by Jean Rhys
After this she must have spoken to Phoebe’s mother, a silent, reserved woman, who said nothing to her daughter but began to watch her in a puzzled, incredulous, even faintly suspicious way. Phoebe knew that very soon she would be questioned, she’d have to explain.
So she was more than half relieved when Edith Cardew announced that they’d quite given up their first idea of spending the rest of the winter on the island and were going back to England by the next boat. When Captain Cardew said ‘Good-bye’ formally, the evening before they left, she had smiled and shaken hands, not quite realizing that she was very unlikely ever to see him again.
There was a flat roof outside her bedroom window. On hot fine nights she’d often lie there in her nightgown looking up at the huge brilliant stars. She’d once tried to write a poem about them but had not got beyond the first line: ‘My stars. Familiar jewels’. But that night she knew that she would never finish it. They were not jewels. They were not familiar. They were cold, infinitely far away, quite indifferent.
The roof looked onto the yard and she could hear Victoria and Joseph talking and laughing outside the pantry, then they must have gone away and it was quite silent. She was alone in the house, for she’d not gone with the others to see the Cardews off. She was sure that now they had gone her mother would be very unlikely to question her, and then began to wonder how he had been so sure, not only that she’d never tell anybody but that she’d make no effort at all to stop him talking. That could only mean that he’d seen at once that she was not a good girl – who would object – but a wicked one – who would listen. He must know. He knew. It was so.
It was so and she felt not so much unhappy about this as uncomfortable, even dismayed. It was like wearing a dress that was much too big for her, a dress that swallowed her up.
Wasn’t it quite difficult being a wicked girl? Even more difficult than being a good one? Besides, didn’t the nuns say that Chastity, in Thought, Word and Deed, was your most precious possession? She remembered Mother Sacred Heart, her second favourite, reciting in her lovely English voice:
‘So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity . . .’
How did it go on? Something about ‘a thousand liveried angels lackey her . . .’
‘A thousand liveried angels’ now no more. The thought of some vague irreparable loss saddened her. Then she told herself that anyway she needn’t bother any longer about whether she’d get married or not. The older girls that she knew talked a great deal about marriage, some of them talked about very little else. And they seemed so sure. No sooner had they put their hair up and begun going to dances, than they’d marry someone handsome (and rich). Then the fun of being grown-up and important, of doing what you wanted instead of what you were told to do, would start. And go on for a long long time.
But she’d always doubted if this would happen to her. Even if numbers of rich and handsome young men suddenly appeared, would she be one of the chosen?
If no one ever marries me
And I don’t see why they should
For nurse says I’m not pretty
And I’m seldom very good . . .
That was it exactly.
Well there was one thing. Now she felt very wise, very grown-up, she could forget these childish worries. She could hardly believe that only a few weeks ago she, like all the others, had secretly made lists of her trousseau, decided on the names of her three children. Jack. Marcus. And Rose.
Now good-bye Marcus. Good-bye Rose. The prospect before her might be difficult and uncertain but it was far more exciting.
The Bishop’s Feast
When I’d left Dominica twenty-five years ago there were no hotels, only a small boarding-house run by three sisters. The few people who wished to stay usually rented a house. So I was relieved when I saw the large cool room in the La Paz. There was a bathroom, and flush lavatories. All was well.
The next morning one of my mother’s old friends sent me some flowers, and there was a letter from Mother Mount Calvary, the Mother Superior of the convent where I was at school, whom I had loved so much. She wrote ‘Welcome back to Dominica. Come to see us at 4 o’clock this afternoon. How could I forget you?’
I asked the driver of the car we had hired to take me to the convent. He told me the old convent I knew had been sold, and the nuns were now living in a much smaller building. They would soon be going back to England and would be replaced by nuns of a Belgian order. ‘I hear the old nun says she won’t go, but she’ll soon find out that she has to.’
‘Isn’t it rather a shame,’ I said, ‘to make them leave when they’ve worked so hard here, all their lives?’
He said ‘They’re too old for the job, anyway.’
Mother Mount Calvary – Good Mother, we used to call her – was smiling when she welcomed me and looked almost as cheerful as I remembered her. When she stopped smiling I saw that her face was very sombre and old. We sat in the garden with two other nuns who I thought I didn’t know. One of them remarked how much I had changed.
‘She hasn’t changed at all,’ Mother Mount Calvary said sharply.
When I looked again at the nun I recognized something in her expression. She was the little Irish nun I had once seen smiling at her reflection in a barrel of water. There were no dimples now. She was a frightened old lady.
So this was the end of the feud between the convent and the bishopric, which had started at the new bishop’s feast.
We’d all subscribed towards a present for the new bishop. It was an armchair to be given to him when he came to watch the performance celebrating his feast. We were excited about this performance.
The evening came. We clustered in the wings listening to a girl reciting ‘Partant pour la Syrie’, which was the first item on the programme. She didn’t seem at all nervous. Her voice sounded clear and assured:
‘Partant pour la Syrie le jeune et beau Dunois
Venait prier Marie de bénir ses exploits.
