"I know--but I could not bear to go back. If we fail now like that we

will fail altogether. Imagine going all that way back. No, I couldn't.

We must risk it."

"I'm thinking that way," said he.

He picked up the bundle and harpoon and they started, and no sooner had

she taken the first step than Fear laid his hand on her heart and a wild

craving to return seized her so that she could have cried out.

She had once said that she feared an ugly face more than a blow, and the

fear that seized her now was less the fear of death than the fear of the

cliffs and their conspiracy with the murmuring sea that would soon be an

inclosing wall.

She fought it down.

The cliff shoulder was further away than they thought; it took them an

hour to reach it and, when they turned it, there, before them lay cliffs

higher, more monstrous and running in a curve to another shoulder seven

miles away, if a yard. But towards the middle of the curve the cliff

face seemed ridged and broken near the base. Raft shading his eyes,

pointed out this broken surface.

"It looks as if there was foothold there beyond tide mark," said he,

"we've got to go on anyhow--Lord, but you're tired!"

He made her sit down. The sight of that gargantuan sweep of cliff coming

on top of the weariness of the journey had crushed her. To go forward

seemed impossible, to fight against that immensity impossible. She could

have wept but she had neither tears nor energy. The gods seemed to have

built those bastions to shut out all hope and the voice of the returning

sea seemed like a tide turning over her broken thoughts like pebbles.

Raft standing over her like a tower said not a word.

Mixed with the voice of the sea came the voices of the gulls and all

sorts of sea echoes from the cliffs.

Then as she sat she made a supreme effort of mind. She must rise and go

on. She struggled to rise, but her limbs had left her, deserted her,

stricken as if by paralysis.

Raft took off his cap and put it in his pocket, then he went to the

cliff side and rested the harpoon against it, standing up. She watched

him, vaguely wondering what he was about, then he returned to her and

bent down and she found herself lifted suddenly and seated on his left

shoulder.

"Hold on to my hair," cried he. Then he bent and picked up the bundle,

went to the cliff side and picked up the harpoon and started. The giant

strength that had caught her when she jumped from the Lizard Point ledge

was carrying her now like a feather, the crook of his left arm round her

legs to steady her, the harpoon clutched in his left hand, the bundle

swung over his right shoulder.

And she held on to his hair as a child might, without a word, and as she

held the strength of him seemed to permeate her through her fingers

casting fear and misery out.

She felt as a tiny tired child feels when caught up and carried by its

mother, and carrying her so he strode on, cursing himself for not having

carried her before.

It was a three-mile journey to that roughness on the cliff and as he

drew near he saw that they were saved, at least for the time.

The rock broke here in ledges like steps and twenty feet up and well

beyond tide mark ran a little plateau some ten or twelve feet broad.

She saw it as well as he and filled with new strength she cried out to

be set down.

"Stay easy," said Raft. "It's easier to carry the bundle with you on my

shoulder, you ain't no weight."

Then when he reached the steps:

"Done it b'God," said he.

He dropped the bundle and harpoon, and, lifting her, set her feet on the

basalt steps.

"Can you climb it?" asked he.

Without a word she climbed and sitting on the little plateau looked down

on him.

Then he followed with the things and took his seat beside her. They sat

for a while without a word, the bare rocks and the grey sea before

them.

A great rock out at sea, pierced and arched like the frame work of a

door, shewed through its opening the sea beyond. Gulls flew round it and

their eternal complaint came on the wind blowing, still lightly, from

the north.

Raft seemed absorbed in thought.

Then he said: "It won't be high water until gettin' on for dark. We'd

better stick here the night anyhow and get the low tide to-morrow. But

there's time for me now to get to that next shoulder and see what's

beyond, it's a matter of four miles there maybe and four miles back."

"I'll go with you," said she, "I'm stronger now."

"No, you stick here," said he. "There's no call for two to go. You'll

want your strength for the morning."

"Only for you I wouldn't be here," said she.

"Well, maybe you wouldn't," said Raft. "It's as well I was along with

you, but you ain't no weight--no more than a kitten. I never thought you

were as bad as that or I'd have lifted you miles back."

"Aren't you tired?" she asked.

"Me--oh, no, not more than a bit stiff in the arm." He stretched his

left arm out. Then he looked at the bundle.

"You don't want nothing to eat just yet?" asked he.

"Not till you come back," she answered. "I'll watch you from here."

He scrambled down, picked up the harpoon which he had left on the rocks

and then looked up and nodded to her.

"I'll keep in sight," said he. Then he started.

She watched his great figure as it went, harpoon in hand, growing

smaller and smaller, till, now, she could have covered it with her thumb

nail. As the distance increased it seemed to go slower and the great

black cliffs to grow higher.

At a dizzy height above her cormorants had their nests, they seemed

angry about something as they clanged and flew, shooting out into the

sky and wheeling back again in an aimless manner. Before her the grey

sea crawled, coming, now, steadily shoreward.

The tide seemed coming in faster than usual. She knew that this could

not be so and that Raft was too wise to allow himself to be cut off, all

the same a smouldering anxiety fed on her heart as she watched the tiny

figure now approaching the out-jutting shoulder of cliff. Then it

disappeared.

He had promised to keep in sight.

Evidently that was impossible if he wanted to get a view of what lay

beyond.

A minute passed, two, three--then the figure reappeared and her heart

that had lain still sprang to life again.

As he drew closer she saw him stoop and pick up something, then he came

right up to the cliff face, paused a minute and continued his way

towards her, walking more slowly now and carrying the thing in his

hands.

It was a big shell shaped like an abalone. He had filled it with water

from a little torrent running from the cliff and when he reached her he

held it up to show.

"We're all right," cried he, "there's only four or five miles of cliff

beyond the point, then it breaks away down to the beach. We'll be able

to get clear of this to-morrow."

She came down the basalt steps and took the shell from him. He had

washed it in the torrent so that the water had no taint of salt. Then,

carrying it carefully she got it to the plateau where he followed her.

CHAPTER XXVIII

NIGHT

Towards dark the incoming tide began to hit the cliff base. Raft had

taken the things from the bundle and had made her wrap herself in the

blanket. "You ain't used to the weather like me," said he, "and this is

nothing to bother about. Lucky it's not blowing. Lucky we made this

shelf. Hark at that!"

The first full blow of a wave hit the basalt below them with a

heart-sickening thud; then miles of stricken cliff began to boom. The

terrific corridor was no more, and between them and the Lizard point so

many miles away to the east and the point of safety miles away to the

west, there was nothing but cliff washed by sea.

"A rotten coast," said Raft as they listened. "Only for this shelf we'd

be down there."

"We'd have been flung against the cliff and beaten to pieces," said she.

"That's so," said Raft.

"When we get free from this," she said, "let us keep inland. I don't

mind climbing over rocks, anything is better than the coast, under these

cliffs."

"We've got to keep pretty close to the cliffs, all the same, to strike

that bay," he replied, "hope it's there."

"It is there," said she. "I feel--I know it is there and that we will

find a ship. We are being looked after."

"Which way?"

"We are being led. You remember when you saved me from dying in that

cave, well, you were making for the bay then. If you had not found me

you would have kept on and you would have crossed that plain where the

bog places are, it looked the easiest way."

"That's so," said Raft.

