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Title: Boomerang (1932)
Author: Helen Simpson
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Language: English
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TO WINIFRED My dear, I would dedicate this book to you, if dedications any longer meant anything, and if I were not, with the rest of us in our hurry, shy and clumsy at making a gesture. I had better stand aside, I think, and let one of your Elizabethans do the trick for me as it should be done. Reginald Scot is speaking: "I do not present this unto you because it is meet for you; but for that you are meet for it (I meane) to judge upon it, to defend it. I hope you will read it, or at the least, lay it up in your study with your other books, among which, and this is sure, there is none dedicated to any with more good will. "Your sincere loving friend--" H. S. Queen Anne Street, London.
CONTENTS: Foreword Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17
Of the various incidents related in this book, some of the more improbable are true; for example, the impersonation of "Martina Fields" in a remote continent, and the visit of a woman to the Australian trenches on the Somme. I say this, not to forestall criticism of my invention, but as a pensive commentary on the difficulty imagination has to keep level when truth is allowed to set the pace.
The characters throughout are either imaginary or dead. In no case have real names been used, except that of the King of France who lost his throne in 1830; as for my Governor-General, like my Premier, Cardinal, and Lord Mayor, he is pure fantasy, having no original among the distinguished gentlemen who have held that office in reality.
The chapter headings throughout are taken from Sir Thomas Browne.
H. S.
But remembering the early civility they brought upon these countreys, and forgetting long passed mischiefs; we mercifully preserve their bones.
--Religio Medici.
Life can afford extravagance, books cannot; for this reason nobody will dream of believing in my two grandfathers. They are too true to be good--good fiction, at any rate; if I try to give some kind of picture of them, it is because they frame between them a vision of a golden age, which could only have existed in brand-new countries, among brand-new circumstances and laws. It was not a golden age for everybody, wives or servants for instance, but for these two it was; they were, to use a word which is almost dead, characters.
I am sorry to think what would happen to these two old gentlemen if they had the misfortune to live now; it would be something legal, that is certain, falling heavily to crush their magnificent egotism and eccentricity. Their wives, who in the 'seventies put up with them with the uncomprehending patience accorded by Insurance Companies to Acts of God, would nowadays divorce them. Servants would bring, and win, actions against them for assault. As for their families, these would scatter immediately after the first row or two, and go forth to earn their livings with all the horrid freedom that the post-war period accords. In an age of standardisation these old crusted, crusty gentlemen, mellow even in their rages as the Madeira which they sent for a roll round the Horn before bottling, would have the deuce of a time.
Doctors, to begin with, who in the last half century have swelled up into demi-gods, would be the first to interfere. They would view the couple, with their picturesquely flushed faces, their sudden wraths after meals, as mere examples of treacherous glands, and hardening arteries. (Character is a word which has died from the doctors' vocabulary too.) They would accept five-guinea fees to persuade the old gentlemen that what they needed was calm; and there would be a great recommending of suitable institutions--"quite in the country, you know, cooking not bad, and just supervision, nothing irksome." When the doctors had done, the lawyers would take their turn. Death duties, they would tell their victims, could best be avoided by making over the estate during lifetime to a reliable son. Relatives would then appear, with hints, backed by statistics, concerning vegetarian diet, and the undesirability of port by the pint twice a day. And at last, having shorn the bewildered unfortunates, for their own good, of home, money, wine and liberty, the twentieth century would turn the key on them with a sigh of genuine relief.
There was none of this in the colonies of last century, which was, for the tyrants, the very grandest imaginable time. There were doctors, true, and lawyers, but they were kept in their place, and the tyrants used them. Land was for the asking. Convicts were done with, to everybody's relief--the last batch reached Sydney in 1840; but there was labour to be had, labour which, like the doctors and lawyers, knew its place, and took its wage with a finger to the forelock. There were English immigrants who came after gold, and remained to use spade and shears. There were Chinese in numbers, who came, as they explained by an interpreter to astonished immigration officers, to earn prouder lacquered coffins in this rich new land than their own exhausted paddy-fields could yield them. (The price of the coffin once safe in a canvas bag, they broke their term of service and returned to China assured of respect.) To deal with the land and the labour, a great many laws were made, and printed, and forgotten on shelves; while on the land existed superbly a number of men and women who were laws to themselves; characters, obeyed as such, loved, feared, and occasionally murdered as such. And here we come upon those prime old personages, ripe and shocking and satisfying as good Stilton cheese, the despair of their families and neighbours, and worth the lot put together; Great-grandfather Boissy, and his son, Gustave-Félicité.
I may say at once that I never knew either.
All places, all Aires, make unto me one country; I have been ship wrackt, yet am not an enemy with the sea or winds.
--Religio Medici.
I
The first unbelievable thing about Grandfather Boissy is that he was born over a century and a quarter ago, in one of those little island colonies which the French and English were accustomed to snap up in passing during the eighteenth century. Great-grandfather, a ne'er-do-weel of family--Boissy de Mortemar was the full name--was sent there for his country's good in 1789, just before the French troubles began, and there remained and was forgotten, very conveniently for him, by his country's successive masters. It must not be thought that this exile, though imposed with a view to relieving a certain irritation which his presence set up in Parisian society, was attended with any humiliation such as the average deportee was obliged to endure. No; my great-grandfather, Auguste-Anne, went off to Santisimo Corazon in style, with a brevet of Lieutenant-Governor in his pocket, to be the representative of his king; my uncle has this brevet yet, with its seals, and its scrolly lawyer's writing, and the brave beginning "Il est ordonné," and at the bottom a fine flourishing signature, "Louis," the L of it three inches tall.
In Paris, Auguste-Anne had, I gather, been a nuisance. In Corazon, freed of relations, with no means ready-made of frittering money, and a climate which after a year or two either calmed or killed the individual submitted to it, he became a very respectable governor. He enjoyed being God, and had a fair conception of how the part should be played. He had a taste for splendour, as had the blacks he ruled. He encouraged their religion, which had withdrawn into the shadows as persecuted faiths will, so that witch doctors throve; even, they got up a procession or two after the fashion of those held at Church festivals, to the great scandal of the official priesthood. In ordinary times these latter would have protested to France, and there would have been a reprimand, and eventually a new Governor with a narrower mind; but by now the year was 1794, priests were disapproved in Paris, and it was felt, after the news of the massacre of Thermidor, that it would be tactless to invite the attention of Robespierre and his colleagues to a religious dispute in a distant island. The clergy did indeed send off some form of protest to the Pope, who replied absent-mindedly with an illuminated blessing, and an indulgence of thirty days for whosoever should recite, fasting, a prayer for the conversion of the heathen. After this their reverences gave it up, and retired with dignity from all competition in processions, wherein, as they had the wit to realize, they were hopelessly outclassed.
Meanwhile Auguste-Anne and his blacks went their scandalous and vivid way, working, but no more than was necessary, and breaking off into refreshing orgies of religion from time to time. The governor's religion, true, was that of Dr. Pangloss rather than of his baptism, but it included dancing and a certain show of physical prowess, and was perfectly understood by the governed. These, indeed, so far sympathised as to lend him occasionally their own mysterious drummers, though not the drums--sacred these, and strung with human hide; had they been borrowed and trifled with odd things might have happened. But the drummers had no objection to showing their skill, and condescended to rub knuckles on the garrison kettles, which thereupon spelt out the strangest aphrodisiac rhythms, unmilitary though commanding. Great-grandfather Boissy was probably the first European to tangle his feet in these rhythms, the germ of jazz, which fell upon barren ground, and bore no fruit for another century. It delights me to think of his two fiddlers and his solitary piper drawling out the artless melodies of old France--Bouton de Rose, Tendre Musette, Dans ce Bocage--with this primal wickedness thudding away underneath.
II
Such was his life on the island, while his impeccable relatives in Paris were scurrying this way and that like rats when a haystack burns. With two frontiers to defend, and a new philosophy to impose upon a sceptical hostile Europe, the Republic One and Indivisible had no thought to spare for Corazon. News came, blown in with stray ships, and was discussed, but without much interest. France was too far away. Then, somewhere about December 1794, came a warship flying the tricolour, from which landed two officers in full regalia with scarves of the three colours, to enquire of the governor why the devil the sacred three did not wave above the little mud fortress which guarded the port. They required an immediate lowering of the detested white flag, together with proofs of citizenship and loyalty from Auguste-Anne. The latter, who happily lacked the kind of principle which obliges a man to strike attitudes, had the flag down at once, and put up a makeshift affair of red, white and blue, made by the garrison's wives out of old petticoats. As for the proofs of citizenship and loyalty, these he provided until the officers were totally exhausted, and unable to deal with a girl or a glass more. He then had them conveyed aboard their vessel by polite negroes, with a note to say that he believed there were English ships in the offing; which hint, when they had recovered sufficiently to read it, they took, and made off under all sail.
When they had gone Auguste-Anne had the tricolour flag hauled down and stowed in a locker for future use. The island dreamed on under the white and gold as before.
A few months later an English sloop appeared, and remained in the harbour a week. At the end of this time another flag, red and white crosses on a blue ground, was stowed in the same locker, and another ship's company went off with aching heads to sea. It was the captain's hope to obtain at least a step in rank by reporting this new acquisition to the territory of George III, and he drew up an impressive report, dwelling on the dangerous nature of the exploit, and the stubborn resistance of the islanders. (More than one of the Governor's ladies had taken fright at his ginger whiskers, which were looked on by the unsophisticated creatures as lusus naturae.) But the Admiralty of those days was ancestor to the Admiralty of these. The king was having a fit when the tidings arrived, and so the report was initialled and docketed, and taken down into the bowels of the earth to be filed; that is to say, it was forgotten with all possible completeness, and the unlucky author remained a post-captain till death.
The years went on. Somewhere about the time when Napoleon was striking like forked lightning through Italy, a deputation waited on Auguste-Anne. He came from his bed to meet it in a peacock-coloured dressing-gown, and learned that it wished him to be king. Now that King Louis was dead, said the spokesman, nobody knew for certain whom the island belonged to. There were the Republicans, who sounded ferocious, and the English, who had run about after a little ball in full mid-day sun, and were regarded by the islanders as no better than lunatics. Remained Auguste-Anne; and the deputation, which included--privately glaring, but publicly all balm--the Bishop, and the most renowned of the witch-doctors, came to suggest that it was his duty to clear up the situation by accepting the crown. The whites harangued him, and drew examples from antiquity; the blacks wept and addressed him, not without a percentage of truth, as the father of their children. Seeing both parties so much in earnest, Auguste-Anne displayed no false modesty, but agreed then and there, all dressing-gowned as he was, to rule them. They thanked him without surprise and retired backwards to compose public demonstrations of rejoicing after their several manners. The blacks got up their inevitable procession, which was rained on, to the secret joy of the Bishop, whose Te Deum with augmented choir, and the now Royal piper playing the serpent, was a triumph of comfort and good producing.
Auguste-Anne was present, needless to say, while the canons and choirs felicitated God on having acquired him as vicegerent, sitting close to the altar and looking impressive in a blackguardly way. Later, when the Bishop, fired by the success of his performance, worked up to a coronation service, he submitted to the various ceremonies with dignity, and was respectful to such relics as the tibia of St. Athanasius and the ossa innominata of St. Stipendius, taken for the occasion from a magnificent charnel-house of solid silver. When it was over, the King, though tired, walked in procession under a canopy to a sort of natural grassy amphitheatre near the bay, and went through the whole thing again, according to the rather more ancient and much more disreputable rites of the blacks. The Bishop, though piqued, feigned not to notice this deliberate encouragement given to Paganism; remembering the result of his application to the Pope, and the distance of Corazon from any authority, he retired with a judicious migraine, and thus avoided taking any scandal. Happily, he recovered in time for the Palace dinner that evening, and did it full justice, which is more than can be said for the chief Witch-doctor, who lay on the shore all night in a sweat of blood, troubled by the resentful ghosts of sacrificed virgins.
