I nodded my head, in agreement with him. ‘I can only say that – if you won’t feel insulted, Pelletier – that you are singularly open-minded, for a man of science! What, by the way, became of Carswell?’
The houseboy came in with a tray, and Pelletier and I drank to each other’s good health.
‘He came in to Port au Prince,’ replied Pelletier after he had done the honors. ‘He did not want to go back to the States, he said. The lady to whom he had been engaged had died a couple of years before; he felt that he would be out of touch with American business. The fact is – he had stayed out here too long, too continuously. But, he remains an “authority” on Haitian native affairs, and is consulted by the High Commissioner. He knows, literally, more about Haiti than the Haitians themselves. I wish you might meet him; you’d have a lot in common.’
‘I’ll hope to do that,’ said I, and rose to leave. The houseboy appeared at the door, smiling in my direction.
The table is set for two, sar,’ said he.
Doctor Pelletier led the way into the dining-room, taking it for granted that I would remain and dine with him. We are informal in St Thomas, about such matters. I telephoned home and sat down with him.
Pelletier suddenly laughed – he was halfway through his soup at the moment. I looked up inquiringly. He put down his soup spoon and looked across the table at me.
‘It’s a bit odd,’ he remarked, ‘when you stop to think of it! There’s one thing Carswell doesn’t know about Haiti and what happens there!’
‘What’s that?’ I inquired.
‘That – thing – in there,’ said Pelletier, indicating the office with his thumb in the way artists and surgeons do. ‘I thought he’d had troubles enough without that on his mind, too.’
I nodded in agreement and resumed my soup. Pelletier has a cook in a thousand.
Hill Drums
When Mr William Palgrave, British consul-general at St Thomas, Danish West Indies, stepped out of his fine residence on Denmark Hill, he looked, as one local wit had unkindly remarked, ‘like an entire procession’! It could not be denied that handsome Mr Palgrave, diplomat, famed author of travel articles in the leading British magazines, made at all times a vastly imposing appearance, and that of this appearance he was entirely conscious.
One blazing afternoon in May, in the year of Grace, 1873, he came in stately fashion down the steps before his house toward his open carriage, waiting in the roadway below. On the box Claude, his Negro coachman, sagged down now under the broiling sun, conversed languidly with one La Touche Penn, a street loafer whose swart skin showed through various rents in a faded, many-times-washed blue dungaree shirt. Seeing the consul-general descending, Claude straightened himself abruptly while La Touche Penn slouched away, the white of an observant, rolled eye on Mr Palgrave.
As this ne’er-do-well strolled nonchalantly down the hill – the hard soles of a pair of feet which had never known the constriction of shoes making sandpaper-like sounds on the steep roadway – he whistled, softly, a nearly soundless little tune. Claude tightened his reins and the small, grass-fed, somnolent carriage-horses plucked up weary heads, ending their nap in the drowsy air. That was how Mr Palgrave liked to find his appointments – in order; ready for their functions. Mr Palgrave – so another St Thomas wit – was not unlike the late General Braddock whose fame is in the American histories; in short, a bureaucratic martinet whose wide travels, soon to bring him greater fame as the distinguished author of Ulysses, had failed signally to modify a native phlegmatic bluntness.
He came down the steps, a resplendent figure of a fine gentleman, dressed with a precise meticulousness in the exact mode of the London fashion, and, glancing after the furtive wastrel now well down the hill road, he caught the whistled tune. As he recognized it he frowned heavily, pursing his lips into a kind of pout which went ill with his appearance of portly, well-nourished grandeur. This accomplished diplomat was fastidious, easily annoyed. Not to put too fine a point upon it, he did not like St Thomas.
For one thing he disliked feminine names for places, and the capital town in those days was called Charlotte Amalia, after one of Denmark’s queens. It was a coquette of a town, a slender brunette of black eyes and very red lips and cheeks; a Latin brunette of the smoldering, garish type; a brunette who ran to mantillas and coquetteries and very high heels on her glistening slippers.
Various times had Mr Palgrave in his blunt manner compared to Charlotte’s disadvantage her alleged beauties with the sedate solidity of his last post, Trebizond in Armenia, whence he had come here to the Caribbean. At first these animadversions of his had been lightly received. Charlotte Amalia was a tolerant lass. This was, perhaps, only a strange variety of British banter! Society had let it go at that; would probably have forgotten all about it. But then the consul-general had made it plain, several times, that he had meant quite literally exactly what he had said. At that Charlotte, though still tolerantly, had been annoyed.
