"Here," said he to the sea lion, "will you take your seat and dejeuner will be served to you."

"I have to leave you for a bit," said Cleo, putting her hand on his arm, "I won't be long."

"I'll wait for you," said Raft. He was a bit amazed at all the new things around him and blissfully unconscious of trouble. He threw his cap on a chair and took his pipe from his pocket, the same old pipe he had lit that night on the ledge of the sea-corridor, then he produced a plug of tobacco, the same tobacco whose pungent fume had comforted her there, with the sound of the hungry sea coming through the dark.

Then he sat down on a silk covered chair and the manager and the girl went out.

"I will serve him myself," said the manager. "I understand; he is a brave man but very rough; the servants do not understand these things. It is a difficulty, but after—? Mademoiselle—after?"

"After what?"

"After he has had his meal?"

She understood. After he had been fed he was to go. He could go, say, to a sailors' lodging house; she had heard of such things. Or, he would walk about the streets; the thing was quite simple. It was only right to give him a good meal and some money, a good round sum, seeing all he had done for her.

She was scarcely heeding the manager. She was viewing, full face, the truth that the manager had demonstrated to her clearly. Raft was impossible. She had had vague ideas of bringing him to Paris and giving him a room for himself in her house on the Avenue Malakoff. She had never thought of the servants, she had thought of her friends and that they would think her conduct queer. But she saw everything now quite straight and in a dry light. Raft was shipwrecked on a social state; to keep company with him she would have to renounce everything and live on his level; she could not treat him as a servant; even if she could, servants would resent him. He was not of their type, much lower, a labouring man from the sea. Not to lose him as he was to her she would have to enter the absolutely impossible and absurd, she would have to give up social life and make a world of her own with Raft. With a man whose setting was the sea, the wilderness, whose life was action, who was ignorant of art, philosophy, the convenances, who was a figure of scorn to every educated eye when caught against the background of Civilisation.

In three beats of a pendulum all this passed through her mind.

Then she said to the manager:

"Quite so. I understand. I must thank you very much for your real kindness. I shall give this man a sum of money, and this afternoon you will be free of him. He can find shelter at a sailors' home—I have heard of such places."

"Oh, Mon Dieu! Yes," said the manager, vastly relieved, "and either I or Fritz, my head waiter, will serve him with his food. Fritz is a man of temperament and knowledge and I will explain to him."

He hurried off and she was left alone in the corridor.

She opened the door of the little sitting-room. The leper was seated hunched on his chair just as she had seen him sitting often on a rock; he was surrounded with a cloud of tobacco smoke.

She had seen the loneliness of Kerguelen but that was nothing to this.

Poor Raft. The very chairs and tables shouted at him; he looked ridiculous. How in her wildest dreams could she have entertained the idea of holding him to her, here?

He would have looked more ridiculous only that he looked, what he felt, forlorn. The place was beginning to tell on him, used to the rough and the open; the smooth and the closed were getting at him.

When he saw her he took the pipe from his mouth and pressed the burning tobacco down with his finger nervously, the same finger she had sucked once when parched with thirst.

She saw, as a matter of fact, that he was nervous, if the term could apply to such a huge and powerful organism, and the fear came to her that if left alone he might bolt before she could conduct him in person to the Sailors' Home.

Standing with the door held half open she nodded to him.

"I want you to stay here," said she, "till I come back. I have to talk to all those people you saw and I may be a couple of hours. That man will bring you something to eat—you don't mind my leaving you here?"

"Oh, I don't mind," said Raft "but you'll be wanting something to eat yourself."

"I'll get it."

"You'll come back, sure?"

"Sure."

She laughed, nodded to him, and closed the door. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright, she was strangely worked up; a touch might have sent her into a storm of anger or a burst of tears.

In the corridor she met Madame de Brie who had been hunting for her.

"Cleo, they are waiting dejeuner for you—but, my dear child, you have not changed, has no one shewn you to your room?"

