CHAPTER XXII THE ROAD TO GRANDE ANSE

Next morning very early Marie made her way to the Rue Victor Hugo, received her tray of goods, and started on her journey. It was a long journey to-day, right away to Grande Anse on the eastern side of the island.

She passed up the steep twilit streets, up, up, past the Rue Petit Versailles, till the houses broke up and the way began to turn from a street to a country road.

Just here she did what she had never done before, turned and looked down at the city steeped in twilight.

With the heavy load of the tray she dared not bend her head. She stood with head erect and eyes cast down, beautiful and statuesque as one of the Greek Caniphori. She was thinking, “Ah, there is someone there, in what house is he, in which street, is he awake yet or does he still sleep?”

Then, raising her eyes, she looked far over the sea, bright beyond the shadow of Pelée and the hills. She was thinking, “He came from there—where from beyond that wonderful bright sea did he come?” The sea had always been one of the mysteries of her life, and the ships that came from away beyond the horizon.

Then she turned and resumed her way along the twilit road filled with the early morning scent of tropical woods and flowers, she had forgotten her fear of the fer de lance. Zombis and evil shapes had vanished from her path—those shadows of the mind that have no existence when forgotten.

140 Yesterday, when she was leaving the market, she had heard the screams of the market-women and had turned to see him surrounded with people. He had killed the fer de lance with his naked hand; snakes could do him no harm, so the market people had said. That fact made the fer de lance less fearful to her. He did not fear it, why should she? In this tropical mind, sealed so long to love, Love had suddenly disclosed himself full grown and statuesque.

It was as though in a tropical garden gone to a state of nature, some wind had pushed the foliage aside revealing the marble form of the garden god, the statue that had been there since the garden was planted first, lurking amidst the leaves, and now seen for the first time. As she turned the shadow of Pelée, the sunlight struck her, and the view lay spread as of old. The wonderful view of Martinique, its hills, and mountains, its fields of cane, and visions of distant sea.

She paused, as she always paused just here, to feel the trade wind and the warmth of the sun. There lay the mountains she had known from childhood with La Trace, the white highroad, winding away across them, the mornes, the valleys, the glimpse of the distant sea towards Fort de France. It seemed to her that she was looking at all this for the first time. The world, since yesterday, had become new, a spirit, half gay, half sad, had infused itself into everything, the hills, the sea, the distance—the world, since yesterday, would never be the same again to Marie of Morne Rouge.

The last time she had passed along that road, she had travelled without thought, careless as a child, free as a bird—now it was all different. She could not tell in the least what had happened to her, she never connected the change with love, the thing Finotte and Pauline chattered about so141 glibly. She only knew that the great old hills were speaking a new language to her and that Distance had become Loneliness.

She had travelled the white highroad many a time alone, yet she had never felt herself alone till to-day.

Then, as she went on her way along the road blazing in the sun and set on either side with palmistes, tree ferns, bushes of grenadilla blossom and sun-stricken tamarinds, a voice said to her:

“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”

There was no one but herself upon the road, nothing moving but the shadows of the palm fronds shaken by the wind and the green lizards slipping across the dust in the sunlight. It was the voice of yesterday.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”

She called it up again and again and made it repeat the words, then she recalled his face as she had seen it when glancing up at him to thank him for the flower.

She had a companion now.

Had you seen her passing, swift, silently, with her burden poised on her head, straight as a palmiste, enveloped in a flame of sunlight, with her luminous eyes gazing straight into the distance before her, you might have fancied her a somnambulist, a person walking in a dream—she was.

As she went on her way, she experienced a new sensation, it was as though St. Pierre had attached itself to her by a thread, the further she went, the tighter did this thread grow—“Come back” said St. Pierre, “every step you take, takes you away from him, come back, you do not know, he is a foreign sailor and may be carried away in one of those mysterious ships, those ships that spread their sails and pass away beyond the blue horizon to be lost forever.”

142 It was up on the Morne du Midi that the voice of St. Pierre said this to her for the first time. She paused. The sun was high and pouring a torrent of light on sea and land.

The sun rays seemed beaten back from the earth, rising in a vague and dazzling spray as the water of a torrent rises in a spray-cloud. The hills were indefinite, blue, and purple shapes, the sea had lost its horizon and seemed part of the sky and the woods of the Morne du Midi were as still as death. Nothing sings or stirs in the West Indian woods when the sun is holding the world like this.

Marie, on the highest summit of the Morne, stood as though the silence of the world had suddenly stricken her, taking away movement and life.

“Ah, if he were to leave St. Pierre! If she were to return and never find him again!”

She had only seen him twice, she had only spoken to him a word, were he to pass out of her life forever, it would be the passing away of a spectre, a mist, a dream, but she would never love again. It was as though she had been waiting for him since the beginning of the world, as though she had lived through the remote past, through the old Carib days, passing from re-incarnation to re-incarnation, through the fervour of tropical days and nights, the silences of the tropical forests, without finding him. And now that she had found him, how would it be with her if she lost him?

Her mind, absolutely virgin and frank as the mind of the prehistoric woman, never paltered with words, she stood there on the morne, gazing at the vision of deathless love, supreme and mysterious happiness, torn by the thought—“Ah, should I lose it!”

There were still miles before her to be travelled before she reached Grande Anse, St. Pierre was calling her back,143 all her soul and being craved to return; few women of Europe could have withstood that call of the heart, she had only to return, to wander through the streets, by the harbour, on the Place Bertine, and she would be almost sure to meet him; but she had a trust to fulfil, the goods she was carrying had to be delivered at Grande Anse, Death might have stopped but would not have prevented her in her endeavour to fulfil her trust, and Love was powerless over her in this simple matter as Death.

That was her character drawn in four lines. Capable of immortal passion, yet bound by a simple duty as matter is bound by gravity.

Then she went on her road due east for Grande Anse, past the silent woods, through the great white light of the day.