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comprise the main street. At one end lay the quay, where a couple of fishing smacks lay at anchor, the
other trailed off into rolling meadowland that might have been anywhere in Sussex, with cows grazing
under tame European trees. Only a single palm tree, and a few Negroes hanging listlessly about, hinted
that we were in the tropics. And nothing else. Listlessness, we were to learn, was the essential character-
istic of the town; that, and an absolute characterlessness that was so extreme that it contrived to develop
from a negative attribute into something destructively positive.
The plane, of course, didn't come.
After hours of waiting, a signal arrived saying that it was impossible to send a plane for four days. The
Rose Millicent
had sailed off to her home port, and all the other sloops had vanished during the night. No
planes were calling from any other island. We were marooned.
How welcome such a delay would have been anywhere but here—in Grenada, or Pointe Baptiste, or with
Raoul in Guade-loupe! Even Pointe-à-Pitre seemed an eligible stopping-place compared to Marigot. We
thought with nostalgia of the Schoelcher and Herminier museums, the snakes, the birds, the fish made out
of cotton and straw….Here there was nothing. Even the blazing sunlight seemed to have been deadened
and robbed of some essential component on its journey from the sun to this island. Our picnics turned out
to be flat little expeditions, possibly because Bella and the girl from St. Barthélémy prepared them with
such poor grace and, above all, so dismally badly. Costa found the light unsuitable for painting, I found
writing impossible, and Joan languished over the pages of
Oblomoff
. We watched the sun go down from
a balcony from which a lump of concrete had fallen to expose a rusty iron prong, part of the entrails of
the building. The various Flemings sat outside their stores, drawling tedious items of news to each other,
or shouting good-evening as the super-Fleming descended from his office, climbed into his car and drove
away. As the days dragged by we got the impression that our presence in the island was becoming as
much a bore for the islanders as it was for us.
It rained without stopping all through the fourth day of our exile, so we were compelled to remain
indoors, talking listlessly and playing paper-games. Soon after sunset I heard Bella talking about a film.
Going down to the street, I saw that people were splashing through the mud toward an ancient marquee
that had been pitched in the yard of the rum-shop. I shouted up to Joan and Costa, but neither of them
wanted to come. So I joined a queue which contained the entire population of Marigot. The only other
European there was a Dominican monk. His black and white habit and pale tonsured head looked quite
extraordinary in the African concourse. While the tent filled up, a cornet soloist played
Horsy keep your
tail up
. The film began. It was
Konigsmarck
, a French picture made at some very remote period; ex-
actly the sort of thing I felt like seeing: reviews of hussars in the squares of Ruritanian castles, with a
grand-duchess riding side-saddle in a plumed busby, a frogged jacket and a dolman; duels between me-
diatized princes in moonlit gardens, chiefs of police with spiked helmets and Kaiser-Bill moustaches;
cloaks, swordsticks, poison and secret passages. The audience gazed at the small screen in silence until
a fight broke out. Then the marquee burst into a frenzy, the spectators shouting advice and punching one
hand deliriously into the palm of the other. As the hero was a French private tutor at the Grand Ducal
Court, and thus far less apt at fighting than the spurred and swashbuckling bullies that surrounded him,
he usually got a pretty bad time, and was frequently booed by the audience. Their sentiments were all
on the side of the monocles and the uniforms, and when the hero was knocked spinning across a Louis
XV library by the Count, all the spectators rose to their feet, bellowing 'Go on, maan! Hit him again!
Hit
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