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 civilized; 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 once that he was sounding me as to some unpalatable plan whose nature began to dawn on me.
He stammered on through a sentence or two about ‘wildness’ and ‘nobody to interfere with you,’ and then I broke in: ‘You surely don’t want to leave the Baltic?’
‘Why not?’ said he, staring into the compass.
‘Hang it, man!’ I returned, tartly, ‘here we are in October, the summer over, and the weather gone to pieces. We’re alone in a cockle-shell boat, at a time when every other yacht of our size is laying up for the winter. Luckily, we seem to have struck an ideal cruising-ground, with a wide choice of safe fiords and a good prospect of ducks, if we choose to take a little trouble about them. You can’t mean to waste time and run risks’ (I thought of the tom leaf in the log-book) ‘in a long voyage to those forbidding haunts of yours in the North Sea.’
‘It’s not very long,’ said Davies, doggedly. ‘Part of it’s canal, and the rest is quite safe if you’re careful. There’s plenty of sheltered water, and it’s not really necessary–‘
‘What’s it all for?’ I interrupted, impatiently. ‘We haven’t _tried_ for shooting here yet. You’ve no notion, have you, of getting the boat back to England this autumn?’
‘England?’ he muttered. ‘Oh, I don’t much care.’ Again his vagueness jarred on me; there seemed to be some bar between us, invisible and insurmountable. And, after all, what was I doing here? Roughing it in a shabby little yacht, utterly out of my element, with a man who, a week ago, was nothing to me, and who now was a tiresome enigma. Like swift poison the old morbid mood in which I left London spread through me. All I had learnt and seen slipped away; what I had suffered remained. I was on the point of saying something which might have put a precipitate end to our cruise, but he anticipated me.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he broke out, ‘for being such a selfish brute. I don’t know what I was thinking about. You’re a brick to join me in this sort of life, and I’m afraid I’m an infernally bad host. Of course this is just the place to cruise. I forgot about the scenery, and all that. Let’s ask about the ducks here. As you say, we’re sure to get sport if we worry and push a bit. We must be nearly there now–yes, there’s the entrance. Take the helm, will you?’
He sprang up the mast like a monkey, and gazed over the land from the cross-trees. I looked up at my enigma and thanked Providence I had not spoken; for no one could have resisted his frank outburst of good nature. Yet it occurred to me that, considering the conditions of our life, our intimacy was strangely slow in growth. I had no clue yet as to where his idiosyncrasies began and his self ended, and he, I surmised, was in the same stage towards me. Otherwise I should have pressed him further now, for I felt convinced that there was some mystery in his behaviour which I had not yet accounted for. However, light was soon to break.
I could see no sign of the entrance he had spoken of, and no wonder, for it is only eighty yards wide, though it leads to a fiord thirty miles long. All at once we were jolting in a tumble of sea, and the channel grudgingly disclosed itself, stealing between marshes and meadows and then broadening to a mere, as at Ekken. We anchored close to the mouth, and not far from a group of vessels of a type that afterwards grew very familiar to me. They were sailing-barges, something like those that ply in the Thames, bluff-bowed, high-sterned craft of about fifty tons, ketch-rigged, and fitted with lee-boards, very light spars, and a long tip-tilted bowsprit. (For the future I shall call them ‘galliots’.) Otherwise the only sign of life was a solitary white house–the pilot’s house, the chart told us–close to the northern point of entrance. After tea we called on the pilot. Patriarchally installed before a roaring stove, in the company of a buxom bustling daughter-in-law and some rosy grandchildren, we found a rotund and rubicund person, who greeted us with a hoarse roar of welcome in German, which instantly changed, when he saw us, to the funniest broken English, spoken with intense relish and pride. We explained ourselves and our mission as well as we could through the hospitable interruptions caused by beer and the strains of a huge musical box, which had been set going in honour of our arrival. Needless to say, I was read like a book at once, and fell into the part of listener.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘all right. There is plenty ducks, but first we will drink a glass beer; then we will shift your ship, captain–she lies not good there.’ (Davies started up in a panic, but was waved back to his beer.) ‘Then we will drink together another glass beer; then we will talk of ducks–no, then we will kill ducks–that is better. Then we will have plenty glasses beer.’
This was an unexpected climax, and promised well for our prospects. And the programme was fully carried out. After the beer our host was packed briskly by his daughter into an armour of woollen gaiters, coats, and mufflers, topped with a worsted helmet, which left nothing of his face visible but a pair of twinkling eyes. Thus equipped, he led the way out of doors, and roared for Hans and his gun, till a great gawky youth, with high cheek-bones and a downy beard, came out from the yard and sheepishly shook our hands.
Together we repaired to the quay, where the pilot stood, looking like a genial ball of worsted, and bawled hoarse directions while we shifted the Dulcibella to a berth on the farther shore close to the other vessels. We returned with our guns, and the interval for refreshments followed. It was just dusk when we sallied out again, crossed a stretch of bog-land, and took up strategic posts round a stagnant pond. Hans had been sent to drive, and the result was a fine mallard and three ducks. It was true that all fell to the pilot’s gun, perhaps owing to Hans’ filial instinct and his parent’s canny egotism in choosing his own lair, or perhaps it was chance; but the shooting-party was none the less a triumphal success. It was celebrated with beer and music as before, while the pilot, an infant on each podgy knee, discoursed exuberantly on the glories of his country and the Elysian content of his life. ‘There is plenty beer, plenty meat, plenty money, plenty ducks,’ summed up his survey.
It may have been fancy, but Davies, though he had fits and starts of vivacity, seemed very inattentive, considering that we were sitting at the feet of so expansive an oracle. It was I who elicited most of the practical information–details of time, weather, and likely places for shooting, with some shrewd hints as to the kind of people to conciliate. Whatever he thought of me, I warmed with sympathy towards the pilot, for he assumed that we had done with cruising for the year, and thought us mad enough as it was to have been afloat so long, and madder still to intend living on ‘so little a ship’ when we could live on land with beer and music handy. I was tempted to raise the North Sea question, just to watch Davies under the thunder of rebukes which would follow. But I refrained from a wish to be tender with him, now that all was going so well. The Frisian Islands were an extravagant absurdity now. I did not even refer to them as we pulled back to the Dulcibella, after swearing eternal friendship with the good pilot and his family.
Davies and I turned in good friends that night–or rather I should say that I turned in, for I left him sucking an empty pipe and aimlessly fingering a volume of Mahan; and once when I woke in the night I felt somehow that his bunk was empty and that he was there in the dark cabin, dreaming.
7 The Missing Page
I WOKE (on 1st October) with that dispiriting sensation that a hitch has occurred in a settled plan. It was explained when I went on deck, and I found the Dulcibella wrapped in a fog, silent, clammy, nothing visible from her decks but the ghostly hull of a galliot at anchor near us. She must have brought up there in the night, for there had been nothing so close the evening before; and I remembered that my sleep had been broken once by sounds of rumbling chain and gruff voices.
‘This looks pretty hopeless for to-day,’ I said, with a shiver, to Davies, who was laying the breakfast.
‘Well, we can’t do anything till this fog lifts,’ he answered, with a good deal of resignation. Breakfast was a cheerless meal. The damp penetrated to the very cabin, whose roof and walls wept a fine dew. I had dreaded a bathe, and yet missed it, and the ghastly light made the tablecloth look dirtier than it naturally was, and all the accessories more sordid. Something had gone wrong with the bacon, and the lack of egg-cups was not in the least humorous.
Davies was just beginning, in his summary way, to tumble the things together for washing tip, when there was a sound of a step on deck, two sea-boots appeared on the ladder, and, before we could wonder who the visitor was, a little man in oilskins and a sou’-wester was stooping towards us in the cabin door, smiling affectionately at Davies out of a round grizzled beard.
‘Well met, captain,’ he said, quietly, in German. ‘Where are you bound to this time?’
‘Bartels!’ exclaimed Davies, jumping up. The two stooping figures, young and old, beamed at one another like father and son.
‘Where have you come from? Have some coffee. How’s the Johannes? Was that you that came in last night? I’m delighted to see you!’ (I spare the reader his uncouth lingo.) The little man was dragged in and seated on the opposite sofa to me.
‘I took my apples to Kappeln,’ he said, sedately, ‘and now I sail to Kiel, and so to Hamburg, where my wife and children are. It is my last voyage of the year. You are no longer alone, captain, I see.’ He had taken off his dripping sou’-wester and was bowing ceremoniously towards me.
‘Oh, I quite forgot!’ said Davies, who had been kneeling on one knee in the low doorway, absorbed in his visitor. ‘This is “_meiner Freund_,” Herr Carruthers. Carruthers, this is my friend, Schiffer Bartels, of the galliot Johannes.’
Was I never to be at an end of the puzzles which Davies presented to me? All the impulsive heartiness died out of his voice and manner as he uttered the last few words, and there he was, nervously glancing from the visitor to me, like one who, against his will or from tactlessness, has introduced two persons who he knows will disagree.
There was a pause while he fumbled with the cups, poured some cold coffee out and pondered over it as though it were a chemical experiment. Then he muttered something about boiling some more water, and took refuge in the forecastle. I was ill at ease at this period with seafaring men, but this mild little person was easy ground for a beginner. Besides, when he took off his oilskin coat he reminded me less of a sailor than of a homely draper of some country town, with his clean turned-down collar and neatly fitting frieze jacket. We exchanged some polite platitudes about the fog and his voyage last night from Kappeln, which appeared to be a town some fifteen miles up the fiord.
Davies joined in from the forecastle with an excess of warmth which almost took the words out of my mouth. We exhausted the subject very soon, and then my _vis-à-vis_ smiled paternally at me, as he had done at Davies, and said, confidentially:
‘It is good that the captain is no more alone. He is a fine young man–Heaven, what a fine young man! I love him as my son–but he is too brave, too reckless. It is good for him to have a friend.’
I nodded and laughed, though in reality I was very far from being amused.
‘Where was it you met?’ I asked.
‘In an ugly place, and in ugly weather,’ he answered, gravely, but with a twinkle of fun in his eye. ‘But has he not told you?’ he added, with ponderous slyness. ‘I came just in time. No! what am I saying? He is brave as a lion and quick as a cat. I think he cannot drown; but still it was an ugly place and ugly–‘
‘What are you talking about, Bartels?’ interrupted Davies, emerging noisily with a boiling kettle.
I answered the question. ‘I was just asking your friend how it was you made his acquaintance.’
‘Oh, he helped me out of a bit of a mess in the North Sea, didn’t you, Bartels?’ he said.
‘It was nothing,’ said Bartels. ‘But the North Sea is no place for your little boat, captain. So I have told you many times. How did you like Flensburg? A fine town, is it not? Did you find Herr Krank, the carpenter? I see you have placed a little mizzen-mast. The rudder was nothing much, but it was well that it held to the Eider. But she is strong and good, your little ship, and–Heaven!–she had need be so.’ He chuckled, and shook his head at Davies as at a wayward child.
