The Beach of Dreams

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THE
BEACH OF DREAMS

A ROMANCE

BY
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
AUTHOR OF "THE MAN WHO LOST HIMSELF," "THE GHOST GIRL,"
"THE GOLD TRAIL," "THE BLUE LAGOON," ETC.

THE NATIONAL BOOK CO.
PUBLISHERS
28 WEST 44TH ST., NEW YORK

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COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY STREET & SMITH
COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY JOHN LANE COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE ALBATROSS 9
II. NORTH-WEST 14
III. THE GASTON DE PARIS 22
IV. DISASTER 41
V. VOICES IN THE NIGHT 48
VI. DAWN 53
VII. THE COAST 66

PART II

VIII. THE AWAKENING 73
IX. THE WOOLEY 80
X. THE CROSS 94
XI. THE CACHE 103
XII. THE QUARREL 117
XIII. WHERE IS BOMPARD? 124
XIV. THE DEATH TRAPS 132
XV. THE STROKE 143
XVI. ALONE 146
XVII. FRIENDS IN DESOLATION 153

PART III

XVIII. GOD MADE FRIENDSHIP 159
XIX. THE BIRDS 167
XX. VAE VICTIS 171

PART IV

XXI. TIME PASSES 181
XXII. A NEWCOMER 185
XXIII. RAFT 194
XXIV. A DREAM 203
XXV. STORIES ON THE BEACH 211
XXVI. THE GREAT WIND 225

PART V

XXVII. THE CORRIDOR 233
XXVIII. NIGHT 248
XXIX. THE SUMMIT 253
XXX. THE BAY 259
XXXI. THE SHIP 264
XXXII. THE OPIUM SMOKERS 272
XXXIII. MAINSAIL HAUL 277
XXXIV. THE CARCASSONNE 281

PART VI

XXXV. MARSEILLES 289
XXXVI. THE LEPER 301
XXXVII. A NEW HOME 313

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THE BEACH OF DREAMS

CHAPTER I

THE ALBATROSS

The fo'c'sle, lit by a teapot lamp, shewed the port watch in their
bunks, snoring, all but Harbutt and Raft seated on a chest, Harbutt
patching a pair of trousers, Raft smoking.

Raft was a big red-headed man with eyes that seemed always roving over
great distances as though in search of something. He was thirty-two
years of age and he had used the sea since twelve--twenty years. His
past was a long succession of fo'c'sles, bar-rooms, blazing suns, storms
and sea happenings so run together that all sequence was lost. Beyond
them lay a dismal blotch, his childhood. He had entered the world and
literally and figuratively had been laid at the door of a workhouse; of
his childhood he remembered little, of his parentage he knew nothing. In
drink he was quiet, but most dangerous under certain provocations.

It was as though deep in his being lay a blazing hatred born of
injustice through ages and only coming to light when upborne by
balloon-juice. On these occasions a saloon bar with its glitter and
phantom show of mirth and prosperity sometimes called on him to dispense
and destroy it, the passion to fight the crowd seized him, a passion
that has its origin, perhaps, in sources other than alcohol.

He was talking now to Harbutt, scarcely lowering his voice on account of
the fellows in the bunks. Snoring and drugged with ozone a kick would
only have made them curse and turn on the other side, and as he talked
his voice made part of that procession of noises inseparable from the
fo'c'sle of a ship under sail against a head sea. He had been holding
forth on the food and general conditions of this ship compared with the
food and conditions of his last, when Harbutt cut in.

"There's not a pin to choose between owners, and ships is owners as far
as a sailorman's concerned.--Blast them."

"I was in a hooker once," said Raft, "and the Old Man came across a lot
of cheap sugar, served it out to save the m'lasses. It was lead, most of
it, and the chaps that swallowed it their teeth came out."

"What happened to them then?"

"They croaked. I joined at Bombay, after the business, or I'd have
croaked too."

"What ship was that?" asked Harbutt.

"I've forgot her name, it was a good bit back--but it's the truth."

"Of course it's the truth," replied the other, "who's doubtin' you, any
dog's trick played on a sailorman's the truth, you can lay to that.
I've had four years of sea and I oughta know."

"What's this you were?" asked Raft.

"Oh, I was a lot o' things," replied Harbutt. "Wished I'd never left
them to join this b--y business, but it's the same ashore, owners all
the time stuffin' themselves and gettin' rich, workers starvin'."

Raft belonged to the old time labour world dating from Pelagon, he
grumbled, but had no grudge against owners in general, it was only in
drink that Pelagon rose in him. Harbutt was an atom of the new voice
that is heard everywhere now, even in fo'c'sles. He had failed in
everything on land and a'board ship he was a slacker. You cannot be a
voice and an A.B. at the same time.

"What was your last job ashore?" went on Raft with the persistence of a
child, always wanting to know.

"Cleanin' out pig sties," said Harbutt viciously. "Drove to it. I tell
you when a chap's down he's down, the chaps that has money tramples on
the chaps that hasn't. I've been through it and I know. It's the rich
man does it."

