“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.