The Violins of Saint-Jacques Read online

  It goes without saying that the susceptible Count’s heart, in unison with those of most of the masculine creole population of Saint-Jacques, thumped faster at the sudden vision of his beautiful and unknown cousin, and when he, like they, received a kindly but inflexible negative, his disappointment was mitigated by thankfulness for his rescue from a situation which, his natural delicacy may have told him, would have been awkward and undignified. He was quite unaccustomed to his overtures ending thus in the past and his feelings changed to admiration and affection and an almost superstitious awe of Berthe’s good sense. She became his confidant and his counsellor on countless matters, and earned the lasting gratitude of the Countess. Madame de Serindan was a beautiful and kind-hearted creature resembling a drawing by Boldini or Helleu. Almost permanently ailing and not particularly clever, she spent much of the year at European watering places. She shared her husband’s wonder at Berthe’s sagacity. ‘They looked on me as a kind of oracle,’ Berthe said. Advising the Count about music and horses and the management of his estate – functions for which her upbringing had qualified her in a measure – and the Countess about servants and cooking and dressmaking, became as important a part of her new life as the bringing up of their children.

  It was inevitable, too, that the fourteen-years-old Sosthène, in a slightly more articulate fashion than the blind adoration of the other children, should fall in love with her – ‘all of which made my task a great deal easier’. (There was nothing boastful about these affirmations. They emerged more by implication as incidental illustrations to other points in her narrative than as direct speech.) Their education at the hands of some local Ursuline sisters and a resident abbé – a very nice man it seemed, but rather an old duffer, whom Madame de Serindan had summoned, to be tutor to Sosthène, from her parents’ house near Vauclin in Martinique – had been adequate but uninspired. M. l’Abbé’s chief activity in his old age was saying grace and acting as partner in the games of whist and picquet and bezique which helped to fill the Countess’s inexhaustible leisure. His instruction went little further than elementary Latin and the use of globes. Berthe, whose own schooling had been rather of the same kind as her charges, but carried far beyond it by the random and hungry reading of a solitary girl in the country and by a year in Paris, succeeded in changing this considerably. The girls were soon reciting long fragments of Racine and Molière, rattling away at the piano, the harp and the guitar, and drawing and painting and composing with an erratic brilliance that was common to the whole family except the poor Countess.

  In Berthe’s sketch-books they emerged at first as delightful children, turning, in the years these records covered, into pale beauties with lustrous black hair and large and long-lashed violet eyes. Their natures swung with startling and unpredictable motions from a rather dreamy creole idleness to an excess of animation over which it was difficult even for the capable Berthe to have any control. Everyone else had long since abdicated. Josephine was twelve, Lucienne nine and Solange eight. The youngest of the family, Anne-Jules, who was five when Mademoiselle de Rennes arrived, was the least tractable of all. He would vanish, in spite of threats of punishment, for hours at a time on mysterious expeditions with little negro boys of his own age – errands usually connected with animals, which he had a passion for and a curious knack of taming. Both houses were filled with odd pets. (The most remarkable were a family of manicous, the mother of which carried her dozen young about by twisting her tail parallel to her spine in order that they might loop their own round it and secure their positions on the parent back. A neat sketch demonstrated this performance.) The whole family, including the Count, who was the only one who had lived for any length of time in France, spoke with the queer and charming creole accent – a characteristic derived from the inability of their former slaves to pronounce the letter R. ‘It was a pure Incroyable accent,’ Berthe explained, ‘exactly like that of the dandies of the Directoire.’ Again and again I begged her to imitate the Count and the girls talking. ‘Ah, Be’the,’ she would mimic, ‘qu’est qu’on va fai’ de ce tewible cheval? C’est un vwai monstwe!’ and, ‘Ma petite Be’the chéwie, je n’appwendwai jamais la twigonométwie.’

