the beautiful trees have been cut down.]

[Footnote 2: I subsequently learned the mystery of this very strange and
beautiful mixed race,--many fine specimens of which may also be seen in
Trinidad. Three widely diverse elements have combined to form it:
European, negro, and Indian,--but, strange to say, it is the most savage
of these three bloods which creates the peculiar charm.... I cannot
speak of this comely and extraordinary type without translating a
passage from Dr. J. J. J. Cornilliac, an eminent Martinique physician,
who recently published a most valuable series of studies upon the
ethnology, climatology, and history of the Antilles. In these he writes:

... "When, among the populations of the Antilles, we first notice those
remarkable _métis_ whose olive skins, elegant and slender figures, fine
straight profiles, and regular features remind us of the inhabitants of
Madras or Pondicherry,--we ask ourselves in wonder, while looking at
their long eyes, full of a strange and gentle melancholy (especially
among the women), and at the black, rich, silky-gleaming hair curling in
abundance over the temples and falling in profusion over the neck,--to
what human race can belong this singular variety,--in which there is a
dominant characteristic that seems indelible, and always shows more and
more strongly in proportion as the type is further removed from the
African element. It is the Carib blood,--blended with blood of Europeans
and of blacks,--which in spite of all subsequent crossings, and in spite
of the fact that it has not been renewed for more than two hundred
years, still conserves as markedly as at the time of the first
interblending, the race-characteristic that invariably reveals its
presence in the blood of every being through whose veins it
flows."--"Recherches chronologiques et historiques sur l'Origine et la
Propagation de la Fièvre Jaune aux Antilles." Par J. J. J. Cornilliac.
Fort-de-France: Imprimerie du Gouvernement. 1886.

But I do not think the term "olive" always indicates the color of these
skins, which seemed to me exactly the tint of gold; and the hair flashes
with bluish lights, like the plumage of certain black birds.]




XIV


... Everywhere crosses, little shrines, wayside chapels, statues of
saints. You will see crucifixes and statuettes even in the forks or
hollows of trees shadowing the high-roads. As you ascend these towards
the interior you will see, every mile or half-mile, some chapel, or a
cross erected upon a pedestal of masonry, or some little niche contrived
in a wall, closed by a wire grating, through which the image of a Christ
or a Madonna is visible. Lamps are kept burning all night before these
figures. But the village of Morne Rouge--some two thousand feet above
the sea, and about an hour's drive from St. Pierre--is chiefly
remarkable for such displays: it is a place of pilgrimage as well as a
health resort. Above the village, upon the steep slope of a higher
morne, one may note a singular succession of little edifices ascending
to the summit,--fourteen little tabernacles, each containing a _relievo_
representing some incident of Christ's Passion. This is called _Le
Calvaire_: it requires more than a feeble piety to perform the religious
exercise of climbing the height, and saying a prayer before each little
shrine on the way. From the porch of the crowning structure the village
of Morne Rouge appears so far below that it makes one almost dizzy to
look at it; but even for the profane one ascent is well worth making,
for the sake of the beautiful view. On all the neighboring heights
around are votive chapels or great crucifixes.

St. Pierre is less peopled with images than Morne Rouge; but it has
several colossal ones, which may be seen from any part of the harbor. On
the heights above the middle quarter, or _Centre_, a gigantic Christ
overlooks the bay; and from the Morne d'Orange, which bounds the city on
the south, a great white Virgin--Notre Dame de la Garde, patron of
mariners--watches above the ships at anchor in the mouillage.

... Thrice daily, from the towers of the white cathedral, a superb chime
of bells rolls its _carillon_ through the town. On great holidays the
bells are wonderfully rung;--the ringers are African, and something of
African feeling is observable in their impressive but incantatory manner
of ringing. The bourdon must have cost a fortune. When it is made to
speak, the effect is startling: all the city vibrates to a weird sound
difficult to describe,--an abysmal, quivering moan, producing unfamiliar
harmonies as the voices of the smaller bells are seized and interblended
by it.... One will not easily forget the ringing of a bel-midi.

... Behind the cathedral, above the peaked city roofs, and at the foot
of the wood-clad Morne d'Orange, is the _Cimetière du Mouillage_.... It
is full of beauty,--this strange tropical cemetery. Most of the low
tombs are covered with small square black and white tiles, set exactly
after the fashion of the squares on a chess-board; at the foot of each
grave stands a black cross, bearing at its centre a little white plaque,
on which the name is graven in delicate and tasteful lettering. So
pretty these little tombs are, that you might almost believe yourself in
a toy cemetery. Here and there, again, are miniature marble chapels
built over the dead,--containing white Madonnas and Christs and little
angels,--while flowering creepers climb and twine about the pillars.
Death seems so luminous here that one thinks of it unconsciously as a
soft rising from this soft green earth,--like a vapor invisible,--to
melt into the prodigious day. Everything is bright and neat and
beautiful; the air is sleepy with jasmine scent and odor of white
lilies; and the palm--emblem of immortality--lifts its head a hundred
feet into the blue light. There are rows of these majestic and symbolic
trees;--two enormous ones guard the entrance;--the others rise from
among the tombs,--white-stemmed, out-spreading their huge parasols of
verdure higher than the cathedral towers.

Behind all this, the dumb green life of the morne seems striving to
descend, to invade the rest of the dead. It thrusts green hands over the
wall,--pushes strong roots underneath;--it attacks every joint of the
stonework, patiently, imperceptibly, yet almost irresistibly.


[Illustration: CIMETIÈRE DU MOUILLAGE, ST. PIERRE
_Under the shadow of the mountain the dead sleep as
peacefully as though nothing had happened._]


... Some day there may be a great change in the little city of St.
Pierre;--there may be less money and less zeal and less remembrance of
the lost. Then from the morne, over the bulwark, the green host will
move down unopposed;--creepers will prepare the way, dislocating the
pretty tombs, pulling away the checkered tiling;--then will come the
giants, rooting deeper,--feeling for the dust of hearts, groping among
the bones;--and all that love has hidden away shall be restored to
Nature,--absorbed into the rich juices of her verdure,--revitalized in
her bursts of color,--resurrected in her upliftings of emerald and gold
to the great sun....




XV


Seen from the bay, the little red-white-and-yellow city forms but one
multicolored streak against the burning green of the lofty island. There
is no naked soil, no bare rock: the chains of the mountains, rising by
successive ridges towards the interior, are still covered with
forests;--tropical woods ascend the peaks to the height of four and five
thousand feet. To describe the beauty of these woods--even of those
covering the mornes in the immediate vicinity of St. Pierre--seems to me
almost impossible;--there are forms and colors which appear to demand
the creation of new words to express. Especially is this true in regard
to hue;--the green of a tropical forest is something which one familiar
only with the tones of Northern vegetation can form no just conception
of: it is a color that conveys the idea of green fire.

You have only to follow the high-road leading out of St. Pierre by way
of the Savane du Fort to find yourself, after twenty minutes' walk, in
front of the Morne Parnasse, and before the verge of a high
wood,--remnant of the enormous growth once covering all the island. What
a tropical forest is, as seen from without, you will then begin to feel,
with a sort of awe, while you watch that beautiful upclimbing of green
shapes to the height of perhaps a thousand feet overhead. It presents
one seemingly solid surface of vivid color,--rugose like a cliff. You do
not readily distinguish whole trees in the mass;--you only perceive
suggestions, dreams of trees, Doresqueries. Shapes that seem to be
staggering under weight of creepers rise a hundred feet above
you;--others, equally huge, are towering above these;--and still higher,
a legion of monstrosities are nodding, bending, tossing up green arms,
pushing out great knees, projecting curves as of backs and shoulders,
intertwining mockeries of limbs. No distinct head appears except where
some palm pushes up its crest in the general fight for sun. All else
looks as if under a veil,--hidden and half smothered by heavy drooping
things. Blazing green vines cover every branch and stem;--they form
draperies and tapestries and curtains and motionless cascades--pouring
down over all projections like a thick silent flood: an amazing
inundation of parasitic life.... It is a weird and awful beauty that you
gaze upon; and yet the spectacle is imperfect. These woods have been
decimated;--the finest trees have been cut down: you see only a ruin of
what was. To see the true primeval forest, you must ride well into the
interior.

The absolutism of green does not, however, always prevail in these
woods. During a brief season, corresponding to some of our winter
months, the forests suddenly break into a very conflagration of color,
caused by the blossoming of the lianas--crimson, canary-yellow, blue,
and white. There are other flowerings, indeed; but that of the lianas
alone has chromatic force enough to change the aspect of a landscape.




XVI


... If it is possible for a West Indian forest to be described at all,
it could not be described more powerfully than it has been by Dr. E.
Rufz, a creole of Martinique, from one of whose works I venture to
translate the following remarkable pages:

... "The sea alone, because it is the most colossal of earthly
spectacles,--only the sea can afford us any term of comparison for the
attempt to describe a _grand-bois_;--but even then one must imagine the
sea on a day of storm, suddenly immobilized in the expression of its
mightiest fury. For the summits of these vast woods repeat all the
inequalities of the land they cover; and these inequalities are
mountains from 4200 to 4800 feet in height, and valleys of corresponding
profundity. All this is hidden, blended together, smoothed over by
verdure, in soft and enormous undulations,--in immense billowings of
foliage. Only, instead of a blue line at the horizon, you have a green
line; instead of flashings of blue, you have flashings of green,--and in
all the tints, in all the combinations of which green is capable: deep
green, light green, yellow-green, black-green.

"When your eyes grow weary--if it indeed be possible for them to
weary--of contemplating the exterior of these tremendous woods, try to
penetrate a little into their interior. What an inextricable chaos it
is! The sands of a sea are not more closely pressed together than the
trees are here: some straight, some curved, some upright, some
toppling,--fallen, or leaning against one another, or heaped high upon
each other. Climbing lianas, which cross from one tree to the other,
like ropes passing from mast to mast, help to fill up all the gaps in
this treillage; and parasites--not timid parasites like ivy or like
moss, but parasites which are trees self-grafted upon trees--dominate
the primitive trunks, overwhelm them, usurp the place of their foliage,
and fall back to the ground, forming factitious weeping-willows. You do
not find here, as in the great forests of the North, the eternal
monotony of birch and fir: this is the kingdom of infinite
variety;--species the most diverse elbow each other, interlace, strangle
and devour each other: all ranks and orders are confounded, as in a
human mob. The soft and tender _balisier_ opens its parasol of leaves
beside the _gommier_, which is the cedar of the colonies;--you see the
_acomat_, the _courbaril_, the mahogany, the _tendre-à-caillou_, the
iron-wood... but as well enumerate by name all the soldiers of an army!
Our oak, the balata, forces the palm to lengthen itself prodigiously in
order to get a few thin beams of sunlight; for it is as difficult here
for the poor trees to obtain one glance from this King of the world, as
for us, subjects of a monarchy, to obtain one look from our monarch. As
for the soil, it is needless to think of looking at it: it lies as far
below us probably as the bottom of the sea;--it disappeared, ever so
long ago, under the heaping of débris,--under a sort of manure that has
been accumulating there since the creation: you sink into it as into
slime; you walk upon putrefied trunks, in a dust that has no name! Here
indeed it is that one can get some comprehension of what vegetable
antiquity signifies;--a lurid light (_lurida lux_), greenish, as wan at
noon as the light of the moon at midnight, confuses forms and lends them
a vague and fantastic aspect; a mephitic humidity exhales from all
parts; an odor of death prevails; and a calm which is not silence (for
the ear fancies it can hear the great movement of composition and of
decomposition perpetually going on) tends to inspire you with that old
mysterious horror which the ancients felt in the primitive forests of
Germany and of Gaul:"

"'Arboribus suus horror inest.'"[3]


[Footnote 3: "Enquête sur le Serpent de la Martinique (Vipère Fer-de-Lance,
Bothrops Lancéolé, etc.)." Par le Docteur E. Rufs. 2 ed. 1859 Paris:
Germer-Ballière, pp. 55-57 (note).]




XVII


But the sense of awe inspired by a tropic forest is certainly greater
than the mystic fear which any wooded wilderness of the North could ever
have created. The brilliancy of colors that seem almost preternatural;
the vastness of the ocean of frondage, and the violet blackness of rare
gaps, revealing its inconceived profundity; and the million mysterious
sounds which make up its perpetual murmur,--compel the idea of a
creative force that almost terrifies. Man feels here like an
insect,--fears like an insect on the alert for merciless enemies: and
the fear is not unfounded. To enter these green abysses without a guide
were folly: even with the best of guides there is peril. Nature is
dangerous here: the powers that build are also the powers that putrefy;
here life and death are perpetually interchanging office in the
never-ceasing transformation of forces,--melting down and reshaping
living substance simultaneously within the same vast crucible. There are
trees distilling venom, there are plants that have fangs, there are
perfumes that affect the brain, there are cold green creepers whose
touch blisters flesh like fire; while in all the recesses and the
shadows is a swarming of unfamiliar life, beautiful or hideous,--insect,
reptile, bird,--inter-warring, devouring, preying.... But the great
peril of the forest--the danger which deters even the naturalist--is
the presence of the terrible fer-de-lance (_trigonocephalus
lanceolatus,--bothrops lanceolatus,--craspodecephalus_),--deadliest of
the Occidental thanatophidia, and probably one of the deadliest serpents
of the known world.

... There are no less than eight varieties of it,--the most common being
the dark gray, speckled with black--precisely the color that enables the
creature to hide itself among the protruding roots of the trees, by
simply coiling about them, and concealing its triangular head. Sometimes
the snake is a clear bright yellow: then it is difficult to distinguish
it from the bunch of bananas among which it conceals itself. Or the
creature may be a dark yellow,--or a yellowish brown,--or the color of
wine-lees, speckled pink and black,--or dead black with a yellow
belly,--or black with a pink belly: all hues of tropical forest-mould,
of old bark, of decomposing trees.... The iris of the eye is
orange,--with red flashes: it glows at night like burning charcoal.

And the fer-de-lance reigns absolute king over the mountains and the
ravines; he is lord of the forest and the solitudes by day, and by night
he extends his dominion over the public roads, the familiar paths, the
parks, the pleasure resorts. People must remain at home after dark,
unless they dwell in the city itself: if you happen to be out visiting
after sunset, only a mile from town, your friends will caution you
anxiously not to follow the boulevard as you go back, and to keep as
closely as possible to the very centre of the path. Even in the
brightest noon you cannot venture to enter the woods without an
experienced escort; you cannot trust your eyes to detect danger: at any
moment a seeming branch, a knot of lianas, a pink or gray root, a clump
of pendent yellow fruit may suddenly take life, writhe, stretch, spring,
strike.... Then you will need aid indeed, and most quickly; for within
the span of a few heart-beats the wounded flesh chills, tumefies,
softens. Soon it changes color, and begins to spot violaceously; while
an icy coldness creeps through all the blood. If the _panseur_ or the
physician arrives in time, and no vein has been pierced, there is hope;
but it more often happens that the blow is received directly on a vein
of the foot or ankle,--in which case nothing can save the victim. Even
when life is saved the danger is not over. Necrosis of the tissues is
likely to set in: the flesh corrupts, falls from the bone sometimes in
tatters; and the colors of its putrefaction simulate the hues of
vegetable decay,--the ghastly grays and pinks and yellows of trunks
rotting down into the dark soil which gave them birth. The human victim
moulders as the trees moulder,--crumbles and dissolves as crumbles the
substance of the dead palms and balatas: the Death-of-the-Woods is upon
him.

To-day a fer-de-lance is seldom found exceeding six feet in length; but
the dimensions of the reptile, at least, would seem to have been
decreased considerably by man's warring upon it since the time of Père
Labat, who mentions having seen a fer-de-lance nine feet long and five
inches in diameter. He also speaks of a _couresse_--a beautiful and
harmless serpent said to kill the fer-de-lance--over ten feet long and
thick as a man's leg; but a large couresse is now seldom seen. The negro
woodsmen kill both creatures indiscriminately; and as the older reptiles
are the least likely to escape observation, the chances for the survival
of extraordinary individuals lessen with the yearly decrease of
forest-area.

... But it may be doubted whether the number of deadly snakes has been
greatly lessened since the early colonial period. Each female produces
viviparously from forty to sixty young at a birth. The favorite haunts
of the fer-de-lance are to a large extent either inaccessible or
unexplored, and its multiplication is prodigious. It is really only the
surplus of its swarming that over-pours into the cane-fields, and makes
the public roads dangerous after dark;--yet more than three hundred
snakes have been killed in twelve months on a single plantation. The
introduction of the Indian mongoose, or _mangouste_ (ichneumon), proved
futile as a means of repressing the evil. The mangouste kills the
fer-de-lance when it has a chance; but it also kills fowls and sucks
their eggs, which condemns it irrevocably with the country negroes, who
live to a considerable extent by raising and selling chickens.

... Domestic animals are generally able to discern the presence of their
deadly enemy long before a human eye can perceive it. If your horse
rears and plunges in the darkness, trembles and sweats, do not try to
ride on until you are assured the way is clear. Or your dog may come
running back, whining, shivering: you will do well to accept his
warning. The animals kept about country residences usually try to fight
for their lives; the hen battles for her chickens; the bull endeavors to
gore and stamp his supple enemy; the pig gives more successful combat;
but the creature who fears the monster least is the brave cat. Seeing a
snake, she at once carries her kittens to a place of safety, then boldly
advances to the encounter. She will walk to the very limit of the
serpent's striking range, and begin to feint,--teasing him, startling
him, trying to draw his blow. How the emerald and the topazine eyes glow
then!--they are flames! A moment more and the triangular head, hissing
from the coil, flashes swift as if moved by wings. But swifter still the
stroke of the armed paw that dashes the horror aside, flinging it
mangled in the dust. Nevertheless, pussy does not yet dare to
spring;--the enemy, still active, has almost instantly reformed his
coil;--but she is again in front of him, watching,--vertical pupil
against vertical pupil. Again the lashing stroke; again the beautiful
countering;--again the living death is hurled aside; and now the scaled
skin is deeply torn,--one eye socket has ceased to flame. Once more the
stroke of the serpent; once more the light, quick, cutting blow. But the
trigonocephalus is blind, is stupefied;--before he can attempt to coil
pussy has leaped upon him,--nailing the horrible flat head fast to the
ground with her two sinewy paws. Now let him lash, writhe, twine, strive
to strangle her!--in vain! he will never lift his head: an instant more,
and he lies still:--the keen white teeth of the cat have severed the
vertebra just behind the triangular skull!...




XVIII


The Jardin des Plantes is not absolutely secure from the visits of the
serpent; for the trigonocephalus goes everywhere,--mounting to the very
summits of the cocoa-palms, swimming rivers, ascending walls, hiding in
palm-thatched roofs, breeding in bagasse heaps. But, despite what has
been printed to the contrary, this reptile fears man and hates light: it
rarely shows itself voluntarily during the day. Therefore, if you desire
to obtain some conception of the magnificence of Martinique vegetation,
without incurring the risk of entering the high woods, you can do so by
visiting the Jardin des Plantes,--only taking care to use your eyes well
while climbing over fallen trees, or picking your way through dead
branches. The garden is less than a mile from the city, on the slopes of
the Morne Parnasse; and the primitive forest itself has been utilized in
the formation of it,--so that the greater part of the garden is a
primitive growth. Nature has accomplished here infinitely more than art
of man (though such art has done much to lend the place its charm),--and
until within a very recent time the result might have been deemed,
without exaggeration, one of the wonders of the world.

A moment after passing the gate you are in twilight, though the sun may
be blinding on the white road without. All about you is a green
gloaming, up through which you see immense trunks rising. Follow the
first path that slopes up on your left as you proceed, if you wish to
obtain the best general view of the place in the shortest possible time.
As you proceed, the garden on your right deepens more and more into a
sort of ravine;--on your left rises a sort of foliage-shrouded cliff;
and all this in a beautiful crepuscular dimness, made by the foliage of
great trees meeting overhead. Palms rooted a hundred feet below you hold
their heads a hundred feet above you; yet they can barely reach the
light.... Farther on the ravine widens to frame in two tiny lakes,
dotted with artificial islands, which are miniatures of Martinique,
Guadeloupe, and Dominica: these are covered with tropical plants, many
of which are total strangers even here: they are natives of India,
Senegambia, Algeria, and the most eastern East. Arborescent ferns of
unfamiliar elegance curve up from path-verge or lake-brink; and the
great _arbre-du-voyageur_ outspreads its colossal fan. Giant lianas
droop down over the way in loops and festoons; tapering green cords,
which are creepers descending to take root, hang everywhere; and
parasites with stems thick as cables coil about the trees like boas.
Trunks shooting up out of sight, into the green wilderness above,
display no bark; you cannot guess what sort of trees they are; they are
so thickly wrapped in creepers as to seem pillars of leaves. Between you
and the sky, where everything is fighting for sun, there is an almost
unbroken vault of leaves, a cloudy green confusion in which nothing
particular is distinguishable.


[Illustration: ROAD TO MORNE ROUGE
_A riot of green fading off into distant grays, and
nearly always a glint of blue ocean in the distance._]


You come to breaks now and then in the green steep to your
left,--openings created for cascades pouring down from one mossed basin
of brown stone to another,--or gaps occupied by flights of stone steps,
green with mosses, and chocolate-colored by age. These steps lead to
loftier paths; and all the stone-work,--the grottos, bridges, basins,
terraces, steps,--are darkened by time and velveted with mossy
things.... It is of another century, this garden: special ordinances
were passed concerning it during the French Revolution (_An. II._);--it
is very quaint; it suggests an art spirit as old as Versailles, or
older; but it is indescribably beautiful even now.

... At last you near the end, to hear the roar of falling water;--there
is a break in the vault of green above the bed of a river below you; and
at a sudden turn you come in sight of the cascade. Before you is the
Morne itself; and against the burst of descending light you discern a
precipice-verge. Over it, down one green furrow in its brow, tumbles the
rolling foam of a cataract, like falling smoke, to be caught below in a
succession of moss-covered basins. The first dear leap of the water is
nearly seventy feet.... Did Josephine ever rest upon that shadowed bench
near by?... She knew all these paths by heart: surely they must have
haunted her dreams in the after-time!

Returning by another path, you may have a view of other cascades--though
none so imposing. But they are beautiful; and you will not soon forget
the effect of one,--flanked at its summit by white-stemmed palms which
lift their leaves so high into the light that the loftiness of them
gives the sensation of vertigo.... Dizzy also the magnificence of the
great colonnade of palmistes and angelins, two hundred feet high,
through which you pass if you follow the river-path from the
cascade,--the famed _Allée des duels_....

The vast height, the pillared solemnity of the ancient trees in the
green dimness, the solitude, the strangeness of shapes but half
seen,--suggesting fancies of silent aspiration, or triumph, or
despair,--all combine to produce a singular impression of awe.... You
are alone; you hear no human voice,--no sounds but the rushing of the
river over its volcanic rocks, and the creeping of millions of lizards
and tree-frogs and little toads. You see no human face; but you see all
around you the labor of man being gnawed and devoured by nature,--broken
bridges, sliding steps, fallen arches, strangled fountains with empty
basins;--and everywhere arises the pungent odor of decay. This
omnipresent odor affects one unpleasantly;--it never ceases to remind
you that where Nature is most puissant to charm, there also is she
mightiest to destroy.

The beautiful garden is now little more than a wreck of what it once
was: since the fall of the Empire it has been shamefully abused and
neglected. Some _agronome_ sent out to take charge of it by the
Republic, began its destruction by cutting down acres of enormous and
magnificent trees,--including a superb alley of palms,--for the purpose
of experimenting with roses. But the rose-trees would not be cultivated
there; and the serpents avenged the demolition by making the
experimental garden unsafe to enter;--they always swarm into underbrush
and shrubbery after forest-trees have been cleared away.... Subsequently
the garden was greatly damaged by storms and torrential rains; the
mountain river overflowed, carrying bridges away and demolishing
stone-work. No attempt was made to repair these destructions; but
neglect alone would not have ruined the loveliness of the
place;--barbarism was necessary! Under the present negro-radical régime
orders have been given for the wanton destruction of trees older than
the colony itself;--and marvels that could not be replaced in a hundred
generations were cut down and converted into charcoal for the use of
public institutions.




XIX


... How gray seem the words of poets in the presence of this Nature!...
The enormous silent poem of color and light--(you who know only the
North do not know color, do not know light!)--of sea and sky, of the
woods and the peaks, so far surpasses imagination as to paralyze
it--mocking the language of admiration, defyingall power of expression.
That is before you which never can be painted or chanted, because there
is no cunning of art or speech able to reflect it. Nature realizes your
most hopeless ideals of beauty, even as one gives toys to a child. And
the sight of this supreme terrestrial expression of creative magic numbs
thought. In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only
the results of mind,--the products of human endeavor: here one views
only the work of Nature,--but Nature in all her primeval power, as in
the legendary frostless morning of creation. Man here seems to bear
scarcely more relation to the green life about him than the insect; and
the results of human effort seem impotent by comparison with the
operation of those vast blind forces which clothe the peaks and crown
the dead craters with impenetrable forest. The air itself seems inimical
to thought,--soporific, and yet pregnant with activities of dissolution
so powerful that the mightiest tree begins to melt like wax from the
moment it has ceased to live. For man merely to exist is an effort; and
doubtless in the perpetual struggle of the blood to preserve itself from
fermentation, there is such an expenditure of vital energy as leaves
little surplus for mental exertion.

... Scarcely less than poet or philosopher, the artist, I fancy, would
feel his helplessness. In the city he may find wonderful picturesqueness
to invite his pencil, but when he stands face to face alone with Nature
he will discover that he has no colors! The luminosities of tropic
foliage could only be imitated in fire. He who desires to paint a West
Indian forest,--a West Indian landscape,--must take his view from some
great height, through which the colors come to his eye softened and
subdued by distance,--toned with blues or purples by the astonishing
atmosphere.


[Illustration: ST. PIERRE-STREET AMONG THE RUINS
_Exuberant vegetation has claimed the ruins and invaded
the beautiful stone-paved streets of the former
capital._]


... It is sunset as I write these lines, and there are witchcrafts of
color. Looking down the narrow, steep street opening to the bay, I see
the motionless silhouette of the steamer on a perfectly green
sea,--under a lilac sky,--against a prodigious orange light.




XX


In these tropic latitudes Night does not seem "to fall,"--to descend
over the many-peaked land: it appears to rise up, like an exhalation,
from the ground. The coast-lines darken first;--then the slopes and the
lower hills and valleys become shadowed;--then, very swiftly, the gloom
mounts to the heights, whose very loftiest peak may remain glowing like
a volcano at its tip for several minutes after the rest of the island is
veiled in blackness and all the stars are out....

... Tropical nights have a splendor that seems strange to northern eyes.
The sky does not look so high--so far away as in the North; but the
stars are larger, and the luminosity greater.

With the rising of the moon all the violet of the sky flushes;--there is
almost such a rose-color as heralds northern dawn.

Then the moon appears over the mornes, very large, very bright--brighter
certainly than many a befogged sun one sees in northern Novembers; and
it seems to have a weird magnetism--this tropical moon. Night-birds,
insects, frogs,--everything that can sing,--all sing very low on the
nights of great moons. Tropical wood-life begins with dark: in the
immense white light of a full moon this nocturnal life seems afraid to
cry out as usual. Also, this moon has a singular effect on the nerves.
It is very difficult to sleep on such bright nights: you feel such a
vague uneasiness as the coming of a great storm gives....




XXI


You reach Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, by steamer from St.
Pierre, in about an hour and a half.... There is an overland route--_La
Trace_; but it is a twenty-five-mile ride, and a weary one in such a
climate, notwithstanding the indescribable beauty of the landscapes
which the lofty road commands.

... Rebuilt in wood after the almost total destruction by an earthquake
of its once picturesque streets of stone, Fort-de-France (formerly
Fort-Royal) has little of outward interest by comparison with St.
Pierre. It lies in a low, moist plain, and has few remarkable buildings:
you can walk all over the little town in about half an hour. But the
Savane,--the great green public square, with its grand tamarinds and
_sabliers_,--would be worth the visit alone, even were it not made
romantic by the marble memory of Josephine.

I went to look at the white dream of her there, a creation of
master-sculptors.... It seemed to me absolutely lovely.

Sea winds have bitten it; tropical rains have streaked it: some
microscopic growth has darkened the exquisite hollow of the throat. And
yet such is the human charm of the figure that you almost fancy you are
gazing at a living presence.... Perhaps the profile is less artistically
real,--statuesque to the point of betraying the chisel; but when you
look straight up into the sweet creole face, you can believe she lives:
all the wonderful West Indian charm of the woman is there.


[Illustration: THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE
"_I went to look at the white dream of her there a
creation of master-sculptors.... It seems to me absolutely
lovely._"]


She is standing just in the centre of the Savane, robed in the fashion
of the First Empire, with gracious arms and shoulders bare: one hand
leans upon a medallion bearing the eagle profile of Napoleon.... Seven
tall palms stand in a circle around her, lifting their comely heads into
the blue glory of the tropic day. Within their enchanted circle you feel
that you tread holy ground,--the sacred soil of artist and poet;--here
the recollections of memoir-writers vanish away; the gossip of history
is hushed for you; you no longer care to know how rumor has it that she
spoke or smiled or wept: only the bewitchment of her lives under the
thin, soft, swaying shadows of those feminine palms.... Over violet
space of summer sea, through the vast splendor of azure light, she is
looking back to the place of her birth, back to beautiful drowsy
Trois-Islets,--and always with the same half-dreaming, half-plaintive
smile,--unutterably touching....




XXII


One leaves Martinique with regret, even after so brief a stay: the old
colonial life itself, not less than the revelation of tropic nature,
having in this island a quality of uniqueness, a special charm, unlike
anything previously seen.... We steam directly for Barbadoes;--the
vessel will touch at the intervening islands only on her homeward route.

... Against a hot wind south,--under a sky always deepening in beauty.
Towards evening dark clouds begin to rise before us; and by nightfall
they spread into one pitch-blackness over all the sky. Then comes a wind
in immense sweeps, lifting the water,--but a wind that is still
strangely warm. The ship rolls heavily in the dark for an hour or
more;--then torrents of tepid rain make the sea smooth again; the clouds
pass, and the violet transparency of tropical night reappears,--ablaze
with stars.

At early morning a long low land appears on the horizon,--totally unlike
the others we have seen; it has no visible volcanic forms. That is
Barbadoes,--a level burning coral coast,--a streak of green,
white-edged, on the verge of the sea. But hours pass before the green
line begins to show outlines of foliage.

... As we approach the harbor an overhanging black cloud suddenly bursts
down in illuminated rain,--through which the shapes of moored ships seem
magnified as through a golden fog. It ceases as suddenly as it began;
the cloud vanishes utterly; and the azure is revealed unflecked,
dazzling, wondrous.... It is a sight worth the whole journey,--the
splendor of this noon sky at Barbadoes;--the horizon glow is almost
blinding, the sea-line sharp as a razor-edge; and motionless upon the
sapphire water nearly a hundred ships lie,--masts, spars, booms,
cordage, cutting against the amazing magnificence of blue.... Meanwhile
the island coast has clearly brought out all its beauties: first you
note the long white winding thread-line of beach--coral and bright
sand;--then the deep green fringe of vegetation through which roofs and
spires project here and there, and quivering feathery heads of palms
with white trunks. The general tone of this verdure is sombre green,
though it is full of lustre: there is a glimmer in it as of metal.
Beyond all this coast-front long undulations of misty pale green are
visible,--far slopes of low hill and plain; the highest curving line,
the ridge of the island, bears a row of cocoa-palms. They are so far
that their stems diminish almost to invisibility: only the crests are
clearly distinguishable,--like spiders hanging between land and sky. But
there are no forests: the land is a naked unshadowed green far as the
eye can reach beyond the coast-line. There is no waste space in
Barbadoes: it is perhaps one of the most densely-peopled places on the
globe--(one thousand and thirty-five inhabitants to the square
mile);--and it sends black laborers by thousands to the other British
colonies every year,--the surplus of its population.


[Illustration: THE QUAY, BRIDGETOWN
_The bustling, busy air of Barba does is in marked contrast
to the sleepy indifference of the other islands._]


... The city of Bridgetown disappoints the stranger who expects to find
any exotic features of architecture or custom,--disappoints more,
perhaps, than any other tropical port in this respect. Its principal
streets give you the impression of walking through an English town,--not
an old-time town, but a new one, plain almost to commonplaceness, in
spite of Nelson's monument. Even the palms are powerless to lend the
place a redly tropical look;--the streets are narrow without being
picturesque, white as lime roads and full of glare;--the manners, the
costumes, the style of living, the system of business are thoroughly
English;--the population lacks visible originality; and its
extraordinary activity, so oddly at variance with the quiet indolence of
other West Indian peoples, seems almost unnatural. Pressure of numbers
has largely contributed to this characteristic; but Barbadoes would be
in any event, by reason of position alone, a busy colony. As the most
windward of the West Indies it has naturally become not only the chief
port, but also the chief emporium of the Antilles. It has railroads,
telephones, street-cars, fire and life insurance companies, good hotels,
libraries and reading-rooms, and excellent public schools. Its annual
export trade figures for nearly $6,000,000.

The fact which seems most curious to the stranger, on his first
acquaintance with the city, is that most of this business activity is
represented by black men--black merchants, shopkeepers, clerks. Indeed,
the Barbadian population, as a mass, strikes one as the darkest in the
West Indies. Black regiments march through the street to the sound of
English music,--uniformed as Zouaves; black police, in white helmets and
white duck uniforms, maintain order; black postmen distribute the mails;
black cabmen wait for customers at a shilling an hour. It is by no means
an attractive population, physically,--rather the reverse, and frankly
brutal as well--different as possible from the colored race of
Martinique; but it has immense energy, and speaks excellent English. One
is almost startled on hearing Barbadian negroes speaking English with a
strong Old Country accent. Without seeing the speaker, you could
scarcely believe such English uttered by black lips; and the commonest
negro laborer about the port pronounces as well as a Londoner. The
purity of Barbadian English is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that,
unlike most of the other islands, Barbadoes has always remained in the
possession of Great Britain. Even as far back as 1676 Barbadoes was in a
very different condition of prosperity from that of the other colonies,
and offered a totally different social aspect--having a white population
of 50,000. At that time the island could muster 20,000 infantry and
3,000 horse; there were 80,000 slaves; there were 1500 houses in
Bridgetown and an immense number of shops; and not less than two hundred
ships were required to export the annual sugar crop alone.


[Illustration: BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOES
_A picture of lights and shadows, the glare of coral
roads relieved by the green palms and the blue and
violet and yellow houses._]


But Barbadoes differs also from most of the Antilles geologically; and
there can be no question that the nature of its soil has considerably
influenced the physical character of its inhabitants. Although Barbadoes
is now known to be also of volcanic origin,--a fact which its low
undulating surface could enable no unscientific observer to suppose,--it
is superficially a calcareous formation; and the remarkable effect of
limestone soil upon the bodily development of a people is not less
marked in this latitude than elsewhere. In most of the Antilles the
white race degenerates and dwarfs under the influence of climate and
environment; but the Barbadian creole--tall, muscular, large of
bone--preserves and perpetuates in the tropics the strength and
sturdiness of his English forefathers.




XXIII


... Night: steaming for British Guiana;--we shall touch at no port
before reaching Demerara.... A strong warm gale, that compels the taking
in of every awning and wind-sail. Driving tepid rain; and an intense
darkness, broken only by the phosphorescence of the sea, which to-night
displays extraordinary radiance.

The steamer's wake is a great broad, seething river of fire,--white like
strong moonshine: the glow is bright enough to read by. At its centre
the trail is brightest;--towards either edge it pales off
cloudily,--curling like smoke of phosphorus. Great sharp lights burst up
momentarily through it like meteors. Weirder than this strange wake are
the long slow fires that keep burning about us at a distance, out in the
dark. Nebulous incandescences mount up from the depths, change form, and
pass;--serpentine flames wriggle by;--there are long billowing crests
of fire. These seem to be formed of millions of tiny sparks, that light
all at the same time, glow for a while, disappear, reappear, and swirl
away in a prolonged smouldering.

There are warm gales and heavy rain each night,--it is the hurricane
season;--and it seems these become more violent the farther south we
sail. But we are nearing those equinoctial regions where the calm of
nature is never disturbed by storms.

... Morning: still steaming south, through a vast blue day. The azure of
the heaven always seems to be growing deeper. There is a bluish-white
glow in the horizon,--almost too bright to look at. An indigo sea....
There are no clouds; and the splendor endures until sunset.

Then another night, very luminous and calm. The Southern constellations
burn whitely.... We are nearing the great shallows of the South American
coast.




XXIV


... It is the morning of the third day since we left Barbadoes, and for
the first time since entering tropic waters all things seem changed. The
atmosphere is heavy with strange mists; and the light of an
orange-colored sun, immensely magnified by vapors, illuminates a
greenish-yellow sea,--foul and opaque, as if stagnant.... I remember
just such a sunrise over the Louisiana gulf-coast.

We are in the shallows, moving very slowly. The line-caster keeps
calling, at regular intervals: "Quarter less five, sir! And a half four,
sir!"... There is little variation in his soundings--a quarter of a
fathom or half a fathom difference. The warm air has a sickly heaviness,
like the air of a swamp; the water shows olive and ochreous tones
alternately;--the foam is yellow in our wake. These might be the colors
of a fresh-water inundation....

A fellow-traveller tells me, as we lean over the rail, that this same
viscous, glaucous sea washes the great penal colony of Cayenne--which he
visited. When a convict dies there, the corpse, sewn up in a sack, is
borne to the water, and a great bell tolled. Then the still surface is
suddenly broken by fins innumerable,--black fins of sharks rushing to
the hideous funeral: they know the Bell!...

There is land in sight--very low land,--a thin dark line suggesting
marshiness; and the nauseous color of the water always deepens.

As the land draws near, it reveals a beautiful tropical appearance. The
sombre green line brightens color, sharpens into a splendid fringe of
fantastic evergreen fronds, bristling with palm crests. Then a mossy
sea-wall comes into sight--dull gray stone-work, green-lined at all its
joints. There is a fort. The steamer's whistle is exactly mocked by a
queer echo, and the cannon-shot once reverberated--only once: there are
no mountains here to multiply a sound. And all the while the water
becomes a thicker and more turbid green; the wake looks more and more
ochreous, the foam ropier and yellower. Vessels becalmed everywhere
speck the glass-level of the sea, like insects sticking upon a mirror.
It begins, all of a sudden, to rain torrentially; and through the white
storm of falling drops nothing is discernible.




XXV


At Georgetown, steamers entering the river can lie close to the
wharf;--we can enter the Government warehouses without getting wet. In
fifteen minutes the shower ceases; and we leave the warehouses to find
ourselves in a broad, palm-bordered street illuminated by the most
prodigious day that yet shone upon our voyage. The rain has cleared the
air and dissolved the mists; and the light is wondrous.

My own memory of Demerara will always be a memory of enormous light. The
radiance has an indescribable dazzling force that conveys the idea of
electric fire;--the horizon blinds like a motionless sheet of lightning;
and you dare not look at the zenith.... The brightest summer-day in the
North is a gloaming to this. Men walk only under umbrellas, or with
their eyes down; and the pavements, already dry, flare almost
unbearably.

... Georgetown has an exotic aspect peculiar to itself,--different from
that of any West Indian city we have seen; and this is chiefly due to
the presence of palm-trees. For the edifices, the plan, the general idea
of the town are modern; the white streets, laid out very broad to the
sweep of the sea-breeze, and drained by canals running through their
centres, with bridges at cross-streets, display the value of
nineteenth-century knowledge regarding house-building with a view to
coolness as well as to beauty. The architecture might be described as a
tropicalized Swiss style--Swiss eaves are developed into veranda roofs,
and Swiss porches prolonged and lengthened into beautiful piazzas and
balconies. The men who devised these large cool halls, these admirably
ventilated rooms, these latticed windows opening to the ceiling, may
have lived in India; but the physiognomy of the town also reveals a fine
sense of beauty in the designers: all that is strange and beautiful in
the vegetation of the tropics has had a place contrived for it, a home
prepared for it. Each dwelling has its garden; each garden blazes with
singular and lovely color; but everywhere and always tower the palms.
There are colonnades of palms, clumps of palms, groves of palms--sago
and cabbage and cocoa and fan palms. You can see that the palm is
cherished here, is loved for its beauty, like a woman. Everywhere you
find palms, in all stages of development, from the first sheaf of tender
green plumes rising above the soil to the wonderful colossus that holds
its head a hundred feet above the roofs; palms border the garden walks
in colonnades; they are grouped in exquisite poise about the basins of
fountains; they stand like magnificent pillars at either side of gates;
they look into the highest windows of public buildings and hotels.

... For miles and miles and miles we drive along avenues of
palms--avenues leading to opulent cane-fields, traversing queer coolie
villages. Rising on either side of the road to the same level, the palms
present the vista of a long unbroken double colonnade of dead-silver
trunks, shining tall pillars with deep green plume-tufted summits,
almost touching, almost forming something like the dream of an
interminable Moresque arcade. Sometimes for a full mile the trees are
only about thirty or forty feet high; then, turning into an older alley,
we drive for half a league between giants nearly a hundred feet in
altitude. The double perspective lines of their crests, meeting before
us and behind us in a bronze-green darkness, betray only at long
intervals any variation of color, where some dead leaf droops like an
immense yellow feather.




XXVI


In the marvellous light, which brings out all the rings of their bark,
these palms sometimes produce a singular impression of subtle, fleshy,
sentient life,--seem to move with a slowly stealthy motion as you ride
or drive past them. The longer you watch them, the stronger this idea
becomes,--the more they seem alive,--the more their long silver-gray
articulated bodies seem to poise, undulate, stretch.... Certainly the
palms of a Demerara country-road evoke no such real emotion as that
produced by the stupendous palms of the Jardin des Plantes in
Martinique. That beautiful, solemn, silent life upreaching through
tropical forest to the sun for warmth, for color, for power,--filled me,
I remember, with a sensation of awe different from anything which I had
ever experienced.... But even here in Guiana, standing alone under the
sky, the palm still seems a creature rather than a tree,--gives you the
idea of personality;--you could almost believe each lithe shape animated
by a thinking force,--believe that all are watching you with such
passionless calm as legend lends to beings supernatural.... And I wonder
if some kindred fancy might not have inspired the name given by the
French colonists to the male palmiste,--_angelin_....


Very wonderful is the botanical garden here. It is new; and there are no
groves, no heavy timber, no shade; but the finely laid-out
grounds,--alternations of lawn and flower-bed,--offer everywhere
surprising sights. You observe curious orange-colored shrubs; plants
speckled with four different colors; plants that look like wigs of green
hair; plants with enormous broad leaves that seem made of colored
crystal; plants that do not look like natural growths, but like
idealizations of plants,--those beautiful fantasticalities imagined by
sculptors. All these we see in glimpses from a carriage-window,--yellow,
indigo, black, and crimson plants.... We draw rein only to observe in
the ponds the green navies of the Victoria Regia,--the monster among
water-lilies. It covers all the ponds and many of the canals. Close to
shore the leaves are not extraordinarily large; but they increase in
breadth as they float farther out, as if gaining bulk proportionately to
the depth of water. A few yards off, they are large as soup-plates;
farther out, they are broad as dinner-trays; in the centre of the pond
or canal they have surface large as tea-tables. And all have an upturned
edge, a perpendicular rim. Here and there you see the imperial
flower,--towering above the leaves.... Perhaps, if your hired driver be
a good guide, he will show you the snake-nut,--the fruit of an
extraordinary tree native to the Guiana forests. This swart nut--shaped
almost like a clam-shell, and halving in the same way along its sharp
edges--encloses something almost incredible. There is a pale envelope
about the kernel; remove it, and you find between your fingers a little
viper, triangular-headed, coiled thrice upon itself, perfect in every
detail of form from head to tail. Was this marvellous mockery evolved
for a protective end? It is no eccentricity: in every nut the
serpent-kernel lies coiled the same.

... Yet in spite of a hundred such novel impressions, what a delight it
is to turn again cityward through the avenues of palms, and to feel once
more the sensation of being watched, without love or hate, by all those
lithe, tall, silent, gracious shapes!




XXVII


Hindoos; coolies; men, women, and children--standing, walking, or
sitting in the sun, under the shadowing of the palms. Men squatting,
with hands clasped over their black knees, are watching us from under
their white turbans--very steadily, with a slight scowl. All these
Indian faces have the same set, stem expression, the same knitting of
the brows; and the keen gaze is not altogether pleasant. It borders upon
hostility; it is the look of measurement--measurement physical and
moral. In the mighty swarming of India these have learned the full
meaning and force of life's law as we Occidentals rarely learn it. Under
the dark fixed frown the eye glitters like a serpent's.

Nearly all wear the same Indian dress; the thickly folded turban,
usually white, white drawers reaching but half-way down the thigh,
leaving the knees and the legs bare, and white jacket. A few don long
blue robes, and wear a colored head-dress: these are babagees--priests.
Most of the men look tall; they are slender and small-boned, but the
limbs are well turned. They are grave--talk in low tones, and seldom
smile. Those you see with heavy black beards are probably Mussulmans: I
am told they have their mosques here, and that the muezzin's call to
prayer is chanted three times daily on many plantations. Others shave,
but the Mohammedans allow all the beard to grow.... Very comely some of
the women are in their close-clinging soft brief robes and tantalizing
veils--a costume leaving shoulders, arms, and ankles bare. The dark arm
is always tapered and rounded; the silver-circled ankle always elegantly
knit to the light straight foot. Many slim girls, whether standing or
walking or in repose, offer remarkable studies of grace; their attitude
when erect always suggests lightness and suppleness, like the poise of a
dancer.

... A coolie mother passes, carrying at her hip a very pretty naked
baby. It has exquisite delicacy of limb: its tiny ankles are circled by
thin bright silver rings; it looks like a little bronze statuette, a
statuette of Kama, the Indian Eros. The mother's arms are covered from
elbow to wrist with silver bracelets,--some flat and decorated; others
coarse, round, smooth, with ends hammered into the form of viper-heads.
She has large flowers of gold in her ears, a small gold flower in her
very delicate little nose. This nose ornament does not seem absurd; on
these dark skins the effect is almost as pleasing as it is bizarre. This
jewellry is pure metal;--it is thus the coolies carry their
savings,--melting down silver or gold coin, and recasting it into
bracelets, ear-rings, and nose ornaments.

... Evening is brief: all this time the days have been growing shorter:
it will be black at 6 P.M. One does not regret it;--the glory of such a
tropical day as this--is almost too much to endure for twelve hours. The
sun is already low, and yellow with a tinge of orange: as he falls
between the palms his stare colors the world with a strange hue--such a
phantasmal light as might be given by a nearly burnt-out sun. The air is
full of unfamiliar odors. We pass a flame-colored bush; and an
extraordinary perfume--strange, rich, sweet--envelops us like a
caress: the soul of a red jasmine....

... What a tropical sunset is this--within two days' steam-journey of
the equator! Almost to the zenith the sky flames up from the sea,--one
tremendous orange incandescence, rapidly deepening to vermilion as the
sim dips. The indescribable intensity of this mighty burning makes one
totally unprepared for the spectacle of its sudden passing: a seeming
drawing down behind the sea of the whole vast flare of light....
Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with
vapor; frogs commence to make a queer bubbling noise; and some unknown
creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the
note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high, keen, as of a
thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents,
aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees of our hotel I hear a
continuous dripping sound; the drops fall heavily, like bodies of clumsy
insects. But it is not dew, nor insects; it is a thick, transparent
jelly--a fleshy liquor that falls in immense drops.... The night grows
chill with dews, with vegetable breath; and we sleep with windows nearly
closed.




XXVIII


... Another sunset like the conflagration of a world, as we steam away
from Guiana;--another unclouded night; and morning brings back to us
that bright blue in the sea-water which we missed for the first time on
our approach to the main-land. There is a long swell all day, and tepid
winds. But towards evening the water once more shifts its hue--takes
olive tint--the mighty flood of the Orinoco is near.


[Illustration: COUNTRY ROAD, BARBADOES
_One rides for miles between walls of waving cane.
The white glare of the coral roads is blinding._]


Over the rim of the sea rise shapes faint pink, faint gray--misty shapes
that grow and lengthen as we advance. We are nearing Trinidad.

It first takes definite form as a prolonged, undulating, pale gray
mountain chain,--the outline of a sierra. Approaching nearer, we discern
other hill summits rounding up and shouldering away behind the chain
itself. Then the nearest heights begin to turn faint green--very slowly.
Right before the outermost spur of cliff, fantastic shapes of rock are
rising sheer from the water: partly green, partly reddish-gray where the
surface remains unclothed by creepers and shrubs. Between them the sea
leaps and whitens.

... And we begin to steam along a magnificent tropical coast,--before a
billowing of hills wrapped in forest from sea to summit,--astonishing
forest, dense, sombre, impervious to sun--every gap a blackness as of
ink. Giant palms here and there overtop the dense, foliage; and queer
monster trees rise above the forest-level against the blue,--spreading
out huge flat crests from which masses of lianas stream down. This
forest-front has the apparent solidity of a wall, and forty-five miles
of it undulate uninterruptedly by us--rising by terraces, or projecting
like turret-lines, or shooting up into semblance of cathedral forms or
suggestions of castellated architecture.... But the secrets of these
woods have not been unexplored;--one of the noblest writers of our time
has so beautifully and fully written of them as to leave little for any
one else to say. He who knows Charles Kingsley's "At Last" probably
knows the woods of Trinidad far better than many who pass them daily.


Even as observed from the steamer's deck, the mountains and forests of
Trinidad have an aspect very different from those of the other
Antilles. The heights are less lofty,--less jagged and abrupt,--with
rounded summits; the peaks of Martinique or Dominica rise fully
two thousand feet higher. The land itself is a totally different
formation,--anciently being a portion of the continent; and its flora
and fauna are of South America.

... There comes a great cool whiff of wind,--another and another;--then
a mighty breath begins to blow steadily upon us,--the breath of the
Orinoco.... It grows dark before we pass through the Ape's Mouth, to
anchor in one of the calmest harbors in the world,--never disturbed by
hurricanes. Over unruffled water the lights of Port-of-Spain shoot long
still yellow beams.... The night grows chill;--the air is made frigid by
the breath of the enormous river and the vapors of the great woods.




XXIX


... Sunrise: a morning of supernal beauty,--the sky of a fairy
tale,--the sea of a love-poem.

Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea has a
perfect luminous dove-color,--the horizon being filled to a great height
with greenish-golden haze,--a mist of unspeakably sweet tint, a hue
that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an
impossibility. As yet the hills are nearly all gray, the forests also
inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for the sun has just risen above
them, and vapors hang like a veil between. Then, over the glassy level
of the flood, bands of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid gold
begin to shoot and quiver and broaden; these are the currents of the
morning, catching varying color with the deepening of the day and the
lifting of the tide.

Then, as the sun rises higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the
grays; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves
through the vapory light, to left and right of the great glow. Only the
city still remains invisible; it lies exactly between us and the
downpour of solar splendor, and the mists there have caught such
radiance that the place seems hidden by a fog of fire. Gradually the
gold-green of the horizon changes to a pure yellow; the hills take soft,
rich, sensuous colors. One of the more remote has turned a marvellous
tone--a seemingly diaphanous aureate color, the very ghost of gold. But
at last all of them sharpen bluely, show bright folds and ribbings of
green through their haze. The valleys remain awhile clouded, as if
filled with something like blue smoke; but the projecting masses of
cliff and slope swiftly change their misty green to a warmer hue. All
these tints and colors have a spectral charm, a preternatural
loveliness; everything seems subdued, softened, semi-vaporized,--the
only very sharply defined silhouettes being those of the little becalmed
ships sprinkling the western water, all spreading colored wings to catch
the morning breeze.

The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the
landscape out of vapory blue; the hills all become green-faced, reveal
the details of frondage. The wind fills the waiting sails--white, red,
yellow,--ripples the water, and turns it green. Little fish begin to
leap; they spring and fall in glittering showers like opalescent blown
spray. And at last, through the fading vapor, dew-glittering red-tiled
roofs reveal themselves: the city is unveiled--a city full of color,
somewhat quaint, somewhat Spanish-looking--a little like St. Pierre, a
little like New Orleans in the old quarter; everywhere fine tall palms.




XXX


Ashore, through a black swarming and a great hum of creole chatter....
Warm yellow narrow streets under a burning blue day;--a confused
impression of long vistas, of low pretty houses and cottages, more or
less quaint, bathed in sun and yellow-wash,---and avenues of
shade-trees,--and low garden-walls overtopped by waving banana leaves
and fronds of palms.... A general sensation of drowsy warmth and vast
light and exotic vegetation,--coupled with some vague disappointment at
the absence of that picturesque humanity that delighted us in the
streets of St. Pierre, Martinique. The bright costumes of the French
colonies are not visible here: there is nothing like them in any of the
English islands. Nevertheless, this wonderful Trinidad is as unique
ethnologically as it is otherwise remarkable among all the other
Antilles. It has three distinct creole populations,--English, Spanish,
and French,--besides its German and Madeiran settlers. There is also a
special black or half-breed element, corresponding to each creole race,
and speaking the language of each: there are fifty thousand Hindoo
coolies, and a numerous body of Chinese. Still, this extraordinary
diversity of race elements does not make itself at once apparent to the
stranger. Your first impression, as you pass through the black crowd
upon the wharf, is that of being among a population as nearly African as
that of Barbadoes; and indeed the black element dominates to such an
extent that upon the streets white faces look strange by contrast. When
a white face does appear, it is usually under the shadow of an Indian
helmet, and heavily bearded, and austere: the physiognomy of one used to
command. Against the fantastic ethnic background of all this colonial
life, this strong, bearded English visage takes something of heroic
relief;--one feels, in a totally novel way, the dignity of a white skin.

... I hire a carriage to take me to the nearest coolie village;--a
delightful drive.... Sometimes the smooth white road curves round the
slope of a forest-covered mountain;--sometimes overlooks a valley
shining with twenty different shades of surface green;--sometimes
traverses marvellous natural arcades formed by the interweaving and
intercrossing of bamboos fifty feet high. Rising in vast clumps, and
spreading out sheaf-wise from the soil towards the sky, the curves of
their beautiful jointed stems meet at such perfect angles above the way,
and on either side of it, as to imitate almost exactly the elaborate
Gothic arch-work of old abbey cloisters. Above the road, shadowing the
slopes of lofty hills, forests beetle in dizzy precipices of verdure.
They are green--burning, flashing green--covered with parasitic green
creepers and vines; they show enormous forms, or rather dreams of form,
fetichistic and startling. Banana leaves flicker and flutter along the
way-side; palms shoot up to vast altitudes, like pillars of white metal;
and there is a perpetual shifting of foliage color, from yellow-green to
orange, from reddish-green to purple, from emerald-green to black-green.
But the background color, the dominant tone, is like the plumage of a
green parrot.

... We drive into the coolie village, along a narrower way, lined with
plantain-trees, bananas, flamboyants, and unfamiliar shrubs with large
broad leaves. Here and there are cocoa-palms. Beyond the little ditches
on either side, occupying openings in the natural hedge, are the
dwellings--wooden cabins, widely separated from each other. The narrow
lanes that enter the road are also lined with habitations, half hidden
by banana-trees. There is a prodigious glare, an intense heat. Around,
above the trees and the roofs, rise the far hill shapes, some brightly
verdant, some cloudy blue, some gray. The road and the lanes are almost
deserted; there is little shade; only at intervals some slender brown
girl or naked baby appears at a door-way. The carriage halts before a
shed built against a wall--a simple roof of palm thatch supported upon
jointed posts of bamboo.

It is a little coolie temple. A few weary Indian laborers slumber in its
shadow; pretty naked children, with silver rings round their ankles, are
playing there with a white dog. Painted over the wall surface, in red,
yellow, brown, blue, and green designs upon a white ground, are
extraordinary figures of gods and goddesses. They have several pairs of
arms, brandishing mysterious things,--they seem to dance, gesticulate,
threaten; but they are all very naif,--remind one of the first efforts
of a child with the first box of paints. While I am looking at these
things, one coolie after another wakes up (these men sleep lightly) and
begins to observe me almost as curiously, and I fear much less kindly,
than I have been observing the gods. "Where is your babagee?" I inquire.
No one seems to comprehend my question; the gravity of each dark face
remains unrelaxed. Yet I would have liked to make an offering unto Siva.


... Outside the Indian goldsmith's cabin, palm shadows are crawling
slowly to and fro in the white glare, like shapes of tarantulas. Inside,
the heat is augmented by the tiny charcoal furnace which glows beside a
ridiculous little anvil set into a wooden block buried level with the
soil. Through a rear door come odors of unknown flowers and the cool
brilliant green of banana leaves.... A minute of waiting in the hot
silence;--then, noiselessly as a phantom, the nude-limbed smith enters
by a rear door,--squats down, without a word, on his little mat beside
his little anvil,--and turns towards me, inquiringly, a face half veiled
by a black beard,--a turbaned Indian face, sharp, severe, and slightly
unpleasant in expression. "_Vlé béras!_" explains my creole driver,
pointing to his client. The smith opens his lips to utter in the tone of
a call the single syllable "_Ra!_" then folds his arms.

Almost immediately a young Hindoo woman enters, squats down on the
earthen floor at the end of the bench which forms the only furniture of
the shop, and turns upon me a pair of the finest black eyes I have ever
seen,--like the eyes of a fawn. She is very simply clad in a coolie robe
leaving arms and ankles bare, and clinging about the figure in gracious
folds; her color is a clear bright brown--new bronze; her face a fine
oval, and charmingly aquiline. I perceive a little silver ring, in the
form of a twisted snake, upon the slender second toe of each bare foot;
upon each arm she has at least ten heavy silver rings; there are also
large silver rings about her ankles; a gold flower is fixed by a little
hook in one nostril, and two immense silver circles, shaped like new
moons, shimmer in her ears. The smith mutters something to her in his
Indian tongue. She rises, and seating herself on the bench beside me, in
an attitude of perfect grace, holds out one beautiful brown arm to me
that I may choose a ring.

The arm is much more worthy of attention than the rings: it has the
tint, the smoothness, the symmetry, of a fine statuary's work in
metal;--the upper arm, tattooed with a bluish circle of arabesques, is
otherwise unadorned; all the bracelets are on the fore-arm. Very clumsy
and coarse they prove to be on closer examination: it was the fine dark
skin which by color contrast made them look so pretty. I choose the
outer one, a round ring with terminations shaped like viper heads;--the
smith inserts a pair of tongs between these ends, presses outward slowly
and strongly, and the ring is off. It has a faint musky odor, not
unpleasant, the perfume of the tropical flesh it clung to. I would have
taken it thus; but the smith snatches it from me, heats it red in his
little charcoal furnace, hammers it into a nearly perfect circle again,
slakes it, and burnishes it.

Then I ask for children's _béras_, or bracelets; and the young mother
brings in her own baby girl,--a little darling just able to walk. She
has extraordinary eyes;--the mother's eyes magnified (the father's are
small and fierce). I bargain for the single pair of thin rings on her
little wrists;--while the smith is taking them off, the child keeps her
wonderful gaze fixed on my face. Then I observe that the peculiarity of
the eye is the size of the iris rather than the size of the ball. These
eyes are not soft like the mother's, after all; they are ungentle,
beautiful as they are; they have the dark and splendid flame of the eyes
of a great bird--a bird of prey.


... She will grow up, this little maid, into a slender, graceful woman,
very beautiful, no doubt; perhaps a little dangerous. She will marry, of
course: probably she is betrothed even now, according to Indian
custom,--pledged to some brown boy, the son of a friend. It will not be
so many years before the day of their noisy wedding: girls shoot up
under this sun with as swift a growth as those broad-leaved beautiful
shapes which fill the open door-way with quivering emerald. And she will
know the witchcraft of those eyes, will feel the temptation to use
them,--perhaps to smile one of those smiles which have power over life
and death.

And then the old coolie story! One day, in the yellowing cane-fields,
among the swarm of veiled and turbaned workers, a word is overheard, a
side glance intercepted;--there is the swirling flash of a cutlass
blade; a shrieking gathering of women about a headless corpse in the
sun; and passing cityward, between armed and helmeted men, the vision of
an Indian prisoner, blood-crimsoned, walking very steadily, very erect,
with the solemnity of a judge, the dry bright gaze of an idol....




XXXI


... We steam very slowly into the harbor of St. George, Grenada, in dead
silence. No cannon-signal allowed here.... Some one suggests that the
violence of the echoes in this harbor renders the firing of cannon
dangerous; somebody else says the town is in so ruinous a condition that
the report of a gun would shake it down.

... There are heavy damp smells in the warm air as of mould, or of wet
clay freshly upturned.

This harbor is a deep clear basin, surrounded and shadowed by immense
volcanic hills, all green. The opening by which we entered is cut off
from sight by a promontory, and hill shapes beyond the promontory;--we
seem to be in the innermost ring of a double crater. There is a
continuous shimmering and plashing of leaping fish in the shadow of the
loftiest height, which reaches half across the water.

As it climbs up the base of the huge hill at a precipitous angle, the
city can be seen from the steamer's deck almost as in a bird's-eye view.
A senescent city; mostly antiquated Spanish architecture,--ponderous
archways and earthquake-proof walls. The yellow buildings fronting us
beyond the wharf seem half decayed; they are strangely streaked with
green, look as if they had been long under water. We row ashore, land in
a crowd of lazy-looking, silent blacks.

... What a quaint, dawdling, sleepy place it is! All these narrow
streets are falling into ruin; everywhere the same green stains upon the
walls, as of slime left by a flood; everywhere disjointed brickwork,
crumbling roofs, pungent odors of mould. Yet this Spanish architecture
was built to endure; those yellow, blue, or green walls were constructed
with the solidity of fortress-work; the very stairs are stone; the
balustrades and the railings were made of good wrought iron. In a
Northern clime such edifices would resist the wear and tear of five
hundred years. But here the powers of disintegration are extraordinary,
and the very air would seem to have the devouring force of an acid. All
surfaces and angles are yielding to the attacks of time, weather, and
microscopic organisms; paint peels, stucco falls, tiles tumble, stones
slip out of place, and in every chink tiny green things nestle,
propagating themselves through the jointures and dislocating the
masonry. There is an appalling mouldiness, an exaggerated mossiness--the
mystery and the melancholy of a city deserted. Old warehouses without
signs, huge and void, are opened regularly every day for so many hours;
yet the business of the aged merchants within seems to be a
problem;--you might fancy those gray men were always waiting for ships
that sailed away a generation ago, and will never return. You see no
customers entering the stores, but only a black mendicant from time to
time. And high above all this, overlooking streets too steep for any
vehicle, slope the red walls of the mouldering fort, patched with the
viridescence of ruin.


By a road leading up beyond the city, you reach the cemetery. The
staggering iron gates by which you enter it are almost rusted from their
hinges, and the low wall enclosing it is nearly all verdant. Within, you
see a wilderness of strange weeds, vines, creepers, fantastic shrubs run
mad, with a few palms mounting above the green confusion;--only here and
there a gleam of slabs with inscriptions half erased. Such as you can
read are epitaphs of seamen, dating back to the years 1800, 1802, 1812.
Over these lizards are running; undulations in the weeds warn you to
beware of snakes; toads leap away as you proceed; and you observe
everywhere, crickets perched--grass-colored creatures with two ruby
specks for eyes. They make a sound shrill as the scream of machinery
bevelling marble. At the farther end of the cemetery is a heavy ruin
that would seem to have once been part of a church: it is so covered
with creeping weeds now that you only distinguish the masonry on close
approach, and high trees are growing within it.

There is something in tropical ruin peculiarly and terribly impressive:
this luxuriant, evergreen, ever-splendid Nature consumes the results of
human endeavor so swiftly, buries memories so profoundly, distorts the
labors of generations so grotesquely, that one feels here, as nowhere
else, how ephemeral man is, how intense and how tireless the effort
necessary to preserve his frail creations even a little while from the
vast unconscious forces antagonistic to all stability, to all factitious
equilibrium.


... A gloomy road winds high around one cliff overlooking the hollow of
the bay. Following it, you pass under extraordinarily dark shadows of
foliage, and over a blackish soil strewn with pretty bright green fruit
that has fallen from above. Do not touch them even with the tip of your
finger! Those are manchineel apples; with their milky juice the old
Caribs were wont to poison the barbs of their parrot-feathered arrows.
Over the mould, swarming among the venomous fruit, innumerable crabs
make a sound almost like the murmuring of water. Some are very large,
with prodigious stalked eyes, and claws white as ivory, and a red
cuirass; others, very small and very swift in their movements, are
raspberry-colored; others, again, are apple-green, with queer mottlings
of black and white. There is an unpleasant odor of decay in the
air--vegetable decay.

Emerging from the shadow of the manchineel-trees, you may follow the
road up, up, up, under beetling cliffs of plutonian rock that seem about
to topple down upon the path-way. The rock is naked and black near the
road; higher, it is veiled by a heavy green drapery of lianas, curling
creepers, unfamiliar vines. All around you are sounds of crawling, dull
echoes of dropping; the thick growths far up waver in the breathless air
as if something were moving sinuously through them. And always the odor
of humid decomposition. Farther on, the road looks wilder, sloping
between black rocks, through strange vaultings of foliage and
night-black shadows. Its lonesomeness oppresses; one returns without
regret, by rusting gate-ways and tottering walls, back to the old West
Indian city rotting in the sun.

... Yet Grenada, despite the dilapidation of her capital and the seeming
desolation of its environs, is not the least prosperous of the Antilles.
Other islands have been less fortunate: the era of depression has almost
passed for Grenada; through the rapid development of her secondary
cultures--coffee and cocoa--she hopes with good reason to repair some of
the vast losses involved by the decay of the sugar industry.

Still, in this silence of mouldering streets, this melancholy of
abandoned dwellings, this invasion of vegetation, there is a suggestion
of what any West Indian port might become when the resources of the
island had been exhausted, and its commerce ruined. After all persons of
means and energy enough to seek other fields of industry and enterprise
had taken their departure, and the plantations had been abandoned, and
the warehouses closed up forever, and the voiceless wharves left to rot
down into the green water, Nature would soon so veil the place as to
obliterate every outward visible sign of the past. In scarcely more than
a generation from the time that the last merchant steamer had taken her
departure some traveller might look for the once populous and busy mart
in vain: vegetation would have devoured it.

... In the mixed English and creole speech of the black population one
can discern evidence of a linguistic transition. The original French
patois is being rapidly forgotten or transformed irrecognizably.

Now, in almost every island the negro idiom is different. So often have
some of the Antilles changed owners, moreover, that in them the negro
has never been able to form a true _patois._ He had scarcely acquired
some idea of the language of his first masters, when other rulers and
another tongue were thrust upon him,--and this may have occurred three
or four times! The result is a totally incoherent agglomeration of
speech-forms--a _baragouin_ fantastic and unintelligible beyond the
power of any one to imagine who has not heard it....




XXXII


... A beautiful fantastic shape floats to us through the morning light;
first cloudy gold like the horizon, then pearly gray, then varying blue,
with growing green lights;--Saint Lucia. Most strangely formed of all
this volcanic family;--everywhere mountainings sharp as broken crystals.
Far off the Pitons--twin peaks of the high coast--show softer contours,
like two black breasts pointing against the sky....

... As we enter the harbor of Castries, the lines of the land seem no
less exquisitely odd, in spite of their rich verdure, than when viewed
afar off;--they have a particular pitch of angle.... Other of these
islands show more or less family resemblance;--you might readily mistake
one silhouette for another as seen at a distance, even after several
West Indian journeys. But Saint Lucia at once impresses you by its
eccentricity.

Castries, drowsing under palm leaves at the edge of its curving
harbor,--perhaps an ancient crater,--seems more of a village than a
town: streets of low cottages and little tropic gardens. It has a
handsome half-breed population: the old French colonial manners have
been less changed here by English influence than in Saint Kitt's and
elsewhere;--the creole _patois_ is still spoken, though the costumes
have changed.... A more beautiful situation could scarcely be
imagined,--even in this tropic world. In the massing of green heights
about the little town are gaps showing groves of palm beyond; but the
peak summits catch the clouds. Behind us the harbor mouth seems spanned
by steel-blue bars: these are lines of currents. Away, on either hand,
volcanic hills are billowing to vapory distance; and in their nearer
hollows are beautiful deepenings of color: ponded shades of diaphanous
blue or purplish tone.... I first remarked this extraordinary coloring
of shadows in Martinique, where it exists to a degree that tempts one to
believe the island has a special atmosphere of its own.... A friend
tells me the phenomenon is probably due to inorganic substances floating
in the air,--each substance in diffusion having its own index of
refraction. Substances so held in suspension by vapors would vary
according to the nature of soil in different islands, and might thus
produce special local effects of atmospheric tinting.

... We remain but half an hour at Castries; then steam along the coast
to take in freight at another port. Always the same delicious
color-effects as we proceed, with new and surprising visions of hills.
The near slopes descending to the sea are a radiant green, with streaks
and specklings of darker verdure;--the farther-rising hills faint blue,
with green saliencies catching the sun;--and beyond these are upheavals
of luminous gray--pearl-gray--sharpened in the silver glow of the
horizon.... The general impression of the whole landscape is one of
motion suddenly petrified,--of an earthquake surging and tossing
suddenly arrested and fixed: a raging of cones and peaks and monstrous
truncated shapes.... We approach the Pitons.

Seen afar off, they first appeared twin mammiform peaks,--naked and dark
against the sky; but now they begin to brighten a little and show
color,--also to change form. They take a lilaceous hue, broken by gray
and green fights; and as we draw yet nearer they prove dissimilar in
both shape and tint.... Now they separate before us, throwing long
pyramidal shadows across the steamer's path. Then, as they open to our
coming, between them a sea bay is revealed--a very lovely curving bay,
bounded by hollow cliffs of fiery green. At either side of the gap the
Pitons rise like monster pylônes. And a charming little settlement, a
beautiful sugar-plantation, is nestling there between them, on the very
edge of the bay.

Out of a bright sea of verdure, speckled with oases of darker foliage,
these Pitons from the land side tower in sombre vegetation. Very high
up, on the nearer one, amid the wooded slopes, you can see houses
perched; and there are bright breaks in the color there--tiny mountain
pastures that look like patches of green silk velvet.


... We pass the Pitons, and enter another little craterine harbor, to
cast anchor before the village of Choiseul. It lies on a ledge above the
beach and under high hills: we land through a surf, running the boat
high up on soft yellowish sand. A delicious saline scent of sea-weed.

It is disappointing, the village: it is merely one cross of brief
streets, lined with blackening wooden dwellings; there are no buildings
worth looking at, except the queer old French church, steep-roofed and
bristling with points that look like extinguishers. Over broad reaches
of lava rock a shallow river flows by the village to the sea, gurgling
under shadows of tamarind foliage. It passes beside the market-place--a
market-place without stalls, benches, sheds, or pavements: meats,
fruits, and vegetables are simply fastened to the trees. Women are
washing and naked children bathing in the stream; they are
bronze-skinned, a fine dark color with a faint tint of red in it....
There is little else to look at: steep wooded hills cut off the view
towards the interior.

But over the verge of the sea there is something strange growing
visible, looming up like a beautiful yellow cloud. It is an island, so
lofty, so luminous, so phantom-like, that it seems a vision of the
Island of the Seven Cities. It is only the form of St. Vincent, bathed
in vapory gold by the sun.


