Part 32

But during this time the Devil had begun to smell badly and he had become swollen so big that Yé found he could not move him. Still, they knew they must get him out of the way somehow. The children had eaten so much that they were all full of strength--_yo tè plein lafòce_; and Yé got a rope and tied one end round the Devil's foot; and then he and the children--all pulling together--managed to drag the Devil out of the cabin and into the bushes, where they left him just like a dead dog. They all felt themselves very happy to be rid of that old Devil.

But some days after old good-for-nothing Yé went off to hunt for birds. He had a whole lot of arrows with him. He suddenly remembered the Devil, and thought he would like to take one more look at him. And he did.

_Fouinq!_ what a sight! The Devil's belly had swelled up like a morne: it was yellow and blue and green,--looked as if it was going to burst. And Yé, like the old fool he always was, shot an arrow up in the air, so that it fell down and stuck into the Devil's belly. Then he wanted to get the arrow, and he climbed up on the Devil, and pulled and pulled till he got the arrow out. Then he put the point of the arrow to his nose,--just to see what sort of a smell dead Devils had.

The moment he did that, his nose swelled up as big as the refinery-pot of a sugar-plantation.

Yé could scarcely walk for the weight of his nose; but he had to go and see the Bon-Dié again. The Bon-Dié said to him:--

--"Ah! Yé, my poor Yé, you will live and die a fool!--you are certainly the biggest fool in the whole world!... Still, I must try to do something for you;--I'll help you anyhow to get rid of that nose!... I'll tell you how to do it. To-morrow morning, very early, get up and take a big _taya_ [whip], and beat all the bushes well, and drive all the birds to the Roche de la Caravelle. Then you must tell them that I, the Bon-Dié, want them to take off their bills and feathers, and take a good bath in the sea. While they are bathing, you can choose a nose for yourself out of the heap of bills there."

Poor Yé did just as the Good-God told him; and while the birds were bathing, he picked out a nose for himself from the heap of beaks,--and left his own refinery-pot in its place.

The nose he took was the nose of the _coulivicou_.[58] And that is why the _coulivicou_ always looks so much ashamed of himself even to this day.

[Footnote 54: In the patois, "_yon rafale yche_"--"a whirlwind of children."]

[Footnote 55: In the original:--"Y té ka monté assous tabe-là, épi y té ka fai caca adans toutt plats-à, adans toutt zassiett-là."]

[Footnote 56: A peaklet rising above the verge of the ancient crater now filled with water.]

[Footnote 57: The great field-rat of Martinique is, in Martinique folklore, the symbol of all cunning, and probably merits its reputation.]

[Footnote 58: The _coulivicou_, or "Colin Vicou," is a Martinique bird with a long meagre body, and an enormous bill. It has a very tristful and taciturn expression.... _Maig conm yon coulivicou_, "thin as a coulivicou," is a popular comparison for the appearance of anybody much reduced by sickness.]

III

... Poor Yé!--you still live for me only too vividly outside of those strange folk-tales of eating and of drinking which so cruelly reveal the long slave-hunger of your race. For I have seen you cutting cane on peak slopes above the clouds;--I have seen you climbing from plantation to plantation with your cutlass in your hand, watching for snakes as you wander to look for work, when starvation forces you to obey a master, though born with the resentment of centuries against all masters;--I have seen you prefer to carry two hundred-weight of bananas twenty miles to market, rather than labor in the fields;--I have seen you ascending through serpent-swarming woods to some dead crater to find a cabbage-palm,--and always hungry,--and always shiftless! And you are still a great fool, poor Yé!--and you have still your swarm of children,--your _rafale yche_,--and they are famished; for you have taken into your _ajoupa_ a Devil who devours even more than you can earn,--even your heart, and your splendid muscles, and your poor artless brain,--the Devil Tafia!... And there is no Bon-Dié to help you rid yourself of him now: for the only Bon-Dié you ever really had, your old creole master, cannot care for you any more, and you cannot care for yourself. Mercilessly moral, the will of this enlightened century has abolished forever that patriarchal power which brought you up strong and healthy on scanty fare, and scourged you into its own idea of righteousness, yet kept you innocent as a child of the law of the struggle for life. But you feel that law now;--you are a citizen of the Republic! you are free to vote, and free to work, and free to starve if you prefer it, and free to do evil and suffer for it;--and this new knowledge stupefies you so that you have almost forgotten how to laugh!

