‘That evening was the first time I had a chance of seeing him close to,’ Berthe said. ‘He had gone out of his way to be agreeable all the evening with a ghastly kind of shop-walker’s gallantry. He was as vain as a peacock. But I don’t think that it was entirely the exasperation and anger that I felt when I thought that we were, or had been, rivals, that deepened my feelings that he was a man capable of any despicable action. There was nothing beyond a vague field of rumour and unfavourable surmise to base this on. Certainly he was not to blame for what happened next, beyond a remark which was, in the circumstances, very unfortunate. The fact that he and Gontran de Chambines came anywhere near each other at all was mere bad luck.’
Gontran de Chambines de la Forest d’Ivry and his twin brother François, Berthe explained, were something of a problem to their family and to Jacobean society in general. They lived a wild life on their estate at Pointe d’Ivry, a steep cape at the north end of the Island where they drank, as Berthe put it, like holes, and spent their sober hours riding and shooting with their negroes and organising cock-fights and contests between snakes and mongooses. Extremely likeable and as gentle as lambs when sober, drunk they were the reverse. Their inflammable tempers and their recklessness made them prone to rash acts and their careers had been a long succession of scrapes. They were tall, strong, florid creatures with choleric, Norman-looking blue eyes. Gontran was only distinguishable from François by a stutter which, when both of them were in their cups, became slightly more pronounced than that of his twin. Both of them, most unfortunately in this instance, were advanced and violent partisans of what Government House described in their reports as ‘the Creole Obscurantist Reaction’. Their two bass voices, now galloping forward, now held up at the hurdle of an awkward consonant, had dominated the noise from the Count’s study for the past hour or two, growing steadily louder and more garbled as the laughter and tinkle of breaking punch glasses increased in frequency. When they appeared arm-in-arm in the library door, their already sodden aspect turned by the heat into that of complete ragamuffins, it was obvious that they could hardly stand. Damp sequins of tipsiness swam in their four blue eyes above two smiles of inane felicity. Gontran, losing his footing in the crowded threshold, swayed dangerously, knocking over a chair. Sciocca, wisely flattening himself against the wall to avoid the danger zone – ineffectually, as Gontran, lurching in the same direction, collided with Marcel Sciocca’s shoulder before regaining his precarious balance – dislodged a small engraving from a constellation of miniatures beside the bookcase. It fell to the floor and the glass broke. Gontran managed to articulate an incoherent apology and prepared to resume his rambling progress, and Sciocca stooped and picked up the picture and the broken glass. Considering the persons involved it had been a dangerous moment. But Gontran had failed to recognise his neighbour and the spectators, who had watched in agony, breathed again. Sciocca, before putting the frame back on its hook, lifted some black silk that hung from the ring and glanced at the picture. His eyebrows went up. ‘Tiens!’ he said, holding the engraving at arms’ length. He tilted his head to one side in a posture of facetious scrutiny and read out loud the legend printed underneath. ‘L’exécution à Vincennes le vingt-et-un mars, mille huit cent quatre, de Son Altesse Royale le Prince Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Duc d’Enghien.’ Looking up with the air of somebody about to append a witty footnote to a tedious text, he went on, ‘Ce n’était vraiment pas la peine de l’abattre deux fois.’ He raised the picture, ‘C’est fouetter un chat mort, comme qui dirait.’
Berthe broke off at this point, lit a cigarette and meditatively allowed a thread of smoke to climb into the olive branches before continuing. ‘The odd part of it,’ she said in the end, ‘is that I don’t think Sciocca meant any harm. After all, the shooting of the Duc d’Enghien was ancient history. Certainly, in ordinary circles, nothing to make a song and dance about any longer. And I suppose Sciocca’s remark was nothing more than a rather inept and pointless, but rather caddish, joke. (In fact, Sciocca’s complacent expression of mild banter and the scattering of titters his words evoked amongst some of the Metropolitans, rather proved this.) He may, with the best will in the world, have been trying to pass off Gontran’s drunkenness and the silly collision as a joke, or he may have intended it as a sly dig (I think it is called) at the antiquated prejudices of the Jacobeans. Or, bearing in mind what happened later, he might have said it merely from nerves and distraction and the desire to chatter lightly and unconcernedly at all costs. But, whatever it was, the creoles were thunderstruck with horror; partly because Sciocca’s words seemed a gratuitously wounding sneer, and in the circumstances, very impertinent, but mostly out of anxiety about their effect on Gontran de Chambines. Any goodwill Sciocca had acquired by virtue of his earlier amiability was squandered in a second. Nobody seemed to find anything to say, not even the Captain. I felt his finger and thumb tighten apprehensively on my elbow as Sciocca spoke. Gontran had stopped in his tracks. Still swaying, he supported himself with one hand on the doorpost. His eyes slowly focused themselves on Sciocca. Then, opening wide with a fixed and owlish stare we all knew only too well, his face appeared to swell and grow crimson with mounting rage. When he spoke after the tentative titters had died down, he had almost lost his voice. It came out halting and strangled.