... Evening at La Soufrière: still another semicircular bay in a hollow
of green hills. Glens hold bluish shadows. The color of the heights is
very tender; but there are long streaks and patches of dark green,
marking watercourses and very abrupt surfaces. From the western side
immense shadows are pitched brokenly across the valley and over half the
roofs of the palmy town. There is a little river flowing down to the bay
on the left; and west of it a walled cemetery's visible, out of which
one monumental palm rises to a sublime height: its crest still bathes in
the sun, above the invading shadow. Night approaches; the shade of the
bills inundates all the landscape, rises even over the palm-crest. Then,
black-towering into the golden glow of sunset, the land loses all its
color, all its charm; forms of frondage, variations of tint, become
invisible. Saint Lucia is only a monstrous silhouette; all its billowing
hills, its volcanic bays, its amphitheatrical valleys, turn black as
ebony.

And you behold before you a geological dream, a vision of the primeval
sea: the apparition of the land as first brought forth, all peak-tossed
and fissured and naked and grim, in the tremendous birth of an
archipelago.




XXXIII


Homeward bound.

Again the enormous poem of azure and emerald unrolls before us, but in
order inverse; again is the island-Litany of the Saints repeated for us,
but now backward. All the bright familiar harbors once more open to
receive us;--each lovely Shape floats to us again, first golden yellow,
then vapory gray, then ghostly blue, but always sharply radiant at last,
symmetrically exquisite, as if chiselled out of amethyst and emerald and
sapphire. We review the same wondrous wrinkling of volcanic hills, the
cities that sit in extinct craters, the woods that tower to heaven, the
peaks perpetually wearing that luminous cloud which seems the breathing
of each island-life,--its vital manifestation....


[Illustration: THE LION OF GUN HILL, BARBADOES
_A heroic statue carved in the native rock by a
British army officer._]


... Only now do the long succession of exotic and unfamiliar impressions
received begin to group and blend, to form homogeneous results,--general
ideas or convictions. Strongest among these is the belief that the white
race is disappearing from these islands, acquired and held at so vast a
cost of blood and treasure. Reasons almost beyond enumeration have been
advanced--economical, climatic, ethnical, political--all of which
contain truth, yet no single one of which can wholly explain the fact.
Already the white West Indian populations are diminishing at a rate that
almost staggers credibility. In the island paradise of Martinique in
1848 there were 12,000 whites; now, against more than 160,000 blacks and
half-breeds, there are perhaps 5000 whites left to maintain the ethnic
struggle, and the number of these latter is annually growing less. Many
of the British islands have been almost deserted by their former
cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate: Tobago is a ruin; St.
Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling; Grenada has
lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the most prosperous,
the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West Indian ports, is in full
decadence. And while the white element is disappearing, the dark races
are multiplying as never before;--the increase of the negro and
half-breed populations has been everywhere one of the startling results
of emancipation. The general belief among the creole whites, of the
Lesser Antilles would seem to confirm the old prediction that the slave
races of the past must become the masters of the future. Here and there
the struggle may be greatly prolonged, but everywhere the ultimate
result must be the same, unless the present conditions of commerce and
production become marvellously changed. The exterminated Indian peoples
of the Antilles have already been replaced by populations equally fitted
to cope with the forces of the nature about them,--that splendid and
terrible Nature of the tropics which consumes the energies of the races
of the North, which devours all that has been accomplished by their
heroism or their crimes,--effacing their cities, rejecting their
civilization. To those peoples physiologically in harmony with this
Nature belong all the chances of victory in the contest--already
begun--for racial supremacy.

But with the disappearance of the white populations the ethnical problem
would be still unsettled. Between the black and mixed peoples prevail
hatreds more enduring and more intense than any race prejudices between
whites and freedmen in the past;--a new struggle for supremacy could not
fail to begin, with the perpetual augmentation of numbers, the
ever-increasing competition for existence. And the true black element,
more numerically powerful, more fertile, more cunning, better adapted to
pyrogenic climate and tropical environment, would surely win. All these
mixed races, all these beautiful fruit-colored populations, seem doomed
to extinction: the future tendency must be to universal blackness, if
existing conditions continue--perhaps to universal savagery. Everywhere
the sins of the past have borne the same bruit, have furnished the
colonies with social enigmas that mock the wisdom of legislators,--a
dragon-crop of problems that no modern political science has yet proved
competent to deal with. Can it even be hoped that future sociologists
will be able to answer them, after Nature--who never forgives--shall
have exacted the utmost possible retribution for all the crimes and
follies of three hundred years?


[Illustration]




MARTINIQUE
SKETCHES


[Illustration]




LES PORTEUSES


I


When you find yourself for the first time, upon some unshadowed day, in
the delightful West Indian city of St. Pierre,--supposing that you own
the sense of poetry, the recollections of a student,--there is apt to
steal upon your fancy an impression of having seen it all before, ever
so long ago,--you cannot tell where. The sensation of some happy dream
you cannot wholly recall might be compared to this feeling. In the
simplicity and solidity of the quaint architecture,--in the eccentricity
of bright narrow streets, all aglow with warm coloring,--in the tints of
roof and wall, antiquated by streakings and patchings of mould greens
and grays,--in the startling absence of window-sashes, glass, gas
lamps, and chimneys,--in the blossom-tenderness of the blue heaven, the
splendor of tropic light, and the warmth of the tropic wind,--you find
less the impression of a scene of to-day than the sensation of something
that was and is not. Slowly this feeling strengthens with your pleasure
in the colorific radiance of costume,--the semi-nudity of passing
figures,--the puissant shapeliness of torsos ruddily swart like statue
metal,--the rounded outline of limbs yellow as tropic fruit,--the grace
of attitudes,--the unconscious harmony of groupings,--the gathering and
folding and falling of light robes that oscillate with swaying of free
hips,--the sculptural symmetry of unshod feet. You look up and down the
lemon-tinted streets,--down to the dazzling azure brightness of meeting
sky and sea; up to the perpetual verdure of mountain woods--wondering at
the mellowness of tones, the sharpness of lines in the light, the
diaphaneity of colored shadows; always asking memory: "When?... where
did I see all this... long ago?"...

Then, perhaps, your gaze is suddenly riveted by the vast and
solemn beauty of the verdant violet-shaded mass of the dead
Volcano,--high-towering above the town, visible from all its ways, and
umbraged, maybe, with thinnest curlings of cloud,--like spectres of its
ancient smoking to heaven. And all at once the secret of your dream is
revealed, with the rising of many a luminous memory,--dreams of the
Idyllists, flowers of old Sicilian song, fancies limned upon Pompeiian
walls. For a moment the illusion is delicious: you comprehend as never
before the charm of a vanished world,--the antique life, the story of
terra-cottas and graven stones and gracious things exhumed: even the sun
is not of to-day, but of twenty centuries gone;--thus, and under such a
light, walked the women of the elder world. You know the fancy
absurd;--that the power of the orb has visibly abated nothing in all the
eras of man,--that millions are the ages of his almighty glory; but for
one instant of reverie he seemeth larger,--even that sun impossible who
coloreth the words, coloreth the works of artist-lovers of the past,
with the gold light of dreams.

Too soon the hallucination is broken by modern sounds, dissipated by
modern sights,--rough trolling of sailors descending to their
boats,--the heavy boom of a packet's signal-gun,--the passing of an
American buggy. Instantly you become aware that the melodious tongue
spoken by the passing throng is neither Hellenic nor Roman: only the
beautiful childish speech of French slaves.




II


But what slaves were the fathers of this free generation? Your
anthropologists, your ethnologists, seem at fault here: the African
traits have become transformed; the African characteristics have been so
modified within little more than two hundred years--by interblending of
blood, by habit, by soil and sun and all those natural powers which
shape the mould of races,--that you may look in vain for verification of
ethnological assertions.... No: the heel does _not_ protrude;--the foot
is _not_ flat, but finely arched;--the extremities are not large;--all
the limbs taper, all the muscles are developed; and prognathism has
become so rare that months of research may not yield a single striking
case of it.... No: this is a special race, peculiar to the island as are
the shapes of its peaks,--a mountain race; and mountain races are
comely.... Compare it with the population of black Barbadoes, where the
apish grossness of African coast types has been perpetuated
unchanged;--and the contrast may well astonish!...




III


The erect carriage and steady swift walk of the women who bear burdens
is especially likely to impress the artistic observer: it is the sight
of such passers-by which gives, above all, the antique tone and color to
his first sensations;--and the larger part of the female population of
mixed race are practised carriers. Nearly all the transportation of
light merchandise, as well as of meats, fruits, vegetables, and food
stuffs,--to and from the interior,--is effected upon human heads. At
some of the ports the regular local packets are loaded and unloaded by
women and girls,--able to carry any trunk or box to its destination. At
Fort-de-France the great steamers of the Compagnie Générale
Transatlantique, are entirely coaled by women, who carry the coal on
their heads, singing as they come and go in processions of hundreds; and
the work is done with incredible rapidity. Now, the creole _porteuse_,
or female carrier, is certainly one of the most remarkable physical
types in the world; and whatever artistic enthusiasm her graceful port,
lithe walk, or half-savage beauty may inspire you with, you can form no
idea, if a total stranger, what a really wonderful being she is.... Let
me tell you something about that highest type of professional female
carrier, which is to the _charbonnière_, or coaling-girl, what the
thorough-bred racer is to the draught-horse,--the type of porteuse
selected for swiftness and endurance to distribute goods in the interior
parishes, or to sell on commission at long distances. To the same class
naturally belong those country carriers able to act as porteuses of
plantation produce, fruits, or vegetables,--between the nearer ports and
their own interior parishes.... Those who believe that great physical
endurance and physical energy cannot exist in the tropics do not know
the creole carrier-girl.




IV


At a very early age--perhaps at five years--she learns to carry small
articles upon her head,--a bowl of rice,--a _dobanne_, or red earthen
decanter, full of water--even an orange on a plate; and before long she
is able to balance these perfectly without using her hands to steady
them. (I have often seen children actually run with cans of water upon
their heads, and never spill a drop.) At nine or ten she is able to
carry thus a tolerably heavy basket, or a trait (a wooden tray with deep
outward sloping sides) containing a weight of from twenty to thirty
pounds; and is able to accompany her mother, sister, or cousin on long
peddling journeys,--walking barefoot twelve and fifteen miles a day. At
sixteen or seventeen she is a tall robust girl,--lithe, vigorous,
tough,--all tendon and hard flesh;--she carries a tray or a basket of
the largest size, and a burden of one hundred and twenty to one hundred
and fifty pounds weight;--she can now earn about thirty francs (about
six dollars) a month, _by walking fifty miles a day_, as an itinerant
seller.

Among her class there are figures to make you dream of Atlanta;--and
all, whether ugly or attractive as to feature, are finely shapen as to
body and limb. Brought into existence by extraordinary necessities of
environment, the type is a peculiarly local one,--a type of human
thorough-bred representing the true secret of grace: economy of force.
There are no corpulent porteuses for the long interior routes; all are
built lightly and firmly as racers. There are no old porteuses;--to do
the work even at forty signifies a constitution of astounding solidity.
After the full force of youth and health is spent, the poor carrier must
seek lighter labor;--she can no longer compete with the girls. For in
this calling the young body is taxed to its utmost capacity of strength,
endurance, and rapid motion.

As a general rule, the weight is such that no well-freighted porteuse
can, unassisted, either "load" or "unload" (_châgé_ or _déchâgé_,
in creole phrase); the effort to do so would burst a blood-vessel,
wrench a nerve, rupture a muscle. She cannot even sit down under her
burden without risk of breaking her neck: absolute perfection of the
balance is necessary for self-preservation. A case came under my own
observation of a woman rupturing a muscle in her arm through careless
haste in the mere act of aiding another to unload.

And no one not a brute will ever refuse to aid a woman to lift or to
relieve herself of her burden;--you may see the wealthiest merchant, the
proudest planter, gladly do it;--the meanness of refusing, or of making
any conditions for the performance of this little kindness has only been
imagined in those strange Stories of Devils wherewith the oral and
uncollected literature of the creole abounds.[4]


[Footnote 4: _Extract from the "Story of Marie," as written from
dictation_:

... Manman-à té ni yon goûte jà à caïe-li. Jà-la té touôp lou'de
pou Marie. Cé té li menm manman là qui té kallé pouend dileau.
Yon jou y pouend jà-la pou y té allé pouend dileau. Lhè manman-à
rivé bé la fontaine, y pa trouvé pésonne pou châgé y. Y rété; y ka crié,
"Toutt bon Chritien, vini châgé moin!"

... This mamma had a great jar in her house. The jar was too
heavy for Marie. It was this mamma herself who used to go for
water. One day she took that jar to go for water. When this
mamma had got to the fountain, she could not find any one to load
her. She stood there, crying out, "Any good Christian, come load
me!"

... Lhè manman rété y ouè pa té ni piess bon Chritien pou châgé
y. Y rété; y crié: "Pouloss, si pa ni bon Chritien» ni mauvais
Chritien! toutt mauvais Chritien vini châgé moin!"


Lhè y fini di ça, y ouè yon diabe qui ka vini, ka di conm ça, "Pou
moin châgé ou ça ou ké baill moin?" Manman-là di,—y réponne,
"Moin pa ni arien!" Diabe-la réponne y, "Y fau ba moin
Marie pou moin pé châgé ou."

... As the mamma stood there she saw there was not a single
good Christian to help her load. She stood there, and cried out:
"Well, then, if there are no good Christians, there are bad Christians.
Any bad Christian, come and load me!"

The moment she said that, she saw a devil coming, who said to
her, "If I load you what will you give me?" This mamma answered,
and said, "I have nothing!" The devil answered her, "Must give me
Marie if you want me to load you."]




V


Preparing for her journey, the young _màchanne_ (marchande) puts on
the poorest and briefest chemise in her possession, and the most worn of
her light calico robes. These are all she wears. The robe is drawn
upward and forward, so as to reach a little below the knee, and is
confined thus by a waist-string, or a long kerchief bound tightly round
the loins. Instead of a Madras or painted turban-kerchief, she binds a
plain _mouchoir_ neatly and closely about her head; and if her hair be
long, it is combed back and gathered into a loop behind. Then, with a
second mouchoir of coarser quality she makes a pad, or, as she calls it,
_tòche_, by winding the kerchief round her fingers as you would coil up
a piece of string;--and the soft mass, flattened with a patting of the
hand, is placed upon her head, over the coiffure. On this the great
loaded trait is poised.

She wears no shoes! To wear shoes and do her work swiftly and well in
such a land of mountains would be impossible. She must climb thousands
and descend thousands of feet every day,--march up and down slopes so
steep that the horses of the country all break down after a few years of
similar journeying. The girl invariably outlasts the horse,--though
carrying an equal weight. Shoes, unless extraordinarily well made, would
shift place a little with every change from ascent to descent, or the
reverse, during the march,--would yield and loosen with the ever-varying
strain,--would compress the toes,--produce corns, bunions, raw places by
rubbing, and soon cripple the porteuse. Remember, she has to walk
perhaps fifty miles between dawn and dark, under a sun to which a single
hour's exposure, without the protection of an umbrella, is perilous to
any European or American--the terrible sun of the tropics! Sandals are
the only conceivable foot-gear suited to such a calling as hers; but she
needs no sandals: the soles of her feet are toughened so as to feel no
asperities, and present to sharp pebbles a surface at once yielding and
resisting, like a cushion of solid caoutchouc.

Besides her load, she carries only a canvas purse tied to her girdle on
the right side, and on the left a very small bottle of rum, or white
tafia,--usually the latter, because it is so cheap.... For she may not
always find the Gouyave water to drink,--the cold clear pure stream
conveyed to the fountains of St. Pierre from the highest mountains by a
beautiful and marvellous plan of hydraulic engineering: she will have to
drink betimes the common spring-water of the bamboo-fountains on the
remoter high-roads; and this may cause dysentery if swallowed without a
spoonful of spirits. Therefore she never travels without a little
liquor.




VI


... So!--She is ready: "_Châgé moin, souplè, chè!_" She
bends to lift the end of the heavy trait: some one takes the
other,--_yon!--dè!--toua!_--it is on her head. Perhaps she winces an
instant;--the weight is not perfectly balanced; she settles it with her
hands,--gets it in the exact place. Then, all steady,--lithe, light,
half naked,--away she moves with a long springy step. So even her walk
that the burden never sways; yet so rapid her motion that however good a
walker you may fancy yourself to be you will tire out after a sustained
effort of fifteen minutes to follow her uphill. Fifteen minutes!--and
she can keep up that pace without slackening--save for a minute to eat
and drink at midday,--for at least twelve hours and fifty-six minutes,
the extreme length of a West Indian day. She starts before dawn; tries
to reach her resting-place by sunset: after dark, like all her people,
she is afraid of meeting _zombis._


[Illustration: THE DEVIL'S DOOR, MARTINIQUE
_Each turn in the road discloses new scenes of tropical
splendor, beetling cliffs. and verdure-covered slopes._]


Let me give you some idea of her average speed under an average weight
of one hundred and twenty-five pounds,--estimates based partly upon my
own observations, partly upon the declarations of the trustworthy
merchants who employ her, and partly on the assertion of habitants of
the burghs or cities named--all of which statements perfectly agree.
From St. Pierre to Basse-Pointe, by the national road, the distance is a
trifle less than twenty-seven kilometres and three-quarters. She makes
the transit easily in three hours and a half; and returns in the
afternoon, after an absence of scarcely more than eight hours. From St.
Pierre to Morne Rouge--two thousand feet up in the mountains (an ascent
so abrupt that no one able to pay carriage-fare dreams of attempting to
walk it)--the distance is seven kilometres and three-quarters. She makes
it in little more than an hour. But this represents only the beginning
of her journey. She passes on to Grande Anse, twenty-one and
three-quarter kilometres away. But she does not rest there: she returns
at the same pace, and reaches St. Pierre before dark. From St. Pierre to
Gros-Morne the distance to be twice traversed by her is more than
thirty-two kilometres. A journey of sixty-four kilometres,--daily,
perhaps,--forty miles! And there are many màchannes who make yet longer
trips,--trips of three or four days' duration;--these rest at villages
upon their route.




VII


Such travel in such a country would be impossible but for the excellent
national roads,--limestone highways, solid, broad, faultlessly
graded,--that wind from town to town, from hamlet to hamlet, over
mountains, over ravines; ascending by zigzags to heights of twenty-five
hundred feet; traversing the primeval forests of the interior; now
skirting the dizziest precipices, now descending into the loveliest
valleys. There are thirty-one of these magnificent routes, with a total
length of 488,052 metres (more than 805 miles), whereof the construction
required engineering talent of the highest order,--the building of
bridges beyond counting, and devices the most ingenious to provide
against dangers of storms, floods and land-slips. Most have
drinking-fountains along their course at almost regular
intervals,--generally made by the negroes, who have a simple but
excellent plan for turning the water of a spring through bamboo pipes to
the road-way. Each road is also furnished with milestones, or rather
kilometre-stones; and the drainage is perfect enough to assure of the
highway becoming dry within fifteen minutes after the heaviest rain, so
long as the surface is maintained in tolerably good condition. Well-kept
embankments of earth (usually covered with a rich growth of mosses,
vines, and ferns), or even solid walls of masonry, line the side that
overhangs a dangerous depth. And all these highways pass through
landscapes of amazing beauty,--visions of mountains so many-tinted and
so singular of outline that they would almost seem to have been created
for the express purpose of compelling astonishment. This tropic Nature
appears to call into being nothing ordinary: the shapes which she evokes
are always either gracious or odd,--and her eccentricities, her
extravagances, have a fantastic charm, a grotesqueness as of artistic
whim. Even where the landscape-view is cut off by high woods the forms
of ancient trees--the infinite interwreathing of vine growths all on
fire with violence of blossom-color,--the enormous green outbursts of
balisiers, with leaves ten to thirteen feet long,--the columnar
solemnity of great palmistes,--the pliant quivering exquisiteness of
bamboo,--the furious splendor of roses run mad--more than atone for the
loss of the horizon. Sometimes you approach a steep covered with a
growth of what, at first glance, looks precisely like fine green fur: it
is a first-growth of young bamboo. Or you see a hill-side covered with
huge green feathers, all shelving down and overlapping as in the tail of
some unutterable bird: these are baby ferns. And where the road leaps
some deep ravine with a double or triple bridge of white stone, note
well what delicious shapes spring up into sunshine from the black
profundity on either hand! Palmiform you might hastily term them,--but
no palm was ever so gracile; no palm ever bore so dainty a head of green
plumes light as lace! These likewise are ferns (rare survivors, maybe,
of that period of monstrous vegetation which preceded the apparition of
man), beautiful tree-ferns, whose every young plume, unrolling in a
spiral from the bud, at first assumes the shape of a crozier,--a crozier
of emerald! Therefore are some of this species called "archbishop-trees"
no doubt.... But one might write for a hundred years of the sights to be
seen upon such a mountain road.




VIII


In every season, in almost every weather, the porteuse makes her
journey,--never heeding rain;--her goods being protected by double and
triple water-proof coverings well bound down over her trait. Yet these
tropical rains, coming suddenly with a cold wind upon her heated and
almost naked body, are to be feared. To any European or unacclimated
white such a wetting, while the pores are all open during a profuse
perspiration, would probably prove fatal: even for white natives the
result is always a serious and protracted illness. But the porteuse
seldom suffers in consequences: she seems proof against fevers,
rheumatisms, and ordinary colds. When she does break down, however, the
malady is a frightful one,--a pneumonia that carries off the victim
within forty-eight hours. Happily, among her class, these fatalities are
very rare.

And scarcely less rare than such sudden deaths are instances of failure
to appear on time. In one case, the employer, a St. Pierre shopkeeper,
on finding his marchande more than an hour late, felt so certain
something very extraordinary must have happened that he sent out
messengers in all directions to make inquiries. It was found that the
woman had become a mother when only half-way upon her journey home....
The child lived and thrived;--she is now a pretty chocolate-colored girl
of eight, who follows her mother every day from their mountain ajoupa
down to the city, and back again,--bearing a little trait upon her head.


[Illustration: THE ROAD TO ST. PIERRE
"_A hillside covered with huge green feathers... tree-ferns
whose every young plume, in a spiral from the
hud, at first assumes the shape of a crozier,--a crozier
of emerald!_"]


Murder for purposes of robbery is not an unknown crime in Martinique;
but I am told the porteuses are never molested. And yet some of these
girls carry merchandise to the value of hundreds of francs; and all
carry money,--the money received for goods sold, often a considerable
sum. This immunity may be partly owing to the fact that they travel
dining the greater part of the year only by day,--and usually in
company. A very pretty girl is seldom suffered to journey unprotected:
she has either a male escort or several experienced and powerful women
with her. In the cacao season--when carriers start from Grande Anse as
early as two o'clock in the morning, so as to reach St. Pierre by
dawn--they travel in strong companies of twenty or twenty-five, singing
on the way. As a general rule the younger girls at all times go two
together,--keeping step perfectly as a pair of blooded fillies; only the
veterans, or women selected for special work by reason of extraordinary
physical capabilities, go alone. To the latter class belong certain
girls employed by the great bakeries of Fort-de-France and St. Pierre:
these are veritable caryatides. They are probably the heaviest-laden of
all, carrying baskets of astounding size far up into the mountains
before daylight, so as to furnish country families with fresh bread at
an early hour; and for this labor they receive about four dollars
(twenty francs) a month and one loaf of bread per diem.... While
stopping at a friend's house among the hills, some two miles from
Fort-de-France, I saw the local bread-carrier halt before our porch one
morning, and a finer type of the race it would be difficult for a
sculptor to imagine. Six feet tall,--strength and grace united
throughout her whole figure from neck to heel; with that clear black
skin which is beautiful to any but ignorant or prejudiced eyes; and the
smooth, pleasing, solemn features of a sphinx,--she looked to me, as she
towered there in the gold light, a symbolic statue of Africa. Seeing me
smoking one of those long thin Martinique cigars called _bouts_, she
begged one; and, not happening to have another, I gave her the price of
a bunch of twenty,--ten sous. She took it without a smile, and went her
way. About an hour and a half later she came back and asked for me,--to
present me with the finest and largest mango I had ever seen, a monster
mango. She said she wanted to see me eat it, and sat down on the ground
to look on. While eating it, I learned that she had walked a whole mile
out of her way under that sky of fire, just to bring her little gift of
gratitude.




IX


Forty to fifty miles a day, always under a weight of more than a hundred
pounds,--for when the trait has been emptied she puts in stones for
ballast;--carrying her employer's merchandise and money over the
mountain ranges, beyond the peaks, across the ravines, through the
tropical forest, sometimes through by-ways haunted by the
fer-de-lance,--and this in summer or winter, the season of rains or the
season of heat, the time of fevers or the time of hurricanes, at a franc
a day!... How does she live upon it?


[Illustration: FORT-DE-FRANCE
_View from the old fortifications. In the distance
the bay, and beyond Trois Islets, where
Josephine was born._]


There are twenty sous to the franc. The girl leaves St. Pierre with her
load at early morning. At the second village, Morne Rouge, she halts to
buy one, two, or three biscuits at a sou apiece; and reaching
Ajoupa-Bouillon later in the forenoon, she may buy another biscuit or
two. Altogether she may be expected to eat five sous of biscuit or bread
before reaching Grande Anse, where she probably has a meal waiting for
her. This ought to cost her ten sous,--especially if there be meat in
her ragoût: which represents a total expense of fifteen sous for
eatables. Then there is the additional cost of the cheap liquor, which
she must mix with her drinking-water, as it would be more than dangerous
to swallow pure cold water in her heated condition; two or three sous
more. This almost makes the franc. But such a hasty and really erroneous
estimate does not include expenses of lodging and clothing;--she may
sleep on the bare floor sometimes, and twenty francs a year may keep her
in clothes; but she must rent the floor and pay for the clothes out of
that franc. As a matter of fact she not only does all this upon her
twenty sous a day, but can even economize something which will enable
her, when her youth and force decline, to start in business for herself.
And her economy will not seem so wonderful when I assure you that
thousands of men here--huge men muscled like bulls and lions—-live upon
an average expenditure of five sous a day. One sou of bread, two sous of
manioc flour, one sou of dried codfish, one sou of tafia: such is their
meal.

There are women carriers who earn more than a franc a day,--women with a
particular talent for selling, who are paid on commission--from ten to
fifteen per cent. These eventually make themselves independent in many
instances;--they continue to sell and bargain in person, but hire a
young girl to carry the goods.




X


... "_Ou 'lè mâchonne!_" rings out a rich alto, resonant as the tone
of a gong, from behind the balisiers that shut in our garden. There are
two of them--no, three--Maiyotte, Chéchelle, and Rina. Maiyotte and
Chéchelle have just arrived from St. Pierre;--Rina comes from
Gros-Morne with fruits and vegetables. Suppose we call them all in, and
see what they have got. Maiyotte and Chéchelle sell on commission; Rina
sells for her mother, who has a little garden at Gros-Morne.

... "_Bonjou', Maiyotte;--bonjou', Chéchelle! comment ou kallé, Rina,
chè!_"... Throw open the folding-doors to let the great trays pass....
Now all three are unloaded by old Théréza and by young Adou;--all the
packs are on the floor, and the water-proof wrappings are being
uncorded, while Ah-Manmzell, the adopted child, brings the rum and water
for the tall walkers.

... "Oh, what a medley, Maiyotte!"... Inkstands and wooden cows; purses
and paper dogs and cats; dolls and cosmetics; pins and needles and soap
and tooth-brushes; candied fruits and smoking-caps; _pelotes_ of thread,
and tapes, and ribbons, and laces, and Madeira wine; cuffs, and collars,
and dancing-shoes, and tobacco sachets.... But what is in that little
flat bundle? Presents for your _guêpe_, if you have one....
_Jesis-Maïa!_--the pretty foulards! Azure and yellow in checkerings;
orange and crimson in stripes; rose and scarlet in plaidings; and bronze
tints, and beetle-tints of black and green.

"Chéchelle, what a _bloucoutoum_ if you should ever let that tray
fall--_aïe yaïe yaïe!_" Here is a whole shop of crockeries and
porcelains;--plates, dishes, cups,--earthen-ware _canaris_ and
_dobannes_; and gift-mugs and cups bearing creole girls' names,--all
names that end in _ine_: "Micheline, Honorine, Prospérine" [you will
never sell that, Chéchelle: there is not a Prospérine this side of St.
Pierre], "Azaline, Leontine, Zéphyrine, Albertine, Chrysaline, Florine,
Coralline, Alexandrine."... And knives and forks, and cheap spoons, and
tin coffee-pots, and tin rattles for babies, and tin flutes for horrid
little boys,--and pencils and note-paper and envelopes!...

... "Oh, Rina, what superb oranges!--fully twelve inches round!...
and these, which look something like our mandarins, what do
you call them? Zorange-macaque!" (monkey-oranges). And here are
avocados--beauties!--guavas of three different kinds,--tropical cherries
(which have four seeds instead of one),--tropical raspberries, whereof
the entire eatable portion comes off in one elastic piece, lined with
something like white silk.... Here are fresh nutmegs: the thick green
case splits in equal halves at a touch; and see the beautiful heart
within,--deep dark glossy red, all wrapped in a bright net-work of flat
blood-colored fibre, spun over it like branching veins.... This big
heavy red-and-yellow thing is a _pomme-cythère_: the smooth cuticle,
bitter as gall, covers a sweet juicy pulp, interwoven with something
that seems like cotton thread.... Here is a _pomme-cannelle_: inside its
scaly covering is the most delicious yellow custard conceivable with
little black seeds floating in it. This larger _corossol_ has almost as
delicate an interior, only the custard is white instead of yellow....
Here are _christophines_,--great pear-shaped things, white and green,
according to kind, with a peel prickly and knobby as the skin of a homed
toad; but they stew exquisitely. And _mélongènes_, or egg-plants; and
palmiste-pith, and _chadèques_, and _pommes-d'Haïti_,--and roots that
at first sight look all alike, but they are not: there are _camanioc_,
and couscous, and _choux-caraïbes_, and _zignames_, and various kinds
of patates among them. Old Théréza's magic will transform these
shapeless muddy things, before evening, into pyramids of smoking
gold,--into odorous porridges that will look like messes of molten amber
and liquid pearl;--for Rina makes a good sale.

Then Chéchelle manages to dispose of a tin coffee-pot and a big
canari.... And Maiyotte makes the best sale of all; for the sight of a
funny _biscuit_ doll has made Ah-Manmzell cry and smile so at the same
time that I should feel unhappy for the rest of my life if I did not buy
it for her. I know I ought to get some change out of that six
francs;--and Maiyotte, who is black but comely as the tents of Kedar, as
the curtains of Solomon, seems to be aware of the fact.

Oh, Maiyotte, how plaintive that pretty sphinx face of yours, now turned
in profile;--as if you knew you looked beautiful thus,--with the great
gold circlets of your ears glittering and swaying as you bend! And why
are you so long, so long untying that poor little canvas
purse?--fumbling and fingering it?--is it because you want me to think
of the weight of that trait and the sixty kilometres you must walk, and
the heat, and dust, and all the disappointments? Ah, you are cunning,
Maiyotte! No, I do not want the change!




XI


... Travelling together, the porteuses often walk in silence for hours
at a time;--this is when they feel weary. Sometimes they sing,--most
often when approaching their destination;--and when they chat, it is in
a key so high-pitched that their voices can be heard to a great distance
in this land of echoes and elevations.

But she who travels alone is rarely silent: she talks to herself or to
inanimate things;--you may hear her talking to the trees, to the
flowers,--talking to the high clouds and the far peaks of changing
color,--talking to the setting sun!

Over the miles of the morning she sees, perchance, the mighty Piton
Gélé, a cone of amethyst in the light; and she talks to it: "_Ou
jojoll, oui!--moin ni envie monté assou ou, pou main ouè bien, bien!_"
(Thou art pretty, pretty, aye!--I would I might climb thee, to see far,
far off!)

By a great grove of palms she passes;--so thickly mustered they are that
against the sun their intermingled heads form one unbroken awning of
green. Many rise straight as masts; some bend at beautiful angles,
seeming to intercross their long pale single limbs in a fantastic dance;
others curve like bows: there is one that undulates from foot to crest,
like a monster serpent poised upon its tail. She loves to look at that
one,--_joli pié-bois-là!_--talks to it as she goes by,--bids it
good-day.

Or, looking back as she ascends, she sees the huge blue dream of the
sea,--the eternal haunter, that ever becomes larger as she mounts the
road; and she talks to it: "_Mi lanmé ka gadé main!_" (There is the
great sea looking at me!) "_Mâché toujou deïé moin, lamnè!_" (Walk
after me, O Sea!)

Or she views the clouds of Pelée, spreading gray from the invisible
summit, to shadow against the sun; and she fears the rain, and she talks
to it: "_Pas mouillé moin, laplie-à! Quitté moin rivé avant mouillé
moin!_" (Do not wet me, O Rain! Let me get there before thou wettest
me!)

Sometimes a dog barks at her, menaces her bare limbs; and she talks to
the dog. "_Chien-a, pas mòdé moin, chien--anh! Moin pa fé ou arien,
chien, pou ou mòdé moin!_" (Do not bite me, O Dog! Never did I
anything to thee that thou shouldst bite me, O Dog! Do not bite me,
dear! Do not bite me, _doudoux!_)

Sometimes she meets a laden sister travelling the opposite way....
"_Coument ou yé, chè?_" she cries. (How art thou, dear?) And the other
makes answer, "_Toutt douce, chè,--et ou?_" (All sweetly, dear,--and
thou?) And each passes on without pausing: they have no time!

... It is perhaps the last human voice she will hear for many a mile.
After that only the whisper of the grasses--_graïe-gras,
graïe-gras!_--and the gossip of the canes--_chououa, chououa!_--and the
husky speech of the _pois-Angole, ka babillé conm yon vié
fenme_,--that babbles like an old woman;--and the murmur of the
_filao_-trees, like the murmur of the River of the Washerwomen.




XII


... Sundown approaches: the light has turned a rich yellow;--long black
shapes lie across the curving road, shadows of balisier and palm,
shadows of tamarind and Indian-reed, shadows of ceiba and giant-fern.
And the porteuses are coming down through the lights and darknesses of
the way horn far Grande Anse, to halt a moment in this little village.
They are going to sit down on the road-side here, before the house of
the baker; and there is his great black workman, Jean-Marie, looking for
them from the door-way, waiting to relieve them of their loads....
Jean-Marie is the strongest man in all the Champ-Flore: see what a
torso,--as he stands there naked to the waist!... His day's work is
done; but he likes to wait for the girls, though he is old now, and has
sons as tall as himself. It is a habit: some say that he had a daughter
once,--a porteuse like those coming, and used to wait for her thus at
that very door-way until one evening that she failed to appear, and
never returned till he carried her home in his arms dead,--striken by a
serpent in some mountain path where there was none to aid.... The roads
were not as good then as now.

... Here they come, the girls--yellow, red, black. See the flash of the
yellow feet where they touch the light! And what impossible tint the red
limbs take in the changing glow!... Finotte, Pauline, Médelle,--all
together, as usual,--with Ti-Clé trotting behind, very tired.... Never
mind, Ti-Clé!--you will outwalk your cousins when you are a few years
older,--pretty Ti-Clé.... Here come Cyrillia and Zabette, and Féfé
and Dodotte and Fevriette. And behind them are coming the two
_chabines_,--golden girls: the twin-sisters who sell silks and threads
and foulards; always together, always wearing robes and kerchiefs of
similar color,--so that you can never tell which is Lorrainie and which
Édoualise.

And all smile to see Jean-Marie waiting for them, and to hear his deep
kind voice calling, "_Coument ou yé chè? coument ou kallé?_"... (How
art thou, dear?--how goes it with thee?)

And they mostly make answer, "_Toutte douce, chè,--et ou?_" (All
sweetly, dear,--and thou?) But some, overweary, cry to him, "_Ah!
déchâgê moin vite, chè! moin lasse, lasse!_" (Unload me quickly,
dear; for I am very, very weary.) Then he takes off their burdens, and
fetches bread for them, and says foolish little things to make them
laugh. And they are pleased, and laugh, just like children, as they sit
right down on the road there to munch their dry bread.


... So often have I watched that scene!... Let me but close my eyes one
moment, and it will come back to me,--through all the thousand
miles,--over the graves of the days....

Again I see the mountain road in the yellow glow, banded with umbrages
of palm. Again I watch the light feet coming,--now in shadow, now in
sun,--soundlessly as falling leaves. Still I can hear the voices crying,
"_Ah! déchâgê moin vite, chè!--moin lasse!_"--and see the mighty
arms outreach to take the burdens away.


[Illustration: LES PORTEUSES
"_Again I see the mountain road in the yellow glow.
... Again I watch the light feet coming,--now in
shadow, now in sun,--soundless as falling leaves._"]


... Only, there is a change,--I know not what!... All vapory the road
is, and the fronds, and the comely coming of feet of the bearers, and
even this light of sunset,--sunset that is ever larger and nearer to us
than dawn, even as death than birth. And the weird way appeareth a way
whose dust is the dust of generations;--and the Shape that waits is
never Jean-Marie, but one darker and stronger;--and these are surely
voices of tired souls who cry to Thee, thou dear black Giver of the
perpetual rest, "_Ah! déchâgé moin vite, chè!--moin lasse!_"


[Illustration]




LA GRANDE ANSE


I


While, at the village of Morne Rouge, I was frequently impressed by the
singular beauty of young girls from the north-east coast--all porteuses,
who passed almost daily, on their way from Grande Anse to St. Pierre and
back again,--a total trip of thirty-five miles.... I knew they were from
Grande Anse, because the village baker, at whose shop they were wont to
make brief halts, told me a good deal about them: he knew each one by
name. Whenever a remarkably attractive girl appeared, and I would
inquire whence she came, the invariable reply (generally preceded by
that peculiarly intoned French "Ah!" signifying, "Why, you certainly
ought to know!") was "Grande Anse."... _Ah! c'est de Grande Anse, ça!_
And if any commonplace, uninteresting type showed itself, it would be
signalled as from somewhere else--Gros-Morne, Capote, Marigot,
perhaps,--but never from Grande Anse. The Grande Anse girls were
distinguishable by their clear yellow or brown skins, lithe light
figures, and a particular grace in their way of dressing. Their short
robes were always of bright and pleasing colors, perfectly contrasting
with the ripe fruit-tint of nude limbs and faces: I could discern a
partiality for white stuffs with apricot-yellow stripes, for plaidings
of blue and violet, and various patterns of pink and mauve. They had a
graceful way of walking under their trays, with hands clasped behind
their heads, and arms uplifted in the manner of caryatides. An artist
would have been wild with delight for the chance to sketch some of
them.... On the whole, they conveyed the impression that they belonged
to a particular race, very different from that of the chief city or its
environs.

"Are they all banana-colored at Grande Anse?" I asked,--"and all as
pretty as these?"

"I was never at Grande Anse," the little baker answered, "although I
have been forty years in Martinique; but I know there is a fine class of
young girls there: _il y a une belle jeunesse là, mon cher!_"

Then I wondered why the youth of Grande Anse should be any finer than
the youth of other places; and it seemed to me that the baker's own
statement of his never having been there might possibly furnish a clew.
... Out of the thirty-five thousand inhabitants of St. Pierre and its
suburbs, there are at least twenty thousand who never have been there,
and most probably never will be. Few dwellers of the west coast visit
the east coast: in fact, except among the white creoles, who represent
but a small percentage of the total population, there are few persons to
be met with who are familiar with all parts of their native island. It
is so mountainous, and travelling is so wearisome, that populations may
live and die in adjacent valleys without climbing the intervening ranges
to look at one another. Grande Anse is only about twenty miles from the
principal city; but it requires some considerable inducement to make the
journey on horseback; and only the professional carrier-girls,
plantation messengers, and colored people of peculiarly tough
constitution attempt it on foot. Except for the transportation of sugar
and rum, there is practically no communication by sea between the west
and the north-east coast--the sea is too dangerous--and thus the
populations on either side of the island are more or less isolated from
each other, besides being further subdivided and segregated by the
lesser mountain chains crossing their respective territories.... In view
of all these things I wondered whether a community so secluded might not
assume special characteristics within two hundred years--might not
develop into a population of some yellow, red, or brown type, according
to the predominant element of the original race-crossing.




II


I had long been anxious to see the city of the porteuses, when the
opportunity afforded itself to make the trip with a friend obliged to go
thither on some important business;--I do not think I should have ever
felt resigned to undertake it alone. With a level road the distance
might be covered very quickly, but over mountains the journey is slow
and wearisome in the perpetual tropic heat. Whether made on horseback or
in a carriage, it takes between four and five hours to go from St.
Pierre to Grande Anse, and it requires a longer time to return, as the
road is then nearly all uphill. The young porteuse travels almost as
rapidly; and the barefooted black postman, who carries the mails in a
square box at the end of a pole, is timed on leaving Morne Rouge at 4
A.M. to reach Ajoupa-Bouillon a little after six, and leaving
Ajoupa-Bouillon at half-past six to reach Grande Anse at half-past
eight, including many stoppages and delays on the way.

Going to Grande Anse from the chief city, one can either hire a horse or
carriage at St. Pierre, or ascend to Morne Rouge by the public
conveyance, and there procure a vehicle or animal, which latter is the
cheaper and easier plan. About a mile beyond Morne Rouge, where the old
Calebasse road enters the public highway, you reach the highest point of
the journey,--the top of the enormous ridge dividing the north-east from
the western coast, and cutting off the trade-winds from sultry St.
Pierre. By climbing the little hill, with a tall stone cross on its
summit, overlooking the Champ-Flore just here, you can perceive the sea
on both sides of the bland at once--_lapis lazuli_ blue. From this
elevation the road descends by a hundred windings and lessening
undulations to the eastern shore. It sinks between monies wooded to
their summits,--bridges a host of torrents and ravines,--passes gorges
from whence colossal trees tower far overhead, through heavy streaming
of lianas, to mingle their green crowns in magnificent gloom. Now and
then you hear a low long sweet sound like the deepest tone of a silver
flute,--a bird-call, the cry of the _siffleur-de-montagne_; then all is
stillness. You are not like'y to see a white face again for hours, but
at intervals a porteuse passes, walking very swiftly, or a field-hand
heavily laden; and these salute you either by speech or a lifting of the
hand to the head.... And it b very pleasant to hear the greetings
and to see the smiles of those who thus pass,--the fine brown girls
bearing trays, the dark laborers bowed under great burdens of
bamboo-grass,--_Bonjou', Missié!_ Then you should reply, if the speaker
be a woman and pretty, "Good-day, dear" (_bonjou', chè_), or,
"Good-day, my daughter" (_mafi_) even if she be old; while if the
passer-by be a man, your proper reply is, "Good-day, my son"
(_monfi_).... They are less often uttered now than in other years, these
kindly greetings, but they still form part of the good and true creole
manners.

The feathery beauty of the tree-ferns shadowing each brook, the grace of
bamboo and arborescent grasses, seem to decrease as the road
descends,--but the palms grow taller. Often the way skirts a precipice
dominating some marvellous valley prospect; again it is walled in by
high green banks or shrubby slopes which cut off the view; and always it
serpentines so that you cannot see more than a few hundred feet of the
white track before you. About the fifteenth kilometre a glorious
landscape opens to the right, reaching to the Atlantic;--the road still
winds very high; forests are billowing hundreds of yards below it, and
rising miles away up the slopes of mornes, beyond which, here and there,
loom strange shapes of mountain,--shading off from misty green to violet
and faintest gray. And through one grand opening in this multicolored
surging of hills and peaks you perceive the gold-yellow of cane-fields
touching the sky-colored sea. Grande Anse lies somewhere in that
direction.... At the eighteenth kilometre you pass a cluster of little
country cottages, a church, and one or two large buildings framed in
shade-trees--the hamlet of Ajoupa-Bouillon. Yet a little farther, and
you find you have left all the woods behind you. But the road continues
its bewildering curves around and between low monies covered with cane
or cocoa plants: it dips down very low, rises again, dips once
more;--and you perceive the soil is changing color; it is taking a red
tint like that of the land of the American cotton-belt. Then you pass
the Rivière Falaise (marked _Filasse_ upon old maps),--with its shallow
crystal torrent flowing through a very deep and rocky channel,--and the
Capote and other streams; and over the yellow rim of cane-hills the long
blue bar of the sea appears, edged landward with a dazzling fringe of
foam. The heights you have passed are no longer verdant, but purplish or
gray,--with Pelée's cloud-wrapped enormity overtopping all. A very
strong warm wind is blowing upon you--the trade-wind, always driving the
clouds west: this is the sunny side of Martinique, where gray days and
heavy rains are less frequent. Once or twice more the sea disappears and
reappears, always over canes; and then, after passing a bridge and
turning a last curve, the road suddenly drops down to the shore and into
the burgh of Grande Anse.




III


Leaving Morne Rouge at about eight in the morning, my friend and I
reached Grande Anse at half-past eleven. Everything had been arranged to
make us comfortable. I was delighted with the airy comer room,
commanding at once a view of the main street and of the sea--a very high
room, all open to the trade-winds--which had been prepared to receive
me. But after a long carriage ride in the heat of a tropical June day,
one always feels the necessity of a little physical exercise. I lingered
only a minute or two in the house, and went out to look at the little
town and its surroundings.

As seen from the high-road, the burgh of Grande Anse makes a long patch
of darkness between the green of the coast and the azure of the water:
it is almost wholly black and gray--suited to inspire an etching. High
slopes of cane and meadow rise behind it and on either side, undulating
up and away to purple and gray tips of mountain ranges. North and south,
to left and right, the land reaches out in two high promontories, mostly
green, and about a mile apart--the Pointe du Rochet and the Pointe de
Séguinau, or Croche-Mort, which latter name preserves the legend of an
insurgent slave, a man of color, shot dead upon the cliff. These
promontories form the semicircular bay of Grande Anse. All this Grande
Anse, or "Great Creek," valley is an immense basin of basalt; and narrow
as it is, no less than five streams water it, including the Rivière de
la Grande Anse.

There are only three short streets in the town. The principal, or Grande
Rue, is simply a continuation of the national road; there is a narrower
one below, which used to be called the Rue de la Paille, because the
cottages lining it were formerly all thatched with cane straw; and there
is one above it, edging the cane-fields that billow away to the meeting
of morne and sky. There is nothing of architectural interest, and all is
sombre,--walls and roofs and pavements. But after you pass through the
city and follow the southern route that ascends the Séguinau
promontory, you can obtain some lovely landscape views--a grand surging
of rounded mornes, with farther violet peaks, truncated or homed,
pushing up their heads in the horizon above the highest flutterings of
cane; and looking back above the town, you may see Pelée all
unclouded,--not as you see it from the other coast, but an enormous
ghostly silhouette, with steep sides and almost square summit, so pale as
to seem transparent. Then if you cross the promontory southward, the
same road will lead you into another very beautiful valley, watered by a
broad rocky torrent,--the Valley of the Rivière du Lorrain. This clear
stream rushes to the sea through a lofty opening in the hills; and
looking westward between them, you will be charmed by the exquisite
vista of green shapes piling and pushing up one behind another to reach
a high blue ridge which forms the background--a vision of tooth-shaped
and fantastical mountains,--part of the great central chain running
south and north through nearly the whole island. It is over those blue
summits that the wonderful road called _La Trace_ winds between primeval
forest walls.

But the more you become familiar with the face of the little town
itself, the more you are impressed by the strange swarthy tone it
preserves in all this splendid expanse of radiant tinting. There are
only two points of visible color in it,--the church and hospital, built
of stone, which have been painted yellow: as a mass in the landscape,
lying between the dead-gold of the cane-clad hills and the delicious
azure of the sea, it remains almost black under the prodigious blaze of
light. The foundations of volcanic rock, three or four feet high, on
which the frames of the wooden dwellings rest, are black; and the
sea-wind appears to have the power of blackening all timber-work here
through any coat of paint. Roofs and façades look as if they had been
long exposed to coal-smoke, although probably no one in Grande Anse ever
saw coal; and the pavements of pebbles and cement are of a deep
ash-color, full of micaceous scintillation, and so hard as to feel
disagreeable even to feet protected by good thick shoes. By-and-by you
notice walls of black stone, bridges of black stone, and perceive that
black forms an element of all the landscape about you. On the roads
leading from the town you note from time to time masses of jagged rock
or great bowlders protruding through the green of the slopes, and dark
as ink. These black surfaces also sparkle. The beds of all the
neighboring rivers are filled with dark gray stones; and many of these,
broken by those violent floods which dash rocks together,--deluging the
valleys, and strewing the soil of the bottom-lands (_fonds_) with dead
serpents,--display black cores. Bare crags projecting from the green
cliffs here and there are soot-colored, and the outlying rocks of the
coast offer a similar aspect. And the sand of the beach is funereally
black--looks almost like powdered charcoal; and as you walk over it,
sinking three or four inches every step, you are amazed by the multitude
and brilliancy of minute flashes in it, like a subtle silver
effervescence.

This extraordinary sand contains ninety per cent, of natural steel, and
efforts have been made to utilize it industrially. Some years ago a
company was formed, and a machine invented to separate the metal from
the pure sand,--an immense revolving magnet, which, being set in motion
under a sand shower, caught the ore upon it. When the covering thus
formed by the adhesion of the steel became of a certain thickness, the
simple interruption of an electric current precipitated the metal into
appropriate receptacles. Fine bars were made from this volcanic steel,
and excellent cutting tools manufactured from it: French metallurgists
pronounced the product of peculiar excellence, and nevertheless the
project of the company was abandoned. Political disorganization
consequent upon the establishment of universal suffrage frightened
capitalists who might have aided the undertaking under a better
condition of affairs; and the lack of large means, coupled with the cost
of freight to remote markets, ultimately baffled this creditable attempt
to found a native industry.

Sometimes after great storms bright brown sand is flung up from the
sea-depths; but the heavy black sand always reappears again to make the
universal color of the beach.




IV


Behind the roomy wooden house in which I occupied an apartment there was
a small garden-plot surrounded with a hedge strengthened by bamboo
fencing, and radiant with flowers of the _loseille-bois_--the creole
name for a sort of begonia, whose closed bud exactly resembles a pink
and white dainty bivalve shell, and whose open blossom imitates the form
of a butterfly. Here and there, on the grass, were nets drying, and
_nasses_--curious fish-traps made of split bamboos interwoven and held
in place with _mibi_ stalks (the mibi is a liana heavy and tough as
copper wire); and immediately behind the garden hedge appeared the white
flashing of the surf. The most vivid recollection connected with my trip
to Grande Anse is that of the first time that I went to the end of that
garden, opened the little bamboo gate, and found myself overlooking the
beach--an immense breadth of soot-black sand, with pale green patches
and stripings here and there upon it--refuse of cane thatch, decomposing
rubbish spread out by old tides. The one solitary boat owned in the
community lay there before me, high and dry. It was the hot period of
the afternoon; the town slept; there was no living creature in sight;
and the booming of the surf drowned all other sounds; the scent of the
warm strong sea-wind annihilated all other odors. Then, very suddenly,
there came to me a sensation absolutely weird, while watching the
strange wild sea roaring over its beach of black sand,--the sensation of
seeing something unreal, looking at something that had no more tangible
existence than a memory! Whether suggested by the first white vision of
the surf over the bamboo hedge,--or by those old green tide-lines on the
desolation of the black beach,--or by some tone of the speaking of the
sea,--or something indefinable in the living touch of the wind,--or by
all of these, I cannot say;--but slowly there became defined within me
the thought of having beheld just such a coast very long ago, I could
not tell where,--in those child-years of which the recollections
gradually become indistinguishable from dreams.


Soon as darkness comes upon Grande Anse the face of the clock in the
church-tower is always lighted: you see it suddenly burst into yellow
glow above the roofs and the cocoa-palms,--just like a pharos. In my
room I could not keep the candle lighted because of the sea-wind; but it
never occurred to me to close the shutters of the great broad
windows,--sashless, of course, like all the glassless windows of
Martinique;--the breeze was too delicious. It seemed full of something
vitalizing that made one's blood warmer, and rendered one full of
contentment--full of eagerness to believe life all sweetness. Likewise,
I found it soporific--this pure, dry, warm wind. And I thought there
could be no greater delight in existence than to lie down at night, with
all the windows open,--and the Cross of the South visible from my
pillow,--and the sea-wind pouring over the bed,--and the tumultuous
whispering and muttering of the surf in one's ears,--dream of that
strange sapphire sea white-bursting over its beach of black sand.




V


Considering that Grande Anse lies almost opposite to St. Pierre, at a
distance of less than twenty miles even by the complicated windings of
the national road, the differences existing in the natural conditions of
both places are remarkable enough. Nobody in St. Pierre sees the sun
rise, because the mountains immediately behind the city continue to
shadow its roofs long after the eastern coast is deluged with light and
heat. At Grande Anse, on the other hand, those tremendous sunsets which
delight west coast dwellers are not visible at all; and during the
briefer West Indian days Grande Anse is all wrapped in darkness as early
as half-past four,--or nearly an hour before the orange light has ceased
to flare up the streets of St. Pierre from the sea;--since the great
mountain range topped by Pelée cuts off all the slanting light from the
east valleys. And early as folks rise in St. Pierre, they rise still
earlier at Grande Anse--before the sun emerges from the rim of the
Atlantic: about half-past four, doors are being opened and coffee is
ready. At St. Pierre one can enjoy a sea bath till seven or half-past
seven o'clock, even during the time of the sun's earliest rising,
because the shadow of the mornes still reaches out upon the bay;--but
bathers leave the black beach of Grande Anse by six o'clock; for once
the sun's face is up, the light, levelled straight at the eyes, becomes
blinding. Again, at St. Pierre it rains almost every twenty-four hours
for a brief while, during at least the greater part of the year; at
Grande Anse it rains more moderately and less often. The atmosphere at
St. Pierre is always more or less impregnated with vapor, and usually an
enervating heat prevails, which makes exertion unpleasant; at Grande
Anse the warm wind keeps the skin comparatively dry, in spite of
considerable exercise. It is quite rare to see a heavy surf at St.
Pierre, but it is much rarer not to see it at Grande Anse.... A curious
fact concerning custom is that few white creoles care to bathe in front
of the town, notwithstanding the superb beach and magnificent surf, both
so inviting to one accustomed to the deep still water and rough pebbly
shore of St. Pierre. The creoles really prefer their rivers as
bathing-places; and when willing to take a sea bath, they will walk up
and down hill for kilometres in order to reach some river mouth, so as
to wash off in the fresh-water afterwards. They say that the effect of
sea-salt upon the skin gives _boutons-chauds_ (what we call "prickly
heat"). Friends took me all the way to the mouth of the Lorrain one
morning that I might have the experience of such a double bath; but
after leaving the tepid sea, I must confess the plunge into the river
was something terrible--an icy shock which cured me of all further
desire for river baths. My willingness to let the sea-water dry upon me
was regarded as an eccentricity.




VI


It may be said that on all this coast the ocean, perpetually moved by
the blowing of the trade-winds, never rests--never hushes its roar. Even
in the streets of Grande Anse, one must in breezy weather lift one's
voice above the natural pitch to be heard; and then the breakers come in
lines more than a mile long, between the Pointe du Rochet and the Pointe
de Séguinau,--every unfurling a thunder-clap. There is no travelling by
sea. All large vessels keep well away from the dangerous coast. There is
scarcely any fishing; and although the sea is thick with fish, fresh
fish at Grande Anse is a rare luxury. Communication with St. Pierre is
chiefly by way of the national road, winding over mountain ridges two
thousand feet high; and the larger portion of merchandise is transported
from the chief city on the heads of young women. The steepness of the
route soon kills draught-horses and ruins the toughest mules. At one
time the managers of a large estate at Grande Anse attempted the
experiment of sending their sugar to St. Pierre in iron carts, drawn by
five mules; but the animals could not endure the work. Cocoa can be
carried to St. Pierre by the porteuses, but sugar and rum must go by
sea, or not at all; and the risks and difficulties of shipping these
seriously affect the prosperity of all the north and north-east coast.
Planters have actually been ruined by inability to send their products
to market during a protracted spell of rough weather. A railroad has
been proposed and planned: in a more prosperous era it might be
constructed, with the result of greatly developing all the Atlantic side
of the island, and converting obscure villages into thriving towns.

Sugar is very difficult to ship; rum and tafia can be handled with less
risk. It is nothing less than exciting to watch a shipment of tafia from
Grande Anse to St. Pierre.

A little vessel approaches the coast with extreme caution, and anchors
in the bay some hundred yards beyond the breakers. She is what they call
a _pirogue_ here, but not at all what is called a pirogue in the United
States: she has a long narrow hull, two masts, no deck; she has usually
a crew of five, and can carry thirty barrels of tafia. One of the
pirogue men puts a great shell to his lips and sounds a call, very
mellow and deep, that can be heard over the roar of the waves far up
among the hills. The shell is one of those great spiral shells, weighing
seven or eight pounds--rolled like a scroll, fluted and scalloped about
the edges, and pink-pearled inside,--such as are sold in America for
mantel-piece ornaments,--the shell of a _lambi._ Here you can often see
the lambi crawling about with its nacreous house upon its back: an
enormous sea-snail with a yellowish back and rose-colored belly, with
big horns and eyes in the tip of each horn--very pretty eyes, having a
golden iris. This creature is a common article of food; but its thick
white flesh is almost compact as cartilage, and must be pounded before
being cooked.[5]

At the sound of the blowing of the lambi-shell, wagons descend to the
beach, accompanied by young colored men running beside the mules. Each
wagon discharges a certain number of barrels of tafia, and
simultaneously the young men strip. They are slight, well built, and
generally well muscled. Each man takes a barrel of tafia, pushes it
before him into the surf, and then begins to swim to the
pirogue,--impelling the barrel before him. I have never seen a swimmer
attempt to convey more than one barrel at a time; but I am told there
are experts who manage as many as three barrels together,--pushing them
forward in line, with the head of one against the bottom of the next. It
really requires much dexterity and practice to handle even one barrel or
cask. As the swimmer advances he keeps close as possible to his
charge,--so as to be able to push it forward with all his force against
each breaker in succession,--making it dive through. If it once glide
well out of his reach while he is in the breakers, it becomes an enemy,
and he must take care to keep out of its way,--for if a wave throws it
at him, or rolls it over him, he may be seriously injured; but the
expert seldom abandons a barrel. Under the most favorable conditions,
man and barrel will both disappear a score of times before the clear
swells are reached, after which the rest of the journey is not
difficult. Men lower ropes from the pirogue, the swimmer passes them
under his barrel, and it is hoisted aboard.

... Wonderful surf-swimmers these men are;--they will go far out for
mere sport in the roughest kind of a sea, when the waves, abnormally
swollen by the peculiar conformation of the bay, come rolling in thirty
and forty feet high. Sometimes, with the swift impulse of ascending a
swell, the swimmer seems suspended in air as it passes beneath him,
before he plunges into the trough beyond. The best swimmer is a young
capre who cannot weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds. Few of the
Grande Anse men are heavily built; they do not compare for stature and
thew with those longshoremen at St. Pierre who can be seen any busy
afternoon on the landing, lifting heavy barrels at almost the full reach
of their swarthy arms.

... There is but one boat owned in the whole parish of Grande Anse,--a
fact due to the continual roughness of the sea. It has a little mast and
sail, and can hold only three men. When the water is somewhat less angry
than usual, a colored crew take it out for a fishing expedition. There
is always much interest in this event; a crowd gathers on the beach; and
the professional swimmers help to bring the little craft beyond the
breakers. When the boat returns after a disappearance of several hours,
everybody runs down from the village to meet it. Young colored women
twist their robes up about their hips, and wade out to welcome it: there
is a display of limbs of all colors on such occasions, which is not
without grace, that untaught grace which tempts an artistic pencil.
Every bonne and every house-keeper struggles for the first chance to buy
the fish;--young girls and children dance in the water for delight, all
screaming, "_Rhalé bois-canot!_"... Then as the boat is pulled through
the surf and hauled up on the sand, the pushing and screaming and crying
become irritating and deafening; the fishermen lose patience and say
terrible things. But nobody heeds them in the general clamoring and
haggling and furious bidding for the _pouèsson-ououge_, the _dorades_,
the _volants_ (beautiful purple-backed flying-fish with silver bellies,
and fins all transparent, like the wings of dragon-flies). There is
great bargaining even for a young shark,--which makes very nice eating
cooked after the creole fashion. So seldom can the fishermen venture out
that each trip makes a memorable event for the village.

The St. Pierre fishermen very seldom approach the bay, but they do much
fishing a few miles beyond it, almost in front of the Pointe du Rochet
and the Roche à Bourgaut. There the best flying-fish are caught,--and
besides edible creatures, many queer things are often brought up by the
nets: monstrosities such as the _coffre_-fish, shaped almost like a box,
of which the lid is represented by an extraordinary conformation of the
jaws;--and the _barrique-de-vin_ ("wine cask"), with round boneless
body, secreting in a curious vesicle a liquor precisely resembling wine
lees;--and the "needle-fish" (_aiguille de mer_), less thick than a
Faber lead-pencil, but more than twice as long;--and huge cuttle-fish
and prodigious eels. One conger secured off this coast measured over
twenty feet in length, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds--a
veritable sea-serpent.... But even the fresh-water inhabitants of Grande
Anse are amazing. I have seen crawfish by actual measurement fifty
centimetres long, but these were not considered remarkable. Many are
said to much exceed two feet from the tail to the tip of the claws and
horns. They are of an iron-black color, and have formidable pincers with
serrated edges and tip-points inwardly converging, which cannot crush
like the weapons of a lobster, but which will cut the flesh and make a
small ugly wound. At first sight one not familiar with the crawfish of
these regions can hardly believe he is not viewing some variety of
gigantic lobster instead of the common fresh-water crawfish of the east
coast. When the head, tail, legs, and cuirass have all been removed,
after boiling, the curved trunk has still the size and weight of a large
pork sausage.

These creatures are trapped by lantern-light. Pieces of manioc root tied
fast to large bowlders sunk in the river are the only bait;--the
crawfish will flock to eat it upon any dark night, and then they are
caught with scoop-nets and dropped into covered baskets.


[Footnote 5: _Y batt li conm lambi_--"he beat him like a lambi"--is an
expression that may often be heard in a creole court from witnesses
testifying in a case of assault and battery. One must have seen a lambi
pounded to appreciate the terrible picturesqueness of the phrase.]




VII


One whose ideas of the people of Grande Anse had been formed only by
observing the young porteuses of the region on their way to the other
side of the island, might expect on reaching this little town to find
its population yellow as that of a Chinese city. But the dominant hue is
much darker, although the mixed element is everywhere visible; and I was
at first surprised by the scarcity of those clear bright skins I
supposed to be so numerous. Some pretty children--notably a pair of
twin-sisters, and perhaps a dozen school-girls from eight to ten years
of age--displayed the same characteristics I have noted in the adult
porteuses of Grande Anse; but within the town itself this brighter
element is in the minority. The predominating race element of the whole
commune is certainly colored (Grande Anse is even memorable because of
the revolt of its _hommes de couleur_ some fifty years ago);--but the
colored population is not concentrated in the town; it belongs rather to
the valleys and the heights surrounding the _chef-lieu._ Most of the
porteuses are country girls, and I found that even those living in the
village are seldom visible on the streets except when departing upon a
trip or returning from one. An artist wishing to study the type might,
however, pass a day at the bridge of the Rivière Falaise to advantage,
as all the carrier-girls pass it at certain hours of the morning and
evening.

But the best possible occasion on which to observe what my friend the
baker called _la belle jeunesse_, is a confirmation day,--when the
bishop drives to Grande Anse over the mountains, and all the population
turns out in holiday garb, and the bells are tapped like tam-tams, and
triumphal arches--most awry to behold!--span the road-way, bearing in
clumsiest lettering the welcome. _Vive Monseigneur._ On that event, the
long procession of young girls to be confirmed--all in white robes,
white veils, and white satin slippers--is a numerical surprise. It is a
moral surprise also,--to the stranger at least; for it reveals the
struggle of a poverty extraordinary with the self-imposed obligations of
a costly ceremonialism.


[Illustration: CATHEDRAL, FORT-DE-FRANCE
_Services begin at daybreak. All day long the ringing
bells mark the joys and sorrows of creole and white
alike._]


No white children ever appear in these processions: there are not half a
dozen white families in the whole urban population of about seven
thousand souls; and those send their sons and daughters to St. Pierre or
Morne Rouge for their religious training and education. But many of the
colored children look very charming in their costume of
confirmation;--you could not easily recognize one of them as the same
little bonne who brings your morning cup of coffee, or another as the
daughter of a plantation _commandeur_ (overseer's assistant),--a brown
slip of a girl who will probably never wear shoes again. And many of
those white shoes and white veils have been obtained only by the hardest
physical labor and self-denial of poor parents and relatives: fathers,
brothers, and mothers working with cutlass and hoe in the snake-swarming
cane-fields;--sisters walking bare-footed every day to St. Pierre and
back to earn a few francs a month.

... While watching such a procession it seemed to me that I could
discern in the features and figures of the young confirmants something
of a prevailing type and tint, and I asked an old planter beside me if
he thought my impression correct.

"Partly," he answered; "there is certainly a tendency towards an
attractive physical type here, but the tendency itself is less stable
than you imagine; it has been changed during the last twenty years
within my own recollection. In different parts of the island particular
types appear and disappear with a generation. There is a sort of
race-fermentation going on, which gives no fixed result of a positive
sort for any great length of time. It is true that certain elements
continue to dominate in certain communes, but the particular
characteristics come and vanish in the most mysterious way. As to color,
I doubt if any correct classification can be made, especially by a
stranger. Your eyes give you general ideas about a red type, a yellow
type, a brown type; but to the more experienced eyes of a creole,
accustomed to live in the country districts, every individual of mixed
race appears to have a particular color of his own. Take, for instance,
the so-called capre type, which furnishes the finest physical examples
of all,--you, a stranger, are at once impressed by the general red tint
of the variety; but you do not notice the differences of that tint in
different persons, which are more difficult to observe than
shade-differences of yellow or brown. Now, to me, every capre or
capresse has an individual color; and I do not believe that in all
Martinique there are two half-breeds--not having had the same father and
mother--in whom the tint is precisely the same."




VIII


I thought Grande Anse the most sleepy place I had ever visited. I
suspect it is one of the sleepiest in the whole world. The wind, which
tans even a creole of St. Pierre to an unnatural brown within
forty-eight hours of his sojourn in the village, has also a peculiarly
somnolent effect. The moment one has nothing particular to do, and
ventures to sit down idly with the breeze in one's face, slumber comes;
and everybody who can spare the time takes a long nap in the afternoon,
and little naps from hour to hour. For all that, the heat of the east
coast is not enervating, like that of St. Pierre; one can take a great
deal of exercise in the sun without feeling much the worse. Hunting
excursions, river fishing parties, surf-bathing, and visits to
neighboring plantations are the only amusements; but these are enough to
make existence very pleasant at Grande Anse. The most interesting of my
own experiences were those of a day passed by invitation at one of the
old colonial estates on the bills near the village.

It is not easy to describe the charm of a creole interior, whether in
the city or the country. The cool shadowy court, with its wonderful
plants and fountain of sparkling mountain water, or the lawn, with its
ancestral trees,--the delicious welcome of the host, whose fraternal
easy manner immediately makes you feel at home,--the coming of the
children to greet you, each holding up a velvety brown cheek to be
kissed, after the old-time custom,--the romance of the unconventional
chat, over a cool drink, under the palms and the ceibas,--the visible
earnestness of all to please the guest, to inwrap him in a very
atmosphere of quiet happiness,--combine to make a memory which you will
never forget. And maybe you enjoy all this upon some exquisite site,
some volcanic summit, overlooking slopes of a hundred greens,--mountains
far winding in blue and pearly shadowing,--rivers singing seaward behind
curtains of arborescent reeds and bamboos,--and, perhaps. Pelée, in the
horizon, dreaming violet dreams under her foulard of vapors,--and,
encircling all, the still sweep of the ocean's azure bending to the
verge of day.

... My host showed or explained to me all that he thought might interest
a stranger. He had brought to me a nest of the _carouge_, a bird which
suspends its home, hammock-fashion, under the leaves of the
banana-tree;--showed me a little fer-de-lance, freshly killed by one of
his field hands; and a field lizard (_zanoli tè_ in creole), not green
like the lizards which haunt the roofs of St. Pierre, but of a beautiful
brown bronze, with shifting tints; and eggs of the _zanoli_, little soft
oval things from which the young lizards will perhaps run out alive as
fast as you open the shells; and the _matoutou-falaise_, or spider of
the cliffs, of two varieties, red or almost black when adult, and bluish
silvery tint when young,--less in size than the tarantula, but equally
hairy and venomous; and the _crabe-c'est-ma-faute_ (the
"Through-my-fault crab"), having one very small and one very large claw,
which latter it carries folded up against its body, so as to have
suggested the idea of a penitent striking his bosom, and uttering the
sacramental words of the Catholic confession, "Through my fault, through
my fault, through my most grievous fault."... Indeed I cannot recollect
one-half of the queer birds, queer insects, queer reptiles, and queer
plants to which my attention was called. But speaking of plants, I was
impressed by the profusion of the _zhèbe-moin-misé_--a little
sensitive-plant I had rarely observed on the west coast. On the
hill-sides of Grande Anse it prevails to such an extent as to give
certain slopes its own peculiar greenish-brown color. It has
many-branching leaves, only one inch and a half to two inches long, but
which recall the form of certain common ferns; these lie almost flat
upon the ground. They fold together upward from the central stem at the
least touch, and the plant thus makes itself almost imperceptible;--it
seems to live so, that you fed guilty of murder if you break off a leaf.
It is called _Zhèbe-moin-misé_, or "Plant-did-I-amuse-myself," because
it is supposed to tell naughty little children who play truant, or who
delay much longer than is necessary in delivering a message, whether
they deserve a whipping or not. The guilty child touches the plant, and
asks, "_Ess moin amisé morn?_" (Did I amuse myself?); and if the plant
instantly shuts its leaves up, that means, "Yes, you did!" Of course the
leaves invariably close; but I suspect they invariably tell the truth,
for all colored children, in Grande Anse at least, are much more
inclined to play than work.

The kind old planter likewise conducted me over the estate. He took me
through the sugar-mill, and showed me, among other more recent
inventions, some machinery devised nearly two centuries ago by the
ingenious and terrible Père Labat, and still quite serviceable, in
spite of all modern improvements in sugar-making;--took me through the
_rhummerie_, or distillery, and made me taste some colorless rum which
had the aroma and something of the taste of the most delicate gin;--and
finally took me into the _cases-à-vent_, or "wind-houses,"--built as
places of refuge during hurricanes. Hurricanes are rare, and more rare
in this century by far than during the previous one; but this part of
the island is particularly exposed to such visitations, and almost every
old plantation used to have one or two cases-à-vent. They were always
built in a hollow, either natural or artificial, below the
land-level,--with walls of rock several feet thick, and very strong
doors, but no windows. My host told me about the experiences of his
family in some case-à-vent during a hurricane which he recollected. It
was found necessary to secure the door within by means of strong ropes;
and the mere task of holding it taxed the strength of a dozen powerful
men: it would bulge in under the pressure of the awful wind,--swelling
like the side of a barrel; and had not its planks been made of a wood
tough as hickory, they would have been blown into splinters.

I had long desired to examine a plantation drum, and see it played upon
under conditions more favorable than the excitement of a holiday
_caleinda_ in the villages, where the amusement is too often terminated
by a _voum_ (general row) or a _goumage_ (a serious fight);--and when I
mentioned this wish to the planter he at once sent word to his
commandeur, the best drummer in the settlement, to come up to the house
and bring his instrument with him. I was thus enabled to make the
observations necessary, and also to take an instantaneous photograph of
the drummer in the very act of playing.

