Part 30

... It seems to you that you could never weary of watching this picturesque life,--of studying the costumes, brilliant with butterfly colors,--and the statuesque semi-nudity of laboring hundreds,--and the untaught grace of attitudes,--and the simplicity of manners. Each day brings some new pleasure of surprise;--even from the window of your lodging you are ever noting something novel, something to delight the sense of oddity or beauty.... Even in your room everything interests you, because of its queerness or quaintness: you become fond of the objects about you,--the great noiseless rocking-chairs that lull to sleep;--the immense bed (_lit-à-bateau_) of heavy polished wood, with its richly carven sides reaching down to the very floor;--and its invariable companion, the little couch or _sopha_, similarly shaped but much narrower, used only for the siesta;--and the thick red earthen vessels (_dobannes_) which keep your drinking-water cool on the hottest days, but which are always filled thrice between sunrise and sunset with clear water from the mountain,--_dleau toutt vivant_, "all alive";--and the _verrines_, tall glass vases with stems of bronze in which your candle will burn steadily despite a draught;--and even those funny little angels and Virgins which look at you from their bracket in the corner, over the oil lamp you are presumed to kindle nightly in their honor, however great a heretic you may be.... You adopt at once, and without reservation, those creole home habits which are the result of centuries of experience with climate,--abstention from solid food before the middle of the day, repose after the noon meal;--and you find each repast an experience as curious as it is agreeable. It is not at all difficult to accustom oneself to green pease stewed with sugar, eggs mixed with tomatoes, salt fish stewed in milk, palmiste pith made into salad, grated cocoa formed into rich cakes, and dishes of titiri cooked in oil,--the minuscule fish, of which a thousand will scarcely fill a saucer. Above all, you are astonished by the endless variety of vegetables and fruits, of all conceivable shapes and inconceivable flavors.

And it does not seem possible that even the simplest little recurrences of this antiquated, gentle home-life could ever prove wearisome by daily repetition through the months and years. The musical greeting of the colored child, tapping at your door before sunrise,--"_Bonjou', Missié_,"--as she brings your cup of black hot coffee and slice of corossole;--the smile of the silent brown girl who carries your meals up-stairs in a tray poised upon her brightly coiffed head, and who stands by while you dine, watching every chance to serve, treading quite silently with her pretty bare feet;--the pleasant manners of the _màchanne_ who brings your fruit, the _porteuse_ who delivers your bread, the _blanchisseuse_ who washes your linen at the river,--and all the kindly folk who circle about your existence, with their trays and turbans, their _foulards_ and _douillettes_, their primitive grace and creole chatter: these can never cease to have a charm for you. You cannot fail to be touched also by the amusing solicitude of these good people for your health, because you are a stranger: their advice about hours to go out and hours to stay at home,--about roads to follow and paths to avoid on account of snakes,--about removing your hat and coat, or drinking while warm.... Should you fall ill, this solicitude intensifies to devotion; you are tirelessly tended;--the good people will exhaust their wonderful knowledge of herbs to get you well,--will climb the mornes even at midnight, in spite of the risk of snakes and fear of zombis, to gather strange plants by the light of a lantern. Natural joyousness, natural kindliness, heart-felt desire to please, childish capacity of being delighted with trifles,--seem characteristic of all this colored population. It is turning its best side towards you, no doubt; but the side of the nature made visible appears none the less agreeable because you suspect there is another which you have not seen. What kindly inventiveness is displayed in contriving surprises for you, or in finding some queer thing to show you,--some fantastic plant, or grotesque fish, or singular bird! What apparent pleasure in taking trouble to gratify,--what innocent frankness of sympathy!... Childishly beautiful seems the readiness of this tinted race to compassionate: you do not reflect that it is also a savage trait, while the charm of its novelty is yet upon you. No one is ashamed to shed tears for the death of a pet animal; any mishap to a child creates excitement, and evokes an immediate volunteering of services. And this compassionate sentiment is often extended, in a semi-poetical way, even to inanimate objects. One June morning, I remember, a three-masted schooner lying in the bay took fire, and had to be set adrift. An immense crowd gathered on the wharves; and I saw many curious manifestations of grief,--such grief, perhaps, as an infant feels for the misfortune of a toy it imagines to possess feeling, but not the less sincere because unreasoning. As the flames climbed the rigging, and the masts fell, the crowd moaned as though looking upon some human tragedy; and everywhere one could hear such strange cries of pity as, "_Pauv' malhérè!_" (poor unfortunate), "_pauv' diabe!_"... "_Toutt baggaïe-y pou allé, casse!_" (All its things-to-go-with are broken!) sobbed a girl, with tears streaming down her cheeks.... She seemed to believe it was alive....

