The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers 64783 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Riddle of the Sands

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the
Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: The Riddle of the Sands

Author: Erskine Childers

Release date: October 1, 2000 [eBook #2360]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2360

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIDDLE OF
THE SANDS ***

The Riddle of the Sands
A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved

Edited by

Erskine Childers

(1870-1922)

Contents

Preface
I. The Letter
II. The Dulcibella
III. Davies
IV. Retrospect
V. Wanted, a North Wind
VI. Schlei Fiord
VII. The Missing Page
VIII. The Theory
IX. I Sign Articles
X. His Chance
XI. The Pathfinders
XII. My Initiation
XIII. The Meaning of our Work
XIV. The First Night in the Islands
XV. Bensersiel
XVI. Commander von Brüning
XVII. Clearing the Air
XVIII. Imperial Escort
XIX. The Rubicon
XX. The Little Drab Book
XXI. Blindfold to Memmert
XXII. The Quartette
XXIII. A Change of Tactics
XXIV. Finesse

XXV. I Double Back
XXVI. The Seven Siels
XXVII. The Luck of the Stowaway
XXVIII. We Achieve our Double Aim
Epilogue
Postscript (March 1903)

Maps and Charts

Map A—General Map
Chart A—Chart to Illustrate the Stranding of the Dulcibella, etc.
Map B—Map of East Friesland
Chart B—Chart of Juist, Memmert, and Part of Norderney
Sketch—Memmert Salvage Depot

Preface

A word about the origin and authorship of this book.
In October last (1902), my friend “Carruthers” visited me in my
chambers, and, under a provisional pledge of secrecy, told me frankly the
whole of the adventure described in these pages. Till then I had only known
as much as the rest of his friends, namely, that he had recently undergone
experiences during a yachting cruise with a certain Mr “Davies” which had
left a deep mark on his character and habits.
At the end of his narrative—which, from its bearing on studies and
speculations of my own, as well as from its intrinsic interest and racy
delivery, made a very deep impression on me—he added that the important
facts discovered in the course of the cruise had, without a moment’s delay,
been communicated to the proper authorities, who, after some dignified
incredulity, due in part, perhaps, to the pitiful inadequacy of their own
secret service, had, he believed, made use of them, to avert a great national
danger. I say “he believed”, for though it was beyond question that the
danger was averted for the time, it was doubtful whether they had stirred a
foot to combat it, the secret discovered being of such a nature that mere
suspicion of it on this side was likely to destroy its efficacy.
There, however that may be, the matter rested for a while, as, for
personal reasons which will be manifest to the reader, he and Mr “Davies”
expressly wished it to rest.
But events were driving them to reconsider their decision. These seemed
to show that the information wrung with such peril and labour from the
German Government, and transmitted so promptly to our own, had had
none but the most transitory influence on our policy. Forced to the
conclusion that the national security was really being neglected, the two
friends now had a mind to make their story public; and it was about this that
“Carruthers” wished for my advice. The great drawback was that an

Englishman, bearing an honoured name, was disgracefully implicated, and
that unless infinite delicacy were used, innocent persons, and, especially, a
young lady, would suffer pain and indignity, if his identity were known.
Indeed, troublesome rumours, containing a grain of truth and a mass of
falsehood, were already afloat.
After weighing both sides of the question, I gave my vote emphatically
for publication. The personal drawbacks could, I thought, with tact be
neutralised; while, from the public point of view, nothing but good could
come from submitting the case to the common sense of the country at large.
Publication, therefore, was agreed upon, and the next point was the form it
should take. “Carruthers”, with the concurrence of Mr “Davies”, was for a
bald exposition of the essential facts, stripped of their warm human
envelope. I was strongly against this course, first, because it would
aggravate instead of allaying the rumours that were current; secondly,
because in such a form the narrative would not carry conviction, and would
thus defeat its own end. The persons and the events were indissolubly
connected; to evade, abridge, suppress, would be to convey to the reader the
idea of a concocted hoax. Indeed, I took bolder ground still, urging that the
story should be made as explicit and circumstantial as possible, frankly and
honestly for the purpose of entertaining and so of attracting a wide circle of
readers. Even anonymity was undesirable. Nevertheless, certain precautions
were imperatively needed.
To cut the matter short, they asked for my assistance and received it at
once. It was arranged that I should edit the book; that “Carruthers” should
give me his diary and recount to me in fuller detail and from his own point
of view all the phases of the “quest”, as they used to call it; that Mr
“Davies” should meet me with his charts and maps and do the same; and
that the whole story should be written, as from the mouth of the former,
with its humours and errors, its light and its dark side, just as it happened;
with the following few limitations. The year it belongs to is disguised; the
names of persons are throughout fictitious; and, at my instance certain
slight liberties have been taken to conceal the identity of the English
characters.
Remember, also that these persons are living now in the midst of us, and
if you find one topic touched on with a light and hesitating pen, do not

blame the Editor, who, whether they are known or not, would rather say too
little than say a word that might savour of impertinence.

E. C.

March, 1903

NOTE

The maps and charts are based on British and German Admiralty charts,
with irrelevant details omitted.

CHAPTER I.
The Letter

I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long
periods in utter solitude—save for a few black faces—have made it a rule to
dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent
a relapse into barbarism. It was in some such spirit, with an added touch of
self-consciousness, that, at seven o’clock in the evening of September 23 in
a recent year, I was making my evening toilet in my chambers in Pall Mall.
I thought the date and the place justified the parallel; to my advantage even;
for the obscure Burmese administrator might well be a man of blunted
sensibilities and coarse fibre, and at least he is alone with nature, while I—
well, a young man of condition and fashion, who knows the right people,
belongs to the right clubs, has a safe, possibly a brilliant, future in the
Foreign Office—may be excused for a sense of complacent martyrdom,
when, with his keen appreciation of the social calendar, he is doomed to the
outer solitude of London in September. I say “martyrdom”, but in fact the
case was infinitely worse. For to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows,
is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my position was that I had
passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it had to offer in ever
dwindling degree since the middle of August, when ties were still fresh and
sympathy abundant. I had been conscious that I was missed at Morven
Lodge party. Lady Ashleigh herself had said so in the kindest possible
manner, when she wrote to acknowledge the letter in which I explained,
with an effectively austere reserve of language, that circumstances
compelled me to remain at my office. “We know how busy you must be just
now”, she wrote, “and I do hope you won’t overwork; we shall all miss you
very much.” Friend after friend “got away” to sport and fresh air, with
promises to write and chaffing condolences, and as each deserted the
sinking ship, I took a grim delight in my misery, positively almost enjoying

the first week or two after my world had been finally dissipated to the four
bracing winds of heaven. I began to take a spurious interest in the
remaining five millions, and wrote several clever letters in a vein of cheap
satire, indirectly suggesting the pathos of my position, but indicating that I
was broad-minded enough to find intellectual entertainment in the scenes,
persons, and habits of London in the dead season. I even did rational things
at the instigation of others. For, though I should have liked total isolation
best, I, of course, found that there was a sediment of unfortunates like
myself, who, unlike me, viewed the situation in a most prosaic light. There
were river excursions, and so on, after office-hours; but I dislike the river at
any time for its noisy vulgarity, and most of all at this season. So I dropped
out of the fresh air brigade and declined H——’s offer to share a riverside
cottage and run up to town in the mornings. I did spend one or two week-
ends with the Catesbys in Kent; but I was not inconsolable when they let
their house and went abroad, for I found that such partial compensations did
not suit me. Neither did the taste for satirical observation last. A passing
thirst, which I dare say many have shared, for adventures of the fascinating
kind described in the New Arabian Nights led me on a few evenings into
some shady haunts in Soho and farther eastward; but was finally quenched
one sultry Saturday night after an hour’s immersion in the reeking
atmosphere of a low music-hall in Ratcliffe Highway, where I sat next a
portly female who suffered from the heat, and at frequent intervals
refreshed herself and an infant from a bottle of tepid stout.
By the first week in September I had abandoned all palliatives, and had
settled into the dismal but dignified routine of office, club, and chambers.
And now came the most cruel trial, for the hideous truth dawned on me that
the world I found so indispensable could after all dispense with me. It was
all very well for Lady Ashleigh to assure me that I was deeply missed; but a
letter from F——, who was one of the party, written “in haste, just starting
to shoot”, and coming as a tardy reply to one of my cleverest, made me
aware that the house party had suffered little from my absence, and that few
sighs were wasted on me, even in the quarter which I had assumed to have
been discreetly alluded to by the underlined all in Lady Ashleigh’s “we
shall all miss you”. A thrust which smarted more, if it bit less deeply, came
from my cousin Nesta, who wrote: “It’s horrid for you to have to be baking
in London now; but, after all, it must be a great pleasure to you” (malicious
little wretch!) “to have such interesting and important work to do.” Here

