... 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:—

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 navely 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-lanm,—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 combin, ch!—pa combin conm a!" (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, Missi", 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."

Combin 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 combin,—non, ch," 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 combin-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. Y.



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



II.

a qui pa t connaitt Y?... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Y? 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 Y 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 Y 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 Y took a good long look at him. After Y had watched him for a while, Y 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 (pi en pile piment),—just what negroes like Y 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 Y 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, Y 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 Y 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. Y put out his hand to take it,—and all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Y's hand and caught it! Y was so frightened he could not even cry out, Ae-yae. The Devil finished the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Y 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 Y's back, like a great ape, and twisted his legs round Y's neck, and cried out:-

—"Carry me to your cabin,—and walk fast!"

... When Y'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 rgime 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 Y 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 Y:—"Put me down there!" Y 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 Y and all the family, and muttered:—

—"Toutt moune lv!" (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 t ka mont assous tabe-l, pi y t ka fai caca adans toutt plats-, adans toutt zassiett-l."]

—"Gobe-moin a!"

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.

Y 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. "Y," she insisted, "go and see the Bon-Di [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 Y started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day, and began to climb the Montagne Pele. 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-God put his head out of a cloud and asked him what he wanted:—

—"Eh bien!—a ou ni, Y fa ou l?"

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

—"Pauv ma pauv! I knew it all before you came, Y. 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 Y! 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 b!' Then the Devil will drop down dead. Don't forget not to eat anything—ou tanne?"...

Y promised to remember all he was told, and not to eat anything on his way down;—then he said good-bye to the Bon-Di (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 b!"— tam ni pou tam ni b!"—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 Y 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-Di: 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, Y 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 Y tried to speak; but his teeth were so on edge that instead of saying,—"Tam ni pou tam ni b," he could only stammer out:-

—"Anni toqu Diabe-l 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 Y and his family, and ordered them as usual;—

—"Gobe-moin a!" And they had to gobble it up,—every bit of it.

The family nearly died of hunger and disgust. Twice more Y climbed the Montagne Pele; twice more he climbed the Morne de la Croix; twice more he disturbed the poor Bon-Di, 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,—*

[* The great field-rat of Martinique is, in Martinique folk-lore, the symbol of all cunning, and probably merits its reputation.]

a boy called Ti Font (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 Y for the last time to see the Bon-Di.

Y 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 Font saw his father getting ready to go, he jumped floup! into one of the pockets and hid himself there. Y 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 Y's pocket,—so as to hear everything the Good- God would say.

This time he was very angry,—the Bon-Di: he spoke very crossly; he scolded Y a great deal. But he was so kind for all that,—he was so generous to good-for-nothing Y, that he took the pains to repeat the words over and over again for him:—"Tam ni pou tam ni b."... And this time the Bon-Di was not talking to no purpose: there was somebody there well able to remember what he said. Ti Font 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, Y did as he had done before—stuffed himself with all the green fruit he could find.

The moment Y got home and took off his coat, Ti Font 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 matt-cirique,—several calabashes of couss-caye, two rgimes-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 Font got up too, and yelled out just as loud as he could:-

—"Tam ni pou tam ni b!"

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, Y, like the old fool he was, kept trying to say what the Bon-Di had told him, and could only mumble:—

—"Anni toqu Diabe-l 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 Y 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!

But during this time the Devil had begun to smell badly and he had become swollen so big that Y 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 t plein lafce; and Y 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 Y 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 Y, 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.

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

—"Ah! Y, my poor Y, 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-Di, 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 Y 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.* And that is why the coulivicou always looks so much ashamed of himself even to this day.

[* 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 Y!—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 Y!—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-Di to help you rid yourself of him now: for the only Bon- Di 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!



CHAPTER XIV 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 mchanne, 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 poumi 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. "Adi enc, ch;—Bon-Di k bni 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 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 Pele 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."...



IV.

... 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 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 faades,—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;—Pele still peers high over the rim of the south.... Day wanes;—the shadow of the ship lengthens over the flower-blue water. Pele 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 Pele; 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.