... And day by day the artlessness of this exotic humanity touches you more;--day by day this savage, somnolent, splendid Nature--delighting in furious color--bewitches you more. Already the anticipated necessity of having to leave it all some day--the far-seen pain of bidding it farewell--weighs upon you, even in dreams.

II

Reader, if you be of those who have longed in vain for a glimpse of that tropic world,--tales of whose beauty charmed your childhood, and made stronger upon you that weird mesmerism of the sea which pulls at the heart of a boy,--one who had longed like you, and who, chance-led, beheld at last the fulfilment of the wish, can swear to you that the magnificence of the reality far excels the imagining. Those who know only the lands in which all processes for the satisfaction of human wants have been perfected under the terrible stimulus of necessity, can little guess the witchery of that Nature ruling the zones of color and of light. Within their primeval circles, the earth remains radiant and young as in that preglacial time whereof some transmitted memory may have created the hundred traditions of an Age of Gold. And the prediction of a paradise to come,--a phantom realm of rest and perpetual light: may this not have been but a sum of the remembrances and the yearnings of man first exiled from his heritage,--a dream born of the great nostalgia of races migrating to people the pallid North?...

... But with the realization of the hope to know this magical Nature you learn that the actuality varies from the preconceived ideal otherwise than in surpassing it. Unless you enter the torrid world equipped with scientific knowledge extraordinary, your anticipations are likely to be at fault. Perhaps you had pictured to yourself the effect of perpetual summer as a physical delight,--something like an indefinite prolongation of the fairest summer weather ever enjoyed at home. Probably you had heard of fevers, risks of acclimatization, intense heat, and a swarming of venomous creatures; but you may nevertheless believe you know what precautions to take; and published statistics of climatic temperature may have persuaded you that the heat is not difficult to bear. By that enervation to which all white dwellers in the tropics are subject you may have understood a pleasant languor,--a painless disinclination to effort in a country where physical effort is less needed than elsewhere,--a soft temptation to idle away the hours in a hammock, under the shade of giant trees. Perhaps you have read, with eyes of faith, that torpor of the body is favorable to activity of the mind, and therefore believe that the intellectual powers can be stimulated and strengthened by tropical influences:--you suppose that enervation will reveal itself only as a beatific indolence which will leave the brain free to think with lucidity, or to revel in romantic dreams.

III

You are not at first undeceived;--the disillusion is long delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity about you,--for idyllic scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval forest, and the valleys threaded by a hundred brooks. I know not whether the faces and forms that you seek will be revealed to you;--but you will not be able to complain for the lack of idyllic loveliness in the commonest landscape. Whatever artistic knowledge you possess will merely teach you the more to wonder at the luxuriant purple of the sea, the violet opulence of the sky, the violent beauty of foliage greens, the lilac tints of evening, and the color-enchantments distance gives in an atmosphere full of iridescent power,--the amethysts and agates, the pearls and ghostly golds, of far mountainings. Never, you imagine, never could one tire of wandering through those marvellous valleys,--of climbing the silent roads under emeraldine shadow to heights from which the city seems but a few inches long, and the moored ships tinier than gnats that cling to a mirror,--or of swimming in that blue bay whose clear flood stays warm through all the year.[53] Or, standing alone, in some aisle of colossal palms, where humming-birds are flashing and shooting like a showering of jewel-fires, you feel how weak the skill of poet or painter to fix the sensation of that white-pillared imperial splendor;--and you think you know why creoles exiled by necessity to colder lands may sicken for love of their own,--die of home-yearning, as did many a one in far Louisiana, after the political tragedies of 1848....

... But you are not a creole, and must pay tribute of suffering to the climate of the tropics. You will have to learn that a temperature of 90° Fahr. in the tropics is by no means the same thing as 90° Fahr. in Europe or the United States;--that the mornes cannot be climbed with safety during the hotter hours of the afternoon;--that by taking a long walk you incur serious danger of catching a fever;--that to enter the high woods, a path must be hewn with the cutlass through the creepers and vines and undergrowth,--among snakes, venomous insects, venomous plants, and malarial exhalations;--that the finest blown dust is full of irritant and invisible enemies;--that it is folly to seek repose on a sward, or in the shade of trees,--particularly under tamarinds. Only after you have by experience become well convinced of these facts can you begin to comprehend something general in regard to West Indian conditions of life.

