Читать книгу The Venture Book - Elinor Mordaunt - Страница 7

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Guadeloupe grows upon one slowly, in its insidious loveliness; but Martinique flashes upon one like a great live emerald, catching one’s breath with its beauty, its greenery, which is like nothing else I have ever seen, could ever have imagined; every shade of green on earth,—apart from that of the cool, gray-green English willows,—deep to black, and yet a shining black, in its shade, brilliant as a parrot’s wing in the sunshine.

We arrived there this morning, Sunday, the great market-day of the week, and Fort de France, the port and capital, was all abuzz with life. The town is clean and well kept, with tall brick or color-washed houses, roofed with wooden slats or red tiles; with wide verandas massed with flowers, the brilliant plumes of bamboos and purple and rose-pink Bougainvillea waving above the garden walls, and clear water running in a deep conduit on each side of the street; more houses and shops, built of wood brilliantly painted and flush with the street.

p. 31

Everywhere was color, the market-place a kaleidoscope of color: gowns and turbans of scarlet and crimson, vermilion and pink, crimson and orange, sky-blue, royal-blue, and peacock-blue, green and yellow, the turbans tied with two smartly twisted ends erect like ears, one on each side of the head and in violent contrast to the color p. 32of the gowns; stalls heaped with oranges and red and bright-green and vermilion peppers and purple egg-fruit, a few mangoes, though it is not yet the season, pumpkins cut open to show their luscious rose and crimson centers, pomegranates with their thick red-and-yellow rinds slit, displaying their ruby-like centers; eggs and fowls, and p. 33fish of every color, and white and gray rabbits. The colors shifted, mingled, and broke like waves as the people moved among the stalls—people who are in themselves more beautiful than anything else; women holding themselves like empresses, deep-breasted and upright in their immensely full, starched print gowns.

For the Martinique negroes and negresses are surely the most splendid in all the world, their skins a clear and perfect black, their teeth flawless, while the great muscles of the men move like snakes beneath the skin. All alike are fresh and untired, though many have walked as much as thirty miles this morning, over the mountains, with their heavy baskets on their heads. And the laughter and talk are like the sound of the sea in a cave, so deep and soft and mellow.

Three of us, the Englishman, a French lady p. 34who is another passenger on the boat,—a tall and magnificently made woman with just enough of Tahitian to mellow the French blood in her veins,—and I, took a motor and drove out over the mountains to St. Pierre, the real capital of the island, which was totally destroyed by an eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902.

For some twenty-three miles the road mounts and mounts, and never in my life have I seen anything like the splendor and richness of the vegetation on each side of it: foliage, flowers, fruit. For the greater part of the way it passes along an immensely high and ever-rising ridge, with a deep ravine and silver thread of river far below, to right and left, running down to the great bay. Three miles from tip to tip of each horn and four miles in depth, the bay lay beneath us like a small platter of pure turquoise, the little islands and ships growing ever more toy-like as we looked back between the arching bamboos which edged the road, with ravine and hillside, deep in tree-fern, below them. The road twists so sharply that upon each short reach the next turn is completely lost to sight.

Here were little villages of very clean color-washed houses, and churches which looked as though they were made of colored cardboard, so p. 35crowded that a greater part of their congregations debouched on to benches outside. Magnificently starched and colored and flounced congregations they were, though every now and then in front of some cottage we came across a group of laughing children at play, colored and shining like black pearls, naked as the day they were born—and not out of poverty, either, for it is impossible to imagine anything of the sort in this luxuriant land, but from sheer wanton delight in air and sunshine. And at one spot, beneath a hibiscus tree with brilliant hanging flowers shaped and colored like scarlet corals, sat an old man clad in little more than a tightly curling white beard.

About eighteen miles from St. Pierre the ground begins to drop. There were high walls of shining canes on each side of us, and presently we came across one house which had survived the catastrophe of 1902; and again the road twisted, bringing us within sight of the sea, and we dropped to the burial-place—or, rather, the dead bones—of what had once been a thriving town, with university and schools, a cathedral and a convent, many shops and many private houses, the most prosperous town in all the French West Indies.

To-day, when we visited it, we found forty or p. 36fifty jerry-built wooden houses, a pathetic attempt at a market-place, a handful of grown people and children; a new town devoid of grandeur save for its surroundings. And yet, with all this, a place in which one was conscious of a brooding spirit that could have been nothing less than the spirit of death; a dry-boned and sultry, brooding death which stood with folded wings over the town where it had reaped so great a harvest.

There was one little café where we took our déjeuner, a rickety wooden affair facing the sea. The meals were served in an upper room which stretched the whole width of the house; beneath it was a sort of open hall with a tiled floor packed with barrels, bottles, and benches, where chickens wandered about at their own free will. Back of this were the kitchen and outhouses. In the whole place there could be no possible space for any other rooms, and yet the card which the bowing proprietor handed to me before I left reads like this:

Voyageurs, Touristes!

