The Sugar Islands (23 page)

We had been travelling for seven hours. We were very sore; riding in cotton slacks when one has not ridden for many months is arduous; when, at a sudden turn of a mounting road, we saw, many feet below us, the Atlantic beating on the windward coast; half-way down the slope the red roof of a bungalow, the green flatness of a lawn, the stately dignity of the royal palm.

We were tired and we were sore and more than a little nervous as we rode up to the timbered bungalow. On the lawn there were peacocks, white and blue, spreading their vast tails. From a flagstaff the Union Jack was flying. On the veranda, in a deck chair, our host was waiting. His appearance had been described to us many times. And as he rose to welcome us he looked very much as I had expected him to look. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and immensely fat. He wore a shirt that was slightly soiled, and open at the neck. The belt that held his trousers had slipped, so that his shirt protruded, revealing an inch or two of skin. He wore slippers; his ankles, as he shuffled towards us, gave the impression of being swollen. He looked as I had expected him to look. A typical colonial planter. But what I had not expected was the voice with which he welcomed us. It was the courtly voice of the old-world English gentleman, with generations of breeding at the back of it.

‘You have had a long journey,' he said. ‘It is very good of you to come all this way to see an old man. He appreciates it. You must be very tired. We will have a glass of our
vin du pays
before your bath.'

The dining-room was almost entirely filled with a long table. At the head of it were laid four places. ‘Captain Armstrong sits upon my right. Will the elder of you sit upon my left?'

I took the place beside him. In front of each of us he set a decanter. We filled our glasses. He bowed towards each of us in turn. Then in one long sip finished the admirably mellowed rum. ‘And now,' he said, ‘I will show you to your rooms.'

It was a large rambling house; a bachelor's house. Its walls were lined with bookshelves and the odd assortment of pictures that bachelors at various periods of taste annex. There were hunting prints and college groups, and nudities from
La Vie Parisienne
, war-time caricatures of ‘Big and Little Willie'. Over the washstand of each room was a printed text: ‘Work is the ruin of the drinking classes'; ‘If water rots the soles of your boots, think what it must do to your inside'. A library is an autobiography. I looked carefully along his shelves. There were a certain number of novels, bought casually, a complete set of
Wisden's Cricketer's Almanac
since 1884, some legal books, the publications of the Rationalist Press, Darwin and the mid-Victorian agnostics, a few classics, a Horace and a Catullus, Thackeray and Dickens.

Dinner was ready by the time that we were. A planter's dinner. A Creole soup, a roast chicken served with Creole vegetables, boiled yam, fried plantains, sweet potatoes. But I could not believe that we were sitting at a bare deal table, in cotton and tieless suits, eating Creole food from earthenware, served by a shambling-footed negress. I felt, so completely did our host's personality dominate the atmosphere, that we were in some old English house; that the table was of polished walnut, reflecting the gleam of candles and old silver; that saddle of mutton was being served us by a silent and venerable butler; that it was Burgundy, not rum, that we were drinking.

The conversation was of the kind for which you would look in such an atmosphere. The judge did most of the talking. He was an admirable raconteur. His anecdotes were scattered with reflections. He was a staunch Tory, with little use for the philosophy and the sociology of the day. What did they want to start educating the working classes for? Education meant discontent. The working classes thought so much of themselves nowadays that they couldn't make good servants.

‘And what else are they any good for?' he asked. ‘They're no happier now. They're less happy.'

We discussed religion. He was the practical late-Victorian rationalist. A Huxley, but the grandfather of Aldous, was his god.

‘All this talk about heaven, as though life were a Sunday School, with prizes for the best boy. When you're dead you are dead.'

The
National Review
was the only magazine he read. The old Imperial flame burnt bright in him. Let the Americans build Dreadnoughts if they wanted to; it could only mean the more for us to sink. It was thus that they talked, the English of his class, thirty years back, before the war had broken finally the power and prestige of the feudal system. He typified an England that has passed.

