Two Years in the French West Indies Part 22

Probably the ability to earn large wages often tempts the blanchisseuse to continue at her trade until it kills her. The "water-disease," as she calls it (_maladie-dleau_), makes its appearance after middle-life: the feet, lower limbs, and abdomen swell enormously, while the face becomes almost fleshless;--then, gradually tissues give way, muscles yield, and the whole physical structure crumbles. Nevertheless, the blanchisseuse is essentially a sober liver,--never a drunkard. In fact, she is sober from rigid necessity: she would not dare to swallow one mouthful of spirits while at work with her feet in the cold water;--everybody else in Martinique, even the little children, can drink rum; the blanchisseuse cannot, unless she wishes to die of a congestion. Her strongest refreshment is _mabi_,--a mild, effervescent, and, I think, rather disagreeable, beer made from mola.s.ses.

III.

Always before daybreak they rise to work, while the vapors of the mornes fill the air with scent of mouldering vegetation,--clayey odors,--gra.s.sy smells: there is only a faint gray light, and the water of the river is very chill. One by one they arrive, barefooted, under their burdens built up tower-shape on their trays;--silently as ghosts they descend the steps to the river-bed, and begin to unfold and immerse their was.h.i.+ng. They greet each other as they come, then become silent again; there is scarcely any talking: the hearts of all are heavy with the heaviness of the hour. But the gray light turns yellow; the sun climbs over the peaks: light changes the dark water to living crystal; and all begin to chatter a little. Then the city awakens; the currents of its daily life circulate again,--thinly and slowly at first, then swiftly and strongly,--up and down every yellow street, and through the Savane, and over the bridges of the river. Pa.s.sers-by pause to look down, and cry "_bonjou', che!_" Idle men stare at some pretty washer, till she points at them and cries:--"_Gade Missie-a ka guette nou!--anh!--anh!--anh!_" And all the others look up and repeat the groan--"_anh!--anh!--anh!_" till the starers beat a retreat. The air grows warmer; the sky blue takes fire: the great light makes joy for the washers; they shout to each other from distance to distance, jest, laugh, sing. Gusty of speech these women are: long habit of calling to one another through the roar of the torrent has given their voices a singular sonority and force: it is well worth while to hear them sing.

One starts the song,--the next joins her; then another and another, till all the channel rings with the melody from the bridge of the Jardin des Plantes to the Pont-bois:- "C'est main qui te ka lave, Pa.s.se, raccommode: Y te nef he disoue Ou mette moin derh,--Yche main a.s.sous bouas moin;--Laplie te ka tombe--Lefan moin a.s.sous tete moin! Doudoux, ou m'abandonne! Moin pa ni pesonne pou soigne moin." [26]

... A melancholy chant--originally a Carnival improvisation made to bring public shame upon the perpetrator of a cruel act;--but it contains the story of many of these lives--the story of industrious affectionate women temporarily united to brutal and worthless men in a country where legal marriages are rare. Half of the creole songs which I was able to collect during a residence of nearly two years in the island touch upon the same sad theme. Of these, "Che Manman Moin," a great favorite still with the older blanchisseuses, has a simple pathos unrivalled, I believe, in the oral literature of this people. Here is an attempt to translate its three rhymeless stanzas into prose; but the childish sweetness of the patois original is lost:--

CHe MANMAN MOIN.

I.

... "Dear mamma, once you were young like I;--dear papa, you also have been young;--dear great elder brother, you too have been young. Ah! let me cherish this sweet friends.h.i.+p!--so sick my heart is--yes, 'tis very, very ill, this heart of mine: love, only love can make it well again."...

II.

"0 cursed eyes he praised that led me to him! 0 cursed lips of mine which ever repeated his name! 0 cursed moment in which I gave up my heart to the ingrate who no longer knows how to love."...

III.

"Doudoux, you swore to me by heaven!--doudoux, you swore to me by your faith!... And now you cannot come to me?... Oh! my heart is withering with pain!... I was pa.s.sing by the cemetery;--I saw my name upon a stone--all by itself. I saw two white roses; and in a moment one faded and fell before me.... So my forgotten heart will be!"...

The air is not so charming, however, as that of a little song which every creole knows, and which may be often heard still at the river: I think it is the prettiest of all creole melodies. "To-to-to" (patois for the French _toc_) is an onomatope for the sound of knocking at a door.