“Faites, Reine Immortelle,” lui dit-il en partant,
“Que j’aime la plus belle et sois le plus vaillant.” ’
Louise was dressed for her song ‘L’Anglaise à Paris’, a mild satire on Englishwomen in Paris and the next item, when Mother St Edmund came bustling in and without giving us any reason told us that the programme had been changed. ‘L’Anglaise à Paris’ was cancelled, instead a selected chorus was to sing ‘Killarney’.
Consternation, giggles.
‘Don’t be silly, children,’ said Mother St Edmund. ‘Sing up and do your best. You all know the words.’
‘He won’t like that one either,’ said Mother Sacred Heart. But Mother St Edmund urged us on:
‘By Killarney’s lakes and fells,
Emerald isles and winding bays . . .’
From the stage we could see the bishop enthroned in his new armchair, Mother Mount Calvary by his side. A large audience of parents and friends stretched away to the end of the room.
‘. . . Beauty’s home, Killarney,
Heaven’s reflex, Killarney.’
The curtain came down.
Somebody played a Chopin mazurka and everything went more or less smoothly on to a series of tableaux vivants, the most important part of the programme.
The first one was of the Last Supper with Mary Magdalene at the feet of Christ. None of the apostles appeared. Delia Paulson’s hair was exactly right – she played Mary Magdalene – though her face, which was hidden, wouldn’t have done at all. Mildred Watts was Jesus Christ. She was lovely, just like Jesus. The nuns had fixed her up with a little beard and she looked into the distance over Mary’s head. (I thought Christ might have looked at Mary but I suppose the nuns told Mildred not to.) However, His hand was raised in a rather absentminded blessing.
The next tableau was the Death of St Cecilia, patron saint of music. There was a statue of her above the piano on which I practised and I always thought she looked at me most severely when I played the waltzes of Rodolphe Berger instead of my scales. St Cecili
a lay smiling on the couch with one finger over three to symbolize that she believed in the Three in One.
So the tableaux went on and we peeped at the bishop, but he didn’t applaud. The old bishop always clapped loudly and smiled, but this bishop seemed very bored.
When the programme ended we trooped onto the stage to hear the bishop give his little speech of thanks and appreciation. There was a pause, because for some reason he didn’t seem able to get up. He put his hands on the arms of the chair, turned round, glared and tried again. No use.
Soon it was plain what had happened; he had stuck to the chair, which had been taken to be varnished and the varnish hadn’t quite dried. Some of the nuns looked apprehensive and hurried to help him, but Mother Superior, who dearly loved a joke, couldn’t stop herself from smiling broadly. Just as she smiled the bishop looked straight at her, their eyes met, she suppressed the smile but it was too late.
Soon afterwards he came to the school to give us dictation. I liked the colour of his purple skull cap but I hated his face. The old bishop had a light voice, he had a heavy throaty voice. He dictated: ‘I have a dog. His name is Toby. He can bark and he can bite . . .’
That’s how it began. He started trying to get rid of them even before I left the island.
Of course Mother Mount Calvary had her friends and must have fought back, but even she couldn’t fight old age. It was a sad meeting. When I left them I promised to visit them again before they sailed.
But I never saw them again. I went away to spend a week on the Atlantic side of the island, and when I returned to town the day before they were to leave, I was told that Mother Mount Calvary had died that morning. I felt very sad, but also something like triumph, because in the end she had won. She had always done what she said she’d do. She had said she would never leave the island, and she hadn’t.
Heat
Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches. I was looking at it two feet deep on the flat roof outside my bedroom. The ash and the silence. Nobody talked in the street, nobody talked while we ate, or hardly at all. I know now that they were all frightened. They thought our volcano was going up.
Our volcano was called the boiling lake. That’s what it was, a sheet of water that always boiled. From what fires? I thought of it as a mysterious place that few people had ever seen. In the churchyard where we often went – for death was not then a taboo subject – quite near the grave of my little sister, was a large marble headstone. ‘Sacred to the memory of Clive —, who lost his life at the boiling lake in Dominica in a heroic attempt to save his guide’. Aged twenty-seven. I remember that too.
He was a young Englishman, a visitor, who had gone exploring with two guides to the boiling lake. As they were standing looking at it one of the guides, who was a long way ahead, staggered and fell. The other seized hold of the Englishman’s hand and said ‘Run!’ There must have been some local tradition that poisonous gases sometimes came out of the lake. After a few steps the Englishman pulled his hand away and went back and lifted up the man who had fallen. Then he too staggered and they both fell. The surviving guide ran and told what had happened.
In the afternoon two little friends were coming to see us and to my surprise they both arrived carrying large glass bottles. Both the bottles had carefully written labels pasted on: ‘Ash collected from the streets of Roseau on May 8th, 1902.’ The little boy asked me if I’d like to have his jar, but I refused. I didn’t want to touch the ash. I don’t remember the rest of the day. I must have gone to bed, for that night my mother woke me and without saying anything, led me to the window. There was a huge black cloud over Martinique. I couldn’t ever describe that cloud, so huge and black it was, but I have never forgotten it. There was no moon, no stars, but the edges of the cloud were flame-coloured and in the middle what looked to me like lightning flickered, never stopping. My mother said: ‘You will never see anything like this in your life again.’ That was all. I must have gone to sleep at the window and been carried to bed.
