Two Years in the French West Indies Part 35

... 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 combine, che!--pa combine conm ca!_" (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, Missie", 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."

_Combine_ 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 combine,--non, che_," 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 combine-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_"...

CHAPTER XIII. Ye.

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 Ye and the Devil. The whole story of Ye would form a large book,--so numerous the list of his adventures; and this adventure seems to me the most characteristic of all. Ye is the most curious figure in Martinique folk-lore. Ye 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-Bacoue_, and feet like an ape, and fire in his throat. _Y ka sam yon gouos, gouos macaque_....

II.

_ca qui pa te connaitt Ye?_... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Ye? 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 [52] of children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.

Well, one day Ye 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 Ye had heard was the crackling of the snail-sh.e.l.ls. The Devil seemed to be very old;--he was sitting on the trunk of a bread-fruit tree; and Ye took a good long look at him. After Ye had watched him for a while, Ye 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 (_epi en pile piment_),--just what negroes like Ye 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 Ye 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, Ye would slip his own fingers into the calabash, and s.n.a.t.c.h a piece. The old Devil did not even look puzzled;--he did not seem to know anything; and Ye 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. Ye put out his hand to take it,--and all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Ye's hand and caught it! Ye was so frightened he could not even cry out, _Ae-yae_. The Devil finished the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Ye in a terrible voice:--"_At, saff!--ou c'est ta moin!_" (I've got you now, you glutton;--you belong to me!) Then he jumped on Ye's back, like a great ape, and twisted his legs round Ye's neck, and cried out:---"Carry me to your cabin,--and walk fast!"

... When Ye'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 _regime_ 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 Ye 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 Ye:--"Put me down there!" Ye 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 m!--papa m!--touttt yche m!_" (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 Ye and all the family, and muttered:--

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

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

[* In the original:--"Y te ka monte a.s.sous tabe-la, epi y te ka fai caca adans toutt plats-a, adans toutt za.s.siett-la."]

--"_Gobe-moin ca!_"

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.

Ye 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. "Ye," she insisted, "go and see the Bon-Die [the Good-G.o.d], 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 Ye started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day, and began to climb the Montagne Pelee. He climbed and walked, and walked and climbed, until he got at last to the top of the Morne de la Croix.*

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

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

--"_Eh bien!--ca ou ni, Ye fa ou le?_"

When Ye had recounted his troubles, the Good-G.o.d said:--

--"_Pauv ma pauv!_ I knew it all before you came, Ye. 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 Ye! 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 be!_' Then the Devil will drop down dead.

Don't forget not to eat anything--_ou tanne?_"...

Ye promised to remember all he was told, and not to eat anything on his way down;--then he said good-bye to the Bon-Die (_bien conm y faut_), and started. All the way he kept repeating the words the Good-G.o.d had told him: "_Tam ni pou tam ni be!"--"tam ni pou tam ni be!_"--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 Ye 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-Die: 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, Ye was really in no condition to do anything.