White umbrellas, striped verandahs, black shadows, laughter, motion, colour, coloured people, coloured clothes, lemon-tinted houses, flower-blue sky, a street of light beneath a roof of azure, the Rue Victor Hugo lay before Gaspard.

Looking straight before one, the scene recalled Naples, Marseilles, Alexandria, with an extra touch as though a gleam, a perfume, a voice, had stolen from some vanished coloured city of the remote past; as though Pompeii had sent an idler, Carthage a trader, Tunis a coloured child, to lose themselves in the crowd and lend it, scarcely seen, a heart-catching subtlety.
* * * * *

There is no sound of feet; everyone is shoeless; they walk in a whisper under the wonderful blue light of the sky, these people, these men and women of all shades of yellow, graceful, dignified, gracious, who might seem the inhabitants of a dream city but for the sounds of everyday life, cries of cigar vendors, and pastry vendors, and fruit sellers, children’s voices, laughter; now comes from far away the music of a mirliton; it is playing in a street below—Pouf! up a steep side street comes the sound, louder, and carried on a breath of hot sea wind, and there below the blue face of the harbour laughs up at you so high above it. You pass on; the shops surround you90 again, and the crowd and the voices; you reach a little square, a cube of colour; in its centre like a diamond flower forever in motion, the jet of a fountain plays in the sun, plays and sings to itself like the spirit of a happy child; and here where human voices are less loud you hear the sound of other fountains, the sound of rivulets, runnels racing by the side walks, pipes that empty into moss-grown channels all drawing their water from Mont Pelée, fatherly, and seated far above the great torrential woods, sky-throned, and turbaned with cloud.

You go on; the endless street bends and dips and rises again, never quite level; houses and blue bursts of sea alternating on the right, on the left, high above you, houses that break with their sun-stricken yellow the green foliage of the high woods. The torrent of yellow houses up above seems tumbling to the sea, or, if you like it better, the houses seem climbing to attack the woods. You can hear from up there wood sounds, the piping of the siffleur de montagne, the wash of moving foliage, just as you can hear from below the sounds of the sea, the songs of the fishermen, and the wash of the water on the beach.

As a curious and beautiful poem leads you to read on, so the coloured and sunlit street leads you to follow it; it brings you by a bridge across the Rivière Roxelane, where the washerwomen work from dawn till dark, and the boulders are snowed with linen, and so to the market-place, where the strangest things from sea and land are sold.

Beyond lie the mornes, green to the water’s edge; the sea, the sky; great blue wastes of sun and silence.
* * * * *

From a flower-seller as they entered the Rue Victor Hugo, Sagesse had bought a gaudy blossom which he put in his coat.

91 He was en fête and his good humour was infectious; linking his arm in that of Gaspard, he had led him into a café, a cool, spacious shop set out with marble-topped tables. On every table there was a little bowl filled with bright-coloured blossoms; men were seated about, men in cool white clothes and broad panama hats. As Gaspard followed his companion between the tables he noticed that all these men gave Sagesse good-day as though he were an old acquaintance, but without enthusiasm, and with a certain constraint.

Then, choosing a table in a corner, they sat down, and Sagesse beckoned to the bartender. He came running.

He had been piling some glasses on a tray and had not caught sight of the newcomers until just before Sagesse beckoned to him; instantly, and almost upsetting the tray in his haste, he came, and now he stood, a middle-aged quadroon, mild-eyed, subdued-looking, standing before Sagesse as a slave might stand before his master.

“Bonjour, Jules.”

“Bonjour, missie.”

“How has trade been since I left?”

“Good, missie—Jules has been busy, very busy, for most a month—before that not so good.” He spoke in the Creole patois, soft, fluent, a language that seems made for the lips of children.

Sagesse ordered drinks. When they were on the table he lit a cigar, handed Gaspard another, and then, crossing his legs and suddenly changing his manner:

“Let us talk business,” said he.

“Business?”

“Ma foi, yes; that’s what they call it—business. See here. I want the true story of the gold in that belt. I want to know more about that island, and I want to know something about that treasure-ship.”

92 When you encounter a tropical centipede the thing that astonishes you most is the way in which it changes form, now effacing itself altogether in some coign of shadow, now drawn out, swollen, vicious, and ready to attack you, now shrunken, drawn together, a mere nothing that, next moment to a touch becomes distended and viciously alive.

The mind of Captain Sagesse seemed to possess this centipede attribute.

