"Doudoux, you swore to me by Heaven!--doudoux, you swore to me by your
faith!... And now you cannot come to me?... Oh! my heart is withering
with pain!... I was passing by the cemetery;--I saw my name upon a
stone--all by itself. I saw two white roses; and in a moment one faded
and fell before me.... So my forgotten heart will be!"...
The air is not so charming, however, as that of a little song which
every creole knows, and which may be often heard still at the river: I
think it is the prettiest of all creole melodies. "To-to-to" (patois for
the French _toc_) is an onomatope for the sound of knocking at a door.
"_To, to, to!_--'Ça qui là?'
--'C'est moin-mênme, lanmou;--
Ouvé lapott ba moin!'
"_To, to, to!_--'Ça qui là?'
--'C'est moin-mênme, lanmou;--
Qui ka ba ou khè moin!'
"_To, to, to!_--'Ça qui là?'
--'C'est moin-mênme, anmou;--
Laplie ka mouillé moin!'"
[_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self
Love: open the door for me."
_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self
Love, who give my heart to thee."
_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"Tis mine own self
Love: open thy door to me;--the rain is wetting me!"...]
... But it is more common to hear the blanchisseuses singing merry,
jaunty, sarcastic ditties,--Carnival compositions,--in which the African
sense of rhythmic melody is more marked:--"Marie-Clémence maudi, Loéma
tombé, Quand ou ni ti mari jojoll."[28]
--At mid-day the màchanne-mangé comes, with her girls,--carrying trays
of fried fish, and _akras_, and cooked beans, and bottles of mabi. The
blanchisseuses buy, and eat with their feet in the water, using rocks
for tables. Each has her little tin cup to drink her mabi in.... Then
the washing and the chanting and the booming of the fessé begin again.
Afternoon wanes;--school-hours close; and children of many beautiful
colors come to the river, and leap down the steps crying, "_Eti!
manman!"--"Sésé!"--"Nenneine!_" calling their elder sisters, mothers,
and godmothers: the little boys strip naked to play in the water a
while.... Towards sunset the more rapid and active workers begin to
gather in their linen, and pile it on trays. Large patches of bald rock
appear again.... By six o'clock almost the whole bed of the river is
bare;--the women are nearly all gone. A few linger a while on the
Savane, to watch the last-comer. There is always a great laugh at the
last to leave the channel: they ask her if she has not forgotten "to
lock up the river."
--"_Ou fèmé lapòte lariviè, chè--anh?_"
--"_Ah! oui, chè!--moin fèmé y, ou tanne?--moin ni laclé-à!_" (Oh
yes, dear. I locked it up,--you hear?--I've got the key!)
But there are days and weeks when they do not sing,--times of want or of
plague, when the silence of the valley is broken only by the sound of
linen beaten upon the rocks, and the great voice of the Roxelane, which
will sing on when the city itself shall have ceased to be, just as it
sang one hundred thousand years ago.... "Why do they not sing to-day?" I
once asked during the summer of 1887,--a year of pestilence. "_Yo ka
pensé toutt lanmizè yo,--toutt lapeine yo_," I was answered. (They are
thinking of all their trouble, all their misery.) Yet in all seasons,
while youth and strength stay with them, they work on in wind and sun,
mist and rain, washing the linen of the living and the dead,--white
wraps for the newly born, white robes for the bride, white shrouds for
them that pass into the Great Silence. And the torrent that wears away
the ribs of the perpetual hills wears away their lives,--sometimes
slowly, slowly as black basalt is worn,--sometimes suddenly,--in the
twinkling of an eye.
For a strange danger ever menaces the blanchisseuse,--the treachery of
the stream!... Watch them working, and observe how often they turn their
eyes to the high north-east, to look at Pelée. Pelée gives them
warning betimes. When all is sunny in St. Pierre, and the harbor lies
blue as lapis-lazuli, there may be mighty rains in the region of the
great woods and the valleys of the higher peaks; and thin streams swell
to raging floods which burst suddenly from the altitudes, rolling down
rocks and trees and wreck of forests, uplifting crags, devastating
slopes. And sometimes, down the ravine of the Roxelane, there comes a
roar as of eruption, with a rush of foaming water like a moving
mountain-wall; and bridges and buildings vanish with its passing. In
1865 the Savane, high as it lies above the river-bed, was flooded;--and
all the bridges were swept into the sea.
So the older and wiser blanchisseuses keep watch upon Pelée; and if a
blackness gather over it, with lightnings breaking through,
then--however fair the sun shine on St. Pierre--the alarm is given, the
miles of bleaching linen vanish from the rocks in a few minutes, and
every one leaves the channel. But it has occasionally happened that
Pelée gave no such friendly signal before the river rose: thus lives
have been lost. Most of the blanchisseuses are swimmers, and good
ones,--I have seen one of these girls swim almost out of sight in the
harbor, during an idle hour;--but no swimmer has any chances in a rising
of the Roxelane: all overtaken by it are stricken by rocks and
drift;--_yo crazé_, as a creole term expresses it,--a term signifying
to crush, to bray, to dash to pieces.
... Sometimes it happens that one who has been absent at home for a
brief while returns to the river only to meet her comrades fleeing from
it,--many leaving their linen behind them. But she will not abandon the
linen intrusted to her: she makes a run for it,--in spite of warning
screams,--in spite of the vain clutching of kind rough fingers. She
gains the river-bed:--the flood has already reached her waist, but she
is strong; she reaches her linen,--snatches it up, piece by piece,
scattered as it is--"one!--two!--five!--seven!";--there is a roaring in
her ears--"eleven!--thirteen!" she has it all... but now the rocks are
moving! For one instant she strives to reach the steps, only a few yards
off;--another, and the thunder of the deluge is upon her,--and the
crushing crags,--and the spinning trees....
Perhaps before sundown some canotier may find her floating far in the
bay,--drifting upon her face in a thousand feet of water,--with faithful
dead hands still holding fast the property of her employer.
[Footnote 27: It was I who washed and ironed and mended;--at nine
o'clock at night thou didst put me out-of-doors, with my child in my
arms,--the rain was falling,--with my poor straw mattress upon my
head!... Doudoux! thou dost abandon me!... I have none to care for me.]
[Footnote 28: See Appendix for specimens of creole music.]
[Illustration]