H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ The rock, weed-grown and emerging from the water, had for a base a column thicker than a man’s body, a column here dazzling bright and flower coloured, here dim and darkened with growing fucus; a column whose lowermost part was lost in the vagueness of the lagoon. The Moco, who had flung himself down and was leaning over the reef ledge so as to see better, gave a start. His sailor’s eye, after the first surprise, saw through the mystery of the rock growing like a hideous flower on a coloured stalk. The rock was the foretop of a ship, the column was the coral-crusted mast. ”

“ Away out there in a right line from where Gaspard was sitting beneath the palm trees, under the blinding dazzle of sea, the Rhone was lying with her bottom ripped out, her boilers burst, her boats hanging smashed at her davits; a horrible travesty of a ship, knocked under the sea as if with the blow of a giant’s fist, a raffle of ropes, machinery, and corpses.
The gods had been very good to Gaspard and Yves, and Gaspard had, by the direction of the gods, been the salvation of Yves. The whole catastrophe had come like a clap of thunder on a moonlit sea. ”

“ The warm wind blew steadily sparkling up the blue, the incredible blue of the sea; the scull-blades, immersed half a foot in the water, were tinted with azure, the floating scraps of seaweed were tinted with indigo; a man floating a yard deep would have shewn like a form of lazulite.
Gaspard had drawn in his sculls; free of the island now, what use was there in rowing? He had no idea of direction, North, South, East or West. His only chance, so he told himself, lay in his sighting a ship. ”

“ Mountains springing to life against a sky still showing a trace of stars, the cloud turban of Pelée, first a luminous haze like some vast nebula just born, then a burning fleece of gold. Then, just as though the shadows of night were a garment unloosed and let slip, the great mountain undrapes itself and stands a cone of emerald green, a pyramid of colour in the blue and voiceless sky.
St. Pierre is still in shadow, but the whole eastward side of the island is burning in the sun. St. Pierre has its feet in the Caribbean Sea, but Grande Anse is washed by the Atlantic. ”

“ It was a siffleur de montagne. She paused and looked in. The great garden, once carefully tended, had gone to decay, the lianas hung like ropes between the trees; palmiste and tree fern, cedar and locust, all were roped and tangled by the lianas, the scent of vanilla came on the air from the green gloom, vanilla, and green orange, wet mould, the sad odour of decaying leaves.
It was a wonderful and mysterious place, the Jardin des Plantes; laid out when Versailles was filled with courtiers, beautiful when Josephine, not yet an empress, walked its paths, nothing dreaming of Napoleon or her fate ”

“ Sagesse, as he said the last words, changed completely, and in a moment, the bon bourgeois vanished, his upper lip raised slightly, disclosing the teeth. Just in that moment he shewed himself what he was, not a villain of romance, but that much more terrible individual, the petty trader, heartless, careful, calculating. The squid of society that, living on crabs and shell-fish, will, when opportunity offers, seize and devour a man.
What numbed the mind of Gaspard was not fear of the authorities, but fear of Sagesse and astonishment at his methods. ”

“ So still seemed everything that one might have fancied the islet wrapped in idyllic peace; but it was the peace that broods over fermentation. The air over the sands was shaking in waves and a faint hum of insect life came from the bushes. A torrid and tremendous pyramid of light stood upon nature, crushing her to silence yet unable to stifle her faint fret and murmur.
At four o’clock Gaspard was standing at the end of the little pier of coral reef just at the place where he had been standing yesterday, when Yves’ voice had called him to see the treasure. ”

“ Great exertion often leaves the mind clear to perception: the passions, desires, and craving of life are stilled and over the resting body the mind floats clear of perception, lazy, alive to feeling, but half dead to thought.
He took his pipe from his pocket—the same pipe he had been smoking beneath the palm trees that day when Yves, returning from the north of the islet had flung the crabs beside him on the sand—filled it and lit it, whilst Marie, beside him, her hands folded and resting upon her knees, sat, her eyes gazing at the road before her yet seeming not to see it. ”