III
When these civil and religious sprees were over, life went on as before; that is to say, the people supplied themselves at Nature's expense with food, and spent the rest of their time with women, or composing liquid symphonies upon a delectable ground-bass of rum. Such was the routine of blacks and whites alike, and Auguste-Anne was the last person to interfere with it. He left matters alone; it was his genius, the one thing he could do really well. Years had taught him that in an island such as Corazon, time and climate do all the ruling needed; glory, by which is usually meant wholesale killing, he left to the tornadoes which whirled through the gulf of Mexico every six or seven years. The anticipation of these disasters, and the rebuilding of life after they had occurred, were the island's artless substitutes for the thrills of civilised warfare, with this important difference, that the heads of the State and the poorest plodding conscript stood in exactly the same danger while the elements raged.
It was after one such tornado, which had blown in the Palace door as by a charge of gunpowder, flattening a couple of domestics, and cutting Auguste-Anne himself about the head with flying splinters, that the second deputation arrived. Auguste-Anne, piratical in bandages, received them and enquired their business; which was, put briefly, to get him married. They said that what with tornadoes and time they might lose him now any day. (Auguste-Anne started at this plain speaking, but the fact remained, he was forty-three and the climate was not tolerant to middle-age.) They knew, they said hastily, that so far there had been no diminishing of his remarkable physical powers, which had become a legend already, handed down in story from mothers to daughters when these attained suitable age; but all the same--
Then, as before, the whites harangued, and the blacks wept. "But where the devil," enquired Auguste-Anne, "am I to look for a wife in this bitch of an island?"
The deputation had an answer to this, having thought the whole situation out with care, amid the mourning and labour of a tornado's aftermath. It would not do, they agreed, to take a wife from the island. Women could not stand splendour; they had no heads for it. Lift up one island woman, and her first idea would be to trample the other island women, and these would rebel, and stir up their husbands, and there would be trouble in no time. (Witness that good-for-nothing daughter of old Tascher de Lapagerie, cocked up on a throne as Empress of the French, making her husband ridiculous with her extravagance and her bad taste in lovers.) Nor would it do, pursued the deputation, to return to France in search of a wife; nothing but parvenues now in France, none of the good old thin blood left, thin noses, thin notions; only a lot of dukes called after battles, and duchesses red-handed from the maternal wash-tub. America was out of the question, as was Canada, and the wilder republics of the south. The only place left where a personage like Auguste-Anne, last of a line of graceful existers, royalist and rich, might best look for a consort, was England. England swarmed with exiled ladies, poor but suitable, bending over embroidery, teaching deportment; even--these too--busied over wash-tubs. (But a wash-tub from which one has risen, and a wash-tub to which, after selling the last jewel, one descends, are two very different things.) The deputation's advice, then, was this: that Auguste-Anne should set sail in the next ship that touched at the little harbour, leaving his people to tidy up the island against his return; that he should take his time in England, look about him, choose, unhurried, some young creature who might enjoy the thought of processions and progeny, and bring her back to reign. Finances, they explained, would hardly run to a second crown; but there was always the Virgin's, which she only wore on feast-days, and could well spare the loan of now and then.
In fact, they had the whole plan neatly cut and dried.
As usual, Auguste-Anne did not keep them waiting, but assented at once, and dismissed them to such rejoicings as the devastation and threatening famine of the land allowed.
Saltimbancoes, Quacksalvers, and Charlatans...whose cries cannot conceal their mischief. For their impostures arc full of cruelty, and worse than any other, deluding not only unto pecuniary defraudations, but the irreparable deceit of death.
--Vulgar Errors.
I
Next month, in an opportune trading vessel, he set off to woo.
How he proposed to go about the business on landing at Bristol is unknown, for he was perfectly innocent of the English tongue, save for a few expletives, and had no introductions or passport except his brevet of governor and his still handsome though florid person. Probably this latter would have been the more useful of the two in a country where George the Prince Regent set fashions, but as things fell out he had no need to put it to the test, or to submit himself to the tilted eyebrows of dowagers, with fledglings in charge, ranged round a ballroom in Bath.
For while still in Bristol he met a young female by pure accident; ran her down, as a matter of fact, just as he was driving out for the first time in the immense chariot which had been specially built for him. The girl was small, and fair, and of no pretensions. Her nose was snub, not the aristocratic feature he had come to seek, but it had for the hawk--but purplish--beaked Auguste-Anne the violent attraction exercised by opposites.
She was hardly hurt at all, and had fainted more from a sense of propriety than anything else; and when she came to in the vast hotel bedroom to which she had been carried, and perceived herself to be wearing a gentleman's silk nightshirt, she was in half a mind to go off again. The nightshirt, however, had no immoral significance. The chambermaid had robed her in it at the bidding, but not in the presence, of Auguste-Anne. Still, he had come once to the door to see that his protégée was safely bestowed; and the sight of her lying there with her pale hair fanning out over the pillow caused him first a pang and then an exaltation. He swore at himself, a loud inconsequent French oath, but the exaltation persisted; then with a stamp of the foot, and a--"Why not? Sacred name of names!"--descended the stairs and ordered his horses to be put up again. He had decided with a truly royal impulsiveness to seek no further.
It must be remembered that he had had twenty years of sun and dark-favoured women, and this girl was fair, and the month an English November. It had rained since the day he arrived. The best inn was panelled throughout with oak, which absorbed any daylight left over from the narrow streets and high buildings. The best inn offered him twice a day mounds of half-raw meat in lieu of meals. There was an entire absence of any person who could converse in the only civil language. He had enquired if Bristol were a considerable city, and got the truthful reply that it was one of the greatest in England. He had enquired if any other part of England were less subject to rain, and was told no. He had enquired if there were anyone in the whole town who spoke French, and was briefly informed that there was a war on. He went to the carriage makers, and found them ignoramuses, unable to understand how the quarterings on the panels of the chariot should go. They had never heard of his illustrious family, and in their easy British way thought that anything ought to do for a Frenchy, and only one of these Markees at that. They were used to Markees, coming round with such pitiful fine bows to solicit the lowest paid jobs, and had got in the way of despising them. Even that anomaly, a Markee with quantities of money, ought, they considered, to put up with such heraldry as they chose to give him. Auguste-Anne nearly burst a blood vessel before he could get his mullets and leopards and blackamoors' heads in the right places.
All this may explain, at least partly, why Auguste-Anne, having set out upon an errand of State, with money in his pockets and the title of queen to offer, should have contented himself--more than that; should have set his heart upon, clung to, and refused to relinquish the first presentable young thing that happened to fall in his way.
II
Literally, to fall in his way; but as I said, she had hardly a touch from the hoofs. She came to, and blushed at the nightdress alone; then rang for the maid, and demanded to know where she was, and to be taken instantly home to her mother. Auguste-Anne, informed through the housemaid of this request, said with a wave of the hand when he had got the sense of it:
"Bring this mother to her."
And brought the mother was, in the identical chariot which had downed her daughter, and put her pale head in the way of a crown. She was a respectable middle-aged person in a clean cap, who let rooms to the grass-widows of sea-captains, and who somewhere in the Dark Ages had become the genuine, or turf-widow, of a sea-captain herself. It is impossible to guess at what she thought, and what the neighbours thought, when a large gilt chariot, its panels covered with blackamoors' heads, its horses glittering like successful generals, drew up with a prodigious jingling and stamping at her modest door. She was at once told of her daughter's accident, but having been brought up in a more practical and less ladylike way, neglected to swoon. Instead, she got into the vehicle, with a glance which made swift calculation of its cost, reflecting that this upset might turn out to be a bit of luck for the girl after all.
When she saw Auguste-Anne, however, she had something of a shock. Both England and France had grown out of the taste for brocades and bright colours. In civil life young gentlemen's choice for coats had dwindled down to a few sombre greens, black, mulberry, and a brown or two, though they might array themselves rather more picturesquely for any kind of slaughter. But Auguste-Anne, again remember, had not seen Europe for twenty years, and had lived among a people to whom strong colour was as natural and wholesome as strong wine. He wore now, in the year 1804, in Bristol, in November, a coat of bright yellow face-cloth, with a kind of laced stock, and crimson knee-breeches buckled with gold. Add to this a sword and a rather elaborate wig, curled so as to afford him an extra two inches of height; and the excellent mother's diffidence, her first astonished cry--"Love-a-duck, play actors!"--is easily explained.
Auguste-Anne led the fluttered lady to a chair, and by means of his interpreter, an able-bodied seaman who had been discovered in the tap, made known his project. His meaning was at first obscured unintentionally by the seaman, whose knowledge of the language of Racine had been acquired as a prisoner in the hulks of Toulon. At this intermediary's first statement of his principal's requirements the outraged mother rose from her chair, seeming to fluff out to twice her size, like an angry cat.
"Never!" declared the mother. "Tell him never, the wicked rascal, and you should think shame yourself to repeat such words, you nasty wretch, you!"
To which the seaman replied without heat:
"Stow your gab, I never said 'e didn't mean to sleep with 'er honest, did I?"
"Marriage?" said the mother incredulously, staring at Auguste-Anne, who recognised the word and bowed, saying in his own tongue:
"I have the honour, madame, as this person says, to demand mademoiselle your daughter's hand in marriage."
"Well!" said the mother, at this repetition of the word, and looked once more up and down the flaunting figure of her daughter's suitor.
"If," pursued Auguste-Anne smoothly, "as is natural, you should wish to peruse my credentials, I have them here--"
And he took from his bosom the parchment displaying King Louis' brevet, unrolled and let it hang, ribbon and seals and all, before the uncomprehending eyes of the mother.
"What's all this?" the latter enquired of the seaman.
"Licence," replied that worthy readily, "writ out in Greek by 'is Nibs the Archbishop o' Canterbury. Didn't I tell yer he wants to (an intolerable word) the girl honest?"
Stupefied, the mother sat surveying the mysterious parchment, while her thoughts played with a dream of riding about to the end of her days behind four horses, and of having done for ever with lodgers. After a brief period, during which it must be confessed that these and similar considerations received due attention while the possible happiness of her daughter went without more than perfunctory enquiry, she signified her willingness to ratify the arrangement.
But certain safeguards had to be thought of first. If there was one thing which a life among the grass-widows of seafarers had taught her, it was the importance of always having a sum of money down, and as far as possible payment in advance. Written pledges to pay she scorned; she had in her younger, more guileless days acquired quite a collection of these, which it gave her very little satisfaction to recall. She sat with folded hands, the primmest creature, while her mind flickered up and down columns of imaginary figures--price of chariot, gold hilt to sword, menservants in livery, diamond pin; and she had arrived at this conclusion, that the mysterious suitor, whatever he might be worth a year, was good as he stood for five hundred guineas. She therefore named this sum in gold as the price of her consent, adding the stipulation that the marriage should be performed by a clergyman of the church of England.
Somehow or other the seaman managed to get this proposition into a form assimilable by Auguste-Anne, with the unimportant difference that the sum demanded, in the usual way, was increased by passing through the middleman's hands. The seaman's eye had summed up the eccentric being more truly than the mother's could do, so long accustomed to the narrow horizons of lodgers. He had seen nabobs, had the seaman, and if this was not one, though a toad-eating Frenchy, blast his bowels, and so on, with a wealth of physiological detail. He demanded, accordingly, one thousand guineas; and when the Frenchy without turning a hair agreed, and told a servant to hand the purse, could have cursed himself blue for not asking double.
It must have been a curious scene, the three of them round the table in that foggy panelled room. There was the pinched respectable visage of the widow, who sat, telling over the coins with genteelly mittened hands; the tarry-tailed seaman striving to catch her eye with a wink, a plea not to give him away; finally the pantomime presence of Auguste-Anne Boissy de Mortemar, in his canary coat and wig twenty years out of date.
The tally completed--and it may be said at once that the mother never did give the seaman away; but to his blasphemous surprise, all that came to his pocket out of the surplus was two guineas, and those of a suspiciously light weight--the tally completed, it was suggested that Miss should be sent for, and informed of her good fortune. The sailor accordingly, not without protest, was banished; and the mother accepted a glass of wine from her son-to-be, while they waited for the girl to appear.
She came at last, looking timid and frail against the dark panelling, and ran towards her mother at once. There was a quick dialogue, unintelligible to Auguste-Anne, which may have run as follows:
"Oh, mother, whatever's been happening? Have you come to take me away?"
"Sit down, Bella, don't look so agitated. Not feverish, are you? Well, then, sit down."
"But who is that man? What does he want here?"
