The Sugar Islands (28 page)

They were, I am gratefully ready to concede, four very pleasant hours. Charles Doorly was Administrator then. A car was waiting for me at the wharf. On the high terrace of Government House, we sat, he and his wife and pretty daughters, talking of his schemes, his many schemes to restore to the island the prosperity that it had known before the opening of the Panama Canal had ruined its coaling trade. We sat, looking out over the harbour till the network of lights spangled the long, straight streets, till the siren of the
Lady Hawkins
sounded in the harbour: till the time came for me to leave St. Lucia, as ninety-nine tourists in a hundred leave it, with a vivid, superficial memory. It was twelve years before I was to carry my suitcase through the Customs. And in those twelve years much had happened.

From that immediately pre-war world of 1938, with its revolution, its civil wars and threats of war, its pogroms and concentration camps, its swastikas and sickles—from that
shadowed, overcast world of the late nineteen-thirties, the bright-young-people period of the 'twenties seemed centuries remote. But even before that period had closed, torpedoed by the Wall Street crash, the craze for coloured singers had been superseded by other crazes; by the craze for eccentric parties—parties in swimming baths, parties in anchored yachts, by the whole
Vile Bodies
period. Long before that dark October of 1929, the boom as far as Louis was concerned had ended.

I would sometimes wonder what had happened to him.

What had happened in general I knew. That which does invariably happen in a ‘craze'. For a while certain artists of true merit are valued above their worth: then through the exposure of their imitators they are written down. There is an interval, a readjustment, a pause, and merit finds its level. Layton, Johnston, Leslie Hutchinson—they had all got back where they belonged. Real merit was re-established. But for the others, those who like Louis had done no more than clamber on to a lift when it was going up, what had happened to them? I wondered.

I made inquiries, but no one knew. Shoulders were shrugged He was working in some cabaret. He was back in Paris. He was in New York. He had gone off terribly. He was fat and gross. He was ignored by that part of London that for a dozen months had made an idol of him. He had been sold short like the small fry in New York who had imagined themselves millionaires during that one wild summer. No one knew where he was. And no one cared.

It was by the merest chance that I came across him a few days before I sailed for the West Indies, in a Soho night club called the Alcove. It was a place of which I had not heard, to which I was taken by a taxi-driver; the kind of place that you could only find in a city such as London, where drink regulations make it impossible for any reputable restaurant to stay open after two o'clock; the kind of place to which the average Londoner would never think of going more than once a year; of which he will say next morning, with a heavy head, ‘I can't think why on earth I went.'

The Alcove was like all those places: a single long room on a basement floor; some twenty tables drawn along a wall; a small square of polished boarding; a piano at one end; no band; the air thick with smoke; a few tinselly decorations; at the head of the stairs a military-looking man in a tail coat proffering a form to the
effect that you had been invited by Captain Ferguson to a bottle party and had contributed five shillings to its cost. Whisky was on sale at two pounds a quart, to be purchased by the bottle. A drab and dreary spot.

Louis was its chief attraction. He had ‘gone off' all right. He had not probably in actual weight put on more than a dozen pounds, but he had lost his lean, panther look. And there is a camel-hair's difference between ugliness and beauty: a milligram less, a millimetre more. He was Pan no longer. He was a satyr, gross and heavy-footed. He could not have faced the hard spotlights of a restaurant. Only in such a place as this, ill-lit and smoky, could he retain his glamour. Even his voice seemed throaty.

I had met him a bare half-dozen times. I half hoped that he would not remember me. It would embarrass him, I felt, to be reminded by the presence of an old acquaintance, of his days of prominence. But it was with a brazen grin displaying his fine row of teeth that he came across. He grasped me by the hand. He brought his left hand heavily upon my shoulder.

‘This is swell. This certainly is swell. Why haven't we seen you here before? Everyone comes here now. It's nice, isn't it? Intimate? Not like those big, noisy places. You must bring your friends along. We always have good fun here. Tonight . . .' He paused, looked round him, shook his head. ‘No, there's not much here tonight. But sometimes, you should see . . .' He half-closed his eyes, in that way of his.

