Georges

by Alexandre Dumas

  “Georges!” he cried. “In the name of heaven, my son, are you here? Speak to me!”

  “It is I, Father,” replied a voice that was weak but calm. “It is I.”

  Pierre Munier turned and saw Georges leaning against the door frame, so pale that for an instant the father thought he was looking at his son’s ghost. He took an involuntary, frightened step backward. “In the name of heaven,” he murmured again, “what has happened to you?”

  “A serious wound—but rest assured, Father, not a fatal one. As you see, I can walk and stand—but not for very long.” Then, in a whisper, “Help me, Laïza. My strength is quite gone.”

  He sank back into the Negro’s arms. Pierre Munier darted to his son’s side, but Georges had already fainted. With typical bravery, the young man had been determined that his father would see him on his feet, even as he weakened almost to the point of death. It was not mere pride that had propelled him; his love for Pierre Munier was so great that he had feared the sight of him prostrate might kill the old man—so, despite Laïza’s protests, as he and his comrades neared the Munier house he had risen from the litter on which he had been carried all the way from Petite-Montagne and, with a superhuman effort, walked to meet his father. As he had wished, Pierre Munier had been calmed by seeing him upright; but the show had entirely drained Georges’s remaining strength.

  The father’s grief at his son’s loss of consciousness was terrible to see. It was too deep for words, too deep for tears; silent and despairing. They laid Georges on a sofa, and the old man knelt beside him, supporting his head and holding his hand, his eyes fixed on the young man’s closed lids, his breathlessness echoing his son’s. He asked nothing about the revolt or the exact cause of Georges’s injuries; all that mattered now was that his boy had been seriously hurt—that he lay here wounded, bleeding, unconscious—and that he might not survive. What else could possibly matter in the face of such a grim truth?

  Laïza stood at a corner of the sideboard, leaning on his musket and looking out the window for the first signs of daylight. The other Negroes, who had respectfully withdrawn from the room after placing Georges on his couch, huddled in the adjoining chamber or outside near the window, looking in from time to time on their fallen leader. Many bore wounds of their own, some of them serious, but they seemed ignorant of these in their concern for Georges.

  More and more Negroes arrived at the plantation as the hours went by; the rebels, after scattering in the woods to avoid being captured or killed, had been drawn to the Munier house like a flock of sheep to the fold. By four o’clock that morning there were nearly two hundred men on the grounds.

  Georges eventually regained consciousness and tried to reassure his father with a few murmured words, but his voice was so weak that Pierre Munier, anxiously imploring him to keep still despite his desperate desire to hear the young man’s voice, could no longer refrain from asking about the nature of the wound his son had received, and the name of the doctor who had dressed it. With a smile and a feeble motion, Georges pointed to Laïza.

  In the colonies, as we know, there are many Negroes who are such skillful surgeons that even the whites prefer their services to those of conventional physicians. These primitive men who pose such a challenge even to trained doctors, similar to our shepherds, spending as much time as they do outdoors, invariably stumble upon secrets of nature that are unknown to other men. Laïza was such a man, known throughout the island as a capable surgeon. His fellow Negroes attributed his skill to magic; the whites trusted his knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs and plants. Pierre Munier was a little easier in his mind when he found out that it was Laïza who had tended to Georges’s wound.

  Daybreak was drawing near, and Laïza appeared more and more anxious. Finally he could suppress his impatience no longer. He went to Georges and, under the pretext of taking his pulse, spoke to him in whispers. Pierre Munier looked at him. “Is there something you need, my friend?”

  “He is afraid I will fall into the hands of the whites, Father,” replied Georges. “He wants to know if I feel strong enough to be taken to the Great Woods.”

  “The Great Woods?” Pierre Munier exclaimed. “And you as weak as you are? No, it is impossible!”

  “I am afraid there is no choice, Father, unless you wish to see me arrested before your eyes.”

  “And if they arrested you, what would happen to you?” Pierre Munier inquired nervously.