LYS

I

It is only half-past four o'clock: there is the faintest blue light of beginning day,--and little Victoire already stands at the bedside with my wakening cup of hot black fragrant coffee. What! so early?... Then with a sudden heart-start I remember this is my last West Indian morning. And the child--her large timid eyes all gently luminous--is pressing something into my hand.

Two vanilla beans wrapped in a morsel of banana-leaf,--her poor little farewell gift!...

Other trifling souvenirs are already packed away. Almost everybody that knows me has given me something. Manm-Robert brought me a tiny packet of orange-seeds,--seeds of a "gift-orange": so long as I can keep these in my vest-pocket I will never be without money. Cyrillia brought me a package of _bouts_, and a pretty box of French matches, warranted inextinguishable by wind. Azaline, the blanchisseuse, sent me a little pocket looking-glass. Cerbonnie, the _màchanne_, left a little cup of guava jelly for me last night. Mimi--dear child!--brought me a little paper dog! It is her best toy; but those gentle black eyes would stream with tears if I dared to refuse it.... Oh, Mimi! what am I to do with a little paper dog? And what am I to do with the chocolate-sticks and the cocoanuts and all the sugar-cane and all the cinnamon-apples?...

II

... Twenty minutes past five by the clock of the Bourse. The hill shadows are shrinking back from the shore;--the long wharves reach out yellow into the sun;--the tamarinds of the Place Bertin, and the pharos for half its height, and the red-tiled roofs along the bay are catching the glow. Then, over the light-house--on the outermost line depending from the southern yard-arm of the semaphore--a big black ball suddenly runs up like a spider climbing its own thread.... _Steamer from the South!_ The packet has been sighted. And I have not yet been able to pack away into a specially purchased wooden box all the fruits and vegetable curiosities and odd little presents sent to me. If Radice the boatman had not come to help me, I should never be able to get ready; for the work of packing is being continually interrupted by friends and acquaintances coming to say good-bye. Manm-Robert brings to see me a pretty young girl--very fair, with a violet foulard twisted about her blonde head. It is little Basilique, who is going to make her _pouémiè communion_. So I kiss her, according to the old colonial custom, once on each downy cheek;--and she is to pray to _Notre Dame du Bon Port_ that the ship shall bear me safely to far-away New York.

And even then the steamer's cannon-call shakes over the town and into the hills behind us, which answer with all the thunder of their phantom artillery.

III

... There is a young white lady, accompanied by an aged negress, already waiting on the south wharf for the boat;--evidently she is to be one of my fellow-passengers. Quite a pleasing presence: slight graceful figure,--a face not precisely pretty, but delicate and sensitive, with the odd charm of violet eyes under black eye-brows....

A friend who comes to see me off tells me all about her. Mademoiselle Lys is going to New York to be a governess,--to leave her native island forever. A story sad enough, though not more so than that of many a gentle creole girl. And she is going all alone, for I see her bidding good-bye to old Titine,--kissing her. "_Adié encò, chè;--Bon-Dié ké béni ou!_" sobs the poor servant, with tears streaming down her kind black face. She takes off her blue shoulder-kerchief, and waves it as the boat recedes from the wooden steps.

... Fifteen minutes later, Mademoiselle and I find ourselves under the awnings shading the saloon-deck of the _Guadeloupe_. There are at least fifty passengers,--many resting in chairs, lazy-looking Demerara chairs with arm-supports immensely lengthened so as to form rests for the lower limbs. Overhead, suspended from the awning-frames, are two tin cages containing parrots;--and I see two little greenish monkeys, no bigger than squirrels, tied to the wheel-hatch,--two _sakiwinkis_. These are from the forests of British Guiana. They keep up a continual thin sharp twittering, like birds,--all the while circling, ascending, descending, retreating or advancing to the limit of the little ropes attaching them to the hatch.

