The Sugar Islands (3 page)

It was the British Consulate that found it for us.

‘You want a house,' they said. ‘That is not easy. We will do our best. If you come tomorrow afternoon we will tell you what we have been able to manage.'

It was in a mood of no great optimism that we went down there. Everyone had shaken their heads when we had told them we were looking for a house.

‘Nobody will want to let his house,' we had been told. ‘A house is a man's home. Where would there be for him to go? And for those who have a house both in the country and the town—well, that means that he is a rich man, that his house in the country is his luxury. There are not many luxuries available in the colonies. He would not be anxious to deprive himself of it.'

It sounded logical enough. And when we found two men waiting for us in the Consulate, it was with the expectation of being shown some sorry shack that we followed them into the car. The sight of the house upon the hill was so complete and so delightful a surprise that we would have accepted any rent that its proprietor demanded of us. We were prudent enough, however, to conceal our elation. And three days later we were installed in the bungalow with three comic-opera servants, the sum of whose monthly wages in francs can have exceeded only slightly the sum of their united ages.

Our cook, Armantine, received eighty francs. Belmont, the guardian, whose chief duty was the supervision of the water supply and the cutting of firewood, fifty francs. His wife, Florentine, who ran errands, washed plates, and did the laundry,
had forty francs. It does not sound generous, but it is useless to pay negroes more than they expect. American prosperity is built on a system of high wages. The higher the worker's wages, the higher his standard of living, the higher his purchasing capacity, the greater is the general commercial activity. But the negro in the French Antilles has no ambition; he is quite content with his standard of living. He does not want it raised. If you were to pay him double wages, he would not buy himself a new suit. He would take a month's holiday. A planter once found that, however high the wages he offered to the natives, he could not induce them to work. In despair he sought an explanation of an older hand.

‘My dear fellow,' he was told, ‘what can you expect with all those fruit trees of yours? Do you think they are going to work eight hours a day when at night they can pick enough fruit to keep them for half a week ?'

In the end, at considerable cost and inconvenience, the planter cut down his fruit trees. Then the natives worked.

Our staff considered itself well rewarded with a hundred and seventy francs a month. And it not only made us comfortable but kept us constantly amused.

Armantine was the static element. She was a very adequate cook, considering the limited resources at her disposal. Meat could only be obtained in small quantities twice a week. Lobster was plentiful only when the moon was full. The small white fish was tasteless. There are only a certain number of ways of serving eggs. And yam and breadfruit, the staple vegetables of the tropics, are uninteresting even when they are flavoured with coconut milk. It says much for her ingenuity that at the end of six weeks we were still able to look forward to our meals. She was also economical. I have little doubt that our larder provisioned her entire family. But no one else was allowed to take advantage of our inexperience. Resolutely, sou by sou, she contested the issue with the local groceries. I should be grateful if in London my housekeeper's weekly books would show no more shillings than Armantine's showed francs. She was also an admirable foil to Florentine.

Florentine was quite frankly a bottle woman. She was never sober when she might be drunk. Amply constructed, I have never seen a person so completely shapeless. Her face was like a piece of
unfinished modelling. With her body swathed in voluminous draperies it was impossible to tell where the various sections of it began. When she danced—and she was fond of dancing—she shook like an india-rubber jelly. Very often after dinner, when we were playing the gramophone, we would see a shadow slinking along the wall. On realizing that its presence had been recognized it would quiver and giggle, turn away its head and produce a mug sheepishly from the intricacies of its raiment. We would look at one another.

‘Armantine!' Eldred would call out. ‘Here!'

In a businesslike, practical manner Armantine hurried round from the kitchen.

‘How much,' we would ask, ‘has Florentine drunk today?'

Armantine's voice would rise on a crescendo of cracked laughter.

‘Too much,' she would reply.

We would look sorrowfully at Florentine and shake our heads, and she would shuffle away like a Newfoundland dog that has been denied a bone. On other evenings Armantine would be lenient.

‘Yes,' she would say, ‘you may give her some tonight.'