"Bompard was swallowed up there. You would have been swallowed up too;

you were led to find me for both our sakes. Then, to-day, I could have

gone no further only for you, and you remember how we thought of going

back? This ledge was here waiting for us. It tells us we have to go on

and be brave and everything will come right."

"Well, maybe, you aren't far wrong," replied the other, "we've scraped

through so far and maybe we'll scrape through to the end. My main wish

is to have a plank under foot again, there ain't no give and take in

land, I'm never surefooted on land, there's no lift in it. I reckon I'm

like one of them sea chickens not used to solid stuff underfoot. D'you

know what one of them gulls does first thing he lands on board a ship by

chance?"

"No."

"He gets sick as a dog."

The cliff had an echo which, when it was not answering some loud boost

of the sea managed to return words, and between the smack of two waves

the girl heard it remark something about a dog. But the echo of the

cliff soon had its mouth too full to hold words. The sea now nearly at

full flood was bringing big waves along with it. In the gloom they could

see the racing grey ghosts, and here, on account of the curve, there was

little rhythm in the sound of it that came like the continuous thunder

of big drums. At their feet, like the licking vicious tongue of the

roaring monster, came the continuous gash-gash of waves washing up and

falling back.

The girl sat with the blanket around her leaning close up against the

man. She felt as a person feels standing before the cage of a tiger

uncertain as to the strength of the bars, sometimes a puff of wind

brought a touch of spray on her face, whilst the continuous muffled

thunder of the coast leagues seemed like the bastions of the whole world

at war with the sea.

"There's no call to be afraid," said Raft. He seemed, by some special

faculty, to be able to divine her feelings.

"I'm not exactly afraid," she replied. "It's just that everything seems

so big--and those cliffs, now, even when they are hidden, they make one

know they are there, they seem wicked and alive, yet not able to move."

"You've hit it," said he, "they're for all the world as if they were

looking at a chap. It's a rotten coast, but it's near high water now and

the tide will soon be drawing out."

This cheered her.

Then the whale birds began to cry and flit about. The whale birds are

blind by daylight and their voices scarcely ever heard, they are the

owls of the sea.

The girl talked about them for something to say, then she fell to

wondering why on a beach like this there were no sea elephants. Raft

explained "sea cows" would never come to a washed beach like this, there

were no dry rocks for them to "hang about" on.

He had lit his pipe with the tinder box and the smell of the tobacco

came good and comforting, the slap and dash of the waves sounded less

vicious, too, as though the sea had done its worst to get at them and

was foiled.

Then she said, apropos of nothing but the last of her wandering

thoughts: "Have you ever seen a man killed?"

He laughed as though over some pleasant reminiscence. "Dozens." Then he

began to recall chaps he had seen killed, falling from aloft and

otherwise. He had seen one hit the sea such a smack it split him open,

and he had seen a chap under water being pulled to pieces by sharks just

as terriers pull an old shoe.

Then he wandered off to a bar scene where a dago--it was at

Nagasaki--had been drinking rice rum and knifed a man, a regular prosy

old sailor's yarn, with "I says to him," and "he says to me" at every

turn.

Then he found that she was leaning more heavily against him and was

asleep. He put his pipe beside him and slipped an arm round her. Then,

as though sleep were infectious, down he sank still holding her and

there they lay. He snoring gently and she with her head pillowed on his

chest.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE SUMMIT

"I will break thee." Across Kerguelen those words are written to be read

by the soul of man. The rock, the rain, the wind and the sea, these, as

instruments, would surely be sufficient for the carrying out of the

threat; but the soul of man is strong, hence the spirit of Kerguelen has

called to its assistance Fog.

Since landing on the great beach the girl had seen the islands

fog-wreathed several times but the beach itself had only once been

attacked.

When she awoke on the rock plateau the first word of Raft to her was

"fog."

They had slept as the dead sleep for nine hours and Raft had awoken with

the girl's head still on his chest and feeling as though he were packed

in damp cotton wool. It was after sun up and the fog was so dense that

the edge of the plateau was only just visible. Through the fog came the

breaking of the waves; the tide was coming in again.

Raft had lit his pipe and the girl, stiff from lying, rose up and

stamped about to warm herself. Neither of them spoke a word in the way

of grumbling.

The plateau was about twenty yards in length and by drawing off five

yards or so one could have a dressing-room screened with a fog veil, so

the fog was not an unmixed evil.

Then they breakfasted, listening to the slashing of the water just below

and counting the time till the out-going sea would let them loose.

"It's a good job I went to the point last night," said Raft, "else we

wouldn't be able to start in this smother, not knowing what was beyond

there."

"Will we be able to start in this?" she asked.

"Lord, yes," replied he, "the cliffs will give us a lead, it'll be slow

going but we'll do it all right, it's not more than six miles or so to

the break from the point there."

"When can we start?"

Raft listened to the water below, it was breaking now against the near

rocks but not yet against the cliff base.

"In another three hours or maybe a bit more," said he.

An hour later, as though the Fog spirit had been listening and watching,

and as though it despaired of its attack on the heart of the prisoners,

the smother began to thin; by the time the tide reluctantly began to

free them it had broken up and patches of the blessed blue sky shewed

overhead.

By the time they reached the point and had a view of the great cliff

break-down that would give them release it was fine weather, with a

gently heaving sea breaking in beneath a sky of summer.

It was as though their troubles were ended. At noon they reached the

great break-down and a new form of country.

Stretching inland almost to the foothills lay a broad valley, boulder

strewn, and looking like the bed of some vanished river. Before them to

the west the ground rose from the valley, gently, unbroken, desolate,

like nothing so much as the desolate country that borders the Riff coast

of Morocco. But it was ease itself compared to the tumble of rocks

around and beyond the Lizard Point.

Down the middle of the valley came a little wimpling rivulet like the

remains of the river that had once been. They drank from it and rested

and had some food, then they started with light hearts, taking the easy

ascent to the high ground, treading a moss dark and springy like the

moss that covers the old lava beds of Iceland.

"Look!" said the girl.

They had reached the highest point and before them, away to the west,

stretched the same rolling dark-smooth country, making low cliffs at the

sea edge and then, as if weary of little things, springing gigantic and

bold towards the sky.

"It's over there the bay would be," said Raft. "Ponting said it was a

black brute of a bay between two cliffs rising higher than a ship's top

masts. Well, there's our chance before us--if you call it a chance. It's

a long way, taking it how you will."

Chance! Despite her optimism and belief in being led, as she stood now

with the wind blowing in her face it seemed to her that she stood

before absolute hopelessness.

Nothing, not even the sea corridor, had balked her like that terrible

distance, calm, sunlit, yet gloomy like a recumbent giant.

The monstrosity of the whole adventure unmasked itself of a sudden;

travelling to find a bay they had heard of on the chance of finding a

ship--a ship on a coast where ships were scarcely to be found.

And even if they found the bay they could not wait for a ship. Here

there was no food, with the exception of rabbits and gulls. The ship

would have to be there, waiting for them.

Raft must have been mad! mad! mad! She herself must have been mad to

dream of such a thing.

Her lips felt dry as pumice stone and she glanced at her companion as he

stood with the bundle at his feet and the harpoon in his hand, looking

about him, far and near, as unconcerned as though beyond that great hump

on the skyline lay a sure town with a railway station.

