“You are a brother Provençal, well, I have picked you up floating about on the sea and that’s all about it, I have more than enough hands to work the ship, and your food, what does it cost? Besides, we can settle up at St. Pierre. St. Pierre, Martinique, yes that is my port. You have never been there? Ah, mordieu, then you have never seen life, you will see it at St. Pierre where men know how to laugh, and love is as cheap as bananas.”
“Well, I will be able to pay you,” said Gaspard, “that is to say if I ever can pay you for all you have done for me.”
Sagesse laughed.
His face, ordinarily pleasant except for a certain fixity of the eyes, lost its pleasantness in some strange way when he laughed.
Clean shaved, except for a rather heavy and drooping moustache, fat and weather-tanned, in white cap and apron, save for his bronzing he would have made an ideal chef; a concocter of sauces and entremets, fat with the steam of his kitchen; but when he laughed he shewed his teeth and just that one touch destroyed his bonhommie, for his laughter did not extend above his mouth, and laughter is inhuman when the eyes do not correct the teeth.
All day they kept the Haitian coast on the distant horizon, the water had been blue off the island, but to Gaspard, as he hung over the side, it seemed that this water was even bluer. It was; the Caribbean, that great lake of burning indigo, was sending its colour to meet them, the foam flakes from the fore-foot of the Belle Arlésienne swept past like marble shavings cast on slabs of lapis-lazuli, and violets would have seemed pale and faded held against the background of the sea to southward.
CHAPTER XIV
THE MONEY-CHANGER
Gaspard, though a man full-grown and a man, moreover, who had passed his life in touch with the brutal side of things, had still in his nature very much of the child. The Provençal rarely grows old, he withers at last in the sun and comes to die, but the child in him remains a child; imaginative, impulsive, easily moved to laughter or tears, good or naughty, with a passion for colour, and movement, and sound, and exaggeration. And so he remains a poet in his way.