was a nemesis for an innocent illusion I had been accustomed to foster in
the minds of my relations and acquaintances, especially in the breasts of the
trustful and admiring maidens whom I had taken down to dinner in the last
two seasons; a fiction which I had almost reached the point of believing in
myself. For the plain truth was that my work was neither interesting nor
important, and consisted chiefly at present in smoking cigarettes, in saying
that Mr So-and-So was away and would be back about October 1, in being
absent for lunch from twelve till two, and in my spare moments making
précis of—let us say—the less confidential consular reports, and squeezing
the results into cast-iron schedules. The reason of my detention was not a
cloud on the international horizon—though I may say in passing that there
was such a cloud—but a caprice on the part of a remote and mighty
personage, the effect of which, ramifying downwards, had dislocated the
carefully-laid holiday plans of the humble juniors, and in my own small
case had upset the arrangement between myself and K——, who positively
liked the dog-days in Whitehall.
Only one thing was needed to fill my cup of bitterness, and this it was
that specially occupied me as I dressed for dinner this evening. Two days
more in this dead and fermenting city and my slavery would be at an end.
Yes, but—irony of ironies!—I had nowhere to go to! The Morven Lodge
party was breaking up. A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had
been one of its accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I
had not been missed, and bred in me that most desolating brand of cynicism
which is produced by defeat through insignificance. Invitations for a later
date, which I had declined in July with a gratifying sense of being much in
request, now rose up spectrally to taunt me. There was at least one which I
could easily have revived, but neither in this case nor in any other had there
been any renewal of pressure, and there are moments when the difference
between proposing oneself and surrendering as a prize to one of several
eagerly competing hostesses seems too crushing to be contemplated. My
own people were at Aix for my father’s gout; to join them was a pis-aller
whose banality was repellent. Besides, they would be leaving soon for our
home in Yorkshire, and I was not a prophet in my own country. In short, I
was at the extremity of depression.
The usual preliminary scuffle on the staircase prepared me for the knock
and entry of Withers. (One of the things which had for some time ceased to
amuse me was the laxity of manners, proper to the season, among the

servants of the big block of chambers where I lived.) Withers demurely
handed me a letter bearing a German postmark and marked “Urgent”. I had
just finished dressing, and was collecting my money and gloves. A
momentary thrill of curiosity broke in upon my depression as I sat down to
open it. A corner on the reverse of the envelope bore the blotted legend:
“Very sorry, but there’s one other thing—a pair of rigging screws from
Carey and Neilson’s, size 1⅜, galvanised.” Here it is:

Yacht Dulcibella,
Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Sept. 21.

Dear Carruthers,—I daresay you’ll be surprised at hearing
from me, as it’s ages since we met. It is more than likely,
too, that what I’m going to suggest won’t suit you, for I
know nothing of your plans, and if you’re in town at all
you’re probably just getting into harness again and can’t get
away. So I merely write on the offchance to ask if you would
care to come out here and join me in a little yachting, and, I
hope, duck-shooting. I know you’re keen on shooting, and I
sort of remember that you have done some yachting too,
though I rather forget about that. This part of the Baltic—the
Schleswig fiords—is a splendid cruising-ground—A1
scenery—and there ought to be plenty of duck about soon, if
it gets cold enough. I came out here via Holland and the
Frisian Islands, starting early in August. My pals have had to
leave me, and I’m badly in want of another, as I don’t want
to lay up yet for a bit. I needn’t say how glad I should be if
you could come. If you can, send me a wire to the P.O. here.
Flushing and on by Hamburg will be your best route, I think.
I’m having a few repairs done here, and will have them
ready sharp by the time your train arrives. Bring your gun
and a good lot of No. 4’s; and would you mind calling at
Lancaster’s and asking for mine, and bringing it too? Bring
some oilskins. Better get the eleven-shilling sort, jacket and
trousers—not the “yachting” brand; and if you paint bring
your gear. I know you speak German like a native, and that
will be a great help. Forgive this hail of directions, but I’ve a

sort of feeling that I’m in luck and that you’ll come.
Anyway, I hope you and the F.O. both flourish. Good-bye.

Yours ever,
Arthur H. Davies.

Would you mind bringing me out a prismatic compass, and a
pound of Raven mixture?

This letter marked an epoch for me; but I little suspected the fact as I
crumpled it into my pocket and started languidly on the voie douloureuse
which I nightly followed to the club. In Pall Mall there were no dignified
greetings to be exchanged now with well-groomed acquaintances. The only
people to be seen were some late stragglers from the park, with a
perambulator and some hot and dusty children lagging fretfully behind;
some rustic sightseers draining the last dregs of the daylight in an effort to
make out from their guide-books which of these reverend piles was which;
a policeman and a builder’s cart. Of course the club was a strange one, both
of my own being closed for cleaning, a coincidence expressly planned by
Providence for my inconvenience. The club which you are “permitted to
make use of” on these occasions always irritates with its strangeness and
discomfort. The few occupants seem odd and oddly dressed, and you
wonder how they got there. The particular weekly that you want is not taken
in; the dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils
oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere within
me there was a faint lightening of the spirits; causeless, as far as I could
discover. It could not be Davies’s letter. Yachting in the Baltic at the end of
September! The very idea made one shudder. Cowes, with a pleasant party
and hotels handy, was all very well. An August cruise on a steam yacht in
French waters or the Highlands was all very well; but what kind of a yacht
was this? It must be of a certain size to have got so far, but I thought I
remembered enough of Davies’s means to know that he had no money to
waste on luxuries. That brought me to the man himself. I had known him at
Oxford—not as one of my immediate set; but we were a sociable college,
and I had seen a good deal of him, liking him for his physical energy
combined with a certain simplicity and modesty, though, indeed, he had
nothing to be conceited about; liked him, in fact, in the way that at that

receptive period one likes many men whom one never keeps up with later.
We had both gone down in the same year—three years ago now. I had gone
to France and Germany for two years to learn the languages; he had failed
for the Indian Civil, and then had gone into a solicitor’s office. I had only
seen him since at rare intervals, though I admitted to myself that for his part
he had clung loyally to what ties of friendship there were between us. But
the truth was that we had drifted apart from the nature of things. I had
passed brilliantly into my profession, and on the few occasions I had met
him since I made my triumphant début in society I had found nothing left in
common between us. He seemed to know none of my friends, he dressed
indifferently, and I thought him dull. I had always connected him with boats
and the sea, but never with yachting, in the sense that I understood it. In
college days he had nearly persuaded me into sharing a squalid week in
some open boat he had picked up, and was going to sail among some dreary
mudflats somewhere on the east coast. There was nothing else, and the
funereal function of dinner drifted on. But I found myself remembering at
the entrée that I had recently heard, at second or third hand, of something
else about him—exactly what I could not recall. When I reached the
savoury, I had concluded, so far as I had centred my mind on it at all, that
the whole thing was a culminating irony, as, indeed, was the savoury in its
way. After the wreck of my pleasant plans and the fiasco of my martyrdom,
to be asked as consolation to spend October freezing in the Baltic with an
eccentric nonentity who bored me! Yet, as I smoked my cigar in the ghastly
splendour of the empty smoking-room, the subject came up again. Was
there anything in it? There were certainly no alternatives at hand. And to
bury myself in the Baltic at this unearthly time of year had at least a smack
of tragic thoroughness about it.
I pulled out the letter again, and ran down its impulsive staccato
sentences, affecting to ignore what a gust of fresh air, high spirits, and good
fellowship this flimsy bit of paper wafted into the jaded club-room. On
reperusal, it was full of evil presage—“A1 scenery”—but what of
equinoctial storms and October fogs? Every sane yachtsman was paying off
his crew now. “There ought to be duck”—vague, very vague. “If it gets cold
enough”—cold and yachting seemed to be a gratuitously monstrous union.
His pals had left him; why? “Not the ‘yachting’ brand”; and why not? As to
the size, comfort, and crew of the yacht—all cheerfully ignored; so many
maddening blanks. And, by the way, why in Heaven’s name “a prismatic

compass”? I fingered a few magazines, played a game of fifty with a
friendly old fogey, too importunate to be worth the labour of resisting, and
went back to my chambers to bed, ignorant that a friendly Providence had
come to my rescue; and, indeed, rather resenting any clumsy attempt at
such friendliness.

CHAPTER II.
The Dulcibella

That two days later I should be found pacing the deck of the Flushing
steamer with a ticket for Hamburg in my pocket may seem a strange result,
yet not so strange if you have divined my state of mind. You will guess, at
any rate, that I was armed with the conviction that I was doing an act of
obscure penance, rumours of which might call attention to my lot and
perhaps awaken remorse in the right quarter, while it left me free to enjoy
myself unobtrusively in the remote event of enjoyment being possible.
The fact was that, at breakfast on the morning after the arrival of the
letter, I had still found that inexplicable lightening which I mentioned
before, and strong enough to warrant a revival of the pros and cons. An
important pro which I had not thought of before was that after all it was a
good-natured piece of unselfishness to join Davies; for he had spoken of the
want of a pal, and seemed honestly to be in need of me. I almost clutched at
this consideration. It was an admirable excuse, when I reached my office
that day, for a resigned study of the Continental Bradshaw, and an order to
Carter to unroll a great creaking wall-map of Germany and find me
Flensburg. The latter labour I might have saved him, but it was good for
Carter to have something to do; and his patient ignorance was amusing.
With most of the map and what it suggested I was tolerably familiar, for I
had not wasted my year in Germany, whatever I had done or not done since.
Its people, history, progress, and future had interested me intensely, and I
had still friends in Dresden and Berlin. Flensburg recalled the Danish war
of ’64, and by the time Carter’s researches had ended in success I had
forgotten the task set him, and was wondering whether the prospect of
seeing something of that lovely region of Schleswig-Holstein, [See Map A]
as I knew from hearsay that it was, was at all to be set against such an
uncomfortable way of seeing it, with the season so late, the company so

