The Beach of Dreams | Page 4

back, clinging to the lift they saved themselves, attacking it again with the dumb fury of dogs or wolves on a fighting prey. Twenty times it tried to destroy them and twenty times they all but had it under.
The fight died out of the monster for a moment and Raft had nearly an armful of it in when it stiffened, fighting free of him, owing to Ponting and the other fellow not having made good. They clung for a moment without moving, resting, and Raft glancing down saw far away below the narrow deck driving wedge-like through the foam-capped seas.
Then the struggle began again. The sail, like its would-be captors, seemed also to have taken breath, it held firm, relaxed, banged out again in thunder, developed new hoods and folds as a struggling monster might develop new heads and kinks, and then, all of a sudden when it seemed that no effort was of avail the end came.
The wind paused for a moment, as if gathering up all its strength against the dogged persistency which is man, and in that moment the three on the yard had the sail under their chests beating and crushing the life out of it. Then the gaskets were passed round it and they clung for a moment to rest and breathe.
It was nothing, or they thought nothing of it, this battle for life with a monster, just the stowing of a top-gallant sail in dirty weather, and most likely when they got down the Bo'sw'n would call them farmers for being such a time over it. Meanwhile they clung idly for a moment, partly to rest and partly to look at something worth seeing.
The squall was blowing out, there was nothing behind it and away on the port quarter the almost setting sun had broken through the smother and was lighting the sea.
There, set in a thousand square acres of snowcapped tourmaline, white as a gull and beautiful as grace itself, was running a vessel under bear poles. The two yellow funnels, the cut of the hull, told Ponting what she was. He had seen her twice before and no sailor who had once set eyes on her could forget her.
"See that blighter," he yelled across to Raft. "Know her?"
"Should think I did, she's the Gaston de Paree--a yacht--seen her in T'lon."
Then they came down, crawling like weary men, and on deck no one abused them for their slackness or the time they'd been over their job. The Albatross was running easy and the Bo'sw'n with others was taken up with a momentary curiosity over the great white yacht.
No one knew her but Ponting, who had for several years acted as deck hand on some of the Mediterranean boats.
"I know her," said he ranging up beside the others. "She's the Gaston de Paree, a yot--seen her in T'lon harbour and seen her again at Suez, she's a thousand tonner, y'can't mistake them funnels nor the width of them, she's a twenty knotter and the chap that owns her is a king or somethin'; last time I saw her she was off to the China seas, they say she's all cluttered up with dredges and dipsy gear, and she mostly spends her time takin' soundin's and scrabblin' up shell fish and such--that's his way of amusin' himself."
"Then he must be crazy," said the Bo'sw'n, "but b'God he's got a beauty under him--what's he doin' down here away?"
"Ax me another," said Ponting. Raft stood with the others, watching the Gaston de Paris from whose funnels now the smoke was coming festooned on the wind, then he went below to shed his oilskins and smoke.
She had ceased to interest him.
CHAPTER III
THE GASTON DE PARIS
Old Ponting was right in all his particulars, except one. The owner of the Gaston de Paris was not a king, only a prince.
Prince Selm, a gentleman like his Highness of Monaco with a passion for the deep sea and its exploration. The Holy Roman Empire had given his great grandfather the title of prince, and estates in Thuringia gave him money enough to do what he pleased, an unfortunate marriage gave him a distaste for High Civilization, and his scientific bent and passion for the sea--inherited with a strain of old Norse blood--did the rest.
He had chosen well. Cards, women and wine, pleasure and the glittering things of life, all these betray one, but the sea, though she may kill, never leaves a man broken, never destroys his soul.
But Eugene Henry William of Selm for all this sea passion might have remained a landsman, for the simple reason that he was one of those thorough souls for whom Life and an Object are synonymous terms. In other words he would never have made a yachtsman, a creature shifting from Keil to Cowes and