The Violins of Saint-Jacques

by PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

SUMMARY. — Mademoiselle Berthe de Rennes is in her seventies and in a reminiscent mood when she tells the story of Saint-Jacques, a rich, fabulous little island in the Caribbean, where in the 1890s she had gone to serve as governess to the children of the Count de Serindan.

Berthe was twenty-four at the time of the Serindans’ Shrove Tuesday Ball, the climax of the carnival season and the social function of the year. The Count, who was the leader of the rich creole landowners, had been waging a long and successful feud against the vulgar politician, Valentin Sciocca, the Governor of the island, but for the sake of peace he had been persuaded to invite the Governor and his flashy wife to the ball. The Count would not have been in so festive and forgiving a frame of mind had he known that his eighteen-year-old daughter Josephine was passionately in love with Marcel Sciocca, the Governor’s brutish son. Josephine has confided all tins to Berthe, who has been keeping an eye on the lovers while the ball is in progress.

10

IT WAS the custom of the Shrove Tuesday masques in Saint-Jacques to range through the town on the last night of carnival, 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 gravecloths, 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 octoroons dressed in splendor, some wearing the tight marmalade-colored turbans with the ends tied in three jutting spikes that signified, for those who understood the sign language, amorous complaisance to all comers. Scarlet and saffron and black were the predominating colors, and many of the girls had crimson hearts painted on their cheeks. All were masked. Recognizable 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 kills of sugar cane and balisier. A number of the 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 white dress, festooned in saltire with necklaces of colored 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.

Copyright 1953, by John Murray, Ltd.

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 masked 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 shack-shacks: 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 Kas: rum kegs with skins stretched over either end. Others, bestriding long wooden tom-toms, moved forward, like ungainly insects, in little bounds. 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. Lastly a dozen zombies bore, aloft and horizontal, a giant tomtom 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, 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 — peruked 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 places to have been filled by the warriors, the witch doctors, and the blood-red splendor 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 and all 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 clangor, the dancers fished gourds of rum and tafia from their disguises and took quick pulls and even offered them to their neighbors and to the guests that stood nearest. Many of them had been drinking all through the last days of carnival and were now in a state of amiable and harmless drunkenness.

“Incidentally,” Bert he 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 froglike postures, with their cheeks laid against those of their partners. 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 (he pitiless and long-drawn-out hail of massed impacts.

11

THE party from Government House, who had never seen such a sight, were bewildered. The Governor kept repeating that it was “fort intéressant, 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, ees gens la,” she cried to the Count at her side.

Positions were soon taken up for a bélé, a dance that 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: —

“Missie lé comte li bon béké.
Et Maitw’ Moustache ka wien savé,
Hié sol’ 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 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 — 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. The Governor was led through the complicated steps by the experienced bands of La Belle Doudou, the most resplendent and prosperous of the disguised matadores. The astonishing headdresses, turning and nodding now in conjunction with the feathers and aigrettes of the creole ladies, while the spikeended 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.

This breakneck maelstrom slowed down in cries and clapping and laughter and Gentilien, the mulatto butler, shouted that supper was ready. The masques danced 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.”

12

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 traveling across the zenith of the sky. On the hair-thin and just descriable line of the horizon beyond the silently spinning trunks, the Aegean 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 prenatal 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 suppertime 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 malapropos, 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. Toward 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 misgiving which I found impossible to unravel. All this was complicated by the presence of Sosthène, the Serindans’ eldest son. 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. As it was, I was too fond of him to be able to pack him off; 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 centered 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 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 upward at the angrily flaming crater (burning, it seemed, every minute brighter), dive down the Salpêtrière. 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 fifteen-year-old 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 his friend Captain Henri Joubert 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 roles to be changed round. She had seemed so set on it that, slightly bewilderod, 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.

“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 humor 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 tight knot and she had drawn a curly mustache 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, quo c’était faramineux! 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 Salpêtrière 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 upward and then down again as it broadened and lost its shape and subsided. A wide stream of lava burned its way down from the crater’s rim.