“ Stung suddenly to madness, with the tears upon his face, he left the tent and sought the beach outside, walking up and down it like a frenzied creature, cursing, calling out, wild with the petty things that had him in their grip, the little Fates that had bound him to this islet as the Lilliputians bound Gulliver. He saw nothing of his own handiwork in this fate which he cursed; he saw nothing of the grave faults of mind, the weaknesses, the impetuosities that had flawed his life, killing Yves, and binding him to the will of Sagesse ”

“ So strange a thing is the human mind that here, cast away, marooned on this desolate spot without a tent to shelter him or a soul to share his loneliness, his first sensation on fully regaining his faculties was one of triumph. Sagesse had gone under, that hateful mind, perfidious and dark, would trouble him no more. He was revenged. He rose to his feet and shook the sand from his clothes. The wind was still blowing strong, but the sea had fallen. The gulls had not returned, and the only sounds in all that blue and breezy world were the sounds of the wind and the breaking waves. ”

“ The Provençal rarely grows old, he withers at last in the sun and comes to die, but the child in him remains a child; imaginative, impulsive, easily moved to laughter or tears, good or naughty, with a passion for colour, and movement, and sound, and exaggeration. And so he remains a poet in his way.
Go all over the earth, and you will find man imitating the insect in this particular, that he is the colour of the leaf he was born on. Gaspard was the colour of Provence, and all the coal-dust of the stokehold, the sordidness of the life had not altered his essential colour ”

“ Broken bits of gold like the twigs from which jewelled fruit had been torn, spinels, peridots, star sapphires, slab-shaped emeralds, cinnamon stones, a black pearl shaped like a pear, diamonds, an enormous turquoise de la vieille roche sun-stricken, coloured, flashing, the treasure of Simon Serpente lay before Gaspard, other treasure there doubtless had been in coin and gold, but this was the cream of it, skimmed by Sagesse, selected no doubt during that calm behind which the sailor’s eye had seen the approaching hurricane. ”

“ The blue distance, the green, curling waves, the blowing wind; it is the only thing that never grows old; unspoiled by time or change, it is to-day as it was when Jason sailed it, when Helen knew it, when the blue-painted triremes clashed beaks at Salamis in the morning of the world.
When we first saw Gaspard, a stoker fresh from the Rhone, sitting under a palm tree smoking and waiting for Yves, he was a man who would have been moved not at all by the youth and spirit of this morning sea ”

“ From the muffler around the neck of Sagesse protruded the head of a snake. Two bright red burning eyes flashed in the sun, the thing seemed furious at being disturbed; a moment more and one would have expected it to wriggle from its concealment and strike, but Gaspard feared it less even than he had feared the fer de lance of the Place du Fort. He knelt down beside Sagesse, heedless of the crabs now surrounding him, removed the muffler from his neck and then removed the snake. It was of solid gold, flexible, one of those antique bracelets made to wind round and cling to a woman’s arm. ”

“ No other sensation is at all like the feel of a sailing ship beneath one’s feet. The steamer is a dead weight driven by an alien force, its progression is a continual insult to the wind and the sea, but the sailing ship is one with the sea and the wind, her motion is fluent, fresh, and part of the eternal movement of nature. As Gaspard stood with his eyes fixed on the distant Haitian coast, Sagesse came out of the deck-house and gave him good-morning. ”

“ Sharks do not follow nigger ships, they say. Gaspard did not know or care; he watched the depths like a man mesmerised, seeing, scarcely seeing, not caring what he saw. He was thinking of Marie,—Marie of Morne Rouge, from whom this cursed ship was taking him moment by moment further away and against his will.
217 He was brought back from his thoughts by one bell striking and by the shadow of the cook bearing dinner from the galley to the deck-house.
Canned beef stewed with carrots formed the repast, with the eternal bananas of the tropics. Sagesse was hungry, and therefore silent. ”

“ Just as the ever-changing light of day made ever-changing10 beauties, so did the ever-changing air, and ever-changing tide; at low tide with a strong breeze every reef would speak and you would hear a sound that once heard you would never forget, the song of a hundred tiny shores, the tune of the reefs. Sometimes in those great low tides in which we fancy the moon and the sun hauling together at the heavy blue robe of the sea, as if to make her shew her hidden armour and her scars, the reefs would be fully exposed, razor-edged, hungry, and lean. ”

