I.
... More finely than any term in our tongue does the French word frisson express that faint shiver—as of a ghostly touch thrilling from hair to feet—which intense pleasure sometimes gives, and which is felt most often and most strongly in childhood, when the imagination is still so sensitive and so powerful that one's whole being trembles to the vibration of a fancy. And this electric word best expresses, I think, that long thrill of amazed delight inspired by the first knowledge of the tropic world,—a sensation of weirdness in beauty, like the effect, in child-days, of fairy tales and stories of phantom isles.
For all unreal seems the vision of it. The transfiguration of all things by the stupendous light and the strange vapors of the West Indian sea,—the interorbing of flood and sky in blinding azure,—the sudden spirings of gem-tinted coast from the ocean,—the iris-colors and astounding shapes of the hills,—the unimaginable magnificence of palms,—the high woods veiled and swathed in vines that blaze like emerald: all remind you in some queer way of things half forgotten,—the fables of enchantment. Enchantment it is indeed—but only the enchantment of that Great Wizard, the Sun, whose power you are scarcely beginning to know.
And into the life of the tropical city you enter as in dreams one enters into the life of a dead century. In all the quaint streets—over whose luminous yellow façades the beautiful burning violet of the sky appears as if but a few feet away—you see youth good to look upon as ripe fruit; and the speech of the people is soft as a coo; and eyes of brown girls caress you with a passing look.... Love's world, you may have heard, has few restraints here, where Nature ever seems to cry out, like the swart seller of corossoles:—"ça qui le doudoux?"...
How often in some passing figure does one discern an ideal almost realized, and forbear to follow it with untired gaze only when another, another, and yet another, come to provoke the same aesthetic fancy,—to win the same unspoken praise! How often does one long for artist's power to fix the fleeting lines, to catch the color, to seize the whole exotic charm of some special type!... One finds a strange charm even in the timbre of these voices,—these half-breed voices, always with a tendency to contralto, and vibrant as ringing silver. What is that mysterious quality in a voice which has power to make the pulse beat faster, even when the singer is unseen?... do only the birds know?
... It seems to you that you could never weary of watching this picturesque life,—of studying the costumes, brilliant with butterfly colors,—and the statuesque semi-nudity of laboring hundreds,—and the untaught grace of attitudes,—and the simplicity of manners. Each day brings some new pleasure of surprise;—even from the window of your lodging you are ever noting something novel, something to delight the sense of oddity or beauty.... Even in your room everything interests you, because of its queerness or quaintness: you become fond of the objects about you,—the great noiseless rocking-chairs that lull to sleep;—the immense bed (lit-à-bateau) of heavy polished wood, with its richly carven sides reaching down to the very floor;—and its invariable companion, the little couch or sopha, similarly shaped but much narrower, used only for the siesta;—and the thick red earthen vessels (dobannes) which keep your drinking-water cool on the hottest days, but which are always filled thrice between sunrise and sunset with clear water from the mountain,—dleau toutt vivant, "all alive";—and the verrines, tall glass vases with stems of bronze in which your candle will burn steadily despite a draught;—and even those funny little angels and Virgins which look at you from their bracket in the corner, over the oil lamp you are presumed to kindle nightly in their honor, however great a heretic you may be.... You adopt at once, and without reservation, those creole home habits which are the result of centuries of experience with climate,—abstention from solid food before the middle of the day, repose after the noon meal;—and you find each repast an experience as curious as it is agreeable. It is not at all difficult to accustom oneself to green pease stewed with sugar, eggs mixed with tomatoes, salt fish stewed in milk, palmiste pith made into salad, grated cocoa formed into rich cakes, and dishes of titiri cooked in oil,—the minuscule fish, of which a thousand will scarcely fill a saucer. Above all, you are astonished by the endless variety of vegetables and fruits, of all conceivable shapes and inconceivable flavors.
