The party from Government House, who had never seen such a sight, were bewildered. The Governor kept repeating that it was ‘fort interessant, ma foi! Personne ne sait danser comme les nègres!’ The Count resisted the temptation to tell him that the word nègre, as opposed to noir, was never used in the Islands except as an insult. But Madame Sciocca’s hands were clasped in an ecstasy of metropolitan rapture. ‘Mais ils sont impayables, ces gens là,’ she cried to the Count at her side; then, as a more premeditated comment: ‘quelle incroyable désinvolture!’, she sighed.
Positions were soon taken up for a bélé,[5] a dance which was often accompanied by satirical words which were improvised afresh every season. With the first movements of the dance, the voices of the masques began singing:
Missié le Comte li bon béke,[6]
Et Maitw’ Moustache ka wien savé,
Hié’ soi’ a six . . .
But, quelled in mid-line by frantic waves from the Count, who rose precipitately from his chair, they got no further. The tune had already provoked a simmer of suppressed giggles and anxious looks among the creoles, for the song, dealing with the conflict between the Count and the Governor very much at the Governor’s expense, had been the rage of Plessis for the last two months. Fortunately, nobody seemed to have explained this to the Governor and his party, who, naturally, could not understand the creole patois and seemed ignorant of the Governor’s universal nickname of Maître Moustache. The tune changed, but not soon enough to drown a loud, rather tipsy guffaw and a shout of Bravo! from the door of the library, where one of the most violent of the younger creole faction, Gontran de Chambines, was uncertainly leaning with a full glass of punch tilted in his hand at a precarious angle.
‘Why did you stop the tune?’ the Governor asked, his forehead puckered in mystification. ‘I’ve been whistling it for days.’ He did so once more, beating time with his pince-nez.
‘My dear Governor,’ the Count whispered, ‘it’s the words – les pawoles sont un peu shocking. You know, the ladies, the bishop . . .’ The Governor’s brow cleared and, with a gesture of knowing bachelor collusion, he held out his glass for some more champagne.
The masques had started a biguine, the dance that more than any other typifies the fusion of African and French influences in the Antilles. At one moment it is European and formal and tinged by something of the touching and obsolete urbanity of a minuet: at the next, it slides into an essentially negro rhythm: African, spasmodic and Calypsonian. The one they had chosen was an old tune that had in some measure become the leitmotif of the French Antilles. The Count’s orchestra joined with the carnival band. The masques fanned out and chose partners among the guests and, in a few moments, the room was a revolving constellation of heteroclite couples. M. de Serindan danced with Maman Zélie, Josephine with a masque dressed as a swordfish and draped in fishnet. Madame Sciocca, deploying a nice compound of diffidence and alacrity, accepted the arm of a young negro wearing an enormous pair of deer’s horns: headgear which, the Captain murmured ominously in Berthe’s ear, in view of his partner’s growing cordiality with the Count, she might usefully borrow for future presentation elsewhere. (‘Our national joke dies hard, you know,’ Berthe inserted parenthetically.) The Governor was led through the complicated steps by the experienced hands of La Belle Doudou, the most resplendent and prosperous of the disguised matadores. The astonishing head-dresses, turning and nodding now in conjunction with the feathers and aigrettes of the creole ladies, while the spike-ended turbans and voluminous douillettes were escorted by the tall collars, the sashes and the starch of the creole squires, spun through verse after lilting verse. At the last one the biguine accelerated into a stampede and everyone joined in the words, which Berthe now softly sang once more in a deep and agreeable voice.
Toute moune tini
Yon moune yo aimé,
Toute moune tini,
Yon moune yo chéwi.
Toute moune tini
Yon doudoux a yo
Jusse moin tou sèle
Pa tini ca, moin.[7]
This breakneck maelstrom slowed down in cries and clapping and laughter and Gentilien shouted that supper was ready. The masques danćed away to the lower terrace where a feast was prepared for them round an immense bowl of Martinique punch. The rest of the guests trailed through to the long lanterned terrace beyond the ballroom windows. A ninefold saraband of Muses dominated it from the balustrade with the swirl of their plaster draperies. ‘It was about time,’ Berthe said. ‘The air in the ballroom by this time had become stifling.’