  “They would seek immediate revenge upon the wretched mulatto who has dared to oppose them,” Georges replied, “and who—for a moment—has made them afraid.” He smiled weakly. “I imagine they would give me the mild punishment of cutting off my head on the plaine Verte.”

  The old man turned white and shook visibly. “Take you away, my Georges, and cut off your head? All because you are more handsome, more brave, more learned than they? No! Let them come and try it!”

  With an energy he would not have been thought capable of five minutes earlier, he seized the rifle he had not fired in sixteen years. “Yes, let them come! We shall see what happens then! The whites have taken everything from me! They robbed me of my self-respect, and I let them do it. They might have killed me and I would not have reproached them with my dying breath. But to take my son, to imprison him, torture him, execute him? Never! I have half a century’s offenses to avenge! It is time to settle accounts!”

  Georges raised himself up on his elbow, a feverish gleam in his eye. “Father! Once again, you have become the man I always knew you to be!”

  “Let us all go to the Great Woods,” said Pierre Munier, “and we shall see if they dare follow us there. Come, my son! The woods are much preferable to the town—for there we are under the eye of God, and may he watch over us and judge our cause.” He turned to the waiting Negroes. “As for you, my children, have I not always been a good master to you?”

  “Yes, yes!” they cried.

  “Have you not said a hundred times that I am less a master than a father to you?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Then it is time to prove your devotion!” Pierre Munier cried.

  “Only command us, master,” the blacks roared. “We will obey!”

  “Come in, all of you,” commanded Georges’s father.

  The room quickly filled with blacks.

  “Look,” the old man continued, “gaze upon my son, who has laid down his life to make you free men! You see how he has been rewarded! Now the whites seek to tear him away from me, wounded and defenseless! Will you protect him? Will you swear to die for him, and with him, if you must?”

  “Yes, yes!” every voice cried.

  “To the Great Woods, then!” Pierre Munier commanded.

  “To the Great Woods!” echoed the blacks. Several of them hastened to fetch the bamboo litter and placed Georges gently upon it. With Laïza in the lead, they set out, Pierre Munier bringing up the rear. The house was left open, completely abandoned of all human creatures.

  In a single body the Negroes marched, nearly two hundred of them, down the road from Port Louis to Grand Port and toward the foot of Mont le Milieu, at the mouth of the rivière des Créoles.

  As they approached le Milieu, Pierre Munier lagged behind a moment to climb a low hill and gaze one last time at the rich, gracious home he had left. His gaze swept up the fertile plains planted with sugarcane, manioc, and corn; the groves of grapefruit, jambosa, and takamaka trees, and the solid, majestic wall of the mountains that surrounded his property. He thought of the three generations of honest, industrious men who had worked to make his plantation the glory of the island, and he could not hold back a tear, and a sigh. Then, turning back with a determined smile on his lips, he strode to catch up with the litter bearing his wounded son, for whom he had now given up everything else.

  XXIV

  THE GREAT WOODS

  Just as the band of fugitives reached the source of the rivière des Créoles, dawn broke and the rays of the eastern sun shone on the rocky peak of le Milie
u. Every creature in the forest appeared to awaken at the same moment; with every step the Negroes took, tenrecs leapt from their hiding places and then back again; monkeys sprang chattering to the farthest leafy branches of one vacoa tree, then swung by their prehensile tails to cover great distances and land with marvelous accuracy in the safety of another tree. Woodcocks rose noisily into the air, and gray parrots uttered their harsh cries. Flamered cardinals shot through the air, sparkling like rubies. Nature, serene, carefree, eternally young and exploding with life, seemed to mock the transitory pains and agitations of mankind.

  After three or four hours of walking, the group halted on a plateau at the foot of a nameless mountain that tapered away into the riverbank. Hunger began to gnaw at them; fortunately, they had had ample opportunity to hunt during their trek through the woods. Some had used their sticks to club the mouse-like tenrecs, considered a delicacy by the blacks; others had killed monkeys or woodcocks—and Laïza had wounded a stag, which four men pursued and brought down in less than an hour. There would be plenty of food for everyone.

