‘There was something very urgent and convincing in Sosthène’s manner, but nevertheless I was astonished when the Captain nodded his long spectacled head and consented. Three of the crew were Jacobeans and the sailor who had offered us the rum as we boarded turned out to be one of the Count’s numerous godsons, fittingly named Agénor. He had not seen Sosthène for years and, though he had wondered all along if it were he, had hesitated to ask. After joyful recognitions, Sosthène and Gentilien prepared to set off. Captain Graham was even persuaded to let them have Agénor and the two other Jacobeans to help row the skiff back more quickly to the Mouillage. Sosthène’s sudden impetuous energy, his communicative and friendly authority, the speed and resolution of everything he did, were such that the whole schooner was infected. As I watched him pointing out on the chart the waters round Cap d’Estaing, indicating the likeliest inlets for us to lie in wait and the reefs where the enemy could most effectively be cornered, I wondered if this could be the same Sosthène who, ever since his return from France, had talked to me so desperately of self-destruction. Was this the sad young man that lay all day under the mango trees of Beauséjour with a volume of Vauvenargues or Seneca? The prospect of action had swept away the cloud of doubt, of melancholy and abstraction in which Sosthène had seemed to be wandering and turned him in a second into something swift, determined and mercurial.
‘The three sailors and Gentilien were soon down the ladder. I embraced Sosthène, who followed them at once into the boat. The face that looked back over the tiller was transfigured with ardour. Swift strokes carried the skiff out of the lantern’s range. Cheerful shouts and the valedictory gleam of a flourished cutlass answered our cries of good luck as the darkness hid them.
‘The second journey, with twice the number of oarsmen on board, was much faster than the first; but it seemed to last an eternity as I leaned over the bulwarks. Although the schooner was some way out to sea, the beat of drums and the sound of violins from the ballroom floated clearly across the water. Through the Captain’s spy-glass I followed the itinerary of the lantern on the mountainside. The footpath climbed in a long zigzag to a point where the forest ended in a stony ridge of pumice and basalt scree between the crater of the Salpetrière and Morne d’Esnambuc. There was still a long climb ahead. The road Sosthène prepared to take to Anse Caraïbe lay across the steep, brittle side of Morne d’Esnambuc and along a tortuous ledge hacked out of the tufa which overhung a deep and dangerous canyon: a journey full of hazards on foot, still more perilous in the dark on the back of Haïdouk, the fast Cuban horse he planned to take from the stables. Just as the lantern turned the last angle of its climb the small dark silhouette of the boat appeared in the gold triangle under Plessis and broke the reflected town. I saw them land at the Mouillage and plunge uphill into the frenzied rigadoon with which the whole town was blocked, and begin to fight their way through the revolving wings and antlers in the Place Hercule. In a few moments they had vanished.’
A flag in the music from the Serindan house drew the aim of Berthe’s telescope to the crest of the town. The ballroom was emptying through the open windows into the garden and the circumference of the spy-glass’s end revealed the terraces crowded with small figures. Then a new kind of music began. Berthe’s spirits, infected by Sosthène’s enthusiasm and by the feeling that Josephine was not lost, had risen buoyantly. Now, at the sound of one of the Count’s ‘surprises’ she was filled with an odd and overflowing access of happiness. At these new sounds the jangling percussion, the distant and muted booming of carnival, fell silent, and the countless whirling torches of Plessis came to rest. The clear sad sound of French hunting horns sailed into the stillness of the night. Somewhere in that far off lighted circle, the three piqueux of the Count’s pack from Beauséjour were standing under the leaves in their scarlet coats, their black cheeks expanded over the mouthpieces of their slender and curling instruments, sending over the waters of the Antilles notes that set ghostly finger-tips creeping up the nape of Berthe’s neck under the thick and disordered pile of plaits. The fanfare played the children’s song about the Good King Dagobert, then the sequence of the grave and formal little tunes, so unlike the brisk twanging of English hunting horns, which mark the incidents of the chase in France as solemnly as the movements in a pavane. They rang in the distance like the secret voice of all French forests; the spirit of the tapestried and the unicorn-haunted penumbra of their alleyways and of the great druidical trees when the bare winter branches are clouded with mistletoe.