The old lady had not only brought along Cleo's maid who, with the rest of the servants, had been on board wages during her mistress's absence, but a trunk full of clothes.

"I am not going to change," said Cleo, "I am too busy—and too hungry—"

A reporter from the Gaulois stopped her as she was turning towards the room, indicated by Madame de Brie, where dejeuner was to be served.

"Mademoiselle," said the reporter, "I did not like to trouble you sooner, may I crave the honour of a short interview with you on account of the Gaulois?"

"Certainly, monsieur," replied the girl. "Pray come to dejeuner as my guest, I hope to tell my friends something of my experiences and what I say you can repeat; that will be better than a formal interview tete-a-tete, which, after all, is rather a depressing affair."

The dejeuner was not a depressing affair. Cleo struck the note. She was in radiant good humour. Madame de Brie sat on her right, Monsieur de Brie on her left. Monsieur Bonvalot, her man of affairs, with his long Dundreary whiskers, opposite to her; the rest were scattered on either side of the long table.

At first the conversation was general, then, after a while, Cleo was talking and the rest listening.

"As I shall be very busy for a long time," said Cleo, "I would like now to give all the information I can about the loss of the yacht. A gentleman is present on behalf of the Gaulois, and as all details I can give relative to the disaster are of world wide interest, considering the position of the late Prince Selm, I take this opportunity of making them known. Unfortunately they are few."

She told briefly but clearly the story of the disaster, of her escape and landing on Kerguelen, of the caves and the cache and the death of the two men. She did not tell how La Touche met his end, that business had to do with no one but herself and La Touche. She gave it to be understood that he, like Bompard, had met his fate in the quicksands.

She told of her loneliness, and how she had been dying simply from loneliness, how she had been saved by Raft and how he had nursed her like a mother.

It was then that she really began to talk and shew them pictures. They saw the beach and that terrible journey along under the cliffs, cliffs that seemed cut out of night and never ending, the sea, like an obsession, crawling shoreward, and Raft carrying her on his shoulder.

They saw the summit where she had stood looking towards the west and the hopeless prospect of finding a bay that might not be there and an anchorage where there might be a ship, on a coast where few ships ever came.

Fascinated and warmed by Perrier Jouet, they followed her to the place where the wind had brought her the smell of the try pots and to the cliff edge where Derision shew her the Chinese whaler and the terrible little man, blood-stained, and busy with butchery.

She shewed them the great serang—Captain of the Chinese—driving them off the beach and telling them to begone back into the wilderness, and, vaguely, the fight where Raft had saved her from death or worse——

"Ah, Mon Dieu, what a man," cried a female voice down the table.

Cleo stopped.

"Yes, Madame la Comtesse," said she, "but a man beyond the pale, a man to be ashamed of, a man who, were he to sit in the lounge of this hotel and smoke his pipe, would drive all the other guests away. A common sailor. A man rough from the sea and illiterate."

There was a dead silence.

Monsieur Bonvalot, a socialist, though a business man, nodded his head. He broke the silence.

"A man," said Monsieur Bonvalot, "is, after all, a man."

"Oh, no, monsieur, he is not," said Cleo, "not in Marseilles. But do not think I am quarrelling with social conditions. There must, I believe, always be hewers of wood and drawers of water. I am just talking of Raft and my own position as regards him. I am not thinking of the fact that he saved my life time and again, or that he nursed me with his great rough hands as tenderly as a mother. I am thinking of the fact that I have discovered something quite new and genuine, a human heart that is warm and real and true and simple, simple as the heart of a child, a mind that has no crookedness, a man who, in Paris or here in Marseilles, is absurd, not because he is rough and uncouth, but because he is like Monsieur Gulliver amongst the little people. I have seen the great, I have seen the wind and the sun and the sea and the mountains as they really are, and life as it really is, for those who really live. I have seen death, none of you here have ever seen or imagined death, none of you here have ever seen life, none of you here have seen the world. You all have been protected from the truth of things, and fortunately, for the truth of things would break you as it would have broken me but for Raft, who sits in a room at the end of that corridor and whom the manager of this hotel is serving with food with his own hands because the hotel servants would consider it an insult were they asked to carry him his food.

