The Riddle of the Sands
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