‘M-Monsieur,’ he said with difficulty, ‘v-voilà une p-p-p-plaisantewie que je ne g-goute que m-m-médiocwement.’ His comment was unexpectedly mild and rather comically pompous. The uninitiated Sciocca, deceived by Gontran’s glassy stare and scarcely audible voice, must have thought that he had been presented with a heaven-sent butt. His eyebrows went up still further in a pert facsimile of surprise. ‘Ah?’ he said, imitating not only Gontran’s tone of voice but his creole accent and his stammer, ‘and w-why are y-you only m-mediocrely am-m-mused?’
Gontran’s face went black with rage. His arm shot out and, seizing Sciocca by the front of his shirt and crumpling it fiercely with an enormous hand, he jerked Sciocca towards him and croaked ‘P-p-parceque v-vous êtes une s-sale b-b-bête.’ Sciocca seized Gontran’s wrist and tried to shake him off, then struck him on the chest. He had gone as white as paper and both men were trembling all over with fury. Gontran lurched, recovered his balance, and, still gripping Sciocca by his shirt, which was beginning to tear, caught him a violent blow on the side of one cheek and then one on the other with the back of his hand, and threw him free against the wall. It was a horrible scene. Sciocca was the first to recover. Red finger-marks showed across his face.
‘I’ll have satisfaction for this,’ he said, ‘tomorrow when he is sober.’
‘G-good,’ Gontran answered in gulps. ‘Ask him to tell a f-fwiend, if he’s got one, to g-get in t-touch with my b-bwother.’
Sciocca looked questioningly at the man standing beside him, who nodded assent.
‘Monsieur Lambert, my father’s a d c will represent me,’ Sciocca said. Then, looking at his watch, he bowed in a stagily ironical manner, exposed a couple of golden grinders in a smile, and turned towards the french window. His second made as though to follow him, but Sciocca held up his hand with a murmur of ‘later on!’ Then saying ‘à demain’ in a loud, clear voice, he walked out alone into the dark.
The whole incident took less than a minute, and, somehow, passed miraculously unnoticed by the dancers revolving continuously past the library door. Everyone was slightly nonplussed, and also impressed by Sciocca’s composure, which, in a measure, took the wind out of their indignation while it increased their dislike. Gontran, of course, had behaved outrageously, as usual. But, unfairly, and in spite of Gontran having shown himself to be a drunken boor, the sympathy was all on his side. Yet the incident had occurred, as it were, in creole territory and the opposition were guests and a minority. Everyone felt thoroughly uncomfortable. The Captain was the first to recover. Gontran, relapsing into his previous state with photographic abruptness, was conducted back into the study and persuaded ‘to rest’ on a sofa, where
he was soon peacefully snoring. Summoning all the witnesses, perhaps a dozen, to the window, the Captain easily persuaded them to tell nobody about the incident, and least of all the Count or the Governor, until every other means of preventing an encounter had been attempted in vain. A meeting between Chambines and Sciocca threatened not only the usual dangers incident to such affairs, but the definitive and total breakdown of the reconciliation, which, until the recent accident, had been going so rosily. Gontran, whose last words before falling asleep had been a bloodthirsty boast about ‘making a hole in that animal’s hide’, was better left undisturbed for the moment.