unattractive, and all the other drawbacks which I counted and treasured as
proofs of my desperate condition, if I were to go. It needed little to decide
me, and I think K——’s arrival from Switzerland, offensively sunburnt,
was the finishing touch. His greeting was “Hullo, Carruthers, you here?
Thought you had got away long ago. Lucky devil, though, to be going now,
just in time for the best driving and the early pheasants. The heat’s been
shocking out there. Carter, bring me a Bradshaw”—(an extraordinary book,
Bradshaw, turned to from habit, even when least wanted, as men fondle
guns and rods in the close season).
By lunch-time the weight of indecision had been removed, and I found
myself entrusting Carter with a telegram to Davies, P.O., Flensburg.
“Thanks; expect me 9.34 p.m. 26th”; which produced, three hours later, a
reply: “Delighted; please bring a No. 3 Rippingille stove”—a perplexing
and ominous direction, which somehow chilled me in spite of its subject
matter.
Indeed, my resolution was continually faltering. It faltered when I turned
out my gun in the evening and thought of the grouse it ought to have
accounted for. It faltered again when I contemplated the miscellaneous list
of commissions, sown broadcast through Davies’s letter, to fulfil which
seemed to make me a willing tool where my chosen rôle was that of an
embittered exile, or at least a condescending ally. However, I faced the
commissions manfully, after leaving the office.
At Lancaster’s I inquired for his gun, was received coolly, and had to pay
a heavy bill, which it seemed to have incurred, before it was handed over.
Having ordered the gun and No. 4’s to be sent to my chambers, I bought the
Raven mixture with that peculiar sense of injury which the prospect of
smuggling in another’s behalf always entails; and wondered where in the
world Carey and Neilson’s was, a firm which Davies spoke of as though it
were as well known as the Bank of England or the Stores, instead of
specialising in “rigging-screws”, whatever they might be. They sounded
important, though, and it would be only polite to unearth them. I connected
them with the “few repairs,” and awoke new misgivings. At the Stores I
asked for a No. 3 Rippingille stove, and was confronted with a formidable
and hideous piece of ironmongery, which burned petroleum in two
capacious tanks, horribly prophetic of a smell of warm oil. I paid for this
miserably, convinced of its grim efficiency, but speculating as to the

domestic conditions which caused it to be sent for as an afterthought by
telegram. I also asked about rigging-screws in the yachting department, but
learnt that they were not kept in stock; that Carey and Neilson’s would
certainly have them, and that their shop was in the Minories, in the far east,
meaning a journey nearly as long as to Flensburg, and twice as tiresome.
They would be shut by the time I got there, so after this exhausting round of
duty I went home in a cab, omitted dressing for dinner (an epoch in itself),
ordered a chop up from the basement kitchen, and spent the rest of the
evening packing and writing, with the methodical gloom of a man setting
his affairs in order for the last time.
The last of those airless nights passed. The astonished Withers saw me
breakfasting at eight, and at 9.30 I was vacantly examining rigging-screws
with what wits were left me after a sulphurous ride in the underground to
Aldgate. I laid great stress on the 3/8’s, and the galvanism, and took them
on trust, ignorant as to their functions. For the eleven-shilling oilskins I was
referred to a villainous den in a back street, which the shopman said they
always recommended, and where a dirty and bejewelled Hebrew chaffered
with me (beginning at 18s.) over two reeking orange slabs distantly
resembling moieties of the human figure. Their odour made me close
prematurely for 14s., and I hurried back (for I was due there at 11) to my
office with my two disreputable brown-paper parcels, one of which made
itself so noticeable in the close official air that Carter attentively asked if I
would like to have it sent to my chambers, and K—— was inquisitive to
bluntness about it and my movements. But I did not care to enlighten K
——, whose comments I knew would be provokingly envious or wounding
to my pride in some way.
I remembered, later on, the prismatic compass, and wired to the Minories
to have one sent at once, feeling rather relieved that I was not present there
to be cross-examined as to size and make. The reply was, “Not stocked; try
surveying-instrument maker”—a reply both puzzling and reassuring, for
Davies’s request for a compass had given me more uneasiness than
anything, while, to find that what he wanted turned out to be a surveying-
instrument, was a no less perplexing discovery. That day I made my last
précis and handed over my schedules—Procrustean beds, where unwilling
facts were stretched and tortured—and said good-bye to my temporary
chief, genial and lenient M——, who wished me a jolly holiday with all
sincerity.

At seven I was watching a cab packed with my personal luggage and the
collection of unwieldy and incongruous packages that my shopping had
drawn down on me. Two deviations after that wretched prismatic compass
—which I obtained in the end secondhand, faute de mieux, near Victoria, at
one of those showy shops which look like jewellers’ and are really
pawnbrokers’—nearly caused me to miss my train. But at 8.30 I had shaken
off the dust of London from my feet, and at 10.30 I was, as I have
announced, pacing the deck of a Flushing steamer, adrift on this fatuous
holiday in the far Baltic.
An air from the west, cooled by a midday thunderstorm, followed the
steamer as she slid through the calm channels of the Thames estuary, passed
the cordon of scintillating lightships that watch over the sea-roads to the
imperial city like pickets round a sleeping army, and slipped out into the
dark spaces of the North Sea. Stars were bright, summer scents from the
Kent cliffs mingled coyly with vulgar steamer-smells; the summer weather
held immutably. Nature, for her part, seemed resolved to be no party to my
penance, but to be imperturbably bent on shedding mild ridicule over my
wrongs. An irresistible sense of peace and detachment, combined with that
delicious physical awakening that pulses through the nerve-sick townsman
when city airs and bald routine are left behind him, combined to provide
me, however thankless a subject, with a solid background of resignation.
Stowing this safely away, I could calculate my intentions with cold egotism.
If the weather held I might pass a not intolerable fortnight with Davies.
When it broke up, as it was sure to, I could easily excuse myself from the
pursuit of the problematical ducks; the wintry logic of facts would, in any
case, decide him to lay up his yacht, for he could scarcely think of sailing
home at such a season. I could then take a chance lying ready of spending a
few weeks in Dresden or elsewhere. I settled this programme comfortably
and then turned in.
From Flushing eastward to Hamburg, then northward to Flensburg, I cut
short the next day’s sultry story. Past dyke and windmill and still canals, on
to blazing stubbles and roaring towns; at the last, after dusk, through a quiet
level region where the train pottered from one lazy little station to another,
and at ten o’clock I found myself, stiff and stuffy, on the platform at
Flensburg, exchanging greetings with Davies.
“It’s awfully good of you to come.”

“Not at all; it’s very good of you to ask me.”
We were both of us ill at ease. Even in the dim gaslight he clashed on my
notions of a yachtsman—no cool white ducks or neat blue serge; and where
was the snowy crowned yachting cap, that precious charm that so easily
converts a landsman into a dashing mariner? Conscious that this impressive
uniform, in high perfection, was lying ready in my portmanteau, I felt oddly
guilty. He wore an old Norfolk jacket, muddy brown shoes, grey flannel
trousers (or had they been white?), and an ordinary tweed cap. The hand he
gave me was horny, and appeared to be stained with paint; the other one,
which carried a parcel, had a bandage on it which would have borne
renewal. There was an instant of mutual inspection. I thought he gave me a
shy, hurried scrutiny as though to test past conjectures, with something of
anxiety in it, and perhaps (save the mark!) a tinge of admiration. The face
was familiar, and yet not familiar; the pleasant blue eyes, open, clean-cut
features, unintellectual forehead were the same; so were the brisk and
impulsive movements; there was some change; but the moment of awkward
hesitation was over and the light was bad; and, while strolling down the
platform for my luggage, we chatted with constraint about trivial things.
“By the way,” he suddenly said, laughing, “I’m afraid I’m not fit to be
seen; but it’s so late it doesn’t matter. I’ve been painting hard all day, and
just got it finished. I only hope we shall have some wind to-morrow—it’s
been hopelessly calm lately. I say, you’ve brought a good deal of stuff,” he
concluded, as my belongings began to collect.
Here was a reward for my submissive exertions in the far east!
“You gave me a good many commissions!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean those things,” he said, absently. “Thanks for bringing
them, by the way. That’s the stove, I suppose; cartridges, this one, by the
weight. You got the rigging-screws all right, I hope? They’re not really
necessary, of course” (I nodded vacantly, and felt a little hurt); “but they’re
simpler than lanyards, and you can’t get them here. It’s that portmanteau,”
he said, slowly, measuring it with a doubtful eye. “Never mind! we’ll try.
You couldn’t do with the Gladstone only, I suppose? You see, the dinghy—
h’m, and there’s the hatchway, too”—he was lost in thought. “Anyhow,
we’ll try. I’m afraid there are no cabs; but it’s quite near, and the porter’ll
help.”

Sickening forebodings crept over me, while Davies shouldered my
Gladstone and clutched at the parcels.
“Aren’t your men here?” I asked, faintly.
“Men?” He looked confused. “Oh, perhaps I ought to have told you, I
never have any paid hands; it’s quite a small boat, you know—I hope you
didn’t expect luxury. I’ve managed her single-handed for some time. A man
would be no use, and a horrible nuisance.” He revealed these appalling
truths with a cheerful assurance, which did nothing to hide a naïve
apprehension of their effect on me. There was a check in our mobilisation.
“It’s rather late to go on board, isn’t it?” I said, in a wooden voice.
Someone was turning out the gaslights, and the porter yawned
ostentatiously. “I think I’d rather sleep at an hotel to-night.” A strained
pause.
“Oh, of course you can do that, if you like,” said Davies, in transparent
distress of mind. “But it seems hardly worth while to cart this stuff all the
way to an hotel (I believe they’re all on the other side of the harbour), and
back again to the boat to-morrow. She’s quite comfortable, and you’re sure
to sleep well, as you’re tired.”
“We can leave the things here,” I argued feebly, “and walk over with my
bag.”
“Oh, I shall have to go aboard anyhow,” he rejoined; “I never sleep on
shore.”
He seemed to be clinging timidly, but desperately, to some diplomatic
end. A stony despair was invading me and paralysing resistance. Better face
the worst and be done with it.
“Come on,” I said, grimly.
Heavily loaded, we stumbled over railway lines and rubble heaps, and
came on the harbour. Davies led the way to a stairway, whose weedy steps
disappeared below in gloom.
“If you’ll get into the dinghy,” he said, all briskness now, “I’ll pass the
things down.”
I descended gingerly, holding as a guide a sodden painter which ended in
a small boat, and conscious that I was collecting slime on cuffs and
trousers.