And it does not seem possible that even the simplest little recurrences of this antiquated, gentle home-life could ever prove wearisome by daily repetition through the months and years. The musical greeting of the colored child, tapping at your door before sunrise,—"Bonjou', Missié,"—as she brings your cup of black hot coffee and slice of corossole;—the smile of the silent brown girl who carries your meals up-stairs in a tray poised upon her brightly coiffed head, and who stands by while you dine, watching every chance to serve, treading quite silently with her pretty bare feet;—the pleasant manners of the màchanne who brings your fruit, the porteuse who delivers your bread, the blanchisseuse who washes your linen at the river,—and all the kindly folk who circle about your existence, with their trays and turbans, their foulards and douillettes, their primitive grace and creole chatter: these can never cease to have a charm for you. You cannot fail to be touched also by the amusing solicitude of these good people for your health, because you are a stranger: their advice about hours to go out and hours to stay at home,—about roads to follow and paths to avoid on account of snakes,—about removing your hat and coat, or drinking while warm.... Should you fall ill, this solicitude intensifies to devotion; you are tirelessly tended;—the good people will exhaust their wonderful knowledge of herbs to get you well,—will climb the mornes even at midnight, in spite of the risk of snakes and fear of zombis, to gather strange plants by the light of a lantern. Natural joyousness, natural kindliness, heart-felt desire to please, childish capacity of being delighted with trifles,—seem characteristic of all this colored population. It is turning its best side towards you, no doubt; but the side of the nature made visible appears none the less agreeable because you suspect there is another which you have not seen. What kindly inventiveness is displayed in contriving surprises for you, or in finding some queer thing to show you,—some fantastic plant, or grotesque fish, or singular bird! What apparent pleasure in taking trouble to gratify,—what innocent frankness of sympathy!... Childishly beautiful seems the readiness of this tinted race to compassionate: you do not reflect that it is also a savage trait, while the charm of its novelty is yet upon you. No one is ashamed to shed tears for the death of a pet animal; any mishap to a child creates excitement, and evokes an immediate volunteering of services. And this compassionate sentiment is often extended, in a semi-poetical way, even to inanimate objects. One June morning, I remember, a three-masted schooner lying in the bay took fire, and had to be set adrift. An immense crowd gathered on the wharves; and I saw many curious manifestations of grief,—such grief, perhaps, as an infant feels for the misfortune of a toy it imagines to possess feeling, but not the less sincere because unreasoning. As the flames climbed the rigging, and the masts fell, the crowd moaned as though looking upon some human tragedy; and everywhere one could hear such strange cries of pity as, "Pauv' malhérè!" (poor unfortunate), "pauv' diabe!"... "Toutt baggaïe-y pou allé, casse!" (All its things-to-go-with are broken!) sobbed a girl, with tears streaming down her cheeks.... She seemed to believe it was alive....
... And day by day the artlessness of this exotic humanity touches you more;—day by day this savage, somnolent, splendid Nature—delighting in furious color—bewitches you more. Already the anticipated necessity of having to leave it all some day—the far-seen pain of bidding it farewell—weighs upon you, even in dreams.
II.
Reader, if you be of those who have longed in vain for a glimpse of that tropic world,—tales of whose beauty charmed your childhood, and made stronger upon you that weird mesmerism of the sea which pulls at the heart of a boy,—one who had longed like you, and who, chance-led, beheld at last the fulfilment of the wish, can swear to you that the magnificence of the reality far excels the imagining. Those who know only the lands in which all processes for the satisfaction of human wants have been perfected under the terrible stimulus of necessity, can little guess the witchery of that Nature ruling the zones of color and of light. Within their primeval circles, the earth remains radiant and young as in that preglacial time whereof some transmitted memory may have created the hundred traditions of an Age of Gold. And the prediction of a paradise to come,—a phantom realm of rest and perpetual light: may this not have been but a sum of the remembrances and the yearnings of man first exiled from his heritage,—a dream born of the great nostalgia of races migrating to people the pallid North?...