Finally he had been – unconsciously (Charlotte granted that quite definitely) – offensive. He had said certain things, used certain terms, which were – inadvisable. The way he used the word ‘native’, society agreed, was bad diplomacy, to put it mildly. Society continued, because he was a Caucasian and because of his official position, to invite him to its dinners, its routs, its afternoon teas, its swizzel parties. Government House took no notice of his ineptitudes, his comparisons.
The British families, and there were many of these permanently resident in St Thomas – Chatfields, Talbots, Robertsons, MacDesmonds – were, of course, the backbone of his social relationships. Some of them tried to give him hints when they saw how the wind was veering against him and wishing their own diplomatic representative to be clear of criticism, but these well-intentioned efforts slipped off Mr Palgrave’s uncompromising broad back like water from a duck’s!
Then he had really put his foot in it. The leading English magazine to which he was a valued contributor brought out an article by him – on Charlotte Amalia. Here the already famous author of travel articles had commented, in cold print, and disparagingly, upon the society of which he was, for the time being, an integral part. He had, too, been so injudicious as to compare Charlotte Amalia with Trebizond, vastly to the advantage of the Armenian capital. Trebizond, if the man had any sentiment in him, must, at that period, have seemed very attractive in retrospect.
It was chiefly the British West Indians who took in the magazine, but there were a few others. The news of the article spread like wildfire. Extra copies, at Lightbourn’s store, were quickly exhausted. Other copies were ordered. Extant copies were worn dog-eared from frequent readings of that faux pas. It finished Mr Palgrave in Charlotte Amalia.
A consul-general, and of Great Britain, can hardly be ignored in a comparatively small community. Nevertheless Charlotte Amalia now drew in her perfumed skirts in no unmistakable gesture. There was, of course, nothing overt about this gesture. Charlotte was far too subtle, far too polite and sophisticated after the Continental manner, for anything crude; anything, that is, smacking of the consul-general’s own methods! But there was an immediate difference, a delicate, subtle difference, which, as the weeks progressed, was to make its impact upon the consciousness of William Palgrave, through his thick mental epidermis, in a very strange manner indeed.
For it had penetrated elsewhere than to the very outer edges of St Thomas society. It had got down to Black Quashee himself, down through the various intervening social strata – minor officials, a few professional persons, shopkeepers, artisans – down to Quashee in his tattered shirt; shoeless, carefree Quashee, at the very bottom of Charlotte Amalia’s social scheme.
Early that spring, at the time when house servants become mysteriously ill and have to be relieved of their duties for a few days, and the Rata drums, Fad’er, Mama, and Boula de Babee, may be heard to roll and boom nightly from the wooded hills in the island’s interior, and the Trade Winds’ changing direction leaves an almost palpable curt
ain of sultriness hanging over the hot, dry town on its three hillsides; in those days when the burros’ tongues hang out of dry mouths along dusty roads and the centipedes come into the houses out of the dust and street dogs slink along blazing sidewalks in the narrow slits of house-shade under the broiling sun of late May-time – then, as the Black People came trickling back into the town from their three- or four-day sojourn in the hills when they make the spring songs – then it was that the Honorable William Palgrave began to be conscious of a vague, partly realized annoyance, an annoyance which seemed to hang in the air all about him.
As he lay on his handsome carved mahogany bedstead during an early-afternoon siesta; as he sat in his cool shaded office before his great desk with its dispatch-boxes in orderly rows, as he dressed for dinner after his late-afternoon bath – taken in the tin tub which he had lugged about the diplomatic world for the past eighteen years – at such times the new annoyance would drift to him in whispers, on the dull wings of the sultry air so hard to breathe for one of his portly habit.
It was a sound-annoyance, a vague, thin, almost imperceptible thing. It was a tune, with certain elusive words; words of which he heard recurrent bits, snatches, snippets, incidental mere light touches of a delicate, withering sarcasm – directed toward him as a child might blow thistle-down with faint derisive intent in the direction of somebody who has managed to incur its dislike.