"I am not grumbling. I quite recognise the logic of the whole thing, but I feel as though I were looking at everything through the large end of a pair of opera glasses, just as when as a child I used to do so and amuse myself by watching human beings reduced to the size of dolls.

"Well, now you have all my story and I have put before you a new view of things and I hope I have not shocked you all. My poor Raft must now go to the Sailors' Home where I am going with him. I want some money, Monsieur Bonvalot."

"Mademoiselle," said Bonvalot, awaking like a person from hypnotism and delighted to find himself on a business footing again, "certainly, I have here your cheque book which I have brought with me."

"Then we will go to another room and discuss business matters," said the girl rising. "Now all you people please enjoy yourselves. You are my guests whilst you stay in this hotel. Madame de Brie will see that you have everything."

She led the way from the room, Monsieur Bonvalot following. A suite had been engaged for her and here in the sitting-room she started to talk business with her man of affairs.

A large fortune is like a delicate animal, always in need of nursing and attention, it is always changing colour in spots from rosy to dark, a depreciation in Peruvian bonds means that your capital has shrunk just there and the question comes will it go on shrinking; a big rise in P.L.M. shares suggests taking the profit and re-investing should they fall again.

Monsieur Bonvalot had problems of this sort to set before the girl—she swept them away. "I have no time to attend to all that now," said she, "some other day will do. I want twenty thousand francs, have you got them?"

"Twenty thousand francs," said Bonvalot. "No, Mademoiselle. I brought five thousand francs in notes thinking you would want them for your expenses here, but you can write a cheque on the Credit Lyonnais and I will get it cashed for you at once."

He produced from a wallet a bundle of pink and blue bank notes and counted out five thousand francs, then she wrote a cheque for fifteen thousand payable to him. He endorsed it, went off and returned in ten minutes with the money. She put the notes in a big envelope and the envelope in her pocket. That same pocket still contained the old tobacco box of Captain Slocum and the other odds and ends which she treasured more than gold.

"That will do for the present," said she, "to-morrow I will open an account at the Marseilles branch of the Credit Lyonnais, or rather you can do it for me to-day. Give them this specimen of my signature and they can telegraph to the Paris branch. I would like two hundred thousand francs put to my credit here.

"But are you not coming back to Paris?" asked Bonvalot.

"No, Monsieur Bonvalot, not at present!" He pulled his whiskers.

The idea had suddenly come to him, and come to him strongly, that she was about to do "something foolish."

He had seen women do very foolish things in the course of his business life and all that talk of hers at the luncheon table came back to him now.

He remembered the beautiful Mademoiselle de Lacy who had run off and married a groom; could it be possible that Cleo contemplated any such mad act with that terrific sailor man? The idea chilled his heart.

Equality and Fraternity were parts of his motto and he was an honest socialist; he believed honestly that all men were equals and that the waiters who served him at table were as good as himself, with a difference of course due to the accidents of life, but he believed, with Daudet, that there is no greater abyss than class difference.

His theory was confounded by this practice. But he could say nothing, for the matter was too delicate to be touched upon.



CHAPTER XXXVII

A NEW HOME

Raft was still in the room where she had left him. As they passed through the hall where a number of people were seated about in basket chairs she felt every eye fixed upon her and her companion. Then out in the sunlit Cannabier Prolongue she drew a deep breath just as a person draws a deep breath after a dive.

She also felt free.

She had always been free in theory; possessed of her own money she could have done absolutely as she liked, in theory. In practice she had always been a slave. The slave of a thousand and one things and circumstances, things and circumstances many of them troublesome, many of them wearisome, all of them not to be denied.