... But with the realization of the hope to know this magical Nature you learn that the actuality varies from the preconceived ideal otherwise than in surpassing it. Unless you enter the torrid world equipped with scientific knowledge extraordinary, your anticipations are likely to be at fault. Perhaps you had pictured to yourself the effect of perpetual summer as a physical delight,—something like an indefinite prolongation of the fairest summer weather ever enjoyed at home. Probably you had heard of fevers, risks of acclimatization, intense heat, and a swarming of venomous creatures; but you may nevertheless believe you know what precautions to take; and published statistics of climatic temperature may have persuaded you that the heat is not difficult to bear. By that enervation to which all white dwellers in the tropics are subject you may have understood a pleasant languor,—a painless disinclination to effort in a country where physical effort is less needed than elsewhere,—a soft temptation to idle away the hours in a hammock, under the shade of giant trees. Perhaps you have read, with eyes of faith, that torpor of the body is favorable to activity of the mind, and therefore believe that the intellectual powers can be stimulated and strengthened by tropical influences:—you suppose that enervation will reveal itself only as a beatific indolence which will leave the brain free to think with lucidity, or to revel in romantic dreams.
III.
You are not at first undeceived;—the disillusion is long delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity about you,—for idyllic scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval forest, and the valleys threaded by a hundred brooks. I know not whether the faces and forms that you seek will be revealed to you;—but you will not be able to complain for the lack of idyllic loveliness in the commonest landscape. Whatever artistic knowledge you possess will merely teach you the more to wonder at the luxuriant purple of the sea, the violet opulence of the sky, the violent beauty of foliage greens, the lilac tints of evening, and the color-enchantments distance gives in an atmosphere full of iridescent power,—the amethysts and agates, the pearls and ghostly golds, of far mountainings. Never, you imagine, never could one tire of wandering through those marvellous valleys,—of climbing the silent roads under emeraldine shadow to heights from which the city seems but a few inches long, and the moored ships tinier than gnats that cling to a mirror,—or of swimming in that blue bay whose clear flood stays warm through all the year. [51]
Or, standing alone, in some aisle of colossal palms, where humming-birds are flashing and shooting like a showering of jewel-fires, you feel how weak the skill of poet or painter to fix the sensation of that white-pillared imperial splendor;—and you think you know why creoles exiled by necessity to colder lands may sicken for love of their own,—die of home-yearning, as did many a one in far Louisiana, after the political tragedies of 1848....
... But you are not a creole, and must pay tribute of suffering to the climate of the tropics. You will have to learn that a temperature of 90° Fahr. in the tropics is by no means the same thing as 90° Fahr. in Europe or the United States;—that the mornes cannot be climbed with safety during the hotter hours of the afternoon;—that by taking a long walk you incur serious danger of catching a fever;—that to enter the high woods, a path must be hewn with the cutlass through the creepers and vines and undergrowth,—among snakes, venomous insects, venomous plants, and malarial exhalations;—that the finest blown dust is full of irritant and invisible enemies;—that it is folly to seek repose on a sward, or in the shade of trees,—particularly under tamarinds. Only after you have by experience become well convinced of these facts can you begin to comprehend something general in regard to West Indian conditions of life.
IV.
... Slowly the knowledge comes.... For months the vitality of a strong European (the American constitution bears the test even better) may resist the debilitating climate: perhaps the stranger will flatter himself that, like men habituated to heavy labor in stifling warmth,—those toiling in mines, in founderies in engine-rooms of ships, at iron-furnaces,—so he too may become accustomed, without losing his strength to the continuous draining of the pores, to the exhausting force of this strange motionless heat which compels change of clothing many times a day. But gradually he finds that it is not heat alone which is debilitating him, but the weight and septic nature of an atmosphere charged with vapor, with electricity, with unknown agents not less inimical to human existence than propitious to vegetal luxuriance. If he has learned those rules of careful living which served him well in a temperate climate, he will not be likely to abandon them among his new surroundings; and they will help him; no doubt,—particularly if he be prudent enough to avoid the sea-coast at night, and all exposure to dews or early morning mists, and all severe physical strain. Nevertheless, he becomes slowly conscious of changes extraordinary going on within him,—in especial, a continual sensation of weight in the brain, daily growing, and compelling frequent repose;—also a curious heightening of nervous sensibility to atmospheric changes, to tastes and odors, to pleasure and pain. Total loss of appetite soon teaches him to follow the local custom of eating nothing solid before mid-day, and enables him to divine how largely the necessity for caloric enters into the food-consumption of northern races. He becomes abstemious, eats sparingly, and discovers his palate to have become oddly exacting—finds that certain fruits and drinks are indeed, as the creoles assert, appropriate only to particular physical conditions corresponding with particular hours of the day. Corossole is only to be eaten in the morning, after black coffee;—vermouth is good to drink only between the hours of nine and half-past ten;—rum or other strong liquor only before meals or after fatigue;—claret or wine only during a repast, and then very sparingly,—for, strangely enough, wine is found to be injurious in a country where stronger liquors are considered among the prime necessaries of existence.