Across the smoky room, he caught a summoning glance: a female glance. With the old arrogance, he took his leave of me. With the old insolence, he swaggered across the room. I watched him as he leant across the table, his neck creased in a heavy roll above his collar. As I foresaw the inevitable stages by which he must drop from one shoddy platform to another, I could not but remember the old Greek theme of retribution, of those who invite the gods' wrath by likening themselves to gods.

Six weeks later, on an afternoon of blinding rain, the
Nerissa
docked at Castries.

During the next fortnight I was to realize what Louis had meant about the half-day tourist never seeing the real St. Lucia.

Destroyed in large part by a recent fire, Castries has little
architectural beauty. Vigie, though an easy ten minutes' row across the harbour, cannot compare with Réduit which is a full forty minutes' drive. And though the view from the Morne is certainly melodramatic—the bay a figure of eight; Castries below you in the hollow; across the water the outline of Martinique with Diamond Rock silvered in the sunlight; the Cul de Sac Valley, a brilliant emerald, at your back—I can understand why Louis argued that that panorama, terrific though it may be, gives you no insight into the island's life, its agriculture, its fishing, its small peasant properties. To get any real idea of one of the world's most charming islands, the tourist
does
need to stay over between boats.

But in a week he can see a lot. And that week can be a most, most pleasant one. The St. Antoine is one of the best hotels in the West Indies. It is cool, the rooms are large, and though Louis had assured me that to appreciate Creole cooking you should sample it in Creole households, I cannot suppose that he had ever entered the hotel by its front entrance. He might change his opinion if he did. The tourist arriving in St. Lucia with letters of introduction will within a few hours find himself caught up into and made a part of a varied and gracious social life. St. Lucia is not one of the richer islands. But money in the tropics is a luxury. By the European standards of that day, the Creole families of St. Lucia would have been considered poor. But there is no less entertainment and entertaining on that account. The traditions of West Indian hospitality were maintained there amply in an atmosphere of picnics, bathing, sailing, riding; most evenings at one house or another there were rum punches and savoury
canapés
. My fortnight passed so quickly and so enjoyably that I do not think I should have deserted Castries had it not been for my curiosity to see Louis's home.

Yet the journey was not a hard one. Soufrière is only some fifteen miles along the coast. A small motor launch, the
Jewel,
made the round trip daily. She left, or was supposed to leave, at half-past two. From one o'clock onwards that section of the wharf was chaos. The narrow first-class section was jammed with packages, suitcases, baskets, sacks. The roof was very low. The steerage passengers were packed as close as their African ancestors in the Guinea slavers. Livestock was carried aft. When it rained— and the rainless day is as rare as is the sunless day in the West
Indies—waterproof flaps were lowered from the roof. The fumes of the engine were just, but only just, the predominant factor in the general atmosphere.

It was rough on the day that I went down. Only for brief intervals could the waterproof flaps be lifted to reveal high, scrub-covered hills, broken here and there by valleys, with sugar factories or fishing villages at their foot. On the bench beside me a young coloured girl was using the shoulder of an adjacent Indian as a writing-desk. Professional curiosity overcame my manners. It was a love-letter, headed like any trans-Atlantic passenger's ‘On Board'. It was a grammatical but impersonal little note: devoted in the main to the headache that the atmosphere of the launch was causing her. When she folded away the note before she had reached the signature, I was afraid that she was about to follow the example of the child two places off and vomit. But clearly she was a serial correspondent. Leaning her elbows on the Indian's shoulders, she scoured his scalp for white hairs which she then proceeded to extract.

I was glad when the ninety minutes of the trip were over, but as the launch swung round at last I could understand Louis's nostalgia. Set in the wide semicircle of a bay, with towering mountains at its back, with the guardian Pitons on the right, Soufrière in a catalogued description might sound a melancholy, overshadowed place. It is not, though. It is friendly, cosy, intimate; with its grove of coconuts, its fishing nets, its sports ground fringed with casuarinas, its banyan tree on the right of the jetty to shade the cobbled square, its church at the end of its centre street to give it an air of Switzerland.

