Old Ponting was right in all his particulars, except one. The owner of the Gaston de Paris was not a king, only a prince.

Prince Selm, a gentleman like his Highness of Monaco with a passion for the deep sea and its exploration. The Holy Roman Empire had given his great grandfather the title of prince, and estates in Thuringia gave him money enough to do what he pleased, an unfortunate marriage gave him a distaste for High Civilization, and his scientific bent and passion for the sea—inherited with a strain of old Norse blood—did the rest.

He had chosen well. Cards, women and wine, pleasure and the glittering things of life, all these betray one, but the sea, though she may kill, never leaves a man broken, never destroys his soul.

But Eugene Henry William of Selm for all this sea passion might have remained a landsman, for the simple reason that he was one of those thorough souls for whom Life and an Object are synonymous terms. In other words he would never have made a yachtsman, a creature shifting from Keil to Cowes and Cowes to Naples according to season, a cup gatherer and club-house haunter.

But Exploration gave him the incentive and the MusÉe OcÉanographique of Monaco his inspiration, limitless wealth supplied the means.

The Gaston de Paris built by Viguard of Toulon was an ocean going steam yacht of twelve hundred and fifty tons with engines by Conturier of Nantes and everything of the latest from Conturier’s twin-action centrifugal bilge pumps to the last thing in sea valves. She was reckoned by those who knew her the finest sea-going yacht in the world and she was certainly the chef-d’oeuvre of Lafiette, Viguard’s chief designer. Lafiette was more than a designer, he was a creator, the sea was in his blood giving him that touch of genius or madness, that something eccentric which made him at times cast rules and formulae aside.

The decks of the Gaston de Paris ran flush, with little encumbrance save a deck-house forward given over to electrical and deep sea instruments.

Forward of the engine room and right to the bulkheads of the fo’c’sle ran a lower deck reached by a hatch aft of the instrument room. Here were stowed the dredges and buoys and all the gear belonging to them, trawl nets and deep sea traps, cable and spare rope and sounding-wire, harpoons and grancs and a hundred odds and ends, all in order and spick and span as the gear of a warship.

Aft of the engine-room the yacht was a little palace. Prince Selm would labour like any of his crew over a net coming in or in an emergency, but he ate off silver and slept between sheets of exceedingly fine linen. Though a sailor, almost one might say a fisherman, he was always Monsieur le Prince and though his hobby lay in the depths of the sea his intellect did not lie there too. Politics, Literature and Art travelled with him as mind companions, whilst in the flesh he often managed to bring off with him on his “outlandish expeditions” more or less pleasant people from the great world where Civilisation sits in cities, feeding Art and Philosophy, Science and Literature with the hearts and souls of men.

The main saloon of the Gaston de Paris fought in all its details against the idea of shipboard life, the gilt and scrolls of the yacht decorator, the mirrors, and all the rest of his abominations were not to be found here, panels by Chardin painted for Madame de Pompadour occupied the walls, the main lamp, a flying dragon by Benvenuto Cellini, clutching in its claws a globe of fire, had, for satellites, four torch bearers of bronze by Claus, a library, writing and smoking room, combined, opened from the main saloon, and there was a boudoir decorated in purple and pearl with flower pictures by Lactropius unfaded despite their date of 1685.

Nothing could be stranger to the mind than the contrast between the fo’c’sle of the Albatross and the after cabins of the Gaston, nothing, except, maybe, the contrast between a garret in Montmartre or Stepney and a drawing-room in the Avenue du TrocadÉro or Mayfair.

