by Jean Rhys
‘But such a damn bore.’
Underneath all this she could be gay and full of life, and almost crazily generous with the little money she had. After I went to live in the country, she would say that she was the Londoner now, I a visitor and her guest. She as hostess must pay for all our outings. It needed a lot of arguing to convince her that that wasn’t how I saw it at all. One day she told me that she had sold one of her poems. ‘Dorinda isn’t mine anymore’ is how she put it. ‘I’ve sold Dorinda.’ So she still writes poetry, I thought. She gave me a copy of the poem.
My name is Dorinda and I live so gay
In a little hut with flowers on a shilling a day.
The white man made me but he cannot tell
The secret of my laughter like a golden bell.
My name is Dorinda and I live so gay
In a little hut with flowers on a shilling a day.
The black man made me but he’ll never know
The secret of my dark heart which he made so.
As we got to know each other better, she showed me other poems. I often wondered when she wrote them. After she came back tired from the office to her little bed-sitting-room? Or on Sundays – did she walk about Hampstead Heath to the tune of ‘Trinidad Selina’?
Watch her walkin’ and stop you takin’
See her dancin’ – she dances on air.
I was certain that some of her songs were salable, and I knew how badly she needed the money, but I didn’t know how to set about selling them. Even if by some miracle someone liked the words, wouldn’t they be set to the wrong music and spoiled? Also, Liliane wasn’t encouraging. She seemed not to have the slightest wish to make money out of poems – even to be somewhat hostile to the idea. It was as if she meant to keep them to herself, to protect them, and I understood this far too well to argue with her.
I didn’t go to London for some time after that. Then I heard from a friend that she wasn’t at all well. I’d noticed it the last time I’d seen her. All the spring and pride had gone out of her walk – she had walked beautifully when she first came to London – and she rarely smiled, which was a pity, because her white, even teeth were her greatest beauty.
The last time I saw her, she showed me a poem. ‘This is different,’ she said. Unlike the others, it was a sad song, about a man who kills his sweetheart, hides her body in the Dominica forest, and escapes to England before she is missed. But he cannot forget her.
Devil made me lash her down, devil made me kill.
Sorrow made me leave her
Now she’s dark in Dominica
And I’m lonely in the snow . . .
I wish I were beside her, where the mountains hide her.
For the whistling bird is calling me.
She said, ‘The whistling bird – you remember. The mountain whistler?’
‘Of course.’
‘My mother called it the siffleur de montagne, le solitaire. I expect there aren’t any left now.’
‘Perhaps a few.’
‘What about the parrots? Long ago the forest was full of parrots, green and grey. There isn’t one now.’
‘Parrots,’ I said, ‘are different. There’s money in parrots. Who’d buy a mountain whistler? If it were caught, it would probably die.’
‘Not at once,’ said Liliane.
After thinking a lot about her, I wrote and begged her to take a holiday, enclosing some money to help. She wrote back coldly, returning the money and adding that I must know that she didn’t want to leave London and didn’t need a holiday. I decided that when I saw her next I would argue her into taking one all the same. Then I heard that one morning she’d got up, had her usual obligatory tepid bath, and was dressing to go to her horrible job, when she fell. The landlady heard the noise and rushed to her bedroom. She was dead.
After all, I saw comparatively little of Liliane. She may have had other friends, another life that I didn’t know about. But I never caught a glimpse of it.
‘Woe to the vanquished’, they say. Need it be so much woe and last such a long time? Anyhow, not Don, not Monica, not Evelina, not Liliane will join in that complicated argument. For it is complicated, whatever the know-alls say.
Invitation to the Dance
There weren’t very many white families in Roseau but nearly all had their fair share of children, some as many as twelve. So, every fine afternoon a certain number of little girls and boys would be taken to the Botanical Gardens to play. I was one of them but, unlike the others, I was alone. Both my brothers and my elder sister had left the island. My younger sister was still a baby.
The nurses would sit on a bench and chatter. We would play, at first nearby, gradually getting farther and farther away until we were out of sight. The game I liked best was Looby Looby Li. I thought it better than Tug of War or any of the ‘I-pick-you, I-pick-you’ games which always ended in a quarrel, much more exciting than Kiss once, kiss twice, all fall down, which grew monotonous and didn’t seem to lead anywhere.
Looby Li was a very energetic game, not to be played on hot afternoons. First, joining hands, we danced round in a ring, singing:
Will you dance Looby Looby Li
Will you dance Looby Looby Li
Will you dance Looby Looby Li
As you did last night?
Then we sang the verses. For Looby Li was about the game of love and chance. Each verse described some variation of the game and after each we’d try to act out the enigmatic, scarcely understood words we’d sung. Then we’d join hands again for the chorus: ‘Will you dance Looby Looby Li, etc. . . . As you did last night?’
