‘Plessis, clear all at once of the smoke and the obscuring wall of flames, was unrecognisable. Only the scarlet bones of the Serindan house remained, a few broken walls of Government House, two gutted belfries, the round bastions and the lighthouse and one or two of the statues. The rest had vanished. The streets were choked with a burning igneous rubble or they had become rivers of lava which flowed steaming and hissing into the sea. Every valley had turned into one of these sluggish streams of fire and the shape of the island itself appeared to have changed. Even the rocks, those great bare shoulders of tufa and basalt jutting through the flattened blaze of the forests, shone red hot. Watching the steady horizontal drift of the flames, the sailors realised what had happened long before I did. “Praise the Lord!” the Captain shouted. “The Lord’s name be in my mouth for evermore!” The sailors were flying up the rigging and their voices sounded from mast to mast as they moved along the spars. The sails were flung free and each expanse of canvas filled with a smack until the red night overhead was crowded with canvas that flapped for a moment and then bellied taut. The Captain was twirling the wheel and bringing the bowsprit round till it pointed due west. The swinging booms were made fast and the Edith Fan bounded across the waves. For the Trade Winds had revived.
‘We had not travelled far before voices hailed us out of the night. A sailor, peering over the red waves from the bows, cried that there were some men in the water. Cables and ladders were lowered over the side and soon ten half-naked men were dripping on the deck. They were the Caribs. A lump of falling scoria had hit their dugout canoe, miraculously without harming anyone. They had all leapt overboard. But the sides had been burnt half away so they had capsized her and clung to the wreck in hopes of being rescued. I had never seen any Caribs before – only a few hundred of them still survived, in Dominica. They were bronze-coloured men with beautiful, rather mongoloid faces and long black hair cut in a thick fringe above heavy-lidded eyes. They scarcely uttered a word, beyond saying that they had felt “Salpetrière was going up”, but huddled together at the foot of the mizzen-mast. They were the descendants of the cannibal savages that inhabited this archipelago long before the whites or the blacks arrived. Some unconscious and atavistic wisdom had prompted them to escape, just as it had prompted the iguanas and the snakes and the armadilloes, while the black and the white intruders had received, or at least, had taken, no hint of the disasters ahead. These primitive men had an inborn knack of survival when dealing with their ancestral problems which was lacking in everybody else . . .
‘The flames, meanwhile, were all driving south-westwards and as the schooner drew away, we could see the great barrier of smoke stretching from the leaning bonfire across bright miles of sea in the direction of the windward slopes of Dominica. As I gazed back over the poop through the spy-glass, the island itself appeared all at once to be moving. The southern side was slipping lower in a smooth white-hot subsidence, until, accompanied by a long rumble of fire and falling rock, the entire mass of Morne d’Esnambuc – the forested peak where we had so often picnicked – began to fall away. Used as my eyes had become that night to strangeness and horror, I thought that they or my mind must have been affected. But the cries of the sailors proved that it was no illusion. The island was coming apart. The fissure that had spread from the watershed between the Morne and the Salpetrière was opening in a fiery yawn. As the jaws widened a long orange tongue of flame curled out and lazily upwards and then twisted away into the current of the trade winds. Morne d’Esnambuc, split now from the watershed to the sea, tilted outwards. Its base was giving. Slowly the overhanging peak broke away and overturned with a shattering detonation and an avalanche of many million tons of red hot mineral. Immense burning bits detached themselves and rolled thundering through the forests or bounded far from the island while the main body of the mountain turned through a slow arc of ninety degrees and collapsed into the sea in the heart of an enormous rising palisade of water and steam.
‘A tidal wave threw the schooner this way and that with a violence that threatened to break her timbers apart, then fled away towards the horizon in a widening ring. The steady drive of the Trade Winds carried us further off and everything began changing fast. Flames were pouring from the exposed heart of the mountain, a wall of vapour now surrounded the broken island and the hiss of steam was almost as loud as the roar and the crackle of the flames. As the distance increased and the blur of steam grew thicker it got harder to see the details of what was happening. Saint-Jacques was now reduced to a steep red triangle growing rapidly smaller; more rapidly, in fact, than seemed natural until I realised that Saint-Jacques was sinking into the ocean.