Gaspard had imagined the affair of the island done with; he had imagined that with the conclusion of the bargain over the gold pieces Sagesse had passed the matter behind him. He had said nothing about a treasure-ship. The ship of coral in the lagoon had been always present in his mind as a ship that might contain treasure, but he had said nothing about it. How, then, had Sagesse read his thoughts, and why had he not spoken of it before?

He stared at the Captain for a moment without speaking. “But that’s all done with,” said he at last. “I’ve told you my story; you’ve had your share in the stuff—Don’t you believe me? And see here, what do you mean about a treasure ship? I never said a word about such a thing.”

“My friend,” said Sagesse, “between the captain and the mate’s cabin on my vessel there is only a plank, and when the man sleeping in the mate’s cabin shouts out in his sleep ‘Hullo there, Yves, look, I can see through her hatch; she’s full of gold; we’ll fetch it out—share and share alike,’ the captain sets himself to think. He says to himself, ‘this man talks of a ship full of gold in his sleep; he came on board my ship from an island over there; he had in his possession a number of old coins, old Spanish pieces; he confesses in drink that he has killed Monsieur93 Yves, the gentleman to whom in his dreams he talks of a ship full of treasure; well, don’t you see?”

“What?”

“The conclusion—come, confess, you have a secret; give me the full story of that affair, or by my soul and on my honour I will call the authorities right in here and tell them a lot of things I know.”

Sagesse, as he said the last words, changed completely, and in a moment, the bon bourgeois vanished, his upper lip raised slightly, disclosing the teeth. Just in that moment he shewed himself what he was, not a villain of romance, but that much more terrible individual, the petty trader, heartless, careful, calculating. The squid of society that, living on crabs and shell-fish, will, when opportunity offers, seize and devour a man.

What numbed the mind of Gaspard was not fear of the authorities, but fear of Sagesse and astonishment at his methods.

He felt as though in the grip of some gelatinous thing, this dusky mind had gripped him on board the Belle Arlésienne and had seemed to let him go; its tentacles had fallen from his arms, and now they were around his feet. It was useless to fight with Sagesse; he was at the man’s mercy; betrayed by drink, he had put himself in the grasp of the cuttlefish.

“Look here,” said he at last, “before I tell you anything, tell me this: Why did you not spring this on me before? Why did you trade with me for those coins? Why did you pretend to be my friend?”

“Why did I trade with you, ma foi? I traded with you because I wanted those coins at a fair price; I brought you here because I wanted to trade with you for94 your secret at a fair price with the law at my elbow. I did not wish to conclude the bargain on board my own ship; it gives a ship a bad name when men are brought off her in chains by the police. I wanted no police on board La Belle Arlésienne. And as to pretending to be your friend, ma foi, I am your friend, and you shall have your share of the profits of your secret. But the truth I must have, come—”

“Dieu!” cried Gaspard with a burst of irritation. “I was hiding nothing from you. There was a wreck on the island; I did think there was treasure on her, but I had put it from my mind. I talked of it in my sleep, did I? Well, it must have been there in my mind. You shall have the story.”

Then, with his elbows on the table, he told how Yves had discovered the ship in the lagoon; he described her. Sagesse, also with his elbows on the table, listening intently, putting in a question now and then.

“That’s all,” finished Gaspard, “she may be up to the hatches with gold for all I know—and for the matter of that—for all I care.”

Sagesse sat, now that the tale was told, musing in his chair, and pulling at his heavy moustache.

“And you were on that island,” said he at last, “you saw that wreck, you found gold and the dead bones of a man, you fancied there might be more stuff there, yet, if I had not got the tale from you you would have said nothing to anyone about it; you would have perhaps gone back to the stokehold. Pah! I believe you, for that’s the kind of thing that fills stokeholds with fools who are good for nothing but stoking—well, you will be fortunate despite yourself. I take the speculation up.”

“You intend—”

95 “I intend to dynamite her open and see what she contains. When La Belle Arlésienne has discharged her cargo, I will put her in ballast, take some diving apparatus and what else is needful, and return to that island; you will go with me.”

“I?”

“Yes, you; do you think I want the whole of St. Pierre in the business? I will take only my coloured crew; several of them are good divers, but I must have another white man on a job like this. You will have your share of the profits, fifteen per cent. That may be much, or it may be nothing, but you will have to work for it, for it will be horse work getting the stuff off her if she lies as you tell me. I take it she has been lying in that lagoon all of a hundred years; if she is a Spaniard there may be a lot of stuff&mdash............