•
Berthe broke off, filled the glasses and lit a new cigarette. The sparks of the flint lit up her face, summoning those hollows and salients for a split second out of the neutral moonlight and the shadows of the olive leaves. The moon, having cast loose long ago from the trees in front of us, was now travelling across the zenith of the sky. On the hair-thin and just descriable line of the horizon beyond the silently spinning trunks, the Ægean hung in a shining and unruffled curtain.
‘It is odd,’ she said at last, ‘how well I remember every detail of that night. It all happened half a century ago and I don’t suppose I’ve talked about it to anyone for almost as long. But hardly a day has passed without my thinking about it and trying to piece it together. A ball is almost a short lifetime in itself. Everything that happened beforehand retreats, for the time being, into a kind of pre-natal oblivion and the world waiting for you when you wake up next day seems as vague and shadowy as the eternity that waits beyond the tomb. Like somebody’s life, the ball goes on and on and the incidents stand out in retrospect like a life’s milestones against a flux of time whose miniature years are measured out in dance tunes.’ She laughed, thoughtfully. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I suppose one might say that by supper-time, Cousin Agénor’s Shrove Tuesday Ball had just about reached middle age and could look forward to a jovial maturity, a leisurely senescence and, in the fullness of time, a happy end. Earlier anxieties had all vanished and in spite of one or two minor mishaps, everything was going swimmingly. The hatchet was buried and forgotten, the two rival parties were, at least on the surface, on the best of terms. Knowing most of the omens, I thought I could predict a worried month or two for Madame de Serindan; but poor Cousin Mathilde was used to this, and Cousin Agénor always returned to her in the end more attentive and solicitous than ever. I also felt that the Governor and La Belle Doudou would not remain strangers for long. It was a relief to see that there had been no spark revived between his son and Josephine. They seemed in fact to be studiously avoiding each other. But Josephine was plainly in a state of great suppressed excitement: listening distractedly, answering mal à-propos and laughing nervously: signs of which I was a fool not to have taken more notice. Every time we danced past each other I would find her eyes fixed on mine with a peculiar intentness in which fear and entreaty were uppermost. Towards the end of the biguine our eyes met again. Still gazing over the shoulder of her swordfish partner with the same overwrought and undecipherable expression, Josephine thrust her lips forward in the moue of a kiss. I blew a kiss back into the air and smiled. But no answering smile came back. Her eyelids fluttered confusedly and she lowered her head, so that all I could see, as the dance carried us away into different streams, was the mass of black hair and the three gardenias pinned there.
‘I, too, was in a strange state of mind, and filled with a disquiet and a misgiving which I found impossible to unravel. All this was complicated by the presence of Sosthène.
‘His time in France had done nothing to change his early feelings of infatuation. He had written continuously from Saint Cyr: long love letters that often enclosed pages of poetry, some of it very good indeed. And on his return–a tall and charming young man now, and, like all his family, something of a beauty – this feeling had turned into a determination that we should marry, or, as he declared in moments of emotion, that he should perish. His appearance, and in many ways, his wild and highly strung nature were
so similar to Josephine’s that I would often find myself gazing at him covertly and wishing that things had been planned for me on more ordinary lines. For, when his present feelings should finally die away, there were plenty of solutions for him elsewhere of a kind that seemed forever denied to me. As it was, I was too fond of him to be able to pack him off to search elsewhere; also, too familiar with his sister’s impulsiveness to treat his own wild promises merely as threats. Our positions, in their different ways, were too similar and too hopeless (though I could not explain to him that all my feelings of love and devotion had irrevocably centred on another member of his family) for me not to feel bound to him by the ties of an invalid suffering from the same disease. We had danced together most of the evening and when after supper (where he had been acting as host to the Governor’s staff) he led me mysteriously away to a little kiosk beyond the top terrace and renewed his entreaties and his terrible alternatives, it was easy to see that poor Sosthène had drunk far too much champagne. He fell on his knees and caught me round the waist. His speech was more exaggerated than ever and his hair was all over the place. I tried to brush it straight with my hands but he kept shaking it angrily loose. Assurances that one loves somebody like a brother (or a sister for that matter) are not the most calming remedies for someone who is in the extremes of the malady of love. He cried out that unless I said I would marry him he would shoot himself, drown himself in the sea or even, pointing upwards at the angrily flaming crater (burning, it seemed, every minute brighter), dive down the Salpetrière. I was really anxious about what might happen and, begging him to give me until tomorrow night to decide, to which he unwillingly consented, I determined not to leave his side all the next day.
