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The Riddle of the Sands

by Erskine Childers · English · Gutenberg #2360 · 624,424 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Riddle of the Sands

Author: Erskine Childers


        
Release date: October 1, 2000 [eBook #2360]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2360


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS ***




[Illustration]




The Riddle of the Sands

A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved

Edited by

Erskine Childers

(1870-1922)

[Illustration: General Map, A]


Contents

        Preface
I.      The Letter
II.     The _Dulcibella_
III.    Davies
IV.     Retrospect
V.      Wanted, a North Wind
VI.     Schlei Fiord
VII.    The Missing Page
VIII.   The Theory
IX.     I Sign Articles
X.      His Chance
XI.     The Pathfinders
XII.    My Initiation
XIII.   The Meaning of our Work
XIV.    The First Night in the Islands
XV.     Bensersiel
XVI.    Commander von Brüning
XVII.   Clearing the Air
XVIII.  Imperial Escort
XIX.    The Rubicon
XX.     The Little Drab Book
XXI.    Blindfold to Memmert
XXII.   The Quartette
XXIII.  A Change of Tactics
XXIV.   Finesse
XXV.    I Double Back
XXVI.   The Seven Siels
XXVII.  The Luck of the Stowaway
XXVIII. We Achieve our Double Aim
        Epilogue
        Postscript (March 1903)

Maps and Charts

Map A—General Map Chart A—Chart to Illustrate the Stranding of the
_Dulcibella,_ etc. Map B—Map of East Friesland Chart B—Chart of Juist,
Memmert, and Part of Norderney Sketch—Memmert Salvage Depot




Preface


A word about the origin and authorship of this book.

In October last (1902), my friend “Carruthers” visited me in my
chambers, and, under a provisional pledge of secrecy, told me frankly
the whole of the adventure described in these pages. Till then I had
only known as much as the rest of his friends, namely, that he had
recently undergone experiences during a yachting cruise with a certain
Mr “Davies” which had left a deep mark on his character and habits.

At the end of his narrative—which, from its bearing on studies and
speculations of my own, as well as from its intrinsic interest and racy
delivery, made a very deep impression on me—he added that the important
facts discovered in the course of the cruise had, without a moment’s
delay, been communicated to the proper authorities, who, after some
dignified incredulity, due in part, perhaps, to the pitiful inadequacy
of their own secret service, had, he believed, made use of them, to
avert a great national danger. I say “he believed”, for though it was
beyond question that the danger was averted for the time, it was
doubtful whether they had stirred a foot to combat it, the secret
discovered being of such a nature that mere suspicion of it on this
side was likely to destroy its efficacy.

There, however that may be, the matter rested for a while, as, for
personal reasons which will be manifest to the reader, he and Mr
“Davies” expressly wished it to rest.

But events were driving them to reconsider their decision. These seemed
to show that the information wrung with such peril and labour from the
German Government, and transmitted so promptly to our own, had had none
but the most transitory influence on our policy. Forced to the
conclusion that the national security was really being neglected, the
two friends now had a mind to make their story public; and it was about
this that “Carruthers” wished for my advice. The great drawback was
that an Englishman, bearing an honoured name, was disgracefully
implicated, and that unless infinite delicacy were used, innocent
persons, and, especially, a young lady, would suffer pain and
indignity, if his identity were known. Indeed, troublesome rumours,
containing a grain of truth and a mass of falsehood, were already
afloat.

After weighing both sides of the question, I gave my vote emphatically
for publication. The personal drawbacks could, I thought, with tact be
neutralised; while, from the public point of view, nothing but good
could come from submitting the case to the common sense of the country
at large. Publication, therefore, was agreed upon, and the next point
was the form it should take. “Carruthers”, with the concurrence of Mr
“Davies”, was for a bald exposition of the essential facts, stripped of
their warm human envelope. I was strongly against this course, first,
because it would aggravate instead of allaying the rumours that were
current; secondly, because in such a form the narrative would not carry
conviction, and would thus defeat its own end. The persons and the
events were indissolubly connected; to evade, abridge, suppress, would
be to convey to the reader the idea of a concocted hoax. Indeed, I took
bolder ground still, urging that the story should be made as explicit
and circumstantial as possible, frankly and honestly for the purpose of
entertaining and so of attracting a wide circle of readers. Even
anonymity was undesirable. Nevertheless, certain precautions were
imperatively needed.

To cut the matter short, they asked for my assistance and received it
at once. It was arranged that I should edit the book; that “Carruthers”
should give me his diary and recount to me in fuller detail and from
his own point of view all the phases of the “quest”, as they used to
call it; that Mr “Davies” should meet me with his charts and maps and
do the same; and that the whole story should be written, as from the
mouth of the former, with its humours and errors, its light and its
dark side, just as it happened; with the following few limitations. The
year it belongs to is disguised; the names of persons are throughout
fictitious; and, at my instance certain slight liberties have been
taken to conceal the identity of the English characters.

Remember, also that these persons are living now in the midst of us,
and if you find one topic touched on with a light and hesitating pen,
do not blame the Editor, who, whether they are known or not, would
rather say too little than say a word that might savour of
impertinence.

E. C.


_March_, 1903

NOTE


The maps and charts are based on British and German Admiralty charts,
with irrelevant details omitted.




CHAPTER I.
The Letter


I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long
periods in utter solitude—save for a few black faces—have made it a
rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their
self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism. It was in some such
spirit, with an added touch of self-consciousness, that, at seven
o’clock in the evening of September 23 in a recent year, I was making
my evening toilet in my chambers in Pall Mall. I thought the date and
the place justified the parallel; to my advantage even; for the obscure
Burmese administrator might well be a man of blunted sensibilities and
coarse fibre, and at least he is alone with nature, while I—well, a
young man of condition and fashion, who knows the right people, belongs
to the right clubs, has a safe, possibly a brilliant, future in the
Foreign Office—may be excused for a sense of complacent martyrdom,
when, with his keen appreciation of the social calendar, he is doomed
to the outer solitude of London in September. I say “martyrdom”, but in
fact the case was infinitely worse. For to feel oneself a martyr, as
everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my
position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it
had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August, when
ties were still fresh and sympathy abundant. I had been conscious that
I was missed at Morven Lodge party. Lady Ashleigh herself had said so
in the kindest possible manner, when she wrote to acknowledge the
letter in which I explained, with an effectively austere reserve of
language, that circumstances compelled me to remain at my office. “We
know how busy you must be just now”, she wrote, “and I do hope you
won’t overwork; we shall _all_ miss you very much.” Friend after friend
“got away” to sport and fresh air, with promises to write and chaffing
condolences, and as each deserted the sinking ship, I took a grim
delight in my misery, positively almost enjoying the first week or two
after my world had been finally dissipated to the four bracing winds of
heaven. I began to take a spurious interest in the remaining five
millions, and wrote several clever letters in a vein of cheap satire,
indirectly suggesting the pathos of my position, but indicating that I
was broad-minded enough to find intellectual entertainment in the
scenes, persons, and habits of London in the dead season. I even did
rational things at the instigation of others. For, though I should have
liked total isolation best, I, of course, found that there was a
sediment of unfortunates like myself, who, unlike me, viewed the
situation in a most prosaic light. There were river excursions, and so
on, after office-hours; but I dislike the river at any time for its
noisy vulgarity, and most of all at this season. So I dropped out of
the fresh air brigade and declined H——’s offer to share a riverside
cottage and run up to town in the mornings. I did spend one or two
week-ends with the Catesbys in Kent; but I was not inconsolable when
they let their house and went abroad, for I found that such partial
compensations did not suit me. Neither did the taste for satirical
observation last. A passing thirst, which I dare say many have shared,
for adventures of the fascinating kind described in the _New Arabian
Nights_ led me on a few evenings into some shady haunts in Soho and
farther eastward; but was finally quenched one sultry Saturday night
after an hour’s immersion in the reeking atmosphere of a low music-hall
in Ratcliffe Highway, where I sat next a portly female who suffered
from the heat, and at frequent intervals refreshed herself and an
infant from a bottle of tepid stout.

By the first week in September I had abandoned all palliatives, and had
settled into the dismal but dignified routine of office, club, and
chambers. And now came the most cruel trial, for the hideous truth
dawned on me that the world I found so indispensable could after all
dispense with me. It was all very well for Lady Ashleigh to assure me
that I was deeply missed; but a letter from F——, who was one of the
party, written “in haste, just starting to shoot”, and coming as a
tardy reply to one of my cleverest, made me aware that the house party
had suffered little from my absence, and that few sighs were wasted on
me, even in the quarter which I had assumed to have been discreetly
alluded to by the underlined _all_ in Lady Ashleigh’s “we shall _all_
miss you”. A thrust which smarted more, if it bit less deeply, came
from my cousin Nesta, who wrote: “It’s horrid for you to have to be
baking in London now; but, after all, it must be a great pleasure to
you” (malicious little wretch!) “to have such interesting and important
work to do.” Here was a nemesis for an innocent illusion I had been
accustomed to foster in the minds of my relations and acquaintances,
especially in the breasts of the trustful and admiring maidens whom I
had taken down to dinner in the last two seasons; a fiction which I had
almost reached the point of believing in myself. For the plain truth
was that my work was neither interesting nor important, and consisted
chiefly at present in smoking cigarettes, in saying that Mr So-and-So
was away and would be back about October 1, in being absent for lunch
from twelve till two, and in my spare moments making _précis_ of—let us
say—the less confidential consular reports, and squeezing the results
into cast-iron schedules. The reason of my detention was not a cloud on
the international horizon—though I may say in passing that there was
such a cloud—but a caprice on the part of a remote and mighty
personage, the effect of which, ramifying downwards, had dislocated the
carefully-laid holiday plans of the humble juniors, and in my own small
case had upset the arrangement between myself and K——, who positively
liked the dog-days in Whitehall.

Only one thing was needed to fill my cup of bitterness, and this it was
that specially occupied me as I dressed for dinner this evening. Two
days more in this dead and fermenting city and my slavery would be at
an end. Yes, but—irony of ironies!—I had nowhere to go to! The Morven
Lodge party was breaking up. A dreadful rumour as to an engagement
which had been one of its accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh
certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most
desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through
insignificance. Invitations for a later date, which I had declined in
July with a gratifying sense of being much in request, now rose up
spectrally to taunt me. There was at least one which I could easily
have revived, but neither in this case nor in any other had there been
any renewal of pressure, and there are moments when the difference
between proposing oneself and surrendering as a prize to one of several
eagerly competing hostesses seems too crushing to be contemplated. My
own people were at Aix for my father’s gout; to join them was a
_pis-aller_ whose banality was repellent. Besides, they would be
leaving soon for our home in Yorkshire, and I was not a prophet in my
own country. In short, I was at the extremity of depression.

The usual preliminary scuffle on the staircase prepared me for the
knock and entry of Withers. (One of the things which had for some time
ceased to amuse me was the laxity of manners, proper to the season,
among the servants of the big block of chambers where I lived.) Withers
demurely handed me a letter bearing a German postmark and marked
“Urgent”. I had just finished dressing, and was collecting my money and
gloves. A momentary thrill of curiosity broke in upon my depression as
I sat down to open it. A corner on the reverse of the envelope bore the
blotted legend: “Very sorry, but there’s one other thing—a pair of
rigging screws from Carey and Neilson’s, size 1⅜, _galvanised_.” Here
it is:

Yacht _Dulcibella_,
Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, _Sept_. 21.

_Dear Carruthers_,—I daresay you’ll be surprised at hearing from me, as
it’s ages since we met. It is more than likely, too, that what I’m
going to suggest won’t suit you, for I know nothing of your plans, and
if you’re in town at all you’re probably just getting into harness
again and can’t get away. So I merely write on the offchance to ask if
you would care to come out here and join me in a little yachting, and,
I hope, duck-shooting. I know you’re keen on shooting, and I sort of
remember that you have done some yachting too, though I rather forget
about that. This part of the Baltic—the Schleswig fiords—is a splendid
cruising-ground—A1 scenery—and there ought to be plenty of duck about
soon, if it gets cold enough. I came out here _via_ Holland and the
Frisian Islands, starting early in August. My pals have had to leave
me, and I’m badly in want of another, as I don’t want to lay up yet for
a bit. I needn’t say how glad I should be if you could come. If you
can, send me a wire to the P.O. here. Flushing and on by Hamburg will
be your best route, I think. I’m having a few repairs done here, and
will have them ready sharp by the time your train arrives. Bring your
gun and a good lot of No. 4’s; and would you mind calling at
Lancaster’s and asking for mine, and bringing it too? Bring some
oilskins. Better get the eleven-shilling sort, jacket and trousers—not
the “yachting” brand; and if you paint bring your gear. I know you
speak German like a native, and that will be a great help. Forgive this
hail of directions, but I’ve a sort of feeling that I’m in luck and
that you’ll come. Anyway, I hope you and the F.O. both flourish.
Good-bye.

Yours ever,
_Arthur H. Davies_.

Would you mind bringing me out a _prismatic compass_, and a pound of
Raven mixture?

This letter marked an epoch for me; but I little suspected the fact as
I crumpled it into my pocket and started languidly on the _voie
douloureuse_ which I nightly followed to the club. In Pall Mall there
were no dignified greetings to be exchanged now with well-groomed
acquaintances. The only people to be seen were some late stragglers
from the park, with a perambulator and some hot and dusty children
lagging fretfully behind; some rustic sightseers draining the last
dregs of the daylight in an effort to make out from their guide-books
which of these reverend piles was which; a policeman and a builder’s
cart. Of course the club was a strange one, both of my own being closed
for cleaning, a coincidence expressly planned by Providence for my
inconvenience. The club which you are “permitted to make use of” on
these occasions always irritates with its strangeness and discomfort.
The few occupants seem odd and oddly dressed, and you wonder how they
got there. The particular weekly that you want is not taken in; the
dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils
oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere
within me there was a faint lightening of the spirits; causeless, as
far as I could discover. It could not be Davies’s letter. Yachting in
the Baltic at the end of September! The very idea made one shudder.
Cowes, with a pleasant party and hotels handy, was all very well. An
August cruise on a steam yacht in French waters or the Highlands was
all very well; but what kind of a yacht was this? It must be of a
certain size to have got so far, but I thought I remembered enough of
Davies’s means to know that he had no money to waste on luxuries. That
brought me to the man himself. I had known him at Oxford—not as one of
my immediate set; but we were a sociable college, and I had seen a good
deal of him, liking him for his physical energy combined with a certain
simplicity and modesty, though, indeed, he had nothing to be conceited
about; liked him, in fact, in the way that at that receptive period one
likes many men whom one never keeps up with later. We had both gone
down in the same year—three years ago now. I had gone to France and
Germany for two years to learn the languages; he had failed for the
Indian Civil, and then had gone into a solicitor’s office. I had only
seen him since at rare intervals, though I admitted to myself that for
his part he had clung loyally to what ties of friendship there were
between us. But the truth was that we had drifted apart from the nature
of things. I had passed brilliantly into my profession, and on the few
occasions I had met him since I made my triumphant _début_ in society I
had found nothing left in common between us. He seemed to know none of
my friends, he dressed indifferently, and I thought him dull. I had
always connected him with boats and the sea, but never with yachting,
in the sense that I understood it. In college days he had nearly
persuaded me into sharing a squalid week in some open boat he had
picked up, and was going to sail among some dreary mudflats somewhere
on the east coast. There was nothing else, and the funereal function of
dinner drifted on. But I found myself remembering at the _entrée_ that
I had recently heard, at second or third hand, of something else about
him—exactly what I could not recall. When I reached the savoury, I had
concluded, so far as I had centred my mind on it at all, that the whole
thing was a culminating irony, as, indeed, was the savoury in its way.
After the wreck of my pleasant plans and the fiasco of my martyrdom, to
be asked as consolation to spend October freezing in the Baltic with an
eccentric nonentity who bored me! Yet, as I smoked my cigar in the
ghastly splendour of the empty smoking-room, the subject came up again.
Was there anything in it? There were certainly no alternatives at hand.
And to bury myself in the Baltic at this unearthly time of year had at
least a smack of tragic thoroughness about it.

I pulled out the letter again, and ran down its impulsive staccato
sentences, affecting to ignore what a gust of fresh air, high spirits,
and good fellowship this flimsy bit of paper wafted into the jaded
club-room. On reperusal, it was full of evil presage—“A1 scenery”—but
what of equinoctial storms and October fogs? Every sane yachtsman was
paying off his crew now. “There ought to be duck”—vague, very vague.
“If it gets cold enough”—cold and yachting seemed to be a gratuitously
monstrous union. His pals had left him; why? “Not the ‘yachting’
brand”; and why not? As to the size, comfort, and crew of the yacht—all
cheerfully ignored; so many maddening blanks. And, by the way, why in
Heaven’s name “a prismatic compass”? I fingered a few magazines, played
a game of fifty with a friendly old fogey, too importunate to be worth
the labour of resisting, and went back to my chambers to bed, ignorant
that a friendly Providence had come to my rescue; and, indeed, rather
resenting any clumsy attempt at such friendliness.




CHAPTER II.
The _Dulcibella_


That two days later I should be found pacing the deck of the Flushing
steamer with a ticket for Hamburg in my pocket may seem a strange
result, yet not so strange if you have divined my state of mind. You
will guess, at any rate, that I was armed with the conviction that I
was doing an act of obscure penance, rumours of which might call
attention to my lot and perhaps awaken remorse in the right quarter,
while it left me free to enjoy myself unobtrusively in the remote event
of enjoyment being possible.

The fact was that, at breakfast on the morning after the arrival of the
letter, I had still found that inexplicable lightening which I
mentioned before, and strong enough to warrant a revival of the pros
and cons. An important pro which I had not thought of before was that
after all it was a good-natured piece of unselfishness to join Davies;
for he had spoken of the want of a pal, and seemed honestly to be in
need of me. I almost clutched at this consideration. It was an
admirable excuse, when I reached my office that day, for a resigned
study of the Continental Bradshaw, and an order to Carter to unroll a
great creaking wall-map of Germany and find me Flensburg. The latter
labour I might have saved him, but it was good for Carter to have
something to do; and his patient ignorance was amusing. With most of
the map and what it suggested I was tolerably familiar, for I had not
wasted my year in Germany, whatever I had done or not done since. Its
people, history, progress, and future had interested me intensely, and
I had still friends in Dresden and Berlin. Flensburg recalled the
Danish war of ’64, and by the time Carter’s researches had ended in
success I had forgotten the task set him, and was wondering whether the
prospect of seeing something of that lovely region of
Schleswig-Holstein, _[See Map A]_ as I knew from hearsay that it was,
was at all to be set against such an uncomfortable way of seeing it,
with the season so late, the company so unattractive, and all the other
drawbacks which I counted and treasured as proofs of my desperate
condition, if I _were_ to go. It needed little to decide me, and I
think K——’s arrival from Switzerland, offensively sunburnt, was the
finishing touch. His greeting was “Hullo, Carruthers, you here? Thought
you had got away long ago. Lucky devil, though, to be going now, just
in time for the best driving and the early pheasants. The heat’s been
shocking out there. Carter, bring me a Bradshaw”—(an extraordinary
book, Bradshaw, turned to from habit, even when least wanted, as men
fondle guns and rods in the close season).

By lunch-time the weight of indecision had been removed, and I found
myself entrusting Carter with a telegram to Davies, P.O., Flensburg.
“Thanks; expect me 9.34 p.m. 26th”; which produced, three hours later,
a reply: “Delighted; please bring a No. 3 Rippingille stove”—a
perplexing and ominous direction, which somehow chilled me in spite of
its subject matter.

Indeed, my resolution was continually faltering. It faltered when I
turned out my gun in the evening and thought of the grouse it ought to
have accounted for. It faltered again when I contemplated the
miscellaneous list of commissions, sown broadcast through Davies’s
letter, to fulfil which seemed to make me a willing tool where my
chosen _rôle_ was that of an embittered exile, or at least a
condescending ally. However, I faced the commissions manfully, after
leaving the office.

At Lancaster’s I inquired for his gun, was received coolly, and had to
pay a heavy bill, which it seemed to have incurred, before it was
handed over. Having ordered the gun and No. 4’s to be sent to my
chambers, I bought the Raven mixture with that peculiar sense of injury
which the prospect of smuggling in another’s behalf always entails; and
wondered where in the world Carey and Neilson’s was, a firm which
Davies spoke of as though it were as well known as the Bank of England
or the Stores, instead of specialising in “rigging-screws”, whatever
they might be. They sounded important, though, and it would be only
polite to unearth them. I connected them with the “few repairs,” and
awoke new misgivings. At the Stores I asked for a No. 3 Rippingille
stove, and was confronted with a formidable and hideous piece of
ironmongery, which burned petroleum in two capacious tanks, horribly
prophetic of a smell of warm oil. I paid for this miserably, convinced
of its grim efficiency, but speculating as to the domestic conditions
which caused it to be sent for as an afterthought by telegram. I also
asked about rigging-screws in the yachting department, but learnt that
they were not kept in stock; that Carey and Neilson’s would certainly
have them, and that their shop was in the Minories, in the far east,
meaning a journey nearly as long as to Flensburg, and twice as
tiresome. They would be shut by the time I got there, so after this
exhausting round of duty I went home in a cab, omitted dressing for
dinner (an epoch in itself), ordered a chop up from the basement
kitchen, and spent the rest of the evening packing and writing, with
the methodical gloom of a man setting his affairs in order for the last
time.