And he expected, at the worst, to feel lazy, to lose some physical energy! But this is no mere languor which now begins to oppress him;—it is a sense of vital exhaustion painful as the misery of convalescence: the least effort provokes a perspiration profuse enough to saturate clothing, and the limbs ache as from muscular overstrain;—the lightest attire feels almost insupportable;—the idea of sleeping even under a sheet is torture, for the weight of a silken handkerchief is discomfort. One wishes one could live as a savage,—naked in the heat. One burns with a thirst impossible to assuage—feels a desire for stimulants, a sense of difficulty in breathing, occasional quickenings of the heart's action so violent as to alarm. Then comes at last the absolute dread of physical exertion. Some slight relief might be obtained, no doubt, by resigning oneself forthwith to adopt the gentle indolent manners of the white creoles, who do not walk when it is possible to ride, and never ride if it is equally convenient to drive;—but the northern nature generally refuses to accept this ultimate necessity without a protracted and painful struggle.
... Not even then has the stranger fully divined the evil power of this tropical climate, which remodels the characters of races within a couple of generations,—changing the shape of the skeleton,—deepening the cavities of the orbits to protect the eye from the flood of light,—transforming the blood,—darkening the skin. Following upon the nervous modifications of the first few months come modifications and changes of a yet graver kind;—with the loss of bodily energy ensues a more than corresponding loss of mental activity and strength. The whole range of thought diminishes, contracts,—shrinks to that narrowest of circles which surrounds the physical sell, the inner ring of merely material sensation: the memory weakens appallingly;—the mind operates faintly, slowly, incoherently,—almost as in dreams. Serious reading, vigorous thinking, become impossible. You doze over the most important project;—you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating of books.
Then comes the vain revolt, the fruitless desperate striving with this occult power which numbs the memory and enchants the will. Against the set resolve to think, to act, to study, there is a hostile rush of unfamiliar pain to the temples, to the eyes, to the nerve centres of the brain; and a great weight is somewhere in the head, always growing heavier: then comes a drowsiness that overpowers and stupefies, like the effect of a narcotic. And this obligation to sleep, to sink into coma, will impose itself just so surely as you venture to attempt any mental work in leisure hours, after the noon repast, or during the heat of the afternoon. Yet at night you can scarcely sleep. Repose is made feverish by a still heat that keeps the skin drenched with thick sweat, or by a perpetual, unaccountable, tingling and prickling of the whole body-surface. With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and slumber comes,—a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will had ebbed away,—all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the night....
V.
It might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain class of invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful stimulant,—a tonic medicine which may produce astonishing results within a fixed time,—but which if taken beyond that time will prove dangerous. After a certain number of months, your first enthusiasm with your new surroundings dies out;—even Nature ceases to affect the senses in the same way: the frisson ceases to come to you. Meanwhile you may have striven to become as much as possible a part of the exotic life into which you have entered,—may have adopted its customs, learned its language. But you cannot mix with it mentally;—You circulate only as an oil-drop in its current. You still feel yourself alone.
