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.”