The old African dances, the _caleinda_ and the _bélé_ (which latter is
accompanied by chanted improvisation) are danced on Sundays to the sound
of the drum on almost every plantation in the island. The drum, indeed,
is an instrument to which the country-folk are so much attached that
they swear by it,--_Tamboul_ being the oath uttered upon all ordinary
occasions of surprise or vexation. But the instrument is quite as often
called _ka_, because made out of a quarter-barrel, or _quart_,--in the
patois "ka." Both ends of the barrel having been removed, a wet hide,
well wrapped about a couple of hoops, is driven on, and in drying the
stretched skin obtains still further tension. The other end of the ka is
always left open. Across the face of the skin a string is tightly
stretched, to which are attached, at intervals of about an inch apart,
very short thin fragments of bamboo or cut feather stems. These lend a
certain vibration to the tones.

In the time of Père Labat the negro drums had a somewhat different
form. There were then two kinds of drums--a big tamtam and a little one,
which used to be played together. Both consisted of skins tightly
stretched over one end of a wooden cylinder, or a section of hollow tree
trunk. The larger was from three to four feet long with a diameter of
fifteen to sixteen inches; the smaller, called _baboula_,[6] was of the
same length, but only eight or nine inches in diameter. Père Labat also
speaks, in his West Indian travels, of another musical instrument, very
popular among the Martinique slaves of his time--"a sort of guitar" made
out of a half-calabash or _couï_, covered with some kind of skin. It
had four strings of silk or catgut, and a very long neck. The tradition
of this African instrument is said to survive in the modern "_banza_"
(_banza nèg Guinée_).

The skilful player (_bel tambouyé_) straddles his ka stripped to the
waist, and plays upon it with the fingertips of both hands
simultaneously,--taking care that the vibrating string occupies a
horizontal position. Occasionally the heel of the naked foot is pressed
lightly or vigorously against the skin, so as to produce changes of
tone. This is called "giving heel" to the drum--_baill y talon._
Meanwhile a boy keeps striking the drum at the uncovered end with a
stick, so as to produce a dry clattering accompaniment. The sound
of the drum itself, well played, has a wild power that makes and
masters all the excitement of the dance--a complicated double roll,
with a peculiar billowy rising and falling. The creole onomatopes,
_b'lip-b'lib-b'lib-b'lip_, do not fully render the roll;--for each
_b'lip_ or _b'lib_ stands really for a series of sounds too rapidly
filliped out to be imitated by articulate speech. The tapping of a ka
can be heard at surprising distances; and experienced players often play
for hours at a time without exhibiting wearisomeness, or in the least
diminishing the volume of sound produced.

It seems there are many ways of playing--different measures familiar to
all these colored people, but not easily distinguished by anybody else;
and there are great matches sometimes between celebrated _tambouyé_ The
same _commandè_ whose portrait I took while playing told me that he
once figured in a contest of this kind, his rival being a drummer from
the neighboring burgh of Marigot.... "_Aie, aïe, yaïe! mon chè!--y
fai tambou-à pàlé!_" said the commandè, describing the execution of
his antagonist;--"my dear, he just made that drum talk! I thought I was
going to be beaten for sure; I was trembling all the time--_aïe,
yaïe-yaïe!_ Then he got off that ka. I mounted it; I thought a moment;
then I struck up the 'River-of-the-Lizard,'--_mais, mon chè, yon
larivie-Léza toutt pi!_--such a River-of-the-Lizard, ah! just perfectly
pure! I gave heel to that ka; I worried that ka;--I made it mad;--I made
it crazy;--I made it talk;--I won!"

During some dances a sort of chant accompanies the music--a long
sonorous cry, uttered at intervals of seven or eight seconds, which
perfectly times a particular measure in the drum roll. It may be the
burden of a song, or a mere improvisation:


"_Oh! yoïe-yoïe!"
(Drum roll.)
"Oh! missié-à!"
(Drum roll.)
"Y bel tambouyé!"
(Drum roll.)
"Aie, ya, yaie!"
(Drum roll.)
"Joli tambouyé!"
(Drum roll.)
"Chauffé tambou-à!"
(Drum roll.)
"Géné tambou-à!"
(Drum roll.)
"Crazé tambou-à!_" etc., etc.


... The crieur, or chanter, is also the leader of the dance. The
caleinda is danced by men only, all stripped to the waist, and twirling
heavy sticks in a mock fight. Sometimes, however--especially at the
great village gatherings, when the blood becomes overheated by
tafia--the mock fight may become a real one; and then even cutlasses are
brought into play.

But in the old days, those improvisations which gave one form of dance
its name, _bélé_ (from the French _bel air_), were often remarkable
rhymeless poems, uttered with natural simple emotion, and full of
picturesque imagery. I cite part of one, taken down from the dictation
of a common field-hand near Fort-de-France. I offer a few lines of the
creole first, to indicate the form of the improvisation. There is a
dancing pause at the end of each line during the performance:


Toutt fois lanmou vini lacase moin
Pou pàlé moin, moin ka reponne:
"Khé moin deja placé,"
Moin ka crié, "Sécou! les voisinages!"
Moin ka crié, "Sécou! la gàde royale!"
Moin ka crié, "Sécou! la gendàmerie!
Lanmou pouend yon poignâ pou poignadé moin!"


The best part of the composition, which is quite long, might be
rendered as follows:


Each time that Love comes to my cabin
To speak to me of love I make answer,
"My heart is already placed,"
I cry out, "Help, neighbors! help!"
I cry out, "Help, _la Garde Royale!_"
I cry out, "Help, help, gendarmes!
Love takes a poniard to stab me;
How can Love have a heart so hard
To thus rob me of my health!"
When the officer of police comes to me
To hear me tell him the truth,
To have him arrest my Love;--
When I see the Garde Royale
Coming to arrest my sweet heart,
I fall down at the feet of the Garde Royale,--
I pray for mercy and forgiveness.
"Arrest me instead, but let my dear Love go!"
How, alas! with this tender heart of mine,
Can I bear to see such an arrest made!
No, no! I would rather die!
Dost not remember, when our pillows lay close together,
How we told each to the other all that our hearts thought?
... etc.


The stars were all out when I bid my host good-bye;--he sent his black
servant along with me to carry a lantern and keep a sharp watch for
snakes along the mountain road.


[Footnote 6: Moreau de Saint-Méry writes, describing the drums of the
negroes of Saint Domingue: "Le plus court de ces tambours est nommé
_Bamboula_, attendu qu'il est formé quelquefois d'un très-gros
bambou."--"Description de la partie française de Saint Domingue," vol.
I., p. 44.]



[Illustration: HOME FROM MARKET, ST. PIERRE
_The notion of speed and scarcity of time has not reached
these dreamy, ease-loving islands._]




IX


... Assuredly the city of St. Pierre never could have seemed more
quaintly beautiful than as I saw it on the evening of my return, while
the shadows were reaching their longest, and sea and sky were turning
lilac. Palm-heads were trembling and masts swaying slowly against an
enormous orange sunset,--yet the beauty of the sight did not touch me!
The deep level and luminous flood of the bay seemed to me for the first
time a dead water;--I found myself wondering whether it could form a
part of that living tide by which I had been dwelling, full of
foam-lightnings and perpetual thunder. I wondered whether the air about
me--heavy and hot and full of faint smells--could ever have been touched
by the vast pure sweet breath of the wind from the sunrising. And I
became conscious of a profound, unreasoning, absurd regret for the
somnolent little black village of that bare east coast,--where there are
no woods, no ships, no sunset,... only the ocean roaring forever over
its beach of black sand.


[Illustration]




UN REVENANT


I


He who first gave to Martinique its poetical name, _Le Pays des
Revenants_, thought of his wonderful island only as "The Country of
Comers-back," where Native's unspeakable spell bewitches wandering souls
like the caress of a Circe,--never as the Land of Ghosts. Yet either
translation of the name holds equal truth: a land of ghosts it is, this
marvellous Martinique! Almost every plantation has its familiar
spirits,--its phantoms: some may be unknown beyond the particular
district in which fancy first gave them being;--but some belong to
popular song and story,--to the imaginative life of the whole people.
Almost every promontory and peak, every village and valley along the
coast, has its special folk-lore, its particular tradition. The legend
of Thomasseau of Perinnelle, whose body was taken out of the coffin and
carried away by the devil through a certain window of the
plantation-house, which cannot be closed up by human power;--the
Demarche legend of the spectral horseman who rides up the hill on bright
hot days to seek a friend buried more than a hundred years ago;--the
legend of the _Habitation Dillon_, whose proprietor was one night
mysteriously summoned from a banquet to disappear forever;--the legend
of l'Abbé Piot, who cursed the sea with the curse of perpetual
unrest;--the legend of Aimée Derivry of Robert, captured by Barbary
pirates, and sold to become a Sultana-Validé--(she never existed,
though you can find an alleged portrait in M. Sidney Darney's history of
Martinique): these and many similar tales might be told to you even on a
journey from St. Pierre to Fort-de-France, or from Lamentin to La
Trinité, according as a rising of some peak into view, or the sudden
opening of an before the vessel's approach, recalls them to a creole
companion.

And new legends are even now being made; for in this remote colony, to
which white immigration has long ceased,--a country so mountainous that
people are born and buried in the same valley without ever seeing towns
but a few hours' journey beyond their native hills, and that distinct
racial types are forming within three leagues of each other,--the memory
of an event or of a name which has had influence enough to send one echo
through all the forty-nine miles of peaks and craters is apt to create
legend within a single generation. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, is
popular imagination more oddly naïve and superstitious; nowhere are
facts more readily exaggerated or distorted into unrecognizability; and
the forms of any legend thus originated become furthermore specialized
in each separate locality where it obtains a habitat. On tracing back
such a legend or tradition to its primal source, one feels amazed at the
variety of the metamorphoses which the simplest fact may rapidly assume
in the childish fancy of this people.

I was first incited to make an effort in this direction by hearing the
remarkable story of "Missié Bon." No legendary expression is more
wide-spread throughout the country than _temps coudvent Missié Bon_ (in
the time of the big wind of Monsieur Bon). Whenever a hurricane
threatens, you will hear colored folks expressing the hope that it may
not be like the _coudvent Missié Bon._ And some years ago, in all the
creole police-courts, old colored witnesses who could not tell their age
would invariably try to give the magistrate some idea of it by referring
to the never-to-be-forgotten _temps coudvent Missié Bon._

... "_Temps coudvent Missié Bon, moin té ka tété encò_" (I was a
child at the breast in the time of the big wind of Missié Bon); or
"_Temps coudvent Missié Bon, moin té toutt piti manmaille,--moin ka
souvini y pouend caïe manman moin pòté allé._" (I was a very, very
little child in the time of the big wind of Missié Bon,--but I remember
it blew mamma's cabin away.) The magistrates of those days knew the
exact date of the _coudvent._

But all I could learn about Missié Bon among the country-folk was this:
Missié Bon used to be a great slave-owner and a cruel master. He was a
very wicked man. And he treated his slaves so terribly that at last the
Good-God (_Bon-Dié_) one day sent a great wind which blew away Missié
Bon and Missié Bon's house and everybody in it, so that nothing was
ever heard of them again.


It was not without considerable research that I succeeded at last in
finding some one able to give me the true facts in the case of Monsieur
Bon. My informant was a charming old gentleman, who represents a New
York company in the city of St. Pierre, and who takes more interest in
the history of his native island than creoles usually do. He laughed at
the legend I had found, but informed me that I could trace it, with
slight variations, through nearly every canton of Martinique.

"And now," he continued, "I can tell you the real history of 'Missié
Bon,'--for he was an old friend of my grandfather; and my grandfather
related it to me.

"It may have been in 1809--I can give you the exact date by reference to
some old papers if necessary--Monsieur Bon was Collector of Customs at
St. Pierre: and my grandfather was doing business in the Grande Rue. A
certain captain, whose vessel had been consigned to my grandfather,
invited him and the collector to breakfast in his cabin. My grandfather
was so busy he could not accept the invitation;--but Monsieur Bon went
with the captain on board the bark."

... "It was a morning like this; the sea was just as blue and the sky as
clear. All of a sudden, while they were at breakfast, the sea began to
break heavily without a wind, and clouds came up, with every sign of a
hurricane. The captain was obliged to sacrifice his anchor; there was no
time to land his guest: he hoisted a little jib and top-gallant, and
made for open water, taking Monsieur Bon with him. Then the hurricane
came; and from that day to this nothing has ever been heard of the bark
nor of the captain nor of Monsieur Bon."[7]

"But did Monsieur Bon ever do anything to deserve the reputation he has
left among the people?" I asked.

"Ah! le pauvre vieux corps!... A kind old soul who never uttered a harsh
word to human being;--timid,--good-natured,--old-fashioned even for
those old-fashioned days.... Never had a slave in his life!"


[Footnote 7: What is known in the West Indies as a hurricane is happily
rare; it blows with the force of a cyclone, but not always circularly;
it may come from one direction, and strengthen gradually for days until
its highest velocity and destructive force are reached. One in the time
of Père Labat blew away the walls of a fort;--that of 1780 destroyed
the lives of twenty-two thousand people in four islands: Martinique,
Saint Lucia, St. Vincent, and Barbadoes.

Before the approach of such a visitation animals manifest the same signs
of terror they display prior to an earthquake. Cattle assemble together,
stamp, and roar; sea-birds fly to the interior; fowl seek the nearest
crevice they can hide in. Then, while the sky is yet dear, begins the
breaking of the sea; then darkness comes, and after it the wind.]




II


The legend of "Missié Bon" had prepared me to hear without surprise the
details of a still more singular tradition,--that of Father Labat.... I
was returning from a mountain ramble with my guide, by way of the
Ajoupa-Bouillon road;--the sun had gone down; there remained only a
blood-red glow in the west, against which the silhouettes of the hills
took a velvety blackness indescribably soft; and stars were beginning to
twinkle out everywhere through the violet. Suddenly I noticed on the
flank of a neighboring morne--which I remembered by day as an apparently
uninhabitable wilderness of bamboos, tree-ferns, and balisiers--a
swiftly moving point of yellow light. My guide had observed it
simultaneously;--he crossed himself, and exclaimed:

"_Moinka ka couè c'est fanal Pè Lobatt!_" (I believe it is the lantern
of Père Labat.)

"Does he live there?" I innocently inquired.

"Live there?--why he has been dead hundreds of years!... _Ouill!_ you
never heard of Pè Labatt?"...

"Not the same who wrote a book about Martinique?"

"Yes,--himself.... They say he comes back at night. Ask mother about
him;--she knows."...

... I questioned old Théréza as soon as we reached home; and she told
me all she knew about "Pè Labatt." I found that the father had left a
reputation far more wide-spread than the recollection of "Missié
Bon,"--that his memory had created, in fact, the most impressive legend
in all Martinique folk-lore.

"Whether you really saw Pè Labatt's lantern," said old Théréza, "I do
not know;--there are a great many queer lights to be seen after
nightfall among these mornes. Some are zombi-fires; and some are
lanterns carried by living men; and some are lights burning in ajoupas
so high up that you can only see a gleam coming through the trees now
and then. It is not everybody who sees the lantern of Pè Labatt; and it
is not good-luck to see it.

"Pè Labatt was a priest who lived here hundreds of years ago; and he
wrote a book about what he saw. He was the first person to introduce
slavery into Martinique; and it is thought that is why he comes back at
night. It is his penance for having established slavery here.

"They used to say, before 1848, that when slavery should be abolished,
Pè Labatt's light would not be seen any more. But I can remember very
well when slavery was abolished; and I saw the light many a time after.
It used to move up the Morne d'Orange every dear night;--I could see it
very well from my window when I lived in St. Pierre. You knew it was Pè
Labatt, because the light passed up places where no man could walk. But
since the statue of Notre Dame de la Garde was placed on the Morne
d'Orange, people tell me that the light is not seen there any more.

"But it is seen elsewhere; and it is not good-luck to see it. Everybody
is afraid of seeing it.... And mothers tell their children, when the
little ones are naughty: '_Mit main ké fai Pè Lobatt vini pouend
ou,--oui!_' (I will make Pè Labatt come and take you away.)"...

What old Théréza stated regarding the establishment of slavery in
Martinique by Père Labat, I knew required no investigation,--inasmuch
as slavery was a flourishing institution in the time of Père Du Tertre,
another Dominican missionary and historian, who wrote his book,--a queer
book in old French,[8]--before Labat was born. But it did not take me
long to find out that such was the general belief about Père Labat's
sin and penance, and to ascertain that his name is indeed used to
frighten naughty children. _Eh! ti manmaille-là, moin ké fai Pè
Labatt vini pouend ou!_--is an exclamation often heard in the vicinity
of ajoupas just about the hour when all good little children ought to be
in bed and asleep.

... The first variation of the legend I heard was on a plantation in the
neighborhood of Ajoupa-Bouillon. There I was informed that Père Labat
had come to his death by the bite of a snake,--the hugest snake that
ever was seen in Martinique. Père Labat had believed it possible to
exterminate the fer-de-lance, and had adopted extraordinary measures for
its destruction. On receiving his death-wound he exclaimed, "_C'est pè
toutt sépent qui té ka mòdé moin_" (It is the Father of all Snakes
that has bitten me); and he vowed that he would come back to destroy the
brood, and would haunt the island until there should be not one snake
left. And the light that moves about the peaks at night is the lantern
of Père Labat still hunting for snakes.

"_Ou pa pè suive ti limié-là press!_" continued my informant. "You
cannot follow that little light at all;--when you first see it, it is
perhaps only a kilometre away; the next moment it is two, three or four
kilometres away."

I was also told that the light is frequently seen near Grande Anse, on
the other side of the island,--and on the heights of La Caravelle, the
long fantastic promontory that reaches three leagues into the sea south
of the harbor of La Trinité.[9] And on my return to St. Pierre I found
a totally different version of the legend;--my informant being one
Manm-Robert, a kind old soul who kept a little _boutique-lapacotte_ (a
little booth where cooked food is sold) near the precipitous Street of
the Friendships.

... "_Ah! Pè Labatt, oui!_" she exclaimed, at my first question,--"Pè
Labatt was a good priest who lived here very long ago. And they did him
a great wrong here;--they gave him a wicked _coup d'langue_ (tongue
wound); and the hurt given by an evil tongue is worse than a serpent's
bite. They lied about him; they slandered him until they got him sent
away from the country. But before the Government 'embarked' him, when he
got to that quay, he took off his shoes and he shook the dust of his
shoe upon that quay, and he said: 'I curse you, O Martinique!--I curse
you! There will be food for nothing, and your people will not even be
able to buy it! There will be clothing material for nothing, and your
people will not be able to get so much as one dress! And the children
will beat their mothers!... You banish me;--but I will come back
again.'"[10]

"And then what happened, Manm-Robert?"

"_Eh! fouinq! chè_, all that Pè Labatt said has come true. There is
food for almost nothing, and people are starving here in St. Pierre;
there is clothing for almost nothing, and poor girls cannot earn enough
to buy a dress. The pretty printed calicoes (_indiennes_) that used to
be two francs and a half the metre, now sell at twelve sous the metre;
but nobody has any money. And if you read our papers,--_Les Colonies, La
Defense Coloniale_,--you will find that there are sons wicked enough to
beat their mothers: _oui! yche ka bait maman!_ It is the malediction of
Pè Labatt."

This was all that Manm-Robert could tell me. Who had related the story
to her? Her mother. Whence had her mother obtained it? From her
grandmother.... Subsequently I found many persons to confirm the
tradition of the curse,--precisely as Manm-Robert had related it.


Only a brief while after this little interview I was invited to pass an
afternoon at the home of a gentleman residing upon the Morne
d'Orange,--the locality supposed to be especially haunted by Père
Labat. The house of Monsieur M----stands on the side of the hill, fully
five hundred feet up, and in a grove of trees: an antiquated dwelling,
with foundations massive as the walls of a fortress, and huge broad
balconies of stone. From one of these balconies there is a view of the
city, the harbor, and Pelée, which I believe even those who have seen
Naples would confess to be one of the fairest sights in the world....
Towards evening I obtained a chance to ask my kind host some questions
about the legend of his neighborhood.

... "Ever since I was a child," observed Monsieur M----, "I heard it
said that Père Labat haunted this mountain, and I often saw what was
alleged to be his light. It looked very much like a lantern swinging in
the hand of some one climbing the hill. A queer fact was that it used to
come from the direction of Carbet, skirt the Morne d'Orange a few
hundred feet above the road, and then move up the face of what seemed a
sheer precipice. Of course somebody carried that light,--probably a
negro; and perhaps the cliff is not so inaccessible as it looks: still,
we could never discover who the individual was, nor could we imagine
what his purpose might have been.... But the light has not been seen
here now for years."


[Footnote 8: "Histoire Générale des Antilles... habités par les
Français." Par le R. P. Du Tertre, de l'Ordre des Frères Prescheurs.
Paris: 1661-71. 4 vols. (with illustrations) in 4 to.]

[Footnote 9: One of the lights seen on the Caravelle was certainly
carried by a cattle-thief,--a colossal negro who had the reputation of
being a sorcerer,--a _quimboiseur._ The greater part of the mountainous
land forming La Caravelle promontory was at that time the property of a
Monsieur Eustache, who used it merely for cattle-raising purposes. He
allowed his animals to run wild in the hills; they multiplied
exceedingly, and became very savage. Notwithstanding their ferocity,
however, large numbers of them were driven away at night, and secretly
slaughtered or sold, by somebody who used to practise the art of
cattle-stealing with a lantern, and evidently without aid. A watch was
set, and the thief arrested. Before the magistrate he displayed
extraordinary assurance, asserting that he had never stolen from a poor
man--he had stolen only from M. Eustache who could not count his own
cattle--_yon richard, mon chè!_ "How many cows did you steal from him?"
asked the magistrate. "_Ess main pè save?--moin té pouend yon savane
toutt pleine_," replied the prisoner. (How can I tell?--I took a whole
savanna-full.)... Condemned on the strength of his own confession, he
was taken to jail. "_Moin pa ké rété la geôle_," he observed. (I
shall not remain in prison.) They put him in irons, but on the following
morning the irons were found lying on the floor of the cell, and the
prisoner was gone. He was never seen in Martinique again.]

[Footnote 10: Y sucoué souyé assous quai-là;--y ka di: "Moin ka maudi
ou, Lanmatinique!--moin ka maudi ou!... Ké ni mangé pou engnien: ou pa
ké pè menm acheté y! Ké ni touèle pou engnien: ou pa ké pè menm
acheté yon robe! Epi yche ké batt manman.... Ou banni moin!--moin ké
vini encò!"]




III


And who was Père Labat,--this strange priest whose memory, weirdly
disguised by legend, thus lingers in the oral literature of the colored
people? Various encyclopædians answer the question, but far less fully
and less interestingly than Dr. Rufz, the Martinique historian, whose
article upon him in the _Études Statistiques et Historiques_ has that
charm of sympathetic comprehension by which a master-biographer
sometimes reveals himself a sort of necromancer,--making us feel a
vanished personality with the power of a living presence. Yet even the
colorless data given by dictionaries of biography should suffice to
convince most readers that Jean-Baptiste Labat must be ranked among the
extraordinary men of his century.


Nearly two hundred years ago--24th August, 1693--a traveller wearing the
white habit of the Dominican order, partly covered by a black camlet
overcoat, entered the city of Rochelle. He was very tall and robust,
with one of those faces, at once grave and keen, which bespeak great
energy and quick discernment. This was the Père Labat, a native of
Paris, then in his thirtieth year. Half priest, half layman, one might
have been tempted to surmise from his attire; and such a judgment would
not have been unjust. Labat's character was too large for his
calling,--expanded naturally beyond the fixed limits of the
ecclesiastical life; and throughout the whole active part of his strange
career we find in him this dual character of layman and monk. He had
come to Rochelle to take passage for Martinique. Previously he had been
professor of philosophy and mathematics at Nancy. While watching a
sunset one evening from the window of his study, some one placed in his
hands a circular issued by the Dominicans of the French West Indies,
calling for volunteers. Death had made many wide gaps in their ranks;
and various misfortunes had reduced their finances to such an extent
that ruin threatened all their West Indian establishments. Labat, with
the quick decision of a mind suffering from the restraints of a life too
narrow for it, had at once resigned his professorship, and engaged
himself for the missions.

... In those days, communication with the West Indies was slow,
irregular, and difficult. Labat had to wait at Rochelle six whole months
for a ship. In the convent at Rochelle, where he stayed, there were
others waiting for the same chance,--including several Jesuits and
Capuchins as well as Dominicans. These unanimously elected him their
leader,--a significant fact considering the mutual jealousy of the
various religious orders of that period. There was something in the
energy and frankness of Labat's character which seems to have naturally
gained him the confidence and ready submission of others.

... They sailed in November; and Labat still found himself in the
position of a chief on board. His account of the voyage is amusing;--in
almost everything except practical navigation, he would appear to have
regulated the life of passengers and crew. He taught the captain
mathematics; and invented amusements of all kinds to relieve the
monotony of a two months' voyage.

... As the ship approached Martinique from the north, Labat first beheld
the very grimmest part of the lofty coast,--the region of Macouba; and
the impression it made upon him was not pleasing. "The island," he
writes, "appeared to me all one frightful mountain, broken everywhere by
precipices: nothing about it pleased me except the verdure which
everywhere met the eye, and which seemed to me both novel and agreeable,
considering the time of the year."

Almost immediately after his arrival he was sent by the Superior of the
convent to Macouba, for acclimation; Macouba then being considered the
healthiest part of the island. Whoever makes the journey on horseback
thither from St. Pierre to-day can testify to the exactitude of Labat's
delightful narrative of the trip. So little has that part of the island
changed since two centuries that scarcely a line of the father's
description would need correction to adopt it bodily for an account of a
ride to Macouba in 1889.

At Macouba everybody welcomes him, pets him,--finally becomes
enthusiastic about him. He fascinates and dominates the little community
almost at first sight. "There is an inexpressible charm," says
Rufz,--commenting upon this portion of Labat's narrative,--"in the
novelty of relations between men: no one has yet been offended, no envy
has yet been excited;--it is scarcely possible even to guess whence that
ill-will you must sooner or later provoke is going to come from;--there
are no rivals;--there are no enemies. You are everybody's friend; and
many are hoping you will continue to be only theirs."... Labat knew how
to take legitimate advantage of this good-will;--he persuaded his
admirers to rebuild the church at Macouba, according to designs made by
himself.

At Macouba, however, he was not permitted to sojourn as long as the good
people of the little burgh would have deemed even reasonable: he had
shown certain aptitudes which made his presence more than desirable at
Saint-Jacques, the great plantation of the order on the Capesterre, or
Windward coast. It was in debt for 700,000 pounds of sugar,--an
appalling condition in those days,--and seemed doomed to get more
heavily in debt every successive season. Labat inspected everything, and
set to work for the plantation, not merely as general director, but as
engineer, architect, machinist, inventor. He did really wonderful
things. You can see them for yourself if you ever go to Martinique; for
the old Dominican plantation--now Government property, and leased at an
annual rent of 50,000 francs--remains one of the most valuable in the
colonies because of Labat's work upon it. The watercourses directed by
him still excite the admiration of modern professors of hydraulics; the
mills he built or invented are still good;--the treatise he wrote on
sugar-making remained for a hundred and fifty years the best of its
kind, and the manual of French planters. In less than two years Labat
had not only rescued the plantation from bankruptcy, but had made it
rich; and if the monks deemed him veritably inspired, the test of time
throws no ridicule on their astonishment at the capacities of the
man.... Even now the advice he formulated as far back as 1720--about
secondary cultures,--about manufactories to establish,--about imports,
exports, and special commercial methods--has lost little of its value.

Such talents could not fail to excite wide-spread admiration,--nor to
win for him a reputation in the colonies beyond precedent. He was wanted
everywhere.... Auger, the Governor of Guadeloupe, sent for him to help
the colonists in fortifying and defending the island against the
English; and we find the missionary quite as much at home in this new
rôle--building bastions, scarps, counterscarps, ravelins, etc.,--as he
seemed to be upon the plantation of Saint-Jacques. We find him even
taking part in an engagement;--himself conducting an artillery
duel,--loading, pointing, and firing no less than twelve times after the
other French gunners had been killed or driven from their posts. After a
tremendous English volley, one of the enemy cries out to him in French:
"White Father, have they told?" (_Père Blanc, ont-ils porté?_) He
replies only after returning the fire with a better-directed aim, and
then repeats the mocking question: "Have they told? Yes, they have,"
confesses the Englishman, in surprised dismay; "but we will pay you back
for that!"...

... Returning to Martinique with new titles to distinction, Labat was
made Superior of the order in that island, and likewise Vicar-Apostolic.
After building the Convent of the Mouillage, at St. Pierre, and many
other edifices, he undertook that series of voyages in the interests of
the Dominicans whereof the narration fills six ample volumes. As a
traveller Père Labat has had few rivals in his own field;--no one,
indeed, seems to have been able to repeat some of his feats. All the
French and several of the English colonies were not merely visited by
him, but were studied in their every geographical detail. Travel in the
West Indies is difficult to a degree of which strangers have little
idea; but in the time of Père Labat there were few roads,--and a far
greater variety of obstacles. I do not believe there are half a dozen
whites in Martinique who thoroughly know their own island,--who have
even travelled upon all its roads; but Labat knew it as he knew the palm
of his hand, and travelled where roads had never been made. Equally well
he knew Guadeloupe and other islands; and he learned all that it was
possible to learn in those years about the productions and resources of
the other colonies. He travelled with the fearlessness and examined with
the thoroughness of a Humboldt,--so far as his limited science
permitted: had he possessed the knowledge of modern naturalists and
geologists he would probably have left little for others to discover
after him. Even at the present time West Indian travellers are glad to
consult him for information.

These duties involved prodigious physical and mental exertion, in a
climate deadly to Europeans. They also involved much voyaging in waters
haunted by filibusters and buccaneers. But nothing appears to daunt
Labat. As for the filibusters, he becomes their comrade and personal
friend;--he even becomes their chaplain, and does not scruple to make
excursions with them. He figures in several sea-fights;--on one occasion
he aids in the capture of two English vessels,--and then occupies
himself in making the prisoners, among whom are several ladies, enjoy
the event like a holiday. On another voyage Labat's vessel is captured
by a Spanish ship. At one moment sabres are raised above his head, and
loaded muskets levelled at his breast;--the next, every Spaniard is on
his knees, appalled by a cross that Labat holds before the eyes of the
captors,--the cross worn by officers of the Inquisition,--the terrible
symbol of the Holy Office. "It did not belong to me," he says, "but to
one of our brethren who had left it by accident among my effects." He
seems always prepared in some way to meet any possible emergency. No
humble and timid monk this: he has the frame and temper of those
mediaeval abbots who could don with equal indifference the helmet or the
cowl. He is apparently even more of a soldier than a priest. When
English corsairs attempt a descent on the Martinique coast at
Sainte-Marie they find Père Labat waiting for them with all the negroes
of the Saint-Jacques plantation, to drive them back to their ships.

For other dangers he exhibits absolute unconcern. He studies the
phenomena of hurricanes with almost pleasurable interest, while his
comrades on the ship abandon hope. When seized with yellow-fever, then
known as the Siamese Sickness (_mal de Siam_), he refuses to stay in bed
the prescribed time, and rises to say his mass. He faints at the altar;
yet a few days later we hear of him on horseback again, travelling over
the mountains in the worst and hottest season of the year...

... Labat was thirty years old when he went to the Antilles;--he was
only forty-two when his work was done. In less than twelve years he made
his order the most powerful and wealthy of any in the West
Indies,--lifted their property out of bankruptcy to rebuild it upon a
foundation of extraordinary prosperity. As Rufz observes without
exaggeration, the career of Père Labat in the Antilles seems to more
than realize the antique legend of the labors of Hercules. Whithersoever
he went,--except in the English colonies,--his passage was memorialized
by the rising of chinches, convents, and schools,--as well as mills,
forts, and refineries. Even cities claim him as their founder. The
solidity of his architectural creations is no less remarkable than their
excellence of design;--much of what he erected still remains; what has
vanished was removed by human agency, and not by decay; and when the old
Dominican church at St. Pierre had to be pulled down to make room for a
larger edifice, the workmen complained that the stones could not be
separated,--that the walls seemed single masses of rock. There can be no
doubt, moreover, that he largely influenced the life of the colonies
during those years, and expanded their industrial and commercial
capacities.

He was sent on a mission to Rome after these things had been done, and
never returned from Europe. There he travelled more or less in
after-years; but finally settled at Paris, where he prepared and
published the voluminous narrative of his own voyages, and other curious
books;--manifesting as a writer the same tireless energy he had shown in
so many other capacities. He does not, however, appear to have been
happy. Again and again he prayed to be sent back to his beloved
Antilles, and for some unknown cause the prayer was always refused. To
such a character, the restraint of the cloister must have proved a slow
agony; but he had to endure it for many long years. He died at Paris in
1738, aged seventy-five.

... It was inevitable that such a man should make bitter enemies: his
preferences, his position, his activity, his business shrewdness, his
necessary self-assertion, must have created secret hate and jealousy
even when open malevolence might not dare to show itself. And to these
natural results of personal antagonism or opposition were afterwards
superadded various resentments--irrational, perhaps, but extremely
violent,--caused by the father's cynical frankness as a writer. He spoke
freely about the family origin and personal failings of various
colonists considered high personages in their own small world; and to
this day his book has an evil reputation undeserved in those old creole
communities, where any public mention of a family scandal is never
forgiven or forgotten.... But probably even before his work appeared it
had been secretly resolved that he should never be permitted to return
to Martinique or Guadeloupe after his European mission. The exact
purpose of the Government in this policy remains a mystery,--whatever
ingenious writers may have alleged to the contrary. We only know that M.
Adrien Dessalles,--the trustworthy historian of Martinique,--while
searching among the old _Archives de la Marine_, found there a
ministerial letter to the Intendent de Vaucresson in which this
statement occurs:--

... "Le Père Labat shall never be suffered to return to the colonies,
whatever efforts he may make to obtain permission."




IV


One rises from the perusal of the "Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de
l'Amérique" with a feeling approaching regret; for although the six
pursy little volumes composing it--full of quaint drawings, plans, and
odd attempts at topographical maps--reveal a prolix writer. Père Labat
is always able to interest. He reminds you of one of those slow,
precise, old-fashioned conversationalists who measure the weight of
every word and never leave anything to the imagination of the audience,
yet who invariably reward the patience of their listeners sooner or
later by reflections of surprising profundity or theories of a totally
novel description. But what particularly impresses the reader of these
volumes is not so much the recital of singular incidents and facts as
the revelation of the author's personality. Reading him, you divine a
character of enormous force,--gifted but unevenly balanced; singularly
shrewd in worldly affairs, and surprisingly credulous in other respects;
superstitious and yet cynical; unsympathetic by his positivism, but
agreeable through natural desire to give pleasure; just by nature, yet
capable of merciless severity; profoundly devout, but withal tolerant
for his calling and his time. He is sufficiently free from petty bigotry
to make fun of the scruples of his brethren in the matter of employing
heretics; and his account of the manner in which he secured the services
of a first-class refiner for the Martinique plantation at the Fond
Saint-Jacques is not the least amusing page in the book. He writes: "The
religious who had been appointed Superior in Guadeloupe wrote me that he
would find it difficult to employ this refiner because the man was a
Lutheran. This scruple gave me pleasure, as I had long wanted to have
him upon our plantation in the Fond Saint-Jacques, but did not know how
I would be able to manage it. I wrote to the Superior at once that all
he had to do was to send the man to me, because it was a matter of
indifference to me whether the sugar he might make were Catholic or
Lutheran sugar, provided it were very white."[11] He displays equal
frankness in confessing an error or a discomfiture. He acknowledges that
while Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, he used to teach that
there were no tides in the tropics: and in a discussion as to whether
the _diablotin_ (a now almost extinct species of West Indian nocturnal
bird) were fish or flesh, and might or might not be eaten in Lent, he
tells us that he was fairly worsted,--(although he could cite the
celebrated myth of the "barnacle-geese" as a "fact" in justification of
one's right to doubt the nature of diablotins).

One has reason to suspect that Père Labat, notwithstanding his
references to the decision of the Church that diablotins were not birds,
felt quite well assured within himself that they were. There is a sly
humor in his story of these controversies, which would appear to imply
that while well pleased at the decision referred to, he knew all about
diablotins. Moreover, the father betrays certain tendencies to
gormandize not altogether in harmony with the profession of an
ascetic.... There were parrots in nearly all of the French Antilles in
those days;[12] and Père Labat does not attempt to conceal his fondness
for--cooked parrots. (He does not appear to have cared much for them as
pets: if they could not talk well, he condemned them forthwith to the
pot.) "They all live upon fruits and seeds," he writes, "and their flesh
contracts the odor and color of that particular fruit or seed they feed
upon. They become exceedingly tat in the season when the guavas are
ripe; and when they eat the seeds of the _Bois d'Inde_ they have an odor
of nutmeg and cloves which is delightful (_une odeur de muscade et de
girofle qui fait plaisir_)." He recommends four superior ways of
preparing them, as well as other fowls, for the table, of which the
first and the best way is "to pluck them alive, then to make them
swallow vinegar, and then to strangle them while they have the vinegar
still in their throats by twisting their necks"; and the fourth way is
"to skin them alive" (_de les écorcher tout en vie_).... "It is
certain," he continues, "that these ways are excellent, and that fowls
that have to be cooked in a hurry thereby obtain an admirable tenderness
(_une tendreté admirable_)." Then he makes a brief apology to his
readers, not for the inhumanity of his recipes, but for a display of
culinary knowledge scarcely becoming a monk, and acquired only through
those peculiar necessities which colonial life in the tropics imposed
upon all alike. The touch of cruelty here revealed produces an
impression which there is little in the entire work capable of
modifying. Labat seems to have possessed but a very small quantity of
altruism; his cynicism on the subject of animal suffering is not offset
by any visible sympathy with human pain;--he never compassionates: you
may seek in vain through all his pages for one gleam of the goodness of
gentle Père Du Tertre, who, filled with intense pity for the condition
of the blacks, prays masters to be merciful and just to their slaves for
the love of God. Labat suggests, on the other hand, that slavery is a
good means of redeeming negroes from superstition and saving their souls
from hell: he selects and purchases them himself for the Saint-Jacques
plantation, never makes a mistake or a bad bargain, and never appears to
feel a particle of commiseration for their lot. In fact, the emotional
feeling displayed by Père Du Tertre (whom he mocks slyly betimes) must
have seemed to him rather condemnable than praiseworthy; for Labat
regarded the negro as a natural child of the devil,--a born
sorcerer,--an evil being wielding occult power.

Perhaps the chapters on negro sorcery are the most astonishing in the
book, displaying on the part of this otherwise hard and practical nature
a credulity almost without limit. After having related how he had a
certain negro sent out of the country "who predicted the arrival of
vessels and other things to come,--in so far, at least, as the devil
himself was able to know and reveal these matters to him," he plainly
states his own belief in magic as follows.--

"I know there are many people who consider as pure imagination, and as
silly stories, or positive falsehoods, all that is related about
sorcerers and their compacts with the devil. I was myself for a long
time of this opinion. Moreover, I am aware that what is said on this
subject is frequently exaggerated; but I am now convinced it must be
acknowledged that all which has been related is not entirely false,
although perhaps it may not be entirely true."...

Therewith he begins to relate stones upon what may have seemed
unimpeachable authority in those days. The first incident narrated took
place, he assures us, in the Martinique Dominican convent, shortly
before his arrival in the colony. One of the fathers, Père Fraise, had
had brought to Martinique, "from the kingdom of Juda (?) in Guinea," a
little negro about nine or ten years old. Not long afterwards there was
a serious drought, and the monks prayed vainly for rain. Then the negro
child, who had begun to understand and speak a little French, told his
masters that he was a Rainmaker, that he could obtain them all the rain
they wanted. "This proposition," says Père Labat, "greatly astonished
the fathers: they consulted together, and at last, curiosity overcoming
reason, they gave their consent that this unbaptized child should make
some rain fall in their garden." The unbaptized child asked them if they
wanted "a big or a little rain"; they answered that a moderate rain
would satisfy them. Thereupon the little negro got three oranges, and
placed them on the ground in a line at a short distance from one
another, and bowed down before each of them in turn, muttering words in
an unknown tongue. Then he got three small orange-branches, stuck a
branch in each orange, and repeated his prostrations and
mutterings;--after which he took one of the branches, stood up, and
watched the horizon. A small cloud appeared, and he pointed the branch
at it. It approached swiftly, rested above the garden, and sent down a
copious shower of rain. Then the boy made a hole in the ground, and
buried the oranges and the branches. The fathers were amazed to find
that not a single drop of rain had fallen outside their garden. They
asked the boy who had taught him this sorcery, and he answered them that
among the blacks on board the slave-ship which had brought him
over there were some Rain-makers who had taught him. Père Labat
declares there is no question as to the truth of the occurrence:
he cites the names of Père Praise Père Rosiè, Père Temple, and Père
Bournot,--all members of his own order,--as trustworthy witnesses of
this incident.

Père Labat displays equal credulity in his recital of a still more
extravagant story told him by Madame la Comtesse du Gênes. M. le Comte
du Gênes, husband of the lady in question, and commander of a French
squadron, captured the English fort of Gorea in 1696, and made prisoners
of all the English slaves in the service of the factory there
established. But the vessel on which these were embarked was unable to
leave the coast, in spite of a good breeze: she seemed bewitched. Some
of the slaves finally told the captain there was a negress on board who
had enchanted the ship, and who had the power to "dry up the hearts" of
all who refused to obey her. A number of deaths taking place among the
blacks, the captain ordered autopsies made, and it was found that the
hearts of the dead negroes were desiccated. The negress was taken on
deck, tied to a gun and whipped, but uttered no cry;--the ship's
surgeon, angered at her stoicism, took a hand in the punishment and
flogged her "with all his force." Thereupon she told him that inasmuch
as he had abused her without reason, his heart also should be "dried
up." He died next day; and his heart was found in the condition
predicted. All this time the ship could not be made to move in any
direction; and the negress told the captain that until he should put her
and her companions on shore he would never be able to sail. To convince
him of her power she further asked him to place three fresh melons in a
chest, to lock the chest and put a guard over it; when she should tell
him to unlock it, there would be no melons there. The captain made the
experiment. When the chest was opened, the melons appeared to be there;
but on touching them it was found that only the outer rind remained: the
interior had been dried up,--like the surgeon's heart. Thereupon the
captain put the witch and her friends ashore, and sailed away without
further trouble.

Another story of African sorcery for the truth of which Père Labat
earnestly vouches is the following:--

A negro was sentenced to be burned alive for witchcraft at St. Thomas in
1701: his principal crime was "having made a little figure of baked clay
to speak." A certain creole, meeting the negro on his way to the place
of execution, jeeringly observed, "Well, you cannot make your little
figure talk any more now;--it has been broken. If the gentleman allow
me," replied the prisoner, "I will make the cane he carries in his hand
speak." The creole's curiosity was strongly aroused: he prevailed upon
the guards to halt a few minutes, and permit the prisoner to make the
experiment. The negro then took the cane, stuck it into the ground in
the middle of the road, whispered something to it, and asked the
gentleman what he wished to know. "I would like to know," answered the
latter, "whether the ship----has yet sailed from Europe, and when she
will arrive." "Put your ear to the head of the cane," said the negro. On
doing so the creole distinctly heard a thin voice which informed him
that the vessel in question had left a certain French port on such a
date; that she would reach St. Thomas within three days; that she had
been delayed on her voyage by a storm which had carried away her foretop
and her mizzen sail; that she had such and such passengers on board
(mentioning the names), all in good health.... After this incident the
negro was burned alive; but within three days the vessel arrived in
port, and the prediction or divination was found to have been absolutely
correct in every particular.

... Père Labat in no way disapproves the atrocious sentence inflicted
upon the wretched negro: in his opinion such predictions were made by
the power and with the personal aid of the devil; and for those who
knowingly maintained relations with the devil, he could not have
regarded any punishment too severe. That he could be harsh enough
himself is amply shown in various accounts of his own personal
experience with alleged sorcerers, and especially in the narration of
his dealings with one--apparently a sort of African doctor--who was a
slave on a neighboring plantation, but used to visit the Saint-Jacques
quarters by stealth to practise his art. One of the slaves of the order,
a negress, falling very sick, the wizard was sent for; and he came with
all his paraphernalia--little earthen pots and fetiches, etc.--during
the night. He began to practise his incantations, without the least
suspicion that Père Labat was watching him through a chink; and, after
having consulted his fetiches, he told the sick woman she would die
within four days. At this juncture the priest suddenly burst in the door
and entered, followed by several powerful slaves. He dashed to pieces
the soothsayer's articles, and attempted to reassure the frightened
negress, by declaring the prediction a lie inspired by the devil. Then
he had the sorcerer stripped and flogged in his presence.

"I had him given," he calmly observes, "about (_environ_) three hundred
lashes, which flayed him (_l'écorchait_) from his shoulders to his
knees. He screamed like a madman. All the negroes trembled, and assured
me that the devil would cause my death.... Then I had the wizard put in
irons, after having had him well washed with a _pimentade_,--that is to
say, with brine in which pimentos and small lemons have been crushed.
This causes a horrible pain to those skinned by the whip; but it is a
certain remedy against gangrene."...

And then he sent the poor wretch back to his master with a note
requesting the latter to repeat the punishment,--a demand that seems to
have been approved, as the owner of the negro was "a man who feared
God." Yet Père Labat is obliged to confess that in spite of all his
efforts, the sick negress died on the fourth day,--as the sorcerer had
predicted. This fact must have strongly confirmed his belief that the
devil was at the bottom of the whole affair, and caused him to doubt
whether even a flogging of _about_ three hundred lashes, followed by a
pimentade, was sufficient chastisement for the miserable black. Perhaps
the tradition of this frightful whipping may have had something to do
with the terror which still attaches to the name of the Dominican in
Martinique. The legal extreme punishment was twenty-nine lashes.

Père Labat also avers that in his time the negroes were in the habit of
carrying sticks which had the power of imparting to any portion of the
human body touched by them a most severe chronic pain. He at first
believed, he says, that these pains were merely rheumatic; but after all
known remedies for rheumatism had been fruitlessly applied, he became
convinced there was something occult and diabolical in the manner of
using and preparing these sticks.... A fact worthy of note is that this
belief is still prevalent in Martinique!

One hardly ever meets in the country a negro who does not carry either a
stick or a cutlass, or both. The cutlass is indispensable to those who
work in the woods or upon plantations; the stick is carried both as a
protection against snakes and as a weapon of offence and defence in
village quarrels, for unless a negro be extraordinarily drunk he will
not strike his fellow with a cutlass. The sticks are usually made of a
strong dense wood: those most sought after of a material termed
_moudongue_,[13] almost as tough as, but much lighter than, our hickory.
On inquiring whether any of the sticks thus carried were held to possess
magic powers, I was assured by many country people that there were men
who knew a peculiar method of "arranging" sticks so that to touch any
person with them even lightly, _and through any thickness of clothing_,
would produce terrible and continuous pain.


[Illustration: LE CALVAIRE
_Above the village of Fort-de-France a series of fourteen
little crosses lines the roadside to the hilltop--each
bearing a relievo representing incidents of Christ's
Passion._]


Believing in these things, and withal unable to decide whether the sun
revolved about the earth, or the earth about the sun,[14] Père Labat
was, nevertheless, no more credulous and no more ignorant than the
average missionary of his time: it is only by contrast with his
practical perspicacity in other matters, his worldly rationalism and
executive shrewdness, that this superstitious naïveté impresses one as
odd. And how singular sometimes is the irony of Time! All the wonderful
work the Dominican accomplished has been forgotten by the people; while
all the witchcrafts that he warred against survive and flourish openly;
and his very name is seldom uttered but in connection with
superstitions,--has been, in fact, preserved among the blacks by the
power of superstition alone, by the belief in zombis and even
goblins.... "_Mi! ti manmaille-là, main ké fai Pè Labatt vini pouend
ou!_"...


[Footnote 11: Vol. III, p. 382-3. Edition of 1722.]

[Footnote 12: The parrots of Martinique he describes as having been
green, with slate-colored plumage on the top of the head, mixed with a
little red, and as having a few red feathers in the wings, throat, and
tail.]

[Footnote 13: The creole word _moudongue_ is said to be a corruption of
_Mondongue_, the name of an African coast tribe who had the reputation
of being cannibals. A Mondongue slave on the plantations was generally
feared by his fellow-blacks of other tribes; and the name of the
cannibal race became transformed into an adjective to denote anything
formidable or terrible. A blow with a stick made of the wood described
being greatly dreaded, the term was applied first to the stick, and
afterward to the wood itself.]

[Footnote 14: Accounting for the origin of the trade-winds, he writes:
"I say that the Trade-Winds do not exist in the Torrid Zone merely by
chance; forasmuch as the cause which produces them is very necessary,
very sure, and very continuous, since they result _either from the
movement of the Earth around the Sun, or from the movement of the Sun
around the Earth, Whether it he the one or the other of these two great
bodies which moves_..." etc.]




V


Few habitants of St. Pierre now remember that the beautiful park behind
the cathedral used to be called the Savanna of the White Fathers,--and
the long shadowed meadow beside the Roxelane, the Savanna of the Black
Fathers: the Jesuits. All the great religious orders have long since
disappeared from the colony: their edifices have been either converted
to other uses or demolished; their estates have passed into other
hands.... Were their labors, then, productive of merely ephemeral
results?--was the colossal work of a Père Labat all in vain, so far as
the future is concerned? The question is not easily answered; but it is
worth considering.

Of course the material prosperity which such men toiled to obtain for
their order represented nothing more, even to their eyes, than the means
of self-maintenance, and the accumulation of force necessary for the
future missionary labors of the monastic community. The real ultimate
purpose was, not the acquisition of power for the order, but for the
Church, of which the orders represented only a portion of the force
militant; and this purpose did not fail of accomplishment. The orders
passed away only when their labors had been completed,--when Martinique
had become (exteriorly, at least) more Catholic than Rome itself,--after
the missionaries had done all that religious zeal could do in moulding
and remoulding the human material under their control. These men could
scarcely have anticipated those social and political changes which the
future reserved for the colonies, and which no ecclesiastical sagacity
could, in any event, have provided against. It is in the existing
religious condition of these communities that one may observe and
estimate the character and the probable duration of the real work
accomplished by the missions.

... Even after a prolonged residence in Martinique, its visible
religious condition continues to impress one as something phenomenal. A
stranger, who has no opportunity to penetrate into the home life of the
people, will not, perhaps, discern the full extent of the religious
sentiment; but, nevertheless, however brief his stay, he will observe
enough of the extravagant symbolism of the cult to fill him with
surprise. Wherever he may choose to ride or to walk, he is certain to
encounter shrines, statues of saints, or immense crucifixes. Should he
climb up to the clouds of the peaks, he will find them all along the
way;--he will perceive them waiting for him, looming through the mists
of the heights; and passing through the loveliest ravines, he will see
niches hollowed out in the volcanic rocks, above and below him, or
contrived in the trunks of trees bending over precipices, often in
places so difficult of access that he wonders how the work could have
been accomplished. All this has been done by the various property-owners
throughout the country: it is the traditional custom to do it--brings
good-luck! After a longer stay in the island, one discovers also that in
almost every room of every dwelling--stone residence, wooden cottage, or
palm-thatched ajoupa--there is a chapelle: that is, a sort of large
bracket fastened to the wall, on which crosses or images are placed,
with vases of flowers, and lamps or wax-tapers to be burned at night.
Sometimes, moreover, statues are placed in windows, or above
door-ways;--and all passers-by take off their hats to these. Over the
porch of the cottage in a mountain village, where I lived for some
weeks, there was an absurd little window contrived,--a sort of purely
ornamental dormer,--and in this a Virgin about five inches high had been
placed. At a little distance it looked like a toy,--a child's doll
forgotten there; and a doll I always supposed it to be, until one day
that I saw a long procession of black laborers passing before the house,
every one of whom took off his hat to it.... My bedchamber in the same
cottage resembled a religious museum. On the chapelle there were no less
than eight Virgins, varying in height from one to sixteen inches,--a St.
Joseph,--a St. John,--a crucifix,--and a host of little objects in the
shape of hearts or crosses, each having some special religious
significance;--while the walls were covered with framed certificates of
baptism, "first-communion," confirmation, and other documents
commemorating the whole church life of the family for two generations.

... Certainly the first impression created by this perpetual display of
crosses, statues, and miniature chapels is not pleasing,--particularly
as the work is often inartistic to a degree bordering upon the
grotesque, and nothing resembling art is anywhere visible. Millions of
francs must have been consumed in these creations, which have the
rudeness of mediævalism without its emotional sincerity, and
which--amid the loveliness of tropic nature, the grace of palms, the
many-colored fire of liana blossoms--jar on the æsthetic sense with an
almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent
populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something
older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,--something
strangely distorted and transformed, it is true, but recognizably
conserved by the Latin race from those antique years when every home had
its beloved ghosts, when every wood or hill or spring had its gracious
divinity, and the boundaries of all fields were marked and guarded by
statues of gods.

Instances of iconoclasm are of course highly rare in a country of which
no native--rich or poor, white or half-breed--fails to doff his hat
before every shrine, cross, or image he may happen to pass. Those
merchants of St. Pierre or of Fort-de-France living only a few miles out
of the city must certainly perform a vast number of reverences on their
way to or from business;--I saw one old gentleman uncover his white head
about twenty times in the course of a fifteen minutes' walk. I never
heard of but one image-breaker in Martinique; and his act was the result
of superstition, not of any hostility to popular faith or custom: it was
prompted by the same childish feeling which moves Italian fishermen
sometimes to curse St. Antony or to give his image a ducking in bad
weather. This Martinique iconoclast was a negro cattle-driver who one
day, feeling badly in need of a glass of tafia, perhaps, left the
animals intrusted to him in care of a plaster image of the Virgin, with
this menace (the phrase is on record):--

"_Moin ka quitté bef-la ba ou pou gàdé ba moin. Quand moin vini, si
moin pa trouvé compte-moin, moin ké fouté ou vingt-nèf coudfouètt!_"
(I leave these cattle with you to take care of for me. When I come
back, if I don't find them all here, I'll give you twenty-nine lashes.)


[Illustration: A WAYSIDE SHRINE
"_There is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of
plaster and wood and stone. Something older than
the Middle Ages, older than Christianity._"]


Returning about half an hour later, he was greatly enraged to find his
animals scattered in every direction;--and, rushing at the statue, he
broke it from the pedestal, fixing it upon the ground, and gave it
twenty-nine lashes with his bull-whip. For this he was arrested, tried,
and sentenced to imprisonment, with hard labor, for life! In those days
there were no colored magistrates;--the judges were all _bêkés._

"Rather a severe sentence," I remarked to my informant, a planter who
conducted me to the scene of the alleged sacrilege.

"Severe, yes," he answered;--"and I suppose the act would seem to you
more idiotic than criminal. But here, in Martinique, there were large
questions involved by such an offence. Relying, as we have always done
to some extent, upon religious influence as a factor in the maintenance
of social order, the negro's act seemed a dangerous example."...


That the Church remains still rich and prosperous in Martinique there
can be no question; but whether it continues to wield any powerful
influence in the maintenance of social order is more than doubtful. A
Polynesian laxity of morals among the black and colored population, and
the history of race-hatreds and revolutions inspired by race-hate, would
indicate that neither in ethics nor in politics does it possess any
preponderant authority. By expelling various religious orders;--by
establishing lay schools, lycées, and other educational institutions
where the teaching is largely characterized by aggressive antagonism to
Catholic ideas;--by the removal of crucifixes and images from public
buildings, French Radicalism did not inflict any great blow upon Church
interests. So far as the white, and, one may say, the wealthy,
population is concerned, the Church triumphs in her hostility to the
Government schools; and to the same extent she holds an educational
monopoly. No white creole would dream of sending his children to a lay
school or a lycée--notwithstanding the unquestionable superiority of
the educational system in the latter institutions;--and, although
obliged, as the chief tax-paying class, to bear the burden of
maintaining these establishments, the whites hold them in such horror
that the Government professors are socially ostracized. No doubt the
prejudice or pride which abhors mixed schools aids the Church in this
respect; she herself recognizes race-feeling, keeps her schools unmixed,
and even in her convents, it is said, obliges the colored nuns to serve
the white! For more than two centuries every white generation has been
religiously moulded in the seminaries and convents; and among the native
whites one never hears an overt declaration of free-thought opinion.
Except among the colored men educated in the Government schools, or
their foreign professors, there are no avowed free-thinkers;--and this,
not because the creole whites, many of whom have been educated in Paris,
are naturally narrow-minded, or incapable of sympathy with the mental
expansion of the age, but because the religious question at Martinique
has become so intimately complicated with the social and political one,
concerning which there can be no compromise whatever, that to divorce
the former from the latter is impossible. Roman Catholicism is an
element of the cement which holds creole society together; and it is
noteworthy that other creeds are not represented. I knew of only one
Episcopalian and one Methodist in the island,--and heard a sort of
legend about a solitary Jew whose whereabouts I never could
discover;--but these were strangers.

It was only through the establishment of universal suffrage, which
placed the white population at the mercy of its former slaves, that the
Roman Church sustained any serious injury. All local positions are
filled by blacks or men of color; no white creole can obtain a public
office or take part in legislation; and the whole power of the black
vote is ungenerously used against the interests of the class thus
politically disinherited. The Church suffers in consequence: her power
depended upon her intimate union with the wealthy and dominant class;
and she will never be forgiven by those now in power for her sympathetic
support of that class in other years. Politics yearly intensify this
hostility; and as the only hope for the restoration of the whites to
power, and of the Church to its old position, lies in the possibility of
another empire or a revival of the monarchy, the white creoles and their
Church are forced into hostility against republicanism and the republic.
And political newspapers continually attack Roman Catholicism,--mock its
tenets and teachings,--ridicule its dogmas and ceremonies,--satirize its
priests.

In the cities and towns the Church indeed appears to retain a large
place in the affection of the poorer classes;--her ceremonies are always
well attended; money pours into her coffers; and one can still witness
the curious annual procession of the "converted,"--aged women of color
and negresses going to communion for the first time, all wearing
snow-white turbans in honor of the event. But among the country people,
where the dangerous forces of revolution exist, Christian feeling is
almost stifled by ghastly beliefs of African origin;--the images and
crucifixes still command respect, but this respect is inspired by a
feeling purely fetichistic. With the political dispossession of the
whites, certain dark powers, previously concealed or repressed, have
obtained formidable development. The old enemy of Père Labat, the
wizard (the _quimboiseur_), already wields more authority than the
priest, exercises more terror than the magistrate, commands more
confidence than the physician. The educated mulatto class may affect to
despise him;--but he is preparing their overthrow in the dark.
Astonishing is the persistence with which the African has clung to these
beliefs and practices, so zealously warred upon by the Church and so
mercilessly punished by the courts for centuries. He still goes to mass,
and sends his children to the priest; but he goes more often to the
quimboiseur and the "_magnetise._" He finds use for both beliefs, but
gives large preference to the savage one,--just as he prefers the
pattering of his tamtam to the music of the military band at the _Savane
du Fort_.... And should it come to pass that Martinique be ever totally
abandoned by its white population,--an event by no means improbable in
the present order of things,--the fate of the ecclesiastical fabric so
toilsomely reared by the monastic orders is not difficult to surmise.




VI


From my window in the old Rue du Bois-Morin,--which climbs the foot
of Morne Labelle by successions of high stone steps,--all the
southern end of the city is visible as in a bird's-eye view. Under me
is a long peaking of red-scaled roofs,--gables and dormer-windows,--with
clouds of bright green here and there,--foliage of tamarind and
corossolier;--westward purples and flames the great circle of the
Caribbean Sea;--east and south, towering to the violet sky, curve the
volcanic hills, green-clad from base to summit;--and right before me the
beautiful Morne d'Orange, all palm-plumed and wood-wrapped, trends
seaward and southward. And every night, after the stars come out, I see
moving lights there,--lantern fires guiding the mountain-dwellers home;
but I look in vain for the light of Père Labat.

And nevertheless,--although no believer in ghosts,--I see thee very
plainly sometimes, thou quaint White Father, moving through winter-mists
in the narrower Paris of another century; musing upon the churches that
arose at thy bidding under tropic skies; dreaming of the primeval
valleys changed by thy will to green-gold seas of cane,--and the strong
mill that will bear thy name for two hundred years (it stands solid unto
this day),--and the habitations made for thy brethren in pleasant palmy
places,--and the luminous peace of thy Martinique convent,--and odor of
roasting parrots fattened upon _grains de bois d'Inde_ and
guavas,--"_l'odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_"...

Eh, Père Labat!--what changes there have been since thy day! The White
Fathers have no place here now; and the Black Fathers, too, have been
driven from the land, leaving only as a memory of them the perfect and
ponderous architecture of the Perinnelle plantation-buildings, and the
appellation of the river still known as the Rivière des Pères. Also
the Ursulines are gone, leaving only their name on the corner of a
crumbling street. And there are no more slaves; and there are new races
of colors thou wouldst deem scandalous though beautiful; and there are
no more parrots; and there are no more diablotins. And the grand woods
thou sawest in their primitive and inviolate beauty, as if fresh from
the Creator's touch in the morning of the world, are passing away; the
secular trees are being converted into charcoal, or sawn into timber for
the boat-builders: thou shouldst see two hundred men pulling some forest
giant down to the sea upon the two-wheeled screaming thing they call a
"devil" (_yon diabe_),--cric-crac!--cric-crac!--all chanting together:--


"_Soh-soh!--yaïe-yah!
Rhâlé bois-canot!_"


And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been
changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the
eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and
violet sea,--and the jewel-colors of the perpetual hills;--the same
tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still
blow over Sainte-Marie;--the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle
and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this
land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of
it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even
as were thine own. Père Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the
sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of tropic
dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm
wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent
flickering of the great fire-flies through the lukewarm darkness, when
mothers call their children home.... "_Mi fanal Pè Labatt!--mi Pè
Labatt ka vini pouend oi!_"


[Illustration]




LA GUIABLESSE


I


Night in all countries brings with it vaguenesses and illusions which
terrify certain imaginations;--but in the tropics it produces effects
peculiarly impressive and peculiarly sinister. Shapes of vegetation that
startle even while the sun shines upon them assume, after his setting, a
grimness,--a grotesquery,--a suggestiveness for which there is no
name.... In the North a tree is simply a tree;--here it is a personality
that makes itself felt; it has a vague physiognomy, an indefinable Me:
it is an Individual (with a capital I); it is a Being (with a capital
B).

From the high woods, as the moon mounts, fantastic darknesses descend
into the roads,--black distortions, mockeries, bad dreams,--an endless
procession of goblins. Least startling are the shadows flung down by the
various forms of palm, because instantly recognizable;--yet these take
the semblance of giant fingers opening and closing over the way, or a
black crawling of unutterable spiders....

Nevertheless, these phasma seldom alarm the solitary and belated Bitaco:
the darknesses that creep stealthily along the path have no frightful
signification for him,--do not appeal to his imagination;--if he
suddenly starts and stops and stares, it is not because of such shapes,
but because he has perceived two specks of orange light, and is not yet
sure whether they are only fire-flies, or the eyes of a trigonocephalus.
The spectres of his fancy have nothing in common with those indistinct
and monstrous umbrages: what he most fears, next to the deadly serpent,
are human witchcrafts. A white rag, an old bone lying in the path, might
be a maléfice which, if trodden upon, would cause his leg to blacken
and swell up to the size of the limb of an elephant;--an unopened bundle
of plantain leaves or of bamboo strippings, dropped by the way-side,
might contain the skin of a _Soucouyan._ But the ghastly being who doffs
or dons his skin at will--and the Zombi--and the _Moun-Mò_--may be
quelled or exorcised by prayer; and the lights of shrines, the white
gleaming of crosses, continually remind the traveller of his duty to the
Powers that save. All along the way there are shrines at intervals, not
very far apart: while standing in the radiance of one niche-lamp, you
may perhaps discern the glow of the next, if the road be level and
straight. They are almost everywhere,--shining along the skirts of the
woods, at the entrance of ravines, by the verges of precipices;--there
is a cross even upon the summit of the loftiest peak in the island. And
the night-walker removes his hat each time his bare feet touch the soft
stream of yellow light outpoured from the illuminated shrine of a white
Virgin or a white Christ. These are good ghostly company for him;--he
salutes them, talks to them, tells them his pains or fears: their
blanched faces seem to him full of sympathy;--they appear to cheer him
voicelessly as he strides from gloom to gloom, under the goblinry of
those woods which tower black as ebony under the stars.... And he has
other companionship. One of the greatest terrors of darkness in other
lands does not exist here after the setting of the sun,--the terror of
Silence.... Tropical night is full of voices;--extraordinary
populations of crickets are trilling; nations of tree-frogs are
chanting; the _Cabri-des-bois_,[15] or _cra-cra_, almost deafens you
with the wheezy bleating sound by which it earned its creole name; birds
pipe: everything that bells, ululates, drones, clacks, guggles, joins
the enormous chorus; and you fancy you see all the shadows vibrating to
the force of this vocal storm. The true life of Nature in the tropics
begins with the darkness, ends with the light.

And it is partly, perhaps, because of these conditions that the coming
of the dawn does not dissipate all fears of the supernatural. _I ni pè
zombi mênm gran'-jou_ (he is afraid of ghosts even in broad daylight)
is a phrase which does not sound exaggerated in these latitudes,--not,
at least, to any one knowing something of the conditions that nourish or
inspire weird beliefs. In the awful peace of tropical day, in the hush
of the woods, the solemn silence of the hills (broken only by torrent
voices that cannot make themselves heard at night), even in the amazing
luminosity, there is a something apparitional and weird,--something that
seems to weigh upon the world like a measureless haunting. So still all
Nature's chambers are that a loud utterance jars upon the ear brutally,
like a burst of laughter in a sanctuary. With all its luxuriance of
color, with all its violence of light, this tropical day has its
ghostliness and its ghosts. Among the people of color there are many who
believe that even at noon--when the boulevards behind the city are most
deserted--the zombis will show themselves to solitary loiterers.


[Footnote 15: In creole, _cabritt-bois_--("the Wood-Kid")--a colossal
cricket. Precisely at half-past four in the morning it becomes silent;
and for thousands of early risers too poor to own a dock, the cessation
of its song is the signal to get up.]




II


... Here a doubt occurs to me,--a doubt regarding the precise nature of
a word, which I call upon Adou to explain. Adou is the daughter of the
kind old capresse from whom I rent my room in this little mountain
cottage. The mother is almost precisely the color of cinnamon; the
daughter's complexion is brighter,--the ripe tint of an orange.... Adou
tells me creole stories and _tim-tim._ Adou knows all about ghosts, and
believes in them. So does Adou's extraordinarily tall brother,
Yébé,--my guide among the mountains.

--"Adou," I ask, "what is a zombi?"

The smile that showed Adou's beautiful white teeth has instantly
disappeared; and she answers, very seriously, that she has never seen a
zombi, and does not want to see one.

--"_Moin pa té janmain ouè zombi,--pa 'lè ouè ça, moin!_"

--"But, Adou, child, I did not ask you whether you ever saw It;--I asked
you only to tell me what It is like?"...

Adou hesitates a little, and answers:

--"_Zombi? Mais ça fai désòde lanuitt, zombi!_"

Ah! it is Something which "makes disorder at night." Still, that is not
a satisfactory explanation. "Is it the spectre of a dead person, Adou?
Is it _one who comes back?_"

--"_Non, Misié,--non; çê pa ça._"

--"Not that?... Then what was it you said the other night when you were
afraid to pass the cemetery on an errand,--_ça ou té ka di_, Adou?"

--"Moin té ka di: 'Moin pa lé k'allé bò cimétiè-là pa ouappò
moun-mò ké barré moin: moin pa sé pè vini enco.'" (_I said, "I do
not want to goby that cemetery because of the dead folk;--the dead folk
will bar the way and I cannot get back again._")

--"And you believe that, Adou?"

--"Yes, that is what they say.... And if you go into the cemetery at
night you cannot come out again: the dead folk will stop you--_moun-mò
ké barré ou._"...

--"But are the dead folk zombis, Adou?"

--"No; the moun-mò are not zombis. The zombis go everywhere: the dead
folk remain in the graveyard.... Except on the Night of All Souls: then
they go to the houses of their people everywhere."

--"Adou, if after the doors and windows were locked and barred you were
to see entering your room in the middle of the night, a Woman fourteen
feet high?"...

--"_Ah! pa pàlé ça!!_"...

--"No! tell me, Adou?"

--"Why, yes: that would be a zombi. It is the zombis who make all those
noises at night one cannot understand.... Or, again, if I were to see a
dog that high [she holds her hand about five feet above the floor]
coming into our house at night, I would scream: _Mi Zombi!_"

... Then it suddenly occurs to Adou that her mother knows something
about zombis.

--"_Ou! Mannam!_"

--"_Eti!_" answers old Théréza's voice from the little out-building
where the evening meal is being prepared, over a charcoal furnace, in an
earthen canari.

--"_Missié-là ka mandé save ça ça yé yonne zombi;--vini ti
bouin!_"... The mother laughs, abandons her canari, and comes in to tell
me all she knows about the weird word.

"_I ni pè zombi_"--I find from old Théréza's explanations--is a
phrase indefinite as our own vague expressions, "afraid of ghosts,
afraid of the dark." But the word "Zombi" also has special strange
meanings.... "Ou passé nans grand chimin lanuitt, épi ou ka ouè
gouôs difé, épi plis ou ka vini assou difé-à pli ou ka ouè
difé-à ka màché: çé zombi ka fai ça.... Encò, chouval ka
passé,--chouval ka ni anni toua patt: ça zombi." (You pass along the
high-road at night, and you see a great fire, and the more you walk to
get to it the more it moves away: it is the zombi makes that.... Or a
horse _with only three legs_ passes you: that is a zombi.)

--"How big is the fire that the zombi makes?" I ask.

--"It fills the whole road," answers Théréza: "_li ka rempli toutt
chimin-là._ Folk call those fires the Evil Fires,--_mauvai difé_,--and
if you follow them they will lead you into chasms,--_ou ké tombé adans
labîme._"...

And then she tells me this:

--"Baidaux was a mad man of color who used to live at St. Pierre, in the
Street of the Precipice. He was not dangerous,--never did any harm;--his
sister used to take care of him. And what I am going to relate is
true,--_çe zhistouè veritabe!_

"One day Baidaux said to his sister: 'Moin ni yonne yche, va!--ou pa
connaitt li! [I have a child, ah!--you never saw it!] His sister paid no
attention to what he said that day; but the next day he said it again,
and the next, and the next, and every day after,--so that his sister at
last became much annoyed by it, and used to cry out: 'Ah! mais pé
guiole ou, Baidaux! ou fou pou embêté moin conm ça!--ou bien fou!'...
But he tormented her that way for months and for years.

"One evening he went out, and only came home at midnight leading a child
by the hand,--a black child he had found in the street; and he said to
his sister:--

"'Mi yche-là moin mené ba ou! Tou léjou moin té ka di ou moin tini
yonne yche: ou pa té 'lè couè,--eh, ben! MI Y!' [Look at the child I
have brought you! Every day I have been telling you I had a child: you
would not believe me,--very well, look at him!]

"The sister gave one look, and cried out: 'Baidaux, oti ou pouend
yche-là?'... For the child was growing taller and taller every
moment.... And Baidaux,--because he was mad,--kept saying: 'Çé
yche-moin! çé yche moin!' [It is my child!]

"And the sister threw open the shutters and screamed to all the
neighbors,--'_Sécou, sécou, sécou! Vint oué ça Baidaux mené ba
moin!_' [Help! help! Come see what Baidaux has brought in here!] And the
child said to Baidaux: '_Ou ni bonhè ou fou!_' [You are lucky that you
are mad!]... Then all the neighbors came running in; but they could not
see anything: the Zombi was gone."...




