And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft, bearing a brass tray, and on the tray an electro-teapot, sugar-basin, and milk-jug, and a white cup and saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernalia! Exquisite and potent draft, far surpassing champagne drunk amid the bright glances of beauty! Only the finest China tea is employed aboard the Velsa. I drank, and was healed; and I gave also to the shipper. Earth was transformed. We began to talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling over, spurted. It was a grand life. We descried the French coast. The hours flew. Before breakfast-time we were becalmed, in sunshine, between the piers at Boulogne, and had to go in on the engine. At 8:15 we ran her on the mud, on a rising tide, next to a pilot-boat, the Jean et Marie, inhabited by three jolly French sailors. We carried a warp to the Quai Chanzy, and another to a buoy, and considered ourselves fairly in France.
The officials of the French republic on the quay had been driven by the spectacle of our peculiar Dutch lines and rig to adopt strange, emotional attitudes; and as soon as we were afloat, the French republic came aboard in a dinghy manned by two acolytes. The skipper usually receives the representatives of foreign powers, but as the skipper speaks no French, and as this was the first time I had entered France in this style, I thought I would be my own ambassador. I received the French republic in my saloon; we were ravishingly polite to each other; we murmured sweet compliments to each other. He gave me a clean bill of health, and went off with four francs and one half-penny. There is no nation like the French. A French milliner will make a hat out of a piece of felt and nothing; and a French official will make a diplomatic episode out of nothing at all, putting into five minutes of futility all the Gallic civilization of centuries.
Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as its area is narrowly limited, and its entrance difficult, the amount of signaling that goes on is extraordinary. A single ship will fill the entrance; hence a flag flies to warn the surrounding seas when the entrance is occupied or about to be occupied. The state of the tide is also indicated, and the expert can read from hieroglyphics slung in the air the exact depth of water at a particular moment between the piers. In addition, of course, there is the weather signaling. We had scarcely been in port a couple of hours before the weather signaling shocked us; nay, we took it as an affront to ourselves. The south cone went up. We had come in at the tail-end of one south gale, and now another was predicted! How could small people like us hope to work our way down to Brittany in the teeth of the gale! And I had an appointment in the harbor of Carantec, a tiny village near Morlaix, in a week’s time! The thing was monstrous. But the south cone was hoisted, and it remained hoisted. And the cone is never displayed except for a real gale,—not a yachtsman’s gale, but a sailor’s gale, which is serious.
A tender went forth to meet a Dutch American liner in the roads. We followed her along the jetty. At the end of the jetty the gale was already blowing; and rain-squalls were all round the horizon. Soon we were in the midst of a squall ourselves. The rain hid everything for a minute. It cleared. The vast stretch of sands glistened wet, with the variegated bathing-tents, from which even then beautiful creatures were bathing in a shallow surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex roofs of Boulogne, and to the north a road climbing up to the cliff-top, and the illimitable dunes that are a feature of this part of the country. Above all floated thunder-clouds, white in steely blue. The skipper did not like those thunder-clouds; he said they were the most dangerous of all clouds, “because anything might come out of them.” He spoke as if they already contained in their bosoms every conceivable sort of weather, which they would let loose according to their caprice.
The rain resumed heavily. The wind compelled us to hold tight to the rail of the pier. A poster announced that in the casino behind the rain, Suppé’s “Boccaccio” was to be performed that night, and Massenet’s “Thaïs” the next night. And opera seemed a very artificial and unnecessary form of activity as we stood out there in the reality of the storm. The Atlantic liner had now bid good-by to the tender, and was hugely moving. She found sea-room, and then turned with the solemnity of her bigness, and headed straight into the gale, pitching like a toy. The rain soon veiled her, and she was gone. I could not picture the Velsa in such a situation, at any rate with the owner on board. We went back, rather pensive, to the Quai Chanzy.