This is all the conversation that I need record. For my part I merely waited for its end, determined on my course, which was to know the truth once and for all, and make an end of these distracting mystifications. Davies plied his friend with coffee, and kept up the talk gallantly; but affectionate as he was, his manner plainly showed that he wanted to be alone with me.
The gist of the little skipper’s talk was a parental warning that, though we were well enough here in the ‘Ost-See’, it was time for little boats to be looking for winter quarters. That he himself was going by the Kiel Canal to Hamburg to spend a cosy winter as a decent citizen at his warm fireside, and that we should follow his example. He ended with an invitation to us to visit him on the Johannes, and with suave farewells disappeared into the fog. Davies saw him into his boat, returned without wasting a moment, and sat down on the sofa opposite me.
‘What did he mean?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Davies, ‘I’ll tell you the whole thing. As far as you’re concerned it’s partly a confession. Last night I had made up my mind to say nothing, but when Bartels turned up I knew it must all come out. It’s been fearfully on my mind, and perhaps you’ll be able to help me. But it’s for you to decide.’
‘Fire away!’ I said.
‘You know what I was saying about the Frisian Islands the other day? A thing happened there which I never told you, when you were asking about my cruise.’
‘It began near Norderney,’ I put in.
‘How did you guess that?’ he asked.
‘You’re a bad hand at duplicity,’ I replied. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, you’re quite right, it was there, on 9th September. I told you the sort of thing I was doing at that time, but I don’t think I said that I made inquiries from one or two people about duck-shooting, and had been told by some fishermen at Borkum that there was a big sailing-yacht in those waters, whose owner, a German of the name of Dollmann, shot a good deal, and might give me some tips. Well, I found this yacht one evening, knowing it must be her from the description I had. She was what is called a “barge-yacht”, of fifty or sixty tons, built for shallow water on the lines of a Dutch galliot, with lee-boards and those queer round bows and square stern. She’s something like those galliots anchored near us now. You sometimes see the same sort of yacht in English waters, only there they copy the Thames barges. She looked a clipper of her sort, and very smart; varnished all over and shining like gold. I came on her about sunset, after a long day of exploring round the Ems estuary. She was lying in–‘
‘Wait a bit, let’s have the chart,’ I interrupted.
Davies found it and spread it on the table between us, first pushing back the cloth and the breakfast things to one end, where they lay in a slovenly litter. This was one of the only two occasions on which I ever saw him postpone the rite of washing up, and it spoke volumes for the urgency of the matter in hand.
‘Here it is,’ said Davies _[See Map A]_ and I looked with a new and strange interest at the long string of slender islands, the parallel line of coast, and the confusion of shoals, banks, and channels which lay between. ‘Here’s Norderney, you see. By the way, there’s a harbour there at the west end of the island, the only real harbour on the whole line of islands, Dutch or German, except at Terschelling. There’s quite a big town there, too, a watering place, where Germans go for sea-bathing in the summer. Well, the Medusa, that was her name, was lying in the Riff Gat roadstead, flying the German ensign, and I anchored for the night pretty near her. I meant to visit her owner later on, but I very nearly changed my mind, as I always feel rather a fool on smart yachts, and my German isn’t very good. However, I thought I might as well; so, after dinner, when it was dark, I sculled over in the dinghy, hailed a sailor on deck, said who I was, and asked if I could see the owner. The sailor was a surly sort of chap, and there was a good long delay while I waited on deck, feeling more and more uncomfortable. Presently a steward came up and showed me down the companion and into the saloon, which, after _this_, looked–well, horribly gorgeous–you know what I mean, plush lounges, silk cushions, and that sort of thing. Dinner seemed to be just over, and wine and fruit were on the table. Herr Dollmann was there at his coffee. I introduced myself somehow–‘
‘Stop a moment,’ I said; ‘what was he like?’
‘Oh, a tall, thin chap, in evening dress; about fifty I suppose, with greyish hair and a short beard. I’m not good at describing people. He had a high, bulging forehead, and there was something about him–but I think I’d better tell you the bare facts first. I can’t say he seemed pleased to see me, and he couldn’t speak English, and, in fact, I felt infernally awkward. Still, I had an object in coming, and as I was there I thought I might as well gain it.’
The notion of Davies in his Norfolk jacket and rusty flannels haranguing a frigid German in evening dress in a ‘gorgeous’ saloon tickled my fancy greatly.
‘He seemed very much astonished to see me; had evidently seen the Dulcibella arrive, and had wondered what she was. I began as soon as I could about the ducks, but he shut me up at once, said I could do nothing hereabouts. I put it down to sportsman’s jealousy–you know what that is. But I saw I had come to the wrong shop, and was just going to back out and end this unpleasant interview, when he thawed a bit, offered me some wine, and began talking in quite a friendly way, taking a great interest in my cruise and my plans for the future. In the end we sat up quite late, though I never felt really at my ease. He seemed to be taking stock of me all the time, as though I were some new animal.’ (How I sympathized with that German!) ‘We parted civilly enough, and I rowed back and turned in, meaning to potter on eastwards early next day.
‘But I was knocked up at dawn by a sailor with a message from Dollmann asking if he could come to breakfast with me. I was rather flabbergasted, but didn’t like to be rude, so I said, “Yes.” Well, he came, and I returned the call–and–well, the end of it was that I stayed at anchor there for three days.’ This was rather abrupt.
‘How did you spend the time?’ I asked. Stopping three days anywhere was an unusual event for him, as I knew from his log.
‘Oh, I lunched or dined with him once or twice–with _them_, I ought to say,’ he added, hurriedly. ‘His daughter was with him. She didn’t appear the evening I first called.’
‘And what was she like?’ I asked, promptly, before he could hurry on.
‘Oh, she seemed a very nice girl,’ was the guarded reply, delivered with particular unconcern, ‘and–the end of it was that I and the Medusa sailed away in company. I must tell you how it came about, just in a few words for the present.
‘It was his suggestion. He said he had to sail to Hamburg, and proposed that I should go with him in the Dulcibella as far as the Elbe, and then, if I liked, I could take the ship canal at Brunsbüttel through to Kiel and the Baltic. I had no very fixed plans of my own, though I had meant to go on exploring eastwards between the islands and the coast, and so reach the Elbe in a much slower way. He dissuaded me from this, sticking to it that I should have no chance of ducks, and urging other reasons. Anyway, we settled to sail in company direct to Cuxhaven, in the Elbe. With a fair wind and an early start it should be only one day’s sail of about sixty miles.
‘The plan only came to a head on the evening of the third day, 12th September.
‘I told you, I think, that the weather had broken after a long spell of heat. That very day it had been blowing pretty hard from the west, and the glass was falling still. I said, of course, that I couldn’t go with him if the weather was too bad, but he prophesied a good day, said it was an easy sail, and altogether put me on my mettle. You can guess how it was. Perhaps I had talked about single-handed cruising as though it were easier than it was, though I never meant it in a boasting way, for I hate that sort of thing, and besides there _is_ no danger if you’re careful–‘
‘Oh, go on,’ I said.
‘Anyway, we went next morning at six. It was a dirty-looking day, wind W.N.W., but his sails were going up and mine followed. I took two reefs in, and we sailed out into the open and steered E.N.E. along the coast for the Outer Elbe Lightship about fifty knots off. Here it all is, you see.’ (He showed me the course on the chart.) ‘The trip was nothing for his boat, of course, a safe, powerful old tub, forging through the sea as steady as a house. I kept up with her easily at first. My hands were pretty full, for there was a hard wind on my quarter and a troublesome sea; but as long as nothing worse came I knew I should be all right, though I also knew that I was a fool to have come.
‘All went well till we were off Wangeroog, the last of the islands–_here_–and then it began to blow really hard. I had half a mind to chuck it and cut into the Jade River, _down there_,’ but I hadn’t the face to, so I hove to and took in my last reef.’ (Simple words, simply uttered; but I had seen the operation in calm water and shuddered at the present picture.) ‘We had been about level till then, but with my shortened canvas I fell behind. Not that that mattered in the least. I knew my course, had read up my tides, and, thick as the weather was, I had no doubt of being able to pick up the lightship. No change of plan was possible now. The Weser estuary was on my starboard hand, but the whole place was a lee-shore and a mass of unknown banks–just look at them. I ran on, the Dulcibella doing her level best, but we had some narrow shaves of being pooped. I was about _here_, say six miles south-west of the lightship, _[See Chart A]_ when I suddenly saw that the Medusa had hove to right ahead, as though waiting till I came up. She wore round again on the course as I drew level, and we were alongside for a bit. Dollmann lashed the wheel, leaned over her quarter, and shouted, very slowly and distinctly so that I could understand; “Follow me–sea too bad for you outside–short cut through sands–save six miles.”
‘It was taking me all my time to manage the tiller, but I knew what he meant at once, for I had been over the chart carefully the night before. _[See Map A]_ You see, the whole bay between Wangeroog and the Elbe is encumbered with sand. A great jagged chunk of it runs out from Cuxhaven in a north-westerly direction for fifteen miles or so, ending in a pointed spit, called the _Scharhorn_. To reach the Elbe from the west you nave to go right outside this, round the lightship, which is off the Scharhorn, and double back. Of course, that’s what all big vessels do. But, as you see, these sands are intersected here and there by channels, very shallow and winding, exactly like those behind the Frisian Islands. Now look at this one, which cuts right through the big chunk of sand and comes out near Cuxhaven. The _Telte_ _[See Chart A]_ it’s called. It’s miles wide, you see, at the entrance, but later on it is split into two by the Hohenhörn bank: then it gets shallow and very complicated, and ends in a mere tidal driblet with another name. It’s just the sort of channel I should like to worry into on a fine day or with an off-shore wind. Alone, in thick weather and a heavy sea, it would have been folly to attempt it, except as a desperate resource. But, as I said I knew at once that Dollmann was proposing to run for it and guide me in.
‘I didn’t like the idea, because I like doing things for myself, and, silly as it sounds, I believe I resented being told the sea was too bad for me. which it certainly was. Yet the short cut did save several miles and a devil of a tumble off the Scharhorn, where two tides meet. I had complete faith in Dollmann, and I suppose I decided that I should be a fool not to take a good chance. I hesitated. I know; but in the end I nodded, and held up my arm as she forged ahead again. Soon after, she shifted her course and I followed. You asked me once if I ever took a pilot That was the only time.’
He spoke with bitter gravity, flung himself back, and felt his dramatic pause, but it certainly was one. I had just a glimpse of still another Davies–a Davies five years older throbbing with deep emotions, scorn, passion, and stubborn purpose; a being above my plane, of sterner stuff, wider scope. Intense as my interest had become, I waited almost timidly while he mechanically rammed tobacco into his pipe and struck ineffectual matches. I felt that whatever the riddle to be solved, it was no mean one. He repressed himself with an effort, half rose, and made his circular glance at the clock, barometer, and skylight, and then resumed.