So the bottle was got out, the glass was quarter filled. Florentine never looked at the glass while the rum was being poured. She preferred to keep as a surprise the extent of her good fortune, in the same way that a child shuts its eyes till a present is within its hands. And in the same way that a child takes away its present to open it in secret, so would Florentine, with averted face, hurry round the corner of the house. A minute later she would return; a shiny grin across her face.

‘Now I will dance for you,' she would say.

Sometimes she would become unruly as a result of visits to the village. And Armantine would come to us with a distressed look.

‘Please,' she would say, ‘give Florentine some clothes to wash. She earned five francs yesterday. Unless she is employed here, she will go down into the village and get drunk.'

So we would make a collection of half-soiled linen, and sorrowfully Florentine would set about the justifying of her monthly wage.

A grotesque creature, Florentine. But a friendly, but a good-natured one. Once I think she may have been attractive in a robust,
florid, expansive way; the kind of attraction that would be likely to wake a last flicker of enterprise in an ageing heart. For Belmont was very many years her senior. Now he has passed into the kindly harbour of indifference. He does not care what she does. He observes her antics with the same detachment that one accepts the irritating but inevitable excursions of a mosquito. He remains aloof, behind an armour of impressive dignity.

He was one of the most impassive and the most dignified figures that I have ever met. He never hurried. Under the shadow of such a straw hat as one associates with South America he moved at a pace infinitely slower than that of a slow-motion film. He possessed a pair of buttonless button boots which can have served no other purpose, so perforated were they, than the warming of his ankles. One day he would wear the right boot. On the next the left. Every fourth or fifth day he would wear neither. Only once did I see him wearing both. That was on New Year's Day. To our astonishment he appeared at breakfast-time in both boots, a straw hat, a flannel shirt buttoned at the neck, and a clean white suit. In his hand he carried a bunch of roses. He was going into Fort de France, he explained, to wish the proprietor of the house a happy New Year.

‘C'est mon droit,'
he said,
‘comme gardien
.' No Roman praetor could have boasted more proudly of his citizenship.

Indeed, there was a Roman quality in Belmont. There was something regal about the way he would lean completely motionless for a whole hour against the concrete terrace work, looking out over the sea, and then at the end of the hour walk, across to the other side of the veranda to lean there for another hour, motionless. And as he slowly climbed the steep stairway from the beach, a long, straight cutlass swinging from his wrist, he looked very like some emperor of the decadence deliberating the execution of a stubborn courtier.

There are two ways of forming an impression of a country. In a few weeks one can only hope to gain a first impression. Very often, if one stays longer, the vividness of that first impression goes. The art of reviewing a book is, I am told, not to read the book carefully. Accurate considered judgment of a book within twenty-four hours of reading it is not possible. A rough idea is all that can be got. And it is usually to one's first impression
that ultimately one returns. At the end of ten days in a place I have often felt that I should know no more of it if I were to stay ten years, but that were I to stay ten months the clarity of that first impression would be gone. My sight would be confused with detail; I should be unable ‘to put anything across'.

The tourist has to rely on first impressions. The question is how is that first impression best obtained? There are two ways. Either you are the explorer, who leaves no corner unexamined, who hurries from place to place collecting and codifying facts; or else you are the observer. From a secluded spot you watch the life of one section of it pass in front of you. From the close scrutiny of that one section you deduce and generalize. Each way has its merits and demerits. It is a matter of temperament, I suppose. Myself, I have always chosen to let life come to me. And in the mornings as I sat on the veranda of our bungalow I would watch the life of the island pass in review before me.