‘At this point Lucienne came running up the steps shouting for me. Sosthène jumped to his feet and rushed into the trees. Lucienne caught me by the hand. “Berthe,” she cried, “we’ve been looking for you everywhere. It is time to change for the play. Everything is ready, and Josephine is first for once. Come along quick, or we shall be late.” ’
Gathering up their skirts, Berthe and Lucienne ran indoors and up to their bedrooms. The Count, his face glowing with excitement, was waiting on the landing. He gave them a friendly pat on the shoulders as they passed, saying, ‘vite, vite, mes enfants, your public is waiting’, and then hastened downstairs to put the finishing touches to the scenery on the stage which had been rigged up at the end of the ballroom during supper.
The one-act play the Count had written specially for the occasion a couple of months before was a slight, witty and sentimental little sketch called Amour en Castille. The actors wore pseudo-Spanish costume of the time of Alfred de Musset. ‘It was full of charm and fun,’ Berthe said, ‘and exactly right for a diverting interlude in the ball.’ They had been rehearsing it hard during the last few weeks but there had been several changes in the cast. The grotesque part of an elderly and rather clownish grandee, necessitating a false obesity padded out with a pillow, the Count had written for himself; but when the invitation to Government House had been sent out, he had lost his nerve and begged the Captain to play it. The two principal figures, that of the grandee’s niece, Doña Paz, a jealously guarded beauty, and her suitor Don Fernando, a young Castilian hidalgo, had been destined for Josephine and Berthe respectively and rehearsals had gone forward. But suddenly, one morning a week before, Josephine had begged Berthe for their two rôles to be changed round. She had seemed so set on it, that, slightly bewildered, both Berthe and the Count had consented. All the family, except for the Countess and Sosthène, whose late arrival would have cut rehearsal time too short, were included. Anne-Jules had insisted on Pierrot’s participation as a page and ally to his own rôle of rascally valet, and their exile to bed had been summarily rescinded. (As a matter of fact, neither of them had gone there in the first place. They had retired instead to the friendly obscurity of the kitchen to console themselves on secret feasting for the loss of Sardanapalus.)
‘Everything considered,’ said Berthe, ‘it all went off very well. As you can guess, I felt in no state for acting in a play, but luckily I have always been able to disguise my emotions. But Josephine was more excited and erratic than ever. She missed her cue several times, repeated the same stanza of a serenade twice and struck the last chord so violently that two of the guitar-strings broke. But by that time of the night the audience was in such good humour that it was an immense success. Josephine looked ravishing. Her boyish figure was dressed in a high-collared, tight-waisted black coat and a white stock. Tight black pantaloons were strapped under her boots and small silver spurs were screwed to her heels. Her hair was brushed back into a knot and she had drawn a curly moustache along her upper lip with kohl. Fernando and Paz had to take call after call – the Captain, sweating like a river under his upholstery, kept thrusting us forward – and Josephine and I, hand in hand, bowed and curtsied a score of times to an uproar of clapping and cheers. Cousin Agénor, answering massed shouts of ‘Author!’ was beside himself with pleasure. Madame Sciocca fanned herself in transports of voluble delight and the Governor kept declaring that it was better than anything he had seen in Paris, que c’était pharamineux! The actors’ hands were caught by admirers from below and they were made to jump from the stage and take part in a schottische on the freshly powdered floor while the stage was cleared away.’
In the middle of this dance a deep and ominous rumble was heard above the notes of the orchestra. A bright flash like lightning drowned the many candle flames for a second with its brighter intensity and a rush of wind filled the curtains in their confining coils of hibiscus and blew them into the ballroom in wavering cylinders. The dancers stopped and looked through the long windows at the top of the Salpetrière where a sparkling fountain of fire had suddenly sprung to a great height in the air; a brilliant red gold needle, whose mounting summit bore all the gazing eyes upwards and then down again as it broadened and lost its shape and subsided. A wide stream of lava burnt its way down from the crater’s rim to the waiting chaudières.
