CHAPTER XXI THE FLEUR D’AMOUR

Then, as if challenged by the bells, the clouds around Pelée spread out fanwise, the sky darkened, and Marie, taking shelter beneath a verandah, heard the rush of rain as it swept down from street to street.

The darkness and the rain were like an omen—or might have been but for the bells, ringing on, joyous, triumphant, like the love that lives through disaster and beyond death.

She heard the thunder of the rain on roof and verandah, the sky looked as though it would never clear again, and then, just as though the bells had broken a way to heaven, a blue rift shewed through the clouds, widened, spread wider still to a burst of sunshine and the clouds were passing away over the sea, sweeping it with meadows of tourmaline-coloured shadow.

Marie, leaving the shelter of the verandah, turned to the shop of M. Sartine, gave the account of her dealings with the Se?ora, received her meed of praise from the old shopkeeper, who was an excellent-hearted man in all things in which money was not concerned, and departed for home.

As she left the shop and entered the Rue Victor Hugo, the world seemed commonplace again, the bells had ceased ringing, the joyous morning had passed away as if the voices of the bells had carried it away out to sea with them.

135 She returned to the Street of the Precipice. Man’m Charles was in a bad humour; Finotte, one of the girls whom she employed in her business, had not turned up that morning and she was short-handed. The ill-temper which ought to have fallen to Finotte fell on Marie.

It is always just so in this world, the day that begins cloudless, warm, and perfect, rarely lasts till sunset.

The girl who was never for a moment idle took the place of Finotte, one might have thought that working as she did at the trade of porteuse a holiday might have fallen to her occasionally on such a day as this, but she did not grumble.

She set to work painting the great madras handkerchief without a murmur.

Three other girls were working in the room with her, a dim room into which the blazing sunshine of the street outside scarcely penetrated through the green slats of the shutters. Pauline, Celestine, and Florine were their names, and they chatted as they worked in the sweet childish French of the tropics. It was like the chatting of birds in a dimly lit cage. Celestine was to be married next month, Pauline and Florine had lovers, Love, marriage, other girls’ lovers, heart-affairs, Rosine jilted by the fisherman Ambrose, who had gone to live at Fort de France, Lys who had jilted Achille, who had threatened to drown himself—so the conversation ran on. Birds one might imagine talking like this, one to the other in the branches of the loseille bois and the tamarinds. Marie took no part in the conversation, she never did when the talk ran like this. To-day as she worked, she seemed even more abstracted than usual. But she was listening—half listening, wondering why Lys had jilted Achille, why the fisherman Ambrose had jilted Rosine, interested in the troubles of these people, though she could not tell why. Yesterday136 their squabblings would have been quite uninteresting to her.

Then as she worked, she saw things. The road over the Morne de Parnasse, the green gloom of the Jardin des Plantes, the sun-stricken Place du Fort, the Rue Victor Hugo and the Place de la Fontaine with the diamond flower of the fountain glittering in the sun.

Wherever her thoughts might lead her, they always strayed back to the Place de la Fontaine. Then she would see a white figure coming towards her. Her thoughts would try to escape, to turn back—impossible, they had to go on, meet face to face that someone, meet again that gaze, answer it—then only might she pass on to lose herself in the crowd, to meet the music of the bells, the carillon of joy; voices from the woods, echoes from the harbour side, music from heaven, echoes from earth, clasping her, folding her in waves of sound—

Just as the waves of a tropic sea breaking on the shores of an islet may tell to a man the fact of man’s isolation and loneliness—loneliness that love alone can banish—so the waves of sound, brilliant, dim, sonorous or echo-broken, had told Marie the fact of woman’s isolation and loneliness.

All her life suddenly appeared to her as a great loneliness. It was as though she were standing on the shore of an islet and had suddenly discovered the fact for the first time that she was utterly alone, the discovery being brought to her by the glimpse of a far-off ship, a momentary vision that had vanished, leaving her to her loneliness.

That is how real love first comes, analyse it to its depths, that tremendous wave which strikes all human beings at some time of their life, the crest may be sunlit, joyous,—but the heart is from the great ocean where loneliness is137 supreme. Lifted on the joyous crest, a man sees the object of his desire, the companion of his soul; if he does not seize her, he will sink into the heart of the wave, the gloom of its loneliness, to be carried to the shore at last without ever seeing the true sunlight again.

After dark, when the stars were out and the voices of the children playing in the streets had ceased, Marie went to her room, a room so poorly furnished that one might almost say it was not furnished at all. Just a mattress on the floor, a chair, a box of cedar wood where she kept her clothes and her few possessions, and on the wall a little shrine to the Virgin, a tiny thing, gaudily painted, and with a little trough to hold flowers.

She had been brought up in the Catholic faith, she placed flowers in the little trough of the shrine and prayed to the Virgin, but I doubt if her faith was more than a fetish worship of the image of the Virgin, or if her religion gave her any comfort in bad times.

Ti Finotte had died and gone away into the darkness, the smiling Virgin in the little shrine could not stop that or say one word of comfort. In her heart of hearts, she felt religion to be an entirely one-sided affair wherein Man did everything from good works to worship and the Deity nothing. But then she was only Marie, a being come from very far away. Her people had given the Caribbean Sea its name, had hunted the wild horses before our Saviour was born, were lost to sight behind centuries of sunlight, and silence, and savagery. How could she see clearly the light, with the dawn of the world still in her eyes?

She went to bed and to the dreamless sleep that comes to the hard worker whose work lies in the open air. Next morning she was up before the stars had paled, for her138 aunt had set her several tasks to do before breakfast time.

Amongst other things, she had to go to the market to buy provisions, and it was there, you will remember, that she had her second meeting with Gaspard, and his gift of the fleur d’amour.