The Sugar Islands (24 page)

‘It was then dark. After some time there was a crash on the roof and a few minutes later a lump of earth
inside
the house came from the ceiling and fell on the floor at my feet. The people started singing hymns, then suddenly the corn cob out of the basin in the next room flew over the partition and a few minutes later a shower of nutmegs out of the basket under the bench flew into the air and fell all round us. My hair felt like standing on end and when a few minutes later the bottle jumped off the table, hit the roof and fell at my feet, I thought it time to go; so, making some feeble remark about being late for dinner, I beat a retreat.

‘These people next day had the Anglican parson to come and say prayers and when that had no effect they got the Roman
Catholic priest to do ditto. The spirits took no notice and so they decided to call in the African Shango Dancers.

‘They had to pay these people five pounds. They built a roof over a flat piece of ground about twenty feet square cut out of the hill above the top house. They started dancing—an old woman, a girl of about seventeen and a man to beat the tomtom—at 7 a.m. on Friday morning. On Saturday afternoon myself and a fellow planter went up to see it. They beat the same monotonous beat on the tomtom and the old woman and girl made the same motions, dancing all the time. You could see they were self-hypnotized. The old woman fell on the ground from exhaustion and her limbs still continued to jerk in time to the drum. She then started to roll, and rolled over and over out of the shed down the hill and, to our amazement, when past the empty house, she rolled along the side of the house and then
rolled up the hill
into the shed again. It was a very steep hill—quite as steep as the hill from the Hospital in St. George's past the St. James's Hotel. It looked impossible and the whole thing was so inhuman and beastly that we left. I told the occupants to send away the young girl aged twelve, as I had read of poltergeists and felt sure she was the cause of the trouble. I don't know if they did so, but the manifestations stopped, as the Africans had said they would.'

Such occurrences, my friend wrote me, are very frequent. In more than one respect the traditions and the faith of Africa made the middle passage from the Guinea Coast.

II

from
MOST WOMEN

Written in
1929

No one doubts the power of the evil eye. If a labourer who is unhappy can go into a decline, turning his face to the wall and dying in the course of a few days without any visible complaint, there is no reason why the same powers of will and concentration should not work harm upon an enemy.

During my first days in Martinique, before I had moved into the bungalow, Eldred Curwen and I stayed in a small hotel in
Fort de France. As they only charged us forty francs a day and as that included, in addition to our food, as much red wine as we could manage, we did not expect a high standard of comfort. We did expect, though, something rather better in the way of service than the slatternly half-caste who clattered the plates like muskets, upset sardine oil on my trousers, and brought no potatoes till we had finished our
entrée
. It was not even as though she had made up for her inefficiency, as do so many negroes, by an amiable readiness to smile. She was sour and ill-favoured. Without being old, she looked as though she had never been young. Her features were set in a sulky scowl. Her long, red print frock was soiled and shapeless. There was no pretty handkerchief knotted in her hair. She was, we decided, just too much of a good thing.

‘We'll change our table this evening,' Eldred said.

We did not expect to meet with any difficulty. A boat was sailing for St. Thomas that afternoon, and the dining-room when we came down to it for dinner was comparatively empty. The
maître d'hôtel
became flustered, however, when we asked to be placed at another table.

‘I have put you at Floria's table,' he said.

‘I know,' we answered. ‘But we want to be moved from it. There are several tables vacant, aren't there?'

He nodded his head. Yes, certainly there were tables vacant. At the same time. . . .

He was still hesitating when Floria shuffled across the room on her bare feet.

‘That's your table, there,' she said.

‘We are arranging to change tables,' Eldred told her.

The sullen look on her face darkened. ‘That's your table,' she repeated, ‘there.'

But by this time I had begun to grow impatient. ‘We can't wait here the whole evening,' I said to the
maître d'hôtel
. ‘Please find us another table. That one over there is empty, isn't it?'

I had begun to move across to it, when Floria pushed in front of me.

‘Why?' she asked.

Her manner was so offensive that my impatience conquered my self-control. ‘Because I don't want to have all my trousers covered with sardine oil.'

I spoke angrily. And as she heard me, the sulky expression of her features deepened into a stare of fierce malevolence. Her eyes followed us as we crossed the room.