‘Every few minutes the sea was ploughed up into ravines of water that looked ready to engulf the ship. Then the sea would lift her, shaking and flooded, to the summit of another great wave. Once she was drawn into a hollow that turned her three times round on herself in a whirlpool before a heavier onrush of water from the east came and lifted her free. Less of the island was visible through the spy-glass at the end of each of these contests. Soon only the cone of the Salpetrière remained above the water, which had now grown unnaturally still. A long fierce flame curling from the crater proved that one channel had remained free of the encroaching salt water, which had sealed the others one by one with hissing explosions of steam. At last only the crater’s rim remained above sea level. Then, as we all gazed at the distant red circle and its immense plume of fire, the crater tilted over slowly on its side and the water flowed in and snuffed it almost in silence; and, of course, for ever. The night had been growing darker fast until the wild glare had dwindled to a blood red glow. The unnatural daylight of an hour before had shrunk to a solitary branching flower of yellow flame, which, severed from its stalk now, floated loose in the sky along the tide of the wind, which drew it lengthways into the shape of a flying dragon. The dragon grew smaller and redder and turned into a flower again and slowly fell to pieces until only a few crimson flickers remained; and when the last floating chrysanthemum petal went out, we were in the dark. The waves from this last motion of the distant submarine earthquake shook the sea all round us into a storm again and the schooner plunged in the darkness. High overhead and as remote as the Milky Way, the sky was covered by a faint red confetti of small drifting cinders. This was all that remained of the island of Saint-Jacques des Alisées, its mountains and its forests, its beautiful town and the forty-two thousand souls that had lived there till an hour ago. The world had come to an end. Solvet saeclum in favilla!’
•
The silence that followed Berthe’s last words was unusually long.
‘My mind took a long time,’ she resumed at last, ‘to catch up with all that I had seen. There must be a merciful kind of stupidity, almost an anaesthetic, that settles on one’s brain at moments like this and limits the range of one’s understanding to the bare faculties of sight and sound and touch. I saw the flames and the smoke, heard the explosions and felt the heat; knew, in a theoretical way, that all the people I loved and every inhabitant of the island had been killed, that the island had blown up and sunk to the bottom of the sea; but all as a sleep-walker or somebody in the power of a drug might understand these things. Various detached and almost static visions kept reappearing before my mind’s eye like lantern-slides: the first upright flames, and then, like one of the sieges or disasters in a picture by Gustave Doré, the thousands of figures locked in flight down the streets of Plessis and the Serindan terraces. Next the great rose-like cloud turning black, the hecatomb of the islanders, the lamp-posts melting, the smoke coiling upwards, the fall of Morne d’Esnambuc and lastly the flames dying away after the volcano had been swallowed up. The only fact that I was able to assimilate for a time was the immense, the blind and brutal and annihilating event of the island’s destruction: a thing so irresistible and indifferent to ordinary life that the death of the Jacobeans and my own survival seemed a matter of trivial, almost frivolous lack of consequence. Eruptions and c
ataclysms and plagues and the colliding of planets were the only real, the only inevitable events, and the human activities that happened to lie in their path, and which are destroyed with such blind ease and ignorance, were of as little real importance as the doings of insects. How effortlessly they had all been burnt up! How pointless all our passions and complications and the intricate structure of our little society now seemed! We were reduced by this juxtaposition of unbridled power and absolute impotence to the status of ants and, by these standards, the destruction of forty-two thousand of them seemed as slight and, fundamentally, as uninteresting, a matter, as the fluke by which one of them had escaped: a stray ant had survived when the whole nest was demolished by a power that was unaware of the existence of either ants or nest. That was all. Explosions, floods and ice ages, you might say, are the only true dates in history and the improvisations of human societies between these events – art, civilisation, love, wars, literature, the development and the melting of one religion into another, the movement of ideas, the migrations of power from continent to continent – have as little bearing on this basic calendar of red letter days as a page out of Fabre’s Book of Insects. Then how microscopic, how minute, were the feuds, the passions, the pleasures and the vanities of the small anachronistic community of Saint-Jacques!’