This diversion was greeted, as though it were a firework display, with claps and shouts, and when it had passed, the dance swept forward with a new vigor. It looked as if the volcano itself were conspiring with the Count to add luster 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.

13

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 Jacobean stuffed heron with petunia-colored 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 cases. Over the chimney piece, 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 labeled 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 forefinger had alighted triumphantly on the skeleton leaf where the scarcely legible name of her own great-grandmother was inscribed: Athenais de Serindan, married in 1782 to the Chevalier Armand de Rennes, who was killed in the fighting at Nouaillé in the Vendée on the same day as La Rochejaquelein.) The rest of live room was a jungle of globes, astrolabes, telescopes, albums, ancient maps, sheet music, and old instruments of all kinds. Usually some newly arrived acquisition from Paris occupied the center 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 motorcar 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 vigor 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.

“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 shopwalker’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 rumor and unfavorable 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 lie 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 Francois, Berthe explained, were something of a problem to their family and to Jacobean society in general. They lived a wild file 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 organizing cockfights and contests between snakes and mongooses. Extremely likable 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 recognize his neighbor, 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 arm s length. He tilted his head to one side in a posture of facetious scrutiny and read out loud the legend printed underneath. “The execution at Vincennes, March twenty-first, 1804, of his Royal Highness the Due d’Enghien.” Looking up with the air of somebody about to append a witty footnote to a tedious text, he went on, “It wasn’t really worth while to knock him oil’ twice.’ He raised the picture. “It’s like flogging a dead horse, as you might say. ‘

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 Due 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. But 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 good will 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 fell 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 alter 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 tine p-p-p-plaisantewie quo je ne g-goute que m-mmediocwement.” 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 arc y-you only m-mediocrely am-m-inused?”

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 toward him and croaked, “B-b-because you’re a f-f-filthy s-swine.” 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 lury. 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-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 toward the French window. His second made as though to follow him, but Sciocca held up Ids hand with a murmur of “Later on!” Then saying “A domain” 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 nonplused, 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 toll 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 had been going so rosily.

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.

The 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 feathersoft ash that often followed any unusual activity of the Salpêtrière. It glittered in daylight like hoarfrost, and the Jacobean Negroes used to call it saltpeter 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.”

14

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 toward 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 mustache that was still penciled 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 uprush 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 to say was “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, dampcheeked little hidalgo with her wide violet eyes and that smudged mustache 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 lightheaded fixity. So I pointed to the billiards-room clock and said: ‘Look! It’s a quarter to three. Bun 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 wo 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 1 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 was the little spurs twinkling on her heels in the candlelight. 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 SaintJacques was an English colony, looked out over the treetops. 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 Salpêtrière, which was invisible at the other side of the house, cast a rufous glow over the treetops, all covered now with flakes of ash. 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 rumor 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. “I really think it’s the best ball we’ve ever had!" he said. “Everything has gone right from the start. I was afraid for a moment we might have trouble with Gontran and his brother. You know what they are. But, no — everything is going capitally.” He paused a moment, and then said, rather cautiously: “You know, Madame Sciocca is a most delightful woman. Don’t you think so:'

“Well . . .” Berthe began.

The Count raised his hand. “I know’! You haven’t had time to get to know her yet! But she s a charming creature and so intelligent and amusing and very well read too! I’m sure you’ll like her. And we were all totally wrong about the Governor too — he’s quite a nice old stick, apart from his infernal politics — though, I’m bound to admit, rather a bore. ... Of course nobody knows where the money comes from. But, I must say, I don’t think I could ever get to like that ghastly son of his. He gives me gooseflesh. I don’t wonder his wife stayed behind in Paris.”

“His wife?”

“Yes, quite a nice little thing, she sounds. But I’d be ready to bet a thousand louis that lies a vilain monsieur. What do you make of him?

“I think he’s terrible.”

“Do you? Do you really?” He spoke as though Berthe’s answer revealed a new aspect of Marcel Sciocca that had not previously been manifest, “I am sure you’re right.” The subject dropped and the Count hummed the tune of “Quand I’amour revient” which the band was playing, for a few seconds. “They are all enjoying themselves, that’s the great thing. Except,” his brow clouded, “poor Josephine. I don’t know what’s the matter with that child. I went up to get some more cigars about an hour ago and there she was, mooning about by herself in the billiards-room passage. She leaped at my neck and embraced me as if her last hour had come. Do you know what’s the matter?”