The St Thomas Negroes, so it became borne in upon Mr Palgrave’s understanding, had ‘made a song on’ him.
It was a characteristic, quickstep kind of song; something in the nature of a folksong. Of these there are various examples, like the one wherein the more urban St Thomian makes fun of his Santa Crucian neighbor by alleging that: ‘De Crucian gyurl don’ wish dey skin’, and which ends on the rollicking chorus: ‘Wash yo’self in a sardine-tin!’
In the course of the weeks in which he was obliged to listen to it, Mr Palgrave came to recognize the tune, and even a few of the words, which, because of almost incessant repetition, had been forced, though with a delicacy that was almost eery, upon his attention. The tune went to the lilt of the small drum – Boula, de babee – somewhat as follows.
The words, of which there were many, resolved themselves, so far as his appreciation of them was concerned, into two first lines, and a refrain, thus:
Weelum Palgrave is a Cha-Cha, b’la-hoo!
Him are a koind of a half-a-Jew
Then the refrain:
Him go back to Trebizond.
There were, in these apparently Mother Goose words, various hidden meanings. ‘B’la-hoo’, a contraction from ‘bally-hoo’, is the name of a small, hard-fleshed, surface-water fish, not unlike the flying-fish in consistency, and living, like its winged neighbor, on the surface of deeps. As used in the verses it intensified ‘Cha-Cha’. A Cha-Cha – so-called, it is currently believed in St Thomas, because of the peculiar sneezing nasality with which these French poor-whites enunciate their Norman French – is one of a peculiarly St Thomian community, originally emigrés from St Bartholomew’s, now so thoroughly inbred as to look all alike – brave and hardy fishermen who cannot swim, West Indian poor-whites of the lowest class, like the Barbadian ‘red-legs’. A Cha-Cha B’la-hoo means a particularly Cha-Charish Cha-Cha; an indubitable Cha-Cha. The application of such a term to the consul-general meant that he was of the lowest sort of humanity the St Thomian Negro could name.
Being ‘half-a-Jew’ did not at all mean that Mr Palgrave partook, as the hearer might easily imagine, of any characteristics believed to inhere in the co-religionists of Moses and Aaron. The phrase had a far deeper – and lower – significance than that. The significant portion of it was that word ‘half’. That, stated plainly, meant an aspersion upon the legitimacy of Mr Palgrave’s birth. It was, that epithet, essentially a ‘tu quoque’ type of insult – you’re another! It referred directly to one of Mr Palgrave’s mordant aspersions upon the quality of the St Thomians, or, rather, upon the class, the Negroes, which was now retaliating. It was not the usual custom of these Negroes to marry. It had not been their custom in Africa. Their Danish overlords did not compel it here. Why should this foreigner, this Bukra of the double-chin, cast his aspersions upon them? How was he concerned? Not at all, was Black Quashee’s obvious reply, according to the logic of the situation. His equally obvious retort, to drum-beats, was:
Him are a koind of a half-a-Jew!
But – the real gist of the retort, compared to which these glancing blows at his self-esteem were mere thrusts of the banderillo, goads – was the refrain:
Him go back to Trebizond.
It was not, precisely, a command. It was still less a statement of accomplished fact. Mr Palgrave had not gone back to his esteemed Armenian post, Mr Palgrave had no intention whatever of applying to Downing Street for a transfer back there. It was – a suggestion.
It was that refrain which La Touche Penn had been whistling as he walked demurely away down the glaring white road under the blazing sunlight. Mr Palgrave stared angrily after the slouching figure; stared after it, an uncompromising scowl upon his handsome, florid features, until it disappeared abruptly around a sudden turn halfway down the hill. Then he mounted the step of his barouche and settled himself in the exact center of the sun-heated leather cushion, a linen dust-cloth over his knees.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, and later, at five o’clock, it was Mr Palgrave’s intention to call at Government House. Governor Arendrup was receiving that afternoon, as he did once a month, but between now and then there was an interval of an hour and a half which the consul-general meant to spend in making duty calls.