The Captain took Berthe aside and begged her to find Sosthène (of whom Gontran was very fond) who was clearly the person, reinforced by Berthe, to reason with him when he came round. Sciocca had disappeared, so the Captain got to work on his second, Monsieur Lambert, who was in complete agreement about the calamitous possibilities ahead. Unfortunately, Gontran’s brother and second, leaning out of the window at the far end of the library in a state close to collapse, was in no fitter plight to discuss matters than his principal. Gontran was known to be equally formidable with rapier and sabre and pistol; but, violent and spadassin when drunk, he was also, especially waking up after a night like this, both penitent and tractable. Monsieur Lambert, an intelligent and rather agreeable man, had no light to shed on Sciocca’s lethal proficiency or his accessibility to reason, except the admission, accompanied by a dubious shake of the head, that he was ‘un homme très rancunier . . .’
Their deliberations were interrupted by the sepulchral voice of François de Chambines from the window: ‘L-look,’ he said, ‘it’s s-snowing.’ The observation was so unexpected and irrelevant that everybody burst out laughing. And snow was indeed falling. It was that light descent of feather-soft ash that often followed any unusual activity of the Salpetrière. It glittered in daylight like hoarfrost, and the Jacobean negroes used to call it ‘saltpetre-snow’. They watched the silent, fluttering, windless descent across the lamplit window and, putting their arms outside, allowed the warm strange flakes, the only snowfall ever seen in the Antilles, to settle on their hands. Berthe found the Captain standing beside her.
‘Berthe,’ he whispered, ‘do please go and find Sosthène.’
•
Sosthène, however, was nowhere. After a search all over the house, the gardens and the bedrooms, Berthe was on her way back to the library when her eye was caught by a line of light under a door next to the oratory, whose red sanctuary lamp was usually the only thing visible there, at the end of a long passage. (Beyond this door lay a billiard room, adorned, for some reason, with English sporting prints and an enlarged daguerreotype of Leo XIII.) It was an odd place for anybody to be, and thinking Sosthène might have retreated there, Berthe ran along the passage and opened the door. A faint star of light burned at the end of the shadowy room. A young man in black, not clearly discernible by the candlestick placed on the green baize, was standing by the end of the table with some papers in his hand which he quickly thrust inside his coat. Berthe stopped in the threshold in confusion and was about to leave with an apology when he called her name and, picking up the candle, ran towards her. It was Josephine, still dressed in the costume she had worn for the play.
‘Josephine, darling,’ Berthe exclaimed, ‘what are you doing up here all alone? Do hurry up and change. Everybody’s asking for you. Have you seen Sosthène?’
Josephine shook her head. Taking the candle from her, Berthe saw that she had been crying. The track of a tear had run through one side of the moustache that was still pencilled along her upper lip. Berthe touched it with her forefinger and saw that it was wet.
‘I – I didn’t want to go back to the ball . . .’ Josephine began. Breaking off, she threw her arms round Berthe’s neck and put her head on her shoulder in a sudden up-rush of weeping. Her hair came undone and fell down her back and her body was shaken by a deep and violent fit of tears. All Berthe could think of was saying ‘there, there, my angel’, folding her in her arms and stroking and comforting her as best she could.
Gradually this first wild intensity died down and subsided into a succession of wrenching and destructive sobs. At last Berthe tipped Josephine’s head back, swept the damp hair away from her forehead and dried the tears away with her handkerchief. Josephine grew calmer and Berthe ventured to ask her what was the matter.
Josephine heaved a long sigh. ‘It’s nothing,’ she kept repeating. ‘I’m such an idiot and please, please forgive me, my own darling Berthe.’ Berthe even managed with coaxing to conjure up the ghost of a rainy smile.
‘I can’t tell you how moving, how terribly touching she looked,’ Berthe said. ‘That damp cheeked little hidalgo with her wide violet eyes and that smudged moustache and her hair falling in a long black tangle over one shoulder! But she would not tell me what it was all about, and promised to let me know next day. Almost recovered now, except, occasionally, for a dry and shuddering sob, she kept gazing at me with that queer light-headed fixity. So I pointed to the billiards-room clock and said: ‘Look! It’s a quarter to three. Run upstairs and wash in cold water, darling, and change and come down again.’ She stiffened and made an effort to put on a brave face. ‘Shall I come and help you?’ She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said forlornly, ‘I’ll join you.’ I picked the candle up and we walked along the passage with our arms around each other’s waists. When we reached the foot of the stairs leading to the bedrooms, Josephine caught me by the shoulders and said, ‘Dearest darling, darling Berthe. Will you promise to love me always?’ I said of course I would. ‘Always, always?’ she repeated, putting her forehead against mine and gazing with such close fixity that her bright eyes under their single sweep of brow converged into one, like that of a cyclops. ‘Always, always?’ Then seizing me with a stronger grip than anything of which I had thought her capable, she gave me a long fierce hug. She broke away and caught hold of my hand and kissed it and then ran upstairs to her bedroom without looking round. I watched her running figure till all that was left were the little spurs twinkling on her heels in the candle light. Then they vanished in the darkness of the upper regions and I went slowly downstairs, wondering why she was so unhappy. I had forgotten all about the duel and Sciocca and Sosthène. . . .’
