Then, as if challenged by the bells, the clouds around Pelée spread out fanwise, the sky darkened, and Marie, taking shelter beneath a verandah, heard the rush of rain as it swept down from street to street.
The darkness and the rain were like an omen—or might have been but for the bells, ringing on, joyous, triumphant, like the love that lives through disaster and beyond death.
She heard the thunder of the rain on roof and verandah, the sky looked as though it would never clear again, and then, just as though the bells had broken a way to heaven, a blue rift shewed through the clouds, widened, spread wider still to a burst of sunshine and the clouds were passing away over the sea, sweeping it with meadows of tourmaline-coloured shadow.
Marie, leaving the shelter of the verandah, turned to the shop of M. Sartine, gave the account of her dealings with the Se?ora, received her meed of praise from the old shopkeeper, who was an excellent-hearted man in all things in which money was not concerned, and departed for home.
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.
135 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. Yesterday136 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.
Where............