yacht in the world and she was certainly the chef-d’œuvre of Lafiette, Viguard’s chief designer. Lafiette was more than a designer, he was a creator, the sea was in his blood giving him that touch of genius or madness, that something eccentric which made him at times cast rules and formulae aside.
The decks of the Gaston de Paris ran flush, with little encumbrance save a deck-house forward given over to electrical and deep sea instruments.
Forward of the engine room and right to the bulkheads of the fo’c’sle ran a lower deck reached by a hatch aft of the instrument room. Here were stowed the dredges and buoys and all the gear belonging to them, trawl nets and deep sea traps, cable and spare rope and sounding-wire, harpoons and grancs and a hundred odds and ends, all in order and spick and span as the gear of a warship.
Aft of the engine-room the yacht was a little palace. Prince Selm would labour like any of his crew over a net coming in or in an emergency, but he ate off silver and slept between sheets of exceedingly fine linen. Though a sailor, almost one might say a fisherman, he was always Monsieur le Prince and though his hobby lay in the depths of the sea his intellect did not lie there too. Politics, Literature and Art travelled with him as mind companions, whilst in the flesh he often managed to bring off with him on his “outlandish expeditions” more or less pleasant people from the great world where Civilisation sits in cities, feeding Art and Philosophy, Science and Literature with the hearts and souls of men.
The main saloon of the Gaston de Paris fought in all its details against the idea of shipboard life, the gilt and scrolls of the yacht decorator, the mirrors, and all the rest of his abominations were not to be found here, panels by Chardin painted for Madame de Pompadour occupied the walls, the main lamp, a flying dragon by Benvenuto Cellini, clutching in its claws a globe of fire, had, for satellites, four torch bearers of bronze by Claus, a library, writing and smoking room, combined, opened from the main saloon, and there was a boudoir decorated in purple and pearl with flower pictures by Lactropius unfaded despite their date of 1685.
Nothing could be stranger to the mind than the contrast between the fo’c’sle of the Albatross and the after cabins of the Gaston, nothing, except, maybe, the contrast between a garret in Montmartre or Stepney and a drawing-room in the Avenue du Trocadéro or Mayfair.
Dinner was served on board the Gaston de Paris at seven, and to-night the Prince and his four guests, seated beneath the flying dragon of Cellini and enjoying their soup, held converse together light-heartedly and with a spirit that had been somewhat lacking of late. Every sea voyage has its periods of depression due to monotony; they had not sighted a ship for over ten days, and this evening the glimpse of the Albatross revealed through the break in the weather had in some curious way shattered the sense of isolation and broken the monotony. The four guests of the Prince were: Madame la Comtesse de Warens, an old lady with a passion for travel, a free thinker, whose mother was a friend of Voltaire in her youth and whose father had been a member of the Jacobin club; she was eighty-four years of age, declared herself indestructible by time, and her one last ambition to be a burial at sea. She was also a Socialistic-Anarchist, possessed an income of some forty thousand pounds a year derived from speculations of her late husband conducted during the war with Germany in 1870, yet was never known to give a sou to charity; her hands were all but the hands of a skeleton and covered with jewels, she smoked cigarettes incessantly. She was one of those old women whose energy seems to increase with age, tireless as a gnat she was always the last in bed and the first on deck, though lying in her bunk half the night reading French novels of which she had a trunkful and smoking her eternal cigarettes.
Beside her sat her niece, Cléo de Bromsart, English on the mother’s side and educated in England, a girl of twenty, unmarried, dark-haired, fragile and beautiful as a dream. She was one of the old nobility, without dilution, yet strangely enough with money, for the Bromsarts, without marrying into trade, had adapted themselves to the new times so cleverly that Eugène de Bromsart the last of his race had retired from life leaving his only daughter and the last of her race wealthy, even by the standard of wealth set in Paris. She was a sportswoman and, despite her lack of frailty, had led an outdoor life and possessed a nerve of steel.
Madame de Warens had brought the girl up after she left school, had laboured over her and found her labour in vain. Cléo had no leanings towards the People and the opinions of her aunt seemed to her a sort of disreputable madness bred on hypocrisy. Cléo looked on the lower classes just as she looked on animals, beings with rights of their own but belonging to an entirely different order of creation, and one thing certainly could be said for her—she was honest in her outlook on life.
Beside her sat Doctor Epinard, the ship’s doctor, a serious young man who spoke little, and the fifth at table was Lagross, the sea painter, who had come for the sake of his health and to absorb the colours of the ocean. The vision of the Albatross with towering canvas breasting the blue-green seas in an atmosphere of sunset and storm was with him still as he sat listening to the chatter of the others and occasionally joining in. He intended to paint that picture.
It had come to him as a surprise. They had been playing cards when a quarter-master called them on deck saying that the weather had moderated and that there was a ship in sight, and there, away across the tumbling seas, the Albatross had struck his vision, remote, storm surrounded, and sunlit, almost a vision of the past in these days of mechanism.
“Now tell me, Prince,” Madame de Warens was saying, “how long do you propose staying at this Kerguelen Land of yours?”
“Not more than a week,” replied the Prince. “I want to take some soundings off the Smoky Islands and I shall put in for a day on the mainland where you can go ashore if you like, but I shan’t stay here long. It is like putting one’s head into a wolf’s mouth.”
“How is that?”
“Weather. You saw that sudden squall we passed through this evening, or rather you heard it, no doubt, well that’s the sort of thing Kerguelen brews.”
“Suppose,” said the astute old lady, “it brewed one of those things, only much worse, and we were blown ashore?”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Our engines can fight anything.”
“Are there any natives in this place?”
“Only penguins and rabbits.”
“Tell me,” said Lagross, “that three-master we saw just now, would she be making for Kerguelen?”
“Oh, no, she must be out of her course and beating up north. She’s not a whaler, and ships like that would keep north of the Crozets. Probably she was driven down by that big storm we had a week ago. We wouldn’t be where we are only that I took those soundings south of Marion Island.”
“And, after Kerguelen, what land shall we see next?” asked the old lady.
“New Amsterdam, madame,” replied the Prince, “and after that the Sunda Islands and beautiful Java with its sun and palm trees.”
Mademoiselle de Bromsart shivered slightly. She had been silent up to this, and she spoke now with eyes fixed far away as if viewing the picture of Java with its palms and sapphire skies.
“Could we not go there now?” asked she.
“In what way?” asked the Prince.
“Turn the ship round and leave this place behind,” she replied.
“But
