paula sails into the south, seeking the holy man of saint pierre, where la montagne pelée gives warning
wonderfully strengthened, she was, by the voyage. sorrow had destroyed large fields of verdure, and turned barren the future, but its devouring was finished. quentin charter was adjusted in her mind to a duality with which paula linster could have no concern. only to one mistress could he be faithful; indeed, it was only in the presence of this mistress that he became the tower of visions to another; in the midst of the work he worshipped, quentin charter had heard the skylark sing. paula did not want to see him again, nor selma cross. to avoid these two, as well as the place where the destroyer had learned so well to penetrate, she had managed not to return to her apartment during the two days before sailing.... there would never be another master-romance—never again so rich a giving, nor so pure an ideal. before this tragic reality, the inner glory of her womanhood became meaningless. it was this that made the future a crossing of sterile tundras,—yet she would keep her friends, and love her work, and try to hold her faith....
bellingham did not call her at sea, but he had frightened her too profoundly to be far from mind. the face she had seen in the hall-way was drawn and disordered by the dreadful tortures of nether-planes; and awful in the eyes, was that feline vacancy of soul. once in a dream, she saw him—a pale reptile-monster upreared from a salty sea, voiceless in that oceanic isolation, a shameful secret of the depths. the ghastly bulk had risen with a mute protest to the sky against dissolution and creeping decay—and sounded again....
to her, bellingham was living death, the triumph of desire which rends itself, the very essence of tragedy. she gladly would have died to make her race see the awfulness of just flesh—as she saw it now.... his power seemed ended; she felt with the reifferscheids and madame nestor, that her secret was hermetic, and there was a goodly sense of security in the intervening sea....
and now there was a new island each day; each morning a fresh garden arose from the caribbean—sun-wooed, rain-softened isles with colorful little ports.... there was one tropic city—she could not recall the name—which from the offing had looked like the flower-strewn gateway to an amphitheatre of mountains.
the fruitlands had lain for a day in the hot, sharky harbor of santiago; had run into a real cloudburst off the silver reefs of santo domingo, and breathed on the radiant next morning before the stately and ancient city of san juan de porto rico—shining white as a dream-castle of old spain, and adrift in an azure world of sky and sea. she spent a day and an evening in this isle of ripe fruits and riper amours; and took away materials for a memory composite of interminable siestas, restless radiant nights, towering cliffs, incomparable courtesy, and soft-voiced maidens with wondrous spanish eyes that laugh and turn away.
then for two days they had steamed down past the saintly archipelago—st. thomas, st. martin, st. kitts; then montserrat, guadeloupe, dominica, and a legion of littler isles—truncated peaks jutting forth from fragrant, tinted water. there were afternoons when she did not care to lift her voice or move about. fruit-juices and the simplest salads, a flexible cane chair under the awnings, a book to rest the eyes from the gorgeous sea and enchanted shores, somnolence rather than sleep—these are enough for the approach to perfection in the caribbean, with the lesser antilles on the lee.... then at last in late afternoon, the great hulking shape of pelée loomed watery green against the sky; in the swift-speeding twilight, the volcano seemed to swell and blacken until it was like the shadow of a continent, and the lights of saint pierre pricked off the edge of the land.
at last late at night, queerly restless, she sat alone on deck in the windless roadstead and regarded the illumined terraces of saint pierre. they had told her that the breath from martinique was like the heavy moist sweetness of a horticultural garden, but the island must have been sick with fever this night, for a mile at sea the land-breeze was dry, devitalized, irritating the throat and nostrils.
there was no moon, and the stars were so faint in the north that the mass of pelée was scarcely shaped against the sky. the higher lights of the city had a reddish uncertain glow, as if a thin film of fog hung between them and the eye; but to the south the night cleared into pure purple and unsullied tropic stars. the harbor was weirdly hot.
before her was the city which held the quest of her voyaging—father fontanel, the holy man of saint pierre.... only a stranger can realize what a pure shining garment his actual flesh has become. to me there was healing in the very approach of the man.... this was the enduring fragment from the charter letters; and in that dreadful sunday night when she began her flight from bellingham, already deep within her mind father fontanel was the goal.... paula set out for shore early the next morning. the second-officer of the fruitlands sat beside her in the launch. she spoke of the intense sultriness.
