The band and the Count’s tunes from Paris were a quick success; the floor soon filled with couples, and the intervals were loud with the planters’ deep voices and the fluttering and light-hearted tones of their wives and daughters, as bright, all of them, and as lively as humming birds. The strange creole diction, whose oddity and charm in Berthe’s ears still survived its six years’ familiarity, twittered in the warm candle-lit air. The brilliant dresses of the women were flanked by the high collars and stiff round plastrons, the white clothes and the scarlet sashes of the men. Negroes in their black and gold liveries skimmed among the guests, holding great silver trays laden with champagne glasses or long goblets of Martinique punch high above their turbans. A violet splash betokened the presence of the Bishop of Plessis, deep in colloquy with a dowager from the other side of the island. Every time the music stopped, the sounds of carnival from the rest of Plessis sailed in through the windows.
‘Son Excellence le Gouverneur,’ Gentilien announced in one of these pauses, ‘et Madame Sciocca.’ The Count, with the Countess rustling beside him in the new Worth dress she had brought back from Paris, moved to meet them. The august visitors appeared in the doorway.
The Governor was a stocky figure in a black evening coat. A broad red ribbon ran across his shirt front and he wore a heavy black moustache, a fringe and pince-nez. Standing hesitantly between the Corinthian columns, he mopped the back of his neck with a silk handkerchief. Madame Sciocca quite over-shadowed him. She was a tall and opulent woman with a mass of red hair. Her towering coiffure was crowned with a high mauve aigrette that matched the mauve sequins of her dress and also her long mauve gloves, round one wrist of which a heavy pearl necklace was twisted; a large ostrich feather fan fluttered up and down as languorously as the flabella that once cooled the brow of the Egyptian queen. The Captain, presiding in the midst of the newly-formed group by the door, tactfully abetted the meeting of the Creoles with the gubernatorial couple and the sombre looking staff attending them. The group moved slowly across the floor to a table by the largest window.
‘Madame,’ the Governor said feelingly, offering one arm to the timid Countess, and mopping his brow, ‘quelle épouvantable chaleur!’ The Count’s natural affability was never more apparent. Madame Sciocca rested her hand on his gallantly crooked elbow, and gazed round the room. ‘Mais quelle splendeur chez vous, mon cher comte,’ she sighed, and her eyelids seemed to move with the same torpid voluptuousness as the long white feathers of her fan. ‘C’est une vraie splendeur. . . .’ The Count’s eyes, glancing down at the thick white throat and the monumental curves at his side and catching the glint of the two green eyes now swivelling towards his own, were focused in expert appraisal that soon kindled into a bright answering spark of approbation.
A quarter of an hour later, when the party was safely established, Berthe was standing in one of the window recesses talking to the Captain. ‘Thank God!’ he murmured in her ear, ‘I believe everything is going like a honeymoon.’ He looked down with satisfaction at the outstretched lilac fingers of one of his hands and smoothed an imaginary wrinkle on the little finger. ‘I wonder who told la belle dame Sciocca about my new gloves – not that I mind, my dear – far from it. Plagiary is really very flattering. . . .’
The Count by now was waltzing gaily round and round with Madame Sciocca. Nimbly reversing towards Berthe and her companion, his revolutions brought him and his partner close to the alcove. The Count smiled at Berthe over his partner’s shoulder, and she thought she could catch the ghost of a wink in his jovial face. She burst out laughing and said to the Captain, ‘I believe you are right’. The Captain placed his hand on his shirt front and rolling his eyes histrionically, said, ‘C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée!’ and, delighted that all was going so well, went off to assist Madame de Serindan with the Governor.