“No, I don’t, Cousin Agénor.”

“ Well, whatever it is, I hope she’ll get over it soon. Then there’s Sosthène. Wandering about ever since he got back like a mute at a funeral! Why, at his age, on a night like this, I’d have been through a dozen collars by now! Berthe, you’re so clever and sensible, I wish you’d get them out of it.” The Count took one of her hands and held it fora moment between both of his. “You know how happy Mathilde and I would be if you and Sosthène . . . Well, there’s plenty of time to talk about that”

He put her hand gently back on her lap and, taking two water ices from a tray held out by Gentilien, he gave one of them to Berthe.

“Do try this,” he said, “it’s a new sort I am experimenting with — it’s made out of mangoes and flavored with kirsch. And just imagine, in three weeks’ time the motorcar will be here! Think of all the picnics we’ll have . . .” The Count’s face, radiant once more, seemed to reflect the shining prospects ahead. It was suddenly distorted with a rictus of anguish. “A-yi!" he exclaimed. “What a mess they are making of that tune! And we practiced it scores of times. I must go and lend a hand.”

He leaped agilely to his feet and, catching sight of his reflection in a long art nouveau looking glass surrounded by a plaster relief of lotus leaves and poppies, he said: “I’m a complete scarecrow.” He flattened his disordered hair, straightened his Maltese Cross, smoothed his mustache, and combed his strong forked beard with his fingertips.

“Really, this snow,” he murmured, dusting some flakes from his shoulders; “we might be at Chamonix.” Then his mind jumped back to the motorcar. “And we could drive up the Salpêtrière to the sulphur springs and bat he! Perhaps I ought to have ordered two motors. . . . After all, there’s got to be room for the servants and the tent and the food. . . . Berthe, do go and tell Sosthène and Josephine about it. Nobody knows yet, and it might cheer them up. Tell them everyone’s asking for them.”

A few moments later he was through the door and on the orchestra platform with one of the Negroes’ violins under his chin, alternately fiddling and beating the measure with his bow, and reviving by word and example the strayed rhythm of the “ Washington Post.”

Gentilien was still standing behind the sofa. Once again Berthe was struck by the resemblance between the two men that centered on that thick single bar of joined eyebrow. He had made signals that he had something important and private to tell her, as he handed the ices, and Berthe had done her best to hasten Monsieur de Serindan back to the ballroom. Gentilien was agitated. “Mademoiselle Berthe,” he began, holding out an envelope, “Numa Pompilius has just discovered this.” Berthe took the letter. It was a thick envelope, addressed to her, with a big blue J entwined with embossed forget-me-nots on the back. “He discovered it in the wire letter box behind the front door which was hooked back, so nobody would have seen it until tomorrow, if Numa had not gone there for a broom to sweep some ashes away. Mademoiselle Josephine has been so strange lately — Fanette is very anxious and I am frightened something might happen to her. . . .”Berthe, meanwhile, after struggling to tear the envelope with her finger, ripped it open with the handle of the ice spoon. It contained several smaller envelopes addressed to the Count and the Countess and the other children and a sheet of paper with a message that ran as follows: —

MY DEAREST DARLING BERTHE. When you read this tomorrow, my darling, I will be on my way to Paris and I am marrying him the second we get there. Please do not be cross or hate me but love me always and come and see me. I’ll write at once and please, please explain everything to Papa and Maman. I can’t help it darling, it’s my fate, and you will love him as much as I do when you all know him. I kiss you tenderly again and again my darling only Berthe, Your JOSEPHINE.

There were swollen smudges in places where tears had fallen on the ink, and two lines of crosses. Then in a different-colored ink: —

I have just said good-by to you darling at the bottom of the stairs. You are so kind to me. I wish I were dead and I kiss you again and love you always. J. X X X X X

(To be concluded)