“ Grey and dead she seemed, lying there in the diamond-clear emerald of the water, but the lagoon this morning was gay with fish, parrot-fish, gropers, flights of coloured arrows, sapphire, ruby and emerald-tinted ghosts.
34 The swell of the incoming tide came slobbering over the reef; shutting one’s eyes one might have fancied a giant shuddering and catching his breath and sobbing to himself.
Gaspard stood for a long time watching the moving life of the lagoon, absorbed, as a child might be before the contents of an aquarium. ”

“ At the approach of night the air had become filled with sound. The woods were beginning to awake. The cabritt bois, the great beetles that boom amidst the tamarinds, the thousand insects of the night were tuning up, the fireflies were drifting in clouds above the grenadilla blossoms and, now, as though a door had been suddenly shut, night filled the world and the stars the sky. When they reached the turn of the road leading down to St. Pierre Gaspard paused. ”

“ Towards noon a shoal of them chased by some enemy broke the water to starboard; one passed right over the boat, soundless in flight, swift, brilliant against the blue, with staring sightless eyes; a phantom from the deep pursued by a phantom, definite for a moment and hard to the sight as a jewel, gone like a ghost the moment after, made one again with the blue sea.
The wind tempered the heat of the sun, long strips of seaweed floated past lazily, and a turtle that had been sunning itself basking on the water’s surface, slipped away and vanished as the boat drew near. ”

“ He stood, and, shading his eyes, he swept the horizon—not a trace of sail or smoke could he see. The sky, of a burning emerald just above the sea-line, swept up into the burning blue, and from sea and sky, like the breath from a great blue mouth, came the warm wind. It felt like a woman’s hot fingers playing with his hair, like a woman’s warm arm cast round his neck.
From the southeast with the wind, now loud, now low, came the crying of the gulls. ”

“ Sagesse, with the prospect of a hard day’s work on the morrow, was already in his and snoring. The deck was in charge of Jules.
For a long time Gaspard could not sleep, haunted by the thoughts of the morrow. Notwithstanding his hatred of the island and his half-formed resolve to have no share in the treasure, the treasure had already laid ghostly hands upon him. No man can withstand the fascination of the near presence of free gold. Men may be cold to women, to wine, to sin, but gold hidden and to be had for the finding is a magnet for all men, even as it was for Gaspard. ”

“ You can fancy how beautiful it was, this garden in the old day, scented, languorous, sunlit, twilit, filled with the notes of193 the bell bird and the siffleur de montagne, the whisper of the trees and the voice of the waterfall.
As certainly as there were flowers in that garden there were lovers; men fought and killed one another in the allée des duels; what a volume of romance lay here brightly written, vivid in colour, of which remains nothing but a few torn leaves; faded pictures where the forest had half blotted out the garden paths and the glades from which the statues have vanished. ”

“ Then he sat and contemplated the glittering battalions of his treasure. White, red, blue, the blue of the turquoise,268 the wine colour of the amethyst, the black of the pearl, he feasted his eyes on them all. Then, turning on his back, shutting his eyes and casting his right hand backwards across them, he laughed.
He could see them almost better with his eyes shut. That was the most delightful and extraordinary moment in his life, it would have been in any man’s life; coloured Fortune, real, tangible Fortune, Fortune in her most beautiful guise at his elbow and the whole blue world before him ”

“ He fetched a pen and inkhorn from the locker, and made just over the islet the form of a tiny cross, then he put the chart, pen and ink back in their places and came on deck.
The moon had risen, still a crescent but strong enough to flood the sea with light. Jules had relieved the man at the wheel, and stood a dusky ghost before the yellow binnacle light, the wind still held and had even strengthened a little, and in the silence of the night the click of the rudder chain, the wash of the water at the bow, and the occasional groan of hemp-rope and block could be heard. ”

“ Yes, he was alone, no one was watching him; no one was there to dispute his possession; the wind blew and the bay-cedar bushes bent before the wind, the sun shone, the sea burned blue and flashed beneath the sun. In all the island world there was no sign or sound of life save the flickering wings of the cormorants on the northern beach and occasionally their cries.
Loneliness no longer had terrors for him, the sight of a ship at this moment would have flung him into consternation. ”