On the landing halfway down a tall fan-topped window, built during the interregnum when Saint-Jacques was an English colony, looked out over the tree-tops. It was hotter than ever and the sinister volcanic snow was still silently falling. The trees in shadow were as dark as ink. Every few seconds, a flicker from the Salpetrière, which was invisible at the other side of the house, cast a rufous glow over the tree-tops, all covered now with flakes of ash. The sound of singing, high carnival howls and the throb of drums rose from the town, and the great headdresses – the helms, now, under the white downfall, of Teuton Burgraves in the Lithuanian mists – were slanting and turning along the torchlit lanes. Beyond the lighthouse’s turning beam, the red port light of an anchored sailing ship hung high in the darkness.
•
The buoyant rhythm of a waltz and the rumour of talk and laughter drowned the tom-toms of Plessis as Berthe came downstairs to the lights of the ballroom. She found the Count standing in the hall, his hair ruffled and his eyebrows twisted up in obvious distress.
‘Really, Berthe,’ he said, leading her into an antechamber, ‘of all the things to happen, just when everything was going so well!’
Berthe asked what was the matter but he appeared not to have heard her.
‘The best ball we’ve ever had,’ he went on, ‘and now this comes along and ruins everything.’ He lowered his tall body despondently onto a sofa and, leaning an elbow on his knee, rested his bearded chin on his fist in an attitude of bewildered pensiveness. Somebody must have told him about the duel, Berthe thought. But it soon turned out to be something else.
‘I thought there was something queer about those black dominoes from the start,’ he went on. Completely at sea, Ber
the could stand it no longer. She sat down beside him on the sofa. ‘What about the black dominoes, Cousin Agénor?’
‘You haven’t heard? Thank God for that! Well, you noticed those black dominoes who came in with the carnival masques – the drunkest of the lot? Well, when the time came to unmask at half past two, I went down to their terrace with Gentilien to have a drink with the whole party. They did the usual caleinda and then off came the masks. Everything was very lively and gay. But the dominoes had all collected to one side and were about to slip away into the trees. The others saw them, and everyone shouted that the masks must all come off. A crowd of boys ran and pulled them back to the fireside. Everyone was laughing and Maman Zélie took charge and said they must each drink a full glass of rum as a forfeit. But they still refused to unmask and tried to run off again, so the others caught hold of them and the Roi-Diable ceremoniously threw back the first one’s domino and lifted off his mask. And,’ the Count lowered his voice, ‘what do you think?’ His voice fell still lower. ‘It was a leper. And when the other five were unmasked, they all turned out to be lepers as well. There was a terrified silence at first. Then – you can imagine the uproar . . . I tried to calm everybody down and sent Gentilien back to the house for Dr Vamel. The lepers were in such a condition they could hardly articulate. They had been loose in the town for the past five days, drinking hard all the time and never daring to join in the meals in case they were discovered. As you can guess, they were all as drunk as Poles, and it was very hard to make out how they got here. It seems that they came from the Desirade[8]. One of them had been there seventeen years. Some time last week they stole a boat and headed for Marie Galante, meaning to hide there in the dominoes (which they had prepared beforehand) for the first few days of carnival. When the search for them in the Desirade and in Guadeloupe had died down, they planned to slip across and stow away on the Brest packet from Pointe-à-Pitre,[9] and make their way to France. A myth has apparently grown up in the Desirade that a new cure for the disease has been discovered in France which the local authorities know nothing about or are wilfully withholding. . . . At all events, off they set, steered much too far south, missed Marie Galante and finally landed here at Cap d’Ivry. They made their way to Plessis under cover of night, living on dasheen and yam and breadfruit they had uprooted from the plantations and lying up in the forest till it was dark, arriving here five days ago, when they were able to put on their dominoes and come out of hiding. . . .
The Violins of Saint-Jacques Page 7