No, Raft was not mad. He was unconcerned. He knew, even better than she,

the hopelessness of their position, yet he was calm and unmoved, never

from the first moment she had seen him had he been otherwise; before

everything, like a rock, he continued.

Yet it was only now, as he quietly stood there surveying their "chance,"

that he came home to her truly as he was, unbreakable; simple, vast,

forged by the sea. She swallowed down the devil of doubt and despair as

she stood looking at him standing so, and she was about to speak when,

catching sight of something along the high ground to the right he

pointed it out to her. She saw a white point on the ground a couple of

hundred yards away.

As they drew close to it it enlarged and other things shewed. It was the

top of a skull belonging to a skeleton tucked away in a little hollow as

though it were sheltering from the wind.

Rags of clothing still hung to it and the boots were there still that

had once belonged to it.

"Wonder what did that poor chap in?" said Raft as he stood looking at

it. "Wrecked, most likely and lost himself--well, it's a sign folk have

been here, anyhow."

He gauged the measure of the desolation around by his words. Here a

skeleton did not make the desolation more desolate; on the contrary, it

proved that folk had been here.

So the girl felt.

"He'd have been blown away by this only for that hollow he's in," said

Raft, "well, he's out of his troubles whoever he was and whatever ship

he hailed from."

"We can't bury him," said she.

"He's buried," said Raft.

He had summed up Kerguelen in two words and there was almost a trace of

bitterness in his voice. Beyond the remark that it was a brute of a

coast he had never grumbled against the place or abused it or the

Almighty for making it, as many a man has done; and now at the summit of

things two words sufficed him.

Then, leaving the skeleton to the wind and the sky and the countless

ages, they turned and went on their way west.

CHAPTER XXX

THE BAY

It took them till dusk to reach the foot of the western rise of ground;

here they slept under a rock, continuing their way next morning,

climbing till they reached the summit of the rise and keeping their

course along the edge of a cliff that fell a sheer three hundred feet to

the shore below.

Sometimes Raft peeped over the cliff edge and once the girl drew close

and looked, too, dizzy with the height, made more dreadful by the gulls

flying far below.

At noon, far ahead of them, they saw something that made them pause; a

little mound. As they drew closer they knew. It was another cache, a

cache made of heaped earth and loose stones with about a foot of sign

post protruding from it. The post had been broken off in some storm and

blown away.

"There'll be stuff under there," said Raft, "and if we have to go back

it'll come in handy. It's a pointer to the bay anyhow; there must be

some landin' place near here, we've only got to keep on."

They sat down and rested and had some food, eating as much as they

wanted now that they had a store to depend on. They had drunk twice

that morning from pot holes still half-filled with the rain of a few

days ago and they had no need of water--it is the one thing a man never

needs in Kerguelen. They were in good spirits; the haunting fear that

their provisions might not be enough to last them for the return journey

was gone; also, if the bay were near, they could remain now some time,

even take up their quarters here to wait on the chance of a ship.

The idea came to them to make a burrow into the cache, now, working with

the harpoon and their hands, and for the purpose of verifying the

contents; but they put it away, the desire to get on drove them like a

whip and they went on, halting towards dusk and sleeping in a hollow

that gave them shelter from the wind that was blowing from the south.

Towards dawn the wind changed to the west and at the first rays of light

Raft awoke, sat up and sniffed. Then he laid his hand on the girl's

shoulder.

"Smell that!" cried he.

She sat up, her eyes half-blind with sleep.

"Smell the wind!" said Raft.

She turned her face to the west. On the wind was coming the ghost of a

smell, faint and horrible and soul-searching.

"That's a ship," said Raft.

"A ship!"

"Boiling down blubber. I struck that smell once, seven years ago; it's

blubber. I reckon we're all right." He heaved himself on to his feet

and the girl half-rose, kneeling, and looked at him.

"Are you sure?"

"Sure as sure; smell it."

Then, as she sniffed again, she knew. That was not a nature smell;

horrible though it was it was not the tragic smell of corruption. It had

something, almost one might say, low down about it, little, mean,

business-like--it was her first sniff of returning Civilization, the

first impression on an olfactory sense cleared and cleaned by the winds

of Kerguelen.

She looked at Raft. He was standing, shading his eyes as though staring

at the smell. The dawn was at his back, and across the dawn a flight of

wild duck was making in from the sea.

Imagine a person walking in a garret from absolute penury to find

himself a millionaire. Such a person, were he normal, would feel what

the girl felt as the message of that noxious odour struck home to her

mind.

Her teeth chattered a little as she rose to her feet. She could not

speak and she had to hold her lower jaw with her hand to still it. Then

the muscles of her throat did all sorts of queer things on their own

account and a violent feeling of sickness seized her that would have

ended in an attack of vomiting had it not passed as quickly as it came.

Raft, who had ceased staring to the west, saw how she was taken and put

his hand on her shoulder.

"You'll be all right in a bit," said he, "it comes hard at first. I've

seen chaps go clean off their heads sniffin' land after three months of

hell and weather. We'll start in a bit, there's no call to hurry, and

I'll just take a walk to get the stiffness out of my legs."

Off he went, away and away, disappearing beyond a dip in the ground.

She knew that he would be away at least half an hour. Thoughtful as a

mother for her comfort, yet almost as outspoken, sometimes, as a nurse,

he was wonderful.

The dawn broke broader and stronger, peaceful and grey, promising a

continuance of the fine weather that had now lasted for three days,

three days without wind or rain or threat from the mountains that sat

this morning far away and clear cut against the sky.

Then as they went on their way the sun broke over the edge of the high

lands and gulls rising above the cliff edge flitted like birds born of

snow and fire.

They stopped for ten minutes to breakfast, then they went on, and now

suddenly came something new. On the wind they could hear the sound of

gulls quarrelling, a sound quite distinct from the ordinary mewing and

wheezing of the gulls at peace.

"We're near there," said Raft. "Hark at the gulls, they're fighting over

the scraps. Them chaps, whoever they are, have been killing seals and

boiling the blubber. The bay's there."

He pointed to a higher rise in the ground just before them and to the

fact that the land from there sloped down inland at a terrific rate.

He was right.

Ten minutes walking brought them to the end of their journey and to the

edge of a cliff two hundred feet high. It was as though a giant had

taken a gouge and cut a bay right through the sea cliffs. Far across the

water of the bay before them the land rose again in a precipice steep as

the one on whose edge they stood.

The ripples of the bay washed in on a beach of black pebbles easily

reached by the declivity of the land and on the beach, stewing like

witches' cauldrons, queer looking try-pots were sending up their smoke.

Near the pots carcases of sea-bulls lay ripped and gory and being

cleared of their blubber by small men, strange-looking, stripped to the

waist and with arms and chests splashed by blood.

But the clove in this devil's mixture was the ship moored in the cliff

shadows, a small ship like a withered kernel in the shell of the bay,

barque-rigged, antiquated, high pooped, almost with the lines of a junk.

One might have fancied her designer to have taken for his model some old

picture of the ships of Drake.

The try-pots, carcases and busy men left Raft unmoved. The ship held his

whole mind.

"Lord! Look at her," said he.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE SHIP

She had been built on the Chu Kiang in the great Junk building yards

that lie just below Canton and her bones had been put together by yellow

men. Built to a European design China had come out in her lines just as

the curve of the Tartar tent tops still lingers in the roof of the

pagoda.