"_To, to, to!_--ca qui la?'-- 'C'est moin-menme, lanmou;--Ouve lapott ba moin!'

"_To, to, to!_--ca qui la?'-- 'C'est moin-menme lanmou, Qui ka ba ou khe moin!'

"_To, to, to!_--ca qui la?'-- 'C'est moin-menme lanmou, Laplie ka mouille moin!'"

[_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self Love: open the door for me." _To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self Love, who give my heart to thee." _To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--" "'Tis mine own self Love: open thy door to me;--the rain is wetting me!"]

... But it is more common to hear the blanchisseuses singing merry, jaunty, sarcastic ditties,--Carnival compositions,--in which the African sense of rhythmic melody is more marked:--"Marie-Clemence maudi," "Loema tombe," "Quand ou ni ti mari jojoll."

--At mid-day the machanne-mange comes, with her girls,--carrying trays of fried fish, and _akras_, and cooked beans, and bottles of mabi. The blanchisseuses buy, and eat with their feet in the water, using rocks for tables. Each has her little tin cup to drink her mabi in... Then the was.h.i.+ng and the chanting and the booming of the fesse begin again.

Afternoon wanes;--school-hours close; and children of many beautiful colors come to the river, and leap down the steps crying, "_Eti!

manman!"--"Sese!"--"Nenneine!_" calling their elder sisters, mothers, and G.o.dmothers: the little boys strip naked to play in the water a while....

Towards sunset the more rapid and active workers begin to gather in their linen, and pile it on trays. Large patches of bald rock appear again.... By six o'clock almost the whole bed of the river is bare;--the women are nearly all gone. A few linger a while on the Savane, to watch the last-comer. There is always a great laugh at the last to leave the channel: they ask her if she has not forgotten "to lock up the river."

--"_Ou feme lapte larivie, che-anh?_"

--"_Ah! oui, che!--moin feme y, ou tanne?--moin ni lacle-a!_" (Oh yes, dear. I locked it up,--you hear?--I've got the key!)

But there are days and weeks when they do not sing,--times of want or of plague, when the silence of the valley is broken only by the sound of linen beaten upon the rocks, and the great voice of the Roxelane, which will sing on when the city itself shall have ceased to be, just as it sang one hundred thousand years ago....

"Why do they not sing to-day?" I once asked during the summer of 1887,

--a year of pestilence. "_Yo ka pense toutt lanmize yo,--toutt lapeine yo_," I was answered. (They are thinking of all their trouble, all their misery.) Yet in all seasons, while youth and strength stay with them, they work on in wind and sun, mist and rain, was.h.i.+ng the linen of the living and the dead,--white wraps for the newly born, white robes for the bride, white shrouds for them that pa.s.s into the Great Silence. And the torrent that wears away the ribs of the perpetual hills wears away their lives,--sometimes slowly, slowly as black basalt is worn,--sometimes suddenly,--in the twinkling of an eye.

For a strange danger ever menaces the blanchisseuse,--the treachery of the stream!... Watch them working, and observe how often they turn their eyes to the high north-east, to look at Pelee. Pelee gives them warning betimes. When all is sunny in St. Pierre, and the harbor lies blue as lapis-lazuli, there may be mighty rains in the region of the great woods and the valleys of the higher peaks; and thin streams swell to raging floods which burst suddenly from the alt.i.tudes, rolling down rocks and trees and wreck of forests, uplifting crags, devastating slopes. And sometimes, down the ravine of the Roxelane, there comes a roar as of eruption, with a rush of foaming water like a moving mountain-wall; and bridges and buildings vanish with its pa.s.sing. In 1865 the Savane, high as it lies above the river-bed, was flooded;--and all the bridges were swept into the sea.

So the older and wiser blanchisseuses keep watch upon Pelee; and if a blackness gather over it, with lightnings breaking through, then--however fair the sun s.h.i.+ne on St. Pierre--the alarm is given, the miles of bleaching linen vanish from the rocks in a few minutes, and every one leaves the channel. But it has occasionally happened that Pelee gave no such friendly signal before the river rose: thus lives have been lost. Most of the blanchisseuses are swimmers, and good ones,--I have seen one of these girls swim almost out of sight in the harbor, during an idle hour;--but no swimmer has any chances in a rising of the Roxelane: all overtaken by it are stricken by rocks and drift;--_yo craze_, as a creole term expresses it,--a term signifying to crush, to bray, to dash to pieces.

