Part 31

One day, in the second hour of the afternoon, a few moments after leaving home, there will come to you a sensation such as you have never known before: a sudden weird fear of the light.

It seems to you that the blue sky-fire is burning down into your brain,--that the flare of the white pavements and yellow walls is piercing somehow into your life,--creating an unfamiliar mental confusion,--blurring out thought.... Is the whole world taking fire?... The flaming azure of the sea dazzles and pains like a crucible-glow;--the green of the mornes flickers and blazes in some amazing way.... Then dizziness inexpressible: you grope with eyes shut fast--afraid to open them again in that stupefying torrefaction,--moving automatically,--vaguely knowing you must get out of the flaring and flashing,--somewhere, anywhere away from the white wrath of the sun, and the green fire of the hills, and the monstrous color of the sea.... Then, remembering nothing, you find yourself in bed,--with an insupportable sense of weight at the back of the head,--a pulse beating furiously,--and a strange sharp pain at intervals stinging through your eyes.... And the pain grows, expands,--fills all the skull,--forces you to cry out, replaces all other sensations except a weak consciousness, vanishing and recurring, that you are very sick, more sick than ever before in all your life.

... And with the tedious ebbing of the long fierce fever, all the heat seems to pass from your veins. You can no longer imagine, as before, that it would be delicious to die of cold;--you shiver even with all the windows closed;--you feel currents of air,--imperceptible to nerves in a natural condition,--which shock like a dash of cold water, whenever doors are opened and closed; the very moisture upon your forehead is icy. What you now wish for are stimulants and warmth. Your blood has been changed;--tropic Nature has been good to you: she is preparing you to dwell with her.

... Gradually, under the kind nursing of those colored people,--among whom, as a stranger, your lot will probably be cast,--you recover strength; and perhaps it will seem to you that the pain of lying a while in the Shadow of Death is more than compensated by this rare and touching experience of human goodness. How tirelessly watchful,--how naïvely sympathetic,--how utterly self-sacrificing these women-natures are! Patiently, through weeks of stifling days and sleepless nights,--cruelly unnatural to them, for their life is in the open air,--they struggle to save without one murmur of fatigue, without heed of their most ordinary physical wants, without a thought of recompense;--trusting to their own skill when the physician abandons hope,--climbing to the woods for herbs when medicines prove, without avail. The dream of angels holds nothing sweeter than this reality of woman's tenderness.

And simultaneously with the return of force, you may wonder whether this sickness has not sharpened your senses in some extraordinary way,--especially hearing, sight, and smell. Once well enough to be removed without danger, you will be taken up into the mountains somewhere,--for change of air; and there it will seem to you, perhaps, that never before did you feel so acutely the pleasure of perfumes,--of color-tones,--of the timbre of voices. You have simply been acclimated.... And suddenly the old fascination of tropic Nature seizes you again,--more strongly than in the first days;--the _frisson_ of delight returns; the joy of it thrills through all your blood,--making a great fulness at your heart as of unutterable desire to give thanks....

VII

... My friend Felicien had come to the colony fresh from the region of the Vosges, with the muscles and energies of a mountaineer, and cheeks pink as a French country-girl's;--he had never seemed to me physically adapted for acclimation; and I feared much for him on hearing of his first serious illness. Then the news of his convalescence came to me as a grateful surprise. But I did not feel reassured by his appearance the first evening I called at the little house to which he had been removed, on the brow of a green height overlooking the town. I found him seated in a _berceuse_ on the veranda. How wan he was, and how spectral his smile of welcome,--as he held out to me a hand that seemed all of bone!

... We chatted there a while. It had been one of those tropic days whose charm interpenetrates and blends with all the subtler life of sensation, and becomes a luminous part of it forever,--steeping all after-dreams of ideal peace in supernal glory of color,--transfiguring all fancies of the pure joy of being. Azure to the sea-line the sky had remained since morning; and the trade-wind, warm as a caress, never brought even one gauzy cloud to veil the naked beauty of the peaks.