‘We soon came to what I knew must be the beginning of the Telte channel. All round you could hear the breakers on the sands, though it was too thick to see them yet. As the water shoaled, the sea, of course, got shorter and steeper. There was more wind–a whole gale I should say.
‘I kept dead in the wake of the Medusa, but to my disgust I found she was gaining on me very fast. Of course I had taken for granted, when he said he would lead me in, that he would slow down and keep close to me. He could easily have done so by getting his men up to check his sheets or drop his peak. Instead of that he was busting on for all he was worth. Once, in a rain-squall, I lost sight of him altogether; got him faintly again, but had enough to do with my own tiller not to want to be peering through the scud after a runaway pilot. I was all right so far, but we were fast approaching the worst part of the whole passage, where the Hohenhörn bank blocks the road, and the channel divides. I don’t know what it looks like to you on the chart–perhaps fairly simple, because you can follow the twists of the channels, as on a ground-plan; but a stranger coming to a place like that (where there are no buoys, mind you) can tell nothing certain by the eye–unless perhaps at dead low water, when the banks are high and dry, and in very clear weather–he must trust to the lead and the compass, and feel his way step by step. I knew perfectly well that what I should soon see would be a wall of surf stretching right across and on both sides. To _feel_ one’s way in that sort of weather is impossible. You must _know_ your way, or else have a pilot. I had one, but he was playing his own game.
‘With a second hand on board to steer while I conned I should have felt less of an ass. As it was, I knew I ought to be facing the music in the offing, and cursed myself for having broken my rule and gone blundering into this confounded short cut. It was giving myself away, doing just the very thing that you can’t do in single-handed sailing.
‘By the time I realized the danger it was far too late to turn and hammer out to the open. I was deep in the bottle-neck bight of the sands, jammed on a lee shore, and a strong flood tide sweeping me on. That tide, by the way, gave just the ghost of a chance. I had the hours in my head, and knew it was about two-thirds flood, with two hours more of rising water. That meant the banks would be all covering when I reached them, and harder than ever to locate; but it also meant that I _might_ float right over the worst of them if I hit off a lucky place.’ Davies thumped the table in disgust. ‘Pah! It makes me sick to think of having to trust to an accident like that, like a lubberly cockney out for a boozy Bank Holiday sail. Well, just as I foresaw, the wall of surf appeared clean across the horizon, and curling back to shut me in, booming like thunder. When I last saw the Medusa she seemed to be charging it like a horse at a fence, and I took a rough bearing of her position by a hurried glance at the compass. At that very moment I _thought_ she seemed to luff and show some of her broadside; but a squall blotted her out and gave me hell with the tiller. After that she was lost in the white mist that hung over the line of breakers. I kept on my bearing as well as I could, but I was already out of the channel. I knew that by the look of the water, and as we neared the bank I saw it was all awash and without the vestige of an opening. I wasn’t going to chuck her on to it without an effort; so, more by instinct than with any particular hope, I put the helm down, meaning to work her along the edge on the chance of spotting a way over. She was buried at once by the beam sea, and the jib flew to blazes; but the reefed stays’l stood, she recovered gamely, and I held on, though I knew it could only be for a few minutes, as the centre-plate was up, and she made frightful leeway towards the bank.
‘I was half-blinded by scud, but suddenly I noticed what looked like a gap, behind a spit which curled out right ahead. I luffed still more to clear this spit, but she couldn’t weather it. Before you could say knife she was driving across it, bumped heavily, bucked forward again, bumped again, and–ripped on in deeper water! I can’t describe the next few minutes. I was in some sort of channel, but a very narrow one, and the sea broke everywhere. I hadn’t proper command either; for the rudder had crocked up somehow at the last bump. I was like a drunken man running for his life down a dark alley, barking himself at every corner. It couldn’t last long, and finally we went crash on to something and stopped there, grinding and banging. So ended that little trip under a pilot.
‘Well, it was like this–there was really no danger’–I opened my eyes at the characteristic phrase. ‘I mean, that lucky stumble into a channel was my salvation. Since then I had struggled through a mile of sands, all of which lay behind me like a breakwater against the gale. They were covered, of course, and seething like soapsuds; but the force of the sea was deadened. The Dulce was bumping, but not too heavily. It was nearing high tide, and at half ebb she would be high and dry.
‘In the ordinary way I should have run out a kedge with the dinghy, and at the next high water sailed farther in and anchored where I could lie afloat. The trouble was now that my hand was hurt and my dinghy stove in, not to mention the rudder business. It was the first bump on the outer edge that did the damage. There was a heavy swell there, and when we struck, the dinghy, which was towing astern, came home on her painter and down with a crash on the yacht’s weather quarter. I stuck out one hand to ward it off and got it nipped on the gunwale. She was badly stove in and useless, so I couldn’t run out the kedge’–this was Greek to me, but I let him go on–‘and for the present my hand was too painful even to stow the boom and sails, which were. whipping and racketing about anyhow. There was the rudder, too, to be mended; and we were several miles from the nearest land. Of course, if the wind fell, it was all easy enough; but if it held or increased it was a poor look-out. There’s a limit to strain of that sort–and other things might have happened.
‘In fact, it was precious lucky that Bartels turned up. His galliot was at anchor a mile away, up a branch of the channel. In a clear between squalls he saw us, and, like a brick, rowed his boat out–he and his boy, and a devil of a pull they must have had. I was glad enough to see them–no, that’s not true; I was in such a fury of disgust and shame that I believe I should have been idiot enough to say I didn’t want help, if he hadn’t just nipped on board and started work. He’s a terror to work, that little mouse of a chap. In half an hour he had stowed the sails, unshackled the big anchor, run out fifty fathoms of warp, and hauled her off there and then into deep water. Then they towed her up the channel–it was dead to leeward and an easy job–and berthed her near their own vessel. It was dark by that time, so I gave them a drink, and said good-night. It blew a howling gale that night, but the place was safe enough, with good ground-tackle.
‘The whole affair was over; and after supper I thought hard about it all.’
8 The Theory
DAVIES leaned back and gave a deep sigh, as though he still felt the relief from some tension. I did the same, and felt the same relief. The chart, freed from the pressure of our fingers, rolled up with a flip, as though to say, ‘What do you think of that?’ I have straightened out his sentences a little, for in the excitement of his story they had grown more and more jerky and elliptical.
‘What about Dollmann?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Davies, ‘what about him? I didn’t get at much that night. It was all so sudden. The only thing I could have sworn to from the first was that he had purposely left me in the lurch that day. I pieced out the rest in the next few days, which I’ll just finish with as shortly as I can. Bartels came aboard next morning, and though it was blowing hard still we managed to shift the Dulcibella to a place where she dried safely at the mid-day low water, and we could get at her rudder. The lower screw-plate on the stern post had wrenched out, and we botched it up roughly as a make-shift. There were other little breakages, but nothing to matter, and the loss of the jib was nothing, as I had two spare ones. The dinghy was past repair just then, and I lashed it on deck.
‘It turned out that Bartels was carrying apples from Bremen to Kappeln (in this fiord), and had run into that channel in the sands for shelter from the weather. To-day he was bound for the Eider River, whence, as I told you, you can get through (by river and canal) into the Baltic. Of course the Elbe route, by the new Kaiser Wilhelm Ship Canal, is the shortest. The Eider route is the old one, but he hoped to get rid of some of his apples at Tönning, the town at its mouth. Both routes touch the Baltic at Kiel. As you know, I had been running for the Elbe, but yesterday’s muck-up put me off, and I changed my mind–I’ll tell you why presently–and decided to sail to the Eider along with the Johannes and get through that way. It cleared from the east next day, and I raced him there, winning hands down, left him at Tönning, and in three days was in the Baltic. It was just a week after I ran ashore that I wired to you. You see, I had come to the conclusion that _that chap was a spy_.
In the end it came out quite quietly and suddenly, and left me in profound amazement. ‘I wired to you–that chap was a spy.’ It was the close association of these two ideas that hit me hardest at the moment. For a second I was back in the dreary splendour of the London club-room, spelling out that crabbed scrawl from Davies, and fastidiously criticizing its proposal in the light of a holiday. Holiday! What was to be its issue? Chilling and opaque as the fog that filtered through the skylight there flooded my imagination a mist of doubt and fear.
‘A spy!’ I repeated blankly. ‘What do you mean? Why did you wire to me? A spy of what–of whom?’
‘I’ll tell you how I worked it out,’ said Davies. ‘I don’t think “spy” is the right word; but I mean something pretty bad.
‘He purposely put me ashore. I don’t think I’m suspicious by nature, but I know something about boats and the sea. I know he could have kept close to me if he had chosen, and I saw the whole place at low water when we left those sands on the second day. Look at the chart again. Here’s the Hohenhörn bank that I showed you as blocking the road. _[See Chart A]_ It’s in two pieces–first the west and then the east. You see the Telte channel dividing into two branches and curving round it. Both branches are broad and deep, as channels go in those waters. Now, in sailing in I was nowhere near either of them. When I last saw Dollmann he must have been steering straight for the bank itself, at a point somewhere _here_, quite a mile from the northern arm of the channel, and two from the southern. I followed by compass, as you know, and found nothing but breakers ahead. How did I get through? That’s where the luck came in. I spoke of only two channels, that is, _round_ the bank–one to the north, the other to the south. But look closely and you’ll see that right through the centre of the West Hohenhörn runs another, a very narrow and winding one, so small that I hadn’t even noticed it the night before, when I was going over the chart. That was the one I stumbled into in that tailor’s fashion, as I was groping along the edge of the surf in a desperate effort to gain time. I bolted down it blindly, came out into this strip of open water, crossed that aimlessly, and brought up on the edge of the _East_ Hohenhörn, _here_. It was more than I deserved. I can see now that it was a hundred to one in favour of my striking on a bad place outside, where I should have gone to pieces in three minutes.’
‘And how did Dollmann go?’ I asked.
‘It’s as clear as possible,’ Davies answered. ‘He doubled back into the northern channel when he had misled me enough. Do you remember my saying that when I last saw him I _thought_ he had luffed and showed his broadside? I had another bit of luck in that. He was luffing towards the north–so it struck me through the blur–and when I in my turn came up to the bank, and had to turn one way or the other to avoid it, I think I should naturally have turned north too, as he had done. In that case I should have been done for, for I should have had a mile of the bank to skirt before reaching the north channel, and should have driven ashore long before I got there. But as a matter of fact I turned south.’
‘Why?’
‘Couldn’t help it. I was running on the starboard tack–boom over to port; to turn north would have meant a jibe, and as things were I couldn’t risk one. It was blowing like fits; if anything had carried away I should have been on shore in a jiffy. I scarcely thought about it at all, but put the helm down and turned her south. Though I knew nothing about it, that little central channel was now on my port hand, distant about two cables. The whole thing was luck from beginning to end.’