She might have been a hundred and fifty tons, not more, maybe less, and

the junk pattern had been eliminated and European sticks and decent

canvas substituted for lateen sails by the direction of the man who

ordered her and who was a smuggler.

She had been built for swiftness as well as cargo and, her builders

having been junk builders since the time of Tiberius, she was a failure,

sailing like a dough dish; and the yard that built her, having seen her

float off, went on building junks.

Then she passed from hand to hand, and dirty hands they were, from the

Chu Kiang to the Hoang Ho, and through the Korea Channel into the Japan

sea, trading sometimes, smuggling sometimes, and once, as far as the

Kuriles, sealing in forbidden waters. She was caught by the Russians

and her crew clubbed to death or sent to the quicksilver mines and then

she came back to China, somehow, by way of Vladivostok and was sold and

sold again till she fell into the hands of one, Chang, a sea scraper to

whom everything came in handy from bêche de mer to barratry and murder.

Chang was modern in some of his ideas, he carried a Swenfoyn-harpoon gun

and, having luck down by the Sundas, he collected half a cargo of oil

which he sold at Perth; from Perth he had dough-dished along down to

Kerguelen after the "big seals." He had struck this bay by chance and he

had struck oil, for all to westward of it lay a stretch of unwashed

rock, as good a sea elephant ground as that on the long beach.

The girl standing beside Raft viewed the scene below her with a catch at

the heart. The carcases, the little blood-stained busy men, the try-pots

like witches' cauldrons and that strange-looking ship which even to her

eyes seemed not as other ships were, all these had a tinge of nightmare.

Amongst the men she noted one, big almost as Raft. He seemed their

leader.

"Chinks," said Raft, "Chinee--they've got their pigtails rolled up,

well, they're better than nothing."

He picked up the bundle that he had laid down and led the way to the

slope that gave on the beach.

As they came on to the upper part of the beach the "Chinks" noticed

them, paused for a second in their labours and then, finding that it

was only a solitary man and woman, went on with their work as though the

intruders had been a couple of penguins.

"Cool lot," said Raft.

The girl paused. The sight of the carcases and the blood at close

quarters, the absolute indifference of the blubber strippers at the

sight of an obvious pair of castaways, the whole scene and circumstance

turned her soul and chilled her heart.

"I don't like this," said she. "Those men make me afraid, they don't

seem human--they are _horrible_."

"Wait you here," said Raft.

He advanced alone across the black shingle and she stood watching him

and listening to the stones crunching beneath his feet.

His advance did not disturb the workers.

They seemed working against time. Without any manner of doubt they were

anxious to be done with the business and be out of that bay before the

next blow came, for the place was fully exposed to the west-nor'west and

a storm out of there might easily break their ship from its moorings and

send her broadside on to the shingle.

Undersized, agile, with weary-old faces that seemed covered with drawn

parchment, they seemed less like men than automata; all save the leader,

a gigantic, imperious-looking Mongolian with a thin cat-like moustache,

a man of the true river pirate type with a dash of the Mandarin. This

man held in his hand a long thong of leather. Captain or leader, or

whatever he might be, he was most evidently the serang of that labour

party.

On the shingle where the ripples washed in lay a boat, half-beached.

The big man was Chang, and as Raft approached harpoon in hand, she saw

Chang draw himself up to his full height and stand waiting. Then she

heard Raft's voice and saw him pointing at her and inland and then at

the ship.

Chang stood dumb. Then all at once he exploded, shouting and

gesticulating. She could not make out what he said, but she knew. He was

ordering them off. He seemed to be ordering them off the earth as well

as the beach. And Raft stood there patient and dumb like a chidden

child.

Then she saw Raft nod his head and turn away.

He came back crunching up the shingle. "Sit down," said he.

She sat down and he took his seat beside her. He had dropped the bundle

just there, and as he sat for a moment before speaking he noticed that

the fish line securing the mouth of the sack was loose, he carefully

retied it.

"You saw how that chap carried on," said he, "I had to put a stopper on

myself. He's the chap; them little yellow bellies don't count. He's the

chap, and I've got to get him aside from the others." He spoke rapidly

and she saw that his eyes were injected with blood.

A new fear seized upon her, a fear akin to the dread she had felt that

dark night in the cave when she had caught the sound of La Touche

dragging himself close to her, the dread of imminently impending action.

"Let us go away," said she, "another ship may come; anything is better

than having a fight with those men."

"Have you got that knife safe?" asked Raft. She still wore the

fisherman's knife round her waist. She put her hand on it.

"Yes, the knife is safe."

"If that chap downs me for good," said Raft, "stick that knife through

yourself. If he doesn't you take my orders and take them sharp."

He had risen to his feet and without a word more he came down the

shingle again towards the workers, walking in a leisurely way and

trailing the harpoon along.

He approached Chang who turned on him again with the anger of a busy man

importuned by a beggar. The most heart-sickening thing to the girl was

the way in which, after the first driving off of Raft, the great

Chinaman and his crew had gone on with their work as though they were

alone on the beach. Pity and humanity seemed as remote from that crowd

as from the carcases they were handling. Active hostility would have

been less horrible, somehow, than this absolute indifference to the

condition of others.

Chang did not wait for Raft to speak, this time; he began the speaking,

or, rather, the shouting, advancing on the other who began to retreat.

Chang, as if wishing to have done with this matter for good, followed

him up and at every step the devil in him seemed to rise higher whilst

his voice filled the beach.

What a voice that was! Half-singing, half-booming, the

"whant-whong-goom-along" of the running coolie chanting as he runs

seemed mixed with it, till, his anger breaking bounds, he let fly with

the strap in his hand, catching the other across the shoulder of the arm

that held the harpoon.

Then Raft killed him.

The girl who saw the killing was less appalled for the moment by the

deed than the doer of it. The blow of the harpoon that sent Chang's

brains flying like the contents of a smashed custard apple was like a

flash of lightning, it was the thunder that terrified.

Roaring like a sea bull he sprang from the body of Chang towards the

crowd who faced him for a moment with their flensing knives like a herd

of jackals. The girl, who had sprung to her feet, plucked the knife from

her belt and came running, terror gone and a wind seeming to carry her

over the shingle; zoned in steel blue light she saw the harpoon flying

from right to left destroying everything in its way, knives flying into

the air as if tossed by jugglers, a yellow greasy back into which she

struck with her knife, a yellow Chinese face falling backwards with eyes

wide on her, as if the Chinese soul of the creature she had stabbed to

the heart were trying to cling to her.

Then she was sitting on the shingle very ill and Raft was coming back to

her, running.

The fight was over and the beasts had flown, left and right, she could

see them crawling like ants away up on the higher ground. They had

dropped their knives and the knives were lying here and there on the

shingle where also lay four dead bodies including the body of Chang.

Ten minutes ago there had been fifteen live Chinamen on that beach.

Raft was bleeding from a cut on the arm, his face was gashed above the

beard, a knife had ripped his coat and the back of his left hand shewed

another wound.

He was laughing and carrying on like a man in drink and now that her

stomach was relieved an extraordinary light-headedness seized her. Like

Raft, she seemed drunk.

