From my window in the old Rue du Bois-Morin,--which climbs the foot
of Morne Labelle by successions of high stone steps,--all the
southern end of the city is visible as in a bird's-eye view. Under me
is a long peaking of red-scaled roofs,--gables and dormer-windows,--with
clouds of bright green here and there,--foliage of tamarind and
corossolier;--westward purples and flames the great circle of the
Caribbean Sea;--east and south, towering to the violet sky, curve the
volcanic hills, green-clad from base to summit;--and right before me the
beautiful Morne d'Orange, all palm-plumed and wood-wrapped, trends
seaward and southward. And every night, after the stars come out, I see
moving lights there,--lantern fires guiding the mountain-dwellers home;
but I look in vain for the light of Père Labat.
And nevertheless,--although no believer in ghosts,--I see thee very
plainly sometimes, thou quaint White Father, moving through winter-mists
in the narrower Paris of another century; musing upon the churches that
arose at thy bidding under tropic skies; dreaming of the primeval
valleys changed by thy will to green-gold seas of cane,--and the strong
mill that will bear thy name for two hundred years (it stands solid unto
this day),--and the habitations made for thy brethren in pleasant palmy
places,--and the luminous peace of thy Martinique convent,--and odor of
roasting parrots fattened upon _grains de bois d'Inde_ and
guavas,--"_l'odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_"...
Eh, Père Labat!--what changes there have been since thy day! The White
Fathers have no place here now; and the Black Fathers, too, have been
driven from the land, leaving only as a memory of them the perfect and
ponderous architecture of the Perinnelle plantation-buildings, and the
appellation of the river still known as the Rivière des Pères. Also
the Ursulines are gone, leaving only their name on the corner of a
crumbling street. And there are no more slaves; and there are new races
of colors thou wouldst deem scandalous though beautiful; and there are
no more parrots; and there are no more diablotins. And the grand woods
thou sawest in their primitive and inviolate beauty, as if fresh from
the Creator's touch in the morning of the world, are passing away; the
secular trees are being converted into charcoal, or sawn into timber for
the boat-builders: thou shouldst see two hundred men pulling some forest
giant down to the sea upon the two-wheeled screaming thing they call a
"devil" (_yon diabe_),--cric-crac!--cric-crac!--all chanting together:--
"_Soh-soh!--yaïe-yah!
Rhâlé bois-canot!_"
And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been
changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the
eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and
violet sea,--and the jewel-colors of the perpetual hills;--the same
tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still
blow over Sainte-Marie;--the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle
and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this
land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of
it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even
as were thine own. Père Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the
sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of tropic
dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm
wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent
flickering of the great fire-flies through the lukewarm darkness, when
mothers call their children home.... "_Mi fanal Pè Labatt!--mi Pè
Labatt ka vini pouend oi!_"
[Illustration]