The strains and anxieties of the night and the fever of the pursuit were quieted for a moment and Berthe, thus compellingly and without warning reminded, as the notes of the Appel and the Hallali reached her ears, of a girlhood that seemed a century ago, of long rides beside her father in the Vendean woods and of the squat rustic towers of her home, felt her eyes misting and the twinkling town of Plessis growing indistinct at the other end of the spy-glass. The sad notes of the Saint Hubert and then of the Death died away at last and left that nocturnal world, for the first time for several nights and days, in silence.
Captain Graham and the sailors were now leaning over the bulwarks on either side of Berthe and peering at the capital over which this strange hush had fallen. Before any of them uttered a word or a single sound of carnival had broken out on the shore, a thin swaying pencil-stroke of silver began slowly ascending from the apex of the town and up into the darkness where it expanded in a great shining dome of light composed of bright falling and radiating threads that hung in the middle of the air like a floating palace. A long gasp of wonder escaped the seamen as they watched the firework subsiding, and, seconds later, at the same moment that the cracks of the explosion reached the schooner across the expanse of water, came the massed thousands of exclamations from Plessis in a single cadence that died away like the sighing of a giant. Each sinking thread of fire opened in a cupola that drooped seawards in a silver harebell to meet the reflected upturned cups of light that rose through the intervening fathoms to compose with them loose and shrinking armillary spheres of radiance that the salt water soon extinguished. Then a golden sheaf of grouped rockets soared upwards and spread, blown higher, it might almost seem, by the delayed and muffled gasp that its ascension detonated; to break up, as each trajectory began to curve towards its fall, into a shower of coloured balls that slowly drifted downwards to meet their climbing under-water ghosts, and kiss there for a moment on the surface and expire.
The bangs echoed volleying through the twisted island ravines like the sounds of a battle far away. Rocket followed rocket, flinging their coloured fragments over the water in broken rainbows, and soon, at their roots, the battlements of the round tower were a burning ring of Catherine Wheels and the tiered and statued terraces were spouting with scores of Roman Candles. The shadowless lilac moonlight of magnesium irradiated the snow-town and the still and gorgon-struck citizens, and the gibbous and feathery upheaval of the mornes reared stage-wings that faded fast into the dark. When they had burnt themselves out a great silver rain was showered in the air, and then, against its slowly falling background, three perfect, immense and golden fleurs de lys burned for long seconds in a shimmering and visionary flag that slowly faded and then died, the reports and the loud valedictory cries lasting for many seconds after it had gone.
Berthe smiled in the darkness at the thought of the delight with which her cousin must have hoisted these airy lilies and she could imagine his tall figure, his brain filled with whirling oriflammes and Heaven knew what ancient war cries, with arms akimbo in the upward gazing throng as he jubilantly watched the proscribed emblems so brightly and triumphantly burning; and when she imagined the displeasure of the Governor, the ecstatic exclamations of the creoles, the unpartisan wonder of the negroes and the amusement of the Captain, she found herself laughing out loud. But the music had begun again and the wire-thin harmonies of the violins were sounding as the minute figures beyond the circular lens pressed back into the ballroom and began rhythm
ically to revolve past the windows in yet another waltz. All the clatter of carnival revived, the quasi-heraldic head-dresses gyrated once more and the fluttering groves of flambeaux were on the move again.