III


... As I was saying, the hours of vastest light have their weirdness
here;--and it is of a Something which walketh abroad under the eye of
the sun, even at high noontide, that I desire to speak, while the
impressions of a morning journey to the scene of Its last alleged
apparition yet remains vivid in my recollection.

You follow the mountain road leading from Calebasse over long meadowed
levels two thousand feet above the ocean, into the woods of La Couresse,
where it begins to descend slowly, through deep green shadowing, by
great zigzags. Then, at a turn, you find yourself unexpectedly looking
down upon a planted valley, through plumy fronds of arborescent fern.
The surface below seems almost like a lake of gold-green
water,--especially when long breaths of mountain-wind set the miles of
ripening cane a-ripple from verge to verge: the illusion is marred only
by the road, fringed with young cocoa-palms, which serpentines across
the luminous plain. East, west, and north the horizon is almost wholly
hidden by surging of hills: those nearest are softly shaped and
exquisitely green; above them loftier undulations take hazier verdancy
and darker shadows; farther yet rise silhouettes of blue or violet tone,
with one beautiful breast-shaped peak thrusting up in the midst;--while,
westward, over all, topping even the Piton, is a vapory huddling of
prodigious shapes--wrinkled, fissured, horned, fantastically tall....
Such at least are the tints of the morning.... Here and there, between
gaps in the volcanic chain, the land hollows into gorges, slopes down
into ravines;--and the sea's vast disk of turquoise flames up through
the interval. Southwardly those deep woods, through which the way winds
down, shut in the view.... You do not see the plantation buildings till
you have advanced some distance into the valley;--they are hidden by a
fold of the land, and stand in a little hollow where the road turns: a
great quadrangle of low gray antiquated edifices, heavily walled and
buttressed, and roofed with red tiles. The court they form opens upon
the main route by an immense archway. Farther along ajoupas begin to
line the way,--the dwellings of the field hands,--tiny cottages built
with trunks of the arborescent fern or with stems of bamboo, and
thatched with cane-straw: each in a little garden planted with bananas,
yams, couscous, camanioc, choux-caraibes, or other things,--and hedged
about with roseaux d'Inde and various flowering shrubs.

Thereafter, only the high whispering wildernesses of cane on either
hand,--the white silent road winding between its swaying
cocoa-trees,--and the tips of hills that seem to glide on before you as
you walk, and that take, with the deepening of the afternoon light, such
amethystine color as if they were going to become transparent.




IV


... It is a breezeless and cloudless noon. Under the dazzling downpour
of light the hills seem to smoke blue: something like a thin yellow fog
haloes the leagues of ripening cane,--a vast reflection. There is no
stir in all the green mysterious front of the vine-veiled woods. The
palms of the roads keep their heads quite still, as if listening. The
canes do not utter a single susurration. Rarely is there such absolute
stillness among them: upon the calmest days there are usually rustlings
audible, thin cracklings, faint creepings: sounds that betray the
passing of some little animal or reptile--a rat or a manicou, or a
zanoli or couresse,--more often, however, no harmless lizard or snake,
but the deadly fer-de-lance. To-day, all these seem to sleep; and there
are no workers among the cane to clear away the weeds,--to uproot the
_pié-treffe, pié-poule, pié-balai, zhèbe-en-mè_: it is the hour of
rest.


[Illustration: PITONS DU CARBET
"_The horizon is almost wholly hidden by surging of
hills: silhouettes of blue and violet... a vapory huddling
of prodigious shapes._"]


A woman is coming along the road,--young, very swarthy, very tall, and
barefooted, and black-robed: she wears a high white turban with dark
stripes, and a white foulard is thrown about her fine shoulders; she
bears no burden, and walks very swiftly and noiselessly.... Soundless as
shadow the motion of all these naked-footed people is. On any quiet
mountain-way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may
often be startled by something you _feel_, rather than hear, behind
you,--surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb
oscillations of raiment;--and ere you can turn to look, the haunter
swiftly passes with creole greeting of "bonjou'" or "bonsouè, Missié."
This sudden "becoming aware" in broad daylight of a living presence
unseen is even more disquieting than that sensation which, in absolute
darkness, makes one halt all breathlessly before great solid objects,
whose proximity has been revealed by some mute blind emanation of force
alone. But it is very seldom, indeed, that the negro or half-breed is
thus surprised: he seems to divine an advent by some specialized
sense,--like an animal,--and to become conscious of a look directed upon
him from any distance or from behind any covert;--to pass within the
range of his keen vision unnoticed is almost impossible.... And the
approach of this woman has been already observed by the habitants of the
ajoupas;--dark faces peer out from windows and door-ways;--one
half-nude laborer even strolls out to the road-side under the sun to
watch her coming. He looks a moment, turns to the hut again, and
calls:--

--"Ou-ou! Fafa!"

--"Êti! Gabou!"

--"Vini ti bouin!--mi bel négresse!"

Out rushes Fafa, with his huge straw hat in his hand: "Oti, Gabou?"

--"Mi!"

--"Ah! quimbé moin!" cries black Fafa, enthusiastically; "fouinq! li
bel!--Jésis-Maïa! li doux!"... Neither ever saw that woman before; and
both feel as if they could watch her forever.

There is something superb in the port of a tall young mountain-griffone,
or negress, who is comely and knows that she is comely: it is a black
poem of artless dignity, primitive grace, savage exultation of
movement.... "Ou marché tête enlai cornu couresse qui ka passé
lariviè" (_You walk with, your head in the air, like the
couresse-serpent swimming a river_) is a creole comparison which
pictures perfectly the poise of her neck and chin. And in her walk there
is also a serpentine elegance, a sinuous charm: the shoulders do not
swing; the cambered torso seems immobile;--but alternately from waist to
heel, and from heel to waist, with each long full stride, an
indescribable undulation seems to pass; while the folds of her loose
robe oscillate to right and left behind her, in perfect libration, with
the free swaying of the hips. With us, only a finely trained dancer
could attempt such a walk;--with the Martinique woman of color it is
natural as the tint of her skin; and this allurement of motion
unrestrained is most marked in those who have never worn shoes and are
clad lightly as the women of antiquity,--in two very thin and simple
garments;--chemise and _robe-d'indienne_.... But whence is she?--of what
canton? Not from Vauclin, nor from Lamentin, nor from Marigot,--from
Case-Pilote or from Case-Navire: Fafa knows all the people there. Never
of Sainte-Anne, nor of Sainte-Luce, nor of Sainte-Marie, nor of Diamant,
nor of Gros-Morne, nor of Carbet,--the birthplace of Gabou. Neither is
she of the village of the Abysms, which is in the Parish of the
Preacher,--nor yet of Ducos nor of François, which are in the Commune
of the Holy Ghost....




V


... She approaches the ajoupa: both men remove their big straw hats; and
both salute her with a simultaneous "Bonjou', Manzell."

--"Bonjou', Missié," she responds, in a sonorous alto, without
appearing to notice Gabou,--but smiling upon Fafa as she passes, with
her great eyes turned full upon his face.... All the libertine blood of
the man flames under that look;--he feels as if momentarily wrapped in a
blaze of black lightning.

--"Ça ka fai moin pè," exclaims Gabou, turning his face towards the
ajoupa. Something indefinable in the gaze of the stranger has terrified
him.

--"_Pa ka fai moin pè--fouinq!_" (She does not make me afraid) laughs
Fafa, boldly following her with a smiling swagger.

--"Fafa!" cries Gabou, in alarm. "_Fafa, pa ça!_"

But Fafa does not heed. The strange woman has slackened her pace, as if
inviting pursuit;--another moment and he is at her side.

--"Oti ou ka rété, chè?" he demands, with the boldness of one who
knows himself a fine specimen of his race.

--"Zaffai cabritt pa zaffai lapin," she answers, mockingly.

--"Mais pouki ou rhabillé toutt noué conm ça."

--"Moin pòté deil pou name moin mò."

--"Ale ya yaïe!... Non, voué!--ça ou kallé atouèlement?"

--"Lanmou pàti: moin pàti delé lanmou."

--"Ho!--ou ni guêpe, anh?"

--"Zanoli bail yon bal; épi maboya rentré ladans."

--"Di moin oti ou kallé, doudoux?"

--"Jouq lariviè Lezà."

--"Fouinq!--ni plis passé trente kilomett!"

--"Eh ben?--ess ou 'lè vini épi moin?"[16]

And as she puts the question she stands still and gazes at him;--her
voice is no longer mocking: it has taken another tone,--a tone soft as
the long golden note of the little brown bird they call the
_siffleur-de-montagne_, the mountain-whistler.... Yet Fafa hesitates. He
hears the clear clang of the plantation bell recalling him to duty;--he
sees far down the road--(_Ouill!_ how fast they have been walking!)--a
white and black speck in the sun: Gabou, uttering through his joined
hollowed hands, as through a horn, the _ouklé_, the rally call. For an
instant he thinks of the overseer's anger,--of the distance,--of the
white road glaring in the dead heat: then he looks again into the black
eyes of the strange woman, and answers:

--"Oui;--moin ké vini épi ou."

With a burst of mischievous laughter, in which Fafa joins, she walks
on,--Fafa striding at her side.... And Gabou, far off, watches them
go,--and wonders that, for the first time since ever they worked
together, his comrade failed to answer his _ouklé._

--"Coument yo ka crié ou, chè?" asks Fafa, curious to know her name.

--"Châché nom moin ou-menm, duviné."

But Fafa never was a good guesser,--never could guess the simplest of
tim-tim.

--"Ess Cendrine?"

--"Non, çé pa ça."

--"Ess Vitaline?"

--"Non, çé pa ça."

--"Ess Aza?"

--"Non, çé pa ça."

--"Ess Nini?"

--"Chaché encò."

--"Ess Tité?"

--"Ou pa save,--tant pis pou ou!"

--"Ess Youma?"

--"Pouki ou 'lè save nom moin?--ça ou ké fai épi y?"

--"Ess Yaiya?"

--"Non, çé pa y."

--"Ess Maiyotte?"

--"Non! ou pa ké janmain trouvé y!"

--"Ess Sounoune?--ess Loulouze?"

She does not answer, but quickens her pace and begins to sing,--not as
the half-breed, but as the African sings,--commencing with a low long
weird intonation that suddenly breaks into fractions of notes
inexpressible, then rising all at once to a liquid purling bird-tone,
and descending as abruptly again to the first deep quavering strain:--


"À tè--
moin ka dòmi toute longue;
Yon paillasse sé fai moin bien,
Doudoux!

À tè--
moin ka dòmi toute longue;
Yon robe biésé sé fai moin bien,
Doudoux!

À tè--
moin ka dòmi toute longue;
Dè jolis foulà sé fai moin bien,
Doudoux!

À tè--
moin ka dòmi toute longue;
Yon joli madras sé fai moin bien,
Doudoux!

À tè--
moin ka dòmi toute longue:
Çé à tè..."


... Obliged from the first to lengthen his stride in order to keep up
with her, Fafa has found his utmost powers of walking overtaxed, and has
been left behind. Already his thin attire is saturated with sweat; his
breathing is almost a panting;--yet the black bronze of his companion's
skin shows no moisture; her rhythmic step, her silent respiration,
reveal no effort: she laughs at his desperate straining to remain by her
side.

--"Marché toujou' deïé moin,--anh, chè?--marché toujou' deïé!"...

And the involuntary laggard--utterly bewitched by the supple allurement
of her motion, by the black flame of her gaze, by the savage melody of
her chant--wonders more and more who she may be, while she waits for him
with her mocking smile.

But Gabou--who has been following and watching from afar off, and
sounding his fruitless ouklé betimes--suddenly starts, halts, turns,
and hurries back, fearfully crossing himself at every step.

He has seen the sign by which She is known....


[Footnote 16:--"Where dost stay, dear?"

--"Affaire of the goat are not affaire of the rabbit."

--"But why art thou dressed all in black thus?"

--"I wear mourning for my dead soul."

--"_Aïe ya yaïe!_... No, true!... where art thou going now?"

--"Love is gone: I go after love."

--"Ho! thou hast a Wasp [lover]--eh?"

--"The zanoli gives a ball; the maboya enters unasked."

--"Tell me where thou art going, sweetheart?"

--"As far as the River of the Lizard."

--"_Fouinq!_--there are more than thirty kilometres!"

--"What of that?--do t thou want to come with me?"]




VI


... None ever saw her by night. Her hour is the fulness of the sun's
flood-tide: she comes in the dead hush and white flame of windless
noons,--when colors appear to take a very unearthliness of
intensity,--when even the flash of some colibri, bosomed with living
fire, shooting hither and thither among the grenadilla blossoms, seemeth
a spectral happening because of the great green trance of the land....

Mostly she haunts the mountain roads, winding from plantation to
plantation, from hamlet to hamlet,--sometimes dominating huge sweeps of
azure sea, sometimes shadowed by mornes deep-wooded to the sky. But
close to the great towns she sometimes walks: she has been seen at
mid-day upon the highway which overlooks the Cemetery of the Anchorage,
behind the cathedral of St. Pierre.... A black Woman, simply clad, of
lofty stature and strange beauty, silently standing in the light,
_keeping her eyes fixed upon the Sun!_...




VII


Day wanes. The further western altitudes shift their pearline gray to
deep blue where the sky is yellowing up behind them; and in the
darkening hollows of nearer mornes strange shadows gather with the
changing of the light--dead indigoes, fuliginous purples, rubifications
as of scoriæ,--ancient volcanic colors momentarily resurrected by the
illusive haze of evening. And the fallow of the canes takes a faint warm
ruddy tinge. On certain far high slopes, as the sun lowers, they look
like thin golden hairs against the glow,--blond down upon the skin of
the living hills.

Still the Woman and her follower walk together,--chatting loudly,
laughing, chanting snatches of song betimes. And now the valley is well
behind them;-- they climb the steep road crossing the eastern
peaks,--through woods that seem to stifle under burdening of creepers.
The shadow of the Woman and the shadow of the man,--broadening from
their feet,--lengthening prodigiously,--sometimes, mixing, fill all the
way; sometimes, at a turn, rise up to climb the trees. Huge masses of
frondage, catching the failing light, take strange fiery color;--the
sun's rim almost touches one violet hump in the western procession of
volcanic silhouettes....


Sunset, in the tropics, is vaster than sunrise.... The dawn, upflaming
swiftly from the sea, has no heralding erubescence, no awful
blossoming--as in the North: its fairest hues are fawn-colors,
dove-tints, and yellows,--pale yellows as of old dead gold, in horizon
and flood. But after the mighty heat of day has charged all the blue air
with translucent vapor, colors become strangely changed, magnified,
transcendentalized when the sun falls once more below the verge of
visibility. Nearly an hour before his death, his light begins to turn
tint; and all the horizon yellows to the color of a lemon. Then this hue
deepens, through tones of magnificence unspeakable, into orange; and the
sea becomes lilac. Orange is the light of the world for a little space;
and as the orb sinks, the indigo darkness comes--not descending, but
rising, as if from the ground--all within a few minutes. And during
those brief minutes peaks and mornes, purpling into richest velvety
blackness, appear outlined against passions of fire that rise half-way
to the zenith,--enormous furies of vermilion.


... The Woman all at once leaves the main road,--begins to mount a steep
narrow path leading up from it through the woods upon the left. But Fafa
hesitates,--halts a moment to look back. He sees the sun's huge orange
face sink down,--sees the weird procession of the peaks vesture
themselves in blackness funereal,--sees the burning behind them crimson
into awfulness; and a vague fear comes upon him as he looks again up the
darkling path to the left. Whither is she now going?


--"Oti ou kallé là?" he cries.

--"Mais conm ça!--chimin tala plis cou't,--coument?"

It may be the shortest route, indeed;--but then, the fer-de-lance!...

--"Ni sèpent ciya,--en pile."

No: there is not a single one, she avers; she has taken
that path too often not to know:

--"Pa ni sèpent piess! Moin ni coutime passé là;--pa ni piess!"

... She leads the way.... Behind them the tremendous glow
deepens;--before them the gloom. Enormous gnarled forms of ceiba,
balata, acoma, stand dimly revealed as they pass; masses of viny
drooping things take, by the failing light, a sanguine tone. For a
little while Fafa can plainly discern the figure of the Woman before
him;--then, as the path zigzags into shadow, he can descry only the
white turban and the white foulard;--and then the boughs meet overhead:
he can see her no more, and calls to her in alarm:--

--"Oti ou?--moin pa pè ouè arien!"

Forked pending ends of creepers trail cold across his face. Huge
fire-flies sparkle by,--like atoms of kindled charcoal thudding, blown
by a wind.

--"Içitt!--quimbé lanmain-moin!"...

How cold the hand that guides him!... She walks swiftly, surely, as one
knowing the path by heart. It zigzags once more; and the incandescent
color flames again between the trees;--the high vaulting of foliage
fissures overhead, revealing the first stars. A _cabritt-bois_ begins
its chant. They reach the summit of the morne under the clear sky.

The wood is below their feet now; the path curves on eastward between a
long swaying of ferns sable in the gloom,--as between a waving of
prodigious black feathers. Through the further purpling, loftier
altitudes dimly loom; and from some viewless depth, a dull vast rushing
sound rises into the night.... Is it the speech of hurrying waters, or
only some tempest of insect voices from those ravines in which the night
begins?...

Her face is in the darkness as she stands;--Fafa's eyes are turned to
the iron-crimson of the western sky. He still holds her hand, fondles
it,--murmurs something to her in undertones.

--"Ess ou ainmein moin conm ça?" she asks, almost in a whisper.

Oh! yes, yes, yes!... more than any living being he loves her!... How
much? Ever so much,--_gouôs conm caze!_... Yet she seems to doubt
him,--repeating her question over and over:

--"Ess ou ainmein moin?"

And all the while,--gently, caressingly, imperceptibly,--she draws him a
little nearer to the side of the path, nearer to the black waving of the
ferns, nearer to the great dull rushing sound that rises from beyond
them:

--"Ess ou ainmein moin?"

--"Oui, oui!" he responds,--"ou save ça!--oui, chè doudoux, ou save
ça!"...

And she, suddenly,--turning at once to him and to the last red light,
the goblin horror of her face transformed,--shrieks with a burst of
hideous laughter:

--"_Atò, bô!_"[17]

For the fraction of a moment he knows her name:--then, smitten to the
brain with the sight of her, reels, recoils, and, backward falling,
crashes two thousand feet down to his death upon the rocks of a mountain
torrent.


[Footnote 17: "Kiss me now!"]


[Illustration]




La VÉRETTE


I


--St. Pierre, _1887._


One returning from the country to the city in the Carnival season is
lucky to find any comfortable rooms for rent. I have been happy to
secure one even in a rather retired street,--so steep that it is really
dangerous to sneeze while descending it, lest one lose one's balance and
tumble right across the town. It is not a fashionable street, the Rue du
Morne Mirait; but, after all, there is no particularly fashionable
street in this extraordinary city, and the poorer the neighborhood, the
better one's chance to see something of its human nature.

One consolation is that I have Manm-Robert for a next-door neighbor, who
keeps the best bouts in town (those long thin Martinique cigars of which
a stranger soon becomes fond), and who can relate more queer stories and
legends of old times in the island than anybody else I know of.
Manm-Robert is _yon màchonne lapacotte_, a dealer in such cheap
articles of food as the poor live upon: fruits and tropical vegetables,
manioc-flour, "macadam" (a singular dish of rice stewed with salt
fish--_diri épi coubouyon lamori_), akras, etc.; but her bouts probably
bring her the largest profit--they are all bought up by the békés.
Manm-Robert is also a sort of doctor: whenever any one in the
neighborhood falls sick she is sent for, and always comes, and very
often cures,--as she is skilled in the knowledge and use of medical
herbs, which she gathers herself upon the mornes. But for these services
she never accepts any remuneration: she is a sort of Mother of the poor
in her immediate vicinity. She helps everybody, listens to everybody's
troubles, gives everybody some sort of consolation, trusts everybody,
and sees a great deal of the thankless side of human nature without
seeming to feel any the worse for it. Poor as she must really be, she
appears to have everything that everybody wants; and will lend anything
to her neighbors except a scissors or a broom, which it is thought
bad-luck to lend. And, finally, if anybody is afraid of being bewitched
(_guimboisé_) Manm-Robert can furnish him or her with something that
will keep the bewitchment away....




II

_February 15th._


... Ash-Wednesday. The last masquerade will appear this afternoon,
notwithstanding; for the Carnival lasts in Martinique a day longer than
elsewhere.

All through the country districts since the first week of January there
have been wild festivities every Sunday--dancing on the public highways
to the pattering of tamtams,--African dancing, too, such as is never
seen in St. Pierre. In the city, however, there has been less merriment
than in previous years;--the natural gaiety of the population has been
visibly affected by the advent of a terrible and unfamiliar visitor to
the island,--_La Vérette_: she came by steamer from Colon.

... It was in September. Only two cases had been reported when every
neighboring British colony quarantined against Martinique. Then other
West Indian colonies did likewise. Only two cases of small-pox. "But
there may be two thousand in another month," answered the governors and
the consuls to many indignant protests. Among West Indian populations
the malady has a signification unknown in Europe or the United States:
it means an exterminating plague.

Two months later the little capital of Fort-de-France was swept by the
pestilence as by a wind of death. Then the evil began to spread. It
entered St. Pierre in December, about Christmas time. Last week 173
cases were reported; and a serious epidemic is almost certain. There
were only 8500 inhabitants in Fort-de-France; there are 28,000 in the
three quarters of St. Pierre proper, not including her suburbs; and
there is no saying what ravages the disease may make here.




III


... Three o'clock, hot and clear.... In the distance there is a heavy
sound of drums, always drawing nearer: _tam!--tam!--tamtamtam!_ The
Grande Rue is lined with expectant multitudes; and its tiny square,--the
Batterie d'Esnotz,--thronged with békés.--_Tam!--tam!--tamtamtam!_...
In our own street the people are beginning to gather at door-ways, and
peer out of windows,--prepared to descend to the main thoroughfare at
the first glimpse of the procession.

--"_Oti masque-à?_" Where are the maskers?

It is little Mimi's voice: she is speaking for two besides herself, both
quite as anxious as she to know where the maskers are,--Maurice, her
little fair-haired and blue-eyed brother, three years old; and
Gabrielle, her child-sister, aged four,--two years her junior.

Every day I have been observing the three, playing in the door-way of
the house across the street. Mimi, with her brilliant white skin, black
hair, and laughing black eyes, is the prettiest,--though all are
unusually pretty children. Were it not for the fact that their mother's
beautiful brown hair is usually covered with a violet foulard, you would
certainly believe them white as any children in the world. Now there are
children whom every one knows to be white, living not very far from
here, but in a much more silent street, and in a rich house full of
servants,--children who resemble these as one fleur-d'amour blossom
resembles another;--there is actually another Mimi (though she is not so
called at home) so like this Mimi that you could not possibly tell one
from the other,--except by their dress. And yet the most unhappy
experience of the Mimi who wears white satin slippers was certainly that
punishment given her for having been once caught playing in the street
with this Mimi, who wears no shoes at all. What mischance could have
brought them thus together?--and the worst of it was they had fallen in
love with each other at first sight!... It was not because the other
Mimi must not talk to nice little colored girls, or that this one may
not play with white children of her own age: it was because there are
cases.... It was not because the other children I speak of are prettier
or sweeter or more intelligent than these now playing before me;--or
because the finest microscopist in the world could or could not detect
any imaginable race difference between those delicate satin skins. It
was only because human nature has little changed since the day that
Hagar knew the hate of Sarah, and the thing was grievous in Abraham's
sight because of his son....

... The father of these children loved them very much: he had provided a
home for them,--a house in the Quarter of the Fort, with an allowance of
two hundred francs monthly; and he died in the belief their future was
secured. But relatives fought the will with large means and shrewd
lawyers, and won!... Yzore, the mother, found herself homeless and
penniless, with three children to care for. But she was brave;--she
abandoned the costume of the upper class forever, put on the douilette
and the foulard,--the attire that is a confession of race,--and went to
work. She is still comely, and so white that she seems only to be
masquerading in that violet head-dress and long loose robe....

--"_Vini ouè!--vini ouè!_" cry the children to one another,--"come and
see!" The drums are drawing near;--everybody is running to the Grande
Rue....




IV


_Tam!--tam!--tamtamtam!_ ... The spectacle is interesting from the
Batterie d'Esnotz. High up the Rue Peysette,--up all the precipitous
streets that ascend the mornes,--a far gathering of showy color appears:
the massing of maskers in rose and blue and sulphur-yellow attire....
Then what a _degringolade_ begins!--what a tumbling, leaping, cascading
of color as the troupes descend. Simultaneously from north and south,
from the Mouillage and the Fort, two immense bands enter the Grande
Rue;--the great dancing societies these,--the _Sans-souci_ and the
_Intrépides._ They are rivals; they are the composers and singers of
those Carnival songs,--cruel satires most often, of which the local
meaning is unintelligible to those unacquainted with the incident
inspiring the improvisation,--of which the words are too often coarse or
obscene,--whose burdens will be caught up and re-echoed through all the
burghs of the island. Vile as may be the motive, the satire, the malice,
these chants are preserved for generations by the singular beauty of the
airs; and the victim of a Carnival song need never hope that his failing
or his wrong will be forgotten: it will be sung of long after he is in
his grave.

... Ten minutes more, and the entire length of the street is thronged
with a shouting, shrieking, laughing, gesticulating host of maskers.
Thicker and thicker the press becomes;--the drums are silent: all are
waiting for the signal of the general dance. Jests and practical jokes
are being everywhere perpetrated; there is a vast hubbub, made up of
screams, cries, chattering, laughter. Here and there snatches of
Carnival song are being sung:--"_Cambronne, Cambronne_;" or "_Ti
fenm-là doux, li doux, li doux!_"... "Sweeter than sirup the little
woman is";--this burden will be remembered when the rest of the song
passes out of fashion. Brown hands reach out from the crowd of masks,
pulling the beards and patting the faces of white spectators.... "_Main
connaitt! ou, chè!--moin connaitt ou, doudoux! ba moin ti d'mi franc!_"
It is well to refuse the half-franc,--though you do not know what these
maskers might take a notion to do to-day.... Then all the great drums
suddenly boom together; all the bands strike up; the mad medley
kaleidoscopes into some sort of order; and the immense processional
dance begins. Prom the Mouillage to the Fort there is but one continuous
torrent of sound and color: you are dazed by the tossing of peaked caps,
the waving of hands, and twinkling of feet;--and all this passes with a
huge swing,--a regular swaying to right and left.... It will take at
least an hour for all to pass; and it is an hour well worth passing.
Band after band whirls by; the musicians all garbed as women or as monks
in canary-colored habits;--before them the dancers are dancing backward,
with a motion as of skaters; behind them all leap and wave hands as in
pursuit. Most of the bands are playing creole airs,--but that of the
_Sans-souci_ strikes up the melody of the latest French song in
vogue,--_Petits amoureux aux plumes_ ("Little feathered lovers"[18]).
Everybody now seems to know this song by heart; you hear children only
five or six years old singing it: there are pretty lines in it, although
two out of its four stanzas are commonplace enough, and it is certainly
the air rather than the words which accounts for its sudden popularity.


[Footnote 18: "Petits amoureux aux plumes,
Enfants d'un brillant séjour
Vous ignorez l'amertume,
Vous parlez souvent d'amour:...
Vous méprisez la dorure,
Les salons, et les bijoux;
Vous chérissez la Nature,
Petits oiseaux, becquetez-vous!

"Voyez là bas, dans cette église,
Auprès d'un confessional,
Le prêtre, qui veut faire croire à Lise,
Qu'un baiser est un grand mal;--
Pour prouver à la mignonne
Qu'un baiser bien fait, bien doux,
N'a jamais damné personne
Petits oiseaux, becquetez-vous!"

[_Translation._]
Little feathered lovers, cooing,
Children of the radiant air,
Sweet your speech,--the speech of wooing;
Ye have ne'er a grief to bear!
Gilded ease and jewelled fashion
Never own a charm for you;
Ye love Nature's truth with passion.
Pretty birdlings, bill and coo!

See that priest who, Lise confessing,
Wants to make the girl believe
That a kiss without a blessing
Is a fault for which to grieve!
Now to prove, to his vexation,
That no tender kiss and true
Ever caused a soul's damnation,
Pretty birdlings, bill and coo!]




V


... Extraordinary things are happening in the streets through which the
procession passes. Pest-smitten women rise from their beds to costume
themselves,--to mask face already made unrecognizable by the hideous
malady,--and stagger out to join the dancers.... They do this in the Rue
Longchamps, in the Rue St. Jean-de-Dieu, in the Rue Peysette, in the Rue
de Petit Versailles. And in the Rue Ste.-Marthe there are three young
girls sick with the disease, who hear the blowing of the horns and the
pattering of feet and clapping of hands in chorus;--they get up to look
through the slats of their windows on the masquerade,--and the creole
passion of the dance comes upon them. "Ah!" cries one,--"_nou ké
amieusé nou!--c'est zaffai si nou mò!_" [We will have our fill of fun:
what matter if we die after!] And all mask, and join the rout, and dance
down to the Savane, and over the river bridge into the high streets of
the Fort, carrying contagion with them!... No extraordinary example,
this: the ranks of the dancers hold many and many a _verrettier._




VI


... The costumes are rather disappointing,--though the mummery has some
general characteristics that are not unpicturesque;--for example, the
predominance of crimson and canary-yellow in choice of color, and a
marked predilection for pointed hoods and high-peaked head-dresses. Mock
religious costumes also form a striking element in the general tone of
the display,--Franciscan, Dominion, or Penitent habits,--usually
crimson or yellow, rarely sky-blue. There are no historical costumes,
few eccentricities or monsters: only a few "vampire-bat" head-dresses
abruptly break the effect of the peaked caps and the hoods.... Still
there are some decidedly local ideas in dress which deserve notice,--the
_congo_, the _bébé_ (or _ti-manmaille_), the _ti nègue gouos-sirop_
("little molasses-negro"); and the _diablesse._

The congo is merely the exact reproduction of the dress worn by workers
on the plantations. For the women, a gray calico shirt and coarse
petticoat of percaline; with two coarse handkerchiefs (_mouchoirs
fatas_), one for her neck, and one for the head, over which is worn a
monstrous straw hat;--she walks either barefoot or shod with rude native
sandals, and she carries a hoe. For the man the costume consists of a
gray shirt of rough material, blue canvas pantaloons, a large mouchoir
fatas to tie around his waist, and a _chapeau Bacoué_,--an enormous hat
of Martinique palm-straw. He walks barefooted and carries a cutlass.

The sight of a troupe of young girls en _bébé_, in baby-dress, is
really pretty. This costume comprises only a loose embroidered chemise,
laoe-edged pantalettes, and a child's cap; the whole being decorated
with bright ribbons of various colors. As the dress is short and leaves
much of the lower limbs exposed, there is ample opportunity for display
of tinted stockings and elegant slippers.

The "molasses-negro" wears nothing but a cloth around his loins;--his
whole body and face being smeared with an atrocious mixture of soot and
molasses. He is supposed to represent the original African ancestor.

The _devilesses_ (_diablesses_)are few in number; for it requires a very
tall woman to play deviless. These are robed all in black, with a white
turban and white foulard; they wear black masks. They also carry _boms_
(large tin cans), which they allow to fall upon the pavement from time
to time; and they walk barefoot.... The deviless (in true Bitaco idiom,
"_guiablesse_") represents a singular Martinique superstition. It is
said that sometimes at noonday a beautiful negress passes silently
through some isolated plantation,--smiling at the workers in the
cane-fields,--tempting men to follow her. But he who follows her never
comes back again; and when a field hand mysteriously disappears, his
fellows say, "_Y té ka ouè la Guiablesse!_"... The tallest among the
devilesses always walks first, chanting the question, "_Jou ouvè?_" (Is
it yet daybreak?) And all the others reply in chorus, "_Jou pa'ncò
ouvè._" (It is not yet day.)

--The masks worn by the multitude include very few grotesques: as a
rule, they are simply white wire masks, having the form of an oval and
regular human face;--and they disguise the wearer absolutely, although
they can be seen through perfectly well from within. It struck me at
once that this peculiar type of wire mask gave an indescribable tone of
ghostliness to the whole exhibition. It is not in the least comical; it
is neither comely nor ugly; it is colorless as mist,--expressionless,
void, dead;--it lies on the face like a vapor, like a cloud,--creating
the idea of a spectral vacuity behind it....




VII


... Now comes the band of the _Intrépides_, playing the _bouèné._ It
is a dance melody,--also the name of a mode of dancing, peculiar and
unrestrained;--the dancers advance and retreat face to face; they hug
each other, press together, and separate to embrace again. A very old
dance, this,--of African origin; perhaps the same of which Père Labat
wrote in 1722:--

--"It is not modest. Nevertheless, it has not failed to become so
popular with the Spanish Creoles of America, and so much in vogue among
them, that it now forms the chief of their amusements, and that it
enters even into their devotions. They dance it even in their Churches,
and in their Processions; and the Nuns seldom fail to dance it Christmas
Night, upon a stage erected in their Choir and immediately in front of
their iron grating, which is left open, so that the People may share in
the joy manifested by these good souls for the birth of the
Saviour."[19]...


[Footnote 19: ... "Cette danse est opposée à la pudeur. Avec tout
cela, elle ne laisse pas d'être tellement du goût des Espagnols
Créolles de l'Amérique, & si fort en usage parmi eux, qu'elle fait la
meilleure partie de leurs divertissements, & qu'elle entre même dans
leurs devotions. Ils la dansent même dans leurs Églises & à leurs
processions; et les Religieuses ne manquent guère de la danser la Nuit
de Noël, sur un théâtre élevé dans leur Chœur, vis-à-vis de leur
grille, qui est ouverte, afin que le Peuple ait sa part dans la joye que
ces bonnes âmes témoignent pour la naissance du Sauveur."]




VIII


... Every year, on the last day of the Carnival, a droll ceremony used
to take place called the "Burial of the Bois-bois,"--the bois-bois being
a dummy, a guy, caricaturing the most unpopular thing in city life or in
politics. This bois-bois, after having been paraded with mock solemnity
through all the ways of St. Pierre, was either interred or
"drowned,"--flung into the sea.... And yesterday the dancing societies
had announced their intention to bury a _bois-bois laverette_,--a
manikin that was to represent the plague. But this bois-bois does not
make its appearance. _La Vérette_ is too terrible a visitor to be made
fun of, my friends;--you will not laugh at her, because you dare not....

No: there is one who has the courage,--a yellow goblin crying from
behind his wire mask, in imitation of the màchannes: "_Ça qui 'lè
quatòze graines laverette pou yon sou?_" (Who wants to buy fourteen
verette-spots for a sou?)

Not a single laugh follows that jest.... And just one week from to-day,
poor mocking goblin, you will have a great many more than quatorze
graines, which will not cost you even a sou, and which will disguise you
infinitely better than the mask you now wear;--and they will pour
quick-lime over you, ere ever they let you pass through this street
again--in a seven franc coffin!...




IX


And the multicolored clamoring stream rushes by,--swerves off at last
through the Rue des Ursulines to the Savane,--rolls over the new bridge
of the Roxelane to the ancient quarter of the Fort.

All of a sudden there is a hush, a halt;--the drums stop beating, the
songs cease. Then I see a sudden scattering of goblins and demons and
devilesses in all directions: they run into houses, up alleys,--hide
behind door-ways. And the crowd parts; and straight through it, walking
very quickly, conies a priest in his vestments, preceded by an acolyte
who rings a little bell. _C'est Bon-Dié ka passé!_ ("It is the
Good-God who goes by!") The father is bearing the "viaticum" to some
victim of the pestilence: one must not appear masked as a devil or a
deviless in the presence of the Bon-Dié.

He goes by. The flood of maskers recloses behind the ominous
passage;--the drums boom again; the dance recommences; and all the
fantastic mummery ebbs swiftly out of sight.




X


Night falls;--the maskers crowd to the ball-rooms to dance strange
tropical measures that will become wilder and wilder as the hours pass.
And through the black streets, the Devil makes his last Carnival-round.

By the gleam of the old-fashioned oil lamps hung across the
thoroughfares I can make out a few details of his costume. He is clad in
red, wears a hideous blood-colored mask, and a cap of which the four
sides are formed by four looking-glasses;--the whole head-dress being
surmounted by a red lantern. He has a white wig made of horse-hair, to
make him look weird and old,--since the Devil is older than the world!
Down the street he comes, leaping nearly his own height,--chanting words
without human signification,--and followed by some three hundred boys,
who form the chorus to his chant--all clapping hands together and giving
tongue with a simultaneity that testifies how strongly the sense of
rhythm enters into the natural musical feeling of the African,--a
feeling powerful enough to impose itself upon, all Spanish-America, and
there create the unmistakable characteristics of all that is called
"creole music."

--"Bimbolo!"

--"Zimabolo!"

--"Bimbolo!"

--"Zimabolo!"

--"Et zimbolo!"

--"Et bolo-po!"

--sing the Devil and his chorus. His chant is cavernous, abysmal,--booms
from his chest like the sound of a drum beaten in the bottom of a
well.... _Ti maillelà, baill moin lavoix!_ ("Give me voice, little
folk,--give me voice!") And all chant after him, in a chanting like the
rushing of many waters, and with triple clapping of hands:--"_Ti
marmaille-là, baill moin lavoix!_"... Then he halts before a dwelling
in the Rue Peysette, and thunders:--

--"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!--mi! diabe-là derhò!_"

That is evidently a piece of spite-work: there is somebody living there
against whom he has a grudge.... "Hey! Marie-without-teeth! look! the
Devil is outside!" And the chorus catch the clue.

DEVIL.--"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!_"...

CHORUS.--"_Marie-sans-dent! mi!--diabe-là derhò!_"

D.--"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!_"...

C.--"_Marie-sans-dent! mi!--diabe-là derhò!_"

D.--"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!_"... etc.

The Devil at last descends to the main street, always singing the same
song;--I follow the chorus to the Savanna, where the rout makes for the
new bridge over the Roxelane, to mount the high streets of the old
quarter of the Fort; and the chant changes as they cross over:—

DEVIL.--"_Oti ouè diabe-là passé lariviè?_" (Where did you see the
Devil going over the river?) And all the boys repeat the words, falling
into another rhythm with perfect regularity and ease:--"_Oti ouè
diabe-là passé lariviè?_"

DEVIL.--"_Oti ouè diabe?_"...

CHORUS.--"_Oti ouè diabe-là passé lariviè?_"

D.--"_Oti ouè diabe?_"

C.--"_Oti ouè diabe-là passé lariviè?_"

D.--"_Oti ouè diabe?_"... etc.


About midnight the return of the Devil and his following arouses me from
sleep:--all are chanting a new refrain, "The Devil and the zombis sleep
anywhere and everywhere!" (_Diabe épi zombi ka dòmi tout-pàtout._)
The voices of the boys are still clear, shrill, fresh,--clear as a chant
of frogs;--they still clap hands with a precision of rhythm that is
simply wonderful,--making each time a sound almost exactly like the
bursting of a heavy wave:--

DEVIL.--"_Diabe épi zombi._"...

CHORUS.--"_Diabe épi zombi ka dàmi tout-pàtout!_"

D.--"_Diabe épi zombi._"...

C.--"_Diabe épi zombi ka dòmi tout-pàtout!_"

D.--"_Diabe épi zombi._"... etc.

... What is this after all but the old African method of chanting at
labor. The practice of carrying the burden upon the head left the hands
free for the rhythmic accompaniment of clapping. And you may still hear
the women who load the transatlantic steamers with coal at
Fort-de-France thus chanting and clapping....

Evidently the Devil is moving very fast; for all the boys are
running;--the pattering of bare feet upon the pavement sounds like a
heavy shower.... Then the chanting grows fainter in distance; the
Devil's immense basso becomes inaudible;--one only distinguishes at
regular intervals the crescendo of the burden,--a wild swelling of many
hundred boy-voices all rising together,--a retreating storm of rhythmic
song, wafted to the ear in gusts, in rafales of contralto....




XI

_February 17th._


... Yzore is a _calendeuse._

The calendeuses are the women who make up the beautiful Madras turbans
and color them; for the amazingly brilliant yellow of these head-dresses
is not the result of any dyeing process: they are all painted by hand.
When purchased the Madras is simply a great oblong handkerchief, having
a pale green or pale pink ground, and checkered or plaided by
intersecting bands of dark blue, purple, crimson, or maroon. The
calendeuse lays the Madras upon a broad board placed across her
knees,--then, taking a camel's-hair brush, she begins to fill in the
spaces between the bands with a sulphur-yellow paint, which is always
mixed with gum-arabic. It requires a sure eye, very steady fingers, and
long experience to do this well.... After the Madras has been
"calendered" (_calendé_) and has become quite stiff and dry, it is
folded about the head of the purchaser after the comely Martinique
fashion,--which varies considerably from the modes popular in Guadeloupe
or Cayenne,--is fixed into the form thus obtained; and can thereafter be
taken off or put on without arrangement or disarrangement, like a cap.
The price for calendering a Madras is now two francs and fifteen
sous;--and for making-up the turban, six sous additional, except in
Carnival-time, or upon holiday occasions, when the price rises to
twenty-five sous.... The making-up of the Madras into a turban is
called "tying a head" (_marré yon tête_); and a prettily folded turban
is spoken of as "a head well tied" (_yon tête bien marré_)....
However, the profession of calendeuse is far from being a lucrative one:
it is two or three days' work to calendar a single Madras well...

But Yzore does not depend upon calendering alone for a living: she earns
much more by the manufacture of moresques and of chinoises than by
painting Madras turbans.... Everybody in Martinique who can afford it
wears moresques and chinoises. The moresques are large loose comfortable
pantaloons of thin printed calico (_indienne_),--having colored designs
representing birds, frogs, leaves, lizards, flowers, butterflies, or
kittens,--or perhaps representing nothing in particular, being simply
arabesques. The chinoise is a loose body-garment, very much like the
real Chinese blouse, but always of brightly colored calico with
fantastic designs. These things are worn at home during siestas, after
office-hours, and at night. To take a nap during the day with one's
ordinary clothing on means always a terrible drenching from
perspiration, and an after-feeling of exhaustion almost
indescribable--best expressed, perhaps, by the local term: _corps
écrasé._ Therefore, on entering one's room for the siesta, one strips,
puts on the light moresques and the chinoise, and dozes in comfort. A
suit of this sort is very neat, often quite pretty, and very cheap
(costing only about six francs);--the colors do not fade out in washing,
and two good suits will last a year.... Yzore can make two pair of
moresques and two chinoises in a single day upon her machine.

... I have observed there is a prejudice here against treadle
machines;--the creole girls are persuaded they injure the health. Most
of the sewing-machines I have seen among this people are operated by
hand,--with a sort of little crank....




XII

_February 22d._


... Old physicians indeed predicted it; but who believed them?...

It is as though something sluggish and viewless, dormant and deadly, had
been suddenly upstirred to furious life by the wind of robes and tread
of myriad dancing feet,--by the crash of cymbals and heavy vibration of
drums! Within a few days there has been a frightful increase of the
visitation, an almost incredible expansion of the invisible poison: the
number of new cases and of deaths has successively doubled, tripled,
quadrupled....

... Great caldrons of tar are kindled now at night in the more thickly
peopled streets,--about one hundred paces apart, each being tended by an
Indian laborer in the pay of the city: this is done with the idea of
purifying the air. These sinister fires are never lighted but in times
of pestilence and of tempest: on hurricane nights, when enormous waves
roll in from the fathomless sea upon one of the most fearful coasts in
the world, and great vessels are being driven ashore, such is the
illumination by which the brave men of the coast make desperate efforts
to save the lives of shipwrecked men, often at the cost of their
own.[20]


[Footnote 20: During a hurricane, several years ago, a West Indian
steamer was disabled at a dangerously brief distance from the coast of
the island by having her propeller fouled. Some broken and drifting
rigging had become wrapped around it. One of the crew, a Martinique
mulatto, tied a rope about his waist, took his knife between his teeth,
dived overboard, and in that tremendous sea performed the difficult feat
of disengaging the propeller, and thus saving the steamer from otherwise
certain destruction.... This brave fellow received the Cross of the
Legion of Honor....]




XIII

_February 23d._


A coffin passes, balanced on the heads of black men. It bolds the body
of Pascaline Z----, covered with quick-lime.

She was the prettiest, assuredly, among the pretty shop-girls of the
Grande Rue,--a rare type of _sang-mêlée._ So oddly pleasing, the young
face, that once seen, you could never again dissociate the recollection
of it from the memory of the street. But one who saw it last night
before they poured quick-lime upon it could discern no features,--only
a dark brown mass, like a fungus, too frightful to think about.

... And they are all going thus, the beautiful women of color. In the
opinion of physicians, the whole generation is doomed.... Yet a curious
fact is that the young children of octoroons are suffering least: these
women have their children vaccinated,--though they will not be
vaccinated themselves. I see many brightly colored children, too,
recovering from the disorder: the skin is not pitted, like that of the
darker classes; and the rose-colored patches finally disappear
altogether, leaving no trace.

... Here the sick are wrapped in banana leaves, after having been
smeared with a certain unguent....


[Illustration: FORT-DE-FRANCE
_The city from the heights of Le Calvaire, behind
the town._]


There is an immense demand for banana leaves. In ordinary times these
leaves--especially the younger ones, still unrolled, and tender and soft
beyond any fabric possible for man to make--are used for poultices of
all kinds, and sell from one to two sous each, according to size and
quality.




XIV

_February 29th._


... The whites remain exempt from the malady.

One might therefore hastily suppose that liability to contagion would be
diminished in proportion to the excess of white blood over African; but
such is far from being the case;--St. Pierre is losing its handsomest
octoroons. Where the proportion of white to black blood is 116 to 8, as
in the type called _mamelouc_;--or 122 to 4, as in the _quarteronné_
(not to be confounded with the quarteron or quadroon);--or even 127 to
1, as in the _sang-mêlé_, the liability to attack remains the same,
while the chances of recovery are considerably less than in the case of
the black. Some few striking instances of immunity appear to offer a
different basis for argument; but these might be due to the social
position of the individual rather than to any constitutional temper:
wealth and comfort, it must be remembered, have no small prophylactic
value in such times. Still,--although there is reason to doubt whether
mixed races have a constitutional vigor comparable to that of the
original parent-races,--the liability to diseases of this class is
decided less, perhaps, by race characteristics than by ancestral
experience. The white peoples of the world have been practically
inoculated, vaccinated, by experience of centuries;--while among these
visibly mixed or black populations the seeds of the pest find absolutely
fresh soil in which to germinate, and its ravages are therefore scarcely
less terrible than those it made among the American-Indian or the
Polynesian races in other times. Moreover, there is an unfortunate
prejudice against vaccination here. People even now declare that those
vaccinated die just as speedily of the plague as those who have never
been;--and they can cite cases in proof. It is useless to talk to them
about averages of immunity, percentage of liability, etc.;--they have
seen with their own eyes persons who had been well vaccinated die of the
verette, and that is enough to destroy their faith in the system... Even
the priests, who pray their congregations to adopt the only known
safeguard against the disease, can do little against this scepticism.




XV

_March 5th._


... The streets are so narrow in this old-fashioned quarter that even a
whisper is audible across them; and after dark I hear a great many
things,--sometimes sounds of pain, sobbing, despairing cries as Death
makes his nightly round,--sometimes, again, angry words, and laughter,
and even song,--always one melancholy chant: the voice has that peculiar
metallic timbre that reveals the young negress:--


"_Paw' ti Lélé,
Paw' ti Lélé!
Li gagnin doulè, doulè, doulè,--
Li gagnin doulè
Tout-pàtout!_"


I want to know who little Lélé was, and why she had pains "all
over";--for however artless and childish these creole songs seem, they
are invariably originated by some real incident. And at last somebody
tells me that "poor little Lélé" had the reputation in other years of
being the most unlucky girl in St. Pierre; whatever she tried to do
resulted only in misfortune;--when it was morning she wished it were
evening, that she might sleep and forget; but when the night came she
could not sleep for thinking of the trouble she had had during the day,
so that she wished it were morning....

More pleasant it is to hear the chatting of Yzore's children across the
way, after the sun has set, and the stars come out.... Gabrielle always
wants to know what the stars are:--

--"_Ça qui ka clairé conm, ça, manman?_" (What is it that shines like
that?)

And Yzore answers:--

--"_Ça, mafi,--c'est ti limiè Bon-Dié._" (Those are the little lights
of the Good-God.)

--"It is so pretty,--eh, mamma? I want to count them."

--"You cannot count them, child."

--"One--two--three--four--five--six--seven." Gabrielle can only count up
to seven. "_Moin pride!_--I am lost, mamma!"

The moon comes up;--she cries:--"_Mi! manman!--gàdé gouôs difé qui
adans ciel-à!_" (Look at the great fire in the sky!)

--"It is the Moon, child!... Don't you see St. Joseph in it, carrying a
bundle of wood?"

--"Yes, mamma! I see him!... A great big bundle of wood!"...

But Mimi is wiser in moon-lore: she borrows half a franc from her mother
"to show to the Moon." And holding it up before the silver light, she
sings:--

--"Pretty Moon, I show you my little money;--now let me always have
money so long as you shiner!"[21]

Then the mother takes them up to bed;--and in a little while there
floats to me, through the open window, the murmur of the children's
evening prayer:--


"Ange-gardien,
Veillez sur moi."
* * * *
"Ayez pitié de ma faiblesse;
Couchez-vous sur mon petit lit;
Suivez-moi sans cesse."[22]...


I can only catch a line here and there.... They do not sleep
immediately;--they continue to chat in bed. Gabrielle wants to know
what a guardian-angel is like. And I hear Mimi's voice replying in
creole:--

--"_Zange-gàdien, c'est yon jeine fi, touts bel._" (The guardian-angel
is a young girl, all beautiful.)

A little while, and there is silence; and I see Yzore come out,
barefooted, upon the moonlit balcony of her little room,--looking up and
down the hushed street, looking at the sea, looking up betimes at the
high flickering of stars,--moving her lips as in prayer.... And,
standing there white-robed, with her rich dark hair loose-falling, there
is a weird grace about her that recalls those long slim figures of
guardian-angels in French religious prints....


[Footnote 21: "_Bel ladine, moin ka montré ou ti pièce moin!--ba moin
làgent toutt tempe ou ka clairé!_"... This little invocation is
supposed to have most power when ottered on the first appearance of the
new moon.]

[Footnote 22: "Guardian-angel, watch over me;--have pity upon my
weakness; lie down on my little bed with me; follow me whithersoever I
go."... The prayers are always said in French. Metaphysical and
theological terms cannot be rendered in the patois; and the authors of
creole catechisms have always been obliged to borrow and explain French
religious phrases in order to make their texts comprehensible.]





XVI

_March 6th._


This morning Manm-Robert brings me something queer,--something hard tied
up in a tiny piece of black cloth, with a string attached to hang it
round my neck. I must wear it, she says.

--"_Ça ça yè, Manm-Robert?_"

--"_Pou empêché ou pouend laverette_" she answers. It is to keep me
from catching the verette!... And what is inside it?

--"_Toua graines maïs, épi dicamfre._" (Three grains of corn, with a
bit of camphor!)...




XVII

_March 8th._


... Rich households throughout the city are almost helpless for the want
of servants. One can scarcely obtain help at any price: it is true that
young country-girls keep coming into town to fill the places of the
dead; but these new-comers fall a prey to the disease much more readily
than those who preceded them. And such deaths often represent more than
a mere derangement in the mechanism of domestic life. The creole bonne
bears a relation to the family of an absolutely peculiar sort,--a
relation of which the term "house-servant" does not convey the faintest
idea. She is really a member of the household: her association with its
life usually begins in childhood, when she is barely strong enough to
carry a dobanne of water up-stairs;--and in many cases she has the
additional claim of having been born in the house. As a child, she plays
with the white children,--shares their pleasures and presents. She is
very seldom harshly spoken to, or reminded of the fact that she is a
servitor: she has a pet name;--she is allowed much familiarity,--is
often permitted to join in conversation when there is no company
present, and to express her opinion about domestic affairs. She costs
very little to keep; four or five dollars a year will supply her with
all necessary clothing;--she rarely wears shoes;--she sleeps on a little
straw mattress (_paillasse_) on the floor, or perhaps upon a paillasse
supported upon an "elephant" (_léfan_)--two thick square pieces of hard
mattress placed together so as to form an oblong. She is only a nominal
expense to the family; and she is the confidential messenger, the nurse,
the chamber-maid, the water-carrier,--everything, in short, except cook
and washer-woman. Families possessing a really good bonne would not part
with her on any consideration. If she has been brought up in the
household, she is regarded almost as a kind of adopted child. If she
leave that household to make a home of her own, and have ill-fortune
afterwards, she will not be afraid to return with her baby, which will
perhaps be received and brought up as she herself was, under the old
roof. The stranger may feel puzzled at first by this state of affairs;
yet the cause is not obscure. It is traceable to the time of the
formation of creole society--to the early period of slavery. Among the
Latin races,--especially the French,--slavery preserved in modern times
many of the least harsh features of slavery in the antique
world,--where the domestic slave, entering the _famillia_, actually
became a member of it.




XVIII

_March 10th._


... Yzore and her little ones are all in Manm-Robert's shop;--she is
recounting her troubles,--fresh troubles: forty-seven francs' worth of
work delivered on time, and no money received.... So much I hear as I
enter the little boutique myself, to buy a package of "bouts."

--"_Assise!_" says Manm-Robert, handing me her own chair;--she is always
pleased to see me, pleased to chat with me about creole folk-lore. Then
observing a smile exchanged between myself and Mimi, she tells the
children to bid me good-day:--"_Allé di bonjou' Missié-à!_"

One after another, each holds up a velvety cheek to kiss. And Mimi, who
has been asking her mother the same question over and over again for at
least five minutes without being able to obtain an answer, ventures to
demand of me on the strength of this introduction:--

--"_Missié, oti masque-à?_"

--"_Y ben fou, pouloss!_" the mother cries out;--"Why, the child must
be going out of her senses!... _Mimi pa 'mbêté moune conm ça!--pa ni
piess masque: c'est la-vérette qui ni._" (Don't annoy people like
that!--there are no maskers now; there is nothing but the verette!)


[You are not annoying me at all, little Mimi; but I would not like to
answer your question truthfully. I know where the maskers are,--most of
them, child; and I do not think it would be well for you to know. They
wear no masks now; but if you were to see them for even one moment, by
some extraordinary accident, pretty Mimi, I think you would feel more
frightened than you ever felt before.]...

--"_Toutt la nuite y k'anni rêvé masque-à_," continues Yzore.... I am
curious to know what Mimi's dreams are like;--wonder if I can coax her
to tell me....




XIX


... I have written Mimi's last dream from the child's dictation:--[23]

--"I saw a ball," she says. "I was dreaming: I saw everybody dancing
with masks on;--I was looking at them. And all at once I saw that the
folks who were dancing were all made of pasteboard. And I saw a
commandeur: he asked me what I was doing there. I answered him: 'Why, I
saw a ball, and I came to look--what of it?' He answered me:--'Since you
are so curious to come and look at other folks' business, you will have
to stop here and dance too!' I said to him:--'No! I won't dance with
people made of pasteboard;--I am afraid of them!'... And I ran and ran
and ran,--I was so much afraid. And I ran into a big garden, where I saw
a big cherry-tree that had only leaves upon it; and I saw a man sitting
under the cherry-tree. He asked me:--'What are you doing here?' I said
to him:--'I am trying to find my way out.' He said:--'You must stay
here.' I said:--'No, no!'--and I said, in order to be able to get
away:--'Go up there!--you will see a fine ball: all pasteboard people
dancing there, and a pasteboard commandeur commanding them!'... And then
I got so frightened that I awoke."...

... "And why were you so afraid of them, Mimi?" I ask.

--"_Pace yo té toutt vide endedans!_" answers Mimi. (_Because they were
all hollow inside!_)



[Footnote 23:--"Moin té ouè yon bal;--moin rêvé: moin té ka ouè toutt
moune ka dansé masqué; moin té ka gàdé. Et toutt-à-coup moin ka ouè c'est
bonhomme-càton ka dansé. Et main ka ouè yon Commandè: y ka mandé moin
ça moin ka fai là. Moin reponne y conm ça:--'Moin ouè yon bal, moin
gàdé-coument!' Y ka réponne moin:--'Pisse ou si quirièse pou vini gàdé
baggaïe moune, faut rété là pou dansé 'tou.' Moin réponne y:--'Non! moin
pa dansé épi bonhomme-càton!--moin pè!'... Et moin ka couri, moin ka
couri, main ka couri à fòce moin te ni pè. Et moin rentré adans grand
jàdin; et moin ouè gouôs pié-cirise qui té chàgé anni feuill; et moin ka
ouè yon nhomme assise enba cirise-à. Y mandé moin:--'Ça ou ka fai là?'
Moin di y:--'Moin ka châché chimin pou moin allé.' Y di moin:--'Faut
rété içitt.' Et moin di y:--'Non!'--et pou chappé cò moin, moin di
y:--'Allé enhaut-là: ou ké ouè yon bel bal,--toutt bonhomme-càton ka
dansé, épi yon Commande-en-càton ka coumandé yo.'... Epi moin levé, à
fòce moin té pè."...]




XX

_Mardi 19th._


... The death-rate in St. Pierre is now between three hundred and fifty
and four hundred a month. Our street is being depopulated. Every day men
come with immense stretchers,--covered with a sort of canvas awning,--to
take somebody away to the _lazaretto._ At brief intervals, also, coffins
are carried into houses empty, and carried out again followed by women
who cry so loud that their sobbing can be heard a great way off.

... Before the visitation few quarters were so densely peopled: there
were living often in one small house as many as fifty. The poorer
classes had been accustomed from birth to live as simply as
animals,--wearing scarcely any clothing, sleeping on bare floors,
exposing themselves to all changes of weather, eating the cheapest and
coarsest food. Yet, though living under such adverse conditions, no
healthier people could be found, perhaps, in the world,--nor a more
cleanly. Every yard having its fountain, almost everybody could bathe
daily,--and with hundreds it was the custom to enter the river every
morning at daybreak or to take a swim in the bay (the young women here
swim as well as the men).... But the pestilence, entering among so dense
and unprotected a life, made extraordinarily rapid havoc; and bodily
cleanliness availed little against the contagion. Now all the bathing
resorts are deserted,--because the lazarettos infect the bay with
refuse, and because the clothing of the sick is washed in the Roxelane.

... Guadeloupe, the sister colony, now sends aid;--the sum total is less
than a single American merchant might give to a charitable undertaking:
but it is a great deal for Guadeloupe to give. And far Cayenne sends
money too; and the mother-country will send one hundred thousand francs.




XXI

_March 20th._


... The infinite goodness of this colored population to one another is
something which impresses with astonishment those accustomed to the
selfishness of the world's great cities. No one is suffered to go to the
pesthouse who has a bed to lie upon, and a single relative or tried
friend to administer remedies;--the multitude who pass through the
lazarettos are strangers,--persons from the country who have no home of
their own, or servants who are not permitted to remain sick in houses of
employers.... There are, however, many cases where a mistress will not
suffer her bonne to take the risks of the pest-house,--especially in
families where there are no children: the domestic is carefully nursed;
a physician hired for her, remedies purchased for her....

But among the colored people themselves the heroism displayed is
beautiful, is touching,--something which makes one doubt all accepted
theories about the natural egotism of mankind, and would compel the most
hardened pessimist to conceive a higher idea of humanity. There is never
a moment's hesitation in visiting a stricken individual: every relative,
and even the most intimate friends of every relative, may be seen
hurrying to the bedside. They take turns at nursing, sitting up all
night, securing medical attendance and medicines, without ever a thought
of the danger,--nay, of the almost absolute certainty of contagion. If
the patient have no means, all contribute: what the sister or brother
has not, the uncle or the aunt, the godfather or godmother, the cousin,
brother-in-law, or sister-in-law, may be able to give. No one dreams of
refusing money or linen or wine or anything possible to give, lend, or
procure on credit. Women seem to forget that they are beautiful, that
they are young, that they are loved,--to forget everything but the sense
of that which they hold to be duty. You see young girls of remarkably
elegant presence,--young colored girls well educated and
_élevées-en-chapeau_[24] (that is to say, brought up like white creole
girls, dressed and accomplished like them), voluntarily leave rich homes
to nurse some poor mulatress or capresse in the indigent quarters of the
town, because the sick one happens to be a distant relative. They will
not trust others to perform this for them;--they feel bound to do it in
person. I heard such a one say, in reply to some earnest protest about
thus exposing herself (she had never been vaccinated):--"_Ah! quand il
s'agit du devoir, la vie ou la mort c'est pour moi la même chose._"

... But without any sanitary law to check this self-immolation, and with
the conviction that in the presence of duty, or what is believed to be
duty, "life or death is the same thing," or ought to be so
considered,--you can readily imagine how soon the city must become one
vast hospital.


[Footnote 24: Lit.,--"brought-up-in-a-hat." To wear the madras is to
acknowledge oneself of color;--to follow the European style of dressing
the hair and adopt the costume of the white creoles indicate a desire to
affiliate with the white class.]




XXII


... By nine o'clock, as a general rule, St. Pierre becomes silent: every
one here retires early and rises with the sun. But sometimes, when the
night is exceptionally warm, people continue to sit at their doors and
chat until a far later hour; and on such a night one may hear and see
curious things, in this period of plague....

It is certainly singular that while the howling of a dog at night has no
ghastly signification here (nobody ever pays the least attention to the
sound, however hideous), the moaning and screaming of cats is believed
to bode death; and in these times folks never appear to feel too sleepy
to rise at any hour and drive them away when they begin their cries....
To-night--a night so oppressive that all but the sick are sitting
up--almost a panic is created in our street by a screaming of cats;--and
long after the creatures have been hunted out of sight and hearing,
everybody who has a relative ill with the prevailing malady continues to
discuss the omen with terror.

... Then I observe a colored child standing barefooted in the moonlight,
with her little round arms uplifted and hands joined above her head. A
more graceful little figure it would be hard to find as she appears thus
posed; but, all unconsciously, she is violating another superstition by
this very attitude; and the angry mother shrieks:--

--"_Ti manmaille-là!--tiré lanmain-ou assous tête-ou, foute! pisse
moin encò là!... Espéré moin allé lazarett avant metté lanmain
conm ça!_" (Child, take down your hands from your head... because I am
here yet! Wait till I go to the lazaretto before you put up your hands
like that!)

For it was the savage, natural, primitive gesture of mourning,--of great
despair.

... Then all begin to compare their misfortunes, to relate their
miseries;--they say grotesque things,--even make jests about their
troubles. One declares:--

--"_Si moin té ka venne chapeau, à fòce moin ni malhè, toutt manman
sé fai yche yo sans tête._" (I have that ill-luck, that if I were
selling hats all the mothers would have children without heads!)

--Those who sit at their doors, I observe, do not sit, as a rule, upon
the steps, even when these are of wood. There is a superstition which
checks such a practice. "_Si ou assise assous pas-lapòte, ou ké pouend
doulè toutt moune._" (If you sit upon the door-step, you will take the
pain of all who pass by.)




XXIII

_March 30th._


Good Friday....

The bells have ceased to ring,--even the bells for the dead; the hours
are marked by cannon-shots. The ships in the harbor form crosses with
their spars, turn their flags upside down. And the entire colored
population put on mourning:--it is a custom among them centuries old.

You will not perceive a single gaudy robe to-day, a single calendered
Madras: not a speck of showy color is visible through all the ways of
St. Pierre. The costumes donned are all similar to those worn for the
death of relatives: either full mourning,--a black robe with violet
foulard, and dark violet-banded headkerchief; or half-mourning,--a dark
violet robe with black foulard and turban;--the half-mourning being worn
only by those who cannot afford the more sombre costume. From my window
I can see long processions climbing the mornes about the city, to visit
the shrines and crucifixes, and to pray for the cessation of the
pestilence.

... Three o'clock. Three cannon-shots shake the hills: it is the
supposed hour of the Saviour's death. All believers--whether in the
churches, on the highways, or in their homes--bow down and kiss the
cross thrice, or, if there be no cross, press their lips three times to
the ground or the pavement, and utter those three wishes which if
expressed precisely at this traditional moment will surely, it is held,
be fulfilled. Immense crowds are assembled before the crosses on the
heights, and about the statue of Notre Dame de la Garde.

... There is no hubbub in the streets; there is not even the customary
loud weeping to be heard as the coffins go by. One must not complain
to-day, nor become angry, nor utter unkind words,--any fault committed
on Good Friday is thought to obtain a special and awful magnitude in the
sight of Heaven.... There is a curious saying in vogue here. If a son
or daughter grows up vicious,--become a shame to the family and a curse
to the parents,--it is observed of such:--"_Ça, c'est yon péché
Vendredi-Saint!_" (Must be a _Good-Friday sin!_)

There are two other strange beliefs connected with Good Friday. One is
that it always rains on that day,--that the sky weeps for the death of
the Saviour; and that this rain, if caught in a vessel, will never
evaporate or spoil, and will cure all diseases.

The other is that only Jesus Christ died precisely at three o'clock.
Nobody else ever died exactly at that hour;--they may die a second
before or a second after three, but never exactly at three.




XXIV

_Mardi 31st._


... Holy Saturday morning;--nine o'clock. All the bells suddenly ring
out; the humming of the bourdon blends with the thunder of a hundred
guns: this is the _Gloria!_... At this signal it is a religious custom
for the whole coast-population to enter the sea, and for those living
too far from the beach to bathe in the rivers. But rivers and sea are
now alike infected;--all the linen of the lazarettos has been washed
therein; and to-day there are fewer bathers than usual.

But there are twenty-seven burials. Now they are burying the dead two
together: the cemeteries are overburdened....




XXV


... In most of the old stone houses you will occasionally see spiders of
terrifying size,--measuring across perhaps as much as six inches from
the tip of one outstretched leg to the tip of its opposite fellow, as
they cling to the wall. I never heard of any one being bitten by them;
and among the poor it is deemed unlucky to injure or drive them away....
But early this morning Yzore swept her house clean, and ejected through
the door-way quite a host of these monster insects. Manm-Robert is quite
dismayed:--

--"_Jesis-Maïa!--ou 'lè malhè éncò fou fai ça, chè?_" (You want
to have still more bad luck, that you do such a thing?)

And Yzore answers:--

--"_Toutt moune içitt pa ni yon soul--ça fil zagrignin, et moin pa
menm mangé! Epi laverette encò.... Main couè toutt ça ka pòté
malhè!_" (No one here has a sou!--heaps of cobwebs like that, and
nothing to eat yet; and the verette into the bargain.... I think those
things bring bad luck.)

--"Ah! you have not eaten yet!" cries Manm-Robert. "_Vini épi moin!_"
(Come with me!)

And Yzore--already feeling a little remorse for her treatment of the
spiders--murmurs apologetically as she crosses over to Manm-Robert's
little shop:--"_Moin pa tchoué yo; moin chassé yo--ké vini encò._"
(I did not kill them; I only put them out;--they will come back again.)

But long afterwards, Manm-Robert remarked to me that they never went
back....




XXVI

_April 5th._


--"_Toutt bel bois ka allé_," says Manm-Robert. (All the beautiful
trees are going.)... I do not understand.

--"_Toutt bel bois--toutt bel moune ka allé_," she adds,
interpretatively. (All the "beautiful trees,"--all the handsome
people,--are passing away.)... As in the speech of the world's primitive
poets, so in the creole patois is a beautiful woman compared with a
comely tree: nay, more than this, the name of the object is actually
substituted for that of the living being. _Yon bel bois_ may mean a fine
tree: it more generally signifies a graceful woman: this is the very
comparison made by Ulysses looking upon Nausicas, though more naïvely
expressed.... And now there comes to me the recollection of a creole
ballad illustrating the use of the phrase,--a ballad about a youth of
Fort-de-France sent to St. Pierre by his father to purchase a stock of
dobannes,[25] who, falling in love with a handsome colored girl, spent
all his father's mopey in buying her presents and a wedding outfit:--


"Moin descenne Saint-Piè
Acheté dobannes
Auliè ces dobannes
C'est yon _bel-bois_ moin mennein monté!"


("I went down to Saint-Pierre to buy dobannes: instead of the dobannes,
'tis a pretty tree--a charming girl--that I bring back with me.")

--"Why, who is dead now, Manm-Robert?"

--"It is little Marie, the porteuse, who has got the vérette. She is
gone to the lazaretto."


[Footnote 25: Red earthen-ware jars for keeping drinking-water cool. The
origin of the word is probably to be sought in the name of the town,
near Marseilles, where they are made,--"Aubagne."]




XXVII

_April 7th._


--_Toutt bel bois ka allé_.... News has just come that Ti Marie died
last night at the lazaretto of the Fort: she was attacked by what they
call the _lavérette-pouff_,--a form of the disease which strangles its
victim within a few hours.

Ti Marie was certainly the neatest little màchanne I ever knew. Without
being actually pretty, her face had a childish charm which made it a
pleasure to look at her;--and she had a clear chocolate-red skin, a
light compact little figure, and a remarkably symmetrical pair of little
feet which had never felt the pressure of a shoe. Every morning I used
to hear her passing cry, just about daybreak:--"_Qui 'lè café?--qui
'lè sirop?_" (Who wants coffee?--who wants syrup?) She looked about
sixteen, but was a mother. "Where is her husband?" I ask. "_Nhomme-y mò
laverette 'tou._" (Her man died of the verette also.) "And the little
one, her _yche? Y lazarett._" (At the lazaretto.)... But only those
without friends or relatives in the city are suffered to go to the
lazaretto;--Ti Marie cannot have been of St. Pierre?

--"No: she was from Vauclin," answers Manm-Robert. "You do not often see
pretty red girls who are natives of St. Pierre. St. Pierre has pretty
_sang-mêlées._ The pretty red girls mostly come from Vauclin. The
yellow ones, who are really bel-bois, are from Grande Anse: they are
banana-colored people there. At Gros-Morne they are generally black."...




XXVIII


... It appears that the red race here, the race _capresse_, is
particularly liable to the disease. Every family employing capresses for
house-servants loses them;--one family living at the next corner has
lost four in succession....

The tint is a cinnamon or chocolate color;--the skin is naturally clear,
smooth, glossy: it is of the capresse especially that the term
"sapota-skin" (_peau-chapoti_) is used,--coupled with all curious creole
adjectives to express what is comely,--_jojoll, beaujoll_,[26] etc. The
hair is long, but bushy; the limbs light and strong, and admirably
shaped.... I am told that when transported to a colder climate, the
capre or capresse partly loses this ruddy tint. Here, under the tropic
sun, it has a beauty only possible to imitate in metal.... And because
photography cannot convey any idea of this singular color, the capresse
hates a photograph.--"_Moin pas noué_," she says;--"_moin ouôuge: ou
fai moin nouè nans pàtrait-à._" (I am not black: I am red:--you make
me black in that portrait.) It is difficult to make her pose before the
camera: she is red, as she avers, beautifully red; but the malicious
instrument makes her gray or black--_noué conm poule-zo-nouè_ ("black
as a blackboned hen!")

... And this red race is disappearing from St. Pierre--doubtless also
from other plague-striken centres.


[Footnote 26: I may cite in this relation one stanza of a creole
song--very popular in St. Pierre--celebrating the charms of a little
capresse:--

"Moin toutt jeine,
Goufa, gouàs, vaillant,
Peau di chapoti
Ka fai plaisi;--
Lapeau moin
Li bien poli;
Et moin ka plai
Mêmn toutt nhomme grave!"

--Which might be freely rendered thus:--

"I am dimpled, young,
Round-limbed, and strong,
With sapota-skin
That is good to see:
All glossy-smooth
Is this skin of mine;
And the gravest men
Like to look to me!"]