The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six minutes;—perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the brevity of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all activity ceases with sundown: there is no going outside of the city after dark, because of snakes;—club life here ends at the hour it only begins abroad;—there is no visiting of evenings; after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone prepares to retire. And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time for social intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself to this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,—at least some interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours during the suspension of business after noon, or those following the closing of offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy men may find time for such relaxation; and these very hours have been always devoted to restorative sleep by the native population ever since the colony began. Naturally, therefore, the stranger dreads the coming of the darkness, the inevitable isolation of long sleepless hours. And if he seek those solaces for loneliness which he was wont to seek at home,—reading, study,—he is made to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of all libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter, means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad to obtain even a review, and wait months for its coming. And this mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one feels less inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that single enjoyment, which at first rendered a man indifferent to other pleasures,—the delight of being alone with tropical Nature,—becomes more difficult to indulge. When lethargy has totally mastered habit and purpose, and you must at last confess yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber, or at best from a carriage window,—then, indeed, the want of all literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,—from climate as well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see young girls passing to walk right across the island and back before sunset, under burdens difficult for a strong man to lift to his shoulder;—the same journey on horseback would now weary you for days. You wonder of what flesh and blood can these people be made,—what wonderful vitality lies in those slender woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and despite their astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight and touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this savage strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand better how mighty the working of those powers which temper races and shape race habits in accordance with environment.
... 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 naïvely sympathetic,—how utterly self-sacrificing these women-natures are! Patiently, through weeks of stifling days and sleepless nights,—cruelly unnatural to them, for their life is in the open air,—they struggle to save without one murmur of fatigue, without heed of their most ordinary physical wants, without a thought of recompense;—trusting to their own skill when the physician abandons hope,—climbing to the woods for herbs when medicines prove, without avail. The dream of angels holds nothing sweeter than this reality of woman's tenderness.
And simultaneously with the return of force, you may wonder whether this sickness has not sharpened your senses in some extraordinary way,—especially hearing, sight, and smell. Once well enough to be removed without danger, you will be taken up into the mountains somewhere,—for change of air; and there it will seem to you, perhaps, that never before did you feel so acutely the pleasure of perfumes,—of color-tones,—of the timbre of voices. You have simply been acclimated.... And suddenly the old fascination of tropic Nature seizes you again,—more strongly than in the first days;—the frisson of delight returns; the joy of it thrills through all your blood,—making a great fulness at your heart as of unutterable desire to give thanks....
VII.
... My friend Felicien had come to the colony fresh from the region of the Vosges, with the muscles and energies of a mountaineer, and cheeks pink as a French country-girl's;—he had never seemed to me physically adapted for acclimation; and I feared much for him on hearing of his first serious illness. Then the news of his convalescence came to me as a grateful surprise. But I did not feel reassured by his appearance the first evening I called at the little house to which he had been removed, on the brow of a green height overlooking the town. I found him seated in a berceuse on the veranda. How wan he was, and how spectral his smile of welcome,—as he held out to me a hand that seemed all of bone!
... We chatted there a while. It had been one of those tropic days whose charm interpenetrates and blends with all the subtler life of sensation, and becomes a luminous part of it forever,—steeping all after-dreams of ideal peace in supernal glory of color,—transfiguring all fancies of the pure joy of being. Azure to the sea-line the sky had remained since morning; and the trade-wind, warm as a caress, never brought even one gauzy cloud to veil the naked beauty of the peaks.
And the sun was yellowing,—as only over the tropics he yellows to his death. Lilac tones slowly spread through sea and heaven from the west;—mornes facing the light began to take wondrous glowing color,—a tone of green so fiery that it looked as though all the rich sap of their woods were phosphorescing. Shadows blued;—far peaks took tinting that scarcely seemed of earth,—iridescent violets and purples interchanging through vapor of gold.... Such the colors of the carangue, when the beautiful tropic fish is turned in the light, and its gem-greens shift to rich azure and prism-purple.
Reclining in our chairs, we watched the strange splendor from the veranda of the little cottage,—saw the peaked land slowly steep itself in the aureate glow,—the changing color of the verdured mornes, and of the sweep of circling sea. Tiny birds, bosomed with fire, were shooting by in long curves, like embers flung by invisible hands. From far below, the murmur of the city rose to us,—a stormy hum. So motionless we remained that the green and gray lizards were putting out their heads from behind the columns of the veranda to stare at us,—as if wondering whether we were really alive. I turned my head suddenly to look at two queer butterflies; and all the lizards hid themselves again. Papillon-lanmò,—Death's butterflies,—these were called in the speech of the people: their broad wings were black like blackest velvet;—as they fluttered against the yellow light, they looked like silhouettes of butterflies. Always through my memory of that wondrous evening,—when I little thought I was seeing my friend's face for the last time,—there slowly passes the black palpitation of those wings....