"That's not a man, child, that's a rich gentleman. Bob to him, do; look how he's bending himself nigh-on double--"
"Oh, the brute, that's him that was in the coach!"
"Well, what of it? He'll make you amends. He's a gentleman every inch--" here the purse in her pocket gave an approving clink--"and I don't want no better for my daughter. Ah, you'll be calling on your poor old mother, my dear, in your own carriage before long."
At this point the girl, turning one horrified glance on the hawk-face which, while it had not forgotten dignity so far as to smirk, was at any rate attempting an agreeable grimace, burst into tears, and subsided to a chair weeping. Over her bent head mother and suitor exchanged comprehending glances, and with a further bow, and a word or two of solace, Auguste-Anne left his heart's choice to a parent's care.
The argument was not soon over. Miss Bella had read quite a number of the fashionable horrid books in which mysterious strangers carried off damsels to castles hung with pictures whose hands dripped blood, whose lofty corridors resounded by night with female screams. To her otherwise untutored mind this dark personage was just such a being, and she had no fancy for screaming in corridors however lofty. She preferred, being a nice, ordinary, unadventurous girl, and a milliner's apprentice, to remain at home making bonnets for the gentry of Bristol, and told her mother so, as firmly as she could for tears. But she was no match for that lady, or for that lady's strict sense of honour, which having accepted payment, insisted upon delivering the goods. Finally to tears she opposed tears, louder, saltier, more abandoned. The daughter weakened, was assailed more closely, and at last yielded; on which the mother, her victory won, pocketed her handkerchief after a brisk final blast, and sent a servant to tell the foreign gentleman that the young lady would see him now.
Though the interview which followed from an English point of view could hardly have been reckoned a success, being in fact nothing but a series of silences linked by sobs, Auguste-Anne was not disturbed by it. Marriages, in his pre-revolution world, were entirely affairs between parents. Red eyes at the betrothal were to him only decent, a proof of sensibility, nothing out of the way. He looked his acquisition up and down, discreetly, not to cause her embarrassment, and putting his gleanings with the more particular information afforded by the housemaid who had undressed her, sat down content, and in good appetite, to the supper he had ordered.
III
The marriage, which took place soon, by licence, must have been an absurd and pathetic ceremony. Bella would have let it go over without fuss, swallowing Auguste-Anne like a pill, in private. Auguste-Anne himself, to whom a marriage service conducted by heretics was about as binding as a thread of cotton, would likewise have preferred to keep it quiet, and have the show on their return to Corazon in a climate better adapted to display.
But the mother was inexorable. Not content with the certainty of ease, she was determined that all Bristol should know of her divorce from the obloquy of furnished rooms, and of her daughter's elevation to a gilded coach. She had visions of lawn sleeves blessing the couple. Was there not, only a dozen miles off, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and was a Bishop any too good for a man who could hand out a thousand guineas without a blink, like so much copper? A thousand pounds in thy courts is but a day, thought the widow, transposing the psalmist to the tune of Auguste-Anne's pockets, while she urged making a semi-royal spread of it, and asking the Mayor. She even went so far as to broach the idea of the Bishop to her rector, but that humble priest was so aghast at the idea of asking the Bishop to drive a dozen miles, and don his lawn sleeves to join a milliner's apprentice and a person who looked like a pirate, was in fact so sincerely shocked at the notion of requiring the Bishop to do anything but exist, that she gave way, and relinquished her dear ambition. With the Bishop departed hope of the Mayor, and with hope of the Mayor the whole official character of the thing, so that in no time it had come down to a pullulation of captain's wives and millinery companions, and the glory had quite departed. It was the Rector himself who undertook to marry them in the end, and the service at any rate was fully choral.
It must have been a grand sight--though some of the milliners tittered--to see the ruler of Corazon in really full fig, heels, wig, colour, everything slightly higher than ordinary. Even his nose seemed to have a more pronounced cant upwards at the bridge; but this may have been due to the amused contempt with which the whole ceremony filled him, comparing it with what his own witch-doctors and canons could do in the same line. A puffy post-captain on leave borrowed for the occasion from an ex-lodger gave the bride away, so that her mother, who could be perfectly the lady when occasion called or opportunity offered, might ply the smelling salts and be genteelly overcome. One unfortunate though picturesque circumstance was the intrusion of the seaman whose exaggeration had obtained for the widow five hundred pounds over her due, and who had been so smoothly bilked of his rightful commission. This unbidden wedding-guest, having waited till the ceremony was well under way, began, in a voice that in its time had competed with tempests, to deliver his version of the bargain which had resulted in the present ceremony.
He made a most unbecoming uproar, and his neighbours and the vergers, though scandalised, were too much filled with respect for the Lord's house, and also perhaps too completely scared by his appearance, to make effective protest. They remonstrated in whispers, which availed against his bawling about as well as a lady's fan against a hurricane; they looked with disapproval, or else feigned to ignore. The rumpus increased with their efforts until the bridal couple, who had got to the exchange of vows, could hardly hear themselves speak; at which point it occurred to the groom that the noise, which he, accustomed to oddities in religion, had at first supposed to be an integral part of the Church of England service, was in fact an interpolation. Accordingly, not being troubled by any scruples as to the sanctity of the place, he put the ring back in his pocket, and leaving the bride to the clergyman's mercies, advanced towards the disturber drawing his sword; seeing which the disturber fled, vaulting pews, and escaped with a thwack on his backside, which split his breeches and showed a semi-circle of white, as though that part of his anatomy grinned. Having purged the sacred edifice of din, the groom returned at the stately pace to which his heels compelled him, and concluded the business of getting married with the utmost decorum.
IV
A ship for the West Indies sailed that night on the tide, and they went aboard her from the church. There was a good deal of the kind of British merriment which seeks to veil with jocosity the deadly possibilities of every marriage. There was a good deal of assorted liquor of the very best quality; rum for the sailors, and champagne for the puffy post-captain, and for the ladies a little mild punch with ratafia biscuits. After justice had been done to these, and all the refined jokes had been made--the vulgar ones are inexhaustible, but were confined to the forecastle--the captain, being anxious for his tide, cleared away the guests with nautical finality. There were tears, and on the part of the post-captain, dragged from his liquor untimely, a protest or two; but he was prevailed on, and departed at last, weeping, between a couple of seamen. The widow was, as was right, the last to go. She was in fact anxious to be quit of her daughter, whose behaviour during the fortnight of the betrothal had shown a complete lack of gratitude to fate; but the girl clung, down in the dark and narrow cabin, and it was only decent to remain, and pat her shoulder and prophesy, and take every means to console and reassure. Thus the widow, though glad to leave, was last along the gangway. She had, as has been said, a strong sense of right, and never failed to pay the tribute of a gesture to virtue. Accordingly, she remained on the wharf in a fine mizzling rain until the ship was warped out and began to slide down-channel. Then, full of elation, charged with the enviable task of selling the gilt chariot and keeping what she could get for it, happy in the consciousness of a thousand gold guineas safe hidden behind the chimney, she made her way up and down the curling streets of Bristol, home.
Her conviction that she need never more let lodgings, and that she would ride behind four horses was proved true, for two mornings later she was found by her new servant lying before the fireplace, from which some bricks had been removed. She had been dead since midnight, and there was an ugly knife, of the kind that seamen carry, standing up out of her breast.
V
Corazon, not having been warned of their majesties' arrival, which in any case was far sooner than anyone expected, had no flags out as the ship crept in on a light dawn wind to Seven Wounds Bay. The flagstaff was bare--it may be told here, unofficially, that the military had gone off duty the day after their ruler's departure, and the flags of three political systems had shared the same sea-chest for months. The wreckage of wattle and daub houses was still to be seen everywhere, and the master's eye, looking towards the summit of the cathedral tower, observed that the gilded Virgin who formed the wind-vane no longer caught the sun. His telescope sought her, for she was one of the chief landmarks, and it was customary to take a bearing by her at a certain point in the narrow entry to the port. But she had gone, leaving only her pedestal.
This was the first news that greeted Auguste-Anne when he came on deck in the most gorgeous dressing-gown of all his repertoire. He was not much upset by it; he was seldom ruffled by any event which did not intimately affect his own comfort, and the Virgin, though celebrated and useful to mariners, had never really captured his attention, save when he cursed her for predicting the devastating nor'-west wind. He stood still, watching the morning light grow pink over the town, and for some few uncounted minutes was completely happy; that is to say, he did not know himself to be so. He breathed, and existed, and ignored time, like a god, until a touch on his arm brought him out of the clouds to realise that he had been experiencing a number of outmoded emotions such, for example, as love of home. It was his wife at his elbow.
"Augustus," she began, "my love--"
She persisted in this form of address, which humbled her husband but which he could not prevail on her to drop. She could not pronounce properly the "Monsieur" which to his mind was all that was permissible to a wife, and his couple of surnames prevented her from employing the Bristol idiom "Mister--" followed by the initial letter of the name. Mr. B. de M. would have been altogether too complex.
"Augustus," said she, therefore, "my love, is this really the place?"
He signified that it was. She looked about as the ship drew nearer to the ravaged waterfront with an air of being dutifully willing to be pleased with what she saw: but in her heart she was obliged to confess that it was indeed very different from Bristol. For one thing, there was, although it was barely dawn, more light: and this light, streaming up from behind the mountains, was increasing every instant so that her English eyes could hardly bear it; but they were not so blind but that they could observe the general dilapidation of the town, like a tattered patchwork quilt tossed over a couple of hills. It was not ashamed of its raggedness, did not tuck the broken-down streets away out of sight as was the custom in England. There were gaping roofs everywhere, even a very palatial building had a temporary wig of thatch, and a list to eastwards. A qualm overcame her. "Is that," said she pointing, "our residence?"
Auguste-Anne, casting a careless eye in the direction her finger showed, nodded with no diminution of his calm.
"But," she insisted, "that building is all askew!" Auguste-Anne nodded once more, and vouchsafed a short explanation.
"We have a gale, it does so, pouf! The next gale--pouf--blows it straight again. What matter?"
And he resumed his contemplation of the approaching port.
His wife would have wept, but at the end of a six weeks' voyage in her husband's company she knew better than to weep. Nevertheless she inwardly thought both the residence and its prevailing angle shocking, and had a momentary daughterly pang of resentment against her mother. The pictures that inspired lady had drawn! The visions of splendour she had known how to call up, out of an imagination nourished upon seafarers' tales! As the dutiful but disillusioned wife went below to finish her packing, she had privacy to indulge in a tear or two. But she was married now, and in her inmost heart of a milliner's apprentice and lodging-keeper's daughter, she knew that while without a husband a woman was dross, for a woman armed by marriage against the world there was sometimes hope. And she resumed her packing resigned.
By the time she came on deck again the news of their arrival had swept through the town, in the manner so surprising to those unused to the ways of blacks. The mud fort was dotted with gay uniforms, and as she looked the squat gun poking out from its casement gave a kind of loud bark, and recoiled for an instant out of sight. Down every street, out of every door, window, and other practicable aperture people were swarming, calling to each other, waving bits of bright stuff, assembling on the front to watch the ship berth, and receive her gig when it should come ashore. Auguste-Anne, perceiving these preparations, and mindful of the politeness of princes, turned to go below and array himself. But first he looked at his wife.
She was dressed in her wedding-dress of silk. It was the finest she had, it would have stood alone had it been set on the floor, but it was grey. Her bonnet, self-made, was also grey, though stuffed with pink roses. She looked, no doubt, very charming, and would have made a picture against a background of tender English green; here the background gave her no chance. It was daubed in like a very modern picture, in the strongest primary colours, blue and yellow and blinding white, and against it Madame la Marquise would not do.
"What is this dress?" he asked abruptly in French. "Why do you wear the costume of a nun?"
She swallowed once--after all, it was her wedding finery--before she answered in English:
"It is my best dress, Augustus."
"Have you nothing more suitable? Grey! Come, you see for yourself--"
His hand indicated the startling shore and the harbour now filling with small boats, red-sailed. She understood what he meant, but this was an eventuality she had not foreseen. She had nothing but what, in England, was suitable and in good taste, little pink dresses, white dresses, one grand flounced dress with sprigs; nothing that would accord in the least with this glare. Auguste-Anne shrugged, saying drily:
"We must remedy that," and went below to do his subjects' expectation justice.
