The Riddle of the Sands
with a Yankee twang. Encumbered with the mythical sister, of course I
stuck to my lie, said I had been on an English ship so long that I had
picked up the accent, and also gave him some words in broken English.
At the same time I showed I thought him an impertinent nuisance, paid
my score and walked out—quit of him? Not a bit of it! He insisted on
showing me the way to Dornumersiel, and followed me down the street.
Perceiving that he was in liquor, in spite of the early hour, I dared
not risk a quarrelsome scene with a man who already knew so much about
me, and might at any moment elicit more. So I melted, and humoured him;
treated him in a ginshop in the hope of giving him the slip—a
disastrous resource, which was made a precedent for further potations
elsewhere. I would gladly draw a veil over our scandalous progress
through peaceable Dornum, of the terrors I experienced when he
introduced me as his friend, and as his English friend, and of the
abasement I felt, too, as, linked arm in arm, we trod the three miles
of road coastwards. It was his malicious whim that we should talk
English; a fortunate whim, as it turned out, because I knew no fo’c’sle
German, but had a smattering of fo’c’sle English, gathered from
Cutcliffe Hyne and Kipling. With these I extemporised a disreputable
hybrid, mostly consisting of oaths and blasphemies, and so yarned of
imaginary voyages. Of course he knew every port in the world, but
happily was none too critical, owing to repeated _schnappsen._
Nevertheless, it was a deplorable _contretemps_ from every point of
view. I was wasting my time, for the road took a different direction to
the Neues Tief, so that I had not even the advantage of inspecting the
canal and only met with it when we reached the sea. Here it split into
two mouths, both furnished with locks, and emptying into two little
mud-hole harbours, replicas of Bensersiel, each owning its cluster of
houses. I made straight for the _Gasthaus_ at Dornumersiel, primed my
companion well, and asked him to wait while I saw about a boat in the
harbour; but, needless to say, I never rejoined him. I just took a
cursory look at the left-hand harbour, saw a lighter locking through
(for the tide was high), and then walked as fast as my legs would carry
me to the outermost dyke, mounted it, and strode along the sea
westwards in the teeth of a smart shower of rain, full of deep
apprehensions as to the stir and gossip my disappearance might cause if
my odious crimp was sober enough to discover it. As soon as I deemed it
safe, I dropped on to the sand and ran till I could run no more. Then I
sat on my bundle with my back to the dyke in partial shelter from the
rain, watching the sea recede from the flats and dwindle into slender
meres, and the laden clouds fly weeping over the islands till those
pale shapes were lost in mist.
The barge I had seen locking through was creeping across towards
Langeoog behind a tug and a wisp of smoke.
No more exploration by daylight! That was my first resolve, for I felt
as if the country must be ringing with reports of an Englishman in
disguise. I must remain in hiding till dusk, then regain the railway
and slink into that train to Norden. Now directly I began to resign
myself to temporary inaction, and to centre my thoughts on the
rendezvous, a new doubt assailed me. Nothing had seemed more certain
yesterday than that Norden was the scene of the rendezvous, but that
was before the seven _siels_ had come into prominence. The name Norden
now sounded naked and unconvincing. As I wondered why, it suddenly
occurred to me that _all_ the stations along this northern line, though
farther inland than Norden, were equally “coast stations”, in the sense
that they were in touch with harbours (of a sort) on the coast. Norden
had its tidal creek, but Esens and Dornum had their “tiefs” or canals.
Fool that I had been to put such a narrow and literal construction on
the phrase “the tide serves!” Which was it more likely that my
conspirators would visit—Norden, whose intrusion into our theories was
purely hypothetical, or one of these _siels_ to whose sevenfold systems
all my latest observations gave such transcendent significance?
There was only one answer; and it filled me with profound
discouragement. Seven possible rendezvous!—eight, counting Norden.
Which to make for? Out came the time-table and map, and with them hope.
The case was not so bad after all; it demanded no immediate change of
plan, though it imported grave uncertainties and risks. Norden was
still the objective, but mainly as a railway junction, only remotely as
a seaport. Though the possible rendezvous were eight, the possible
stations were reduced to five—Norden, Hage, Dornum, Esens, Wittmund—all
on one single line. Trains from east to west along this line were
negligible, because there were none that could be called night trains,
the latest being the one I had this morning fixed on to bring me to
Norden, where it arrived at 7.15. Of trains from west to east there was
only one that need be considered, the same one that I had travelled by
last night, leaving Norden at 7.43 and reaching Esens at 8.50, and
Wittmund at 9.13. This train, as the reader who was with me in it
knows, was in correspondence with another from Emden and the south, and
also, I now found, with services from Hanover, Bremen, and Berlin. He
will also remember that I had to wait three-quarters of an hour at
Norden, from 7 to 7.43.
The platform at Norden Junction, therefore, between 7.15, when I should
arrive at it _from_ the east, and 7.43 when Böhme and his unknown
friend should leave it _for_ the east; there, and in that half-hour,
was my opportunity for recognising and shadowing two at least of the
conspirators. I must take the train they took, and alight where they
alighted. If I could not find them at all I should be thrown back on
the rejected view that Norden itself was the rendezvous, and should
wait there till 10.46.