... I had been chatting with Felicien about various things which I thought might have a cheerful interest for him; and more than once I had been happy to see him smile.... But our converse waned. The ever-magnifying splendor before us had been mesmerizing our senses,—slowly overpowering our wills with the amazement of its beauty. Then, as the sun's disk—enormous,—blinding gold—touched the lilac flood, and the stupendous orange glow flamed up to the very zenith, we found ourselyes awed at last into silence.
The orange in the west deepened into vermilion. Softly and very swiftly night rose like an indigo exhalation from the land,—filling the valleys, flooding the gorges, blackening the woods, leaving only the points of the peaks a while to catch the crimson glow. Forests and fields began to utter a rushing sound as of torrents, always deepening,—made up of the instrumentation and the voices of numberless little beings: clangings as of hammered iron, ringings as of dropping silver upon a stone, the dry bleatings of the cabritt-bois, and the chirruping of tree-frogs, and the k-i-i-i-i-i-i of crickets. Immense trembling sparks began to rise and fall among the shadows,—twinkling out and disappearing all mysteriously: these were the fire-flies awakening. Then about the branches of the bois-canon black shapes began to hover, which were not birds—shapes flitting processionally without any noise; each one in turn resting a moment as to nibble something at the end of a bough;—then yielding place to another, and circling away, to return again from the other side...the guimbos, the great bats.
But we were silent, with the emotion of sunset still upon us: that ghostly emotion which is the transmitted experience of a race,—the sum of ancestral experiences innumerable,—the mingled joy and pain of a million years.... Suddenly a sweet voice pierced the stillness,—pleading:—
—"Pa combiné, chè!—pa combiné conm ça!" (Do not think, dear!—do not think like that!)
... Only less beautiful than the sunset she seemed, this slender half-breed, who had come all unperceived behind us, treading soundlessly with her slim bare feet.... "And you, Missié", she said to me, in a tone of gentle reproach;—"you are his friend! why do you let him think? It is thinking that will prevent him getting well."
Combiné in creole signifies to think intently, and therefore to be unhappy,—because, with this artless race, as with children, to think intensely about anything is possible only under great stress of suffering.
—"Pa combiné,—non, chè," she repeated, plaintively, stroking Felicien's hair. "It is thinking that makes us old.... And it is time to bid your friend good-night."...
—"She is so good," said Felicien, smiling to make her pleased;—"I could never tell you how good. But she does not understand. She believes I suffer if I am silent. She is contented only when she sees me laugh; and so she will tell me creole stories by the hour to keep me amused, as if I were a child."...
As he spoke she slipped an arm about his neck.
—"Doudoux," she persisted;—and her voice was a dove's coo,—"Si ou ainmein moin, pa combiné-non!"
And in her strange exotic beauty, her savage grace, her supple caress, the velvet witchery of her eyes,—it seemed to me that I beheld a something imaged, not of herself, nor of the moment only,—a something weirdly sensuous: the Spirit of tropic Nature made golden flesh, and murmuring to each lured wanderer:—"If thou wouldst love me, do not think"...
I.
Almost every night, just before bedtime, I hear some group of children in the street telling stories to each other. Stories, enigmas or tim-tim, and songs, and round games, are the joy of child-life here,—whether rich or poor. I am particularly fond of listening to the stories,—which seem to me the oddest stories I ever heard.