The last of those airless nights passed. The astonished Withers saw me
breakfasting at eight, and at 9.30 I was vacantly examining
rigging-screws with what wits were left me after a sulphurous ride in
the underground to Aldgate. I laid great stress on the 3/8’s, and the
galvanism, and took them on trust, ignorant as to their functions. For
the eleven-shilling oilskins I was referred to a villainous den in a
back street, which the shopman said they always recommended, and where
a dirty and bejewelled Hebrew chaffered with me (beginning at 18_s_.)
over two reeking orange slabs distantly resembling moieties of the
human figure. Their odour made me close prematurely for 14_s_., and I
hurried back (for I was due there at 11) to my office with my two
disreputable brown-paper parcels, one of which made itself so
noticeable in the close official air that Carter attentively asked if I
would like to have it sent to my chambers, and K—— was inquisitive to
bluntness about it and my movements. But I did not care to enlighten
K——, whose comments I knew would be provokingly envious or wounding to
my pride in some way.

I remembered, later on, the prismatic compass, and wired to the
Minories to have one sent at once, feeling rather relieved that I was
not present there to be cross-examined as to size and make. The reply
was, “Not stocked; try surveying-instrument maker”—a reply both
puzzling and reassuring, for Davies’s request for a compass had given
me more uneasiness than anything, while, to find that what he wanted
turned out to be a surveying-instrument, was a no less perplexing
discovery. That day I made my last _précis_ and handed over my
schedules—Procrustean beds, where unwilling facts were stretched and
tortured—and said good-bye to my temporary chief, genial and lenient
M——, who wished me a jolly holiday with all sincerity.

At seven I was watching a cab packed with my personal luggage and the
collection of unwieldy and incongruous packages that my shopping had
drawn down on me. Two deviations after that wretched prismatic
compass—which I obtained in the end secondhand, _faute de mieux_, near
Victoria, at one of those showy shops which look like jewellers’ and
are really pawnbrokers’—nearly caused me to miss my train. But at 8.30
I had shaken off the dust of London from my feet, and at 10.30 I was,
as I have announced, pacing the deck of a Flushing steamer, adrift on
this fatuous holiday in the far Baltic.

An air from the west, cooled by a midday thunderstorm, followed the
steamer as she slid through the calm channels of the Thames estuary,
passed the cordon of scintillating lightships that watch over the
sea-roads to the imperial city like pickets round a sleeping army, and
slipped out into the dark spaces of the North Sea. Stars were bright,
summer scents from the Kent cliffs mingled coyly with vulgar
steamer-smells; the summer weather held immutably. Nature, for her
part, seemed resolved to be no party to my penance, but to be
imperturbably bent on shedding mild ridicule over my wrongs. An
irresistible sense of peace and detachment, combined with that
delicious physical awakening that pulses through the nerve-sick
townsman when city airs and bald routine are left behind him, combined
to provide me, however thankless a subject, with a solid background of
resignation. Stowing this safely away, I could calculate my intentions
with cold egotism. If the weather held I might pass a not intolerable
fortnight with Davies. When it broke up, as it was sure to, I could
easily excuse myself from the pursuit of the problematical ducks; the
wintry logic of facts would, in any case, decide him to lay up his
yacht, for he could scarcely think of sailing home at such a season. I
could then take a chance lying ready of spending a few weeks in Dresden
or elsewhere. I settled this programme comfortably and then turned in.

From Flushing eastward to Hamburg, then northward to Flensburg, I cut
short the next day’s sultry story. Past dyke and windmill and still
canals, on to blazing stubbles and roaring towns; at the last, after
dusk, through a quiet level region where the train pottered from one
lazy little station to another, and at ten o’clock I found myself,
stiff and stuffy, on the platform at Flensburg, exchanging greetings
with Davies.

“It’s awfully good of you to come.”

“Not at all; it’s very good of you to ask me.”

We were both of us ill at ease. Even in the dim gaslight he clashed on
my notions of a yachtsman—no cool white ducks or neat blue serge; and
where was the snowy crowned yachting cap, that precious charm that so
easily converts a landsman into a dashing mariner? Conscious that this
impressive uniform, in high perfection, was lying ready in my
portmanteau, I felt oddly guilty. He wore an old Norfolk jacket, muddy
brown shoes, grey flannel trousers (or had they been white?), and an
ordinary tweed cap. The hand he gave me was horny, and appeared to be
stained with paint; the other one, which carried a parcel, had a
bandage on it which would have borne renewal. There was an instant of
mutual inspection. I thought he gave me a shy, hurried scrutiny as
though to test past conjectures, with something of anxiety in it, and
perhaps (save the mark!) a tinge of admiration. The face was familiar,
and yet not familiar; the pleasant blue eyes, open, clean-cut features,
unintellectual forehead were the same; so were the brisk and impulsive
movements; there was some change; but the moment of awkward hesitation
was over and the light was bad; and, while strolling down the platform
for my luggage, we chatted with constraint about trivial things.

“By the way,” he suddenly said, laughing, “I’m afraid I’m not fit to be
seen; but it’s so late it doesn’t matter. I’ve been painting hard all
day, and just got it finished. I only hope we shall have some wind
to-morrow—it’s been hopelessly calm lately. I say, you’ve brought a
good deal of stuff,” he concluded, as my belongings began to collect.

Here was a reward for my submissive exertions in the far east!

“You gave me a good many commissions!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean those things,” he said, absently. “Thanks for
bringing them, by the way. That’s the stove, I suppose; cartridges,
this one, by the weight. You got the rigging-screws all right, I hope?
They’re not really necessary, of course” (I nodded vacantly, and felt a
little hurt); “but they’re simpler than lanyards, and you can’t get
them here. It’s that portmanteau,” he said, slowly, measuring it with a
doubtful eye. “Never mind! we’ll try. You couldn’t do with the
Gladstone only, I suppose? You see, the dinghy—h’m, and there’s the
hatchway, too”—he was lost in thought. “Anyhow, we’ll try. I’m afraid
there are no cabs; but it’s quite near, and the porter’ll help.”

Sickening forebodings crept over me, while Davies shouldered my
Gladstone and clutched at the parcels.

“Aren’t your men here?” I asked, faintly.

“Men?” He looked confused. “Oh, perhaps I ought to have told you, I
never have any paid hands; it’s quite a small boat, you know—I hope you
didn’t expect luxury. I’ve managed her single-handed for some time. A
man would be no use, and a horrible nuisance.” He revealed these
appalling truths with a cheerful assurance, which did nothing to hide a
naïve apprehension of their effect on me. There was a check in our
mobilisation.

“It’s rather late to go on board, isn’t it?” I said, in a wooden voice.
Someone was turning out the gaslights, and the porter yawned
ostentatiously. “I think I’d rather sleep at an hotel to-night.” A
strained pause.

“Oh, of course you can do that, if you like,” said Davies, in
transparent distress of mind. “But it seems hardly worth while to cart
this stuff all the way to an hotel (I believe they’re all on the other
side of the harbour), and back again to the boat to-morrow. She’s quite
comfortable, and you’re sure to sleep well, as you’re tired.”

“We can leave the things here,” I argued feebly, “and walk over with my
bag.”

“Oh, I shall have to go aboard anyhow,” he rejoined; “I _never_ sleep
on shore.”

He seemed to be clinging timidly, but desperately, to some diplomatic
end. A stony despair was invading me and paralysing resistance. Better
face the worst and be done with it.

“Come on,” I said, grimly.

Heavily loaded, we stumbled over railway lines and rubble heaps, and
came on the harbour. Davies led the way to a stairway, whose weedy
steps disappeared below in gloom.

“If you’ll get into the dinghy,” he said, all briskness now, “I’ll pass
the things down.”

I descended gingerly, holding as a guide a sodden painter which ended
in a small boat, and conscious that I was collecting slime on cuffs and
trousers.

“Hold up!” shouted Davies, cheerfully, as I sat down suddenly near the
bottom, with one foot in the water.

I climbed wretchedly into the dinghy and awaited events.

“Now float her up close under the quay wall, and make fast to the ring
down there,” came down from above, followed by the slack of the sodden
painter, which knocked my cap off as it fell. “All fast? Any knot’ll
do,” I heard, as I grappled with this loathsome task, and then a big,
dark object loomed overhead and was lowered into the dinghy. It was my
portmanteau, and, placed athwart, exactly filled all the space
amidships. “Does it fit?” was the anxious inquiry from aloft.

“Beautifully.”

“Capital!”

Scratching at the greasy wall to keep the dinghy close to it, I
received in succession our stores, and stowed the cargo as best I
could, while the dinghy sank lower and lower in the water, and its
precarious superstructure grew higher.

“Catch!” was the final direction from above, and a damp soft parcel hit
me in the chest. “Be careful of that, it’s meat. Now back to the
stairs!”

I painfully acquiesced, and Davies appeared.

“It’s a bit of a load, and she’s rather deep; but I _think_ we shall
manage,” he reflected. “You sit right aft, and I’ll row.”

I was too far gone for curiosity as to how this monstrous pyramid was
to be rowed, or even for surmises as to its foundering by the way. I
crawled to my appointed seat, and Davies extricated the buried sculls
by a series of tugs, which shook the whole structure, and made us roll
alarmingly. How he stowed himself into rowing posture I have not the
least idea, but eventually we were moving sluggishly out into the open
water, his head just visible in the bows. We had started from what
appeared to be the head of a narrow loch, and were leaving behind us
the lights of a big town. A long frontage of lamp-lit quays was on our
left, with here and there the vague hull of a steamer alongside. We
passed the last of the lights and came out into a broader stretch of
water, when a light breeze was blowing and dark hills could be seen on
either shore.

“I’m lying a little way down the fiord, you see,” said Davies. “I hate
to be too near a town, and I found a carpenter handy here— There she
is! I wonder how you’ll like her!”

I roused myself. We were entering a little cove encircled by trees, and
approaching a light which flickered in the rigging of a small vessel,
whose outline gradually defined itself.

“Keep her off,” said Davies, as we drew alongside.

In a moment he had jumped on deck, tied the painter, and was round at
my end.

“You hand them up,” he ordered, “and I’ll take them.”

It was a laborious task, with the one relief that it was not far to
hand them—a doubtful compensation, for other reasons distantly shaping
themselves. When the stack was transferred to the deck I followed it,
tripping over the flabby meat parcel, which was already showing ghastly
signs of disintegration under the dew. Hazily there floated through my
mind my last embarkation on a yacht; my faultless attire, the trim gig
and obsequious sailors, the accommodation ladder flashing with varnish
and brass in the August sun; the orderly, snowy decks and basket chairs
under the awning aft. What a contrast with this sordid midnight
scramble, over damp meat and littered packing-cases! The bitterest
touch of all was a growing sense of inferiority and ignorance which I
had never before been allowed to feel in my experience of yachts.

Davies awoke from another reverie over my portmanteau to say, cheerily:
“I’ll just show you round down below first, and then we’ll stow things
away and get to bed.”

He dived down a companion ladder, and I followed cautiously. A complex
odour of paraffin, past cookery, tobacco, and tar saluted my nostrils.

“Mind your head,” said Davies, striking a match and lighting a candle,
while I groped into the cabin. “You’d better sit down; it’s easier to
look round.”

There might well have been sarcasm in this piece of advice, for I must
have cut a ridiculous figure, peering awkwardly and suspiciously round,
with shoulders and head bent to avoid the ceiling, which seemed in the
half-light to be even nearer the floor than it was.

“You see,” were Davies’s reassuring words, “there’s plenty of room to
_sit_ upright” (which was strictly true; but I am not very tall, and he
is short). “Some people make a point of head-room, but I never mind
much about it. That’s the centreboard case,” he explained, as, in
stretching my legs out, my knee came into contact with a sharp edge.

I had not seen this devilish obstruction, as it was hidden beneath the
table, which indeed rested on it at one end. It appeared to be a long,
low triangle, running lengthways with the boat and dividing the
naturally limited space into two.

“You see, she’s a flat-bottomed boat, drawing very little water without
the plate; that’s why there’s so little headroom. For deep water you
lower the plate; so, in one way or another, you can go practically
anywhere.”

I was not nautical enough to draw any very definite conclusions from
this, but what I did draw were not promising. The latter sentences were
spoken from the forecastle, whither Davies had crept through a low
sliding door, like that of a rabbit-hutch, and was already busy with a
kettle over a stove which I made out to be a battered and disreputable
twin brother of the No. 3 Rippingille.

“It’ll be boiling soon,” he remarked, “and we’ll have some grog.”

My eyes were used to the light now, and I took in the rest of my
surroundings, which may be very simply described. Two long
cushion-covered seats flanked the cabin, bounded at the after end by
cupboards, one of which was cut low to form a sort of miniature
sideboard, with glasses hung in a rack above it. The deck overhead was
very low at each side but rose shoulder high for a space in the middle,
where a “coach-house roof” with a skylight gave additional cabin space.
Just outside the door was a fold-up washing-stand. On either wall were
long net-racks holding a medley of flags, charts, caps, cigar-boxes,
hanks of yarn, and such like. Across the forward bulkhead was a
bookshelf crammed to overflowing with volumes of all sizes, many upside
down and some coverless. Below this were a pipe-rack, an aneroid, and a
clock with a hearty tick. All the woodwork was painted white, and to a
less jaundiced eye than mine the interior might have had an enticing
look of snugness. Some Kodak prints were nailed roughly on the after
bulkhead, and just over the doorway was the photograph of a young girl.

“That’s my sister,” said Davies, who had emerged and saw me looking at
it. “Now, let’s get the stuff down.” He ran up the ladder, and soon my
portmanteau blackened the hatchway, and a great straining and squeezing
began. “I was afraid it was too big,” came down; “I’m sorry, but you’ll
have to unpack on deck—we may be able to squash it down when it’s
empty.”

Then the wearisome tail of packages began to form a fresh stack in the
cramped space at my feet, and my back ached with stooping and moiling
in unfamiliar places. Davies came down, and with unconcealed pride
introduced me to the sleeping cabin (he called the other one “the
saloon”). Another candle was lit and showed two short and narrow berths
with blankets, but no sign of sheets; beneath these were drawers, one
set of which Davies made me master of, evidently thinking them a
princely allowance of space for my wardrobe.

“You can chuck your things down the skylight on to your berth as you
unpack them,” he remarked. “By the way, I doubt if there’s room for all
you’ve got. I suppose you couldn’t manage——”

“No, I couldn’t,” I said shortly.

The absurdity of argument struck me; two men, doubled up like monkeys,
cannot argue.

“If you’ll go out I shall be able to get out too,” I added. He seemed
miserable at this ghost of an altercation, but I pushed past, mounted
the ladder, and in the expiring moonlight unstrapped that accursed
portmanteau and, brimming over with irritation, groped among its
contents, sorting some into the skylight with the same feeling that
nothing mattered much now, and it was best to be done with it;
repacking the rest with guilty stealth ere Davies should discover their
character, and strapping up the whole again. Then I sat down upon my
white elephant and shivered, for the chill of autumn was in the air. It
suddenly struck me that if it had been raining things might have been
worse still. The notion made me look round. The little cove was still
as glass; stars above and stars below; a few white cottages glimmering
at one point on the shore; in the west the lights of Flensburg; to the
east the fiord broadening into unknown gloom. From Davies toiling below
there were muffled sounds of wrenching, pushing, and hammering,
punctuated occasionally by a heavy splash as something shot up from the
hatchway and fell into the water.

How it came about I do not know. Whether it was something pathetic in
the look I had last seen on his face—a look which I associated for no
reason whatever with his bandaged hand; whether it was one of those
instants of clear vision in which our separate selves are seen divided,
the baser from the better, and I saw my silly egotism in contrast with
a simple generous nature; whether it was an impalpable air of mystery
which pervaded the whole enterprise and refused to be dissipated by its
most mortifying and vulgarising incidents—a mystery dimly connected
with my companion’s obvious consciousness of having misled me into
joining him; whether it was only the stars and the cool air rousing
atrophied instincts of youth and spirits; probably, indeed, it was all
these influences, cemented into strength by a ruthless sense of humour
which whispered that I was in danger of making a mere commonplace fool
of myself in spite of all my laboured calculations; but whatever it
was, in a flash my mood changed. The crown of martyrdom disappeared,
the wounded vanity healed; that precious fund of fictitious resignation
drained away, but left no void. There was left a fashionable and
dishevelled young man sitting in the dew and in the dark on a
ridiculous portmanteau which dwarfed the yacht that was to carry it; a
youth acutely sensible of ignorance in a strange and strenuous
atmosphere; still feeling sore and victimised; but withal sanely
ashamed and sanely resolved to enjoy himself. I anticipate; for though
the change was radical its full growth was slow. But in any case it was
here and now that it took its birth.

“Grog’s ready!” came from below. Bunching myself for the descent I
found to my astonishment that all trace of litter had miraculously
vanished, and a cosy neatness reigned. Glasses and lemons were on the
table, and a fragrant smell of punch had deadened previous odours. I
showed little emotion at these amenities, but enough to give intense
relief to Davies, who delightedly showed me his devices for storage,
praising the “roominess” of his floating den. “There’s your stove, you
see,” he ended; “I’ve chucked the old one overboard.” It was a weakness
of his, I should say here, to rejoice in throwing things overboard on
the flimsiest pretexts. I afterwards suspected that the new stove had
not been “really necessary” any more than the rigging-screws, but was
an excuse for gratifying this curious taste.

We smoked and chatted for a little, and then came the problem of going
to bed. After much bumping of knuckles and head, and many giddy
writhings, I mastered it, and lay between the rough blankets. Davies,
moving swiftly and deftly, was soon in his.

“It’s quite comfortable, isn’t it?” he said, as he blew out the light
from where he lay, with an accuracy which must have been the fruit of
long practice.

I felt prickly all over, and there was a damp patch on the pillow,
which was soon explained by a heavy drop of moisture falling on my
forehead.

“I suppose the deck’s not leaking?” I said, as mildly as I could.

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Davies, earnestly, tumbling out of his bunk.
“It must be the heavy dew. I did a lot of caulking yesterday, but I
suppose I missed that place. I’ll run up and square it with an
oilskin.”

“What’s wrong with your hand?” I asked, sleepily, on his return, for
gratitude reminded me of that bandage.

“Nothing much; I strained it the other day,” was the reply; and then
the seemingly inconsequent remark: “I’m glad you brought that prismatic
compass. It’s not really necessary, of course; but” (muffled by
blankets) “it may come in useful.”




CHAPTER III.
Davies


I dozed but fitfully, with a fretful sense of sore elbows and neck and
many a draughty hiatus among the blankets. It was broad daylight before
I had reached the stage of torpor in which such slumber merges. That
was finally broken by the descent through the skylight of a torrent of
water. I started up, bumped my head hard against the decks, and blinked
leaden-eyed upwards.

“Sorry! I’m scrubbing decks. Come up and bathe. Slept well?” I heard a
voice saying from aloft.

“Fairly well,” I growled, stepping out into a pool of water on the
oilcloth. Thence I stumbled up the ladder, dived overboard, and buried
bad dreams, stiffness, frowsiness, and tormented nerves in the
loveliest fiord of the lovely Baltic. A short and furious swim and I
was back again, searching for a means of ascent up the smooth black
side, which, low as it was, was slippery and unsympathetic. Davies, in
a loose canvas shirt, with the sleeves tucked up, and flannels rolled
up to the knee, hung over me with a rope’s end, and chatted
unconcernedly about the easiness of the job when you know how, adjuring
me to mind the paint, and talking about an accommodation ladder he had
once had, but had thrown overboard because it was so horribly in the
way. When I arrived, my knees and elbows were picked out in black
paint, to his consternation. Nevertheless, as I plied the towel, I knew
that I had left in those limpid depths yet another crust of discontent
and self-conceit.

As I dressed into flannels and blazer, I looked round the deck, and
with an unskilled and doubtful eye took in all that the darkness had
hitherto hidden. She seemed very small (in point of fact she was seven
tons), something over thirty feet in length and nine in beam, a size
very suitable to week-ends in the Solent, for such as liked that sort
of thing; but that she should have come from Dover to the Baltic
suggested a world of physical endeavour of which I had never dreamed. I
passed to the æsthetic side. Smartness and beauty were essential to
yachts, in my mind, but with the best resolves to be pleased I found
little encouragement here. The hull seemed too low, and the mainmast
too high; the cabin roof looked clumsy, and the skylights saddened the
eye with dull iron and plebeian graining. What brass there was, on the
tiller-head and elsewhere, was tarnished with sickly green. The decks
had none of that creamy purity which Cowes expects, but were rough and
grey, and showed tarry exhalations round the seams and rusty stains
near the bows. The ropes and rigging were in mourning when contrasted
with the delicate buff manilla so satisfying to the artistic eye as
seen against the blue of a June sky at Southsea. Nor was the whole
effect bettered by many signs of recent refitting. An impression of
paint, varnish, and carpentry was in the air; a gaudy new burgee
fluttered aloft; there seemed to be a new rope or two, especially round
the diminutive mizzen-mast, which itself looked altogether new. But all
this only emphasised the general plainness, reminding one of a
respectable woman of the working-classes trying to dress above her
station, and soon likely to give it up.