  It became plain from the number of drawings, following her slow metamorphosis from a pretty little girl into a ravishing wild-eyed creature of nineteen, that Josephine was the governess’s favourite. Berthe did everything she could to conceal her preference. In time this became more than a preference and turned into a passionate friendship, protective and possessive on Berthe’s side, romantic, adoring and dependent on Josephine’s. Her three years’ seniority to the eldest of her sisters in a measure separated her from the other girls, and, as she grew older, with increasing freedom and permission to stay up late, it flung her more completely into the company of Berthe. After Sosthène’s departure for France, three years after Berthe’s arrival, to study for Saint Cyr (still desperately in love with his beautiful cousin and ex-governess), the two girls were seldom apart. Their friendship flourished by dint of numberless evenings sitting up late in their rooms at the top of the house. (I knew these upper regions well from the sketch-books – the tents of mosquito netting, the crucifix on the wall with its plaited palm-frond, the rosaries lying about, images d’Epinal cut out and stuck on the wall, a toy penguin and a couple of dolls superannuated and pensioned off on top of a cupboard; guitars and paint-boxes and the faded bindings of the Bibliothèque Rose, the elaborate West Indian dressing-tables, the upheaval of tree-tops under the windows.) Their intimacy was fostered by long rides through the waving avenues of sugar-cane and the nocturnal highwoods alive with fireflies. It was the world of Paul et Virginie: dark forests and sweeping savannahs, hot noondays and shadowy valleys between the mornes[4] and silver nights when the bamboos showered their silent expanding fountains towards the moon. Everything that an idyll possesses that is most primitive and innocent seemed to surround these girls, like a Garden of Eden on the volcano’s side. The Atlantic storms pounded to windward beyond the watershed, but the demesne of Beauséjour sloped peacefully between tree-feathered canefield and parkland. It was bounded by mountains and by ravines where the distant cascades fell through the gloom of the forest like shining horse-tails. Its western boundary was the calm leeward shore and the smooth sweep of the Caribbean Sea. Scattered across that blue expanse, the Desirade, Marie Galante and the little archipelago of the Saints trailed north and west. The horizon where the sun burnt itself out among the monumental clouds like a phoenix’s funeral that was resolemnised each evening stretched from the towering cloud-smothered Souffrière of Guadeloupe to the phantom spire of Morne Diablotin in Dominica. For Berthe and Josephine it was a miraculous region suspended in space, where everything – the forests, the sea, the air and the sunset – united in a favourable conspiracy. ‘All this may sound a bit silly,’ Mademoiselle Berthe suddenly broke off, ‘but it was the happiest time of my life. I asked nothing more than for it to go on for ever.’

  •

  It did, almost. For as long, that is, as anything was allowed to continue in Saint-Jacques. But, a few weeks before the ball in which all the island affairs culminated, something went wrong. This was in the early years of the present century. Berthe was twenty-four and Josephine eighteen. Relations between the creole squirearchy and the government administration from France, never very cordial, had been growing steadily worse. It had not been too bad in the past, for the Governor and his staff had been content to take the advice of the creoles on most matters; and, as Saint-Jacques, unlike many of the Antilles, had long been famous for the harmony of its internal affairs, all had gone well. But two years ago a new Governor, called Valentin Sciocca, and an entirely new staff, had been appointed. It was the time when Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes were the most prominent figures in French politics, the era of the Expulsion of the Congregations and the Affaire des Fiches; and Sciocca, an affluent professional politician of Corsican origin – formerly implicated, it was rumoured, in several shady affairs – was al
l that was most unacceptable to the Royalist and profoundly Catholic creoles: a radical, an anti-clerical, an atheist, a suspected freemason and an open Dreyfusard. (‘He was right on the last point of course, as all the world knows,’ said Berthe, ‘and the Jacobeans were wrong. But feelings ran very high at the time.’) His manner and his general vulgarity, it appeared, were as disagreeable to the creoles as his political associations. What was perhaps stranger at first glance was his lack of success with the negro population. A herald of reform and a noisy demagogue at every chance he could find for a public speech, he was politely clapped each time, but frustrated in the implementation of his measures by obstructiveness among the black officials and among the labourers themselves. He was maddened at every turn by the reiteration of ‘fô dimandé ça à Messié le Comte’. As the popular mayor of Plessis, the Count’s position was strong. As head of the creoles and a figure beloved by the whole island, it was invincible. He availed himself of it with savage delight, rubbing his hands at each fresh reverse of ‘ces cwapules de métwopolitains’. Sciocca he never referred to except as ‘cet animal corse’. It was the most exciting and satisfactory sport with which he had yet experimented and the administration of the island was soon at a standstill.