XXIX

_April 10th._


... Manm-Robert is much annoyed and puzzled because the American
steamer--the _bom-mangé_, as she calls it--does not come. It used to
bring regularly so many barrels of potatoes and beans, so much lard and
cheese and garlic and dried pease--everything, almost of which she keeps
a stock. It is now nearly eight weeks since the cannon of a New York
steamer aroused the echoes of the harbor. Every morning Manm-Robert has
been sending out her little servant Louis to see if there is any sign of
the American packet:--"_Allé ouè Batterie d'Esnotz si bom-mangé-à
pas vini._" But Louis always returns with the same rueful answer:--

--"_Manm-Robert, pa ni piess bom-mangé_" (there is not so much as a bit
of a _bom-mangé_).

... "No more American steamers for Martinique:" that is the news
received by telegraph! The disease has broken out among the shipping;
the harbors have been declared infected. United States mail-packets drop
their Martinique mails at St. Kitt's or Dominica, and pass us by. There
will be suffering now among the canotiers, the caboteurs, all those who
live by stowing or unloading cargo;--great warehouses are being closed
up, and strong men discharged, because there will be nothing for them to
do.

... They are burying twenty-five _verettiers_ per day in the city.

But never was this tropic sky more beautiful;--never was this circling
sea more marvellously blue;--never were the mornes more richly robed in
luminous green, under a more golden day.... And it seems strange that
Nature should remain so lovely....


... Suddenly it occurs to me that I have not seen Yzore nor her children
for some days; and I wonder if they have moved away.... Towards evening,
passing by Manm-Robert's, I ask about them. The old woman answers me
very gravely:--

--"_Aid, mon chè, c'est Yzore qui ni lavérette!_"

The mother has been seized by the plague at last. But Manm-Robert will
look after her; and Manm-Robert has taken charge of the three little
ones, who are not now allowed to leave the house, for fear some one
should tell them what it were best they should not know.... _Pauv ti
manmaille!_




XXX

_April 13th._


... Still the vérette does not attack the native whites. But the whole
air has become poisoned; the sanitary condition of the city becomes
unprecedentedly bad; and a new epidemic makes its appearance,--typhoid
fever. And now the békés begin to go, especially the young and strong;
and bells keep sounding for them, and the tolling bourdon fills the city
with its enormous hum all day and far into the night. For these are
rich; and the high solemnities of burial are theirs--the coffin of
acajou, and the triple ringing, and the Cross of Gold to be carried
before them as they pass to their long sleep under the palms,--saluted
for the last time by all the population of St. Pierre, standing
bareheaded in the sun....

... Is it in times like these, when all the conditions are febrile, that
one is most apt to have queer dreams?

Last night it seemed to me that I saw that Carnival dance again,--the
hooded musicians, the fantastic torrent of peaked caps, and the spectral
masks, and the swaying of bodies and waving of arms,--but soundless as a
passing of smoke. There were figures I thought I knew;--hands I had
somewhere seen reached out and touched me in silence;--and then, all
suddenly, a Viewless Something seemed to scatter the shapes as leaves
are blown by a wind.... And waking, I thought I heard again,--plainly as
on that last Carnival afternoon,--the strange cry of fear:--"_C'est
Bon-Dié ka passé!_"...




XXXI

_April 20th._


... Very early yesterday morning Yzore was carried away under a covering
of quick-lime: the children do not know; Manm-Robert took heed they
should not see. They have been told their mother has been taken to the
country to get well,--that the doctor will bring her back soon.... All
the furniture is to be sold at auction to pay the debts;--the landlord
was patient, he waited four months; the doctor was kindly: but now these
must have their due. Everything will be bidden off, except the chapelle,
with its Virgin and angels of porcelain: _yo pa ka pè venne Bon-Dié_
(the things of the Good-God must not be sold). And Manm-Robert will take
care of the little ones.

The bed--a relic of former good-fortune,--a great Martinique bed of
carved heavy native wood,--_a lit-à-bateau_ (boat-bed), so called
because shaped almost like a barge, perhaps--will surely bring three
hundred francs;--the armoire, with its mirror doors, not less than two
hundred and fifty. There is little else of value: the whole will not
fetch enough to pay all the dead owes.




XXXII

_April 28th._


--_Tam-tam-tam!--tam-tam-tam!_... It is the booming of the auction-drum
from the Place: Yzore's furniture is about to change hands.

The children start at the sound, so vividly associated in their minds
with the sights of Carnival days, with the fantastic mirth of the great
processional dance: they run to the sunny street, calling to each
other,--_Vini ouè!_--they look up and down. But there is a great quiet
in the Rue du Morne Mirail;--the street is empty.

... Manm-Robert enters very weary: she has been at the sale, trying to
save something for the children, but the prices were too high. In
silence she takes her accustomed seat at the worn counter of her little
shop; the young ones gather about her, caress her;--Mimi looks up
laughing into the kind brown face, and wonders why Manm-Robert will not
smile. Then Mimi becomes afraid to ask where the maskers are,--why they
do not come. But little Maurice, bolder and less sensitive, cries out:--

--"_Manm-Robert, oti masque-à?_"


Manm-Robert does not answer;--she does not hear. She is gazing directly
into the young faces clustered about her knee,--yet she does not see
them: she sees far, far beyond them,--into the hidden years. And,
suddenly, with a savage tenderness in her voice, she utters all the dark
thought of her heart for them:--

--"_Toua ti blancs sans lesou!--quitté main châché papa-ou qui adans
cimétiè pou vint pouend ou tou!_" (Ye three little penniless white
ones!--let me go call your father, who is in the cemetery, to come and
take you also away!)


[Illustration]




LES BLANCHISSEUSES


I


Whoever stops for a few months in St. Pierre is certain, sooner or
later, to pass an idle half-hour in that charming place of Martinique
idlers,--the beautiful Savane du Fort,--and, once there, is equally
certain to lean a little while over the mossy parapet of the river-wall
to watch the _blanchisseuses_ at work. It has a curious interest, this
spectacle of primitive toil: the deep channel of the Roxelane winding
under the palm-crowned heights of the Fort; the blinding whiteness of
linen laid out to bleach for miles upon the huge bowlders of porphyry
and prismatic basalt; and the dark bronze-limbed women, with faces
hidden under immense straw hats, and knees in the rushing torrent,--all
form a scene that makes one think of the earliest civilizations. Even
here, in this modern colony, it is nearly three centuries old; and it
will probably continue thus at the Rivière des Blanchisseuses for fully
another three hundred years. Quaint as certain weird Breton legends
whereof it reminds you,--especially if you watch it before daybreak
while the city sleeps,--this fashion of washing is not likely to change.
There is a local prejudice against new methods, new inventions, new
ideas;--several efforts at introducing a less savage style of washing
proved unsuccessful; and an attempt to establish a steam-laundry
resulted in failure. The public were quite contented with the old ways
of laundrying, and saw no benefits to be gained by forsaking
them;--while the washers and ironers engaged by the laundry proprietor
at higher rates than they had ever obtained before soon wearied of
in-door work, abandoned their situations, and returned with a sense of
relief to their ancient way of working out in the blue air and the wind
of the hills, with their feet in the mountain-water and their heads in
the awful sun.

... It is one of the sights of St. Pierre,--this daily scene at the
River of the Washerwomen: everybody likes to watch it;--the men,
because among the blanchisseuses there are not a few decidedly
handsome girls; the women, probably because a woman feels always
interested in woman's work. All the white bridges of the Roxelane
are dotted with lookers-on during fine days, and particularly
in the morning, when every bonne on her way to and from the
market stops a moment to observe or to greet those blanchisseuses
whom she knows. Then one hears such a calling and clamoring,--such
an intercrossing of cries from the bridge to the river, and the river
to the bridge.... "Ouill! Noémi!" ... "Coument ou yé, chè?"...
"Eh! Pascaline!"... "Bonjou', Youtte!--Dédé!--Fifi!--Henrillia!"...
"Coument ou kallé, Cyrillia?"... "Toutt douce, chè!--et Ti Mémé?"... "Y
bien;--oti Ninotte?"... "Bo ti manmaille pou moin, chè--ou tanne?"... But
the bridge leading to the market of the Fort is the poorest point of view;
for the better classes of blanchisseuses are not there: only the lazy,
the weak, or non-professionals--house-servants, who do washing at the
river two or three times a month as part of their family-service--are
apt to get so far down. The experienced professionals and early risers
secure the best places and choice of rocks; and among the hundreds at
work you can discern something like a physical gradation. At the next
bridge the women look better, stronger; more young faces appear; and the
further you follow the river-course towards the Jardin des Plantes, the
more the appearance of the blanchisseuses improves,--so that within the
space of a mile you can see well exemplified one natural law of life's
struggle,--the best chances to the best constitutions.

You might also observe, if you watch long enough, that among the
blanchisseuses there are few sufficiently light of color to be classed
as bright mulâtresses;--the majority are black or of that dark
copper-red race which is perhaps superior to the black creole in
strength and bulk; for it requires a skin insensible to sun as well as
the toughest of constitutions to be a blanchisseuse. A porteuse can
begin to make long trips at nine or ten years; but no girl is strong
enough to learn the washing-trade until she is past twelve. The
blanchisseuse is the hardest worker among the whole population;--her
daily labor is rarely less than thirteen hours; and during the greater
part of that time she is working in the sun, and standing up to her
knees in water that descends quite cold from the mountain peaks. Her
labor makes her perspire profusely; and she can never venture to cool
herself by further immersion without serious danger of pleurisy. The
trade is said to kill all who continue at it beyond a certain number of
years:--"_Nou ka mò toutt dleau_" (we all die of the water), one told
me, replying to a question. No feeble or light-skinned person can
attempt to do a single day's work of this kind without danger; and a
weak girl, driven by necessity to do her own washing, seldom ventures to
go to the river. Yet I saw an instance of such rashness one day. A
pretty sang-mêlée, perhaps about eighteen or nineteen years old,--whom
I afterwards learned had just lost her mother and found herself thus
absolutely destitute,--began to descend one of the flights of stone
steps leading to the river, with a small bundle upon her head; and two
or three of the blanchisseuses stopped their work to look at her. A tall
capresse inquired mischievously:--


[Illustration: LES BLANCHISSEUSES
"_Their daily labor is rarely less than thirteen hours,--during
the greater part of the time in the sun and up to
their knees in water that descends quite cold from the
mountain peaks._"]


--"_Ou vini pou pouend yon bain?_" (Coming to take a bath?) For the
river is a great bathing-place.

--"_Non; moin vini lavé._" (No; I am coming to wash.)

--"_Aïe! aïe! aïe!--y vini lavé!_"... And all within hearing laughed
together. "Are you crazy, girl?--_ess ou fou?_" The tall capresse
snatched the bundle from her, opened it, threw a garment to her nearest
neighbor, another to the next one, dividing the work among a little
circle of friends, and said to the stranger, "Non ké lavé toutt ça ba
ou bien vite chè,--va, amisé ou!" (We'll wash this for you very
quickly, dear--go and amuse yourself!) These kind women even did more
for the poor girl;--they subscribed to buy her a good breakfast, when
the food-seller--the màchanne-mangé--made her regular round among
them, with fried fish and eggs and manioc flour and bananas.




II


All of the multitude who wash clothing at the river are not professional
blanchisseuses. Hundreds of women, too poor to pay for laundrying, do
their own work at the Roxelane;--and numerous bonnes there wash the
linen of their mistresses as a regular part of their domestic duty. But
even if the professionals did not always occupy a certain well-known
portion of the channel, they could easily be distinguished from others
by their rapid and methodical manner of work, by the ease with which
immense masses of linen are handled by them, and, above all, by their
way of whipping it against the rocks. Furthermore, the greater number of
professionals are likewise teachers, mistresses (_bou'geoises_), and
have their apprentices beside them,--young girls from twelve to sixteen
years of age. Among these _apprenti_, as they are called in the patois,
there are many attractive types, such as idlers upon the bridges like to
look at.

If, after one year of instruction, the apprentice fails to prove a good
washer, it is not likely she will ever become one; and there are some
branches of the trade requiring a longer period of teaching and of
practice. The young girl first learns simply to soap and wash the linen
in the river, which operation is called "rubbing" (_frotté_ in
creole);--after she can do this pretty well, she is taught the curious
art of whipping it (_fessé_). You can hear the sound of the fessé a
great way off, echoing and re-echoing among the mornes: it is not a
sharp smacking noise, as the name might seem to imply, but a heavy
hollow sound exactly like that of an axe splitting dry timber. In fact,
it so closely resembles the latter sound that you are apt on first
hearing it to look up at the mornes with the expectation of seeing
woodmen there at work. And it is not made by striking the linen with
anything, but only by lashing it against the sides of the rocks....
After a piece has been well rubbed and rinsed, it is folded up into a
peculiar sheaf-shape, and seized by the closely gathered end for the
fessé. Then the folding process is repeated on the reverse, and the
other end whipped. This process expels suds that rinsing cannot remove:
it must be done very dexterously to avoid tearing or damaging the
material. By an experienced hand the linen is never torn; and even pearl
and bone buttons are much less often broken than might be supposed. The
singular echo is altogether due to the manner of folding the article for
the fessé.

After this, all the pieces are spread out upon the rocks, in the sun,
for the "first bleaching" (_poumèmiè lablanie_). In the evening they
are gathered into large wooden trays or baskets, and carried to what is
called the "lye-house" (_locaïe lessive_)--overlooking the river from a
point on the Fort bank opposite to the higher end of the Savane. Here
each blanchisseuse hires a small or a large vat, or even
several,--according to the quantity of work done,--at two, three or ten
sous, and leaves her washing to steep in lye (_coulé_ is the creole
word used) during the night. There are watchmen to guard it. Before
daybreak it is rinsed in warm water; then it is taken back to the
river,--is rinsed again, bleached again, blued and starched. Then it is
ready for ironing. To press and iron well is the most difficult part of
the trade. When an apprentice is able to iron a gentleman's shirt
nicely, and a pair of white pantaloons, she is considered to have
finished her time;--she becomes a journey-woman (_ouvouïyé_).

Even in a country where wages are almost incredibly low, the
blanchisseuse earns considerable money. There is no fixed scale of
prices: it is even customary to bargain with these women beforehand.
Shirts and white pantaloons figure at six and eight cents in laundry
bills; but other washing is much cheaper. I saw a lot of thirty-three
pieces--including such large ones as sheets, bed-covers, and several
douillettes (the long Martinique trailing robes of one piece from neck
to feet)--for which only three francs was charged. Articles are
frequently stolen or lost by house-servants sent to do washing at the
river; but very seldom indeed by the regular blanchisseuses. Few of them
can read or write or understand owners' marks on wearing apparel; and
when you see at the river the wilderness of scattered linen, the
seemingly enormous confusion, you cannot understand how these women
manage to separate and classify it all. Yet they do this admirably,--and
for that reason perhaps more than any other, are able to charge fair
rates;--it is false economy to have your washing done by the
house-servant;--with the professionals your property is safe. And cheap
as her rates are, a good professional can make from twenty-five to
thirty francs a week; averaging fully a hundred francs a month,--as much
as many a white clerk can earn in the stores of St. Pierre, and quite as
much (considering local differences in the purchasing power of money) as
$60 per month would represent in the United States.

Probably the ability to earn large wages often tempts the blanchisseuse
to continue at her trade until it kills her. The "water-disease," as she
calls it (_maladie-dleau_), makes its appearance after middle-life: the
feet, lower limbs, and abdomen swell enormously, while the face becomes
almost fleshless;--then, gradually tissues give way, muscles yield, and
the whole physical structure crumbles.

Nevertheless, the blanchisseuse is essentially a sober liver,--never a
drunkard. In fact, she is sober from rigid necessity: she would not dare
to swallow one mouthful of spirits while at work with her feet in the
cold water;--everybody else in Martinique, even the little children, can
drink rum; the blanchisseuse cannot unless she wishes to die of a
congestion. Her strongest refreshment is _mabi_,--a mild, effervescent,
and, I think, rather disagreeable, beer made from molasses.




III


Always before daybreak they rise to work, while the vapors of the monies
fill the air with scent of mouldering vegetation,--clayey odors,--grassy
smells: there is only a faint gray light, and the water of the river is
very chill. One by one they arrive, barefooted, under their burdens
built up tower-shape on their trays;--silently as ghosts they descend
the steps to the river-bed, and begin to unfold and immerse their
washing. They greet each other as they come, then become silent again;
there is scarcely any talking: the hearts of all are heavy with the
heaviness of the hour. But the gray light turns yellow; the sun climbs
over the peaks: light changes the dark water to living crystal; and all
begin to chatter a little. Then the city awakens; the currents of its
daily life circulate again,--thinly and slowly at first, then swiftly
and strongly,--up and down every yellow street, and through the Savane,
and over the bridges of the river. Passers-by pause to look
down, and cry "_bonjou', chè!_" Idle men stare at some pretty washer,
till she points at them and cries:--"_Godé Missié-à ka guetté
nou!--anh!--anh!--anh!_" And all the others look up and repeat the
groan--"_anh!--anh!--anh!_" till the starers beat a retreat. The air
grows warmer; the sky blue takes fire: the great light makes joy for the
washers; they shout to each other from distance to distance, jest,
laugh, sing.

Gusty of speech these women are: long habit of calling to one another
through the roar of the torrent has given their voices a singular
sonority and force: it is well worth while to hear them sing. One starts
the song,--the next joins her; then another and another, till all the
channel rings with the melody from the bridge of the Jardin des Plantes
to the Pont-bois:--


"C'est moin qui té ka lavé,
Passé, raccommodé:
Y té néf hè disouè
Ou metté moin derhò,--
Yche moin assous bouas moin;--
Laplie té ka tombé--
Léfan moin assous tète moin!
Doudoux, ou m'abandonne!
Moin pa ni pèsonne pou soigné moin."[27]


... A melancholy chant--originally a Carnival improvisation made to
bring public shame upon the perpetrator of a cruel act;--but it contains
the story of many of these lives--the story of industrious affectionate
women temporarily united to brutal and worthless men in a country where
legal marriages are rare. Half of the creole songs which I was able to
collect during a residence of nearly two years in the island touch upon
the same sad theme. Of these, "Chè Manman Moin," a great favorite still
with the older blanchisseuses, has a simple pathos unrivalled, I
believe, in the oral literature of this people. Here is an attempt to
translate its three rhymeless stanzas into prose; but the childish
sweetness of the patois original is lost:--


CHÈ MANMAN MOIN


I


... "Dear mamma, once you were young like I;--dear papa, you also have
been young;--dear great elder brother, you too have been young. Ah! let
me cherish this sweet friendship!--so sick my heart is--yes, 'tis very,
very ill, this heart of mine: love, only love can make it well
again."...




II


"O cursed eyes he praised that led me to him! O cursed lips of mine
which ever repeated his name! O cursed moment in which I gave up my
heart to the ingrate who no longer knows how to love."...




III


"Doudoux, you swore to me by Heaven!--doudoux, you swore to me by your
faith!... And now you cannot come to me?... Oh! my heart is withering
with pain!... I was passing by the cemetery;--I saw my name upon a
stone--all by itself. I saw two white roses; and in a moment one faded
and fell before me.... So my forgotten heart will be!"...

The air is not so charming, however, as that of a little song which
every creole knows, and which may be often heard still at the river: I
think it is the prettiest of all creole melodies. "To-to-to" (patois for
the French _toc_) is an onomatope for the sound of knocking at a door.


"_To, to, to!_--'Ça qui là?'
--'C'est moin-mênme, lanmou;--
Ouvé lapott ba moin!'

"_To, to, to!_--'Ça qui là?'
--'C'est moin-mênme, lanmou;--
Qui ka ba ou khè moin!'

"_To, to, to!_--'Ça qui là?'
--'C'est moin-mênme, anmou;--
Laplie ka mouillé moin!'"

[_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self
Love: open the door for me."

_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self
Love, who give my heart to thee."

_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"Tis mine own self
Love: open thy door to me;--the rain is wetting me!"...]


... But it is more common to hear the blanchisseuses singing merry,
jaunty, sarcastic ditties,--Carnival compositions,--in which the African
sense of rhythmic melody is more marked:--"Marie-Clémence maudi, Loéma
tombé, Quand ou ni ti mari jojoll."[28]

--At mid-day the màchanne-mangé comes, with her girls,--carrying trays
of fried fish, and _akras_, and cooked beans, and bottles of mabi. The
blanchisseuses buy, and eat with their feet in the water, using rocks
for tables. Each has her little tin cup to drink her mabi in.... Then
the washing and the chanting and the booming of the fessé begin again.
Afternoon wanes;--school-hours close; and children of many beautiful
colors come to the river, and leap down the steps crying, "_Eti!
manman!"--"Sésé!"--"Nenneine!_" calling their elder sisters, mothers,
and godmothers: the little boys strip naked to play in the water a
while.... Towards sunset the more rapid and active workers begin to
gather in their linen, and pile it on trays. Large patches of bald rock
appear again.... By six o'clock almost the whole bed of the river is
bare;--the women are nearly all gone. A few linger a while on the
Savane, to watch the last-comer. There is always a great laugh at the
last to leave the channel: they ask her if she has not forgotten "to
lock up the river."

--"_Ou fèmé lapòte lariviè, chè--anh?_"

--"_Ah! oui, chè!--moin fèmé y, ou tanne?--moin ni laclé-à!_" (Oh
yes, dear. I locked it up,--you hear?--I've got the key!)


But there are days and weeks when they do not sing,--times of want or of
plague, when the silence of the valley is broken only by the sound of
linen beaten upon the rocks, and the great voice of the Roxelane, which
will sing on when the city itself shall have ceased to be, just as it
sang one hundred thousand years ago.... "Why do they not sing to-day?" I
once asked during the summer of 1887,--a year of pestilence. "_Yo ka
pensé toutt lanmizè yo,--toutt lapeine yo_," I was answered. (They are
thinking of all their trouble, all their misery.) Yet in all seasons,
while youth and strength stay with them, they work on in wind and sun,
mist and rain, washing the linen of the living and the dead,--white
wraps for the newly born, white robes for the bride, white shrouds for
them that pass into the Great Silence. And the torrent that wears away
the ribs of the perpetual hills wears away their lives,--sometimes
slowly, slowly as black basalt is worn,--sometimes suddenly,--in the
twinkling of an eye.

For a strange danger ever menaces the blanchisseuse,--the treachery of
the stream!... Watch them working, and observe how often they turn their
eyes to the high north-east, to look at Pelée. Pelée gives them
warning betimes. When all is sunny in St. Pierre, and the harbor lies
blue as lapis-lazuli, there may be mighty rains in the region of the
great woods and the valleys of the higher peaks; and thin streams swell
to raging floods which burst suddenly from the altitudes, rolling down
rocks and trees and wreck of forests, uplifting crags, devastating
slopes. And sometimes, down the ravine of the Roxelane, there comes a
roar as of eruption, with a rush of foaming water like a moving
mountain-wall; and bridges and buildings vanish with its passing. In
1865 the Savane, high as it lies above the river-bed, was flooded;--and
all the bridges were swept into the sea.

So the older and wiser blanchisseuses keep watch upon Pelée; and if a
blackness gather over it, with lightnings breaking through,
then--however fair the sun shine on St. Pierre--the alarm is given, the
miles of bleaching linen vanish from the rocks in a few minutes, and
every one leaves the channel. But it has occasionally happened that
Pelée gave no such friendly signal before the river rose: thus lives
have been lost. Most of the blanchisseuses are swimmers, and good
ones,--I have seen one of these girls swim almost out of sight in the
harbor, during an idle hour;--but no swimmer has any chances in a rising
of the Roxelane: all overtaken by it are stricken by rocks and
drift;--_yo crazé_, as a creole term expresses it,--a term signifying
to crush, to bray, to dash to pieces.

... Sometimes it happens that one who has been absent at home for a
brief while returns to the river only to meet her comrades fleeing from
it,--many leaving their linen behind them. But she will not abandon the
linen intrusted to her: she makes a run for it,--in spite of warning
screams,--in spite of the vain clutching of kind rough fingers. She
gains the river-bed:--the flood has already reached her waist, but she
is strong; she reaches her linen,--snatches it up, piece by piece,
scattered as it is--"one!--two!--five!--seven!";--there is a roaring in
her ears--"eleven!--thirteen!" she has it all... but now the rocks are
moving! For one instant she strives to reach the steps, only a few yards
off;--another, and the thunder of the deluge is upon her,--and the
crushing crags,--and the spinning trees....

Perhaps before sundown some canotier may find her floating far in the
bay,--drifting upon her face in a thousand feet of water,--with faithful
dead hands still holding fast the property of her employer.


[Footnote 27: It was I who washed and ironed and mended;--at nine
o'clock at night thou didst put me out-of-doors, with my child in my
arms,--the rain was falling,--with my poor straw mattress upon my
head!... Doudoux! thou dost abandon me!... I have none to care for me.]

[Footnote 28: See Appendix for specimens of creole music.]


[Illustration]




LA PELÉE


I


The first attempt made to colonize Martinique was abandoned almost as
soon as begun, because the leaders of the expedition found the country
"too rugged and too mountainous," and were "terrified by the prodigious
number of serpents which covered its soil." Landing on June 25, 1635,
Olive and Duplessis left the island after a few hours' exploration, or,
rather, observation, and made sail for Guadeloupe,--according to the
quaint and most veracious history of Père Du Tertre, of the Order of
Friars-Preachers.

A single glance at the topographical map of Martinique would suffice to
confirm the father's assertion that the country was found to be _trop
haché et trop montueux_: more than two-thirds of it is peak and
mountain;--even to-day only 42,445 of its supposed 98,782 hectares have
been cultivated; and on page 426 of the last "Annuaire" (1887) I find
the statement that in the interior there are extensive Government lands
of which the area is "not exactly known." Yet mountainous as a country
must be which--although scarcely forty-nine miles long and twenty miles
in average breath--remains partly unfamiliar to its own inhabitants
after nearly three centuries of civilization (there are not half a dozen
creoles who have travelled all over it), only two elevations in
Martinique bear the name _montagne._ These are La Montagne Pelée, in
the north, and La Montagne du Vauclin, in the south. The term _morne_,
used throughout the French West Indian colonies to designate certain
altitudes of volcanic origin, a term rather unsatisfactorily translated
in certain dictionaries as "a small mountain," is justly applied to the
majority of Martinique hills, and unjustly sometimes even to its
mightiest elevation,--called Morne Pelé, or Montagne Pelée, or simply
"La Montagne," according, perhaps, to the varying degree of respect it
inspires in different minds. But even in the popular nomenclature one
finds the orography of Martinique, as well as of other West Indian
islands, regularly classified by _pitons, mornes_, and _monts_ or
_montagnes._ Mornes usually have those beautiful and curious forms which
bespeak volcanic origin even to the unscientific observer: they are most
often pyramidal or conoid up to a certain height; but have summits
either rounded or truncated;--their sides, green with the richest
vegetation, rise from valley-levels and coastlines with remarkable
abruptness, and are apt to be curiously ribbed or wrinkled. The pitons,
far fewer in number, are much more fantastic in form;--volcanic cones,
or volcanic upheavals of splintered strata almost at right
angles,--sometimes sharp of lines as spires, and mostly too steep for
habitation. They are occasionally mammiform, and so symmetrical that one
might imagine them artificial creations,--particularly when they occur
in pairs. Only a very important mass is dignified by the name
_montagne_: there are, as I have already observed, but two thus called
in all Martinique,--Pelée, the head and summit of the island; and La
Montagne du Vauclin, in the south-east. Vauclin is inferior in height
and bulk to several mornes and pitons of the north and north-west,--and
owes its distinction probably to its position as centre of a system of
ranges: but in altitude and mass and majesty. Pelée far outranks
everything in the island, and well deserves its special appellation, "La
Montagne."

No description could give the reader a just idea of what Martinique is,
configuratively, so well as the simple statement that, although less
than fifty miles in extreme length, and less than twenty in average
breadth, there are upwards of _four hundred mountains_ in this little
island, or of what at least might be termed mountains elsewhere. These
again are divided and interpeaked, and bear hillocks on their
slopes;--and the lowest hillock in Martinique is fifty metres high. Some
of the peaks are said to be totally inaccessible: many mornes are so on
one or two or even three sides. Ninety-one only of the principal
mountains have been named; and among these several bear similar
appellations: for example, there are two Mornes-Rouges, one in the north
and one in the south; and there are four or five Gros-Mornes. All the
elevations belong to six great groups, clustering about or radiating
from six ancient volcanic centres,--1. La Pelée; 2. Pitons du Carbet;
3. Roches Carrées;[29] 4. Vauclin; 5. Marin; 6. Morne de la Plaine.
Forty-two distinct mountain-masses belong to the Carbet system
alone,--that of Pelée including but thirteen; and the whole Carbet area
has a circumference of 120,000 metres,--much more considerable than that
of Pelée. But its centre is not one enormous pyramidal mass like that
of "La Montagne"; it is marked only by a group of five remarkable
porphyritic cones,--the Pitons of Carbet;--while Pelée, dominating
everything, and filling the north, presents an aspect and occupies an
area scarcely inferior to those of Ætna.

--Sometimes, while looking at La Pelée, I have wondered if the
enterprise of the great Japanese painter who made the Hundred Views of
Fusiyama could not be imitated by some creole artist equally proud of
his native hills, and fearless of the heat of the plains or the snakes
of the slopes. A hundred views of Pelée might certainly be made: for
the enormous mass is omnipresent to dwellers in the northern part of the
island, and can be seen from the heights of the most southern mornes. It
is visible from almost any part of St. Pierre,--which nestles in a fold
of its rocky skirts. It overlooks all the island ranges, and overtops
the mighty Pitons of Carbet by a thousand feet;--you can only lose sight
of it by entering gorges, or journeying into the valleys of the
south.... But the peaked character of the whole country, and the hot
moist climate, oppose any artistic undertaking of the sort suggested:
even photographers never dream of taking views in the further interior,
nor on the east coast. Travel, moreover, is no less costly than
difficult: there are no inns or places of rest for tourists; there are,
almost daily, sudden and violent rains, which are much dreaded (since a
thorough wetting, with the pores all distended by heat, may produce
pleurisy); and there are serpents! The artist willing to devote a few
weeks of travel and study to Pelée, in spite of these annoyances and
risks, has not yet made his appearance in Martinique.[30]

Huge as the mountain looks from St. Pierre, the eye underestimates its
bulk; and when you climb the mornes about the town, Labelle, d'Orange,
or the much grander Parnasse, you are surprised to find how much vaster
Pelée appears from these summits. Volcanic hills often seem higher, by
reason of their steepness, than they really are; but Pelée deludes in
another manner. From surrounding valleys it appears lower, and from
adjacent mornes higher than it really is: the illusion in the former
case being due to the singular slope of its contours, and the remarkable
breadth of its base, occupying nearly all the northern end of the
island; in the latter, to misconception of the comparative height of the
eminence you have reached, which deceives by the precipitious pitch of
its sides. Pelée is not very remarkable in point of altitude, however:
its height was estimated by Moreau de Jonnés at 1600 metres; and by
others at between 4400 and 4500 feet. The sum of the various imperfect
estimates made justifies the opinion of Dr. Cornilliac that the extreme
summit is over 5000 feet above the sea--perhaps 5200.[31] The clouds of
the summit afford no indication to eyes accustomed to mountain scenery
in northern countries; for in these hot moist latitudes clouds hang very
low, even in fair weather. But in bulk Pelée is grandiose: it spurs out
across the island from the Caribbean to the Atlantic: the great chains
of mornes about it are merely counter-forts; the Piton Pierreux and the
Piton Pain-à-Sucre (_Sugar-loaf Peak_), and other elevations varying
from 800 to 2100 feet, are its volcanic children. Nearly thirty rivers
have their birth in its flanks,--besides many thermal springs, variously
mineralized. As the culminant point of the island. Pelée is also the
ruler of its météorologie life,--cloud-herder, lightning-forger, and
rain-maker. During clear weather you can see it drawing to itself all
the white vapors of the land,--robbing lesser eminences of their
shoulder-wraps and head-coverings;--though the Pitons of Carbet (3700
feet) usually manage to retain about their middle a cloud-clout,--a
_lantchô._ You will also see that the clouds run in a circle about
Pelée,--gathering bulk as they turn by continual accessions from other
points. If the crater be totally bare in the morning, and shows the
broken edges very sharply against the blue, it is a sign of foul rather
than of fair weather to come.[32]

Even in bulk, perhaps, Pelée might not impress those who know the
stupendous scenery of the American ranges; but none could deny it
special attractions appealing to the senses of form and color. There is
an imposing fantasticality in its configuration worth months of artistic
study: one does not easily tire of watching its slopes undulating
against the north sky,--and the strange jagging of its ridges,--and the
succession of its terraces crumbling down to other terraces, which again
break into ravines here and there bridged by enormous buttresses of
basalt: an extravaganza of lava-shapes overpitching and cascading into
sea and plain. All this is verdant wherever surfaces catch the sun: you
can divine what the frame is only by examining the dark and ponderous
rocks of the torrents. And the hundred tints of this verdure do not form
the only colorific charms of the landscape. Lovely as the long
upreaching slopes of cane are,--and the loftier bands of forest-growths,
so far off that they look like belts of moss,--and the more
tender-colored masses above, wrinkling and folding together up to the
frost-white clouds of the summit,--you will be still more delighted by
the shadow-colors,--opulent, diaphanous. The umbrages lining the
wrinkles, collecting in the hollows, slanting from sudden projections,
may become before your eyes almost as unreally beautiful as the
landscape colors of a Japanese fan;--they shift most generally during
the day from indigo-blue through violets and paler blues to final lilacs
and purples; and even the shadows of passing clouds have a faint blue
tinge when they fall on Pelée.

.... Is the great volcano dead?... Nobody knows. Less than forty years
ago it rained ashes over all the roofs of St. Pierre;--within twenty
years it has uttered mutterings. For the moment, it appears to sleep;
and the clouds have dripped into the cup of its highest crater till it
has become a lake, several hundred yards in circumference. The crater
occupied by this lake--called L'Étang, or "The Pool"--has never been
active within human memory. There are others,--difficult and dangerous
to visit because opening on the side of a tremendous gorge; and it was
one of these, no doubt, which has always been called _La Soufrière_,
that rained ashes over the city in 1851.

The explosion was almost concomitant with the last of a series of
earthquake shocks, which began in the middle of May and ended in the
first week of August,--all much more severe in Guadeloupe than in
Martinique. In the village Au Prêcheur, lying at the foot of the
western slope of Pelée, the people had been for some time complaining
of an oppressive stench of sulphur,--or, as chemists declared it,
sulphuretted hydrogen,--when, on the 4th of August, much trepidation was
caused by a long and appalling noise from the mountain,--a noise
compared by planters on the neighboring slopes to the hollow roaring
made by a packet blowing off steam, but infinitely louder. These sounds
continued through intervals until the following night, sometimes
deepening into a rumble like thunder. The mountain guides declared:
"_C'est la Soufrière qui bout!_" (the Souffrière is boiling); and a
panic seized the negroes of the neighboring plantations. At 11 P.M. the
noise was terrible enough to fill all St. Pierre with alarm; and on the
morning of the 6th the city presented an unwonted aspect, compared by
creoles who had lived abroad to the effect of a great hoar-frost. All
the roofs, trees, balconies, awnings, pavements, were covered with a
white layer of ashes. The same shower blanched the roofs of Monte Rouge,
and all the villages about the chief city,--Carbet, Fond-Corré, and Au
Prêcheur; also whitening the neighboring country: the mountain was
sending up columns of smoke or vapor; and it was noticed that the
Rivière Blanche, usually of a glaucous color, ran black into the sea
like an outpouring of ink, staining its azure for a mile. A committee
appointed to make an investigation, and prepare an official report,
found that a number of rents had either been newly formed, or suddenly
become active, in the flank of the mountain: these were all situated in
the immense gorge sloping westward from that point now known as the
Morne de la Croix. Several were visited with much difficulty,--members
of the commission being obliged to lower themselves down a succession of
precipices with cords of lianas; and it is noteworthy that their
researches were prosecuted in spite of the momentary panic created by
another outburst. It was satisfactorily ascertained that the main force
of the explosion had been exerted within a perimeter of about one
thousand yards; that various hot springs had suddenly gushed out,--the
temperature of the least warm being about 37° Réaumur (116°
F.);--that there was no change in the configuration of the
mountain;--and that the terrific sounds had been produced only by the
violent outrush of vapor and ashes from some of the rents. In hope of
allaying the general alarm, a creole priest climbed the summit of the
volcano, and there planted the great cross which gives the height its
name and still remains to commemorate the event.

There was an extraordinary emigration of serpents from the high woods,
and from the higher to the lower plantations,--where they were killed by
thousands. For a long time Pelée continued to send up an immense column
of white vapor; but there were no more showers of ashes; and the
mountain gradually settled down to its present state of quiescence.


[Footnote 29: Also called _La Barre de l'Isle_,--a long high
mountain-wall interlinking the northern and southern system of
ranges,--and only two metres broad at the summit. The "Roches-Carrées"
display a geological formation unlike anything discovered in the rest of
the Antillesian system, excepting in Grenada,--columnar or prismatic
basalts.... In the plains of Marin curious petrifactions exist;--I saw a
honey-comb so perfect that the eye alone could scarcely divine the
transformation.]

[Footnote 30: Thibault de Chanvallon, writing of Martinique in 1751,
declared:--"All possible hindrances to study are encountered here (_tout
s'oppose à l'étude_): if the Americans (creoles) do not devote
themselves to research, the fact must not be attributed solely to
indifference or indolence. On the one hand, the overpowering and
continual heat,--the perpetual succession of mornes and
acclivities,--the difficulty of entering forests rendered almost
inaccessible by the lianas interwoven across all openings, and the
prickly plants which oppose a barrier to the naturalist,--the continual
anxiety and fear inspired by serpents also;--on the other hand, the
disheartening necessity of having to work alone, and the discouragement
of being unable to communicate one's ideas or discoveries to persons
having similar tastes. And finally, it must be remembered that these
discouragements and dangers are never mitigated by the least hope of
personal consideration, or by the pleasure of emulation,--since such
study is necessarily unaccompanied either by the one or the other in a
country where nobody undertakes it."--(_Voyage à la Martinique._)...
The conditions have scarcely changed since De Chanvallon's day, despite
the creation of Government roads, and the thinning of the high woods.]

[Footnote 31: Humboldt believed the height to be not less than 800 taint
(1 toise=6 feet 4.73 inches), or about 5115 feet.]

[Footnote 32: There used to be a strange popular belief that however
heavily veiled by clouds the mountain might be prior to an earthquake,
these would always vanish with the first shock. But Thibault de
Chanvallon took pains to examine into the truth of this alleged
phenomenon; and found that during a number of earthquake shocks the
clouds remained over the crater precisely as usual.... There was more
foundation, however, for another popular belief, which still
exists,--that the absolute purity of the atmosphere about Pelée, and
the perfect exposure of its summit for any considerable tinny might be
regarded as an omen of hurricane.]




II


From St. Pierre, trips to Pelée can be made by several routes;--the
most popular is that by way of Morne Rouge and the Calebasse; but the
summit can be reached in much less time by making the ascent from
different points along the coast-road to Au Prêcheur,--such as the
Morne St. Martin, or a well-known path further north, passing near the
celebrated hot springs (_Fontaines Chaudes_). You drive towards Au
Prêcheur, and begin the ascent on foot, through cane-plantations....
The road by which you follow the north-west coast round the skirts of
Pelée is very picturesque:--you cross the Roxelane, the Rivière des
Pères, the Rivière Sèche (whose bed is now occupied only by a
motionless torrent of rocks);--passing first by the suburb of
Fond-Corré, with its cocoa groves, and broad beach of iron-gray
sand,--a bathing resort;--then Pointe Prince, and the Fond de
Canonville, somnolent villages that occupy wrinkles in the hem of
Pelée's lava robe. The drive ultimately rises and lowers over the
undulations of the cliff, and is well shadowed along the greater part of
its course: you will admire many huge _fromagers_, or silk-cotton trees,
various heavy lines of tamarinds, and groups of _flamboyants_ with thick
dark feathery foliage, and cassia-trees with long pods pending and
blackening from every branch, and hedges of campêche, or logwood, and
calabash-trees, and multitudes of the pretty shrubs bearing the fruit
called in creole _raisins-bò-lanmè_, or "sea-side grapes." Then you
reach Au Prêcheur: a very antiquated village, which boasts a stone
church and a little public square with a fountain in it. If you have
time to cross the Rivière du Prêcheur, a little further on, you can
obtain a fine view of the coast, which, rising suddenly to a grand
altitude, sweeps round in a semicircle over the Village of the Abysses
(_Aux Abymes_),--whose name was doubtless suggested by the immense depth
of the sea at that point.... It was under the shadow of those cliffs
that the Confederate cruiser _Alabama_ once, hid herself, as a fish
hides in the shadow of a rock, and escaped from her pursuer, the
Iroquois. She had long been blockaded in the harbor of St. Pierre by the
Northern man-of-war,--anxiously awaiting a chance to pounce upon her the
instant she should leave French waters;--and various Yankee vessels in
port were to send up rocket-signals should the _Alabama_ attempt to
escape under cover of darkness. But one night the privateer took a
creole pilot on board, and steamed out southward, with all her lights
masked, and her chimneys so arranged that neither smoke nor sparks could
betray her to the enemy in the offing. However, some Yankee vessels near
enough to discern her movements through the darkness at once shot
rockets south; and the Iroquois gave chase. The _Alabama_ hugged the
high shore as far as Carbet, remaining quite invisible in the shadow of
it: then she suddenly turned and recrossed the harbor. Again Yankee
rockets betrayed her manœuvre to the _Iroquois_; but she gained Aux
Abymes, laid herself dose to the enormous black cliff, and there
remained indistinguishable; the _Iroquois_ steamed by north without
seeing her. Once the Confederate cruiser found her enemy well out of
sight, she put her pilot ashore and escaped into the Dominica channel.
The pilot was a poor mulatto, who thought himself well paid with five
hundred francs!

... The more popular route to Pelée by way of Morne Rouge is otherwise
interesting.... Anybody not too much afraid of the tropic sun must find
it a delightful experience to follow the mountain roads leading to the
interior from the city, as all the mornes traversed by them command
landscapes of extraordinary beauty. According to the zigzags of the way,
the scenery shifts panoramically. At one moment you are looking down
into valleys a thousand feet below, at another, over luminous leagues of
meadow or cane-field, you see some far crowding of cones and cratered
shapes--sharp as the teeth of a saw, and blue as sapphire,--with further
eminences ranging away through pearline color to high-peaked
remotenesses of vapory gold. As you follow the windings of such a way as
the road of the Morne Labelle, or the Morne d'Orange, the city
disappears and reappears many times,--always diminishing, till at last
it looks no bigger than a chess-board. Simultaneously distant mountain
shapes appear to unfold and lengthen;--and always, always the sea rises
with your rising. Viewed at first from the bulwark (boulevard)
commanding the roofs of the town, its horizon-line seemed straight and
keen as a knife-edge;--but as you mount higher, it elongates, begins to
curve; and gradually the whole azure expanse of water broadens out
roundly like a disk. From certain very lofty summits further inland you
behold the immense blue circle touching the sky all round you,--except
where a still greater altitude, like that of Pelée or the Pitons,
breaks the ring; and this high vision of the sea has a phantasmal effect
hard to describe, and due to vapory conditions of the atmosphere. There
are bright cloudless days when, even as seen from the city, the
ocean-verge has a spectral vagueness; but on any day, in any season,
that you ascend to a point dominating the sea by a thousand feet, the
rim of the visible world takes a ghostliness that startles,--because the
prodigious light gives to all near shapes such intense sharpness of
outline and vividness of color.


[Illustration: LA PELÉE
"_Over luminous leagues of meadow or cane field, you
see far crowding of cones and cratered shapes--sharp
as the teeth of a saw, and blue as a sapphire._"]


Yet wonderful as are the perspective beauties of those mountain routes
from which one can keep St. Pierre in view, the road to Morne Rouge
surpasses them, notwithstanding that it almost immediately leaves the
city behind, and out of sight. Excepting only _La Trace_,--the long
routs winding over mountain ridges and between primitive forests south
to Fort-de-France,--there is probably no section of national highway in
the island more remarkable than the Morne Rouge road. Leaving the Grande
Rue by the public conveyance, you drive out through the Savane du Fort,
with its immense mango and tamarind trees, skirting the Roxelane. Then
reaching the boulevard, you pass high Morne Labelle,--and then the
Jardin des Plantes on the right, where white-stemmed palms are lifting
their heads two hundred feet,--and beautiful Parnasse, heavily timbered
to the top;--while on your left the valley of the Roxelane shallows up,
and Pelée shows less and less of its tremendous base. Then you pass
through the sleepy, palmy, pretty Village of the Three Bridges (_Trois
Ponts_),--where a Fahrenheit thermometer shows already three degrees of
temperature lower than at St. Pierre;--and the national road, making a
sharp turn to the right, becomes all at once very steep--so steep that
the horses can mount only at a walk. Around and between the wooded hills
it ascends by zigzags,--occasionally overlooking the sea,--sometimes
following the verges of ravines. Now and then you catch glimpses of the
road over which you passed half an hour before undulating far below,
looking narrow as a tape-line,--and of the gorge of the Roxelane,--and
of Pelée always higher, now thrusting out long spurs of green and
purple land into the sea. You drive under cool shadowing of mountain
woods--under waving bamboos like enormous ostrich feathers dyed
green,--and exquisite tree-ferns thirty to forty feet high,--and
imposing ceibas, with strangely buttressed trunks,--and all sorts of
broadleaved forms: cachibous, balisiers, bananiers.... Then you reach a
plateau covered with cane, whose yellow expanse is bounded on the right
by a demilune of hills sharply angled as crystals;--on the left it dips
seaward; and before you Pelée's head towers over the shoulders of
intervening monies. A strong cool wind is blowing; and the horses can
trot a while. Twenty minutes, and the road, leaving the plateau, becomes
steep again;--you are approaching the volcano over the ridge of a
colossal spur. The way turns in a semicircle,--zigzags,--once more
touches the edge of a valley,--where the clear fall might be nearly
fifteen hundred feet. But narrowing more and more, the valley becomes an
ascending gorge; and across its chasm, upon the brow of the opposite
cliff, you catch sight of houses and a spire seemingly perched on the
verge, like so many birds'-nests,--the village of Morne Rouge. It is two
thousand feet above the sea; and Pelée, although looming high over it,
looks a trifle less lofty now.

One's first impression of Morne Rouge is that of a single straggling
street of gray-painted cottages and shops (or rather booths), dominated
by a plain church, with four pursy-bodied palmistes facing the main
porch. Nevertheless, Morne Rouge is not a small place, considering its
situation;--there are nearly five thousand inhabitants; but in order to
find out where they live, you must leave the public road, which is on a
ridge, and explore the high-hedged lanes leading down from it on either
side. Then you will find a veritable city of little wooden
cottages,--each screened about with banana-trees, Indian-reeds, and
_pommiers-roses._ You will also see a number of handsome private
residences--country-houses of wealthy merchants; and you will find that
the church, though uninteresting exteriorly, is rich and impressive
within: it is a famous shrine, where miracles are alleged to have been
wrought. Immense processions periodically wend their way to it from St.
Pierre,--starting at three or four o'clock in the morning, so as to
arrive before the sun is well up.... But there are no woods here,--only
fields. An odd tone is given to the lanes by a local custom of planting
hedges of what are termed _roseaux d'Inde_, having a dark-red foliage;
and there is a visible fondness for ornamental plants with crimson
leaves. Otherwise the mountain summit is somewhat bare; trees have a
scrubby aspect. You must have noticed while ascending that the palmistes
became smaller as they were situated higher: at Morne Rouge they are
dwarfed,--having a short stature, and very thick trunks.

In spite of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the
valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat
bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray
tint of the buildings,--very melancholy by comparison with the apricot
and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless
gray is the only color which can resist the climate of Morne Rouge,
where people are literally dwelling in the clouds. Rolling down like
white smoke from Pelée, these often create a dismal fog; and Morne
Rouge is certainly one of the rainiest places in the world. When it is
dry everywhere else, it rains at Morne Rouge. It rains at least three
hundred and sixty days and three hundred and sixty nights of the year.
It rains almost invariably once in every twenty-four hours; but oftener
five or six times. The dampness is phenomenal. All mirrors become
patchy; linen moulds in one day; leather turns white; woollen goods feel
as if saturated with moisture; new brass becomes green; steel crumbles
into red powder: wood-work rots with astonishing rapidity; salt is
quickly transformed into brine; and matches, unless kept in a very warm
place, refuse to light. Everything moulders and peels and decomposes;
even the frescos of the church-interior lump out in immense blisters;
and a microscopic vegetation, green or brown, attacks all exposed
surfaces of timber or stone. At night it is often really cold;--and it
is hard to understand how, with all this dampness and coolness and
mouldiness, Morne Rouge can be a healthy place. But it is so, beyond any
question: it is the great Martinique resort for invalids; strangers
debilitated by the climate of Trinidad or Cayenne come to it for
recuperation.

Leaving the village by the still uprising road, you will be surprised,
after a walk of twenty minutes northward, by a magnificent view,--the
vast valley of the Champ-Flore, watered by many torrents, and bounded
south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of
mountains,--mountains broken, peaked, tormented-looking, and tinted
(_irisées_, as the creoles say) with all those gem-tones distance gives
in a West Indian atmosphere. Particularly impressive is the beauty of
one purple cone in the midst of this many-colored chain: the Piton
Gélé. All the valley-expanse of rich land is checkered with
alternations of meadow and cane and cacao,--except northwestwardly,
where woods billow out of sight beyond a curve. Facing this landscape,
on your left, are mornes of various heights,--among which you will
notice La Calebasse, overtopping everything but Pelée shadowing behind
it;--and a grass-grown road leads up westward from the national highway
towards the volcano. This is the Calebasse route to Pelée.




III


One must be very sure of the weather before undertaking the ascent of
Pelée; for if one merely selects some particular leisure day in
advance, one's chances of seeing anything from the summit are
considerably less than an astronomer's chances of being able to make a
satisfactory observation of the next transit of Venus. Moreover, if the
heights remain even partly clouded, it may not be safe to ascend the
Morne de la Croix,--a cone-point above the crater itself, and ordinarily
invisible below. And a cloudless afternoon can never be predicted from
the aspect of deceitful Pelée: when the crater edges are quite clearly
cut against the sky at dawn, you may be tolerably certain there will be
bad weather during the day; and when they are all bare at sundown, you
have no good reason to believe they will not be hidden next morning.
Hundreds of tourists, deluded by such appearances, have made the weary
trip in vain,--found themselves obliged to return without having seen
anything but a thick white cold fog. The sky may remain perfectly blue
for weeks in every other direction, and Pelée's head remain always
hidden. In order to make a successful ascent, one must not wait for a
period of dry weather,--one might thus wait for years! What one must
look for is a certain periodicity in the diurnal rains,--a regular
alternation of sun and cloud; such as characterizes a certain portion of
the hivernage, or rainy summer season, when mornings and evenings are
perfectly limpid, with very heavy sudden rains in the middle of the day.
It is of no use to rely on the prospect of a dry spell. There is no
really dry weather, notwithstanding there recurs--in books--a _Saison de
la Sécheresse._ In fact, there are no distinctly marked seasons in
Martinique:--a little less heat and rain from October to July, a little
more rain and heat from July to October: that is about all the notable
difference! Perhaps the official notification by cannon-shot that the
hivernage, the season of heavy rains and hurricanes, begins on July
15th, is no more trustworthy than the contradictory declarations of
Martinique authors who have attempted to define the vague and illusive
limits of the tropic seasons. Still, the Government report on the
subject is more satisfactory than any: according to the "Annuaire,"
there are these seasons:--

1. _Saison fraîche._ December to March. Rainfall, about 475
millimeters.

2. _Saison chaude et sèche._ April to July. Rainfall, about 140
millimeters.

3. _Saison chaude et pluvieuse._ July to November. Rainfall average,
1121 millimeters.

Other authorities divide the _saison chaude et sèche_ into two periods,
of which the latter, beginning about May, is called the _Renouveau_; and
it is at least true that at the time indicated there is a great burst of
vegetal luxuriance. But there is always rain, there are almost always
clouds, there is no possibility of marking and dating the beginnings and
the endings of weather in this country where the barometer is almost
useless, and the thermometer mounts in the sun to twice the figure it
reaches in the shade. Long and patient observation has, however,
established the fact that during the hivernage, if the heavy showers
have a certain fixed periodicity,--falling at mid-day or in the heated
part of the afternoon,--Pelée is likely to be clear early in the
morning; and by starting before daylight one can then have good chances
of a fine view from the summit.




IV


At five o'clock of a September morning, warm and starry, I leave St.
Pierre in a carriage with several friends, to make the ascent by the
shortest route of all,--that of the Morne St. Martin, one of Pelée's
western counterforts. We drive north along the shore for about half an
hour; then, leaving the coast behind, pursue a winding mountain road,
leading to the upper plantations, between leagues of cane. The sky
begins to brighten as we ascend, and a steely glow announces that day
has begun on the other side of the island. Miles up, the crest of the
volcano cuts sharp as a saw-edge against the growing light: there is not
a cloud visible. Then the light slowly yellows behind the vast cone; and
one of the most beautiful dawns I ever saw reveals on our right an
immense valley through which three rivers flow. This deepens very
quickly as we drive; the mornes about St. Pierre, beginning to catch the
light, sink below us in distance; and above them, southwardly, an
amazing silhouette begins to rise,--all blue,--a mountain wall capped
with cusps and cones, seeming high as Pelée itself in the middle, but
sinking down to the sea-level westward. There are a number of
extraordinary acuminations; but the most impressive shape is the
nearest,--a tremendous conoidal mass crowned with a group of peaks, of
which two, taller than the rest, tell their name at once by the beauty
of their forms,--the Pitons of Carbet. They wear their girdles of cloud,
though Pelée is naked to-day. All this is blue: the growing light only
deepens the color, does not dissipate it;--but in the nearer valleys
gleams of tender yellowish green begin to appear. Still the sun has not
been able to show himself;--it will take him some time yet to climb
Pelée.

Reaching the last plantation, we draw rein in a village of small wooden
cottages,--the quarters of the field hands,--and receive from the
proprietor, a personal friend of my friends, the kindest welcome. At his
house we change clothing and prepare for the journey;--he provides for
our horses, and secures experienced guides for us,--two young colored
men belonging to the plantation. Then we begin the ascent. The guides
walk before, barefoot, each carrying a cutlass in his hand and a package
on his head--our provisions, photographic instruments, etc.

The mountain is cultivated in spots up to twenty-five hundred feet; and
for three-quarters of an hour after leaving the planter's residence we
still traverse fields of cane and of manioc. The light is now strong in
the valley; but we are in the shadow of Pelée. Cultivated fields end at
last; the ascending path is through wild cane, wild guavas, guinea-grass
run mad, and other tough growths, some bearing pretty pink blossoms. The
forest is before us. Startled by our approach, a tiny fer-de-lance
glides out from a bunch of dead wild-cane, almost under the bare feet of
our foremost guide, who as instantly decapitates it with a touch of his
cutlass. It is not quite fifteen inches long, and almost the color of
the yellowish leaves under which it had been hiding.... The
conversation turns on snakes as we make our first halt at the verge of
the woods.


[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, ST. PIERRE
_Completely destroyed by the catastrophe of 1902 except
for a marble statue of the Virgin. This has been set
high on a cliff above the town and may be seen from
far out at sea._]


Hundreds may be hiding around us; but a snake never shows himself by
daylight except under the pressure of sudden alarm. We are not likely,
in the opinion of all present, to meet another. Every one in the party,
except myself, has some curious experience to relate. I hear for the
first time about the alleged inability of the trigonocephalus to wound
except at a distance from his enemy of not less than one-third of his
length;--about M. A----, a former director of the Jardin des Plantes,
who used to boldly thrust his arm into holes where he knew snakes were,
and pull them out,--catching them just behind the head and wrapping the
tail round his arm,--and place them alive in a cage without ever getting
bitten;--about M. B----, who, while hunting one day, tripped in the
coils of an immense trigonocephalus, and ran so fast in his fright that
the serpent, entangled round his leg, could not bite him;--about M.
C----, who could catch a fer-de-lance by the tail, and "crack it like a
whip" until the head would fly off;--about an old white man living in
the Champ-Flore, whose diet was snake-meat, and who always kept in his
ajoupa "a keg of salted serpents" (_yon ka sèpent-salé_);--about a
monster eight feet long which killed, near Morne Rouge, M. Charles
Fabre's white cat, but was also killed by the cat after she had been
caught in the folds of the reptile;--about the value of snakes as
protectors of the sugar-cane and cocoa-shrub against rats;--about an
unsuccessful effort made, during a plague of rats in Guadeloupe, to
introduce the fer-de-lance there;--about the alleged power of a
monstrous toad, the _crapaud-ladre_, to cause the death of the snake
that swallows it;--and, finally, about the total absence of the idyllic
and pastoral elements in Martinique literature, as due to the presence
of reptiles everywhere. "Even the flora and fauna of the country remain
to a large extent unknown,"--adds the last speaker, an amiable old
physician of St. Pierre,--"because the existence of the fer-de-lance
renders all serious research dangerous in the extreme."

My own experiences do not justify my taking part in such a
conversation;--I never saw alive but two very small specimens of the
trigonocephalus. People who have passed even a considerable time in
Martinique may have never seen a fer-de-lance except in a jar of
alcohol, or as exhibited by negro snake-catchers, tied fast to a bamboo.
But this is only because strangers rarely travel much in the interior of
the country, or find themselves on country roads after sundown. It is
not correct to suppose that snakes are uncommon even in the neighborhood
of St. Pierre: they are often killed on the bulwarks behind the city and
on the verge of the Savane; they have been often washed into the streets
by heavy rains; and many washer-women at the Roxelane have been bitten
by them. It is considered very dangerous to walk about the bulwarks
after dark;--for the snakes, which travel only at night, then descend
from the mornes towards the river. The Jardin des Plantes shelters great
numbers of the reptiles; and only a few days prior to the writing of
these lines a colored laborer in the garden was stricken and killed by a
fer-de-lance measuring one metre and sixty-seven centimetres in length.
In the interior much larger reptiles are sometimes seen: I saw one
freshly killed measuring six feet five inches, and thick as a man's leg
in the middle. There are few planters in the island who have not some of
their hands bitten during the cane-cutting and cocoa-gathering
seasons;--the average annual mortality among the class of travailleurs
from serpent bite alone is probably fifty[33],--always fine young men or
women in the prime of life. Even among the wealthy whites deaths from
this cause are less rare than might be supposed: I know one gentleman, a
rich citizen of St. Pierre, who in ten years lost three relatives by the
trigonocephalus,--the wound having in each case been received in the
neighborhood of a vein. When the vein has been pierced, cure is
impossible.


[Footnote 33: "De la piqûre du serpent de la Martinique," par Auguste
Charriez, Médecin de la Marine. Paris: Moquet, 1875.]




V


... We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields,
and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding beyond an opening
in the west. It has already broadened surprisingly, the sea,--appears to
have risen up, not as a horizontal plane, but like an immeasurable azure
precipice: what will it look like when we shall have reached the top?
Far down we can distinguish a line of field-hands--the whole _atelier_,
as it is called, of a plantation--slowly descending a slope, hewing the
canes as they go. There is a woman to every two men, a binder
(_amarreuse_): she gathers the canes as they are cut down, binds them
with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf, and carries them
away on her head;--the men wield their cutlasses so beautifully that it
is a delight to watch them. One cannot often enjoy such a spectacle
nowadays; for the introduction of the piece-work system has destroyed
the picturesqueness of plantation labor throughout the island, with rare
exceptions. Formerly the work of cane-cutting resembled the march of an
army;--first advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then
the amarreuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the
_ka_, the drum,--with a paid _crieur_ or _crieuse_ to lead the
song;--and lastly the black Commandeur, for general. And in the old
days, too, it was not unfrequent that the sudden descent of an English
corsair on the coast converted this soldiery of labor into veritable
military: more than one attack was repelled by the cutlasses of a
plantation atelier.

At this height the chatting and chanting can be heard, though not
distinctly enough to catch the words. Suddenly a voice, powerful as a
bugle, rings out,--the voice of the Commandeur: he walks along the line,
looking, with his cutlass under his arm. I ask one of our guides what
the cry is:--

--"_Y ka coumandé yo pouend gàde pou sèpent_," he replies. (He is
telling them to keep watch for serpents.) The nearer the cutlassers
approach the end of their task, the greater the danger: for the
reptiles, retreating before them to the last clump of cane, become
massed there, and will fight desperately. Regularly as the
ripening-time, Death gathers his toll of human lives from among the
workers. But when one falls, another steps into the vacant
place,--perhaps the Commandeur himself: these dark swordsmen never
retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as before; there is hardly any
emotion; the travailleur is a fatalist....[34]


[Footnote 34: M. Francard Baya delle, overseer of the Presbourg
plantation at Grande Anse, tells me that the most successful treatment
of snakebite consists in severe local cupping and bleeding; the
immediate application of twenty to thirty leeches (when these can be
obtained), and the administration of alkali as an internal medicine. He
has saved several lives by these methods.

The negro _panseur's_ method is much more elaborate and, to some
extent, mysterious. He cups and bleeds, using a small _couï_, or
half-calabash,  in lieu of a glass; and then applies cataplasms of
herbs,--orange-leaves, cinnamon-leaves, clove-leaves, _chardon-béni,
charpentier_, perhaps twenty other things, all mingled together;--this
poulticing being continued every day for a month. Meantime the patient
is given all sorts of absurd things to drink, in tafia and sour-orange
juice--such as old clay pipes ground to powder, or _the head of the
fer-de-lance itself_, roasted dry and pounded.... The plantation negro
has no faith in any other system of cure but that of the panseur;--he
refuses to let the physician try to save him, and will scarcely submit
to be treated even by an experienced white overseer.]




VI


... We enter the _grands-bois_,--the primitive forest,--the "high
woods."

As seen with a field-glass from St. Pierre, these woods present only the
appearance of a band of moss belting the volcano, and following all its
corrugations,--so densely do the leafy crests intermingle. But on
actually entering them, you find yourself at once in green twilight,
among lofty trunks uprising everywhere like huge pillars wrapped with
vines;--and the inter-spaces between these bulks are all occupied by
lianas and parasitic creepers,--some monstrous,--veritable
parasite-trees,--ascending at all angles, or dropping straight down from
the tallest crests to take root again. The effect in the dim light is
that of innumerable black ropes and cables of varying thicknesses
stretched taut from the soil to the tree-tops, and also from branch to
branch, like rigging. There are rare and remarkable trees
here,--acomats, courbarils, balatas, ceibas or fromages, acajous,
gommiers;--hundreds have been cut down by charcoal-makers; but the
forest is still grand. It is to be regretted that the Government has
placed no restriction upon the barbarous destruction of trees by the
_charbonniers_, which is going on throughout the island. Many valuable
woods are rapidly disappearing. The courbaril, yielding a fine-grained,
heavy, chocolate-colored timber; the balata, giving a wood even heavier,
denser, and darker; the acajou, producing a rich red wood, with a strong
scent of cedar; the bois-de-fer; the bois d'Inde; the superb
acomat,--all used to flourish by tens of thousands upon these volcanic
slopes, whose productiveness is eighteen times greater than that of the
richest European soil. All Martinique furniture used to be made of
native woods; and the colored cabinet-makers still produce work which
would probably astonish New York or London manufacturers. But today the
island exports no more hard woods: it has even been found necessary to
import much from neighboring islands;--and yet the destruction of
forests still goes on. The domestic fabrication of charcoal from
forest-trees has been estimated at 1,400,000 hectolitres per annum.
Primitive forest still covers the island to the extent of 21.37 per
cent; but to find precious woods now, one must climb heights like those
of Pelée and Carbet, or penetrate into the mountains of the interior.

Most common formerly on these slopes were the gommiers, from which
canoes of a single piece, forty-five feet long by seven wide, used to be
made. There are plenty of gommiers still; but the difficulty of
transporting them to the shore has latterly caused a demand for the
gommiers of Dominica. The dimensions of canoes now made from these trees
rarely exceed fifteen feet in length by eighteen inches in width: the
art of making them is an inheritance from the ancient Caribs. First the
trunk is shaped to the form of the canoe, and pointed at both ends; it
is then hollowed out. The width of the hollow does not exceed six inches
at the widest part; but the cavity is then filled with wet sand, which
in the course of some weeks widens the excavation by its weight, and
gives the boat perfect form. Finally gunwales of plank are fastened on;
seats are put in--generally four;--and no boat is more durable or more
swift.


... We climb. There is a trace rather than a footpath;--no visible soil,
only vegetable detritus, with roots woven over it in every direction.
The foot never rests on a flat surface,--only upon surfaces of roots;
and these are covered, like every protruding branch along the route,
with a slimy green moss, slippery as ice. Unless accustomed to walking
in tropical woods, one will fall at every step. In a little while I find
it impossible to advance. Our nearest guide, observing my predicament,
turns, and without moving the bundle upon his head, cuts and trims me an
excellent staff with a few strokes of his cutlass. This staff not only
saves pie from dangerous slips, but also serves at times to probe the
way; for the further we proceed, the vaguer the path becomes. It was
made by the _chasseurs-de-choux_ (cabbage-hunters),--the negro
mountaineers who live by furnishing heads of young cabbage-palm to the
city markets; and these men also keep it open,--otherwise the woods
would grow over it in a month. Two chasseurs-de-choux stride past as we
advance, with their freshly gathered palm-salad upon their heads,
wrapped in cachibou or balisier leaves, and tied with lianas. The
palmiste-franc reaches a stature of one hundred feet; but the young
trees are so eagerly sought for by the chasseurs-de-choux that in these
woods few reach a height of even twelve feet before being cut.

... Walking becomes more difficult;--there seems no termination to the
grands-bois: always the same faint green light, the same rude natural
stair-way of slippery roots,--half the time hidden by fern leaves and
vines. Sharp ammoniacal scents are in the air; a dew, cold as ice-water,
drenches our clothing. Unfamiliar insects make trilling noises in dark
places; and now and then a series of soft clear notes ring out, almost
like a thrush's whistle: the chant of a little tree-frog. The path
becomes more and more overgrown; and but for the constant excursions of
the cabbage-hunters, we should certainly have to cutlass every foot of
the way through creepers and brambles. More and more amazing also is the
interminable interweaving of roots: the whole forest is thus spun
together--not underground so much as overground. These tropical trees do
not strike deep, although able to climb steep slopes of porphyry and
basalt: they send out great far-reaching webs of roots,--each such web
interknotting with others all round it, and these in turn with further
ones; while between their reticulations lianas ascend and descend: and a
nameless multitude of shrubs as tough as india-rubber push up, together
with mosses, grasses, and ferns. Square miles upon square miles of woods
are thus interlocked and interbound into one mass solid enough to resist
the pressure of a hurricane; and where there is no path already made,
entrance into them can only be effected by the most dexterous
cutlassing.

An inexperienced stranger might be puzzled to understand how this
cutlassing is done. It is no easy feat to sever with one blow a liana
thick as a man's arm; the trained cutlasser does it without apparent
difficulty: moreover, he cuts horizontally, so as to prevent the severed
top presenting a sharp angle and proving afterwards dangerous. He never
appears to strike hard,--only give light taps with his blade, which
flickers continually about him as he moves. Our own guides in cutlassing
are not at all inconvenienced by their loads; they walk perfectly
upright, never stumble, never slip, never hesitate, and do not even seem
to perspire: their bare feet are prehensile. Some creoles in our party,
habituated to the woods, walk nearly as well in their shoes; but they
carry no loads.

... At last we are rejoiced to observe that the trees are becoming
smaller;--there are no more colossal trunks;--there are frequent
glimpses of sky: the sun has risen well above the peaks, and sends
occasional beams down through the leaves. Ten minutes, and we reach a
clear space,--a wild savane, very steep, above which looms a higher belt
of woods. Here we take another short rest.

Northward the view is cut off by a ridge covered with herbaceous
vegetation;--but to the south-west it is open, over a gorge of which
both sides are shrouded in sombre green--crests of trees forming a solid
curtain against the sun. Beyond the outer and lower cliff
valley-surfaces appear miles away, flinging up broad gleams of
cane-gold; further off greens disappear into blues, and the fantastic
masses of Carbet loom up far higher than before. St. Pierre, in a curve
of the coast, is a little red-and-yellow semicircular streak, less than
two inches long. The interspaces between far mountain chains,--masses of
pyramids, cones, single and double humps, queer blue angles as of raised
knees under coverings,--resemble misty lakes: they are filled with
brume;--the sea-line has vanished altogether. Only the horizon,
enormously heightened, can be discerned as a circling band of faint
yellowish light,--auroral, ghostly,--almost on a level with the tips of
the Pitons. Between this vague horizon and the shore, the sea no longer
looks like sea, but like a second hollow sky reversed. All the landscape
has unreal beauty:--there are no keen lines; there are no definite
beginnings or endings; the tints are half-colors only;--peaks rise
suddenly from mysteries of bluish fog as from a flood; land melts into
sea the same hue. It gives one the idea of some great aquarelle
unfinished,--abandoned before tones were deepened and details brought
out.




VII


We are overlooking from this height the birthplaces of several rivers;
and the rivers of Pelée are the clearest and the coolest of the island.

From whatever direction the trip be undertaken, the ascent of the
volcano must be made over some one of those many immense ridges sloping
from the summit to the sea west, north, and east,--like buttresses eight
to ten miles long,--formed by ancient lava-torrents. Down the deep
gorges between them the cloud-fed rivers run,--receiving as they descend
the waters of countless smaller streams gushing from either side of the
ridge. There are also cold springs,--one of which furnishes St. Pierre
with her _Eau-de-Gouyave_ (guava-water), which is always sweet, clear,
and cool in the very hottest weather. But the water of almost every one
of the seventy-five principal rivers of Martinique is cool and clear and
sweet. And these rivers are curious in their way. Their average fall has
been estimated at nine inches to every six feet;--many are
cataracts;--the Rivière de Case-Navire has a fall of nearly 150 feet to
every fifty yards of its upper course. Naturally these streams cut for
themselves channels of immense depth. Where they flow through forests
and between monies, their banks vary from 1200 to 1600 feet high,--so as
to render their beds inaccessible; and many enter the sea through a
channel of rock with perpendicular walls from 150 to 200 feet high.
Their waters are necessarily shallow in normal weather; but during
rainstorms they become torrents thunderous and terrific beyond
description. In order to comprehend their sudden swelling, one must know
what tropical rain is. Col. Boyer Peyreleau, in 1823, estimated the
annual rainfall in these colonies at 150 inches on the coast, to 350 on
the mountains,--while the annual fall at Paris was only eighteen inches.
The character of such rain is totally different from that of rain in the
temperate zone: the drops are enormous, heavy like hailstones,--one will
spatter over the circumference of a saucer!--and the shower roars so
that people cannot hear each other speak without shouting. When there is
a true storm, no roofing seems able to shut out the cataract; the
best-built houses leak in all directions; and objects but a short
distance off become invisible behind the heavy curtain of water. The
ravages of such rain may be imagined! Roads are cut away in an hour;
trees are overthrown as if blown down;--for there are few West Indian
trees which plunge their roots even as low as two feet; they merely
extend them over a large diameter; and isolated trees will actually
slide under rain. The swelling of rivers is so sudden that washer-women
at work in the Roxelane and other streams have been swept away and
drowned without the least warning of their danger; the shower occurring
seven or eight miles off.