"Mademoiselle, your bath is ready."

"Mademoiselle, the first gong has sounded."

"What dress will Mademoiselle wear this afternoon?"

Oh, the day, the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the dresses that went with each phase, the lukewarm emotions and interests and boredom and suppressed hatreds, this thing called the day, which she had first reviewed in the open boat after the wreck of the Gaston de Paris terrified to find it torn from her—this thing had been returned to her that morning in all its futility. It seemed to her, as she cast it away, a horrible gaud, a thing made of tinsel, yet a thing that could destroy the soul and blind the eyes and numb the heart.

She had never been free, she had always been the veriest slave, the slave of things, of people, of convenances, and of circumstances.

Doctor Epinard had spoken something of the truth.

Man may not be an automaton worked by environment, all the same he is the slave of environment, and never such a slave as when his environment is that of high Civilisation.

For there the pure motives of the mind have ever to be regulated and falsified, the heart crushed, the face veiled.

To break with all that falsity means shipwreck.

"Which way does the sea lie?" asked the girl. Raft turned to the left as though the smell of the sea were leading him.

"I'm glad to be out of there," said he, "I was near smothered in that place."

"So was I," said she, "did that man bring you your food all right?"

"Another chap brought it," said Raft, "a Dutchman."

She laughed.

"Do you know what I was thinking?" said she.

"I was thinking of the time you brought me food when I was nearly dying. You didn't tell a Dutchman to bring it. I'd have brought you your food myself and we would have had it together only I had to talk to those people. Well, I've got rid of them. How would you like to live always in a place like that hotel?"

Raft mentally reviewed the room done in blue silk, Fritz, and the rest of it.

"I'd rather be out in the open," said Raft. "Not that I have anything to say against it—but I'd rather be out in the open."

They walked along.

Companionship with Raft had for her one delightful thing about it, it was companionship without restraint. In a way it was like companionship with a dog, or a child. Like two old sailors they would hang silent, sometimes, for a long time, not bothering to speak, content with being together.

She had never imagined the possibility of a man and a woman of absolutely different social position in such a relationship, never drawn the ghost of such an idea from all the books she had read, all the plays she had seen. Never could she have imagined a common sailor man striking Art for her to pieces, as he had struck the story of Anatole France, and creating above a world he had taught her to despise, a nest for her mind rough as himself, but in air pure and living.

Raft, the common man, had made her social world seem vulgar as well as small, chill as well as vulgar.

She was thinking just now as she walked beside him how when she had told him that the hotel manager would bring him something to eat, he had said, "but you will want something to eat yourself." That was the sort of thing constantly recurring in all sorts of ways that had brought her to know him truly, occurring in little ways as well as in that great and heroic moment when he had told her to destroy herself with the knife if he were killed.

As they passed along the Cannabier they saw a drunken sailor reeling along towards them through the crowd, and Raft drew her by the arm off the sidewalk to avoid him.

The sight in other times would have made him laugh, or more likely it would have been scarcely noticed, but She, in some manner or another, made drink discreditable, and the sight of it to be avoided. It would have been the same, most likely, had he been taking a child for a walk. Down near the docks they passed a birdshop before which Raft cast anchor almost forgetful of his companion. There were all sorts of birds here, those tiny birds from the African coast one sees in the shops of the Riviera, canaries and parrots.

There was one parrot, enormous and coloured like a tropical sunset, drowsy-eyed and insolent looking. When he saw the sailor man he seemed to rouse up. He looked at Raft and Raft at him.

"I'd like that chap," said Raft, "he beats the lot of them."

"And you shall have him," said she.

He laughed.

"Much good he'd be to a chap like me. Where'd I keep him?"

Her eyes softened as she looked at the bird and from the bird to the man. Where, indeed, could he keep him? He who had no home—nothing. Then it was that Money seemed to her what it really is, a god, beautiful and benign.

