The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  ‘One has to suffer for being patriotic,’ he said, and began to tell us some story, the details of which I could not clearly catch, of a naturalized German whom he had insulted in the Roseau Club. ‘Once a German always a German. I told him so. If I had been a younger man I should have flung him into the street. But I was fifty. They’ve never forgiven me down there. They all took the fellow’s side.’

  For a moment a hard, harsh look came into his face. In an instant it had gone, replaced by the suave, courteous look of hospitality. But I could understand how that reputation for violence had grown up in Roseau. I could picture the evenings when boredom and indigestion and the tiresome company of people who would argue and contradict him would goad him, who had never borne fools lightly, into one of those outbursts that would make even his most true admirer a little frightened of him. They were few who had not felt at some time the sting of that pointed rapier.

  It was after eleven when we left the table. It had been one of the best evenings that we had had since our farewell dinner to Europe in Bordeaux at the Chapeau Rouge. But it was, nevertheless, in a puzzled, almost embarrassed way that we turned to each other the moment we were alone.

  ‘Do you realize,’ said Eldred, ‘that he’s no idea we’re going away tomorrow?’

  I nodded my head. Our invitation had been arranged over the telephone. Telephones in Dominica are notoriously inadequate. And during the evening several such remarks as ‘Captain Armstrong will take you and show you over there in a day or two’ had made it very clear that we were expected to stay at least a week.

  ‘I wish to heaven we could,’ I said.

  Wished it both for our sake and his. There was no doubt that we should have had a delightful time there, and it was clear that he would enjoy our visit. He loved company and saw little company. It had been many months since he had seen travellers from England.

  ‘I suppose we can’t, though,’ said Eldred.

  For a while we debated the problem. The boat on which we were booked to sail left within three days. There would not be another for a fortnight. We had arrangements to make in Martinique. We had written to friends in Barbados announcing the date of our arrival. We did not see how those plans were to be cancelled.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy telling him,’ I said.

  It wasn’t. I have enjoyed few things less than I did the next morning the making of that first inquiry to the judge about the time at which we ought to start.

  ‘Start,’ he said; ‘but where?’

  ‘To Rosalie. I was wondering how long it would take to get there.’

  ‘But Rosalie? I do not understand.’

  We had exchanged half a dozen sentences before he understood.

  ‘What!’ he cried. ‘You are going to leave me?’

  It was said on such a note of pathetic, almost child-like disappointment that I almost then and there cancelled all our Barbados plans.

  ‘I had not realized,’ he said. ‘I thought.

  I began to explain. Our ship was sailing in three days. There were connections waiting. He scarcely listened. ‘You are going to leave me?’ he repeated.

  For a moment he was completely overcome by disappointment, but only for a moment. He was too good a host not to realize that a guest must not be embarrassed by a host’s personal feelings.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry. But since your boat is sailing it cannot be helped. We must see about preparing you a lunch.’

  Immediately he had begun to make preparations for our journey. A bottle of rum was to be packed, with cheese and a loaf of bread, cold meat and fruit and pickles. He abused roundly in patois the servant who made up the packet; but the servant laughed; his master might abuse him; but his master liked him. A negro will do anything for you provided that he knows that.

  ‘I’ll write you a letter to the overseer at my sister’s property,’ he said. ‘He’ll put you up for the night. He’ll make you comfortable.’

  And he talked cheerfully as we packed, of the island and the island’s history, its personalities and peculiarities. But there was a wistful look on his face as he said good-bye to us.

  ‘Come back one day,’ he said, ‘and make it soon. I won’t be here much longer.’

  We promised that we would. We believed we would.

  ‘Within eighteen months we’ll be back,’ we said.

  When we turned at the corner of the road we saw him standing on his parapet waving his arms to us.

  For quite a while we rode on in silence, picturing that long bungalow and the old man returning to his chair, his hands hanging limply over the sides, his mind abrood; thinking of what during those long hours, when the sun was too hot and he too tired to leave the cool shade of the veranda? Did his mind turn backwards to the past, to the thatched cottages of the Wiltshire where he was born, to the grey stone and green lawns of Oxford, to the mullioned windows of Lincoln’s Inn? Did he relive the ardours and optimisms of youth, the tumult and the feuds of middle life, the successes and disappointments, the friendships and the enmities, the loves that went awry? Or did he, who had no faith in any immaterial heaven, look forward, adoze there in his chair, to a day imperfectly discerned when the veranda on which he sat would be a bank of rubble, when the grass would run raggedly between the palms, when one more plantation had been reclaimed by the jungle from which it sprang, with he himself mingled with the roots of the tall mangoes under which by moonlight the brown people that he loved would dance?

  Obeah

  from THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

  Written in 1939

  I Spoke of the West Indians as an uprooted people. They have lost their country, their language, and their faith. They have brought with them and retained, however, many of their superstitions. Much has been written in recent years, particularly since it has become possible for white men to visit Haiti, about Obeah men and voodoo rites, and there can be little doubt that in the last analysis most West Indians have more faith in their own witch-doctors than in the priests whom their education has approved for them. Until recently there was a clause in the Haitian Code forbidding the use of Zombies, the raising of dead men to work as labourers in the fields. Seabrook’s Magic Island has dealt at length with this question.