The _Guadeloupe_ has seven hundred packages to deliver at St. Pierre: we have ample time,--Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes and I,--to take one last look at the "Pays des Revenants."

I wonder what her thoughts are, feeling a singular sympathy for her,--for I am in that sympathetic mood which the natural emotion of leaving places and persons one has become fond of, is apt to inspire. And now at the moment of my going,--when I seem to understand as never before the beauty of that tropic Nature, and the simple charm of the life to which I am bidding farewell,--the question comes to me: "Does she not love it all as I do,--nay, even much more, because of that in her own existence which belongs to it?" But as a child of the land, she has seen no other skies,--fancies, perhaps, there may be brighter ones....

... Nowhere on this earth, Violet-Eyes!--nowhere beneath this sun!... Oh! the dawnless glory of tropic morning!--the single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of the mornes! And the early breezes from the hills,--all cool out of the sleep of the forests, and heavy with vegetal odors thick, sappy, savage-sweet!--and the wild high winds that run ruffling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound!--

And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green-drenched with silent pouring of creepers,--dashed with the lilac and yellow and rosy foam of liana flowers!--

And the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea,--that as you mount the heights ever appears to rise perpendicularly behind you,--that seems, as you descend, to sink and flatten before you!--

And the violet velvet distances of evening;--and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning,--when all the heaven seems filled with vapors of a molten sun!...

IV

How beautiful the mornes and azure-shadowed hollows in the jewel clearness of this perfect morning! Even Pelée wears only her very lightest head-dress of gauze; and all the wrinklings of her green robe take unfamiliar tenderness of tint from the early sun. All the quaint peaking of the colored town--sprinkling the sweep of blue bay with red and yellow and white-of-cream--takes a sharpness in this limpid light as if seen through a diamond lens; and there above the living green of the familiar hills I can see even the faces of the statues--the black Christ on his white cross, and the White Lady of the Morne d'Orange--among curving palms.... It is all as though the island were donning its utmost possible loveliness, exerting all its witchery,--seeking by supremest charm to win back and hold its wandering child,--Violet-Eyes over there!... She is looking too.

I wonder if she sees the great palms of the Voie du Parnasse,--curving far away as to bid us adieu, like beautiful bending women. I wonder if they are not trying to say something to her; and I try myself to fancy what that something is:--

--"Child, wilt thou indeed abandon all who love thee!... Listen!--'tis a dim grey land thou goest unto,--a land of bitter winds,--a land of strange gods,--a land of hardness and barrenness, where even Nature may not live through half the cycling of the year! Thou wilt never see us there.... And there, when thou shalt sleep thy long sleep, child--that land will have no power to lift thee up;--vast weight of stone will press thee down forever;--until the heavens be no more thou shalt not awake!... But here, darling, our loving roots would seek for thee, would find thee: thou shouldst live again!--we lift, like Aztec priests, the blood of hearts to the Sun."...

V

... It is very hot.... I hold in my hand a Japanese paper-fan with a design upon it of the simplest sort: one jointed green bamboo, with a single spurt of sharp leaves, cutting across a pale blue murky double streak that means the horizon above a sea. That is all. Trivial to my Northern friends this design might seem; but to me it causes a pleasure bordering on pain.... I know so well what the artist means; and they could not know, unless they had seen bamboos,--and bamboos peculiarly situated. As I look at this fan I know myself descending the Morne Parnasse by the steep winding road; I have the sense of windy heights behind me, and forest on either hand, and before me the blended azure of sky and sea with one bamboo-spray swaying across it at the level of my eyes. Nor is this all;--I have the every sensation of the very moment,--the vegetal odors, the mighty tropic light, the warmth, the intensity of irreproducible color.... Beyond a doubt, the artist who dashed the design on this fan with his miraculous brush must have had a nearly similar experience to that of which the memory is thus aroused in me, but which I cannot communicate to others.

... And it seems to me now that all which I have tried to write about the _Pays des Revenants_ can only be for others, who have never beheld it,--vague like the design upon this fan.

