The Riddle of the Sands
shooting-box in inclement weather, the _Dulcibella_ lost ground in my
estimation, which she had latterly gained.
“I’m fond of shooting,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’m only a fair-weather
yachtsman, and I should much prefer sun and scenery.”
“Scenery,” he repeated, reflectively. “I say, you must have thought it
a queer taste of mine to cruise about on that outlandish Frisian coast.
How would you like that sort of thing?”
“I should loathe it,” I answered, promptly, with a clear conscience.
“Weren’t you delighted yourself to get to the Baltic? It must be a
wonderful contrast to what you described. Did you ever see another
yacht there?”
“Only one,” he answered. “Good night!”
“Good night!”
CHAPTER V.
Wanted, a North Wind
Nothing disturbed my rest that night, so adaptable is youth and so
masterful is nature. At times I was remotely aware of a threshing of
rain and a humming of wind, with a nervous kicking of the little hull,
and at one moment I dreamt I saw an apparition by candle-light of
Davies, clad in pyjamas and huge top-boots, grasping a misty lantern of
gigantic proportions. But the apparition mounted the ladder and
disappeared, and I passed to other dreams.
A blast in my ear, like the voice of fifty trombones, galvanised me
into full consciousness. The musician, smiling and tousled, was at my
bedside, raising a foghorn to his lips with deadly intention. “It’s a
way we have in the _Dulcibella_,” he said, as I started up on one
elbow. “I didn’t startle you much, did I?” he added.
“Well, I like the _mattinata_ better than the cold douche,” I answered,
thinking of yesterday.
“Fine day and magnificent breeze!” he answered. My sensations this
morning were vastly livelier than those of yesterday at the same hour.
My limbs were supple again and my head clear. Not even the searching
wind could mar the ecstasy of that plunge down to smooth, seductive
sand, where I buried greedy fingers and looked through a medium blue,
with that translucent blue, fairy-faint and angel-pure, that you see in
perfection only in the heart of ice. Up again to sun, wind, and the
forest whispers from the shore; down just once more to see the uncouth
anchor stabbing the sand’s soft bosom with one rusty fang, deaf and
inert to the _Dulcibella_’s puny efforts to drag him from his prey.
Back, holding by the cable as a rusty clue from heaven to earth, up to
that _bourgeoise_ little maiden’s bows; back to breakfast, with an
appetite not to be blunted by condensed milk and somewhat _passé_
bread. An hour later we had dressed the _Dulcibella_ for the road, and
were foaming into the grey void of yesterday, now a noble expanse of
wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills, their every
outline vivid in the rain-washed air.
I cannot pretend that I really enjoyed this first sail into the open,
though I was keenly anxious to do so. I felt the thrill of those
forward leaps, heard that persuasive song the foam sings under the
lee-bow, saw the flashing harmonies of sea and sky; but sensuous
perception was deadened by nervousness. The yacht looked smaller than
ever outside the quiet fiord. The song of the foam seemed very near,
the wave crests aft very high. The novice in sailing clings desperately
to the thoughts of sailors—effective, prudent persons, with a typical
jargon and a typical dress, versed in local currents and winds. I could
not help missing this professional element. Davies, as he sat grasping
his beloved tiller, looked strikingly efficient in his way, and
supremely at home in his surroundings; but he looked the amateur
through and through, as with one hand, and (it seemed) one eye, he
wrestled with a spray-splashed chart half unrolled on the deck beside
him. All his casual ways returned to me—his casual talk and that last
adventurous voyage to the Baltic, and the suspicions his reticence had
aroused.
“Do you see a monument anywhere?” he said, all at once; and, before I
could answer; “We must take another reef.” He let go of the tiller and
relit his pipe, while the yacht rounded sharply to, and in a twinkling
was tossing head to sea with loud claps of her canvas and passionate
jerks of her boom, as the wind leapt on its quarry, now turning to bay,
with redoubled force. The sting of spray in my eyes and the Babel of
noise dazed me; but Davies, with a pull on the fore-sheet, soothed the
tormented little ship, and left her coolly sparring with the waves
while he shortened sail and puffed his pipe. An hour later the narrow
vista of Als Sound was visible, with quiet old Sonderburg sunning
itself on the island shore, and the Dybbol heights towering above—the
Dybbol of bloody memory; scene of the last desperate stand of the Danes
in ’64, ere the Prussians wrested the two fair provinces from them.
“It’s early to anchor, and I hate towns,” said Davies, as one section
of a lumbering pontoon bridge opened to give us passage. But I was firm
on the need for a walk, and got my way on condition that I bought
stores as well, and returned in time to admit of further advance to a
“quiet anchorage”. Never did I step on the solid earth with stranger
feelings, partly due to relief from confinement, partly to that sense
of independence in travelling, which, for those who go down to the sea
in small ships, can make the foulest coal-port in Northumbria seem
attractive. And here I had fascinating Sonderburg, with its broad-eaved
houses of carved woodwork, each fresh with cleansing, yet reverend with
age; its fair-haired Viking-like men, and rosy, plain-faced women, with
their bullet foreheads and large mouths; Sonderburg still Danish to the
core under its Teuton veneer. Crossing the bridge I climbed the
Dybbol—dotted with memorials of that heroic defence—and thence could
see the wee form and gossamer rigging of the _Dulcibella_ on the silver
ribbon of the Sound, and was reminded by the sight that there were
stores to be bought. So I hurried down again to the old quarter and
bargained over eggs and bread with a dear old lady, pink as a
_débutante,_ made a patriotic pretence of not understanding German, and
called in her strapping son, whose few words of English, being chiefly
nautical slang picked up on a British trawler, were peculiarly useless
for the purpose. Davies had tea ready when I came aboard again, and,
drinking it on deck, we proceeded up the sheltered Sound, which, in
spite of its imposing name, was no bigger than an inland river, only
the hosts of rainbow jelly-fish reminding us that we were threading a
highway of ocean. There is no rise and fall of tide in these regions to
disfigure the shore with mud. Here was a shelving gravel bank; there a
bed of whispering rushes; there again young birch trees growing to the
very brink, each wearing a stocking of bright moss and setting its foot
firmly in among golden leaves and scarlet fungus.
