“We might have had some difficulty in getting a boat,” remarked Fordham. “As it happens, though, I saw my commissionaire, François Berthod, in Montreux, and he has a brother at St. Gingolph who owns one. So I made him wire him to look out for us.”
But when they reached St. Gingolph a fresh deadlock seemed likely to arise. There was not much demand for boatmen at the out-of-the-way, seldom-visited little village. Accordingly those amphibious worthies were, one and all, absent, following their other avocations, and among them Jules Berthod. To the whereabouts of the latter nobody seemed able to furnish a clue. The woman who managed the wineshop opined that he had gone over to Bouveret, and would not return till late; but in any case it didn’t matter, she being perfectly certain that neither Jules nor any other boat-owner would cross the lake that afternoon—an opinion abundantly backed up in unintelligible patois by more than one blue-bloused boozer lounging on the wooden seats.
But Fordham knew better, and he was right. For, as luck would have it, who should arrive at that very moment but the missing Jules—a cheery, copper-faced athlete, who, recognising Fordham, made no great difficulty about the undertaking. He glanced at the party, then at his boat; remarked dubiously that it was rather late in the day for crossing, and he should hardly get back that night; then shrugged his shoulders, ejaculated “Enfin,” and straightway set off to haul in his craft.
The latter, though roomy, was somewhat narrow of beam, and not so heavy as it looked. There were seats for three rowers, each pulling a pair of sculls.
“I’ll take stroke, if it’s all the same to everybody,” said Philip.
Fordham was about to demur, Philip being the heaviest man of the party, except perhaps the boatman, and there was abundance of weight in the stem; but remembering that Alma had been voted coxswain, he refrained. So Berthod was constituted bow, and Scott, eager to distinguish himself, took the remaining pair.
It was five o’clock when they pushed off. From St. Gingolph to Vevey the distance is about eight miles; therefore they reckoned upon barely two hours of easy pulling. Another two hours’ walk in the cool of the evening would bring them back to Les Avants almost before it was dark.
“I don’t think much of this sort of rowing,” grumbled Scott, for about the third time as, with a final effort to scrape down some of the stars of heaven, he violently fouled Philip’s oar. “They don’t seem to know what it is in this country. Fancy having your oars hitched on to an iron peg, instead of running free in rowlocks. Why, you can’t even feather.”
“I suppose you went in for boating a good deal when you were at the ’Varsity, Mr Scott?” remarked Fordham, innocently. It was rather cruel, Scott being one of that rapidly increasing class of parson who has never kept terms at any university.
“Er—not a very great deal—a little, that is,” was the somewhat confused reply.