Northwards and southwards, over St. Pierre and Fort de France, there is a rainbow curving, for the rainless is as rare as the sunless day; westwards, on the horizon beyond ‘the bright blue meadow of a bay', ships are passing: the stately liners of the Transatlantic, with their twin funnels and their high white superstructures; the smaller boats of three or four thousand tons, the innumerable and homely cargoes, broad, black, low-lying, with only the white look-out of the bridge above their high-piled decks. Whither are they bound? Northwards for New York, for Jacmel and the dark republics? Southwards for Cristobal, for the silent wizardry of Panama? Afterwards in the blue Pacific will they turn southwards to Peru and Ecuador, or northwards to the coffee ports of Mexico and Guatemala; to Champerico, where they haul you in baskets up onto the long iron pier that runs out into the sea; to Puerto Angeles, where the lighters are loaded by hand, by natives who splash through the waves, their broad shoulders loaded; to Manzanillo, where for three intolerable days I sat in the shadow of a café among squabbling Mexicans, while the
City of San Francisco
discharged an oil tank; Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico? In six weeks' time, who knows, these broad beams may be swinging through the Golden Gate; there may be passengers there who six weeks from now will be looking down from the high window of the
St. Francis
onto the lights and animation of the little square. Whither are they bound, those
nameless cargoes? Hour after hour I would watch them pass and repass upon the horizon.

Sometimes, in a state of high excitement, Armantine would come rushing from the kitchen. ‘
Regardez! Touristes Américains!'
Slowly, in the majesty of its twenty thousand tons, the vast ship would be moving southwards. Shortly after breakfast it discharged its passengers at St. Pierre. For a little they wandered among the ruins; then in a fleet of cars they hurried over the southern road to Fort de France. For an hour or so they will assume control of it. With cameras in their hands they will stroll through the town as though it were an exhibition. They will peer into private houses. They will load themselves with souvenirs, with shouts of laughter they will call each other's attention to such sights as will appear to them remarkable. They will consider fantastically humorous their attempts to make themselves understood in pidgeon French. For an hour, buying, examining, commenting, they will parade the town. Then, with a sigh of relief, they will consider their educational duty to themselves acquitted. It is time the fun began.

‘Let's go some place and enjoy ourselves,' they say.

As likely as not they will choose the Café Bédiat. It is lunch-time. But they do not bother about food. You can eat anywhere. You can eat in Ogden and Omaha and Buffalo. You do not come all the way to Martinique to eat.

‘Rhum, compris? Rhum, Beaucoup
,' they will tell the waitresses.

There is no nonsense about their drinking. They do not spoil good liquor with ice or lime or syrup. This isn't bootleg gin.
[The U.S.A. was in the clutches of Prohibition at this time.]
They know how to treat the real stuff when they meet it. They take it straight. A port glass of neat rum in the one hand, a tumblerful of ice water as a chaser in the other, they set about the serious business of their trip. By the time the last siren of their steamer goes, half the men and three-quarters of the women are drunk. In a country where you can drink all you want for two francs and as much as you can carry for four, they toss their hundred-franc notes upon the table.

‘Ah, don't bother about that,' they say, as the waitress fumbles in her pocket. ‘If you can find any use for that flimsy pink stuff, you cling on to it.'

Laughing and shouting, arm in arm, they sway towards the
ship, having in one small section of the globe done their country's name more damage in four hours than her statesmen and engineers and artists can do it good in as many years. Tomorrow they will pass the day comparing ‘hang-overs'. Who are these people, what are they, where do they come from? In America itself one never sees them.

Far on the horizon the large ships pass; the liners, the tourists, and the cargoes. Nearer the shore is the little tug that plies between St. Pierre and Fort de France. It carries mail and cargo and a few passengers, stopping at Belfontain and Carbet and Case Pilote. At Carbet there is a little pier against which the tug is wharfed. But at Belfontain and Case Pilote and St. Pierre small boats row out to it. A fierce conflict is always staged about the ladder. The boat that gets its cargo and passengers discharged first will get back to the shore in time for another load. No sooner has a boat got into position beside the ladder than another boat enfilades it, creeping closer to the side of the ship; it tries to elbow it out into the sea. It is a form of aquatic spillikins: the object of the game being to displace the other boat without upsetting its passengers and cargoes into the water. The sailors shriek at each other like baseball players. It is a damp and noisy game. The last time I made such an excursion I offered our boatman double fare if he would wait till last. He shook his head. The game was greater than the reward.