Though they had faded away two minutes before, the bright phantoms of these lilies seemed still to be hanging before her eyes when the dim disc at the far end of the spy-glass was suddenly turned, as though by the igniting of a last and cataclysmic firework, into a blinding and incandescent ball of light. She felt the alarmed grip of Captain Graham’s hand on her shoulder and then two seconds later came a deafening clap of thunder as though the world had been blown in two. The night had vanished. Everything was suddenly brighter than noonday and from the crater of the Salpetrière a broad pillar of red and white flame, thickly streaked with black, was shooting into the sky like the fire from a cannon’s mouth. It climbed higher every second until it had reached a fierce zenith miles up in the air, and the roar that accompanied its journey was interrupted by hoarse thunder claps that almost broke the eardrum. A great wave of heat, as though an oven door had been opened, swept over the watchers on the schooner, and the sea, reflecting the conflagration, leapt from the darkness in a smooth and vivid desert. The neighbouring islands of Marie Galante, the Saints, Guadeloupe and Dominica, thus strangely lit up and towering all at once across the intervening leagues, looked almost within touching distance. Fiery fragments from the centre of the earth were flying through the sky and missiles like jagged lumps of fire, coming apart in their flight as liquidly as sealing wax, fell dripping to the water, whose smooth surface was broken up in a moment with a forest of waterspouts and plumes of steam. One of them, about the size, Berthe said, of a hayrick, fell about fifty yards to starboard and set the schooner rocking in a hot cloud of vapour. In a few seconds the blast that held this great flame as rigid as a plumbline from the sky to the overflowing crater must have slackened, for the fiery column began to waver and its summit sank swelling and spreading from its height in great subsiding coils.
The forests and the canefields were burning savagely in a score of places and five great fires had broken out in Plessis itself. In the streets, all was panic and turmoil. Antlered and horned figures were leaping into the water and swarming aboard the sloops, and the terraces round the Serindan house were black with dancers in flight. A tall figure silhouetted above the burning town – could it be the Count’s? it was impossible to distinguish through the spy-glass – had leapt on to the topmost balustrade and seemed, by the wild and quixotic flourishes of his arms, to be exhorting the fleeing throng not to give way to panic. Gaze as she might, it was no longer possible to pick out the faint lantern’s gleam from the hundred fires in the forest, and, paralysed with horror, Berthe thought of the horses rearing and whinneying, of Josephine, still dressed as a black hidalgo, flung this way and that in the heaving saddle among the crackling and blazing trunks, while the flames, tempestuously travelling, roared through the labyrinthine debris of those combustible woods. . . .
The great column had sunk almost level with the crater and the daylight radiance dwindled to a ghastly crimson glow as the flames curled from the volcano’s lip in a shrinking cauliflower of fire. Some of the crater’s wall must have fallen in and blocked the channel. It looked as if the eruption were over.
All these events had happened in the space of seconds and Berthe was still gazing petrified at the dark patch in the burning forest, where she prayed that Josephine might still be alive, when a second blinding flash burst from exactly that place, followed by something which seemed for a moment, by contrast, pitch darkness. For a black cloud had burst out of the volcano’s flank far below the crater. The fires inside the mountain had blown a new rift which spread upwards towards the streaming chaudières. This jagged, growing tear revealed the inside of the mountain for a blazing fraction of a second before it was obscured by the rapidly swelling volume of a cloud that came rolling and billowing down towards the town, setting fire to everything in its track. There was a heavy and pillow-soft inevitability in the movements of these oily black convolutions and, now and then, as they rolled forward, they seemed to hang like the folds of a curtain, with a satanic light flickering in the changing pleats. Then it moved onwards again, heavy and swelling, and sometimes breaking open for a second or two to show the white and orange whorls of fire that raged inside.
A deep rumbling groan accompanied this journey of destruction. Now and again the dark mass would kindle from inside, and the black sails of smoke glowed crimson and scarlet and then changed to a soft pink without the seething interior flames once breaking through the containing folds, which momentarily appeared as thin and transparent as the surface of a balloon. At last the entire cloud was growing from the island’s side in a great unfolding rose. It slowly faded again into fire-rimmed blackness and all was opaque and impenetrable. Gently it settled over the town and enfolded the houses and the spires.
The streets had fallen silent. The citizens had been halted in their flight and then laid low in swathes, as though one invisible sweep of a sickle had reaped them all, by the descending gas which had invaded the capital the moment the mountain-side opened. The flaming Serindan house was the first to disappear and then the black tide flowed wreathing and eddying over the roofs and down the alleyways. Long before it reached the waterfront, Berthe could see the slender dolphin lamp posts drooping like dying flowers before they finally melted away. The ships caught fire and the burning masts and hulls glowed redly for a moment through the cloud as it rolled out over the bay. The flames deepened to scarlet and purple, then they too were hidden in darkness.