As the launch drew level with the jetty, a number of urchins, bare-footed, with ragged shirts and shapeless hats, rushed forward, clamorous for our bags. Twenty years earlier Louis must have looked like that, must have run forward just like that, touching his hat. ‘Your bag, sah. Douglas Fairbanks, sah, that's me.' Running my eye along the row of chattering faces, I wondered whether for any of them a fate so romantic waited; to travel so far, to reach so high, to fall so fast. Here Louis had been born: here his family had lived—in what circumstances I did not need to ask. The setting changes, but the story of the child of humble origin who touches fame is universal. It is del Sarto's story:

‘They were born poor, lived poor and poor they died . . .

And I have laboured somewhat in my time

And not been paid profusely. Some good son

Paint my two hundred pictures—let him try.'

I foresaw what I should find.

I found it, more or less.

His mother, I was told, had died; but there was an aunt left, living with a cousin in her sister's house. It was in a side street; not, as Louis had told me, on the square. It had two rooms, curtains, and some furniture. It was not actually dirty. A visiting member of the Royal Commission might indeed have considered it with approval. ‘The home, I presume, of the rather better kind of fisherman.' It was only when I remembered that flashing of an engraved cigarette case that in contrast it seemed squalid.

The aunt was very old, very infirm, her body shrunken with age, so that her head appeared top-heavy—she was suffering probably from some kind of dropsy. She was a macabre object, sitting in a high-backed rocking chair, in a shawl, with a long skirt falling over the hems of innumerable petticoats round swollen ankles.

She shook her head sadly when I spoke of Louis.

No, he never wrote. When his mother had died, yes, he had been kind then. He had sent some money. They had put up a nice gravestone for her. I should go and see it. But apart from that, no, not one word in all these years. The Empire broadcasts gave them their sole news of him. He sang once a fortnight. He would be singing tomorrow night. On the mantelpiece was a photograph, cut from the
Radio Times
and pasted on a sheet of cardboard. ‘He hasn't altered at all. He looks the same dear boy. I wish he could find some nice girl and settle down.' I examined the photograph. It had come from the file room, clearly. It must be at least ten years old. Beside the rocking chair was an early nineteenth-century spinet. Remembering how Louis had talked of the crowds that had gathered under the banyan tree at sundown, I supposed that his singing must be missed in Soufrière; his aunt shook her head. Louis had run away at twelve, signed on a French boat as cabin boy. They remembered him here, if they remembered him at all, as a no-account fellow, who would not
work, who only cared for music. The parson's daughter used to give him lessons. But no one else had noticed him.

I was surprised, but I should not have been. It was in character that during these early months of struggle, first as a cabin boy, then in Paris as a waiter, the main spur to his ambition should have been the resolve to prove his real worth to the cousins who had despised him. And when he had fought his way to a position from which he could afford to remember their contempt of him with a smile, it was only natural that he should dramatize, should visualize his success in terms of a conquered, subject Soufrière.

I rose to my feet. Once the rough walls of this cabin had housed ambition of sufficient power to carry such an urchin as had besieged the motor launch that afternoon to the bizarre destiny of boastfully flashed silver cases. I looked about me, missing something. The clock: where could that have gone? A chuckle came from the vast nodded head. ‘So he told you about that? The clock with the soldier that beat the hours. Fancy his remembering. But of course he would. He'd sit and stare for minutes before each hour so as not to miss it.'

‘But where is it now?'

‘Where it always was. The Rectory.'

‘Then it wasn't yours?'

‘Could we afford a clock like that? Louis only went to the Rector's Bible classes so that he could look at it. We used to say that it was the only reason that he took music lessons from the Rector's daughter.'

And that too was in the picture.

The next day my host took me for a ride over the mountains to Guilese, where the Government had established an experimental station for local agriculture. I understood during that ride what Louis had meant about the domesticity of the scenery round Castries. This, in comparison, was completely wild. A succession of intersecting valleys; no roads; just tracks, cut away by streams, winding round the side of mountains with a sheer drop on the far side, so narrow that every so often we would have to get off and lead our horses. Along the road, groups of peasants carrying huge bunches of bananas passed us on their way to the coast. An occasional youth with a shot-gun showed us a bag of pigeon.