"yes, saint pierre is glowing like a brazier," he said. "i was ashore last night for awhile. the people blame the mountain. old pelée has been acting up—showering the town with ash every little while lately. it's the taint of sulphur that spoils the air."
she turned apprehensively toward the volcano. la montague pelée, over the red-tiled roofs of saint pierre, looked huge like an emperor of the romans. paled in the intense morning light, he wore a delicate ruching of white cloud about his crown. they stepped ashore on the sugar landing where paula found a carriage to take her to the hotel des palms, a rare old plantation-house on the morne d'orange, recently converted for public use.
the ponies were ascending the rise in rue victor hugo, at the southern end of the city, when paula discovered the little catholic church she had imaged for so many weeks, notre dame des lourdes, niched away in the crowded streets with a quebec-like quaintness, and all the holier from its close association with the lowly shops. from these walls had risen the spiritual house of father fontanel—her far bright beacon.... the porteuses, said to be the lithest, hardiest women of the occident, wore a pitiable look of fatigue, as they came down from the hill-trails, steadying the baskets upon their heads. the pressure of the heat, and the dispiriting atmosphere revealed their effects in the distended eyelids and colorless, twisted lips of the burden-bearers.
the ponies at length gained the eminence of the morne d'orange, and ahead she saw the broad, white plantation-house—hotel des palms. to the right was the dazzling, turquoise sea where the fruitlands lay large among the shipping, and near her a private sea-going yacht, nearly as long and angelically white. the broad verandas of the hotel were alluring with palms; the walls and portcullises were cooled with embroidering vines. gardens flamed with poinsettias and roses, and a shaded grove of mango and india trees at the end of the lawn, was edged with moon flowerets and oleanders. back of the plantation-house waved the sloping seas of cane; in front, the caribbean. on the south rose the peaks of carbet; on the north, the monster.
paula had hardly left the veranda of magnificent vistas two hours later, when the friendly captain of the fruitlands approached with an elderly american, of distinguished appearance, whom he presented—mr. peter stock, of pittsburg.
"since you are to leave us here, miss wyndam," the captain added, "i thought you would be glad to know mr. stock, who makes an annual cruise around these islands—and knows them better than any american i've encountered yet. yonder is his yacht—that clipper-built beauty just a bit in from the liner."
"i've already been admiring the yacht," paula said, "and wondering her name. there's something venetian about her dazzling whiteness in the soft, deep blue."
"i get it exactly, miss wyndam—that 'mirage of marble' in the italian sky.... my craft is the saragossa." his eyelids were tightened against the light, and the voice was sharp and brisk. his face, tropically tanned, contrasted effectively with the close-cropped hair and mustache, lustrous-white as his ship.... paula having found the captain's courtesy and good sense invariable during the voyage, gladly accepted his friend, who proved most interesting on the matter of pelée.
"i've stayed here in saint pierre longer now than usual," he told her, pointing toward the mountain, "to study the old man yonder. pelée, you know, is identified with martinique, much the same as the memory of josephine; yet the people of the city can't seem to take his present disorder seriously. this is cataclysmic country. hell—i use the word to signify a geological stratum—is very close to the surface down here. all these lovely islands are merely ash-piles hurled up by the great subterranean fires. the point is, lost atlantis is apt to stir any time under the caribbean—and rub out our very pretty panorama."
"you regard this as an entertainment worth waiting for?" paula asked.
the vaguest sort of a smile passed over his eyes and touched his lips. "pelée and i are very old friends. i spoke of the volcanic origin of these islands in the way of suggesting that any seismic activity in the archipelago—pelée's present internal complaint, for instance,—should be taken significantly. saint pierre would have been white this morning—except for the heavy rain before dawn."