... Sometimes it happens that one who has been absent at home for a brief while returns to the river only to meet her comrades fleeing from it,--many leaving their linen behind them. But she will not abandon the linen intrusted to her: she makes a run for it,--in spite of warning screams,--in spite of the vain clutching of kind rough fingers. She gains the river-bed;--the flood has already reached her waist, but she is strong; she reaches her linen,--s.n.a.t.c.hes it up, piece by piece, scattered as it is--"one!--two!--five!--seven!"--there is a roaring in her ears--"eleven!--thirteen!" she has it all... but now the rocks are moving! For one instant she strives to reach the steps, only a few yards off;--another, and the thunder of the deluge is upon her,--and the crus.h.i.+ng crags,--and the spinning trees....

Perhaps before sundown some canotier may find her floating far in the bay,--drifting upon her face in a thousand feet of water,--with faithful dead hands still holding fast the property of her employer.

CHAPTER VII. LA PELeE.

I.

The first attempt made to colonize Martinique was abandoned almost as soon as begun, because the leaders of the expedition found the country "too rugged and too mountainous," and were "terrified by the prodigious number of serpents which covered its soil." Landing on June 25, 1635, Olive and Duplessis left the island after a few hours' exploration, or, rather, observation, and made sail for Guadeloupe,--according to the quaint and most veracious history of Pere Dutertre, of the Order of Friars-Preachers.

A single glance at the topographical map of Martinique would suffice to confirm the father's a.s.sertion that the country was found to be _trop hache et trop montueux_: more than two-thirds of it is peak and mountain;--even to-day only 42,445 of its supposed 98,782 hectares have been cultivated; and on page 426 of the last "Annuaire" (1887) I find the statement that in the interior there are extensive Government lands of which the area is "not exactly known." Yet mountainous as a country must be which--although scarcely forty-nine miles long and twenty miles in average breadth--remains partly unfamiliar to its own inhabitants after nearly three centuries of civilization (there are not half a dozen creoles who have travelled all over it), only two elevations in Martinique bear the name _montagne_. These are La Montagne Pelee, in the north, and La Montagne du Vauclin, in the south. The term _morne_, used throughout the French West Indian colonies to designate certain alt.i.tudes of volcanic origin, a term rather unsatisfactorily translated in certain dictionaries as "a small mountain," is justly applied to the majority of Martinique hills, and unjustly sometimes even to its mightiest elevation,--called Morne Pele, or Montagne Pelee, or simply "La Montagne," according, perhaps, to the varying degree of respect it inspires in different minds. But even in the popular nomenclature one finds the orography of Martinique, as well as of other West Indian islands, regularly cla.s.sified by _pitons_, _mornes_, and _monts_ or _montagnes_. Mornes usually have those beautiful and curious forms which bespeak volcanic origin even to the unscientific observer: they are most often pyramidal or conoid up to a certain height; but have summits either rounded or truncated;--their sides, green with the richest vegetation, rise from valley-levels and coast-lines with remarkable abruptness, and are apt to be curiously ribbed or wrinkled. The pitons, far fewer in number, are much more fantastic in form;--volcanic cones, or volcanic upheavals of splintered strata almost at right angles,--sometimes sharp of line as spires, and mostly too steep for habitation. They are occasionally mammiform, and so symmetrical that one might imagine them artificial creations,--particularly when they occur in pairs. Only a very important ma.s.s is dignified by the name _montagne_... there are, as I have already observed, but two thus called in all Martinique,--Pelee, the head and summit of the island; and La Montagne du Vauclin, in the south-east. Vauclin is inferior in height and bulk to several mornes and pitons of the north and north-west,--and owes its distinction probably to its position as centre of a system of ranges: but in alt.i.tude and ma.s.s and majesty, Pelee far outranks everything in the island, and well deserves its special appellation, "La Montagne."

No description could give the reader a just idea of what Martinique is, configuratively, so well as the simple statement that, although less than fifty miles in extreme length, and less than twenty in average breadth, there are upwards of _four hundred mountains_ in this little island, or of what at least might be termed mountains elsewhere.

These again are divided and interpeaked, and bear hillocks on their slopes;--and the lowest hillock in Martinique is fifty metres high. Some of the peaks are said to be totally inaccessible: many mornes are so on one or two or even three sides. Ninety-one only of the princ.i.p.al mountains have been named; and among these several bear similar appellations: for example, there are two Mornes-Rouges, one in the north and one in the south; and there are four or five Gros-Mornes. All the elevations belong to six great groups, cl.u.s.tering about or radiating from six ancient volcanic centres,--1. La Pelee; 2. Pitons du Carbet; 3. Roches Carrees; [27] 4. Vauclin; 5. Marin; 6. Morne de la Plaine.

