"But," said the husband, "if you want monsieur to kiss your mother for you, you ought first to give him the kiss."
"Oh yes, certainly!" exclaimed the young wife effusively; "with all my heart." And she flung her arms round my neck. Here was an unusual situation! That woman and I had never seen one another till the night before, and in the morning we were still strangers to one another; at starting we were merely acquaintances; by luncheon we had developed into friends; parting made us seem like brother and sister. Oh! mysteries of the heart, misunderstood by the crowd at large, but which turn those to whom God has revealed His secrets into beings destined for suffering. I had greater difficulty in leaving these friends of a day than it would have given me pleasure to see friends of twenty years' standing.
"You will not forget my name, will you, monsieur?" the young wife said.
"Try and read the next books that I shall write, madame, and I promise you you shall find that name in one of my very first novels."
There was also, perhaps, underlying the attraction for the ship, my anxiety at the prospect of the more or less perilous descent to which I was about to subject myself. Luckily, I had plenty of spectators to witness my gymnastic manœuvres, and you know how the feeling of being looked at redoubles one's courage. So I went bravely forward towards the ship's side; I caught hold of the main shrouds as well as the ladder, which the pilot, afraid, perhaps, of my falling into the sea before I had paid him his crown, had, to make my descent easier, held taut with one hand, while with his other, by help of a rope fastened through a port-hole, he kept the skiff within reach of the ship. I had not descended two rungs of the ladder before the wind blew my hat off. I did not even try to catch it, for I more than needed both hands to clutch fast hold of the ladder. At last, to my great satisfaction, and without displaying too much clumsiness, I reached the bottom of the skiff. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I was scarcely seated on one of the seats in the boat before the pilot let go both ladder and rope, and we were thirty feet away from la Pauline. I could soon hear the captain's voice shouting—
"Let go the main-sails!"
And instantly the sails stopped quivering and the ship resumed her course. Our two young people stood astern, he waving his hat and she her handkerchief. Meanwhile, the pilot was trimming a little sail; I noticed that it was set by the skiff suddenly heeling over, so if I had not held on to the opposite side of the boat I should have been spilled right into the sea. The joke soon began to appear rather less funny to me—all the more so since the pilot, who could hardly speak any French, and who was chary of using what words he did know of our language, kept staring at the horizon with a fixedness that troubled me. The fact was that the nearer we approached the coast the rougher grew the sea. Night, too, was rapidly coming on. I could still see the three-master, because its pyramids of sails stood out against the purple horizon of the setting sun; but it was evident that they could no longer see us, or that, if they did see us, we must have looked like a gull hidden among the waves. Those who have ever found themselves in a frail boat over a watery abyss, with a moving wall to right and left, immensity of sea before and behind and a stormy sky over their heads, alone know what the wind has told them, as it drives through their hair soaked with foam. In half an hour's time the pilot was compelled to lower his sail. He took to the oars, but they did not grip the waves properly. Here and there we saw high white waves fling their broken crests up into the air, which the wind carried to us in fine, ice-cold rain. These were the places where the waves broke against the rocks. Luckily the flow was carrying us landwards; but at the same time that the flowing tide served us, the wind blew us past the mouth of the Loire and drove us along the coast of Croisic. I myself had no notion where we were. Night came on faster and faster, and the circle of darkness contracted more and more, until we only had about twenty paces of horizon.
I made up my mind to hold on tight to the bottom of the boat, and to trouble about nothing else except preventing myself being pitched into the sea; but, seated at the bottom as I was, I was half soaked in the water we had shipped when we were sailing. Two hours went by in this fashion, and I must say they seemed the longest hours I ever lived. Once, when I rose to look about me, I saw the pilot make a quick movement, and next instant the barque bounded up as though it were gone crazy; we passed under a sort of cataract which came from the dark crest of a rock. I thought all was over that time; the water ran down the collar of my shirt and streamed right through to my gaiters. I shut my eyes and waited; at the end of five minutes, as I still felt I was in the boat, I opened them again. We were neither better nor worse off than before, and nothing had changed except that we could now hear the noise of the surf against the shore; we were evidently not farther off than the length of a couple of cables. The pilot held on to the helm and, driven by the flowing tide, left all the work to the sea; his sole task (and no easy one it seemed to me) being to steer us through the rocks. Suddenly he got up and shouted to me—
"Hold on tight!"