“Scenery,” he repeated, reflectively. “I say, you must have thought it a queer taste of mine to cruise about on that outlandish Frisian coast. How would you like that sort of thing?”
“I should loathe it,” I answered, promptly, with a clear conscience. “Weren’t you delighted yourself to get to the Baltic? It must be a wonderful contrast to what you described. Did you ever see another yacht there?”
Nothing disturbed my rest that night, so adaptable is youth and so masterful is nature. At times I was remotely aware of a threshing of rain and a humming of wind, with a nervous kicking of the little hull, and at one moment I dreamt I saw an apparition by candle-light of Davies, clad in pyjamas and huge top-boots, grasping a misty lantern of gigantic proportions. But the apparition mounted the ladder and disappeared, and I passed to other dreams.
A blast in my ear, like the voice of fifty trombones, galvanised me into full consciousness. The musician, smiling and tousled, was at my bedside, raising a foghorn to his lips with deadly intention. “It’s a way we have in the _Dulcibella_,” he said, as I started up on one elbow. “I didn’t startle you much, did I?” he added.
“Well, I like the _mattinata_ better than the cold douche,” I answered, thinking of yesterday.
“Fine day and magnificent breeze!” he answered. My sensations this morning were vastly livelier than those of yesterday at the same hour. My limbs were supple again and my head clear. Not even the searching wind could mar the ecstasy of that plunge down to smooth, seductive sand, where I buried greedy fingers and looked through a medium blue, with that translucent blue, fairy-faint and angel-pure, that you see in perfection only in the heart of ice. Up again to sun, wind, and the forest whispers from the shore; down just once more to see the uncouth anchor stabbing the sand’s soft bosom with one rusty fang, deaf and inert to the _Dulcibella_’s puny efforts to drag him from his prey. Back, holding by the cable as a rusty clue from heaven to earth, up to that _bourgeoise_ little maiden’s bows; back to breakfast, with an appetite not to be blunted by condensed milk and somewhat _passé_ bread. An hour later we had dressed the _Dulcibella_ for the road, and were foaming into the grey void of yesterday, now a noble expanse of wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills, their every outline vivid in the rain-washed air.