... Thou dim and lofty heaven of the North,—grey sky of Odin, —bitter thy winds and spectral all thy colors!—they that dwell beneath thee know not the glory of Eternal Summer's green,—the azure splendor of southern day!—but thine are the lightnings of Thought illuminating for human eyes the interspaces between sun and sun. Thine the generations of might,—the strivers, the battlers,—the men who make Nature tame!—thine the domain of inspiration and achievement,—the larger heroisms, the vaster labors that endure, the higher knowledge, and all the witchcrafts of science!...

But in each one of us there lives a mysterious Something which is Self, yet also infinitely more than Self,—incomprehensibly multiple,—the complex total of sensations, impulses, timidities belonging to the unknown past. And the lips of the little stranger from the tropics have become all white, because that Something within her,—ghostly bequest from generations who loved the light and rest and wondrous color of a more radiant world,—now shrinks all back about her girl's heart with fear of this pale grim North.... And lo!—opening mile-wide in dream- grey majesty before us,—reaching away, through measureless mazes of masting, into remotenesses all vapor-veiled,—the mighty perspective of New York harbor!...

Thou knowest it not, this gloom about us, little maiden;—'tis only a magical dusk we are entering,—only that mystic dimness in which miracles must be wrought!... See the marvellous shapes uprising,—the immensities, the astonishments! And other greater wonders thou wilt behold in a little while, when we shall have become lost to each other forever in the surging of the City's million-hearted life!... 'Tis all shadow here, thou sayest?— Ay, 'tis twilight, verily, by contrast with that glory out of which thou camest, Lys—twilight only,—but the Twilight of the Gods!... Adi, ch!—Bon-Di k bnt ou!...



ENDNOTES



[1] Since this was written the market has been removed to the Savane,—to allow of the erection of a large new market-building on the old site; and the beautiful trees have been cut down.

[2] I subsequently learned the mystery of this very strange and beautiful mixed race,—many fine specimens of which may also be seen in Trinidad. Three widely diverse elements have combined to form it: European, negro, and Indian,—but, strange to say, it is the most savage of these three bloods which creates the peculiar charm.... I cannot speak of this comely and extraordinary type without translating a passage from Dr. J. J. J. Cornilliac, an eminent Martinique physician, who recently published a most valuable series of studies upon the ethnology, climatology, and history of the Antilles. In these he writes: ...

"When, among the populations of the Antilles, we first notice those remarkable mtis whose olive skins, elegant and slender figures, fine straight profiles, and regular features remind us of the inhabitants of Madras or Pondicherry,—we ask ourselves in wonder, while looking at their long eyes, full of a strange and gentle melancholy (especially among the women), and at the black, rich, silky-gleaming hair curling in abundance over the temples and falling in profusion over the neck,—to what human race can belong this singular variety,—in which there is a dominant characteristic that seems indelible, and always shows more and more strongly in proportion as the type is further removed from the African element. It is the Carib blood—blended with blood of Europeans and of blacks,—which in spite of all subsequent crossings, and in spite of the fact that it has not been renewed for more than two hundred years, still conserves as markedly as at the time of the first interblending, the race-characteristic that invariably reveals its presence in the blood of every being through whose veins it flows."—"Recherches chronologiques et historiques sur l'Origine et la Propagation de la Fivre Jaune aux Antilles." Par J. J. J. Cornilliac. Fort-de-France: Imprimerie du Gouvernement. 1886.

But I do not think the term "olive" always indicates the color of these skins, which seemed to me exactly the tint of gold; and the hair flashes with bluish lights, Like the plumage of certain black birds.

[3] Extract from the "Story of Marie," as written from dictation:

... Manman- t ni yon gous j cae-li. J-la t toup lou'de pou Marie. C t li menm manman l qui t kall pouend dileau. Yon jou y pouend j-la pou y t all pouend dileau. Lh manman- riv b la fontaine, y pa trouv psonne pou chg y. Y rt; y ka cri, "Toutt bon Chritien, vini chg moin!"

... Lh manman rt y ou pa t ni piess bon Chritien pou chage y. Y rt; y cri: "Pouloss, si pa ni bon Chritien, ni mauvais Chritien! toutt mauvais Chritien vini chg moin!"