And the sun was yellowing,--as only over the tropics he yellows to his death. Lilac tones slowly spread through sea and heaven from the west;--mornes facing the light began to take wondrous glowing color,--a tone of green so fiery that it looked as though all the rich sap of their woods were phosphorescing. Shadows blued;--far peaks took tinting that scarcely seemed of earth,--iridescent violets and purples interchanging through vapor of gold.... Such the colors of the _carangue_, when the beautiful tropic fish is turned in the light, and its gem-greens shift to rich azure and prism-purple.

Reclining in our chairs, we watched the strange splendor from the veranda of the little cottage,--saw the peaked land slowly steep itself in the aureate glow,--the changing color of the verdured mornes, and of the sweep of circling sea. Tiny birds, bosomed with fire, were shooting by in long curves, like embers flung by invisible hands. From far below, the murmur of the city rose to us,--a stormy hum. So motionless we remained that the green and gray lizards were putting out their heads from behind the columns of the veranda to stare at us,--as if wondering whether we were really alive. I turned my head suddenly to look at two queer butterflies; and all the lizards hid themselves again. _Papillon-lanmò_,--Death's butterflies,--these were called in the speech of the people: their broad wings were black like blackest velvet;--as they fluttered against the yellow light, they looked like silhouettes of butterflies. Always through my memory of that wondrous evening,--when I little thought I was seeing my friend's face for the last time,--there slowly passes the black palpitation of those wings....

... I had been chatting with Felicien about various things which I thought might have a cheerful interest for him; and more than once I had been happy to see him smile.... But our converse waned. The ever-magnifying splendor before us had been mesmerizing our senses,--slowly overpowering our wills with the amazement of its beauty. Then, as the sun's disk--enormous,--blinding gold--touched the lilac flood, and the stupendous orange glow flamed up to the very zenith, we found ourselyes awed at last into silence.

The orange in the west deepened into vermilion. Softly and very swiftly night rose like an indigo exhalation from the land,--filling the valleys, flooding the gorges, blackening the woods, leaving only the points of the peaks a while to catch the crimson glow. Forests and fields began to utter a rushing sound as of torrents, always deepening,--made up of the instrumentation and the voices of numberless little beings: clangings as of hammered iron, ringings as of dropping silver upon a stone, the dry bleatings of the _cabritt-bois_, and the chirruping of tree-frogs, and the _k-i-i-i-i-i-i_ of crickets. Immense trembling sparks began to rise and fall among the shadows,--twinkling out and disappearing all mysteriously: these were the fire-flies awakening. Then about the branches of the _bois-canon_ black shapes began to hover, which were not birds--shapes flitting processionally without any noise; each one in turn resting a moment as to nibble something at the end of a bough;--then yielding place to another, and circling away, to return again from the other side...the _guimbos_, the great bats.

But we were silent, with the emotion of sunset still upon us: that ghostly emotion which is the transmitted experience of a race,--the sum of ancestral experiences innumerable,--the mingled joy and pain of a million years.... Suddenly a sweet voice pierced the stillness,--pleading:--

--"_Pa combiné, chè!--pa combiné conm ça!_" (Do not think, dear!--do not think like that!)

... Only less beautiful than the sunset she seemed, this slender half-breed, who had come all unperceived behind us, treading soundlessly with her slim bare feet.... "And you, Missié", she said to me, in a tone of gentle reproach;--"you are his friend! why do you let him think? It is thinking that will prevent him getting well."

_Combiné_ in creole signifies to think intently, and therefore to be unhappy,--because, with this artless race, as with children, to think intensely about anything is possible only under great stress of suffering.

--"_Pa combiné,--non, chè_," she repeated, plaintively, stroking Felicien's hair. "It is thinking that makes us old.... And it is time to bid your friend good-night."...

--"She is so good," said Felicien, smiling to make her pleased;--"I could never tell you how good. But she does not understand. She believes I suffer if I am silent. She is contented only when she sees me laugh; and so she will tell me creole stories by the hour to keep me amused, as if I were a child."...

