They talked a good deal during these days and at odd times, and the girl began to get some true glimpses of the mind of her companion, a mind that had never grown up, yet had in no wise deteriorated from remaining ungrown. Raft, who had been round the world a dozen times and more, knew less of the world than a modern child. Fights and roaring drunks and the smoke haze of bar rooms, wharf Messalinas and sailors’ lodging houses had done him no harm at all. His innocence was vast and indestructible as his ignorance.
Bompard and La Touche were old men of the world compared to Raft; they were of different stuff, and being yachtsmen they had been long rubbed against the ways of high civilization.
To the girl, born and bred amongst all the intricacies of modern life and thought, and with a sense of mind-values as delicate as a jeweller’s scales, Raft was a revelation.
She tried to sound his past. He had no past beyond the Albatross. He could tell all about the Albatross and his shipmates and the Old Man and so forth, but beyond that lay only a ship called the Pathfinder, and beyond that a muddle of ships and ports, a forest of masts stretching to a grey time an infinite distance away, the time of his childhood. He had no professed religion and he could neither read nor write.
Yet he had remembered her sou’wester, this man without a memory and he was always astonishing her by remembering little things she had said or things she had wished for.
Of social distinction, beyond the division of afterguard from fo’c’sle, he seemed to possess little idea, save for a vague echo, caught from the man Harbutt, about the Rich People; and as to sex, beyond a queer instinctive delicacy and a tenderness due to her weakness and the memory of how he had found her, she might just as well have been a man, or a child like himself.
Another thing that struck her forcibly was the sense of his good humour. His mind seemed to possess an equable warm temperature, a temperature that it seemed impossible to lower or raise. She could not fancy him getting angry about anything. Had she seen him as in the past during one of his rare sprees, fighting the crowd and tossing men about like ninepins, she would have said: ‘This is not the same man’—and maybe she would have been right.
“Where did you come from,” said he one day to her as they sat rain-bound watching the gulls dashing about over the crests of the incoming seas.
“I came from Paris—you have never been to Paris?”
No, he had never been to Paris. He knew of the place, it was in France. Then she thought that she would interest him by trying to describe it. She spoke of the busy streets and the great Boulevards, then she tried to describe the people and what they were doing and then, as she talked, it was just as though Kerguelen had become the big end of a telescope and the doings of civilisation, as exemplified by Paris, a panorama seen at the little end.