During the following weeks of Berthe’s convalescence, Josephine was seldom far from her side, and everything, except for long abstracted silences on Josephine’s part and a terrible anxiety on Berthe’s, seemed as it had been before. Their ideas were suddenly changed by the joyful event of Sosthène’s arrival from Saint Cyr, where he had had a stormy but not altogether unsuccessful career. He was due to return soon for a course at Saumur before joining a regiment of hussars. He came back with Madame de Serindan, who had been spending the winter between Paris and Contrexéville. Sosthène seemed more deeply than ever in love with Berthe, and she was submitted to an impassioned fusillade of proposals and, alternatively, to threats of suicide. Sosthène looked younger than his age and his character was an odd and contradictory mixture of youthfulness and extreme precocity. It was plain that his ardour was no longer to be stemmed, as it had been before his departure, by telling him not to be a Silly Billy. If Berthe had consented, the Serindans would have been delighted at the match, in spite of the four years difference in age. ‘But it was out of the question,’ Berthe concluded. ‘How ridiculous and rather pathetic it all seems now, and what a long time ago. . . .’
•
Mademoiselle de Rennes had to leave for Athens on some business or other and she was away almost a week. One evening Phrosoula appeared at my little hotel with a note from Berthe asking me to dinner.
There was a full moon and the table was laid among olive trees beside an old well that plunged deep into the rock. The water was brought to the top by a windlass, ice cold after long winding. Phrosoula rested her tray on the edge of the well-head and leant against it while she waited to change the plates. Berthe talked about Athens and the incidents that had occurred on the steamer to and fro.
When we had drunk our coffee, the girl put a full pitcher of wine on the table between our wicker chairs, said goodnight and vanished. The olives advanced to the brink of the headland, each ancient stem twisting in a contrary direction to its neighbour. Many of the trees were so old that the trunks were split wide apart to the roots, each half following the spiral convolutions of the other, like dancing-partners in a waltzing forest; the rising moon, entangled overhead in the silver and lanceolate leaves, had frozen these gyrations into immobility. This highly literary simile was Berthe’s, and a complementary arabesque of her glowing cigarette end underlined the verve of this imaginary choreography. The cue seemed apt, so, ‘Berthe,’ I ventured, ‘I wish you would tell me about the Ball’.
‘A – ha,’ she said with a sigh, ‘the Ball. . .’ The orange cigarette-end came to rest on the arm of the chair and after a few moments of silence we were back in Saint-Jacques on the last day of carnival in the first decade of the twentieth century.
•
I knew the appearance and the atmosphere of the Serindan house in Plessis so well from Berthe’s discourse and her innumerable sketches that it was as though I had been present at the preparations for the Shrove Tuesday Ball she so evocatively described: the great white rooms opening to each other through fluted Corinthian pillars of wood; the crowding, rather primitive portraits of dead Serindans in wigs, or later, in high collars, by Clamart the student of Liotard; the plaster flourishes and rococo cartwheels of foliage on the ceilings; the chandeliers with their prismatic and melodiously jangling lustres, all of them bright now with innumerable candles, and already the meeting place of an army of little moths, which, in advance of the guests, had fluttered in from the forest.
The Serindan house was not only the biggest in Plessis, but the highest perched. It was islanded among ascending and descending terraces, and the balustrades were adorned with posturing graces and marble nymphs. Beyond their elegant barrier, the forest began: a huge wilderness of tangled ceibas and balisiers and tree-ferns that only halted a slanting six miles beyond at the jagged crater of the Salpetrière. The day had ended in a flaunting sunset so apocalyptic – a Last Judgement, an apotheosis, an assumption, one could have thought – that each falling ray seemed a ladder for the descending Paraclete, and Berthe almost expected to see long-shafted trumpets advance along the slanting beams from the gold and crimson clouds. Then it suddenly died away into night. The volcano had been burning for the last week or so with unaccustomed vigour. Now it hung in the dark like a bright red torch, prompting the island wiseacres, mindful of the terrible eruptions that had coincided over a century ago with the fall of the Bastille, to shake their heads. But such renewals of activity and such gloomy presages recurred every few years. Each minor overflow of lava, heralded invariably by showers of ashes and an overpowering heat, was always halted by those intervening canyons known as les chaudières – a grey desert region of fumeroles and volcanic gas and half fossilised trees. ‘Ga’dez Salpetwière!” the negroes said joyfully to each other; ‘li pas faché, li fait bomba pou’ Ma’di Gwas, comme nous’, and the carnival drums beat vigorously all over the town. There had been not a drop of rain for many days – a rare event even in this dry season – and the trade winds had ceased altogether. The heat was appalling.