  The authority of the ‘Obeah men’ is little questioned. Most residents in the West Indies have had personal experiences of ‘the spirits’. A planter in Grenada wrote me the following account of one of his:

  ‘Two of my labourers had not been at work for some time when I met one of them and asked him why? He said, “Boss, the spirits troubling us too much. We never get any sleep at night.”

  ‘I questioned him and he said for the past twenty days things had been thrown about in the house and that anyone who went near the house after dark got beaten with sticks and had stones thrown at them.

  ‘I laughed at him and told him I would come myself to see what was going on.

  ‘Two afternoons later I went to where he was living. He took me through a nutmeg grove and on up a grass-covered hill to a small labourer’s house built of mud and wattle. He told me this was the house where things first began to happen, and they had left the house and were living in their grandmother’s house down below in the nutmeg grove, but that the spirits still attacked them.

  ‘I sat and talked to the two young men aged about twenty, a wife of one of them, and two children till it began to get dusk, when I said we would go to the lower house.

  ‘There was a worn path down the grass slope and no trees or bushes anywhere near. I sent the woman and children in front; then I came, and then the two young men. A few yards down the path the two men tried to run past me, shouting, “Oh, God! They’re getting us.”

  ‘I thought they were trying to frighten the woman, and so I made them walk in front of me. After a few yards I felt gravel and dust being thrown at my head, and they started to cry out again. I pretended nothing had happened, although I had dust and fine earth over my neck and shoulders.

  �
��We reached the lower house, and while it was light I examined it. There was a ladder of four steps to reach the door. On the left a half-partition, behind which was the bedroom. I looked under the bed and saw a basin with a corn cob in it, used for washing clothes. Sitting on the floor in the other room was the grandmother, leaning against the partition holding a baby. Opposite her was a bench along the side of the house and under the bench some baskets full of nutmegs. Facing the door was a table with a lamp on it and a pickle bottle. I saw all the windows shut and barred, and stood in the doorway facing into the house. The occupants sat on the bench—two men, two women, and the two children. I tried to persuade them that it was someone playing tricks on them and throwing stones, et cetera, on the roof, but they said, “Wait, Boss. You will see things.”

  ‘It was then dark. After some time there was a crash on the roof and a few minutes later a lump of earth inside the house came from the ceiling and fell on the floor at my feet. The people started singing hymns, then suddenly the corn cob out of the basin in the next room flew over the partition and a few minutes later a shower of nutmegs out of the basket under the bench flew into the air and fell all round us. My hair felt like standing on end and when a few minutes later the bottle jumped off the table, hit the roof and fell at my feet, I thought it time to go; so, making some feeble remark about being late for dinner, I beat a retreat.

  ‘These people next day had the Anglican parson to come and say prayers and when that had no effect they got the Roman Catholic priest to do ditto. The spirits took no notice and so they decided to call in the African Shango Dancers.

  ‘They had to pay these people five pounds. They built a roof over a flat piece of ground about twenty feet square cut out of the hill above the top house. They started dancing—an old woman, a girl of about seventeen and a man to beat the tomtom—at 7 a.m. on Friday morning. On Saturday afternoon myself and a fellow planter went up to see it. They beat the same monotonous beat on the tomtom and the old woman and girl made the same motions, dancing all the time. You could see they were self-hypnotized. The old woman fell on the ground from exhaustion and her limbs still continued to jerk in time to the drum. She then started to roll, and rolled over and over out of the shed down the hill and, to our amazement, when past the empty house, she rolled along the side of the house and then rolled up the hill into the shed again. It was a very steep hill—quite as steep as the hill from the Hospital in St. George’s past the St. James’s Hotel. It looked impossible and the whole thing was so inhuman and beastly that we left. I told the occupants to send away the young girl aged twelve, as I had read of poltergeists and felt sure she was the cause of the trouble. I don’t know if they did so, but the manifestations stopped, as the Africans had said they would.’

  Such occurrences, my friend wrote me, are very frequent. In more than one respect the traditions and the faith of Africa made the middle passage from the Guinea Coast.

  II

  from MOST WOMEN

  Written in 1929

  No one doubts the power of the evil eye. If a labourer who is unhappy can go into a decline, turning his face to the wall and dying in the course of a few days without any visible complaint, there is no reason why the same powers of will and concentration should not work harm upon an enemy.