Bella remained, looking down with fascinated eyes at the swimmers and rowing boats that now by dozens surrounded the ship. They kept up a continuous yelling, and those in the boats splashed madly with their paddles. This, had she but known, was not occasioned by the wildness of their enthusiasm, but from the need to terrify sharks, which frequented the harbour in schools. She gazed, then averted her eyes with all possible speed. The swimmers were unclad.
"Oh!" thought the unhappy Bella, wondering whether or no she should swoon, "Never, never did I think such things could be!"
And it is possible that in this comprehensive wail she included certain practices of her husband, Auguste-Anne Boissy de Mortemar.
"Well, meddarm," said the captain's voice behind her, "you don't see this sort o' thing much in Bristol."
"No, indeed," she agreed with feeling, and blushing.
No indeed, people did not cast away all restraint, all clothing in Bristol. People did not yell, nor live in pink houses all blown to one side. There were matrons in the boats, grinning and publicly feeding naked babies, while what clothes they wore seemed to serve no decent purpose. No, things were very different in Bristol.
The captain took a few walnuts from his pockets and tossed them down among the swimmers, who dived as they saw them coining, and then caught them accurately between their teeth; caught and cracked with one motion, and ate with one more.
"Look at that," said the captain, "monkeys ain't in it with these coves."
And he laughed heartily, searching his pockets for more nuts.
"I think they are terrible," said Bella, faintly, averting her eyes.
"Well," said the captain, considering, "I don't know. They have human sacrifices, by what I've heard, but not for eating, more in the way of fun. And they get up to a lot of mischief, with spells and such-like. They go mad a lot, too. But I don't know that they're so terrible, taking them all round."
At this point, just as Bella had decided that she could bear no more, Auguste-Anne, dressed for the occasion, came majestically on deck, and the welcomers began to arrive.
VI
First, the Bishop, rowed by six unclad negroes, his processional umbrella fringed with gold held over him by a priest. He was a bishop of the old school, rounded and jolly, who always found plenty of words in season to say to brides; and he had been devoting the past months to getting up a ceremony of uncommon splendour for the coronation, and to thinking out in private, with chuckles, something appropriate for a christening. It was with a conscience at ease and a mind alert with benevolent curiosity that he permitted himself to be hoisted by his negroes up the ship's ladder, into the presence of the island's lord and master. Auguste-Anne, who enjoyed the Bishop and played up to him, sank to one silken knee for his blessing; Bella, completely awed by this tribute, sank to both of hers; and the Bishop let off a good long Latin benediction over their heads, which, owing to the incurable fruitiness of his voice, sounded more like an excerpt from Petronius Arbiter. Then they rose, the bride keeping an eye on her spouse for cues of behaviour, like a parvenu watching a duke's manipulation of forks, and there was an outburst of foreign chatter. She was able to catch a word here and there of it, and understood that Auguste-Anne was introducing her. She had been coached, and should have known what to do when the Bishop thrust out his exquisite little rosy hand towards her; she did know what to do, she remembered perfectly, but at the popishness of it all the Bristol blood in her revolted, and she did not kiss the hand, but shook it; timidly, civilly, and with a curtsy as she had been taught at school.
Auguste-Anne glowered, while the Bishop appeared surprised. Another outburst of rapid French permitted her to guess that she was being apologised for as a heretic. Strangely enough, the Bishop did not seem in the least put out, but taking her hand kindly in his own two, like scented cushions, made her a little speech, from which she gathered that he promised himself great pleasure in taking on his shoulders the responsibility of her instruction in the Faith. She had not French enough to repudiate this, nor strength to withstand any longer her husband's sombre eye; and so she blushed, and looked appealing, and could not help being the prettiest creature the Bishop had ever seen. He said, measuring every word:
"You have a treasure, monsieur. We have lost our Blessed Lady (figuratively, you understand), and we will make of Madame a little golden saint to replace her."
And he chuckled again, and motioned the pair to a share of his umbrella, which already was totally inadequate for one; and they all three stood in state to survey the arrival, in a dug-out canoe hung with skulls, of the chief witch-doctor, his reverence Hele Tombai. This personage needed no help from his rowers to ascend the ship's side; he was up and over it in one bound, bowing and grinning, and finally whirling dizzily on his heels, while in the canoe his assistants waved a mysterious shape on the end of a thong, which gave out sounds like an angry bull. Auguste-Anne said to this power, when he finished his introductory dance, in the pidgin French of the island:
"This woman queen alonga me, you bloody well love her, name of a sacred name of a sacred pig, Tombai!"
Sacred pig was not at all an inappropriate term for the witch-doctor. His calling and station excused a good deal in him; but then the same might have been said, for that matter, both of the Bishop and of Auguste-Anne. This latter, while the Bishop feigned an aside to his chaplain, continued and closed his harangue with the simple words:
"She bring luck all same Yellow Mary" (the black's name for the lost Virgin). "You make tella your people, species of sacred goose, Tombai!"
Sacred goose was not bad either, as a piece of description. The witch-doctor was always cackling warnings, and the hurricanes which came along punctually every few years always bore him out as a prophet of disaster. His reputation rested on these hurricanes. It was supposed that a man whom the deities forewarned of their intentions in one important respect would hardly keep him in the dark about such minor matters as lost goats and sore eyes. But he was not, or perhaps the deities themselves were not, quite so strong on good-luck prophecies, and Auguste-Anne thought it as well in his exordium to offer an immediate and suitable substitute for Yellow Mary departed. This image was the only fragment of the island's official faith that the blacks were able to take to at all. They had been used to revere and say prayers to her, standing there so high, telling the winds which way to blow, bidding with her outstretched sceptre. Mistress of the Winds was their secret sacred name for her, and she came in for a good deal of devotion, mingled, as the blacks love to do, with fear. Auguste-Anne was aware of this, and seized his opportunity to set Bella in her place; she was as unbelievably white and gold, and every hair of her head was most evidently as good for the strongest kind of white magic as the gilded Lady brought from Seville two centuries ago.
The witch-doctor gave Bella an all-over glance as the Bishop had done, but no sentiment, whether of delight, covetousness, or contempt, was betrayed in the glaucous mirrors of his eyes. (They were greyish and opaque, the colour of oysters, but by no means blind.) He looked, then gave a final caper and twirl, and leaped over the ship's side again into his waiting, roaring canoe.
When he was out of reasonable earshot the Bishop began, in a tone of some concern:
"Excellence, my dear friend; I perceive that you appreciate fully the situation which the loss of Our Lady brings upon us. May I congratulate you upon your quick-wittedness in setting up--" he bowed--"an equivalent? The facts are these--"
"Facts?" repeated Auguste-Anne, drily. He knew the turn of the Bishop's mind, which could make a good story out of a mule consuming an over-ripe orange. The everyday glowed in rainbow hues when he set tongue to it. In the pulpit he could lend to Christianity the strangeness, the interest of an Eastern fairy-tale. Therefore Auguste-Anne repeated, without malice, the single word:
"Facts?"
"Aha!" said the Bishop with good-humour, "you do not trust me; well you are right, perhaps. We will let the abbé tell my story."
Thus encouraged the chaplain began.
VII
"Excellence, after the last tornado--you were gone soon after, and may not have observed it--Our Lady was discovered to be growing very stiff in her bearings, by no means so active or so accurate with regard to the wind. She was oiled, every care was paid her by steeplejacks, but with no effect. She creaked. She groaned like a soul in purgatory. Finally, she stuck."
"Stuck, abbé?"
"Stuck, Excellence; at south-east by east. Whether she had been bent by the excessive force of the wind is not known. This was one evening. Next day at dawn she was gone."
"Alas!" said the Bishop with a comfortable sigh.
"Hum!" mused Auguste-Anne, his eyes upon the swarming boats with their freight of monkey-like humans. "Your steeplejacks, were they black men?"
"Certainly," replied the abbé, "they were black men, Excellence. They are accustomed to hurry up and down tall trees in search of fruits and I don't know what else. Certainly our climbers were blacks."
"And have you seen them since?"
"Yes, Excellence, oh indeed, yes. Poor fellows, they were much distressed when coming in the morning they found her gone."
"She had not fallen?"
"There was no sound; no trace. Our Lady weighed some hundredweights, you know. She could hardly have fallen unnoticed. His Lordship, to begin with, must have heard the noise in the palace, which is so very close by--"
"Hum!" said Auguste-Anne again. He had himself been present at parties in the said palace when the sky might have fallen without any one of the guests being in a condition to observe it. He took a few steps this way and that upon the deck, eyed by all; then faced-about abruptly to declare:
"Your steeplejacks have got her."
"Excellence!" exclaimed the Bishop and his chaplain together. "What atrocity, our Blessed Lady in such hands!"
"Permit me. They have taken her away to worship. She will be treated with every respect."
"They will set skulls full of rum before her," moaned the chaplain.
"Force her to witness obscenities," added the Bishop, with a regretful sigh.
"Gentlemen," said Auguste-Anne, "you exaggerate. Our Lady can take care of herself; besides, she has influence--" He pointed upwards; then, seized by a sickening thought: "she was not of real gold?"
"Lead, gilded," replied the chaplain tearfully.
The Bishop and the ruler exchanged a glance which seemed to say "that would have been sacrilege indeed." The Bishop, taking a scented handkerchief from under the lace of his cotta--for the crowd of boats was growing thicker every moment, and the odour of their human freight mounting higher--said to the chaplain in his comfortable voice:
"Remind me, abbé, to curse the miscreants to-morrow morning before my Mass. They must not go unscathed." Then, turning to Bella, to whom the whole scene was a mystery, and who stood looking more adorable than ever in her bewilderment--she was one of those women whose faces an expression of intelligence kills:
"Madame," said the Bishop, bowing as well as his rotundity would allow, "here at last is your state barge coming, with, let us hope, a somewhat less perilous ladder. Will you honour my arm by taking it towards the descent?"
She slipped her white fingers under the Bishop's elbow, and found them caught close to the Bishop's side by muscles of unexpected strength. Together they took the ten steps to the ship's bulwark, Auguste-Anne following contemptuously with the chaplain. The state vessel indeed was there, hung with brocades that looked as though they had been dyed in wine, gilded, carved, its rowers dressed in liveries copied from those which had served poor King Louis upon his ornamental waters. A kind of boatswain with a whip stood in her prow, flailing off the encroaching negro eyes. Another official fixed the steps and came half-way up them to take his new mistress's hand. The Bishop gently urged her. She came to stand upon the broad top stop, lifted up above the boats, for the first time in full view. The crowd yelled, seeing her, and timidly she put a hand to her breast, while the other hand still stretched out and down. She did not know it, but she stood for ten seconds in the very attitude of the lost Virgin, and the quick eyes of the blacks perceived it at once. The yell came down to a duller crooning noise, with a rhythm to it, so that the Bishop, who knew that prayers sound the same in all languages, gave a start. Then she stepped down into the gilt cabin of the barge, and was lost to the worshippers' sight.
What an experience for Bella! The whole old story of Cinderella was being lived by her over again. There she sat, amid hangings of silk, with a Bishop, who for grandeur could have played His Inertia of Bath and Wells off the stage, bending to her lightest whisper; and a husband whom thousands feared; and a whole dark people smitten with wonder at her pale beauty. Her thoughts are not to be known; but it would surprise me to learn that there was nothing in them of regret, no hankering for the bonnets, the sameness, the dear respectability of Bristol, as she set foot that morning in the island's preposterous only town.
VIII
Almost immediately after her arrival things began to happen in Corazon. This in itself was unprecedented; things, caprices of the elements, often happened to the island, but it was against nature for the ordinary lotus-life of the islanders to engender events. Auguste-Anne, having reigned twenty years over docility, found actual problems presenting themselves to his lazy and despotic eye. The blacks, to begin with, were restless. He supposed that they had installed some new gods--they were always getting tired of the old ones, and inventing conquerors for them--and that their irritating drumming in the hills would soon die down. Possibly it was the cathedral statue, he thought, idly listening to the thuds through his netted windows, and they were offering her the kind of treats which in their innocence they supposed a virgin must enjoy. But there was no telling. The witch-doctor, questioned as closely and subtly as the simplicities of pidgin-French would admit, was bland, and civilly ignorant.