At the table next to ours was a French Creole who had come out on the same boat with us.

‘That was a black look she gave us,' I remarked.

He nodded his head. ‘It certainly was,' he answered, pausing significantly, as though there were more that he would say. He shrugged his shoulders casually, however. ‘Ah, well,' he said. ‘It may mean nothing.'

That night I could not sleep. I was weary with the exhaustion of a long sea voyage, of packing, of early rising, of the excitement of arriving at a new place; but I could not sleep; all night I tossed restlessly under the mosquito-net. I felt limp and lifeless as I came up from my shower bath to the wide veranda on which my morning coffee and fruit were awaiting me, to find that Eldred Curwen, usually a late riser, was already down. There were red rims under his eyes.

‘How did you sleep?' I asked.

‘Twice, for three consecutive minutes.'

‘That's more than I managed.'

At the other end of the veranda the French Creole who had travelled out with us was dipping a crust of bread into his coffee. He laughed at our admission.

‘I was wondering about that,' he said. ‘If I were you, I should go back to Floria's table.'

We stared at him in surprise.

‘What are we to take that to mean?' we asked.

‘Only that black magic does exist.'

We laughed at that. ‘Are you trying to tell us that Floria's put a spell on us?'

‘More or less.'

‘And are you expecting us to believe that?'

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You can believe it or not believe it, as you choose, but do you fancy the people who run this hotel would keep a woman like that if they weren't afraid of her? Anyhow, wait and see how you sleep tonight. It may be that last night you were too excited.'

Throughout that day I thought of nothing except sleep. As I strolled through the narrow, coloured streets of Fort de France, as
I sat on the balcony of the Club sipping a rum punch, looking out over the green savannah to the white statue of Josephine, as I drove in the afternoon through green fields of cane to the palm groves of La Fontaine and Carbet, my eyelids ached and throbbed. I counted the moments till the sun should have sunk into the Caribbean.

It was only a few minutes after eight that I went to bed, feeling that not for another second could I keep awake, but once again I was to toss, hot and restless and exhausted, through the interminable hours of a tropic night, and once again, when at last dawn came, I found a fractious and red-eyed Eldred awaiting me on the veranda.

‘Really,' he said, ‘this is too much of a good thing. I haven't had two minutes' sleep.'

The Frenchman laughed knowingly over his coffee. ‘I should change your table in the dining-room if I were you,' he said.

We were less sceptical now than we had been on the previous evening.

‘Has she been poisoning us?' we asked.

He shook his head. ‘She doesn't need poison—not material poison, anyhow. She's got beyond that. You wouldn't be surprised at the hotel keeping her on here if you knew her story.' He paused; then, seeing that we were listening, went on.

She was sixteen, he told us, at the time, and in the Martinique fashion she was lovely. She was straight and tall and supple. She wore a long, flowing, green silk robe, a yellow
madras
about her neck, and a green-and-yellow handkerchief for her hair. There were rings swinging from her ears; the gift of a sailor brother. And she was proud, as are the women of Martinique who know their beauty to be famous through the length of the Antilles.

It is of such a one that he spoke to us, and of an evening twenty years before when her dark eyes had smiled softly through a moon-silvered dusk at the young Frenchman at her feet.

‘So you were afraid to speak to me. Silly one, there was no need to be,' she whispered.

Her voice was soft, and her French had that unslurred purity of accent which is for those only to whom it comes as a taught language.

From the adjacent flank of the veranda came the sound of voices, of a gramophone, of ice rattled against glass. Below, many feet below, the gentle waters of the Caribbean were breaking
upon the beach. From the encircling hills the murmur of innumerable crickets ebbed and throbbed. But for the two young people crouched on the long flight of steps there existed beneath that velvet sky no sound but their own voices, no being but themselves.

‘And all this time,' she went on, ‘you've been missing me, really and truly missing me?'

‘From that first instant, beautiful. Do you remember?'

She nodded her head slowly. ‘How should I forget?'