“Hold up!” shouted Davies, cheerfully, as I sat down suddenly near the
bottom, with one foot in the water.
I climbed wretchedly into the dinghy and awaited events.
“Now float her up close under the quay wall, and make fast to the ring
down there,” came down from above, followed by the slack of the sodden
painter, which knocked my cap off as it fell. “All fast? Any knot’ll do,” I
heard, as I grappled with this loathsome task, and then a big, dark object
loomed overhead and was lowered into the dinghy. It was my portmanteau,
and, placed athwart, exactly filled all the space amidships. “Does it fit?”
was the anxious inquiry from aloft.
“Beautifully.”
“Capital!”
Scratching at the greasy wall to keep the dinghy close to it, I received in
succession our stores, and stowed the cargo as best I could, while the
dinghy sank lower and lower in the water, and its precarious superstructure
grew higher.
“Catch!” was the final direction from above, and a damp soft parcel hit
me in the chest. “Be careful of that, it’s meat. Now back to the stairs!”
I painfully acquiesced, and Davies appeared.
“It’s a bit of a load, and she’s rather deep; but I think we shall manage,”
he reflected. “You sit right aft, and I’ll row.”
I was too far gone for curiosity as to how this monstrous pyramid was to
be rowed, or even for surmises as to its foundering by the way. I crawled to
my appointed seat, and Davies extricated the buried sculls by a series of
tugs, which shook the whole structure, and made us roll alarmingly. How he
stowed himself into rowing posture I have not the least idea, but eventually
we were moving sluggishly out into the open water, his head just visible in
the bows. We had started from what appeared to be the head of a narrow
loch, and were leaving behind us the lights of a big town. A long frontage of
lamp-lit quays was on our left, with here and there the vague hull of a
steamer alongside. We passed the last of the lights and came out into a
broader stretch of water, when a light breeze was blowing and dark hills
could be seen on either shore.
“I’m lying a little way down the fiord, you see,” said Davies. “I hate to
be too near a town, and I found a carpenter handy here— There she is! I

wonder how you’ll like her!”
I roused myself. We were entering a little cove encircled by trees, and
approaching a light which flickered in the rigging of a small vessel, whose
outline gradually defined itself.
“Keep her off,” said Davies, as we drew alongside.
In a moment he had jumped on deck, tied the painter, and was round at
my end.
“You hand them up,” he ordered, “and I’ll take them.”
It was a laborious task, with the one relief that it was not far to hand them
—a doubtful compensation, for other reasons distantly shaping themselves.
When the stack was transferred to the deck I followed it, tripping over the
flabby meat parcel, which was already showing ghastly signs of
disintegration under the dew. Hazily there floated through my mind my last
embarkation on a yacht; my faultless attire, the trim gig and obsequious
sailors, the accommodation ladder flashing with varnish and brass in the
August sun; the orderly, snowy decks and basket chairs under the awning
aft. What a contrast with this sordid midnight scramble, over damp meat
and littered packing-cases! The bitterest touch of all was a growing sense of
inferiority and ignorance which I had never before been allowed to feel in
my experience of yachts.
Davies awoke from another reverie over my portmanteau to say, cheerily:
“I’ll just show you round down below first, and then we’ll stow things away
and get to bed.”
He dived down a companion ladder, and I followed cautiously. A
complex odour of paraffin, past cookery, tobacco, and tar saluted my
nostrils.
“Mind your head,” said Davies, striking a match and lighting a candle,
while I groped into the cabin. “You’d better sit down; it’s easier to look
round.”
There might well have been sarcasm in this piece of advice, for I must
have cut a ridiculous figure, peering awkwardly and suspiciously round,
with shoulders and head bent to avoid the ceiling, which seemed in the half-
light to be even nearer the floor than it was.
“You see,” were Davies’s reassuring words, “there’s plenty of room to sit
upright” (which was strictly true; but I am not very tall, and he is short).

“Some people make a point of head-room, but I never mind much about it.
That’s the centreboard case,” he explained, as, in stretching my legs out, my
knee came into contact with a sharp edge.
I had not seen this devilish obstruction, as it was hidden beneath the
table, which indeed rested on it at one end. It appeared to be a long, low
triangle, running lengthways with the boat and dividing the naturally
limited space into two.
“You see, she’s a flat-bottomed boat, drawing very little water without
the plate; that’s why there’s so little headroom. For deep water you lower
the plate; so, in one way or another, you can go practically anywhere.”
I was not nautical enough to draw any very definite conclusions from
this, but what I did draw were not promising. The latter sentences were
spoken from the forecastle, whither Davies had crept through a low sliding
door, like that of a rabbit-hutch, and was already busy with a kettle over a
stove which I made out to be a battered and disreputable twin brother of the
No. 3 Rippingille.
“It’ll be boiling soon,” he remarked, “and we’ll have some grog.”
My eyes were used to the light now, and I took in the rest of my
surroundings, which may be very simply described. Two long cushion-
covered seats flanked the cabin, bounded at the after end by cupboards, one
of which was cut low to form a sort of miniature sideboard, with glasses
hung in a rack above it. The deck overhead was very low at each side but
rose shoulder high for a space in the middle, where a “coach-house roof”
with a skylight gave additional cabin space. Just outside the door was a
fold-up washing-stand. On either wall were long net-racks holding a medley
of flags, charts, caps, cigar-boxes, hanks of yarn, and such like. Across the
forward bulkhead was a bookshelf crammed to overflowing with volumes
of all sizes, many upside down and some coverless. Below this were a pipe-
rack, an aneroid, and a clock with a hearty tick. All the woodwork was
painted white, and to a less jaundiced eye than mine the interior might have
had an enticing look of snugness. Some Kodak prints were nailed roughly
on the after bulkhead, and just over the doorway was the photograph of a
young girl.
“That’s my sister,” said Davies, who had emerged and saw me looking at
it. “Now, let’s get the stuff down.” He ran up the ladder, and soon my
portmanteau blackened the hatchway, and a great straining and squeezing

began. “I was afraid it was too big,” came down; “I’m sorry, but you’ll have
to unpack on deck—we may be able to squash it down when it’s empty.”
Then the wearisome tail of packages began to form a fresh stack in the
cramped space at my feet, and my back ached with stooping and moiling in
unfamiliar places. Davies came down, and with unconcealed pride
introduced me to the sleeping cabin (he called the other one “the saloon”).
Another candle was lit and showed two short and narrow berths with
blankets, but no sign of sheets; beneath these were drawers, one set of
which Davies made me master of, evidently thinking them a princely
allowance of space for my wardrobe.
“You can chuck your things down the skylight on to your berth as you
unpack them,” he remarked. “By the way, I doubt if there’s room for all
you’ve got. I suppose you couldn’t manage——”
“No, I couldn’t,” I said shortly.
The absurdity of argument struck me; two men, doubled up like
monkeys, cannot argue.
“If you’ll go out I shall be able to get out too,” I added. He seemed
miserable at this ghost of an altercation, but I pushed past, mounted the
ladder, and in the expiring moonlight unstrapped that accursed portmanteau
and, brimming over with irritation, groped among its contents, sorting some
into the skylight with the same feeling that nothing mattered much now, and
it was best to be done with it; repacking the rest with guilty stealth ere
Davies should discover their character, and strapping up the whole again.
Then I sat down upon my white elephant and shivered, for the chill of
autumn was in the air. It suddenly struck me that if it had been raining
things might have been worse still. The notion made me look round. The
little cove was still as glass; stars above and stars below; a few white
cottages glimmering at one point on the shore; in the west the lights of
Flensburg; to the east the fiord broadening into unknown gloom. From
Davies toiling below there were muffled sounds of wrenching, pushing, and
hammering, punctuated occasionally by a heavy splash as something shot
up from the hatchway and fell into the water.
How it came about I do not know. Whether it was something pathetic in
the look I had last seen on his face—a look which I associated for no reason
whatever with his bandaged hand; whether it was one of those instants of
clear vision in which our separate selves are seen divided, the baser from