Forty-two distinct mountain-ma.s.ses belong to the Carbet system alone,--that of Pelee including but thirteen; and the whole Carbet area has a circ.u.mference of 120,000 metres,--much more considerable than that of Pelee. But its centre is not one enormous pyramidal ma.s.s like that of "La Montagne": it is marked only by a group of five remarkable porphyritic cones,--the Pitons of Carbet;--while Pelee, dominating everything, and filling the north, presents an aspect and occupies an area scarcely inferior to those of AEtna.

--Sometimes, while looking at La Pelee, I have wondered if the enterprise of the great j.a.panese painter who made the Hundred Views of Fusiyama could not be imitated by some creole artist equally proud of his native hills, and fearless of the heat of the plains or the snakes of the slopes. A hundred views of Pelee might certainly be made: for the enormous ma.s.s is omnipresent to dwellers in the northern part of the island, and can be seen from the heights of the most southern mornes. It is visible from almost any part of St. Pierre,--which nestles in a fold of its rocky skirts. It overlooks all the island ranges, and overtops the mighty Pitons of Carbet by a thousand feet;--you can only lose sight of it by entering gorges, or journeying into the valleys of the south.... But the peaked character of the whole country, and the hot moist climate, oppose any artistic undertaking of the sort suggested: even photographers never dream of taking views in the further interior; nor on the east coast. Travel, moreover, is no less costly than difficult: there are no inns or places of rest for tourists; there are, almost daily, sudden and violent rains, which are much dreaded (since a thorough wetting, with the pores all distended by heat, may produce pleurisy); and there are serpents! The artist willing to devote a few weeks of travel and study to Pelee, in spite of these annoyances and risks, has not yet made his appearance in Martinique. [28]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOOT OF PELeE, BEHIND THE QUARTER OF THE FORT.]

Huge as the mountain looks from St. Pierre, the eye under-estimates its bulk; and when you climb the mornes about the town, Labelle, d'Orange, or the much grander Parna.s.se, you are surprised to find how much vaster Pelee appears from these summits. Volcanic hills often seem higher, by reason of their steepness, than they really are; but Pelee deludes in another manner. From surrounding valleys it appears lower, and from adjacent mornes higher than it really is: the illusion in the former case being due to the singular slope of its contours, and the remarkable breadth of its base, occupying nearly all the northern end of the island; in the latter, to misconception of the comparative height of the eminence you have reached, which deceives by the precipitous pitch of its sides. Pelee is not very remarkable in point of alt.i.tude, however: its height was estimated by Moreau de Jonnes at 1600 metres; and by others at between 4400 and 4500 feet. The sum of the various imperfect estimates made justify the opinion of Dr. Cornilliac that the extreme summit is over 5000 feet above the sea--perhaps 5200. [29] The clouds of the summit afford no indication to eyes accustomed to mountain scenery in northern countries; for in these hot moist lat.i.tudes clouds hang very low, even in fair weather. But in bulk Pelee is grandiose: it spurs out across the island from the Caribbean to the Atlantic: the great chains of mornes about it are merely counter-forts; the Piton Pierreux and the Piton Pain-a-Sucre (_Sugar-loaf Peak_), and other elevations varying from 800 to 2100 feet, are its volcanic children. Nearly thirty rivers have their birth in its flanks,--besides many thermal springs, variously mineralized. As the culminant point of the island, Pelee is also the ruler of its meteorologic life,--cloud-herder, lightning-forger, and rain-maker. During clear weather you can see it drawing to itself all the white vapors of the land,--robbing lesser eminences of their shoulder-wraps and head-coverings;--though the Pitons of Carbet (3700 feet) usually manage to retain about their middle a cloud-clout,--a _lantcho_. You will also see that the clouds run in a circle about Pelee,--gathering bulk as they turn by continual accessions from other points. If the crater be totally bare in the morning, and shows the broken edges very sharply against the blue, it is a sign of foul rather than of fair weather to come. [30]

