“A porteuse—there, ’tis thine—wait till I get the change, and thy mother, how is she? All sweetly I hope—there, take thy change, little one—” all in the patois that takes the sharpness from words, makes new words of old, a tropical growth of language, coloured, quaint, infantile.
Gaspard turned to Pierre-Alphonse. “Well, I must be going, good luck—” He disengaged himself from a fishy embrace and, followed by a shower of good wishes from Pierre-Alphonse and his crew, mingled with the crowd. The girl was nowhere to be seen, there were pretty girls everywhere, but he had no eyes for them.
Was she angry with him? Why had she turned away? Five minutes ago, as he stood there helping Pierre-Alphonse to sell his fish, he had forgotten her; if he had never seen her again he would not have troubled very much; but, now, something inexplicable had happened, the world had altered in a flash, it was as though to a man going blindly along a misty road the vision of a beautiful and unattainable country had suddenly appeared through a rent in the mist which closed again destroying the vision, but leaving the dream. He was in love.
He crossed the Place, and wandered amongst the stalls where fruit, vegetables, and flowers were sold. Here the air had a heady and intoxicating perfume, the place was glorious with colour, piles, and mounds of colour, such fruit! such vegetables! such flowers! Egg plants, pommes d’Haiti, oranges—green oranges, tiny monkey oranges, giant oranges—giant apricots each the size of a turnip, osier baskets filled with green nutmegs, custard apples, guavas, white and green christophines, prickly pears—then the vegetables, palm tops, and sweet potatoes, bread fruit—choux. And the flowers, grenadilla blossoms and fleurs d’amour, flowers of the Loseille Bois, delicate butterfly blossoms, poised as if forever in the act of taking flight. Gaspard had ceased looking for the girl in the kaleidoscopic throng around him, he was standing at a stall half of which was laden with fruit of every colour, the other half with every coloured flowers when, turning, he found that she was beside him.
She was quite unconscious of the fact. Wandering amidst the crowd she had drifted against him, touched him with her elbow without being aware of whom she was touching until he turned and their eyes met for the third time in their lives; then, all at once, and as though the faint reflection of a rose had been cast upon her face and neck, she blushed—it was less a blush than a deepening of the southern dusk beneath her skin.
It told him at once that she recognised him, not only that; in some mysterious way it told him that she had been thinking of him. It gave him courage.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
“Bonjou, missie.”
It was the salutation that everyone gave to everyone else in St. Pierre, strangers, friends, everyone. She was passing on when, picking up a spray of the fleur d’amour from the stall and flinging some coins on the board, he handed the branch laden with delicate blossoms to her. She took it, glanced at him with a half smile, then she looked at the flowers as though she had never seen flowers before, her lips were moving, she was murmuring something, speaking to the flowers, to the branch, “Oh, thou art pretty—thou art sweet.” Then she had passed away; with a glance and a little bow to the giver of the flowers she had dissolved before his sight in the coloured moving throng.
But her voice remained with him, the caressing words she had spoken to the flowers in the infantile French of the tropics.