the better, and I saw my silly egotism in contrast with a simple generous
nature; whether it was an impalpable air of mystery which pervaded the
whole enterprise and refused to be dissipated by its most mortifying and
vulgarising incidents—a mystery dimly connected with my companion’s
obvious consciousness of having misled me into joining him; whether it
was only the stars and the cool air rousing atrophied instincts of youth and
spirits; probably, indeed, it was all these influences, cemented into strength
by a ruthless sense of humour which whispered that I was in danger of
making a mere commonplace fool of myself in spite of all my laboured
calculations; but whatever it was, in a flash my mood changed. The crown
of martyrdom disappeared, the wounded vanity healed; that precious fund
of fictitious resignation drained away, but left no void. There was left a
fashionable and dishevelled young man sitting in the dew and in the dark on
a ridiculous portmanteau which dwarfed the yacht that was to carry it; a
youth acutely sensible of ignorance in a strange and strenuous atmosphere;
still feeling sore and victimised; but withal sanely ashamed and sanely
resolved to enjoy himself. I anticipate; for though the change was radical its
full growth was slow. But in any case it was here and now that it took its
birth.
“Grog’s ready!” came from below. Bunching myself for the descent I
found to my astonishment that all trace of litter had miraculously vanished,
and a cosy neatness reigned. Glasses and lemons were on the table, and a
fragrant smell of punch had deadened previous odours. I showed little
emotion at these amenities, but enough to give intense relief to Davies, who
delightedly showed me his devices for storage, praising the “roominess” of
his floating den. “There’s your stove, you see,” he ended; “I’ve chucked the
old one overboard.” It was a weakness of his, I should say here, to rejoice in
throwing things overboard on the flimsiest pretexts. I afterwards suspected
that the new stove had not been “really necessary” any more than the
rigging-screws, but was an excuse for gratifying this curious taste.
We smoked and chatted for a little, and then came the problem of going
to bed. After much bumping of knuckles and head, and many giddy
writhings, I mastered it, and lay between the rough blankets. Davies,
moving swiftly and deftly, was soon in his.
“It’s quite comfortable, isn’t it?” he said, as he blew out the light from
where he lay, with an accuracy which must have been the fruit of long

practice.
I felt prickly all over, and there was a damp patch on the pillow, which
was soon explained by a heavy drop of moisture falling on my forehead.
“I suppose the deck’s not leaking?” I said, as mildly as I could.
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Davies, earnestly, tumbling out of his bunk. “It
must be the heavy dew. I did a lot of caulking yesterday, but I suppose I
missed that place. I’ll run up and square it with an oilskin.”
“What’s wrong with your hand?” I asked, sleepily, on his return, for
gratitude reminded me of that bandage.
“Nothing much; I strained it the other day,” was the reply; and then the
seemingly inconsequent remark: “I’m glad you brought that prismatic
compass. It’s not really necessary, of course; but” (muffled by blankets) “it
may come in useful.”

CHAPTER III.
Davies

I dozed but fitfully, with a fretful sense of sore elbows and neck and many a
draughty hiatus among the blankets. It was broad daylight before I had
reached the stage of torpor in which such slumber merges. That was finally
broken by the descent through the skylight of a torrent of water. I started up,
bumped my head hard against the decks, and blinked leaden-eyed upwards.
“Sorry! I’m scrubbing decks. Come up and bathe. Slept well?” I heard a
voice saying from aloft.
“Fairly well,” I growled, stepping out into a pool of water on the oilcloth.
Thence I stumbled up the ladder, dived overboard, and buried bad dreams,
stiffness, frowsiness, and tormented nerves in the loveliest fiord of the
lovely Baltic. A short and furious swim and I was back again, searching for
a means of ascent up the smooth black side, which, low as it was, was
slippery and unsympathetic. Davies, in a loose canvas shirt, with the sleeves
tucked up, and flannels rolled up to the knee, hung over me with a rope’s
end, and chatted unconcernedly about the easiness of the job when you
know how, adjuring me to mind the paint, and talking about an
accommodation ladder he had once had, but had thrown overboard because
it was so horribly in the way. When I arrived, my knees and elbows were
picked out in black paint, to his consternation. Nevertheless, as I plied the
towel, I knew that I had left in those limpid depths yet another crust of
discontent and self-conceit.
As I dressed into flannels and blazer, I looked round the deck, and with
an unskilled and doubtful eye took in all that the darkness had hitherto
hidden. She seemed very small (in point of fact she was seven tons),
something over thirty feet in length and nine in beam, a size very suitable to
week-ends in the Solent, for such as liked that sort of thing; but that she
should have come from Dover to the Baltic suggested a world of physical

endeavour of which I had never dreamed. I passed to the æsthetic side.
Smartness and beauty were essential to yachts, in my mind, but with the
best resolves to be pleased I found little encouragement here. The hull
seemed too low, and the mainmast too high; the cabin roof looked clumsy,
and the skylights saddened the eye with dull iron and plebeian graining.
What brass there was, on the tiller-head and elsewhere, was tarnished with
sickly green. The decks had none of that creamy purity which Cowes
expects, but were rough and grey, and showed tarry exhalations round the
seams and rusty stains near the bows. The ropes and rigging were in
mourning when contrasted with the delicate buff manilla so satisfying to the
artistic eye as seen against the blue of a June sky at Southsea. Nor was the
whole effect bettered by many signs of recent refitting. An impression of
paint, varnish, and carpentry was in the air; a gaudy new burgee fluttered
aloft; there seemed to be a new rope or two, especially round the diminutive
mizzen-mast, which itself looked altogether new. But all this only
emphasised the general plainness, reminding one of a respectable woman of
the working-classes trying to dress above her station, and soon likely to
give it up.
That the ensemble was businesslike and solid even my untrained eye
could see. Many of the deck fittings seemed disproportionately substantial.
The anchor-chain looked contemptuous of its charge; the binnacle with its
compass was of a size and prominence almost comically impressive, and
was, moreover the only piece of brass which was burnished and showed
traces of reverent care. Two huge coils of stout and dingy warp lay just
abaft the mainmast, and summed up the weather-beaten aspect of the little
ship. I should add here that in the distant past she had been a lifeboat, and
had been clumsily converted into a yacht by the addition of a counter, deck,
and the necessary spars. She was built, as all lifeboats are, diagonally, of
two skins of teak, and thus had immense strength, though, in the matter of
looks, all a hybrid’s failings.
Hunger and “Tea’s made!” from below brought me down to the cabin,
where I found breakfast laid out on the table over the centreboard case, with
Davies earnestly presiding, rather flushed as to the face, and sooty as to the
fingers. There was a slight shortage of plate and crockery, but I praised the
bacon and could do so truthfully, for its crisp and steaming shavings would
have put to shame the efforts of my London cook. Indeed, I should have
enjoyed the meal heartily were it not for the lowness of the sofa and table,

causing a curvature of the body which made swallowing a more lengthy
process than usual, and induced a periodical yearning to get up and stretch
—a relief which spelt disaster to the skull. I noticed, too, that Davies spoke
with a zest, sinister to me, of the delights of white bread and fresh milk,
which he seemed to consider unusual luxuries, though suitable to an
inaugural banquet in honour of a fastidious stranger. “One can’t be always
going on shore,” he said, when I showed a discreet interest in these things.
“I lived for ten days on a big rye loaf over in the Frisian Islands.”
“And it died hard, I suppose?”
“Very hard, but” (gravely) “quite good. After that I taught myself to make
rolls; had no baking powder at first, so used Eno’s fruit salt, but they
wouldn’t rise much with that. As for milk, condensed is—I hope you don’t
mind it?”
I changed the subject, and asked about his plans.
“Let’s get under way at once,” he said, “and sail down the fiord.” I tried
for something more specific, but he was gone, and his voice drowned in the
fo’c’sle by the clatter and swish of washing up. Thenceforward events
moved with bewildering rapidity. Humbly desirous of being useful I joined
him on deck, only to find that he scarcely noticed me, save as a new and
unexpected obstacle in his round of activity. He was everywhere at once—
heaving in chain, hooking on halyards, hauling ropes; while my part
became that of the clown who does things after they are already done, for
my knowledge of a yacht was of that floating and inaccurate kind which is
useless in practice. Soon the anchor was up (a great rusty monster it was!),
the sails set, and Davies was darting swiftly to and fro between the tiller and
jib-sheets, while the Dulcibella bowed a lingering farewell to the shore and
headed for the open fiord. Erratic puffs from the high land behind made her
progress timorous at first, but soon the fairway was reached and a true
breeze from Flensburg and the west took her in its friendly grip. Steadily
she rustled down the calm blue highway whose soft beauty was the
introduction to a passage in my life, short, but pregnant with moulding
force, through stress and strain, for me and others.
Davies was gradually resuming his natural self, with abstracted intervals,
in which he lashed the helm to finger a distant rope, with such speed that
the movements seemed simultaneous. Once he vanished, only to reappear in
an instant with a chart, which he studied, while steering, with a success that

its reluctant folds seemed to render impossible. Waiting respectfully for his
revival I had full time to look about. The fiord here was about a mile broad.
From the shore we had left the hills rose steeply, but with no rugged
grandeur; the outlines were soft; there were green spaces and rich woods on
the lower slopes; a little white town was opening up in one place, and
scattered farms dotted the prospect. The other shore, which I could just see,
framed between the gunwale and the mainsail, as I sat leaning against the
hatchway, and sadly missing a deck-chair, was lower and lonelier, though
prosperous and pleasing to the eye. Spacious pastures led up by slow
degrees to ordered clusters of wood, which hinted at the presence of some
great manor house. Behind us, Flensburg was settling into haze. Ahead, the
scene was shut in by the contours of hills, some clear, some dreamy and
distant. Lastly, a single glimpse of water shining between the folds of hill
far away hinted at spaces of distant sea of which this was but a secluded
inlet. Everywhere was that peculiar charm engendered by the association of
quiet pastoral country and a homely human atmosphere with a branch of the
great ocean that bathes all the shores of our globe.
There was another charm in the scene, due to the way in which I was
viewing it—not as a pampered passenger on a “fine steam yacht”, or even
on “a powerful modern schooner”, as the yacht agents advertise, but from
the deck of a scrubby little craft of doubtful build and distressing plainness,
which yet had smelt her persistent way to this distant fiord through I knew
not what of difficulty and danger, with no apparent motive in her single
occupant, who talked as vaguely and unconcernedly about his adventurous
cruise as though it were all a protracted afternoon on Southampton Water.
I glanced round at Davies. He had dropped the chart and was sitting, or
rather half lying, on the deck with one bronzed arm over the tiller, gazing
fixedly ahead, with just an occasional glance around and aloft. He still
seemed absorbed in himself, and for a moment or two I studied his face
with an attention I had never, since I had known him, given it. I had always
thought it commonplace, as I had thought him commonplace, so far as I had
thought at all about either. It had always rather irritated me by an excess of
candour and boyishness. These qualities it had kept, but the scales were
falling from my eyes, and I saw others. I saw strength to obstinacy and
courage to recklessness, in the firm lines of the chin; an older and deeper
look in the eyes. Those odd transitions from bright mobility to detached
earnestness, which had partly amused and chiefly annoyed me hitherto,