It had often seemed to her as a demon, but Raft, who unconsciously had cast ridicule on her world, was now, unconsciously, shewing her the great truth she had never seen before, the truth that Money is more beautiful than Apollo, more etherial than Psyche, more powerful than Jove.

"You will soon have somewhere to keep him," said she, "we will get him to-morrow. Come on. I want now to find the place where the fishing boats put in. I saw it the last time I was here in Marseilles, years ago, but I am not sure of the direction."

She asked a man who was passing and he pointed the way; it was a long distance, but it seemed short, so full was her mind with the plan she had formulated before leaving the hotel. She talked as she went. Talked just as though they were on the Kerguelen beach hunting for a cave.

"We will find a place to put the parrot. I want a great big boat, not a yacht. I've had enough of those. I want a good sea boat and the fisher-boats I have seen here seemed to me good, and the men are the right sort of men. I am going to buy one—or hire one—well, we shall see. I want you to help to get it ready for us. How good the smell of this place is," she paused to sniff the tar-sea scents brought by the afternoon wind. It was like the smell of Freedom.

Then they came on to the fisher wharf and right into the arms of Captain Jean Bontemps.

Captain Jean was about five feet in height and he seemed five feet in thickness. He was propped against a bollard and he was in his shore-going clothes. The girl's eye told her at once that here was a useful man, a man of authority and knowledge. She approached him, and as he took his pipe from his mouth and removed his cap, she opened her business without parley or hesitation.

She wanted to buy or hire a fishing boat, price no object.

He did not understand her at first. He seemed suffering from some form of deafness. Then when she repeated the statement he shewed no surprise.

He himself was a fishing boat owner, Captain Bontemps of the Arlesienne, and he was quite willing to sell his boat, for a sum—two thousand pounds he asked, and she did not know that he was speaking in jest, just as one might speak to a child.

"If your boat suits me, I will pay what you ask," said she, "let me see it."

Then it came upon Captain Jean that he was either talking to a lunatic or some wealthy woman with a craze. His sails were taken aback and he was left wallowing in a heavy ground sea of the mind with a smell of spice islands tinging the air.

La Belle Arlesienne, his old boat, was not worth a thousand pounds. Under the hammer heaven knows what she would have fetched, but she was his wife, or the only female thing that stood in that relationship to him. He tapped the dottle out of his pipe, then he took a pouch from his pocket and began to refill and the girl, seeing his condition, drew him aside, asking Raft to wait for her.

They went to another bollard and there, the mariner anchoring himself, she began to talk. She introduced herself. He knew all about the Gaston de Paris and Mademoiselle de Bromsart. He put his pipe in his pocket, finding himself in such famous company. She went on. In ten minutes she told him her whole story, told him just what Raft was and just how they stood related, and just how he had been treated in the hotel.

"It's as though they had turned out my father or my brother," said she, "we two who have fought and faced everything together have grown into companions. Friends who cannot be parted, Captain Bontemps. If he were a woman or I a man it would be easier. As it is things are difficult. Well, I do not care. I will do exactly as I like. I feel you will be my friend, too; you understand me. And I want you to look after him to-night, for in the whole of Marseilles I do not know where he could go unless to some wretched Sailors' Home or worse. Ah, it is wicked. Of what use is it to be brave, to be honest, to be true in this world?"

"Mon Dieu," said the Captain, "I will look after him, if for no other reason than that he is what you say, mademoiselle; but La Belle Arlesienne is rough, should you use her as a yacht, you would not find her a yacht. She smells of fish—"

"I am used to rough things," said the girl. "I dread the smooth. Captain Bontemps, for one who has done for me everything should I dread anything? And a little roughness, what is that to freedom and the life I have learned to love with the man I love? For I love Raft, Captain Bontemps, just as I know he loves me. Oh, do not mistake me, it is not the sort of thing they call love here amongst houses and streets, it is not a woman that is speaking to you but a human being."