This diversion was greeted, as though it were a firework display, with claps and with shouts of ‘vive la Salpetwière!’ and ‘à la bonne heure!’ and when it had passed, the dance swept forward with a new vigour. It looked as if the volcano itself were conspiring with the Count to add lustre to his rout.
Berthe, meanwhile, had shed her combs and her shawls, kicked off her hooped black satin crinoline and put on her ball dress again. As she reached the ballroom, she felt an arm slid through hers. It was the Captain’s.
‘Berthe,’ he exclaimed, ‘you were a marvel. Come and have a glass of champagne this instant.’ It was the first time she had seen him even slightly tipsy and, amused, she followed him into the library.
•
The noisy room beyond, usually the Count’s study, had been turned for the evening into a smoking-room. It was one of the pleasantest and most lived-in rooms of the house and it was only out of bounds to the rest of the family when the Count was in the pangs of one of his sudden onslaughts of creative fever. The walls were covered with bookcases and the horns of strange animals. A stuffed Jacobean heron, with petunia-coloured breast-feathers, a duck-billed platypus, two toucans, a wombat, a quetzal and three birds of paradise, one of them with tail feathers ascending in a wonderful lyre, were immured in glass. Over the chimneypiece, an apt symbol of the Count’s Confucian tendencies, was a vast genealogical tree whose timbers glittered with impalements and quarterings and augmentations. The roots were inscribed with the name of Gaultier de Serindan, Seigneur de la Charce, Bailli of Fontenay and Vidame of Luçon in the reign of Phillipe IV le Bel. Its ample and heavily-loaded boughs spread like those of an immense and overgrown pear tree basking espalierwise on an orchard wall; branch sprang from branch with the advance of generations, diminishing at last to the smallest and most recent twig, neatly labelled with the name of Anne-Jules. (On the day of her arrival Berthe had been conducted to this forest giant and the Count’s long and unerring fore-finge
r had alighted triumphantly on the skeleton leaf where the scarcely legible name of her own great grandmother was inscribed: Athenaïs de Serindan, married in 1782 to the Chevalier Armand de Rennes, who was killed in the fighting at Nouaille in the Vendée on the same day as La Rochejaquelein.) The rest of the room was a jungle of globes, astralabs, telescopes, albums, ancient maps, sheet music and old instruments of all kinds. The harpsichord, M. de Serindan would affirm, had once belonged to Lulli, and round this treasure were grouped a rebeck, a cromorne, a theorbo and a tromba marina. There were vessels containing snakes in spirits and a large case of great blue-green butterflies from Cayenne. Usually some newly arrived acquisition from Paris occupied the centre of the room – a magic lantern, a kaleidoscope or, that particular year – for the Count was determined to own the first horseless carriage in the island – an elaborate working model of the de Dion-Bouton motor car that he had just ordered; and a game of puff-billiards. Many of these treasures had been put on one side before the ball to make room for the present occupants of the study. But its tutelary genius, an immense and splendid macaw from Nicaragua called Triboulet, still presided on his accustomed perch, silencing the hubbub from time to time with a screech and a succession of clicks, followed by the words, ‘Montjoy–Saint Denis!’ or, alternatively, the only words that the Count had mastered in English: Have a dwink!
The injunctions of this bird had not been falling on deaf ears. From where she sat Berthe could see the Jacobean squires leaning against the desk and spread at their ease across the chairs and sofas in their white suits and red sashes. Long cheroots were stuck between their teeth and there were rum-glasses in their hands. (A closet beyond was exclusively devoted to the changing of collars, whose rigidity melted into damp shapelessness with the heat and vigour of half a dozen dances. Ardent performers – six-collar-men – had sent on their servants in advance with a liberal supply of fresh collars and white cotton gloves.) Thick clouds of tobacco smoke, creeping out into the library and hanging in layers round the candelabra, streamed in horizontal drifts through the windows and into the dark. In the doorway Marcel Sciocca and another member of the Government House party were talking to a nephew of the Count’s, who, in default of Sosthène, was looking after them. Sciocca was paying little attention to the conversation and every now and then he drew a watch from his pocket in a manner which spelled either boredom or preoccupation.
The Violins of Saint-Jacques Page 6