... Lh y fini di a, y ou yon diabe qui ka vini, ka di conm aa, "Pou moin chg ou, a ou k baill moin?" Manman-l di,—y rponne, "Moin pa ni arien!" Diabe-la rponne y, "Y fau ba moin Marie pou moin p chg ou."

This mamma had a great jar in her house. The jar was too heavy for Marie. It was this mamma herself who used to go for water. One day she took that jar to go for water. When this mamma had got to the fountain, she could not find anyone to load her. She stood there, crying out, "Any good Christian, come load me!"

As the mamma stood there she saw there was not a single good Christian to help her load. She stood there, and cried out: "Well, then, if there are no good Christians, there are bad Christians. Any bad Christian, come and load me!"

The moment she said that, she saw a devil coming, who said to her, "If I load you, what will you give me?" This mamma answered, and said, I have nothing !" The devil answered her, "Must give me Marie if you want me to load you."

[4] Y batt li conm lambi—"he beat him like a lambi"—is an expression that may often be heard in a creole court from witnesses testifying in a case of assault and battery. One must have seen a lambi pounded to appreciate the terrible picturesqueness of the phase.

[5] Moreau de Saint-Mry writes, describing the drums of the negroes of Saint Domingue: "Le plus court de ces tambours est nomm Bamboula, attendu qu'il est form quelquefois d'un trs- gros bambou."—"Description de la partie franaise de Saint Domingue, vol. i., p. 44.]

[6] What is known in the West Indies as a hurricane is happily rare; it blows with the force of a cyclone, but not always circularly; it may come from one direction, and strengthen gradually for days until its highest velocity and destructive force are reached. One in the time of Pre Labat blew away the walls of a fort;—that of 1780 destroyed the lives of twenty-two thousand people in four islands: Martinique, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent, and Barbadoes.

Before the approach of such a visitation animals manifest the same signs of terror they display prior to an earthquake. Cattle assemble together, stamp, and roar; sea-birds fly to the interior; fowl seek the nearest crevice they can hide in. Then, while the sky is yet clear, begins the breaking of the sea; then darkness comes, and after it the wind.

[7] "Histoire Gnrale des Antilles... habits par les Franais." Par le R. P. Du Tertre, de l'Ordre des Frres Prescheurs. Paris: 1661-71. 4 vols. (with illustrations) in 4to.

[8] One of the lights seen on the Caravelle was certainly carried by a cattle-thief,—a colossal negro who had the reputation of being a sorcerer ,—a quimboiseur. The greater part of the mountainous land forming La Caravelle promontory was at that time the property of a Monsieur Eustache, who used it merely for cattle-raising purposes. He allowed his animals to run wild in the hills; they multiplied exceedingly, and became very savage. Notwithstanding their ferocity, however, large numbers of them were driven away at night, and secretly slaughtered or sold, by somebody who used to practise the art of cattle-stealing with a lantern, and evidently without aid. A watch was set, and the thief arrested. Before the magistrate he displayed extraordinary assurance, asserting that he had never stolen from a poor man—he had stolen only from M. Eustache who could not count his own cattle—yon richard, man ch! "How many cows did you steal from him?" asked the magistrate. "Ess moin p save?—moin t pouend yon savane toutt pleine," replied the prisoner. (How can I tell?—I took a whole savanna-full.)... Condemned on the strength of his own confession, he was taken to jail. "Moin pa k rt geole," he observed. (I shall not remain in prison.) They put him in irons, but on the following morning the irons were found lying on the floor of the cell, and the prisoner was gone. He was never seen in Martinique again.

[9] Y sucou souy assous quai-l;—y ka di: "Moin ka maudi ou, Lanmatinique!—moin ka maudi ou!...K ni mang pou engnien: ou pa k p menm achet y! K ni toule pou engnien: ou pa k p menm achet yon robe! Epi yche k batt manman.... Ou banni moin!—moin k vini enc"

[10] Vol. iii., p. 382-3. Edition of 1722.]