Helped by pluck, I thought to myself, as I tried with my landsman’s fancy to conjure up that perilous scene. As to the truth of the affair, the chart and Davies’s version were easy enough to follow, but I felt only half convinced. The ‘spy’, as Davies strangely called his pilot, might have honestly mistaken the course himself, outstripped his convoy inadvertently, and escaped disaster as narrowly as she did. I suggested this on the spur of the moment, but Davies was impatient.
‘Wait till you hear the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I must go back to when I first met him. I told you that on that first evening he began by being as rude as a bear and as cold as stone, and then became suddenly friendly. I can see now that in the talk that followed he was pumping me hard. It was an easy game to play, for I hadn’t seen a gentleman since Morrison left me, I was tremendously keen about my voyage, and I thought the chap was a good sportsman, even if he was a bit dark about the ducks. I talked quite freely–at least, as freely as I could with my bad German–about my last fortnight’s sailing; how I had been smelling out all the channels in and out of the islands, how interested I had been in the whole business, puzzling out the effect of the winds on the tides, the set of the currents, and so on. I talked about my difficulties, too; the changes in the buoys, the prehistoric rottenness of the English charts. He drew me out as much as he could, and in the light of what followed I can see the point of scores of his questions.
‘The next day and the next I saw a good deal of him, and the same thing went on. And then there were my plans for the future. My idea was, as I told you, to go on exploring the German coast just as I had the Dutch. His idea–Heavens, how plainly I see it now!–was to choke me off, get me to clear out altogether from that part of the coast. That was why he said there were no ducks. That was why he cracked up the Baltic as a cruising-ground and shooting-ground. And that was why he broached and stuck to that plan of sailing in company direct to the Elbe. It was to _see_ me clear.
‘He improved on that.’
‘Yes, but after that, it’s guess-work. I mean that I can’t tell when he first decided to go one better and drown me. He couldn’t count for certain on bad weather, though he held my nose to it when it came. But, granted that he wanted to get rid of me altogether, he got a magnificent chance on that trip to the Elbe
lightship. I expect it struck him suddenly, and he acted on the impulse. Left to myself I was all right; but the short cut was a grand idea of his. Everything was in its favour–wind, sea, sand, tide. He thinks I’m dead.’
‘But the crew?’ I said; ‘what about the crew?’
‘That’s another thing. When he first hove to, waiting for me, of course they were on deck (two of them, I think) hauling at sheets. But by the time I had drawn tip level the Medusa had worn round again on her course, and no one was on deck but Dollmann at the wheel. No one overheard what he said.’
‘Wouldn’t they have _seen_ you again?’
‘Very likely not; the weather was very thick, and the Dulce is very small.’
The incongruity of the whole business was striking me. Why should anyone want to kill Davies, and why should Davies, the soul of modesty and simplicity, imagine that anyone wanted to kill him? He must have cogent reasons, for he was the last man to give way to a morbid fancy.
‘Go on,’ I said. What was his motive? A German finds an Englishman exploring a bit of German coast, determines to stop him, and even to get rid of him. It looks so far as if you were thought to be the spy.
Davies winced. ‘_But he’s not a German_,’ he said, hotly. ‘He’s an Englishman.’
‘An Englishman?’
‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Not that I’ve much to go on. He professed to know very little English, and never spoke it, except a word or two now and then to help me out of a sentence; and as to his German, he seemed to me to speak it like a native; but, of course, I’m no judge.’ Davies sighed. ‘That’s where I wanted someone like you. You would have spotted him at once, if he wasn’t German. I go more by a–what do you call it?–a–‘
‘General impression,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that’s what I mean. It was something in his looks and manner; you know how different we are from foreigners. And it wasn’t only himself, it was the way he talked–I mean about cruising and the sea, especially. It’s true he let me do most of the talking; but, all the same–how can I explain it? I felt we understood one another, in a way that two foreigners wouldn’t.
He pretended to think me a bit crazy for coming so far in a small boat, but I could swear he knew as much about the game as I did; for lots of little questions he asked had the right ring in them. Mind you, all this is an afterthought. I should never have bothered about it–I’m not cut out for a Sherlock Holmes–if it hadn’t been for what followed.
‘It’s rather vague,’ I said. ‘Have you no more definite reason for thinking him English?’
‘There were one or two things rather more definite,’ said Davies, slowly. ‘You know when he hove to and hailed me, proposing the short cut, I told you roughly what he said. I forget the exact words, but “abschneiden” came in–“durch Watten” and “abschneiden” (they call the banks “watts”, you know); they were simple words, and he shouted them loud, so as to carry through the wind. I understood what he meant, but, as I told you, I hesitated before consenting. I suppose he thought I didn’t understand, for just as he was drawing ahead again he pointed to the suth’ard, and then shouted through his hands as a trumpet “Verstehen Sie? short-cut through sands; follow me!” the last two sentences in downright English. I can hear those words now, and I’ll swear they were in his native tongue. Of course I thought nothing of it at the time. I was quite aware that he knew a few English words, though he had always mis-pronounced them; an easy trick when your hearer suspects nothing. But I needn’t say that just then I was observant of trifles. I don’t pretend to be able to unravel a plot and steer a small boat before a heavy sea at the same moment.’
‘And if he was piloting you into the next world he could afford to commit himself before you parted! Was there anything else? By the way, how did the daughter strike you? Did she look English too?’
Two men cannot discuss a woman freely without a deep foundation of intimacy, and, until this day, the subject had never arisen between us in any form. It was the last that was likely to, for I could have divined that Davies would have met it with an armour of reserve. He was busy putting on this armour now; yet I could not help feeling a little brutal as I saw how badly he jointed his clumsy suit of mail. Our ages were the same, but I laugh now to think how old and _blasé_ I felt as the flush warmed his brown skin, and he slowly propounded the verdict, ‘Yes, I think she did.’
‘She _talked_ nothing but German, I suppose?’
‘Oh, of course.’
‘Did you see much of her?’
‘A good deal.’
‘Was she–,’ (how frame it?) ‘Did she want you to sail to the Elbe with them?’
‘She seemed to,’ admitted Davies, reluctantly, clutching at his ally, the match-box. ‘But, hang it, don’t dream that she knew what was coming,’ he added, with sudden fire.
I pondered and wondered, shrinking from further inquisition, easy as it would have been with so truthful a victim, and banishing all thought of ill-timed chaff. There was a cross-current in this strange affair, whose depth and strength I was beginning to gauge with increasing seriousness. I did not know my man yet, and I did not know myself. A conviction that events in the near future would force us into complete mutual confidence withheld me from pressing him too far. I returned to the main question; who was Dollmann, and what was his motive? Davies struggled out of his armour.
‘I’m convinced,’ he said, ‘that he’s an Englishman in German service. He must be in German service, for he had evidently been in those waters a long time, and knew every inch of them; of course, it’s a very lonely part of the world, but he has a house on Norderney Island; and he, and all about him, must be well known to a certain number of people. One of his friends I happened to meet; what do you think he was? A naval officer. It was on the afternoon of the third day, and we were having coffee on the deck of the Medusa, and talking about next day’s trip, when a little launch came buzzing up from seaward, drew alongside, and this chap I’m speaking of came on board, shook hands with Dollmann, and stared hard at me. Dollmann introduced us, calling him Commander von Brüning, in command of the torpedo gunboat Blitz. He pointed towards Norderney, and I saw her–a low, grey rat of a vessel–anchored in the Roads about two miles away. It turned out that she was doing the work of fishery guardship on that part of the coast.
‘I must say I took to him at once. He looked a real good sort, and a splendid officer, too–just the sort of chap I should have liked to be. You know I always wanted–but that’s an old story, and can wait. I had some talk with him, and we got on capitally as far as we went, but that wasn’t far, for I left pretty soon, guessing that they wanted to be alone.’
‘_Were_ they alone then?’ I asked, innocently.
‘Oh, Fräulein Dollmann was there, of course,’ explained Davies, feeling for his armour again.
‘Did he seem to know them well?’ I pursued, inconsequently.
‘Oh, yes, very well.’
Scenting a faint clue, I felt the need of feminine weapons for my sensitive antagonist. But the opportunity passed.
‘That was the last I saw of him,’ he said. ‘We sailed, as I told you, at daybreak next morning. Now, have you got any idea what I’m driving at?’
‘A rough idea,’ I answered. ‘Go ahead.’
Davies sat up to the table, unrolled the chart with a vigorous sweep of his two hands, and took up his parable with new zest.
‘I start with two certainties,’ he said. ‘One is that I was “moved on” from that coast, because I was too inquisitive. The other is that Dollmann is at some devil’s work there which is worth finding out. Now’–he paused in a gasping effort to be logical and articulate. ‘Now–well, look at the chart. No, better still, look first at this map of Germany. It’s on a small scale, and you can see the whole thing.’ He snatched down a pocket-map from the shelf and unfolded it. _[See Map A]_ ‘Here’s this huge empire, stretching half over central Europe–an empire growing like wildfire, I believe, in people, and wealth, and everything. They’ve licked the French, and the Austrians, and are the greatest military power in Europe. I wish I knew more about all that, but what I’m concerned with is their sea-power. It’s a new thing with them, but it’s going strong, and that Emperor of theirs is running it for all it’s worth. He’s a splendid chap, and anyone can see he’s right. They’ve got no colonies to speak of, and _must_ have them, like us. They can’t get them and keep them, and they can’t protect their huge commerce without naval strength. The command of the sea is _the_ thing nowadays, isn’t it? I say, don’t think these are my ideas,’ he added, naively. ‘It’s all out of Mahan and those fellows. Well, the Germans have got a small fleet at present, but it’s a thundering good one, and they’re building hard. There’s the–and the–.’ He broke off into a digression on armaments and speeds in which I could not follow him. He seemed to know every ship by heart. I had to recall him to the point. ‘Well, think of Germany as a new sea-power,’ he resumed. ‘The next thing is, what is her coast-line? It’s a very queer one, as you know, split clean in two by Denmark, most of it lying east of that and looking on the Baltic, which is practically an inland sea, with its entrance blocked by Danish islands. It was to evade that block that William built the ship canal from Kiel to the Elbe, but that could be easily smashed in war-time. Far the most important bit of coast-line is that which lies _west_ of Denmark and looks on the North Sea. It’s there that Germany gets her head out into the open, so to speak. It’s there that she fronts us and France, the two great sea-powers of Western Europe, and it’s there that her greatest ports are and her richest commerce.