But nothing could repress the Count’s enthusiasm on such an occasion. (The Countess, ensconced in a rocking-chair, gently fanning herself in a cool little room with a pretty Clamart pastoral scene on the ceiling, had long ago resigned from such duties. Lavender- and barley-water and hartshorn stood ready on a little table. Safely embowered there among indoor shrubs, she turned the pages of La Mode à Paris.) He and the Captain and Berthe were directing the decoration of the two great saloons where the dancing would take place. Negroes had been at work all day plaiting thick festoons of bougainvillea and poinsettia, and when the Captain arrived, the Count, Berthe and Gentilien, with the children and an army of servants, were looping them from the walls to the chandeliers. The Captain’s hands had gone up in horror.
‘Agénor! Berthe! Gentilien! It’s hideous! Pray throw those monstrosities away at once, it’s worse than an English Christmas at Cape Town. Nothing but hibiscus and magnolia, I beg!’
The Count was only downcast for a moment and the work had to begin all over again. The new decorations were ready just in time. ‘No, not strung from the chandeliers but like this,’ the Captain insisted, ‘hanging in swags from the cornice and twisted in spirals round the curtains and the pillars.’
The result was charming. The heavy scent of the garlands mingled with that of polish and beeswax. Together they arranged the great sheaves of flowers and chose the places for the branching candelabra. (Each candle was enclosed in the swelling and waisted cylinder of a glittering hurricane glass.) Next they inspected the cold table, with its hams and its quails in aspic, the giant lobsters and crabs, the ivory pyramids of chou coco and chou palmiste for each one of which a tall palm tree had been felled in order that the precious heart might be dislodged; the mounds of soursops and mangos, the pineapples and sapodillas and sweetsops and granadillas and avocado pears; the cold barracks for champagne, where on banks of ice from Nova Scotia, the magnums of Aï reclined in green and gold battalions; the arrays of rum and syrup jugs, the lemons and the nutmeg and the newly-cut yard-long swizzle sticks for the punch martiniquais; the ingredients for the sorbets and the Sangaree were methodically laid out along a dresser. At noon the Count and Gentilien had descended the spiral to the cellars with the gravity of turnkeys, reascending from the cobwebbed catacombs (which warrened the volcanic rock on which the house was built), like chaplains hearing a succession of fragile and wonder-working reliquaries. Now the count gazed with the tenderness of a nurse at the alcove where, like sleeping children who must come to no harm, the fabulous clarets, uncorked with almost alchemical skill, lay at rest; cradled there for the last few hours, sleepers of Ephesus all gently waking, they mingled with the Antillean air the quiet breath they had held since their infancy by far-off castles on the banks of the Garonne.
In the kitchen, urchins, sea-eggs and dwarf oysters – the last still clustering in scores on lengths of mangrove-stalk – were heaped in pails. The snow-white whorls of the co
nch shells (each of them opening to display a pink internal helix) were arrayed like a tritons’ orchestra announcing, in a silent fanfare, the later delights of lambi flambé au rhum. A swarm of little frogs swam agitatedly round their tank; the great shell of a turtle had already been evacuated by its lodger. Horny backed iguanas, trussed like captured dragons, moved restlessly in their baskets. The Count stopped and gazed at them.
‘What beautiful and mythical creatures!’ he apostrophised. ‘To think that our pygmy ancestors trembled before their giant ancestors in prehistoric times!’ He picked one up. Its tail swayed in uneasy protest. ‘And now, poor creatures, how the rôles are reversed!’ Stooping, he whistled a few bars from the overture to Lucia di Lammermoor, and soon the dragon was motionless, as though these notes had mesmerized it into an aesthetic trance. Running his finger along its jagged backbone to the tip of the slender striped tail, he replaced it with a sigh. ‘They love Donizetti,’ he said; then, with a slight change of key, turning to the Captain: ‘I’ve discovered a new way of cooking them, Henri. Don’t forget to tell me what you think of it. . . .’ Outside under the mango trees a dozen negroes turned spits on which sucking pigs were impaled over trenches of charcoal. White teeth were bared in greeting among the shadows. ‘Goutez ça, Messié le Comte,’ said one of the negroes, snipping off a crisp ear. ‘Ou ka volé au pawadis!’