  During my first days in Martinique, before I had moved into the bungalow, Eldred Curwen and I stayed in a small hotel in Fort de France. As they only charged us forty francs a day and as that included, in addition to our food, as much red wine as we could manage, we did not expect a high standard of comfort. We did expect, though, something rather better in the way of service than the slatternly half-caste who clattered the plates like muskets, upset sardine oil on my trousers, and brought no potatoes till we had finished our entrée. It was not even as though she had made up for her inefficiency, as do so many negroes, by an amiable readiness to smile. She was sour and ill-favoured. Without being old, she looked as though she had never been young. Her features were set in a sulky scowl. Her long, red print frock was soiled and shapeless. There was no pretty handkerchief knotted in her hair. She was, we decided, just too much of a good thing.

  ‘We’ll change our table this evening,’ Eldred said.

  We did not expect to meet with any difficulty. A boat was sailing for St. Thomas that afternoon, and the dining-room when we came down to it for dinner was comparatively empty. The maître d’hôtel became flustered, however, when we asked to be placed at another table.

  ‘I have put you at Floria’s table,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ we answered. ‘But we want to be moved from it. There are several tables vacant, aren’t there?’

  He nodded his head. Yes, certainly there were tables vacant. At the same time. . . .

  He was still hesitating when Floria shuffled across the room on her bare feet.

  ‘That’s your table, there,’ she said.

  ‘We are arranging to change tables,’ Eldred told her.

  The sullen look on her face darkened. ‘That’s your table,’ she repeated, ‘there.’

  But by this time I had begun to grow impatient. ‘We can’t wait here the whole evening,’ I said to the maître d’hôtel. ‘Please find us another table. That one over there is empty, isn’t it?’

  I had begun to move across to it, when Floria pushed in front of me.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  Her manner was so offensive that my impatience conquered my self-control. ‘Because I don’t want to have all my trousers covered with sardine oil.’

  I spoke angrily. And as she heard me, the sulky expression of her features deepened into a stare of fierce malevolence. Her eyes followed us as we crossed the room.

  At the table next to ours was a French Creole who had come out on the same boat with us.

  ‘That was a black look she gave us,’ I remarked.

  He nodded his head. ‘It certainly was,’ he answered, pausing significantly, as though there were more that he would say. He shrugged his shoulders casually, however. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘It may mean nothing.’

  That night I could not sleep. I was weary with the exhaustion of a long sea voyage, of packing, of early rising, of the excitement of arriving at a new place; but I could not sleep; all night I tossed restlessly under the mosquito-net. I felt limp and lifeless as I came up from my shower bath to the wide veranda on which my morning coffee and fruit were awaiting me, to find that Eldred Curwen, usually a late riser, was already down. There were red rims under his eyes.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ I asked.

  ‘Twice, for three consecutive minutes.’

  ‘That’s more than I managed.’

  At the other end of the veranda the French Creole who had travelled out with us was dipping a crust of bread into his coffee. He laughed at our admission.

  ‘I was wondering about that,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I should go back to Floria’s table.’

  We stared at him in surprise.

  ‘What are we to take that to mean?’ we asked.

  ‘Only that black magic does exist.’

  We laughed at that. ‘Are you trying to tell us that Floria’s put a spell on us?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And are you expecting us to believe that?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You can believe it or not believe it, as you choose, but do you fancy the people who run this hotel would keep a woman like that if they weren’t afraid of her? Anyhow, wait and see how you sleep tonight. It may be that last night you were too excited.’

  Throughout that day I thought of nothing except sleep. As I strolled through the narrow, coloured streets of Fort de France, as I sat on the balcony of the Club sipping a rum punch, looking out over the green savannah to the white statue of Josephine, as I drove in the afternoon through green fields of cane to the palm groves of La Fontaine and Carbet, my eyelids ached and throbbed. I counted the moments till the sun should have sunk into the Caribbean.

  It was only a few minutes after
eight that I went to bed, feeling that not for another second could I keep awake, but once again I was to toss, hot and restless and exhausted, through the interminable hours of a tropic night, and once again, when at last dawn came, I found a fractious and red-eyed Eldred awaiting me on the veranda.

  ‘Really,’ he said, ‘this is too much of a good thing. I haven’t had two minutes’ sleep.’

  The Frenchman laughed knowingly over his coffee. ‘I should change your table in the dining-room if I were you,’ he said.

  We were less sceptical now than we had been on the previous evening.

  ‘Has she been poisoning us?’ we asked.

  He shook his head. ‘She doesn’t need poison—not material poison, anyhow. She’s got beyond that. You wouldn’t be surprised at the hotel keeping her on here if you knew her story.’ He paused; then, seeing that we were listening, went on.

  She was sixteen, he told us, at the time, and in the Martinique fashion she was lovely. She was straight and tall and supple. She wore a long, flowing, green silk robe, a yellow madras about her neck, and a green-and-yellow handkerchief for her hair. There were rings swinging from her ears; the gift of a sailor brother. And she was proud, as are the women of Martinique who know their beauty to be famous through the length of the Antilles.

  It is of such a one that he spoke to us, and of an evening twenty years before when her dark eyes had smiled softly through a moon-silvered dusk at the young Frenchman at her feet.

  ‘So you were afraid to speak to me. Silly one, there was no need to be,’ she whispered.