As he spoke she slipped an arm about his neck.

--"_Doudoux_," she persisted;--and her voice was a dove's coo,--"_Si ou ainmein moin, pa combiné-non!_"

And in her strange exotic beauty, her savage grace, her supple caress, the velvet witchery of her eyes,--it seemed to me that I beheld a something imaged, not of herself, nor of the moment only,--a something weirdly sensuous: the Spirit of tropic Nature made golden flesh, and murmuring to each lured wanderer:--"_If thou wouldst love me, do not think_"...

YÉ

I

Almost every night, just before bedtime, I hear some group of children in the street telling stories to each other. Stories, enigmas or _tim-tim_, and songs, and round games, are the joy of child-life here,--whether rich or poor. I am particularly fond of listening to the stories,--which seem to me the oddest stories I ever heard.

I succeeded in getting several dictated to me, so that I could write them;--others were written for me by creole friends, with better success. To obtain them in all their original simplicity and naive humor of detail, one should be able to write them down in short-hand as fast as they are related: they lose greatly in the slow process of dictation. The simple mind of the native story-teller, child or adult, is seriously tried by the inevitable interruptions and restraints of the dictation method;--the reciter loses spirit, becomes soon weary, and purposely shortens the narrative to finish the task as soon as possible. It seems painful to such a one to repeat a phrase more than once,--at least in the same way; while frequent questioning may irritate the most good-natured in a degree that shows how painful to the untrained brain may be the exercise of memory and steady control of imagination required for continuous dictation. By patience, however, I succeeded in obtaining many curiosities of oral literature,--representing a group of stories which, whatever their primal origin, have been so changed by local thought and coloring as to form a distinctively Martinique folk-tale circle. Among them are several especially popular with the children of my neighborhood; and I notice that almost every narrator embellishes the original plot with details of his own, which he varies at pleasure.

I submit a free rendering of one of these tales,--the history of Yé and the Devil. The whole story of Yé would form a large book,--so numerous the list of his adventures; and this adventure seems to me the most characteristic of all. Yé is the most curious figure in Martinique folk-lore. Yé is the typical Bitaco,--or mountain negro of the lazy kind,--the country black whom city blacks love to poke fun at. As for the Devil of Martinique folk-lore, he resembles the _travailleur_ at a distance; but when you get dangerously near him, you find that he has red eyes and red hair, and two little horns under his _chapeau-Bacouè_, and feet like an ape, and fire in his throat. _Y ka sam yon gouôs, gouôs macaque_....

II

Ça qui pa té eonnaitt Yé?... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault under the sun;--he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number of children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.

_Ça qui pa té connaitt Yé?_... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault under the sun;--he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number[54] of children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.

Well, one day Yé went out to the woods to look for something to eat. And he walked through the woods nearly all day, till he became ever so tired; but he could not find anything to eat. He was just going to give up the search, when he heard a queer crackling noise,--at no great distance. He went to see what it was,--hiding himself behind the big trees as he got nearer to it.

All at once he came to a little hollow in the woods, and saw a great fire burning there,--and he saw a Devil sitting beside the fire. The Devil was roasting a great heap of snails; and the sound Yé had heard was the crackling of the snail-shells. The Devil seemed to be very old;--he was sitting on the trunk of a bread-fruit tree; and Yé took a good long look at him. After Yé had watched him for a while, Yé found out that the old Devil was quite blind.