seemed now to be lost in a sensitive reserve, not cold or egotistic, but
strangely winning from its paradoxical frankness. Sincerity was stamped on
every lineament. A deep misgiving stirred me that, clever as I thought
myself, nicely perceptive of the right and congenial men to know, I had
made some big mistakes—how many, I wondered? A relief, scarcely less
deep because it was unconfessed, stole in on me with the suspicion that,
little as I deserved it, the patient fates were offering me a golden chance of
repairing at least one. And yet, I mused, the patient fates have crooked
methods, besides a certain mischievous humour, for it was Davies who had
asked me out—though now he scarcely seemed to need me—almost tricked
me into coming out, for he might have known I was not suited to such a
life; yet trickery and Davies sounded an odd conjuncture.
Probably it was the growing discomfort of my attitude which produced
this backsliding. My night’s rest and the “ascent from the bath” had, in fact,
done little to prepare me for contact with sharp edges and hard surfaces. But
Davies had suddenly come to himself, and with an “I say, are you
comfortable? Have something to sit on?” jerked the helm a little to
windward, felt it like a pulse for a moment, with a rapid look to windward,
and dived below, whence he returned with a couple of cushions, which he
threw to me. I felt perversely resentful of these luxuries, and asked:
“Can’t I be of any use?”
“Oh, don’t you bother,” he answered. “I expect you’re tired. Aren’t we
having a splendid sail? That must be Ekken on the port bow,” peering under
the sail, “where the trees run in. I say, do you mind looking at the chart?”
He tossed it over to me. I spread it out painfully, for it curled up like a
watch-spring at the least slackening of pressure. I was not familiar with
charts, and this sudden trust reposed in me, after a good deal of neglect,
made me nervous.
“You see Flensburg, don’t you?” he said. “That’s where we are,” dabbing
with a long reach at an indefinite space on the crowded sheet. “Now which
side of that buoy off the point do we pass?”
I had scarcely taken in which was land and which was water, much less
the significance of the buoy, when he resumed:
“Never mind; I’m pretty sure it’s all deep water about here. I expect that
marks the fairway for steamers.

In a minute or two we were passing the buoy in question, on the wrong
side I am pretty certain, for weeds and sand came suddenly into view below
us with uncomfortable distinctness. But all Davies said was:
“There’s never any sea here, and the plate’s not down,” a dark utterance
which I pondered doubtfully. “The best of these Schleswig waters,” he went
on, “is that a boat of this size can go almost anywhere. There’s no
navigation required. Why——” At this moment a faint scraping was felt,
rather than heard, beneath us.
“Aren’t we aground?” I asked with great calmness.
“Oh, she’ll blow over,” he replied, wincing a little.
She “blew over”, but the episode caused a little naïve vexation in Davies.
I relate it as a good instance of one of his minor peculiarities. He was
utterly without that didactic pedantry which yachting has a fatal tendency to
engender in men who profess it. He had tossed me the chart without a
thought that I was an ignoramus, to whom it would be Greek, and who
would provide him with an admirable subject to drill and lecture, just as his
neglect of me throughout the morning had been merely habitual and
unconscious independence. In the second place, master of his métier, as I
knew him afterwards to be, resourceful, skilful, and alert, he was liable to
lapse into a certain amateurish vagueness, half irritating and half amusing. I
think truly that both these peculiarities came from the same source, a hatred
of any sort of affectation. To the same source I traced the fact that he and
his yacht observed none of the superficial etiquette of yachts and
yachtsmen, that she never, for instance, flew a national ensign, and he never
wore a “yachting suit”.
We rounded a low green point which I had scarcely noticed before.
“We must jibe,” said Davies: “just take the helm, will you?” and, without
waiting for my co-operation, he began hauling in the mainsheet with great
vigour. I had rude notions of steering, but jibing is a delicate operation. No
yachtsman will be surprised to hear that the boom saw its opportunity and
swung over with a mighty crash, with the mainsheet entangled round me
and the tiller.
“Jibed all standing,” was his sorrowful comment. “You’re not used to her
yet. She’s very quick on the helm.”
“Where am I to steer for?” I asked, wildly.

“Oh, don’t trouble, I’ll take her now,” he replied.
I felt it was time to make my position clear. “I’m an utter duffer at
sailing,” I began. “You’ll have a lot to teach me, or one of these days I shall
be wrecking you. You see, there’s always been a crew——”
“Crew!”—with sovereign contempt—“why, the whole fun of the thing is
to do everything oneself.”
“Well, I’ve felt in the way the whole morning.”
“I’m awfully sorry!” His dismay and repentance were comical. “Why, it’s
just the other way; you may be all the use in the world.” He became absent.
We were following the inward trend of a small bay towards a cleft in the
low shore.
“That’s Ekken Sound,” said Davies; “let’s look into it,” and a minute or
two later we were drifting through a dainty little strait, with a peep of open
water at the end of it. Cottages bordered either side, some overhanging the
very water, some connecting with it by a rickety wooden staircase or a
miniature landing-stage. Creepers and roses rioted over the walls and tiny
porches. For a space on one side, a rude quay, with small smacks floating
off it, spoke of some minute commercial interests; a very small tea-garden,
with neglected-looking bowers and leaf-strewn tables, hinted at some
equally minute tripping interest. A pervading hue of mingled bronze and
rose came partly from the weather-mellowed woodwork of the cottages and
stages, and partly from the creepers and the trees behind, where autumn’s
subtle fingers were already at work. Down this exquisite sea-lane we glided
till it ended in a broad mere, where our sails, which had been shivering and
complaining, filled into contented silence.
“Ready about!” said Davies, callously. “We must get out of this again.”
And round we swung.
“Why not anchor and stop here?” I protested; for a view of tantalising
loveliness was unfolding itself.
“Oh, we’ve seen all there is to be seen, and we must take this breeze
while we’ve got it.” It was always torture to Davies to feel a good breeze
running to waste while he was inactive at anchor or on shore. The “shore”
to him was an inferior element, merely serving as a useful annexe to the
water—a source of necessary supplies.

“Let’s have lunch,” he pursued, as we resumed our way down the fiord.
A vision of iced drinks, tempting salads, white napery, and an attentive
steward mocked me with past recollections.
“You’ll find a tongue,” said the voice of doom, “in the starboard sofa-
locker; beer under the floor in the bilge. I’ll see her round that buoy, if you
wouldn’t mind beginning.” I obeyed with a bad grace, but the close air and
cramped posture must have benumbed my faculties, for I opened the port-
side locker, reached down, and grasped a sticky body, which turned out to
be a pot of varnish. Recoiling wretchedly, I tried the opposite one,
combating the embarrassing heel of the boat and the obstructive edges of
the centreboard case. A medley of damp tins of varied sizes showed in the
gloom, exuding a mouldy odour. Faded legends on dissolving paper, like
the remnants of old posters on a disused hoarding, spoke of soups, curries,
beefs, potted meats, and other hidden delicacies. I picked out a tongue, re-
imprisoned the odour, and explored for beer. It was true, I supposed, that
bilge didn’t hurt it, as I tugged at the plank on my hands and knees, but I
should have myself preferred a more accessible and less humid wine-cellar
than the cavities among slimy ballast from which I dug the bottles. I
regarded my hard-won and ill-favoured pledges of a meal with giddiness
and discouragement.
“How are you getting on?” shouted Davies; “the tin-opener’s hanging up
on the bulkhead; the plates and knives are in the cupboard.”
I doggedly pursued my functions. The plates and knives met me half-
way, for, being on the weather side, and thus having a downward slant, its
contents, when I slipped the latch, slid affectionately into my bosom, and
overflowed with a clatter and jingle on to the floor.
“That often happens,” I heard from above. “Never mind! There are no
breakables. I’m coming down to help.” And down he came, leaving the
Dulcibella to her own devices.
“I think I’ll go on deck,” I said. “Why in the world couldn’t you lunch
comfortably at Ekken and save this infernal pandemonium of a picnic?
Where’s the yacht going to meanwhile? And how are we to lunch on that
slanting table? I’m covered with varnish and mud, and ankle-deep in
crockery. There goes the beer!”
“You shouldn’t have stood it on the table with this list on,” said Davies,
with intense composure, “but it won’t do any harm; it’ll drain into the

bilge” (ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I thought). “You go on deck now, and
I’ll finish getting ready.” I regretted my explosion, though wrung from me
under great provocation.
“Keep her straight on as she’s going,” said Davies, as I clambered up out
of the chaos, brushing the dust off my trousers and varnishing the ladder
with my hands. I unlashed the helm and kept her as she was going.
We had rounded a sharp bend in the fiord, and were sailing up a broad
and straight reach which every moment disclosed new beauties, sights fair
enough to be balm to the angriest spirit. A red-roofed hamlet was on our
left, on the right an ivied ruin, close to the water, where some contemplative
cattle stood knee-deep. The view ahead was a white strand which fringed
both shores, and to it fell wooded slopes, interrupted here and there by low
sandstone cliffs of warm red colouring, and now and again by a dingle with
cracks of greensward.
I forgot petty squalors and enjoyed things—the coy tremble of the tiller
and the backwash of air from the dingy mainsail, and, with a somewhat
chastened rapture, the lunch which Davies brought up to me and
solicitously watched me eat.
Later, as the wind sank to lazy airs, he became busy with a larger topsail
and jib; but I was content to doze away the afternoon, drenching brain and
body in the sweet and novel foreign atmosphere, and dreamily watching the
fringe of glen cliff and cool white sand as they passed ever more slowly by.