[Footnote 53: Rufz remarks that the first effect of this climate of the Antilles is a sort of general physical excitement, an exaltation, a sense of unaccustomed strength,--which begets the desire of immediate action to discharge the surplus of nervous force. "Then all distances seem brief;--the greatest fatigues are braved without hesitation."--_Études._]

IV

... Slowly the knowledge comes.... For months the vitality of a strong European (the American constitution bears the test even better) may resist the debilitating climate: perhaps the stranger will flatter himself that, like men habituated to heavy labor in stifling warmth,--those toiling in mines, in founderies in engine-rooms of ships, at iron-furnaces,--so he too may become accustomed, without losing his strength to the continuous draining of the pores, to the exhausting force of this strange motionless heat which compels change of clothing many times a day. But gradually he finds that it is not heat alone which is debilitating him, but the weight and septic nature of an atmosphere charged with vapor, with electricity, with unknown agents not less inimical to human existence than propitious to vegetal luxuriance. If he has learned those rules of careful living which served him well in a temperate climate, he will not be likely to abandon them among his new surroundings; and they will help him; no doubt,--particularly if he be prudent enough to avoid the sea-coast at night, and all exposure to dews or early morning mists, and all severe physical strain. Nevertheless, he becomes slowly conscious of changes extraordinary going on within him,--in especial, a continual sensation of weight in the brain, daily growing, and compelling frequent repose;--also a curious heightening of nervous sensibility to atmospheric changes, to tastes and odors, to pleasure and pain. Total loss of appetite soon teaches him to follow the local custom of eating nothing solid before mid-day, and enables him to divine how largely the necessity for caloric enters into the food-consumption of northern races. He becomes abstemious, eats sparingly, and discovers his palate to have become oddly exacting--finds that certain fruits and drinks are indeed, as the creoles assert, appropriate only to particular physical conditions corresponding with particular hours of the day. Corossole is only to be eaten in the morning, after black coffee;--vermouth is good to drink only between the hours of nine and half-past ten;--rum or other strong liquor only before meals or after fatigue;--claret or wine only during a repast, and then very sparingly,--for, strangely enough, wine is found to be injurious in a country where stronger liquors are considered among the prime necessaries of existence.

And he expected, at the worst, to feel lazy, to lose some physical energy! But this is no mere languor which now begins to oppress him;--it is a sense of vital exhaustion painful as the misery of convalescence: the least effort provokes a perspiration profuse enough to saturate clothing, and the limbs ache as from muscular overstrain;--the lightest attire feels almost insupportable;--the idea of sleeping even under a sheet is torture, for the weight of a silken handkerchief is discomfort. One wishes one could live as a savage,--naked in the heat. One burns with a thirst impossible to assuage--feels a desire for stimulants, a sense of difficulty in breathing, occasional quickenings of the heart's action so violent as to alarm. Then comes at last the absolute dread of physical exertion. Some slight relief might be obtained, no doubt, by resigning oneself forthwith to adopt the gentle indolent manners of the white creoles, who do not walk when it is possible to ride, and never ride if it is equally convenient to drive;--but the northern nature generally refuses to accept this ultimate necessity without a protracted and painful struggle.

... Not even then has the stranger fully divined the evil power of this tropical climate, which remodels the characters of races within a couple of generations,--changing the shape of the skeleton,--deepening the cavities of the orbits to protect the eye from the flood of light,--transforming the blood,--darkening the skin. Following upon the nervous modifications of the first few months come modifications and changes of a yet graver kind;--with the loss of bodily energy ensues a more than corresponding loss of mental activity and strength. The whole range of thought diminishes, contracts,--shrinks to that narrowest of circles which surrounds the physical sell, the inner ring of merely material sensation: the memory weakens appallingly;--the mind operates faintly, slowly, incoherently,--almost as in dreams. Serious reading, vigorous thinking, become impossible. You doze over the most important project;--you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating of books.

Then comes the vain revolt, the fruitless desperate striving with this occult power which numbs the memory and enchants the will. Against the set resolve to think, to act, to study, there is a hostile rush of unfamiliar pain to the temples, to the eyes, to the nerve centres of the brain; and a great weight is somewhere in the head, always growing heavier: then comes a drowsiness that overpowers and stupefies, like the effect of a narcotic. And this obligation to sleep, to sink into coma, will impose itself just so surely as you venture to attempt any mental work in leisure hours, after the noon repast, or during the heat of the afternoon. Yet at night you can scarcely sleep. Repose is made feverish by a still heat that keeps the skin drenched with thick sweat, or by a perpetual, unaccountable, tingling and prickling of the whole body-surface. With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and slumber comes,--a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will had ebbed away,--all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the night....