I for one pranced about in all innocence. So, I think, did most of the others, and I was very surprised when one day my mother asked me: ‘Do you ever play a game called Looby Li?’ I said yes, we did, and that it was a good game and that I liked it.
She asked: ‘Who started it? Who taught you the words?’ I answered truthfully that I didn’t remember, I didn’t know; but immediately added: ‘Perhaps it was Willie.’
She said: ‘Willie? Well, I’m surprised at Willie, I’m astonished at Willie. Where did he pick it up?’ But I was miserably wondering why I had told such a lie. For it wasn’t Willie and I liked him the best. I didn’t want to get him into any sort of trouble. Why had I said it was Willie when it wasn’t Willie? I don’t remember the rest of the conversation but it ended by her saying that whoever had started it, I must never play it again. Never. It was the reverse of a good game. It was a wicked game and I must forget all about it. ‘Now promise me,’ she said, then went off forgetting apparently that I hadn’t promised anything at all.
Very soon after this, it may have been the next day, when afternoon came at the Botanical Gardens, some suggested playing Looby Looby Li. But the older girls and boys gathered in a group whispering and giggling. Finally one of them announced that he was sick of Looby Li, that it was a silly game, a baby’s game, a lot of rubbish. ‘Let’s play something else. Let’s play Tug of War.’ But in spite of all this camouflage, everyone soon knew what had happened. Some man or some woman – impossible to know – had watched us playing, then gone away to report that we played disgusting games, sang disgusting songs, that the nurses were lazy brutes, sprawled on the benches gossiping, and didn’t care what we did or even know where we went. Most of the children had been spoken to and the older ones decided that Looby Li wasn’t worth the trouble and we wouldn’t play it any more.
But even when I grew older I remembered and thought about it. Was it a negro song? Was it a negro version of a French song? I didn’t think so. At the time I’m writing of, West Indian music had far more of a Spanish rhythm than it has now. But Spanish, American, or African, it was always sad. Looby Li was a quick dancing tune, full of gaiety and light-heartedness. I know it wasn’t any sort of a negro sound. Later, when I was fascinated by novels of the Middle Ages, I decided that it was an English song of very long ago, before Cromwell and the Puritans, before Henry VIII and the Reformation. Sung in t
he remote country, it had trickled down the centuries, trickled out to the West Indies, there at last to die, or to be changed out of all knowledge like so many other things. Try as I may I can’t remember who taught us the words and the music or why I said ‘Willie’ when it wasn’t Willie.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
This collection first published 1987
Published in Penguin Classics 2017
Copyright © Jean Rhys, 2017
Introduction © Diana Athill, 1987
Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1967, 1976 by Jean Rhys. ‘The Whistling Bird’ © 1978, ‘On Not Shooting Sitting Birds’ © 1976, ‘Heat’ © 1976, ‘Kikomora’ © 1976, ‘Goodbye Marcus Goodbye Rose’ © 1976 by The New Yorker.
‘Illusion’, ‘A Spiritualist’, ‘From a French Prison’, ‘In a Café’, ‘Tout Montparnasse and a Lady’, ‘Mannequin’, ‘In the Luxemburg Gardens’, ‘Tea with an Artist’, ‘Trio’, ‘Mixing Cocktails’, ‘Again the Antilles’, ‘Hunger’, ‘Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend’, ‘A Night’, ‘In the Rue de l’Arrivée’, ‘Learning to Be a Mother’, ‘The Blue Bird’, ‘The Grey Day’, ‘The Sidi’, ‘At the Villa d’Or’, ‘La Grosse Fifi’ and ‘Vienne’ are from The Left Bank, which was first published by Jonathan Cape (London) and Harper & Brothers (New York) in 1927.
‘Till September Petronella’, ‘The Day They Burned the Books’, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, ‘Tigers Are Better-Looking’, ‘Outside the Machine’, ‘The Lotus’, ‘A Solid House’ and ‘The Sound of the River’ are from Tigers Are Better-Looking, which was first published in 1968 by André Deutsch Limited (London) and by Harper & Row (New York) in 1974.
‘I Spy a Stranger’ and ‘Temps Perdi’ were published in 1969 in Penguin Modern Stories (London).
‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, ‘Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose’, ‘The Bishop’s Feast’, ‘Heat’, ‘Fishy Waters’, ‘Overture and Beginners Please’, ‘Before the Deluge’, ‘On Not Shooting Sitting Birds’, ‘Kikimora’, ‘Night Out 1925’, ‘The Chevalier of the Place Blanche’, ‘The Insect World’, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel’, ‘Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic?’, ‘Sleep It Off Lady’ and ‘I Used to Live Here Once’ are from Sleep It Off Lady, which was published in 1976 by Harper & Row (New York).
‘Kismet’ and ‘Invitation to the Dance’ originally appeared in Vogue.
Cover photograph © Niall McDiarmid/Millennium Images
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-29085-9
CHAPTER 43
1 This story is a much-adapted translation of one written by Edouard de Nève.