‘Now it must strike you at once that it’s ridiculously short compared with the huge country behind it. From Borkum to the Elbe, as the crow flies, is only seventy miles. Add to that the west coast of Schleswig, say 120 miles. Total, say, two hundred. Compare that with the seaboard of France and England. Doesn’t it stand to reason that every inch of it is important? Now what _sort_ of coast is it? Even on this small map you can see at once, by all those wavy lines, shoals and sand everywhere, blocking nine-tenths of the land altogether, and doing their best to block the other tenth where the great rivers run in. Now let’s take it bit by bit. You see it divides itself into three. Beginning from the west the _first piece_ is from Borkum to Wangeroog–fifty odd miles. What’s that like? A string of sandy islands backed by sand; the Ems river at the western end, on the Dutch border, leading to Emden–not much of a place. Otherwise, no coast towns at all. _Second piece:_ a deep sort of bay consisting of the three great estuaries–the Jade, the Weser, and the Elbe–leading to Wilhelmshaven (their North Sea naval base), Bremen, and Hamburg. Total breadth of bay twenty odd miles only; sandbanks littered about all through it. _Third piece:_ the Schleswig coast, hopelessly fenced in behind a six to eight mile fringe of sand. No big towns; one moderate river, the Eider. Let’s leave that third piece aside. I may be wrong, but, in thinking this business out, I’ve pegged away chiefly at the other two, the seventy-mile stretch from Borkum to the Elbe–half of it estuaries, and half islands. It was there that I found the Medusa, and it’s that stretch that, thanks to him, I missed exploring.’
I made an obvious conjecture. ‘I suppose there are forts and coast defences? Perhaps he thought you would see too much. By the way, he saw your naval books, of course?’
‘Exactly. Of course that was my first idea; but it can’t be that. It doesn’t explain things in the least. To begin with, there _are_ no forts and can be none in that first division, where the islands are. There might be something on Borkum to defend the Ems; but it’s very unlikely, and, anyway, I had passed Borkum and was at Norderney. There’s nothing else to defend. Of course it’s different in the second division, where the big rivers are. There are probably hosts of forts and mines round Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven, and at Cuxhaven just at the mouth of the Elbe. Not that I should ever dream of bothering about them; every steamer that goes in would see as much as me. Personally, I much prefer to stay on board, and don’t often go on shore. And, good Heavens!’ (Davies leant back and laughed joyously) ‘do I _look_ like that kind of spy?’
I figured to myself one of those romantic gentlemen that one reads of in sixpenny magazines, with a Kodak in his tie-pin, a sketch-book in the lining of his coat, and a selection of disguises in his hand luggage. Little disposed for merriment as I was, I could not help smiling, too.
‘About this coast,’ resumed Davies. ‘In the event of war it seems to me that every inch of it would be important, _sand and all._ Take the big estuaries first, which, of course, might be attacked or blockaded by an enemy. At first sight you would say that their main channels were the only things that mattered. Now, in time of peace there’s no secrecy about the navigation of these. They’re buoyed and lighted like streets, open to the whole world, and taking an immense traffic; well charted, too, as millions of pounds in commerce depend on them. But now look at the sands they run through, intersected, as I showed you, by threads of channels, tidal for the most part, and probably only known to smacks and shallow coasters, like that galliot of Bartels.
‘It strikes me that in a war a lot might depend on these, both in defence and attack, for there’s plenty of water in them at the right tide for patrol-boats and small torpedo craft, though I an see they take a lot of knowing. Now, say _we_ were at war with Germany–both sides could use them as lines between the three estuaries; and to take our own case, a small torpedo-boat (not a destroyer, mind you) could on a dark night cut clean through from the Jade to the Elbe and play the deuce with the shipping there. But the trouble is that I doubt if there’s a soul in our fleet who knows those channels. _We_ haven’t coasters there; and, as to yachts, it’s a most unlikely game for an English yacht to play at; but it does so happen that I have a fancy for that sort of thing and would have explored those channels in the ordinary course.’ I began to see his drift.
‘Now for the islands. I was rather stumped there at first, I grant, because, though there are lashings of sand behind them, and the same sort of intersecting channels, yet there seems nothing important to guard or attack.
‘Why shouldn’t a stranger ramble as he pleases through them? Still Dollmann had his headquarters there, and I was sure that had some meaning. Then it struck me that the same point held good, for that strip of Frisian coast adjoins the estuaries, and would also form a splendid base for raiding midgets, which could travel unseen right through from the Ems to the Jade, and so to the Elbe, as by a covered way between a line of forts.
‘Now here again it’s an unknown land to us. Plenty of local galliots travel it, but strangers never, I should say. Perhaps at he most an occasional foreign yacht gropes in at one of the gaps between the islands for shelter from bad weather, and is precious lucky to get in safe. Once again, it was my fad to like such places, and Dollmann cleared me out. He’s not a German, but he’s in with Germans, and naval Germans too. He’s established on that coast, and knows it by heart. And he tried to drown me. Now what do you think?’ He gazed at me long and anxiously.
9 I Sign Articles
IT was not an easy question to answer, for the affair was utterly outside all my experience; its background the sea, and its actual scene a region of the sea of which I was blankly ignorant. There were other difficulties that I could see perhaps better than Davies, an enthusiast with hobbies, who had been brooding in solitude over his dangerous adventure. Yet both narrative and theory (which have lost, I fear, in interpretation to the reader) had strongly affected me; his forcible roughnesses, tricks of manner, sudden bursts of ardour, sudden retreats into shyness, making up a charm I cannot render. I found myself continually trying to see the man through the boy, to distinguish sober judgement from the hot-headed vagaries of youth. Not that I dreamed for a moment of dismissing the story of his wreck as an hallucination. His clear blue eyes and sane simplicity threw ridicule on such treatment.
Evidently, too, he wanted my help, a matter that might well have influenced my opinion on the facts, had he been other than he was. But it would have taken a ‘finished and finite clod’ to resist the attraction of the man and the enterprise; and I take no credit whatever for deciding to follow him, right or wrong. So, when I stated my difficulties, I knew very well that we should go.
‘There are two main points that I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘First, you’ve never explained why an _Englishman_ should be watching those waters and ejecting intruders; secondly, your theory doesn’t supply sufficient motive. There may be much in what you say about the navigation of those channels, but it’s not enough. You say he wanted to drown you–a big charge, requiring a big motive to support it. But I don’t deny that you’ve got a strong case.’ Davies lighted up. ‘I’m willing to take a good deal for granted–until we find out more.’
He jumped up, and did a thing I never saw him do before or since–bumped his head against the cabin roof.
‘You mean that you’ll come?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, I hadn’t even asked you! Yes, I want to go back and clear up the whole thing. I know now that I want to; telling it all to you has been such an immense relief. And a lot depended on you, too, and that’s why I’ve been feeling such an absolute hypocrite. I say, how can I apologize?’
‘Don’t worry about me; I’ve had a splendid time. And I’ll come right enough; but I should like to know exactly what you–‘
‘No; but wait till I just make a clean breast of it–about you, I mean. You see, I came to the conclusion that I could do nothing alone; not that two are really necessary for managing the boat in the ordinary way, but for this sort of job you _do_ want two; besides, I can’t speak German properly, and I’m a dull chap all round. If my theory, as you call it, is right, it’s a case for sharp wits, if ever there was one; so I thought of you. You’re clever, and I knew you had lived in Germany and knew German, and I knew,’ he added, with a little awkwardness, ‘that you had done a good deal of yachting; but of course I ought to have told you what you were in for–roughing it in a small boat with no crew. I felt ashamed of myself when you wired back so promptly, and when you came–er–‘ Davies stammered and hesitated in the humane resolve not to wound my feelings. ‘Of course I couldn’t help noticing that it wasn’t what you expected,’ was the delicate summary he arrived at. ‘But you took it splendidly,’ he hastened to add. ‘Only, somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the plan. It was good enough of you to come out at all, without bothering you with hare-brained schemes. Beside, I wasn’t even sure of myself. It’s a tangled business. There were reasons, there are reasons still’–he looked nervously at me–‘which–well, which make it a tangled business.’ I had thought a confidence was coming, and was disappointed. ‘I was in an idiotic state of uncertainty,’ he hurried on; ‘but the plan grew on me more and more, when I saw how you were taking to the life and beginning to enjoy yourself. All that about the ducks on the Frisian coast was humbug; part of a stupid idea of decoying you there and gaining time. However, you quite naturally objected, and last night I meant to chuck the whole thing up and give you the best time here I could. Then Bartels turned up–‘
‘Stop,’ I put in. ‘Did you know he might turn up when you sailed here?’
‘Yes,’ said Davies, guiltily. ‘I knew he might; and now it’s all come out, and you’ll come! What a fool I’ve been!’
Long before he had finished I had grasped the whole meaning of the last few days, and had read their meaning into scores of little incidents which had puzzled me.
‘For goodness’ sake, don’t apologize,’ I protested. ‘I could make confessions, too, if I liked. And I doubt if you’ve been such a fool as you think. I’m a patient that wants careful nursing, and it has been the merest chance all through that I haven’t rebelled and bolted. We’ve got a good deal to thank the weather for, and other little stimulants. And you don’t know yet my reasons for deciding to try your cure at all.’
‘My cure?’ said Davies; ‘what in the world do you mean? It was jolly decent of you to–‘
‘Never mind! There’s another view of it, but it doesn’t matter now. Let’s return to the point. What’s your plan of action?’
‘It’s this,’ was the prompt reply: ‘to get back to the North Sea, _via_ Kiel and the ship canal. Then there will be two objects: one, to work back to Norderney, where I left off before, exploring all those channels through the estuaries and islands; the other, to find Dollmann, discover what he’s up to, and settle with him. The two things may overlap, we can’t tell yet. I don’t even know where he and his yacht are; but I’ll be bound they’re somewhere in those same waters, and probably back at Norderney.’
‘It’s a delicate matter,’ I mused, dubiously, ‘if your theory’s correct. Spying on a spy–‘
‘It’s not like that,’ said Davies, indignantly. ‘Anyone who likes can sail about there and explore those waters. I say, you don’t really think it’s like that, do you?’
‘I don’t think you’re likely to do anything dishonourable,’ I hastened to explain. ‘I grant you the sea’s public property in your sense. I only mean that developments are possible, which you don’t reckon on. There _must_ be more to find out than the mere navigation of those channels, and if that’s so, mightn’t we come to be genuine spies ourselves?’
‘And, after all, hang it!’ exclaimed Davies, ‘if it comes to that, why shouldn’t we? I look at it like this. The man’s an Englishman, and if he’s in with Germany he’s a traitor to us, and we as Englishmen have a right to expose him. If we can’t do it without spying we’ve a right to spy, at our own risk–‘
‘There’s a stronger argument than that. He tried to take your life.’
‘I don’t care a rap about that. I’m not such an ass as to thirst for revenge and all that, like some chap in a shilling shocker. But it makes me wild to think of that fellow masquerading as a German, and up to who knows what mischief–mischief enough to make him want to get rid of _any_ one. I’m keen about the sea, and I think they’re apt to be a bit slack at home,’ he continued inconsequently. ‘Those Admiralty chaps want waking up. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it’s quite natural that I should look him up again.’
‘Quite,’ I agreed; ‘you parted friends, and they may be delighted to see you. You’ll have plenty to talk about.’
‘I–I’m,’ said Davies, withered into silence by the ‘they’. ‘Hullo! I say, do you know it’s three o’clock? How the time has gone! And, by Jove! I believe the fog’s lifting.’
