M. Seguin laughed, not without a touch of grim humour, but he offered no further opposition. Instead, he accompanied them to the shop of M. Carbet where the girl had left her tray.
M. Carbet, himself, helped to put it on her head and stood with M. Seguin watching them as they departed.
It was a little after two o’clock and the white national road lay before them, balisiers, palmistes, tamarinds on either side and fields of bending cane. The island before them leaping up to the sky in great bouquets of happy colour, purple and blue and mauve of mountain, black-blues and green of ravine and morne: above all, Pelée, with his turban of cloud. One might have imagined that some giant in play had put gum on Pelée’s head and a tuft of cotton wool on the gum.
It was the only cloud in the blue sky, and as they walked, some wind, suddenly born in the upper air, began to play with it so that it seemed to fume and rise like smoke.
It gave them something to talk about. He found it very difficult to follow what she said, speaking as she did, in the patois of the island and this difficulty in understanding one another gave them something to laugh about so that soon they were like two good companions almost forgetting, for a moment, the mysterious attraction that had drawn them one towards the other. At times she would seem to forget him, the old mesmerism of the road would seize her, the mesmerism of distance and light, the rock-a-bye of movement; she would hum to herself as though she were alone, once she put words to the tune, it was an old Creole song, simple, and sorrowful; she only sang a few bars and then remembering that her companion was beside her, ceased. She had not forgotten him for a moment, she was singing to him in her mind, but she had half forgotten the fact that he was listening in the flesh.
She was happy, entirely happy. He was beside her. She knew nothing more of love than that, two birds flying forever side by side through the blue sky, that was her dim conception of love, two beings accompanying each other through life just as now, he and she were accompanying each other along the national road, what more could one want?
They passed over mornes and through valleys, following the great white road; they were cutting canes in the fields and the negroes looked after Marie of Morne Rouge accompanied by a man, she had found a mate at last.
They called after her, but what they said was swallowed up, dissolved in the langourous air of afternoon, it seemed like voices coming across the fields of dreamland. A siffleur de montagne, singing in the woods of balisier, sent its bell-like notes to follow them.
On the Morne du Midi they paused. The world and the far off sea swam in a golden haze, the mountains were blue cloud shapes, vague purple cones; nothing was definite but the peak of Pelée, now stripped entirely of cloud and standing shrill in the blue. Then they passed on, following the road as it dipped into the valley and rose again over the Morne d’Avril.
It was now that Gaspard remembered M. Seguin’s words: “You can never keep pace with a porteuse.” The girl beside him, laden though she was with the heavy tray, seemed to move without effort, swift, and silent as a cloud shadow. He was beginning to tire, but he would not give in. “Mon Dieu,” thought he, “to be outwalked by a girl. I would die first.”