N’oubliez pas en passant à Saint-Pierre

de visiter le

SELECT-HOTEL

Rue Bouillé

(tout près du débarcardère)

Où vous trouverez:

Apéritifs divers, Casse-croute et Repas a toute

heure. Cuisine moderne.

Service irréprochable.—Prix modérés.

Pension de Famille.

p. 37In the upper room four more than brunette Frenchmen were playing dominoes, splitting a bottle of wine among them. Two more, whose mothers, even more obviously, had “drunk too much coffee,” one with a wooden leg and both very smartly dressed in large-check tweeds and flowing silk ties,—twanging loudly upon their guitars, decorated with bright-pink ribbons,—sang French love-songs. All this did nothing whatever to diminish that indescribable feeling of the immutability of everything on earth: a depression which flattened the good rum-punch, the claret, the simple country meal—brawn and tiny pasties the size of pennies, cold fish with a piquant sauce heavy in garlic; rabbit and purée of peas; wild raspberries and coffee. Even the sight of the small black pig and pullet which slept in a fond embrace upon the floor was powerless to lighten my gloom.

An old negro gave me a wonderful and graphic description of the eruption,—or, rather, what he saw of it from the other side of the island, for no p. 38one now lives who was in it, or can tell exactly how it came upon the town. In the whole town there was but one man left alive: a man who had been imprisoned for murder the night before, shut up in a deep underground cell. Four days later his frenzied screams attracted attention, and he was found to be raving mad, scorched and blistered from head to foot.

The great eruption took place on the morning of May 8th. But for days before that there had been a sound like the continual roar of cannon inside the mountain, while a fine powdering of ashes had fallen over the town, lying so thick in the streets that the people moved about silently, like ghosts; and all the singing and laughing in the cafés, all the joking upon the quay, came to an end, beaten under by a weight of foreboding. The people went about their business white-faced and tight-lipped, refusing to leave the town which they so greatly loved—“the darlingest little town in the Antilles,” as Lafcadio Hearn called it, with all its streets of seventeenth-century houses, its yellow walls and green hanging balconies, its cathedral and universities, its many shops,—for was it not rightly named the Paris of the West Indies?—its theaters and cafés; La Place Bertil, the pride of Martinique, with its many fountains, its p. 39gardens so thronged in general by happy strolling citizens, overrun by laughing children; for of all the islands in the world this island of Martinique, with its mixture of French-negro blood, shows most strikingly what the true mating of different races can be like at its best, breeding women who are, indeed, unmatched in the whole world.

One can see it as it lay during those days, edged with the blazing sea, beneath a sunshine which is like the clear white light of electricity, with all its palm-fringed streets and gardens, its mountains and many streams, its wide and shining river, its mouillage, or landing-stage, its many flights of steps leading to the upper part of the town which must have made it so like Italy. The lovely capital of an altogether lovely island.

On May 5th the sound of cannonading within the mountain gathered to one continuous roar, while a suffocating wind blew from it and a stream of boiling mud,—which some one speaks of as “Mount Pelée bleeding black like a dying octopus,”—bursting forth, rolled down the side of the mountain, spreading out for many acres, moving at the rate of a mile a minute along the bed of the Rivière Blanche, carrying away a great sugar-factory in its course, dashing at last into the sea, throwing up fantastic fountains of steam p. 40as though boiling lead had been poured into it.

Upon this night a very few people began to slip away as though ashamed of being seen leaving by daylight, jeered at by their fellows, who, with their own nerves all on edge, terrified and defiant, bitterly resented the very idea of any one being so mean-spirited as to forsake the town.

The night of May 7th was stiflingly hot. Early in the evening the Italian ship, Orsolino, steamed away; for the captain, who knew Naples, realized what was brooding over the fated town. At daylight next morning, however, the Quebec boat, Roraima, came cheerfully to anchor, to be gutted, charred, burnt to the water’s edge in less than two hours. For at eight o’clock an explosion came like the bursting of a mine, cutting short a message which was even then being sent over the telegraph wires to Fort de France, and of which the one word to reach it, prelude to Heaven only knows what, was curiously and pathetically enough, Allez. It was the last word of a doomed city. A city which was in another moment devastated by a cyclone of red-hot dust and flame; a hurricane of sulphur before which the men in the streets were swept headlong, with clothes and flesh alike torn from them.

That was at eight o’clock, and, at that time, p. 41people upon the far mountain summit declared that they saw a violet-gray cloud, luminous and shot with fire, belch forth from the torn crater like a charge from a cannon, striking the town and spreading to the sea, with the flames eddying and twisting like live things within it. In another moment the mountain itself, the blazing city, hills, and bays, were blotted out by a dense cloud of smoke and ashes which covered the entire island and spread to many of the nearer ones.

In this disaster there was no fall of lava, and it was altogether from the poisonous gases and the falling buildings, the flames which swept the town like a scythe, that the people died,—between twenty and thirty thousand of them,—while so terrible were the fumes which hung over the dead town for at least three days that those who ventured near it were found later, dead among the dead, with blackened and protruding tongues.