The Sugar Islands (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once we went to St. Pierre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History has no parallel for St. Pierre.

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

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