VI

_Brrrrrrrrrrr!_... The steam-winch is lifting the anchor; and the _Guadeloupe_ trembles through every plank as the iron torrent of her chain-cable rumbles through the hawse-holes.... At last the quivering ceases;--there is a moment's silence; and Violet-Eyes seems trying to catch a last glimpse of her faithful _bonne_ among the ever-thickening crowd upon the quay.... Ah! there she is--waving her foulard. Mademoiselle Lys is waving a handkerchief in reply....

Suddenly the shock of the farewell gun shakes heavily through our hearts, and over the bay,--where the tall mornes catch the flapping thunder, and buffet it through all their circle in tremendous mockery. Then there is a great whirling and whispering of whitened water behind the steamer--another,--another; and the whirl becomes a foaming stream: the mighty propeller is playing!.... All the blue harbor swings slowly round;--and the green limbs of the land are pushed out further on the left, shrink back upon the right;--and the mountains are moving their shoulders. And then the many-tinted façades,--and the tamarinds of the Place Bertin,--and the light-house,--and the long wharves with their throng of turbaned women,--and the cathedral towers,--and the fair palms,--and the statues of the hills,--all veer, change place, and begin to float away... steadily, very swiftly.

Farewell, fair city,--sun-kissed city,--many-fountained city!--dear yellow-glimmering streets,--white pavements learned by heart,--and faces ever looked for,--and voices ever loved! Farewell, white towers with your golden-throated bells!--farewell, green steeps, bathed in the light of summer everlasting!--craters with your coronets of forest!--bright mountain paths upwinding 'neath pomp of fern and angelin and feathery bamboo!--and gracious palms that drowse above the dead! Farewell, soft-shadowing majesty of valleys unfolding to the sun,--green golden cane-fields ripening to the sea!...

... The town vanishes. The island slowly becomes a green silhouette. So might Columbus first have seen it from the deck of his caravel,--nearly four hundred years ago. At this distance there are no more signs of life upon it than when it first became visible to his eyes: yet there are cities there,--and toiling,--and suffering,--and gentle hearts that knew me.... Now it is turning blue,--the beautiful shape!--becoming a dream....

VII

And Dominica draws nearer,--sharply massing her hills against the vast light in purple nodes and gibbosities and denticulations. Closer and closer it comes, until the green of its heights breaks through the purple here and there,--in flashings and ribbings of color. Then it remains as if motionless a while;--then the green lights go out again,--and all the shape begins to recede sideward towards the south.

... And what had appeared a pearl-grey cloud in the north slowly reveals itself as another island of mountains,--hunched and horned and mammiform: Guadeloupe begins to show her double profile. But Martinique is still visible;--Pelée still peers high over the rim of the south.... Day wanes;--the shadow of the ship lengthens over the flower-blue water. Pelée changes aspect at last,--turns pale as a ghost,--but will not fade away....

... The sun begins to sink as he always sinks to his death in the tropics,--swiftly,--too swiftly!--and the glory of him makes golden all the hollow west,--and bronzes all the flickering wave-backs. But still the gracious phantom of the island will not go,--softly haunting us through the splendid haze. And always the tropic wind blows soft and warm;--there is an indescribable caress in it! Perhaps some such breeze, blowing from Indian waters, might have inspired that prophecy of Islam concerning the Wind of the Last Day,--that "Yellow Wind, softer than silk, balmier than musk,"--which is to sweep the spirits of the just to God in the great Winnowing of Souls....

Then into the indigo night vanishes forever from my eyes the ghost of Pelée; and the moon swings up,--a young and lazy moon, drowsing upon her back, as in a hammock.... Yet a few nights more, and we shall see this slim young moon erect,--gliding upright on her way,--coldly beautiful like a fair Northern girl.

VIII

And ever through tepid nights and azure days the _Guadeloupe_ rushes on,--her wake a river of snow beneath the sun, a torrent of fire beneath the stars,--steaming straight for the North.

Under the peaking of Montserrat we steam,--beautiful Montserrat, all softly wrinkled like a robe of greenest velvet fallen from the waist!--breaking the pretty sleep of Plymouth town behind its screen of palms... young palms, slender and full of grace as creole children are;--

And by tall Nevis, with her trinity of dead craters purpling through ocean-haze;--by clouded St. Christopher's mountain-giant;--past ghostly St. Martin's, far-floating in fog of gold, like some dream of the Saint's own Second Summer;--

Past low Antigua's vast blue harbor,--shark-haunted, bounded about by huddling of little hills, blue and green.