  Laïza now took advantage of the pause to change the dressing on Georges’s wound. As the group passed through the woods, he had gathered precious medicinal herbs and plants—the properties of which he alone understood—which he now crushed together with a rounded stone in the hollow of a rock. Soaking a linen cloth in the juices, he applied this to the wound. Fortunately, the bullet had not lodged in Georges’s flesh—it had entered his body on the left side just below the rib cage and passed out slightly above the hip.

  Pierre Munier watched Laïza’s ministrations with deep anxiety. The wound was serious, to be sure, but not mortal. By all appearances, no internal organs had been damaged. In fact, it might even heal faster here than it would have in the city, under a licensed physician’s care. Still, the poor father could not help but feel agony at the sight of his son injured, and in pain. Georges, on the other hand, endured Laïza’s attentions without flinching; the hand his father held did not clench in pain even once.

  The dressing changed and the meal finished, the party set out again. Bearing Georges on his litter made their progress slow and laborious, and their footsteps left a path easy to detect on the uneven ground.

  They walked for almost an hour, following the bank of the rivière des Créoles, and, turning left, finally reached the edge of the Great Woods. Enormous mimosas and leafy ferns grew tall and thick between the trees, pushing even above the treetops here and there, and creeper vines hung draped like enormous serpents from the topmost boughs of the takamakas.

  The bamboo grew thicker and thicker and proved increasingly hard to pass through, especially for the men carrying the litter. Tree trunks seemed to form walls, and creeper vines entwined together to form barriers across the path. Georges, aware of the difficulty, protested that he could walk on his own, but his father pleaded with him—and Laïza ordered him—to lie back. In order to satisfy the devotion of one and the tenderness of the other, the sick man resumed his position on the litter. From time to time he asked again to be allowed to walk, but his voice grew weaker and weaker, and finally he fell silent.

  Difficult as it was for the band of Negroes to penetrate the forest, they did not complain, for the density of the woods also provided a measure of security. They were quite used to negotiating wildernesses such as this, whereas the soldiers pursuing them were British, accustomed to performing their maneuvers at champ de Mars and champ de Lort.

  Eventually, though, the rebels came to a dense wall of foliage through which even they could not pass. They contemplated hacking their way through it with an ax, but to do so would allow their pursuers to follow them more easily, so they decided against it.

  As they searched for a way through the barrier, they came upon a small, crude hut called an ajoupa, commonly built by hunters needing overnight shelter. Inside, the remains of a fire were still smoldering; evidently, other runaway slaves had been in the area quite recently. They could not be far away now.

  Laïza set out to follow their trail. We know how easy it is for savages to hunt the traces left by friend or foe across huge, lonely spaces. With single-minded determination, doubled over as he walked, he followed the bent blades of grass, overturned stones, and broken branches marking the path the earlier fugitives had taken—but all at once he came to a place where the traces vanished suddenly and completely. On one side of him was a stream that tumbled down the mountainside and emptied into the rivière des Créoles; on the other was a solid wall of rocks, stones, and brush, at the top of which the forest seemed denser than ever. Laïza crossed the rivulet and searched on the other side for the traces he had followed to its banks, but in vain. The blacks—for there were several of them—could not have gone much farther.

  Laïza tried again to scale the wall and succeeded to a point—but when he reached the top, he realized that it would be impossible for his group, some of whom were wounded, to follow him. He climbed back down and, convinced that the party he was searching for must be close by, called out the code names commonly used by runaway slaves to recognize one another.

  In a few moments he thought he could hear a slight rustling coming from the thickest part of the brush. The rocks that made up the barrier seemed to quiver. If Laïza had not been quite accustomed to solitude and the sounds of nature, he might have assumed that the wind was responsible for this slight movement of the undergrowth—but he knew otherwise. He gazed fixedly at the thicket in question and eventually discerned two eyes, which were staring back at him warily. He repeated the words he had called out a moment before, and the next instant a man slid noiselessly as a snake from his hiding place. It was, indeed, a runaway black.