I succeeded in getting several dictated to me, so that I could write them;—others were written for me by creole friends, with better success. To obtain them in all their original simplicity and naive humor of detail, one should be able to write them down in short-hand as fast as they are related: they lose greatly in the slow process of dictation. The simple mind of the native story-teller, child or adult, is seriously tried by the inevitable interruptions and restraints of the dictation method;—the reciter loses spirit, becomes soon weary, and purposely shortens the narrative to finish the task as soon as possible. It seems painful to such a one to repeat a phrase more than once,—at least in the same way; while frequent questioning may irritate the most good-natured in a degree that shows how painful to the untrained brain may be the exercise of memory and steady control of imagination required for continuous dictation. By patience, however, I succeeded in obtaining many curiosities of oral literature,—representing a group of stories which, whatever their primal origin, have been so changed by local thought and coloring as to form a distinctively Martinique folk-tale circle. Among them are several especially popular with the children of my neighborhood; and I notice that almost every narrator embellishes the original plot with details of his own, which he varies at pleasure.
I submit a free rendering of one of these tales,—the history of Yé and the Devil. The whole story of Yé would form a large book,—so numerous the list of his adventures; and this adventure seems to me the most characteristic of all. Yé is the most curious figure in Martinique folk-lore. Yé is the typical Bitaco,—or mountain negro of the lazy kind,—the country black whom city blacks love to poke fun at. As for the Devil of Martinique folk-lore, he resembles the travailleur at a distance; but when you get dangerously near him, you find that he has red eyes and red hair, and two little horns under his chapeau-Bacouè, and feet like an ape, and fire in his throat. Y ka sam yon gouôs, gouôs macaque....
II.
Ça qui pa té connaitt Yé?... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault under the sun;—he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number [52] of children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.
Well, one day Yé went out to the woods to look for something to eat. And he walked through the woods nearly all day, till he became ever so tired; but he could not find anything to eat. He was just going to give up the search, when he heard a queer crackling noise,—at no great distance. He went to see what it was,—hiding himself behind the big trees as he got nearer to it.
All at once he came to a little hollow in the woods, and saw a great fire burning there,—and he saw a Devil sitting beside the fire. The Devil was roasting a great heap of snails; and the sound Yé had heard was the crackling of the snail-shells. The Devil seemed to be very old;—he was sitting on the trunk of a bread-fruit tree; and Yé took a good long look at him. After Yé had watched him for a while, Yé found out that the old Devil was quite blind.
—The Devil had a big calabash in his hand full of feroce,—that is to say, boiled salt codfish and manioc flour, with ever so many pimentos (épi en pile piment),—just what negroes like Yé are most fond of. And the Devil seemed to be very hungry; and the food was going so fast down his throat that it made Yé unhappy to see it disappearing. It made him so unhappy that he felt at last he could not resist the temptation to steal from the old blind Devil. He crept quite close up to the Devil without making any noise, and began to rob him. Every time the Devil would lift his hand to his mouth, Yé would slip his own fingers into the calabash, and snatch a piece. The old Devil did not even look puzzled;—he did not seem to know anything; and Yé thought to himself that the old Devil was a great fool. He began to get more and more courage;—he took bigger and bigger handfuls out of the calabash;—he ate even faster than the Devil could eat. At last there was only one little bit left in the calabash. Yé put out his hand to take it,—and all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Yé's hand and caught it! Yé was so frightened he could not even cry out, Aïe-yaïe. The Devil finished the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Yé in a terrible voice:—"Atò, saff!—ou c'est ta moin!" (I've got you now, you glutton;—you belong to me!) Then he jumped on Yé's back, like a great ape, and twisted his legs round Yé's neck, and cried out:—-"Carry me to your cabin,—and walk fast!"
... When Yé's poor children saw him coming, they wondered what their papa was carrying on his back. They thought it might be a sack of bread or vegetables or perhaps a régime of bananas,—for it was getting dark, and they could not see well. They laughed and showed their teeth and danced and screamed: "Here's papa coming with something to eat!—papa's coming with something to eat!" But when Yé had got near enough for them to see what he was carrying, they yelled and ran away to hide themselves. As for the poor mother, she could only hold up her two hands for horror.
When they got into the cabin the Devil pointed to a corner, and said to Yé:—"Put me down there!" Yé put him down. The Devil sat there in the corner and never moved or spoke all that evening and all that night. He seemed to be a very quiet Devil indeed. The children began to look at him.