That the _ensemble_ was businesslike and solid even my untrained eye
could see. Many of the deck fittings seemed disproportionately
substantial. The anchor-chain looked contemptuous of its charge; the
binnacle with its compass was of a size and prominence almost comically
impressive, and was, moreover the only piece of brass which was
burnished and showed traces of reverent care. Two huge coils of stout
and dingy warp lay just abaft the mainmast, and summed up the
weather-beaten aspect of the little ship. I should add here that in the
distant past she had been a lifeboat, and had been clumsily converted
into a yacht by the addition of a counter, deck, and the necessary
spars. She was built, as all lifeboats are, diagonally, of two skins of
teak, and thus had immense strength, though, in the matter of looks,
all a hybrid’s failings.

Hunger and “Tea’s made!” from below brought me down to the cabin, where
I found breakfast laid out on the table over the centreboard case, with
Davies earnestly presiding, rather flushed as to the face, and sooty as
to the fingers. There was a slight shortage of plate and crockery, but
I praised the bacon and could do so truthfully, for its crisp and
steaming shavings would have put to shame the efforts of my London
cook. Indeed, I should have enjoyed the meal heartily were it not for
the lowness of the sofa and table, causing a curvature of the body
which made swallowing a more lengthy process than usual, and induced a
periodical yearning to get up and stretch—a relief which spelt disaster
to the skull. I noticed, too, that Davies spoke with a zest, sinister
to me, of the delights of white bread and fresh milk, which he seemed
to consider unusual luxuries, though suitable to an inaugural banquet
in honour of a fastidious stranger. “One can’t be always going on
shore,” he said, when I showed a discreet interest in these things. “I
lived for ten days on a big rye loaf over in the Frisian Islands.”

“And it died hard, I suppose?”

“Very hard, but” (gravely) “quite good. After that I taught myself to
make rolls; had no baking powder at first, so used Eno’s fruit salt,
but they wouldn’t rise much with that. As for milk, condensed is—I hope
you don’t mind it?”

I changed the subject, and asked about his plans.

“Let’s get under way at once,” he said, “and sail down the fiord.” I
tried for something more specific, but he was gone, and his voice
drowned in the fo’c’sle by the clatter and swish of washing up.
Thenceforward events moved with bewildering rapidity. Humbly desirous
of being useful I joined him on deck, only to find that he scarcely
noticed me, save as a new and unexpected obstacle in his round of
activity. He was everywhere at once—heaving in chain, hooking on
halyards, hauling ropes; while my part became that of the clown who
does things after they are already done, for my knowledge of a yacht
was of that floating and inaccurate kind which is useless in practice.
Soon the anchor was up (a great rusty monster it was!), the sails set,
and Davies was darting swiftly to and fro between the tiller and
jib-sheets, while the _Dulcibella_ bowed a lingering farewell to the
shore and headed for the open fiord. Erratic puffs from the high land
behind made her progress timorous at first, but soon the fairway was
reached and a true breeze from Flensburg and the west took her in its
friendly grip. Steadily she rustled down the calm blue highway whose
soft beauty was the introduction to a passage in my life, short, but
pregnant with moulding force, through stress and strain, for me and
others.

Davies was gradually resuming his natural self, with abstracted
intervals, in which he lashed the helm to finger a distant rope, with
such speed that the movements seemed simultaneous. Once he vanished,
only to reappear in an instant with a chart, which he studied, while
steering, with a success that its reluctant folds seemed to render
impossible. Waiting respectfully for his revival I had full time to
look about. The fiord here was about a mile broad. From the shore we
had left the hills rose steeply, but with no rugged grandeur; the
outlines were soft; there were green spaces and rich woods on the lower
slopes; a little white town was opening up in one place, and scattered
farms dotted the prospect. The other shore, which I could just see,
framed between the gunwale and the mainsail, as I sat leaning against
the hatchway, and sadly missing a deck-chair, was lower and lonelier,
though prosperous and pleasing to the eye. Spacious pastures led up by
slow degrees to ordered clusters of wood, which hinted at the presence
of some great manor house. Behind us, Flensburg was settling into haze.
Ahead, the scene was shut in by the contours of hills, some clear, some
dreamy and distant. Lastly, a single glimpse of water shining between
the folds of hill far away hinted at spaces of distant sea of which
this was but a secluded inlet. Everywhere was that peculiar charm
engendered by the association of quiet pastoral country and a homely
human atmosphere with a branch of the great ocean that bathes all the
shores of our globe.

There was another charm in the scene, due to the way in which I was
viewing it—not as a pampered passenger on a “fine steam yacht”, or even
on “a powerful modern schooner”, as the yacht agents advertise, but
from the deck of a scrubby little craft of doubtful build and
distressing plainness, which yet had smelt her persistent way to this
distant fiord through I knew not what of difficulty and danger, with no
apparent motive in her single occupant, who talked as vaguely and
unconcernedly about his adventurous cruise as though it were all a
protracted afternoon on Southampton Water.

I glanced round at Davies. He had dropped the chart and was sitting, or
rather half lying, on the deck with one bronzed arm over the tiller,
gazing fixedly ahead, with just an occasional glance around and aloft.
He still seemed absorbed in himself, and for a moment or two I studied
his face with an attention I had never, since I had known him, given
it. I had always thought it commonplace, as I had thought him
commonplace, so far as I had thought at all about either. It had always
rather irritated me by an excess of candour and boyishness. These
qualities it had kept, but the scales were falling from my eyes, and I
saw others. I saw strength to obstinacy and courage to recklessness, in
the firm lines of the chin; an older and deeper look in the eyes. Those
odd transitions from bright mobility to detached earnestness, which had
partly amused and chiefly annoyed me hitherto, seemed now to be lost in
a sensitive reserve, not cold or egotistic, but strangely winning from
its paradoxical frankness. Sincerity was stamped on every lineament. A
deep misgiving stirred me that, clever as I thought myself, nicely
perceptive of the right and congenial men to know, I had made some big
mistakes—how many, I wondered? A relief, scarcely less deep because it
was unconfessed, stole in on me with the suspicion that, little as I
deserved it, the patient fates were offering me a golden chance of
repairing at least one. And yet, I mused, the patient fates have
crooked methods, besides a certain mischievous humour, for it was
Davies who had asked me out—though now he scarcely seemed to need
me—almost tricked me into coming out, for he might have known I was not
suited to such a life; yet trickery and Davies sounded an odd
conjuncture.

Probably it was the growing discomfort of my attitude which produced
this backsliding. My night’s rest and the “ascent from the bath” had,
in fact, done little to prepare me for contact with sharp edges and
hard surfaces. But Davies had suddenly come to himself, and with an “I
say, are you comfortable? Have something to sit on?” jerked the helm a
little to windward, felt it like a pulse for a moment, with a rapid
look to windward, and dived below, whence he returned with a couple of
cushions, which he threw to me. I felt perversely resentful of these
luxuries, and asked:

“Can’t I be of any use?”

“Oh, don’t you bother,” he answered. “I expect you’re tired. Aren’t we
having a splendid sail? That must be Ekken on the port bow,” peering
under the sail, “where the trees run in. I say, do you mind looking at
the chart?” He tossed it over to me. I spread it out painfully, for it
curled up like a watch-spring at the least slackening of pressure. I
was not familiar with charts, and this sudden trust reposed in me,
after a good deal of neglect, made me nervous.

“You see Flensburg, don’t you?” he said. “That’s where we are,” dabbing
with a long reach at an indefinite space on the crowded sheet. “Now
which side of that buoy off the point do we pass?”

I had scarcely taken in which was land and which was water, much less
the significance of the buoy, when he resumed:

“Never mind; I’m pretty sure it’s all deep water about here. I expect
that marks the fairway for steamers.

In a minute or two we were passing the buoy in question, on the wrong
side I am pretty certain, for weeds and sand came suddenly into view
below us with uncomfortable distinctness. But all Davies said was:

“There’s never any sea here, and the plate’s not down,” a dark
utterance which I pondered doubtfully. “The best of these Schleswig
waters,” he went on, “is that a boat of this size can go almost
anywhere. There’s no navigation required. Why——” At this moment a faint
scraping was felt, rather than heard, beneath us.

“Aren’t we aground?” I asked with great calmness.

“Oh, she’ll blow over,” he replied, wincing a little.

She “blew over”, but the episode caused a little naïve vexation in
Davies. I relate it as a good instance of one of his minor
peculiarities. He was utterly without that didactic pedantry which
yachting has a fatal tendency to engender in men who profess it. He had
tossed me the chart without a thought that I was an ignoramus, to whom
it would be Greek, and who would provide him with an admirable subject
to drill and lecture, just as his neglect of me throughout the morning
had been merely habitual and unconscious independence. In the second
place, master of his _métier_, as I knew him afterwards to be,
resourceful, skilful, and alert, he was liable to lapse into a certain
amateurish vagueness, half irritating and half amusing. I think truly
that both these peculiarities came from the same source, a hatred of
any sort of affectation. To the same source I traced the fact that he
and his yacht observed none of the superficial etiquette of yachts and
yachtsmen, that she never, for instance, flew a national ensign, and he
never wore a “yachting suit”.

We rounded a low green point which I had scarcely noticed before.

“We must jibe,” said Davies: “just take the helm, will you?” and,
without waiting for my co-operation, he began hauling in the mainsheet
with great vigour. I had rude notions of steering, but jibing is a
delicate operation. No yachtsman will be surprised to hear that the
boom saw its opportunity and swung over with a mighty crash, with the
mainsheet entangled round me and the tiller.

“Jibed all standing,” was his sorrowful comment. “You’re not used to
her yet. She’s very quick on the helm.”

“Where am I to steer for?” I asked, wildly.

“Oh, don’t trouble, I’ll take her now,” he replied.

I felt it was time to make my position clear. “I’m an utter duffer at
sailing,” I began. “You’ll have a lot to teach me, or one of these days
I shall be wrecking you. You see, there’s always been a crew——”

“Crew!”—with sovereign contempt—“why, the whole fun of the thing is to
do everything oneself.”

“Well, I’ve felt in the way the whole morning.”

“I’m awfully sorry!” His dismay and repentance were comical. “Why, it’s
just the other way; you may be all the use in the world.” He became
absent.

We were following the inward trend of a small bay towards a cleft in
the low shore.

“That’s Ekken Sound,” said Davies; “let’s look into it,” and a minute
or two later we were drifting through a dainty little strait, with a
peep of open water at the end of it. Cottages bordered either side,
some overhanging the very water, some connecting with it by a rickety
wooden staircase or a miniature landing-stage. Creepers and roses
rioted over the walls and tiny porches. For a space on one side, a rude
quay, with small smacks floating off it, spoke of some minute
commercial interests; a very small tea-garden, with neglected-looking
bowers and leaf-strewn tables, hinted at some equally minute tripping
interest. A pervading hue of mingled bronze and rose came partly from
the weather-mellowed woodwork of the cottages and stages, and partly
from the creepers and the trees behind, where autumn’s subtle fingers
were already at work. Down this exquisite sea-lane we glided till it
ended in a broad mere, where our sails, which had been shivering and
complaining, filled into contented silence.

“Ready about!” said Davies, callously. “We must get out of this again.”
And round we swung.

“Why not anchor and stop here?” I protested; for a view of tantalising
loveliness was unfolding itself.

“Oh, we’ve seen all there is to be seen, and we must take this breeze
while we’ve got it.” It was always torture to Davies to feel a good
breeze running to waste while he was inactive at anchor or on shore.
The “shore” to him was an inferior element, merely serving as a useful
annexe to the water—a source of necessary supplies.

“Let’s have lunch,” he pursued, as we resumed our way down the fiord. A
vision of iced drinks, tempting salads, white napery, and an attentive
steward mocked me with past recollections.

“You’ll find a tongue,” said the voice of doom, “in the starboard
sofa-locker; beer under the floor in the bilge. I’ll see her round that
buoy, if you wouldn’t mind beginning.” I obeyed with a bad grace, but
the close air and cramped posture must have benumbed my faculties, for
I opened the port-side locker, reached down, and grasped a sticky body,
which turned out to be a pot of varnish. Recoiling wretchedly, I tried
the opposite one, combating the embarrassing heel of the boat and the
obstructive edges of the centreboard case. A medley of damp tins of
varied sizes showed in the gloom, exuding a mouldy odour. Faded legends
on dissolving paper, like the remnants of old posters on a disused
hoarding, spoke of soups, curries, beefs, potted meats, and other
hidden delicacies. I picked out a tongue, re-imprisoned the odour, and
explored for beer. It was true, I supposed, that bilge didn’t hurt it,
as I tugged at the plank on my hands and knees, but I should have
myself preferred a more accessible and less humid wine-cellar than the
cavities among slimy ballast from which I dug the bottles. I regarded
my hard-won and ill-favoured pledges of a meal with giddiness and
discouragement.

“How are you getting on?” shouted Davies; “the tin-opener’s hanging up
on the bulkhead; the plates and knives are in the cupboard.”

I doggedly pursued my functions. The plates and knives met me half-way,
for, being on the weather side, and thus having a downward slant, its
contents, when I slipped the latch, slid affectionately into my bosom,
and overflowed with a clatter and jingle on to the floor.

“That often happens,” I heard from above. “Never mind! There are no
breakables. I’m coming down to help.” And down he came, leaving the
_Dulcibella_ to her own devices.

“I think I’ll go on deck,” I said. “Why in the world couldn’t you lunch
comfortably at Ekken and save this infernal pandemonium of a picnic?
Where’s the yacht going to meanwhile? And how are we to lunch on that
slanting table? I’m covered with varnish and mud, and ankle-deep in
crockery. There goes the beer!”

“You shouldn’t have stood it on the table with this list on,” said
Davies, with intense composure, “but it won’t do any harm; it’ll drain
into the bilge” (ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I thought). “You go on
deck now, and I’ll finish getting ready.” I regretted my explosion,
though wrung from me under great provocation.

“Keep her straight on as she’s going,” said Davies, as I clambered up
out of the chaos, brushing the dust off my trousers and varnishing the
ladder with my hands. I unlashed the helm and kept her as she was
going.

We had rounded a sharp bend in the fiord, and were sailing up a broad
and straight reach which every moment disclosed new beauties, sights
fair enough to be balm to the angriest spirit. A red-roofed hamlet was
on our left, on the right an ivied ruin, close to the water, where some
contemplative cattle stood knee-deep. The view ahead was a white strand
which fringed both shores, and to it fell wooded slopes, interrupted
here and there by low sandstone cliffs of warm red colouring, and now
and again by a dingle with cracks of greensward.

I forgot petty squalors and enjoyed things—the coy tremble of the
tiller and the backwash of air from the dingy mainsail, and, with a
somewhat chastened rapture, the lunch which Davies brought up to me and
solicitously watched me eat.

Later, as the wind sank to lazy airs, he became busy with a larger
topsail and jib; but I was content to doze away the afternoon,
drenching brain and body in the sweet and novel foreign atmosphere, and
dreamily watching the fringe of glen cliff and cool white sand as they
passed ever more slowly by.




CHAPTER IV
Retrospect


“Wake up!” I rubbed my eyes and wondered where I was; stretched myself
painfully, too, for even the cushions had not given me a true bed of
roses. It was dusk, and the yacht was stationary in glassy water,
coloured by the last after-glow. A roofing of thin upper-cloud had
spread over most of the sky, and a subtle smell of rain was in the air.
We seemed to be in the middle of the fiord, whose shores looked distant
and steep in the gathering darkness. Close ahead they faded away
suddenly, and the sight lost itself in a grey void. The stillness was
absolute.

“We can’t get to Sonderburg to-night,” said Davies.

“What’s to be done then?” I asked, collecting my senses.

“Oh! we’ll anchor anywhere here, we’re just at the mouth of the fiord;
I’ll tow her inshore if you’ll steer in that direction.” He pointed
vaguely at a blur of trees and cliff. Then he jumped into the dinghy,
cast off the painter, and, after snatching at the slack of a rope,
began towing the reluctant yacht by short jerks of the sculls. The
menacing aspect of that grey void, combined with a natural preference
for getting to some definite place at night, combined to depress my
spirits afresh. In my sleep I had dreamt of Morven Lodge, of heather
tea-parties after glorious slaughters of grouse, of salmon leaping in
amber pools—and now——

“Just take a cast of the lead, will you?” came Davies’s voice above the
splash of the sculls.

“Where is it?” I shouted back.

“Never mind—we’re close enough now; let—— Can you manage to let go the
anchor?”

I hurried forward and picked impotently at the bonds of the sleeping
monster. But Davies was aboard again, and stirred him with a deft touch
or two, till he crashed into the water with a grinding of chain.

“We shall do well here,” said he.

“Isn’t this rather an open anchorage?” I suggested.

“It’s only open from that quarter,” he replied. “If it comes on to blow
from there we shall have to clear out; but I think it’s only rain.
Let’s stow the sails.”

Another whirlwind of activity, in which I joined as effectively as I
could, oppressed by the prospect of having to “clear out”—who knows
whither?—at midnight. But Davies’s _sang froid_ was infectious, I
suppose, and the little den below, bright-lit and soon fragrant with
cookery, pleaded insistently for affection. Yachting in this singular
style was hungry work, I found. Steak tastes none the worse for having
been wrapped in newspaper, and the slight traces of the day’s news
disappear with frying in onions and potato-chips. Davies was indeed on
his mettle for this, his first dinner to his guest; for he produced
with stealthy pride, not from the dishonoured grave of the beer, but
from some more hallowed recess, a bottle of German champagne, from
which we drank success to the _Dulcibella_.

“I wish you would tell me all about your cruise from England,” I asked.
“You must have had some exciting adventures. Here are the charts; let’s
go over them.”

“We must wash up first,” he replied, and I was tactfully introduced to
one of his very few “standing orders”, that tobacco should not burn,
nor post-prandial chat begin, until that distasteful process had ended.
“It would never get done otherwise,” he sagely opined. But when we were
finally settled with cigars, a variety of which, culled from many
ports—German, Dutch, and Belgian—Davies kept in a battered old box in
the net-rack, the promised talk hung fire.

“I’m no good at description,” he complained; “and there’s really very
little to tell. We left Dover—Morrison and I—on the 6th of August; made
a good passage to Ostend.”

“You had some fun there, I suppose?” I put in, thinking of—well, of
Ostend in August.

“Fun! A filthy hole I call it; we had to stop a couple of days, as we
fouled a buoy coming in and carried away the bobstay; we lay in a dirty
little tidal dock, and there was nothing to do on shore.”

“Well, what next?”

“We had a splendid sail to the East Scheldt, but then, like fools,
decided to go through Holland by canal and river. It was good fun
enough navigating the estuary—the tides and banks there are
appalling—but farther inland it was a wretched business, nothing but
paying lock-dues, bumping against schuyts, and towing down stinking
canals. Never a peaceful night like this—always moored by some quay or
tow-path, with people passing and boys. Heavens! shall I ever forget
those boys! A perfect murrain of them infests Holland; they seem to
have nothing in the world to do but throw stones and mud at foreign
yachts.”

“They want a Herod, with some statesmanlike views on infanticide.”

“By Jove! yes; but the fact is that you want a crew for that pottering
inland work; they can smack the boys and keep an eye on the sculls. A
boat like this should stick to the sea, or out-of-the-way places on the
coast. Well, after Amsterdam.”

“You’ve skipped a good deal, haven’t you?” I interrupted.

“Oh! have I? Well, let me see, we went by Dordrecht to Rotterdam;
nothing to see there, and swarms of tugs buzzing about and shaving
one’s bows every second. On by the Vecht river to Amsterdam, and
thence—Lord, what a relief it was!—out into the North Sea again. The
weather had been still and steamy; but it broke up finely now, and we
had a rattling three-reef sail to the Zuyder Zee.”

He reached up to the bookshelf for what looked like an ancient ledger,
and turned over the leaves.

“Is that your log?” I asked. “I should like to have a look at it.”

“Oh! you’d find it dull reading—if you could read it at all; it’s just
short notes about winds and bearings, and so on.” He was turning some
leaves over rapidly. “Now, why don’t you keep a log of what we do? I
can’t describe things, and you can.”

“I’ve half a mind to try,” I said.

“We want another chart now,” and he pulled down a second yet more
stained and frayed than the first. “We had a splendid time then
exploring the Zuyder Zee, its northern part at least, and round those
islands which bound it on the north. Those are the Frisian Islands, and
they stretch for 120 miles or so eastward. You see, the first two of
them, Texel and Vlieland, shut in the Zuyder Zee, and the rest border
the Dutch and German coasts.” _[See Map A]_

“What’s all this?” I said, running my finger over some dotted patches
which covered much of the chart. The latter was becoming
unintelligible; clean-cut coasts and neat regiments of little figures
had given place to a confusion of winding and intersecting lines and
bald spaces.

“All _sand_,” said Davies, enthusiastically. “You can’t think what a
splendid sailing-ground it is. You can explore for days without seeing
a soul. These are the channels, you see; they’re very badly charted.
This chart was almost useless, but it made it all the more fun. No
towns or harbours, just a village or two on the islands, if you wanted
stores.”