I returned, with a shock, to the present, to the weeping walls, the discoloured deal table, the ghastly breakfast litter–all the visible symbols of the life I had pledged myself to. Disillusionment was making rapid headway when Davies returned, and said, with energy:
‘What do you say to starting for Kiel at once? The fog’s going, and there’s a breeze from the sou’-west.’
‘Now?’ I protested. ‘Why, it’ll mean sailing all night, won’t it?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Davies. ‘Not with luck.’
‘Why, it’s dark at seven!’
‘Yes, but it’s only twenty-five miles. I know it’s not exactly a fair wind, but we shall lie closehauled most of the way. The glass is falling, and we ought to take this chance.’
To argue about winds with Davies was hopeless, and the upshot was that we started lunchless. A pale sun was flickering out of masses of racing vapour, and through delicate vistas between them the fair land of Schleswig now revealed and now withdrew her pretty face, as though smiling _adieux_ to her faithless courtiers.
The clank of our chain brought up Bartels to the deck of the Johannes, rubbing his eyes and pulling round his throat a grey shawl, which gave him a comical likeness to a lodging-house landlady receiving the milk in morning _déshabillé._
‘We’re off, Bartels,’ said Davies, without looking up from his work. ‘See you at Kiel, I hope.’
‘You are always in a hurry, captain,’ bleated the old man, shaking his head. ‘You should wait till to-morrow. The sky is not good, and it will be dark before you are off Eckenförde.’
Davies laughed, and very soon his mentor’s sad little figure was lost in haze.
That was a curious evening. Dusk soon fell, and the devil made a determined effort to unman me; first, with the scrambled tea which was the tardy substitute for an orderly lunch, then with the new and nauseous duty of filling the side-lights, which meant squatting in the fo’c’sle to inhale paraffin and dabble in lamp-black; lastly, with an all-round attack on my nerves as the night fell on our frail little vessel, pitching on her precarious way through driving mist. In a sense I think I went through the same sort of mental crisis as when I sat upon my portmanteau at Flensburg. The main issue was not seriously in question, for I had signed on in the Dulcibella for good or ill; but in doing so I had outrun myself, and still wanted an outlook, a mood suited to the enterprise, proof against petty discouragements. Not for the first time a sense of the ludicrous came to my assistance, as I saw myself fretting in London under my burden of self-imposed woes, nicely weighing that insidious invitation, and stepping finally into the snare with the dignity due to my importance; kidnapped as neatly as ever a peaceful clerk was kidnapped by a lawless press-gang, and, in the end, finding as the arch-conspirator a guileless and warm-hearted friend, who called me clever, lodged me in a cell, and blandly invited me to talk German to the purpose, as he was aiming at a little secret service on the high seas. Close in the train of Humour came Romance, veiling her face, but I knew it was the rustle of her robes that I heard in the foam beneath me; I knew that it was she who handed me the cup of sparkling wine and bade me drink and be merry. Strange to me though it was, I knew the taste when it touched my lips. It was not that bastard concoction I had tasted in the pseudo-Bohemias of Soho; it was not the showy but insipid beverage I should have drunk my fill of at Morven Lodge; it was the purest of her pure vintages, instilling the ancient inspiration which, under many guises, quickens thousands of better brains than mine, but whose essence is always the same; the gay pursuit of a perilous quest. Then and there I tried to clinch the matter and keep that mood. In the main I think I succeeded, though I had many lapses.
For the present my veins tingled with the draught. The wind humming into the mainsail, the ghostly wave-crests riding up out of the void, whispered a low thrilling chorus in praise of adventure. Potent indeed must the spell have been, for, in reality, that first night sail teemed with terrors for me. It is true that it began well, for the haze dispersed, as Davies had prophesied, and Bulk Point Lighthouse guided us safely to the mouth of Kiel Fiord. It was during this stage that, crouching together aft, our pipe-bowls glowing sympathetically, we returned to the problem before us; for we had shot out on our quest with volcanic precipitation, leaving much to be discussed. I gleaned a few more facts, though I dispelled no doubts. Davies had only seen the Dollmanns on their yacht, where father and daughter were living for the time. Their villa at Norderney, and their home life there, were unknown to him, though he had landed once at the harbour himself. Further, he had heard vaguely of a stepmother, absent at Hamburg. They were to have joined her on their arrival at that city, which, be it noted, stands a long way up the Elbe, forty miles and more above Cuxhaven, the town at the mouth.
The exact arrangement made on the day before the fatal voyage was that the two yachts should meet in the evening at Cuxhaven and proceed up the river together. Then, in the ordinary course, Davies would have parted company at Brunsbüttel (fifteen miles up), which is the western terminus of the ship canal to the Baltic. Such at least had been his original intention; but, putting two and two together, I gathered that latterly, and perhaps unconfessed to himself, his resolve had weakened, and that he would have followed the Medusa to Hamburg, or indeed the end of the world, impelled by the same motive that, contrary to all his tastes and principles, had induced him to abandon his life in the islands and undertake the voyage at all. But on that point he was immovably reticent, and all I could conclude was that the strange cross-current connected with Dollmann’s daughter had given him cruel pain and had clouded his judgement to distraction, but that he now was prepared to forget or ignore it, and steer a settled course.
The facts I elicited raised several important questions. Was it not known by this time that he and his yacht had survived? Davies was convinced that it was not. ‘He may have waited at Cuxhaven, or inquired at the lock at Brunsbüttel,’ he said. ‘But there was no need, for I tell you the thing was a certainty. If I had struck and _stuck_ on that outer bank, as it was a hundred to one I should do, the yacht would have broken up in three minutes. Bartels would never have seen me, and couldn’t have got to me if he had. No one would have seen me. And nothing whatever has happened since to show that they know I’m alive.’
‘They,’ I suggested. ‘Who are “they”? Who are our adversaries?’ If Dollmann were an accredited agent of the German Admiralty–But, no, it was incredible that the murder of a young Englishman should be connived at in modern days by a friendly and civilized government! Yet, if he were not such an agent, the whole theory fell to the ground.
‘I believe,’ said Davies, ‘that Dollmann did it off his own bat, and beyond that I can’t see. And I don’t know that it matters at present. Alive or dead we’re doing nothing wrong, and have nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘I think it matters a good deal,’ I objected. ‘Who will be interested in our resurrection, and how are we to go to work, openly or secretly? I suppose we shall keep out of the way as much as we can?’
‘As for keeping out of the way,’ said Davies, jerkily, as he peered to windward under the foresail, ‘we _must_ pass the ship canal; that’s a public highway, where anyone can see you. After that there won’t be much difficulty. Wait till you see the place!’ He gave a low, contented laugh, which would have frozen my marrow yesterday. ‘By the way, that reminds me,’ he added; ‘we must stop at Kiel for the inside of a day and lay in a lot of stores. We want to be independent of the shore.’ I said nothing. Independence of the shore in a seven-tonner in October! What an end to aim at!
About nine o’clock we weathered the point, entered Kiel Fiord, and began a dead beat to windward of seven miles to the head of it where Kiel lies. Hitherto, save for the latent qualms concerning my total helplessness if anything happened to Davies, interest and excitement had upheld me well. My alarms only began when I thought them nearly over. Davies had frequently urged me to turn in and sleep, and I went so far as to go below and coil myself up on the lee sofa with my pencil and diary. Suddenly there was a flapping and rattling on deck, and I began to slide on to the floor. ‘What’s happened?’ I cried, in a panic, for there was Davies stooping in at the cabin door.
‘Nothing,’ he said, chafing his hands for warmth; ‘I’m only going about. Hand me the glasses, will you? There’s a steamer ahead. I say, if you really don’t want to turn in, you might make some soup. Just let’s look at the chart.’ He studied it with maddening deliberation, while I wondered how near the steamer was, and what the yacht was doing meanwhile.
‘I suppose it’s not really necessary for anyone to be at the helm?’ I remarked.
‘Oh, she’s all right for a minute,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Two–one and a half–one–lights in line sou’-west by west–got a match?’ He expended two, and tumbled upstairs again.
‘You don’t want me, do you?’ I shouted after him.
‘No, but come up when you’ve put the kettle on. It’s a pretty beat up the fiord. Lovely breeze.’
His legs disappeared. A sort of buoyant fatalism possessed me as I finished my notes and pored over the stove. It upheld me, too, when I went on deck and watched the ‘pretty beat’, whose prettiness was mainly due to the crowd of fog-bound shipping–steamers, smacks, and sailing-vessels–now once more on the move in the confined fairway of the fiord, their baleful eyes of red, green, or yellow, opening and shutting, brightening and fading; while shore-lights and anchor-lights added to my bewilderment, and a throbbing of screws filled the air like the distant roar of London streets. In fact, every time we spun round for our dart across the fiord I felt like a rustic matron gathering her skirts for the transit of the Strand on a busy night. Davies, however, was the street arab who zigzags under the horses’ feet unscathed; and all the time he discoursed placidly on the simplicity and safety of night-sailing if only you are careful, obeying rules, and burnt good lights. As we were nearing the hot glow in the sky that denoted Kiel we passed a huge scintillating bulk moored in mid-stream. ‘Warships,’ he murmured, ecstatically.
At one o’clock we anchored off the town.
10 His Chance
‘I SAY, Davies,’ I said, ‘how long do you think this trip will last? I’ve only got a month’s leave.’
We were standing at slanting desks in the Kiel post-office, Davies scratching diligently at his letter-card, and I staring feebly at mine.
‘By Jove!’ said Davies, with a start of dismay; ‘that’s only three weeks more; I never thought of that. You couldn’t manage to get an extension, could you?’
‘I can write to the chief,’ I admitted; ‘but where’s the answer to come to? We’re better without an address, I suppose.’
‘There’s Cuxhaven,’ reflected Davies; ‘but that’s too near, and there’s–but we don’t want to be tied down to landing anywhere. I tell you what: say “Post Office, Norderney”, just your name, not the yacht’s. We _may_ get there and be able to call for letters.’ The casual character of our adventure never struck me more strongly than then.
‘Is that what _you’re_ doing?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I shan’t be having important letters like you.’
‘But what are you saying?’
‘Oh, just that we’re having a splendid cruise, and are on our way home.’
The notion tickled me, and I said the same in my home letter, adding that we were looking for a friend of Davies’s who would be able to show us some sport. I wrote a line, too, to my chief (unaware of the gravity of the step I was taking) saying it was possible that I might have to apply for longer leave, as I had important business to transact in Germany, and asking him kindly to write to the same address. Then we shouldered our parcels and resumed our business.
Two full dinghy-loads of Stores we ferried to the Dulcibella, chief among which were two immense cans of petroleum, constituting our reserves of heat and light, and a sack of flour. There were spare ropes and blocks, too; German charts of excellent quality; cigars and many weird brands of sausage and tinned meats, besides a miscellany of oddments, some of which only served in the end to slake my companion’s craving for jettison. Clothes were my own chief care, for, freely as I had purged it at Flensburg, my wardrobe was still very unsuitable, and I had already irretrievably damaged two faultless pairs of white flannels. (‘We shall be able to throw them overboard,’ said Davies, hopefully.) So I bought a great pair of seaboots of the country, felt-lined and wooden-soled, and both of us got a number of rough woollen garments (as worn by the local fishermen), breeches, jerseys, helmets, gloves; all of a colour chosen to harmonize with paraffin stains and anchor mud.