We did not leave the table after dinner. The plates were cleared away and we sat there over our rum. The judge was a heavy drinker; every quarter of an hour or so he filled his glass, looked round the table, gave a little whistle, lifted his glass and drained it. He was a heavy drinker, but he was too well bred to put any pressure on us to drink with him. We had each our decanter at our side: we could take as much or as little as we chose. They say that wine mellows man. But I have hardly ever met a man of over forty whom wine in large quantities improves. Young people it does quite often. It removes their self-consciousness, releasing their natural gaiety and high spirits. But with older people it is more often grievances that are released. By the time one has come to seventy one has accumulated a good many unsettled scores. Now and again a peeved look came into the judge's face.

‘One has to suffer for being patriotic,' he said, and began to tell us some story, the details of which I could not clearly catch, of a naturalized German whom he had insulted in the Roseau Club. ‘Once a German always a German. I told him so. If I had been a younger man I should have flung him into the street. But I was fifty. They've never forgiven me down there. They all took the fellow's side.'

For a moment a hard, harsh look came into his face. In an instant it had gone, replaced by the suave, courteous look of hospitality. But I could understand how that reputation for violence had grown up in Roseau. I could picture the evenings when boredom and indigestion and the tiresome company of people who would argue and contradict him would goad him, who had never borne fools lightly, into one of those outbursts that would make even his most true admirer a little frightened of him. They were few who had not felt at some time the sting of that pointed rapier.

It was after eleven when we left the table. It had been one of
the best evenings that we had had since our farewell dinner to Europe in Bordeaux at the Chapeau Rouge. But it was, nevertheless, in a puzzled, almost embarrassed way that we turned to each other the moment we were alone.

‘Do you realize,' said Eldred, ‘that he's no idea we're going away tomorrow?'

I nodded my head. Our invitation had been arranged over the telephone. Telephones in Dominica are notoriously inadequate. And during the evening several such remarks as ‘Captain Armstrong will take you and show you over there in a day or two' had made it very clear that we were expected to stay at least a week.

‘I wish to heaven we could,' I said.

Wished it both for our sake and his. There was no doubt that we should have had a delightful time there, and it was clear that he would enjoy our visit. He loved company and saw little company. It had been many months since he had seen travellers from England.

‘I suppose we can't, though,' said Eldred.

For a while we debated the problem. The boat on which we were booked to sail left within three days. There would not be another for a fortnight. We had arrangements to make in Martinique. We had written to friends in Barbados announcing the date of our arrival. We did not see how those plans were to be cancelled.

‘It's not going to be easy telling him,' I said.

It wasn't. I have enjoyed few things less than I did the next morning the making of that first inquiry to the judge about the time at which we ought to start.

‘Start,' he said; ‘but where?'

‘To Rosalie. I was wondering how long it would take to get there.'

‘But Rosalie? I do not understand.'

We had exchanged half a dozen sentences before he understood.

‘What!' he cried. ‘You are going to leave me?'

It was said on such a note of pathetic, almost child-like disappointment that I almost then and there cancelled all our Barbados plans.

‘I had not realized,' he said. ‘I thought.

I began to explain. Our ship was sailing in three days. There
were connections waiting. He scarcely listened. ‘You are going to leave me?' he repeated.

For a moment he was completely overcome by disappointment, but only for a moment. He was too good a host not to realize that a guest must not be embarrassed by a host's personal feelings.

‘I am sorry,' he said. ‘I am very sorry. But since your boat is sailing it cannot be helped. We must see about preparing you a lunch.'

Immediately he had begun to make preparations for our journey. A bottle of rum was to be packed, with cheese and a loaf of bread, cold meat and fruit and pickles. He abused roundly in patois the servant who made up the packet; but the servant laughed; his master might abuse him; but his master liked him. A negro will do anything for you provided that he knows that.

‘I'll write you a letter to the overseer at my sister's property,' he said. ‘He'll put you up for the night. He'll make you comfortable.'

