CHAPTER XLVII THE FOOTSTEP IN THE DUST

St. Pierre had passed away and with St. Pierre, Marie, and with Marie his will to live.

The extraordinary and most tragically poetic part of his drama was the manner in which St. Pierre, the lost city, clung to the vision of the woman he loved.

She wore it as a garment; he saw her surrounded by its beauty; dawn lit her in the Street of the Precipice, morn in the music-haunted Place de la Fontaine; evening in the twilit Jardin des Plantes.

The super-mortal tragedy of the city had raised her image to supernal heights. The passion, the agony that lives alone in the highest poetry had mixed itself in this common man’s tragedy. The city obliterated from the world was part of his grief.

As he lay like a man fascinated by a serpent, motionless, scarcely seeming to breathe, with eyes fixed, and pupils dilated, the roar of the anchor-chain through the hawse pipe shook the vessel. He sat up, leaning on his elbow, exactly as a man sits up who has been awakened suddenly from sleep.

A disc of reflected sunlight, liquid and tremulous as the water from which it was reflected, was cast by the porthole upon the wall of the cabin; it trembled and moved to the motion of the vessel as she rocked at her moorings.

He gazed at it, following it with his eyes as it leapt and quivered; then, slipping from the bunk he stood erect on the floor of the cabin.

303 He was fully dressed and, in the act of stepping from the bunk, his full strength seemed to have returned to him. He opened the door of the cabin and a moment later he was on deck.

All the crew were gathered forward; a boat was rowing away from the ship, Captain Stock and the mate were in it, and they were making for the nearest war-ship. The Anne Martin was close in shore and the vast, formless, blanketed city cast its chill gray reflection on the water of the harbour. Mounds of ashes terraced by the heavy rains, wildernesses of ashes mounting to wildernesses of ashes, ghosts of buildings vaguely outlined beneath their cerement of ashes—cinders, dust, and ashes, and from all that immensity of desolation not a sound, save now and then a call from one of the working parties, half invisible amidst the ruins.

He cast his eyes over it all and then up to Pelée still fuming in the windless blue; like a madman, exhausted, the great mountain seemed inexpressibly sinister above the ruins of the city it had protected for long years, fed with the gouyave water, sheltered from the winds. Gaspard stretched out his arms, his fingers were crooked, it was as though the man were saying to the mountain, “Ah, what would I not do with you, if I only had you in my grip!”

Then he clambered over the starboard rail.

The men forward did not hear the splash, nor did they notice the black head of the swimmer passing towards the shore.

He had not even kicked off the deck shoes he was wearing, he swam with ease and half unconsciously; in his condition all things were possible to him, he would have guided his way through a turbulent sea just as surely as across this summer-smooth harbour. And now he was clinging304 to the angle of a great block of stone shaken out from the once quay-wall and slobbered round by the tide. He dragged himself on to it, and from it to the next.

The Place Bertine had been here; here in the sunlight the tamarinds had shaken their leaves to the wind and cast dancing shadows on the sun-smitten pavement, the songs of the canotiers had mixed with the sounds of trade—here where tamarind trees would bloom no more; where the blasting scoriae had fused broken stones and broken building; where the sunlight was horrible.

Around him lay nothing but mounds where once the sugar barrels had been piled, where buildings had been. Mounds like the sand dunes on a desolate coast. A little wind had arisen and, just as amidst the dunes the wind brings the whisper of sand, here, it brought the faint silky whisper of dust.

He had no objective—no object, here, but to feel the ruin; to touch it, walk amidst it, become part of it. To torture his soul. All this was her bed, the dust he trod on her winding sheet, the desolation her silence.

He passed amidst the mounds. In the great mountain of ashes before him the rains had washed out what seemed the bed of a mountain torrent. It had once been a street. He began to climb it. This horrible ravine was tainted by a faint sickly smell of corruption, the crust of the scoriae broke beneath his feet so that he plunged sometimes knee-deep, the sweat ran from his brow, and the sun struck fiercely on him. The heat was terrific. Never, even in the old days of the stokehold, had he experienced such heat, yet still he climbed.

He had reached, now, a transverse ravine, a huge donga with steep banks from which here and there broke out the walls of ruined houses. It was the Rue Victor Hugo.

305 The silence here was terrible, the silence of Nineveh, the silence of the Nothing, which is at the heart of things. Finotte and Lys; the corrossole sellers; the merchants and traffickers; the coloured crowd; the little children—nothing spoke of them here.