"Well," said Raft, "I don't even remember seeing one."

"Haven't you ever been in no cities?"

"I've been in cities right enough, but most by the water-side."

"Well, you've seen chaps in plug hats and chaps drivin' in carriages,
that's the sort that keeps us down, that's the sort we've got to make
an end of."

Raft did not quite see. He had a respect for Harbutt mixed with a
contempt for him as a sailor. Harbutt knew a lot--but he could not see
how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen
had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and
always busy about their own affairs--and how were they to be made an end
of?

"Do you mean killing them?" he asked.

"Oh, there's other ways than killin'," replied Harbutt. "It's not them,
it's their money does the trick."

He finished his patch and turned in. Raft finished his pipe and turned
in also and the fo'c'sle was given over to the noises of the sea and the
straining timbers of the ship.

Now that the figures of the two sailors had vanished its personality
took fuller life, grim, dark, close, like the interior of a grimy hand
clutching the lives of all those sleepers. The beams shewed like the
curved fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the
in-turned thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it,
intensifying, after the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes,
without losing in power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know
what these things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene,
with the grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with
smoke haze; with the heave and fall of the sea; the groaning of timbers
and the boom of the waves. This is the fo'c'sle whose great, great,
great grandmother was the lower deck of the trireme where slaves chained
to benches laboured till they died, just as they labour to-day.

CHAPTER II

NORTH-WEST

The _Albatross_, bound from Cape Town to Melbourne, had been blown out
of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering
north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like
a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the
top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the cold blue
of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like the white
clouds that hang round the Pacific Trades.

Raft was at the wheel and Captain Pound the master was pacing the deck
with Mason the first officer, up and down, pausing now and then for a
glance away to windward, now with an eye aloft at the steadfast canvas,
talking all the time of subjects half a world away.

It was a sociable ship as far as the afterguard was concerned. Pound
being a rough and capable man of the old school with no false dignity
and an open manner of speech. He had been talking of his little house at
Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and neighbours
that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He had been
dreaming the night before of Pembroke docks, the port he had started
from as a boy. Pembroke docks was a bad dream for Pound, and he said so.
It always heralded some disaster when it appeared before him in
dreamland.

"I've always dreamt before that I was starting from there," said he,
"but last night I was getting the old _Albatross_ in, and the tow rope
went, and the tug knocked herself to bits, and then the old hooker swung
round and there was Mrs. P. on the quayside in her night attire shouting
to me to put the helm down--under hare sticks in the docks, mind you!"

"Dreams are crazy things," said Mason. "I don't believe there's anything
in them."

"Well, maybe not," said Pound. He glanced at the binnacle card and then
went below.

Nothing is more impressive to the unaccustomed mind than the spars and
canvas of a ship under full sail seen from the deck, nothing more
suggestive of power and the daring of man than the sight of those
leviathan spars and vast sail spaces rising dizzily from main and
foresail in pyramids to where the truck works like a pencil point
writing on the sky. Nothing more arresting than the power of the
steersman. A turn of the wheel in the hands of Raft would set all that
canvas shuddering or thundering, spilling the wind as the water is
spilled from a reservoir, a moment's indecision or slackness might lose
the ship a mile on her course. But Raft steered as he breathed,
automatically, almost unconsciously, almost without effort. He, who
ashore was hopelessly adrift and without guidance, at the helm was all
wisdom, direction and intuition.

The wake of the _Albatross_ lay as if drawn with a ruler.

His trick was nearly up, and when he was relieved he went forward;
pausing at the fo'c'sle head to light a pipe he fell in talk with some
of the hands, leaning with his back against the bulwarks and blown upon
by the spill of the wind from the head sails.

An old shell-back by name of Ponting was holding the floor.

"We're comin' up to Kerguelen," he was saying. "Should think I did know
it. Put in there in a sealer out of New Bedford in '82. I wasn't more'n
a boy then. The Yanks used to use that place a lot in those days. The
blackest blastedest hole I ever struck. Christmas Island was where we
lay mostly, for two months, the chaps huntin' the wal'uses and killin'
more than they could carry. The blastedest hole I ever struck."

"I was there in a Dane once," began another of the crew. "It was time of
year the sea cows was matin' and you could hear the roarin' of them ten
mile off."

"Dane," said Ponting, "what made you ship a'board a Dane--I've heard
tell of Danes. Knew a chap signed on in one of them Leith boots out of
Copenhagen runnin' north, one of them old North Sea cattle trucks turned
into a passenger tramp, passengers and ponies with a hundred ton of hay
stowed forward and the passengers lyin' on their backs on it smokin'
their pipes, and the bridge crawled over with passengers, girls and
children, and the chap at the wheel havin' to push 'em out of the way,
kept hittin' reefs all the run from Leith to God knows where, and the
Old Man playin' the fiddle most of the time."

"That chap said the Danes was a d----d lot too sociable for him."