Claude, very erect, drove carefully down the hill, turned the sharp corner around which La Touche Penn had disappeared, and thence, by a devious route, descended the slight slope leading to the chief thoroughfare along the sea’s edge. Here he turned to the left, passed that massive structure, the Grand Hotel, driving between it and Emancipation Park, turned once more to the left, and soon the wiry little carriage-horses were sweating up one of Charlotte Amalia’s steepest hills. They moved carefully around hair-breadth turns guarded by huge clumps of cacti, and at last emerged near the summit of Government Hill. Claude stopped before the entrance to a massive residence perched atop a still higher rise in the land.
Mr Palgrave climbed steps to the stone and cement terrace of this house and gave to the expressionless black butler his card for Mrs Talbot. The servant took his stick and hat and led the way up a flight of stairs to Mrs Talbot’s drawingroom. As the consul-general mounted behind his ebony guide he became aware of a tap-tapping, a light sound as though made by the fingers of a supple hand on a kitchen pan. The tapping went: ‘oóm-bom, bom; oóm-bom, bom; oóm-bom, bom’, over and over, monotonously. Accompanying this beat was a light, almost childish, voice; one of the black maids, probably, in some distant portion of the great house. The tune was the tune La Touche Penn had been whistling as he slouched down the hill. Mr Palgrave mentally supplied the words.
Weelum Palgrave is a Cha-Cha, b’la-hoo!
Him are a koind of a half-a-Jew –
Him go back to Trebizond!
It was maddening, this sort of thing. It should not be allowed. Here, in Mrs Talbot’s house! A choleric red disfigured Mr Palgrave’s handsome face as he walked into the drawing-room. It took him several minutes to reassume his accustomed urbanity.
Something Mrs Talbot said, too, was annoying.
‘I am sure I cannot say where I acquired the idea, Mr Palgrave, but – somehow – it came to me that you were not remaining with us; that you were expecting to go back; to Armenia, was it not?’
‘I have no such intention – I assure you.’ Mr Palgrave felt himself suddenly pink in the face. He used his handkerchief. May, in this climate, is very warm, Mrs Talbot hoped he would not mind the summer heat.
‘We find the sea bathing refreshing,’ she had vouchsafed.
Mr Palgrave did not outstay the twenty-minute minimum for a duty call. As he d
escended the broad stairway he heard the tap-tapping once more, but now the words accompanying it were muted. There was no song. He found himself repeating the doggerel words to the tapping of that damnable pan.
Him go back to Trebizond.
Absurd! He should do nothing of the sort. Only fancy – blackamoors! To suggest such a thing – to him! He descended the steps to the roadway, a picture of complacent dignity.
A tiny barefooted black child strolled past, an empty kerosene-tin balanced on her kinky, kerchiefed head. The child, preoccupied with a wilted bougainvillea blossom which she held between her hands, hummed softly, a mere tuneless little murmur, barely audible on the freshening Trade Wind of mid-afternoon. Mr Palgrave, his perceptions singularly sensitive this afternoon, caught it, however. His directions for the next call were given to black Claude almost savagely.
Precisely at five he mounted the steps of Government House. He was saluted in form by the pair of Danish gendarmes, in their stiff Frederick the Great uniforms, from each side of the doorway. He subscribed his name and titles in the visitors’ book. He gave up his hat and stick to another saluting gendarme, and mounted the interior stairway to the great drawing-room above.
Here all St Thomas society congregated monthly at the governor’s reception, and with those who had arrived on time this afternoon the drawing-room was half filled. The Governor’s Band, outside on the east end of the iron gallery which runs along the front of Government House, started up an air. Officers, officials, the clergy, the town’s gentry, the other resident consuls, and the ladyfolk of all these, passed solemnly in review before the governor, stiff in his black clothes, shaking hands formally in his box-like frock coat, his spotless white kid gloves.
Mr Palgrave, still ruffled from his afternoon’s experiences, greeted His Danish Majesty’s representative in this loyal colony with a stiffness quite equal to the governor’s, and passed within. Ladies seated at both ends of a vast mahogany table in the dining-room dispensed coffee and tea. Mounded along the table’s sides stood great silver trays of ‘spread’, half-sandwiches of white and brown bread covered with cheese, with preserves, with ground meats, with liver-pastei. At the sideboard Santa Cruz rum, made in the colony, French brandy imported from Martinique, and Danish beer in small bottles and served with fine pieces of ice in the glasses, were being rapidly dispensed by liveried Negro servants to a crowd which stood eight deep.
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 59