“They look rather desolate,” I said.

“Desolate’s no word for it; they’re really only gigantic sandbanks
themselves.”

“Wasn’t all this rather dangerous?” I asked.

“Not a bit; you see, that’s where our shallow draught and flat bottom
came in—we could go anywhere, and it didn’t matter running
aground—she’s perfect for that sort of work; and she doesn’t really
_look_ bad either, does she?” he asked, rather wistfully. I suppose I
hesitated, for he said, abruptly:

“Anyway, I don’t go in for looks.”

He had leaned back, and I detected traces of incipient
absentmindedness. His cigar, which he had lately been lighting and
relighting feverishly—a habit of his when excited—seemed now to have
expired for good.

“About running aground,” I persisted; “surely that’s apt to be
dangerous?”

He sat up and felt round for a match.

“Not the least, if you know where you can run risks and where you
can’t; anyway, you can’t possibly help it. That chart may look simple
to you”—(“simple!” I thought)—“but at half flood all those banks are
covered; the islands and coasts are scarcely visible, they are so low,
and everything looks the same.” This graphic description of a “splendid
cruising-ground” took away my breath. “Of course there _is_ risk
sometimes—choosing an anchorage requires care. You can generally get a
nice berth under the lee of a bank, but the tides run strong in the
channels, and if there’s a gale blowing——”

“Didn’t you ever take a pilot?” I interrupted.

“Pilot? Why, the whole point of the thing”—he stopped short—“I did take
one once, later on,” he resumed, with an odd smile, which faded at
once.

“Well?” I urged, for I saw a reverie was coming.

“Oh! he ran me ashore, of course. Served me right. I wonder what the
weather’s doing”; he rose, glanced at the aneroid, the clock, and the
half-closed skylight with a curious circular movement, and went a step
or two up the companion-ladder, where he remained for several minutes
with head and shoulders in the open air.

There was no sound of wind outside, but the _Dulcibella_ had begun to
move in her sleep, as it were, rolling drowsily to some faint send of
the sea, with an occasional short jump, like the start of an uneasy
dreamer.

“What does it look like?” I called from my sofa. I had to repeat the
question.

“Rain coming,” said Davies, returning, “and possibly wind; but we’re
safe enough here. It’s coming from the sou’-west; shall we turn in?”

“We haven’t finished your cruise yet,” I said. “Light a pipe and tell
me the rest.”

“All right,” he agreed, with more readiness than I expected.

“After Terschelling—here it is, the third island from the west—I
pottered along eastward.” _[See Map A]_

“I?”

“Oh! I forgot. Morrison had to leave me there. I missed him badly, but
I hoped at that time to get —— to join me. I could manage all right
single-handed, but for that sort of work two are much better than one.
The plate’s beastly heavy; in fact, I had to give up using it for fear
of a smash.”

“After Terschelling?” I jogged his memory.

“Well, I followed the Dutch islands, Ameland, Schiermonnikoog, Rottum
(outlandish names, aren’t they?), sometimes outside them, sometimes
inside. It was a bit lonely, but grand sport and very interesting. The
charts were shocking, but I worried out most of the channels.”

“I suppose those waters are only used by small local craft?” I put in;
“that would account for inaccuracies.” Did Davies think that
Admiralties had time to waste on smoothing the road for such quixotic
little craft as his, in all its inquisitive ramblings? But he fired up.

“That’s all very well,” he said, “but think what folly it is. However,
that’s a long story, and will bore you. To cut matters short, for we
ought to be turning in, I got to Borkum—that’s the first of the
_German_ islands.” He pointed at a round bare lozenge lying in the
midst of a welter of sandbanks. “Rottum—this queer little one—it has
only one house on it—is the most easterly Dutch island, and the
mainland of Holland ends _here_, opposite it, at the Ems
River”—indicating a dismal cavity in the coast, sown with names
suggestive of mud, and wrecks, and dreariness.

“What date was this?” I asked.

“About the ninth of this month.”

“Why, that’s only a fortnight before you wired to me! You were pretty
quick getting to Flensburg. Wait a bit, we want another chart. Is this
the next?”

“Yes; but we scarcely need it. I only went a little way farther on—to
Norderney, in fact, the third German island—then I decided to go
straight for the Baltic. I had always had an idea of getting there, as
Knight did in the _Falcon_. So I made a passage of it to the Eider
River, _there_ on the West Schleswig coast, took the river and canal
through to Kiel on the Baltic, and from there made another passage up
north to Flensburg. I was a week there, and then you came, and here we
are. And now let’s turn in. We’ll have a fine sail to-morrow!” He ended
with rather forced vivacity, and briskly rolled up the chart. The
reluctance he had shown from the first to talk about his cruise had
been for a brief space forgotten in his enthusiasm about a portion of
it, but had returned markedly in this bald conclusion. I felt sure that
there was more in it than mere disinclination to spin nautical yarns in
the “hardy Corinthian” style, which can be so offensive in amateur
yachtsmen; and I thought I guessed the explanation. His voyage
single-handed to the Baltic from the Frisian Islands had been a
foolhardy enterprise, with perilous incidents, which, rather than make
light of, he would not refer to at all. Probably he was ashamed of his
recklessness and wished to ignore it with me, an inexperienced
acquaintance not yet enamoured of the _Dulcibella_’s way of life, whom
both courtesy and interest demanded that he should inspire with
confidence. I liked him all the better as I came to this conclusion,
but I was tempted to persist a little.

“I slept the whole afternoon,” I said; “and, to tell the truth, I
rather dread the idea of going to bed, it’s so tiring. Look here,
you’ve rushed over that last part like an express train. That passage
to the Schleswig coast—the Eider River, did you say?—was a longish one,
wasn’t it?”

“Well, you see what it was; about seventy miles, I suppose, direct.” He
spoke low, bending down to sweep up some cigar ashes on the floor.

“Direct?” I insinuated. “Then you put in somewhere?”

“I stopped once, anchored for the night; oh, that’s nothing of a sail
with a fair wind. By Jove! I’ve forgotten to caulk that seam over your
bunk, and it’s going to rain. I must do it now. You turn in.”

He disappeared. My curiosity, never very consuming, was banished by
concern as to the open seam; for the prospect of a big drop,
remorseless and regular as Fate, falling on my forehead throughout the
night, as in the torture-chamber of the Inquisition, was alarming
enough to recall me wholly to the immediate future. So I went to bed,
finding on the whole that I had made progress in the exercise, though
still far from being the trained contortionist that the occasion called
for. Hammering ceased, and Davies reappeared just as I was stretched on
the rack—tucked up in my bunk, I mean.

“I say,” he said, when he was settled in his, and darkness reigned, “do
you think you’ll like this sort of thing?”

“If there are many places about here as beautiful as this,” I replied,
“I think I shall. But _I_ should like to land now and then and have a
walk. Of course, a great deal depends on the weather, doesn’t it? I
hope this rain” (drops had begun to patter overhead) “doesn’t mean that
the summer’s over for good.”

“Oh, you can sail just the same,” said Davies, “unless it’s very bad.
There’s plenty of sheltered water. There’s bound to be a change soon.
But then there are the ducks. The colder and stormier it is, the better
for them.”

I had forgotten the ducks and the cold, and, suddenly presented as a
shooting-box in inclement weather, the _Dulcibella_ lost ground in my
estimation, which she had latterly gained.

“I’m fond of shooting,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’m only a fair-weather
yachtsman, and I should much prefer sun and scenery.”

“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?”

“Only one,” he answered. “Good night!”

“Good night!”




CHAPTER V.
Wanted, a North Wind


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.

I cannot pretend that I really enjoyed this first sail into the open,
though I was keenly anxious to do so. I felt the thrill of those
forward leaps, heard that persuasive song the foam sings under the
lee-bow, saw the flashing harmonies of sea and sky; but sensuous
perception was deadened by nervousness. The yacht looked smaller than
ever outside the quiet fiord. The song of the foam seemed very near,
the wave crests aft very high. The novice in sailing clings desperately
to the thoughts of sailors—effective, prudent persons, with a typical
jargon and a typical dress, versed in local currents and winds. I could
not help missing this professional element. Davies, as he sat grasping
his beloved tiller, looked strikingly efficient in his way, and
supremely at home in his surroundings; but he looked the amateur
through and through, as with one hand, and (it seemed) one eye, he
wrestled with a spray-splashed chart half unrolled on the deck beside
him. All his casual ways returned to me—his casual talk and that last
adventurous voyage to the Baltic, and the suspicions his reticence had
aroused.

“Do you see a monument anywhere?” he said, all at once; and, before I
could answer; “We must take another reef.” He let go of the tiller and
relit his pipe, while the yacht rounded sharply to, and in a twinkling
was tossing head to sea with loud claps of her canvas and passionate
jerks of her boom, as the wind leapt on its quarry, now turning to bay,
with redoubled force. The sting of spray in my eyes and the Babel of
noise dazed me; but Davies, with a pull on the fore-sheet, soothed the
tormented little ship, and left her coolly sparring with the waves
while he shortened sail and puffed his pipe. An hour later the narrow
vista of Als Sound was visible, with quiet old Sonderburg sunning
itself on the island shore, and the Dybbol heights towering above—the
Dybbol of bloody memory; scene of the last desperate stand of the Danes
in ’64, ere the Prussians wrested the two fair provinces from them.

“It’s early to anchor, and I hate towns,” said Davies, as one section
of a lumbering pontoon bridge opened to give us passage. But I was firm
on the need for a walk, and got my way on condition that I bought
stores as well, and returned in time to admit of further advance to a
“quiet anchorage”. Never did I step on the solid earth with stranger
feelings, partly due to relief from confinement, partly to that sense
of independence in travelling, which, for those who go down to the sea
in small ships, can make the foulest coal-port in Northumbria seem
attractive. And here I had fascinating Sonderburg, with its broad-eaved
houses of carved woodwork, each fresh with cleansing, yet reverend with
age; its fair-haired Viking-like men, and rosy, plain-faced women, with
their bullet foreheads and large mouths; Sonderburg still Danish to the
core under its Teuton veneer. Crossing the bridge I climbed the
Dybbol—dotted with memorials of that heroic defence—and thence could
see the wee form and gossamer rigging of the _Dulcibella_ on the silver
ribbon of the Sound, and was reminded by the sight that there were
stores to be bought. So I hurried down again to the old quarter and
bargained over eggs and bread with a dear old lady, pink as a
_débutante,_ made a patriotic pretence of not understanding German, and
called in her strapping son, whose few words of English, being chiefly
nautical slang picked up on a British trawler, were peculiarly useless
for the purpose. Davies had tea ready when I came aboard again, and,
drinking it on deck, we proceeded up the sheltered Sound, which, in
spite of its imposing name, was no bigger than an inland river, only
the hosts of rainbow jelly-fish reminding us that we were threading a
highway of ocean. There is no rise and fall of tide in these regions to
disfigure the shore with mud. Here was a shelving gravel bank; there a
bed of whispering rushes; there again young birch trees growing to the
very brink, each wearing a stocking of bright moss and setting its foot
firmly in among golden leaves and scarlet fungus.

Davies was preoccupied, but he lighted up when I talked of the Danish
war. “Germany’s a thundering great nation,” he said; “I wonder if we
shall ever fight her.” A little incident that happened after we
anchored deepened the impression left by this conversation. We crept at
dusk into a shaded back-water, where our keel almost touched the gravel
bed. Opposite us on the Alsen shore there showed, clean-cut against the
sky, the spire of a little monument rising from a leafy hollow.

“I wonder what that is,” I said. It was scarcely a minute’s row in the
dinghy, and when the anchor was down we sculled over to it. A bank of
loam led to gorse and bramble. Pushing aside some branches we came to a
slender Gothic memorial in grey stone, inscribed with bas-reliefs of
battle scenes, showing Prussians forcing a landing in boats and Danes
resisting with savage tenacity. In the failing light we spelt out an
inscription: “Den bei dem Meeres Uebergange und der Eroberung von Alsen
am 29. Juni 1864 heldenmüthig gefallenen zum ehrenden Gedächtniss.” “To
the honoured memory of those who died heroically at the invasion and
storming of Alsen.” I knew the German passion for commemoration; I had
seen similar memorials on Alsatian battlefields, and several on the
Dybbol only that afternoon; but there was something in the scene, the
hour, and the circumstances, which made this one seem singularly
touching. As for Davies, I scarcely recognised him; his eyes flashed
and filled with tears as he glanced from the inscription to the path we
had followed and the water beyond. “It was a landing in boats, I
suppose,” he said, half to himself. “I wonder they managed it. What
does _heldenmüthig_ mean?”—“Heroically.”—“Heldenmüthig gefallenen,” he
repeated, under his breath, lingering on each syllable. He was like a
schoolboy reading of Waterloo.

Our conversation at dinner turned naturally on war, and in naval
warfare I found I had come upon Davies’s literary hobby. I had not
hitherto paid attention to the medley on our bookshelf, but I now saw
that, besides a Nautical Almanack and some dilapidated _Sailing
Directions_, there were several books on the cruises of small yachts,
and also some big volumes crushed in anyhow or lying on the top.
Squinting painfully at them I saw Mahan’s _Life of Nelson_, Brassey’s
_Naval Annual_, and others.

“It’s a tremendously interesting subject,” said Davies, pulling down
(in two pieces) a volume of Mahan’s _Influence of Sea Power_.

Dinner flagged (and froze) while he illustrated a point by reference to
the much-thumbed pages. He was very keen, and not very articulate. I
knew just enough to be an intelligent listener, and, though hungry, was
delighted to hear him talk.

“I’m not boring you, am I?” he said, suddenly.

“I should think not,” I protested. “But you might just have a look at
the chops.”

They had indeed been crying aloud for notice for some minutes, and drew
candid attention to their neglect when they appeared. The diversion
they caused put Davies out of vein. I tried to revive the subject, but
he was reserved and diffident.

The untidy bookshelf reminded me of the logbook, and when Davies had
retired with the crockery to the forecastle, I pulled the ledger down
and turned over the leaves. It was a mass of short entries, with
cryptic abbreviations, winds, tides, weather, and courses appearing to
predominate. The voyage from Dover to Ostend was dismissed in two
lines: “Under way 7 p.m., wind W.S.W. moderate; West Hinder 5 a.m.,
outside all banks; Ostend 11 a.m.” The Scheldt had a couple of pages
very technical and _staccato_ in style. Inland Holland was given a
contemptuous summary, with some half-hearted allusions to windmills,
and so on, and a caustic word or two about boys, paint, and canal
smells.

At Amsterdam technicalities began again, and a brisker tone pervaded
the entries, which became progressively fuller as the writer cruised on
the Frisian coast. He was clearly in better spirits, for here and there
were quaint and laboured efforts to describe nature out of material
which, as far as I could judge, was repellent enough to discourage the
most brilliant and observant of writers; with an occasional note of a
visit on shore, generally reached by a walk of half a mile over sand,
and of talks with shop people and fishermen. But such lighter relief
was rare. The bulk dealt with channels and shoals with weird and
depressing names, with the centre-plate, the sails, and the wind, buoys
and “booms”, tides and “berths” for the night. “Kedging off” appeared
to be a frequent diversion; “running aground” was of almost daily
occurrence.

It was not easy reading, and I turned the leaves rapidly. I was
curious, too, to see the latter part. I came to a point where the rain
of little sentences, pattering out like small shot, ceased abruptly. It
was at the end of September 9. That day, with its “kedging” and
“boom-dodging”, was filled in with the usual detail. The log then leapt
over three days, and went on: “_Sept._ 13. Wind W.N.W. fresh. Decided
to go to Baltic. Sailed 4 a.m. Quick passage E. 1/2 S. to mouth of
Weser. Anchored for night under Hohenhörn Sand. _ Sept._ 14, _nil_.
_Sept._ 15, under way at 4 a.m. Wind East moderate. Course W. by S.;
four miles; N.E. by N. fifteen miles. Norderpiep 9.30. Eider River
11.30.” This recital of naked facts was quite characteristic when
“passages” were concerned, and any curiosity I had felt about his
reticence on the previous night would have been rather allayed than
stimulated had I not noticed that a page had been torn out of the book
just at this point. The frayed edge left had been pruned and picked
into very small limits; but dissimulation was not Davies’s strong
point, and a child could have seen that a leaf was missing, and that
the entries, starting from the evening of September 9 (where a page
ended), had been written together at one sitting. I was on the point of
calling to Davies, and chaffing him with having committed a grave
offence against maritime law in having “cooked” his log; but I checked
myself, I scarcely know why, probably because I guessed the joke would
touch a sensitive place and fail. Delicacy shrank from seeing him
compelled either to amplify a deception or blunder out a confession—he
was too easy a prey; and, after all, the matter was of small moment. I
returned the book to the shelf, the only definite result of its perusal
being to recall my promise to keep a diary myself, and I then and there
dedicated a notebook to the purpose.

We were just lighting our cigars when we heard voices and the splash of
oars, followed by a bump against the hull which made Davies wince, as
violations of his paint always did. “Guten Abend; wo fahren Sie hin?”
greeted us as we climbed on deck. It turned out to be some jovial
fishermen returning to their smack from a visit to Sonderburg. A short
dialogue proved to them that we were mad Englishmen in bitter need of
charity.

“Come to Satrup,” they said; “all the smacks are there, round the
point. There is good punch in the inn.”

Nothing loth, we followed in the dinghy, skirted a bend of the Sound,
and opened up the lights of a village, with some smacks at anchor in
front of it. We were escorted to the inn, and introduced to a
formidable beverage, called coffee-punch, and a smoke-wreathed circle
of smacksmen, who talked German out of courtesy, but were Danish in all
else. Davies was at once at home with them, to a degree, indeed, that I
envied. His German was of the crudest kind, _bizarre_ in vocabulary and
comical in accent; but the freemasonry of the sea, or some charm of his
own, gave intuition to both him and his hearers. I cut a poor figure in
this nautical gathering, though Davies, who persistently referred to me
as “meiner Freund”, tried hard to represent me as a kindred spirit and
to include me in the general talk. I was detected at once as an
uninteresting hybrid. Davies, who sometimes appealed to me for a word,
was deep in talk over anchorages and ducks, especially, as I well
remember now, about the chance of sport in a certain _Schlei Fiord_. I
fell into utter neglect, till rescued by a taciturn person in
spectacles and a very high cap, who appeared to be the only landsman
present. After silently puffing smoke in my direction for some time, he
asked me if I was married, and if not, when I proposed to be. After
this inquisition he abandoned me.

It was eleven before we left this hospitable inn, escorted by the whole
party to the dinghy. Our friends of the smack insisted on our sharing
their boat out of pure good-fellowship—for there was not nearly room
for us—and would not let us go till a bucket of fresh-caught fish had
been emptied into her bottom. After much shaking of scaly hands, we
sculled back to the _Dulcibella_, where she slept in a bed of tremulous
stars.

Davies sniffed the wind and scanned the tree-tops, where light gusts
were toying with the leaves.

“Sou’-west still,” he said, “and more rain coming. But it’s bound to
shift into the north.”

“Will that be a good wind for us?”

“It depends where we go,” he said, slowly. “I was asking those fellows
about duck-shooting. They seemed to think the best place would be
Schlei Fiord. That’s about fifteen miles south of Sonderburg, on the
way to Kiel. They said there was a pilot chap living at the mouth who
would tell us all about it. They weren’t very encouraging though. We
should want a north wind for that.”

“I don’t care where we go,” I said, to my own surprise.

“Don’t you really?” he rejoined, with sudden warmth. Then, with a
slight change of voice. “You mean it’s all very jolly about here?”

Of course I meant that. Before we went below we both looked for a
moment at the little grey memorial; its slender fretted arch outlined
in tender lights and darks above the hollow on the Alsen shore. The
night was that of September 27, the third I had spent on the
_Dulcibella_.




CHAPTER VI.
Schlei Fiord


I make no apology for having described these early days in some detail.
It is no wonder that their trivialities are as vividly before me as the
colours of earth and sea in this enchanting corner of the world. For
every trifle, sordid or picturesque, was relevant; every scrap of talk
a link; every passing mood critical for good or ill. So slight indeed
were the determining causes that changed my autumn holiday into an
undertaking the most momentous I have ever approached.

Two days more preceded the change. On the first, the southwesterly wind
still holding, we sallied forth into Augustenburg Fiord, “to practise
smartness in a heavy thresh,” as Davies put it. It was the day of
dedication for those disgusting oilskins, immured in whose stiff and
odorous angles, I felt distressfully cumbersome; a day of proof indeed
for me, for heavy squalls swept incessantly over the loch, and Davies,
at my own request, gave me no rest. Backwards and forwards we tacked,
blustering into coves and out again, reefing and unreefing, now stung
with rain, now warmed with sun, but never with time to breathe or
think.

I wrestled with intractable ropes, slaves if they could be subdued,
tyrants if they got the upper hand; creeping, craning, straining, I
made the painful round of the deck, while Davies, hatless and tranquil,
directed my blundering movements.

“Now take the helm and try steering in a hard breeze to windward. It’s
the finest sport on earth.”

