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 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 , 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 reality, the inner glory of her womanhood became meaningless. It was this that made the future a crossing of 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 and disordered by the dreadful tortures of nether-planes; and awful in the eyes, was that of soul. Once in a dream, she saw him—a pale reptile-monster upreared from a salty sea, voiceless in that oceanic , a 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 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 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 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 world of sky and sea. She spent a day and an evening in this of ripe fruits and riper amours; and took away materials for a memory composite of interminable , restless radiant nights, towering cliffs, incomparable courtesy, and soft-voiced with 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 from , water. There were afternoons when she did not care to lift her voice or move about. Fruit-juices and the simplest salads, a flexible chair under the , a book to rest the eyes from the gorgeous sea and shores, rather than sleep—these are enough for the approach to perfection in the Caribbean, with the Antilles on the lee.... Then at last in late afternoon, the great hulking shape of Pelée green against the sky; in the swift-speeding , the volcano seemed to and blacken until it was like the shadow of a continent, and the lights of Saint Pierre 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 .
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 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 of the intense sultriness.
"Yes, Saint Pierre is glowing like a brazier," he said. "I was last night for awhile. The people blame the mountain. Old Pelée has been up—showering the town with ash every little while lately. It's the of sulphur that spoils the air."
She turned 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 were the rise in Victor Hugo, at the southern end of the city, when Paula discovered the little Catholic church she had imaged for so many weeks, Notre des Lourdes, niched away in the crowded streets with a Quebec-like , 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 .... The porteuses, said to be the lithest, women of the , wore a pitiable look of , 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 and colorless, twisted lips of the burden-bearers.
The ponies at length gained the of the Morne d'Orange, and ahead she saw the broad, white plantation-house—Hotel des Palms. To the right was the dazzling, sea where the Fruitlands lay large among the , and near her a private sea-going yacht, nearly as long and angelically white. The broad of the hotel were with palms; the walls and portcullises were cooled with vines. Gardens flamed with poinsettias and roses, and a shaded of mango and India trees at the end............