PAULA SAILS INTO THE SOUTH, SEEKING THE HOLY MAN OF SAINT PIERRE, WHERE
_LA MONTAGNE PELEE_ GIVES WARNING
Wonderfully strengthened, she was, by the voyage. Sorrow had destroyed
large fields of verdure, and turned barren the future, but its devouring
was finished. Quentin Charter was adjusted in her mind to a duality with
which Paula Linster could have no concern. Only to one mistress could he
be faithful; indeed, it was only in the presence of this mistress that
he became the tower of visions to another; in the midst of the work he
worshipped, Quentin Charter had heard the Skylark sing. Paula did not
want to see him again, nor Selma Cross. To avoid these two, as well as
the place where the Destroyer had learned so well to penetrate, she had
managed not to return to her apartment during the two days before
sailing.... There would never be another master-romance--never again so
rich a giving, nor so pure an ideal. Before this tragic reality, the
inner glory of her womanhood became meaningless. It was this that made
the future a crossing of sterile tundras,--yet she would keep her
friends, and love her work, and try to hold her faith....
Bellingham did not call her at sea, but he had frightened her too
profoundly to be far from mind. The face she had seen in the hall-way
was drawn and disordered by the dreadful tortures of nether-planes; and
awful in the eyes, was that feline vacancy of soul. Once in a dream, she
saw him--a pale reptile-monster upreared from a salty sea, voiceless in
that oceanic isolation, a shameful secret of the depths. The ghastly
bulk had risen with a mute protest to the sky against dissolution and
creeping decay--and sounded again....
To her, Bellingham was living death, the triumph of desire which rends
itself, the very essence of tragedy. She gladly would have died to make
her race see the awfulness of _just flesh_--as she saw it now.... His
power seemed ended; she felt with the Reifferscheids and Madame Nestor,
that her secret was hermetic, and there was a goodly sense of security
in the intervening sea....
And now there was a new island each day; each morning a fresh garden
arose from the Caribbean--sun-wooed, rain-softened isles with colorful
little ports.... There was one tropic city--she could not recall the
name--which from the offing had looked like the flower-strewn gateway to
an amphitheatre of mountains.
The _Fruitlands_ had lain for a day in the hot, sharky harbor of
Santiago; had run into a real cloudburst off the Silver Reefs of Santo
Domingo, and breathed on the radiant next morning before the stately and
ancient city of San Juan de Porto Rico--shining white as a dream-castle
of old Spain, and adrift in an azure world of sky and sea. She spent a
day and an evening in this isle of ripe fruits and riper amours; and
took away materials for a memory composite of interminable siestas,
restless radiant nights, towering cliffs, incomparable courtesy, and
soft-voiced maidens with wondrous Spanish eyes that laugh and turn away.
Then for two days they had steamed down past the saintly
archipelago--St. Thomas, St. Martin, St. Kitts; then Montserrat,
Guadeloupe, Dominica, and a legion of littler isles--truncated peaks
jutting forth from fragrant, tinted water. There were afternoons when
she did not care to lift her voice or move about. Fruit-juices and the
simplest salads, a flexible cane chair under the awnings, a book to rest
the eyes from the gorgeous sea and enchanted shores, somnolence rather
than sleep--these are enough for the approach to perfection in the
Caribbean, with the Lesser Antilles on the lee.... Then at last in late
afternoon, the great hulking shape of Pelee loomed watery green against
the sky; in the swift-speeding twilight, the volcano seemed to swell and
blacken until it was like the shadow of a continent, and the lights of
Saint Pierre pricked off the edge of the land.
At last late at night, queerly restless, she sat alone on deck in the
windless roadstead and regarded the illumined terraces of Saint Pierre.
They had told her that the breath from Martinique was like the heavy
moist sweetness of a horticultural garden, but the island must have been
sick with fever this night, for a mile at sea the land-breeze was dry,
devitalized, irritating the throat and nostrils.
There was no moon, and the stars were so faint in the north that the
mass of Pelee was scarcely shaped against the sky. The higher lights of
the city had a reddish uncertain glow, as if a thin film of fog hung
between them and the eye; but to the south the night cleared into pure
purple and unsullied tropic stars. The harbor was weirdly hot.