Raft listened without entirely comprehending. He had always been a
fore-mast hand. He knew practically nothing of steam and he would just
as soon have fancied himself a railway porter as a hand on a passenger
ship. He was one of the old school of merchant seamen and the idea of a
cargo of girls and children and general passengers, not to speak of
ponies, was beyond him.

The girls he had mostly known were of the wharf-side. He finished his
pipe and went down below--and turned in.

He was rousted out by the voice of the Bo'sw'n calling for all hands on
deck and slipping into his oilskins he came up, receiving a smack of sea
in his face as he emerged from the fo'c'sle hatch. The wind had shifted
and a black squall coming up from astern had hit the ship. More was
coming and through the sheeting rain and spindrift the voice of the
Bo'sw'n was roaring to let go the fore top-gallant halyards.

Next moment Raft was in the rigging followed by others. The sail had to
be stowed. The wind tried to tear him loose and the sheeting rain to
drown him, but he went on clinging to the top-gallant mast-stays and
looking down he could see the faces of the others following him, faces
sheeted over with rain and working blindly upwards.

Ponting was the man immediately below him, and taking breath for a
moment and against the wind, Ponting was now yelling out that they had
their work cut out for them.

They had.

The top-gallant sail had taken charge of itself, and Raft and Ponting as
they lay out on the yard seemed battling with a thing alive,
intelligent, and desperately wicked.

The sail snored and trembled and sang, standing out in great hoods and
folds, hard as steel; now it would yield, owing to a slackening of the
wind, and then, like a brute that had only been waiting to take them by
surprise, it would burst out again, releasing itself, whilst the yard
buckled and sprang, almost casting them from it.

Then began a battle fought without a sound or cry except the bubbling
and snoring of the great sail struggling for its wicked liberty, it
shrank and they flung themselves on it, it bellied and flung them back,
clinging to the lift they saved themselves, attacking it again with the
dumb fury of dogs or wolves on a fighting prey. Twenty times it tried to
destroy them and twenty times they all but had it under.

The fight died out of the monster for a moment and Raft had nearly an
armful of it in when it stiffened, fighting free of him, owing to
Ponting and the other fellow not having made good. They clung for a
moment without moving, resting, and Raft glancing down saw far away
below the narrow deck driving wedge-like through the foam-capped seas.

Then the struggle began again. The sail, like its would-be captors,
seemed also to have taken breath, it held firm, relaxed, banged out
again in thunder, developed new hoods and folds as a struggling monster
might develop new heads and kinks, and then, all of a sudden when it
seemed that no effort was of avail the end came.

The wind paused for a moment, as if gathering up all its strength
against the dogged persistency which is man, and in that moment the
three on the yard had the sail under their chests beating and crushing
the life out of it. Then the gaskets were passed round it and they clung
for a moment to rest and breathe.

It was nothing, or they thought nothing of it, this battle for life with
a monster, just the stowing of a top-gallant sail in dirty weather, and
most likely when they got down the Bo'sw'n would call them farmers for
being such a time over it. Meanwhile they clung idly for a moment,
partly to rest and partly to look at something worth seeing.

The squall was blowing out, there was nothing behind it and away on the
port quarter the almost setting sun had broken through the smother and
was lighting the sea.

There, set in a thousand square acres of snowcapped tourmaline, white as
a gull and beautiful as grace itself, was running a vessel under bear
poles. The two yellow funnels, the cut of the hull, told Ponting what
she was. He had seen her twice before and no sailor who had once set
eyes on her could forget her.

"See that blighter," he yelled across to Raft. "Know her?"

"Should think I did, she's the _Gaston de Paree_--a yacht--seen her in
T'lon."

Then they came down, crawling like weary men, and on deck no one abused
them for their slackness or the time they'd been over their job. The
_Albatross_ was running easy and the Bo'sw'n with others was taken up
with a momentary curiosity over the great white yacht.

No one knew her but Ponting, who had for several years acted as deck
hand on some of the Mediterranean boats.

"I know her," said he ranging up beside the others. "She's the _Gaston
de Paree_, a yot--seen her in T'lon harbour and seen her again at Suez,
she's a thousand tonner, y'can't mistake them funnels nor the width of
them, she's a twenty knotter and the chap that owns her is a king or
somethin'; last time I saw her she was off to the China seas, they say
she's all cluttered up with dredges and dipsy gear, and she mostly
spends her time takin' soundin's and scrabblin' up shell fish and
such--that's his way of amusin' himself."

"Then he must be crazy," said the Bo'sw'n, "but b'God he's got a beauty
under him--what's he doin' down here away?"

"Ax me another," said Ponting. Raft stood with the others, watching the
_Gaston de Paris_ from whose funnels now the smoke was coming festooned
on the wind, then he went below to shed his oilskins and smoke.

She had ceased to interest him.

CHAPTER III

THE GASTON DE PARIS

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 Musee Oceanographique 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 Trocadero 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, Cleo 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 Eugene 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. Cleo had no leanings
towards the People and the opinions of her aunt seemed to her a sort of
disreputable madness bred on hypocrisy. Cleo 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.

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