No, he knew of no trouble. All were busy, all were contented. There had been no reshuffling of gods.
Then perhaps Tombai could tell them what had become of Yellow Mary? Tombai shrugged so that his necklaces of teeth rattled ominously. Behind the glaucous eyes Auguste-Anne, long attuned to him, perceived a sullenness.
Yellow Mary, answered the witch-doctor, was very holy no doubt, very strong for magic?
It was a question. Auguste-Anne answered, feeling his way through the dark of Tombai's mind, that she was indeed strong. Had she not for two centuries beckoned the winds to the island?
"Ha!" replied Tombai, in a grunt so expressionless that Auguste-Anne knew it concealed something. But what? Was the witch-doctor afraid, or plotting, or shielding the thieves who had stolen Yellow Mary from her tower? Auguste-Anne could not resolve the problem, and in the end had to let his chancellor go. It never occurred to him that the poor ageing man was trying to keep his temper and his face, and pretend that all was well while in his spiritual dominions heresy raged with the fury of the recent hurricane.
But this was the truth, as appeared from the terrified confession of one of the house-servants one evening after his fingers had been held for a minute or two over a live candle. (This was such a very short way to the truth that local morality did not frown on it.) He could speak easy French, having been in the Governor's service many years, and the story came out comprehensibly enough to make Auguste-Anne swear, and take turns about the room.
The blacks were, said Boule de Neige, dissatisfied with Tombai. They thought him a true, but a disagreeable prophet, always faithful to disaster. He predicted cyclones, cyclones came, and there was endless rebuilding and work, to say nothing of personal danger. It seemed as though he had authority only over storms, for his other prophecies about children and crops and live stock were not notably accurate. There had been murmurings for some time. It had occurred to a good many people that they might do well to unfrock Tombai of his magic masks and necklaces, but they found themselves up against the usual difficulty of finding someone to put in his place. Half the population had watched and adored Yellow Mary for years, as presumably half the population of England in Newton's day had seen apples fall, but only one among them all conceived the notion of electing her in Tombai's stead.
Once the idea was grasped, it was acclaimed. Yellow Mary, as everyone with eyes in his head could see, was beckoner to all winds, not the dreaded nor'-wester alone. Her sceptre held magic to make the airs gallop which way she pleased; and it seemed to them that any person who could contrive, with the utmost respect, of course, to keep her sceptre towards the calmer quarters, might put a stop to tornadoes and their laborious consequences for ever.
So the steeplejacks one night ran up the spire and with reverence tried the experiment of roping the figure to one of their desired directions. They did it after much prayer, and with terror at their hearts, realising that the audacious experiment might well provoke a chastening tempest. But nothing happened save a few groans from the straining statue; then they realised with ecstasy that she was theirs, and that if only they could get her down safe from her height they might snap their fingers at old Tombai, and set up as popes for themselves. A nice stroke of irony directing the Bishop's choice, they found themselves summoned to deal with the immobility which themselves had caused. They used this daylight opportunity to reconnoitre, to slacken certain screws, to attach certain pulleys; and by the following morning there was no more trace of the Virgin than if she had had a second assumption, and been drawn up to heaven, points of the compass and all.
Since then, Tombai's offerings had been falling off, and the new worship had been sending the people into unequalled frenzies. Even the old man's drummers had deserted, and sat thumping day and night in the distant grotto where Yellow Mary stood, pointing with her sceptre always south-east by east. And except for a few women, always apt to lag behind where new ideas were concerned, nobody came any more to ask magic advice of Tombai.
Thus Boule de Neige, sucking from time to time his roasted finger.
"Do you know this grotto?" the Bishop asked.
(He was present, and none the worst for two bottles of claret.) Boule de Neige fell to gibbering, from which they gathered that he did know, but that it was as much as his life was worth to tell.
"She must be rescued," the Bishop avowed. "Our Lady in the hands of infidels, never! A new crusade--"
And he began to describe, with delicate gestures, the joys of suffering, of marching, of fighting amid blood and sweat as Our Lady's knights.
"As to that, I don't know," said Auguste-Anne slowly, impervious to eloquence, "I don't know, monseigneur, that we need go to all this trouble. I have done some campaigning, when I was younger, in this scrub of ours; they have only to sink the figure in a swamp, or bury her, and we may hunt till our tails turn blue. No, my advice--with deference, monseigneur--is to leave them in possession."
"It is sacrilege," said the Bishop firmly, for he would have enjoyed organising a crusade, and might even have accompanied it in a hammock between porters on the first day's march as far as the foothills.
"It is infernally bad policy," retorted Auguste-Anne. "(You may go, Boule de Neige.) If we lend importance to this theft, we set these black fellows thinking, 'Ha, we have stolen the goddess of the whites, their power lies in her, we have stolen their power, ha, he!' Then trouble begins," said Auguste-Anne slowly, "that's all that comes of crusades."
The Bishop gave the faintest shrug, and as he imagined turned the subject.
"When is it your wish that Madame should be crowned?"
"You can take a hint, Monseigneur," answered Auguste-Anne, with his saturnine smile. "That is, of course, the answer to these thieving monkeys. Madame is the new goddess in person, and I wish this made clear to the people. She must be dressed like the statue; the sceptre and crown should be easy, and with a few yards of cloth of gold--"
"You refer to her robes for the coronation?"
"What else? Then, seeing her enthroned, messieurs the blacks say among themselves, 'Ha, these whites are more foxy than we thought, they have still the power, the true Yellow Mary comes down from the sky to them, they are still our masters, ha, he!'"
"Excellence," replied the Bishop after a moment's smiling thought, "as a Christian I must approve your detestation of force."
"Ay, do," said Auguste-Anne with his sneer. "Force would have had us all barbecued long ago. Force recoils. Inaction--there's the policy for this island; ruse, laissez-faire. I remind you that the blacks are to the whites in a proportion of a thousand to one, all a great deal better equipped than we are with muscle, force potential. But I do not believe there is a sou's worth of intelligence to set up a rattle in the ten thousand empty cocoanuts they call their brains; and so we shall continue, if we use our wits, to rule."
"You are right, no doubt, my dear Lord," the lazy Bishop answered. Then, with a fat chuckle, lifting his glass, "To our new little golden saint!"
Auguste-Anne glowered, but drank.
IX
The coronation ceremony drew near. Bella, poor little creature, was rapidly losing the stiffness, as of Bristol board, which at first had kept her backbone poker-wise. She had, in the space of a month on the island, become much suppled in her ideas; whether the climate, or the lack of example, or the Bishop's persuasions were responsible, is not known. She still jibbed at being baptised, but the Bishop--who, if he had ridden, would have had good hands for a horse--had got her to the point of tolerating the coronation ceremony, and their catechism hour had turned into a kind of rehearsal for this. The abbé, shyly laughing, they installed as bishop, and Bella would approach his chair with a silver coaster on her small head, genuflect, put her hands between his, and come in pat with her amens. (This word, with its strong Church of England flavour, was the only one of the responses her conscience would permit her to make: the others, a sub-deacon was to voice at her shoulder.)
The Bishop, that connoisseur of ceremony, stood aside during this go and come with the cool eye of a theatrical producer nicely calculating the adjustment of his means--Bella--to his end--the maintenance of white rule. He was jolly, but he was also a strategist, and it cost him little on the whole to let the abbé press the creamy fingers, smooth now after nearly three months neglect of the needle; for on his pupil's right behaviour depended, to put it very bluntly, the Bishop's own skin, with which the blacks would not hesitate to rig their drums in case of a successful revolt. Women, he may have meditated, are all very well, but a skin is essential to the full enjoyment of them. So he held off, and criticised, and was kind in the most fatherly way till her timidity almost vanished, and she stepping about in her absurd coaster-crown as to the manner born. Then the Bishop gave the hint, and Auguste-Anne gave notice, by means of trumpeters in the market square, that there would be a coronation, oyez, oyez, and a procession after it on the following Monday, and that there would be a general amnesty for all prisoners (thus enabling their guards to swell the ranks of the uniformed and add dignity to the affair). The new queen, added the trumpeters, would be proclaimed by the name of Golden Mary.
When this was announced, in French and the native tongue, there was something like a commotion in the market-place; all the dark eyes rolled up to look at the cathedral spire, as if they expected to see the new queen perched on it; and then down scowling. Evidently they did not in the least know what to make of this announcement, although, having seen Bella on the day of arrival, it did not take anyone quite by surprise. Auguste-Anne had kept her pretty close since then and except the palace servants few had set eyes on her. She was flesh and blood, so much they were sure of, but whether this gave her an advantage over her gilded rival remained to be seen. They dispersed chattering, and somehow or other the news came almost as soon as the trumpeters had done with it to the two usurping witch-doctors as these sat outside their grotto, making a very good meal off recent offerings. The message did not come by word of mouth, and since they were alone when it reached them they could give their real opinions play. Said the first steeplejack-pontiff, with a laugh:
"How can this other Mary be the true one? How can a woman be a goddess?"
"Our black women," answered pontiff the second seriously, "are beasts and witless, but even they prophesy now and then, after there has been singing. This white woman is strong magic, we know, for even the greatest, even Sword-Face (Auguste-Anne) himself bends before her, and kisses her hand like a slave."
"It will be a nice thing for us, if She can't hold her own. Back all the rats will go to Tombai, and this"--a gesture included the broken meat and maize and sugar--"will come to an end."
The other, still laughing, rebuked him.
"How is Her"--a nod--"praying-stick set?"
"In the way of the good wind," answered pontiff the second. The first wetted his finger and held it up.
"Do the same, brother. Which side do you feel it blow cold?"
"The side of the good wind," repeated the second, relieved.
They wasted no more words, but nodded at each other in a satisfied kind of way, and buried the superfluous victuals with the carelessness of men who know for certain whence their next meal is coming.
The fact was that a pleasant and persistent trade-wind had blown from exactly that quarter for a month, as was its habit at this time of year. But they had never had leisure to note the habits of winds; it was a branch of blessing which they had been content, in the old days, to leave to Tombai. They presumed that they owed this month of constancy to Yellow Mary's firmly wedged sceptre and, in the confidence engendered by the belief, made a plan--a plan that was more in the nature of a challenge. They brooded and shaped it for days and delivered it full-blown to Auguste-Anne on the very morning of the procession.
It will be remembered that the island's Excellence was himself a patron and encourager of the black rites. He found them interestingly archaic, though far from effete, and had submitted indulgently to certain of the ceremonies which were appropriate to his dignity and his sex. But his stupefaction, his rage at the calm proposition of these two jumped-up witch-doctors, none of Tombai's disciples, but a pair of heretics in imitation necklaces, was unchancy to behold. What they proposed with such calm was nothing less than a trial of strength between the two Marys, with the suggestion--half a threat--that there were a few ceremonies of their own which Golden Mary had better attend, after the Bishop's affair at the cathedral. Their tone, though glazed with the official whine, was confident to insolence.
Sword-Face had a moment's unreasoning impulse to string up the two blackmailers in front of his palace and chance a row; then his own words concerning force recurred to him, and he mastered himself. He did not reply to the challenge, nor even go so far as to indicate the door; he merely laughed, once, and resumed perusal of the papers on his table. The pontiffs, disconcerted, made some attempt at argument, and stood shuffling. He ignored them more completely than if they had been flies. The first, who believed most firmly and therefore was most sure of himself, lifted a hand and said to the disdainful master in ugly bastard French:
"We know who will rule the island, and it is not you, mossié."
On that they departed, the second of them more than a little cast down, for Sword-Face seen close was really alarming; but the other consoled him.
X
The coronation went off well enough while it kept to the cathedral. The canons sang loud, and the Bishop was dignified, and the abbé was devout as though he had never sat dressed as the Bishop in a red shawl to bless Bella with the coaster on her head. But the anxious time came afterwards. She was to have walked, crowned, from the cathedral to the palace, no very great way, and the procession was taking its final orders in the canons' robing-room when it occurred to somebody--the organ having stopped and the bells not begun--that outside the cathedral things were suspiciously silent. The abbé went to look out, and came back with both pink cheeks faded.
"Not a soul," said he, whispering in the Bishop's ear; "the market-place is bare as my hand; and one can hear drums."
