as the Place de la
Concorde which bordered quite naturally the great beach of Kerguelen.

CHAPTER XXV

STORIES ON THE BEACH

For a week after that day not a word was said about their departure for
that problematical bay to the westward where ships put in, or where they
might put in should they find themselves in the region of Kerguelen. The
idea seemed to the girl like one of those nightmare ideas, those
terrific tasks which fever or indigestion sets to one in dreams.

It blew during that week as it had never blown before; blew from the
north and the south and the west Atlantic oceans of rain driving
seawards from the hills and passing off towards the islands, followed by
breaks of clear weather and blue sparkling skies filled with the tearing
screaming wind.

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, beyo