The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [39]
6
IT only remained now for Sandra to leave. It could not have been an easy time for her. But the true wound I thought to be mine, and I believed by saying nothing I was behaving well. Sandra was after all in a position to leave: other relationships awaited her, other countries. I had nowhere to go; I wished to experience no new landscapes; I had cut myself off from that avidity which I still attributed to her. It was not for me to decide to leave; that decision was hers alone. We continued to go out together; we continued to try out new restaurants and nightclubs. But I was waiting for her to leave. The time for quarrels between us was past. A quarrel occurred, though, before she left. It was not with me. It was with Wendy Deschampsneufs.
The name of Deschampsneufs was famous in our island. They were one of our old French families – always a Deschampsneufs on the committee of our Turf Club, always a Deschampsneufs prominent in the Cercle Sportif – but their reputation had always been slightly ambiguous since the unexpected emergence of a Deschampsneufs as a leader of the common man, ‘the man without’, during the Rate Riots of 1877. The challenge to the Colonial Government then had been serious enough for an emergency to be declared and a governor recalled. But just ten years later the Deschampsneufs appeared to have become quite respectable again, respectable enough at any rate to entertain James Anthony Froude, the imperialist pamphleteer, who was visiting. The story of this visit was famous in Isabella. Froude arrived in a state of nerves. A pathologically gloomy man, he had been thoroughly rattled by an Irish telegraph operator in New York who, between items of fact, was transmitting vivid accounts of imaginary British disasters in various parts of the world. On Isabella Froude had little heart for looking over more declining plantations and listening to more tales of imperial woe. The Deschampsneufs offered to take him on an expedition to the Devil’s Cauldron, a hot sulphur lake high up in our mountains. It was a difficult three-day journey on foot and mule through forest, rain and mud, and Froude’s temper wore very thin. The sight of every Negro forest hut drove him to rage at Negro idleness and to pessimistic conclusions about the future of that race; he saw the bush speedily claiming its own again and reflected bitterly on the abolition of slavery, which he thought the Negroes themselves would live to regret. The only hope for Isabella, he said, lay in the large-scale settlement of Asiatics, who ‘to the not inconsiderable merits of picturesqueness and civilization add the virtues of thrift and industry’. Matters reached a head when at the Cauldron itself a solitary Negro was discovered, totally naked, washing some clothes. Froude, exceeding his privileges as a visitor and exceeding, too, the custom of the island, ‘most civilly requested the young black to return into his already sufficiently threadbare garment or garments and proceed in any direction of his choice’. The Negro grew ‘sullen’, then ‘abusive’; and it was clear, even from Froude’s account, that it was only the intercession of the great Deschampsneufs, speaking soothingly in the French patois of the mountains, that saved Froude from violence or a show of violence. Froude was not greatly impressed; the chapter on Isabella in The Bow of Ulysses was rounded off with a diatribe against the French, their language, their religion; in the existence of these things on a British island Froude saw the greatest