"you mean volcanic ash?"
"exactly."
"that explains the white scum i saw in the gutters, driving through the city.... but it isn't altogether a novelty, is it, for the mountain to behave this way?"
"from time to time in the past ten days, miss wyndam, pelée has had a session of grumbling."
"i mean as a usual thing——"
he turned to her abruptly and inquired, "didn't you know that there hasn't been a sound from pelée for twenty years before the month of april now ending?"
this gave intimacy to the disorder. mr. stock was called away just now, but after dinner that night he joined paula again on the great veranda.
"ever been in pittsburg?" he asked.
"no."
"i've only to shut my eyes in this second-hand air—to think i'm back among the steel mills of the lower monongahela."
"the moon looks like beaten egg," paula said with a slight shiver. "they must be suffering down in the city. you're the expert on pelée, mr. stock, please tell me more about him."
he had been regarding the new moon, low and to the left of the carbet peaks. it had none of the sharpness of outline peculiar to the tropics, but was blurred and of an orange hue, instead of silvery. "it's the ash-fog in the air which has the effect of a fine wire screen," he explained. "we'll have a white world to-morrow, if it doesn't rain."
they turned to the north where a low rumbling was heard. it was like distant thunder, but the horizon beyond pelée was unscathed by lightning.
"are you really worried, mr. stock?"
"why, it's as i said. the fact that pelée is acting out of the ordinary is quite enough to make any one skeptical regarding his intentions."
he discussed familiarly certain of the man-eaters among the mountains of the world—krakatoa, bandaisan, cotopaxi, vesuvius, ætna, calling them chronic old ruffians, whom time doesn't tame.
"a thousand years is nothing to them," he added. "they wait, still as crocodiles, until seers have built their temples in the high rifts and cities have formed on their flanks. they have tasted blood, you see, and the madness comes back. twenty years is only a siesta. pelée is a suspect."
"i think i should prefer to hear you tell the treachery of volcanoes outside of the fire-zone," she declared. "it's like listening to ghost stories in a haunted house."
pelée rumbled again, and paula's fingers involuntarily started toward his sleeve. the heavy wooden shutters of the great house rattled in the windless night; the ground upon which they stood seemed to wince at the monster's pain. she was conscious of the fragrance of roses and magnolia blooms above the acrid taint of the air. some strange freak of the atmosphere exerted a pressure upon the flowers, forcing a sudden expulsion of perfume. the young moon was a formless blotch now in the fouled sky. a sigh like the whimpering of many sick children was audible from the servants' cabins behind the hotel.... later, from her own room, she saw the double chain of lights out in the harbor—the saragossa pulling at her moorings among the lesser craft, like a bright empress in the midst of dusky maid-servants; and in the north was vulcan struggling to contain the fury of his fluids. she was a little afraid of pelée.
very early abroad, paula set out on her first pilgrimage to notre dame des lourdes. rain had not fallen in the night, and she regarded a white world, as stock had promised, and the source of the phenomenon with the pastelle tints of early morning upon his huge eastern slope. she had slept little and with her face turned to the north. a cortege had passed before her in dream—all the destroyers of history, each with a vivid individuality, like the types of faces of all nations—the story of each and the desolation it had made among men and the works of men.
most of them had given warning. pelée was warning now. his warning was written upon the veins of every leaf, painted upon the curve of every blade of grass, sheeted evenly-white upon the red tiles of every roof. gray dust blown by steam from the bursting quarries of the mountain clogged the gutters of the city and the throats of men. it was a moving, white cloud in the river, a chalky shading that marked the highest reach of the harbor tide. it settled in the hair of the children, and complicated the toil of bees in the nectar-cups. with league-long cerements, and with a voice that caused to tremble his dwarfed companions, the hills and mornes, great pelée had proclaimed his warning in the night.