--The Devil had a big calabash in his hand full of _feroce_,--that is to say, boiled salt codfish and manioc flour, with ever so many pimentos (_épi en pile piment_),--just what negroes like Yé are most fond of. And the Devil seemed to be very hungry; and the food was going so fast down his throat that it made Yé unhappy to see it disappearing. It made him so unhappy that he felt at last he could not resist the temptation to steal from the old blind Devil. He crept quite close up to the Devil without making any noise, and began to rob him. Every time the Devil would lift his hand to his mouth, Yé would slip his own fingers into the calabash, and snatch a piece. The old Devil did not even look puzzled;--he did not seem to know anything; and Yé thought to himself that the old Devil was a great fool. He began to get more and more courage;--he took bigger and bigger handfuls out of the calabash;--he ate even faster than the Devil could eat. At last there was only one little bit left in the calabash. Yé put out his hand to take it,--and all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Yé's hand and caught it! Yé was so frightened he could not even cry out, _Aïe-yaïe_. The Devil finished the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Yé in a terrible voice:--"_Atò, saff!--ou c'est ta moin!_" (I've got you now, you glutton;--you belong to me!) Then he jumped on Yé's back, like a great ape, and twisted his legs round Yé's neck, and cried out:---"Carry me to your cabin,--and walk fast!"

... When Yé's poor children saw him coming, they wondered what their papa was carrying on his back. They thought it might be a sack of bread or vegetables or perhaps a _régime_ of bananas,--for it was getting dark, and they could not see well. They laughed and showed their teeth and danced and screamed: "Here's papa coming with something to eat!--papa's coming with something to eat!" But when Yé had got near enough for them to see what he was carrying, they yelled and ran away to hide themselves. As for the poor mother, she could only hold up her two hands for horror.

When they got into the cabin the Devil pointed to a corner, and said to Yé:--"Put me down there!" Yé put him down. The Devil sat there in the corner and never moved or spoke all that evening and all that night. He seemed to be a very quiet Devil indeed. The children began to look at him.

But at breakfast-time, when the poor mother had managed to procure something for the children to eat,--just some bread-fruit and yams,--the old Devil suddenly rose up from his corner and muttered:--

--"_Manman mò!--papa mò!--touttt yche mò!_" (Mamma dead!--papa dead!--all the children dead!)

And he blew his breath on them, and they all fell down stiff as if they were dead--_raidi-cadave!_. Then the Devil ate up everything there was on the table. When he was done, he filled the pots and dishes with dirt, and blew his breath again on Yé and all the family, and muttered:--

--"_Toutt moune lévé!_" (Everybody get up!)

Then they all got up. Then he pointed to all the plates and dishes full of dirt, and said to them:--[55]

--"_Gobe-moin ça!_"

And they had to gobble it all up, as he told them.

After that it was no use trying to eat anything. Every time anything was cooked, the Devil would do the same thing. It was thus the next day, and the next, and the day after, and so every day for a long, long time.

Yé did not know what to do; but his wife said she did. If she was only a man, she would soon get rid of that Devil. "Yé," she insisted, "go and see the Bon-Dié [the Good-God], and ask him what to do. I would go myself if I could; but women are not strong enough to climb the great morne."

So Yé started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day, and began to climb the Montagne Pelée. He climbed and walked, and walked and climbed, until he got at last to the top of the Morne de la Croix.[56]

Then he knocked at the sky as loud as he could till the Good-God put his head out of a cloud and asked him what he wanted:--

--"_Eh bien!--ça ou ni, Yé fa ou lè?_"

When Yé had recounted his troubles, the Good-God said:--

--"_Pauv ma pauv!_ I knew it all before you came, Yé. I can tell you what to do; but I am afraid it will be no use--you will never be able to do it! Your gluttony is going to be the ruin of you, poor Yé! Still, you can try. Now listen well to what I am going to tell you. First of all, you must not eat anything before you get home. Then when your wife has the children's dinner ready, and you see the Devil getting up, you must cry out:--'_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!_' Then the Devil will drop down dead. Don't forget not to eat anything--_ou tanne?_"...

Yé promised to remember all he was told, and not to eat anything on his way down;--then he said good-bye to the Bon-Dié (_bien conm y faut_), and started. All the way he kept repeating the words the Good-God had told him: "_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!"--"tam ni pou tam ni bé!_"--over and over again.

--But before reaching home he had to cross a little stream; and on both banks he saw wild guava-bushes growing, with plenty of sour guavas upon them;--for it was not yet time for guavas to be ripe. Poor Yé was hungry! He did all he could to resist the temptation, but it proved too much for him. He broke all his promises to the Bon-Dié: he ate and ate and ate till there were no more guavas left,--and then he began to eat _zicaques_ and green plums, and all sorts of nasty sour things, till he could not eat any more.

