The Sugar Islands (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused and shrugged his shoulders.

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

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

from
NO QUARTER

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

Written in
1930

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

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

The young man made no particular bones about his courtship.

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

He was long in waiting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eagerly the small boy listened.

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

‘The son of the Chevalier de Monterey does not play with the sons of labourers.'

He was greeted with a derisive laugh.

During the week he had rehearsed and re-rehearsed the scene. He had pictured in proud detail the flattering hush that would follow his announcement. They would be humble and abashed. They would understand and be respectful of his aloofness. They would admit his superiority. Yet here they were, grinning at him with their monkey faces. The son of the Chevalier, they mocked. And who had told him that he was that?

His cheeks flushed scarlet. Angrily he stamped his foot.

‘I am,' he cried. ‘I know I am.'

They laughed the louder, as the scarlet deepened in his cheeks, and tears glittered in his eyes. It was the first time that they had seen Roger Vaisseau at a disadvantage. They were resolved to make the most of it.

In a circle they stood taunting him. So he was the son of a chevalier. Would he like them to kiss his hand? Should they kneel before him? Would he deign to place the sole of his foot upon their necks? Where were his rings, they jeered, his feathered hat, the jewelled cross about his neck?

His fists clenched tightly.

‘You don't believe me, then we'll ask my father.'

In a group outside the church François Vaisseau was discussing with the worthies of the village such local matters as came under the jurisprudence of their weekly gatherings.. They had no great authority. The inspectors from Paris regulated the settlement of their taxes. But they liked to talk; they liked to sit around in their best clothes, solemnly agreeing or disagreeing with one another. Every Sunday for a couple of hours or so they would deliberate. Their deliberations were respected. Wives did not dare disturb them. In the village annals there was no precedent
for the irruption into the sacrosanct circle of a hot-cheeked, wild-eyed infant, with a crowd of sniggering children at his heels; for the full-volumed thunder of infant lungs: ‘Father, tell them whose son I am.'

‘These children wouldn't believe that I'm the son of the Chevalier de Monterey. Will you please, Father, tell them that I am.'

It is not often that the members of a village assembly laugh. Laughs are out of place in that austere atmosphere. And it was less a laugh than a snigger that rippled through those venerable beards. François had boasted appropriately about his four months' son. But there had been whispers. There had been suspicions. Now they knew.

For a moment François Vaisseau did not realize what exactly lay behind this demand. His brain moved slowly. When it had travelled far enough for him to understand, he took three swift steps across the sward, swept Roger beneath his arm and staggered up the sun-parched gutter that led towards his home.

Under a steady rain of blows Roger, rolled into a ball, his knees drawn high into his stomach, his arm wrapped round his head, lay without sound or movement. When his father with a kick and a last curse left him, he rose to his feet, shook himself, hobbled over to the fire, and knelt on one knee before it. There was not an inch unbruised upon his body. For days sleep would be an agony to him, but his head was held high, his lips were firm and his eyes bright.

His father had not denied that he was the Chevalier's son.

Never again was he to make any reference to his father. Like a stored heirloom the knowledge of his birth remained shut within his heart. It gave him a sense of superiority over his surroundings and a distaste for them. As boyhood passed his contempt deepened for his home and for the life his parents and their neighbours were content to lead.

§

It was a hard and rugged life. The days of the kindly monarch who had wished for every peasant a fowl in his pot on Sundays were at an end. The era of the Sun King had dawned; Richelieu and Mazarin were preparing the way for Colbert and for Vauban.
France and her possessions were to be bled so that Paris might impose her culture on the world. Through every district the flock of inspectors swarmed like bees over a garden, carrying away the honey of their spoils. The peasant bound to the soil, labouring under the caprice of chance, dependent upon favourable or unkindly seasons, upon the sun that ripened and the frost that withered the early grapes and the tender shoots, accepted mutely and uncomplainingly the demands made upon him first by the
seigneurs
and later by the centralized officialdom of Paris; accepted them as he would accept a succession of bad harvests, adopting the same protective measures. In summer you laid away the stores that would see you through the dark days of winter. You let the good harvest insure you against the bad. When the demands of the inspector grew oppressive you concealed your profits, hiding them in a stocking beneath the bed for the day when taxes would be increased. You were not going to invest your profits in any improvement of your property when these improvements would only be accepted by the intendant as a proof of increased prosperity, and as an excuse for heavier taxation.