CHAPTER XIX
MARIE OF MORNE ROUGE
The street of the Precipice hung literally between sea and sky; almost as steep as a ladder, so steep that the causeway here and there broke into flights of steps, just as a river breaks into waterfalls. You saw, looking upwards, far above you, the green of the high woods, and looking downwards, far below you the harbour, blue at noon and emerald in the morning. Nothing could be more beautiful in its way than this old, narrow, unfashionable street during those hours in the morning when the harbour, gauze-green and ghostly, gazed up as through a well of twilight at the woods, black-green against the brightening sky.
Old as the time of Josephine, the street of the Precipice held in these morning hours the twilight of romance. The murmurs of the sea below and the woods above, the trickling and tinkling of the gouyave water flowing down its runnels seemed voices speaking of the past, times long gone, women vanished, men once brave—now ghosts.
In the full blaze of noon, the old street shone out bright with colours and moving with people; then, as the hour of siesta approached, it gradually emptied, the great heat of afternoon seemed to dry up its stream of life, the song of the calendeuse over her work, the note of a guitar, voices from the harbour side seemed less sounds than echoes of sound, green lizards slipped from shadow to shadow or basked openly in the heat. Then as the sun declined, the old street began to speak again and live, the sunset rushed up it like a torchbearer, setting fire to roof and gable, yellow house wall, coloured garments of women, up, up, lighting the woods far above—lighting the stars and leaving them burning and leaping in the dusky blue.
This was the children’s hour. You could hear their voices as they played, told their stories, sang their songs, whilst the blue above became more dark, more definite, more filled with stars.
It was here in this old street that Marie lived with her aunt, Man’m Charles, in a house on the right as you went up from the harbour and close to the passageway leading to the Rue Buonaparte.
Born sixteen years ago up at the village of Morne Rouge, she had paid for life the greatest payment that life can extract from a human being. She had lost her mother. Her father, who owned the only shop in the village, had been fairly prosperous in a small way; besides the shop he owned a small farm, and three times a week he would come into the market at St. Pierre to sell his produce, leaving the shop to the care of his sister, Ti Finotte, a woman of forty, a woman once tall, stately, beautiful as any woman in Martinique, but now a cripple, broken down, slain by hard work. She had been a porteuse.
The porteuse of Martinique is a race apart; she is in reality a peddler, selling everything from fruit to ribbons. She carries her tray upon her head and her goods upon the tray, and her load would break an Englishman down were he to carry it half a dozen miles. She thinks nothing of it. Wonderful is not the word for the work done by these women, graceful, sometimes slightly built, often beautiful, who, with their loads perfectly balanced, bare-footed, dressed in clothing slight as the clothing of the ancient Greeks, will travel fifty miles in a day from village to village, over hill and dale, under the tropical sun, joyous as children, pleasant, sweet to look upon, yet fated to die at last—from overwork!
Yet they do not complain, nor do they look back on their lives with bitterness; hard though the work is, it is free from constraint of walls and houses and masters; it is lonely passing from village to village amidst the mountains, but they have the companionship of sun and wind and distance. So Ti Finotte, though she was dying from the hardships of life and though she loved little Marie, made no opposition when Marie’s father declared his intention of making a porteuse of the child.
Marie was four years of age when he came to this decision, and he came to it because he could see no better future for her. Since the birth of Marie he had fallen upon evil days; wishing to extend his farm, he had borrowed money, and he had borrowed it from Sagesse, then a rising power in St. Pierre; a bad crop and a tornado crippled him in this new development of his business, he had to apply to Sagesse for another loan, and from that dated his ruin.