She had been snatched for a moment into a world where to kill was the

only alternative to death or worse than death. For a moment she had

lived in the Stone Age, she had fought like a savage animal and with the

fury of the female, more terrific than the rage of the male. She had

been pushed to the edge of things, and it was she who had turned the

fight. The man she had killed was in the act of knifing Raft in the

back.

"The boat!" cried Raft.

She struggled to her feet, steadied herself, and came to the boat. They

pushed it out till it was nearly water borne; she scrambled in, he

followed, and pushed off. Out in the bay the high black cliffs rose

above them as if pushed by a scene shifter, the light-headed laughing

raving feeling left her, and as they came alongside of the barque to

starboard and tied up to the channel plates she was clear headed and

calm and able to get on board by the channel without assistance.

On the deck she tottered and fell in the dead swoon of exhaustion.

It is a long journey to the Stone Age and back and the man or woman who

makes it is never quite, quite the same again.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE OPIUM SMOKERS

Raft had never seen a female swoon before. He thought for a moment that

she had dropped dead and the shock of the business pulled him together

like a douche of cold water. Then he saw that she was breathing and took

heart, rubbing her hands and poking her in the ribs and calling on her

to pull herself together. He would have been more frightened only that

he put her condition down to her general unaccountableness in some ways.

In less than five minutes she had come to and was leaning on her elbow

and declaring herself to be all right. Then she got on her feet and,

taking her seat on the side of the open hatch, looked about her at the

dingy deck cumbered with a whale boat and all sorts of raffle. The

slight swell of the bay rocked the barque to the creaking tune of block

and cordage, whilst overhead the sea-gulls flitted mewing against the

vast black cliff that rose three hundred feet sheer from the licking

sea.

"You're all right now?" said Raft dubiously.

"Yes, I feel quite right and strong again--just a little dizzy, that's

all."

"Mind and don't tumble back down that hatch," said he, "I'll drop below

and see what's to be found if you keep your eye out for them Larrikens.

Give me a call if you sight them."

The Larrikens were nowhere to be seen; they were in the high ground

hidden, and no doubt holding a council of war, but sight or sound of

them there was none.

She nodded and he dropped below into the cabin.

The cabin of Chang was clean, almost dainty. Two smaller cabins opened

from it, one evidently for Chang and the other for his second in

command. Raft in his hurried look round saw a lot of things including a

rack containing six rifles and two heavy revolvers resting on an

ammunition box filled with hundreds of cartridges. He opened the

lazarette beneath the cabin flooring; it seemed well-stored, and on a

shelf in the main cabin there were some provisions including a tin of

biscuits.

He brought up the biscuits, the two revolvers and a pocketful of

ammunition and, taking his seat on the hatch edge beside the girl,

opened the tin; then he went forward and hunted for water, found the

water cask and, getting a tin pannikin from the galley, brought her a

drink.

He had never loaded or fired a revolver; the girl had, and she shewed

him how, the echoes of the cliffs answering to the ear splitting reports

as he made a few practice shots, and the guillemots squalling and rising

in clouds from their perches on the rock.

"We're fixed all right now," said he, "and we can have those chaps on

board when they're ready to come."

"On board!"

"Oh, they'll come right enough, they've got no grub on land."

"Come--but do you mean to say you will let them?"

"Who's to work the hooker out of the bay?" he answered, "Not you and me.

We've got to get them aboard. There's no harm in them now they're

licked."

He spoke with a knowledge of men absorbed from the whole world over. The

Chinese were licked and like dogs they would come to heel. He knew it,

for he knew men. He had put the fear of God into them, he and the girl;

the thing was over. Give the "Chinks" time to lick their wounds and

swallow their gruel and they would be right as pie. He had seen a whole

ship's company licked by a little man of great will, and in hundreds of

experiences and fights he had found that a beaten man, be he strong as

ten, is to be led like a child. He was right. Next morning--they slept

on deck that night keeping watch alternately--the "Chinks," hungry and

starving for a suck at their opium pipes appeared, the whole eleven of

them, and coming down the beach like a troop of children stood in a

line; then they began to wail.

Wail and wag their heads and wave their hands. Kerguelen, coming on top

of the licking, had broken them to pieces. Then the whole lot kow-towed

like one man, knees and forehead on the shingle.

Raft got into the boat and rowed off for the beach bringing them aboard

four at a time and as each lot reached the deck they kow-towed to the

girl and then trotted forward to the fo'c'sle, disappearing like rats,

their teeth chattering from exposure during the night, stripped to the

waist as they were, and never could one have imagined these little

cringing harmless looking men the jackals of the day before.

When the whole lot were in the fo'c'sle Raft gave them time to settle,

then he went down amongst them revolver in pocket. They had lit a lamp,

some had lit opium pipes and some were lighting them, and they lay about

like creatures broken with cold and weariness. He nodded to them and

left them to the opium that would drive the chill from their bones, then

coming on deck stood beside the girl.

"They'll be able to work the ship to-morrow," said he, "told you they'd

be all right; reckon they won't mind changing that big chap I knocked

out for us."

"They don't seem to be able to speak a word of English," said she.

"Oh, I reckon I'll do the steering till we get clear of this place,"

said he, "they'll handle the sails without knowing English and once

we're clear we have only to make north till we strike a Christian

ship."

"They seem so harmless," she said, "and when I think of that fight--and

of what I did--"

"You fought fine--damned fine," said Raft, "damned fine." He put his arm

round her, not as a man puts his arm round a woman, but as a shipmate

puts his arm round a shipmate.

CHAPTER XXXIII

MAINSAIL HAUL

That night Raft and the girl took it in turns again to keep watch on

deck. They might just as well have gone below for all the trouble the

crew could have given them. These gentry had fought bitterly because

they had been attacked. Raft had frightened them. There is a form of

bravery which one might liken to inverted terror. Rats shew it when they

are cornered, and so do men. They had seen their boss killed with a blow

and the destroyer hurling himself on them and, though they were

peaceable men, they fought. These same peaceable men, be it understood,

would, all the same, have murdered a human being for profit could they

have done so with reasonable safety.

When the girl came on deck in the morning, after her watch below, she

found the deck busy and Raft with his hands in his pockets leaning

against the port bulwarks and watching the busy ones.

"They're in a thundering hurry to get out," said Raft. "That chap,"

pointing to a "chink" that seemed a cut above the others and was

evidently the mate, "has been pointing to the sky and out there beyond

the bay. They seem to smell bad weather coming. I nodded my head to him

and he's working the hands now for all they're worth."

"The wind is blowing from the land," said the girl.

"Yes," said Raft, "it'll take us out without towing, unless it changes."

The hatch cover had been put on and the boat brought to the davits, some

of the crew were up aloft scrambling about like monkeys, others were

making ready to haul on the halyards and a fellow was unlashing the

wheel. There was not a face in all the crowd that did not bear the

signature of Anxiety writ on parchment.

The fear of weather, the fear of Kerguelen, and the fear of that bay,

which was evidently haunted by evil spirits, drove them like a whip.

The mainsail was set to a chorus like the crying of sea fowl and the

foresail and jib. The tide coming in held the barque to a taut anchor

chain with her stern to the beach and the wind ready to take her. The

mate was at the wheel and now from forward ought to have come the sound

of the windlass pawls and the rasp of the rising anchor chain. It

didn't. From the group of Chinese collected there came, instead, a clang

followed by a splash.

"Why, the beggars have knocked the shackle off the chain," cried Raft.