--By the time he got to the cabin his teeth were so on edge that he could scarcely speak distinctly enough to tell his wife to get the supper ready.

And so while everybody was happy, thinking that they were going to be freed from their trouble, Yé was really in no condition to do anything. The moment the supper was ready, the Devil got up from his corner as usual, and approached the table. Then Yé tried to speak; but his teeth were so on edge that instead of saying,--"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé_," he could only stammer out:---"_Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan_."

This had no effect on the Devil at all: he seemed to be used to it! He blew his breath on them all, sent them to sleep, ate up all the supper, filled the empty dishes with filth, awoke Yé and his family, and ordered them as usual;--

--"_Gobe-moin ça!_" And they had to gobble it up,--every bit of it.

The family nearly died of hunger and disgust. Twice more Yé climbed the Montagne Pelée; twice more he climbed the Morne de la Croix; twice more he disturbed the poor Bon-Dié, all for nothing!--since each time on his way down he would fill his paunch with all sorts of nasty sour things, so that he could not speak right. The Devil remained in the house night and day;--the poor mother threw herself down on the ground, and pulled out her hair,--so unhappy she was!

But luckily for the poor woman, she had one child as cunning as a rat,[57]--a boy called Ti Fonté (little Impudent), who bore his name well. When he saw his mother crying so much, he said to her:--

--"Mamma, send papa just once more to see the Good-God: I know something to do!"

The mother knew how cunning her boy was: she felt sure he meant something by his words;--she sent old Yé for the last time to see the Bon-Dié.

Yé used always to wear one of those big long coats they call _lavalasses_;--whether it was hot or cool, wet or dry, he never went out without it. There were two very big pockets in it--one on each side. When Ti Fonté saw his father getting ready to go, he jumped _floup!_ into one of the pockets and hid himself there. Yé climbed all the way to the top of the Morne de la Croix without suspecting anything. When he got there the little boy put one of his ears out of Yé's pocket,--so as to hear everything the Good-God would say.

This time he was very angry,--the Bon-Dié: he spoke very crossly; he scolded Yé a great deal. But he was so kind for all that,--he was so generous to good-for-nothing Yé, that he took the pains to repeat the words over and over again for him:--"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé_."... And this time the Bon-Dié was not talking to no purpose: there was somebody there well able to remember what he said. Ti Fonté made the most of his chance;--he sharpened that little tongue of his; he thought of his mamma and all his little brothers and sisters dying of hunger down below. As for his father, Yé did as he had done before--stuffed himself with all the green fruit he could find.

The moment Yé got home and took off his coat, Ti Fonté jumped out, _plapp!_--and ran to his mamma, and whispered:--

--"Mamma, get ready a nice, big dinner!--we are going to have it all to ourselves to-day: the Good-God didn't talk for nothing,--I heard every word he said!"

Then the mother got ready a nice _calalou-crabe_, a _tonton-banane_, a _matété-cirique_,--several calabashes of _couss-caye_, two _régimes-figues_ (bunches of small bananas),--in short, a very fine dinner indeed, with a _chopine_ of tafia to wash it all well down.

The Devil felt as sure of himself that day as he had always felt, and got up the moment everything was ready. But Ti Fonté got up too, and yelled out just as loud as he could:---"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!_"

At once the Devil gave a scream so loud that it could be heard right down to the bottom of hell,--and he fell dead.

Meanwhile, Yé, like the old fool he was, kept trying to say what the Bon-Dié had told him, and could only mumble:--

--"_Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan!_"

He would never have been able to do anything;--and his wife had a great mind just to send him to bed at once, instead of letting him sit down to eat all those nice things. But she was a kind-hearted soul; and so she let Yé stay and eat with the children, though he did not deserve it. And they all ate and ate, and kept on eating and filling themselves until daybreak--_pauv piti!_