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.