Most of these rivers are well stocked with fish, of which the _tétart,
banane, loche_, and _dormeur_ are the principal varieties. The tétart
(best of all) and the loche climb the torrents to the height of 2500 and
even 3000 feet: they have a kind of pneumatic sucker, which enables them
to cling to rocks. Under stones in the lower basins crawfish of the most
extraordinary size are taken; some will measure thirty-six inches from
claw to tail. And at all the river-mouths, during July and August, are
caught vast numbers of _titiri_[35],--tiny white fish, of which a
thousand might be put into one teacup. They are delicious when served in
oil,--infinitely more delicate than the sardine. Some regard them as a
particular species: others believe them to be only the fry of larger
fish,--as their periodical appearance and disappearance would seem to
indicate. They are often swept by millions into the city of St. Pierre,
with the flow of mountain-water which purifies the streets:
then you will see them swarming in the gutters, fountains, and
bathing-basins;--and on Saturdays, when the water is temporarily shut
off to allow of the pipes being cleansed, the titiri may die in the
gutters in such numbers as to make the air offensive.

The mountain-crab, celebrated for its periodical migrations, is also
found at considerable heights. Its numbers appear to have been
diminished extraordinarily by its consumption as an article of negro
diet; but in certain islands those armies of crabs described by the old
writers are still occasionally to be seen. The Père Du Tertre relates
that in 1640, at St. Christophe, thirty sick emigrants, temporarily left
on the beach, were attacked and devoured alive during the night by a
similar species of crab. "They descended from the mountains in such
multitude," he tells us, "that they were heaped higher than houses over
the bodies of the poor wretches... whose bones were picked so clean that
not one speck of flesh could be found upon them."...


[Footnote 35: The sheet-lightnings which play during the nights
of July  and August are termed in creole _Zéclai-tiriri_, or
"titiri-lightnings";--it is believed these give notice that the titiri
have begun to swarm in the rivers. Among the colored population there
exists an idea of some queer relation between the lightning and the
birth of the little fish;--it is commonly said, "Zéclai-à ka fai yo
écloré" (the lightning hatches them).]




VIII


... We enter the upper belt of woods--green twilight again. There are as
many lianas as ever: but they are less massive in stem;--the trees,
which are stunted, stand closer together; and the web-work of roots is
finer and more thickly spun. These are called the _petits-bois_ (little
woods), in contradistinction to the grands-bois, or high woods.
Multitudes of balisiers, dwarf-palms, arborescent ferns, wild guavas,
mingle with the lower growths on either side of the path, which has
narrowed to the breadth of a wheel-rut, and is nearly concealed by
protruding grasses and fern leaves. Never does the sole of the foot
press upon a surface large as itself,--always the slippery backs of
roots crossing at all angles, like loop-traps, over sharp fragments of
volcanic rock or pumice-stone. There are abrupt descents, sudden
acclivities, mud-holes, and fissures;--one grasps at the ferns on both
sides to keep from falling; and some ferns are spiked sometimes on the
under surface, and tear the hands. But the barefooted guides stride on
rapidly, erect as ever under their loads,--chopping off with their
cutlasses any branches that hang low. There are beautiful flowers
here,--various unfamiliar species of lobelia;--pretty red and yellow
blossoms belonging to plants which the creole physician calls
_Bromeliaceœ_; and a plant like the _Guy Lussacia_ of Brazil, with
violet-red petals. There is an indescribable multitude of ferns,--a very
museum of ferns! The doctor, who is a great woodsman, says that he never
makes a trip to the hills without finding some new kind of fern; and he
had already a collection of several hundred.

The route is continually growing steeper, and makes a number of turns
and windings: we reach another bit of savane, where we have to walk over
black-pointed stones that resemble slag;--then more petits-bois, still
more dwarfed, then another opening. The naked crest of the volcano
appears like a peaked precipice, dark-red, with streaks of green, over a
narrow but terrific chasm on the left: we are almost on a level with the
crater, but must make a long circuit to reach it, through a wilderness
of stunted timber and bush. The creoles call this undergrowth _razié_:
it is really only a prolongation of the low jungle which carpets the
high forests below, with this difference, that there are fewer creepers
and much more fern.... Suddenly we reach a black gap in the path about
thirty inches wide--half hidden by the tangle of leaves,--_La Fente._ It
is a volcanic fissure which divides the whole ridge, and is said to have
no bottom: for fear of a possible slip, the guides insist upon holding
our hands while we cross it. Happily there are no more such clefts; but
there are mud-holes, snags, roots, and loose rocks beyond counting.
Least disagreeable are the _boubiers_, in which you sink to your knees
in black or gray slime. Then the path descends into open light
again;--and we find ourselves at the Étang,--in the dead Crater of the
Three Palmistes.


An immense pool, completely encircled by high green walls of rock, which
shut out all further view, and shoot up, here and there, into cones, or
rise into queer lofty humps and knobs. One of these elevations at the
opposite side has almost the shape of a blunt horn: it is the Morne de
la Croix. The scenery is at once imposing and sinister: the shapes
towering above the lake and reflected in its still surface have the
weirdness of things seen in photographs of the moon. Clouds are circling
above them and between them;--one descends to the water, haunts us a
moment, blurring everything; then rises again. We have travelled too
slow; the clouds have had time to gather.

I look in vain for the Three Palmistes which gave the crater a name:
they were destroyed long ago. But there are numbers of young ones
scattered through the dense ferny covering of the lake-slopes,--just
showing their heads like bunches of great dark-green feathers.

--The estimate of Dr. Rufz, made in 1851, and the estimate of the last
"Annuaire" regarding the circumference of the lake, are evidently both
at fault. That of the "Annuaire," 150 metres, is a gross error: the
writer must have meant the diameter,--following Rufz, who estimated the
circumference at something over 300 paces. As we find it, the Étang,
which is nearly circular, must measure 200 yards across;--perhaps it has
been greatly swollen by the extraordinary rains of this summer. Our
guides say that the little iron cross projecting from the water about
two yards off was high and dry on the shore last season. At present
there is only one narrow patch of grassy bank on which we can rest,
between the water and the walls of the crater.

The lake is perfectly clear, with a bottom of yellowish shallow mud,
which rests--according to investigations made in 1851--upon a mass of
pumice-stone mixed in places with ferruginous sand; and the yellow mud
itself is a detritus of pumice-stone. We strip for a swim.

Though at an elevation of nearly 5000 feet, this water is not so cold as
that of the Roxelane, nor of other rivers of the north-west and
north-east coasts. It has an agreeable fresh taste, like dew. Looking
down into it, I see many lame of the maringouin, or large mosquito: no
fish. The maringouins themselves are troublesome,--whirring around us
and stinging. On striking out for the middle, one is surprised to feel
the water growing slightly warmer. The committee of investigation in
1851 found the temperature of the lake, in spite of a north wind, 20.5
Centigrade, while that of the air was but 19 (about 69 F. for the water,
and 66.2 for the air). The depth in the centre is over six feet; the
average is scarcely four.

Regaining the bank, we prepare to ascend the Morne de la Croix. The
circular path by which it is commonly reached is now under water; and we
have to wade up to our waists. All the while clouds keep passing over us
in great slow whirls. Some are white and half-transparent; others opaque
and dark gray;--a dark cloud passing through a white one looks like a
goblin. Gaining the opposite shore, we find a very rough path over
splintered stone, ascending between the thickest fern-growths possible
to imagine. The general tone of this fern is dark green; but there are
paler cloudings of yellow and pink,--due to the varying age of the
leaves, which are pressed into a cushion three or four feet high, and
almost solid enough to sit upon. About two hundred and fifty yards from
the crater edge, the path rises above this tangle, and zigzags up the
morne, which now appears twice as lofty as from the lake, where we had a
curiously foreshortened view of it. It then looked scarcely a hundred
feet high; it is more than double that. The cone is green to the top
with moss, low grasses, small fern, and creeping pretty plants, like
violets, with big carmine flowers. The path is a black line: the rock
laid bare by it looks as if burned to the core. We have now to use our
hands in climbing; but the low thick ferns give a good hold. Out of
breath, and drenched in perspiration, we reach the apex,--the highest
point of the island. But we are curtained about with clouds,--moving in
dense white and gray masses: we cannot see fifty feet away.

The top of the peak has a slightly slanting surface of perhaps twenty
square yards, very irregular in outline;--southwardly the morne pitches
sheer into a frightful chasm, between the converging of two of those
long corrugated ridges already described as buttressing the volcano on
all sides. Through a cloud-rift we can see another crater-lake twelve
hundred feet below--said to be five times larger than the Étang we have
just left: it is also of more irregular outline. This is called the
_Étang Sec_, or "Dry Pool," because dry in less rainy seasons. It
occupies a more ancient crater, and is very rarely visited: the path
leading to it is difficult and dangerous,--a natural ladder of roots and
lianas over a series of precipices. Behind us the Crater of the Three
Palmistes now looks no larger than the surface on which we stand;--over
its further boundary we can see the wall of another gorge, in which
there is a third crater-lake. West and north are green peakings, ridges,
and high lava walls steep as fortifications. All this we can only note
in the intervals between passing of clouds. As yet there is no landscape
visible southward;--we sit down and wait.




IX


... Two crosses are planted nearly at the verge of the precipice; a
small one of iron; and a large one of wood--probably the same put up by
the Abbé Lespinasse during the panic of 1851, after the eruption. This
has been splintered to pieces by a flash of lightning; and the fragments
are clumsily united with cord. There is also a little tin plate let into
a slit in a black post: it bears a date,--_8 Avril, 1867_.... The
volcanic vents, which were active in 1851, are not visible from the
peak: they are in the gorge descending from it, at a point nearly on a
level with the Étang Sec.

The ground gives out a peculiar hollow sound when tapped, and is covered
with a singular lichen,--all composed of round overlapping leaves about
one-eighth of an inch in diameter, pale green, and tough as fish-scales.
Here and there one sees a beautiful branching growth, like a mass of
green coral: it is a gigantic moss. _Cabane-Jésus_ ("bed-of-Jesus") the
patois name is: at Christmas-time, in all the churches, those decorated
cribs in which the image of the Child-Saviour is laid are filled with
it. The creeping crimson violet is also here. Fire-flies with
bronze-green bodies are crawling about;--I notice also small frogs,
large gray crickets, and a species of snail with a black shell. A
solitary humming-bird passes, with a beautiful blue head, flaming like
sapphire.

All at once the peak vibrates to a tremendous sound from somewhere
below.... It is only a peal of thunder; but it startled at first,
because the mountain rumbles and grumbles occasionally.... From the
wilderness of ferns about the lake a sweet long low whistle
comes--three times;--a _siffleur-de-montagne_ has its nest there.

There is a rain-storm over the woods beneath us: clouds now hide
everything but the point on which we rest; the crater of the Palmistes
becomes invisible. But it is only for a little while that we are thus
befogged: a wind conies, blows the clouds over us, lifts them up and
folds them like a drapery, and slowly whirls them away northward. And
for the first time the view is clear over the intervening gorge,--now
spanned by the rocket-leap of a perfect rainbow.

... Valleys and mornes, peaks and ravines,--succeeding each other
swiftly as surge succeeds surge in a storm,--a weirdly tossed world, but
beautiful as it is weird: all green the foreground, with all tints of
green, shadowing off to billowy distances of purest blue. The sea-line
remains invisible as ever: you know where it is only by the zone of pale
light ringing the double sphericity of sky and ocean. And in this double
blue void the island seems to hang suspended: far peaks seem to come up
from nowhere, to rest on nothing--like forms of mirage. Useless to
attempt photography;--distances take the same color as the sea.
Vauclin's truncated mass is recognizable only by the shape of its indigo
shadows. All is vague, vertiginous;--the land still seems to quiver with
the prodigious forces that upheaved it.

High over all this billowing and peaking tower the Pitons of Carbet,
gem-violet through the vapored miles,--the tallest one filleted with a
single soft white band of cloud. Through all the wonderful chain of the
Antilles you might seek in vain for other peaks exquisite of form as
these. Their beauty no less surprises the traveller to-day than it did
Columbus three hundred and eighty-six years ago, when--on the thirteenth
day of June, 1502--his caravel first sailed into sight of them, and he
asked his Indian guide the name of the unknown land, and the names of
those marvellous shapes. Then, according to Pedro Martyr de Anghiera,
the Indian answered that the name of the island was Madiana; that those
peaks had been venerated from immemorial time by the ancient peoples of
the archipelago as the birthplace of the human race; and that the first
brown habitants of Madiana, having been driven from their natural
heritage by the man-eating pirates of the south--the cannibal
Caribs,--remembered and mourned for their sacred mountains, and gave the
names of them, for a memory, to the loftiest summits of their new
home,--Hayti.... Surely never was fairer spot hallowed by the legend of
man's nursing-place than the valley blue-shadowed by those
peaks,--worthy, for their gracious femininity of shape, to seem the
visible breasts of the All-nourishing Mother,--dreaming under this
tropic sun.

Touching the zone of pale light north-east, appears a beautiful peaked
silhouette,--Dominica. We had hoped to perceive Saint Lucia; but the
atmosphere is too heavily charged with vapor to-day. How magnificent
must be the view on certain extraordinary days, when it reaches from
Antigua to the Grenadines--over a range of three hundred miles! But the
atmospheric conditions which allow of such a spectacle are rare indeed.
As a general rule, even in the most unclouded West Indian weather, the
loftiest peaks fade into the light at a distance of one hundred miles.

A sharp ridge covered with fern cuts off the view of the northern
slopes: one must climb it to look down upon Macouba. Macouba occupies
the steepest slope of Pelée, and the grimmest part of the coast: its
little _chef-lieu_ is industrially famous for the manufacture of native
tobacco, and historically for the ministrations of Père Labat, who
rebuilt its church. Little change has taken place in the parish since
his time. "Do you know Macouba?" asks a native writer;--"it is not
Pelion upon Ossa, but ten or twelve Pelions side by side with ten or
twelve Ossæ, interseparated by prodigious ravines. Men can speak to
each other from places whence, by rapid walking, it would require hours
to meet;--to travel there is to experience on dry land the sensation of
the sea."

With the diminution of the warmth provoked by the exertion of climbing,
you begin to notice how cool it feels;--you could almost doubt the
testimony of your latitude. Directly east is Senegambia: we are well
south of Timbuctoo and the Sahara,--on a line with southern India. The
ocean has cooled the winds; at this altitude the rarity of the air is
northern; but in the valleys below the vegetation is African. The best
alimentary plants, the best forage, the flowers of the gardens, are of
Guinea;--the graceful date-palms are from the Atlas region: those
tamarinds, whose thick shade stifles all other vegetal life beneath it,
are from Senegal. Only, in the touch of the air, the vapory colors of
distance, the shapes of the hills, there is a something not of Africa:
that strange fascination which has given to the island its poetic creole
name,--_le Pays des Revenants._ And the charm is as puissant in our own
day as it was more than two hundred years ago, when Père Du Tertre
wrote:--"I have never met one single man, nor one single woman, of all
those who came back therefrom, in whom I have not remarked a most
passionate desire to return thereunto."

Time and familiarity do not weaken the charm, either for those born
among these scenes who never voyaged beyond their native island, or for
those to whom the streets of Paris and the streets of St. Pierre are
equally well known. Even at a time when Martinique had been forsaken by
hundreds of her ruined planters, and the paradise-life of the old days
had become only a memory to embitter exile,--a Creole writes:--

--"Let there suddenly open before you one of those vistas, or anses,
with colonnades of cocoa-palm--at the end of which you see smoking the
chimney of a sugar-mill, and catch a glimpse of the hamlet of negro
cabins (_cases_);--or merely picture to yourself one of the most
ordinary, most trivial scenes: nets being hauled by two ranks of
fishermen; a canot waiting for the embellie to make a dash for the
beach; even a negro bending under the weight of a basket of fruits, and
running along the shore to get to market;--and illuminate that with the
light of our sun! What landscapes!--O Salvator Rosa! O Claude
Lorrain,--if I had your pencil!... Well do I remember the day on which,
after twenty years of absence, I found myself again in presence of these
wonders;--I feel once more the thrill of delight that made all my body
tremble, the tears that came to my eyes. It was my land, my own land,
that appeared so beautiful."...[36]


[Footnote 36: Dr. E. Rufz: "Études historiques," vol. I, p. 180.]




X


At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the
world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new
impressions: every face was radiant.... Now all look serious;--none
speak. The first physical joy of finding oneself on this point in violet
air, exalted above the hills, soon yields to other emotions inspired by
the mighty vision and the colossal peace of the heights. Dominating all,
I think, is the consciousness of the awful antiquity of what one is
looking upon,--such a sensation, perhaps, as of old found utterance in
that tremendous question of the Book of Job:--"_Wast thou brought forth
before the hills?_"


[Illustration: RUINS, ST. PIERRE
_Decked out with flowers grayed by the passing years,
these crumbling walls look immeasurably old._]


... And the blue multitude of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of
the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,--telling of
Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us
and beyond us and beneath,--until something like the fulness of a great
grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For all this astonishment of
beauty, all this majesty of light and form and color, will surely
endure,--marvellous as now,--after we shall have lain down to sleep
where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to
look upon it.


[Illustration]




'TI CANOTIÉ


I


One might almost say that commercial time in St. Pierre is measured by
cannon-shots,--by the signal-guns of steamers. Every such report
announces an event of extreme importance to the whole population. To the
merchant it is a notification that mails, money, and goods have
arrived;--to consuls and Government officials it gives notice of fees
and dues to be collected;--for the host of lightermen, longshoremen,
port laborers of all classes, it promises work and pay;--for all it
signifies the arrival of food. The island does not feed itself: cattle,
salt meats, hams, lard, flour, cheese, dried fish, all come from
abroad,--particularly from America. And in the minds of the colored
population the American steamer is so intimately associated with the
idea of those great tin cans in which food-stuffs are brought from the
United States, that the onomatope applied to the can, because of the
sound outgiven by it when tapped,--_bom!_--is also applied to the ship
itself. The English or French or Belgian steamer, however large,
is only known as _packett-à, batiment-là_; but the American
steamer is always the "bom-ship"--_batiment-bom-à_; or, the
"food-ship"--_batiment-mangé-à._ ... You hear women and men asking
each other, as the shock of the gun flaps through all the town, "_Mil
godé ça qui là, chè?_" And if the answer be, "_Mais c'est bom-là,
chè,--bom-mangé-à ka rivé_" (Why, it is the bom, dear,--the food-bom
that has come), great is the exultation.

Again, because of the sound of her whistle, we find a steamer called in
this same picturesque idiom, _batiment-cône_,--"the horn-ship." There
is even a song, of which the refrain is:--


"Bom-là rivé, chè,--
Batiment-cône-là rivé."


... But of all the various classes of citizens, those most joyously
excited by the coming of a great steamer, whether she be a "bom" or
not,--are the '_ti canotié_, who swarm out immediately in little canoes
of their own manufacture to dive for coins which passengers gladly throw
into the water for the pleasure of witnessing the graceful spectacle. No
sooner does a steamer drop anchor--unless the water be very rough
indeed--than she is surrounded by a fleet of the funniest little boats
imaginable, full of naked urchins screaming creole.


These _'ti canotié_--these little canoe-boys and professional
divers--are, for the most part, sons of boatmen of color, the real
canotiers. I cannot find who first invented the '_ti canot_: the shape
and dimensions of the little canoe are fixed according to a tradition
several generations old; and no improvements upon the original model
seem to have ever been attempted, with the sole exception of a tiny
water-tight box contrived sometimes at one end, in which the _palettes_,
or miniature paddles, and various other trifles may be stowed away. The
actual cost of material for a canoe of this kind seldom exceeds
twenty-five or thirty cents; and, nevertheless, the number of canoes is
not very large--I doubt if there be more than fifteen in the harbor;--as
the families of Martinique boatmen are all so poor that twenty-five sous
are difficult to spare, in spite of the certainty that the little son
can earn fifty times the amount within a month after owning a canoe.

For the manufacture of a canoe an American lard-box or kerosene-oil box
is preferred by reason of its shape; but any well-constructed
shipping-case of small size would serve the purpose. The top is removed;
the sides and the corners of the bottom are sawn out at certain angles;
and the pieces removed are utilized for the sides of the bow and
stern,--sometimes also in making the little box for the paddles, or
palettes, which are simply thin pieces of tough wood about the form and
size of a cigar-box lid. Then the little boat is tarred and varnished:
it cannot sink,--though it is quite easily upset. There are no seats.
The boys (there are usually two to each canot) simply squat down in the
bottom,--facing each other. They can paddle with surprising swiftness
over a smooth sea; and it is a very pretty sight to witness one of their
prize contests in racing,--which take place every 14th of July....




II


... It was five o'clock in the afternoon: the horizon beyond the harbor
was turning lemon-color;--and a thin warm wind began to come in weak
puffs from the south-west,--the first breaths to break the immobility of
the tropical air. Sails of vessels becalmed at the entrance of the bay
commenced to flap lazily: they might belly after sundown.

The _La Guayra_ was in port, lying well out: her mountainous iron mass
rising high above the modest sailing craft moored in her
vicinity,--barks and brigantines and brigs and schooners and
barkentines. She had lain before the town the whole afternoon,
surrounded by the entire squadron of canots; and the boys were still
circling about her flanks, although she had got up steam and was lifting
her anchor. They had been very lucky, indeed, that afternoon,--all the
little canotiers;--and even many yellow lads, not fortunate enough to
own canoes, had swum out to her in hope of sharing the silver shower
falling from her saloon-deck. Some of these, tired out, were resting
themselves by sitting on the slanting cables of neighboring ships.
Perched naked thus,--balancing in the sun, against the blue of sky or
water, their slender bodies took such orange from the mellowing light as
to seem made of some self-luminous substance,--flesh of sea-fairies....

Suddenly the _La Guayra_ opened her steam-throat and uttered such a moo
that all the mornes cried out for at least a minute after;--and the
little fellows perched on the cables of the sailing craft tumbled into
the sea at the sound and struck out for shore. Then the water all at
once burst backward in immense frothing swirls from beneath the stem of
the steamer; and there arose such a heaving as made all the little
canoes dance. The _La Guayra_ was moving. She moved slowly at first,
making a great fuss as she turned round: then she began to settle down
to her journey very majestically,--just making the water pitch a little
behind her, as the hem of a woman's robe tosses lightly at her heels
while she walks.

And, contrary to custom, some of the canoes followed after her. A dark
handsome man, wearing an immense Panama hat, and jewelled rings upon his
hands, was still throwing money; and still the boys dived for it. But
only one of each crew now plunged; for, though the _La Guayra_ was yet
moving slowly, it was a severe strain to follow her, and there was no
time to be lost.

The captain of the little band--black Maximilien, ten years old, and his
comrade Stéphane--nicknamed _Ti Chabin_, because of his bright hair,--a
slim little yellow boy of eleven--led the pursuit, crying always,
"_Encò, Missié,--encò!_"...

The _La Guayra_ had gained fully two hundred yards when the handsome
passenger made his final largess,--proving himself quite an expert in
flinging coin. The piece fell far short of the boys, but near enough to
distinctly betray a yellow shimmer as it twirled to the water. That was
gold!

In another minute the leading canoe had reached the spot, the other
canotiers voluntarily abandoning the quest,--for it was little use to
contend against Maximilien and Stéphane, who had won all the canoe
contests last 14th of July. Stéphane, who was the better diver,
plunged.

He was much longer below than usual, came up at quite a distance, panted
as he regained the canoe, and rested his arms upon it. The water was so
deep there, he could not reach the coin the first time, though he could
see it: he was going to try again,--it was gold, sure enough.

--"_Fouinq! ça fond içitt!_" he gasped.

Maximilien felt all at once uneasy. Very deep water, and perhaps sharks.
And sunset not far off! The _La Guayra_ was diminishing in the offing.

--"_Boug-là 'lé fai nou néyé!--laissé y, Stéphane!_" he cried.
(The fellow wants to drown us. _Laissé_--leave it alone.)

But Stéphane had recovered breath, and was evidently resolved to try
again. It was gold!

--"_Mais ça c'est lò!_"

--"_Assez, non!_" screamed Maximilien. "_Pa plongé ncò, moin ka di ou!
Ah! foute!_"...

Stéphane had dived again!

... And where were the others? "_Bon-Dié, gadé oti yo yé!_" They were
almost out of sight,--tiny specks moving shoreward.... The _La Guayra_
now seemed no bigger than the little packet running between St. Pierre
and Fort-de-France.

Up came Stéphane again, at a still greater distance than
before,--holding high the yellow coin in one hand. He made for the
canoe, and Maximilien paddled towards him and helped him in. Blood was
streaming from the little diver's nostrils, and blood colored the water
he spat from his mouth.

--"_Ah! moin té ka di ou laissé y!_" cried Maximilien, in anger and
alarm.... "_Gàdé, godé sang-à ka coulé nans nez ou,--nans bouche
ou!... Mi oti lézautt!_"

_Lézautt_, the rest, were no longer visible.

--"_Et mi oti nou yé!_" cried Maximilien again. They had never ventured
so far from shore.

But Stéphane answered only, "_C'est lò!_" For the first time in his
life he held a piece of gold in his fingers. He tied it up in a little
rag attached to the string fastened about his waist,--a purse of his own
invention,--and took up his paddles, coughing the while and spitting
crimson.

--"_Mi! mi!--mi oti nou yé!_" reiterated Maximilien. "_Bon-Dié!_ look
where we are!"

The Place had become indistinct;--the light-house, directly behind half
an hour earlier, now lay well south: the red light had just been
kindled. Seaward, in advance of the sinking orange disk of the sun, was
the _La Guayra_, passing to the horizon. There was no sound from the
shore: about them a great silence had gathered,--the Silence of seas,
which is a fear. Panic seized them: they began to paddle furiously.

But St. Pierre did not appear to draw any nearer. Was it only an effect
of the dying light, or were they actually moving towards the
semicircular cliffs of Fond-Corré?... Maximilien began to cry. The
little chabin paddled on,--though the blood was still trickling over his
breast.

Maximilien screamed out to him:--

--"_Ou pa ka pagayé,--anh?--ou ni bousoin demi?_?" (Thou dost not
paddle, eh?--thou wouldst go to sleep?)

--"_Si! moin ka pagayé,--epi fò!_" (I am paddling, and hard, too!)
responded Stéphane....

--"_Ou ka pagayé!--ou ka menti!_" (Thou art paddling!--thou liest!)
vociferated Maximilien.... "And the fault is all thine. I cannot, all by
myself, make the canoe to go in water like this! The fault is all thine:
I told thee not to dive, thou stupid!"

--"_Ou fou!_" cried Stéphane, becoming angry. "_Moin ka pagayé!_" (I
am paddling.)

--"Beast! never may we get home so! Paddle, thou lazy;--paddle, thou
nasty!"

--"_Macaque_ thou!--monkey!"

--"_Chabin!_--must be chabin, for to be stupid so!"

--"Thou black monkey!--thou species of _ouistiti!_"

--"Thou tortoise-of-the-land!--thou slothful more than _molocoye!_"

--"Why, thou cursed monkey, if thou sayest I do not paddle, thou dost
not know how to paddle!"...

... But Maximilien's whole expression changed: he suddenly stopped
paddling, and stared before him and behind him at a great violet band
broadening across the sea northward out of sight; and his eyes were big
with terror as he cried out:--

--"_Mais ni qui chose qui douôle içitt!_... There is something queer,
Stéphane; there is something queer."...

--"Ah! you begin to see now, Maximilien!--it is the current!"

--"A devil-current, Stéphane.... We are drifting: we will go to the
horizon!"...

To the horizon--"_nou kallé Ihorizon!_"--a phrase of terrible
picturesqueness.... In the creole tongue, "to the horizon" signifies to
the Great Open--into the measureless sea.

--"_C'est pa lapeine pagayé atouèlement!_" (It is no use to paddle
now), sobbed Maximilien, laying down his palettes.

--"_Si! si!_" said Stéphane, reversing the motion: "paddle with the
current."

--"With the current! It runs to La Dominique!"

--"_Pouloss_," phlegmatically returned Stéphane,--"_ennou!_--let us
make for La Dominique!"

--"Thou fool!--it is more than past forty kilometres.... _Stéphane,
mi! gadé!--mi qui gouôs requ'em!_"

A long black fin cut the water almost beside them, passed, and
vanished,--a requin indeed! But, in his patois, the boy almost re-echoed
the name as uttered by quaint Père Du Tertre, who, writing of strange
fishes more than two hundred years ago, says it is called REQUIEM,
because for the man who findeth himself alone with it in the midst of
the sea, surely a requiem must be sung.

--"Do not paddle, Stéphane!--do not put thy hand in the water again!"




III


... The _La Guayra_ was a point on the sky-verge;--the sun's face had
vanished. The silence and the darkness were deepening together.

--"_Si lanmè ka vini plis fò, ça nou ké fai?_" (If the sea roughens,
what are we to do?) asked Maximilien.

--"Maybe we will meet a steamer," answered Stéphane: "the _Orinoco_ was
due to-day."

--"And if she pass in the night?"

--"They can see us."...

--"No, they will not be able to see us at all. There is no moon."

--"They have lights ahead."

--"I tell thee, they will not see us at all,--_pièss! pièss!_"

--"Then they will hear us cry out."

--"No,--we cannot cry so loud. One can hear nothing but a steam-whistle
or a cannon, with the noise of the wind and the water and the
machine.... Even on the Fort-de-France packet one cannot hear for the
machine. And the machine of the _Orinoco_ is more big than the church of
the 'Centre.'"

--"Then we must try to get to La Dominique."

... They could now feel the sweep of the mighty current;--it even seemed
to them that they could hear it,--a deep low whispering. At long
intervals they saw lights,--the lights of houses in Pointe-Prince, in
Fond-Canonville,--in Au Prêcheur. Under them the depth was
unfathomed:--hydrographic charts mark it _sans-fond._ And they passed
the great cliffs of Aux Abymes, under which lies the Village of the
Abysms.

The red glare in the west disappeared suddenly as if blown out;--the rim
of the sea vanished into the void of the gloom;--the night narrowed
about them, thickening like a black fog. And the invisible, irresistible
power of the sea was now bearing them away from the tall coast,--over
profundities unknown,--over the _sans-fond_,--out "to the horizon."




IV


... Behind the canoe a long thread of pale light quivered and twisted:
bright points from time to time mounted up, glowered like eyes, and
vanished again;--glimmerings of faint flame wormed away on either side
as they floated on. And the little craft no longer rocked as
before;--they felt another and a larger motion,--long slow ascents and
descents enduring for minutes at a time;--they were riding the great
swells,--_riding the horizon!_

Twice they were capsized. But happily the heaving was a smooth one, and
their little canoe could not sink: they groped for it, found it, righted
it, and climbed in, and baled out the water with their hands.

From time to time they both cried out together, as loud as they
could,--"_Sucou!--sucou!--sucou!_"--hoping that some one might be
looking for them.... The alarm had indeed been given; and one of the
little steam-packets had been sent out to look for them,--with
torch-fires blazing at her bows; but she had taken the wrong direction.

--"Maximilien," said Stéphane, while the great heaving seemed to grow
vaster,--"_fau nou ka prié Bon-Dié._"...

Maximilien answered nothing.

--"_Fau prié Bon-Dié_" (We must pray to the Bon-Dié), repeated
Stéphane.

--"_Pa lapeine, li pas pè ouè nou atò!_" (It is not worth while: He
cannot see us now) answered the little black.

... In the immense darkness even the loom of the island was no longer
visible.

--"O Maximilien!--_Bon-Dié ka ouè toutt, ha connaitt toutt_" (He sees
all; He knows all), cried Stéphane.

--"_Y pa pè ouè non pièss atouèlement, moin ben sur!_" (He cannot
see us at all now,--I am quite sure) irreverently responded
Maximilien....

--"Thou thinkest the Bon-Dié like thyself!--He has not eyes like thou,"
protested Stéphane. "_Li pas ka tiny coulé; li pas ka tini zié_" (He
has not color; He has not eyes), continued the boy, repeating the text
of his catechism,--the curious creole catechism of old Perè Goux, of
Carbet. [Quaint priest and quaint catechism have both passed away.]

--"_Moin pa save si li pa ka tini coulè_" (I know not if He has not
color), answered Maximilien. "But what I well know is that if He has not
eyes. He cannot see.... _Fouinq!_--how idiot!"

--"Why, it is in the Catechism," cried Stéphane.... "'_Bon-Dié, li
conm vent: vent tout-patout, et nou pa save ouè li;--li ka touché
nou,--li ka boulvésé lamnè._" (The Good-God is like the Wind: the
Wind is everywhere, and we cannot see It;--It touches us,--It tosses the
sea.)

--"If the Bon-Dié is the Wind," responded Maximilien, "then pray thou
the Wind to stay quiet."

--"The Bon-Dié is not the Wind," cried Stéphane: "He is like the Wind,
but He is not the Wind."...

--"_Ah! soc-soc!--fouinq!_... More better past praying to care we be
not upset again and eaten by sharks."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


... Whether the little chabin prayed either to the Wind or to the
Bon-Dié, I do not know. But the Wind remained very quiet all that
night,--seemed to hold its breath for fear of ruffling the sea. And in
the Mouillage of St. Pierre furious American captains swore at the Wind
because it would not fill their sails.




V


Perhaps, if there had been a breeze, neither Stéphane nor Maximilien
would have seen the sun again. But they saw him rise.

Light pearled in the east, over the edge of the ocean, ran around the
rim of the sky and yellowed: then the sun's brow appeared;--a current of
gold gushed rippling across the sea before him;--and all the heaven at
once caught blue fire from horizon to zenith. Violet from flood to cloud
the vast recumbent form of Pelée loomed far behind,--with long reaches
of mountaining: pale grays o'ertopping misty blues. And in the north
another lofty shape was towering,--strangely jagged and peaked and
beautiful,--the silhouette of Dominica: a sapphire saw!... No wandering
clouds:--over far Pelée only a shadowy piling of nimbi.... Under them
the sea swayed dark as purple ink--a token of tremendous depth.... Still
a dead calm, and no sail in sight.

--"_Ça c'est la Dominique_," said Maximilien,--"_Ennou pou
ouivage-à!_"

They had lost their little palettes during the night;--they used their
naked hands, and moved swiftly. But Dominica was many and many a mile
away. Which was the nearer island, it was yet difficult to say;--in the
morning sea-haze, both were vapory,--difference of color was largely due
to position....

_Sough!--sough!--sough!_--A bird with a white breast passed overhead;
and they stopped paddling to look at it,--a gull. Sign of fair
weather!--it was making for Dominica.

--"_Moin ni ben faim_," murmured Maximilien. Neither had eaten since the
morning of the previous day,--most of which they had passed sitting in
their canoe.

--"_Moin ni anni soif_," said Stéphane. And besides his thirst he
complained of a burning pain in his head, always growing worse. He still
coughed, and spat out pink threads after each burst of coughing.

The heightening sun flamed whiter and whiter: the flashing of waters
before his face began to dazzle like a play of lightning.... Now the
islands began to show sharper lines, stronger colors; and Dominica was
evidently the nearer;--for bright streaks of green were breaking at
various angles through its vapor-colored silhouette, and Martinique
still remained all blue.

... Hotter and hotter the sun burned; more and more blinding became his
reverberation. Maximilien's black skin suffered least; but both lads,
accustomed as they were to remaining naked in the sun, found the heat
difficult to bear. They would gladly have plunged into the deep water to
cool themselves, but for fear of sharks;--all they could do was to
moisten their heads, and rinse their mouths with sea-water.

Each from his end of the canoe continually watched the horizon. Neither
hoped for a sail, there was no wind; but they looked for the coining of
steamers,--the _Orinoco_ might pass, or the English packet, or some one
of the small Martinique steamboats might be sent out to find them.

Yet hours went by; and there still appeared no smoke in the ring of the
sky,--never a sign in all the round of the sea, broken only by the two
huge silhouettes.... But Dominica was certainly nearing;--the green
lights were spreading through the luminous blue of her hills.

... Their long immobility in the squatting posture began to tell upon
the endurance of both boys,--producing dull throbbing aches in thighs,
hips, and loins.... Then, about mid-day, Stéphane declared he could
not paddle any more;--it seemed to him as if his head must soon burst
open with the pain which filled it: even the sound of his own voice hurt
him,--he did not want to talk.




VI


... And another oppression came upon them,--in spite of all the pains,
and the blinding dazzle of waters, and the biting of the sun: the
oppression of drowsiness. They began to doze at intervals,--keeping
their canoe balanced in some automatic way,--as cavalry soldiers,
overweary, ride asleep in the saddle.

But at last, Stéphane, awaking suddenly with a paroxysm of coughing, so
swayed himself to one side as to overturn the canoe; and both found
themselves in the sea.

Maximilien righted the craft, and got in again; but the little chabin
twice fell back in trying to raise himself upon his arms. He had become
almost helplessly feeble. Maximilien, attempting to aid him, again
overturned the unsteady little boat; and this time it required all his
skill and his utmost strength to get Stéphane out of the water.
Evidently Stéphane could be of no more assistance;--the boy was so weak
he could not even sit up straight.

--"_Aïe! ou kê jété nou encò_," panted Maximilien,--"_metté ou
toutt longue._"

Stéphane slowly let himself down, so as to lie nearly all his length in
the canoe,--one foot on either side of Maximilien's hips. Then he lay
very still for a long time,--so still that Maximilien became uneasy.

--"_Ou ben malade?_" he asked.... Stéphane did not seem to hear: his
eyes remained closed.

--"Stéphane!" cried Maximilien, in alarm,--"Stéphane!"

--"_C'est lò, papoute_," murmured Stéphane, without lifting his
eyelids,--"_ça c'est lò!--ou pa janmain cuè yon bel pièce conm
ça?_" (It is gold, little father.... Didst thou ever see a pretty piece
like that?... No, thou wilt not beat me, little father?--no, _papoute!_)

--"_Ou ka dòmi, Stéphane?_"--queried Maximilien, wondering,--"art
asleep?"

But Stéphane opened his eyes and looked at him so strangely! Never had
he seen Stéphane look that way before.

--"_Ça ou ni, Stéphane?_--what ails thee?--_aïe! Bon-Dié,
Bon-Dié?_"

--"_Bon-Dié!_"--muttered Stéphane, closing his eyes again at the sound
of the great Name,--"He has no color;--He is like the Wind."...

--"Stéphane!"...

--"He feels in the dark;--He has not eyes."...

--"_Stéphane, pa pàlé ça!_"

--"He tosses the sea.... He has no face;--He lifts up the dead... and
the leaves."...


[Illustration: ARMISTICE DAY, FORT-DE-FRANCE
_A review at 7 A. M. by the governor anti his staff, all
in evening dress, with cannons booming as noisily as
in the north--followed by a day busily devoted to
doing nothing._]


--"_Ou fou!_" cried Maximilien, bursting into a wild fit of
sobbing,--"Stéphane, thou art mad!"

And all at once he became afraid of Stéphane,--afraid of all he
said,--afraid of his touch,--afraid of his eyes... he was growing like a
_zombi!_

But Stéphane's eyes remained closed;--he ceased to speak.

... About them deepened the enormous silence of the sea;--low swung the
sun again. The horizon was yellowing: day had begun to fade. Tall
Dominica was now half green; but there yet appeared no smoke, no sail,
no sign of life.

And the tints of the two vast Shapes that shattered the rim of the light
shifted as if evanescing,--shifted like tones of West Indian fishes,--of
_pisquette_ and _congre_,--of _caringue_ and _gouôs-zié_ and _balaou._
Lower sank the sun;--cloud-fleeces of orange pushed up over the edge of
the west;--a thin warm breath caressed the sea,--sent long lilac
shudderings over the flanks of the swells. Then colors changed again:
violet richened to purple;--greens blackened softly;--grays smouldered
into smoky gold.

And the sun went down.




VII


And they floated into the fear of the night together. Again the ghostly
fires began to wimple about them: naught else was visible but the high
stars.

Black hours passed. From minute to minute Maximilien cried
out:--"_Sucou! sucou!_" Stéphane lay motionless and dumb: his feet,
touching Maximilien's naked hips, felt singularly cold.

... Something knocked suddenly against the bottom of the canoe,--knocked
heavily--making a hollow loud sound. It was not Stéphane;--Stéphane
lay still as a stone: it was from the depth below. Perhaps a great fish
passing.

It came again,--twice,--shaking the canoe like a great blow. Then
Stéphane suddenly moved,--drew up his feet a little,--made as if to
speak:--"_Ou_..."; but the speech failed at his lips,--ending in a sound
like the moan of one trying to call out in sleep;--and Maximilien's
heart almost stopped beating.... Then Stéphane's limbs straightened
again; he made no more movement;--Maximilien could not even hear him
breathe.... All the sea had begun to whisper.

A breeze was rising;--Maximilien felt it blowing upon him. All at once
it seemed to him that he had ceased to be afraid,--that he did not care
what might happen. He thought about a cricket he had one day watched in
the harbor,--drifting out with the tide, on an atom of dead bark,--and
he wondered what had become of it. Then he understood that he himself
was the cricket,--still alive. But some boy had found him and pulled off
his legs. There they were,--his own legs, pressing against him: he could
still feel the aching where they had been pulled off; and they had been
dead so long they were now quite cold.... It was certainly Stéphane who
had pulled them off....

The water was talking to him. It was saying the same thing over and over
again,--louder each time, as if it thought he could not hear. But he
heard it very well:--"_Bon-Dié, li conm vent... li ka touché nou...
nou pa save ouè li._" (But why had the Bon-Dié shaken the wind?) "_Li
pa ka tint zié_," answered the water.... _Ouille!_--He might all the
same care not to upset folks in the sea!... _Mi!_...

But even as he thought these things, Maximilien became aware that a
white, strange, bearded face was looking at him: the Bon-Dié was
there,--bending over him with a lantern,--talking to him in a language
he did not understand. And the Bon-Dié certainly had eyes,--great gray
eyes that did not look wicked at all. He tried to tell the Bon-Dié how
sorry he was for what he had been saying about him;--but found he could
not utter a word. He felt great hands lift him up to the stars, and lay
him down very near them,--just under them. They burned blue-white, and
hurt his eyes like lightning:--he felt afraid of them.... About him he
heard voices,--always speaking the same language, which he could not
understand.... "_Poor little devils!--poor little devils!_" Then he
heard a bell ring; and the Bon-Dié made him swallow something nice and
warm;--and everything became black again. The stars went out!...


... Maximilien was lying under an electric-light on board the great
steamer _Rio de Janeiro_, and dead Stéphane beside him.... It was four
o'clock in the morning.


[Illustration]




LA FILLE DE COULEUR




I


Nothing else in the picturesque life of the French colonies of the
Occident impresses the traveller on his first arrival more than the
costumes of the women of color. They surprise the aesthetic sense
agreeably;--they are local and special: you will see nothing resembling
them among the populations of the British West Indies; they belong to
Martinique, Guadeloupe, Désirade, Marie-Galante, and Cayenne,--in each
place differing sufficiently to make the difference interesting,
especially in regard to the head-dress. That of Martinique is quite
Oriental;--more attractive, although less fantastic than the Cayenne
coiffure, or the pretty drooping mouchoir of Guadeloupe.

These costumes are gradually disappearing, for various reasons,--the
chief reason being of course the changes in the social condition of the
colonies during the last forty years. Probably the question of health
had also something to do with the almost universal abandonment in
Martinique of the primitive slave dress,--_chemise_ and _jupe_,--which
exposed its wearer to serious risks of pneumonia; for as far as
economical reasons are concerned, there was no fault to find with it:
six francs could purchase it when money was worth more than it is now.
The douillette, a long trailing dress, one piece from neck to feet, has
taken its place.[37] But there was a luxurious variety of the jupe
costume which is disappearing because of its cost; there is no money in
the colonies now for such display:--I refer to the celebrated attire of
the pet slaves and _belles affranchies_ of the old colonial days. A full
costume,--including violet or crimson "petticoat" of silk or satin;
chemise with half-sleeves, and much embroidery and lace;
"trembling-pins" of gold (_zépingue tremblant_) to attach the folds of
the brilliant Madras turban; the great necklace of three or four strings
of gold beads bigger than peas (_collier-choux_); the ear-rings, immense
but light as egg-shells (_zanneaux-à-clous_ or _zanneaux-chenilles_);
the bracelets (_portes-bonheur_); the studs (_boutons-à-clous_); the
brooches, not only for the turban, but for the chemise, below the folds
of the showy silken foulard or shoulder-scarf,--would sometimes
represent over five thousand francs expenditure. This gorgeous attire is
becoming less visible every year: it is now rarely worn except on very
solemn occasions,--weddings, baptisms, first communions, confirmations.
The _da_ (nurse) or "porteuse-de-baptême" who bears the baby to church
holds it at the baptismal font, and afterwards carries it from house to
house in order that all the friends of the family may kiss it, is thus
attired; but nowadays, unless she be a professional (for there are
professional _das_, hired only for such occasions), she usually borrows
the jewellry. If tall, young, graceful, with a rich gold tone of skin,
the effect of her costume is dazzling as that of a Byzantine Virgin. I
saw one young da who, thus garbed, scarcely seemed of the earth and
earthly;--there was an Oriental something in her appearance difficult to
describe,--something that made you think of the Queen of Sheba going to
visit Solomon. She had brought a merchant's baby, just christened, to
receive the caresses of the family at whose house I was visiting; and
when it came to my turn to kiss it, I confess I could not notice the
child: I saw only the beautiful dark face, coiffed with orange and
purple, bending over it, in an illumination of antique gold.... What a
da!... She represented really the type of that _belle affranchie_ of
other days, against whose fascination special sumptuary laws were made;
romantically she imaged for me the supernatural god-mothers and
Cinderellas of the creole fairy-tales. For these become transformed in
the West Indian folklore,--adapted to the environment, and to local
idealism:--Cinderella, for example, is changed to a beautiful metisse,
wearing a quadruple _collier-choux_, _zépingues tremblants_, and all
the ornaments of a da.[38] Recalling the impression of that dazzling
_da_, I can even now feel the picturesque justice of the fabulist's
description of Cinderella's creole costume: _Ça té ka baille ou mal
zie!_--(it would have given you a pain in your eyes to look at her!)


... Even the every-day Martinique costume is slowly changing. Year by
year the "calendeuses"--the women who paint and fold the turbans--have
less work to do;--the colors of the _douiellette_ are becoming less
vivid;--while more and more young colored girls are being _élevées en
chapeau_ ("brought up in a hat")--i.e., dressed and educated like the
daughters of the whites. These, it must be confessed, look far less
attractive in the latest Paris fashion, unless white as the whites
themselves: on the other hand, few white girls could look well in
_douillette_ and _mouchoir_,--not merely because of color contrast, but
because they have not that amplitude of limb and particular cambering of
the torso peculiar to the half-breed race, with its large bulk and
stature. Attractive as certain coolie women are, I observed that all who
have adopted the Martinique costume look badly in it: they are too
slender of body to wear it to advantage.

Slavery introduced these costumes, even though it probably did not
invent them; and they were necessarily doomed to pass away with the
peculiar social conditions to which they belonged. If the population
clings still to its _douillettes_, _mouchoirs_, and _foulards_, the fact
is largely due to the cheapness of such attire. A girl can dress very
showily indeed for about twenty francs--shoes excepted;--and thousands
never wear shoes. But the fashion will no doubt have become cheaper and
uglier within another decade.

At the present time, however, the stranger might be sufficiently
impressed by the oddity and brilliancy of these dresses to ask about
their origin,--in which case it is not likely that he will obtain any
satisfactory answer. After long research I found myself obliged to give
up all hope of being able to outline the history of Martinique
costume,--partly because books and histories are scanty or defective,
and partly because such an undertaking would require a knowledge
possible only to a specialist. I found good reason, nevertheless, to
suppose that these costumes were in the beginning adopted from certain
fashions of provincial France,--that the respective fashions of
Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Cayenne were patterned after modes still
worn in parts of the mother-country. The old-time garb of the
_affranchie_--that still worn by the _da_--somewhat recalls dresses worn
by the women of Southern France, more particularly about Montpellier.
Perhaps a specialist might also trace back the evolution of the various
creole coiffures to old forms of head-dresses which still survive among
the French country-fashions of the south and south-west provinces;--but
local taste has so much modified the original style as to leave it
unrecognizable to those who have never studied the subject. The
Martinique fashion of folding and tying the Madras, and of calendering
it, are probably local; and I am assured that the designs of the curious
semi-barbaric jewellry were all invented in the colony, where the
_collier-choux_ is still manufactured by local goldsmiths. Purchasers
buy one, two, or three _grains_, or beads, at a time, and string them
only on obtaining the requisite number.... This is the sum of all that I
was able to learn on the matter; but in the course of searching various
West Indian authors and historians for information, I found something
far more important than the origin of the _douillette_ or the
_collier-choux_: the facts of that strange struggle between nature and
interest, between love and law, between prejudice and passion, which
forms the evolutional history of the mixed race.


[Footnote 37: The brightly colored douillettes are classified by the people
according to the designs of the printed
calico:--_robe-à-bambou,--robe-à-bouquet,--robe-arc-en-ciel--robe-à-carreau_,--etc.,
according as the pattern is in stripes, flower-designs, "rainbow" bands
of different tints, or plaidings. _Ronde-en-ronde_ means a stuff printed
with disk-patterns, or link-patterns of different colors,--each joined
with the other. A robe of one color only is called a _robe-uni._

The general laws of contrasts observed in the costume require the silk
foulard, or shoulder-kerchief, to make a sharp relief with the color of
the robe, thus:--

_Robe_                    _Foulard._
Yellow                     Blue.
Dark blue                  Yellow.
Pink                       Green.
Violet                     Bright red.
Red                        Violet.
Chocolate (cacao)          Pale blue.
Sky blue                   Pale rose.

These refer, of course, to dominant or ground colors, as there are
usually several tints in the foulard as well as the robe. The painted
Madras should always be bright yellow. According to popular ideas of
good dressing, the different tints of skin should be relieved by special
choice of color in the robe, as follows:--

_Capresse_ (a clear red skin) should wear  Pale yellow.

_Mulatresse_ (according to shade)          Rose.
                                           Blue.
                                           {Green.

_Négresse_                                 {White.
                                           {Scarlet, or any violent color.]

[Footnote 38: "_Vouèla Cendrillon evec yon bel ròbe velou grande
lakhè.... Ça té ka bail ou mal ziè. Li té tini bel zanneau dans
zòreill li, quate-tou-chou, bouoche, bracelet, tremblant,--toutt sòte
bel baggaïe conm ça._"...--(_Conte Cendrillon_,--d'après Turiault.)

--"There was Cendrillon with a beautiful long trailing robe of velvet on
her!... It was enough to hurt one's eyes to look at her! She had
beautiful rings in her ears, and a collier-choux of four rows, brooches,
_tremblants_, bracelets,--everything fine of that sort."--(Story of
Cinderella in Turinault's Creole Grammar).]




II


Considering only the French peasant colonist and the West African slave
as the original factors of that physical evolution visible in the modern
_fille-de-couleur_, it would seem incredible;--for the intercrossing
alone could not adequately explain all the physical results. To
understand them fully, it will be necessary to bear in mind that both of
the original races became modified in their lineage to a surprising
degree by conditions of climate and environment.

The precise time of the first introduction of slaves into Martinique is
not now possible to ascertain,--no record exists on the subject; but it
is probable that the establishment of slavery was coincident with the
settlement of the island. Most likely the first hundred colonists from
St. Christophe, who landed, in 1635, near the bay whereon the city of
St. Pierre is now situated, either brought slaves with them, or else
were furnished with negroes very soon after their arrival. In the time
of Père Dutertre (who visited the colonies in 1640, and printed his
history of the French Antilles at Paris in 1667) slavery was already a
flourishing institution,--the foundation of the whole social structure.
According to the Dominican missionary, the Africans then in the colony
were decidedly repulsive; he describes the women as "hideous"
(_hideuses_). There is no good reason to charge Dutertre with prejudice
in his pictures of them. No writer of the century was more keenly
sensitive to natural beauty than the author of that "Voyage aux
Antilles" which inspired Chateaubriand, and which still, after two
hundred and fifty years, delights even those perfectly familiar with the
nature of the places and things spoken of. No other writer and traveller
of the period possessed to a more marked degree that sense of generous
pity which makes the unfortunate appear to us in an illusive, almost
ideal aspect. Nevertheless, he asserts that the negresses were, as a
general rule, revoltingly ugly,--and, although he had seen many strange
sides of human nature (having been a soldier before becoming a monk),
was astonished to find that miscegenation had already begun. Doubtless
the first black women thus favored, or afflicted, as the case might be,
were of the finer types of negresses; for he notes remarkable
differences among the slaves procured from different coasts and various
tribes. Still, these were rather differences of ugliness than aught
else: they were all repulsive;--only some were more repulsive than
others.[39] Granting that the first mothers of mulattoes in the colony
were the superior rather than the inferior physical types,--which would
be a perfectly natural supposition,--still we find their offspring
worthy in his eyes of no higher sentiment than pity. He writes in his
chapter entitled "_De la naissance honteuse des mulastres_":

--"They have something of their Father and something of their
Mother,--in the same wise that Mules partake of the qualities of the
creatures that engendered them: for they are neither all white, like the
French; nor all black, like the Negroes, but have a livid tint, which
comes of both."...

To-day, however, the traveller would look in vain for a _livid_ tint
among the descendants of those thus described: in less than two
centuries and a half the physical characteristics of the race have been
totally changed. What most surprises is the rapidity of the
transformation. After the time of Père Labat, Europeans never could
"have mistaken little negro children for monkeys." Nature had begun to
remodel the white, the black, and half-breed according to environment
and climate: the descendant of the early colonists ceased to resemble
his fathers; the creole negro improved upon his progenitors;[40] the
mulatto began to give evidence of those qualities of physical and mental
power which were afterwards to render him dangerous to the integrity of
the colony itself. In a temperate climate such a change would have been
so gradual as to escape observation for a long period;--in the tropics
it was effected with a quickness that astounds by its revelation of the
natural forces at work.

--"Under the sun of the tropics," writes Dr. Rufz, of Martinique, "the
African race, as well as the European, becomes greatly modified in its
reproduction. Either race gives birth to a totally new being. The Creole
African came into existence as did the Creole white." And just as the
offspring of Europeans who emigrated to the tropics from different parts
of France displayed characteristics so identical that it was impossible
to divine the original race-source,--so likewise the Creole
negro--whether brought into being by the heavy thick-set Congo, or the
long slender black of Senegambia, or the suppler and more active
Mandingo,--appeared so remodelled, homogeneous, and adapted in such wise
to his environment that it was utterly impossible to discern in his
features anything of his parentage, his original kindred, his original
source.... The transformation is absolute. All that In be asserted is:
"This is a white Creole; this is a black Creole";--or, "This is a
European white; this is an African black";--and furthermore, after a
certain number of years passed in the tropics, the enervated and
discolored aspect of the European may create uncertainty, as to his
origin. But with very few exceptions the primitive African, or, as he is
termed here, the "Coast Black" (_le noir de la Côte_), can be
recognized at once....

... "The Creole negro is gracefully shaped, finely proportioned: his
limbs are lithe, his neck long;--his features are more delicate, his
lips less thick, his nose less flattened, than those of the African;--he
has the Carib's large and melancholy eye, better adapted to express the
emotions.... Rarely can you discover in him the sombre fury of the
African, rarely a surly and savage mien: he is brave, chatty, boastful.
His skin has not the same tint as his father's,--it has become more
satiny; his hair remains woolly, but it is a finer wool... all his
outlines are more rounded;--one may perceive that the cellular tissue
predominates, as in cultivated plants, of which the ligneous and savage
fibre has become transformed."...[41]

This new and comelier black race naturally won from its masters a more
sympathetic attention than could have been vouchsafed to its
progenitors; and the consequences in Martinique and elsewhere seemed to
have evoked the curious Article 9 of the _Code Noir_ of 1665,--enacting,
first, that free men who should have one or two children by slave women,
as well as the slave-owners permitting the same, should be each
condemned to pay two thousand pounds of sugar; secondly, that if the
violator of the ordinance should be himself the owner of the mother and
father of her children, the mother and the children should be
confiscated for the profit of the Hospital, and deprived for their lives
of the right to enfranchisement. An exception, however, was made to the
effect that if the father were unmarried at the period of his
concubinage, he could escape the provisions of the penalty by marrying,
"according to the rites of the Church," the female slave, who would
thereby be enfranchised, and her children "rendered free and
legitimate." Probably the legislators did not imagine that the first
portion of the article could prove inefficacious, or that any violator
of the ordinance would seek to escape the penalty by those means offered
in the provision. The facts, however, proved the reverse. Miscegenation
continued; and Labat notices two cases of marriage between whites and
blacks,--describing the offspring of one union as "very handsome little
mulattoes." These legitimate unions were certainly exceptional,--one of
them was dissolved by the ridicule cast upon the father;--but
illegitimate unions would seem to have become common within a very brief
time after the passage of the law. At a later day they were to become
customary. The Article 9 was evidently at fault; and in March, 1724, the
Black Code was reinforced by a new ordinance, of which the sixth
provision prohibited marriage as well as concubinage between the races.

It appears to have had no more effect than the previous law, even in
Martinique, where the state of public morals was better than in Santo
Domingo. The slave race had begun to exercise an influence never
anticipated by legislators. Scarcely a century had elapsed since the
colonization of the island; but in that time climate and civilization
had transfigured the black woman. "After one or two generations," writes
the historian Rufz, "the _Africaine_, reformed, refined, beautified in
her descendants, transformed into the creole negress, commenced to exert
a fascination irresistible, capable of winning anything (_capable de
tout obtenir_)."[42] Travellers of the eighteenth century were
confounded by the luxury of dress and of jewellry displayed by swarthy
beauties in St. Pierre. It was a public scandal to European eyes. But
the creole negress or mulattress, beginning to understand her power,
sought for higher favors and privileges than silken robes and necklaces
of gold beads: she sought to obtain, not merely liberty for herself, but
for her parents, brothers, sisters,--even friends. What successes she
achieved in this regard may be imagined from the serious statement of
creole historians that if human nature had been left untrammelled to
follow its better impulses, slavery would have ceased to exist a century
before the actual period of emancipation! By 1738, when the white
population had reached its maximum (15,000),[43] and colonial luxury had
arrived at its greatest height, the question of voluntary
enfranchisement was becoming very grave. So omnipotent the charm of
half-breed beauty that masters were becoming the slaves of their slaves.
It was not only the creole _negress_ who had appeared to play a part in
this strange drama which was the triumph of nature over interest and
judgment: her daughters, far more beautiful, had grown up to aid her,
and to form a special class. These women, whose tints of skin rivalled
the colors of ripe fruit, and whose gracefulness--peculiar, exotic, and
irresistible--made them formidable rivals to the daughters of the
dominant race, were no doubt physically superior to the modern
_filles-de-couleur_. They were results of a natural selection which
could have taken place in no community otherwise constituted;--the
offspring of the union between the finer types of both races. But that
which only slavery could have rendered possible began to endanger the
integrity of slavery itself: the institutions upon which the whole
social structure rested were being steadily sapped by the influence of
half-breed girls. Some new, severe, extreme policy was evidently
necessary to avert the already visible peril. Special laws were passed
by the Home-Government to check enfranchisement, to limit its reasons or
motives; and the power of the slave woman was so well comprehended by
the Métropole that an extraordinary enactment was made against it. It
was decreed that whosoever should free a woman of color would have to
pay to the Government _three times her value as a slave!_

Thus heavily weighted, emancipation advanced much more slowly than
before, but it still continued to a considerable extent. The poorer
creole planter or merchant might find it impossible to obey the impulse
of his conscience or of his affection, but among the richer classes
pecuniary considerations could scarcely affect enfranchisement. The
country had grown wealthy; and although the acquisition of wealth may
not evoke generosity in particular natures, the enrichment of a whole
class develops pre-existing tendencies to kindness, and opens new ways
for its exercise. Later in the eighteenth century, when hospitality had
been cultivated as a gentleman's duty to fantastical extremes,--when
liberality was the rule throughout society,--when a notary summoned to
draw up a deed, or a priest invited to celebrate a marriage, might
receive for fee five thousand francs in gold,--there were certainly many
emancipations.... "Even though interest and public opinion in the
colonies," says a historian,[44] "were adverse to enfranchisement, the
private feeling of each man combated that opinion;--Nature resumed her
sway in the secret places of hearts;--and as local custom permitted a
sort of polygamy, the rich man naturally felt himself bound in honor to
secure the freedom of his own blood.... It was not a rare thing to see
legitimate wives taking care of the natural children of their
husbands,--becoming their godmothers (_s'en faire les marraines_)."...
Nature seemed to laugh all these laws to scorn, and the prejudices of
race! In vain did the wisdom of legislators attempt to render the
condition of the enfranchised more humble,--enacting extravagant
penalties for the blow by which a mulatto might avenge the insult of a
white,--prohibiting the freed from wearing the same dress as their
former masters or mistresses wore;--"the _belles affranchies_ found, in
a costume whereof the negligence seemed a very inspiration of
voluptuousness, means of evading that social inferiority which the law
sought to impose upon them:--they began to inspire the most violent
jealousies."[45]


[Footnote 39: It is quite possible, however, that the slaves of
Dutertre's time belonged for the most part to the uglier African tribes;
and that later supplies may have been procured from other parts of the
slave coast. Writing half a century later, Père Labat declares having
seen freshly disembarked blacks handsome enough to inspire an
artist:--"_J'en ai vu des deux sexes faits à peindre, et beaux par
merveille_" (vol. iv. chap, vii,). He adds that their skin was extremely
fine, and of velvety softness;--"_le velours n'est pas plus doux_."...
Among the 30,000 blacks yearly shipped to the French colonies, there
were doubtless many representatives of the finer African races.]

[Footnote 40: "Leur sueur n'est pas fétide comme celle des nègres de
la Guinée," writes the traveller Dauxion-Lavaysse, in 1813.]

[Footnote 41: Dr. E. Rufz: "Études historiques et statistiques sur la
population de la Martinique." St. Pierre: 1850. Vol. I, pp. 148-50.

It has been generally imagined that the physical constitution of the
black race was proof against the deadly climate of the West Indies. The
truth is that the freshly imported Africans died of fever by thousands
and tens-of-thousands;--the creole-negro race, now so prolific,
represents only the fittest survivors in the long and terrible struggle
of the slave element to adapt itself to the new environment. Thirty
thousand negroes a year were long needed to supply the French colonies.
Between 1700 and 1789 no less than 900,000 slaves were imported by San
Domingo alone;--yet there were less than half that number left in 1789.
(See Placide Justin's history of Santo Domingo, p. 147.) The entire
slave population of Barbadoes had to be renewed every sixteen years,
according to estimates: the loss to planters by deaths of slaves
(reckoning the value of a slave at only £20 sterling) during the same
period was £1,600,000 ($8,000,000). (Burck's "History of European
Colonies," vol. II., p. 141; French edition of 1767.)]

[Footnote 42: Rufz: "Études," vol. I., p. 236.]

[Footnote 43: I am assured it has now fallen to a figure not exceeding
5000.]

[Footnote 44: Rufz: "Études," vol. II., pp. 311, 312.]

[Footnote 45: Rufz: "Études," vol. I., p. 237.]




III


What the legislators of 1685 and 1724 endeavored to correct did not
greatly improve with the abolition of slavery, nor yet with those
political troubles which socially deranged colonial life. The
_fille-de-couleur_, inheriting the charm of the belle _affranchie_,
continued to exert a similar influence, and to fulfil an almost similar
destiny. The latitude of morals persisted,--though with less
ostentation: it has latterly contracted under the pressure of necessity
rather than through any other influences. Certain ethical principles
thought essential to social integrity elsewhere have always been largely
relaxed in the tropics; and--excepting, perhaps, Santo Domingo--the
moral standard in Martinique was not higher than in the other French
colonies. Outward decorum might be to some degree maintained; but there
was no great restraint of any sort upon private lives: it was not
uncommon for a rich man to have many "natural" families; and almost
every individual of means had children of color. The superficial
character of race prejudices was everywhere manifested by unions, which
although never mentioned in polite converse, were none the less
universally known; and the "irresistible fascination" of the half-breed
gave the open lie to pretended hate. Nature, in the guise of the _belle
affranchie_, had mocked at slave codes;--in the _fille-de-couleur_ she
still laughed at race pretensions, and ridiculed the fable of physical
degradation. To-day, the situation has not greatly changed; and with
such examples on the part of the cultivated race, what could be expected
from the other? Marriages are rare;--it has been officially stated that
the illegitimate births are sixty per cent; but seventy-five to eighty
per cent would probably be nearer the truth. It is very common to see in
the local papers such announcements as: _Enfants légitimes_, 1 (one
birth announced); _enfants naturels_, 25.

In speaking of the _fille-de-couleur_ it is necessary also to speak of
the extraordinary social stratification of the community to which she
belongs. The official statement of 20,000 "colored" to the total
population of between 173,000 and 174,000 (in which the number of pure
whites is said to have fallen as low as 5,000) does not at all indicate
the real proportion of mixed blood. Only a small element of unmixed
African descent really exists; yet when a white creole speaks of the
_gens-de-couleur_ he certainly means nothing darker than a mulatto skin.
Race classifications have been locally made by sentiments of political
origin: at least four or five shades of visible color are classed as
negro. There is, however, some natural truth at the bottom of this
classification: where African blood predominates, the sympathies are
likely to be African; and the turning-point is reached only in the true
mulatto, where, allowing the proportions of mixed blood to be
nearly equal, the white would have the dominant influence in
situations more natural than existing politics. And in speaking of the
_filles-de-couleur_, the local reference is always to women in whom the
predominant element is white: a white creole, as a general rule, deigns
only thus to distinguish those who are nearly white,--more usually he
refers to the whole class as mulattresses. Those women whom wealth and
education have placed in a social position parallel with that of the
daughters of creole whites are in some cases allowed to pass for
white,--or at the very worst, are only referred to in a whisper as being
_de couleur_. (Needless to say, these are totally beyond the range of
the present considerations: there is nothing to be further said of them
except that they can be classed with the most attractive and refined
women of the entire tropical world.) As there is an almost infinite
gradation from the true black up to the brightest _sang-mêlé_, it is
impossible to establish any color-classification recognizable by the eye
alone; and whatever lines of demarcation can be drawn between castes
must be social rather than ethnical. In this sense we may accept the
local Creole definition of _fille-de-couleur_ as signifying, not so much
a daughter of the race of visible color, as the half-breed girl destined
from her birth to a career like that of the _belle affranchie_ of the
old regime;--for the moral cruelties of slavery have survived
emancipation.

Physically, the typical _fille-de-couleur_ may certainly be classed, as
white creole writers have not hesitated to class her, with the "most
beautiful women of the human race."[46] She has inherited not only the
finer bodily characteristics of either parent race, but a something else
belonging originally to neither, and created by special climatic and
physical conditions,--a grace, a suppleness of form, a delicacy of
extremities (so that all the lines described by the bending of limbs or
fingers are parts of clean curves), a satiny smoothness and fruit-tint
of skin,--solely West Indian.... Morally, of course, it is much more
difficult to describe her; and whatever may safely be said refers rather
to the fille-de-couleur of the past than of the present half-century.
The race is now in a period of transition: public education and
political changes are modifying the type, and it is impossible to guess
the ultimate consequence, because it is impossible to safely predict
what new influences may yet be brought to affect its social development.
Befare the present era of colonial decadence, the character of the
fille-de-couleur was not what it is now. Even when totally uneducated,
she had a peculiar charm,--that charm of childishness which has power to
win sympathy from the rudest natures. One could not but feel attracted
towards this naïf being, docile as an infant, and as easily pleased or
as easily pained,--artless in her goodnesses as in her faults, to all
outward appearance;--willing to give her youth, her beauty, her caresses
to some one in exchange for the promise to love her,--perhaps also to
care for a mother, or a younger brother. Her astonishing capacity for
being delighted with trifles, her pretty vanities and pretty follies,
her sudden veerings of mood from laughter to tears,--like the sudden
rainbursts and sunbursts of her own passionate climate: these touched,
drew, won, and tyrannized. Yet such easily created joys and pains did
not really indicate any deep reserve of feeling: rather a superficial
sensitiveness only,--like the _zhèbe-m'amisé_, or _zhèbe-manmzelle_,
whose leaves close at the touch of a hair. Such human manifestations,
nevertheless, are apt to attract more in proportion as they are more
visible,--in proportion as the soul-current, being less profound, flows
more audibly. But no hasty observation could have revealed the whole
character of the fille-de-couleur to the stranger, equally charmed and
surprised: the creole comprehended her better, and probably treated her
with even more real kindness. The truth was that centuries of
deprivation of natural rights and hopes had given to her race--itself
fathered by passion unrestrained and mothered by subjection
unlimited--an inherent scepticism in the duration of love, and a
marvellous capacity for accepting the destiny of abandonment as one
accepts the natural and the inevitable. And that desire to please--which
in the fille-de-couleur seemed to prevail above all other motives of
action (maternal affection excepted)--could have appeared absolutely
natural only to those who never reflected that even sentiment had been
artificially cultivated by slavery.

She asked for so little,--accepted a gift with such childish
pleasure,--submitted so unresistingly to the will of the man
who promised to love her. She bore him children--such beautiful
children!--whom he rarely acknowledged, and was never asked
to legitimatize;--and she did not ask perpetual affection
notwithstanding,--regarded the relation as a necessarily temporary one,
to be sooner or later dissolved by the marriage of her children's
father. If deceived in all things,--if absolutely ill-treated and left
destitute, she did not lose faith in human nature: she seemed a born
optimist, believing most men good;--she would make a home for another
and serve him better than any slave.... "_Née de l'amour_," says a
creole writer, "_la fille-de-couleur vit d'amour, de rires, et
d'oublis_."...[47]

Then came the general colonial crash!... You cannot see its results
without feeling touched by them. Everywhere the weird beauty, the
immense melancholy of tropic ruin. Magnificent terraces, once golden
with cane, now abandoned to weeds and serpents;--deserted
plantation-homes, with trees rooted in the apartments and pushing up
through the place of the roofs;--grass-grown alleys ravined by
rains;--fruit-trees strangled by lianas;--here and there the stem of
some splendid palmiste, brutally decapitated, naked as a mast;--petty
frail growths of banana-trees or of bamboo slowly taking the place of
century-old forest giants destroyed to make charcoal. But beauty enough
remains to tell what the sensual paradise of the old days must have
been, when sugar was selling at 52.