Dinner was served on board the Gaston de Paris at seven, and to-night the Prince and his four guests, seated beneath the flying dragon of Cellini and enjoying their soup, held converse together light-heartedly and with a spirit that had been somewhat lacking of late. Every sea voyage has its periods of depression due to monotony; they had not sighted a ship for over ten days, and this evening the glimpse of the Albatross revealed through the break in the weather had in some curious way shattered the sense of isolation and broken the monotony. The four guests of the Prince were: Madame la Comtesse de Warens, an old lady with a passion for travel, a free thinker, whose mother was a friend of Voltaire in her youth and whose father had been a member of the Jacobin club; she was eighty-four years of age, declared herself indestructible by time, and her one last ambition to be a burial at sea. She was also a Socialistic-Anarchist, possessed an income of some forty thousand pounds a year derived from speculations of her late husband conducted during the war with Germany in 1870, yet was never known to give a sou to charity; her hands were all but the hands of a skeleton and covered with jewels, she smoked cigarettes incessantly. She was one of those old women whose energy seems to increase with age, tireless as a gnat she was always the last in bed and the first on deck, though lying in her bunk half the night reading French novels of which she had a trunkful and smoking her eternal cigarettes.

Beside her sat her niece, ClÉo de Bromsart, English on the mother’s side and educated in England, a girl of twenty, unmarried, dark-haired, fragile and beautiful as a dream. She was one of the old nobility, without dilution, yet strangely enough with money, for the Bromsarts, without marrying into trade, had adapted themselves to the new times so cleverly that EugÈne de Bromsart the last of his race had retired from life leaving his only daughter and the last of her race wealthy, even by the standard of wealth set in Paris. She was a sportswoman and, despite her lack of frailty, had led an outdoor life and possessed a nerve of steel.

Madame de Warens had brought the girl up after she left school, had laboured over her and found her labour in vain. ClÉo had no leanings towards the People and the opinions of her aunt seemed to her a sort of disreputable madness bred on hypocrisy. ClÉo looked on the lower classes just as she looked on animals, beings with rights of their own but belonging to an entirely different order of creation, and one thing certainly could be said for her—she was honest in her outlook on life.

Beside her sat Doctor Epinard, the ship’s doctor, a serious young man who spoke little, and the fifth at table was Lagross, the sea painter, who had come for the sake of his health and to absorb the colours of the ocean. The vision of the Albatross with towering canvas breasting the blue-green seas in an atmosphere of sunset and storm was with him still as he sat listening to the chatter of the others and occasionally joining in. He intended to paint that picture.

It had come to him as a surprise. They had been playing cards when a quarter-master called them on deck saying that the weather had moderated and that there was a ship in sight, and there, away across the tumbling seas, the Albatross had struck his vision, remote, storm surrounded, and sunlit, almost a vision of the past in these days of mechanism.

“Now tell me, Prince,” Madame de Warens was saying, “how long do you propose staying at this Kerguelen Land of yours?”

“Not more than a week,” replied the Prince. “I want to take some soundings off the Smoky Islands and I shall put in for a day on the mainland where you can go ashore if you like, but I shan’t stay here long. It is like putting one’s head into a wolf’s mouth.”

“How is that?”

“Weather. You saw that sudden squall we passed through this evening, or rather you heard it, no doubt, well that’s the sort of thing Kerguelen brews.”

“Suppose,” said the astute old lady, “it brewed one of those things, only much worse, and we were blown ashore?”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“Our engines can fight anything.”

“Are there any natives in this place?”

“Only penguins and rabbits.”

“Tell me,” said Lagross, “that three-master we saw just now, would she be making for Kerguelen?”

“Oh, no, she must be out of her course and beating up north. She’s not a whaler, and ships like that would keep north of the Crozets. Probably she was driven down by that big storm we had a week ago. We wouldn’t be where we are only that I took those soundings south of Marion Island.”

“And, after Kerguelen, what land shall we see next?” asked the old lady.

“New Amsterdam, madame,” replied the Prince, “and after that the Sunda Islands and beautiful Java with its sun and palm trees.”

Mademoiselle de Bromsart shivered slightly. She had been silent up to this, and she spoke now with eyes fixed far away as if viewing the picture of Java with its palms and sapphire skies.

“Could we not go there now?” asked she.

“In what way?” asked the Prince.

“Turn the ship round and leave this place behind,” she replied.

“But why?”

“I don’t know,” said she, “perhaps it is what you say about Kerguelen, or perhaps it was the sight of that big ship all alone out there, but I feel—” she stopped short.

“Yes—”

“That ship frightened me.”

