The Riddle of the Sands
“boom-dodging”, was filled in with the usual detail. The log then leapt
over three days, and went on: “_Sept._ 13. Wind W.N.W. fresh. Decided
to go to Baltic. Sailed 4 a.m. Quick passage E. 1/2 S. to mouth of
Weser. Anchored for night under Hohenhörn Sand. _ Sept._ 14, _nil_.
_Sept._ 15, under way at 4 a.m. Wind East moderate. Course W. by S.;
four miles; N.E. by N. fifteen miles. Norderpiep 9.30. Eider River
11.30.” This recital of naked facts was quite characteristic when
“passages” were concerned, and any curiosity I had felt about his
reticence on the previous night would have been rather allayed than
stimulated had I not noticed that a page had been torn out of the book
just at this point. The frayed edge left had been pruned and picked
into very small limits; but dissimulation was not Davies’s strong
point, and a child could have seen that a leaf was missing, and that
the entries, starting from the evening of September 9 (where a page
ended), had been written together at one sitting. I was on the point of
calling to Davies, and chaffing him with having committed a grave
offence against maritime law in having “cooked” his log; but I checked
myself, I scarcely know why, probably because I guessed the joke would
touch a sensitive place and fail. Delicacy shrank from seeing him
compelled either to amplify a deception or blunder out a confession—he
was too easy a prey; and, after all, the matter was of small moment. I
returned the book to the shelf, the only definite result of its perusal
being to recall my promise to keep a diary myself, and I then and there
dedicated a notebook to the purpose.
We were just lighting our cigars when we heard voices and the splash of
oars, followed by a bump against the hull which made Davies wince, as
violations of his paint always did. “Guten Abend; wo fahren Sie hin?”
greeted us as we climbed on deck. It turned out to be some jovial
fishermen returning to their smack from a visit to Sonderburg. A short
dialogue proved to them that we were mad Englishmen in bitter need of
charity.
“Come to Satrup,” they said; “all the smacks are there, round the
point. There is good punch in the inn.”
Nothing loth, we followed in the dinghy, skirted a bend of the Sound,
and opened up the lights of a village, with some smacks at anchor in
front of it. We were escorted to the inn, and introduced to a
formidable beverage, called coffee-punch, and a smoke-wreathed circle
of smacksmen, who talked German out of courtesy, but were Danish in all
else. Davies was at once at home with them, to a degree, indeed, that I
envied. His German was of the crudest kind, _bizarre_ in vocabulary and
comical in accent; but the freemasonry of the sea, or some charm of his
own, gave intuition to both him and his hearers. I cut a poor figure in
this nautical gathering, though Davies, who persistently referred to me
as “meiner Freund”, tried hard to represent me as a kindred spirit and
to include me in the general talk. I was detected at once as an
uninteresting hybrid. Davies, who sometimes appealed to me for a word,
was deep in talk over anchorages and ducks, especially, as I well
remember now, about the chance of sport in a certain _Schlei Fiord_. I
fell into utter neglect, till rescued by a taciturn person in
spectacles and a very high cap, who appeared to be the only landsman
present. After silently puffing smoke in my direction for some time, he
asked me if I was married, and if not, when I proposed to be. After
this inquisition he abandoned me.
It was eleven before we left this hospitable inn, escorted by the whole
party to the dinghy. Our friends of the smack insisted on our sharing
their boat out of pure good-fellowship—for there was not nearly room
for us—and would not let us go till a bucket of fresh-caught fish had
been emptied into her bottom. After much shaking of scaly hands, we
sculled back to the _Dulcibella_, where she slept in a bed of tremulous
stars.
Davies sniffed the wind and scanned the tree-tops, where light gusts
were toying with the leaves.
“Sou’-west still,” he said, “and more rain coming. But it’s bound to
shift into the north.”
“Will that be a good wind for us?”
“It depends where we go,” he said, slowly. “I was asking those fellows
about duck-shooting. They seemed to think the best place would be
Schlei Fiord. That’s about fifteen miles south of Sonderburg, on the
way to Kiel. They said there was a pilot chap living at the mouth who
would tell us all about it. They weren’t very encouraging though. We
should want a north wind for that.”
“I don’t care where we go,” I said, to my own surprise.
“Don’t you really?” he rejoined, with sudden warmth. Then, with a
slight change of voice. “You mean it’s all very jolly about here?”
Of course I meant that. Before we went below we both looked for a
moment at the little grey memorial; its slender fretted arch outlined
in tender lights and darks above the hollow on the Alsen shore. The
night was that of September 27, the third I had spent on the
_Dulcibella_.
CHAPTER VI.
Schlei Fiord
I make no apology for having described these early days in some detail.
It is no wonder that their trivialities are as vividly before me as the
colours of earth and sea in this enchanting corner of the world. For
every trifle, sordid or picturesque, was relevant; every scrap of talk
a link; every passing mood critical for good or ill. So slight indeed
were the determining causes that changed my autumn holiday into an
undertaking the most momentous I have ever approached.
