Awakened from where the high woods were rocking and singing in the morning wind, to where the breeze-swept harbour was lipping ship side and quay with the flash of sapphire satin.
One could see, so clear was the air, the tiles on the red-tiled roofs and the palm fronds bursting above them; a flag was flickering above some consulate, the palm-tops were dancing to the breeze that bore on its hot breath the scent of earth and trees and the sounds of the city that seemed less a city than a daring aquarelle, blindingly beautiful, triumphantly bright.
Round the Belle Arlésienne canotiers were paddling; banana-coloured children in little coffin-shaped canoes made out of old packing-cases, canned meat cases, anything in the form of a box that could be cut into the form of a canoe. They were chattering to the black sailors, and when they saw Gaspard they shouted to him to fling them coins to dive for, but before he could put his hand in his pocket Sagesse and the port officers left the deck-house.
The newcomers had offered to row Sagesse and Gaspard ashore, and the captain had evidently told them of the fate of the Rhone, for, as they crossed the harbour, Gaspard found himself an object of interest and plied with a hundred questions. At the sight of Sagesse the little canotiers had dispersed in every direction, and now, as they rowed, Gaspard could hear the thin voices of the children chanting a song; he caught the word “Sagesse” repeated over and over again, but the lisping patois and the breeze dimmed all else but the spirit of the ballad—Derision. Sagesse was not, evidently, a favorite with the canotiers of St. Pierre, yet, to look at him seated by the port doctor, a cigar in his mouth and his thumbs stuck in his waist-belt, one might have fancied him a man to whom children would run by instinct.
He was in grand good humour this morning; so was Gaspard; so, too, seemed the port officers. The joyous city seemed to radiate gaiety; the languor of midday had not yet fallen upon it and it laughed like a child awakened by a kiss on a bright morning.
The harbour-side was crowded; naked children, half-naked men, black men, banana-coloured men, apricot-coloured men, chattering in that French worn smooth which is the language of the French West Indies, a language in which Monsieur becomes Missie, Maman, Manmam, and France, Fouance.
Amidst the ‘longshoremen, the idlers, the canotiers, fishermen, and boatmen, strayed the forms of a few women, bright as tropic birds, graceful in striped foulards and jupes of exquisite colours, their wasp-yellow turbans striking the eye forcibly, the brightest points in a picture surcharged with colour and blinding light.
Sinbad never landed at a stranger port than this, so vividly real, so far removed from the commonplace, so filled with the presence of the past.
Romance sat on the very sea-steps, and as Gaspard landed he felt what every man who ever landed at St. Pierre must have felt vividly or vaguely—her touch.
Sagesse, bidding good-day to the port officers, struck uptown accompanied by Gaspard. Uptown, by flights of old steps, worn, moss-grown, shadowed by the black shadows of houses and roofed with a ribbon of blinding azure sky, everywhere the sound of running water from the thousand conduits and fountains, everywhere the sound of the sea echoing as in the whorl of a great shell.