Happy dream. He had almost forgotten her last night, chatting and smoking with foreign sailors at the bar of a tavern. She must have struck him hard to make him dream about her like that, for in the dream it seemed to him he had known her a long time, that he was her declared lover; this girl whom he had never seen before and whom he might never meet again.
Now, a tap came to the door, and his landlady’s voice offered him coffee or syrup. She brought the coffee in, and placed it on the floor beside him and put the shutters aside, so that the window space became a square dim disc of light, through which, with a breathing of wind, came a tang from the sea below and a breath from the woods above.
St. Pierre was already astir; he could hear women’s voices and the prattle of children, Creole street cries; unfamiliar voices, scents, and sounds came through the open window space, awakening him thoroughly, and awakening in him a keen sense of curiosity such as he had never experienced in any other port.
The people here seemed different from the people anywhere else. Like a child who, turning over the leaves of a dull book, comes upon a surprising and joyously-coloured picture, he felt a pleasure he could neither analyse nor understand. An educated man would have felt as he felt, but cursed by convention and knowledge, and the catch words of language, he would not have felt it so freshly as this child of the south, who, like all the children of the south had some inborn love for all that the true poets sing about and true artists paint.
Having dressed himself he left the house. Man’m Faly was nowhere to be seen, and the Rue du Morne was steeped in curious twilight shewing at its end an extraordinary vision of twilit sea, spreading out to ghost-blue sea and out, away, and beyond the great mountain shadows, to a sea of stainless azure.
He struck upwards to the street above, and then by a flight of steps to the Rue Victor Hugo. The street was astir. Blanchisseuses with bundles making their way to the Rivière Roxelane, calendeuses on their way to their employment, shopkeepers, children, porteuses balancing their loads upon their heads, starting on the long journeys these women make daily over the island, all moving in the twilight of very early dawn with, overhead, the hyacinth-blue sky of morning.
The great fan picture of starlit city, sea, and wood, had been snapped to, and now the magic fan was slowly reopening to shew the same picture sunlit. Pelée and the sea were already in view, and as Gaspard made his way along the Rue Victor Hugo, the day bloomed brighter overhead, dimness of hyacinths turning to the flashing of sapphires. The air, though still surcharged with shadow, had in it now an obscure brightness, a negative light that became positive where any bright surface shewed, shadows were beginning to form, and the little fountain in the Place de la Fontaine was returning from a dancing and whispering ghost to the form of a dancing diamond flower.
He followed the street as it dipped and rose and dipped again to the Rivière Roxelane. He was wondering in what house of all this strange city, what street, was hidden the girl of yesterday.
He had taken his way along the Rue Victor Hugo and through the little Place, perhaps because it was there he had met her; who knows; he was quite unconscious of the manner in which she had taken hold upon him, and, infecting him with that dark glance, had caused something to stir and live in his blood; unconscious as the man who was yesterday infected by malaria and to whom the first faint chill tells nothing of the burning fever to follow.
He paused for a moment on the bridge and looked down at the ghost-dim river raving along to the sea; the banks seemed strewn with snow, it was the linen of the washerwomen, he could hear their voices above the rushing of the river, and the sound they made beating the clothes against the boulders.