[11] The parrots of Martinique he describes as having been green, with slate-colored plumage on the top of the head, mixed with a little red, and as having a few red feathers in the wings, throat, and tail.

[12] The creole word moudongue is said to be a corruption of Mondongue, the name of an African coast tribe who had the reputation of being cannibals. A Mondongue slave on the plantations was generally feared by his fellow-blacks of other tribes; and the name of the cannibal race became transformed into an adjective to denote anything formidable or terrible. A blow with a stick made of the wood described being greatly dreaded, the term was applied first to the stick, and afterward to the wood itself.

[13] Accounting for the origin of the trade-winds, he writes: "I say that the Trade-Winds do not exist in the Torrid Zone merely by chance; forasmuch as the cause which produces them is very necessary, very sure, and very continuous, since they result either from the movement of the Earth around the Sun, or from the movement of the Sun around the Earth. Whether it be the one or the other, of these two great bodies which moves..." etc.

[14] In creole, cabritt-bois,—("the Wood-Kid")—a colossal cricket. Precisely at half-past four in the morning it becomes silent; and for thousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the signal to get up.

[15] —"Where dost stay, dear?"—"Affairs of the goat are not affairs of the rabbit."—"But why art thou dressed all in black thus?"—"I wear mourning for my dead soul."—"Ae ya yae!...No, true!...where art thou going now?"—"Love is gone: I go after love."—"Ho! thou hast a Wasp [lover]—eh?"—"The zanoli gives a ball; the maboya enters unasked."—"Tell me where thou art going, sweetheart?"—"As far as the River of the Lizard."—"Fouinq!—there are more than thirty kilometres!"— "What of that?—dost thou want to come with me?"

[16] "Kiss me now!"

[17] Petits amoureux aux plumes, Enfants d'un brillant sjour, Vous ignorez l'amertume, Vous parlez souvent d'amour;... Vous mprisez la dorure, Les salons, et les bijoux; Vous chrissez la Nature, Petits oiseaux, becquetez-vous!

"Voyez lbas, dans cette glise, Auprs d'un confessional, Le prtre, qui veut faire croire Lise, Qu'un baiser est un grand mal;— Pour prouver la mignonne Qu'un baiser bien fait, bien doux, N'a jamais damn personne Petits oiseaux, becquetez-vous!"

[Translation.]

Little feathered lovers, cooing, Children of the radiant air, Sweet your speech,—the speech of wooing; Ye have ne'er a grief to bear! Gilded ease and jewelled fashion Never own a charm for you; Ye love Nature's truth with passion, Pretty birdlings, bill and coo!

See that priest who, Lise confessing, Wants to make the girl believe That a kiss without a blessing Is a fault for which to grieve! Now to prove, to his vexation, That no tender kiss and true Ever caused a soul's damnation, Pretty birdlings, bill and coo!

[18] ..."Cette danse est oppose la pudeur. Avec tout cela, elle ne lesse pas d'tre tellement du got des Espagnols Crolles de l'Amrique, & si fort en usage parmi eux, qu'elle fait la meilleure partie de leurs divertissements, & qu'elle entre mme dans leurs devotions. Ils la dansent mme dans leurs glises & leurs processions; et les Religieuses ne manquent gure de la danser la Nuit de Nol, sur un thatre lv dans leur Choeur, vis—vis de leur grille, qui est ouverte, afin que le Peuple at sa part dans la joye que ces bonnes mes tmoignent pour la naissance du Sauveur."

[19] During a hurricane, several years ago, a West Indian steamer was disabled at a dangerously brief distance from the coast of the island by having her propeller fouled. Sorely broken and drifting rigging had become wrapped around it. One of the crew, a Martinique mulatto, tied a rope about his waist, took his knife between his teeth, dived overboard, and in that tremendous sea performed the difficult feat of disengaging the propeller, and thus saving the steamer from otherwise certain destruction.... This brave fellow received the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

[20] "Bel laline, moin ka montr ti pice moin!—ba moin lgent toutt temps ou ka clair!"... This little invocation is supposed to have most power when uttered on the first appearance of the new moon.