Berthe’s lighter twinkled on the other side of the table as she surrounded herself with smoke once more and I heard the momentary rather pleasant grate of her laugh. ‘I don’t pretend that I shaped my thoughts at the time even as coherently as this. But they were the half-conscious ideas, I think, composing the anodyne of fatalism and despair that carried me through the first pains of this amputation.
‘But slowly, as the effects of the shock wore off, this changed. The eruption shrank to the size of an insane and wicked interruption, an unnatural accident which had inflicted a cruel and undeserved death on all the people I loved, and broken and drowned the world we had lived in. The disaster seemed as wanton as the blows and tramplings of some immense and muscular idiot. For a long time, a very long time afterwards, Saint-Jacques and its inhabitants were the only real things for me, and the outside world a shadowy limbo. I felt as a solitary surviving inhabitant of Atlantis might have felt when his foothold had vanished under the waves.
‘I tried to work out a theory that the disaster might have been a solution from Heaven to a tangle that could only have unravelled itself otherwise in a sequence of lesser tragedies: a sort of mass solution, in fact. But I soon abandoned this. Any thought of a celestial visitation, like the fate that befell the wicked cities in the Old Testament, was equally unprofitable, for if anything, the inhabitants of Saint-Jacques, in spite of the slightly queer form of society that had sprung up there, were kinder and better, as they were certainly happier, than in most other parts of the world. I remember wondering, too, if there were any supernatural purpose in the island gathering its own together – Sosthène, for instance, and Gentilien and the three Jacobean sailors – for this culminating holocaust; while the Caribs and I were allowed to escape. The inclusion of the Captain and Government House in the disaster ruled this out at once. In fact, there was no lesson, no consoling moral to be drawn. Except, perhaps, that although there may be a curious kind of mutual magnetism between people and the things that happen to them in ordinary circumstances, these great tragedies (whether brought on by human agency or what is sometimes called the Hand of God) spare and condemn with a lack of purpose that no law, divine, human or natural, can possibly rationalise. They are irrelevancies. As the eruption and all its details and implications slowly overcame my first stupid but merciful insensibility, all trace of fatalism melted away and left nothing but utter misery and anger and despair. I felt that my survival had been a desertion. I hated myself for being alive and wished that I had died with them in the flames.’
‘What happened,’ I asked her after a pause, ‘in the end?’
‘How do you mean, “in the end”?’ she asked.
‘After the island had disappeared?’
‘Oh,’ her voice sounded very tired. ‘It’s not very interesting. We sailed on in the dark. There was a great wind and at last, though it cannot have been above an hour after the last flame had disappeared, dawn began to break. It was a crimson and violet blur in the east, brightening through the falling soot and cinders into all the colours of the spectrum, though the light was as dim as that in mid winter in northern Europe. The sea was discoloured with soot and mud and afloat with branches and debris and sargasso weed and with hundreds of dead fish and dead or tired birds.
‘Day broke only just in time, for our many gyrations had driven the Edith Fan off her course and carried her within a mile of the northern rocks of Dominica, under a cape called Pointe Baptiste. Another half an hour of darkness would have wrecked her there. The Caribs and I asked to be put ashore, so Captain Graham sailed in close and landed us in a dinghy which they lowered from the deck. A crowd of creole-speaking negroes helped us ashore, the Caribs set off at a trot towards their forests, and the schooner sailed away. The negroes surrounded me and I had to answer a hundred questions, for the events of the night had filled all the neighbouring islands with terror and dismay. The horizon where Saint-Jacques had been the nearest landmark was now an empty sweep of sea disfigured by an enormous clay-coloured smear.’