M. Marcel Sciocca – the Governor’s son by an earlier marriage that had been dissolved by divorce (it was rumoured in whispers), in order to make way for the present Madame Sciocca – sat on the Countess’s other side, fluently reinforcing his father’s rather cumbrous devoirs with a florid battery of compliments. ‘He was a tall, blue-chinned brute of about forty,’ Berthe said, ‘with a pale fleshy face smothered in rice powder, a deep and modulated voice, an oily address and a permanent flashing smile whose total emptiness was only diversified by half a dozen gold teeth – a dancing master beginning to run to fat, and rigged out in huge diamond studs. He was, in fact, so much a caricature of the ideal rastaquouère that Josephine’s former infatuation became every minute more difficult to understand. But I was relieved to see that not only did he not ask Josephine to dance, but not a glance was exchanged between them. Josephine had taken refuge at the other end of the room, dancing entirely with her cousins and several times running with Hubert de la Tour, the young man whom the parents on both sides had in mind as Josephine’s future husband. I heaved a sigh of relief. The dance came to an end and Cousin Agénor led Madame Sciocca back to his table.’
The floor was bare. But, before the dancers could disperse to the lantern-lit terraces – the heat seemed to be growing more oppressive every minute – they were arrested by a shrill cry from the head of the stairs: ‘Please wait a moment, everybody!’
It was Anne-Jules, standing on the landing with Pierrot at his side. They were dressed from head to foot in palm-leaves, and wore tall gold necromancer’s hats painted with a pattern of stars and planets and snakes. They advanced to the head of the stairs, turned back to back with a precision that must have been often rehearsed and slid down opposite banisters which deposited them simultaneously on the empty dance-floor. Advancing to the middle, Pierrot placed a foot-stool under the central chandelier, and on top of this Anne-Jules placed his mysterious basket. Then, bowing towards his father’s table, he said, ‘Vos Excellences, Monsieur le comte, madame la comtesse, messieurs, mesdames, mesdemoiselles, nous allons vous wévéler le woi du Carnaval.’ Bending to the square basket, he opened a trap door in the side and intoned the following words:
Beauté supwême et toute puissante,
et majesté du carnaval,
Dans les tenèbwes languissantes,
Sors du palais, diwige le bal!
Both boys then began a low, soft coaxing whistle and, in a stage whisper, said in unison, ‘Sors, Sardanapale!’ The long drawn whistling continued, and the guests craned forward with a flutter of curiosity. ‘Sors, Sardanapale!’, Anne-Jules and Pierrot repeated, and a dark object appeared from the little wicker door. It moved from side to side for a few seconds, curled downwards to the floor, and then, followed by two flowing yards of scaly and noiseless sinuosity as thick as a wrist, began to move across the parquet. There was a general gasp and one or two half-suppressed screams. Following it, Anne-Jules changed his whistle to a succession of staccato notes and the snake raised its head high in the air. Its head was followed by an erect pillar of trunk which stretched every second longer until its entire length, rising from and balancing on a small terminal circle of tail, seemed to be standing perpendicular. The terrible triangular and horny head, lowered at right angles to its trunk, swayed from side to side with a drunken-seeming motion. A forked tongue darted swiftly in and out of hissing jaws.
A shock of terror at the sight of the fer de lance, poised in the classical posture preparatory to striking, ran through the room like a wave of electricity. The bite of the trigonocephalus brings certain death within the hour. In a sudden scurry the dancers crowded back from the possible ambit of its leap. The Count was the first to break the silence.
‘Anne-Jules,’ he shouted, ‘do you know how to make that brute get back into the basket?’
Anne-Jules looked at his father round-eyed with feigned surprise. ‘Yes, papa.’
‘Then do so directly.’
Still softly whistling, he approached the poised serpent from behind, caught hold of the back of the hissing head, then, lifting it in the air, gathered up the heavy slack with his other hand and w
alked to where Pierrot was holding the basket open. Everyone held their breath. The Countess, white as chalk, was feverishly fingering her châtelaine. Anne-Jules dropped the tail through the trap-door and coiled the long body after it until only the head remained outside. With a murmur of ‘rentre, Sardanapale,’ he dropped it inside and Pierrot closed the lid.
There was a universal escape of breath and a slightly hysterical rush of talk. The Count strode to the basket, picked it up and handed it to Gentilien, whose pupils were revolving in apprehensive circles of white.
‘Take this brute away and destroy it. And you,’ he said severely, turning to Anne-Jules, ‘go straight up to bed and stay there!’