"Hum!" said the Bishop, and communicated the news to Auguste-Anne. That authority considered, then answered with the half of a grin:
"We had better take our chance of a procession while we can get it. March!"
And march they did, under a canopy heavily fringed, across the burning white dust of the market-place. Bella in her heavy golden dress had to press upon her husband's arm; the ceremony had lasted a good while, and she was carrying a child. However, she had vanity to keep her up, that stronger supporter than a husband's arm, and she did not know enough to be frightened. She walked then with dignity, the milliner's apprentice, thinking with scorn how once she had nearly fainted from awe trying on the bonnet of a mere Viscountess. And here she was with a crown on her head--the Virgin's loan--and a train yards long, sweeping back to her own palace. She thought now with gratitude of her mother's strength of mind, and vowed to write the longest letter to that lady, of whose fulfilled destiny she was not yet aware. The guns down at the port were going, and the bells by this time rollicking in the cathedral spire, so that the drums, which were distant, had their warning covered over, stifled, entirely silenced. But their rhythm went on in the calculating heads of the Bishop and Auguste-Anne.
The moment they, with the new queen and such white officials as were necessary, had entered the doors of the palace, their attitude of joyful composure was abandoned with their swords, baldrics, and other excrescences of State. It was a council of war that, without warning, Bella saw come into being before her eyes. A dozen men about a table; shutters carefully closed; a map; voices in which sounded both haste and dismay.
"Incredible!" one pasty-faced gentleman was repeating. "A rising, but it is irrational. It lacks common-sense. Why rise?"
"Because," answered another, "it is the property of scum to do so. We must skim them off, skim them off as they come--" and he made the gesture of a cook with her ladle. Auguste-Anne replied impatiently:
"They rise because they want to be masters; because for once they have an idea rattling in their skulls, and it is driving them mad. They have our fetish, as they think."
"The proclamation was a mistake," said the Bishop, shaking his head, "they have not been taken in by our goddess."
"Madame Marie is endangered by it," another put in, "they have only to try a silver bullet--"
Auguste-Anne hushed him with a scowl. Madame Marie was in the room, glowing but forgotten. He went up to her with his grand manner of the husband-consort, and offered his hand, saying:
"You should rest, Madame, you are fatigued. These gentlemen will excuse you."
But she had learned a little French by now, and the sentence about the silver bullet had not escaped her.
"Augustus," said she, clinging suddenly to his formally-arched hand, "is it me, trouble through me? Is there danger?"
"None," said he, with his formal smile. "Will you come?"
"But what is happening with the blacks?"
"That, Madame, is what we would give something to know."
And with this for sole satisfaction, her train looped into a bundle on her arm, she was obliged to depart, and submit herself to her servant women, who to-day--these too--were sullen and silent.
Below, the conclave went on. Where to defend? There had been no such threat as this for fifty, sixty years. Defence had sunk to mere decoration, as the plates of steel of the man-at-arms dwindled at last to epaulettes of gold braid. The fort's cannon had not been asked for generations to take charges of ball. The walls of the palace had grown thick with mosses, and the climbing plants of the tropics made living ladders over them. They could still be defended by an adequate force, adequately supplied, but what force was there? Perhaps three hundred able-bodied white men in the town; and the walls, conceived and built in more spacious days, enclosed a park, and wandered for a couple of miles before they met again at the iron gates. There were no muskets, save the fifty down at the fort; the butts of these were shiny with the slapping of hands during a half century of presenting arms, but as weapons they would need, to be effective, to be held by the barrel end. The stocks of powder were low, and the last lot, purchased from the English warship, of doubtful quality. The ten gentlemen, made aware of these facts, turned as underlings will upon a leader at a loss; and Auguste-Anne had to defend, as a deliberate policy, his past years of aimless pure idleness. He made, however, no long protest.
"If there were nothing but discontent in this," said he, "if it were only a question of who is to wear the regalia, that might be settled. I have no wish to lie uneasy at night for the sake of being called Excellency by day. But there is a bitterness in this brew of trouble that--with deference to monseigneur the Bishop--only religion can give. Oppression will not wake our indolent islanders to frenzy; it is this deuced godliness that is too strong wine for them. Their heads cannot stand religion as European heads can; they take it seriously. I was wrong, I confess, to start with them a competition in saints."
"True enough," admitted the Bishop, whose lackadaisical airs were now overcast by the shrewdness of his native Normandy, "but if religion stirs up danger, gentlemen--which is part of her task in this world--she is also the provider of refuge; and it is my suggestion that the cathedral, which possesses narrow windows and towers admirably loopholed, should shelter God's flock while the present storm threatens."
There was a murmur of agreement. Then the literal gentleman who saw no common-sense in a negro rising took up the last words.
"A storm?" said he, sniffing the air, "I believe his lordship is right. What says the barometer?"
"I spoke figuratively, sir," said the Bishop, impatiently.
"Oh, did you?" replied the unabashed gentleman. "Well, I think you've hit the truth, for all that."
And going to the shutters, he threw them open and stood breathing deeply of the leaden air. A broken spider's web hanging loose from one of the slats did not even tremble. The sea, far down below, was steel. Colour, movement, and sound had gone together out of the atmosphere; yet the stillness was dangerous with movement withheld, violence to come.
"Feels like a hurricane," said another gentleman, coming to stand beside the first in the window.
At that they were all down on him. The last disaster was not six months old. Hurricanes took time to gather. No, no, he was altogether wrong. He subsided, and the conclave went on with its business; but the first obstinate gentleman remained, shaking his head, and looking out to sea in the direction which usually vented the first gush of storm wind; that is to say the nor'-west.
XI
He could not know the interest that point of the compass was exciting among those who were gathered in the hills to cause the whites uneasiness, and would only have damned them heartily had he been aware. But the fact was that alarmed by the portents, which they could recognise very surely without the aid of barometers, the blacks had interrupted their drumming and other preparations to beseech the steeple-jacks, and to pray that Yellow Mary should show herself. Both pontiffs were averse to letting the goddess be seen, though since all the world had looked at her for years, beckoning on top of her pinnacle, there might seem nothing very sacrilegious in it. But they had to pay the penalty of those elected to power by the people, and give the people what the people chose, loudly, to demand. Everyone knew they were not genuine papaloi, real priests who got knowledge by years of silence and starvation. Everyone knew that they had once been mere climbers, and that the goddess had come into their hands by trickery and thieving. This did not mean that the goddess was less potent, but only that her devotees would not stand the priesthood putting on airs. The goddess was mighty, the steeplejacks were nothing; anyone might take their place, anyone could keep a goddess prisoner in a grotto. This having been made clear to the two, they gave way.
Yellow Mary, her sceptre still pointing south by east, was rolled forward, somewhere about 4.30 in the afternoon, out of her sacred darkness, and down went a great many thousand black heads in adoration. The priests had tricked her out in decorations copied from those worn by Tombai, a scarf of crimson stuff, necklaces, shining beads. She glittered through these, indifferent, with her weathered smile unchanged and the sceptre rigid. There was silence, and much bowing. Then the chief of the drummers rose, tiptoeing, and went to his tall drum which stood beside the impromptu altar. He struck out a solemn tune which they all knew, and by and by the thousands were singing their hymn of the Mother-Goddess:--
She who nourishes,
She who keeps with safety,
She who is not afraid,
Help us, Lady!
Over and over they sang it, the petition to be fed, and delivered from fear, and kept out of mischief. They droned it until the words lost significance, and the drumming and stamping rose above and drowned them. A bull died by the knife while they sang, and some goats; the blood of these creatures, drained into a long trough-shaped wooden bowl, was sacramentally drunk. Women began to writhe, and froth at the mouth; they prophesied before they fell. Men raged at each other in mimic fights, brandishing weapons which had been anointed with brains. The bull-roarers whirled. Amid the fury, Yellow Mary smiled, and a darkness gathered, unnoticed, in the direction opposed to her sceptre.
XII
When night had fallen, with the abrupt finality of a theatre curtain, the white pilgrimage to the cathedral began, unimaginably different from the morning procession. There was no light; they were afraid that the blacks, from their vantage-point in the hills, would spy the lanterns and learn of the panic. So muskets and blankets, and children, food, pet monkeys and birds, powder, skins of wine and water--all were brought by men and women, shoving and struggling like ants in the complete darkness. It took three hours, from six till nine, to get the cathedral munitioned, though the Bishop and clergy, who could work unobserved, had been busy in the crypt since early noon. All told, there was little confusion. The building was huge, and hugely strong. It had been set up in earlier days, and those first essentials of all good building, time and unlimited slave labour, had gone to make it. The windows of the aisles were, as the Bishop had said, narrow and high. The east and west windows, wherein flaunted a Last Judgment and a terrifying Crucifixion, were more attackable; but the builders--Spaniards, always on guard against possible treachery--had provided galleries with loopholes which commanded them. Altogether the cathedral made a passable fortress, thought Auguste-Anne, looking about with the casual eye of the amateur soldier.
Nor were the ghostly forces at the Bishop's command neglected. Before the high altar, where the red lamp burned, the woman and older priests were engaged upon a litany, preparing, much as their enemies had done, for death and battle by a passionate appeal to the Woman.
"Tower of ebony," sang the leaders,
"Tower of ivory,
House of gold--"
"Pray for us!" implored the chorus.
And the Bishop had caused to be rigged, with pulleys, strong lamps just inside the Judgment window, in particular near that corner on the left of the central figure which was thronged with devils, convincingly imagined. These lamps were not to be lit until the besiegers were actually at the doors; for--
"If I cannot save my windows," said the Bishop, "at least they shall earn us a minute's grace through fear."
Apart from the crowd that worked, and planned, and prayed, sat the cause of half the bother, little Bella the milliner's apprentice, upright on the Bishop's throne. She still wore her gold gown, and felt heavy in it, fatigued and perplexed. She could not be busy, women's hands were unneeded among the barrels and great sacks of provisions; and as for prayer, the English liturgy did not seem to her memory to be designed for such emergencies as this. There was something green and peaceable about most of the prayers she could recollect; they were recited orderly, and without much emphasis or meaning, as though they apologised in a well-bred way for taking up God's attention. But these prayers--the people were opening their mouths wide, and clamouring:
"Queen of Patriarchs,
Queen of prophets,
Queen of apostles
Pray for us!"
It was as though they said:
"We've tried flattery. Now we'll try what old association can do. We are in great need, Lady, and shameless. You must listen; surely one of these titles will catch your ear--"
And on they went, tirelessly, while Bella, even in her fright and her languor a little contemptuous, sat up, and said a prim prayer or two decently, within her own mind.
XIII
A watcher had been posted in the tower. He sat there in the dark, among the bells, keeping an eye on the far camp-fires. By daylight the whole town could be seen from this vantage point, which was its apex, and by daylight the watcher might have enjoyed his task. There would have been ten thousand lives to spy on, and the masts of ships pricking up over the horizon a good ten minutes before they could be seen in the port below.
But to-night the town and the very air seemed dead. No lights, no footsteps, and the rats were disquieting. They rushed about, continually squealing, and there were more of them every minute. They came scampering over his legs, racing past him up the bell-ropes and even on to the bells. The rafters were clotted with them; they fought, squealing, for places. The watcher had never heard anything like it before, and he did not care for it. He struck a light, thinking to frighten them, and only frightened himself; for the flame was reflected in ten thousand beads of eyes, and showed him, besides, the brown ordinary rats outnumbered and outfought by lean buccaneers from the waterside. Brown corpses were being devoured. He stared, neglecting his scrap of tow, which gasped once and went out. Swearing and sweating, he lit it again. It was bad to see the brutes, but worse to hear them capering and scampering in a black world which contained no other sounds. To distract his mind from the problem they offered--waterside rats? waterside rats in the tower?--he turned to his spyhole again.
Downhill the lights were moving, torches he judged, and still a couple of miles away. There was a regular path of them, a winding line coming down through the bush, quick and regular as if their bearers marched to a drum-beat. The attack! And thank God for it, thought the watcher, kicking his way through the still increasing tide of rats, and making for the rope knotted and looped by which he had come. Rats were on it, and he heard, as he kicked again, one or two of them thud down on the belfry's stone floor. As he lowered himself hand over hand, they swarmed over and past him. The musty stink of them was in his nose, and twice he felt teeth in his forearm.