  ‘The pity,’ Berthe went on, ‘was that Sciocca wasn’t a bad fellow really. But he had the manners of a cab-driver and less tact than a boot.’ The whole island began to suffer from this deadlock and soon the administrative body and the creoles themselves began to wish with equal fervour that the feud between the Count and the Governor would end. Something had to be done. ‘It was patched up in the end,’ Berthe continued, ‘partly by me, partly by the Captain.

  ‘Haven’t I told you about the Captain?’ She turned the pages of a sketch-book and handed it across to me. ‘There you are: Henri Joubert, capitaine de fregate en retraite, Beauséjour, 1898 – the year he settled in Saint-Jacques. He was a well-known writer and poet, though few people read him now. He specialised in outlandish settings – islands, deserts, pagodas, icebergs and so on, in a most melodramatic style. I don’t expect you have ever come across any of his books – Dans le Bled, Aurore Boréale, Crépuscule du Bosphore, Chandernagore and Les Tonkinoises. I never cared for them much, but we were all very fond of the Captain himself.’

  It was a very detailed sketch. The author’s face, one eyesocket expanded with a ribboned eyeglass, gazed deep-eyed from the page. The hair, parted in the middle, swept away in two curling wings and a little moustache was twisted up musketeerishly above a mouth with many curves whose benignity and humour belied the bristly overshadowing challenge. One hand, emerging from a stiff striped cuff fastened with large cameo links, trailed, limp and gloved, over a rakishly crooked knee; a long quill pen flourished from fore-finger and thumb. The other elbow rested on an African drum. The forearm rose perpendicular, and the hand, the gloved ring-finger of which was adorned with a heavy signet, was twisted outwards and palm upwards, holding a thick cigarette in a foppish gesture.

  ‘Poor Captain!’ Berthe said. ‘He was charming, but in some ways rather absurd. He lived in a little house in the negro quarter, surrounded by gongs and incense burners and nargilehs and a host of young negro servants that he called “my bronze and ebony Apollos”. They said he smoked opium and he was sometimes known as le parfumeur because of the cloud of exotic scents that always followed him about; and his grey hair was dyed a deep chestnut. He had a fin de siècle style that one rarely meets nowadays.’ Berthe laughed. ‘He was very kind and everybody liked him, the Count especially – he was such a diverting companion and such an inventive collaborator in the conduct of fêtes.’

  The Captain was a brilliant storyteller, as inexhaustible as a circumnavigator, and the family would listen to him with the raptness of a Renaissance court. After dinner on the terrace at Beauséjour he would entertain the Serindans for hours with tales of his far-flung adventures on the pampas, in Papua, on the Siberian tundras or in Madagascar at the court of Queen Ranavalo. His anecdotes of literary colleagues and high life and the stage, and his imitations of Castellane and Montesquiou, of Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane and Eleanore Duse and of Coquelin and Mounet-Sully would set the Count mopping the tears of laughter from his cheek with a large bandana handkerchief. He was an ardent bicyclist, he had been for a ride in an automobile and had even made an ascent in a balloon, the story of which the Count never tired of hearing. (How well the Captain told it! The crowd in the Champ de Mars as the great globe, striped in segments of silver and scarlet, floated up and above the Eiffel Tower, down the Seine, over the chimerae and the flying buttresses of Notre Dame and the fields and villages of the Ile de France. . . . The conversations with the literary critic and the two actresses from the Varietés that were with him in the basket, the muddles with the sandbags and the anchor, the champagne corks popping in mid-air as Chantilly floated underneath. . . . The silence except for the astonished twittering of thousands of birds a few yards below in the tree-tops of the Forest of Compiègne; and, at last, the dispersal of a great dappled troop of fallow deer that watched them in a ring from the surrounding beech-trees as they settled among the swans in the middle of a lake. . .)

