The stepways led to streets, lines of blazing light and colour, verandahed, broken by black house shadows, filled with coloured people of all shades, all hues, from the muletresse to the chabine; all busy, moving, drifting, chattering, buying or selling, finely formed, graceful as the palmistes.
Then more steps haunted by fountain and sea sounds, and they entered a river of light—the Rue Victor Hugo.
Gaspard, as he reached the street, looked back down the steep and twilight vico they had ascended, and saw the harbour, liquid shadow on which, seeming suspended in air, floated La Belle Arlésienne.
It was like a picture closing the first chapter of his life; the sea, and the island, and the ever-crying gulls, dead Yves, the stokehold, Marseilles, all lay there. Here was a new land and the beginning of a new existence. The sea, the island, the man he had slain—all beyond there. It all seemed remote, done with forever; yet it was close to him, potently alive in the form of Captain Sagesse, and able to stretch out a hand and touch him on the shoulder if so it chose.
CHAPTER XVI
RUE VICTOR HUGO
White umbrellas, striped verandahs, black shadows, laughter, motion, colour, coloured people, coloured clothes, lemon-tinted houses, flower-blue sky, a street of light beneath a roof of azure, the Rue Victor Hugo lay before Gaspard.
Looking straight before one, the scene recalled Naples, Marseilles, Alexandria, with an extra touch as though a gleam, a perfume, a voice, had stolen from some vanished coloured city of the remote past; as though Pompeii had sent an idler, Carthage a trader, Tunis a coloured child, to lose themselves in the crowd and lend it, scarcely seen, a heart-catching subtlety.
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