After lunch we went again strolling about and left ourselves just time for a turn in Hyde Park before dinner. I begged for a four-wheeler instead of taking a hansom to drive there, dreading that sort of conveyance.
We were desperately hungry by this time and certainly we earned our dinner that day, which we took at “Monico’s,” a famous restaurant not only for the quality of the menu, but also for that of the guests. We ended our evening in a music-hall, and came back to the hotel after midnight to enjoy a well earned rest.
The following morning we ran down by train to the Crystal Palace where a great festival was given by the Temperance Society. This palace is used now for popular meetings, concerts, theatres, flower-shows, bazaars, etc. We entered a hall of enormous proportions where we found a monster musical gathering of some five thousand singers. A room was shown to us especially assigned for strayed children who had lost themselves in the crowd. In our presence a policeman brought there a small boy who was shouting desperately, “I want mother!” There was great animation in the extensive grounds all round. A dinner gratis was offered to the visitors, who belonged for the most part to the middle classes. They ate their meal under the trees, and the grass was all strewn with egg-shells and scraps of paper. As drink only beer was allowed. Two military schools, with their bands at the head, defiled before us.
The pleasure-train which brought us back to London was taken by assault. We ran from end to end of the long train in search of seats nowhere to be found, until at last we were literally hurled into a crowded compartment in which I squeezed myself between two fat ladies, taking up as little room as I could. Though we were returning from a temperance festival, there was a tipsy woman drunk with beer in the next car, who was leaning out of the window shouting bacchanal songs in a voice thick with drink.
We left London on the following morning. Our old Pole exhorted us to prolong our stay for another day, but we had no more time, and he saw us off at Victoria station. The mail train that was taking us back to France conveyed us swiftly to Newhaven from where we crossed by the ordinary steamer to Dieppe.
The train stopped close to the landing-place. The sea looked horrible from the pier, the wind was blowing strongly and black clouds hung over the sea. The prospect of crossing the channel in such weather was not enticing, and we were inclined to turn back to London, but it would be a shame to be so chicken-hearted, and braving sea-sickness we decided to go on.
We had hardly left the harbour when the steamer began to bounce and to pick its way from one wave to another, giving us the impression of a swing. I proved to be a miserable sailor and went below at once and put myself into the hands of the stewardess, who quickly placed a basin under my very nose. I lay prostrate on a sofa in the ladies’ saloon; my head was very bad and everything went round. What miserable creatures all my cabin companions were! woefully sick all of them. Sergy, much less liable to sea-sickness, remained on deck all the time. He came to see how I was and said I had better come up on deck, but I was too deadly ill even to answer him.
It took us six hours to get to Dieppe. We looked ghostly when we landed on the pier, where a large crowd had assembled to see the passengers fresh from a rough channel passage. I was so happy to be on dry land. I would rather die than endure another half hour of sickness. We saw on the pier Mme. Kethoudoff, one of our Moscow friends, a French lady married to an Armenian. That couple was compelled to strictly fulfil the French proverb, La parole est d’argent et le silence est d’or, (speech is silver and silence is gold) as Mr. Kethoudoff does not speak a word of French, and his spouse completely ignores the Armenian language. Mme. Kethoudoff had settled at Dieppe for good. She received us with open arms when we stepped on shore, and carried us away to her own house, situated on the “Quai des Écluses.”
I had not yet recovered from our rough passage and felt all the time as if the ground tottered under me. I tried not to think about the treacherous sea but couldn’t, for the ocean was there, just in front of our windows, in all its vastness.
Mme. Kethoudoff had at dinner that day the Vicaire du Pollet, a rosy and plump curate. This gossip-loving priest was a great favourite among his lady parishioners, to whom he was very fond of confiding little bits of scandal.