The same evening we were taking our last look at the Baltic, sailing past warships and groups of idle yachts battened down for their winter’s sleep; while the noble shores of the fiord, with its villas embowered in copper foliage, grew dark and dim above us.
We rounded the last headland, steered for a galaxy of coloured lights, tumbled down our sails, and came to under the colossal gates of the Holtenau lock. That these would open to such an infinitesimal suppliant seemed inconceivable. But open they did, with ponderous majesty, and our tiny hull was lost in the womb of a lock designed to float the largest battleships. I thought of Boulter’s on a hot August Sunday, and wondered if I really was the same peevish dandy who had jostled and sweltered there with the noisy cockney throng a month ago. There was a blaze of electricity overhead, but utter silence till a solitary cloaked figure hailed us and called for the captain. Davies ran up a ladder, disappeared with the cloaked figure, and returned crumpling a paper into his pocket. It lies before me now, and sets forth, under the stamp of the Königliches Zollamt, that, in consideration of the sum of ten marks for dues and four for tonnage, an imperial tug would tow the vessel Dulcibella (master A. H. Davies) through the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal from Holtenau to Brunsbüttel. Magnificent condescension! I blush when I look at this yellow document and remember the stately courtesy of the great lock gates; for the sleepy officials of the Königliches Zollamt little knew what an insidious little viper they were admitting into the imperial bosom at the light toll of fourteen shillings.
‘Seems cheap,’ said Davies, joining me, ‘doesn’t it? They’ve a regular tariff on tonnage, same for yachts as for liners. We start at four to-morrow with a lot of other boats. I wonder if Bartels is here.’
The same silence reigned, but invisible forces were at work. The inner gates opened and we prised ourselves through into a capacious basin, where lay moored side by side a flotilla of sailing vessels of various sizes. Having made fast alongside a vacant space of quay, we had our dinner, and then strolled out with cigars to look for the Johannes. We found her wedged among a stack of galliots, and her skipper sitting primly below before a blazing stove, reading his Bible through spectacles. He produced a bottle of schnapps and some very small and hard pears, while Davies twitted him mercilessly about his false predictions.
‘The sky was not good,’ was all he said, beaming indulgently at his incorrigible young friend.
Before parting for the night it was arranged that next morning we should lash alongside the Johannes when the flotilla was marshalled for the tow through the canal.
‘Karl shall steer for us both,’ he said, ‘and we will stay warm in the cabin.’
The scheme was carried out, not without much confusion and loss of paint, in the small hours of a dark and drizzling morning. Boisterous little tugs sorted us into parties, and half lost under the massive bulwarks of the Johannes we were carried off into a black inane. If any doubt remained as to the significance of our change of cruising-grounds, dawn dispelled it. View there was none from the deck of the Dulcibella; it was only by standing on the mainboom that you could see over the embankments to the vast plain of Holstein, grey and monotonous under a pall of mist. The soft scenery of the Schleswig coast was a baseless dream of the past, and a cold penetrating rain added the last touch of dramatic completeness to the staging of the new act.
For two days we travelled slowly up the mighty waterway that is the strategic link between the two seas of Germany. Broad and straight, massively embanked, lit by electricity at night till it is lighter than many a great London street; traversed by great war vessels, rich merchantmen, and humble coasters alike, it is a symbol of the new and mighty force which, controlled by the genius of statesmen and engineers, is thrusting the empire irresistibly forward to the goal of maritime greatness.
‘Isn’t it splendid?’ said Davies. ‘He’s a fine fellow, that emperor.’
Karl was the shock-headed, stout-limbed boy of about sixteen, who constituted the whole crew of the Johannes, and was as dirty as his master was clean. I felt a certain envious reverence for this unprepossessing youth, seeing in him a much more efficient counterpart of myself; but how he and his little master ever managed to work their ungainly vessel was a miracle I never understood. Phlegmatically impervious to rain and cold, he steered the Johannes down the long grey reaches in the wake of the tug, while we and Bartels held snug gatherings down below, sometimes in his cabin, sometimes in ours. The heating arrangements of the latter began to be a subject of serious concern. We finally did the only logical thing, and brought the kitchen-range into the parlour, fixing the Rippingille stove on the forward end of the cabin table, where it could warm as well as cook for us. As an ornament it was monstrous, and the taint of oil which it introduced was a disgusting drawback; but, after all, the great thing–as Davies said–is to be comfortable, and after that to be clean.
Davies held long consultations with Bartels, who was thoroughly at home in the navigation of the sands we were bound for, his own boat being a type of the very craft which ply in them. I shall not forget the moment when it first dawned on him that his young friend’s curiosity was practical; for he had thought that our goal was his own beloved Hamburg, queen of cities, a place to see and die.
‘It is too late,’ he wailed. ‘You do not know the Nord See as I do.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Bartels, it’s quite safe.’
‘Safe! And have I not found you fast on Hohenhörn, in a storm, with your rudder broken? God was good to you then, my son.’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t my f–‘ Davies checked himself. ‘We’re going home. There’s nothing in that.’ Bartels became sadly resigned.
‘It is good that you have a friend,’ was his last word on the subject; but all the same he always glanced at me with a rather doubtful eye. As to Davies and myself, our friendship developed quickly on certain limited lines, the chief obstacle, as I well know now, being his reluctance to talk about the personal side of our quest.
On the other hand, I spoke about my own life and interests, with an unsparing discernment, of which I should have been incapable a month ago, and in return I gained the key to his own character. It was devotion to the sea, wedded to a fire of pent-up patriotism struggling incessantly for an outlet in strenuous physical expression; a humanity, born of acute sensitiveness to his own limitations, only adding fuel to the flame. I learnt for the first time now that in early youth he had failed for the navy, the first of several failures in his career. ‘And I can’t settle down to anything else,’ he said. ‘I read no end about it, and yet I am a useless outsider. All I’ve been able to do is to potter about in small boats; but it’s all been _wasted_ till this chance came. I’m afraid you’ll not understand how I feel about it; but at last, for once in a way, I see a chance of being useful.’
‘There ought to be chances for chaps like you,’ I said, ‘without the accident of a job such as this.’
‘Oh, as long as I get it, what matter? But I know what you mean. There must be hundreds of chaps like me–I know a good many myself–who know our coasts like a book–shoals, creeks, tides, rocks; there’s nothing in it, it’s only practice. They ought to make some use of us as a naval reserve. They tried to once, hut it fizzled out, and nobody really cares. And what’s the result? Using every man of what reserves we’ve got, there’s about enough to man the fleet on a war footing, and no more. They’ve tinkered with fishermen, and merchant sailors, and yachting hands, but everyone of them ought to be got hold of; and the colonies, too. Is there the ghost of a doubt that if war broke out there’d be wild appeals for volunteers, aimless cadging, hurry, confusion, waste? My own idea is that we ought to go much further, and train every able-bodied man for a couple of years as a sailor. Army? Oh, I suppose you’d have to give them the choice. Not that I know or care much about the Army, though to listen to people talk you’d think it really mattered as the Navy matters. We’re a maritime nation–we’ve grown by the sea and live by it; if we lose command of it we starve. We’re unique in that way, just as our huge empire, only linked by the sea, is unique. And yet, read Brassey, Dilke, and those “Naval Annuals”, and see what mountains of apathy and conceit have had to be tackled. It’s not the people’s fault. We’ve been safe so long, and grown so rich, that we’ve forgotten what we owe it to. But there’s no excuse for those blockheads of statesmen, as they call themselves, who are paid to see things as they are. They have to go to an American to learn their A B C, and it’s only when kicked and punched by civilian agitators, a mere handful of men who get sneered at for their pains, that they wake up, do some work, point proudly to it, and go to sleep again, till they get another kick. By Jove! we want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn’t wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country, and sees ahead.’
‘We’re improving, aren’t we?’
‘Oh, of course, we are! But it’s a constant uphill fight; and we aren’t ready. They talk of a two-power standard–‘ He plunged away into regions where space forbids me to follow him. This is only a sample of many similar conversations that we afterwards held, always culminating in the burning question of Germany. Far from including me and the Foreign Office among his targets for vague invective, he had a profound respect for my sagacity and experience as a member of that institution; a respect which embarrassed me not a little when I thought of my _précis_ writing and cigarette-smoking, my dancing, and my dining. But I did know something of Germany, and could satisfy his tireless questioning with a certain authority. He used to listen rapt while I described her marvellous awakening in the last generation, under the strength and wisdom of her rulers; her intense patriotic ardour; her seething industrial activity, and, most potent of all, the forces that are moulding modern Europe, her dream of a colonial empire, entailing her transformation from a land-power to a sea-power. Impregnably based on vast territorial resources which we cannot molest, the dim instincts of her people, not merely directed but anticipated by the genius of her ruling house, our great trade rivals of the present, our great naval rival of the future, she grows, and strengthens, and waits, an ever more formidable factor in the future of our delicate network of empire, sensitive as gossamer to external shocks, and radiating from an island whose commerce is its life, and which depends even for its daily ration of bread on the free passage of the seas.
‘And we aren’t ready for her,’ Davies would say; ‘we don’t look her way. We have no naval base in the North Sea, and no North Sea Fleet. Our best battleships are too deep in draught for North Sea work. And, to crown all, we were asses enough to give her Heligoland, which commands her North Sea coast. And supposing she collars Holland; isn’t there some talk of that?’
That would lead me to describe the swollen ambitions of the Pan-Germanic party, and its ceaseless intrigues to promote the absorption of Austria, Switzerland, and–a direct and flagrant menace to ourselves–of Holland.
‘I don’t blame them,’ said Davies, who, for all his patriotism, had not a particle of racial spleen in his composition. ‘I don’t blame them; their Rhine ceases to be German just when it begins to be most valuable. The mouth is Dutch, and would give them magnificent ports just opposite British shores. We can’t talk about conquest and grabbing. We’ve collared a fine share of the world, and they’ve every right to be jealous. Let them hate us, and say so; it’ll teach us to buck up; and that’s what really matters.’
In these talks there occurred a singular contact of minds. It was very well for me to spin sonorous generalities, but I had never till now dreamed of being so vulgar as to translate them into practice. I had always detested the meddlesome alarmist, who veils ignorance under noisiness, and for ever wails his chant of lugubrious pessimism. To be thrown with Davies was to receive a shock of enlightenment; for here, at least, was a specimen of the breed who exacted respect. It is true he made use of the usual jargon, interlarding his stammering sentences (sometimes, when he was excited, with the oddest effect) with the conventional catchwords of the journalist and platform speaker. But these were but accidents; for he seemed to have caught his innermost conviction from the very soul of the sea itself. An armchair critic is one thing, but a sunburnt, brine-burnt zealot smarting under a personal discontent, athirst for a means, however tortuous, of contributing his effort to the great cause, the maritime supremacy of Britain, that was quite another thing. He drew inspiration from the very wind and spray. He communed with his tiller, I believe, and marshalled his figures with its help. To hear him talk was to feel a current of clarifying air blustering into a close club-room, where men bandy ineffectual platitudes, and mumble old shibboleths, and go away and do nothing.