And the fille-de-couleur has also changed. She is much less humble and
submissive,--somewhat more exacting: she comprehends better the moral
injustice of her position. The almost extreme physical refinement and
delicacy, bequeathed to her by the freedwomen of the old regime, are
passing away: like a conservatory plant deprived of its shelter, she is
returning to a more primitive condition,--hardening and growing perhaps
less comely as well as less helpless. She perceives also in a vague way
the peril of her race: the creole white, her lover and protector, is
emigrating;--the domination of the black becomes more and more probable.
Furthermore, with the continual increase of the difficulty of living,
and the growing pressure of population, social cruelties and hatreds
have been developed such as her ancestors never knew. She is still
loved; but it is alleged that she rarely loves the white, no matter how
large the sacrifices made for her sake, and she no longer enjoys that
reputation of fidelity accorded to her class in other years. Probably
the truth is that the fille-de-couleur never had at any time capacity to
bestow that quality of affection imagined or exacted as a right. Her
moral side is still half savage: her feelings are still those of a
child. If she does not love the white man according to his unreasonable
desire, it is certain at least that she loves him as well as he
deserves. Her alleged demoralization is more apparent than real;--she is
changing from an artificial to a very natural being, and revealing more
and more in her sufferings the true character of the luxurious social
condition that brought her into existence. As a general rule, even while
questioning her fidelity, the creole freely confesses her kindness of
heart, and grants her capable of extreme generosity and devotedness to
strangers or to children whom she has an opportunity to care for.
Indeed, her natural kindness is so strikingly in contrast with the
harder and subtler character of the men of color that one might almost
feel tempted to doubt if she belong to the same race. Said a creole
once, in my hearing:--"The gens-de-couleur are just like the
_tourtouroux_:[48] one must pick out the females and leave the males
alone." Although perhaps capable of a double meaning, his words were not
lightly uttered;--he referred to the curious but indubitable fact that
the character of the colored woman appears in many respects far superior
to that of the colored man. In order to understand this, one must bear
in mind the difference in the colonial history of both sexes; and a
citation from General Romanet,[49] who visited Martinique at the end of
the last century, offers a clue to the mystery. Speaking of the tax upon
enfranchisement, he writes:--

--"The governor appointed by the sovereign delivers the certificates of
liberty,--on payment by the master of a sum usually equivalent to the
value of the subject. Public interest frequently justifies him in making
the price of the slave proportionate to the desire or the interest
manifested by the master. It can be readily understood that the tax upon
the liberty of the women ought to be higher than that of the men: the
latter unfortunates having no greater advantage than that of being
useful;--the former know how to please: they have those rights and
privileges which the whole world allows to their sex; they know how to
make even the fetters of slavery serve them for adornments. They may be
seen placing upon their proud tyrants the same chains worn by
themselves, and making them kiss the marks left thereby: the master
becomes the slave, and purchases another's liberty only to lose his
own."

Long before the time of General Romanet, the colored male slave might
win liberty as the guerdon of bravery in fighting against foreign
invasion, or might purchase it by extraordinary economy, while working
as a mechanic on extra time for his own account (he always refused to
labor with negroes); but in either case his success depended upon the
possession and exercise of qualities the reverse of amiable. On the
other hand, the bondwoman won manumission chiefly through her power to
excite affection. In the survival and perpetuation of the fittest of
both sexes these widely different characteristics would obtain more and
more definition with successive generations.

I find in the "Bulletin des Actes Administratifs de la Martinique" for
1831 (No. 41) a list of slaves to whom liberty was accorded _pour
services rendus à leurs maîtres_. Out of the sixty-nine
enfranchisements recorded under this head, there are only two names of
male adults to be found,--one an old man of sixty;--the other, called
Laurencin, the betrayer of a conspiracy. The rest are young girls, or
young mothers and children;--plenty of those singular and pretty names
in vogue among the creole population,--Acélie, Avrillette, Mélie,
Robertine, Célianne, Francillette, Adée, Catharinette, Sidollie,
Céline, Coraline;--and the ages given are from sixteen to twenty-one,
with few exceptions. Yet these liberties were asked for and granted at a
time when Louis Philippe had abolished the tax on manumissions.... The
same "Bulletin" contains a list of liberties granted to colored men,
_pour service accompli dans la milice_, only!

Most of the French West Indian writers whose works I was able to obtain
and examine speak severely of the _hommes-de-couleur_ as a class,--in
some instances the historian writes with a very violence of hatred. As
far back as the commencement of the eighteenth century, Labat, who, with
all his personal oddities, was undoubtedly a fine judge of men,
declared:--"The mulattoes are as a general rule well made, of good
stature, vigorous, strong, adroit, industrious, and daring (_hardis_)
beyond all conception. They have much vivacity, but are given to their
pleasures, fickle, proud, deceitful (_cachés_), wicked, and capable of
the greatest crimes." A San Domingo historian, far more prejudiced than
Père Labat, speaks of them "as physically superior, though morally
inferior to the whites": he wrote at a time when the race had given to
the world the two best swordsmen it has yet perhaps seen,--Saint-Georges
and Jean-Louis.

Commenting on the judgment of Père Labat, the historian Borde
observes:--"The wickedness spoken of by Père Labat doubtless relates to
their political passions only; for the women of color are, beyond any
question, the best and sweetest persons in the world--_à coup
sûr, les meilleures et les plus douces personnes qu'il y ait au
monde_."--("Histoire de l'Ile de la Trinidad," par M. Pierre Gustave
Louis Borde, vol. I., p. 222.) The same author, speaking of their
goodness of heart, generosity to strangers and the sick says "they are
born Sisters of Charity";--and he is not the only historian who has
expressed such admiration of their moral qualities. What I myself saw
during the epidemic of 1887-88 at Martinique convinced me that these
eulogies of the women of color are not extravagant. On the other hand,
the existing creole opinion of the men of color is much less favorable
than even that expressed by Père Labat. Political events and passions
have, perhaps, rendered a just estimate of their qualities difficult.
The history of the _hommes-de-couleur_ in all the French colonies has
been the same;--distrusted by the whites, who feared their aspirations
to social equality, distrusted even more by the blacks (who still hate
them secretly, although ruled by them), the mulattoes became an
Ishmaelitish clan, inimical to both races, and dreaded of both. In
Martinique it was attempted, with some success, to manage them by
according freedom to all who would serve in the militia for a certain
period with credit. At no time was it found possible to compel them to
work with blacks; and they formed the whole class of skilled city
workmen and mechanics for a century prior to emancipation.

... To-day it cannot be truly said of the _fille-de-couleur_ that her
existence is made up of "love, laughter, and forgettings." She has aims
in life,--the bettering of her condition, the higher education of her
children, whom she hopes to free from the curse of prejudice. She still
clings to the white, because through him she may hope to improve her
position. Under other conditions she might even hope to effect some sort
of reconciliation between the races. But the gulf has become so much
widened within the last forty years, that no rapprochement now appears
possible; and it is perhaps too late even to restore the lost prosperity
of the colony by any legislative or commercial reforms. The universal
creole belief is summed up in the daily-repeated cry: "_C'est un pays
perdu!_" Yearly the number of failures increase; and more whites
emigrate;--and with every bankruptcy or departure some fille-de-couleur
is left almost destitute, to begin life over again. Many a one has been
rich and poor several times in succession;--one day her property is
seized for debt;--perhaps on the morrow she finds some one able and
willing to give her a home again... Whatever comes, she does not die for
grief, this daughter of the sun: she pours out her pain in song, like a
bird, Here is one of her little improvisations,--a song very popular in
both Martinique and Guadeloupe, though originally composed in the latter
colony:--


--"Good-bye Madras!
Good-bye foulard!
Good-bye pretty calicoes!
Good-bye collier-choux!
That ship
Which is there on the buoy,
It is taking
My doudoux away."

--"Adiéu Madras!
Adiéu foulard!
Adiéu dézinde!
Adiéu collier-choux!
Batiment-là
Qui sou labouè-là,
Li ka mennein
Doudoux-à-moin allé."

--"Very good-day,--
Monsieur the Consignee.
I come
To make one little petition.
My doudoux
Is going away.
Alas! I pray you
Delay his going."

--"Bien le-bonjou',
Missié le Consignataire.
Moin ka vini
Fai yon ti pétition;
Doudoux-à-moin
Y ka pati,--T'enprie, hélas!
Rétàdé li."

[He answers kindly in French: the _békés_ are always kind to these
gentle children.]

--"My dear child,
It is too late.
The bills of lading
Are already signed;
The ship
Is already on the buoy.
In an hour from now
They will be getting her under way."

--"Ma chère enfant
Il est trop tard,
Les connaissements
Sont déjà signés,
Est déjà sur la bouée;
Dans une heure d'ici,
Ils vont appareiller."

--"When the foulards came....
I always had some;
When the Madras-kerchiefs came,
I always had some;
When the printed calicoes came,
I always had some.
... That second officer--Is such a kind man!"

--"Foulard rivé,
Moin té toujou tini;
Madras rivé,
Moin té toujou tini;
Dézindes rivé,
Moin té toujou tini.--Capitaine sougonde
C'est yon bon gàçon!"

"Everybody has
Somebody to love;
Everybody has
Somebody to pet;
Every body has
A sweetheart of her own.
I am the only one
Who cannot have that,--I!"

"Toutt moune tini
Yon moune yo aimé;
Toutt moune tini
Yon moune yo chéri;
Toutt moune tini
Yon doudoux à yo.
Jusse moin tou sèle
Pa tini ça--moin!"


... On the eve of the _Fête Dieu_, or Corpus Christi festival, in all
these Catholic countries, the city streets are hung with banners and
decorated with festoons and with palm branches; and great altars are
erected at various points along the route of the procession, to serve as
resting-places for the Host. These are called _reposoirs_; in creole
patois, "_reposouè Bon-Dié_." Each wealthy man lends something to help
to make them attractive,--rich plate, dainty crystal, bronzes,
paintings, beautiful models of ships or steamers, curiosities from
remote parts of the world.... The procession over, the altar is
stripped, the valuables are returned to their owners: all the splendor
disappears.... And the spectacle of that evanescent magnificence,
repeated year by year, suggested to this proverb-loving people a
similitude for the unstable fortune of the fille-de-couleur:--_Fortune
milatresse c'est reposouè Bon-Dié_. (The luck of the mulattress is the
resting-place of the Good-God).


[Footnote 46: _La race de sang-mêlé, issue des blancs et des noirs,
est éminement civilizable. Comme types physiques, elle fournit dans
beaucoup d'individus, dans ses femmes en général, les plus beaux
specimens de la race humaine_.--"Le Préjugé de Race aux Antilles
Françaises." Par G. Souquet-Basiège. St. Pierre, Martinique: 1883. pp.
661-62.]

[Footnote 47: Turiault: "Étude sur le langage Créole de la
Martinique." Brest: 1874.... On page 136 he cites the following pretty
verses in speaking of the _fille-de-couleur_:--

L'Amour prit soin de la former
Tendre, naïve, et caressante.
Faite pour plaire, encore plus pour aimer.
Portant tous les traits précieux
Du caractère d'une amante.
Le plaisir sur sa bouche et l'amour dans set yeux.]

[Footnote 48: A sort of land-crab;--the female is selected for food,
and, properly cooked, makes a delicious dish;--the male is almost
worthless.]

[Footnote 49: "Voyage à la Martinique," Par J. R., Général de
Brigade. Paris: An. XII., 1804. Page 106.]


[Illustration]




BÊTE-NI-PIÉ




I


St. Pierre is in one respect fortunate beyond many tropical cities;--she
has scarcely any mosquitoes, although there are plenty of mosquitoes
in other parts of Martinique, even in the higher mountain villages. The
flood of bright water that pours perpetually through all her streets,
renders her comparatively free from the pest;--nobody sleeps under a
mosquito bar.

Nevertheless, St. Pierre is not exempt from other peculiar plagues of
tropical life; and you cannot be too careful about examining your bed
before venturing to lie down, and your clothing before you dress;--for
various disagreeable things might be hiding in them: a spider large as a
big crab, or a scorpion or a _mabouya_ or a centipede,--or certain large
ants whose bite burns like the pricking of a red-hot needle. No one who
has lived in St. Pierre is likely to forget the ants.... There are three
or four kinds in every house;--the _fourmi fou_ (mad ant), a little
speckled yellowish creature whose movements are so rapid as to delude
the vision; the great black ant which allows itself to be killed before
it lets go what it has bitten; the venomous little red ant, which is
almost too small to see; and the small black ant which does not bite at
all,--are usually omnipresent, and appear to dwell together in
harmony. They are pests in kitchens, cupboards, and safes; but they are
scavengers. It is marvellous to see them carrying away the body of
a great dead roach or centipede,--pulling and pushing together like
trained laborers, and guiding the corpse over obstacles or around them
with extraordinary skill.... There was a time when ants almost destroyed
the colony,--in 1751. The plantations, devastated by them are described
by historians as having looked as if desolated by fire. Underneath the
ground in certain places, layers of their eggs two inches deep were
found extending over acres. Infants left unwatched in the cradle for a
few hours were devoured alive by them. Immense balls of living ants
were washed ashore at the same time on various parts of the coast (a
phenomenon repeated within the memory of creoles now living in the
north-east parishes). The Government vainly offered rewards for the best
means of destroying the insects; but the plague gradually disappeared as
it came.

None of these creatures can be prevented from entering a dwelling;--you
may as well resign yourself to the certainty of meeting with them from
time to time. The great spiders (with the exception of those which are
hairy) need excite no alarm or disgust;--indeed they are suffered to
live unmolested in many houses, partly owing to a belief that they bring
good-luck, and partly because they destroy multitudes of those enormous
and noisome roaches which spoil whatever they cannot eat. The scorpion
is less common; but it has a detestable habit of lurking under beds; and
its bite communicates a burning fever. With far less reason, the mabouya
is almost equally feared. It is a little lizard about six inches long,
and ashen-colored;--it haunts only the interior of houses, while the
bright-green lizards dwell only upon the roofs. Like other reptiles of
the same order, the mabouya can run over or cling to polished surfaces;
and there is a popular belief that if frightened, it will leap at one's
face or hands and there fasten itself so tightly that it cannot be
dislodged except by cutting it to pieces. Moreover, it's feet are
supposed to have the power of leaving certain livid and ineffaceable
marks upon the skin of the person to whom it attaches itself:--_ça ka
ba ou lota_, say the colored people. Nevertheless, there is no creature
more timid and harmless than the mabouya.

But the most dreaded and the most insolent invader of domestic peace is
the centipede. The water system of the city banished the mosquito; but
it introduced the centipede into almost every dwelling. St. Pierre has a
plague of centipedes. All the covered drains, the gutters, the crevices
of fountain-basins and bathing-basins, the spaces between floor and
ground, shelter centipedes. And the _bête à-mille-pattes_ is the terror
of the barefooted population:--scarcely a day passes that some child or
bonne or workman is not bitten by the creature.

The sight of a full-grown centipede is enough to affect a strong set
of nerves. Ten to eleven inches is the average length of adults; but
extraordinary individuals much exceeding this dimension may be sometimes
observed in the neighborhood of distilleries (_rhommeries_) and
sugar-refineries. According to age, the color of the creature varies
from yellowish to black;--the younger ones often have several different
tints; the old ones are uniformly jet-black, and have a carapace of
surprising toughness,--difficult to break. If you tread, by accident or
design, upon the tail, the poisonous head will instantly curl back and
bite the foot through any ordinary thickness of upper-leather.

As a general rule the centipede lurks about the court-yards,
foundations, and drains by preference; but in the season of heavy rains
he does not hesitate to move upstairs, and make himself at home in
parlors and bed-rooms. He has a provoking habit of nestling in your
_moresques_ or your _chinoises_,--those wide light garments you put on
before taking your siesta or retiring for the night. He also likes to
get into your umbrella,--an article indispensable in the tropics; and
you had better never open it carelessly. He may even take a notion to
curl himself up in your hat, suspended on the wall. (I have known a
trigonocephalus to do the same thing in a country-house). He has also a
singular custom of mounting upon the long trailing dresses (douillettes)
worn by Martinique women,--and climbing up very swiftly and lightly to
the wearer's neck, where the prickling of his feet first betrays his
presence. Sometimes he will get into bed with you and bite you, because
you have not resolution enough to lie perfectly still while he is
tickling you.... It is well to remember before dressing that merely
shaking a garment may not dislodge him;--you must examine every part
very patiently,--particularly the sleeves of a coat and the legs of
pantaloons.

The vitality of the creature is amazing. I kept one in a bottle without
food or water for thirteen weeks, at the end of which time it remained
active and dangerous as ever. Then I fed it with living insects,
which it devoured ravenously;--beetles, roaches, earthworms, several
_lepismaoe_, even one of the dangerous-looking millepedes, which have a
great resemblance in outward structure to the centipede, but a thinner
body, and more numerous limbs,--all seemed equally palatable to the
prisoner.... I knew an instance of one, nearly a foot long, remaining in
a silk parasol for more than four months, and emerging unexpectedly
one day, with aggressiveness undiminished, to bite the hand that had
involuntarily given it deliverance.

In the city the centipede has but one natural enemy able to cope with
him,--the hen! The hen attacks him with delight, and often swallows him,
head first, without taking the trouble to kill him. The cat hunts him,
but she is careful never to put her head near him;--she has a trick of
whirling him round and round upon the floor so quickly as to stupefy
him: then, when she sees a good chance, she strikes him dead with her
claws. But if you are fond of your cat you will let her run no risks, as
the bite of a large centipede might have very bad results for your pet.
Its quickness of movement demands all the quickness of even the cat for
self-defence.... I know of men who have proved themselves able to seize
a fer-de-lance by the tail, whirl it round and round, and then flip it
as you would crack a whip,--whereupon the terrible head flies off; but I
never heard of anyone in Martinique daring to handle a living centipede.

There are superstitions concerning the creature which have a good effect
in diminishing his tribe. If you kill a centipede, you are sure
to receive money soon; and even if you dream of killing one it
is good-luck. Consequently, people are glad of any chance to kill
centipedes,--usually taking a heavy stone or some iron utensil for the
work;--a wooden stick is not a good weapon. There is always a little
excitement when a _bête-ni-pié_ (as the centipede is termed in the
patois) exposes itself to death; and you may often hear those who kill
it uttering a sort of litany of abuse with every blow, as if addressing
a human enemy:--"_Quitté moin tchoué ou, maudi!--quitté moin tchoué
ou, scelerat!--quitté moin tchoué ou, Satan!--quitté moin tchoué
ou, abonocio!_" etc. (Let me kill you, accursed! scoundrel! Satan!
abomination!)

The patois term for the centipede is not a mere corruption of the French
_bête-à-mille-pattes_. Among a population of slaves, unable to read or
write, [48] there were only the vaguest conceptions of numerical values;
and the French term bête-à-mille-pattes was not one which could appeal
to negro imagination. The slaves themselves invented an equally vivid
name, _bête-anni-pié_ (the Beast-which-is-all-feet); _anni_ in creole
signifying "only," and in such a sense "all." Abbreviated by subsequent
usage to _bête-'ni-pié_, the appellation has amphibology;--for there are
two words _ni_ in the patois, one signifying "to have," and the other
"naked." So that the creole for a centipede might be translated in three
ways,--"the Beast-which-is-all-feet"; or, "the Naked-footed Beast"; or,
with fine irony of affirmation, "the Beast-which-has-feet."


[Footnote 50: According to the Martinique "Annuaire" for 1887, there
were even then, out of a total population of 173,182, no less than
125,366 unable to read and write.]




II


What is the secret of that horror inspired by the centipede?... It
is but very faintly related to our knowledge that the creature is
venomous;--the results of the bite are only temporary swelling and a
brief fever;--it is less to be feared than the bite of other tropical
insects and reptiles which never inspire the same loathing by their
aspect. And the shapes of venomous creatures are not always shapes of
ugliness. The serpent has elegance of form as well as attractions
of metallic tinting;--the tarantula, or the _matoutou-falaise_, have
geometrical beauty. Lapidaries have in all ages expended rare skill
upon imitations of serpent grace in gold and gems;--a princess would not
scorn to wear a diamond spider. But what art could utilize successfully
the form of the centipede? It is a form of absolute repulsiveness,--a
skeleton-shape half defined:--the suggestion of some old reptile-spine
astir, crawling with its fragments of ribs.

No other living thing excites exactly the same feeling produced by the
sight of the centipede,--the intense loathing and peculiar fear. The
instant you see a centipede you feel it is absolutely necessary to kill
it; you cannot find peace in your house while you know that such a life
exists in it: perhaps the intrusion of a serpent would annoy and
disgust you less. And it is not easy to explain the whole reason of this
loathing. The form alone has, of course, something to do with it,--a
form that seems almost a departure from natural laws. But the form alone
does not produce the full effect, which is only experienced when you see
the creature in motion. The true horror of the centipede, perhaps, must
be due to the monstrosity of its movement,--multiple and complex, as of
a chain of pursuing and inter-devouring lives: there is something about
it that makes you recoil, as from a sudden corrupt swarming-out. It is
confusing,--a series of contractings and lengthenings and, undulations
so rapid as to allow of being only half seen: it alarms also, because
the thing seems perpetually about to disappear, and because you know
that to lose sight of it for one moment involves the very unpleasant
chance of finding it upon you the next,--perhaps between skin and
clothing.

But this is not all:--the sensation produced by the centipede is still
more complex--complex, in fact, as the visible organization of the
creature. For, during pursuit,--whether retreating or attacking, in
hiding or fleeing,--it displays a something which seems more than
instinct: calculation and cunning,--a sort of malevolent intelligence.
It knows how to delude, how to terrify;--it has marvellous skill in
feinting;--it is an abominable juggler....



III


I am about to leave my room after breakfast, when little Victoire who
carries the meals up-stairs in a wooden tray, screams out:--"_Gadé,
Missié! ni bête-ni-pié assous dos ou!_" There is a thousand-footed beast
upon my back!

Off goes my coat, which I throw upon the floor;--the little servant, who
has a nervous horror of centipedes, climbs upon a chair. I cannot see
anything under the coat, nevertheless;--I lift it by the collar, turn it
about very cautiously--nothing! Suddenly the child screams again; and I
perceive the head close to my hand;--the execrable thing had been hiding
in a perpendicular fold of the coat, which I drop only just in time to
escape getting bitten. Immediately the centipede becomes invisible.
Then I take the coat by one flap, and turn it over very quickly: just
as quickly does the centipede pass over it in the inverse direction, and
disappear under it again. I have had my first good look at him: he
seems nearly a foot long,--has a greenish-yellow hue against the black
cloth,--and pink legs, and a violet head;--he is evidently young.... I
turn the coat a second time: same disgusting manreuvre. Undulations of
livid color flow over him as he lengthens and shortens;--while running
his shape is but half apparent; it is only as he makes a half pause in
doubling round and under the coat that the panic of his legs becomes
discernible. When he is fully exposed they move with invisible
rapidity,--like a vibration;--you can see only a sort of pink haze
extending about him,--something to which you would no more dare advance
your finger than to the vapory halo edging a circular saw in motion.
Twice more I turn and re-turn the coat with the same result;--I observe
that the centipede always runs towards my hand, until I withdraw it: he
feints!

With a stick I uplift one portion of the coat after another; and
suddenly perceive him curved under a sleeve,--looking quite small!--how
could he have seemed so large a moment ago?... But before I can strike
him he has flickered over the cloth again, and vanished; and I discover
that he has the power of _magnifying himself_,--dilating the disgust of
his shape at will: he invariably amplifies himself to face attack....

It seems very difficult to dislodge him; he displays astonishing
activity and cunning at finding wrinkles and folds to hide in. Even at
the risk of damaging various things in the pockets, I stamp upon the
coat;--then lift it up with the expectation of finding the creature
dead. But it suddenly rushes out from some part or other, looking larger
and more wicked than ever,--drops to the floor, and charges at my feet:
a sortie! I strike at him unsuccessfully with the stick: he retreats
to the angle between wainscoting and floor, and runs along it fast as
a railroad train,--dodges two or three pokes,--gains the
door-frame,--glides behind a hinge, and commences to run over the wall
of the stair-way. There the hand of a black servant slaps him dead.

--"Always strike at the head," the servant tells me; "never tread on the
tail.... This is a small one: the big fellows can make you afraid if you
do not know how to kill them."

... I pick up the carcass with a pair of scissors. It does not look
formidable now that it is all contracted;--it is scarcely eight
inches long,--thin as card-board, and even less heavy. It has no
substantiality, no weight;--it is a mere appearance, a mask, a
delusion.... But remembering the spectral, cunning, juggling something
which magnified and moved it but a moment ago,--I feel almost tempted to
believe, with certain savages, that there are animal shapes inhabited by
goblins....




IV


--"Is there anything still living and lurking in old black drains
of Thought,--any bigotry, any prejudice, anything in the moral world
whereunto the centipede may be likened?"

--"Really, I do not know," replied the friend to whom I had put the
question; "but you need only go as far as the vegetable world for a
likeness. Did you ever see anything like this?" he added, opening a
drawer and taking therefrom something revolting, which, as he pressed it
in his hand, looked like a long thick bundle of dried centipedes.

--"Touch them," he said, holding out to me the mass of articulated flat
bodies and bristling legs.

--"Not for anything!" I replied, in astonished disgust. He laughed, and
opened his hand. As he did so, the mass expanded.

--"Now look," he exclaimed!

Then I saw that all the bodies were united at the tails--grew together
upon one thick flat annulated stalk... a plant!--"But here is the
fruit," he continued, taking from the same drawer a beautifully embossed
ovoid nut, large as a duck's egg, ruddy-colored, and so exquisitely
varnished by nature as to resemble a rosewood carving fresh from the
hands of the cabinet-maker. In its proper place among the leaves and
branches, it had the appearance of something delicious being devoured
by a multitude of centipedes. Inside was a kernel, hard and heavy as
iron-wood; but this in time, I was told, falls into dust: though the
beautiful shell remains always perfect.

Negroes call it the _coco-macaque._


[Illustration]




MA BONNE




I


I cannot teach Cyrillia the clock;--I have tried until both of us had
our patience strained to the breaking-point. Cyrillia still believes she
will learn how to tell the time some day or other;--I am certain that
she never will. "_Missié_," she says, "_lézhè pa aïen pou moin: c'est
minitt ka fouté moin yon travail!_"--the hours do not give her any
trouble; but the minutes are a frightful bore! And nevertheless,
Cyrillia is punctual as the sun;--she always brings my coffee and a
slice of corossol at five in the morning precisely. Her clock is the
_cabritt-bois_. The great cricket stops singing, she says, at half-past
four: the cessation of its chant awakens her.

--"_Bonjou', Missié. Coument ou passé lanuitt?_"--"Thanks, my daughter,
I slept well."--"The weather is beautiful: if Missié would like to go
to the beach, his bathing-towels are ready."--"Good! Cyrillia; I will
go."... Such is our regular morning conversation.

Nobody breakfasts before eleven o'clock or thereabout; but after an
early sea-bath, one is apt to feel a little hollow during the morning,
unless one take some sort of refreshment. Cyrillia always prepares
something for me on my return from the beach,--either a little pot of
fresh cocoa-water, or a _cocoyage_, or a _mabiyage_, or a _bavaroise_.

The _cocoyage_ I like the best of all. Cyrillia takes a green cocoa-nut,
slices off one side of it so as to open a hole, then pours the
opalescent water into a bowl, adds to it a fresh egg, a little Holland
gin, and some grated nutmeg and plenty of sugar. Then she whips up the
mixture into effervescence with her _baton-lélé_. The _baton-lélé_ is an
indispensaple article in every creole home: it is a thin stick which is
cut from a young tree so as to leave at one end a whorl of branch-stumps
sticking out at right angles like spokes;--by twirling the stem between
the hands, the stumps whip up the drink in a moment.

The _mabiyage_ is less agreeable, but is a popular morning drink among
the poorer classes. It is made with a little white rum and a bottle of
the bitter native root-beer called _mabi_. The taste of _mabi_ I can
only describe as that of molasses and water flavored with a little
cinchona bark.

The _bavaroise_ is fresh milk, sugar, and a little Holland gin or
rum,--mixed with the baton-lélé until a fine thick foam is formed.
After the _cocoyage_, I think it is the best drink one can take in the
morning; but very little spirit must be used for any of these mixtures.
It is not until just before the mid-day meal that one can venture to
take a serious stimulant,--_yon ti ponch_,--rum and water, sweetened
with plenty of sugar or sugar syrup.

The word _sucre_ is rarely used in Martinique,--considering that sugar
is still the chief product;--the word _doux_, "sweet," is commonly
substituted for it. _Doux_ has, however, a larger range of meaning: it
may signify syrup, or any sort of sweets,--duplicated into _doudoux_, it
means the corossole fruit as well as a sweetheart. _Ça qui lè doudoux?_
is the cry of the corossole-seller. If a negro asks at a grocery store
(_graisserie_) for _sique_ instead of for _doux_, it is only because he
does not want it to be supposed that he means syrup;--as a general rule,
he will only use the word _sique_ when referring to quality of
sugar wanted, or to sugar in hogsheads. _Doux_ enters into domestic
consumption in quite remarkable ways. People put sugar into fresh milk,
English porter, beer, and cheap wine;--they cook various vegetables
with sugar, such as peas; they seem to be particularly fond of
sugar-and-water and of _d'leau-pain_,--bread-and-water boiled, strained,
mixed with sugar, and flavored with cinnamon. The stranger gets
accustomed to all this sweetness without evil results. In a northern
climate the consequence would probably be at least a bilious attack; but
in the tropics, where salt fish and fruits are popularly preferred to
meat, the prodigal use of sugar or sugar-syrups appears to be decidedly
beneficial.

... After Cyrillia has prepared my _cocoyage_, and rinsed the
bathing-towels in fresh-water, she is ready to go to market, and wants
to know what I would like to eat for breakfast. "Anything creole,
Cyrillia;--I want to know what people eat in this country." She always
does her best to please me in this respect,--almost daily introduces me
to some unfamiliar dishes, something odd in the way of fruit or fish.




II


Cyrillia has given me a good idea of the range and character of
_mangé-Créole_, and I can venture to write something about it after a
year's observation. By _mangé-Créole_ I refer only to the food of the
people proper, the colored population; for the _cuisine_ of the small
class of wealthy whites is chiefly European, and devoid of local
interest:--I might observe, however, that the fashion of cooking is
rather Provençal than Parisian;--rather of southern than of northern
France.

Meat, whether fresh or salt, enters little into the nourishment of the
poorer classes. This is partly, no doubt, because of the cost of all
meats; but it is also due to natural preference for fruits and
fish. When fresh meat is purchased, it is usually to make a stew or
_daube_;--probably salt meats are more popular; and native vegetables
and manioc flour are preferred to bread. There are only two popular
soups which are peculiar to the creole cuisine,--_calalou_, a
gombo soup, almost precisely similar to that of Louisiana; and the
_soupe-d'habitant_, or "country soup." It is made of yams, carrots,
bananas, turnips, _choux-caraïbes_, pumpkins, salt pork, and pimento,
all boiled together;--the salt meat being left out of the composition on
Fridays.

The great staple, the true meat of the population, is salt codfish,
which is prepared in a great number of ways. The most popular and the
rudest preparation of it is called "Ferocious" (_férocé_); and it is
not at all unpalatable. The codfish is simply fried, and served with
vinegar, oil, pimento;--manioc flour and avocados being considered
indispensable adjuncts. As manioc flour forms a part of almost every
creole meal, a word of information regarding it will not be out of place
here. Everybody who has heard the name probably knows that the manioc
root is naturally poisonous, and that the toxic elements must be removed
by pressure and desiccation before the flour can be made. Good manioc
flour has an appearance like very coarse oatmeal; and is probably quite
as nourishing. Even when dear as bread, it is preferred, and forms
the flour of the population, by whom the word _farine_ is only used
to signify manioc flour: if wheat-flour be referred to it is always
qualified as "French flour" (_farine-Fouance_). Although certain flours
are regularly advertised as American in the local papers, they are still
_farine-Fouance_ for the population, who call everything foreign French.
American beer is _biè-Fouance_; American canned peas, _ti-pois-Fouance_;
any white foreigner who can talk French is _yon béké-Fouance_.

Usually the manioc flour is eaten uncooked:[51] merely poured into a
plate, with a little water and stirred with a spoon into a thick paste
or mush,--the thicker the better;--_dleau passé farine_ (more water
than manioc flour) is a saying which describes the condition of a very
destitute person. When not served with fish, the flour is occasionally
mixed with water and refined molasses (_sirop-battrie_): this
preparation, which is very nice, is called _cousscaye_. There is also a
way of boiling it with molasses and milk into a kind of pudding. This
is called _matêté_; children are very fond of it. Both of these names,
_cousscaye_ and _matêté_, are alleged to be of Carib origin: the art of
preparing the flour itself from manioc root is certainly an inheritance
from the Caribs, who bequeathed many singular words to the creole patois
of the French West Indies.

Of all the preparations of codfish with which manioc flour is eaten,
I preferred the _lamori-bouilli_,--the fish boiled plain, after having
been steeped long enough to remove the excess of salt; and then served
with plenty of olive-oil and pimento. The people who have no home of
their own, or at least no place to cook, can buy their food already
prepared from the _màchannes lapacotte_, who seem to make a specialty
of _macadam_ (codfish stewed with rice) and the other two dishes already
referred to. But in every colored family there are occasional feasts
of _lamori-au-laitt_, codfish stewed with milk and potatoes;
_lamori-au-grattin_, codfish boned, pounded with toast crumbs, and
boiled with butter, onions, and pepper into a mush;--_coubouyon-lamori_,
codfish stewed with butter and oil;--_bachamelle_, codfish boned and
stewed with potatoes, pimentos, oil, garlic, and butter.

_Pimento_ is an essential accompaniment to all these dishes, whether
it be cooked or raw: everything is served with plenty of pimento,-_en
pile_, _en pile piment._ Among the various kinds I can mention only the
_piment-café_, or "coffee-pepper," larger but about the same shape as a
grain of Liberian coffee, violet-red at one end; the _piment-zouèseau_,
or bird-pepper, small and long and scarlet;--and the _piment-capresse_,
very large, pointed at one end, and bag-shaped at the other. It takes a
very deep red color when ripe, and is so strong that if you only break
the pod in a room, the sharp perfume instantly fills the apartment.
Unless you are as well-trained as any Mexican to eat pimento, you will
probably regret your first encounter with the _capresse_.

Cyrillia told me a story about this infernal vegetable.


[Footnote 51: There is record of an attempt to manufacture bread with
one part manioc flour to three of wheat flour. The result was excellent;
but no serious effort was ever made to put the manioc bread on the
market.]




III


ZHISTOUÈ PIMENT.

Té ni yon manman qui té ni en pile, en pile yche; et yon jou y pa té ni
aïen pou y té baill yche-là mangé. Y té ka lévé bon matin-là sans yon
sou: y pa sa ça y té douè fai,--là y té ké baill latête. Y allé
lacaïe macoumè-y, raconté lapeine-y. Macoumè baill y toua chopine
farine-manioc. Y allé lacaill liautt macoumè, qui baill y yon grand
trai piment. Macoumè-là di y venne trai-piment-à, épi y té pè acheté
lamori,--pisse y ja té ni farine. Madame-là di: "Mèçi, macoumè;"--y di y
bonjou'; épi y allé lacaïe-y.

Lhè y rivé àcaïe y limé difè: y metté canari épi dleau assous difé-a;
épi y cassé toutt piment-là et metté yo adans canari-à assous diré.

Lhè y oue canari-à ka bouï, y pouend _baton-lélé_, epi y lélé piment-à:
aloss y ka fai yonne calalou-piment. Lhè calalou-piment-là té tchouitt,
y pouend chaque zassiett yche-li; y metté calalou yo fouète dans
zassiett-là; y metté ta-mari fouète, assou, épi ta-y. Épi lhè calalou-là
té bien fouète, y metté farine nans chaque zassiett-là. Épi y crié toutt
moune vini mangé. Toutt moune vini metté yo à-tabe.

Pouèmiè bouchée mari-à pouend, y rété,--y crié: "Aïe! ouaill! mafenm!"
Fenm-là réponne mari y: "Ouaill! monmari!" Cés ti manmaille-la crie:
"Ouaill! manman!" Manman-à. réponne:--"Ouaill! yches-moin!"... Yo toutt
pouend couri, quitté caïe-là sèle,--épi yo toutt tombé larviè à touempé
bouche yo. Cés ti manmaille-là bouè dleau sitellement jusse temps yo
toutt néyé: té ka rété anni manman-là épi papa-là. Yo té là bò lariviè,
qui té ka pleiré. Moin té ka passé à lhè-à;--moin ka mandé yo: "Ça zautt
ni?"

Nhomme-là lévé: y baill moin yon sèle coup d'piè, y voyé moin lautt bo
lariviè-ou ouè moin vini pou conté ça ba ou.

There was once a mamma who had ever so many children; and one day she
had nothing to give those children to eat. She had got up very early
that morning, without a sou in the world: she did not know what to do:
she was so worried that her head was upset. She went to the house of a
woman-friend, and told her about her trouble. The friend gave her three
_chopines_ [three pints] of manioc flour. Then she went to the house
of another female friend, who gave her a big trayful of pimentos. The
friend told her to sell that tray of pimentos: then she could buy some
codfish,--since she already had some manioc flour. The good-wife said:
"Thank you, _macoumè_,"--she bid her good-day, and then went to her own
house.

The moment she got home, she made a fire, and put her _canari_ [earthen
pot] full of water on the fire to boil: then she broke up all the
pimentos and put them into the canari on the fire.

As soon as she saw the canari boiling, she took her _baton-lélé_, and
beat up all those pimentos: then she made a _pimento-calalou_. When the
pimento-calalou was well cooked, she took each one of the children's
plates, and poured their calalou into the plates to cool it; she also
put her husband's out to cool, and her own. And when the calalou was
quite cool, she put some manioc flour into each of the plates. Then
she called to everybody to come and eat. They all came, and sat down to
table.

The first mouthful that husband took he stopped and screamed:--"_Aïe!
ouaill!_ my wife!" The woman answered her husband: "_Ouaill_! my
husband!" The little children all screamed: "_Ouaill!_ mamma!" Their
mamma answered: "_Ouaill!_ my children!"... They all ran out, left the
house empty; and they tumbled into the river to steep their mouths.
Those little children just drank water and drank water till they were
all drowned: there was nobody left except the mamma and the papa, They
stayed there on the river-bank, and cried. I was passing that way just
at that time;--I asked them: "What ails you people?" That man got up and
gave me just one kick that sent me right across the river; I came here
at once, as you see, to tell you all about it....




IV


... It is no use for me to attempt anything like a detailed description
of the fish Cyrillia brings me day after day from the Place du Fort: the
variety seems to be infinite. I have learned, however, one curious fact
which is worth noting: that, as a general rule, the more beautifully
colored fish are the least palatable, and are sought after only by the
poor. The _perroquet_, black, with bright bands of red and yellow;
the _cirurgien_, blue and black; the _patate_, yellow and black; the
_moringue_, which looks like polished granite; the _souri_, pink
and yellow; the vermilion _Gouôs-zie_; the rosy _sade_; the red
_Bon-Dié-manié-moin_ ("the-Good-God-handled-me")--it has two queer marks
as of great fingers; and the various kinds of all-blue fish, _balaou_,
_conliou_, etc. varying from steel-color to violet,--these are seldom
seen at the tables of the rich. There are exceptions, of course, to this
and all general rules: notably the _couronné_, pink spotted beautifully
with black,--a sort of Redfish, which never sells less than fourteen
cents a pound; and the _zorphie_, which has exquisite changing lights
of nacreous green and purple. It is said, however, that the zorphi is
sometimes poisonous, like the _bécunne_; and there are many fish which,
although not venomous by nature, have always been considered dangerous.
In the time of Père Dutertre it was believed these fish ate the apples
of the manchineel-tree, washed into the sea by rains;--to-day it is
popularly supposed that they are rendered occasionally poisonous by
eating the barnacles attached to copper-plating of ships. The _tazard_,
the _lune_, the _capitaine_, the _dorade_, the _perroquet_, the
_couliou_, the _congre_, various crabs, and even the _tonne_,--all
are dangerous unless perfectly fresh: the least decomposition seems
to develop a mysterious poison. A singular phenomenon regarding the
poisoning occasionally produced by the bécunne and dorade is that the
skin peels from the hands and feet of those lucky enough to survive
the terrible colics, burnings, itchings, and delirium, which are early
symptoms, Happily these accidents are very rare, since the markets have
been properly inspected: in the time of Dr. Rufz, they would seem to
have been very common,--so common that he tells us he would not eat
fresh fish without being perfectly certain where it was caught and how
long it had been out of the water.

The poor buy the brightly colored fish only when the finer qualities
are not obtainable at low rates; but often and often the catch is so
enormous that half of it has to be thrown back into the sea. In the hot
moist air, fish decomposes very rapidly; it is impossible to transport
it to any distance into the interior; and only the inhabitants of the
coast can indulge in fresh fish,--at least sea-fish.

Naturally, among the laboring class the question of quality is less
important than that of quantity and substance, unless the fish-market be
extraordinarily well stocked. Of all fresh fish, the most popular is the
_tonne_, a great blue-gray creature whose flesh is solid as beef; next
come in order of preferment the flying-fish (_volants_), which often
sell as low as four for a cent;--then the _lambi_, or sea-snail, which
has a very dense and nutritious flesh;--then the small whitish fish
classed as _sàdines_;--then the blue-colored fishes according to price,
_couliou_, _balaou_, etc.;--lastly, the shark, which sells commonly at
two cents a pound. Large sharks are not edible; the flesh is too hard;
but a young shark is very good eating indeed. Cyrillia cooked me a slice
one morning: it was quite delicate, tasted almost like veal.

The quantity of very small fish sold is surprising. With ten sous the
family of a laborer can have a good fish-dinner: a pound of _sàdines_ is
never dearer than two sous;--a pint of manioc flour can be had for the
same price; and a big avocado sells for a sou. This is more than enough
food for any one person; and by doubling the expense one obtains a
proportionately greater quantity--enough for four or five individuals.
The _sàdines_ are roasted over a charcoal fire, and flavored with a
sauce of lemon, pimento, and garlic. When there are no _sàdines_, there
are sure to be _coulious_ in plenty,--small _coulious_ about as long as
your little finger: these are more delicate, and fetch double the price.
With four sous' worth of _coulious_ a family can have a superb _blaffe_.
To make a _blaffe_ the fish are cooked in water, and served with
pimento, lemon, spices, onions, and garlic; but without oil or butter.
Experience has demonstrated that _coulious_ make the best _blaffe_; and
a _blaffe_ is seldom prepared with other fish.




V


There are four dishes which are the holiday luxuries of the
poor:--_manicou_, _ver-palmiste_, _zandouille_, and _poule-épi-diri_.[52]


[Illustration: MARKET, FORT-DE FRANCE
_Daily, at dawn, these carriers stream in from the
country with burdens of fruit upon their heads._]


The _manitou_ is a brave little marsupial, which might be called
the opossum of Martinique: it fights, although overmatched, with the
serpent, and is a great enemy to the field-rat. In the market a manicou
sells for two francs and a half at cheapest: it is generally salted
before being cooked.

The great worm, or caterpillar, called _ver-palmiste_ is found in the
heads of cabbage-palms,--especially after the cabbage has been cut out,
and the tree has begun to perish. It is the grub of a curious beetle,
which has a proboscis of such form as suggested the creole appellation,
_léfant_: the "elephant." These worms are sold in the Place du Fort at
two sous each: they are spitted and roasted alive, and are said to taste
like almonds. I have never tried to find out whether this be fact or
fancy; and I am glad to say that few white creoles confess a liking for
this barbarous food.

The _zandouilles_ are delicious sausages made with pig-buff,--and only
seen in the market on Sundays. They cost a franc and a half each; and
there are several women who have an established reputation throughout
Martinique for their skill in making them. I have tasted some not less
palatable than the famous London "pork-pies." Those of Lamentin are
reputed the best in the island.

But _poule-épi-diri_ is certainly the most popular dish of all: it is
the dearest, as well, and poor people can rarely afford it. In Louisiana
an almost similar dish is called _jimbalaya_: chicken cooked with rice.
The Martiniquais think it such a delicacy that an over-exacting person,
or one difficult to satisfy, is reproved with the simple question:--"_Ça
ou lè 'nco-poule, épi-diri?_" (What more do you want, great
heavens!--chicken-and-rice?) Naughty children are bribed into absolute
goodness by the promise of poule-épi-diri:--


--"_Aïe! chè, bò doudoux!
Doudoux ba ou poule-épi-diri;
Aïe! chè, bò doudoux!_"...

(Aïe, dear! kiss _doudoux!--doudoux_ has rice-and-chicken for
you!--_aïe_, dear! kiss _doudoux!_)


How far rice enters into the success of the dish above mentioned I
cannot say; but rice ranks in favor generally above all cereals; it is
at least six times more in demand than maize. _Diri-doux_, rice boiled
with sugar, is sold in prodigious quantities daily,--especially at
the markets, where little heaps of it, rolled in pieces of banana
or _cachibou_ leaves, are retailed at a cent each. _Diri-aulaitt_, a
veritable rice-pudding, is also very popular; but it would weary the
reader to mention one-tenth of the creole preparations into which rice
enters.


[Footnote 52: I must mention a surreptitious dish, _chatt_;--needless to
say the cats are not sold, but stolen. It is true that only a small
class of poor people eat cats; but they eat so many cats that cats have
become quite rare in St Pierre. The custom is purely superstitious: it
is alleged that if you eat cat seven times, or if you eat seven cats, no
witch, wizard, or _quimboiseur_ can ever do you any harm; and the cat
ought to be eaten on Christmas Eve in order that the meal be perfectly
efficacious. . . . The mystic number "seven" enters into another and a
better creole superstition;--if you kill a serpent, seven great sins are
forgiven to you: _ou ké ni sept grands péchés effacé._]




VI


Everybody eats _akras_;--they sell at a cent apiece. The akra is a small
fritter or pancake, which may be made of fifty different things,--among
others codfish, titiri, beans, brains, _choux-caraïbes_, little
black peas (_poix-zié-nouè_, "black-eyed peas"), or of crawfish
(_akra-cribîche_). When made of carrots, bananas, chicken, palm-cabbage,
etc. and sweetened, they are called _marinades_. On first acquaintance
they seem rather greasy for so hot a climate; but one learns, on
becoming accustomed to tropical conditions, that a certain amount of
oily or greasy food is both healthy and needful.

First among popular vegetables are beans. Red beans are preferred; but
boiled white beans, served cold with vinegar and plenty of oil, form a
favorite salad. Next in order of preferment come the _choux-caraïbes_,
_patates_, _zignames_, _camanioc_, and _cousscouche_: all immense
roots,--the true potatoes of the tropics. The camanioc is finer than the
choux-caraïbe, boils whiter and softer: in appearance it resembles the
manioc root very closely, but has no toxic element. The cousscouche is
the best of all: the finest Irish potato boiled into sparkling flour
is not so good. Most of these roots can be cooked into a sort of mush,
called _migan_: such as _migan-choux_, made with the choux-caraïbe;
_migan-zignames_, made with yams; _migan-cousscouche_, etc.,--in which
case crabs or shrimps are usually served with the _migan_. There is a
particular fondness for the little rosy crab called _tourlouroux_, in
patois _touloulou_. _Migan_ is also made with bread-fruit. Very large
bananas or plantains are boiled with codfish, with _daubes_, or
meat stews, and with eggs. The bread-fruit is a fair substitute for
vegetables. It must be cooked very thoroughly, and has a dry potato
taste. What is called the _fleu-fouitt-à-pain_, or "bread-fruit
flower"--a long pod-shaped solid growth, covered exteriorly with tiny
seeds closely set as pin-heads could be, and having an interior pith
very elastic and resistant,--is candied into a delicious sweetmeat.




VII


The consumption of bananas is enormous: more bananas are eaten than
vegetables; and more banana-trees are yearly being cultivated. The negro
seems to recognize instinctively that economical value of the banana to
which attention was long since called by Humboldt, who estimated that
while an acre planted in wheat would barely support three persons, an
acre planted in banana-trees would nourish fifty.

Bananas and plantains hold the first place among fruits in popular
esteem;--they are cooked in every way, and served with almost every sort
of meat or fish. What we call bananas in the United States, however, are
not called bananas in Martinique, but figs (_figues_). Plantains seem
to be called _bananes_. One is often surprised at popular nomenclature:
_choux_ may mean either a sort of root (_choux-caraïbe_), or the top
of the cabbage-palm; _Jacquot_ may mean a fish; _cabane_ never means
a cabin, but a bed; _crickett_ means not a cricket, but a frog; and at
least fifty other words have equally deceptive uses. If one desires
to speak of real figs--dried figs--he must say _figues-Fouanc_ (French
figs); otherwise nobody will understand him. There are many kinds
of bananas here called _figues_,--the four most popular are the
_figues-bananes_, which are plantains, I think; the _figues-makouenga_,
which grow wild, and have a red skin; the _figues-pommes_
(apple-bananas), which are large and yellow; and the _ti-figues-desse_
(little-dessert-bananas), which are to be seen on all tables in St.
Pierre. They are small, sweet, and always agreeable, even when one has
no appetite for other fruits.

It requires some little time to become accustomed to many tropical
fruits, or at least to find patience as well as inclination to eat them.
A large number, in spite of delicious flavor, are provokingly stony:
such as the ripe guavas, the cherries, the barbadines; even the
corrossole and _pomme-cannelle_ are little more than huge masses of
very hard seeds buried in pulp of exquisite taste. The _sapota_, or
_sapodtilla_, is less characterized by stoniness, and one soon learns to
like it. It has large flat seeds, which can be split into two with the
finger-nail; and a fine white skin lies between these two halves. It
requires some skill to remove entire this little skin, or pellicle,
without breaking it: to do so is said to be a test of affection. Perhaps
this bit of folk-lore was suggested by the shape of the pellicle, which
is that of a heart. The pretty fille-de-couleur asks her doudoux:--"_Ess
ou ainmein moin?--pouloss tiré ti lapeau-là sans cassé-y_." Woe to
him if he breaks it!... The most disagreeable fruit is, I think, the
_pomme-d'Haiti_, or Haytian apple: it is very attractive exteriorly;
but has a strong musky odor and taste which nauseates. Few white creoles
ever eat it.

Of the oranges, nothing except praise can be said; but there are
fruits that look like oranges, and are not oranges, that are far more
noteworthy. There is the _chadèque_, which grows here to fully three
feet in circumference, and has a sweet pink pulp; and there is the
"forbidden-fruit" (_fouitt-défendu_), a sort of cross between the orange
and the chadèque, and superior to both. The colored people declare that
this monster fruit is the same which grew in Eden upon the fatal tree:
_c'est ça mênm qui fai moune ka fai yche conm ça atouelement!_ The
fouitt-défendu is wonderful, indeed, in its way; but the fruit which
most surprised me on my first acquaintance with it was the _zabricôt_.

--"_Ou lè yon zabricôt?_" (Would you like an apricot?) Cyrillia asked
me one day. I replied that I liked apricots very much,--wanted more than
one. Cyrillia looked astonished, but said nothing until she
returned from market, and put on the table _two_ apricots, with the
observation:--"_Ça ke fai ou malade mangé toutt ça!_" (You will get sick
if you eat all that.) I could not eat even half of one of them. Imagine
a plum larger than the largest turnip, with a skin like a russet apple,
solid sweet flesh of a carrot-red color, and a nut in the middle bigger
than a duck's egg and hard as a rock. These fruits are aromatic as well
as sweet to the taste: the price varies from one to four cents each,
according to size. The tree is indigenous to the West Indies; the
aborigines of Hayti had a strange belief regarding it. They alleged that
its fruits formed the nourishment of the dead; and however pressed by
hunger, an Indian in the woods would rather remain without food than
strip one of these trees, lest he should deprive the ghosts of their
sustenance.... No trace of this belief seems to exist among the colored
people of Martinique.

Among the poor such fruits are luxuries: they eat more mangoes than
any other fruits excepting bananas. It is rather slobbery work eating
a common mango, in which every particle of pulp is threaded fast to
the kernel: one prefers to gnaw it when alone. But there are cultivated
mangoes with finer and thicker flesh which can be sliced off, so that
the greater part of the fruit may be eaten without smearing and sucking.
Among grafted varieties the _mangue_ is quite as delicious as the
orange. Perhaps there are nearly as many varieties of mangoes in
Martinique as there are varieties of peaches with us: I am acquainted,
however, with only a few,--such as the _mango-Bassignac_;--_mango-pêche_
(or peach-mango);--_mango-vert_ (green mango), very large and
oblong;--_mango-grêffé_;--_mangotine_, quite round and
small;--_mango-quinette_, very small also, almost egg-shaped;--_mango-Zézé_,
very sweet, rather small, and of flattened form;--_mango-d'or_ (golden
mango), worth half a franc each;--_mango-Lamentin_, a highly cultivated
variety--and the superb _Reine-Amélie_ (or Queen Amelia), a great yellow
fruit which retails even in Martinique at five cents apiece.




VIII


... "_Ou c'est bonhomme caton?-ou c'est zimage, non?_" (Am I a
pasteboard man, or an image, that I do not eat?) Cyrillia wants to know.
The fact is that I am a little overfed; but the stranger in the tropics
cannot eat like a native, and my abstemiousness is a surprise. In the
North we eat a good deal for the sake of caloric; in the tropics, unless
one be in the habit of taking much physical exercise, which is a very
difficult thing to do, a generous appetite is out of the question.
Cyrillia will not suffer me to live upon _mangé-Creole_ altogether; she
insists upon occasional beefsteaks and roasts, and tries to tempt me
with all kinds of queer delicious, desserts as well,--particularly those
cakes made of grated cocoanut and sugar-syrup (_tablett-coco-rapé_)
of which a stranger becomes very fond. But, nevertheless, I cannot eat
enough to quiet Cyrillia's fears.

Not eating enough is not her only complaint against me. I am perpetually
doing something or other which shocks her. The Creoles are the most
cautious livers in the world, perhaps;--the stranger who walks in the
sun without an umbrella, or stands in currents of air, is for them
an object of wonder and compassion. Cyrillia's complaints about my
recklessness in the matter of hygiene always terminate with the refrain:
"_Yo pa fai ça içi_"--(People never do such things in Martinique.) Among
such rash acts are washing one's face or hands while perspiring, taking
off one's hat on coming in from a walk, going out immediately after
a bath, and washing my face with soap. "Oh, Cyrillia! what
foolishness!--why should I not wash my face with soap? Because it will
blind you," Cyrillia answers: "_ça ké tchoué limiè zié ou_" (it will
kill the light in your eyes). There is no cleaner person than Cyrillia;
and, indeed among the city people, the daily bath is the rule in all
weathers; but soap is never used on the face by thousands, who, like
Cyrillia, believe it will "kill the light of the eyes."

One day I had been taking a long walk in the sun, and returned so
thirsty that all the old stories about travellers suffering in waterless
deserts returned to memory with new significance;--visions of simooms
arose before me. What a delight to see and to grasp the heavy, red,
thick-lipped _dobanne_, the water-jar, dewy and cool with the exudation
of the _Eau-de-Gouyave_ which filled it to the brim,--_toutt vivant_,
as Cyrillia says, "all alive"! There was a sudden scream,--the
water-pitcher was snatched from my hands by Cyrillia with the question:
"_Ess ou lè tchoué cò-ou?--Saint Joseph!_" (Did I want to kill my
body?)... The Creoles use the word "body" in speaking of anything that
can happen to one,--"hurt one's body, tire one's body, marry
one's body, bury one's body," etc.;--I wonder whether the expression
originated in zealous desire to prove a profound faith in the soul....
Then Cyrillia made me a little punch with sugar and rum, and told me
I must never drink fresh-water after a walk unless I wanted to kill my
body. In this matter her advice was good. The immediate result of a
cold drink while heated is a profuse and icy perspiration, during which
currents of air are really dangerous. A cold is not dreaded here, and
colds are rare; but pleurisy is common, and may be the consequence of
any imprudent exposure.

I do not often have the opportunity at home of committing even an
unconscious imprudence; for Cyrillia is ubiquitous, and always on the
watch lest something dreadful should happen to me. She is wonderful as
a house-keeper as well as a cook: there is certainly much to do, and
she has only a child to help her, but she always seems to have time.
Her kitchen apparatus is of the simplest kind: a charcoal furnace
constructed of bricks, a few earthenware pots (_canar_), and some
grid-irons;--yet with these she can certainly prepare as many dishes as
there are days in the year. I have never known her to be busy with her
_canari_ for more than an hour; yet everything is kept in perfect order.
When she is not working, she is quite happy in sitting at a window, and
amusing herself by watching the life of the street,--or playing with
a kitten, which she has trained so well that it seems to understand
everything she says.




IX


With darkness all the population of the island retire to their
homes;--the streets become silent, and the life of the day is done.
By eight o'clock nearly all the windows are closed, and the lights put
out;--by nine the people are asleep. There are no evening parties, no
night amusements, except during rare theatrical seasons and times of
Carnival; there are no evening visits: active existence is almost timed
by the rising and setting of the sun.... The only pleasure left for the
stranger of evenings is a quiet smoke on his balcony or before his door:
reading is out of the question, partly because books are rare, partly
because lights are bad, partly because insects throng about every lamp
or candle. I am lucky enough to have a balcony, broad enough for a
rocking-chair; and sometimes Cyrillia and the kitten come to keep me
company before bedtime. The kitten climbs on my knees; Cyrillia sits
right down upon the balcony.

One bright evening, Cyrillia was amusing herself very much by watching
the clouds: they were floating high; the moonlight made them brilliant
as frost. As they changed shape under the pressure of the trade-wind,
Cyrillia seemed to discover wonderful things in them: sheep, ships with
sails, cows, faces, perhaps even _zombis_.

--"_Travaill Bon-Dié joli,--anh?_" (Is not the work of the Good-God
pretty?) she said at last.... "There was Madame Remy, who used to sell
the finest _foulards_ and Madrases in St. Pierre;--she used to study the
clouds. She drew the patterns of the clouds for her _foulards_: whenever
she saw a beautiful cloud or a beautiful rainbow, she would make a
drawing of it in color at once; and then she would send that to France
to have _foulards_ made just like it.... Since she is dead, you do not
see any more pretty _foulards_ such as there used to be."...

--"Would you like to look at the moon with my telescope, Cyrillia?" I
asked. "Let me get it for you."

--"Oh no, no!" she answered, as if shocked.

--"Why?"

--"_Ah! faut pa gàdé baggaïe Bon-Dié conm ça!_" (It is not right to look
at the things of the Good-God that way.)

I did not insist. After a little silence, Cyrillia resumed:--

--"But I saw the Sun and the Moon once fighting together: that was what
people call an _eclipse_,--is not that the word?... They fought together
a long time: I was looking at them. We put a _terrine_ full of water
on the ground, and looked into the water to see them. And the Moon is
stronger than the Sun!--yes, the Sun was obliged to give way to the
Moon.... Why do they fight like that?"

--"They don't, Cyrillia."

--"Oh yes, they do. I saw them!... And the Moon is much stronger than
the Sun!"

I did not attempt to contradict this testimony of the eyes. Cyrillia
continued to watch the pretty clouds. Then she said:--"Would you not
like to have a ladder long enough to let you climb up to those clouds,
and see what they are made of?"

--"Why, Cyrillia, they are only vapor,--brume: I have been in clouds."

She looked at me in surprise, and, after a moment's silence, asked, with
an irony of which I had not supposed her capable:--

--"Then you are the Good-God?"

--"Why, Cyrillia, it is not difficult to reach clouds. You see clouds
always upon the top of the Montagne Pelée;--people go there. I have been
there--in the clouds."

--"Ah! those are not the same clouds: those are not the clouds of the
Good-God. You cannot touch the sky when you are on the Morne de la
Croix."

--"My dear Cyrillia, there is no sky to touch. The sky is only an
appearance."

--"_Anh, anh, anh!_ No sky!--you say there is no sky?... Then, what is
that up there?"

--"That is air, Cyrillia, beautiful blue air."

--"And what are the stars fastened to?"

--"To nothing. They are suns, but so much further away than our sun that
they look small."

--"No, they are not suns! They have not the same form as the sun... You
must not say there is no sky: it is wicked! But you are not a Catholic!"

--"My dear Cyrillia, I don't see what that has to do with the sky."

--"Where does the Good-God stay, if there be no sky? And where is
heaven?--and where is hell?"

--"Hell in the sky, Cyrillia?"

--"The Good-God made heaven in one part of the sky, and hell in another
part, for bad people.... Ah! you are a Protestant;--you do not know the
things of the Good-God! That is why you talk like that."

--"What is a Protestant, Cyrillia?"

--"You are one. The Protestants do not believe in religion,--do not love
the Good-God."

--"Well, I am neither a Protestant nor a Catholic, Cyrillia."

--"Oh! you do not mean that; you cannot be a _maudi_, an accursed. There
are only the Protestants, the Catholics, and the accursed. You are not a
_maudi_, I am sure, But you must not say there is no sky"...

--"But, Cyrillia"--

--"No: I will not listen to you:--you are a Protestant. Where does the
rain come from, if there is no sky,"...

--"Why, Cyrillia... the clouds"...

--"No, you are a Protestant.... How can you say such things? There are
the Three Kings and the Three Valets,--the beautiful stars that come
at Christmas-time,--there, over there--all beautiful, and big, big,
big!... And you say there is no sky!"

--"Cyrillia, perhaps I am a _maudi_."

--"No, no! You are only a Protestant. But do not tell me there is no
sky: it is wicked to say that!"

--"I won't say it any more, Cyrillia--there! But I will say there are no
_zombis_."

--"I know you are not a _maudi_;--you have been baptized."

--"How do you know I have been baptized?"

--"Because, if you had not been baptized you would see _zombis_ all
the time, even in broad day. All children who are not baptized see
_zombis_."...




X


Cyrilla's solicitude for me extends beyond the commonplaces of hygiene
and diet into the uncertain domain of matters ghostly. She fears much
that something might happen to me through the agency of wizards, witches
(_sociès_), or _zombis_. Especially zombis. Cyrillia's belief in zombis
has a solidity that renders argument out of the question. This belief
is part of her inner nature,--something hereditary, racial, ancient
as Africa, as characteristic of her people as the love of rhythms
and melodies totally different from our own musical conceptions, but
possessing, even for the civilized, an inexplicable emotional charm.

_Zombi!_--the word is perhaps full of mystery even for those who made
it. The explanations of those who utter it most often are never quite
lucid: it seems to convey ideas darkly impossible to define,--fancies
belonging to the mind of another race and another era,--unspeakably old.
Perhaps the word in our own language which offers the best analogy is
"goblin": yet the one is not fully translated by the other. Both have,
however, one common ground on which they become indistinguishable,--that
region of the supernatural which is most primitive and most vague; and
the closest relation between the savage and the civilized fancy may be
found in the fears which we call childish,--of darkness, shadows, and
things dreamed. One form of the _zombi_-belief--akin to certain ghostly
superstitions held by various primitive races--would seem to have
been suggested by nightmare,--that form of nightmare in which familiar
persons become slowly and hideously transformed into malevolent beings.
The _zombi_ deludes under the appearance of a travelling companion, an
old comrade--like the desert spirits of the Arabs--or even under the
form of an animal. Consequently the creole negro fears everything living
which he meets after dark upon a lonely road,--a stray horse, a cow,
even a dog; and mothers quell the naughtiness of their children by
the threat of summoning a zombi-cat or a zombi-creature of some kind.
"_Zombi ké nana ou_" (the zombi will gobble thee up) is generally an
effectual menace in the country parts, where it is believed zombis may
be met with any time after sunset. In the city it is thought that their
regular hours are between two and four o'clock in the morning. At least
so Cyrillia says:--

--"Dèezhè, toua-zhè-matin: c'est lhè zombi. Yo ka sòti dèzhè, toua zhè:
c'est lhè yo. A quattrhè yo ka rentré;--angelus ka sonné." (At four
o'clock they go back where they came from, before the _Angelus_ rings.)
Why?

--"_C'est pou moune pas joinne yo dans larue_." (So that people may not
meet with them in the street), Cyrillia answers.

--"Are they afraid of the people, Cyrillia?" I asked.

--"No, they are not afraid; but they do not want people to know their
business" (_pa lè moune ouè zaffai yo_).

Cyrillia also says one must not look out of the window when a dog howls
at night. Such a dog may be a _mauvais vivant_ (evil being): "If he sees
me looking at him he will say, '_Ou tropp quirièse quittée cabane ou pou
gàdé zaffai lezautt_.'" (You are too curious to leave your bed like that
to look at other folks' business.)

--"And what then, Cyrillia?"

--"Then he will put out your eyes,--_y ké coqui zié ou_,--make you
blind."

--"But, Cyrillia," I asked one day, "did you ever see any zombis?"

--"How? I often see them!... They walk about the room at night;--they
walk like people. They sit in the rocking-chairs and rock themselves
very softly, and look at me. I say to them:--'What do you want here?--I
never did any harm to anybody. Go away!' Then they go away."

--"What do they look like?"

--"Like people,--sometimes like beautiful people (_bel moune_). I am
afraid of them. I only see them when there is no light burning. While
the lamp bums before the Virgin they do not come. But sometimes the oil
fails, and the light dies."

In my own room there are dried palm leaves and some withered flowers
fastened to the wall. Cyrillia put them there. They were taken from
the _reposoirs_ (temporary altars) erected for the last Corpus Christi
procession: consequently they are blessed, and ought to keep the zombis
away. That is why they are fastened to the wall, over my bed.

Nobody could be kinder to animals than Cyrillia usually shows herself
to be: all the domestic animals in the neighborhood impose upon
her;--various dogs and cats steal from her impudently, without the least
fear of being beaten. I was therefore very much surprised to see her
one evening catch a flying beetle that approached the light, and
deliberately put its head in the candle-flame. When I asked her how she
could be so cruel, she replied:--

--"_Ah ou pa connaitt choïe pays-ci_." (You do not know Things in this
country.)

The Things thus referred to I found to be supernatural Things. It is
popularly believed that certain winged creatures which circle about
candles at night may be _engagés_ or _envoyés_--wicked people having the
power of transformation, or even zombis "sent" by witches or wizards to
do harm. "There was a woman at Tricolore," Cyrillia says, "who used to
sew a great deal at night; and a big beetle used to come into her room
and fly about the candle, and and bother her very much. One night she
managed to get hold of it, and she singed its head in the candle. Next
day, a woman who was her neighbor came to the house with her head
all tied up. '_Ah! macoumè_,' asked the sewing-woman, '_ça ou ni dans
guiôle-ou?_' And the other answered, very angrily, '_Ou ni toupet mandé
moin ça moin ni dans guiôle moin!--et cété ou qui té brilé guiôle moin
nans chandelle-ou hiè-souè_.'" (You have the impudence to ask what
is the matter with my mouth! and you yourself burned my mouth in your
candle last night.)

Early one morning, about five o'clock, Cyrillia, opening the front door,
saw a huge crab walking down the street. Probably it had escaped from
some barrel; for it is customary here to keep live crabs in barrels and
fatten them,--feeding them with maize, mangoes, and, above all, green
peppers: nobody likes to cook crabs as soon as caught; for they may have
been eating manchineel apples at the river-mouths. Cyrillia uttered
a cry of dismay on seeing that crab; then I heard her talking to
herself:--"_I_ touch it?--never! it can go about its business. How do
I know it is not _an arranged crab_ (_yon crabe rangé_), or an
_envoyé_?--since everybody knows I like crabs. For two sous I can buy
a fine crab and know where it comes from." The crab went on down the
street: everywhere the sight of it created consternation; nobody dared
to touch it; women cried out at it, "_Miserabe!--envoyé Satan!--allez,
maudi!_"--some threw holy water on the crab. Doubtless it reached the
sea in safety. In the evening Cyrillia said: "I think that crab was
a little zombi;--I am going to burn a light all night to keep it from
coming back."

Another day, while I was out, a negro to whom I had lent two francs came
to the house, and paid his debt Cyrillia told me when I came back, and
showed me the money carefully enveloped in a piece of brown paper; but
said I must not touch it,--she would get rid of it for me at the market.
I laughed at her fears; and she observed: "You do not know negroes,
Missié!--negroes are wicked, negroes are jealous! I do not want you to
touch that money, because I have not a good opinion about this affair."

After I began to learn more of the underside of Martinique life, I could
understand the source and justification of many similar superstitions
in simple and uneducated minds. The negro sorcerer is, at worst, only a
poisoner; but he possesses a very curious art which long defied serious
investigation, and in the beginning of the last century was attributed,
even by whites, to diabolical influence. In 1721, 1723, and 1725,
several negroes were burned alive at the stake as wizards in league with
the devil. It was an era of comparative ignorance; but even now
things are done which would astonish the most sceptical and practical
physician. For example, a laborer discharged from a plantation vows
vengeance; and the next morning the whole force of hands--the entire
atelier--are totally disabled from work. Every man and woman on the
place is unable to walk; everybody has one or both legs frightfully
swollen. _Yo te ka pilé malifice_: they have trodden on a "malifice."
What is the "malifice"? All that can be ascertained is that certain
little prickly seeds have been scattered all over the ground, where the
barefooted workers are in the habit of passing. Ordinarily, treading on
these seeds is of no consequence; but it is evident in such a case that
they must have been prepared in a special way,--soaked in some poison,
perhaps snake-venom. At all events, the physician deems it safest to
treat the inflammations after the manner of snake wounds; and after many
days the hands are perhaps able to resume duty.




XI


While Cyrillia is busy with her _canari_, she talks to herself or sings.
She has a low rich voice,--sings strange things, things that have been
forgotten by this generation,--creole songs of the old days, having a
weird rhythm and fractions of tones that are surely African. But more
generally she talks to herself, as all the Martiniquaises do: it is
a continual murmur as of a stream. At first I used to think she was
talking to somebody else, and would call out:--

--"_Épi quiless moune ça ou ka pàlé-à?_"

But she would always answer:--"_Moin ka pàlé anni cò moin_" (I am only
talking to my own body), which is the creole expression for talking to
oneself.

--"And what are you talking so much to your own body about, Cyrillia?"

--"I am talking about my own little affairs" (_ti zaffai-moin_).... That
is all that I could ever draw from her.

But when not working, she will sit for hours looking out of the window.
In this she resembles the kitten: both seem to find the same silent
pleasure in watching the street, or the green heights that rise above
its roofs,--the Morne d'Orange. Occasionally at such times she will
break the silence in the strangest way, if she thinks I am not too busy
with my papers to answer a question:--

--"_Missié?_"--timidly.

--"Eh?"

--"_Di moin, chè, ti manmaille dans pays ou, toutt piti, piti,--ess ça
pàlé Anglais?_" (Do the little children in my country--the very, very
little children--talk English?)

--"Why, certainly, Cyrillia."

--"_Toutt piti, piti?_"--with growing surprise.

--"Why, of course!"

--"_C'est drôle, ça_" (It is queer, that!) She cannot understand it.

--"And the little _manmaille_ in Martinique, Cyrillia--_toutt
piti, piti_,--don't they talk creole?"

--"'_Oui; mais toutt moune ka pâlé nègue: ça facile_." (Yes; but anybody
can talk negro--that is easy to learn.)




XII


Cyrillia's room has no furniture in it: the Martinique bonne lives as
simply and as rudely as a domestic animal. One thin mattress covered
with a sheet, and elevated from the floor only by a léfant, forms her
bed. The _léfant_, or "elephant," is composed of two thick square pieces
of coarse hard mattress stuffed with shavings, and placed
end to end. Cyrillia has a good pillow, however,--_bourré épi
flêches-canne_,--filled with the plumes of the sugar-cane. A cheap
trunk with broken hinges contains her modest little wardrobe: a few
_mouchoirs_, or kerchiefs, used for head-dresses, a spare _douillette_,
or long robe, and some tattered linen. Still she is always clean, neat,
fresh-looking. I see a pair of sandals in the corner,--such as the women
of the country sometimes wear--wooden soles with a leather band for the
instep, and two little straps; but she never puts them on. Fastened to
the wall are two French prints--lithographs: one representing Victor
Hugo's _Esmeralda_ in prison with her pet goat; the other, Lamartine's
_Laurence_ with her fawn. Both are very old and stained and bitten by
the _bête-à-ciseau_, a species of _lepisma_, which destroys books
and papers, and everything it can find exposed. On a shelf are two
bottles,--one filled with holy water; another with _tafia camphrée_
(camphor dissolved in tafia), which is Cyrillia's sole remedy for colds,
fevers, headaches--all maladies not of a very fatal description. There
are also a little woollen monkey, about three inches high--the
dusty plaything of a long-dead child;--an image of the Virgin, even
smaller;--and a broken cup with fresh bright blossoms in it, the
Virgin's flower-offering;--and the Virgin's invariable lamp--a
night-light, a little wick floating on olive-oil in a tiny glass.

