The Beach of Dreams | Page 5

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 Cowes to Naples according to season, a cup
gatherer and club-house haunter.
But Exploration gave him the incentive and the Musée
Océanographique of Monaco his inspiration, limitless wealth supplied
the means.
The Gaston de Paris built by Viguard of Toulon was an ocean going
steam yacht of twelve hundred and fifty tons with engines by Conturier
of Nantes and everything of the latest from Conturier's twin-action
centrifugal bilge pumps to the last thing in sea valves. She was
reckoned by those who knew her the finest sea-going yacht in the world
and she was certainly the chef-d'oeuvre 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