And, still, far above him went the mountain of ashes, the broken streets, walls that had once been houses, charred stumps that had once been palm trees. And still he climbed. He had cast off his coat, never thinking of the treasure in its pocket, he had forgotten all that, even Marie had become vague as a ghost in his mind. One thing only stood clearly before him, half-mesmerised as he was by exhaustion, heat, and the ruin around him—the beach of Grande Anse. The soot-black beach and the green curling waves where a man might find oblivion. He did not know in the least that it was the vision of Marie that was calling him to the cliffs, where he had first truly met her face to face.

At noon, broken, dazed, grimed with dust, having a dozen times escaped by a miracle from death, he reached the summit of the ruins of St. Pierre, and the path of ashes that had once been the road to Morne Rouge. Gazing from here, and not glancing at the ruined city, nothing had altered. The sea lay the same as of old, and Dominica shewed ghostly and haze-blue on the far sea line, gulls were flying over the bay. Eternal summer sat by the ruined city, voiceless, and lost in eternal sleep. Though the silence of the Rue Victor Hugo had been broken by no sound, up here, could be heard a faint breathing from the sea. The requiem of the ocean whose tide was now flooding into the bay.

“Ah, the palms, the coloured houses, the old sea-steps I used to wash—the voices of the canotiers, the tall ships I brought thee, where are they?” Vaguely, like a voice heard in a dream came the whispered lament of the sea.

306 Gaspard did not hear it. He paused only to rest and breathe, he had slipped and fallen many times in his ascent; coatless, his arms were clay-coloured with sweat-caked volcanic dust; his face was frightful; grimed and seamed—it looked as though spat upon by Ruin. In a few short hours his eyes had become sunken, his cheeks had fallen in; his lips baked and parched, and caked with dust were inhuman, the lips of a tragic mask of antiquity. A frightful thirst filled him, obliterating all other feelings. Beneath him lay the city, formless and bulked out with cinders and dust, exactly as the ship of coral had once lain beneath him bulked out with coral in the still lagoon.

Ah, that night when he had turned with Yves from the vision of the sunken ship, feeling that what he had seen was evil; could he but have seen this greater vision! This greater story of man’s futility and the fate of the imaginers of vain things!

He turned, seeing nothing of it all but the great white sheet of light that leapt from the horizon half-way to the zenith, and the dazzle of the sea.

He came along the path of cinders that had once been a road set with grenadillas and palms; merry with mule bells and songs of the cane-cutters by day, drifted over by fireflies at night. The volcanic dust, the sun, the terrible climb amidst the ruins had called up the thirst which is known only in the desert. He walked scarcely knowing where he went, casting his eyes from side to side of the way in search of water. He had forgotten the black beach at Grande Anse and his desire for the oblivion of the sea; he had only one immediate desire, to drink.

Thirst in its acutest form like this is quite divorced from the sensation which civilisation knows as thirst. It is a passion far stronger than hatred or desire, it affects the soul307 no less than the body, it drives all other feelings before it and reigns supreme. The physical pangs are nothing compared to the mental desire which drives all other desires away.

As he turned the shoulder of Pelée, the ashes ceased on the road giving place to volcanic dust, for only St. Pierre and the western portion of the island had been exposed to the full blast of the eruption. The road became a road again, and, had he possessed eyes to see, hope might have come to him.

For here, where Marie used to pause of a morning to drink in the view before her, still lay the view as of old. The volcanic dust that had lain grey on tree and shrub, had been washed away by rains, and the green waving canes, the palms, and wild pines, the tamarinds, and ceibas, the mornes, mountains, and valleys lay stretched before him; who saw nothing of it all, walking like a somnambulist in the dream of thirst.

He had passed Morne Rouge where there was no sign of life, and the Morne d’Avril was showing green, but unseen, before him when the voice of water, liquid, and laughing, broke the silence. It was a way-side fountain. Crystal water spouting from a moss-grown lion-head.
* * * * *

It was like drinking life; the mountains in the distance became mountains again; the wind, the wind; and the sunlight, the sunlight; the world of shadows and semi-delirium through which he had been walking, faded away. Like a good enchantress, the water had washed away the stains of his journey and the thirst from his soul. In that moment, just like one convalescing from a severe illness, he felt newborn. He was seated upon a bank, and above him in the trade wind waved the huge fronds of ferns, and before him308 lay a field of canes overripe, that had been spared the cane-cutters’ knives.