“Frightened you,” cried Madame de Warens, “why, ClÉo, what is the matter with you to-night? You who are never frightened. I’m not easily frightened, but I admit I almost said my prayers in that storm, and you, you were doing embroidery.”

“Oh, I am not frightened of storms or things in the ordinary way,” said the girl half laughing. “Physical things have no power over me, an ugly face can frighten me more than the threat of a blow. It is a question of psychology. That ship produced on my mind a feeling as though I had seen desolation itself, and something worse.”

“Something worse!” cried Madame de Warens, “what can be worse than desolation?”

“I don’t know,” said ClÉo, “It also made me feel that I wanted to be far away from it and from here. Then, Monsieur le Prince, with his story of desolate Kerguelen, completed the feeling. It is strong upon me now.”

“You do not wish to go to Kerguelen then?” said the Prince smiling as he helped himself to the entrÉe that was being passed round.

“Oh, monsieur, it is not a question of my wishes at all,” replied the girl.

“But, excuse me,” replied the owner of the Gaston de Paris, “it is entirely a question of your wishes. We are not a cargo boat, Captain Lepine is on the bridge, he has only to go into his chart house, set his course for New Amsterdam, and a turn of the wheel will put our stern to the south.” He touched an electric bell push, attached to the table, as he spoke.

“And your soundings?” asked she.

“They can wait for some other time or some other man, sea depths are pretty constant.”

A quarter-master appeared at the saloon door, came forward and saluted.

“Ask Captain Lepine to come aft,” said the Prince. “I wish to speak to him.”

“Wait,” said Mademoiselle Bromsart. Then to her host. “No. I will not have the course altered for me. I am quite clear upon that point. What I said was foolish and it would pain me more than I can tell to have it acted upon. I really mean what I say.”

He looked at her for a moment and seemed to glimpse something of the iron will that lay at the heart of her beauty and fragility.

“That will do,” said he to the quarter-master. “You need not give my message.”

Madame de Warens laughed. “That is what it is to be young,” said she, “if an old woman like me had spoken of changing our course I doubt if your quarter-master would have been called, Monsieur. But I have no fads and fancies, thank heaven, I leave all that to the young women of to-day.”

“Pardon me, madame,” said Doctor Epinard speaking for almost the first time, “but in impressions produced by objects upon the mind there is no room for the term fancy. I speak of course of the normal mind free of disease. Furthermore, we talk of objects as things of secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the objects that form our environment.”

“Is this a theory of your own, Epinard?” asked the Prince.

“It is, monsieur, and it may be bad or good but I adhere to it.”

“You mean to say that man is composed entirely of environment, past and present?”

“Yes, monsieur, you have caught my meaning exactly. Past and present. Man is nothing more than a concretion formed from emanations of all the objects whose emanations have impinged upon living tissue since, at the beginning of the world, living tissue was formed. He is the sunset he saw a million years ago, the water he swam in when he was a fish, the knight in armour he fought with when he was an ancestor, or rather he is a concretion of the light, touch and sound vibrations from these and a million other things. I have written the matter fully out in a thesis, which I hope to publish some day.”

“Well, you may put my name down for a dozen copies,” said the Prince, “for certainly the theory is less mad than some of the theories I have come across explaining the origin of mind.”

“But what has all that to do with the ship?” asked Madame de Warens.

“Simply, madame, that the ship which one looked at as a structure of canvas and wood, once seen by Mademoiselle de Bromsart, has become part of her mind, just as it has become part of yours and mine, a logical and definite part of our minds; now, mark me, there was also the sunset and the storm clouds, those objects also became part of the mind of Mademoiselle de Bromsart, and the reasons interlying between all these objects produced in her a definite and painful impression. They were, in fact, all thinking something which she interpreted.”

“It seemed to me,” said the girl, “that I saw Loneliness itself, and for the first time, and I felt just now that it was following me. It was to escape from that absurd phantom that I suggested to Monsieur le Prince that we should alter our course.”

“Well,” said Madame de Warens, “your will has conquered the Phantom. Let us talk of something more cheerful.”