CHAPTER IV.
Retrospect

“Wake up!” I rubbed my eyes and wondered where I was; stretched myself
painfully, too, for even the cushions had not given me a true bed of roses. It
was dusk, and the yacht was stationary in glassy water, coloured by the last
after-glow. A roofing of thin upper-cloud had spread over most of the sky,
and a subtle smell of rain was in the air. We seemed to be in the middle of
the fiord, whose shores looked distant and steep in the gathering darkness.
Close ahead they faded away suddenly, and the sight lost itself in a grey
void. The stillness was absolute.
“We can’t get to Sonderburg to-night,” said Davies.
“What’s to be done then?” I asked, collecting my senses.
“Oh! we’ll anchor anywhere here, we’re just at the mouth of the fiord;
I’ll tow her inshore if you’ll steer in that direction.” He pointed vaguely at a
blur of trees and cliff. Then he jumped into the dinghy, cast off the painter,
and, after snatching at the slack of a rope, began towing the reluctant yacht
by short jerks of the sculls. The menacing aspect of that grey void,
combined with a natural preference for getting to some definite place at
night, combined to depress my spirits afresh. In my sleep I had dreamt of
Morven Lodge, of heather tea-parties after glorious slaughters of grouse, of
salmon leaping in amber pools—and now——
“Just take a cast of the lead, will you?” came Davies’s voice above the
splash of the sculls.
“Where is it?” I shouted back.
“Never mind—we’re close enough now; let—— Can you manage to let
go the anchor?”
I hurried forward and picked impotently at the bonds of the sleeping
monster. But Davies was aboard again, and stirred him with a deft touch or

two, till he crashed into the water with a grinding of chain.
“We shall do well here,” said he.
“Isn’t this rather an open anchorage?” I suggested.
“It’s only open from that quarter,” he replied. “If it comes on to blow
from there we shall have to clear out; but I think it’s only rain. Let’s stow
the sails.”
Another whirlwind of activity, in which I joined as effectively as I could,
oppressed by the prospect of having to “clear out”—who knows whither?—
at midnight. But Davies’s sang froid was infectious, I suppose, and the little
den below, bright-lit and soon fragrant with cookery, pleaded insistently for
affection. Yachting in this singular style was hungry work, I found. Steak
tastes none the worse for having been wrapped in newspaper, and the slight
traces of the day’s news disappear with frying in onions and potato-chips.
Davies was indeed on his mettle for this, his first dinner to his guest; for he
produced with stealthy pride, not from the dishonoured grave of the beer,
but from some more hallowed recess, a bottle of German champagne, from
which we drank success to the Dulcibella.
“I wish you would tell me all about your cruise from England,” I asked.
“You must have had some exciting adventures. Here are the charts; let’s go
over them.”
“We must wash up first,” he replied, and I was tactfully introduced to one
of his very few “standing orders”, that tobacco should not burn, nor post-
prandial chat begin, until that distasteful process had ended. “It would never
get done otherwise,” he sagely opined. But when we were finally settled
with cigars, a variety of which, culled from many ports—German, Dutch,
and Belgian—Davies kept in a battered old box in the net-rack, the
promised talk hung fire.
“I’m no good at description,” he complained; “and there’s really very
little to tell. We left Dover—Morrison and I—on the 6th of August; made a
good passage to Ostend.”
“You had some fun there, I suppose?” I put in, thinking of—well, of
Ostend in August.
“Fun! A filthy hole I call it; we had to stop a couple of days, as we fouled
a buoy coming in and carried away the bobstay; we lay in a dirty little tidal
dock, and there was nothing to do on shore.”

“Well, what next?”
“We had a splendid sail to the East Scheldt, but then, like fools, decided
to go through Holland by canal and river. It was good fun enough
navigating the estuary—the tides and banks there are appalling—but farther
inland it was a wretched business, nothing but paying lock-dues, bumping
against schuyts, and towing down stinking canals. Never a peaceful night
like this—always moored by some quay or tow-path, with people passing
and boys. Heavens! shall I ever forget those boys! A perfect murrain of
them infests Holland; they seem to have nothing in the world to do but
throw stones and mud at foreign yachts.”
“They want a Herod, with some statesmanlike views on infanticide.”
“By Jove! yes; but the fact is that you want a crew for that pottering
inland work; they can smack the boys and keep an eye on the sculls. A boat
like this should stick to the sea, or out-of-the-way places on the coast. Well,
after Amsterdam.”
“You’ve skipped a good deal, haven’t you?” I interrupted.
“Oh! have I? Well, let me see, we went by Dordrecht to Rotterdam;
nothing to see there, and swarms of tugs buzzing about and shaving one’s
bows every second. On by the Vecht river to Amsterdam, and thence—
Lord, what a relief it was!—out into the North Sea again. The weather had
been still and steamy; but it broke up finely now, and we had a rattling
three-reef sail to the Zuyder Zee.”
He reached up to the bookshelf for what looked like an ancient ledger,
and turned over the leaves.
“Is that your log?” I asked. “I should like to have a look at it.”
“Oh! you’d find it dull reading—if you could read it at all; it’s just short
notes about winds and bearings, and so on.” He was turning some leaves
over rapidly. “Now, why don’t you keep a log of what we do? I can’t
describe things, and you can.”
“I’ve half a mind to try,” I said.
“We want another chart now,” and he pulled down a second yet more
stained and frayed than the first. “We had a splendid time then exploring the
Zuyder Zee, its northern part at least, and round those islands which bound
it on the north. Those are the Frisian Islands, and they stretch for 120 miles
or so eastward. You see, the first two of them, Texel and Vlieland, shut in

the Zuyder Zee, and the rest border the Dutch and German coasts.” [See
Map A]
“What’s all this?” I said, running my finger over some dotted patches
which covered much of the chart. The latter was becoming unintelligible;
clean-cut coasts and neat regiments of little figures had given place to a
confusion of winding and intersecting lines and bald spaces.
“All sand,” said Davies, enthusiastically. “You can’t think what a
splendid sailing-ground it is. You can explore for days without seeing a
soul. These are the channels, you see; they’re very badly charted. This chart
was almost useless, but it made it all the more fun. No towns or harbours,
just a village or two on the islands, if you wanted stores.”
“They look rather desolate,” I said.
“Desolate’s no word for it; they’re really only gigantic sandbanks
themselves.”
“Wasn’t all this rather dangerous?” I asked.
“Not a bit; you see, that’s where our shallow draught and flat bottom
came in—we could go anywhere, and it didn’t matter running aground—
she’s perfect for that sort of work; and she doesn’t really look bad either,
does she?” he asked, rather wistfully. I suppose I hesitated, for he said,
abruptly:
“Anyway, I don’t go in for looks.”
He had leaned back, and I detected traces of incipient absentmindedness.
His cigar, which he had lately been lighting and relighting feverishly—a
habit of his when excited—seemed now to have expired for good.
“About running aground,” I persisted; “surely that’s apt to be
dangerous?”
He sat up and felt round for a match.
“Not the least, if you know where you can run risks and where you can’t;
anyway, you can’t possibly help it. That chart may look simple to you”—
(“simple!” I thought)—“but at half flood all those banks are covered; the
islands and coasts are scarcely visible, they are so low, and everything looks
the same.” This graphic description of a “splendid cruising-ground” took
away my breath. “Of course there is risk sometimes—choosing an
anchorage requires care. You can generally get a nice berth under the lee of

a bank, but the tides run strong in the channels, and if there’s a gale blowing
——”
“Didn’t you ever take a pilot?” I interrupted.
“Pilot? Why, the whole point of the thing”—he stopped short—“I did
take one once, later on,” he resumed, with an odd smile, which faded at
once.
“Well?” I urged, for I saw a reverie was coming.
“Oh! he ran me ashore, of course. Served me right. I wonder what the
weather’s doing”; he rose, glanced at the aneroid, the clock, and the half-
closed skylight with a curious circular movement, and went a step or two up
the companion-ladder, where he remained for several minutes with head
and shoulders in the open air.
There was no sound of wind outside, but the Dulcibella had begun to
move in her sleep, as it were, rolling drowsily to some faint send of the sea,
with an occasional short jump, like the start of an uneasy dreamer.
“What does it look like?” I called from my sofa. I had to repeat the
question.
“Rain coming,” said Davies, returning, “and possibly wind; but we’re
safe enough here. It’s coming from the sou’-west; shall we turn in?”
“We haven’t finished your cruise yet,” I said. “Light a pipe and tell me
the rest.”
“All right,” he agreed, with more readiness than I expected.
“After Terschelling—here it is, the third island from the west—I pottered
along eastward.” [See Map A]
“I?”
“Oh! I forgot. Morrison had to leave me there. I missed him badly, but I
hoped at that time to get —— to join me. I could manage all right single-
handed, but for that sort of work two are much better than one. The plate’s
beastly heavy; in fact, I had to give up using it for fear of a smash.”
“After Terschelling?” I jogged his memory.
“Well, I followed the Dutch islands, Ameland, Schiermonnikoog, Rottum
(outlandish names, aren’t they?), sometimes outside them, sometimes
inside. It was a bit lonely, but grand sport and very interesting. The charts
were shocking, but I worried out most of the channels.”