They returned munching to the hall, where the servants were waiting. The Count always dressed them for this dance in the liveries of his great-grandfather’s time, which had been preserved in great chests in the attics. Many of them, drawn by Berthe, were familiar figures: Charlemagne, Gratien, Mignon, Ajax, Fortuné, Hyacinthe, Zénon, Félix, Théodule, Sarpedon, Numa Pompilius, Siriaque, Clovis, and Hiram Abif, a rather secretive young man formerly apprenticed to a brick-layer; and a dozen more. They were dressed in white breeches with a bunch of ribbons at the knee, and their feet and legs were bare. Their white linen shirts had billowing sleeves and ribbons at the collar and the cuff. Broad yellow sashes bound their middles, and their torsos were enclosed in black plush boleros galooned with gold lace. They wore golden ear-rings and large black and yellow turbans fastened with plumes, and round their necks hung silver plaques on chains incised with the Serindan cognizance: a shield bearing three greyhounds passant on a bend on a field of cross-crosslets within a tressure flory-counter-flory.
Then the girls – Dody, Uldarix, Modestine, Lucette, Baby, La Grande Suzanne, Vénus, Eulalie, Marie Médicis, Léocade, Scholastique, Jug Betty and Joan from Antigua, Bibiane and a swarm of others – lined up giggling. Berthe and Gentilien – the latter dressed in buckled shoes and a black and gold frock coat with epaulettes and aiguillettes, his grizzled hair redundantly powdered – straightened the tall cylindrical turbans of the girls and the huge yellow and black bows down the front; puffed out a pannier here, tightened a sash there, and smoothed the pleated skirts over their bare feet. The Count beamed, exclaiming, ‘Charmant mes enfants!’ – a familiar mode of address which in three cases and possibly more, was literally exact in this instance – then clapped his hands, and the girls scuttled off laughing. But the orchestra, assembled and trained by himself at Beauséjour and transported to Plessis for the Carnival, was his favourite care. He had sent for the sheet music of the most recent dance tunes from Paris, and, sitting at the piano, seizing now a violin, now a ’cello, he went over the difficult passages till all seemed perfect.
‘Now, Henri,’ he said to the Captain, ‘it’s time to change. And, I entreat you, please be here when your Metropolitan friends arrive. We shall all be lost without you.’
The Captain shouted from the doorstep that he would rather be late for the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
•
Upstairs in the girls’ rooms, all was at sixes and sevens. A flotsam of stockings, petticoats, cardboard boxes and tissue-paper smothered the beds and overflowed to the floor. Gentilien’s wife, the old and bulky Fanette, who had been the Da, or Nanny, of the Serindan children since they were born, presided over half a dozen maids who knelt round the four girls with their mouths full of pins: taking in last-minute tucks, arranging ribbons, brushing and braiding hair. The Count had given all four of them new dresses for the ball. Berthe’s was green – ‘they thought it went best with my fair hair’ – Lucienne’s pale blue, and Solange’s pink. Josephine ran into Berthe’s room, pirouetted on one white satin toe with a swirl of skirts and then stood still with a look of expectancy. It was her first low dress, a stiff pagoda of white taffeta that made the warm olive skin of her shoulders, and the dusky smoothness of her cheek, shine with the lustre of ivory on silver, and burn with the utmost fervour of créole beauty: a warmth accentuated by the pallor of the gardenias along the corsage of her dress and the three gardenias in her blue-black hair.
‘O, Josephine,’ Berthe could not help saying. ‘How lovely you look!’
‘Do I, darling Berthe?’ she answered in a gasp. ‘And you?’ They held each other at arms’ length.
‘Josephine had been very excited all day,’ Berthe explained to me, ‘and I hoped she had forgotten all about her romance with M. Sciocca. She was the giddiest of the three girls and excitement at the prospect of the ball and her new dress easily accounted for her exaltation. But I could not forget that he would be there with his father, and decided to keep my eyes open.