Next morning we heard what had happened. Was it a blue or a grey day? I only know ash wasn’t falling any longer. The Roseau fishermen went out very early, as they did in those days. They met the fishermen from Port de France, who knew. That was how we heard before the cablegrams, the papers and all the rest came flooding in. That was how we heard of Mont Pelée’s eruption and the deaths of 40,000 people, and that there was nothing left of St Pierre.
As soon as ships were sailing again between Dominica and Martinique my father went to see the desolation that was left. He brought back a pair of candlesticks, tall heavy brass candlesticks which must have been in a church. The heat had twisted them into an extraordinary shape. He hung them on the wall of the dining-room and I stared at them all through meals, trying to make sense of the shape.
It was after this that the gossip started. That went on for years so I can remember it well. St Pierre, they said, was a very wicked city. It had not only a theatre, but an opera house, which was probably wickeder still. Companies from Paris performed there. But worse than this was the behaviour of the women who were the prettiest in the West Indies. They tied their turbans in a particular way, a sort of language of love that all St Pierre people understood. Tied in one way it meant ‘I am in love, I am not free’; tied another way it meant ‘You are welcome, I am free.’ Even the women who were married, or as good as, tied their kerchiefs in the ‘I am free’ way. And that wasn’t all. The last bishop who had visited the city had taken off his shoes and solemnly shaken them over it. After that, of course, you couldn’t wonder.
As I grew older I heard of a book by a man called Lafcadio Hearn who had written about St Pierre as it used to be, about Ti Marie and all the others, but I never found the book and stopped looking for it. However, one day I did discover a pile of old newspapers and magazines, some illustrated: the English version of the eruption. They said nothing about the opera house or the theatre which must have seemed to the English the height of frivolity in a Caribbean island, and very little about the city and its inhabitants. It was nearly all about the one man who had survived. He was a convict imprisoned in an underground cell, so he escaped – the only one out of 40,000. He was now travelling round the music-halls of the world being exhibited. They had taught him a little speech. He must be quite a rich man – what did he do with his money? Would he marry again? His wife and children had been killed in the eruption . . . I read all this, then I thought but it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all.
Fishy Waters
The Editor
The Dominica Herald
Dear Sir,
March 3rd 189–
Yesterday I heard a piece of news that appalled me. It seems that a British workman, Mr Longa by name, who arrived a year ago, has been arrested and is being held by the police. Mr Longa is a carpenter. He is also a socialist, and does not disguise his political opinions. It goes without saying that a certain class of person in this island, who seem to imagine that the colour of their skins enables them to behave like gods, disliked and disapproved of him from the first. He was turned out of Miss Lambton’s boarding-house after one night and had the greatest difficulty in finding anywhere to live. Eventually he settled in a predominantly negro quarter – another cause for offence. A determined effort was made to induce him to leave the island. When this failed, with their usual hypocrisy they pretended to ignore him, but they were merely biding their time.
He was found joking roughly with one of the many vagabond children who infest the streets of Roseau, and is to be accused of child-molesting and cruelty, if you please. A trumped-up charge, on the face of it. In this way, they plan to be rid of a long-standing nuisance and to be able to boast about their even-handed justice. The hypocrisy of these people, who bitterly resent that they no longer have the power over the bodies and minds of the blacks they once had (the cruelty of West Indian planters was a by-word), making a scape-goat of an hon
est British workman, is enough to make any decent person’s gorge rise. A London barrister, new to this island, has offered to defend Mr Longa without charge. Only one just man among so many?
Yours truly,
Disgusted
The Editor
The Dominica Herald
Dear Sir,
March 10th, 189–
Who is ‘Disgusted’? Who is this person (I believe people) who tries to stir up racial hatred whenever possible? Almost invariabley with gloating satisfaction, they will drag in the horrors of the slave trade. Who would think, to hear them talk, that slavery was abolished by the English nearly a hundred years ago? They are long on diatribes, but short on facts. The slave trade was an abominable one, but it could not have existed without the help and cooperation of African chiefs. Slavery still exists, and is taken for granted, in Africa, both among Negroes and Arabs. Are these facts ever mentioned? The bad is endlessly repeated and insisted upon; the good is ridiculed, forgotten or denied. Who does this, and why?
Yours truly,
Ian J. MacDonald
The Editor
The Dominica Herald
Dear Sir,
March 17th, 189–
It is sometimes said that African chiefs probably had a good deal to do with the slave trade, but I never heard before that this was proven. In his typical letter I noticed that Mr MacDonald places all the blame on these perhaps mythical Africans and says nothing about the greed of white merchants or the abominable cruelty and indifference of white planters. The treatment meted out to Mr Longa shows that their heirs and successors have not changed all that much.
Yours truly,
P. Kelly
Kelly’s Universal Stores
The Editor