Part 26 (1/2)

Two of the inhabitants, and two only, escaped; one a negro prisoner, who was not found until three days later, burned half to death in his prison cell; and one, a shoemaker, who, by some strange eddy in the all-killing gas, and who was on the very edge of the track of destruction, fled, though others fell dead on every side of him.

A second eruption, coupled with an earthquake, on May 20, completed the wreckage of the buildings. This outburst was even more violent than the first. There was no loss of life, for no one was left to slay.

Five years later, Sir Frederick Treves visited St. Pierre. ”Along the whole stretch of the bay,” he writes, ”there is not one living figure to be seen, not one sign of human life, not even a poor hut, nor grazing cattle.... A generous growth of jungle has spread over the place in these five years. Rank bushes, and even small trees, make a thicket along some of the less traversed ways.... Over some of the houses luxuriant creepers have spread, while long gra.s.s, ferns and forest flowers have filled up many a court and modest lane.”

Twelve years later, a visitor to St. Pierre found a small wooden pier erected. A tiny hotel had been built. Huts were cl.u.s.tering under the ruins. Several parties were at work clearing away the ruins, but slowly, for the government of the colony would not a.s.sist in the work, believing that the region was unsafe. At the time of this visit, Mont Pelee was still smoking.

This was the ruined city which Stuart was going to see. On board the steamer were the two or three books which tell the story of the great eruption, and the boy filled his brain full of the terrible story that he might better feel the great adventure that the next day should bring him.

The steamer reached Fort-de-France in the evening, and the boy found the town, though ill-lighted, gay. A band was playing in the Plaza, not far from the landing place and most of the shops were still open. Morning showed an even brighter Fort-de-France, for, though when St. Pierre was in its glory, Fort-de-France was the lesser town, the capital now is the center of the commercial prosperity of the island. For this, however, Stuart had little regard. Sunrise found him on the little steamer which leaves daily for St. Pierre.

The journey was not long, three hours along a coast of steep cliffs with verdant mountains above. Small fis.h.i.+ng hamlets, half-hidden behind coco-nut palms, appeared in every cove. The steamer pa.s.sed Carbet, that town on the edge of the great eruptive flood, which had its own death-list, and they turned the point of land into the harbor of St.

Pierre.

Before the boy's eyes rose the Mountain of Destruction, sullen, twisted, wrinkled and still menacing, not all silent yet. The hills around were green, and verdure spread over the country once deep in volcanic ash.

But Mont Pelee was brown and bald still.

Nineteen years had pa.s.sed since the eruption, but St. Pierre had not recovered. At first sight, from the sea, the town gave a slight impression of being rebuilt. But this was only the strange combination of old ruins and modern fis.h.i.+ng huts. The handsome stone wharves still stood, but no vessels lay beside them.

The little steamer slowed and tied up at a tiny wooden pier. A statue, symbolical of St. Pierre in her agony, had been erected on the end of the pier. The boy landed, and walked slowly along the frail wooden structure, to take in the scene as it presented itself to him.

Alas, for St. Pierre! As Lafcadio Hearn described it--”the quaint, whimsical, wonderfully colored little town, the sweetest, queerest, darlingest little city in the Antilles.... Walls are lemon color, quaint balconies and lattices are green. Palm trees rise from courts and gardens into the warm blue sky, indescribably blue, that appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things within and without the yellow vista are steeped in a suns.h.i.+ne electrically white, in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavement of basalt the glitter of silver ore.

”Everywhere rushes mountain water--cool and crystal--clear, was.h.i.+ng the streets; from time to time you come to some public fountain flinging a silvery column to the sun.... And often you will note, in the course of a walk, little drinking fountains contrived in the angle of a building, or in the thick walls bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares; glittering threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone.”

Alas for St. Pierre!

Above the pier but one street had been partly restored, and, at every gap, the boy's gaze encountered gray ruins. The ash, poured out by the mountain in its vast upheaval, has made a rich soil. To Stuart's eyes, the town was a town of dreams, of great stone staircases that led to nowhere, of high archways that gave upon a waste. The entrance hall of the great Cathedral, once one of the finest in the West Indies, still leads to the high altar, but that finds its home in a little wooden structure with a tin roof, shrinking in what was once a corner of the apse.

Built as a lean-to in the corner of what had once been a small, but strongly-built house was a store, a very small store, outside the door of which a crippled negro was sitting. Thinking that this might be one of the old-timers of St. Pierre, Stuart stopped and bought a small trinket, partly as a memento, partly as a means of getting into conversation.

”But yes, Monsieur,” answered the storekeeper, ”it was my wife and I--we escaped. My wife, she had been sent into Morne Rouge, that very morning, with a message from her mistress. Me, I was working on the road, not more than a mile away. I saw nothing of it, Monsieur. About half-past seven that morning (twenty-two minutes, therefore, before the final eruption) a shower of stones fell where I was working. One fell on my back, and left me crippled, as you see. But my four children, ah!

Monsieur, they sleep here, somewhere!”

He waved his hand toward the riot of ruin and foliage which now marks the city which once prided itself on being called ”the gayest little city in the West Indies.”

”Yet you have come back!” exclaimed Stuart.

”But yes, Monsieur, what would you? It pleased G.o.d that I should be born here, that my children should be taken away from me here; and, maybe, that I should die here, too.”

”You are not afraid that Mont Pelee will begin again?”

The negro shrugged his shoulders.

”It is my home, Monsieur,” he said simply. ”Better a home which is sad than the place of a stranger which is gay. But we hope, Monsieur, that some day the government of Martinique will accept a parole of good conduct from the Great Eater of Lives”--he pointed to Mont Pelee--”and give us back our town again.”

Next morning, studying the life of the little town, Stuart found that many others shared the view of the crippled negro. The little market-place on the Place Bertin, though lacking any shelter from pouring rain or blazing sun, was crowded with three or four hundred market women. Daily the little steamer takes a cargo from St. Pierre, for the ash from the volcano has enriched the soil, and the planters are growing wealthy. There are many more little houses and thatched huts tucked into corners of the ruins than appear at first sight, and a hotel has been built for the tourists who visit the strange spot.

The crater in Mont Pelee is silent now; the great vent which hurled white-hot rocks, incandescent dust and mephitic gases, is now covered with a thick green shrubbery, only here and there do small smoke-holes emit a light sulphurous vapor; but the great mountain, treeless, wrinkled, implacable, seemed to Stuart to throw a solemn shadow of threat upon the town. The secret of St. Pierre, as Stuart wrote to his paper, ”lies in the hope of its inhabitants, but its real future lies in the parole of good conduct from the Great Eater of Human Lives, Mont Pelee.”