I know that Cyrillia must have bought these flowers--they are garden
flowers--at the Marchè du Fort. There are always old women sitting there
who sell nothing else but bouquets for the Virgin,--and who cry out to
passers-by:--"_Gagné ti bouquet pou Viège-ou, chè!_... Buy a nosegay,
dear, for your Virgin;--she is asking you for one;--give her a little
one, _chè cocott_."... Cyrillia says you must not smell the flowers you
give the Virgin: it would be stealing from her.... The little lamp is
always lighted at six o'clock. At six o'clock the Virgin is supposed to
pass through all the streets of St. Pierre, and wherever a lamp burns
before her image, she enters there and blesses that house. "_Faut limé
lampe ou pou fai la-Viège passé dans caïe-ou_," says Cyrillia. (You must
light the lamp to make the Virgin come into your house.)... Cyrillia
often talks to her little image, exactly as if it were a baby,--calls it
pet names,--asks if it is content with the flowers.

This image of the Virgin is broken: it is only half a Virgin,--the upper
half. Cyrillia has arranged it so, nevertheless, that had I not been
very inquisitive I should never have divined its mishap. She found a
small broken powder-box without a lid,--probably thrown negligently out
of a boudoir window by some wealthy beauty: she filled this little box
with straw, and fixed the mutilated image upright within it, so that you
could never suspect the loss of its feet. The Virgin looks very funny,
thus peeping over the edge of her little box,--looks like a broken toy,
which a child has been trying to mend. But this Virgin has offerings
too: Cyrillia buys flowers for her, and sticks them all round her,
between the edge of the powder-box and the straw. After all, Cyrillia's
Virgin is quite as serious a fact as any image of silver or of ivory in
the homes of the rich: probably the prayers said to her are more simply
beautiful, and more direct from the heart, than many daily murmured
before the _chapelles_ of luxurious homes. And the more one looks at it,
the more one feels that it were almost wicked to smile at this little
broken toy of faith.

--"Cyrillia, _mafi_," I asked her one day, after my discovery of the
little Virgin,--"would you not like me to buy a _chapelle_ for you?"
The _chapelle_ is the little bracket-altar, together with images and
ornaments, to be found in every creole bedroom.

--"_Mais non, Missié_," she answered, smiling, "_moin aimein ti Viège
moin, pa lè gagnin dautt_. I love my little Virgin: do not want any
other. I have seen much trouble: she was with me in my trouble;--she
heard my prayers. It would be wicked for me to throw her away. When I
have a sou to spare, I buy flowers for her;--when I have no money, I
climb the mornes, and pick pretty buds for her.... But why should Missié
want to buy me a _chapelle?_--Missié is a Protestant?"

--"I thought it might give you pleasure, Cyrillia."

--"No, Missié, I thank you; it would not give me pleasure. But Missié
could give me something else which would make me very happy--I often
thought of asking Missié...but--"


[Illustration: CREOLE WOMEN
_In their gay dresses with their brilliant "maárases"
and "foulards they seem always in gala array._]


--"Tell me what it is, Cyrillia."

She remained silent a moment, then said:--

--"Missié makes photographs...."

--"You want a photograph of yourself, Cyrillia?"

--"Oh! no, Missié, I am too ugly and too old. But I have a daughter. She
is beautiful--_yon bel bois_,--like a beautiful tree, as we say here. I
would like so much to have her picture taken."

A photographic instrument belonging to a clumsy amateur suggested this
request to Cyrillia. I could not attempt such work successfully; but I
gave her a note to a photographer of much skill; and a few days later
the portrait was sent to the house. Cyrillia's daughter was certainly a
comely girl,--tall and almost gold-colored, with pleasing features; and
the photograph looked very nice, though less nice than the original.
Half the beauty of these people is a beauty of tint,--a tint so
exquisite sometimes that I have even heard white creoles declare
no white complexion compares with it: the greater part of the charm
remaining is grace,--the grace of movement; and neither of these can be
rendered by photography. I had the portrait framed for Cyrillia, to hang
up beside her little pictures.

When it came, she was not in; I put it in her room, and waited to see
the effect. On returning, she entered there; and I did not see her for
so long a time that I stole to the door of the chamber to observe her.
She was standing before the portrait,--looking at it, talking to it as
if it were alive. "_Yche moin, yche moin!... Oui! ou toutt bel!--yche
moin bel_." (My child, my child!... Yes, thou art all beautiful: my
child is beautiful.) All at once she turned--perhaps she noticed
my shadow, or felt my presence in some way: her eyes were wet;--she
started, flushed, then laughed.

--"Ah! Missié, you watch me;--_ou guette moin_.... But she is my child.
Why should I not love her?... She looks so beautiful there."

--"She is beautiful, Cyrillia;--I love to see you love her."

She gazed at the picture a little longer in silence;--then turned to me
again, and asked earnestly:--

--"_Pouki yo ja ka fai pòtrai palé--anh?... pisse yo ka tiré y toutt
samm ou: c'est ou-menm!... Yo douè fai y palé 'tou_."

(Why do they not make a portrait talk,--tell me? For they draw it just
all like you!--it is yourself: they ought to make it talk.)

--"Perhaps they will be able to do something like that one of these
days, Cyrillia."

--"Ah! that would be so nice. Then I could talk to her. _C'est yon bel
moune moin fai--y bel, joli moune!... Moin sé causé épi y_."...


... And I, watching her beautiful childish emotion, thought:--Cursed
be the cruelty that would persuade itself that one soul may be
like another,--that one affection may be replaced by another,--that
individual goodness is not a thing apart, original, untwinned on earth,
but only the general characteristic of a class or type, to be sought and
found and utilized at will!...
Self-curséd he who denies the divinity of love! Each heart, each brain
in the billions of humanity,--even so surely as sorrow lives,--feels and
thinks in some special way unlike any other; and goodness in each
has its unlikeness to all other goodness,--and thus its own infinite
preciousness; for however humble, however small, it is something all
alone, and God never repeats his work. No heart-beat is cheap, no
gentleness is despicable, no kindness is common; and Death, in removing
a life--the simplest life ignored,--removes what never will reappear
through the eternity of eternities,--since every being is the sum of
a chain of experiences infinitely varied from all others.... To some
Cyrillia's happy tears might bring a smile: to me that smile would seem
the unforgivable sin against the Giver of Life!...




[Illustration]




"PA COMBINÉ, CHÈ!"


I


More finely than any term in our tongue does the French word
_frisson_ express that faint shiver--as of a ghostly touch thrilling
from hair to feet--which intense pleasure sometimes gives, and which is
felt most often and most strongly in childhood, when the imagination is
still so sensitive and so powerful that one's whole being trembles
to the vibration of a fancy. And this electric word best expresses,
I think, that long thrill of amazed delight inspired by the first
knowledge of the tropic world,--a sensation of weirdness in beauty, like
the effect, in child-days, of fairy tales and stories of phantom isles.

For all unreal seems the vision of it. The transfiguration of all
things by the stupendous light and the strange vapors of the West Indian
sea,--the interorbing of flood and sky in blinding azure,--the sudden
spirings of gem-tinted coast from the ocean,--the iris-colors and
astounding shapes of the hills,--the unimaginable magnificence of
palms,--the high woods veiled and swathed in vines that blaze like
emerald: all remind you in some queer way of things half forgotten,--the
fables of enchantment. Enchantment it is indeed--but only the
enchantment of that Great Wizard, the Sun, whose power you are scarcely
beginning to know.

And into the life of the tropical city you enter as in dreams one enters
into the life of a dead century. In all the quaint streets--over whose
luminous yellow façades the beautiful burning violet of the sky appears
as if but a few feet away--you see youth good to look upon as ripe
fruit; and the speech of the people is soft as a coo; and eyes of brown
girls caress you with a passing look.... Love's world, you may have
heard, has few restraints here, where Nature ever seems to cry out, like
the swart seller of corossoles:--"_ça qui le doudoux?_"...

How often in some passing figure does one discern an ideal almost
realized, and forbear to follow it with untired gaze only when another,
another, and yet another, come to provoke the same aesthetic fancy,--to
win the same unspoken praise! How often does one long for artist's power
to fix the fleeting lines, to catch the color, to seize the whole exotic
charm of some special type!... One finds a strange charm even in the
timbre of these voices,--these half-breed voices, always with a tendency
to contralto, and vibrant as ringing silver. What is that mysterious
quality in a voice which has power to make the pulse beat faster, even
when the singer is unseen?... do only the birds know?

... It seems to you that you could never weary of watching this
picturesque life,--of studying the costumes, brilliant with butterfly
colors,--and the statuesque semi-nudity of laboring hundreds,--and the
untaught grace of attitudes,--and the simplicity of manners. Each day
brings some new pleasure of surprise;--even from the window of your
lodging you are ever noting something novel, something to delight the
sense of oddity or beauty.... Even in your room everything interests
you, because of its queerness or quaintness: you become fond of the
objects about you,--the great noiseless rocking-chairs that lull to
sleep;--the immense bed (_lit-à-bateau_) of heavy polished wood, with
its richly carven sides reaching down to the very floor;--and its
invariable companion, the little couch or _sopha_, similarly shaped
but much narrower, used only for the siesta;--and the thick red earthen
vessels (_dobannes_) which keep your drinking-water cool on the hottest
days, but which are always filled thrice between sunrise and sunset with
clear water from the mountain,--_dleau toutt vivant_, "all alive";--and
the _verrines_, tall glass vases with stems of bronze in which your
candle will burn steadily despite a draught;--and even those funny
little angels and Virgins which look at you from their bracket in the
corner, over the oil lamp you are presumed to kindle nightly in their
honor, however great a heretic you may be.... You adopt at once, and
without reservation, those creole home habits which are the result of
centuries of experience with climate,--abstention from solid food before
the middle of the day, repose after the noon meal;--and you find each
repast an experience as curious as it is agreeable. It is not at all
difficult to accustom oneself to green pease stewed with sugar, eggs
mixed with tomatoes, salt fish stewed in milk, palmiste pith made into
salad, grated cocoa formed into rich cakes, and dishes of titiri cooked
in oil,--the minuscule fish, of which a thousand will scarcely fill
a saucer. Above all, you are astonished by the endless variety of
vegetables and fruits, of all conceivable shapes and inconceivable
flavors.

And it does not seem possible that even the simplest little recurrences
of this antiquated, gentle home-life could ever prove wearisome by daily
repetition through the months and years. The musical greeting of
the colored child, tapping at your door before sunrise,--"_Bonjou',
Missié_,"--as she brings your cup of black hot coffee and slice of
corossole;--the smile of the silent brown girl who carries your meals
up-stairs in a tray poised upon her brightly coiffed head, and who
stands by while you dine, watching every chance to serve, treading
quite silently with her pretty bare feet;--the pleasant manners of
the _màchanne_ who brings your fruit, the _porteuse_ who delivers your
bread, the _blanchisseuse_ who washes your linen at the river,--and all
the kindly folk who circle about your existence, with their trays and
turbans, their _foulards_ and _douillettes_, their primitive grace
and creole chatter: these can never cease to have a charm for you. You
cannot fail to be touched also by the amusing solicitude of these good
people for your health, because you are a stranger: their advice about
hours to go out and hours to stay at home,--about roads to follow and
paths to avoid on account of snakes,--about removing your hat and
coat, or drinking while warm.... Should you fall ill, this solicitude
intensifies to devotion; you are tirelessly tended;--the good people
will exhaust their wonderful knowledge of herbs to get you well,--will
climb the mornes even at midnight, in spite of the risk of snakes and
fear of zombis, to gather strange plants by the light of a lantern.
Natural joyousness, natural kindliness, heart-felt desire to please,
childish capacity of being delighted with trifles,--seem characteristic
of all this colored population. It is turning its best side towards you,
no doubt; but the side of the nature made visible appears none the less
agreeable because you suspect there is another which you have not seen.
What kindly inventiveness is displayed in contriving surprises for you,
or in finding some queer thing to show you,--some fantastic plant,
or grotesque fish, or singular bird! What apparent pleasure in taking
trouble to gratify,--what innocent frankness of sympathy!... Childishly
beautiful seems the readiness of this tinted race to compassionate: you
do not reflect that it is also a savage trait, while the charm of its
novelty is yet upon you. No one is ashamed to shed tears for the death
of a pet animal; any mishap to a child creates excitement, and evokes an
immediate volunteering of services. And this compassionate sentiment is
often extended, in a semi-poetical way, even to inanimate objects. One
June morning, I remember, a three-masted schooner lying in the bay
took fire, and had to be set adrift. An immense crowd gathered on the
wharves; and I saw many curious manifestations of grief,--such grief,
perhaps, as an infant feels for the misfortune of a toy it imagines to
possess feeling, but not the less sincere because unreasoning. As the
flames climbed the rigging, and the masts fell, the crowd moaned as
though looking upon some human tragedy; and everywhere one could hear
such strange cries of pity as, "_Pauv' malhérè!_" (poor unfortunate),
"_pauv' diabe!_"... "_Toutt baggaïe-y pou allé, casse!_" (All its
things-to-go-with are broken!) sobbed a girl, with tears streaming down
her cheeks.... She seemed to believe it was alive....

... And day by day the artlessness of this exotic humanity touches you
more;--day by day this savage, somnolent, splendid Nature--delighting in
furious color--bewitches you more. Already the anticipated necessity
of having to leave it all some day--the far-seen pain of bidding it
farewell--weighs upon you, even in dreams.



II


Reader, if you be of those who have longed in vain for a glimpse of that
tropic world,--tales of whose beauty charmed your childhood, and made
stronger upon you that weird mesmerism of the sea which pulls at the
heart of a boy,--one who had longed like you, and who, chance-led,
beheld at last the fulfilment of the wish, can swear to you that the
magnificence of the reality far excels the imagining. Those who know
only the lands in which all processes for the satisfaction of human
wants have been perfected under the terrible stimulus of necessity, can
little guess the witchery of that Nature ruling the zones of color and
of light. Within their primeval circles, the earth remains radiant and
young as in that preglacial time whereof some transmitted memory
may have created the hundred traditions of an Age of Gold. And the
prediction of a paradise to come,--a phantom realm of rest and perpetual
light: may this not have been but a sum of the remembrances and the
yearnings of man first exiled from his heritage,--a dream born of the
great nostalgia of races migrating to people the pallid North?...


... But with the realization of the hope to know this magical Nature you
learn that the actuality varies from the preconceived ideal otherwise
than in surpassing it. Unless you enter the torrid world equipped with
scientific knowledge extraordinary, your anticipations are likely to be
at fault. Perhaps you had pictured to yourself the effect of perpetual
summer as a physical delight,--something like an indefinite prolongation
of the fairest summer weather ever enjoyed at home. Probably you had
heard of fevers, risks of acclimatization, intense heat, and a swarming
of venomous creatures; but you may nevertheless believe you know what
precautions to take; and published statistics of climatic temperature
may have persuaded you that the heat is not difficult to bear. By that
enervation to which all white dwellers in the tropics are subject you
may have understood a pleasant languor,--a painless disinclination
to effort in a country where physical effort is less needed than
elsewhere,--a soft temptation to idle away the hours in a hammock, under
the shade of giant trees. Perhaps you have read, with eyes of faith,
that torpor of the body is favorable to activity of the mind, and
therefore believe that the intellectual powers can be stimulated and
strengthened by tropical influences:--you suppose that enervation will
reveal itself only as a beatific indolence which will leave the brain
free to think with lucidity, or to revel in romantic dreams.




III


You are not at first undeceived;--the disillusion is long delayed.
Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
(this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the
same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity
about you,--for idyllic scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval
forest, and the valleys threaded by a hundred brooks. I know not whether
the faces and forms that you seek will be revealed to you;--but you
will not be able to complain for the lack of idyllic loveliness in the
commonest landscape. Whatever artistic knowledge you possess will merely
teach you the more to wonder at the luxuriant purple of the sea, the
violet opulence of the sky, the violent beauty of foliage greens, the
lilac tints of evening, and the color-enchantments distance gives in
an atmosphere full of iridescent power,--the amethysts and agates, the
pearls and ghostly golds, of far mountainings. Never, you imagine,
never could one tire of wandering through those marvellous valleys,--of
climbing the silent roads under emeraldine shadow to heights from which
the city seems but a few inches long, and the moored ships tinier than
gnats that cling to a mirror,--or of swimming in that blue bay whose
clear flood stays warm through all the year.[53] Or, standing alone,
in some aisle of colossal palms, where humming-birds are flashing and
shooting like a showering of jewel-fires, you feel how weak the skill
of poet or painter to fix the sensation of that white-pillared imperial
splendor;--and you think you know why creoles exiled by necessity to
colder lands may sicken for love of their own,--die of home-yearning, as
did many a one in far Louisiana, after the political tragedies of 1848....


[Illustration: DIDIER SPRINGS
_At the end of a gorgeous ride, in a deep ravine we
found the spring--warm, effervescent water gushing
from the depths of the earth._]


... But you are not a creole, and must pay tribute of suffering to the
climate of the tropics. You will have to learn that a temperature of
90° Fahr. in the tropics is by no means the same thing as 90° Fahr. in
Europe or the United States;--that the mornes cannot be climbed with
safety during the hotter hours of the afternoon;--that by taking a long
walk you incur serious danger of catching a fever;--that to enter the
high woods, a path must be hewn with the cutlass through the creepers
and vines and undergrowth,--among snakes, venomous insects, venomous
plants, and malarial exhalations;--that the finest blown dust is full
of irritant and invisible enemies;--that it is folly to seek repose on
a sward, or in the shade of trees,--particularly under tamarinds. Only
after you have by experience become well convinced of these facts can
you begin to comprehend something general in regard to West Indian
conditions of life.


[Footnote 53: Rufz remarks that the first effect of this climate of the
Antilles is a sort of general physical excitement, an exaltation, a
sense of unaccustomed strength,--which begets the desire of immediate
action to discharge the surplus of nervous force. "Then all
distances seem brief;--the greatest fatigues are braved without
hesitation."--_Études._]




IV


... Slowly the knowledge comes.... For months the vitality of a strong
European (the American constitution bears the test even better) may
resist the debilitating climate: perhaps the stranger will flatter
himself that, like men habituated to heavy labor in stifling
warmth,--those toiling in mines, in founderies in engine-rooms of ships,
at iron-furnaces,--so he too may become accustomed, without losing his
strength to the continuous draining of the pores, to the exhausting
force of this strange motionless heat which compels change of clothing
many times a day. But gradually he finds that it is not heat alone which
is debilitating him, but the weight and septic nature of an atmosphere
charged with vapor, with electricity, with unknown agents not less
inimical to human existence than propitious to vegetal luxuriance. If
he has learned those rules of careful living which served him well in a
temperate climate, he will not be likely to abandon them among his new
surroundings; and they will help him; no doubt,--particularly if he be
prudent enough to avoid the sea-coast at night, and all exposure to dews
or early morning mists, and all severe physical strain. Nevertheless,
he becomes slowly conscious of changes extraordinary going on within
him,--in especial, a continual sensation of weight in the brain, daily
growing, and compelling frequent repose;--also a curious heightening
of nervous sensibility to atmospheric changes, to tastes and odors, to
pleasure and pain. Total loss of appetite soon teaches him to follow the
local custom of eating nothing solid before mid-day, and enables him
to divine how largely the necessity for caloric enters into the
food-consumption of northern races. He becomes abstemious, eats
sparingly, and discovers his palate to have become oddly exacting--finds
that certain fruits and drinks are indeed, as the creoles assert,
appropriate only to particular physical conditions corresponding with
particular hours of the day. Corossole is only to be eaten in the
morning, after black coffee;--vermouth is good to drink only between the
hours of nine and half-past ten;--rum or other strong liquor only before
meals or after fatigue;--claret or wine only during a repast, and then
very sparingly,--for, strangely enough, wine is found to be injurious
in a country where stronger liquors are considered among the prime
necessaries of existence.

And he expected, at the worst, to feel lazy, to lose some physical
energy! But this is no mere languor which now begins to oppress him;--it
is a sense of vital exhaustion painful as the misery of convalescence:
the least effort provokes a perspiration profuse enough to saturate
clothing, and the limbs ache as from muscular overstrain;--the lightest
attire feels almost insupportable;--the idea of sleeping even under a
sheet is torture, for the weight of a silken handkerchief is discomfort.
One wishes one could live as a savage,--naked in the heat. One burns
with a thirst impossible to assuage--feels a desire for stimulants, a
sense of difficulty in breathing, occasional quickenings of the heart's
action so violent as to alarm. Then comes at last the absolute dread of
physical exertion. Some slight relief might be obtained, no doubt, by
resigning oneself forthwith to adopt the gentle indolent manners of the
white creoles, who do not walk when it is possible to ride, and never
ride if it is equally convenient to drive;--but the northern nature
generally refuses to accept this ultimate necessity without a protracted
and painful struggle.

... Not even then has the stranger fully divined the evil power of this
tropical climate, which remodels the characters of races within a couple
of generations,--changing the shape of the skeleton,--deepening
the cavities of the orbits to protect the eye from the flood of
light,--transforming the blood,--darkening the skin. Following upon the
nervous modifications of the first few months come modifications and
changes of a yet graver kind;--with the loss of bodily energy ensues a
more than corresponding loss of mental activity and strength. The whole
range of thought diminishes, contracts,--shrinks to that narrowest of
circles which surrounds the physical sell, the inner ring of merely
material sensation: the memory weakens appallingly;--the mind operates
faintly, slowly, incoherently,--almost as in dreams. Serious reading,
vigorous thinking, become impossible. You doze over the most important
project;--you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating of books.

Then comes the vain revolt, the fruitless desperate striving with this
occult power which numbs the memory and enchants the will. Against
the set resolve to think, to act, to study, there is a hostile rush of
unfamiliar pain to the temples, to the eyes, to the nerve centres of
the brain; and a great weight is somewhere in the head, always growing
heavier: then comes a drowsiness that overpowers and stupefies, like the
effect of a narcotic. And this obligation to sleep, to sink into coma,
will impose itself just so surely as you venture to attempt any mental
work in leisure hours, after the noon repast, or during the heat of the
afternoon. Yet at night you can scarcely sleep. Repose is made feverish
by a still heat that keeps the skin drenched with thick sweat, or by
a perpetual, unaccountable, tingling and prickling of the whole
body-surface. With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and
slumber comes,--a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and
perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such
a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you
keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation
that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden
rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will
had ebbed away,--all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the
night....




V


It might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain class of
invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful stimulant,--a
tonic medicine which may produce astonishing results within a fixed
time,--but which if taken beyond that time will prove dangerous. After
a certain number of months, your first enthusiasm with your new
surroundings dies out;--even Nature ceases to affect the senses in the
same way: the _frisson_ ceases to come to you. Meanwhile you may have
striven to become as much as possible a part of the exotic life into
which you have entered,--may have adopted its customs, learned its
language. But you cannot mix with it mentally;--You circulate only as an
oil-drop in its current. You still feel yourself alone.

The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six
minutes;--perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the brevity
of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all activity ceases with
sundown: there is no going outside of the city after dark, because of
snakes;--club life here ends at the hour it only begins abroad;--there
is no visiting of evenings; after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone
prepares to retire. And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time
for social intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself
to this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European
or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,--at least some
interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours during the
suspension of business after noon, or those following the closing of
offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy men may find time
for such relaxation; and these very hours have been always devoted to
restorative sleep by the native population ever since the colony began.
Naturally, therefore, the stranger dreads the coming of the darkness,
the inevitable isolation of long sleepless hours. And if he seek those
solaces for loneliness which he was wont to seek at home,--reading,
study,--he is made to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of
all libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter,
means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad to
obtain even a review, and wait months for its coming. And this
mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one feels less
inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that single enjoyment,
which at first rendered a man indifferent to other pleasures,--the
delight of being alone with tropical Nature,--becomes more difficult to
indulge. When lethargy has totally mastered habit and purpose, and you
must at last confess yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber,
or at best from a carriage window,--then, indeed, the want of all
literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to
discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,--from climate as
well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see young girls
passing to walk right across the island and back before sunset, under
burdens difficult for a strong man to lift to his shoulder;--the same
journey on horseback would now weary you for days. You wonder of what
flesh and blood can these people be made,--what wonderful vitality
lies in those slender woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and
despite their astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight
and touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this savage
strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand better how
mighty the working of those powers which temper races and shape race
habits in accordance with environment.

... Ultimately, if destined for acclimatation, you will cease to suffer
from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long period of
nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must thin the blood,
soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint of health to a dead
brown. You will have to learn that intellectual pursuits can be
persisted in only at risk of life;--that in this part of the world
there is nothing to do but to plant cane and cocoa, and make rum,
and cultivate tobacco,--or open a magazine for the sale of Madras
handkerchiefs and _foulards_,--and eat, drink, sleep, perspire. You
will understand why the tropics settled by European races produce no
sciences, arts, or literature,--why the habits and the thoughts of
other centuries still prevail where Time itself moves slowly as though
enfeebled by the heat.

And with the compulsory indolence of your life, the long exacerbation
of the nervous system, will come the first pain of nostalgia,--the first
weariness of the tropics. It is not that Nature can become ever less
lovely to your sight; but that the tantalization of her dangerous
beauty, which you may enjoy only at a safe distance, exasperates at
last. The colors that at first bewitched will vex your eyes by their
violence;--the creole life that appeared so simple, so gentle, will
reveal dulnesses and discomforts undreamed of. You will ask yourself how
much longer can you endure the prodigious light, and the furnace heat
of blinding blue days, and the void misery of sleepless nights, and the
curse of insects, and the sound of the mandibles of enormous roaches
devouring the few books in your possession. You will grow weary of the
grace of the palms, of the gemmy colors of the ever-clouded peaks, of
the sight of the high woods made impenetrable by lianas and vines and
serpents. You will weary even of the tepid sea, because to enjoy it as a
swimmer you must rise and go out at hours while the morning air is
still chill and heavy with miasma;--you will weary, above all, of tropic
fruits, and feel that you would gladly pay a hundred francs for the
momentary pleasure of biting into one rosy juicy Northern apple.




VI


--But if you believe this disillusion perpetual,--if you fancy the old
bewitchment has spent all its force upon you,--you do not know this
Nature. She is not done with you yet: she has only torpefied your
energies a little. Of your willingness to obey her, she takes no
cognizance;--she ignores human purposes, knows only molecules and their
combinations; and the blind blood in your veins,--thick with Northern
heat and habit,--is still in dumb desperate rebellion against her.

Perhaps she will quell this revolt forever,--thus:--

One day, in the second hour of the afternoon, a few moments after
leaving home, there will come to you a sensation such as you have never
known before: a sudden weird fear of the light.

It seems to you that the blue sky-fire is burning down into your
brain,--that the flare of the white pavements and yellow walls is
piercing somehow into your life,--creating an unfamiliar mental
confusion,--blurring out thought.... Is the whole world taking
fire?... The flaming azure of the sea dazzles and pains like a
crucible-glow;--the green of the mornes flickers and blazes in some
amazing way.... Then dizziness inexpressible: you grope with eyes shut
fast--afraid to open them again in that stupefying torrefaction,--moving
automatically,--vaguely knowing you must get out of the flaring and
flashing,--somewhere, anywhere away from the white wrath of the sun,
and the green fire of the hills, and the monstrous color of the
sea.... Then, remembering nothing, you find yourself in bed,--with an
insupportable sense of weight at the back of the head,--a pulse beating
furiously,--and a strange sharp pain at intervals stinging through your
eyes.... And the pain grows, expands,--fills all the skull,--forces you
to cry out, replaces all other sensations except a weak consciousness,
vanishing and recurring, that you are very sick, more sick than ever
before in all your life.


... And with the tedious ebbing of the long fierce fever, all the heat
seems to pass from your veins. You can no longer imagine, as before,
that it would be delicious to die of cold;--you shiver even with all the
windows closed;--you feel currents of air,--imperceptible to nerves in
a natural condition,--which shock like a dash of cold water, whenever
doors are opened and closed; the very moisture upon your forehead is
icy. What you now wish for are stimulants and warmth. Your blood has
been changed;--tropic Nature has been good to you: she is preparing you
to dwell with her.

... Gradually, under the kind nursing of those colored people,--among
whom, as a stranger, your lot will probably be cast,--you recover
strength; and perhaps it will seem to you that the pain of lying a
while in the Shadow of Death is more than compensated by this rare and
touching experience of human goodness. How tirelessly watchful,--how
naïvely sympathetic,--how utterly self-sacrificing these women-natures
are! Patiently, through weeks of stifling days and sleepless
nights,--cruelly unnatural to them, for their life is in the open
air,--they struggle to save without one murmur of fatigue, without
heed of their most ordinary physical wants, without a thought of
recompense;--trusting to their own skill when the physician abandons
hope,--climbing to the woods for herbs when medicines prove, without
avail. The dream of angels holds nothing sweeter than this reality of
woman's tenderness.

And simultaneously with the return of force, you may wonder whether
this sickness has not sharpened your senses in some extraordinary
way,--especially hearing, sight, and smell. Once well enough to
be removed without danger, you will be taken up into the mountains
somewhere,--for change of air; and there it will seem to you, perhaps,
that never before did you feel so acutely the pleasure of perfumes,--of
color-tones,--of the timbre of voices. You have simply been
acclimated.... And suddenly the old fascination of tropic Nature seizes
you again,--more strongly than in the first days;--the _frisson_ of
delight returns; the joy of it thrills through all your blood,--making a
great fulness at your heart as of unutterable desire to give thanks....




VII


... My friend Felicien had come to the colony fresh from the region of
the Vosges, with the muscles and energies of a mountaineer, and cheeks
pink as a French country-girl's;--he had never seemed to me physically
adapted for acclimation; and I feared much for him on hearing of his
first serious illness. Then the news of his convalescence came to me as
a grateful surprise. But I did not feel reassured by his appearance the
first evening I called at the little house to which he had been removed,
on the brow of a green height overlooking the town. I found him seated
in a _berceuse_ on the veranda. How wan he was, and how spectral his
smile of welcome,--as he held out to me a hand that seemed all of bone!

... We chatted there a while. It had been one of those tropic days whose
charm interpenetrates and blends with all the subtler life of sensation,
and becomes a luminous part of it forever,--steeping all after-dreams
of ideal peace in supernal glory of color,--transfiguring all fancies of
the pure joy of being. Azure to the sea-line the sky had remained since
morning; and the trade-wind, warm as a caress, never brought even one
gauzy cloud to veil the naked beauty of the peaks.

And the sun was yellowing,--as only over the tropics he yellows to
his death. Lilac tones slowly spread through sea and heaven from the
west;--mornes facing the light began to take wondrous glowing color,--a
tone of green so fiery that it looked as though all the rich sap of
their woods were phosphorescing. Shadows blued;--far peaks took
tinting that scarcely seemed of earth,--iridescent violets and
purples interchanging through vapor of gold.... Such the colors of the
_carangue_, when the beautiful tropic fish is turned in the light, and
its gem-greens shift to rich azure and prism-purple.

Reclining in our chairs, we watched the strange splendor from the
veranda of the little cottage,--saw the peaked land slowly steep itself
in the aureate glow,--the changing color of the verdured mornes, and of
the sweep of circling sea. Tiny birds, bosomed with fire, were shooting
by in long curves, like embers flung by invisible hands. From far below,
the murmur of the city rose to us,--a stormy hum. So motionless we
remained that the green and gray lizards were putting out their heads
from behind the columns of the veranda to stare at us,--as if wondering
whether we were really alive. I turned my head suddenly to look at
two queer butterflies; and all the lizards hid themselves again.
_Papillon-lanmò_,--Death's butterflies,--these were called in the speech
of the people: their broad wings were black like blackest velvet;--as
they fluttered against the yellow light, they looked like silhouettes of
butterflies. Always through my memory of that wondrous evening,--when I
little thought I was seeing my friend's face for the last time,--there
slowly passes the black palpitation of those wings....

... I had been chatting with Felicien about various things which I
thought might have a cheerful interest for him; and more than once I
had been happy to see him smile.... But our converse waned.
The ever-magnifying splendor before us had been mesmerizing our
senses,--slowly overpowering our wills with the amazement of its beauty.
Then, as the sun's disk--enormous,--blinding gold--touched the lilac
flood, and the stupendous orange glow flamed up to the very zenith, we
found ourselyes awed at last into silence.

The orange in the west deepened into vermilion. Softly and very swiftly
night rose like an indigo exhalation from the land,--filling the
valleys, flooding the gorges, blackening the woods, leaving only the
points of the peaks a while to catch the crimson glow. Forests
and fields began to utter a rushing sound as of torrents, always
deepening,--made up of the instrumentation and the voices of numberless
little beings: clangings as of hammered iron, ringings as of dropping
silver upon a stone, the dry bleatings of the _cabritt-bois_, and the
chirruping of tree-frogs, and the _k-i-i-i-i-i-i_ of crickets. Immense
trembling sparks began to rise and fall among the shadows,--twinkling
out and disappearing all mysteriously: these were the fire-flies
awakening. Then about the branches of the _bois-canon_ black shapes
began to hover, which were not birds--shapes flitting processionally
without any noise; each one in turn resting a moment as to nibble
something at the end of a bough;--then yielding place to another, and
circling away, to return again from the other side...the _guimbos_, the
great bats.

But we were silent, with the emotion of sunset still upon us: that
ghostly emotion which is the transmitted experience of a race,--the sum
of ancestral experiences innumerable,--the mingled joy and pain
of a million years.... Suddenly a sweet voice pierced the
stillness,--pleading:--

--"_Pa combiné, chè!--pa combiné conm ça!_" (Do not think, dear!--do not
think like that!)

... Only less beautiful than the sunset she seemed, this slender
half-breed, who had come all unperceived behind us, treading soundlessly
with her slim bare feet.... "And you, Missié", she said to me, in a tone
of gentle reproach;--"you are his friend! why do you let him think? It
is thinking that will prevent him getting well."

_Combiné_ in creole signifies to think intently, and therefore to be
unhappy,--because, with this artless race, as with children, to
think intensely about anything is possible only under great stress of
suffering.

--"_Pa combiné,--non, chè_," she repeated, plaintively, stroking
Felicien's hair. "It is thinking that makes us old.... And it is time to
bid your friend good-night."...

--"She is so good," said Felicien, smiling to make her pleased;--"I
could never tell you how good. But she does not understand. She believes
I suffer if I am silent. She is contented only when she sees me laugh;
and so she will tell me creole stories by the hour to keep me amused, as
if I were a child."...

As he spoke she slipped an arm about his neck.

--"_Doudoux_," she persisted;--and her voice was a dove's coo,--"_Si ou
ainmein moin, pa combiné-non!_"


And in her strange exotic beauty, her savage grace, her supple caress,
the velvet witchery of her eyes,--it seemed to me that I beheld a
something imaged, not of herself, nor of the moment only,--a something
weirdly sensuous: the Spirit of tropic Nature made golden flesh, and
murmuring to each lured wanderer:--"_If thou wouldst love me, do not
think_"...




[Illustration]




YÉ


I


Almost every night, just before bedtime, I hear some group of children
in the street telling stories to each other. Stories, enigmas or
_tim-tim_, and songs, and round games, are the joy of child-life
here,--whether rich or poor. I am particularly fond of listening to the
stories,--which seem to me the oddest stories I ever heard.

I succeeded in getting several dictated to me, so that I could write
them;--others were written for me by creole friends, with better
success. To obtain them in all their original simplicity and naive humor
of detail, one should be able to write them down in short-hand as fast
as they are related: they lose greatly in the slow process of dictation.
The simple mind of the native story-teller, child or adult, is seriously
tried by the inevitable interruptions and restraints of the dictation
method;--the reciter loses spirit, becomes soon weary, and purposely
shortens the narrative to finish the task as soon as possible. It seems
painful to such a one to repeat a phrase more than once,--at least
in the same way; while frequent questioning may irritate the most
good-natured in a degree that shows how painful to the untrained brain
may be the exercise of memory and steady control of imagination required
for continuous dictation. By patience, however, I succeeded in obtaining
many curiosities of oral literature,--representing a group of stories
which, whatever their primal origin, have been so changed by local
thought and coloring as to form a distinctively Martinique folk-tale
circle. Among them are several especially popular with the children of
my neighborhood; and I notice that almost every narrator embellishes the
original plot with details of his own, which he varies at pleasure.

I submit a free rendering of one of these tales,--the history of Yé and
the Devil. The whole story of Yé would form a large book,--so numerous
the list of his adventures; and this adventure seems to me the most
characteristic of all. Yé is the most curious figure in Martinique
folk-lore. Yé is the typical Bitaco,--or mountain negro of the lazy
kind,--the country black whom city blacks love to poke fun at. As for
the Devil of Martinique folk-lore, he resembles the _travailleur_ at a
distance; but when you get dangerously near him, you find that he has
red eyes and red hair, and two little horns under his _chapeau-Bacouè_,
and feet like an ape, and fire in his throat. _Y ka sam yon gouôs, gouôs
macaque_....




II


Ça qui pa té eonnaitt Yé?... Who is there in all Martinique who never
heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault
under the sun;--he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the
biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number of
children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.

_Ça qui pa té connaitt Yé?_... Who is there in all Martinique who never
heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault
under the sun;--he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was
the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number[54] of
children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.

Well, one day Yé went out to the woods to look for something to eat.
And he walked through the woods nearly all day, till he became ever so
tired; but he could not find anything to eat. He was just going to
give up the search, when he heard a queer crackling noise,--at no great
distance. He went to see what it was,--hiding himself behind the big
trees as he got nearer to it.

All at once he came to a little hollow in the woods, and saw a great
fire burning there,--and he saw a Devil sitting beside the fire. The
Devil was roasting a great heap of snails; and the sound Yé had heard
was the crackling of the snail-shells. The Devil seemed to be very
old;--he was sitting on the trunk of a bread-fruit tree; and Yé took a
good long look at him. After Yé had watched him for a while, Yé found
out that the old Devil was quite blind.

--The Devil had a big calabash in his hand full of _feroce_,--that is
to say, boiled salt codfish and manioc flour, with ever so many pimentos
(_épi en pile piment_),--just what negroes like Yé are most fond of. And
the Devil seemed to be very hungry; and the food was going so fast down
his throat that it made Yé unhappy to see it disappearing. It made him
so unhappy that he felt at last he could not resist the temptation to
steal from the old blind Devil. He crept quite close up to the Devil
without making any noise, and began to rob him. Every time the Devil
would lift his hand to his mouth, Yé would slip his own fingers into
the calabash, and snatch a piece. The old Devil did not even look
puzzled;--he did not seem to know anything; and Yé thought to himself
that the old Devil was a great fool. He began to get more and more
courage;--he took bigger and bigger handfuls out of the calabash;--he
ate even faster than the Devil could eat. At last there was only one
little bit left in the calabash. Yé put out his hand to take it,--and
all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Yé's hand and caught it! Yé was
so frightened he could not even cry out, _Aïe-yaïe_. The Devil finished
the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Yé in a terrible
voice:--"_Atò, saff!--ou c'est ta moin!_" (I've got you now, you
glutton;--you belong to me!) Then he jumped on Yé's back, like a great
ape, and twisted his legs round Yé's neck, and cried out:---"Carry me to
your cabin,--and walk fast!"


... When Yé's poor children saw him coming, they wondered what their
papa was carrying on his back. They thought it might be a sack of bread
or vegetables or perhaps a _régime_ of bananas,--for it was getting
dark, and they could not see well. They laughed and showed their
teeth and danced and screamed: "Here's papa coming with something to
eat!--papa's coming with something to eat!" But when Yé had got near
enough for them to see what he was carrying, they yelled and ran away to
hide themselves. As for the poor mother, she could only hold up her two
hands for horror.

When they got into the cabin the Devil pointed to a corner, and said to
Yé:--"Put me down there!" Yé put him down. The Devil sat there in the
corner and never moved or spoke all that evening and all that night. He
seemed to be a very quiet Devil indeed. The children began to look at
him.

But at breakfast-time, when the poor mother had managed to procure
something for the children to eat,--just some bread-fruit and yams,--the
old Devil suddenly rose up from his corner and muttered:--

--"_Manman mò!--papa mò!--touttt yche mò!_" (Mamma dead!--papa
dead!--all the children dead!)

And he blew his breath on them, and they all fell down stiff as if they
were dead--_raidi-cadave!_. Then the Devil ate up everything there was
on the table. When he was done, he filled the pots and dishes with dirt,
and blew his breath again on Yé and all the family, and muttered:--

--"_Toutt moune lévé!_" (Everybody get up!)

Then they all got up. Then he pointed to all the plates and dishes full
of dirt, and said to them:--[55]

--"_Gobe-moin ça!_"

And they had to gobble it all up, as he told them.

After that it was no use trying to eat anything. Every time anything was
cooked, the Devil would do the same thing. It was thus the next day, and
the next, and the day after, and so every day for a long, long time.


Yé did not know what to do; but his wife said she did. If she was only
a man, she would soon get rid of that Devil. "Yé," she insisted, "go
and see the Bon-Dié [the Good-God], and ask him what to do. I would go
myself if I could; but women are not strong enough to climb the great
morne."

So Yé started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day,
and began to climb the Montagne Pelée. He climbed and walked, and walked
and climbed, until he got at last to the top of the Morne de la Croix.[56]

Then he knocked at the sky as loud as he could till the Good-God put his
head out of a cloud and asked him what he wanted:--

--"_Eh bien!--ça ou ni, Yé fa ou lè?_"

When Yé had recounted his troubles, the Good-God said:--

--"_Pauv ma pauv!_ I knew it all before you came, Yé. I can tell you
what to do; but I am afraid it will be no use--you will never be able to
do it! Your gluttony is going to be the ruin of you, poor Yé! Still, you
can try. Now listen well to what I am going to tell you. First of all,
you must not eat anything before you get home. Then when your wife has
the children's dinner ready, and you see the Devil getting up, you must
cry out:--'_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!_' Then the Devil will drop down dead.
Don't forget not to eat anything--_ou tanne?_"...

Yé promised to remember all he was told, and not to eat anything on his
way down;--then he said good-bye to the Bon-Dié (_bien conm y faut_),
and started. All the way he kept repeating the words the Good-God had
told him: "_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!"--"tam ni pou tam ni bé!_"--over and
over again.

--But before reaching home he had to cross a little stream; and on both
banks he saw wild guava-bushes growing, with plenty of sour guavas
upon them;--for it was not yet time for guavas to be ripe. Poor Yé was
hungry! He did all he could to resist the temptation, but it proved too
much for him. He broke all his promises to the Bon-Dié: he ate and ate
and ate till there were no more guavas left,--and then he began to eat
_zicaques_ and green plums, and all sorts of nasty sour things, till he
could not eat any more.

--By the time he got to the cabin his teeth were so on edge that he
could scarcely speak distinctly enough to tell his wife to get the
supper ready.

And so while everybody was happy, thinking that they were going to be
freed from their trouble, Yé was really in no condition to do anything.
The moment the supper was ready, the Devil got up from his corner as
usual, and approached the table. Then Yé tried to speak; but his teeth
were so on edge that instead of saying,--"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé_," he
could only stammer out:---"_Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan_."

This had no effect on the Devil at all: he seemed to be used to it! He
blew his breath on them all, sent them to sleep, ate up all the supper,
filled the empty dishes with filth, awoke Yé and his family, and ordered
them as usual;--

--"_Gobe-moin ça!_" And they had to gobble it up,--every bit of it.


The family nearly died of hunger and disgust. Twice more Yé climbed the
Montagne Pelée; twice more he climbed the Morne de la Croix; twice more
he disturbed the poor Bon-Dié, all for nothing!--since each time on his
way down he would fill his paunch with all sorts of nasty sour things,
so that he could not speak right. The Devil remained in the house night
and day;--the poor mother threw herself down on the ground, and pulled
out her hair,--so unhappy she was!

But luckily for the poor woman, she had one child as cunning as a
rat,[57]--a boy called Ti Fonté (little Impudent), who bore his name well.
When he saw his mother crying so much, he said to her:--

--"Mamma, send papa just once more to see the Good-God: I know something
to do!"

The mother knew how cunning her boy was: she felt sure he meant
something by his words;--she sent old Yé for the last time to see the
Bon-Dié.

Yé used always to wear one of those big long coats they call
_lavalasses_;--whether it was hot or cool, wet or dry, he never went
out without it. There were two very big pockets in it--one on each side.
When Ti Fonté saw his father getting ready to go, he jumped _floup!_
into one of the pockets and hid himself there. Yé climbed all the way
to the top of the Morne de la Croix without suspecting anything. When he
got there the little boy put one of his ears out of Yé's pocket,--so as
to hear everything the Good-God would say.

This time he was very angry,--the Bon-Dié: he spoke very crossly; he
scolded Yé a great deal. But he was so kind for all that,--he was so
generous to good-for-nothing Yé, that he took the pains to repeat the
words over and over again for him:--"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé_."... And
this time the Bon-Dié was not talking to no purpose: there was somebody
there well able to remember what he said. Ti Fonté made the most of his
chance;--he sharpened that little tongue of his; he thought of his mamma
and all his little brothers and sisters dying of hunger down below. As
for his father, Yé did as he had done before--stuffed himself with all
the green fruit he could find.

The moment Yé got home and took off his coat, Ti Fonté jumped out,
_plapp!_--and ran to his mamma, and whispered:--

--"Mamma, get ready a nice, big dinner!--we are going to have it all to
ourselves to-day: the Good-God didn't talk for nothing,--I heard every
word he said!"

Then the mother got ready a nice _calalou-crabe_, a _tonton-banane_,
a _matété-cirique_,--several calabashes of _couss-caye_, two
_régimes-figues_ (bunches of small bananas),--in short, a very fine
dinner indeed, with a _chopine_ of tafia to wash it all well down.

The Devil felt as sure of himself that day as he had always felt, and
got up the moment everything was ready. But Ti Fonté got up too, and
yelled out just as loud as he could:---"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!_"

At once the Devil gave a scream so loud that it could be heard right
down to the bottom of hell,--and he fell dead.

Meanwhile, Yé, like the old fool he was, kept trying to say what the
Bon-Dié had told him, and could only mumble:--

--"_Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan!_"

He would never have been able to do anything;--and his wife had a great
mind just to send him to bed at once, instead of letting him sit down to
eat all those nice things. But she was a kind-hearted soul; and so she
let Yé stay and eat with the children, though he did not deserve it. And
they all ate and ate, and kept on eating and filling themselves until
daybreak--_pauv piti!_

But during this time the Devil had begun to smell badly and he had
become swollen so big that Yé found he could not move him. Still, they
knew they must get him out of the way somehow. The children had eaten so
much that they were all full of strength--_yo tè plein lafòce_; and Yé
got a rope and tied one end round the Devil's foot; and then he and the
children--all pulling together--managed to drag the Devil out of the
cabin and into the bushes, where they left him just like a dead dog.
They all felt themselves very happy to be rid of that old Devil.


But some days after old good-for-nothing Yé went off to hunt for birds.
He had a whole lot of arrows with him. He suddenly remembered the Devil,
and thought he would like to take one more look at him. And he did.

_Fouinq!_ what a sight! The Devil's belly had swelled up like a morne:
it was yellow and blue and green,--looked as if it was going to burst.
And Yé, like the old fool he always was, shot an arrow up in the air,
so that it fell down and stuck into the Devil's belly. Then he wanted
to get the arrow, and he climbed up on the Devil, and pulled and pulled
till he got the arrow out. Then he put the point of the arrow to his
nose,--just to see what sort of a smell dead Devils had.

The moment he did that, his nose swelled up as big as the refinery-pot
of a sugar-plantation.


Yé could scarcely walk for the weight of his nose; but he had to go and
see the Bon-Dié again. The Bon-Dié said to him:--

--"Ah! Yé, my poor Yé, you will live and die a fool!--you are certainly
the biggest fool in the whole world!... Still, I must try to do
something for you;--I'll help you anyhow to get rid of that nose!...
I'll tell you how to do it. To-morrow morning, very early, get up and
take a big _taya_ [whip], and beat all the bushes well, and drive all
the birds to the Roche de la Caravelle. Then you must tell them that I,
the Bon-Dié, want them to take off their bills and feathers, and take a
good bath in the sea. While they are bathing, you can choose a nose for
yourself out of the heap of bills there."

Poor Yé did just as the Good-God told him; and while the birds were
bathing, he picked out a nose for himself from the heap of beaks,--and
left his own refinery-pot in its place.

The nose he took was the nose of the _coulivicou_.[58] And that is why the
_coulivicou_ always looks so much ashamed of himself even to this day.


[Footnote 54: In the patois, "_yon rafale yche_"--"a whirlwind of
children."]

[Footnote 55: In the original:--"Y té ka monté assous tabe-là, épi y
té ka fai caca adans toutt plats-à, adans toutt zassiett-là."]

[Footnote 56: A peaklet rising above the verge of the ancient crater now
filled with water.]

[Footnote 57: The great field-rat of Martinique is, in Martinique
folklore, the symbol of all cunning, and probably merits its
reputation.]

[Footnote 58: The _coulivicou_, or "Colin Vicou," is a Martinique bird
with a long meagre body, and an enormous bill. It has a very tristful
and taciturn expression.... _Maig conm yon coulivicou_, "thin as a
coulivicou," is a popular comparison for the appearance of anybody much
reduced by sickness.]




III


... Poor Yé!--you still live for me only too vividly outside of those
strange folk-tales of eating and of drinking which so cruelly reveal the
long slave-hunger of your race. For I have seen you cutting cane on peak
slopes above the clouds;--I have seen you climbing from plantation to
plantation with your cutlass in your hand, watching for snakes as you
wander to look for work, when starvation forces you to obey a master,
though born with the resentment of centuries against all masters;--I
have seen you prefer to carry two hundred-weight of bananas twenty miles
to market, rather than labor in the fields;--I have seen you
ascending through serpent-swarming woods to some dead crater to find
a cabbage-palm,--and always hungry,--and always shiftless! And you
are still a great fool, poor Yé!--and you have still your swarm of
children,--your _rafale yche_,--and they are famished; for you have
taken into your _ajoupa_ a Devil who devours even more than you can
earn,--even your heart, and your splendid muscles, and your poor artless
brain,--the Devil Tafia!... And there is no Bon-Dié to help you rid
yourself of him now: for the only Bon-Dié you ever really had, your old
creole master, cannot care for you any more, and you cannot care for
yourself. Mercilessly moral, the will of this enlightened century has
abolished forever that patriarchal power which brought you up strong
and healthy on scanty fare, and scourged you into its own idea of
righteousness, yet kept you innocent as a child of the law of the
struggle for life. But you feel that law now;--you are a citizen of the
Republic! you are free to vote, and free to work, and free to starve
if you prefer it, and free to do evil and suffer for it;--and this new
knowledge stupefies you so that you have almost forgotten how to laugh!




[Illustration]




LYS

I


It is only half-past four o'clock: there is the faintest blue light of
beginning day,--and little Victoire already stands at the bedside with
my wakening cup of hot black fragrant coffee. What! so early?...
Then with a sudden heart-start I remember this is my last West Indian
morning. And the child--her large timid eyes all gently luminous--is
pressing something into my hand.

Two vanilla beans wrapped in a morsel of banana-leaf,--her poor little
farewell gift!...

Other trifling souvenirs are already packed away. Almost everybody that
knows me has given me something. Manm-Robert brought me a tiny packet of
orange-seeds,--seeds of a "gift-orange": so long as I can keep these
in my vest-pocket I will never be without money. Cyrillia brought me
a package of _bouts_, and a pretty box of French matches, warranted
inextinguishable by wind. Azaline, the blanchisseuse, sent me a little
pocket looking-glass. Cerbonnie, the _màchanne_, left a little cup of
guava jelly for me last night. Mimi--dear child!--brought me a little
paper dog! It is her best toy; but those gentle black eyes would stream
with tears if I dared to refuse it.... Oh, Mimi! what am I to do with a
little paper dog? And what am I to do with the chocolate-sticks and the
cocoanuts and all the sugar-cane and all the cinnamon-apples?...



II


... Twenty minutes past five by the clock of the Bourse. The hill
shadows are shrinking back from the shore;--the long wharves reach out
yellow into the sun;--the tamarinds of the Place Bertin, and the pharos
for half its height, and the red-tiled roofs along the bay are catching
the glow. Then, over the light-house--on the outermost line depending
from the southern yard-arm of the semaphore--a big black ball suddenly
runs up like a spider climbing its own thread.... _Steamer from the
South!_ The packet has been sighted. And I have not yet been able to
pack away into a specially purchased wooden box all the fruits and
vegetable curiosities and odd little presents sent to me. If Radice the
boatman had not come to help me, I should never be able to get ready;
for the work of packing is being continually interrupted by friends and
acquaintances coming to say good-bye. Manm-Robert brings to see me a
pretty young girl--very fair, with a violet foulard twisted about her
blonde head. It is little Basilique, who is going to make her _pouémiè
communion_. So I kiss her, according to the old colonial custom, once on
each downy cheek;--and she is to pray to _Notre Dame du Bon Port_ that
the ship shall bear me safely to far-away New York.

And even then the steamer's cannon-call shakes over the town and into
the hills behind us, which answer with all the thunder of their phantom
artillery.



III


... There is a young white lady, accompanied by an aged negress, already
waiting on the south wharf for the boat;--evidently she is to be one
of my fellow-passengers. Quite a pleasing presence: slight graceful
figure,--a face not precisely pretty, but delicate and sensitive, with
the odd charm of violet eyes under black eye-brows....

A friend who comes to see me off tells me all about her. Mademoiselle
Lys is going to New York to be a governess,--to leave her native island
forever. A story sad enough, though not more so than that of many a
gentle creole girl. And she is going all alone, for I see her bidding
good-bye to old Titine,--kissing her. "_Adié encò, chè;--Bon-Dié ké béni
ou!_" sobs the poor servant, with tears streaming down her kind black
face. She takes off her blue shoulder-kerchief, and waves it as the boat
recedes from the wooden steps.


... Fifteen minutes later, Mademoiselle and I find ourselves under the
awnings shading the saloon-deck of the _Guadeloupe_. There are at least
fifty passengers,--many resting in chairs, lazy-looking Demerara chairs
with arm-supports immensely lengthened so as to form rests for the lower
limbs. Overhead, suspended from the awning-frames, are two tin cages
containing parrots;--and I see two little greenish monkeys, no bigger
than squirrels, tied to the wheel-hatch,--two _sakiwinkis_. These are
from the forests of British Guiana. They keep up a continual thin sharp
twittering, like birds,--all the while circling, ascending, descending,
retreating or advancing to the limit of the little ropes attaching them
to the hatch.

The _Guadeloupe_ has seven hundred packages to deliver at St. Pierre: we
have ample time,--Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes and I,--to take one last look
at the "Pays des Revenants."

I wonder what her thoughts are, feeling a singular sympathy for
her,--for I am in that sympathetic mood which the natural emotion of
leaving places and persons one has become fond of, is apt to inspire.
And now at the moment of my going,--when I seem to understand as never
before the beauty of that tropic Nature, and the simple charm of the
life to which I am bidding farewell,--the question comes to me: "Does
she not love it all as I do,--nay, even much more, because of that in
her own existence which belongs to it?" But as a child of the land,
she has seen no other skies,--fancies, perhaps, there may be brighter
ones....

... Nowhere on this earth, Violet-Eyes!--nowhere beneath this sun!...
Oh! the dawnless glory of tropic morning!--the single sudden leap of the
giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of
the mornes! And the early breezes from the hills,--all cool out of
the sleep of the forests, and heavy with vegetal odors thick, sappy,
savage-sweet!--and the wild high winds that run ruffling and crumpling
through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound!--

And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green-drenched with silent
pouring of creepers,--dashed with the lilac and yellow and rosy foam of
liana flowers!--

And the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea,--that as you
mount the heights ever appears to rise perpendicularly behind you,--that
seems, as you descend, to sink and flatten before you!--

And the violet velvet distances of evening;--and the swaying of palms
against the orange-burning,--when all the heaven seems filled with
vapors of a molten sun!...



IV


How beautiful the mornes and azure-shadowed hollows in the jewel
clearness of this perfect morning! Even Pelée wears only her very
lightest head-dress of gauze; and all the wrinklings of her green robe
take unfamiliar tenderness of tint from the early sun. All the quaint
peaking of the colored town--sprinkling the sweep of blue bay with red
and yellow and white-of-cream--takes a sharpness in this limpid light as
if seen through a diamond lens; and there above the living green of the
familiar hills I can see even the faces of the statues--the black Christ
on his white cross, and the White Lady of the Morne d'Orange--among
curving palms.... It is all as though the island were donning its utmost
possible loveliness, exerting all its witchery,--seeking by supremest
charm to win back and hold its wandering child,--Violet-Eyes over
there!... She is looking too.

I wonder if she sees the great palms of the Voie du Parnasse,--curving
far away as to bid us adieu, like beautiful bending women. I wonder if
they are not trying to say something to her; and I try myself to fancy
what that something is:--

--"Child, wilt thou indeed abandon all who love thee!... Listen!--'tis
a dim grey land thou goest unto,--a land of bitter winds,--a land of
strange gods,--a land of hardness and barrenness, where even Nature may
not live through half the cycling of the year! Thou wilt never see us
there.... And there, when thou shalt sleep thy long sleep, child--that
land will have no power to lift thee up;--vast weight of stone will
press thee down forever;--until the heavens be no more thou shalt not
awake!... But here, darling, our loving roots would seek for thee, would
find thee: thou shouldst live again!--we lift, like Aztec priests, the
blood of hearts to the Sun."...



V


... It is very hot.... I hold in my hand a Japanese paper-fan with a
design upon it of the simplest sort: one jointed green bamboo, with a
single spurt of sharp leaves, cutting across a pale blue murky double
streak that means the horizon above a sea. That is all. Trivial to my
Northern friends this design might seem; but to me it causes a pleasure
bordering on pain.... I know so well what the artist means; and they
could not know, unless they had seen bamboos,--and bamboos peculiarly
situated. As I look at this fan I know myself descending the Morne
Parnasse by the steep winding road; I have the sense of windy heights
behind me, and forest on either hand, and before me the blended azure of
sky and sea with one bamboo-spray swaying across it at the level of
my eyes. Nor is this all;--I have the every sensation of the very
moment,--the vegetal odors, the mighty tropic light, the warmth, the
intensity of irreproducible color.... Beyond a doubt, the artist who
dashed the design on this fan with his miraculous brush must have had a
nearly similar experience to that of which the memory is thus aroused in
me, but which I cannot communicate to others.

... And it seems to me now that all which I have tried to write about
the _Pays des Revenants_ can only be for others, who have never beheld
it,--vague like the design upon this fan.



VI


_Brrrrrrrrrrr!_... The steam-winch is lifting the anchor; and the
_Guadeloupe_ trembles through every plank as the iron torrent of her
chain-cable rumbles through the hawse-holes.... At last the quivering
ceases;--there is a moment's silence; and Violet-Eyes seems trying to
catch a last glimpse of her faithful _bonne_ among the ever-thickening
crowd upon the quay.... Ah! there she is--waving her foulard.
Mademoiselle Lys is waving a handkerchief in reply....

Suddenly the shock of the farewell gun shakes heavily through our
hearts, and over the bay,--where the tall mornes catch the flapping
thunder, and buffet it through all their circle in tremendous mockery.
Then there is a great whirling and whispering of whitened water behind
the steamer--another,--another; and the whirl becomes a foaming stream:
the mighty propeller is playing!.... All the blue harbor swings slowly
round;--and the green limbs of the land are pushed out further on the
left, shrink back upon the right;--and the mountains are moving their
shoulders. And then the many-tinted façades,--and the tamarinds of the
Place Bertin,--and the light-house,--and the long wharves with their
throng of turbaned women,--and the cathedral towers,--and the fair
palms,--and the statues of the hills,--all veer, change place, and begin
to float away... steadily, very swiftly.


Farewell, fair city,--sun-kissed city,--many-fountained city!--dear
yellow-glimmering streets,--white pavements learned by heart,--and faces
ever looked for,--and voices ever loved! Farewell, white towers with
your golden-throated bells!--farewell, green steeps, bathed in the light
of summer everlasting!--craters with your coronets of forest!--bright
mountain paths upwinding 'neath pomp of fern and angelin and feathery
bamboo!--and gracious palms that drowse above the dead! Farewell,
soft-shadowing majesty of valleys unfolding to the sun,--green golden
cane-fields ripening to the sea!...


... The town vanishes. The island slowly becomes a green silhouette. So
might Columbus first have seen it from the deck of his caravel,--nearly
four hundred years ago. At this distance there are no more signs of life
upon it than when it first became visible to his eyes: yet there are
cities there,--and toiling,--and suffering,--and gentle hearts that
knew me.... Now it is turning blue,--the beautiful shape!--becoming a
dream....



VII


And Dominica draws nearer,--sharply massing her hills against the vast
light in purple nodes and gibbosities and denticulations. Closer and
closer it comes, until the green of its heights breaks through the
purple here and there,--in flashings and ribbings of color. Then
it remains as if motionless a while;--then the green lights go out
again,--and all the shape begins to recede sideward towards the south.

... And what had appeared a pearl-grey cloud in the north slowly
reveals itself as another island of mountains,--hunched and horned and
mammiform: Guadeloupe begins to show her double profile. But Martinique
is still visible;--Pelée still peers high over the rim of the south....
Day wanes;--the shadow of the ship lengthens over the flower-blue water.
Pelée changes aspect at last,--turns pale as a ghost,--but will not fade
away....

... The sun begins to sink as he always sinks to his death in the
tropics,--swiftly,--too swiftly!--and the glory of him makes golden all
the hollow west,--and bronzes all the flickering wave-backs. But still
the gracious phantom of the island will not go,--softly haunting us
through the splendid haze. And always the tropic wind blows soft and
warm;--there is an indescribable caress in it! Perhaps some such breeze,
blowing from Indian waters, might have inspired that prophecy of Islam
concerning the Wind of the Last Day,--that "Yellow Wind, softer than
silk, balmier than musk,"--which is to sweep the spirits of the just to
God in the great Winnowing of Souls....

Then into the indigo night vanishes forever from my eyes the ghost of
Pelée; and the moon swings up,--a young and lazy moon, drowsing upon her
back, as in a hammock.... Yet a few nights more, and we shall see this
slim young moon erect,--gliding upright on her way,--coldly beautiful
like a fair Northern girl.



VIII


And ever through tepid nights and azure days the _Guadeloupe_ rushes
on,--her wake a river of snow beneath the sun, a torrent of fire beneath
the stars,--steaming straight for the North.

Under the peaking of Montserrat we steam,--beautiful Montserrat,
all softly wrinkled like a robe of greenest velvet fallen from the
waist!--breaking the pretty sleep of Plymouth town behind its screen
of palms... young palms, slender and full of grace as creole children
are;--

And by tall Nevis, with her trinity of dead craters purpling through
ocean-haze;--by clouded St. Christopher's mountain-giant;--past ghostly
St. Martin's, far-floating in fog of gold, like some dream of the
Saint's own Second Summer;--

Past low Antigua's vast blue harbor,--shark-haunted, bounded about by
huddling of little hills, blue and green.

Past Santa Cruz, the "Island of the Holy Cross,"--all radiant with
verdure though well nigh woodless,--nakedly beautiful in the tropic
light as a perfect statue;--

Past the long cerulean reaching and heaping of Porto Rico on the left,
and past hopeless St. Thomas on the right,--old St. Thomas, watching
the going and the coming of the commerce that long since abandoned
her port,--watching the ships once humbly solicitous for patronage now
turning away to the Spanish rival, like ingrates forsaking a ruined
patrician;--

And the vapory Vision of, St. John;--and the grey ghost of Tortola,--and
further, fainter, still more weirdly dim, the aureate phantom of Virgin
Gorda.




IX


Then only the enormous double-vision of sky and sea.

The sky: a cupola of blinding blue, shading down and paling into
spectral green at the rim of the world,--and all fleckless, save at
evening. Then, with sunset, comes a light gold-drift of little feathery
cloudlets into the West,--stippling it as with a snow of fire.

The sea: no flower-tint may now make my comparison for the splendor of
its lucent color. It has shifted its hue;--for we have entered into the
Azure Stream: it has more than the magnificence of burning cyanogen....

But, at night, the Cross of the South appears no more. And other changes
come, as day succeeds to day,--a lengthening of the hours of light, a
longer lingering of the after-glow,--a cooling of the wind. Each morning
the air seems a little cooler, a little rarer;--each noon the sky looks
a little paler, a little further away--always heightening, yet also
more shadowy, as if its color, receding, were dimmed by distance,--were
coming more faintly down from vaster altitudes.


... Mademoiselle is petted like a child by the lady passengers. And
every man seems anxious to aid in making her voyage a pleasant one. For
much of which, I think, she may thank her eyes!




X


A dim morning and chill;--blank sky and sunless waters: the sombre
heaven of the North with colorless horizon rounding in a blind grey
sea.... What a sudden weight comes to the heart with the touch of the
cold mist, with the spectral melancholy of the dawn;--and then what
foolish though irrepressible yearning for the vanished azure left
behind!

... The little monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the chilly air.
The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their
perches with eyes closed.

... A vagueness begins to shape itself along the verge of the sea, far
to port: that long heavy clouding which indicates the approach of land.
And from it now floats to us something ghostly and frigid which makes
the light filmy and the sea shadowy as a flood of dreams,--the fog of
the Jersey coast.

At once the engines slacken their respiration. The _Guadeloupe_ begins
to utter her steam-cry of warning,--regularly at intervals of two
minutes,--for she is now in the track of all the ocean vessels. And
from far away we can hear a heavy knelling,--the booming of some great
fog-bell.

... All in a white twilight. The place of the horizon has vanished;--we
seem ringed in by a wall of smoke.... Out of this vapory emptiness--very
suddenly--an enormous steamer rushes, towering like a hill--passes
so close that we can see faces, and disappears again, leaving the sea
heaving and frothing behind her.


... As I lean over the rail to watch the swirling of the wake, I feel
something pulling at my sleeve: a hand,--a tiny black hand,--the hand of
a _sakiwinki_. One of the little monkeys, straining to the full length
of his string, is making this dumb appeal for human sympathy;--the
bird-black eyes of both are fixed upon me with the oddest look of
pleading. Poor little tropical exiles! I stoop to caress them; but
regret the impulse a moment later: they utter such beseeching cries when
I find myself obliged to leave them again alone!...

... Hour after hour the _Guadeloupe_ glides on through the white
gloom,--cautiously, as if feeling her way; always sounding her whistle,
ringing her bells, until at last some brown-winged bark comes flitting
to us out of the mist, bearing a pilot.... How strange it must all seem
to Mademoiselle who stands so silent there at the rail!--how weird this
veiled world must appear to her, after the sapphire light of her own
West Indian sky, and the great lazulite splendor of her own tropic sea!

But a wind comes;--it strengthens,--begins to blow very cold. The mists
thin before its blowing; and the wan blank sky is all revealed again
with livid horizon around the heaving of the iron-grey sea.


... Thou dim and lofty heaven of the North,--grey sky of Odin,--bitter
thy winds and spectral all thy colors!--they that dwell beneath thee
know not the glory of Eternal Summer's green,--the azure splendor of
southern day!--but thine are the lightnings of Thought illuminating for
human eyes the interspaces between sun and sun. Thine the generations
of might,--the strivers, the battlers,--the men who make Nature
tame!--thine the domain of inspiration and achievement,--the larger
heroisms, the vaster labors that endure, the higher knowledge, and all
the witchcrafts of science!...


But in each one of us there lives a mysterious Something which is Self,
yet also infinitely more than Self,--incomprehensibly multiple,--the
complex total of sensations, impulses, timidities belonging to the
unknown past. And the lips of the little stranger from the tropics have
become all white, because that Something within her,--ghostly bequest
from generations who loved the light and rest and wondrous color of a
more radiant world,--now shrinks all back about her girl's heart
with fear of this pale grim North.... And lo!--opening mile-wide in
dream-grey majesty before us,--reaching away, through measureless mazes
of masting, into remotenesses all vapor-veiled,--the mighty perspective
of New York harbor!...


Thou knowest it not, this gloom about us, little maiden;--'tis only
a magical dusk we are entering,--only that mystic dimness in which
miracles must be wrought!... See the marvellous shapes uprising,--the
immensities, the astonishments! And other greater wonders thou wilt
behold in a little while, when we shall have become lost to each other
forever in the surging of the City's million-hearted life!... 'Tis all
shadow here, thou sayest?--Ay, 'tis twilight, verily, by contrast
with that glory out of which thou camest, Lys--twilight only,--but the
Twilight of the Gods!... _Adié, chè!--Bon-Dié ké bént ou!_...




APPENDIX


SOME CREOLE MELODIES


More than a hundred years ago Thibault de Chanvallon expressed his
astonishment at the charm and wonderful sense of musical rhythm
characterizing the slave-songs and slave-dances of Martinique. The
rhythmical sense of the negroes especially impressed him. "I have seen,"
he writes, "seven or eight hundred negroes accompanying a wedding-party
to the sound of song. They would all leap up in the air and come down
together;--the movement was so exact and general that the noise of their
fall made but a single sound."

An almost similar phenomenon may be witnessed any Carnival season in St.
Pierre,--while the Devil makes his nightly round, followed by many
hundred boys clapping hands and leaping in chorus. It may also be
observed in the popular malicious custom of the pillard, or, in creole,
_piyà._ Some person whom it is deemed justifiable and safe to annoy,
may suddenly find himself followed in the street by a singing chorus of
several hundred, all clapping hands and dancing or running in perfect
time, so that all the bare feet strike the ground together. Or the
_pillard-chorus_ may even take up its position before the residence of
the party disliked, and then proceed with its performance. An example of
such a _pillard_ is given further on, in the song entitled _Loéma
tombé._ The improvisation by a single voice begins the pillard,--which
in English might be rendered as follows:--


(_Single voice_) You little children there!--you who were by the
river-side!
Tell me truly this:--Did you see Loéma fall?
Tell me truly this--
(_Chorus, opening_) Did you see Loéma fall?
(_Single voice_) Tell me truly this--
(_Chorus_) Did you see Loéma fall?
(_Single voice, more rapidly_) Tell me truly this--
(_Chorus, more quickly_) Loéma fall!
(_Single voice_) Tell me truly this--
(_Chorus_) Loéma fall!
(_Single voice_) Tell me truly this--
(_Chorus, always more quickly, and more loudly, all the hands
clapping together like a fire of musketry_) Loéma fall! etc.


The same rhythmic element characterizes many of the games and round
dances of Martinique children;--but, as a rule, I think it is
perceptible that the sense of time is less developed in the colored
children than in the black.

The other melodies which are given as specimens of Martinique music show
less of the African element,--the nearest approach to it being in _Tant
sirop_; but all are probably creations of the mixed race.
_Marie-Clémence_ is a Carnival satire composed not more than four years
ago. _To-to-to_ is very old--dates back, perhaps, to the time of the
_belles-affranchies._ It is seldom sung now except by survivors of the
old régime: the sincerity and tenderness of the emotion that inspired
it--the old sweetness of heart and simplicity of thought,--are passing
forever away.

To my friend, Henry Edward Krehbiel, the musical lecturer and
critic,--at once historian and folklorist in the study of
race-music,--and to Mr. Frank van der Stucken, the New York musical
composer, I owe the preparation of these four melodies for voice and
piano-forte. The arrangements of _To-to-to_ and _Loéma tombé_ are Mr.
Van der Stucken's.


"TO-TO-TO"

(_Creole werds_)

[Illustration]




MARIE-CLÉMENCE

(_Creole words_)


[Illustration]

[Illustration]




TANT SIROP EST DOUX

(_Negro-French_)


[Illustration]

[Illustration]




LOÉMA TOMBÉ

(_Creole words_)


[Illustration]

[Illustration]





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Two years in the French West Indies, by 
Lafcadio Hearn

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