[21] ... Guardian-angel, watch over me;—have pity upon my weakness; lie down on my little bed with me: follow me whithersoever I go." ...The prayers are always said in French. Metaphysical and theological terms cannot be rendered in the patois; and the authors of creole catechisms have always been obliged to borrow and explain French religious phrases in order to make their texts comprehensible.

[22] —"Moin t ou yon bal;—moin rv: moin t ka ou toutt moune ka dans masqu; moin t ka gd. Et toutt—coup moin ka ou c'est bonhomme-cton ka danse. Et main ka ou yon Command: y ka mand moin a moin ka fai l. Moin reponne y conm a: —'Moin ou yon bal, moin gd-coument!" Y ka rponne moin: —'Pisse ou si quirise pou vini gd baggae moune, faut rt l pou dans 'tou.' Moin rponne y:—'Non! main pa dans pi bonhomme-cton!—moin p!'... Et moin ka couri, moin ka couri, main ka couri fce moin te ni p. Et moin rentr adans grand jdin; et moin ou gous pi-cirise qui t chg anni feuill; et moin ka ou yon nhomme assise enba cirise-. Y mand moin:—'a ou ka fai l?' Moin di y:—'Moin ka chch chimin pou moin all.' Y di moin:—'Faut rt iitt.' Et moin di y:—'Non!'—et pou chapp c moin, moin di y:—'All enhaut- l: ou k ou yon bel bal,—toutt bonhomme-cton ka dans, pi yon Commande-en-cton ka coumand yo.'... Epi moin lev, fce moin t p."...]

[23] Lit.,—"brought-up-in-a-hat." To wear the madras is to acknowledge oneself of color;—to follow the European style of dressing the hair, and adopt the costume of the white creoles indicates a desire to affiliate with the white class.

[24] Red earthen-ware jars for keeping drinking-water cool. The origin of the word is probably to be sought in the name of the town, near Marseilles, where they are made,—Aubagne.

[25] I may cite in this relation one stanza of a creole song—very popular in St. Pierre—celebrating the charms of a little capresse:—

"...Moin toutt jeine, Gous, gous, vaillant, Peau,di chapoti Ka fai plaisi;— Lapeau moin Li bien poli; Et moin ka plai Mnm toutt nhomme grave!"

—Which might be freely rendered thus:—

"...I am dimpled, young, Round-limbed, and strong, With sapota-skin That is good to see: All glossy-smooth Is this skin of mine; And the gravest men Like to look at me!"

[26] It was I who washed and ironed and mended;—at nine o'clock at night thou didst put me out-of-doors, with my child in my arms,—the rain was falling,—with my poor straw mattress upon my head! ... Doudoux! thou dost abandon me! ... I have none to care for me.

[27] Also called La Barre de 'Isle,—a long high mountain-wall interlinking the northern and southern system of ranges,—and only two metres broad at the summit. The "Roches-Carres", display a geological formation unlike anything discovered in the rest of the Antillesian system, excepting in Grenada,—columnar or prismatic basalts.... In the plains of Marin curious petrifactions exist;—I saw a honey-comb so perfect that the eye alone could scarcely divine the transformation.

[28] Thibault de Chanvallon, writing of Martinique in 1751, declared:—"All possible hinderances to study are encountered here (tout s'oppose l'etude): if the Americans [creoles] do not devote themselves to research, the fact must not be attributed solely to indifference or indolence. On the one hand, the overpowering and continual heat,—the perpetual succession of mornes and acclivities,—the difficulty of entering forests rendered almost inaccessible by the lianas interwoven across all openings, and the prickly plants which oppose a barrier to the naturalist,—the continual anxiety and fear inspired by serpents also;—on the othelr hand, the disheartening necessity of having to work alone, and the discouragement of being unable to communicate one's ideas or discoveries to persons having similar tastes. And finally, it must be remembered that these discouragements and dangers are never mitigated by the least hope of personal consideration, or by the pleasure of emulation,—since such study is necessarily unaccompanied either by the one or the other in a country where nobody undertakes it."—(Voyage la Martinique.) ...The conditions have scarcely changed since De Chanvallon's day, despite the creation of Government roads, and the thinning of the high woods.