The two little wizards, their conical hats hanging dejectedly now, made for the stairs and, climbing sadly to the landing, vanished.
‘I apologise for my son’s ridiculous behaviour,’ the Count said, with a circular gesture to his guests, and then waved to the band. Raggedly at first they struck up a polka. He seized Berthe round the waist and off they galloped, the musicians recovering the beat once more from their master’s determined pacings. Other couples joined them and soon, in a hubbub of chatter, the Ball revived.
Exactly at the right moment a diversion reinforced the Count’s efforts. It was the custom of the Shrove Tuesday masques in Saint-Jacques to range through the town, holding the burghers to ransom in the streets with mock threats, and entering their houses, where a libation of rum was claimed as a prerogative, and willingly granted. This was the sort of thing the Count loved and the masques could always rely on a generous reception at his house. The sounds of carnival had been growing steadily louder. Now, a score of negroes, dressed in fluttering rags designed to resemble grave-cloths and their faces painted like skulls, burst into the ballroom with savage yells, waving flaming torches over their heads. They advanced across the floor where a passage opened in front of them, passed out of the windows to leave their torches on the terrace and returned across the ballroom to usher in their companions. And in they came. Some of them wore torn frock coats and battered top hats. Others were dressed in the scarlet rags and the long noses, the painted ears and the horns, of devils. There were mock aristocrats in powdered wigs, and these were followed by beautiful negresses and quadroons and octaroons and capresses dressed in all the splendour of the gwan’ wobe, the foulard, the gwains d’or and the madwas – the tight marmalade coloured turbans with the ends tied in three jutting spikes that signified, for those who understood the sign language, amorous complaisance to all-comers. (Some of the largest of these – towering mamelouques and sacatras and griffonnes – were really men in disguise.) Scarlet and saffron and black were the predominating colours, and many of the girls had crimson hearts painted on their cheeks. All were masked. Recognisable under their disguises, and beautifully rigged out in feathers and great paste jewels, were some of the leading mulatto matadores – the Jacobean equivalent of poules de luxe – drawn from their gilded ease into this plebeian swarm by an unconquerable desire to see the inside of the Serindan house.
(A number of the creole squires, Berthe noticed, and some of the Governor’s staff, at once retreated to strategic positions behind pillars where they might escape immediate recognition. . . .)
Half a dozen black dominoes were scattered among the rest. Human bats came beating in with large ribbed wings, pursued by leopards and tigers and jaguars whose faces were covered by the animals’ masks, while the skins flew loose behind them. Round their waists were kilts of sugar-cane and balisier. Mummers riding paper horses and hippopotamuses and dragons and giraffes, all vividly caparisoned, came prancing and rearing after them. Their steeds were built out on hoops round their waists, and dummy human legs sat astride them in saddles and stirrups. The riders’ real legs and the four putative ones of their mounts were concealed by gaudy housings, fringed with little bells, that swept swirling and tinkling to the ground as they caracoled along. A number of masques wore stags’ antlers and buffalo horns which rose above the heads of their fellows like the crests of condottieri and one or two wore carved and painted wooden heads with alarming and slanting eyes outlined in white paint. Gaping mouths were armed with long white tusks, and yellow manes of plaited straw and palm trash trailed down their backs. At the core of the masques danced two tall figures who seemed to hold some particular sway over their companions. One was a well-known sorceress and practitioner of quimbois, (the black magic of the islands), Maman Zélie: a hollow-cheeked crone in a white turban and a white dress, festooned in saltire with necklaces of coloured shells and beads. A short wooden pipe, smoking like a furnace, was irremovably clamped between her jaws, a white heart was painted on her forehead, and the rest of her face was patterned with bold rings and spirals of white. Beside her danced her invariable partner, the Devil King. He was dressed wholly in scarlet. A blood-red mask covered his face and his tall square cap, which was surmounted by a great flickering lantern, was adorned on each of its sides with a looking-glass and fringed all the way round with horses’ tails.
