To-day as my boat grated on the gravel my eyes fell on a young English lord who was holding the centre of the stage in the sunlight. He was dressed from head to foot in a skin-tight suit of underwear which had been cut for him by a Garden-of-Eden tailor. He was just out of the water—a straight, well-built, ruddy-skinned fellow—every inch a man! What birth and station had done for him would become apparent when his valet began to hand him his Bond Street outfit. The next instant William stood beside him. Then there came a wriggle about the shoulders, the slip of a buckle, and he was overboard and out again before my lord had discarded his third towel.
I fell to thinking.
Naked they were equals. That was the way they came into the world and that's the way they would go out. And yet within the hour my lord would be back to his muffins and silver service, with two flunkies behind his chair, and William would be swabbing out a boat or poling me home through the pond lilies.
But why?—I kept asking myself. A totally idiotic and illogical question, of course. Both were of an age; both would be a joy to a sculptor looking for modern gods with which to imitate the Greek ones. Both were equal in the sight of their Maker. Both had served their country—my lord, I learned later, being one of the first to draw a bead on Spion Kop close enough to be of any use—and both were honest—at least William was—and the lord must have been.
There is no answer—never can be. And yet the picture of the two as they stood glistening in the sunlight continues to rise in my memory, and with it always comes this same query—one which will never down—Why should there be the difference?
But the summer is moving on apace. There is another Inn and another William—or rather, there was one several hundred years ago before he went off crusading. It is an old resort of mine. Seven years now has old Leah filled my breakfast cup with a coffee that deserves a hymn of praise in its honor. I like it hot—boiling, blistering hot, and the old woman brings it on the run, her white sabots clattering across the flower-smothered courtyard. During all these years I have followed with reverent fingers not only the slopes of its roof but the loops of swinging clematis that crowd its balconies and gabies as well. I say “my” because I have known this Inn of William the Conqueror long enough to include it in the list of the many good ones I frequent over Europe—the Bellevue, for instance, at Dordrecht, over against Papendrecht (I shall be there in another month). And the Britannia in Venice, and I hope still a third in unknown Athens—unknown to me—my objective point this year.
This particular Inn with the roof and the clematis, is at Dives, twenty miles from Trouville on the coast. You never saw anything like it, and you never will again. I hold no brief for my old friend Le Remois, the proprietor, but the coffee is not the only thing over which grateful men chant hymns. There is a kitchen, resplendent in polished brass, with three French chefs in attendance, and a two-century-old spit for roasting. There is the wine-cellar, in which cobwebs and not labels record the age and the vintage; there is a dining-room—three of them—with baronial fireplaces, sixteenth-century furniture, and linen and glass to match—to say nothing of tapestries, Spanish leathers, shrines, carved saints, ivories, and pewter—the whole a sight to turn bric-a-brac fiends into burglars—not a difficult thing by the way—and then, of course—there is the bill!
“Where have you been, M. Le Rémois?” asked a charming woman.
“To church, Madame.”