So I grappled with the niceties of that delicate craft; smarting eyes,
chafed hands, and dazed brain all pressed into the service, whilst
Davies, taming the ropes the while, shouted into my ear the subtle
mysteries of the art; that fidgeting ripple in the luff of the
mainsail, and the distant rattle from the hungry jib—signs that they
are starved of wind and must be given more; the heavy list and wallow
of the hull, the feel of the wind on your cheek instead of your nose,
the broader angle of the burgee at the masthead—signs that they have
too much, and that she is sagging recreantly to leeward instead of
fighting to windward. He taught me the tactics for meeting squalls, and
the way to press your advantage when they are defeated—the iron hand in
the velvet glove that the wilful tiller needs if you are to gain your
ends with it; the exact set of the sheets necessary to get the easiest
and swiftest play of the hull—all these things and many more I
struggled to apprehend, careless for the moment as to whether they were
worth knowing, but doggedly set on knowing them. Needless to say, I had
no eyes for beauty. The wooded inlets we dived into gave a brief
respite from wind and spindrift, but called into use the lead and the
centreboard tackle—two new and cumbrous complexities. Davies’s passion
for intricate navigation had to be sated even in these secure and
tideless waters.

“Let’s get in as near as we can—you stand by the lead,” was his
formula; so I made false casts, tripped up in the slack, sent rivers of
water up my sleeves, and committed all the other _gaucheries_ that
beginners in the art commit, while the sand showed whiter beneath the
keel, till Davies regretfully drew off and shouted: “Ready about,
centre-plate down,” and I dashed down to the trappings of that
diabolical contrivance, the only part of the _Dulcibella_’s equipment
that I hated fiercely to the last. It had an odious habit when lowered
of spouting jets of water through its chain-lead on to the cabin floor.
One of my duties was to gag it with cotton-waste, but even then its
choking gurgle was a most uncomfortable sound in your dining-room. In a
minute the creek would be behind us and we would be thumping our stem
into the short hollow waves of the fiord, and lurching through spray
and rain for some point on the opposite shore. Of our destination and
objects, if we had any, I knew nothing. At the northern end of the
fiord, just before we turned, Davies had turned dreamy in the most
exasperating way, for I was steering at the time and in mortal need of
sympathetic guidance, if I was to avoid a sudden jibe. As though
continuing aloud some internal debate, he held a onesided argument to
the effect that it was no use going farther north. Ducks, weather, and
charts figured in it, but I did not follow the pros and cons. I only
know that we suddenly turned and began to “battle” south again. At
sunset we were back once more in the same quiet pool among the trees
and fields of Als Sound, a wondrous peace succeeding the turmoil.
Bruised and sodden, I was extricating myself from my oily prison, and
later was tasting (though not nearly yet in its perfection) the unique
exultation that follows such a day, when, glowing all over, deliciously
tired and pleasantly sore, you eat what seems ambrosia, be it only
tinned beef; and drink nectar, be it only distilled from terrestrial
hops or coffee berries, and inhale as culminating luxury balmy fumes
which even the happy Homeric gods knew naught of.

On the following morning, the 30th, a joyous shout of “Nor’-west wind”
sent me shivering on deck, in the small hours, to handle rain-stiff
canvas and cutting chain. It was a cloudy, unsettled day, but still
enough after yesterday’s boisterous ordeal. We retraced our way past
Sonderburg, and thence sailed for a faint line of pale green on the far
south-western horizon. It was during this passage that an incident
occurred, which, slight as it was, opened my eyes to much.

A flight of wild duck crossed our bows at some little distance, a
wedge-shaped phalanx of craning necks and flapping wings. I happened to
be steering while Davies verified our course below; but I called him up
at once, and a discussion began about our chances of sport. Davies was
gloomy over them.

“Those fellows at Satrup were rather doubtful,” he said. “There are
plenty of ducks, but I made out that it’s not easy for strangers to get
shooting. The whole country’s so very civilised; it’s not _wild_
enough, is it?”

He looked at me. I had no very clear opinion. It was anything but wild
in one sense, but there seemed to be wild enough spots for ducks. The
shore we were passing appeared to be bordered by lonely marshes, though
a spacious champaign showed behind. If it were not for the beautiful
places we had seen, and my growing taste for our way of seeing them,
his disappointing vagueness would have nettled me more than it did.
For, after all, he had brought me out loaded with sporting equipment
under a promise of shooting.

“Bad weather is what we want for ducks,” he said; “but I’m afraid we’re
in the wrong place for them. Now, if it was the North Sea, among those
Frisian Islands——” His tone was timid and interrogative, and I felt at
once that he was sounding me as to some unpalatable plan whose nature
began to dawn on me.

He stammered on through a sentence or two about “wildness” and “nobody
to interfere with you,” and then I broke in: “You surely don’t want to
leave the Baltic?”

“Why not?” said he, staring into the compass.

“Hang it, man!” I returned, tartly, “here we are in October, the summer
over, and the weather gone to pieces. We’re alone in a cockle-shell
boat, at a time when every other yacht of our size is laying up for the
winter. Luckily, we seem to have struck an ideal cruising-ground, with
a wide choice of safe fiords and a good prospect of ducks, if we choose
to take a little trouble about them. You can’t mean to waste time and
run risks” (I thought of the torn leaf in the log-book) “in a long
voyage to those forbidding haunts of yours in the North Sea.”

“It’s not very long,” said Davies, doggedly. “Part of it’s canal, and
the rest is quite safe if you’re careful. There’s plenty of sheltered
water, and it’s not really necessary——”

“What’s it all _for?_” I interrupted, impatiently. “We haven’t _tried_
for shooting here yet. You’ve no notion, have you, of getting the boat
back to England this autumn?”

“England?” he muttered. “Oh, I don’t much care.” Again his vagueness
jarred on me; there seemed to be some bar between us, invisible and
insurmountable. And, after all, what was I doing here? Roughing it in a
shabby little yacht, utterly out of my element, with a man who, a week
ago, was nothing to me, and who now was a tiresome enigma. Like swift
poison the old morbid mood in which I left London spread through me.
All I had learnt and seen slipped away; what I had suffered remained. I
was on the point of saying something which might have put a precipitate
end to our cruise, but he anticipated me.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he broke out, “for being such a selfish brute. I
don’t know what I was thinking about. You’re a brick to join me in this
sort of life, and I’m afraid I’m an infernally bad host. Of course this
is just the place to cruise. I forgot about the scenery, and all that.
Let’s ask about the ducks here. As you say, we’re sure to get sport if
we worry and push a bit. We must be nearly there now—yes, there’s the
entrance. Take the helm, will you?”

He sprang up the mast like a monkey, and gazed over the land from the
cross-trees. I looked up at my enigma and thanked Providence I had not
spoken; for no one could have resisted his frank outburst of good
nature. Yet it occurred to me that, considering the conditions of our
life, our intimacy was strangely slow in growth. I had no clue yet as
to where his idiosyncrasies began and his self ended, and he, I
surmised, was in the same stage towards me. Otherwise I should have
pressed him further now, for I felt convinced that there was some
mystery in his behaviour which I had not yet accounted for. However,
light was soon to break.

I could see no sign of the entrance he had spoken of, and no wonder,
for it is only eighty yards wide, though it leads to a fiord thirty
miles long. All at once we were jolting in a tumble of sea, and the
channel grudgingly disclosed itself, stealing between marshes and
meadows and then broadening to a mere, as at Ekken. We anchored close
to the mouth, and not far from a group of vessels of a type that
afterwards grew very familiar to me. They were sailing-barges,
something like those that ply in the Thames, bluff-bowed, high-sterned
craft of about fifty tons, ketch-rigged, and fitted with lee-boards,
very light spars, and a long tip-tilted bowsprit. (For the future I
shall call them “galliots”.) Otherwise the only sign of life was a
solitary white house—the pilot’s house, the chart told us—close to the
northern point of entrance. After tea we called on the pilot.
Patriarchally installed before a roaring stove, in the company of a
buxom bustling daughter-in-law and some rosy grandchildren, we found a
rotund and rubicund person, who greeted us with a hoarse roar of
welcome in German, which instantly changed, when he saw us, to the
funniest broken English, spoken with intense relish and pride. We
explained ourselves and our mission as well as we could through the
hospitable interruptions caused by beer and the strains of a huge
musical box, which had been set going in honour of our arrival.
Needless to say, I was read like a book at once, and fell into the part
of listener.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “all right. There is plenty ducks, but first we
will drink a glass beer; then we will shift your ship, captain—she lies
not good there.” (Davies started up in a panic, but was waved back to
his beer.) “Then we will drink together another glass beer; then we
will talk of ducks—no, then we will kill ducks—that is better. Then we
will have plenty glasses beer.”

This was an unexpected climax, and promised well for our prospects. And
the programme was fully carried out. After the beer our host was packed
briskly by his daughter into an armour of woollen gaiters, coats, and
mufflers, topped with a worsted helmet, which left nothing of his face
visible but a pair of twinkling eyes. Thus equipped, he led the way out
of doors, and roared for Hans and his gun, till a great gawky youth,
with high cheek-bones and a downy beard, came out from the yard and
sheepishly shook our hands.

Together we repaired to the quay, where the pilot stood, looking like a
genial ball of worsted, and bawled hoarse directions while we shifted
the _Dulcibella_ to a berth on the farther shore close to the other
vessels. We returned with our guns, and the interval for refreshments
followed. It was just dusk when we sallied out again, crossed a stretch
of bog-land, and took up strategic posts round a stagnant pond. Hans
had been sent to drive, and the result was a fine mallard and three
ducks. It was true that all fell to the pilot’s gun, perhaps owing to
Hans’s filial instinct and his parent’s canny egotism in choosing his
own lair, or perhaps it was chance; but the shooting-party was none the
less a triumphal success. It was celebrated with beer and music as
before, while the pilot, an infant on each podgy knee, discoursed
exuberantly on the glories of his country and the Elysian content of
his life. “There is plenty beer, plenty meat, plenty money, plenty
ducks,” summed up his survey.

It may have been fancy, but Davies, though he had fits and starts of
vivacity, seemed very inattentive, considering that we were sitting at
the feet of so expansive an oracle. It was I who elicited most of the
practical information—details of time, weather, and likely places for
shooting, with some shrewd hints as to the kind of people to
conciliate. Whatever he thought of me, I warmed with sympathy towards
the pilot, for he assumed that we had done with cruising for the year,
and thought us mad enough as it was to have been afloat so long, and
madder still to intend living on “so little a ship” when we could live
on land with beer and music handy. I was tempted to raise the North Sea
question, just to watch Davies under the thunder of rebukes which would
follow. But I refrained from a wish to be tender with him, now that all
was going so well. The Frisian Islands were an extravagant absurdity
now. I did not even refer to them as we pulled back to the
_Dulcibella_, after swearing eternal friendship with the good pilot and
his family.

Davies and I turned in good friends that night—or rather I should say
that I turned in, for I left him sucking an empty pipe and aimlessly
fingering a volume of Mahan; and once when I woke in the night I felt
somehow that his bunk was empty and that he was there in the dark
cabin, dreaming.




CHAPTER VII.
The Missing Page


I woke (on the 1st of October) with that dispiriting sensation that a
hitch has occurred in a settled plan. It was explained when I went on
deck, and I found the _Dulcibella_ wrapped in a fog, silent, clammy,
nothing visible from her decks but the ghostly hull of a galliot at
anchor near us. She must have brought up there in the night, for there
had been nothing so close the evening before; and I remembered that my
sleep had been broken once by sounds of rumbling chain and gruff
voices.

“This looks pretty hopeless for to-day,” I said, with a shiver, to
Davies, who was laying the breakfast.

“Well, we can’t do anything till this fog lifts,” he answered, with a
good deal of resignation. Breakfast was a cheerless meal. The damp
penetrated to the very cabin, whose roof and walls wept a fine dew. I
had dreaded a bathe, and yet missed it, and the ghastly light made the
tablecloth look dirtier than it naturally was, and all the accessories
more sordid. Something had gone wrong with the bacon, and the lack of
egg-cups was not in the least humorous.

Davies was just beginning, in his summary way, to tumble the things
together for washing up, when there was a sound of a step on deck, two
sea-boots appeared on the ladder, and, before we could wonder who the
visitor was, a little man in oilskins and a sou’-wester was stooping
towards us in the cabin door, smiling affectionately at Davies out of a
round grizzled beard.

“Well met, captain,” he said, quietly, in German. “Where are you bound
to this time?”

“Bartels!” exclaimed Davies, jumping up. The two stooping figures,
young and old, beamed at one another like father and son.

“Where have you come from? Have some coffee. How’s the _Johannes_? Was
that you that came in last night? I’m delighted to see you!” (I spare
the reader his uncouth lingo.) The little man was dragged in and seated
on the opposite sofa to me.

“I took my apples to Kappeln,” he said, sedately, “and now I sail to
Kiel, and so to Hamburg, where my wife and children are. It is my last
voyage of the year. You are no longer alone, captain, I see.” He had
taken off his dripping sou’-wester and was bowing ceremoniously towards
me.

“Oh, I quite forgot!” said Davies, who had been kneeling on one knee in
the low doorway, absorbed in his visitor. “This is ‘_meiner Freund_,’
Herr Carruthers. Carruthers, this is my friend, Schiffer Bartels, of
the galliot _Johannes_.”

Was I never to be at an end of the puzzles which Davies presented to
me? All the impulsive heartiness died out of his voice and manner as he
uttered the last few words, and there he was, nervously glancing from
the visitor to me, like one who, against his will or from tactlessness,
has introduced two persons who he knows will disagree.

There was a pause while he fumbled with the cups, poured some cold
coffee out and pondered over it as though it were a chemical
experiment. Then he muttered something about boiling some more water,
and took refuge in the forecastle. I was ill at ease at this period
with seafaring men, but this mild little person was easy ground for a
beginner. Besides, when he took off his oilskin coat he reminded me
less of a sailor than of a homely draper of some country town, with his
clean turned-down collar and neatly fitting frieze jacket. We exchanged
some polite platitudes about the fog and his voyage last night from
Kappeln, which appeared to be a town some fifteen miles up the fiord.

Davies joined in from the forecastle with an excess of warmth which
almost took the words out of my mouth. We exhausted the subject very
soon, and then my _vis-à-vis_ smiled paternally at me, as he had done
at Davies, and said, confidentially:

“It is good that the captain is no more alone. He is a fine young
man—Heaven, what a fine young man! I love him as my son—but he is too
brave, too reckless. It is good for him to have a friend.”

I nodded and laughed, though in reality I was very far from being
amused.

“Where was it you met?” I asked.

“In an ugly place, and in ugly weather,” he answered, gravely, but with
a twinkle of fun in his eye. “But has he not told you?” he added, with
ponderous slyness. “I came just in time. No! what am I saying? He is
brave as a lion and quick as a cat. I think he cannot drown; but still
it was an ugly place and ugly——”

“What are you talking about, Bartels?” interrupted Davies, emerging
noisily with a boiling kettle.

I answered the question. “I was just asking your friend how it was you
made his acquaintance.”

“Oh, he helped me out of a bit of a mess in the North Sea, didn’t you,
Bartels?” he said.

“It was nothing,” said Bartels. “But the North Sea is no place for your
little boat, captain. So I have told you many times. How did you like
Flensburg? A fine town, is it not? Did you find Herr Krank, the
carpenter? I see you have placed a little mizzen-mast. The rudder was
nothing much, but it was well that it held to the Eider. But she is
strong and good, your little ship, and—Heaven!—she had need be so.” He
chuckled, and shook his head at Davies as at a wayward child.

This is all the conversation that I need record. For my part I merely
waited for its end, determined on my course, which was to know the
truth once and for all, and make an end of these distracting
mystifications. Davies plied his friend with coffee, and kept up the
talk gallantly; but affectionate as he was, his manner plainly showed
that he wanted to be alone with me.

The gist of the little skipper’s talk was a parental warning that,
though we were well enough here in the “Ost-See”, it was time for
little boats to be looking for winter quarters. That he himself was
going by the Kiel Canal to Hamburg to spend a cosy winter as a decent
citizen at his warm fireside, and that we should follow his example. He
ended with an invitation to us to visit him on the _Johannes_, and with
suave farewells disappeared into the fog. Davies saw him into his boat,
returned without wasting a moment, and sat down on the sofa opposite
me.

“What did he mean?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” said Davies, “I’ll tell you the whole thing. As far as
you’re concerned it’s partly a confession. Last night I had made up my
mind to say nothing, but when Bartels turned up I knew it must all come
out. It’s been fearfully on my mind, and perhaps you’ll be able to help
me. But it’s for you to decide.”

“Fire away!” I said.

“You know what I was saying about the Frisian Islands the other day? A
thing happened there which I never told you, when you were asking about
my cruise.”

“It began near Norderney,” I put in.

“How did you guess that?” he asked.

“You’re a bad hand at duplicity,” I replied. “Go on.”

“Well, you’re quite right, it was there, on September 9. I told you the
sort of thing I was doing at that time, but I don’t think I said that I
made inquiries from one or two people about duck-shooting, and had been
told by some fishermen at Borkum that there was a big sailing-yacht in
those waters, whose owner, a German of the name of Dollmann, shot a
good deal, and might give me some tips. Well, I found this yacht one
evening, knowing it must be her from the description I had. She was
what is called a ‘barge-yacht’, of fifty or sixty tons, built for
shallow water on the lines of a Dutch galliot, with lee-boards and
those queer round bows and square stern. She’s something like those
galliots anchored near us now. You sometimes see the same sort of yacht
in English waters, only there they copy the Thames barges. She looked a
clipper of her sort, and very smart; varnished all over and shining
like gold. I came on her about sunset, after a long day of exploring
round the Ems estuary. She was lying in——”

“Wait a bit, let’s have the chart,” I interrupted.

Davies found it and spread it on the table between us, first pushing
back the cloth and the breakfast things to one end, where they lay in a
slovenly litter. This was one of the only two occasions on which I ever
saw him postpone the rite of washing up, and it spoke volumes for the
urgency of the matter in hand.

“Here it is,” said Davies _[See Map A]_ and I looked with a new and
strange interest at the long string of slender islands, the parallel
line of coast, and the confusion of shoals, banks, and channels which
lay between. “Here’s Norderney, you see. By the way, there’s a harbour
there at the west end of the island, the only real harbour on the whole
line of islands, Dutch or German, except at Terschelling. There’s quite
a big town there, too, a watering place, where Germans go for
sea-bathing in the summer. Well, the _Medusa_, that was her name, was
lying in the Riff Gat roadstead, flying the German ensign, and I
anchored for the night pretty near her. I meant to visit her owner
later on, but I very nearly changed my mind, as I always feel rather a
fool on smart yachts, and my German isn’t very good. However, I thought
I might as well; so, after dinner, when it was dark, I sculled over in
the dinghy, hailed a sailor on deck, said who I was, and asked if I
could see the owner. The sailor was a surly sort of chap, and there was
a good long delay while I waited on deck, feeling more and more
uncomfortable. Presently a steward came up and showed me down the
companion and into the saloon, which, after _this_, looked—well,
horribly gorgeous—you know what I mean, plush lounges, silk cushions,
and that sort of thing. Dinner seemed to be just over, and wine and
fruit were on the table. Herr Dollmann was there at his coffee. I
introduced myself somehow——”

“Stop a moment,” I said; “what was he like?”

“Oh, a tall, thin chap, in evening dress; about fifty I suppose, with
greyish hair and a short beard. I’m not good at describing people. He
had a high, bulging forehead, and there was something about him—but I
think I’d better tell you the bare facts first. I can’t say he seemed
pleased to see me, and he couldn’t speak English, and, in fact, I felt
infernally awkward. Still, I had an object in coming, and as I was
there I thought I might as well gain it.”

The notion of Davies in his Norfolk jacket and rusty flannels
haranguing a frigid German in evening dress in a “gorgeous” saloon
tickled my fancy greatly.

“He seemed very much astonished to see me; had evidently seen the
_Dulcibella_ arrive, and had wondered what she was. I began as soon as
I could about the ducks, but he shut me up at once, said I could do
nothing hereabouts. I put it down to sportsman’s jealousy—you know what
that is. But I saw I had come to the wrong shop, and was just going to
back out and end this unpleasant interview, when he thawed a bit,
offered me some wine, and began talking in quite a friendly way, taking
a great interest in my cruise and my plans for the future. In the end
we sat up quite late, though I never felt really at my ease. He seemed
to be taking stock of me all the time, as though I were some new
animal.” (How I sympathised with that German!) “We parted civilly
enough, and I rowed back and turned in, meaning to potter on eastwards
early next day.

“But I was knocked up at dawn by a sailor with a message from Dollmann
asking if he could come to breakfast with me. I was rather
flabbergasted, but didn’t like to be rude, so I said, ‘Yes.’ Well, he
came, and I returned the call—and—well, the end of it was that I stayed
at anchor there for three days.” This was rather abrupt.

“How did you spend the time?” I asked. Stopping three days anywhere was
an unusual event for him, as I knew from his log.

“Oh, I lunched or dined with him once or twice—with _them_, I ought to
say,” he added, hurriedly. “His daughter was with him. She didn’t
appear the evening I first called.”

“And what was she like?” I asked, promptly, before he could hurry on.