Davies was preoccupied, but he lighted up when I talked of the Danish
war. “Germany’s a thundering great nation,” he said; “I wonder if we
shall ever fight her.” A little incident that happened after we
anchored deepened the impression left by this conversation. We crept at
dusk into a shaded back-water, where our keel almost touched the gravel
bed. Opposite us on the Alsen shore there showed, clean-cut against the
sky, the spire of a little monument rising from a leafy hollow.
“I wonder what that is,” I said. It was scarcely a minute’s row in the
dinghy, and when the anchor was down we sculled over to it. A bank of
loam led to gorse and bramble. Pushing aside some branches we came to a
slender Gothic memorial in grey stone, inscribed with bas-reliefs of
battle scenes, showing Prussians forcing a landing in boats and Danes
resisting with savage tenacity. In the failing light we spelt out an
inscription: “Den bei dem Meeres Uebergange und der Eroberung von Alsen
am 29. Juni 1864 heldenmüthig gefallenen zum ehrenden Gedächtniss.” “To
the honoured memory of those who died heroically at the invasion and
storming of Alsen.” I knew the German passion for commemoration; I had
seen similar memorials on Alsatian battlefields, and several on the
Dybbol only that afternoon; but there was something in the scene, the
hour, and the circumstances, which made this one seem singularly
touching. As for Davies, I scarcely recognised him; his eyes flashed
and filled with tears as he glanced from the inscription to the path we
had followed and the water beyond. “It was a landing in boats, I
suppose,” he said, half to himself. “I wonder they managed it. What
does _heldenmüthig_ mean?”—“Heroically.”—“Heldenmüthig gefallenen,” he
repeated, under his breath, lingering on each syllable. He was like a
schoolboy reading of Waterloo.
Our conversation at dinner turned naturally on war, and in naval
warfare I found I had come upon Davies’s literary hobby. I had not
hitherto paid attention to the medley on our bookshelf, but I now saw
that, besides a Nautical Almanack and some dilapidated _Sailing
Directions_, there were several books on the cruises of small yachts,
and also some big volumes crushed in anyhow or lying on the top.
Squinting painfully at them I saw Mahan’s _Life of Nelson_, Brassey’s
_Naval Annual_, and others.
“It’s a tremendously interesting subject,” said Davies, pulling down
(in two pieces) a volume of Mahan’s _Influence of Sea Power_.
Dinner flagged (and froze) while he illustrated a point by reference to
the much-thumbed pages. He was very keen, and not very articulate. I
knew just enough to be an intelligent listener, and, though hungry, was
delighted to hear him talk.
“I’m not boring you, am I?” he said, suddenly.
“I should think not,” I protested. “But you might just have a look at
the chops.”
They had indeed been crying aloud for notice for some minutes, and drew
candid attention to their neglect when they appeared. The diversion
they caused put Davies out of vein. I tried to revive the subject, but
he was reserved and diffident.
The untidy bookshelf reminded me of the logbook, and when Davies had
retired with the crockery to the forecastle, I pulled the ledger down
and turned over the leaves. It was a mass of short entries, with
cryptic abbreviations, winds, tides, weather, and courses appearing to
predominate. The voyage from Dover to Ostend was dismissed in two
lines: “Under way 7 p.m., wind W.S.W. moderate; West Hinder 5 a.m.,
outside all banks; Ostend 11 a.m.” The Scheldt had a couple of pages
very technical and _staccato_ in style. Inland Holland was given a
contemptuous summary, with some half-hearted allusions to windmills,
and so on, and a caustic word or two about boys, paint, and canal
smells.
At Amsterdam technicalities began again, and a brisker tone pervaded
the entries, which became progressively fuller as the writer cruised on
the Frisian coast. He was clearly in better spirits, for here and there
were quaint and laboured efforts to describe nature out of material
which, as far as I could judge, was repellent enough to discourage the
most brilliant and observant of writers; with an occasional note of a
visit on shore, generally reached by a walk of half a mile over sand,
and of talks with shop people and fishermen. But such lighter relief
was rare. The bulk dealt with channels and shoals with weird and
depressing names, with the centre-plate, the sails, and the wind, buoys
and “booms”, tides and “berths” for the night. “Kedging off” appeared
to be a frequent diversion; “running aground” was of almost daily
occurrence.
It was not easy reading, and I turned the leaves rapidly. I was
curious, too, to see the latter part. I came to a point where the rain
of little sentences, pattering out like small shot, ceased abruptly. It
was at the end of September 9. That day, with its “kedging” and