Before her was the city which held the quest of her voyaging--Father
Fontanel, the holy man of Saint Pierre.... _Only a stranger can realize
what a pure shining garment his actual flesh has become. To me there was
healing in the very approach of the man...._ This was the enduring
fragment from the Charter letters; and in that dreadful Sunday night
when she began her flight from Bellingham, already deep within her mind
Father Fontanel was the goal.... Paula set out for shore early the next
morning. The second-officer of the _Fruitlands_ sat beside her in the
launch. She spoke of the intense sultriness.
"Yes, Saint Pierre is glowing like a brazier," he said. "I was ashore
last night for awhile. The people blame the mountain. Old Pelee has been
acting up--showering the town with ash every little while lately. It's
the taint of sulphur that spoils the air."
She turned apprehensively toward the volcano. _La Montague Pelee_, over
the red-tiled roofs of Saint Pierre, looked huge like an Emperor of the
Romans. Paled in the intense morning light, he wore a delicate ruching
of white cloud about his crown. They stepped ashore on the Sugar Landing
where Paula found a carriage to take her to the _Hotel des Palms_, a
rare old plantation-house on the _Morne d'Orange_, recently converted
for public use.
The ponies were ascending the rise in _Rue Victor Hugo_, at the southern
end of the city, when Paula discovered the little Catholic church she
had imaged for so many weeks, _Notre Dame des Lourdes_, niched away in
the crowded streets with a Quebec-like quaintness, and all the holier
from its close association with the lowly shops. From these walls had
risen the spiritual house of Father Fontanel--her far bright beacon....
The _porteuses_, said to be the lithest, hardiest women of the occident,
wore a pitiable look of fatigue, as they came down from the hill-trails,
steadying the baskets upon their heads. The pressure of the heat, and
the dispiriting atmosphere revealed their effects in the distended
eyelids and colorless, twisted lips of the burden-bearers.
The ponies at length gained the eminence of the _Morne d'Orange_, and
ahead she saw the broad, white plantation-house--_Hotel des Palms_. To
the right was the dazzling, turquoise sea where the _Fruitlands_ lay
large among the shipping, and near her a private sea-going yacht, nearly
as long and angelically white. The broad verandas of the hotel were
alluring with palms; the walls and portcullises were cooled with
embroidering vines. Gardens flamed with poinsettias and roses, and a
shaded grove of mango and India trees at the end of the lawn, was edged
with moon flowerets and oleanders. Back of the plantation-house waved
the sloping seas of cane; in front, the Caribbean. On the south rose the
peaks of Carbet; on the north, the Monster.
Paula had hardly left the veranda of magnificent vistas two hours later,
when the friendly captain of the _Fruitlands_ approached with an elderly
American, of distinguished appearance, whom he presented--Mr. Peter
Stock, of Pittsburg.
"Since you are to leave us here, Miss Wyndam," the captain added, "I
thought you would be glad to know Mr. Stock, who makes an annual cruise
around these Islands--and knows them better than any American I've
encountered yet. Yonder is his yacht--that clipper-built beauty just a
bit in from the liner."
"I've already been admiring the yacht," Paula said, "and wondering her
name. There's something Venetian about her dazzling whiteness in the
soft, deep blue."
"I get it exactly, Miss Wyndam--that 'mirage of marble' in the Italian
sky.... My craft is the _Saragossa_." His eyelids were tightened against
the light, and the voice was sharp and brisk. His face, tropically
tanned, contrasted effectively with the close-cropped hair and mustache,
lustrous-white as his ship.... Paula having found the captain's courtesy
and good sense invariable during the voyage, gladly accepted his friend,
who proved most interesting on the matter of Pelee.
"I've stayed here in Saint Pierre longer now than usual," he told her,
pointing toward the mountain, "to study the old man yonder. Pelee, you
know, is identified with Martinique, much the same as the memory of
Josephine; yet the people of the city can't seem to take his present
disorder seriously. This is cataclysmic country. Hell--I use the word to
signify a geological stratum--is very close to the surface down here.
All these lovely islands are merely ash-piles hurled up by the great
subterranean fires. The point is, Lost Atlantis is apt to stir any time
under the Caribbean--and rub out our very pretty panorama."
"You regard this as an entertainment worth waiting for?" Paula asked.
The vaguest sort of a smile passed over his eyes and touched his lips.
