Part 35 (1/2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleo stopped.

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

There was a dead silence.

Monsieur Bonvalot, a socialist, though a business man, nodded his head.

He broke the silence.

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

”Oh, no, monsieur, he is not,” said Cleo, ”not in Ma.r.s.eilles. But do not think I am quarrelling with social conditions. There must, I believe, always be hewers of wood and drawers of water. I am just talking of Raft and my own position as regards him. I am not thinking of the fact that he saved my life time and again, or that he nursed me with his great rough hands as tenderly as a mother. I am thinking of the fact that I have discovered something quite new and genuine, a human heart that is warm and real and true and simple, simple as the heart of a child, a mind that has no crookedness, a man who, in Paris or here in Ma.r.s.eilles, is absurd, not because he is rough and uncouth, but because he is like Monsieur Gulliver amongst the little people. I have seen the great, I have seen the wind and the sun and the sea and the mountains as they really are, and life as it really is, for those who really live. I have seen death, none of you here have ever seen or imagined death, none of you here have ever seen life, none of you here have seen the world.

You all have been protected from the truth of things, and fortunately, for the truth of things would break you as it would have broken me but for Raft, who sits in a room at the end of that corridor and whom the manager of this hotel is serving with food with his own hands because the hotel servants would consider it an insult were they asked to carry him his food.

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

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

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

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

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