"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 sh.o.r.eward, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles. 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 gla.s.ses, 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 Sloc.u.m 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 cla.s.s difference.
His theory was confounded by this practice. But he could say nothing, for the matter was too delicate to be touched upon.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
A NEW HOME
Raft was still in the room where she had left him. As they pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances, things and circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances.
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.