"Lord bless _my_ soul, never waited to raise the mud hook?"

"Does it matter?" she asked.

"Sure to have a spare one," answered he, "but it gets me, that's Chinee

all over, they're rattled."

"Look!" she cried, "we're moving!"

The cliff's were beginning to glide landward and the bay's mouth to

widen, sea-gulls flew with them screaming a challenge, and the

guillemots lining the cliff ledges broke into voice, echoes and

guillemots storming at them as they went.

Then the sea opened wide under the grey breezy day and the great islands

shewed themselves away to the east. To the west and the north all was

clear water.

Raft and the girl walked to the after-rail and looked at the coast they

were leaving; it seemed horribly near and the great black cliffs only a

gunshot away. If the infernal wind of Kerguelen were to arise and blow

from the north even now they might be seized and dashed back on those

rocks, but the south-east wind held steady and the cliffs drew away and

the coast lengthened and new cliffs and bays disclosed themselves, till

they almost fancied they could see, away to the east, the great seal

beach where the remains of the dead man lay in the cave and where the

great sea-bulls were without doubt taking their ease on the rocks.

And now came the last call of Kerguelen, the voice of the kittiwakes:

"Get-away--get-away--get-away."

Raft, as they stood and watched, put his arm over the shoulder of the

girl and as she held the great hand that had saved her and brought her

so far towards safety her mind, miles away, kept travelling the long

road from the caves.

"I'm thinking of the bundle and all the poor things in it," said she,

"it will lie there forever on the beach, waiting to be picked up--it's

strange."

"I was thinkin' the same thing myself," said Raft, "and the old harpoon

I licked that chap across the head with."

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE CARCASSONNE

Raft had found other things than arms and ammunition in the cabin, he

had found a box containing nearly three thousand five hundred dollars,

partly in American money and partly in English gold coin. Chang had

stowed it in his chest, a big cedar-wood affair containing all sorts of

oddments, including a can of blue label Canton opium, cigars, a couple

of suits of fine silk and a woman's gold bracelet.

Chang had evidently been well-to-do in his way and a man of refinement.

His bunk bedding was of the finest quality and on a shelf near the bunk

lay piled new-washed sheets and pillow cases. The girl took his cabin

and slept in his bunk. Long ago, in the world that was slowly coming

back to her, the idea of sleeping in the bunk of a Chinaman she had seen

killed would have revolted her, now, it did not trouble her at all. She

only knew that a mattress and clean sheets were heaven, even if she had

to sleep with a revolver under her pillow. Then in a day or two she only

put the revolver there as a matter of routine. The "Chinks" gave

evidence that so far from making trouble they were extremely anxious to

propitiate and please, and the man who had evidently served Chang

appeared in the cabin tidying things and laying out the food, whilst the

man who had evidently been mate worked the ship in his own weird way

seeming scarcely ever to sleep. He had laid the course almost due north,

taking the sun with a back-stick that might have come out of the Ark,

working out his calculations in the fo'c'sle in his own head. Raft did

not know, he knew nothing of navigation as a science, nor did he care,

they were going north and day by day drawing into the track of ships,

that was enough for him.

One day the girl said to him: "Suppose these men make trouble over that

man you killed--and those others."

"Let them," said Raft, "I'll tell my yarn--it's plain enough--I'm not

going to tell no lies. The chap tried to drive us off, and we lost and

near done for, and he hit me a welt on top of all. He got his gruel."

She had played with the idea of making up a story for the sake of Raft;

she felt ashamed of the idea when she heard his words.

"I'm thinking of that money down below," said he, "it belonged by rights

to that big chap. If a ship takes us off we'd better hand it over to the

mate or just leave it there for him to take."

"Yes, we don't want the money," she replied, "I have plenty."

"You! Where have you got it?" asked he, looking her over.

"In France," she replied. Then she laughed. It was the first time she

had laughed since that day when the sea-bulls had driven the penguins

off, and Raft, as though her mirth were infectious, laughed also.

It seemed a joke to him, somehow, the idea of her having money in

France.

The idea of her being one of the Rich People had never worked its way

into his head. She was just herself, different it is true in some

indefinable way from anyone he had ever met, speaking differently,

acting differently, but made used to his mind by struggle and adversity.

He scarcely thought of her as a woman, yet he was hugely fond of her, a

fondness that had begun in pity and had been strengthened and made to

grow by her pluck. He liked to have her near him and when she was out of

sight he felt a bit astray. He never bothered about the future, so the

idea of parting with her had not come to him.

And she? When Raft was out of her sight she felt astray. Her mind had

spun between them a tie, of a new sort in a world grown cynical and old

and cold; an affection permanent as the hills, warm as summer.

Everything good in her loved Raft, it was the affection of a mother for

a child, of a child for a mother.

He had nursed her back to life, he had brought her life, and never once

since that day had he chilled her with a littleness or broken a thread

of what was spinning in her heart. He was illiterate, he was rough, but

he was Raft. He was the great beach of Kerguelen and the sea-bulls and

the distant islands, he was the hand that had destroyed Loneliness and

driven away Death, the child who had listened to Jack and the Bean

Stalk, the Lion that had destroyed Chang, the companion in a loneliness

ringed with despair.

One morning beyond the 40th parallel, and some two hundred miles to the

nor'west of St. Paul, the Chinese mate plucked Raft by the sleeve and

pointed into the west.

The day was clear with a wind just enough to fill the sails of the

barque and a long blue leisurely swell running from the south. Away in

the east was a trace of smoke as though a grimy finger had stained the

sky just above the sea-line.

"Ship," said the mate.

It was the one word of English that he knew. Raft was about to shout and

run to the cabin hatch to call the girl. Then he held himself back. It

might be a false hope. Yet if he had thought he might have known that a

ship in the east meant a ship right across their course, here, where

there were no trade tracks north and south.

Then above the sea-line and clear of smoke he saw her hull.

He pointed to the halyards and the mate understood. The mate was

evidently desperately anxious to be quit for good of his self-invited

passengers, for when Raft came on deck again with the girl they found

the barque under bare poles rolling to the swell and a Chinese flag

half-masted flicking in the wind.

Also, away across the sea, sheering towards them and making to cross

their bows a mile away a two funnelled steamer whose funnels closed to

one as she shifted her helm to get within speaking distance of them.

She was the _Carcassonne_, a seven thousand ton freighter carrying

passengers, a French boat, bound from Sydney to Cape Town and

Marseilles.

Raft, the day before, had taken the Chinese mate down to the cabin and

shewed him Chang's money and had presented it to him and the crew in

pantomime.

It was honesty. It was also a good stroke. There was no trouble when the

_Carcassonne_, her huge bulk rolling gently to the swell, dropped a

boat, though indeed had the companions of Chang wished to raise trouble

they would have found themselves seriously handicapped, dumb as they

were in every language but their own.

Chang had been their linguist as well as their leader. They had

literally lost their tongue.

PART VI

CHAPTER XXXV

MARSEILLES

On board the _Carcassonne_ the girl had broken down as though all the

exhaustion she had defied had waited for that moment to fall upon her.

But the energy that had held her above defeat and had given her hope

when things seemed hopeless was there, undestroyed, and when the turning

point came she rallied swiftly. She came on deck one morning where

Bathurst lay a point invisible beyond the blue sea to starboard and

sitting in a deck chair made friends with the other passengers.

