The Beach of Dreams Part 33

"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 Pet.i.t," 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 s.e.x 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 Cleo 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 pa.s.s before her mind's eye with her gold eye gla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed the entrance of the straits and Gibraltar, and one bright blue winter's morning they entered the harbour of Ma.r.s.eilles, with Ma.r.s.eilles 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.

Cleo 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 _Carca.s.sonne_ 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 pa.s.sed 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 Cleo. 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 Cleo, "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 Ma.r.s.eilles--on their way to Monte Carlo--to meet the _Carca.s.sonne_ 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 ill.u.s.trated papers were amongst the crowd and a Pathe operator was on the quay.

Cleo 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-b.u.t.toned overcoats, chilled by Monsieur de Brie's gold rimmed eye gla.s.ses, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 Cleo 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 Cleo, the girl introduced Raft.

"This is Raft who saved my life," said Cleo.

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 gla.s.ses.

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 Cleo 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."