Even in bulk, perhaps, Pelee might not impress those who know the stupendous scenery of the American ranges; but none could deny it special attractions appealing to the senses of form and color. There is an imposing fantasticality in its configuraion worth months of artistic study: one does not easily tire of watching its slopes undulating against the north sky,--and the strange jagging of its ridges,--and the succession of its terraces crumbling down to other terraces, which again break into ravines here and there bridged by enormous b.u.t.tresses of basalt: an extravaganza of lava-shapes overpitching and cascading into sea and plain. All this is verdant wherever surfaces catch the sun: you can divine what the frame is only by examining the dark and ponderous rocks of the torrents. And the hundred tints of this verdure do not form the only colorific charms of the landscape. Lovely as the long upreaching slopes of cane are,--and the loftier bands of forest-growths, so far off that they look like belts of moss,--and the more tender-colored ma.s.ses above, wrinkling and folding together up to the frost-white clouds of the summit,--you will be still more delighted by the shadow-colors,--opulent, diaphanous. The umbrages lining the wrinkles, collecting in the hollows, slanting from sudden projections, may become before your eyes almost as unreally beautiful as the landscape colors of a j.a.panese fan;--they s.h.i.+ft most generally during the day from indigo-blue through violets and paler blues to final lilacs and purples; and even the shadows of pa.s.sing clouds have a faint blue tinge when they fall on Pelee.

... Is the great volcano dead?... n.o.body knows. Less than forty years ago it rained ashes over all the roofs of St. Pierre;--within twenty years it has uttered mutterings. For the moment, it appears to sleep; and the clouds have dripped into the cup of its highest crater till it has become a lake, several hundred yards in circ.u.mference. The crater occupied by this lake--called L'etang, or "The Pool"--has never been active within human memory. There are others,--difficult and dangerous to visit because opening on the side of a tremendous gorge; and it was one of these, no doubt, which has always been called _La Souffriere_, that rained ashes over the city in 1851.

The explosion was almost concomitant with the last of a series of earthquake shocks, which began in the middle of May and ended in the first week of August,--all much more severe in Guadeloupe than in Martinique. In the village Au Precheur, lying at the foot of the western slope of Pelee, the people had been for some time complaining of an oppressive stench of sulphur,--or, as chemists declared it, sulphuretted hydrogen,--when, on the 4th of August, much trepidation was caused by a long and appalling noise from the mountain,--a noise compared by planters on the neighboring slopes to the hollow roaring made by a packet blowing off steam, but infinitely louder. These sounds continued through intervals until the following night, sometimes deepening into a rumble like thunder. The mountain guides declared: "_C'est la Souffriere qui bout!_" (the Souffriere is boiling); and a panic seized the negroes of the neighboring plantations. At 11 P.M. the noise was terrible enough to fill all St. Pierre with alarm; and on the morning of the 6th the city presented an unwonted aspect, compared by creoles who had lived abroad to the effect of a great h.o.a.r-frost. All the roofs, trees, balconies, awnings, pavements, were covered with a white layer of ashes.

The same shower blanched the roofs of Morne Rouge, and all the villages about the chief city,--Carbet, Fond-Corre, and Au Precheur; also whitening the neighboring country: the mountain was sending up columns of smoke or vapor; and it was noticed that the Riviere Blanche, usually of a glaucous color, ran black into the sea like an outpouring of ink, staining its azure for a mile. A committee appointed to make an investigation, and prepare an official report, found that a number of rents had either been newly formed, or suddenly become active, in the flank of the mountain: these were all situated in the immense gorge sloping westward from that point now known as the Morne de la Croix.

Several were visited with much difficulty,--members of the commission being obliged to lower themselves down a succession of precipices with cords of lianas; and it is noteworthy that their researches were prosecuted in spite of the momentary panic created by another outburst.

It was satisfactorily ascertained that the main force of the explosion had been exerted within a perimeter of about one thousand yards; that various hot springs had suddenly gushed out,--the temperature of the least warm being about 37 Reaumur (116 F.);--that there was no change in the configuration of the mountain;--and that the terrific sounds had been produced only by the violent outrush of vapor and ashes from some of the rents. In hope of allaying the general alarm, a creole priest climbed the summit of the volcano, and there planted the great cross which gives the height its name and still remains to commemorate the event.

There was an extraordinary emigration of serpents from the high woods, and from the higher to the lower plantations,--where they were killed by thousands. For a long time Pelee continued to send up an immense column of white vapor; but there were no more showers of ashes; and the mountain gradually settled down to its present state of quiescence.