The PRINTS OF HANTOUN A Complete Novelette by T. S. Stribling Author of "The Governor of Cape Haitien," "Cricket," etc.
N FORT DE FRANCE, Martinique, Professor Henry Poggioli, American psychologist and criminologist, struck up a very pleasant friendship with Marian de Creviceau, a gentleman with a fellow interest in the philosophic aspects of crime.
The Chevalier de Creviceau, following the general temperament of the French in Martinique, elaborated innumerable theories about his hobby without putting one to the touchstone of investigation. He had become a theoretical spider spinning his web not to catch flies, but to indulge a passion for geometry.
So, at nine o’clock in the morning, while Fort de France lay under a downpour of sunshine already torrid, these two gentlemen sat at dejeuner at one of the little tables which had been placed on the wide pavement in front of the Hotel Coloniale discussing the highly theoretical question of how far the architectural surroundings of a people influenced their crimes.
The reason they had picked on this peculiar topic was that the street in which they sat spread before them a glare of multicolors which perhaps could not be duplicated anywhere else in the world. Some of the houses were painted in blazing blue and red bands, like a Brobdingnagian barber sign; the surface of others were enormous zig-zags of yellow and vermilion; some were struck off in diagonals of umber and orange. The whole street vibrated with these hot clashing colors and screwed up the impression of heat to a degree almost unbearable.
“The Prints of Hantoun,” copyright, 1925, by T. S. Stribling.
Poggioli, with his American flair for simplicity, suggested that this futuristic decoration would tend to produce crimes as bizarre and grotesque as the pied and streaked surroundings in which they were committed. But the Chevalier de Creviceau, with French subtlety, took exactly an opposite view. He held a theory analagous to that of Stanley Hall in “Adolescence:” Just as the vicarious criminal experience obtained during youth by novel reading tended to produce sober-minded men, so these clashing colors would tend to produce simplicity in the approach to life of all the Martiniquais whether criminal or normal members of society. He reinforced this opinion with humorous cleverness by declaring that the apocalyptic vision of St. John on Patmos described Heaven itself as a highly colored place not so very dissimilar to Fort de France.156