  The two men spoke briefly, and then Laïza rejoined his companions. The group, in their turn, followed him along the path to the place where the runaway had been hidden. He was able to lead them to a particular spot in the wall of rocks, a few of which had been loosened for easy removal. The cavernous passage thus revealed led to a large clearing, and the rebels now moved, two by two, into this highly defensible space.

  When the last of them had entered, the runaway stranger replaced the stones in the wall exactly as they were before, so that not a trace of the entrance was visible. Then, clinging to the brush and protruding edges of the rocks, he scaled the wall and disappeared once again into the depths of the forest, leaving the two hundred fugitives so completely swallowed up in the belly of the forest that only the alertest of eyes would have had any chance of discovering them.

  Whether by one of those accidents of nature that occurs occasionally without man having any hand in the effect produced, or as a result of the long and diligent work of runaway blacks, the summit of the mountain now concealing the band of rebels was protected on one side by a wall of rock that served as a rampart and on the other by the wall of tree trunks, vines, and brush that had earlier been an insurmountable obstacle. The only navigable entrance was the one I have just described, and this was a cavern, entirely hidden by stones and brush. It was so well hidden, in fact, that neither armed colonists acting on their own behalf nor English soldiers acting on that of the government would have noticed it had they passed by it a hundred times. It was a refuge known only to fugitive slaves.

  On this side of the grotto and its impassable wall, the terrain was completely different. There were still towering trees and thickets, but these were not so dense that a path could not be forced through them. All the necessities of life were to be found here, despite the remoteness of the place; a waterfall tumbled sixty feet from the mountain’s peak to explode in clouds of spray upon the rocks, flowing away in rivulets and disappearing into the ground only to bubble up again outside the walls of the enclosure. Stags, boars, deer, monkeys, and tenrecs were plentiful; in the places where sunlight penetrated the foliage there were heavily laden grapefruit trees and cabbage palms whose fruit, when ripe, drops to the ground at the slightest breeze or shake of its trunk. If the fugitives could remain undiscovered, they
would have everything they needed to survive until Georges was well and could determine their next move. Whatever he might decide, the remaining rebels had pledged themselves to remain with him to the last.

  Severely wounded as he was, Georges retained his customary calm. He had examined their hiding place thoroughly and taken note of every advantage it offered. Once on the other side of the enclosure he called Laïza to his side, and they discussed how the grotto and the entrance cavern could be defended both inside and out by means of trenches, as well as booby-trapped with mines made from the gunpowder they had brought with them from Moka. Work on this project began immediately under Pierre Munier’s supervision, for Georges knew that his enemies would search relentlessly until they found him, and that they would not rest until he was bound hand and foot, and completely in their power.

  Thus the men set to work on the defensive measures they had planned, with Georges presiding passively and Pierre Munier actively over them.

  Meanwhile Laïza made an exhaustive tour of the mountain. It was almost entirely defended by steep and rugged rock formations; there was only one place where these might be scaled, and even then it would require ladders at least fifteen feet high. The path that led to the mountain was bordered by a sheer cliff, and would have been easily defensible if the rebels had numbered more than two hundred. As it was, they would have to confine themselves to protecting their natural fortress and the entrance into it.

  Dusk had fallen, and Laïza stationed ten guards at the entry and went to make his report to Georges, whom he found resting in a crude shelter that had been hastily built from tree branches. Work on the trenches was proceeding steadily despite the advancing darkness; twenty-five men stood sentinel around the enclosure, to be relieved every two hours during the night. Pierre Munier remained at his post in the cavern, and Laïza went to keep his own watch after changing the dressing on Georges’s wound.

  Thus the night passed anxiously, as everyone awaited whatever might happen next.