Let pride in my ship, then, be the first emotion I shall record in this account of her voyages. Certainly the summer smiled upon us when we started down the turbid, evil-smelling river Tyne, and began to dip our whale-nosed bows to the North Sea. The men I had shipped for the service, attracted by the terms of my offer, and drawn from the cream of the yachting ports of England, were as fine a lot as ever trod a spotless deck. Benson, my chief engineer, used to be one of Yarrow’s most trusted experts. Captain Larry had been almost everything nautical, both afloat and ashore. A clean-shaven, blue-eyed, hard-faced man, I have staked my fortune upon his courage. And how shall I forget Cain and Abel, the breezy twin quartermasters from County Cork—to say nothing of Balaam, the Scotch boatswain, or Merry, the little cockney cook! These fellows had been taken aside and told one by one frankly that the voyage spelled danger, and after danger, reward. They accepted my conditions with a frankness which declared their relish for them. I had but three refusals, and one of these, Harry Avenhill, had no title to be a chooser.
Such was the crew which steamed with me, away from gloomy Newcastle, southward, I knew not to what seas or harbourage. To be just, certain ideas and conjectures of my own dictated a vague course, and were never absent from my reckoning. I believed that the ocean had living men’s secrets in her possession, and that she would yield them up to me. Let Fate, I said, stand at the tiller, and Prudence be her handmaiden. But one man in all Europe knew that I intended to call at the port of Havre, and afterwards to steam for Cape Town. To others I told a simpler tale. The yacht was my hobby, the voyage a welcome term of idleness. They rarely pursued the subject further.
Now, I had determined to call at the port of Havre, not because I had any business to do there, but because intelligence had come to me that Joan Fordibras was spending some weeks at Dieppe, and that I should find her at the Hôtel de Palais. We made a good passage down the North Sea, and on the morning following our arrival I stood among a group of lazy onlookers, who watched the bathers go down to the sea at Dieppe and found their homely entertainment therein. Joan Fordibras was one of the last to bathe, but many eyes followed her with interest, and I perceived that she was an expert swimmer, possessed of a graceful figure, and of a daring in the water which had few imitators among her sex. Greatly admired and evidently very well known, many flatterers surrounded her when she had dressed, and I must have passed her by at least a dozen times before she suddenly recognised me, and came running up to greet me.
“Why, it’s Dr. Fabos, of London! Isn’t it, now?” she exclaimed. “I thought I could not be mistaken. Whoever would have believed that so grave a person would spend his holiday at Dieppe?”
“Two days,” said I, answering her to the point. “I am yachting round the coast, and some good instinct compelled me to come here.”
She looked at me, I thought, a little searchingly. A woman’s curiosity was awake, in spite of her nineteen years. None the less she made a pretty picture enough; and the scene about stood for a worthy frame. Who does not know the summer aspect of a French watering-place—the fresh blue sea, the yellow beach, the white houses with the green jalousies, the old Gothic churches with their crazy towers—laughter and jest and motor-cars everywhere—Mademoiselle La France tripping over the shingle with well-poised ankle—her bathing dress a very miracle of ribbons and diminuendos—the life, the vivacity, the joy of it, and a thousand parasols to roof the whispers in. So I saw Mistress Joan amid such a scene. She, this shrewd little schemer of nineteen, began to suspect me.
“Who told you that I was at Dieppe?” she asked quickly.
“Instinct, the best of guides. Where else could you have been?”
“Why not at Trouville?”
“Because I am not there.”