The Riddle of the Sands
“Well, what do you propose?”
“Hitherto I believe we stand fairly well. Let’s assume we hoodwinked
von Brüning at Bensersiel, and base our policy on that assumption. It
follows that we must show Dollmann at the earliest possible moment that
you _have_ come back, and give him time to revise his tactics before he
commits himself. Now——”
“But _she’ll_ tell him we’re back,” interrupted Davies.
“I don’t think so. We’ve just agreed to keep this afternoon’s episode a
secret. She expects never to see us again.”
“Now, he comes to-morrow by the morning boat, she said. What did that
mean? Boat from where?”
“I know. From Norddeich on the mainland opposite. There’s a railway
there from Norden, and a steam ferry crosses to the island.”
“At what time?”
“Your Bradshaw will tell us—here it is: ‘Winter Service, 8.30 a.m., due
at 9.5.’”
“Let’s get away at once.”
We had a tussle with the tide at first, but once over the watershed the
channel improved, and the haze lightened gradually. A lighthouse
appeared among the sand-dunes on the island shore, and before darkness
fell we dimly saw the spires and roofs of a town, and two long black
piers stretching out southwards. We were scarcely a mile away when we
lost our wind altogether, and had to anchor. Determined to reach our
destination that night we waited till the ebb stream made, and then
towed the yacht with the dinghy. In the course of this a fog dropped on
us suddenly, just as it had yesterday. I was towing at the time, and,
of course, stopped short; but Davies shouted to me from the tiller to
go on, that he could manage with the lead and compass. And the end of
it was that, at about nine o’clock, we anchored safely in the
five-fathom roadstead, close to the eastern pier, as a short
reconnaissance proved to us. It had been a little masterpiece of adroit
seamanship.
There was utter stillness till our chain rattled down, when a muffled
shout came from the direction of the pier, and soon we heard a boat
groping out to us. It was a polite but sleepy port-officer, who asked
in a perfunctory way for our particulars, and when he heard them,
remembered the _Dulcibella_’s previous visit.
“Where are you bound to?” he asked.
“England—sooner or later,” said Davies.
The man laughed derisively. “Not this year,” he said; “there will be
fogs for another week; it is always so, and then storms. Better leave
your yawl here. Dues will be only sixpence a month for you.
“I’ll think about it,” said Davies. “Good-night.”
The man vanished like a ghost in the thick night.
“Is the post-office open?” I called after him.
“No; eight to-morrow,” came back out of the fog.
We were too excited to sup in comfort, or sleep in peace, or to do
anything but plan and speculate. Never till this night had we talked
with absolute mutual confidence, for Davies broke down the last
barriers of reserve and let me see his whole mind. He loved this girl
and he loved his country, two simple passions which for the time
absorbed his whole moral capacity. There was no room left for
casuistry. To weigh one passion against the other, with the discordant
voices of honour and expediency dinning in his ears, had too long
involved him in fruitless torture. Both were right; neither could be
surrendered. If the facts showed them irreconcilable, _tant pis pour
les faits._ A way must be found to satisfy both or neither.
I should have been a spiritless dog if I had not risen to his mood. But
in truth his cutting of the knot was at this juncture exactly what
appealed to me. I, too, was tired of vicarious casuistry, and the
fascination of our enterprise, intensified by the discovery of that
afternoon, had never been so strong in me. Not to be insincere, I
cannot pretend that I viewed the situation with his single mind. My
philosophy when I left London was of a very worldly sort, and no one
can change his temperament in three weeks. I plainly said as much to
Davies, and indeed took perverse satisfaction in stating with brutal
emphasis some social truths which bore on this attachment of his to the
daughter of an outlaw. Truths I call them, but I uttered them more by
rote than by conviction, and he heard them unmoved. And meanwhile I
snatched recklessly at his own solution. If it imparted into our
adventure a strain of crazy chivalry more suited to knights-errant of
the Middle Ages than to sober modern youths—well, thank Heaven, I was
not too sober, and still young enough to snatch at that fancy with an
ardour of imagination, if not of character; perhaps, too, of character,
for Galahads are not so common but that ordinary folk must needs draw
courage from their example and put something of a blind trust in their
tenfold strength.
To reduce a romantic ideal to a working plan is a very difficult thing.
“We shall have to argue backwards,” I said. “What is to be the final
stage? Because that must govern the others.”
There was only one answer—to get Dollmann, secrets and all, daughter
and all, away from Germany altogether. So only could we satisfy the
double aim we had set before us. What a joy it is, when beset with
doubts, to find a bed-rock necessity, however unattainable! We fastened
on this one and reasoned back from it. The first lesson was that,
however many and strong were the enemies we had to contend with, our
sole overt foe must be Dollmann. The issue of the struggle must be
known only to ourselves and him. If we won, and found out “what he was
at”, we must at all costs conceal our success from his German friends,
and detach him from them before he was compromised. (You will remark
that to blithely accept this limitation showed a very sanguine spirit
in us.) The next question, how to find out what he was at, was a deal
more thorny. If it had not been for the discovery of Dollmann’s
identity, we should have found it as hard a nut to crack as ever. But
this discovery was illuminating. It threw into relief two methods of
action which hitherto we had been hazily seeking to combine, seesawing
between one and the other, each of us influenced at different times by
different motives. One was to rely on independent research; the other
to extort the secret from Dollmann direct, by craft or threats. The
moral of to-day was to abandon the first and embrace the second.