“Listen!” said Mademoiselle de Bromsart. “It seems to me that the engines are going slower.”

“You have a quick ear, mademoiselle,” said the Prince, “they undoubtedly are. The Captain has reduced speed. Kerguelen is before us, or rather on our starboard bow, and daybreak will, no doubt, give us a view of it. We do not want to be too close to it in the dark hours, that is why speed has been reduced.”

Coffee was served at table and presently, amidst the fumes of cigarette smoke, the conversation turned to politics, the works of Anatole France, and other absorbing subjects. One might have fancied oneself in Paris but for the vibrations of the propeller, the heave of the sea, and the hundred little noises that mark the passage of a ship under way.

Later Mademoiselle de Bromsart found herself in the smoking-room alone with her host, Madame de Warens having retired to her state-room and the others gone on deck.

The girl was doing some embroidery work which she had fetched from her cabin and the Prince was glancing at the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Presently he laid the book down.

“I was in earnest,” said he.

“How?” she asked, glancing up from her work.

“When I proposed altering the course. Nothing would please me more than to spoil a plan of my own to please you.”

“It is good of you to say that,” she replied, “all the same I am glad I did not spoil your plan, not so much for your sake as my own.”

“How?”

“I would rather die than run away from danger.”

“So you feared danger?”

“No, I did not fear it, but I felt it. I felt a premonition of danger. I did not say so at dinner. I did not want to alarm the others.”

He looked at her curiously for a moment, contrasting her fragility and beauty with the something unbendable that was her spirit, her soul—call it what you will.

“Well,” said he, “your slightest wish is my law. I have been going to speak to you for the last few days. I will say what I want to say now. It is only four words. Will you marry me?”

She looked up at him, meeting his eyes full and straight.

“No,” said she, “it is impossible.”

“Why?”

“I have a very great regard for you—but—”

“You do not love me?”

She said nothing, going on with her work calmly as though the conversation was about some ordinary topic.

“I don’t see why you should,” he went on, “but look around you—how many people marry for love now-a-days—and those who do, are they any the happier? I have seen a very great deal of the world and I know for a fact that happiness in marriage has little to do with what the poets call love and everything to do with companionship. If a man and woman are good companions then they are happy together, if not they are miserable, no matter how much they may love one another at the start.”

“Have you seen much of the world?” she raised her eyes again as she asked the question. “Have you seen anything really of the world? I do not mean to be rude, but this world of ours, this world of society that holds us all, is there anything real about it, since nearly everything in it is a sham? Look at the lives we lead, look at Paris and London and Berlin. Why the very language of society is framed to say things we do not mean.”

“It is civilization. How else would you have it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, “but I do know it is not life. It is dishonesty. You say that the only happy married people are those that are good companions, that love does not count in the long run, and you are right, perhaps, as far as what you call the World is concerned. I only repeat that the thing you call the World is not the real world, for love is real, and love is not merely a question of good companionship. It is an immortal bond between two spirits and death cannot break it.”

“You speak as though you were very certain of a thing which, of all things, is most hidden from us.”

“I speak by instinct.”

“Well,” said the Prince, “perhaps you are right. We have left behind us the simplicity of the old world, we have become artificial, our life is a sham—but what would you have and how are we to alter it? We are all like passengers in a train travelling to heaven knows where; the seats are well cushioned and the dining-car leaves nothing to be desired, but I admit the atmosphere is stuffy and the long journey has developed all sorts of unpleasant traits among the passengers—well, what would you do? We cannot get out.”

“I suppose not,” said she.

He rose up and stood for a moment turning over some magazines lying on the table. He had received his answer and he knew instinctively that it was useless to pursue the business further.

Then after a few more words he went on deck. The wind had fallen to a steady blow but the sky was still overcast and the atmosphere was heavy and clammy and not consistent. It was as though the low lying clouds dipped here and there to touch the sea. Every now and then the Gaston de Paris would run into a wreath of fog and pass through it into the clear darkness of the night beyond.

In the darkness aft of the bridge nothing could be seen but the pale hint of the bridge canvas and a trace of spars and funnels now wiped out with mist, now visible again against the night.

