Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [16]
Now Sister Marie Augustine is leading me out of the dormitory, asking if I am ill, telling me that I must not disturb the others and though I am still shivering I wonder if she will take me behind the mysterious curtains to the place where she sleeps. But no. She seats me in a chair, vanishes, and after a while comes back with a cup of hot chocolate
I said, ‘I dreamed I was in Hell.’
‘That dream is evil. Put it from your mind – never think of it again,’ and she rubbed my cold hands to warm them.
She looks as usual, composed and neat, and I want to ask her if she get up before dawn or hasn’t been to bed at all.
‘Drink your chocolate.’
While I am drinking it I remember that after my mother’s funeral, very early in the morning, almost as early as this, we went home to drink chocolate and eat cakes. She died last year, no one told me how, and I didn’t ask. Mr Mason was there and Christophine, no one else. Christophine cried bitterly but I could not. I prayed, but the words fell to the ground meaning nothing.
Now the thought of her is mixed up with my dream.
I saw her in her mended habit riding a borrowed horse, trying to wave at the head of the cobblestoned road at Coulibri, and tears came to my eyes again. ‘Such terrible things happen,’ I said. ‘Why? Why?’
‘You must not concern yourself with that mystery,’ said Sister Maria Augustine. ‘We do not know why the devil must have his little day. Not yet.’
She never smiled as much as the others, now she was not smiling at all. She looked sad.
She said, as if she was talking to herself, ‘Now go quietly back to bed. Think of calm, peaceful things and try to sleep. Soon I will give the signal. Soon it will be tomorrow morning.’
Part Two
So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. There we were, sheltering from the heavy rain under a large mango tree, myself, my wife Antoinette and a little half-caste servant who was called Amélie. Under a neighbouring tree I could see our luggage covered with sacking, the two porters and a boy holding fresh horses, hired to carry us up 2,000 feet to the waiting honeymoon house.
The girl Amélie said this morning, ‘I hope you will be very happy, sir, in your sweet honeymoon house.’ She was laughing at me I could see. A lovely little creature but sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like much else in this place.
‘It’s only a shower,’ Antoinette said anxiously. ‘It will soon stop.’
I looked at the sad leaning cocoanut palms, the fishing boats drawn up on the shingly beach, the uneven row of whitewashed huts, and asked the name of the village.
‘Massacre.’
‘And who was massacred here? Slaves?’
‘Oh no.’ She sounded shocked. ‘Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now.’
The rain fell more heavily, huge drops sounded like hail on the leaves of he tree, and the sea crept stealthily forwards and backwards.
So this is Massacre. Not the end of the world, only the last stage of our interminable journey from Jamaica, the start of our sweet honeymoon. And it will all look very different in the sun.
I had been arranged that we would leave Spanish Town immediately after the ceremony and spend some weeks in one of the Windward Islands, at a small estate which had belonged to Antoinette’s mother. I agreed. As I had agreed to everything else.
The windows of the huts were shut, the doors opened into silence and dimness. Then three little boys came to stare at us. The smallest wore nothing but a religious medal round his neck and the brim of a large fisherman’s hat. When I smiled at him, he began to cry. A woman called from one of the huts