"Pelee and I are very old friends. I spoke of the volcanic origin of
these islands in the way of suggesting that any seismic activity in the
archipelago--Pelee's present internal complaint, for instance,--should
be taken significantly. Saint Pierre would have been white this
morning--except for the heavy rain before dawn."
"You mean volcanic ash?"
"Exactly."
"That explains the white scum I saw in the gutters, driving through the
city.... But it isn't altogether a novelty, is it, for the mountain to
behave this way?"
"From time to time in the past ten days, Miss Wyndam, Pelee has had a
session of grumbling."
"I mean as a usual thing----"
He turned to her abruptly and inquired, "Didn't you know that there
hasn't been a sound from Pelee for twenty years before the month of
April now ending?"
This gave intimacy to the disorder. Mr. Stock was called away just now,
but after dinner that night he joined Paula again on the great veranda.
"Ever been in Pittsburg?" he asked.
"No."
"I've only to shut my eyes in this second-hand air--to think I'm back
among the steel mills of the lower Monongahela."
"The moon looks like beaten egg," Paula said with a slight shiver. "They
must be suffering down in the city. You're the expert on Pelee, Mr.
Stock, please tell me more about him."
He had been regarding the new moon, low and to the left of the Carbet
peaks. It had none of the sharpness of outline peculiar to the tropics,
but was blurred and of an orange hue, instead of silvery. "It's the
ash-fog in the air which has the effect of a fine wire screen," he
explained. "We'll have a white world to-morrow, if it doesn't rain."
They turned to the north where a low rumbling was heard. It was like
distant thunder, but the horizon beyond Pelee was unscathed by
lightning.
"Are you really worried, Mr. Stock?"
"Why, it's as I said. The fact that Pelee is acting out of the ordinary
is quite enough to make any one skeptical regarding his intentions."
He discussed familiarly certain of the man-eaters among the mountains of
the world--Krakatoa, Bandaisan, Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, AEtna, calling them
chronic old ruffians, whom Time doesn't tame.
"A thousand years is nothing to them," he added. "They wait, still as
crocodiles, until seers have built their temples in the high rifts and
cities have formed on their flanks. They have tasted blood, you see, and
the madness comes back. Twenty years is only a siesta. Pelee is a
suspect."
"I think I should prefer to hear you tell the treachery of volcanoes
outside of the fire-zone," she declared. "It's like listening to ghost
stories in a haunted house."
Pelee rumbled again, and Paula's fingers involuntarily started toward
his sleeve. The heavy wooden shutters of the great house rattled in the
windless night; the ground upon which they stood seemed to wince at the
Monster's pain. She was conscious of the fragrance of roses and magnolia
blooms above the acrid taint of the air. Some strange freak of the
atmosphere exerted a pressure upon the flowers, forcing a sudden
expulsion of perfume. The young moon was a formless blotch now in the
fouled sky. A sigh like the whimpering of many sick children was audible
from the servants' cabins behind the hotel.... Later, from her own room,
she saw the double chain of lights out in the harbor--the _Saragossa_
pulling at her moorings among the lesser craft, like a bright empress in
the midst of dusky maid-servants; and in the north was Vulcan struggling
to contain the fury of his fluids. She was a little afraid of Pelee.
Very early abroad, Paula set out on her first pilgrimage to _Notre Dame
des Lourdes_. Rain had not fallen in the night, and she regarded a white
world, as Stock had promised, and the source of the phenomenon with the
pastelle tints of early morning upon his huge eastern slope. She had
slept little and with her face turned to the north. A cortege had passed
before her in dream--all the destroyers of history, each with a vivid
individuality, like the types of faces of all nations--the story of each
and the desolation it had made among men and the works of men.
Most of them had given warning. Pelee was warning now. His warning was
written upon the veins of every leaf, painted upon the curve of every
blade of grass, sheeted evenly-white upon the red tiles of every roof.
Gray dust blown by steam from the bursting quarries of the mountain
clogged the gutters of the city and the throats of men. It was a moving,
white cloud in the river, a chalky shading that marked the highest reach
of the harbor tide. It settled in the hair of the children, and
complicated the toil of bees in the nectar-cups. With league-long
cerements, and with a voice that caused to tremble his dwarfed
companions, the hills and _mornes_, great Pelee had proclaimed his
warning in the night.