But at breakfast-time, when the poor mother had managed to procure something for the children to eat,—just some bread-fruit and yams,—the old Devil suddenly rose up from his corner and muttered:—
—"Manman mò!—papa mò!—touttt yche mò!" (Mamma dead!—papa dead!—all the children dead!)
And he blew his breath on them, and they all fell down stiff as if they were dead—raidi-cadave!. Then the Devil ate up everything there was on the table. When he was done, he filled the pots and dishes with dirt, and blew his breath again on Yé and all the family, and muttered:—
—"Toutt moune lévé!" (Everybody get up!)
Then they all got up. Then he pointed to all the plates and dishes full of dirt, and said to them:—*
[* In the original:—"Y té ka monté assous tabe-là, épi y té ka fai caca adans toutt plats-à, adans toutt zassiett-là."]
—"Gobe-moin ça!"
And they had to gobble it all up, as he told them.
After that it was no use trying to eat anything. Every time anything was cooked, the Devil would do the same thing. It was thus the next day, and the next, and the day after, and so every day for a long, long time.
Yé did not know what to do; but his wife said she did. If she was only a man, she would soon get rid of that Devil. "Yé," she insisted, "go and see the Bon-Dié [the Good-God], and ask him what to do. I would go myself if I could; but women are not strong enough to climb the great morne."
So Yé started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day, and began to climb the Montagne Pelée. He climbed and walked, and walked and climbed, until he got at last to the top of the Morne de la Croix.*
[*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!—ça ou ni, Yé fa ou lè?"
When Yé had recounted his troubles, the Good-God said:—
—"Pauv ma pauv! I knew it all before you came, Yé. I can tell you what to do; but I am afraid it will be no use—you will never be able to do it! Your gluttony is going to be the ruin of you, poor Yé! Still, you can try. Now listen well to what I am going to tell you. First of all, you must not eat anything before you get home. Then when your wife has the children's dinner ready, and you see the Devil getting up, you must cry out:—'Tam ni pou tam ni bé!' Then the Devil will drop down dead. Don't forget not to eat anything—ou tanne?"...
Yé promised to remember all he was told, and not to eat anything on his way down;—then he said good-bye to the Bon-Dié (bien conm y faut), and started. All the way he kept repeating the words the Good-God had told him: "Tam ni pou tam ni bé!"—"tam ni pou tam ni bé!"—over and over again.
—But before reaching home he had to cross a little stream; and on both banks he saw wild guava-bushes growing, with plenty of sour guavas upon them;—for it was not yet time for guavas to be ripe. Poor Yé was hungry! He did all he could to resist the temptation, but it proved too much for him. He broke all his promises to the Bon-Dié: he ate and ate and ate till there were no more guavas left,—and then he began to eat zicaques and green plums, and all sorts of nasty sour things, till he could not eat any more.
—By the time he got to the cabin his teeth were so on edge that he could scarcely speak distinctly enough to tell his wife to get the supper ready.
And so while everybody was happy, thinking that they were going to be freed from their trouble, Yé was really in no condition to do anything. The moment the supper was ready, the Devil got up from his corner as usual, and approached the table. Then Yé tried to speak; but his teeth were so on edge that instead of saying,—"Tam ni pou tam ni bé," he could only stammer out:—-"Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan."
This had no effect on the Devil at all: he seemed to be used to it! He blew his breath on them all, sent them to sleep, ate up all the supper, filled the empty dishes with filth, awoke Yé and his family, and ordered them as usual;—
—"Gobe-moin ça!" And they had to gobble it up,—every bit of it.
The family nearly died of hunger and disgust. Twice more Yé climbed the Montagne Pelée; twice more he climbed the Morne de la Croix; twice more he disturbed the poor Bon-Dié, all for nothing!—since each time on his way down he would fill his paunch with all sorts of nasty sour things, so that he could not speak right. The Devil remained in the house night and day;—the poor mother threw herself down on the ground, and pulled out her hair,—so unhappy she was!
But luckily for the poor woman, she had one child as cunning as a rat,—*