As she left the shop and entered the Rue Victor Hugo, the world seemed commonplace again, the bells had ceased ringing, the joyous morning had passed away as if the voices of the bells had carried it away out to sea with them.
She returned to the Street of the Precipice. Man’m Charles was in a bad humour; Finotte, one of the girls whom she employed in her business, had not turned up that morning and she was short-handed. The ill-temper which ought to have fallen to Finotte fell on Marie.
It is always just so in this world, the day that begins cloudless, warm, and perfect, rarely lasts till sunset.
The girl who was never for a moment idle took the place of Finotte, one might have thought that working as she did at the trade of porteuse a holiday might have fallen to her occasionally on such a day as this, but she did not grumble.
She set to work painting the great madras handkerchief without a murmur.
Three other girls were working in the room with her, a dim room into which the blazing sunshine of the street outside scarcely penetrated through the green slats of the shutters. Pauline, Celestine, and Florine were their names, and they chatted as they worked in the sweet childish French of the tropics. It was like the chatting of birds in a dimly lit cage. Celestine was to be married next month, Pauline and Florine had lovers, Love, marriage, other girls’ lovers, heart-affairs, Rosine jilted by the fisherman Ambrose, who had gone to live at Fort de France, Lys who had jilted Achille, who had threatened to drown himself—so the conversation ran on. Birds one might imagine talking like this, one to the other in the branches of the loseille bois and the tamarinds. Marie took no part in the conversation, she never did when the talk ran like this. To-day as she worked, she seemed even more abstracted than usual. But she was listening—half listening, wondering why Lys had jilted Achille, why the fisherman Ambrose had jilted Rosine, interested in the troubles of these people, though she could not tell why. Yesterday their squabblings would have been quite uninteresting to her.
Then as she worked, she saw things. The road over the Morne de Parnasse, the green gloom of the Jardin des Plantes, the sun-stricken Place du Fort, the Rue Victor Hugo and the Place de la Fontaine with the diamond flower of the fountain glittering in the sun.
Wherever her thoughts might lead her, they always strayed back to the Place de la Fontaine. Then she would see a white figure coming towards her. Her thoughts would try to escape, to turn back—impossible, they had to go on, meet face to face that someone, meet again that gaze, answer it—then only might she pass on to lose herself in the crowd, to meet the music of the bells, the carillon of joy; voices from the woods, echoes from the harbour side, music from heaven, echoes from earth, clasping her, folding her in waves of sound—
Just as the waves of a tropic sea breaking on the shores of an islet may tell to a man the fact of man’s isolation and loneliness—loneliness that love alone can banish—so the waves of sound, brilliant, dim, sonorous or echo-broken, had told Marie the fact of woman’s isolation and loneliness.
All her life suddenly appeared to her as a great loneliness. It was as though she were standing on the shore of an islet and had suddenly discovered the fact for the first time that she was utterly alone, the discovery being brought to her by the glimpse of a far-off ship, a momentary vision that had vanished, leaving her to her loneliness.