He understood her. To his broad and simple mind the thing was simple; she did not want to part with the man who had saved her and fought for her and who had been "chucked out" of a hotel because he was a rough sailor, and marvellously well he understood that when she said she loved Raft she did not mean the thing that the dock side called Love. No Paris poet could have understood her. The old fisher captain did.

But he was a practical man. He struck himself a blow on the head.

"I have what you want," said he, "La Belle Arlesienne, no, it is no use, I have something better, a good cruising boat—you say money is no object."

"None."

"Then come with me, you two."

He led the way followed by Raft and the girl to a wharf where a tug lay moored and by the tug a fifty ton yawl.

"There's your boat," said Bontemps, "built by Pinoli of Genoa for an American. She has even a bath-room—a main cabin with two cabins off it, your man could berth in the fo'c'sle which is big enough for twenty like him. Follow me."

He led the way on to the deck of the yawl.

The girl went over it down below into the main cabin with two little sleeping cabins off it. She peeped into the tiny bath-room, examined the pantry well-stored with crockeryware, there was everything even to the bunk bedding, sheets and towels, she went to the fo'c'sle; compared with the fo'c'sle of the Albatross it was a little palace.

Then she turned to Raft.

"This is your new home," said she, "there is room for your parrot here." Then turning to Captain Bontemps. "Well, that is settled and now I only want a crew and a captain—fishermen. I will have no yachtsmen on my boat. I have had to do with yachtsmen, Captain Bontemps."

"Oh, my faith," said the old fellow, "you will easily find a crew."

"Yes, but I won't easily find a captain. I want you."

The Captain laughed.

"And how about La Belle Arlesienne?" asked he.

"You must leave her behind you to be sold. In my service money is no object. Now as to this boat, who is the agent from whom I can buy her?"

"Latour and Company," replied the old fellow, for the first time in his life in the powerful grip of wealth and not knowing exactly whether the great golden hand was holding him heels or head up.

"How far is Latour's from here?"

"Not far."

The girl stood for a moment looking round her at the white deck, the masts, the rigging, and as she looked some hand seemed to draw aside a veil revealing the stupid immovable houses of the land filled with stupid immovable people bound and tied up by soul-killing conventions—and on the other hand the old mystery of ships, those homes of Freedom on the road that has no boundaries.

Then she turned to Bontemps.

"Come," said she, "let us go to Latour's."

* * * * *

"Cleo," said the distracted Madame de Brie, writing to a friend, "Cleo must always have been as mad as her aunt De Warens. Fishermen, it seems, are the only honest people, and she and her cargo of fishermen, with an old man named Bontemps, are now heaven knows where since I met them at Portofino.

"She calls them her children and when I last saw her she was coming along the little quay at Portofino helping that big red bearded man to carry provisions.

"The times are revolutionary, that's the truth, and women are not what they were, and I am old, I suppose, and cannot see things as I ought to see them—and the grief is she might have married any one, she might have married Royalty itself, and I told her so and she laughed in my face. She said she never intended to marry any one, that she already had a family of 'children' and that the great bearded man Raft was the smallest of them all, that she was teaching him to read and write and to talk French so that he could converse with the rest of her family.

"She has made Portofino her headquarters, it seems, and she is the lady bountiful of the fishing folk there, sits in their cottages and talks to them, taking up her quarters at the little auberge and sometimes living on board her boat.

"A strange life, and yet she seems happy, like that poor Mademoiselle La Fontaine, whom I last saw at the Maison de Sante of Doctor Schwanthaller, seated with a straw crown on her head and imagining herself a queen."

There ended the letter of Madame de Brie, and here ends the story of Cleo de Bromsart, a woman of energy and mind who learned from Kerguelen that Life is an endless striving, not a peaceful drifting, and that of all things high the highest is the soul of a child.

THE END