The Riddle of the Sands
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