The Riddle of the Sands
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