‘While we were gazing at each other in admiration, Anne-Jules burst into the room. “You girls may think you’re something,” he shouted, “but you wait. I’ve got a surprise in here,” he pointed to a mysterious basket, “that’s going to wake everybody up!” He had been more than usually hard to find during the last week, always returning from the woods late for meals, and invariably in the company of a little black boy of his own age, Gentilian’s son, Pierrot – though Anne-Jules did not know it, his own first cousin – who now hovered in the background. The other girls came running in and the boys disappeared. They were joined by Sosthène, who emerged from his room looking tall and grave in a brand new uniform. After suitable exclamations, we joined hands and rustled down the great staircase, all feeling very proud of ourselves. Modestine, Josephine’s maid, ran halfway down to give Josephine a fan that she had forgotten. We were only just in time, for the first guests were arriving as we reached the hall.’
The first arrivals were cousins and neighbours: the entire vast family of La Tour d’Astirac-Belcastel of Savanne de Rohan. They streamed into the hall with kisses and exclamations of wonder at the dresses and the flowers. After that, the carriages rolled up one after the other, till the courtyard was ringing with trampling and spark-striking hooves. Wheels ground and squeaked on the flagstones. Many kinds of vehicles appeared – modern barouches and victorias, neat flies and coupés, antiquated berlines and bourbonnaises and here and there a smart turnout à la Daumont – each unloading at the Count’s staircase the denizens of all the gentilhommières of Saint-Jacques. With shouts and cracking whips the equipages moved on. The newly alighted groups flowed indoors between two gigantic stone figures of Atlas which stooped with frowning brows and contorted biceps beneath a massive pediment loaded with blazons and cornucopias hewn out of coral rock. (In the heart of the petrified cascades of fruits and flowers that overflowed the plinth, single-horned supporters with tempestuous manes hoisted a great stone shield on which, beneath a nine-pearled circlet, a baton in bend sinister debruised the du Plessis canton quartering the hounds of Serindan, and an inescutcheon with the rose of Fontenay was superimposed in pretence.)
I made Berthe repeat the picturesque names as though she were fulfilling Gentilian’s rôle of butler: the Solignacs of Triste Etang, the Vauduns of Anse Verte, the Tharonnes of Morne Zombi, the Vertprés of Battaka and Bombardopolis, the Chaumes of Carbet du Roi, the Cussacs of Ajoupa, the Rivrys of Allégresse, the O’Rourkes of Bouillante, the Kerascoët-Plougastels of Cayes Fendus, the Fains of Noé des Bois, the La Mottes of Piton-Noir, the Fertés of Deux Rivières, the La Flour d’Aiguesamares of Sans Pitié, the Montgirards of Morne
Bataille, the Chambines de la Forest d’Ivry of Pointe d’Ivry and the La Popelinières from the strangely named acres of Confiture; Hucs, Dentus, Pornics, Médards, Vamels; here and there a visiting cousin from another island – a de Jaham or a Despointes from Martinique, a du Boulay from English St Lucia. A few prominent members of the little Jewish community of Plessis – names like Spinoza, Leon, da Costa, Astrologo and da Cordova – arrived together. These were the descendants of Sephardic families that had fled from Ferdinand and Isabella to the Brazilian town of Pernambuco; taking refuge, when the town was captured, in the hospitable Antilles. Most of the sugar- and rum- and molasses-brokerage in Saint-Jacques was in their hands, and they had occupied for generations an honourable position in the island.
The Captain’s arrival was greeted with acclamation, for – ‘with his cheeks a little pinker than usual,’ Berthe said, ‘and his eye-brows a little more poignantly dark’ – he came swaying along in a painted Sedan chair upholstered in purple satin and borne by two of his dark retinue. He swore that the streets where he lived were too narrow for any larger equipage. Alighting with the resilience of an aeronaut, he coiled towards the Count and Countess, and stooped over her hand with a delicate interweaving of compliments. The effluvia of oriental essences surrounded him. His hair had been brushed and cajoled into an ambrosial nest, his moustache was crisply tonged, and the hand that held the flattened opera hat against his erect and pigeon-breasted torso was gloved in lilac. Screwing in his eyeglass, he peered challengingly round the room with an air of debonair severity, epitomising, his attitude seemed to say, the fourfold essence of mariner, explorer, man of letters and balloonist.
The Violins of Saint-Jacques Page 4