That first instant. It had been within an hour of his arrival at Martinique to take up a post there as a minor Government official. He was frightened and he was excited. He had never seen the tropics before. He had never left home even. He had never had any responsibility. He was only twenty-one. He was frightened and he was homesick. It was so new, so strange. And yet it was so lovely, the green square with its palm trees and its statue, its flanking of blue sea and shuttered houses. And it was so friendly. He had been welcomed enthusiastically, he had been taken to the Club, had been stood rum punches. He had sat looking down over the balcony when suddenly in the street below. . . .

‘There you were,' he said, ‘in that mauve-coloured frock of yours. And you looked up at me. And oh, my dear, for six months I've not been thinking of anything but that.'

‘Why didn't you tell me, silly?'

‘How was I to? I didn't know even who you were.'

He had been shy of asking: shy with the inexperience of twenty-one and with the exaggerated sense of dignity that he felt was due to his position. Even when he had discovered who she was, the daughter of a Frenchman and a native, killed, both of them, in the disaster of St. Pierre, living with cousins in Fort de France, supporting herself with her needle, he had felt no nearer to meeting her. She went out little. He knew none of her friends. There was no link between them. ‘It's ridiculous,' he told himself as the months went by. ‘You won't meet her. You'd far better stop thinking about her.'

He had not been able to. He could not believe that that look, that had seemed on her side as on his an utter admission of surrender, could be an end as well as a beginning. For six months the memory of that look had held him back when the moment and the mood had flung in his way the opportunities that inevitably come to a young man, handsome and well-placed.

‘No, no,' he had thought. ‘I must keep free. One day I'll be meeting her again. One day all of a sudden it'll happen.'

As it had happened. Never had he felt further from meeting her than he had that afternoon as he walked down from his office to the Club. Five o'clock, he had thought. For an hour I'll play bridge or billiards, make or lose some three or four hundred sous, then it'll be sundown and I'll be sitting on the big veranda looking out over the savannah. There'll be five or six of us. And we'll discuss the things one does discuss in a place like Fort de France: the price of rum, the price of sugar, the rival merits of various kinds of car. And we'll go on talking there till seven or half-past; till it's time to go back to dinner. And I'll be at the hotel, at my table, by myself, with the exhilaration of the punch subsiding, and I'll be sleepy and a little lonely, and I'll feel that it should be all different, that there should be some other use to make of the early twenties. I'll be thinking how different
she
could make it for me.

That was how he felt as he had walked down the Rue Perin-non towards the Club. And then, just as he had turned to the right at the street's foot, a voice from a car had hailed him.

‘What are you doing? Nothing? Well, come out with us to bathe at Founigaut. Yes, of course you can. There are three carloads of us. Just room for you in this. Jump in.'

It was from a man he did not know well, a mulatto of no particular account who directed a small photographic establishment, that the invitation had come. Ordinarily he would have refused it. No sooner, indeed, had he accepted it than he began to wish he hadn't. In no French colony is the colour line drawn strictly. But there were many people in Fort de France whom he felt it would be better for him, as an official, not to know. ‘What am I doing here?' he thought as the car, with its load of shrieking, laughing half-castes, rattled round the sharp corners of the uneven, mounting road; as he stood, nervous and silent, trying not to look superior, on the fringe of the chattering crowd that was splashing about the water's edge. He felt embarrassed, self-conscious, out of place. ‘What am I doing here,' he thought, ‘among these people?'

And then suddenly he saw her. And instantly he was unconscious of the silly, noisy crowd. The slim, erect figure, the black eyes, the sleek skin whose dark colouring betrayed its origin.
‘You,' he whispered. And the dark eyes smiled and she stretched out her hand to him. ‘Let's swim,' she said. They ran into the water, to swim side by side with slow, even strokes as the sun, red and largening, sank into the Caribbean, and the first stars in the violet sky behind the hills began to glimmer. They said nothing: there was no need for words. Not yet. It was enough, after these months, to be together. In silence they swam back to shore, followed the rest of the party to the bungalow, where on the veranda a gramophone was playing. In silence at the head of the long flight of steps they turned into each other's arms to dance. And it was as though all their lives they had danced together. It was an utter harmony, so that afterwards, with the record finished, when they walked away to sit side by side on the veranda steps, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he who was so nervous, should without nervousness speak to her of all the things he had thought and felt during those dividing months.