“Oh, she seemed a very nice girl,” was the guarded reply, delivered
with particular unconcern, “and—the end of it was that I and the
_Medusa_ sailed away in company. I must tell you how it came about,
just in a few words for the present.

“It was his suggestion. He said he had to sail to Hamburg, and proposed
that I should go with him in the _Dulcibella_ as far as the Elbe, and
then, if I liked, I could take the ship canal at Brunsbüttel through to
Kiel and the Baltic. I had no very fixed plans of my own, though I had
meant to go on exploring eastwards between the islands and the coast,
and so reach the Elbe in a much slower way. He dissuaded me from this,
sticking to it that I should have no chance of ducks, and urging other
reasons. Anyway, we settled to sail in company direct to Cuxhaven, in
the Elbe. With a fair wind and an early start it should be only one
day’s sail of about sixty miles.

“The plan only came to a head on the evening of the third day, on the
12th of September.

“I told you, I think, that the weather had broken after a long spell of
heat. That very day it had been blowing pretty hard from the west, and
the glass was falling still. I said, of course, that I couldn’t go with
him if the weather was too bad, but he prophesied a good day, said it
was an easy sail, and altogether put me on my mettle. You can guess how
it was. Perhaps I had talked about single-handed cruising as though it
were easier than it was, though I never meant it in a boasting way, for
I hate that sort of thing, and besides there _is_ no danger if you’re
careful——”

“Oh, go on,” I said.

“Anyway, we went next morning at six. It was a dirty-looking day, wind
W.N.W., but his sails were going up and mine followed. I took two reefs
in, and we sailed out into the open and steered E.N.E. along the coast
for the Outer Elbe Lightship about fifty knots off. Here it all is, you
see.” (He showed me the course on the chart.) “The trip was nothing for
his boat, of course, a safe, powerful old tub, forging through the sea
as steady as a house. I kept up with her easily at first. My hands were
pretty full, for there was a hard wind on my quarter and a troublesome
sea; but as long as nothing worse came I knew I should be all right,
though I also knew that I was a fool to have come.


Illustration: Chart A to Illustrate the Stranding of the Dulcibella,
etc.

“All went well till we were off Wangeroog, the last of the
islands—_here_—and then it began to blow really hard. I had half a mind
to chuck it and cut into the Jade River, _down there_,” but I hadn’t
the face to, so I hove to and took in my last reef.” (Simple words,
simply uttered; but I had seen the operation in calm water and
shuddered at the present picture.) “We had been about level till then,
but with my shortened canvas I fell behind. Not that that mattered in
the least. I knew my course, had read up my tides, and, thick as the
weather was, I had no doubt of being able to pick up the lightship. No
change of plan was possible now. The Weser estuary was on my starboard
hand, but the whole place was a lee-shore and a mass of unknown
banks—just look at them. I ran on, the _Dulcibella_ doing her level
best, but we had some narrow shaves of being pooped. I was about
_here_, say six miles south-west of the lightship, _[See Chart A]_ when
I suddenly saw that the _Medusa_ had hove to right ahead, as though
waiting till I came up. She wore round again on the course as I drew
level, and we were alongside for a bit. Dollmann lashed the wheel,
leaned over her quarter, and shouted, very slowly and distinctly so
that I could understand; ‘Follow me—sea too bad for you outside—short
cut through sands—save six miles.’

“It was taking me all my time to manage the tiller, but I knew what he
meant at once, for I had been over the chart carefully the night
before. _[See Map A]_ You see, the whole bay between Wangeroog and the
Elbe is encumbered with sand. A great jagged chunk of it runs out from
Cuxhaven in a north-westerly direction for fifteen miles or so, ending
in a pointed spit, called the _Scharhorn_. To reach the Elbe from the
west you have to go right outside this, round the lightship, which is
off the Scharhorn, and double back. Of course, that’s what all big
vessels do. But, as you see, these sands are intersected here and there
by channels, very shallow and winding, exactly like those behind the
Frisian Islands. Now look at this one, which cuts right through the big
chunk of sand and comes out near Cuxhaven. The _Telte_ _[See Chart A]_
it’s called. It’s miles wide, you see, at the entrance, but later on it
is split into two by the Hohenhörn bank: then it gets shallow and very
complicated, and ends in a mere tidal driblet with another name. It’s
just the sort of channel I should like to worry into on a fine day or
with an off-shore wind. Alone, in thick weather and a heavy sea, it
would have been folly to attempt it, except as a desperate resource.
But, as I said I knew at once that Dollmann was proposing to run for it
and guide me in.

“I didn’t like the idea, because I like doing things for myself, and,
silly as it sounds, I believe I resented being told the sea was too bad
for me, which it certainly was. Yet the short cut did save several
miles and a devil of a tumble off the Scharhorn, where two tides meet.
I had complete faith in Dollmann, and I suppose I decided that I should
be a fool not to take a good chance. I hesitated. I know; but in the
end I nodded, and held up my arm as she forged ahead again. Soon after,
she shifted her course and I followed. You asked me once if I ever took
a pilot. That was the only time.”

He spoke with bitter gravity, flung himself back, and felt his pocket
for his pipe. It was not meant for a dramatic pause, but it certainly
was one. I had just a glimpse of still another Davies—a Davies five
years older throbbing with deep emotions, scorn, passion, and stubborn
purpose; a being above my plane, of sterner stuff, wider scope. Intense
as my interest had become, I waited almost timidly while he
mechanically rammed tobacco into his pipe and struck ineffectual
matches. I felt that whatever the riddle to be solved, it was no mean
one. He repressed himself with an effort, half rose, and made his
circular glance at the clock, barometer, and skylight, and then
resumed.

“We soon came to what I knew must be the beginning of the Telte
channel. All round you could hear the breakers on the sands, though it
was too thick to see them yet. As the water shoaled, the sea, of
course, got shorter and steeper. There was more wind—a whole gale I
should say.

“I kept dead in the wake of the _Medusa_, but to my disgust I found she
was gaining on me very fast. Of course I had taken for granted, when he
said he would lead me in, that he would slow down and keep close to me.
He could easily have done so by getting his men up to check his sheets
or drop his peak. Instead of that he was busting on for all he was
worth. Once, in a rain-squall, I lost sight of him altogether; got him
faintly again, but had enough to do with my own tiller not to want to
be peering through the scud after a runaway pilot. I was all right so
far, but we were fast approaching the worst part of the whole passage,
where the Hohenhörn bank blocks the road, and the channel divides. I
don’t know what it looks like to you on the chart—perhaps fairly
simple, because you can follow the twists of the channels, as on a
ground-plan; but a stranger coming to a place like that (where there
are no buoys, mind you) can tell nothing certain by the eye—unless
perhaps at dead low water, when the banks are high and dry, and in very
clear weather—he must trust to the lead and the compass, and feel his
way step by step. I knew perfectly well that what I should soon see
would be a wall of surf stretching right across and on both sides. To
_feel_ one’s way in that sort of weather is impossible. You must _know_
your way, or else have a pilot. I had one, but he was playing his own
game.

“With a second hand on board to steer while I conned I should have felt
less of an ass. As it was, I knew I ought to be facing the music in the
offing, and cursed myself for having broken my rule and gone blundering
into this confounded short cut. It was giving myself away, doing just
the very thing that you can’t do in single-handed sailing.

“By the time I realised the danger it was far too late to turn and
hammer out to the open. I was deep in the bottle-neck bight of the
sands, jammed on a lee shore, and a strong flood tide sweeping me on.
That tide, by the way, gave just the ghost of a chance. I had the hours
in my head, and knew it was about two-thirds flood, with two hours more
of rising water. That meant the banks would be all covering when I
reached them, and harder than ever to locate; but it also meant that I
_might_ float right over the worst of them if I hit off a lucky place.”
Davies thumped the table in disgust. “Pah! It makes me sick to think of
having to trust to an accident like that, like a lubberly cockney out
for a boozy Bank Holiday sail. Well, just as I foresaw, the wall of
surf appeared clean across the horizon, and curling back to shut me in,
booming like thunder. When I last saw the _Medusa_ she seemed to be
charging it like a horse at a fence, and I took a rough bearing of her
position by a hurried glance at the compass. At that very moment I
_thought_ she seemed to luff and show some of her broadside; but a
squall blotted her out and gave me hell with the tiller. After that she
was lost in the white mist that hung over the line of breakers. I kept
on my bearing as well as I could, but I was already out of the channel.
I knew that by the look of the water, and as we neared the bank I saw
it was all awash and without the vestige of an opening. I wasn’t going
to chuck her on to it without an effort; so, more by instinct than with
any particular hope, I put the helm down, meaning to work her along the
edge on the chance of spotting a way over. She was buried at once by
the beam sea, and the jib flew to blazes; but the reefed stays’l stood,
she recovered gamely, and I held on, though I knew it could only be for
a few minutes, as the centre-plate was up, and she made frightful
leeway towards the bank.

“I was half-blinded by scud, but suddenly I noticed what looked like a
gap, behind a spit which curled out right ahead. I luffed still more to
clear this spit, but she couldn’t weather it. Before you could say
knife she was driving across it, bumped heavily, bucked forward again,
bumped again, and—ripped on in deeper water! I can’t describe the next
few minutes. I was in some sort of channel, but a very narrow one, and
the sea broke everywhere. I hadn’t proper command either; for the
rudder had crocked up somehow at the last bump. I was like a drunken
man running for his life down a dark alley, barking himself at every
corner. It couldn’t last long, and finally we went crash on to
something and stopped there, grinding and banging. So ended that little
trip under a pilot.

“Well, it was like this—there was really no danger”—I opened my eyes at
the characteristic phrase. “I mean, that lucky stumble into a channel
was my salvation. Since then I had struggled through a mile of sands,
all of which lay behind me like a breakwater against the gale. They
were covered, of course, and seething like soapsuds; but the force of
the sea was deadened. The _Dulce_ was bumping, but not too heavily. It
was nearing high tide, and at half ebb she would be high and dry.

“In the ordinary way I should have run out a kedge with the dinghy, and
at the next high water sailed farther in and anchored where I could lie
afloat. The trouble was now that my hand was hurt and my dinghy stove
in, not to mention the rudder business. It was the first bump on the
outer edge that did the damage. There was a heavy swell there, and when
we struck, the dinghy, which was towing astern, came home on her
painter and down with a crash on the yacht’s weather quarter. I stuck
out one hand to ward it off and got it nipped on the gunwale. She was
badly stove in and useless, so I couldn’t run out the kedge”—this was
Greek to me, but I let him go on—“and for the present my hand was too
painful even to stow the boom and sails, which were whipping and
racketing about anyhow. There was the rudder, too, to be mended; and we
were several miles from the nearest land. Of course, if the wind fell,
it was all easy enough; but if it held or increased it was a poor
look-out. There’s a limit to strain of that sort—and other things might
have happened.

“In fact, it was precious lucky that Bartels turned up. His galliot was
at anchor a mile away, up a branch of the channel. In a clear between
squalls he saw us, and, like a brick, rowed his boat out—he and his
boy, and a devil of a pull they must have had. I was glad enough to see
them—no, that’s not true; I was in such a fury of disgust and shame
that I believe I should have been idiot enough to say I didn’t want
help, if he hadn’t just nipped on board and started work. He’s a terror
to work, that little mouse of a chap. In half an hour he had stowed the
sails, unshackled the big anchor, run out fifty fathoms of warp, and
hauled her off there and then into deep water. Then they towed her up
the channel—it was dead to leeward and an easy job—and berthed her near
their own vessel. It was dark by that time, so I gave them a drink, and
said good-night. It blew a howling gale that night, but the place was
safe enough, with good ground-tackle.

“The whole affair was over; and after supper I thought hard about it
all.”




CHAPTER VIII.
The Theory


Davies leaned back and gave a deep sigh, as though he still felt the
relief from some tension. I did the same, and felt the same relief. The
chart, freed from the pressure of our fingers, rolled up with a flip,
as though to say, “What do you think of that?” I have straightened out
his sentences a little, for in the excitement of his story they had
grown more and more jerky and elliptical.

“What about Dollmann?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Davies, “what about him? I didn’t get at much that
night. It was all so sudden. The only thing I could have sworn to from
the first was that he had purposely left me in the lurch that day. I
pieced out the rest in the next few days, which I’ll just finish with
as shortly as I can. Bartels came aboard next morning, and though it
was blowing hard still we managed to shift the _Dulcibella_ to a place
where she dried safely at the midday low water, and we could get at her
rudder. The lower screw-plate on the stern post had wrenched out, and
we botched it up roughly as a makeshift. There were other little
breakages, but nothing to matter, and the loss of the jib was nothing,
as I had two spare ones. The dinghy was past repair just then, and I
lashed it on deck.

“It turned out that Bartels was carrying apples from Bremen to Kappeln
(in this fiord), and had run into that channel in the sands for shelter
from the weather. To-day he was bound for the Eider River, whence, as I
told you, you can get through (by river and canal) into the Baltic. Of
course the Elbe route, by the new Kaiser Wilhelm ship canal, is the
shortest. The Eider route is the old one, but he hoped to get rid of
some of his apples at Tönning, the town at its mouth. Both routes touch
the Baltic at Kiel. As you know, I had been running for the Elbe, but
yesterday’s muck-up put me off, and I changed my mind—I’ll tell you why
presently—and decided to sail to the Eider along with the _Johannes_
and get through that way. It cleared from the east next day, and I
raced him there, winning hands down, left him at Tönning, and in three
days was in the Baltic. It was just a week after I ran ashore that I
wired to you. You see, I had come to the conclusion that _that chap was
a spy_.”

In the end it came out quite quietly and suddenly, and left me in
profound amazement. “I wired to you—that chap was a spy.” It was the
close association of these two ideas that hit me hardest at the moment.
For a second I was back in the dreary splendour of the London
club-room, spelling out that crabbed scrawl from Davies, and
fastidiously criticising its proposal in the light of a holiday.
Holiday! What was to be its issue? Chilling and opaque as the fog that
filtered through the skylight there flooded my imagination a mist of
doubt and fear.

“A spy!” I repeated blankly. “What do you mean? Why did you wire to me?
A spy of what—of whom?”

“I’ll tell you how I worked it out,” said Davies. “I don’t think ‘spy’
is the right word; but I mean something pretty bad.

“He purposely put me ashore. I don’t think I’m suspicious by nature,
but I know something about boats and the sea. I know he could have kept
close to me if he had chosen, and I saw the whole place at low water
when we left those sands on the second day. Look at the chart again.
Here’s the Hohenhörn bank that I showed you as blocking the road. _[See
Chart A]_ It’s in two pieces—first the west and then the east. You see
the Telte channel dividing into two branches and curving round it. Both
branches are broad and deep, as channels go in those waters. Now, in
sailing in I was nowhere near either of them. When I last saw Dollmann
he must have been steering straight for the bank itself, at a point
somewhere _here_, quite a mile from the northern arm of the channel,
and two from the southern. I followed by compass, as you know, and
found nothing but breakers ahead. How did I get through? That’s where
the luck came in. I spoke of only two channels, that is, _round_ the
bank—one to the north, the other to the south. But look closely and
you’ll see that right through the centre of the West Hohenhörn runs
another, a very narrow and winding one, so small that I hadn’t even
noticed it the night before, when I was going over the chart. That was
the one I stumbled into in that tailor’s fashion, as I was groping
along the edge of the surf in a desperate effort to gain time. I bolted
down it blindly, came out into this strip of open water, crossed that
aimlessly, and brought up on the edge of the _East_ Hohenhörn, _here_.
It was more than I deserved. I can see now that it was a hundred to one
in favour of my striking on a bad place outside, where I should have
gone to pieces in three minutes.”

“And how did Dollmann go?” I asked.

“It’s as clear as possible,” Davies answered. “He doubled back into the
northern channel when he had misled me enough. Do you remember my
saying that when I last saw him I _thought_ he had luffed and showed
his broadside? I had another bit of luck in that. He was luffing
towards the north—so it struck me through the blur—and when I in my
turn came up to the bank, and had to turn one way or the other to avoid
it, I think I should naturally have turned north too, as he had done.
In that case I should have been done for, for I should have had a mile
of the bank to skirt before reaching the north channel, and should have
driven ashore long before I got there. But as a matter of fact I turned
south.”

“Why?”

“Couldn’t help it. I was running on the starboard tack—boom over to
port; to turn north would have meant a jibe, and as things were I
couldn’t risk one. It was blowing like fits; if anything had carried
away I should have been on shore in a jiffy. I scarcely thought about
it at all, but put the helm down and turned her south. Though I knew
nothing about it, that little central channel was now on my port hand,
distant about two cables. The whole thing was luck from beginning to
end.”

Helped by pluck, I thought to myself, as I tried with my landsman’s
fancy to conjure up that perilous scene. As to the truth of the affair,
the chart and Davies’s version were easy enough to follow, but I felt
only half convinced. The “spy”, as Davies strangely called his pilot,
might have honestly mistaken the course himself, outstripped his convoy
inadvertently, and escaped disaster as narrowly as she did. I suggested
this on the spur of the moment, but Davies was impatient.

“Wait till you hear the whole thing,” he said. “I must go back to when
I first met him. I told you that on that first evening he began by
being as rude as a bear and as cold as stone, and then became suddenly
friendly. I can see now that in the talk that followed he was pumping
me hard. It was an easy game to play, for I hadn’t seen a gentleman
since Morrison left me, I was tremendously keen about my voyage, and I
thought the chap was a good sportsman, even if he was a bit dark about
the ducks. I talked quite freely—at least, as freely as I could with my
bad German—about my last fortnight’s sailing; how I had been smelling
out all the channels in and out of the islands, how interested I had
been in the whole business, puzzling out the effect of the winds on the
tides, the set of the currents, and so on. I talked about my
difficulties, too; the changes in the buoys, the prehistoric rottenness
of the English charts. He drew me out as much as he could, and in the
light of what followed I can see the point of scores of his questions.

“The next day and the next I saw a good deal of him, and the same thing
went on. And then there were my plans for the future. My idea was, as I
told you, to go on exploring the German coast just as I had the Dutch.
His idea—Heavens, how plainly I see it now!—was to choke me off, get me
to clear out altogether from that part of the coast. That was why he
said there were no ducks. That was why he cracked up the Baltic as a
cruising-ground and shooting-ground. And that was why he broached and
stuck to that plan of sailing in company direct to the Elbe. It was to
_see_ me clear.

“He improved on that.”

“Yes, but after that, it’s guess-work. I mean that I can’t tell when he
first decided to go one better and drown me. He couldn’t count for
certain on bad weather, though he held my nose to it when it came. But,
granted that he wanted to get rid of me altogether, he got a
magnificent chance on that trip to the Elbe lightship. I expect it
struck him suddenly, and he acted on the impulse. Left to myself I was
all right; but the short cut was a grand idea of his. Everything was in
its favour—wind, sea, sand, tide. He thinks I’m dead.”

“But the crew?” I said; “what about the crew?”

“That’s another thing. When he first hove to, waiting for me, of course
they were on deck (two of them, I think) hauling at sheets. But by the
time I had drawn up level the _Medusa_ had worn round again on her
course, and no one was on deck but Dollmann at the wheel. No one
overheard what he said.”

“Wouldn’t they have _seen_ you again?”

“Very likely not; the weather was very thick, and the _Dulce_ is very
small.”

The incongruity of the whole business was striking me. Why should
anyone want to kill Davies, and why should Davies, the soul of modesty
and simplicity, imagine that anyone wanted to kill him? He must have
cogent reasons, for he was the last man to give way to a morbid fancy.

“Go on,” I said. “What was his motive? A German finds an Englishman
exploring a bit of German coast, determines to stop him, and even to
get rid of him. It looks so far as if you were thought to be the spy.

Davies winced. “_But he’s not a German_,” he said, hotly. “He’s an
Englishman.”

“An Englishman?”

“Yes, I’m sure of it. Not that I’ve much to go on. He professed to know
very little English, and never spoke it, except a word or two now and
then to help me out of a sentence; and as to his German, he seemed to
me to speak it like a native; but, of course, I’m no judge.” Davies
sighed. “That’s where I wanted someone like you. You would have spotted
him at once, if he wasn’t German. I go more by a—what do you call
it?—a——”

“General impression,” I suggested.

“Yes, that’s what I mean. It was something in his looks and manner; you
know how different we are from foreigners. And it wasn’t only himself,
it was the way he talked—I mean about cruising and the sea, especially.
It’s true he let me do most of the talking; but, all the same—how can I
explain it? I felt we understood one another, in a way that two
foreigners wouldn’t.

“He pretended to think me a bit crazy for coming so far in a small
boat, but I could swear he knew as much about the game as I did; for
lots of little questions he asked had the right ring in them. Mind you,
all this is an afterthought. I should never have bothered about it—I’m
not cut out for a Sherlock Holmes—if it hadn’t been for what followed.”

“It’s rather vague,” I said. “Have you no more definite reason for
thinking him English?”