For the inhabitants of these wild northern reaches of Dominica, it occurred to me, the descent of this fair-haired girl, barefoot in a tattered ball dress, soaking and smeared with soot, and without a possession in the world, alone among strangers on this strange morning, must have seemed an event almost as untoward. An old negress called Victoria took pity on her, put her arm round her shoulders and carried her to her hut out of range of the questioners. Putting her on a bed of palm branches, she gave her a long drink of coconut milk. Then, laying one hand on Berthe’s forehead, and taking one of Berthe’s hands with the other, she told her gently to go to sleep.
‘Victoria looked after me,’ Berthe said, ‘for a whole month and nursed me through a terrible fever. I used to lie all day long in a hammock strung up between the pimento trees on the headland by her hut at Pointe Baptiste. It overlooked a sandy bay and coral reefs littered with conch shells and the waste of water, which gradually cleared as the days went by, where the mountains of Saint-Jacques had once floated. In the end, Victoria gave me some clothes and took me to the little harbour of Portsmouth and then accompanied me on the boat to the island capital of Roseau. The French Consulate and the British Administrator and the nuns were very kind to me. There was no news of a single survivor from Saint-Jacques. Every soul had perished except me. Ships sailing over the point had found no traces of the island and repeated soundings proved that it must have sunk to a very great depth.
‘With the help of these new friends I made my way to Martinique and French Guiana and finally to Brazil, where I joined a Sisterhood of Poor Clares as an oblate. I stayed with them, working in the slums of Bahia and at various towns up the Amazon, for nearly ten years. I thought for a long time that I would never recover from the shock of Saint-Jacques and the feeling of loss and loneliness that followed its disappearance. But I did – sufficiently at least, for outward appearances. I loved this hard work with the nuns. But I grew restless. So I left them in the end and began giving lessons in Rio. But I longed to live on an island again, so I made my way to the South Seas and then back to Europe and the Mediterranean Islands – I seem to have worked through them all in my time. I got a job as a nurse in France during the first war. Finally I settled here. I hope I shall never live anywhere else. A few years before the last war I inherited a small sum of money – just enough to see me out, I think. So I only give lessons for pleasure now – I have always enjoyed teaching. And here I am still.’
Her voice sounded tired out. The moon was setting, and the Pleiades, crossing the middle of the sky, would soon follow her. It was a late hour of the night.
‘How strange it is,’ she said, as we stood up, stretching our l
imbs, ‘that a whole island and all the lives on it can vanish without a trace.’
‘Not quite without a trace,’ I said.
‘How do you mean?’ Berthe asked.
‘Last year when I was in Dominica and Guadeloupe, fishermen told me that anyone, crossing the eastern channel between the islands in carnival time, can hear the sound of violins coming up through the water. As though a ball were in full swing at the bottom of the sea.’
‘Do they?’ Berthe’s voice had changed entirely. There was a note of surprise and of almost girlish excitement in her voice. In that fainting moonlight the ravaged and magnificent features appeared transfigured, and those grey eyes were suddenly faceted and sparkling under their heavy brows, which, usually frowning, had all at once unknit in two youthful arcs of astonishment and pleasure. ‘Do they really say that?’
‘Yes. They are called the “violins of Saint-Jacques” or just “the count’s violins”. Very little is known of the story now and it is seldom connected with the eruption; and, to judge from the way they speak, it might all have happened centuries ago. They say they are the fiddles that were played once at a great ball long ago given by a Count in honour of his beautiful daughter.’
Berthe seemed too moved to speak. At last she said, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much for telling me that.’ I felt certain that if I could have seen her eyes they would have been full of tears. In a few moments she held out her hand under the shadows of an olive tree to say goodnight and turned away to the path that led to the camp bed where she slept out in summer under the vine-trellis. I took the pathway through the olives that led to the cliff’s edge. Turning back, I could see her tall solitary figure standing by an ilex among the vines. She lifted her hand and waved and I climbed down the cliff through the arbutus and tamarisk to the glimmering seashore. The moon, in dying, had revived the faint radiance of the stars, but by the time I reached the town they too were fading, and a faint golden wing of light in the east was darkening and hardening the intervening mountain-tops of Asia Minor.
The Violins of Saint-Jacques Page 11