The Prince leaned on the weather rail and looked over at the tumble and sud of the water lit here and there with the gleam of a port light.

ClÉo de Bromsart had fascinated him, grown upon him, compelled him in some mysterious way to ask her to marry him. He had sworn after his disastrous first experience never to marry again. He had attempted to break his oath. Was he in love with her? He could scarcely answer that question himself. But this he knew, that her refusal of him and the words she had said were filling his mind with quite new ideas.

Was she right after all in her statement that he who fancied himself a man of the world knew nothing of the world except its shams? Was she right in her statement that love was a bond between two spirits, a bond unbreakable by death? That old idea was not new to him, he had played with it as a toy of the mind constructed for the mind to play with by the poets.

The new thing was to find this idea in the mind of a young girl and to hear it expressed with such conviction.

After a while he came forward and went up the steps to the bridge. Captain Lepine was in the chart room, the first officer was on the bridge and Bouvalot, an old navy quarter-master, had the wheel.

“We have slowed down,” said the Prince.

“Yes, monsieur,” replied the first officer, “we are getting close to land. We ought to sight Kerguelen at dawn.”

“What do you think of the weather?”

“I don’t think the weather will bother us much, monsieur, that blow had nothing behind it, and were it not for these fog patches I would ask nothing better; but then it’s Kerguelen—what can one expect!”

“True,” said the other, “it’s a vile place, by all accounts, as far as weather is concerned.”

He tapped at the door of the chart room and entered.

The chart room of the Gaston de Paris was a pleasant change from the dark and damp of the bridge. A couch upholstered in red velvet ran along one side of it and on the couch with one leg up and a pipe in his mouth the captain was resting himself, a big man of the Southern French navy type, with a beard of burnt-up black that reached nearly to his eyes.

The Prince, telling him not to move, sat down and lit a cigar. Then they fell into talk.

Lepine was a sailor and nothing else. Had his character been cut out of cardboard the line of division between the sailor and the rest of the world could not have been more sharply marked. That was perhaps why the two men, though divided by a vast social gulf, were friends, almost chums.

They talked for half an hour or so on all sorts of subjects connected with the ship.

“By the way, Lepine,” said the Prince suddenly, “It has been the toss up of a sou that we are not now steering a course for New Amsterdam.”

“And how is that, monsieur?”

“Well, Mademoiselle de Bromsart proposed to me at dinner that we should alter our course, the idea came to her that some misfortune might happen to us off Kerguelen and, as you know, I am always anxious to please my guests—well, I called a quarter-master down. I was going to have sent for you.”

“To alter our course?”

“Yes, but Mademoiselle de Bromsart altered her mind. She refused to let me send for you.”

“But what gave the young lady that idea?” asked the Captain.

“That big ship we sighted before dinner.”

“The three-master?”

“Yes, there was something about it she did not like.”

“Monsieur, what an idea—and what was wrong with it?”

“Oh, it was just a fancy. The sea breeds fancies and superstitions, you know that, Lepine, for I believe you are superstitious yourself.”

“Perhaps, monsieur; all sailors are, and I have had experiences. There are bad and good ships, just as there are bad and good men, of that I am sure. Perhaps that three-master was a bad ship.” Lepine laughed as though at his own words. “All the same,” he went on, “I don’t like warnings, especially off Kerguelen.”

They left the chart house and came out on the bridge.

The wind was still steady but the clouds had consolidated and the night was pitch black. On the bridge the Gaston de Paris seemed driving into a solid wall of ebony.

The Prince after a glance into the binnacle was preparing to go down the bridge steps when a cry from the Look-out made him wheel round. Suddenly, and as if evolved by magic from the blackness, the vague spectre of a vast ship shewed up ahead on the port bow making to cross their course. Thundering along under full canvas without lights and seemingly blind, she seemed only a pistol shot away.

Then the owner of the Gaston de Paris did what no owner ought ever to do: seeing Destruction and judging that by a bold stroke it might be out-leaped, he sprang to the engine room telegraph and flung the lever to full speed ahead.