“There were one or two things rather more definite,” said Davies,
slowly. “You know when he hove to and hailed me, proposing the short
cut, I told you roughly what he said. I forget the exact words, but
‘abschneiden’ came in—‘durch Watten’ and ‘abschneiden’ (they call the
banks ‘watts’, you know); they were simple words, and he shouted them
loud, so as to carry through the wind. I understood what he meant, but,
as I told you, I hesitated before consenting. I suppose he thought I
didn’t understand, for just as he was drawing ahead again he pointed to
the suth’ard, and then shouted through his hands as a trumpet
‘Verstehen Sie? short-cut through sands: follow me!’ the last two
sentences in downright English. I can hear those words now, and I’ll
swear they were in his native tongue. Of course I thought nothing of it
at the time. I was quite aware that he knew a few English words, though
he had always mispronounced them; an easy trick when your hearer
suspects nothing. But I needn’t say that just then I was observant of
trifles. I don’t pretend to be able to unravel a plot and steer a small
boat before a heavy sea at the same moment.”

“And if he was piloting you into the next world he could afford to
commit himself before you parted! Was there anything else? By the way,
how did the daughter strike you? Did she look English too?”

Two men cannot discuss a woman freely without a deep foundation of
intimacy, and, until this day, the subject had never arisen between us
in any form. It was the last that was likely to, for I could have
divined that Davies would have met it with an armour of reserve. He was
busy putting on this armour now; yet I could not help feeling a little
brutal as I saw how badly he jointed his clumsy suit of mail. Our ages
were the same, but I laugh now to think how old and _blasé_ I felt as
the flush warmed his brown skin, and he slowly propounded the verdict,
“Yes, I think she did.”

“She _talked_ nothing but German, I suppose?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Did you see much of her?”

“A good deal.”

“Was she——,” (how frame it?) “Did she want you to sail to the Elbe with
them?”

“She seemed to,” admitted Davies, reluctantly, clutching at his ally,
the match-box. “But, hang it, don’t dream that she knew what was
coming,” he added, with sudden fire.

I pondered and wondered, shrinking from further inquisition, easy as it
would have been with so truthful a victim, and banishing all thought of
ill-timed chaff. There was a cross-current in this strange affair,
whose depth and strength I was beginning to gauge with increasing
seriousness. I did not know my man yet, and I did not know myself. A
conviction that events in the near future would force us into complete
mutual confidence withheld me from pressing him too far. I returned to
the main question; who was Dollmann, and what was his motive? Davies
struggled out of his armour.

“I’m convinced,” he said, “that he’s an Englishman in German service.
He must be in German service, for he had evidently been in those waters
a long time, and knew every inch of them; of course, it’s a very lonely
part of the world, but he has a house on Norderney Island; and he, and
all about him, must be well known to a certain number of people. One of
his friends I happened to meet; what do you think he was? A naval
officer. It was on the afternoon of the third day, and we were having
coffee on the deck of the _Medusa_, and talking about next day’s trip,
when a little launch came buzzing up from seaward, drew alongside, and
this chap I’m speaking of came on board, shook hands with Dollmann, and
stared hard at me. Dollmann introduced us, calling him Commander von
Brüning, in command of the torpedo gunboat _Blitz_. He pointed towards
Norderney, and I saw her—a low, grey rat of a vessel—anchored in the
Roads about two miles away. It turned out that she was doing the work
of fishery guardship on that part of the coast.

“I must say I took to him at once. He looked a real good sort, and a
splendid officer, too—just the sort of chap I should have liked to be.
You know I always wanted—but that’s an old story, and can wait. I had
some talk with him, and we got on capitally as far as we went, but that
wasn’t far, for I left pretty soon, guessing that they wanted to be
alone.”

“_Were_ they alone then?” I asked, innocently.

“Oh, Fräulein Dollmann was there, of course,” explained Davies, feeling
for his armour again.

“Did he seem to know them well?” I pursued, inconsequently.

“Oh, yes, very well.”

Scenting a faint clue, I felt the need of feminine weapons for my
sensitive antagonist. But the opportunity passed.

“That was the last I saw of him,” he said. “We sailed, as I told you,
at daybreak next morning. Now, have you got any idea what I’m driving
at?”

“A rough idea,” I answered. “Go ahead.”

Davies sat up to the table, unrolled the chart with a vigorous sweep of
his two hands, and took up his parable with new zest.

“I start with two certainties,” he said. “One is that I was ‘moved on’
from that coast, because I was too inquisitive. The other is that
Dollmann is at some devil’s work there which is worth finding out.
Now”—he paused in a gasping effort to be logical and articulate.
“Now—well, look at the chart. No, better still, look first at this map
of Germany. It’s on a small scale, and you can see the whole thing.” He
snatched down a pocket-map from the shelf and unfolded it. _[See Map
A]_ “Here’s this huge empire, stretching half over central Europe—an
empire growing like wildfire, I believe, in people, and wealth, and
everything. They’ve licked the French, and the Austrians, and are the
greatest military power in Europe. I wish I knew more about all that,
but what I’m concerned with is their sea-power. It’s a new thing with
them, but it’s going strong, and that Emperor of theirs is running it
for all it’s worth. He’s a splendid chap, and anyone can see he’s
right. They’ve got no colonies to speak of, and _must_ have them, like
us. They can’t get them and keep them, and they can’t protect their
huge commerce without naval strength. The command of the sea is _the_
thing nowadays, isn’t it? I say, don’t think these are my ideas,” he
added, naïvely. “It’s all out of Mahan and those fellows. Well, the
Germans have got a small fleet at present, but it’s a thundering good
one, and they’re building hard. There’s the——and the——.” He broke off
into a digression on armaments and speeds in which I could not follow
him. He seemed to know every ship by heart. I had to recall him to the
point. “Well, think of Germany as a new sea-power,” he resumed. “The
next thing is, what is her coast-line? It’s a very queer one, as you
know, split clean in two by Denmark, most of it lying east of that and
looking on the Baltic, which is practically an inland sea, with its
entrance blocked by Danish islands. It was to evade that block that
William built the ship canal from Kiel to the Elbe, but that could be
easily smashed in war-time. Far the most important bit of coast-line is
that which lies _west_ of Denmark and looks on the North Sea. It’s
there that Germany gets her head out into the open, so to speak. It’s
there that she fronts us and France, the two great sea-powers of
Western Europe, and it’s there that her greatest ports are and her
richest commerce.

“Now it must strike you at once that it’s ridiculously short compared
with the huge country behind it. From Borkum to the Elbe, as the crow
flies, is only seventy miles. Add to that the west coast of Schleswig,
say 120 miles. Total, say, two hundred. Compare that with the seaboard
of France and England. Doesn’t it stand to reason that every inch of it
is important? Now what _sort_ of coast is it? Even on this small map
you can see at once, by all those wavy lines, shoals and sand
everywhere, blocking nine-tenths of the land altogether, and doing
their best to block the other tenth where the great rivers run in. Now
let’s take it bit by bit. You see it divides itself into three.
Beginning from the west the _first piece_ is from Borkum to
Wangeroog—fifty odd miles. What’s that like? A string of sandy islands
backed by sand; the Ems river at the western end, on the Dutch border,
leading to Emden—not much of a place. Otherwise, no coast towns at all.
_Second piece:_ a deep sort of bay consisting of the three great
estuaries—the Jade, the Weser and the Elbe—leading to Wilhelmshaven
(their North Sea naval base), Bremen, and Hamburg; total breadth of
bay, twenty odd miles only; sandbanks littered about all through it.
_Third piece:_ the Schleswig coast, hopelessly fenced in behind a six
to eight mile fringe of sand. No big towns; one moderate river, the
Eider. Let’s leave that third piece aside. I may be wrong, but, in
thinking this business out, I’ve pegged away chiefly at the other two,
the seventy-mile stretch from Borkum to the Elbe—half of it estuaries,
and half islands. It was there that I found the _Medusa_, and it’s that
stretch that, thanks to him, I missed exploring.”

I made an obvious conjecture. “I suppose there are forts and coast
defences? Perhaps he thought you would see too much. By the way, he saw
your naval books, of course?”

“Exactly. Of course that was my first idea; but it can’t be that. It
doesn’t explain things in the least. To begin with, there _are_ no
forts and can be none in that first division, where the islands are.
There might be something on Borkum to defend the Ems; but it’s very
unlikely, and, anyway, I had passed Borkum and was at Norderney.
There’s nothing else to defend. Of course it’s different in the second
division, where the big rivers are. There are probably hosts of forts
and mines round Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven, and at Cuxhaven just at
the mouth of the Elbe. Not that I should ever dream of bothering about
them; every steamer that goes in would see as much as me. Personally, I
much prefer to stay on board, and don’t often go on shore. And, good
Heavens!” (Davies leant back and laughed joyously) “do I _look_ like
that kind of spy?”

I figured to myself one of those romantic gentlemen that one reads of
in sixpenny magazines, with a Kodak in his tie-pin, a sketch-book in
the lining of his coat, and a selection of disguises in his hand
luggage. Little disposed for merriment as I was, I could not help
smiling, too.

“About this coast,” resumed Davies. “In the event of war it seems to me
that every inch of it would be important, _sand and all._ Take the big
estuaries first, which, of course, might be attacked or blockaded by an
enemy. At first sight you would say that their main channels were the
only things that mattered. Now, in time of peace there’s no secrecy
about the navigation of these. They’re buoyed and lighted like streets,
open to the whole world, and taking an immense traffic; well charted,
too, as millions of pounds in commerce depend on them. But now look at
the sands they run through, intersected, as I showed you, by threads of
channels, tidal for the most part, and probably only known to smacks
and shallow coasters, like that galliot of Bartels.

“It strikes me that in a war a lot might depend on these, both in
defence and attack, for there’s plenty of water in them at the right
tide for patrol-boats and small torpedo craft, though I can see they
take a lot of knowing. Now, say _we_ were at war with Germany—both
sides could use them as lines between the three estuaries; and to take
our own case, a small torpedo-boat (not a destroyer, mind you) could on
a dark night cut clean through from the Jade to the Elbe and play the
deuce with the shipping there. But the trouble is that I doubt if
there’s a soul in our fleet who knows those channels. _We_ haven’t
coasters there; and, as to yachts, it’s a most unlikely game for an
English yacht to play at; but it does so happen that I have a fancy for
that sort of thing and would have explored those channels in the
ordinary course.” I began to see his drift.

“Now for the islands. I was rather stumped there at first, I grant,
because, though there are lashings of sand behind them, and the same
sort of intersecting channels, yet there seems nothing important to
guard or attack.

“Why shouldn’t a stranger ramble as he pleases through them? Still
Dollmann had his headquarters there, and I was sure that had some
meaning. Then it struck me that the same point held good, for that
strip of Frisian coast adjoins the estuaries, and would also form a
splendid base for raiding midgets, which could travel unseen right
through from the Ems to the Jade, and so to the Elbe, as by a covered
way between a line of forts.

“Now here again it’s an unknown land to us. Plenty of local galliots
travel it, but strangers never, I should say. Perhaps at the most an
occasional foreign yacht gropes in at one of the gaps between the
islands for shelter from bad weather, and is precious lucky to get in
safe. Once again, it was my fad to like such places, and Dollmann
cleared me out. He’s not a German, but he’s in with Germans, and naval
Germans too. He’s established on that coast, and knows it by heart. And
he tried to drown me. Now what do you think?” He gazed at me long and
anxiously.




CHAPTER IX.
I Sign Articles


It was not an easy question to answer, for the affair was utterly
outside all my experience; its background the sea, and its actual scene
a region of the sea of which I was blankly ignorant. There were other
difficulties that I could see perhaps better than Davies, an enthusiast
with hobbies, who had been brooding in solitude over his dangerous
adventure. Yet both narrative and theory (which have lost, I fear, in
interpretation to the reader) had strongly affected me; his forcible
roughnesses, tricks of manner, sudden bursts of ardour, sudden retreats
into shyness, making up a charm I cannot render. I found myself
continually trying to see the man through the boy, to distinguish sober
judgement from the hot-headed vagaries of youth. Not that I dreamed for
a moment of dismissing the story of his wreck as an hallucination. His
clear blue eyes and sane simplicity threw ridicule on such treatment.

Evidently, too, he wanted my help, a matter that might well have
influenced my opinion on the facts, had he been other than he was. But
it would have taken a “finished and finite clod” to resist the
attraction of the man and the enterprise; and I take no credit whatever
for deciding to follow him, right or wrong. So, when I stated my
difficulties, I knew very well that we should go.

“There are two main points that I don’t understand,” I said. “First,
you’ve never explained why an _Englishman_ should be watching those
waters and ejecting intruders; secondly, your theory doesn’t supply
sufficient motive. There may be much in what you say about the
navigation of those channels, but it’s not enough. You say he wanted to
drown you—a big charge, requiring a big motive to support it. But I
don’t deny that you’ve got a strong case.” Davies lighted up. “I’m
willing to take a good deal for granted—until we find out more.”

He jumped up, and did a thing I never saw him do before or since—bumped
his head against the cabin roof.

“You mean that you’ll come?” he exclaimed. “Why, I hadn’t even asked
you! Yes, I want to go back and clear up the whole thing. I know now
that I want to; telling it all to you has been such an immense relief.
And a lot depended on you, too, and that’s why I’ve been feeling such
an absolute hypocrite. I say, how can I apologise?”

“Don’t worry about me; I’ve had a splendid time. And I’ll come right
enough; but I should like to know exactly what you——”

“No; but wait till I just make a clean breast of it—about you, I mean.
You see, I came to the conclusion that I could do nothing alone; not
that two are really necessary for managing the boat in the ordinary
way, but for this sort of job you _do_ want two; besides, I can’t speak
German properly, and I’m a dull chap all round. If my theory, as you
call it, is right, it’s a case for sharp wits, if ever there was one;
so I thought of you. You’re clever, and I knew you had lived in Germany
and knew German, and I knew,” he added, with a little awkwardness,
“that you had done a good deal of yachting; but of course I ought to
have told you what you were in for—roughing it in a small boat with no
crew. I felt ashamed of myself when you wired back so promptly, and
when you came—er——” Davies stammered and hesitated in the humane
resolve not to wound my feelings. “Of course I couldn’t help noticing
that it wasn’t what you expected,” was the delicate summary he arrived
at. “But you took it splendidly,” he hastened to add. “Only, somehow, I
couldn’t bring myself to talk about the plan. It was good enough of you
to come out at all, without bothering you with hare-brained schemes.
Beside, I wasn’t even sure of myself. It’s a tangled business. There
were reasons, there are reasons still”—he looked nervously at
me—“which—well, which make it a tangled business.” I had thought a
confidence was coming, and was disappointed. “I was in an idiotic state
of uncertainty,” he hurried on; “but the plan grew on me more and more,
when I saw how you were taking to the life and beginning to enjoy
yourself. All that about the ducks on the Frisian coast was humbug;
part of a stupid idea of decoying you there and gaining time. However,
you quite naturally objected, and last night I meant to chuck the whole
thing up and give you the best time here I could. Then Bartels turned
up——”

“Stop,” I put in. “Did you know he might turn up when you sailed here?”

“Yes,” said Davies, guiltily. “I knew he might; and now it’s all come
out, and you’ll come! What a fool I’ve been!”

Long before he had finished I had grasped the whole meaning of the last
few days, and had read their meaning into scores of little incidents
which had puzzled me.

“For goodness’ sake, don’t apologise,” I protested. “I could make
confessions, too, if I liked. And I doubt if you’ve been such a fool as
you think. I’m a patient that wants careful nursing, and it has been
the merest chance all through that I haven’t rebelled and bolted. We’ve
got a good deal to thank the weather for, and other little stimulants.
And you don’t know yet my reasons for deciding to try your cure at
all.”

“My cure?” said Davies; “what in the world do you mean? It was jolly
decent of you to——”

“Never mind! There’s another view of it, but it doesn’t matter now.
Let’s return to the point. What’s your plan of action?”

“It’s this,” was the prompt reply: “to get back to the North Sea, _via_
Kiel and the ship canal. Then there will be two objects: one, to work
back to Norderney, where I left off before, exploring all those
channels through the estuaries and islands; the other, to find
Dollmann, discover what he’s up to, and settle with him. The two things
may overlap, we can’t tell yet. I don’t even know where he and his
yacht are; but I’ll be bound they’re somewhere in those same waters,
and probably back at Norderney.”

“It’s a delicate matter,” I mused, dubiously, “if your theory’s
correct. Spying on a spy——”

“It’s not like that,” said Davies, indignantly. “Anyone who likes can
sail about there and explore those waters. I say, you don’t really
think it’s like that, do you?”

“I don’t think you’re likely to do anything dishonourable,” I hastened
to explain. “I grant you the sea’s public property in your sense. I
only mean that developments are possible, which you don’t reckon on.
There _must_ be more to find out than the mere navigation of those
channels, and if that’s so, mightn’t we come to be genuine spies
ourselves?”

“And, after all, hang it!” exclaimed Davies, “if it comes to that, why
shouldn’t we? I look at it like this. The man’s an Englishman, and if
he’s in with Germany he’s a traitor to us, and we as Englishmen have a
right to expose him. If we can’t do it without spying we’ve a right to
spy, at our own risk——”

“There’s a stronger argument than that. He tried to take your life.”

“I don’t care a rap about that. I’m not such an ass as to thirst for
revenge and all that, like some chap in a shilling shocker. But it
makes me wild to think of that fellow masquerading as a German, and up
to who knows what mischief—mischief enough to make him want to get rid
of _any_ one. I’m keen about the sea, and I think they’re apt to be a
bit slack at home,” he continued inconsequently. “Those Admiralty chaps
want waking up. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it’s quite natural
that I should look him up again.”

“Quite,” I agreed; “you parted friends, and they may be delighted to
see you. You’ll have plenty to talk about.”

“H’m,” said Davies, withered into silence by the “they”. “Hullo! I say,
do you know it’s three o’clock? How the time has gone! And, by Jove! I
believe the fog’s lifting.”

I returned, with a shock, to the present, to the weeping walls, the
discoloured deal table, the ghastly breakfast litter—all the visible
symbols of the life I had pledged myself to. Disillusionment was making
rapid headway when Davies returned, and said, with energy:

“What do you say to starting for Kiel at once? The fog’s going, and
there’s a breeze from the sou’-west.”

“Now?” I protested. “Why, it’ll mean sailing all night, won’t it?”

“Oh, no,” said Davies. “Not with luck.”

“Why, it’s dark at seven!”

“Yes, but it’s only twenty-five miles. I know it’s not exactly a fair
wind, but we shall lie closehauled most of the way. The glass is
falling, and we ought to take this chance.”

To argue about winds with Davies was hopeless, and the upshot was that
we started lunchless. A pale sun was flickering out of masses of racing
vapour, and through delicate vistas between them the fair land of
Schleswig now revealed and now withdrew her pretty face, as though
smiling _adieux_ to her faithless courtiers.

The clank of our chain brought up Bartels to the deck of the
_Johannes_, rubbing his eyes and pulling round his throat a grey shawl,
which gave him a comical likeness to a lodging-house landlady receiving
the milk in morning _déshabillé._

“We’re off, Bartels,” said Davies, without looking up from his work.
“See you at Kiel, I hope.”

“You are always in a hurry, captain,” bleated the old man, shaking his
head. “You should wait till to-morrow. The sky is not good, and it will
be dark before you are off Eckenförde.”

Davies laughed, and very soon his mentor’s sad little figure was lost
in haze.

That was a curious evening. Dusk soon fell, and the devil made a
determined effort to unman me; first, with the scrambled tea which was
the tardy substitute for an orderly lunch, then with the new and
nauseous duty of filling the side-lights, which meant squatting in the
fo’c’sle to inhale paraffin and dabble in lamp-black; lastly, with an
all-round attack on my nerves as the night fell on our frail little
vessel, pitching on her precarious way through driving mist. In a sense
I think I went through the same sort of mental crisis as when I sat
upon my portmanteau at Flensburg. The main issue was not seriously in
question, for I had signed on in the _Dulcibella_ for good or ill; but
in doing so I had outrun myself, and still wanted an outlook, a mood
suited to the enterprise, proof against petty discouragements. Not for
the first time a sense of the ludicrous came to my assistance, as I saw
myself fretting in London under my burden of self-imposed woes, nicely
weighing that insidious invitation, and stepping finally into the snare
with the dignity due to my importance; kidnapped as neatly as ever a
peaceful clerk was kidnapped by a lawless press-gang, and, in the end,
finding as the arch-conspirator a guileless and warm-hearted friend,
who called me clever, lodged me in a cell, and blandly invited me to
talk German to the purpose, as he was aiming at a little secret service
on the high seas. Close in the train of Humour came Romance, veiling
her face, but I knew it was the rustle of her robes that I heard in the
foam beneath me; I knew that it was she who handed me the cup of
sparkling wine and bade me drink and be merry. Strange to me though it
was, I knew the taste when it touched my lips. It was not that bastard
concoction I had tasted in the pseudo-Bohemias of Soho; it was not the
showy but insipid beverage I should have drunk my fill of at Morven
Lodge; it was the purest of her pure vintages, instilling the ancient
inspiration which, under many guises, quickens thousands of better
brains than mine, but whose essence is always the same; the gay pursuit
of a perilous quest. Then and there I tried to clinch the matter and
keep that mood. In the main I think I succeeded, though I had many
lapses.