And he talked cheerfully as we packed, of the island and the island's history, its personalities and peculiarities. But there was a wistful look on his face as he said good-bye to us.

‘Come back one day,' he said, ‘and make it soon. I won't be here much longer.'

We promised that we would. We believed we would.

‘Within eighteen months we'll be back,' we said.

When we turned at the corner of the road we saw him standing on his parapet waving his arms to us.

For quite a while we rode on in silence, picturing that long bungalow and the old man returning to his chair, his hands hanging limply over the sides, his mind abrood; thinking of what during those long hours, when the sun was too hot and he too tired to leave the cool shade of the veranda? Did his mind turn backwards to the past, to the thatched cottages of the Wiltshire where he was born, to the grey stone and green lawns of Oxford, to the mullioned windows of Lincoln's Inn? Did he relive the ardours and optimisms of youth, the tumult and the feuds of middle life, the successes and disappointments, the friendships and the enmities, the loves that went awry? Or did he, who had no faith in any immaterial heaven, look forward, adoze there in
his chair, to a day imperfectly discerned when the veranda on which he sat would be a bank of rubble, when the grass would run raggedly between the palms, when one more plantation had been reclaimed by the jungle from which it sprang, with he himself mingled with the roots of the tall mangoes under which by moonlight the brown people that he loved would dance?

from
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

Written in
1939

I Spoke
of the West Indians as an uprooted people. They have lost their country, their language, and their faith. They have brought with them and retained, however, many of their superstitions. Much has been written in recent years, particularly since it has become possible for white men to visit Haiti, about Obeah men and voodoo rites, and there can be little doubt that in the last analysis most West Indians have more faith in their own witch-doctors than in the priests whom their education has approved for them. Until recently there was a clause in the Haitian Code forbidding the use of Zombies, the raising of dead men to work as labourers in the fields. Seabrook's
Magic Island
has dealt at length with this question.

The authority of the ‘Obeah men' is little questioned. Most residents in the West Indies have had personal experiences of ‘the spirits'. A planter in Grenada wrote me the following account of one of his:

‘Two of my labourers had not been at work for some time when I met one of them and asked him why? He said, “Boss, the spirits troubling us too much. We never get any sleep at night.”

‘I questioned him and he said for the past twenty days things had been thrown about in the house and that anyone who went near the house after dark got beaten with sticks and had stones thrown at them.

‘I laughed at him and told him I would come myself to see what was going on.

‘Two afternoons later I went to where he was living. He took me through a nutmeg grove and on up a grass-covered hill to a small labourer's house built of mud and wattle. He told me this was the house where things first began to happen, and they had left the house and were living in their grandmother's house down below in the nutmeg grove, but that the spirits still attacked them.

‘I sat and talked to the two young men aged about twenty, a wife of one of them, and two children till it began to get dusk, when I said we would go to the lower house.

‘There was a worn path down the grass slope and no trees or bushes anywhere near. I sent the woman and children in front; then I came, and then the two young men. A few yards down the path the two men tried to run past me, shouting, “Oh, God! They're getting us.”

‘I thought they were trying to frighten the woman, and so I made them walk in front of me. After a few yards I felt gravel and dust being thrown at my head, and they started to cry out again. I pretended nothing had happened, although I had dust and fine earth over my neck and shoulders.

‘We reached the lower house, and while it was light I examined it. There was a ladder of four steps to reach the door. On the left a half-partition, behind which was the bedroom. I looked under the bed and saw a basin with a corn cob in it, used for washing clothes. Sitting on the floor in the other room was the grandmother, leaning against the partition holding a baby. Opposite her was a bench along the side of the house and under the bench some baskets full of nutmegs. Facing the door was a table with a lamp on it and a pickle bottle. I saw all the windows shut and barred, and stood in the doorway facing into the house. The occupants sat on the bench—two men, two women, and the two children. I tried to persuade them that it was someone playing tricks on them and throwing stones, et cetera, on the roof, but they said, “Wait, Boss. You will see things.”