The Riddle of the Sands Part 6

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 sh.o.r.e we were pa.s.sing appeared to be bordered by lonely marshes, though a s.p.a.cious 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 'n.o.body 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 compa.s.s.

'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 c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l 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 torn 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s beer; then we will talk of ducks--no, then we will kill ducks--that is better. Then we will have plenty gla.s.ses 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 m.u.f.flers, 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 hoa.r.s.e directions while we shifted the 'Dulcibella' to a berth on the farther sh.o.r.e 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 a.s.sumed 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.

VII. 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 up, 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 plat.i.tudes 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-a-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 Ca.n.a.l 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.'