“Oh, thou art pretty—thou art sweet—” She had spoken to the flowers, but it seemed to Gaspard she had spoken of herself. She had described herself unconsciously in a sentence.
He passed on. He did not wish to find her again just then. The vision held him satisfied for the moment. She was not angry, more than that, she was not indifferent. To this man, direct and fierce in love as in hate, this girl of his own class was a revelation, she seemed less a woman than a flower that had suddenly blossomed in his path.
The elements of all the grandest poetry live in the commonest man; deaf to the stuff of the drawing-room ballad maker, blind to the embroideries of art, the eternal terrors and beauties of nature move him much or little as the case may be, but they move him. The commonest man would have felt something of the poetry, simple, and sweet, yet exotic and beyond words fascinating, which this girl carried with her—cast around her as the fleur d’amour casts its colour and perfume.
“O thou art pretty—thou art sweet—” He was turning to leave the market-place when a scream from one of the market women made him wheel round.
The stall just behind him had been upset, the crowd was scattering in every direction.
“Fer de lance—fer de lance!”
The cry echoed from one end of the Place to the other, and Gaspard found himself standing alone, face to face with an old gentleman dressed in white and holding a white umbrella over his head.
The old man, though seemingly paralysed by terror, had not dropped his umbrella. His eyes were fixed on the ground where, writhing in the dust, a yellow snake was raising its head to strike him.
It was a fer de lance, young, about three feet in length, but terrible as Death himself. It had come to market hidden in the great clusters of yellow bananas, frightened and ferocious; hating the sunlight, it was preparing to strike at the man before it, terror striking at terror.
The sight of the reptile left Gaspard quite unperturbed. The smallest minority of the great human race are certainly the people who have no dread of snakes. Gaspard belonged to this few, a strange fact considering his imaginative nature. It is true he knew nothing of the fer de lance and its terrors, but if he had, I doubt if he would have done otherwise than he did.