Читать книгу The Venture Book - Elinor Mordaunt - Страница 6

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By the sea-gulls, if by nothing else, I should know that we were nearing land. For weeks the sea has been empty of them, but during the past two or three days there have been thousands upon thousands, flashing white against a flawless deep-blue sky, and early this morning we passed the island of Désirade,—which was among the many islands sighted by Columbus,—a long, flat wedge upon the very edge of the horizon. We make Guadeloupe soon after midnight.

Pointe-à-Pitre as I saw it this morning, backed with its panoply of mountains, is a poor place, a veritable black man’s town, and it is necessary to drive a good twenty miles out into the country to get any real idea of the beauty of the island, when it comes upon one with a sense of something like enchantment after one has crossed the bridge at Salt River, which is in reality a narrow strip of sea dividing the kidney-shaped island toward the southern half.

Beyond this division the road begins to mount up and up in a series of sharp hair-pin bends p. 24among innumerable sugar-cone mountains thick to the very top with vegetation, while the scenery unrolls itself behind one like a broad and brilliant ribbon, an endless shining pattern of bright-blue bays and scattered isles and deep gorges; of small villages, gold and brown like the wings of a moth, and scattered huts—the meanest, a single room roofed with palm-leaves, set in its own gem-like garden. Poinsettias; purple and rose-pink Bougainvillea; rose and scarlet crotons; hibiscus and plumbago; orange-trees laden with fruit; bananas with their immense banners of shining enamel-like green leaves overhung by the glossy foliage of breadfruit, more like shining metal than anything else.

The Englishman from off the boat, with whom I maintain a curious sort of armed neutrality,—for quite plainly he dislikes me as much as I dislike him, and yet at times we are glad to talk to each other in our own language,—was with me; and for that day, at least, so great was the enchantment of the place, we were almost friends.

Some fifteen miles from town we passed the cleared open place, the pedestal and bust which mark the spot where Columbus landed; and soon after this we came to an immense archway of gray dressed stone, magnificent in its conception, p. 25giving on to a long drive bordered with the tallest cocoanut palms that I have ever seen, towering and perfectly upright, silver-gray stems. An avenue designed to lead to something very magnificent in the way of palace or city, but leading here, in this place,—with “all the glades’ colonnades,”—to nothing more than a rougher track, a deeper bush, a greater exuberance of nature. An arch erected during the proud days of Louis XIV, with Heaven only knows what visions of a semi-royal colonization.

Fifty kilometers out from the port we drew up at the Hotel des Bains for lunch, and there saw the first white faces which we had chanced upon since starting: a couple of very slightly shaded young French girls in delicate muslin frocks; an old man; the French proprietor and his wife. Here, too, we discovered what is of all things the most precious, the rarest and most to be desired in life: a place where those who are sufficient to themselves may find peace and escape from the perpetual colds, the unutterable drab dreariness of an English winter; a place where one might, indeed, taste the almost forgotten joy of living within one’s income,—or, without any great uneasiness, upon one’s overdraft,—living at ease in mind and body.

p. 26For Monsieur Dole’s Hotel des Bains is cheap, almost given away, indeed, with the franc as it is: full board with wine, thirteen to fifteen francs a day; the extravagance of a sitting-room and wide stretch of veranda, the equivalent of one and twopence a day in our money; board and lodging for a maid, one and sixpence a day, for a chauffeur, one and ninepence a day; garage accommodation for a car, twopence; with, actually, a reduction on all this for any long stay.

Déjeuner for three of us, my companion and myself in the large, clean, open dining-room—with the forests dipping like green-velvet mantles to the edge of the sea—and the chauffeur somewhere in the back regions, cost fifteen francs; roughly, four shillings. A salad of tomato and onions, eggs in butter, Jerusalem artichokes in white sauce, fresh tongue served hot with salad, a dish of wild raspberries,—of a finer grain, harder, and brighter than ours,—a bottle of claret apiece, iced water, and coffee—such coffee too, freshly roasted and ground and of the country. Could any one wish for anything better? The whole expense increased, as was explained to us when we went round to the back of the hotel to order the car and saw nothing of the chauffeur,—apart from a pair of feet clad in bright blue socks p. 27hanging out over the door, while he took his siesta on the floor,—by the fact, as one might have suspected, that he had ordered an iced rum-punch.

Some day, I promise myself, I will come out to Guadeloupe again and spend two or three months in this hotel, a perfectly ideal place to work in. The beauty of the position and the cheapness are not all there is to it, either; for five minutes farther up the mountainside are the natural warm-water baths after which the hotel is named: three great square pools overhung with immense plumes of bamboo, mahogany trees hung with creepers showing between them as though in a dark frame, the intense azure patches of the sea far below them; pools of graduated depths, so that one may sit or stand with the water to one’s chin. There were, indeed, a few native women sitting there with the odd effect of black heads and shining teeth set upon a clear metal platter of shining green, so deep was the shade; in water that is of an unchanging warmth, so near to the temperature of the skin that as I dipped my hand in it I could scarcely feel it—the same temperature at midnight, at dawn, and at midday. Think of that, you at home in England, with the kitchen stove, the hot-water supply, and the cook’s temper forever at odds!

p. 28Yet, even here, where one pictures oneself with old Andrew Marvell, “Annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade,” sorrow has found its way,—albeit the sort of sorrow which wears a feather in its cap,—for over the door of one of the little dressing-rooms some swain has written these words:

Le cœur est porcelaine qui se brise, mais qui ne se raccommode pas.

Signé Duquor: Juillet, 1923.

From the hotel we drove on another fifteen miles to Basse-Terre, down a succession of steep bends between groves of cocoa-trees and high palms. Basse-Terre is a far better town than Pointe-à-Pitre. In the upper part of it are immense solid old gray-stone buildings, houses and barracks and forts of the same period as the arch and the cocoanut avenue, and right on the edge of the sea are modern wooden houses and shops with brilliantly painted red-and-white and green-and-white striped and checked and starred and spotted shutters, closed during the heat of the day. In the center of its little place is a real merry-go-round—prancing wooden horses with flowing manes.

On the way back to the port we punctured a p. 29tire, and while a new one was put on we waited in an old cottage with walls close upon three feet in thickness, where we were regaled with mandarin oranges from a high old tree just outside the door, dragged down by the weight of the golden fruit. A cottage of one large single room, very cool and full of soft umber lights, belonging to an old negro and his wife who showed us photographs of their daughter married to a Frenchman and living in Paris with her husband. In the beautiful, soft, round-syllabled French used by the negroes they told us about their other children, widely scattered throughout the world, and at parting presented me with two treasured beans of vanilla wrapped in newspaper which looked as though it were stained with blood from the sweet, perfumed juice which exuded from them.

We were obliged to stop again on our way back, to water our engine at a little garage over which was posted the delicious sign of Au Gracieux Sourire,—think of that for a motor-garage, with its smells!—and reached our boat with no more than a bare five minutes to spare before she sailed. Not that I myself should have greatly minded had I missed her, provided I could raise so much as a tooth-brush in the town, with a memory of the Hotel des Bains still fresh in my mind.