THE MAGIC TOWN
He was awakened next morning by the roar of the anchor-chain through
the hawse-pipe.
Five minutes later he was on deck.
_La Belle Arlésienne_, steered by magic hands during the night, had
raised some magic horizon and passed it to anchor in paradise. So it
seemed to him as his eyes travelled from the cloud turban of Mont Pelée
coloured by the dawn, and followed the tumbling woods, the cascades of
leaping foliage high, far off, dark in shadow, falling to the hillside
city; and the city breaking from the woods, falling street by street
to the harbour’s edge; palm-tops peeping above the red-tiled roofs;
houses, shadows, palms; tracery of gardens, squares, step flights
from street to street; old moss-grown flights of steps, old gardens
and scraps of gardens giving shelter to the grenadilla and the fleur
d’amour; old houses, heavy-built and lightly coloured, all stretching
from the great high woods to the very edge of the shadowy harbour in
whose depths the blue of night still lay.
The blue of night—though the sky above Pelée was ablaze with the
morning blue. Over on the east of the island at Grande Anse the morning
was already full and splendid, but here the shadow of peak and morn
held everything in magical _chiara oscuro_. The city, seen as though
through a vague veil of gauze, seemed asleep, yet it was burning
with early morning life, and Gaspard, as he watched, could see the
moving figures of people, forms trickling down the steep flights of
steps leading from street to street, and swarming by the sea-steps and
harbour side.
Held, just for a moment, in this curious twilight lingering in the
shadow of Pelée, whilst all the sea world beyond flashed to the
sun-blaze of the tropics, the old sea-city of St. Pierre hanging,
literally, between sky and sea, between dawn and night, between the
present and the past, shewed to the mind those pictures of suggestion
which lie in tapestry and verse.
Gaspard had never seen anything at all like this. He had seen many a
tropic town where the galvanized tin roof of the trader, or the rigid
outlines of the Methodist meeting house broke crudely through the
beauty of palmiste and orange. But St. Pierre lay before him beautiful,
absolutely beautiful, like a dream city set in Wonderland.
Nothing could be more wonderful than those torrential woods far up
above the houses, woods of balisier and palm, tamarind, ceiba, and
giant fern; lianas cable thick, air shoots, all climbing in the
twilight, and leading the eyes to the slopes of Pelée and the peak,
cloud-wreathed and burning in the blue.
Nothing could be more strange or more poetical than the city reaching
from these woods to the shadowy sea.
Other vessels were anchored in the harbour, boats were putting out from
the shore; now, clear and sharp-cut, through the vague noises of early
morning came the note of a bugle from the fort, and from a sailing-ship
away to starboard the clank of capstan pawls and the cry of sailors
hauling on the halyards.
With and through everything came the perfume of the land, earth and
tropic flowers, jasmine and vanilla scents, mixed with the scent of the
sea.
Gaspard turned from the city and looked westward. Beyond the shadow
of the island the sea lay in the bright daylight, shewing beneath the
emerald ring of the horizon the virginal blue of early morning.
As he turned, Sagesse left the deck-house and stood for a moment
looking on the land before speaking to his companion.
“Better than the stokehold,” said the Captain, who had put on a clean
suit of white drill, and a shore-going and holiday manner; “better than
the engine-room, _vé_! Look, the _canotiers_ are putting off and the
port officers will be aboard us before we have finished breakfast.”
Jules appeared, as he spoke, from the caboose, bearing a steaming
coffee-pot; they went into the deck-house for the meal, and before
it was half through and, as if to bear out the truth of Sagesse’s
prediction, the port officers arrived.
They came into the deck-house, where Sagesse served them with vermouth
and cigarettes; they seemed to know Sagesse as a friend, and bill of
lading or bill of health seemed to trouble them very little as far as
Gaspard could judge, who, in the middle of the cigarette smoking and
exchange of news, left Sagesse to his friends and came on deck.
He found a new St. Pierre. Colour had stolen over the slopes of Pelée;
light had stretched out her hand and torn away the veil of twilight. A
burst of blue struck him in the face as he left the dingy deck-house. A
sky of blue, a sea of blue, triumphant, crystalline, dazzling, and in
the midst of this world of leaping lazulite, St. Pierre standing like a
dreamer awakened by the sea.