Half drowsy, still exhausted, but wrapped in the new feeling of well-being, like a man who is recovering from an anaesthetic, he noted his surroundings; and, as his eyes travelled from point to point, they suddenly came to rest on a spot just before him.

On the dust of the road, sheltered by the bank and the ferns from the wind, lay the imprint of a naked foot. A woman’s little foot had pressed the dust of the road but a short time before; the print was warm to the sight and living, one could almost see the fleeting figure swiftly moving as the breeze, and graceful as the bending palm. The print of the heel was far less marked than that of the fore part.

The volcanic dust, though gone from the foliage, still lay upon the road, and on this dust of ruin lay the woman’s foot mark, vivid, triumphant over death. Gaspard gazed at it. He glanced at the fountain beside him singing and laughing beneath the shadow of the ferns, then he remembered. It was here that he had paused that day with Marie; it was here that she had given him the ratifia, it was here—it was here.

He rose to his feet, gazed again at the mark in the road and followed its printing. Farther on he lost it, for the wind had blown the dust across it; further on he found it, very faint, but still discernible.

Then, where a little side path broke off from the road, he found it clearly again.

She had taken the path.

Along the National Road you find many paths like these. Short cuts to villages, paths used by the cane cutters and309 market folk, often mere traces half smothered by the tropical grasses.

He followed the path which led towards a wood of ceibas and angelines, palms with enormous trunks, thick as the trunks of full grown oak trees; tree ferns and wild pines.

As he came a voice hailed him from the liquid shadow of the trees, it was the voice of the siffleur de montagne; clear, silvery, bell-like, the voice of the bird came through the silence of the sultry noon. There was no other sound but the stirring of the palm fronds in the wind.

Here, amidst the trees, by this old forgotten pathway lay a shrine to the Virgin; one of the thousand shrines that are found on the roads and pathways of Martinique. As he pushed the lianas and the air shoots of the wild pine aside, a voice other than the voice of the siffleur de montagne met his ear. The bird had ceased, and through the murmur of the wind in the trees came this voice; the voice of a woman, sweeter than the voice of the bird.
* * * * *

Moving silently as a shadow, pushing the leafy veils aside, scarcely breathing, he reached a point from which he could see vaguely in the twilight of the trees the shrine and the woman kneeling before it.

Her voice was clear now, and the soft, childish Creole words of the votary came to him for whom she was giving thanks.

No supplicatory prayer was this, but an assured thanksgiving for the safety of one who had been spared the darkness and the terror of chaos, the horror of death, the fate of her ruined world, for one who was safe and who would return. “At morning, noon, and evening, I have praised thee on my knees—”

310 It was the noonday prayer—and it passed devoutly from a prayer of praise to one of supplication. Supplication for the souls of the dead and for the living, for Missie Seguin who had been spared even as she had been spared; for herself, a creature not deserving the protection that had saved her, that had led her away to the safety of Grande Anse when Pelée had spoken and the world had fallen in ruins.

Then she rose to her feet, the white magic of Love and Faith still like a light upon her face. As her eyes fell upon the man standing beneath the trees, for one divine second she paused with breath caught back, spirit like, and ringed with the twilight as with a charm.
* * * * *

Where the trade wind was blowing and the green waves breaking on the beach of Grande Anse, welcome and a new life were waiting for them.

The man he had saved from the fer de lance had the will and the power to open the doors of a golden future for them, yet they could not break from yesterday so soon.

Heedless of time or place they sat by the road-side fountain, till the shadows were lengthening on the road and the valleys humming with night. Darkness found them on the ruined road above the ruined city.

They had come almost unconsciously to look at it again, to breathe the air of the past through which they had so miraculously wandered, and, as they stood clasping one another, gazing through the vagueness at the lights of the warships in the bay, the sea of a sudden became touched with silver and the rising moon broke above the shoulder of Pelée.

The light flooded across the harbour and struck the shrouded city like a tide. The ruins of the Place Bertine311 came into view; its broken and veiled cathedral, the thread of darkness outlining the Rue Victor Hugo.

In the moonlight the desolation became robbed of its terror and all was touched with the poetry of deep antiquity, from the flooding sea to the forms of the lovers set far above the ruins.

The End