In our talk about policy and strategy we were Bismarcks and Rodneys, wielding nations and navies; and, indeed, I have no doubt that our fancy took extravagant flights sometimes. In plain fact we were merely two young gentlemen in a seven-ton pleasure boat, with a taste for amateur hydrography and police duty combined. Not that Davies ever doubted. Once set on the road he gripped his purpose with child-like faith and tenacity. It was his ‘chance’.
11 The Pathfinders
IN the late afternoon of the second day our flotilla reached the Elbe at Brunsbüttel and ranged up in the inner basin, while a big liner, whimpering like a fretful baby, was tenderly nursed into the lock. During the delay Davies left me in charge, and bolted off with an oil-can and a milk-jug. An official in uniform was passing along the quay from vessel to vessel counter-signing papers. I went up to meet him with our receipt for dues, which he signed carelessly. Then he paused and muttered _’Dooltzhibella,’_ scratching his head, ‘that was the name. English?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Little _lust-cutter_, that is so; there was an inquiry for you.’
‘Whom from?’
‘A friend of yours from a big barge-yacht.’
‘Oh, I know; she went on to Hamburg, I suppose?’
‘No such luck, captain; she was outward bound.’
What did the man mean? He seemed to be vastly amused by something.
‘When was this–about three weeks ago?’ I asked, indifferently.
‘Three weeks? It was the day before yesterday. What a pity to miss him by so little!’ He chuckled and winked.
‘Did he leave any message?’ I asked.
‘It was a lady who inquired,’ whispered the fellow, sniggering. ‘Oh, really,’ I said, beginning to feel highly absurd, but keenly curious. ‘And she inquired about the Dulcibella?’
‘Herrgott! she was difficult to satisfy! Stood over me while I searched the books. “A very little one,” she kept saying, and “Are you sure all the names are here?” I saw her into her kleine Boot, and she rowed away in the rain. No, she left no message. It was dirty weather for a young fräulein to be out alone in. Ach! she was safe enough, though. To see her crossing the ebb in a chop of tide was a treat.’
‘And the yacht went on down the river? Where was she bound to?’
‘How do I know? Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Emden – somewhere in the North Sea; too far for you.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said I, bravely.
‘Ach! you will not follow in _that_? Are not you bound to Hamburg?’
‘We can change our plans. It seems a pity to have missed them.’
‘Think twice, captain, there are plenty of pretty girls in Hamburg. But you English will do anything. Well, viel Glück!’
He moved on, chuckling, to the next boat. Davies soon returned with his cans and an armful of dark, rye loaves, just in time, for, the liner being through, the flotilla was already beginning to jostle into the lock and Bartels was growing impatient.
‘They’ll last ten days,’ he said, as we followed the throng, still clinging like a barnacle to the side of the Johannes. We spent the few minutes while the lock was emptied in a farewell talk to Bartels. Karl had hitched their main halyards on to the windlass and was grinding at it in an _acharnement_ of industry, his shock head jerking and his grubby face perspiring. Then the lock gates opened; and so, in a Babel of shouting, whining of blocks, and creaking of spars, our whole company was split out into the dingy bosom of the Elbe. The Johannes gathered way under wind and tide and headed for midstream. A last shake of the hand, and Bartels reluctantly slipped the head-rope and we drifted apart. ‘Gute Reise! Gute Reise!’ It was no time for regretful gazing, for the flood-tide was sweeping us up and out, and it was not until we had set the foresail, edged into a shallow bight, and let go our anchor, that we had leisure to think of him again; but by that time his and the other craft were shades in the murky east.
We swung close to a _glacis_ of smooth blue mud which sloped up to a weed-grown dyke; behind lay the same flat country, colourless, humid; and opposite us, two miles away, scarcely visible in the deepening twilight, ran the outline of a similar shore. Between rolled the turgid Elbe. ‘The Styx flowing through Tartarus,’ I thought to myself, recalling some of our Baltic anchorages.
I told my news to Davies as soon as the anchor was down, instinctively leaving the sex of the inquirer to the last, as my informant had done.
‘The Medusa called yesterday?’ he interrupted. ‘And outward bound? That’s a rum thing. Why didn’t he inquire when he was going _up_?’
‘It was a lady,’ and I drily retailed the official’s story, very busy with a deck-broom the while. ‘We’re all square now, aren’t we?’ I ended. ‘I’ll go below and light the stove.’
Davies had been engaged in fixing up the riding-light. When I last saw him he was still so engaged, but motionless, the lantern under his left arm. and his right hand grasping the forestay and the half-knotted lanyard; his eyes staring fixedly down the river, a strange look in his face, half exultant, half perplexed. When he joined me and spoke he seemed to be concluding a difficult argument.
‘Anyway, it proves,’ he said, ‘that the Medusa has gone back to Norderney. That’s the main thing.’
‘Probably,’ I agreed, ‘but let’s sum up all we know. First, it’s certain that nobody we’ve met as yet has any suspicion of _us_’ ‘I told you he did it off his own bat,’ threw in Davies. ‘Or, secondly, of _him._ If he’s what you think it’s not known here.’
‘I can’t help that.’
‘Thirdly, he inquires for you on his way _back_ from Hamburg, three weeks after the event. It doesn’t look as if he thought he had disposed of you–it doesn’t look as if he had _meant_ to dispose of you. He sends his daughter, too–a curious proceeding under the circumstances. Perhaps it’s all a mistake.’
‘It’s not a mistake,’ said Davies, half to himself. ‘But _did_ he send her? He’d have sent one of his men. He can’t be on board at all.’
This was a new light.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘He must have left the yacht when he got to Hamburg; some other devil’s work, I suppose. She’s being sailed back now, and passing here–‘
‘Oh, I see! It’s a private supplementary inquiry.’
‘That’s a long name to call it.’
‘Would the girl sail back alone with the crew?’
‘She’s used to the sea–and perhaps she isn’t alone. There was that stepmother–But it doesn’t make a ha’porth of difference to our plans: we’ll start on the ebb to-morrow morning.’
We were busier than usual that night, reckoning stores, tidying lockers, and securing movables. ‘We must economize,’ said Davies, for all the world as though we were castaways on a raft. ‘It’s a wretched thing to have to land somewhere to buy oil,’ was a favourite observation of his.
Before getting to sleep I was made to recognize a new factor in the conditions of navigation, now that the tideless Baltic was left behind us. A strong current was sluicing past our sides, and at the eleventh hour I was turned out, clad in pyjamas and oilskins (a horrible combination), to assist in running out a kedge or spare anchor.
‘What’s kedging-off?’ I asked, when we were tucked up again. ‘Oh, it’s when you run aground; you have to–but you’ll soon learn all about it.’ I steeled my heart for the morrow.
So behold us, then, at eight o’clock on 5th October, standing down the river towards the field of our first labours. It is fifteen miles to the mouth; drab, dreary miles like the dullest reaches of the lower Thames; but scenery was of no concern to us, and a south-westerly breeze blowing out of a grey sky kept us constantly on the verge of reefing. The tide as it gathered strength swept us down with a force attested by the speed with which buoys came in sight, nodded above us and passed, each boiling in its eddy of dirty foam. I scarcely noticed at first–so calm was the water, and so regular were the buoys, like milestones along a road–that the northern line of coast was rapidly receding and that the ‘river’ was coming to be but a belt of deep water skirting a vast estuary, three–seven–ten miles broad, till it merged in open sea.
‘Why, we’re at sea!’ I suddenly exclaimed, ‘after an hour’s sailing!’
‘Just discovered that?’ said Davies, laughing.
‘You said it was fifteen miles,’ I complained.
‘So it is, till we reach this coast at Cuxhaven; but I suppose you may say we’re at sea; of course that’s all sand over there to starboard. Look! some of it’s showing already.’
He pointed into the north. Looking more attentively I noticed that outside the line of buoys patches of the surface heaved and worked; in one or two places streaks and circles of white were forming; in the midst of one such circle a sleek mauve hump had risen, like the back of a sleeping whale. I saw that an old spell was enthralling Davies as his eye travelled away to the blank horizon. He scanned it all with a critical eagerness, too, as one who looks for a new meaning in an old friend’s face. Something of his zest was communicated to me, and stilled the shuddering thrill that had seized me. The protecting land was still a comforting neighbour; but our severance with it came quickly. The tide whirled us down, and our straining canvas aiding it, we were soon off Cuxhaven, which crouched so low behind its mighty dyke, that of some of its houses only the chimneys were visible. Then, a mile or so on, the shore sharpened to a point like a claw, where the innocent dyke became a long, low fort, with some great guns peeping over; then of a sudden it ceased, retreating into the far south in a dim perspective of groins and dunes.
We spun out into the open and leant heavily over to the now unobstructed wind. The yacht rose and sank to a little swell, but my first impression was one of wonder at the calmness of the sea, for the wind blew fresh and free from horizon to horizon.
‘Why, it’s all sand _there_ now, and we’re under the lee of it,’ said Davies, with an enthusiastic sweep of his hand over the sea on our left, or port, hand. ‘That’s our hunting ground.’
‘What are we going to do?’ I inquired.
‘Pick up Sticker’s Gat,’ was the reply. ‘It ought to be near Buoy K.’
A red buoy with a huge K on it soon came into view. Davies peered over to port.
‘Just pull up the centre-board, will you?’ he remarked abstractedly, adding, ‘and hand me up the glasses as you re down there.’
‘Never mind the glasses. I’ve got it now; come to the main-sheet,’ was the next remark.
He put down the helm and headed the yacht straight for the troubled and discoloured expanse which covered the submerged sands. A ‘sleeping whale’, with a light surf splashing on it, was right in our path.
‘Stand by the lead, will you?’ said Davies, politely. ‘I’ll manage the sheets, it’s a dead beat in. Ready about!’
The wind was in our teeth now, and for a crowded half-hour we wormed ourselves forward by ever-shortening tacks into the sinuous recesses of a channel which threaded the shallows westward. I knelt in a tangle of line, and, under the hazy impression that something very critical was going on, plied the lead furiously, bumping and splashing myself, and shouting out the depths, which lessened steadily, with a great sense of the importance of my function. Davies never seemed to listen, but tacked on imperturbably, juggling with the tiller, the sheets, and the chart, in a way that made one giddy to look at. For all our zeal we seemed to be making very slow progress.
‘It’s no use, tide’s too strong: we must chance it,’ he said at last.
‘Chance what?’ I wondered to myself. Our tacks suddenly began to grow