  But he was also – and in this dual function the Captain was unique in Saint-Jacques – a favourite at Government House. Berthe had for some time been exhorting the Count on the folly of his feud with Sciocca and when she enrolled the Captain in her support (‘Come, come my dear Agénor, you are driving the poor man mad’), the Count gradually began to give way; the more easily as his unbroken string of victories was beginning to rob the conflict of its zest. Also, perhaps, because Madame Sciocca, a flamboyant creature from Marseilles for whom the Count had invented, without a shred of ascertainable foundation, raffish origins on the waterfront of her native town, was by no means ill-looking. The Captain tactfully proposed that, as a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, Sciocca and his staff should be invited, for the first time since their arrival, to the Serindans’ Shrove Tuesday ball, the apex of the Jacobean carnival and the great social function of the year. The Count’s united eyebrows descended in a spasm of disgust and his beard and moustache bristled like the spines of a hedgehog.

  ‘What? Ask that animal into the house with all his Jacobin scum?’

  The Captain stood up. ‘My dear friend,’ he sighed wearily, ‘if you were a modern Italian living in Rome instead of a Frenchman in the Caribbean, I really believe your whole life would be spent plotting the return of the Tarquins.’

  The Count laughed and then, with one of those sudden changes for which he was well known, he threw his hands negligently into the air and exclaimed, ‘Enfin! Qu’ils viennent! We can always have the house spring-cleaned next day. . . .’

  ‘Agénor,’ the Captain murmured, as his gloved hand descended lightly for a moment on his host’s forearm, ‘you are goodness in human form.’ Picking up his straw boater before another change could occur he sailed away like a dove returning to the ark with an olive twig locked in its beak.

  Meanwhile, in the private world of Berthe and Josephine, all had not been well. Towards the end of January, Berthe fell sick with an attack of malaria which kept her bedridden for a month. During most of this time Josephine would keep her company; re-arranging her pillows, sitting by her bed, and, when Berthe was capable of listening, reading aloud. But the younger girl, who was never able to stay indoors for long, would absent herself on long rides, solitary ones now, returning later and later in the evening. As the severity of the disease abated, Berthe thought she noticed that Josephine came back from these lonely expeditions in a state of elation she found difficult to conceal. One evening she rushed into Berthe’s room with shining eyes, threw her hat and whip on the sofa and then, scrambling inside the mosquito net, flung herself flat on Berthe’s bed. Leaning on the pillow, she propped her chin in her hands. After gazing wildly at the invalid for a few seconds, she said, ‘Darling Berthe, I’ve got a great secret to tell you’, and then, after a pause, ‘I’ve fallen in love.’ Bert
he succeeded in hiding the sudden stab of anguish that transfixed her, and, forcing a smile, said, ‘I thought something had happened. Please tell me.’

  Josephine, it seems, had met this new figure, also on horseback, by chance, on the second of her lonely rides, behind the canefields of Savanne de Rohan in the foothills of the Salpetrière. Since then they had met every afternoon; declared their love, kissed, sworn to marry. ‘I knew something of the kind was bound to happen,’ Berthe said meditatively, ‘and assumed he must be the young La Tour d’Astirac of Savanne, or one of the Tharonnes of Morne Zombi, the estate beyond; perfectly eligible and proper after all, distant relations of the Serindans and admirable matches. Tiresomely, Josephine refused for a long time to tell me his name.’

  At last, hiding her anxiety, and after endless teasing and coaxing, Berthe managed to extort a conditional answer. ‘I’ll tell you, Berthe darling, if you promise to keep it a secret.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Well,’ Josephine said hesitantly, ‘it’s Marcel Sciocca, the Governor’s son.’

  Berthe jerked bolt upright in bed. ‘Josephine!’ she exclaimed, ‘I hope this is a joke.’

  ‘By the terror of the girl’s expression,’ Berthe said, ‘I must have looked as if I were about to lay hands on her. I managed to control my anger and soon understood that it was far from being a joke. “But Josephine,” I kept asking her, “how could it be Sciocca?” For, if his father was perhaps not so bad as he was painted, his son was horrible. He combined the appearance of a Neapolitan barber with the manner of a prize bounder and the reputation of a crook; all of which I didn’t hesitate to tell her. But no, she insisted, that was all prejudice and part of her papa’s political hobby-horse. This was odd language for her to use. She was passionately devoted to the Count. I told her as well, in the conventional way, that it would kill her father should he ever hear of it. I didn’t mention my own savage feelings of jealousy in the matter but I made her promise not to see him again. It all ended in floods of tears until at last she fell asleep.’