As these newcomers danced in they sang a long incantation which was repeated half an octave lower at the end of each phrase, then once more at the initial pitch before the words altered. The musicians were masqued chalk-white, like zombies; their eyes were tight shut (the wearers peeped through slits in the eyebrows) and their buckram jaws hung cretinously open. The leaders wielded shackshacks: cylinders of bamboo filled with rattling seeds. They were followed by others who blew mournful and booming notes down vaccins: instruments made of two yards of bamboo several inches thick. Then came drummers with Ka’s: rumkegs with skins stretched over either end. Others, bestriding long wooden tom-toms, moved forward, like ungainly insects, in little bounds. Two men dancing abreast stooped under a long beam on which three giants hammered deafeningly with clubs. (When these broke, they were speedily supplied with new ones by acolytes who carried sheaves of them in reserve.) Next came one who defined the tune on a shrill reed instrument like a primitive clarinet which somehow dominated the rhythmic din of his colleagues with a high-pitched, syncopated and unflagging scream. He was accompanied by two banza players strumming on rough stringed instruments made of half-calabashes and laths. Lastly a dozen zombies bore, aloft and horizontal, a giant tom-tom fashioned out of the hollow trunk of a tree. This was twelve feet long and a yard in girth and astride it, high above the tossing jungle of horns and antlers, higher even than the great central chandelier (whose pendant prisms, brushed by the perched drummer’s crouching back, tinkled murmuring together in an impotent and inaudible dix-huitième protest at the pandemonium unloosed below), a frenzied rider was mounted. His bare palms hammered the drumhead at a lightning pace and each blow sent such an explosion of sound down the great wooden concavity between his legs that the very candles trembled in their hurricane glasses. In the space of a minute the elegant saloons, the fluted pillars, the white walls with their pale painted population of vanished Serindans – perruqued and fastidious grandees with the ribbon of the Holy Ghost across their sprigged satin waistcoats – their live descendants and all their guests, seemed to have melted away and their place to have been filled by the warriors, the witch-doctors and the blood-red splendour of the sacrificial groves of the Congo and Dahomey.
They fell into single file, each dancer holding the one in front of him by the hips, until the ballroom was girdled with a heaving chain of masques. The rhythm altered to the beat of the Mine dance – which originated, they say, on the Grain Coast – and everyone stooped forward with their torsos swaying from side to side and their bare feet, as they advanced, slapping the polished floor in unison; leaping round at a signal crash of the bamboula and continuing in the opposite direction while, in the middle, the Sorceress and the Devil King, stooping double, repeated the steps in a smaller compass. At a break in the band’s clangour, the dancers fished gourds of rum and tafia from their disguises and took quick pulls and even offered them to their neighbours and to the guests that stood nearest. Many of them had been drinki
ng all through the last days of carnival and were now in a state of amiable and harmless drunkenness. It was plain to see that the most advanced were the half-dozen dominoes who rocked visibly on their feet whenever the dancing stopped.
‘Incidentally,’ Berthe said, ‘the champagne and rum had been circulating continually since the ball began, and with that, the noise, the dancing and the stifling heat, many of the guests were in no better state – especially some young men from the outlying plantations.’
The drums broke out once more in a violent tattoo, and the women and the men arranged themselves in two opposing lines. Hunching their shoulders behind craning heads, they began to shuffle and shake and shudder in the first steps of the caleinda. Setting forward at a warning scream of the wind instrument, they advanced two steps and retreated one, until, reaching their partners opposite, they revolved round each other, jerking and grunting, several times; retreating again to their starting places, then forward and round each other back to back; then facing each other with their hips jerking in unison, and finally, almost on their knees, in frog-like postures, with their cheeks laid against those of their partners and their buttocks and shoulders jerking in quadruple time. Everything heaved and quaked, antlers interlocked with buffalo horns, and, against the hollow booming of the vaccins and the grinding percussion of the tree-trunk, the battery of tom-toms, goaded on by their screaming drummers, sounded as though it would break the instruments to smithereens under the pitiless and long-drawn-out hail of massed impacts.
The Violins of Saint-Jacques Page 5