For the present my veins tingled with the draught. The wind humming
into the mainsail, the ghostly wave-crests riding up out of the void,
whispered a low thrilling chorus in praise of adventure. Potent indeed
must the spell have been, for, in reality, that first night sail teemed
with terrors for me. It is true that it began well, for the haze
dispersed, as Davies had prophesied, and Bulk Point Lighthouse guided
us safely to the mouth of Kiel Fiord. It was during this stage that,
crouching together aft, our pipe-bowls glowing sympathetically, we
returned to the problem before us; for we had shot out on our quest
with volcanic precipitation, leaving much to be discussed. I gleaned a
few more facts, though I dispelled no doubts. Davies had only seen the
Dollmanns on their yacht, where father and daughter were living for the
time. Their villa at Norderney, and their home life there, were unknown
to him, though he had landed once at the harbour himself. Further, he
had heard vaguely of a stepmother, absent at Hamburg. They were to have
joined her on their arrival at that city, which, be it noted, stands a
long way up the Elbe, forty miles and more above Cuxhaven, the town at
the mouth.

The exact arrangement made on the day before the fatal voyage was that
the two yachts should meet in the evening at Cuxhaven and proceed up
the river together. Then, in the ordinary course, Davies would have
parted company at Brunsbüttel (fifteen miles up), which is the western
terminus of the ship canal to the Baltic. Such at least had been his
original intention; but, putting two and two together, I gathered that
latterly, and perhaps unconfessed to himself, his resolve had weakened,
and that he would have followed the _Medusa_ to Hamburg, or indeed the
end of the world, impelled by the same motive that, contrary to all his
tastes and principles, had induced him to abandon his life in the
islands and undertake the voyage at all. But on that point he was
immovably reticent, and all I could conclude was that the strange
cross-current connected with Dollmann’s daughter had given him cruel
pain and had clouded his judgement to distraction, but that he now was
prepared to forget or ignore it, and steer a settled course.

The facts I elicited raised several important questions. Was it not
known by this time that he and his yacht had survived? Davies was
convinced that it was not. “He may have waited at Cuxhaven, or inquired
at the lock at Brunsbüttel,” he said. “But there was no need, for I
tell you the thing was a certainty. If I had struck and _stuck_ on that
outer bank, as it was a hundred to one I should do, the yacht would
have broken up in three minutes. Bartels would never have seen me, and
couldn’t have got to me if he had. No one would have seen me. And
nothing whatever has happened since to show that they know I’m alive.”

“They,” I suggested. “Who are ‘they’? Who are our adversaries?” If
Dollmann were an accredited agent of the German Admiralty—— But, no, it
was incredible that the murder of a young Englishman should be connived
at in modern days by a friendly and civilised government! Yet, if he
were not such an agent, the whole theory fell to the ground.

“I believe,” said Davies, “that Dollmann did it off his own bat, and
beyond that I can’t see. And I don’t know that it matters at present.
Alive or dead we’re doing nothing wrong, and have nothing to be ashamed
of.”

“I think it matters a good deal,” I objected. “Who will be interested
in our resurrection, and how are we to go to work, openly or secretly?
I suppose we shall keep out of the way as much as we can?”

“As for keeping out of the way,” said Davies, jerkily, as he peered to
windward under the foresail, “we _must_ pass the ship canal; that’s a
public highway, where anyone can see you. After that there won’t be
much difficulty. Wait till you see the place!” He gave a low, contented
laugh, which would have frozen my marrow yesterday. “By the way, that
reminds me,” he added; “we must stop at Kiel for the inside of a day
and lay in a lot of stores. We want to be independent of the shore.” I
said nothing. Independence of the shore in a seven-tonner in October!
What an end to aim at!

About nine o’clock we weathered the point, entered Kiel Fiord, and
began a dead beat to windward of seven miles to the head of it where
Kiel lies. Hitherto, save for the latent qualms concerning my total
helplessness if anything happened to Davies, interest and excitement
had upheld me well. My alarms only began when I thought them nearly
over. Davies had frequently urged me to turn in and sleep, and I went
so far as to go below and coil myself up on the lee sofa with my pencil
and diary. Suddenly there was a flapping and rattling on deck, and I
began to slide on to the floor. “What’s happened?” I cried, in a panic,
for there was Davies stooping in at the cabin door.

“Nothing,” he said, chafing his hands for warmth; “I’m only going
about. Hand me the glasses, will you? There’s a steamer ahead. I say,
if you really don’t want to turn in, you might make some soup. Just
let’s look at the chart.” He studied it with maddening deliberation,
while I wondered how near the steamer was, and what the yacht was doing
meanwhile.

“I suppose it’s not really necessary for anyone to be at the helm?” I
remarked.

“Oh, she’s all right for a minute,” he said, without looking up.
“Two—one and a half—one—lights in line sou’-west by west—got a match?”
He expended two, and tumbled upstairs again.

“You don’t want me, do you?” I shouted after him.

“No, but come up when you’ve put the kettle on. It’s a pretty beat up
the fiord. Lovely breeze.”

His legs disappeared. A sort of buoyant fatalism possessed me as I
finished my notes and pored over the stove. It upheld me, too, when I
went on deck and watched the “pretty beat”, whose prettiness was mainly
due to the crowd of fog-bound shipping—steamers, smacks, and
sailing-vessels—now once more on the move in the confined fairway of
the fiord, their baleful eyes of red, green, or yellow, opening and
shutting, brightening and fading; while shore-lights and anchor-lights
added to my bewilderment, and a throbbing of screws filled the air like
the distant roar of London streets. In fact, every time we spun round
for our dart across the fiord I felt like a rustic matron gathering her
skirts for the transit of the Strand on a busy night. Davies, however,
was the street arab who zigzags under the horses’ feet unscathed; and
all the time he discoursed placidly on the simplicity and safety of
night-sailing if only you are careful, obeying rules, and burnt good
lights. As we were nearing the hot glow in the sky that denoted Kiel we
passed a huge scintillating bulk moored in mid-stream. “Warships,” he
murmured, ecstatically.

At one o’clock we anchored off the town.




CHAPTER X.
His Chance


“I say, Davies,” I said, “how long do you think this trip will last?
I’ve only got a month’s leave.”

We were standing at slanting desks in the Kiel post-office, Davies
scratching diligently at his letter-card, and I staring feebly at mine.

“By Jove!” said Davies, with a start of dismay; “that’s only three
weeks more; I never thought of that. You couldn’t manage to get an
extension, could you?”

“I can write to the chief,” I admitted; “but where’s the answer to come
to? We’re better without an address, I suppose.”

“There’s Cuxhaven,” reflected Davies; “but that’s too near, and
there’s—but we don’t want to be tied down to landing anywhere. I tell
you what: say ‘Post Office, Norderney’, just your name, not the
yacht’s. We _may_ get there and be able to call for letters.” The
casual character of our adventure never struck me more strongly than
then.

“Is that what _you’re_ doing?” I asked.

“Oh, I shan’t be having important letters like you.”

“But what are you saying?”

“Oh, just that we’re having a splendid cruise, and are on our way
home.”

The notion tickled me, and I said the same in my home letter, adding
that we were looking for a friend of Davies’s who would be able to show
us some sport. I wrote a line, too, to my chief (unaware of the gravity
of the step I was taking) saying it was possible that I might have to
apply for longer leave, as I had important business to transact in
Germany, and asking him kindly to write to the same address. Then we
shouldered our parcels and resumed our business.

Two full dinghy-loads of stores we ferried to the _Dulcibella_, chief
among which were two immense cans of petroleum, constituting our
reserves of heat and light, and a sack of flour. There were spare ropes
and blocks, too; German charts of excellent quality; cigars and many
weird brands of sausage and tinned meats, besides a miscellany of
oddments, some of which only served in the end to slake my companion’s
craving for jettison. Clothes were my own chief care, for, freely as I
had purged it at Flensburg, my wardrobe was still very unsuitable, and
I had already irretrievably damaged two faultless pairs of white
flannels. (“We shall be able to throw them overboard,” said Davies,
hopefully.) So I bought a great pair of seaboots of the country,
felt-lined and wooden-soled, and both of us got a number of rough
woollen garments (as worn by the local fishermen), breeches, jerseys,
helmets, gloves; all of a colour chosen to harmonise with paraffin
stains and anchor mud.

The same evening we were taking our last look at the Baltic, sailing
past warships and groups of idle yachts battened down for their
winter’s sleep; while the noble shores of the fiord, with its villas
embowered in copper foliage, grew dark and dim above us.

We rounded the last headland, steered for a galaxy of coloured lights,
tumbled down our sails, and came to under the colossal gates of the
Holtenau lock. That these would open to such an infinitesimal suppliant
seemed inconceivable. But open they did, with ponderous majesty, and
our tiny hull was lost in the womb of a lock designed to float the
largest battleships. I thought of Boulter’s on a hot August Sunday, and
wondered if I really was the same peevish dandy who had jostled and
sweltered there with the noisy cockney throng a month ago. There was a
blaze of electricity overhead, but utter silence till a solitary
cloaked figure hailed us and called for the captain. Davies ran up a
ladder, disappeared with the cloaked figure, and returned crumpling a
paper into his pocket. It lies before me now, and sets forth, under the
stamp of the Königliches Zollamt, that, in consideration of the sum of
ten marks for dues and four for tonnage, an imperial tug would tow the
vessel _Dulcibella_ (master A. H. Davies) through the Kaiser Wilhelm
canal from Holtenau to Brunsbüttel. Magnificent condescension! I blush
when I look at this yellow document and remember the stately courtesy
of the great lock-gates; for the sleepy officials of the Königliches
Zollamt little knew what an insidious little viper they were admitting
into the imperial bosom at the light toll of fourteen shillings.

“Seems cheap,” said Davies, joining me, “doesn’t it? They’ve a regular
tariff on tonnage, same for yachts as for liners. We start at four
to-morrow with a lot of other boats. I wonder if Bartels is here.”

The same silence reigned, but invisible forces were at work. The inner
gates opened and we prised ourselves through into a capacious basin,
where lay moored side by side a flotilla of sailing vessels of various
sizes. Having made fast alongside a vacant space of quay, we had our
dinner, and then strolled out with cigars to look for the _Johannes_.
We found her wedged among a stack of galliots, and her skipper sitting
primly below before a blazing stove, reading his Bible through
spectacles. He produced a bottle of schnapps and some very small and
hard pears, while Davies twitted him mercilessly about his false
predictions.

“The sky was not good,” was all he said, beaming indulgently at his
incorrigible young friend.

Before parting for the night it was arranged that next morning we
should lash alongside the _Johannes_ when the flotilla was marshalled
for the tow through the canal.

“Karl shall steer for us both,” he said, “and we will stay warm in the
cabin.”

The scheme was carried out, not without much confusion and loss of
paint, in the small hours of a dark and drizzling morning. Boisterous
little tugs sorted us into parties, and half lost under the massive
bulwarks of the _Johannes_ we were carried off into a black inane. If
any doubt remained as to the significance of our change of
cruising-grounds, dawn dispelled it. View there was none from the deck
of the _Dulcibella_; it was only by standing on the mainboom that you
could see over the embankments to the vast plain of Holstein, grey and
monotonous under a pall of mist. The soft scenery of the Schleswig
coast was a baseless dream of the past, and a cold penetrating rain
added the last touch of dramatic completeness to the staging of the new
act.

For two days we travelled slowly up the mighty waterway that is the
strategic link between the two seas of Germany. Broad and straight,
massively embanked, lit by electricity at night till it is lighter than
many a great London street; traversed by great war vessels, rich
merchantmen, and humble coasters alike, it is a symbol of the new and
mighty force which, controlled by the genius of statesmen and
engineers, is thrusting the empire irresistibly forward to the goal of
maritime greatness.

“Isn’t it splendid?” said Davies. “He’s a fine fellow, that emperor.”

Karl was the shock-headed, stout-limbed boy of about sixteen, who
constituted the whole crew of the _Johannes_, and was as dirty as his
master was clean. I felt a certain envious reverence for this
unprepossessing youth, seeing in him a much more efficient counterpart
of myself; but how he and his little master ever managed to work their
ungainly vessel was a miracle I never understood. Phlegmatically
impervious to rain and cold, he steered the _Johannes_ down the long
grey reaches in the wake of the tug, while we and Bartels held snug
gatherings down below, sometimes in his cabin, sometimes in ours. The
heating arrangements of the latter began to be a subject of serious
concern. We finally did the only logical thing, and brought the
kitchen-range into the parlour, fixing the Rippingille stove on the
forward end of the cabin table, where it could warm as well as cook for
us. As an ornament it was monstrous, and the taint of oil which it
introduced was a disgusting drawback; but, after all, the great
thing—as Davies said—is to be comfortable, and after that to be clean.

Davies held long consultations with Bartels, who was thoroughly at home
in the navigation of the sands we were bound for, his own boat being a
type of the very craft which ply in them. I shall not forget the moment
when it first dawned on him that his young friend’s curiosity was
practical; for he had thought that our goal was his own beloved
Hamburg, queen of cities, a place to see and die.

“It is too late,” he wailed. “You do not know the Nord See as I do.”

“Oh, nonsense, Bartels, it’s quite safe.”

“Safe! And have I not found you fast on Hohenhörn, in a storm, with
your rudder broken? God was good to you then, my son.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t my f——” Davies checked himself. “We’re going home.
There’s nothing in that.” Bartels became sadly resigned.

“It is good that you have a friend,” was his last word on the subject;
but all the same he always glanced at me with a rather doubtful eye. As
to Davies and myself, our friendship developed quickly on certain
limited lines, the chief obstacle, as I well know now, being his
reluctance to talk about the personal side of our quest.

On the other hand, I spoke about my own life and interests, with an
unsparing discernment, of which I should have been incapable a month
ago, and in return I gained the key to his own character. It was
devotion to the sea, wedded to a fire of pent-up patriotism struggling
incessantly for an outlet in strenuous physical expression; a humanity,
born of acute sensitiveness to his own limitations, only adding fuel to
the flame. I learnt for the first time now that in early youth he had
failed for the navy, the first of several failures in his career. “And
I can’t settle down to anything else,” he said. “I read no end about
it, and yet I am a useless outsider. All I’ve been able to do is to
potter about in small boats; but it’s all been _wasted_ till this
chance came. I’m afraid you’ll not understand how I feel about it; but
at last, for once in a way, I see a chance of being useful.”

“There ought to be chances for chaps like you,” I said, “without the
accident of a job such as this.”

“Oh, as long as I get it, what matter? But I know what you mean. There
must be hundreds of chaps like me—I know a good many myself—who know
our coasts like a book—shoals, creeks, tides, rocks; there’s nothing in
it, it’s only practice. They ought to make some use of us as a naval
reserve. They tried to once, but it fizzled out, and nobody really
cares. And what’s the result? Using every man of what reserves we’ve
got, there’s about enough to man the fleet on a war footing, and no
more. They’ve tinkered with fishermen, and merchant sailors, and
yachting hands, but everyone of them ought to be got hold of; and the
colonies, too. Is there the ghost of a doubt that if war broke out
there’d be wild appeals for volunteers, aimless cadging, hurry,
confusion, waste? My own idea is that we ought to go much further, and
train every able-bodied man for a couple of years as a sailor. Army?
Oh, I suppose you’d have to give them the choice. Not that I know or
care much about the Army, though to listen to people talk you’d think
it really mattered as the Navy matters. We’re a maritime nation—we’ve
grown by the sea and live by it; if we lose command of it we starve.
We’re unique in that way, just as our huge empire, only linked by the
sea, is unique. And yet, read Brassey, Dilke, and those _Naval
Annuals_, and see what mountains of apathy and conceit have had to be
tackled. It’s not the people’s fault. We’ve been safe so long, and
grown so rich, that we’ve forgotten what we owe it to. But there’s no
excuse for those blockheads of statesmen, as they call themselves, who
are paid to see things as they are. They have to go to an American to
learn their A B C, and it’s only when kicked and punched by civilian
agitators, a mere handful of men who get sneered at for their pains,
that they wake up, do some work, point proudly to it, and go to sleep
again, till they get another kick. By Jove! we want a man like this
Kaiser, who doesn’t wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his
country, and sees ahead.”

“We’re improving, aren’t we?”

“Oh, of course, we are! But it’s a constant uphill fight; and we aren’t
ready. They talk of a two-power standard——” He plunged away into
regions where space forbids me to follow him. This is only a sample of
many similar conversations that we afterwards held, always culminating
in the burning question of Germany. Far from including me and the
Foreign Office among his targets for vague invective, he had a profound
respect for my sagacity and experience as a member of that institution;
a respect which embarrassed me not a little when I thought of my
_précis_ writing and cigarette-smoking, my dancing, and my dining. But
I did know something of Germany, and could satisfy his tireless
questioning with a certain authority. He used to listen rapt while I
described her marvellous awakening in the last generation, under the
strength and wisdom of her rulers; her intense patriotic ardour; her
seething industrial activity, and, most potent of all, the forces that
are moulding modern Europe, her dream of a colonial empire, entailing
her transformation from a land-power to a sea-power. Impregnably based
on vast territorial resources which we cannot molest, the dim instincts
of her people, not merely directed but anticipated by the genius of her
ruling house, our great trade rivals of the present, our great naval
rival of the future, she grows, and strengthens, and waits, an ever
more formidable factor in the future of our delicate network of empire,
sensitive as gossamer to external shocks, and radiating from an island
whose commerce is its life, and which depends even for its daily ration
of bread on the free passage of the seas.

“And we aren’t ready for her,” Davies would say; “we don’t look her
way. We have no naval base in the North Sea, and no North Sea Fleet.
Our best battleships are too deep in draught for North Sea work. And,
to crown all, we were asses enough to give her Heligoland, which
commands her North Sea coast. And supposing she collars Holland; isn’t
there some talk of that?”

That would lead me to describe the swollen ambitions of the
Pan-Germanic party, and its ceaseless intrigues to promote the
absorption of Austria, Switzerland, and—a direct and flagrant menace to
ourselves—of Holland.

“I don’t blame them,” said Davies, who, for all his patriotism, had not
a particle of racial spleen in his composition. “I don’t blame them;
their Rhine ceases to be German just when it begins to be most
valuable. The mouth is Dutch, and would give them magnificent ports
just opposite British shores. _We_ can’t talk about conquest and
grabbing. We’ve collared a fine share of the world, and they’ve every
right to be jealous. Let them hate us, and say so; it’ll teach us to
buck up; and that’s what really matters.”

In these talks there occurred a singular contact of minds. It was very
well for me to spin sonorous generalities, but I had never till now
dreamed of being so vulgar as to translate them into practice. I had
always detested the meddlesome alarmist, who veils ignorance under
noisiness, and for ever wails his chant of lugubrious pessimism. To be
thrown with Davies was to receive a shock of enlightenment; for here,
at least, was a specimen of the breed who exacted respect. It is true
he made use of the usual jargon, interlarding his stammering sentences
(sometimes, when he was excited, with the oddest effect) with the
conventional catchwords of the journalist and platform speaker. But
these were but accidents; for he seemed to have caught his innermost
conviction from the very soul of the sea itself. An armchair critic is
one thing, but a sunburnt, brine-burnt zealot smarting under a personal
discontent, athirst for a means, however tortuous, of contributing his
effort to the great cause, the maritime supremacy of Britain, that was
quite another thing. He drew inspiration from the very wind and spray.
He communed with his tiller, I believe, and marshalled his figures with
its help. To hear him talk was to feel a current of clarifying air
blustering into a close club-room, where men bandy ineffectual
platitudes, and mumble old shibboleths, and go away and do nothing.

In our talk about policy and strategy we were Bismarcks and Rodneys,
wielding nations and navies; and, indeed, I have no doubt that our
fancy took extravagant flights sometimes. In plain fact we were merely
two young gentlemen in a seven-ton pleasure boat, with a taste for
amateur hydrography and police duty combined. Not that Davies ever
doubted. Once set on the road he gripped his purpose with child-like
faith and tenacity. It was his “chance”.




CHAPTER XI.
The Pathfinders


In the late afternoon of the second day our flotilla reached the Elbe
at Brunsbüttel and ranged up in the inner basin, while a big liner,
whimpering like a fretful baby, was tenderly nursed into the lock.
During the delay Davies left me in charge, and bolted off with an
oil-can and a milk-jug. An official in uniform was passing along the
quay from vessel to vessel countersigning papers. I went up to meet him
with our receipt for dues, which he signed carelessly. Then he paused
and muttered _“Dooltzhibella,”_ scratching his head, “that was the
name. English?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Little _lust-cutter_, that is so; there was an inquiry for you.”

“Whom from?”

“A friend of yours from a big barge-yacht.”

“Oh, I know; she went on to Hamburg, I suppose?”

“No such luck, captain; she was outward bound.”

What did the man mean? He seemed to be vastly amused by something.

“When was this—about three weeks ago?” I asked, indifferently.

“Three weeks? It was the day before yesterday. What a pity to miss him
by so little!” He chuckled and winked.

“Did he leave any message?” I asked.

“It was a lady who inquired,” whispered the fellow, sniggering. “Oh,
really,” I said, beginning to feel highly absurd, but keenly curious.
“And she inquired about the _Dulcibella_?”

“Herrgott! she was difficult to satisfy! Stood over me while I searched
the books. ‘A very little one,’ she kept saying, and ‘Are you sure all
the names are here

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