Two days more preceded the change. On the first, the southwesterly wind
still holding, we sallied forth into Augustenburg Fiord, “to practise
smartness in a heavy thresh,” as Davies put it. It was the day of
dedication for those disgusting oilskins, immured in whose stiff and
odorous angles, I felt distressfully cumbersome; a day of proof indeed
for me, for heavy squalls swept incessantly over the loch, and Davies,
at my own request, gave me no rest. Backwards and forwards we tacked,
blustering into coves and out again, reefing and unreefing, now stung
with rain, now warmed with sun, but never with time to breathe or
think.
I wrestled with intractable ropes, slaves if they could be subdued,
tyrants if they got the upper hand; creeping, craning, straining, I
made the painful round of the deck, while Davies, hatless and tranquil,
directed my blundering movements.
“Now take the helm and try steering in a hard breeze to windward. It’s
the finest sport on earth.”
So I grappled with the niceties of that delicate craft; smarting eyes,
chafed hands, and dazed brain all pressed into the service, whilst
Davies, taming the ropes the while, shouted into my ear the subtle
mysteries of the art; that fidgeting ripple in the luff of the
mainsail, and the distant rattle from the hungry jib—signs that they
are starved of wind and must be given more; the heavy list and wallow
of the hull, the feel of the wind on your cheek instead of your nose,
the broader angle of the burgee at the masthead—signs that they have
too much, and that she is sagging recreantly to leeward instead of
fighting to windward. He taught me the tactics for meeting squalls, and
the way to press your advantage when they are defeated—the iron hand in
the velvet glove that the wilful tiller needs if you are to gain your
ends with it; the exact set of the sheets necessary to get the easiest
and swiftest play of the hull—all these things and many more I
struggled to apprehend, careless for the moment as to whether they were
worth knowing, but doggedly set on knowing them. Needless to say, I had
no eyes for beauty. The wooded inlets we dived into gave a brief
respite from wind and spindrift, but called into use the lead and the
centreboard tackle—two new and cumbrous complexities. Davies’s passion
for intricate navigation had to be sated even in these secure and
tideless waters.
“Let’s get in as near as we can—you stand by the lead,” was his
formula; so I made false casts, tripped up in the slack, sent rivers of
water up my sleeves, and committed all the other _gaucheries_ that
beginners in the art commit, while the sand showed whiter beneath the
keel, till Davies regretfully drew off and shouted: “Ready about,
centre-plate down,” and I dashed down to the trappings of that
diabolical contrivance, the only part of the _Dulcibella_’s equipment
that I hated fiercely to the last. It had an odious habit when lowered
of spouting jets of water through its chain-lead on to the cabin floor.
One of my duties was to gag it with cotton-waste, but even then its
choking gurgle was a most uncomfortable sound in your dining-room. In a
minute the creek would be behind us and we would be thumping our stem
into the short hollow waves of the fiord, and lurching through spray
and rain for some point on the opposite shore. Of our destination and
objects, if we had any, I knew nothing. At the northern end of the
fiord, just before we turned, Davies had turned dreamy in the most
exasperating way, for I was steering at the time and in mortal need of
sympathetic guidance, if I was to avoid a sudden jibe. As though
continuing aloud some internal debate, he held a onesided argument to
the effect that it was no use going farther north. Ducks, weather, and
charts figured in it, but I did not follow the pros and cons. I only
know that we suddenly turned and began to “battle” south again. At
sunset we were back once more in the same quiet pool among the trees
and fields of Als Sound, a wondrous peace succeeding the turmoil.
Bruised and sodden, I was extricating myself from my oily prison, and
later was tasting (though not nearly yet in its perfection) the unique
exultation that follows such a day, when, glowing all over, deliciously
tired and pleasantly sore, you eat what seems ambrosia, be it only
tinned beef; and drink nectar, be it only distilled from terrestrial
hops or coffee berries, and inhale as culminating luxury balmy fumes
which even the happy Homeric gods knew naught of.
On the following morning, the 30th, a joyous shout of “Nor’-west wind”
sent me shivering on deck, in the small hours, to handle rain-stiff
canvas and cutting chain. It was a cloudy, unsettled day, but still
enough after yesterday’s boisterous ordeal. We retraced our way past
Sonderburg, and thence sailed for a faint line of pale green on the far
south-western horizon. It was during this passage that an incident
occurred, which, slight as it was, opened my eyes to much.
A flight of wild duck crossed our bows at some little distance, a
wedge-shaped phalanx of craning necks and flapping wings. I happened to
be steering while Davies verified our course below; but I called him up
at once, and a discussion began about our chances of sport. Davies was
gloomy over them.
“Those fellows at Satrup were rather doubtful,” he said. “There are
plenty of ducks, but I made out that it’s not easy for strangers to get
shooting. The whole country’s so very civilised; it’s not _wild_
enough, is it?”
He looked at me. I had no very clear opinion. It was anything but wild
in one sense, but there seemed to be wild enough spots for ducks. The
shore we were passing appeared to be bordered by lonely marshes, though
a spacious champaign showed behind. If it were not for the beautiful
places we had seen, and my growing taste for our way of seeing them,
his disappointing vagueness would have nettled me more than it did.
For, after all, he had brought me out loaded with sporting equipment
under a promise of shooting.
“Bad weather is what we want for ducks,” he said; “but I’m afraid we’re
in the wrong place for them. Now, if it was the North Sea, among those
Frisian Islands——” His tone was timid and interrogative, and I felt at