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Dorothea was enchanted with Dominica, and kept exclaiming every few minutes: “Oh, if only Great Britain would sell us this island! I think I’d choose to live in Dominica, because if I had a sausage-tree in my garden I should laugh every day, and the children wouldn’t need any playthings.”

* * * * *

S.S. Diana, February 1, 1918

We have had a glimpse of France through a day at Martinique. The principal feature of our visit was a wild motor-drive up an eighteen-hundred-foot mountain. It was a steady climb from glory to glory, with tropical forests on every side. Our method of progress was not quite serene, for there was not a sufficient number of cars to satisfy the demand.

After a long wait Dolly and I took a small mongrel sort of motor that had been refused by all the Diana’s passengers. The Creole driver, handsome, debonair, persuasive, and fluent, though unintelligible, assured us that he had ascended and descended the mountain hundreds of times, a fact only too obvious to one who examined his means of transportation. None of the tires matched, and two of them looked like wounded soldiers just home from the front, displaying patches of adhesive plaster and bandages of cotton and woolen rags of every color, with an occasional inset of an alien material into the rubber. One could catch a glimpse of a tin tomato-can neatly introduced in the place of some vital bit of machinery; a Waterbury alarm-clock figured in an unexpected position, apparently adding its power to the engine; and there were stout ropes, here and there, which I never observed before in the rigging of any motor.

I hesitated to enter, for the future, though not absolutely certain, looked full of hope and promise; but Dolly was firm and reckless. I am ten years her senior, but still young to be called a “‘fraid cat” with impunity; so I finally mounted the vehicle. The driver gave a gay, insouciant tap to a front tire, as much as to say: “Courage, mon enfant! C’est la derniere fois!”–then flung himself into his seat, and, blowing a horn, started his base-hospital up the mountain at a breakneck pace. The motor’s own horn was out of commission, but there was a substitute by the driver’s side. It was easy for him to blow it because he had no particular use for either of his hands, his steering being left largely to chance. Repeated expostulations in boarding-school French only elicited a reply that sounded like: “Soyez tranquilles, mesdames. You speak American? Bien! Leezy est parfaitement docile!”

This conveyed no idea to me, although his broad grin convinced me that in his own opinion it was a subtle witticism. At length, however, it burst upon Dolly, who went off into irrepressible gales of laughter.

“You have lived so continuously in a rarefied Winthrop atmosphere, Charlotte, that you haven’t any modern vocabulary. He is telling you the pet name of his car, to give you confidence. Nobody ever dies in a tin ‘Lizzie.’ Not only is the machine indestructible, but the people that ride in it. Isn’t the driver a witty, reckless darling?”

He was, indeed; and, incredible as it may seem, Lizzie ascended and descended the mountain in safety–though only because a kind Providence watched over us. Then, when we had paid the reckless, danger-proof darling twice the sum he should have demanded, we sat on a bench in the Savanna, where we could be quietly grateful that we were alive and watch the coming and going of the Fort-de-France townspeople, so unmistakably French, with the bright costumes of the women, the pose of their turbans or hats, their sparkle and chatter and vivacious gestures.

Here in the Savanna travelers always gather to look at the marble statue of the Empress Josephine, which is called the greatest work of art in the West Indies. That is not fatuous praise, perhaps, but the figure needed the hand of no master sculptor to hold the eye and captivate the imagination. It is mounted on a huge pedestal and is of heroic size, the white glitter of its marble enhanced by its truly magnificent setting, a circle of towering royal palms. There she stands, the lovely Creole woman of Martinique, forever looking at “Trois Islets,” as if she were remembering her birth in an overseer’s shack and her girlhood passed in a sugar-mill. Straightway the crowds of native men and women chaffering in the market-place, the mothers holding up their crowing babies to the statue, the nursemaids and groups of playing children, all vanished, and we re-lived in spirit poor Josephine’s past, thrilling anew at the remembrance of her romance, her triumph, and her bitter sorrow–the Creole girl who crossed the sea to become Empress of France and share a throne with Napoleon, but who sailed back to her island home a brokenhearted woman.