In the meantime it was all very well to resolve on inaction till dusk;
but after an hour’s rest, damp clothes and feet, and the absence of
pursuers, tempted me to take the field again. Avoiding roads and
villages as long as it was light, I cut across country
south-westwards—a dismal and laborious journey, with oozy fens and
knee-deep drains to course, with circuits to be made to pass clear of
peasants, and many furtive crouchings behind dykes and willows. What
little I learnt was in harmony with previous explorations, for my track
cut at right angles the line of the Harke Tief, the stream issuing at
Nessmersiel. It, too, was in the nature of a canal, but only in embryo
at the point I touched it, south of Nesse. Works on a deviation were in
progress, and in a short digression down stream I sighted another
lighter-building yard. As for Hilgenriedersiel, the fourth of the
seven, I had no time to see anything of it at all. At seven o’clock I
was at Hage Station, very tired, wet, and footsore, after covering
nearly twenty miles all told since I left my bed in the lighter.
From here to Norden it was a run in the train of ten minutes, which I
spent in eating some rye bread and smoked eel, and in scraping the mud
off my boots and trousers. Fatigue vanished when the train drew up at
the station, and the momentous twenty-eight minutes began to run their
course. Having donned a bulky muffler and turned up the collar of my
pea-jacket, I crossed over immediately to the up-platform, walked
boldly to the booking-office, and at once sighted—von Brüning—yes, von
Brüning in mufti; but there was no mistaking his tall athletic figure,
pleasant features, and neat brown beard. He was just leaving the
window, gathering up a ticket and some coins. I joined a _queue_ of
three or four persons who were waiting their turn, flattened myself
between them and the partition till I heard him walk out. Not having
heard what station he had booked for, I took a fourth-class ticket to
Wittmund, which covered all chances. Then, with my chin buried in my
muffler, I sought the darkest corner of the ill-lit combination of bar
and waiting-room where, by the tiresome custom in Germany, would-be
travellers are penned till their train is ready. Von Brüning I
perceived sitting in another corner, with his hat over his eyes and a
cigar between his lips. A boy brought me a tankard of tawny Munich
beer, and, sipping it, I watched. People passed in and out, but nobody
spoke to the sailor in mufti. When a quarter of an hour elapsed, a
platform door opened, and a raucous voice shouted: “Hage, Dornum,
Esens, Wittmund!” A knot of passengers jostled out to the platform,
showing their tickets. I was slow over my beer, and was last of the
knot, with von Brüning immediately ahead of me, so close that his
cigar-smoke curled into my face. I looked over his shoulder at the
ticket he showed, missed the name, but caught a muttered double
sibilant from the official who checked it; ran over the stations in my
head, and pounced on _Esens._ That was as much I wanted to know for the
present; so I made my way to a fourth-class compartment, and lost sight
of my quarry, not venturing, till the last door had banged, to look out
of the window. When I did so two late arrivals were hurrying up to a
carriage—one tall, one of middle height; both in cloaks and comforters.
Their features I could not distinguish, but certainly neither of them
was Böhme. They had not come through the waiting-room door, but,
plainly, from the dark end of the platform, where they had been
waiting. A guard, with some surly remonstrances, shut them in, and the
train started.
Esens—the name had not surprised me; it fulfilled a presentiment that
had been growing in strength all the afternoon. For the last time I
referred to the map, pulpy and blurred with the day’s exposure, and
tried to etch it into my brain. I marked the road to Bensersiel, and
how it converged by degrees on the Benser Tief until they met at the
sea. “The tide serves!” Longing for Davies to help me, I reckoned, by
the aid of my diary, that high tide at Bensersiel would be about
eleven, and for two hours, I remembered (say from ten to twelve
to-night), there were from five to six feet of water in the harbour.
We should reach Esens at 8.50. Would they drive, as von Brüning had
done a week ago? I tightened my belt, stamped my mud-burdened boots,
and thanked God for the Munich beer. Whither were they going from
Bensersiel, and in what; and how was I to follow them? These were
nebulous questions, but I was in fettle for anything; boat-stealing was
a bagatelle. Fortune, I thought, smiled; Romance beckoned; even the sea
looked kind. Ay, and I do not know but that Imagination was already
beginning to unstiffen and flutter those nerveless wings.
CHAPTER XXVII.
The Luck of the Stowaway
At Esens Station I reversed my Norden tactics, jumped out smartly, and
got to the door of egress first of all, gave up my ticket, and hung
about the gate of the station under cover of darkness. Fortune smiled
still; there was no vehicle in waiting at all, and there were only half
a dozen passengers. Two of these were the cloaked gentlemen who had
been so nearly left behind at Norden, and another was von Brüning. The
latter walked well in advance of the first pair, but at the gate on to
the high road the three showed a common purpose, in that, unlike the
rest, who turned towards Esens town, they turned southwards; much to my
perplexity, for this was the contrary direction to Bensersiel and the
sea. I, with my bundle on my shoulder, had been bringing up the rear,
and, as their faithful shadow, turned to the right too, without
foreseeing the consequence. When it was too late to turn back I saw
that, fifty yards ahead, the road was barred by the gates of a level