[29] Humboldt believed the height to be not less than 800 toises (1 toise=6 ft. 4.73 inches), or about 5115 feet.

[30] There used to be a strange popular belief that however heavily veiled by clouds the mountain might be prior to an earthquake, these would always vanish with the first shock. But Thibault de Chanvallon took pains to examine into the truth of this alleged phenomenon; and found that during a number of earthquake shocks the clouds remained over the crater precisely as usual.... There was more foundation, however, for another popular belief, which still exists,—that the absolute purity of the atmosphere about Pele, and the perfect exposure of its summit for any considerable time, might be regarded as an omen of hurricane.

[31] "De la piqure du serpent de la Martinique," par Auguste Charriez, Medecin de la Marine. Paris: Moquet, 1875]

[32] M. Francard Bayardelle, overseer of the Prsbourg plantation at Grande Anse, tells me that the most successful treatment of snake bite consists in severe local cupping and bleeding; the immediate application of twenty to thirty leeches (when these can be obtained), and the administration of alkali as an internal medicine. He has saved several lives by these methods.

The negro panseur method is much more elaborate and, to some extent, mysterious. He cups and bleeds, using a small cou, or half-calabash, in lieu of a grass; and then applies cataplasms of herbs,—orange-leaves, cinnamon-leaves, clove-leaves, chardon- bni, charpentier, perhaps twenty other things, all mingled together;—this poulticing being continued every day for a month. Meantime the patient is given all sorts of absurd things to drink, in tafia and sour-orange juice—such as old clay pipes ground to powder, or the head of the fer-de-lance itself, roasted dry and pounded.... The plantation negro has no faith in any other system of cure but that of the panseur;—he refuses to let the physician try to save him, and will scarcely submit to be treated even by an experienced white over-seer.

[33] The sheet-lightnings which play during the nights of July and August are termed in creole Zclai-titiri, or "titiri- lightnings";—it is believed these give notice that the titiri have begun to swarn in the rivers. Among the colored population there exists an idea of some queer relation between the lightning and the birth of the little fish ,—it is commonly said, "Zclai- a ka fai yo clor" (the lightning hatches them).

[34] Dr. E. Rufz: "tudes historiques," vol. i., p. 189.

[35] The brightly colored douillettes are classified by the people according to the designs of the printed calico:—_robe—bambou_,— _robe—bouquet_,—_robe-arc-en-ciel_,—robe—carreau_,—etc., according as the pattern is in stripes, flower-designs, "rainbow" bands of different tints, or plaidings. _Ronde-en-ronde_ means a stuff printed with disk-patterns, or link-patterns of different colors,—each joined with the other. A robe of one color only is called a _robe-uni_.

The general laws of contrasts observed in the costume require the silk foulard, or shoulder-kerchief, to make a sharp relief with the color of the robe, thus:-

Robe. Foulard. Yellow Blue. Dark blue Yellow. Pink Green. Violet Bright red. Red Violet. Chocolate (cacoa) Pale blue. Sky blue Pale rose.

These refer, of course, to dominant or ground colors, as there are usually several tints in the foulard as well as the robe. The painted Madras should always be bright yellow. According to popular ideas of good dressing, the different tints of skin should be relieved by special choice of color in the robe, as follows:—

Capresse (a clear red skin) should wear.... Pale yellow. Mulatresse (according to shade).... Rose. Blue. Green. Negresse.... White. Scarlet, or any violet color.

[36] ... "Voula Cendrillon evec yon bel rbe velou grande lakh. ... a t ka bail ou mal zi. Li t tini bel zanneau dans zreill li, quate-tou-chou, bouoche, bracelet, tremblant,—toutt ste bel baggae conm a."...—[_Conte Cendrillon,—d'aprs Turiault.]

—"There was Cendrillon with a beautiful long trailing robe of velvet on her!... It was enough to hurt one's eyes to look at her! She had beautiful rings in her ears, and a collier-choux of four rows, brooches, tremblants, bracelets,—everything fine of that sort."—[Story of Cinderella in Turinault's Creole Grammar.