V

It might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain class of invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful stimulant,--a tonic medicine which may produce astonishing results within a fixed time,--but which if taken beyond that time will prove dangerous. After a certain number of months, your first enthusiasm with your new surroundings dies out;--even Nature ceases to affect the senses in the same way: the _frisson_ ceases to come to you. Meanwhile you may have striven to become as much as possible a part of the exotic life into which you have entered,--may have adopted its customs, learned its language. But you cannot mix with it mentally;--You circulate only as an oil-drop in its current. You still feel yourself alone.

The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six minutes;--perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the brevity of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all activity ceases with sundown: there is no going outside of the city after dark, because of snakes;--club life here ends at the hour it only begins abroad;--there is no visiting of evenings; after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone prepares to retire. And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time for social intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself to this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,--at least some interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours during the suspension of business after noon, or those following the closing of offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy men may find time for such relaxation; and these very hours have been always devoted to restorative sleep by the native population ever since the colony began. Naturally, therefore, the stranger dreads the coming of the darkness, the inevitable isolation of long sleepless hours. And if he seek those solaces for loneliness which he was wont to seek at home,--reading, study,--he is made to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of all libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter, means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad to obtain even a review, and wait months for its coming. And this mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one feels less inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that single enjoyment, which at first rendered a man indifferent to other pleasures,--the delight of being alone with tropical Nature,--becomes more difficult to indulge. When lethargy has totally mastered habit and purpose, and you must at last confess yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber, or at best from a carriage window,--then, indeed, the want of all literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,--from climate as well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see young girls passing to walk right across the island and back before sunset, under burdens difficult for a strong man to lift to his shoulder;--the same journey on horseback would now weary you for days. You wonder of what flesh and blood can these people be made,--what wonderful vitality lies in those slender woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and despite their astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight and touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this savage strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand better how mighty the working of those powers which temper races and shape race habits in accordance with environment.

... Ultimately, if destined for acclimatation, you will cease to suffer from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long period of nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must thin the blood, soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint of health to a dead brown. You will have to learn that intellectual pursuits can be persisted in only at risk of life;--that in this part of the world there is nothing to do but to plant cane and cocoa, and make rum, and cultivate tobacco,--or open a magazine for the sale of Madras handkerchiefs and _foulards_,--and eat, drink, sleep, perspire. You will understand why the tropics settled by European races produce no sciences, arts, or literature,--why the habits and the thoughts of other centuries still prevail where Time itself moves slowly as though enfeebled by the heat.

And with the compulsory indolence of your life, the long exacerbation of the nervous system, will come the first pain of nostalgia,--the first weariness of the tropics. It is not that Nature can become ever less lovely to your sight; but that the tantalization of her dangerous beauty, which you may enjoy only at a safe distance, exasperates at last. The colors that at first bewitched will vex your eyes by their violence;--the creole life that appeared so simple, so gentle, will reveal dulnesses and discomforts undreamed of. You will ask yourself how much longer can you endure the prodigious light, and the furnace heat of blinding blue days, and the void misery of sleepless nights, and the curse of insects, and the sound of the mandibles of enormous roaches devouring the few books in your possession. You will grow weary of the grace of the palms, of the gemmy colors of the ever-clouded peaks, of the sight of the high woods made impenetrable by lianas and vines and serpents. You will weary even of the tepid sea, because to enjoy it as a swimmer you must rise and go out at hours while the morning air is still chill and heavy with miasma;--you will weary, above all, of tropic fruits, and feel that you would gladly pay a hundred francs for the momentary pleasure of biting into one rosy juicy Northern apple.

VI

--But if you believe this disillusion perpetual,--if you fancy the old bewitchment has spent all its force upon you,--you do not know this Nature. She is not done with you yet: she has only torpefied your energies a little. Of your willingness to obey her, she takes no cognizance;--she ignores human purposes, knows only molecules and their combinations; and the blind blood in your veins,--thick with Northern heat and habit,--is still in dumb desperate rebellion against her.

Perhaps she will quell this revolt forever,--thus:--