It seemed to her almost impossible that the same world should hold

Kerguelen and at the same time this paradise of azure blue sky and tepid

wind.

Raft had told her story before reaching Cape Town and the loss of the

_Gaston de Paris_ was now old news in Europe, and the fact that of all

the _Gaston's_ crowd only the beautiful Cléo de Bromsart had been saved.

Raft had joined the crew of the _Carcassonne_, sleeping in the foc's'le,

where there were several English speaking sailors, and as much out of

his element as a man used only to masts and spars can be on a

steamboat. However, he swabbed decks and did odd jobs without a grumble

and he was swabbing the deck on the morning she came up; he dropped the

business for a moment to take the two hands she held out to him.

All through that time below she had been wanting Raft and his big hand

to pull her through. Satisfied, knowing he was on board and all right,

but wanting him all the same.

On the old barque once or twice had come the stray thought of how Raft's

figure would accommodate itself against the background of the world she

knew.

Well, here was the world she knew, or part of it; a deck, clean as a

ball-room floor and as spacious, passengers in deck chairs, reading

novels, and a manicured French surgeon ready to talk art or philosophy

to her, polished, but rather narrow of shoulder.

And against all that stood Raft, rough and in the clothes he had worn on

the beach, for there was not a man on board whose clothes would have

fitted him comfortably.

Well, he was not incongruous with this background, simply because he

destroyed it. In a ball-room it would have been the same. He carried

with him his background of high black cliffs and miles of beach and

flying gulls and breaking sea, and in a flash came to her the fact that

he dwarfed and belittled the other people around just as nature dwarfs

and belittles art.

She held both his hands for a moment, managing to pat them, somehow, as

she held them, asking him what on earth he was doing with the swab he

had just dropped. She had an idea that the ship people had put him to

work, but before the idea had risen to indignation heat he reassured

her.

"I must be doing," said Raft. "Not that there's much to be at in this

old kettle. You've got your legs back, well, that's good. I had it out

with that doctor chap and he told me how you were going from day to day,

but I've been wanting the sight of you."

He put his hand on her shoulder as he might on a pal's, then he crossed

his arms. "And well you look," said he.

"Doctor Petit," said the girl, speaking in French, "this is Raft, the

bravest and best man in the world as you will know when I tell you all.

Shake hands with him."

The doctor shook hands.

The passengers, and the first officer, across the bridge canvas, watched

all this with curiosity. They knew something but they did not know all.

They did that night when she had told them as best she could.

After that she met him often on deck, giving him a word or stopping for

a chat, and it was now that she began to think and make plans as to the

future.

Raft had become part of herself, they were bound together as perhaps no

two such contrary beings had ever been bound. The idea of Love, the idea

of Marriage, all conventional ideas as between grown-ups of opposite sex

were as absurd in relation to them as they would have been in relation

to two children who had grown attached one to the other.

As regarded one another they were in fact two children, for Raft had

never been anything but a child and Kerguelen and Raft combined had

awakened the primitive and the child in her, giving her the power of

affection that makes a little child throw its arm round the neck of a

dog.

But the world could not understand that, and Raft to the world was a

rough sailor man, and she, to the world, was Cléo de Bromsart.

She would lie awake at night listening to the pounding of the screws and

thinking of this--contrasting the figure of Raft with the world she knew

and the world she knew with the figure of Raft.

Madame de Brie, her nearest relation, would pass before her mind's eye

with her gold eye glasses, and the Comtesse de Mirandole and a host of

others; and the queer thing was that the vaguest feeling of antagonism

tinged her mind towards these estimable people. They seemed forgeries,

impudent forgeries of the handwriting that had first written the word

Man on the earth. She had seen the original writing.

She felt also towards them the antagonism of the child to the grown up,

and of the person who can't explain to the person who stands waiting

for an explanation.

Then she would laugh quietly to herself, for no woman, surely, was ever

in a similar position. Then, casting her mind back, she would sometimes

choke a little with tears in her throat, tears for herself, dying of

loneliness, and for the hand that had brought her back from death.

They passed the entrance of the straits and Gibraltar, and one bright

blue winter's morning they entered the harbour of Marseilles, with

Marseilles before them blazing in the sun and the bugles of Fort St.

Jean answering the crying of the gulls and the drums of Fort St.

Nicholas.

Cléo was dressed in the same clothes she had worn on her escape from the

_Gaston de Paris_. She had borrowed a hat from one of the ladies on

board and stockings and other things from another lady; but she still

wore round her waist the leather belt with the empty knife sheath.

As she stood on deck, now, waiting whilst the _Carcassonne_ berthed at

the wharf alongside a great Messagerie steamer, she carried over her arm

the oilskin coat and, by its elastic band, the sou'wester. They were old

friends.

Then when the hawsers had been passed and the gang plank was being run

out she saw amongst the crowd on the wharf Monsieur de Brie and Madame

de Brie, also a number of well-dressed people, Parisians some of them.

Then she was being embraced by Madame de Brie and trying at the same

time to acknowledge the salute of Monsieur Bonvalot, her lawyer and man

of affairs, a stout pale man with long Dundreary whiskers who had come

from Paris to receive her.

All this crowd had not come purely on account of Cléo. Beside the people

interested in her there were several friends and relations of Prince

Selm, also his lawyer.

"I have taken rooms at the Hotel Noailles," said Madame de Brie, "and I

have brought you some clothes. Oh, my poor child, what you must have

suffered. But why did the people on board not lend you some better

things?"

"Oh, my clothes are all right," said Cléo, "people wanted to lend me

things, but I am quite comfortable in these."

She was looking about in search of Raft who was nowhere to be seen.

Then she was seized by the rest, by the Comtesse de Mirandole, by Madame

de Florey, and several others who had stopped at Marseilles--on their

way to Monte Carlo--to meet the _Carcassonne_ and greet the girl who had

alone survived the wreck of the _Gaston de Paris_, some of these people

knew her only slightly, but once a person becomes famous or notorious it

is astonishing how slight acquaintanceship blossoms into full

friendship.

Several photographers from the illustrated papers were amongst the crowd

and a Pathé operator was on the quay.

Cléo was already recovering that sixth sense, which one might call the

social sense, and, as she talked almost to half a dozen people at once,

answering questions and receiving felicitations, this sixth sense told

her quite plainly that she was being criticised by her felicitators,

that in their eyes she was a guy. That the old velour hat she had

borrowed, the hair that shewed beneath it, her face, which had still

upon it a reflection of Kerguelen, her old skirt and coat--all these

things, singly and taken together, were exciting in the minds of these

Parisians a pity which was not unrelated to humour. She did not mind,

she was looking for Raft.

It seemed to her that all these people, excellent in their way, had a

tinge of unreality about them. On the voyage she had sometimes vaguely

dreaded that Raft might be pushed away from her, despite herself, by the

contrast between him and her own order. It had come to her that the

difference between the beach of Kerguelen and the Avenue Malakoff might

take her like a giant of mind and divorce her from her allegiance to

him. That the good companion, the true friend, the person she loved

might alter completely under the touch of social alchemy.

Raft was impossible. She knew that. More impossible even than a sea

elephant from that far beach where life was real and Paris a dream.

Impossible in Paris where life was false and the far beach a dream.