[37] It is quite possible, however, that the slaves of Dutertre's time belonged for the most part to the uglier African tribes; and that later supplies may have been procured from other parts of the slave coast. Writing half a century later, Pre Labat declares having seen freshly disembarked blacks handsome enough to inspire an artist:—"J'en ai vu des deux sexes faits peindre, et beaux par merveille" (vol. iv. chap, vii,). He adds that their skin was extremely fine, and of velvety softness;—"le velours n'est pas plus doux."... Among the 30,000 blacks yearly shipped to the French colonies, there were doubtless many representatives of the finer African races.

[38] "Leur sueur n'est pas ftide comme celle des ngres de la Guine," writes the traveller Dauxion-Lavaysse, in 1813.

[39] Dr. E. Rufz: "tudes historiques et statistiques sur la population de la Martinique." St. Pierre: 1850. Vol. i., pp. 148-50.

It has been generally imagined that the physical constitution of the black race was proof against the deadly climate of the West Indies. The truth is that the freshly imported Africans died of fever by thousands and tens-of-thousands;—the creole-negro race, now so prolific, represents only the fittest survivors in the long and terrible struggle of the slave element to adapt itself to the new environment. Thirty thousand negroes a year were long needed to supply the French colonies. Between 1700 and 1789 no less than 900,000 slaves were imported by San Domingo alone;—yet there were less than half that number left in 1789. (See Placide Justin's history of Santo Domingo, p. 147.) The entire slave population of Barbadoes had to be renewed every sixteen years, according to estimates: the loss to planters by deaths of slaves (reckoning the value of a slave at only 20 sterling) during the same period was 1,600,000 ($8,000,000). (Burck's "History of European Colonies," vol. ii., p. 141; French edition of 1767.)

[40] Rufz: "tudes," vol. i., p. 236.

[41] I am assured it has now fallen to a figure not exceeding 5000.

[42] Rufz: "tudes," vol. ii., pp. 311, 312.

[43] Rufz: "tudes," vol. i., p. 237.

[44] La race de sang-ml, issue des blancs et des noirs, est minement civilizable. Comme types physiques, elle fournit dans beaucoup d'individus, dans ses femmes en gnral, les plus beaux specimens de la race humaine.—"Le Prjug de Race aux Antilles Franaises." Par G. Souquet-Basige. St. Pierre, Martinique: 1883. pp. 661-62.

[45] Turiault: "tude sur le langage Crole de la Martinique." Brest: 1874.... On page 136 he cites the following pretty verses in speaking of the fille-de-couleur:—

L'Amour prit soin de la former Tendre, nave, et caressante, Faite pour plaire, encore plus pour aimer. Portant tous les traits prcieux Du caractre d'une amante, Le plaisir sur sa bouche et l'amour dans ses yeux.

[46] A sort of land-crab;—the female is selected for food, and, properly cooked, makes a delicious dish;—the male is almost worthless.

[47] "Voyage la Martinique," Par J. R., Gnral de Brigade. Paris: An, XII., 1804. Page 106.

[48] According to the Martinique "Annuaire" for 1887, there were even then, out of a total population of 173,182, no less than 12,366 able to read and write.

[49] There is record of an attempt to manufacture bread with one part manioc flour to three of wheat flour. The result was excellent; but no serious effort was ever made to put the manioc bread on the market.

[50] I must mention a surreptitious dish, chatt;—needless to say the cats are not sold, but stolen. It is true that only a small class of poor people eat cats; but they eat so many cats that cats have become quite rare in St. Pierre. The custom is purely superstitious: it is alleged that if you eat cat seven times, or if you eat seven cats, no witch, wizard, or quimboiseur can ever do you any harm; and the cat ought to be eaten on Christmas Eve in order that the meal be perfectly efficacious.... The mystic number "seven", enters into another and a better creole superstition;—if you kill a serpent, seven great sins are forgiven to you: ou k ni sept grands pchs effac.

[51] 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."— tudes.

[52] In the patois, "yon rafale yche,"—a "whirlwind of children."

THE END