Then, as she went on her way along the road blazing in the sun and set on either side with palmistes, tree ferns, bushes of grenadilla blossom and sun-stricken tamarinds, a voice said to her:
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
There was no one but herself upon the road, nothing moving but the shadows of the palm fronds shaken by the wind and the green lizards slipping across the dust in the sunlight. It was the voice of yesterday.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
She called it up again and again and made it repeat the words, then she recalled his face as she had seen it when glancing up at him to thank him for the flower.
She had a companion now.
Had you seen her passing, swift, silently, with her burden poised on her head, straight as a palmiste, enveloped in a flame of sunlight, with her luminous eyes gazing straight into the distance before her, you might have fancied her a somnambulist, a person walking in a dream—she was.
As she went on her way, she experienced a new sensation, it was as though St. Pierre had attached itself to her by a thread, the further she went, the tighter did this thread grow—“Come back” said St. Pierre, “every step you take, takes you away from him, come back, you do not know, he is a foreign sailor and may be carried away in one of those mysterious ships, those ships that spread their sails and pass away beyond the blue horizon to be lost forever.”
It was up on the Morne du Midi that the voice of St. Pierre said this to her for the first time. She paused. The sun was high and pouring a torrent of light on sea and land.
The sun rays seemed beaten back from the earth, rising in a vague and dazzling spray as the water of a torrent rises in a spray-cloud. The hills were indefinite, blue, and purple shapes, the sea had lost its horizon and seemed part of the sky and the woods of the Morne du Midi were as still as death. Nothing sings or stirs in the West Indian woods when the sun is holding the world like this.