Raft at a dinner party! Raft at one of those elegant afternoons where

the talk would run on the politics of the moment, on symbolism, on

Bergson, or Iturrino or the works of Othon Friesz--! He could not be her

companion in that place, in that atmosphere, within leagues of those

people.

She was not thinking that now. "These people" around her seemed

strangers; they had in fact always been strangers, strangers who had

kissed her, conversed with her, dined with her, but strangers; the one,

true, living, warm friend, the only one she had ever known, was Raft. It

was the penguins and sea-bulls over again, the polite, bowing,

absolutely correct penguins, the warm lumping, living sea-bulls.

Her heart, chilled by stephanotis-scented kisses, words of felicitation

and the fat smiles of men in tall hats and tight-buttoned overcoats,

chilled by Monsieur de Brie's gold rimmed eye glasses, chilled by a

social state that had never warmed her, cried out for Raft. Kerguelen

and that beach, where, even now, the sea-bulls might be lingering,

seemed a warm and blissful vision, real, alive, a place where life meant

living.

Ah, here he came. He had been helping to fix a hawser at the bows. She

ran towards him.

"Ah, there you are. Now, you are coming with me. I have told the captain

and he said this morning it would be all right as you were not signed

on."

"Right," said Raft, "but where are you going?"

"To an hotel."

He looked about him. He saw the crowd on deck but he did not connect it

with her. He was out of his reckoning. He had never thought of what

would happen in port as regarded her, or where he would go or what he

would do; making plans was not in his way. In the ordinary course of

things he would have gone to the British consulate and the Shipwrecked

Mariners' people would have returned him, carriage paid, to England. He

had always been in the hands of others and of chance.

She--he had always called her She, and here, be it said, he did not know

her name, never having asked--She had now taken him into her hands and

he felt vaguely that she was a power on this new beach where he was

stranded.

Had you told him that she was a woman of society and very wealthy his

idea of her power would not have been increased; he knew nothing of

wealth or society. She was She in her old dress that he knew so well,

and still carrying the sou'wester he had fetched from the cave where she

had done that chap in, and as for any idea of being under an obligation

to her for food or housing he had none. He would have done the same for

her.

Yet, to tell the truth, the docks, with no money in his pocket and the

cold prospect of brilliant Marseilles, had made him feel adrift like a

lost child. Civilisation had affected him as it had affected her, so

that something, now, made him put his hand on her shoulder to get the

touch of her, and she, knowing that every eye in all that party behind

her was upon them, took the great hand and held it and patted it.

It was as well to take her stand at once, though she was scarcely

bothering about that. Then, still holding his hand, she came along that

white deck towards the gang-plank. The officers knew and, as they bade

her good-bye, they nodded to Raft, but the Parisians knew nothing but

that Cléo had gone clearly mad--and that that awful sailor had placed

his hand on her shoulder, familiarly!

There were several automobiles waiting by the wharf and Madame de Brie,

half-dumb and slightly agitated, having pointed out the car she had

reserved for Cléo, the girl introduced Raft.

"This is Raft who saved my life," said Cléo.

Then she took Raft by the arm and pushed him into the seat beside the

chauffeur; having done that, she got into the car, following Madame de

Brie. The Comtesse de Mirandole got in, also, followed by Monsieur de

Brie and his gold eye glasses.

The mistral was blowing so that the windows of the car had to be kept

closed.

Used to fresh air, the girl nearly choked at first with the stuffiness

of the car. The olfactory nerve is really a prolongation of the brain,

as though the brain, distrusting the other senses, had pushed out a

trustworthy scout to see what the world and its contents were really

like. The sense of smell never lies; it is of all senses the truest and

it handed along without comment to the brain of Cléo the faint perfume

of the stephanotis affected by Madame de Brie and of the Yoya-yoya

affected by the Comtesse de Mirandole, also traces from the varnish and

upholstery of the car.

"Who, my dear, is that man," asked Madame de Brie. She had almost said

"that dreadful man" but she had checked herself.

"Man--Oh, that is Raft. He saved my life."

"How delightful," said the Countess, "and he seems quite a character."

"Quite," said Madame de Brie half-heartedly, "but my dear Cléo, you will

excuse an old woman for suggesting it, your generosity must be on its

guard, he placed his hand on your shoulder, quite familiarly it seemed

to me."

"Well," said the choking Cléo, "why should he not? I have slept with my

head on his chest on a rock and I have stabbed a man who was trying to

kill him. Between us we fought a whole crowd of Chinamen. He had a

harpoon and I had a knife and we beat them and took their ship. Do you

mind having the window a wee bit open? I feel rather faint."

"That's better," said she to the speechless other ones, "I'm so used to

fresh air that I can't bear to be closed in."

"But my dear Cléo," suddenly broke out the old lady, "what do you intend

to do with him?"

"Do with him? Nothing. He's my friend, that's all. Ah, here we are."

The car had drawn up in the courtyard of the Hotel.

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE LEPER

Déjeuner had been prepared for the party in a private room, a big room,

for there were twelve guests all told, including not only Cléo's friends

but the business men, and the friends of Prince Selm.

But before thinking of déjeuner or anything else she had to see about

Raft.

She left him standing in the hall whilst she interviewed the manager.

Actually, the business would have been easier for her had she brought

with her an animal, even of the largest pattern. The manager, when he

had caught a glimpse of the intended guest, revolted; not openly, it is

true, but with genuflexions and outstretching of hands.

Where could this man be put, what could be done with him? The valets and

ladies' maids would certainly not eat with him, the visitors would

object to his presence in the lounge, the servants in the servants'

quarters. He was a common sailor man. Heavens! What a problem that

manager had to face, something quite new, quite illogical, yet quite

logical. He had heard of the wreck of the _Gaston_ and he was as

interested in Clêo as a hotel manager could be. He understood the whole

case when she told him that Raft had saved her life; he was a man of

broad mind, but he knew intimately the mental make up of his servants,

his visitors and their servants. He discussed the matter with Cléo quite

openly and she saw the reason of all he said. Raft was "impossible" in

that hotel. His heroism did not count a bit; it did with the manager who

would not have to sit at table with him, it did not with the waiters and

valets and ladies' maids who would have to associate with him, or the

guests whose eyes would be offended by his presence.

"He belongs to a ship," said the manager. Then he solved the question

with a burst.

"I will look after him myself." He ran into the hall and called Raft to

come with him; then, followed by Cléo, he led the way to a sitting-room,

a most elegant sitting-room upholstered in blue silk.

"Here," said he to the sea lion, "will you take your seat and déjeuner

will be served to you."

"I have to leave you for a bit," said Cléo, 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.

"Cléo, they are waiting déjeuner 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 Cléo'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 Cléo, "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 déjeuner 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 déjeuner 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

tête-à-téte, which, after all, is rather a depressing affair."

The déjeuner was not a depressing affair. Cléo 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, Cléo was

talking and the rest listening.

"As I shall be very busy for a long time," said Cléo, "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.

Cléo 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 Cléo, "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 Crédit 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 Crédit 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 Cléo 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 Prolongué 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."

* * * * *

"Cléo," said the distracted Madame de Brie, writing to a friend, "Cléo

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 Santé 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

Cléo 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

End of Project Gutenberg's The Beach of Dreams, by H. De Vere Stacpoole