"Eh, well, man, what is it?" asked the Bishop, whom he found in the crypt, burying--not without a certain impatience and perfunctoriness--the reverend fibulae and pelvices, to put them out of the way of sacrilege. "The attack, you say; from which direction? Torches and drums? Excellence," to Auguste-Anne, from whose pocket hung the seals of his Lieutenant's brevet, all that he had troubled to salve, "as we feared, the priests are with them. That means madness."
"We'll keep them out while we can," responded Auguste-Anne, "and when they overpower us, I have a bullet here for myself and another for my wife. I have no fancy to be barbecued, nor, I imagine, have you. Your cloth forbids the carrying of arms. Permit me--"
The offered weapon was accepted and stowed somewhere within the Bishop's draperies, and a final question tossed to the watcher:
"Nothing else of importance?"
The watcher signified No. He was ashamed, amid these preparations and courtesies and impending mighty happenings, to mention anything so sordid as a gathering of rats. Even when he was sent up once more to observe he did not protest. Rats, thought the watcher, though dirty brutes, were but animals after all; while the blacks, lit up by their priests, would be devils. There was a chance, up in the steeple, of a not too courageous man being forgotten. Without more ado he climbed his stair and his rope again.
Steadily yet restlessly, on came the torches. They were nearer now, at the first outskirts of the town. He saw points of light dive into the narrow channels of the streets, and show only as a glare between the houses. There was noise, yelling, with a rhythm of drums behind it. The glare advanced, turning this and that corner, until it burst into a thousand flares in the open space before the palace. He could almost distinguish faces now, and could see individual movements. A man in a necklace whirled an object, made some gesture or other. Instantly the swarms were on to the palace's broken walls, poised, and over. He thought of the rats; and indeed the blacks looked very like them, crowding, trampling each other to be first over. In no time the thatch blazed, but the stream of black bodies assailing the walls did not cease, and the noise, which had been a continuous excited yelling, turned, he thought, to something uglier still. They had been cheated; they were searching. He saw the torches run in groups this way and that, quartering the gardens. Other groups pushed forward along the streets to other houses. Soon the whole of the white quarter was throwing up flames towards the sky, and from nearly all the streets of the town rose the glare of hidden lights and the clamour of voices.
Below, in the cathedral, the men were at their posts, the women recited prayers, and Bella, swaying a little sideways, had fallen asleep on the Bishop's crimson-hung throne. Auguste-Anne cast one faintly contemptuous glance at his goddess, lovely as ever despite her crown askew, and refrained from waking her. Time enough for that and the pistol-shot. He sat down on the altar steps, and pulling his ivory box out of a pocket, began throwing dice, right hand against left, until the business of the evening should begin.
Noise and the lights drew nearer. From all the five streets which led to it the blacks poured upwards into the little square. The Bishop gave his orders for the cressets to be hoisted, and the demon rout began to live before the besiegers' eyes, dancing to the capricious measure of the flames. From this, the west window, the yelling menace shrank away, but at the others it was loud. A stone, twenty stones came crashing through glass, and set children screaming. There were detonations; an acrid smell of burnt powder crept about the nave like devil's incense. The men, recharging their pieces, waited grimly for the beginning of the end, the thump of a tree trunk against the weak northern door.
Above in his tower, forgotten, the watcher sat with a candle off the altar burning by his side, watching the rats. He knew now what was wrong with them. They were mad with fear. But he had been a sailor, and had seen enough of them to know that rats cared little enough for men's disturbances. Noise did not scare them much, and as for fire, there was no sign of that yet. The one thing that drove them to panic like this was fear of being trapped in a hulk and given no chance--against what? Against water, the rush of invading water.
God! thought the watcher, white-faced; and the sweat began to shine on his lip and forehead. His spy-hole looked northwest; another duplicate opening faced down towards the waterfront and harbour. He ran to it, treading living bodies underfoot, and keeping his balance with difficulty, stared down.
XIV
All the water of the bay was running out of the harbour. No ebb--and the tides in those parts are strong--had ever drawn it away at such a pace. Some of the fishing boats, moored together as was the blacks' custom in a cluster, broke from the single buoy that held them and went bobbing and circling out to sea. By the quayside down sank the water, drawing with it shingle and weed, further, and always more quickly, until the whole floor of the harbour was laid bare, a new landscape shining in the moon; hills, forests of weed, and a narrow valley, the channel for navigation, through which Yellow Mary had been used to give pilots their course. Upon this new territory, soft with slime, such boats as had not dragged anchor settled down, listing sideways. The watcher heard behind him the strangest mad scuffling and crying among the rats; then the moon, hanging low in the sky with no cloud near it, went suddenly out.
He shut his eyes. From the square outside there floated up to his loophole a wail, thin and pitiful, with no fight left in it, no frenzy, only terror. All the prayers he knew went out of his head. He could only stand with shut eyelids counting the seconds while the monstrous roaring wave advanced. It took its time. He counted a slow seventy before he heard the roar burst in a sound that nearly broke his ear-drums, and set the belfry shaking under his feet. All other sound was engulfed in that one. The watcher sat huddled in the dark, waiting without hope for the water to pour in upon him through the loopholes set two hundred feet above ground.
But none came. The roaring retreated. He stood up and peered and saw the moon upon the horizon, calmly on guard again. Her light showed the retreating water foaming backward, cascading down the hill, and bearing black specks that were the remains of roofs and boats and bodies. Houses were beaten flat, trees sailed in the current like straws, but the cathedral stood safe. He turned, and struck his light again, to see the rats fighting their way towards the bell ropes and his ladder, to get down; there was no panic now, and the fighting was only the usual clan-battle between black and brown.
"There'll be feeding for them in what's left of the town," thought the watcher with disgust, "the filthy beasts!" But they were a comfort to him, for all that. As they had known of the danger, so now they knew that it was over. He kicked his way among them, and slowly--for his hands were still wet, and his whole body weak as if with fever--came down to earth.
The cathedral hummed, rhythmic as a huge engine, with prayer. The Bishop, kneeling before the altar, hands upheld and the pistol-butt showing in his sash, was giving out the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Beside him Auguste-Anne knelt on one knee, one hand inside his deep pocket busy still with his dice-box. Under the Bishop's canopy stood Bella, awake now, and very upright. She would not kneel, for that was Popish, nor could she sit, for that was hardly respectful to the God who had just preserved her. She stood, therefore, one hand at her heart, in the very pose and likeness of Yellow Mary; and to the watcher's eye it seemed as if the whole congregation, Bishop and all, were saying their prayers to her.
"Tower of ivory--"
"Pray for us!"
"House of gold--"
"Pray for us!"
These were the very phrases; no others could have described her so well, standing there in the faint light, with her hands and face of ivory and her dress and hair of gold. Auguste-Anne, kneeling inattentively at the Bishop's side, triumphed in his mind over the blacks and their childish competition in goddesses.
"And by Christ's bones, mine won!" thought His Excellency. "We'll have them licking her feet to-morrow--what's left of the poor devils."
It was not many. They reckoned something like eight thousand dead in that disaster, the first submerging of Corazon.
Thus it is observed, that men sometimes, upon the hour of their departure, doe speak and reason above themselves.
--Religio Medici.
I
It is a pity to have to confess that life missed a dramatic opportunity here. It would have been so easy to allow this upheaval to coincide with my grandfather's birth, to let him make his first appearance on earth scandalously in a church, like that most inapropos child of Pope Joan; but occasionally life, which has so many other opportunities at command, disdains these theatrical strokes. My grandfather arrived six months later, in the normal way, and was christened Gustave-Félicité-George. This last name, such an abrupt resolution of the previous harmonies, was due to an outburst of Englishness on the part of his mother, who thought Gustave bad and Félicité worse, and was determined that her boy should have something solid in the way of a name. Auguste-Anne, who was not difficult on minor points, gave way readily enough, and continued to refer to his son by his title of Morhange. "Is M. de Morhange at liberty?" he would enquire. A servant would go to see, and on returning would answer gravely:
"M. de Morhange is having his binder adjusted. He will be at his Excellency's disposal in a few minutes." Bella, however, for the rest of her life never spoke of the boy except as George, nor could she acquire habits of ceremony with him. She loved him passionately in the most middle-class way, and when she died two years later of fever, though her delirium called and thirsted for him, she had the strength, in her lucid moments, to forbid him to be brought within range of the infection.
She died crying his name, and thrusting his imaginary presence away with her hands.
II
It would be possible to make a complete and not uninteresting book about Bella. Not many women in the course of their lives pass from milliner's apprentice to queen, with an interlude of goddess by the way. Emma Hamilton, of the same period, had something the same story, but the course of her fortune followed more everyday lines; men took her beauty, like a box of bricks, and built memorials with it to their own infatuation. Bella had beauty too--must have had, though there is no record of it, no portrait; but she had backbone, which Emma Hamilton never possessed, from the days when she wandered about Hove, her stockings mended with pins, to her zenith in the Queen of Naples' drawing-room. Bella was frightened of her husband, and stood up to him; awed by the Bishop, who still could get nothing out of her more Popish than the word Amen; and she had heard a tidal wave grind ships to powder within fifty yards of her with no audible or visible yielding to terror. It is strange to think that the mainspring of all this good behaviour was not courage, nor religion, nor duty, but simply an honest, healthy British contempt for foreigners and their ways. God bless this great-grandmother! I think--I hope--that I have a lot of her in me.
III
Things went on unchanged after her death. The boy grew, his father read Corneille to him, the Bishop conducted him here and there among the classics, as an able courier shows a traveller the sights of Rome; not too many stupendousnesses in one day, and ample intervals left for refreshment. He grew fair like his mother, beaky and lean like his father, and seemed to have no troubles in the world, and no ambitions beyond those of his years; to extend his body, and do better at sports than his fellows.
But greatness, as everyone knows, is thrust upon an unlucky few. In the year 1816 a ship came into the harbour, rebuilt by this time, and untroubled for a full ten years by storms. The ship was a French one, flying the old white flag, and named the Bon Souvenir, the Happy Memory; enough to show that she was an emissary of the Good Old Days, which somehow or another seemed to have come back to France. Her commander confirmed this impression; he came to inform Auguste-Anne of the accession, thanks to the goodness of God, Prince Metternich, and the higher powers generally, of Louis XVIII, brother to the late sainted king. As luck would have it, all the flags of the various political systems had been engulfed in the island's disaster, and the easiest to replace being the white, this was now flying over the fort and the palace. It did not need the brevet, signed by the lamented saint, to convince the commander of M. de Mortemar's persistent loyalty. He acknowledged it with tears of emotion, and begged the favour of doing so gallant a loyalist any service in his power. Auguste-Anne considered for a whole morning upon his verandah shaded by wistaria, and at length sent for M. de Morhange.
"My dear son," said Auguste-Anne when the boy presented himself, "there is once more a King Louis; and this being so, I propose, with your approval, to render him this island. God forbid that a Mortemar should strive with a Bourbon for a few square miles which may at any moment sink into the sea. You know the deathless motto, which our cousins Rohan stole from us centuries ago and changed--Crown he wears not, honour shares not, Mortemar cares not. There have been in Europe of late years, and still persist there, too many adventurers aping kings; a name such as ours does not enlist in such a shabby company. Better King's lieutenant, and hold our heads high, than a petty cringing equality. And so I have decided--always with your approval, monsieur--to send you to France in our good friend's charge to give His Majesty an account of our stewardship. If King Louis should offer you a place about the court, you may accept, that is only polite; but you are not to solicit any such thing, like a footman that renders a service for hire. This, I believe--with a recommendation against taking a mistress from your own class--is all the advice I have to give you. The first is a matter of dignity; as to the second, it is not to your interest to encourage lightness in a society which you hope may provide you with a wife."
With this inconsiderable amount of mental ballast the child--then aged twelve--set sail with Saint Louis XVI's brevet in his pocket for credentials, and the abbé and two or three old steady servants in attendance.