“ If a fiend had dropped from the sky and stridden the bowsprit, he might have emitted such a laugh at La Belle Arlésienne, her captain, her crew, and her venture before putting his blight upon the vessel and whooping into the sea.
Gaspard glanced at the steersman. He was a big negro, naked to his waist in the hot night, a colossal figure touched by the binnacle light. Whether he heard or whether he did not hear it was impossible to say; he shewed neither sign nor movement, with the exception of the movement of the great right hand upon the wheel spoke, now visible, now fleeting into darkness. ”

“ Sagesse knew the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic that includes the Bahamas as well, almost, as he knew the heart of the lower order of mankind. He knew from his own knowledge, and leaving the chart aside, that there was only one islet about here from which a boat could drift or be rowed in the course of a day to the point where he had picked up his new acquaintance. He knew the island by sight, too, the clump of seven palm trees, the white sandy beach, and the murderous reefs. ”

“ To see her life and work, one must follow her as, leaving the Rue Victor Hugo, up through the steep and twilit streets, she passes, moving as no woman can move who does not walk bare-footed, passing with the silence of a ghost and the grace of Atalanta, giving good-day to every one she meets, friends or strangers, up, up, past the Rue Peysette, the Rue Petit Versailles, till the houses begin to disappear and the road turns from a street to a country road set on either side with balisiers, gigantic ferns, whispering canes ”

“ Finotte and Lys; the corrossole sellers; the merchants and traffickers; the coloured crowd; the little children—nothing spoke of them here.
And, still, far above him went the mountain of ashes, the broken streets, walls that had once been houses, charred stumps that had once been palm trees. And still he climbed. He had cast off his coat, never thinking of the treasure in its pocket, he had forgotten all that, even Marie had become vague as a ghost in his mind. ”

“ All this time, steadily as the tide, the sun had been sinking; he had dropped through a dazzling azure sky and he was now hanging almost in touch with the western horizon, a ball of fire in a sky of dazzling gold; momently the gold of the sunset took possession of the sky, spreading up, up, till the very zenith was reached, and down, down, till the gilding reached the eastern sky line. The world now seemed clipped in the cup of a great golden flower, and the little ripples that came sighing in round the low tide reefs showed their foam like fleeces of gold. ”

“ You pass on; the shops surround you90 again, and the crowd and the voices; you reach a little square, a cube of colour; in its centre like a diamond flower forever in motion, the jet of a fountain plays in the sun, plays and sings to itself like the spirit of a happy child; and here where human voices are less loud you hear the sound of other fountains, the sound of rivulets, runnels racing by the side walks, pipes that empty into moss-grown channels all drawing their water from Mont Pelée, fatherly, and seated far above the great torrential woods, sky-throned, and turbaned with cloud. ”

“ The sea has a hundred voices, Gaiety, Triumph, Strength, Sadness, Regret, the wave speaks them all. But stand on a day like this on a desolate island in the tropics and listen to the voice that steals from all that splendour of light and gaiety of colour, the violent heaving wastes of water, the triumphant sun, the sky of living blue, through all these, from all these you will hear a voice, it is borne by the languid voice of the sea.
It is the voice of Loneliness. ”

“ Yet, but a few weeks ago, Pelée was youthful with foliage, the canotiers were paddling in the sapphire bay, the city was waving its flags to the sun, mirroring its coloured houses in the water. The children were singing their songs and telling their Tim-Tim in the streets. The market-place was gay with life, the gardens gay with colour, the streets with laughter and over all hung the poetry of eternal summer. And now all that was with Thebes, with Nineveh—a world of ashes, desolation, silence. ”

“ Despite her age, despite the decks so yellow stained by time that plank and dowel were of the same colour and indistinguishable, despite the sails all cut and patched, the old barquentine had still a look of buoyancy and life caught from the brave morning light and the flooding azure of sea and sky.
The smell of tar and bilge and rope, the groan of rubber and creak of mast brought up for Gaspard the vision of the Tamalpais and his early youth. ”