Two Years in the French West Indies Part 37

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 t.i.tine,--kissing her. "_Adie enc, che;--Bon-Die ke beni 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 pa.s.sengers,--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 eyening;--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 Pelee 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 Parna.s.se,--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 G.o.ds,--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."...

IV.

... It is very hot.... I hold in my hand a j.a.panese 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 Parna.s.se 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 wamrth, 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 facades,--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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ba.s.sE-TERRE ST. KITTS.]

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 ma.s.sing 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;--Pelee still peers high over the rim of the south....

Day wanes;--the shadow of the ship lengthens over the flower-blue water.

Pelee 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 G.o.d in the great Winnowing of Souls....

Then into the indigo night vanishes forever from my eyes the ghost of Pelee; 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....