Past Santa Cruz, the "Island of the Holy Cross,"--all radiant with verdure though well nigh woodless,--nakedly beautiful in the tropic light as a perfect statue;--

Past the long cerulean reaching and heaping of Porto Rico on the left, and past hopeless St. Thomas on the right,--old St. Thomas, watching the going and the coming of the commerce that long since abandoned her port,--watching the ships once humbly solicitous for patronage now turning away to the Spanish rival, like ingrates forsaking a ruined patrician;--

And the vapory Vision of, St. John;--and the grey ghost of Tortola,--and further, fainter, still more weirdly dim, the aureate phantom of Virgin Gorda.

IX

Then only the enormous double-vision of sky and sea.

The sky: a cupola of blinding blue, shading down and paling into spectral green at the rim of the world,--and all fleckless, save at evening. Then, with sunset, comes a light gold-drift of little feathery cloudlets into the West,--stippling it as with a snow of fire.

The sea: no flower-tint may now make my comparison for the splendor of its lucent color. It has shifted its hue;--for we have entered into the Azure Stream: it has more than the magnificence of burning cyanogen....

But, at night, the Cross of the South appears no more. And other changes come, as day succeeds to day,--a lengthening of the hours of light, a longer lingering of the after-glow,--a cooling of the wind. Each morning the air seems a little cooler, a little rarer;--each noon the sky looks a little paler, a little further away--always heightening, yet also more shadowy, as if its color, receding, were dimmed by distance,--were coming more faintly down from vaster altitudes.

... Mademoiselle is petted like a child by the lady passengers. And every man seems anxious to aid in making her voyage a pleasant one. For much of which, I think, she may thank her eyes!

X

A dim morning and chill;--blank sky and sunless waters: the sombre heaven of the North with colorless horizon rounding in a blind grey sea.... What a sudden weight comes to the heart with the touch of the cold mist, with the spectral melancholy of the dawn;--and then what foolish though irrepressible yearning for the vanished azure left behind!

... The little monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the chilly air. The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their perches with eyes closed.

... A vagueness begins to shape itself along the verge of the sea, far to port: that long heavy clouding which indicates the approach of land. And from it now floats to us something ghostly and frigid which makes the light filmy and the sea shadowy as a flood of dreams,--the fog of the Jersey coast.

At once the engines slacken their respiration. The _Guadeloupe_ begins to utter her steam-cry of warning,--regularly at intervals of two minutes,--for she is now in the track of all the ocean vessels. And from far away we can hear a heavy knelling,--the booming of some great fog-bell.

... All in a white twilight. The place of the horizon has vanished;--we seem ringed in by a wall of smoke.... Out of this vapory emptiness--very suddenly--an enormous steamer rushes, towering like a hill--passes so close that we can see faces, and disappears again, leaving the sea heaving and frothing behind her.

... As I lean over the rail to watch the swirling of the wake, I feel something pulling at my sleeve: a hand,--a tiny black hand,--the hand of a _sakiwinki_. One of the little monkeys, straining to the full length of his string, is making this dumb appeal for human sympathy;--the bird-black eyes of both are fixed upon me with the oddest look of pleading. Poor little tropical exiles! I stoop to caress them; but regret the impulse a moment later: they utter such beseeching cries when I find myself obliged to leave them again alone!...

... Hour after hour the _Guadeloupe_ glides on through the white gloom,--cautiously, as if feeling her way; always sounding her whistle, ringing her bells, until at last some brown-winged bark comes flitting to us out of the mist, bearing a pilot.... How strange it must all seem to Mademoiselle who stands so silent there at the rail!--how weird this veiled world must appear to her, after the sapphire light of her own West Indian sky, and the great lazulite splendor of her own tropic sea!

But a wind comes;--it strengthens,--begins to blow very cold. The mists thin before its blowing; and the wan blank sky is all revealed again with livid horizon around the heaving of the iron-grey sea.