Soon the whole island was obscured in the black and all-enveloping volume which, now fed ceaselessly from behind by the widening rent in the side of Saint-Jacques, rose high in the air in a dark flickering wall. Hot black ash as fine as soot had begun to rain over the schooner and an overpowering smell of sulphur filled the variable twilight. The Captain and the sailors and Berthe had fallen to their knees long ago and, against the crackling and groaning of the hidden conflagration, she could hear their deep voiced wavering prayers. As the cloud spread over the water and the furnace-like heat advanced, the speed of the prayers grew and the pitch of the Captain’s voice rose. Sometimes, for a few seconds, the world was in darkness except for the burning sparks that flew from Plessis and the forests. The whole sky was now afloat with them. The bank of cloud would flicker from inside with an upheaval of the burning gases it contained. Then lightning began to shower to and fro. Sometimes it was held captive within the cloudbank, illuminating its incandescent concavity with a shuddering electric glare, and sometimes it burst forth helter-skelter into the night in branching prongs and zigzags that fissured the sky’s surface and lighted for a wild second or two the great quaking pile and the empty sea and the faces of the sailors shining under rivers of sweat. Close over their heads they could hear the disordered wingbeats and the alarmed cries of birds. Some of them collided with the masts and the rigging and perched in the stays, or, overcome by the gaseous fumes loosed all round Saint-Jacques, fell lifeless to the deck and over the surrounding water. A brief outburst of light from the shifting cloud-stack revealed a ragged troop of flamingoes among the floating motes, flown there from the high pools of the forest. Soon they too were hidden in the universal gloom.
Berthe sank into silence at this point of her story. ‘It is hard to convey,’ she finally went on, ‘the speed of all this. It takes a long while to tell and it seemed to last an eternity at the time, but I don’t think that more than half an hour can have passed between the first perpendicular uprush of fire and this mobile semi-darkness. We watched the black shape in a state of helpless astonishment. The whole of Saint-Jacques was in dissolution and our only course was to wait until the growing circumference of this terrible cloud should swallow up the Edith Fan and its shipload of mercifully asphyxiated corpses. For the sulphurous reek was growing stronger every minute and the volcanic dust kept raining down. Until we bandaged our mouths and noses in
cloths dipped in brine, it seemed likely to choke us. All wild and momentary thoughts of survival and rescue for anyone on the island which may have leapt into our heads when the first outbreak stopped were abolished by the appalling completeness of what happened afterwards. It seemed inevitable that the cloud should overtake us and, when a new and strange commotion – a sound of rushing and whirling – began in the air above us and an increasing clamour among the birds, we thought the moment had come. The Captain’s prayers (“O Lord, look down on thy children of Israel, shed Thy mercy on them and save them from the flames”) rose in a long cry of despair. But the air began to lose its fearful heat and the fall of burning soot grew thinner. The cloud’s soft progress over the water halted and its edges began to creep backwards again as though the ghostly mass were drawing in its skirts. It lifted from the sea and, flowing back on itself in an immense and uniformly evolving coil encompassing the island, the entire shadowy mass, spiked with lightning and accompanied by claps of thunder, rolled into the sky and joined the rain-clouds which had hung motionless there for days.
‘All was suddenly light again. The sea was a brilliant disc and the surrounding archipelago reappeared. From the shore to the crest of the Salpetrière, the island was ablaze. The sudden uprush of wind gathered and combed the flames into a roaring scarlet shock of hair streaked with black tresses of soot from half a dozen new holes tom in the sides of the mountain and climbed blazing and winding upwards. A cool breath of wind from the open sea crossed the schooner’s deck in the direction of the island and then, growing in strength every second, broke up the sea into great waves. One of them lifted the vessel skywards and sent her with a lurch into a hollow and then to the top of another tall hill of water. We had all risen from our knees to grasp the shrouds or the bulwarks for support. At that moment the groaning of the fires from the island grew to a fierce crackling roar and the huge tangle of flames fanned over to one side and stretched away southwest.
The Violins of Saint-Jacques Page 10