The prospects of independent research were not a whit better than
before. There were only two theories in the field, the channel theory
and the Memmert theory. The former languished for lack of
corroboration; the latter also appeared to be weakened. To Fräulein
Dollmann the wreck-works were evidently what they purported to be, and
nothing more. This fact in itself was unimportant, for it was clear as
crystal that she was no party to her father’s treacherous intrigues, if
he was engaged in such. But if Memmert was his sphere for them, it was
disconcerting to find her so familiar with that sphere, lightly talking
of a descent in a diving-bell—hinting, too, that the mystery as to
results was only for local consumption. Nevertheless, the charm of
Memmert as the place we had traced Grimm to, and as the only tangible
clue we had obtained, was still very great. The really cogent objection
was the insuperable difficulty, known and watched as we were, of
learning its significance. If there was anything important to see there
we should never be allowed to see it, while by trying and failing we
risked everything. It was on this point that the last of all
misunderstandings between me and Davies was dissipated. At Bensersiel
he had been influenced more than he owned by my arguments about
Memmert; but at that time (as I hinted) he was biased by a radical
prejudice. The channel theory had become a sort of religion with him,
promising double salvation—not only avoidance of the Dollmanns, but
success in the quest by methods in which he was past master. To have to
desert it and resort to spying on naval defences was an idea he dreaded
and distrusted. It was not the morality of the course that bothered
him. He was far too clear-headed to blink at the essential fact that at
heart we were spies on a foreign power in time of peace, or to salve
his conscience by specious distinctions as to our mode of operation.
The foreign power to him was Dollmann, a traitor. There was his final
justification, fearlessly adopted and held to the last. It was rather
that, knowing his own limitations, his whole nature shrank from the
sort of action entailed by the Memmert theory. And there was strong
common sense in his antipathy.
So much for independent research.
On the other hand the road was now clear for the other method. Davies
no longer feared to face the imbroglio at Norderney; and that day
fortune had given us a new and potent weapon against Dollmann;
precisely how potent we could not tell, for we had only a glimpse of
his past, and his exact relations with the Government were unknown to
us. But we knew who he was. Using this knowledge with address, could we
not wring the rest from him? Feel our way, of course, be guided by his
own conduct, but in the end strike hard and stake everything on the
stroke? Such at any rate was our scheme to-night. Later, tossing in my
bunk, I bethought me of the little drab book, lit a candle, and fetched
it. A preface explained that it had been written during a spell of two
months’ leave from naval duty, and expressed a hope that it might be of
service to Corinthian sailors. The style was unadorned, but scholarly
and pithy. There was no trace of the writer’s individuality, save a
certain subdued relish in describing banks and shoals, which reminded
me of Davies himself. For the rest, I found the book dull, and, in
fact, it sent me to sleep.
CHAPTER XXI.
Blindfold to Memmert
“Here she comes,” said Davies. It was nine o’clock on the next day,
October 22, and we were on deck waiting for the arrival of the steamer
from Norddeich. There was no change in the weather—still the same
stringent cold, with a high barometer, and only fickle flaws of air;
but the morning was gloriously clear, except for a wreath or two of
mist curling like smoke from the sea, and an attenuated belt of opaque
fog on the northern horizon. The harbour lay open before us, and very
commodious and civilised it looked, enclosed between two long piers
which ran quite half a mile out from the land to the roadstead (Riff
Gat by name) where we lay. A stranger might have taken it for a deep
and spacious haven; but this, of course, was an illusion, due to the
high water. Davies knew that three-quarters of it was mud, the
remainder being a dredged-out channel along the western pier. A couple
of tugs, a dredger, and a ferry packet with steam up, were moored on
that side—a small stack of galliots on the other. Beyond these was
another vessel, a galliot in build, but radiant as a queen among sluts;
her varnished sides and spars flashing orange in the sun. These, and
her snow-white sailcovers and the twinkle of brass and gun-metal,
proclaimed her to be a yacht. I had already studied her through the
glasses and read on her stern _Medusa_. A couple of sailors were
swabbing her decks; you could hear the slush of the water and the
scratching of the deck-brooms. “_They_ can see us anyway,” Davies had
said.
For that matter all the world could see us—certainly the incoming
steamer must; for we lay as near to the pier as safety permitted,
abreast of the berth she would occupy, as we knew by a gangway and a
knot of sailors.
A packet boat, not bigger than a big tug, was approaching from the
south.
“Remember, we’re not supposed to know he’s coming,” I said; “let’s go
below.” Besides the skylight, our “coach-house” cabin top had little
oblong side windows. We wiped clean those on the port side and watched
events from them, kneeling on the sofa.