Awakened from where the high woods were rocking and singing in the
morning wind, to where the breeze-swept harbour was lipping ship side
and quay with the flash of sapphire satin.
One could see, so clear was the air, the tiles on the red-tiled roofs
and the palm fronds bursting above them; a flag was flickering above
some consulate, the palm-tops were dancing to the breeze that bore on
its hot breath the scent of earth and trees and the sounds of the city
that seemed less a city than a daring aquarelle, blindingly beautiful,
triumphantly bright.
Round the _Belle Arlésienne_ _canotiers_ were paddling; banana-coloured
children in little coffin-shaped canoes made out of old packing-cases,
canned meat cases, anything in the form of a box that could be cut into
the form of a canoe. They were chattering to the black sailors, and
when they saw Gaspard they shouted to him to fling them coins to dive
for, but before he could put his hand in his pocket Sagesse and the
port officers left the deck-house.
The newcomers had offered to row Sagesse and Gaspard ashore, and the
captain had evidently told them of the fate of the _Rhone_, for, as
they crossed the harbour, Gaspard found himself an object of interest
and plied with a hundred questions. At the sight of Sagesse the little
_canotiers_ had dispersed in every direction, and now, as they rowed,
Gaspard could hear the thin voices of the children chanting a song;
he caught the word “Sagesse” repeated over and over again, but the
lisping _patois_ and the breeze dimmed all else but the spirit of the
ballad—Derision. Sagesse was not, evidently, a favorite with the
_canotiers_ of St. Pierre, yet, to look at him seated by the port
doctor, a cigar in his mouth and his thumbs stuck in his waist-belt,
one might have fancied him a man to whom children would run by instinct.
He was in grand good humour this morning; so was Gaspard; so, too,
seemed the port officers. The joyous city seemed to radiate gaiety;
the languor of midday had not yet fallen upon it and it laughed like a
child awakened by a kiss on a bright morning.
The harbour-side was crowded; naked children, half-naked men, black
men, banana-coloured men, apricot-coloured men, chattering in that
French worn smooth which is the language of the French West Indies, a
language in which _Monsieur_ becomes _Missie_, _Maman_, _Manmam_, and
_France_, _Fouance_.
Amidst the ‘longshoremen, the idlers, the _canotiers_, fishermen, and
boatmen, strayed the forms of a few women, bright as tropic birds,
graceful in striped foulards and jupes of exquisite colours, their
wasp-yellow turbans striking the eye forcibly, the brightest points in
a picture surcharged with colour and blinding light.
Sinbad never landed at a stranger port than this, so vividly real, so
far removed from the commonplace, so filled with the presence of the
past.
Romance sat on the very sea-steps, and as Gaspard landed he felt what
every man who ever landed at St. Pierre must have felt vividly or
vaguely—her touch.
Sagesse, bidding good-day to the port officers, struck uptown
accompanied by Gaspard. Uptown, by flights of old steps, worn,
moss-grown, shadowed by the black shadows of houses and roofed with a
ribbon of blinding azure sky, everywhere the sound of running water
from the thousand conduits and fountains, everywhere the sound of the
sea echoing as in the whorl of a great shell.
The stepways led to streets, lines of blazing light and colour,
verandahed, broken by black house shadows, filled with coloured people
of all shades, all hues, from the muletresse to the chabine; all busy,
moving, drifting, chattering, buying or selling, finely formed,
graceful as the palmistes.
Then more steps haunted by fountain and sea sounds, and they entered a
river of light—the Rue Victor Hugo.
Gaspard, as he reached the street, looked back down the steep and
twilight vico they had ascended, and saw the harbour, liquid shadow on
which, seeming suspended in air, floated _La Belle Arlésienne_.
It was like a picture closing the first chapter of his life; the sea,
and the island, and the ever-crying gulls, dead Yves, the stokehold,
Marseilles, all lay there. Here was a new land and the beginning of a
new existence. The sea, the island, the man he had slain—all beyond
there. It all seemed remote, done with forever; yet it was close to
him, potently alive in the form of Captain Sagesse, and able to stretch
out a hand and touch him on the shoulder if so it chose.