It may be said at once that he never set foot in Corazon again, never again saw his father, or trod, hand in hand with the Bishop, the maze of Latin prosody. For the next tidal wave was final. Earthquakes under the sea set it in motion, deep tremors affecting in their first onset only the bones of a few wrecks. But the subsidence meant the sudden shifting of a great mass of water, which tilted up in a wave five hundred feet high, and travelled solemnly, like a mountain walking, half-way across the Mexican Gulf before it struck land, curled, and broke. A few look-outs in the masts of distant vessels saw the slow-rolling horror go across their horizon; but there were no witnesses of the submerging of Corazon, and no survivors. Ships setting their course for the island months later found only water gently wrinkling and sank their lead many fathoms before they could discover where had been the town.
IV
Which event left Gustave-Félicité-George an orphan and dependent upon that very chancy factor, the gratitude of a Bourbon, for the means of continuing his existence. It may be wondered how he managed to survive; for Bourbon memories, though tenacious of such matters as court etiquette, old injuries, and a contempt for the third and fourth estates, were not otherwise reliable. Besides, there were many young men, of as good family, with better claims to gratitude than this latest sprig of the Mortemars, who could only proffer the submission and loyalty of an island, now, by a caprice of the earth's surface, entirely unpeopled. The Bourbons, however, could be capricious too; and the head of the family chose to exercise the family right in favour of this boy who asked nothing, to the annoyance of the other worthy young persons who had been assiduous, and were for the most part left kicking their heels. Gustave-Félicité became page of honour to the old king, whose brother, Charles X, when he succeeded found him similar employment. The family estates in Artois had been sequestrated; and so, although most of the pious and scandalized relatives who had hustled his father out of the country were conveniently dead and he was heir, it would have meant much money and long waiting to oust the tough Napoleonic general who was in possession. Gustave-Félicité had in his bones some of the indolent quality of the island which had bred him, where enough was enough and no man with ample leisure cared to waste any of his time looking forward. "Mortemar cares not." The motto lent authority for his disdain, the court gave him a sufficient background. He had not grown up like the other youths of his day, amid thrones toppling to the gutter and dominations rising out of it. A kingdom, to him, was something established and sure, in which people went about their business, and if now and then they loosed off guns, did it only in the sovereign's honour, and with the best intentions. (He had been told the story of the witch-doctor's rebellion often enough, but always at the end came in that convulsion of nature in support of the monarchic principle.) He witnessed, therefore, without any dismay the various experiments in government made by the witty and foolish old king. He saw the press being muzzled, the priests creeping back into their old places of power behind the throne, and being unaware that the citizens' attitude towards presses and priests had changed since 1790, thought his majesty well advised. Ministers came and went rather rapidly between 1825 and 1830; a certain restlessness invaded the court. Gustave-Félicité was touched by it; in a spasm of energy he volunteered for the expedition to Algiers, and at once got some inkling of the way democratic principles had invaded even the services. For the generals and admirals concerned in this venture actually consulted, before drawing up their plan of campaign, a little captain, of no importance, whose sole recommendation was that he knew the ground to be fought over, besides depths, and channels, and possible landings. His advice, though mauled about a good deal in the interests of discipline by his superiors in rank, was taken on the whole, with the result that the expedition met with quick and complete success. The force was limited, and even young gentlemen of the King's Household, in uniforms like the most elegant and gleaming strait-jackets, had to do their share of fighting. Gustave-Félicité did not resent this. He had something of the practical turn of mind of his grandmother, the lodging-house keeper in Bristol, to whom any situation, even disagreeable, was something to be grasped and looked at all round, and if possible used to advantage. He galloped, and went thirsty, and did his general's unintelligent errands with complete good temper, until the town of Algiers ceased to struggle, and the triumphant despatches began to speed home. He was one of the envoys chosen to bring the news to Paris, and astounded his general almost to apoplexy by respectfully applying for permission to remain with the troops in occupation.
The fact was, Gustave-Félicité liked all those things which set the general and most of the rank and file panting for home; he liked the heat and the glare and odd odours, and best of all he liked the blacks. He had, as a child, been used to all these things, and in his heart of hearts had missed them while he trotted obediently about vast chilly palaces, and laughed with the gaiety which springs cold from the mind. These Algerians were more solemn than his own native blacks; their religion stalked perpetually by them, instead of being resorted to only when they felt in a good mood; a wifely religion. Still, he liked them well enough to stay with them, if the general would allow it.
But the general had, after the manner of generals, his own ideas on the subject. "Lieutenant of Chasseurs the Marquis Boissy de Mortemar," wrote the general, cursing the flies and dripping sweat, "will make his report to the Minister of War according to orders." Then, with a growl to his aide-de-camp, "All this zeal makes me tired. Bah! I hate a careerist!"
The aide-de-camp might have rejoined that he hoped this lack of charity did not begin at home; but being a careerist himself--as was every man in the army with the exception of the unfortunate conscripts--refrained, and agreed with a nod. Thus Gustave-Félicité was despatched with the story of Hussein Dey's capitulation, and had the novel experience of sending it on twenty-four hours ahead of himself by means of the new telegraph station at Toulon. He arrived in Paris in time to put on his most superb uniform and attend the Te Deum in Notre Dame. That was on July 11th, a time of year when the temperature was trying pretty highly the ambition of careerists left behind in Algiers. But they could say, as they unhooked their stiff collars and cast down their bearskins--the expedition was fought throughout in parade uniform--"Our troubles are over." Gustave-Félicité, riding home through Paris streets after the King's carriage, seeing the lowering faces, hearing no cheers but only a threatening murmur, said to himself, "Our troubles begin."
What had happened to these Parisians, who so short a time back could get drunk on glory? They let the old King go by without a cheer; the flags on public buildings only showed how bare and unenthusiastic were private windows. The fact was, glory at second-hand no longer touched them. If old Charles X, that puppet of Jesuits, that muzzier of journalists, were to get all the credit, then down with glory, and spit on it! Napoleon--passe encore. He used to ride out and direct his own battles, and risk his own life. But an old Bourbon, with a face like the handsomest imaginable sheep, and the kind of wit that goes clean over people's heads--why should he take the cheering? Ah, that, no! said the Paris populace, swapping stories of the kind of thing Jesuits did, and being flicked to the point of madness by a popular press fighting for its life.
V
The tidal wave of revolution gathered during that fortnight, and sucked back in its withdrawal all the surface prosperity and gaiety and charm of Paris, until an ugly city showed, as sinister as that under-sea landscape which the watcher in the cathedral tower of Corazon had seen for a short time exposed to the moon. On the twenty-sixth of July the Ordonnances appeared, pat on the prophecies of the press. It was as though the poor king moved at the bidding of a malevolent hypnotist. Whatever enormity the journalists suggested he might do, that, after hesitation and fumbling, he at last triumphantly did. Their malicious wills goaded him ceaselessly; he was unaware of them, there was a crowd of defenders between them and him; yet somehow their commands reached him, somehow he always obeyed. The Ordonnances were the fine flower of their spite and his stupidity; a rigid censorship, a dissolution, and the disfranchising of a whole class of his own supporters. Trouble was bound to come, and it came. On the twenty-eighth there were barricades building in Paris streets, and a marshal, Marmont, who had once notoriously played the traitor, was given the task of restoring order. Delegates from the people approached him.
"Marshal, the Ordonnances must go."
"Gentlemen, I deplore the Ordonnances; but"--a shrug--"I am a soldier."
An answer equivalent to saying:
"Gentlemen, go ahead with your barricades."
The citizens translated it so, and proceeded tranquilly all night with their preparations, Marmont having withdrawn his troops to barracks after their day's work. The barracks, unluckily, were found to be ill-provided with necessaries, and the martial spirit of the soldiery was considerably lowered by the very circumstances which had been calculated to maintain it--tight uniforms, heavy shakos. To fight thus encumbered, and light of belly--is it any wonder that the following day saw traffic rather than bloodshed round the barricades? Cartridges were swapped for bread and wine with the barricade holders, comfortable in shirt sleeves. There were desertions; two whole regiments, the fifth and fifty-third of the line, went over to the mob. And always the heat increased.
July 29th saw events still more alarming, regiments bowling each other over, like a disaster among ninepins. The Swiss were fired upon in the Louvre by a few sharpshooters. Small blame to them if they remembered August 10th, 1789, when a previous company was massacred to a man in that very place. Attacked by a handful, and that memory, they ran. They ran in a mob towards the Tuileries, carrying panic with them. The picked gendarmes by the Arc de Triomphe were caught up in their rout; the gendarmes in turn swept away two battalions of the guard camped in the Tuileries gardens; and the end of it all was, a general riding like a madman to St. Cloud, stumbling into the King's presence blind with dust, standing painfully at attention and making a report in brief phrases, cut short by tears.
The old king had dignity. He did not interrupt, but when the general--Coetlosquet was his name, a Breton--at last hung his head, he asked with resignation:
"All's lost, then?"
"Not all, sire; but Paris."
VI
After that, excitements of all kinds. Marching and countermarching of citizens, pistol in one hand, the other arm about a female patriot's waist. Two hundred loyalists burned to death in the barracks of the rue de Babylone. Poets scribbling in rooms through whose windows spent bullets came flying. M. Hector Berlioz singing and conducting the "Marseillaise" from the balcony above a mercer's shop:
"First verse: silence complete. Second verse: same effect. This was rot to my mind--I, who had scored the national hymn for 'every man with a voice, and bowels, and blood in his veins.' I could stand it no longer, and when after the fourth verse they still were mute:
"'Sing!' I bawled at them, 'God damn you, can't you sing?'"
At that five thousand voices tore the refrain away from M. Berlioz, with an effect so exactly like a clap of thunder that, stunned by it, he fell backwards in the accommodating mercer's bedroom.
No doubt of it, the Three Days were glorious for the young. Not too much danger, just enough to spice the adventure of living; magnificent weather, when it was no hardship to sleep in the open upon some looted sofa at the summit of a barricade; the songs of Béranger to sing, and posterity to astonish. It was well to be M. Berlioz, aged twenty-seven and an artist, or the Marquis Boissy de Mortemar, aged twenty-five and with a range of becoming uniforms to choose from. As a careerist, however, this latter young gentleman was proving a failure. How easy to have approached Louis-Philippe with offers of sympathy! How easy to have gone to old Lafayette, that stormy petrel, with offers of service in the National Guard, now re-forming! How easy to put the country's good and one's own advancement together, and emerge as a patriot, conscience at rest! M. de Mortemar, however, did none of these things. He galloped about a good deal, true, but on the losing side, bearing messages of delay, unreasoning withdrawal, or equally inopportune defiance. This by day; at night he would stand by the green-clothed table while the old king, with voluntary tranquillity, enjoyed his habitual rubber of whist. Nothing of Paris, sweaty, loud, and merry, intruded upon that quiet room at St. Cloud. It was decorous, the wide windows admitted no sound nor ruffle of wind, only the scent of lime-trees in bloom; the old king with a firm thin hand added his tricks, laughed kindly, and pushed counters across the green baize to his victorious opponents. Not one sentinel more than ordinary, nor one less, guarded him during the three momentous days, and what apprehension or whispering there may have been confined itself to rooms outside the King's hearing.
Wilful blindness, or the disciplined calm of the gamester? Charles X had two essentials of a gentleman: he always picked up a challenge, and he was a good loser.
On July 31st, 1830, he lost with a shrug to Louis-Philippe, who came out of the Three Days as First Citizen of France, a title which immediately ranged him among the unconsidered personages of drama; First Citizen, First Murderer, and so on, necessary rôles but not star ones. However, there he was, wearing the crown which his father had helped to vote down into the guillotine basket, and out of France went Charles X, with no reproaches and no lament, save one ironic word. The young Duchess of Berry, flaunting in a riding habit, pointing with her crop to the provinces north and west which she would raise to save him, was gently snubbed:
"Dear child, you've been reading Walter Scott. Pray let us slip out of history with dignity--"
And his berlin rolled on along the Calais road.
VII
Gustave-Félicité, orphaned by a tidal wave, beggared by a revolution, now found himself exiled in perpetuity, and penalized here and there as well under various articles and sections of the Code Napoléon. His property was confiscated, there were penalties of the gravest kind attached to his presence in France, "or any of her dependencies"; an ironic reward for one of the victors of Algiers. But since he had never possessed the confiscated property, and was young enough not to find exile a burden, he