We have had a glimpse of France through a day at Martinique. The
principal feature of our visit was a wild motor-drive up an
eighteen-hundred-foot mountain. It was a steady climb from glory to
glory, with tropical forests on every side. Our method of progress was
not quite serene, for there was not a sufficient number of cars to
satisfy the demand.
After a long wait Dolly and I took a small mongrel sort of motor that
had been refused by all the Diana's passengers. The Creole driver,
handsome, debonair, persuasive, and fluent, though unintelligible,
assured us that he had ascended and descended the mountain hundreds of
times, a fact only too obvious to one who examined his means of
transportation. None of the tires matched, and two of them looked like
wounded soldiers just home from the front, displaying patches of
adhesive plaster and bandages of cotton and woolen rags of every
color, with an occasional inset of an alien material into the rubber.
One could catch a glimpse of a tin tomato-can neatly introduced in the
place of some vital bit of machinery; a Waterbury alarm-clock figured
in an unexpected position, apparently adding its power to the engine;
and there were stout ropes, here and there, which I never observed
before in the rigging of any motor.
I hesitated to enter, for the future, though not absolutely certain,
looked full of hope and promise; but Dolly was firm and reckless. I am
ten years her senior, but still young to be called a "'fraid cat" with
impunity; so I finally mounted the vehicle. The driver gave a gay,
insouciant tap to a front tire, as much as to say: "Courage, mon
enfant! C'est la derniere fois!"--then flung himself into his seat,
and, blowing a horn, started his base-hospital up the mountain at a
breakneck pace. The motor's own horn was out of commission, but there
was a substitute by the driver's side. It was easy for him to blow it
because he had no particular use for either of his hands, his steering
being left largely to chance. Repeated expostulations in
boarding-school French only elicited a reply that sounded like: "Soyez
tranquilles, mesdames. You speak American? Bien! Leezy est
parfaitement docile!"
This conveyed no idea to me, although his broad grin convinced me that
in his own opinion it was a subtle witticism. At length, however, it
burst upon Dolly, who went off into irrepressible gales of laughter.
"You have lived so continuously in a rarefied Winthrop atmosphere,
Charlotte, that you haven't any modern vocabulary. He is telling you
the pet name of his car, to give you confidence. Nobody ever dies in a
tin 'Lizzie.' Not only is the machine indestructible, but the people
that ride in it. Isn't the driver a witty, reckless darling?"
He was, indeed; and, incredible as it may seem, Lizzie ascended and
descended the mountain in safety--though only because a kind
Providence watched over us. Then, when we had paid the reckless,
danger-proof darling twice the sum he should have demanded, we sat on
a bench in the Savanna, where we could be quietly grateful that we
were alive and watch the coming and going of the Fort-de-France
townspeople, so unmistakably French, with the bright costumes of the
women, the pose of their turbans or hats, their sparkle and chatter
and vivacious gestures.
Here in the Savanna travelers always gather to look at the marble
statue of the Empress Josephine, which is called the greatest work of
art in the West Indies. That is not fatuous praise, perhaps, but the
figure needed the hand of no master sculptor to hold the eye and
captivate the imagination. It is mounted on a huge pedestal and is of
heroic size, the white glitter of its marble enhanced by its truly
magnificent setting, a circle of towering royal palms. There she
stands, the lovely Creole woman of Martinique, forever looking at
"Trois Islets," as if she were remembering her birth in an overseer's
shack and her girlhood passed in a sugar-mill. Straightway the crowds
of native men and women chaffering in the market-place, the mothers
holding up their crowing babies to the statue, the nursemaids and
groups of playing children, all vanished, and we re-lived in spirit
poor Josephine's past, thrilling anew at the remembrance of her
romance, her triumph, and her bitter sorrow--the Creole girl who
crossed the sea to become Empress of France and share a throne with
Napoleon, but who sailed back to her island home a brokenhearted
woman.
Good-bye, Martinique, land of Josephine; and land of St. Pierre, the
scene of one of the greatest tragedies of modern times, when the fury
of Mont Pelee engulfed the growth of centuries and buried forty
thousand human creatures in its scalding lava. St. Lucia, of the
Windward group, to-morrow, and then Barbados, from whence the Diana
goes on to Demerara and returns a week or so later, so that we are
able to rejoin her, taking up our former comfortable cabins and our
much-liked captain.
* * * * *
S.S. Diana
Between Barbados and New York
February 11
Here we are again on our homeward trip, making fewer landings and
briefer stops, principally to take on passengers and thousands of
barrels of limes.
Barbados, with its charming hotel at Hastings, was an unalloyed
delight; and Dorothea, who had determined to live in each of the
islands as it came along, would finally have transferred her
allegiance for good and all had it not seemed more loyal for an
American to choose one of our own possessions and "grow up with the
country." We found ourselves in the midst of pleasant, even
distinguished, society--British officials, ex-governors, and
judge-advocates of the various islands, English and Canadian soldiers
on sick-leave, and officers commanding the U-boat chasers in near-by
waters. Dorothea danced nightly and held court daily on the broad
piazzas, reminding me of Rudyard Kipling's fascinating heroine in an
Indian army post, who, whenever she appeared, caused the horizon to
become black with majors. Her head and heart remained true to the
absent Marmaduke--I am not so sure about her dancing feet!
Now that that experience is over, with the many others, we are at sea
and quiet again, with one tranquil day just like the other.
"What a honeymoon journey it would make, Charlotte!" said Dolly one
moonlight evening on deck. "It is so difficult to grow in knowledge of
people in New York or Washington. One doesn't even know one's self."
"All journeys must be good for honeymooners, don't you think?"
"Yes, in a way; but some places are created for lovers and newlyweds,
who are, after all, only explorers, Charlotte, forever discovering new
lands and annexing new territories."
"Yes; and sometimes falling into the hands of savages and cannibals, I
suppose."
"Yes; that must be terrible--the awakening to find that one has been
mistaken in a man!" sighed Dolly.
"I dare say we ought to worry lest men be mistaken in us; it might
happen, you know."
"Your mind is so logical, Charlotte! However, this voyage wouldn't
have to be idealized to meet the needs of honeymooners. In a Vermont
village where I sometimes stay I remember a girl who had to be married
on Sunday because she could not give up her position as
telegraph-operator till Saturday night. That was dull enough in all
conscience, but she was married in her high-school graduating dress,
and went to her grandmother's house, ten miles away, for her
wedding-journey. I think it required considerable inward felicity to
exalt that situation!"
I sat upright in my steamer chair. "Dorothea," I said sharply, "you
have been manufacturing conversation for the last five minutes--just
killing time for fear that I should ask you questions. Is there
anything on your mind? You have been absentminded and nervous for
days."
"Your imagination is working overtime, Charlotte," she answered. "We
are nearing home, that is all; and life presses closer."
I could not gainsay her, for every mile of ocean crossed makes my
heart beat faster. I seem to be living just now in a sort of pause
between my different lives. There is the heaven of my childhood in the
vague background; then the building of my "career," if so modest a
thing can be called by so shining a name; then the steady,
half-conscious growth of a love that illumines my labors, yet makes
them difficult and perplexing; and now there is a sense of suspended
activity, of waiting, with a glimmering air-castle rising like an
iridescent bubble out of the hazy future. Sometimes there are two
welcoming faces at a window and sometimes the indistinct figure of a
woman stretching out a forbidding hand, my chief's sister, who may not
want a third person in the family!
* * * * *