“I suppose those waters are only used by small local craft?” I put in; “that
would account for inaccuracies.” Did Davies think that Admiralties had
time to waste on smoothing the road for such quixotic little craft as his, in
all its inquisitive ramblings? But he fired up.
“That’s all very well,” he said, “but think what folly it is. However, that’s
a long story, and will bore you. To cut matters short, for we ought to be
turning in, I got to Borkum—that’s the first of the German islands.” He
pointed at a round bare lozenge lying in the midst of a welter of sandbanks.
“Rottum—this queer little one—it has only one house on it—is the most
easterly Dutch island, and the mainland of Holland ends here, opposite it, at
the Ems River”—indicating a dismal cavity in the coast, sown with names
suggestive of mud, and wrecks, and dreariness.
“What date was this?” I asked.
“About the ninth of this month.”
“Why, that’s only a fortnight before you wired to me! You were pretty
quick getting to Flensburg. Wait a bit, we want another chart. Is this the
next?”
“Yes; but we scarcely need it. I only went a little way farther on—to
Norderney, in fact, the third German island—then I decided to go straight
for the Baltic. I had always had an idea of getting there, as Knight did in the
Falcon. So I made a passage of it to the Eider River, there on the West
Schleswig coast, took the river and canal through to Kiel on the Baltic, and
from there made another passage up north to Flensburg. I was a week there,
and then you came, and here we are. And now let’s turn in. We’ll have a
fine sail to-morrow!” He ended with rather forced vivacity, and briskly
rolled up the chart. The reluctance he had shown from the first to talk about
his cruise had been for a brief space forgotten in his enthusiasm about a
portion of it, but had returned markedly in this bald conclusion. I felt sure
that there was more in it than mere disinclination to spin nautical yarns in
the “hardy Corinthian” style, which can be so offensive in amateur
yachtsmen; and I thought I guessed the explanation. His voyage single-
handed to the Baltic from the Frisian Islands had been a foolhardy
enterprise, with perilous incidents, which, rather than make light of, he
would not refer to at all. Probably he was ashamed of his recklessness and
wished to ignore it with me, an inexperienced acquaintance not yet
enamoured of the Dulcibella’s way of life, whom both courtesy and interest

demanded that he should inspire with confidence. I liked him all the better
as I came to this conclusion, but I was tempted to persist a little.
“I slept the whole afternoon,” I said; “and, to tell the truth, I rather dread
the idea of going to bed, it’s so tiring. Look here, you’ve rushed over that
last part like an express train. That passage to the Schleswig coast—the
Eider River, did you say?—was a longish one, wasn’t it?”
“Well, you see what it was; about seventy miles, I suppose, direct.” He
spoke low, bending down to sweep up some cigar ashes on the floor.
“Direct?” I insinuated. “Then you put in somewhere?”
“I stopped once, anchored for the night; oh, that’s nothing of a sail with a
fair wind. By Jove! I’ve forgotten to caulk that seam over your bunk, and
it’s going to rain. I must do it now. You turn in.”
He disappeared. My curiosity, never very consuming, was banished by
concern as to the open seam; for the prospect of a big drop, remorseless and
regular as Fate, falling on my forehead throughout the night, as in the
torture-chamber of the Inquisition, was alarming enough to recall me
wholly to the immediate future. So I went to bed, finding on the whole that
I had made progress in the exercise, though still far from being the trained
contortionist that the occasion called for. Hammering ceased, and Davies
reappeared just as I was stretched on the rack—tucked up in my bunk, I
mean.
“I say,” he said, when he was settled in his, and darkness reigned, “do
you think you’ll like this sort of thing?”
“If there are many places about here as beautiful as this,” I replied, “I
think I shall. But I should like to land now and then and have a walk. Of
course, a great deal depends on the weather, doesn’t it? I hope this rain”
(drops had begun to patter overhead) “doesn’t mean that the summer’s over
for good.”
“Oh, you can sail just the same,” said Davies, “unless it’s very bad.
There’s plenty of sheltered water. There’s bound to be a change soon. But
then there are the ducks. The colder and stormier it is, the better for them.”
I had forgotten the ducks and the cold, and, suddenly presented as a
shooting-box in inclement weather, the Dulcibella lost ground in my
estimation, which she had latterly gained.

“I’m fond of shooting,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’m only a fair-weather
yachtsman, and I should much prefer sun and scenery.”
“Scenery,” he repeated, reflectively. “I say, you must have thought it a
queer taste of mine to cruise about on that outlandish Frisian coast. How
would you like that sort of thing?”
“I should loathe it,” I answered, promptly, with a clear conscience.
“Weren’t you delighted yourself to get to the Baltic? It must be a wonderful
contrast to what you described. Did you ever see another yacht there?”
“Only one,” he answered. “Good night!”
“Good night!”

CHAPTER V.
Wanted, a North Wind

Nothing disturbed my rest that night, so adaptable is youth and so masterful
is nature. At times I was remotely aware of a threshing of rain and a
humming of wind, with a nervous kicking of the little hull, and at one
moment I dreamt I saw an apparition by candle-light of Davies, clad in
pyjamas and huge top-boots, grasping a misty lantern of gigantic
proportions. But the apparition mounted the ladder and disappeared, and I
passed to other dreams.
A blast in my ear, like the voice of fifty trombones, galvanised me into
full consciousness. The musician, smiling and tousled, was at my bedside,
raising a foghorn to his lips with deadly intention. “It’s a way we have in
the Dulcibella,” he said, as I started up on one elbow. “I didn’t startle you
much, did I?” he added.
“Well, I like the mattinata better than the cold douche,” I answered,
thinking of yesterday.
“Fine day and magnificent breeze!” he answered. My sensations this
morning were vastly livelier than those of yesterday at the same hour. My
limbs were supple again and my head clear. Not even the searching wind
could mar the ecstasy of that plunge down to smooth, seductive sand, where
I buried greedy fingers and looked through a medium blue, with that
translucent blue, fairy-faint and angel-pure, that you see in perfection only
in the heart of ice. Up again to sun, wind, and the forest whispers from the
shore; down just once more to see the uncouth anchor stabbing the sand’s
soft bosom with one rusty fang, deaf and inert to the Dulcibella’s puny
efforts to drag him from his prey. Back, holding by the cable as a rusty clue
from heaven to earth, up to that bourgeoise little maiden’s bows; back to
breakfast, with an appetite not to be blunted by condensed milk and
somewhat passé bread. An hour later we had dressed the Dulcibella for the

road, and were foaming into the grey void of yesterday, now a noble
expanse of wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills, their every
outline vivid in the rain-washed air.
I cannot pretend that I really enjoyed this first sail into the open, though I
was keenly anxious to do so. I felt the thrill of those forward leaps, heard
that persuasive song the foam sings under the lee-bow, saw the flashing
harmonies of sea and sky; but sensuous perception was deadened by
nervousness. The yacht looked smaller than ever outside the quiet fiord.
The song of the foam seemed very near, the wave crests aft very high. The
novice in sailing clings desperately to the thoughts of sailors—effective,
prudent persons, with a typical jargon and a typical dress, versed in local
currents and winds. I could not help missing this professional element.
Davies, as he sat grasping his beloved tiller, looked strikingly efficient in
his way, and supremely at home in his surroundings; but he looked the
amateur through and through, as with one hand, and (it seemed) one eye, he
wrestled with a spray-splashed chart half unrolled on the deck beside him.
All his casual ways returned to me—his casual talk and that last
adventurous voyage to the Baltic, and the suspicions his reticence had
aroused.
“Do you see a monument anywhere?” he said, all at once; and, before I
could answer; “We must take another reef.” He let go of the tiller and relit
his pipe, while the yacht rounded sharply to, and in a twinkling was tossing
head to sea with loud claps of her canvas and passionate jerks of her boom,
as the wind leapt on its quarry, now turning to bay, with redoubled force.
The sting of spray in my eyes and the Babel of noise dazed me; but Davies,
with a pull on the fore-sheet, soothed the tormented little ship, and left her
coolly sparring with the waves while he shortened sail and puffed his pipe.
An hour later the narrow vista of Als Sound was visible, with quiet old
Sonderburg sunning itself on the island shore, and the Dybbol heights
towering above—the Dybbol of bloody memory; scene of the last desperate
stand of the Danes in ’64, ere the Prussians wrested the two fair provinces
from them.
“It’s early to anchor, and I hate towns,” said Davies, as one section of a
lumbering pontoon bridge opened to give us passage. But I was firm on the
need for a walk, and got my way on condition that I bought stores as well,
and returned in time to admit of further advance to a “quiet anchorage”.

Never did I step on the solid earth with stranger feelings, partly due to relief
from confinement, partly to that sense of independence in travelling, which,
for those who go down to the sea in small ships, can make the foulest coal-
port in Northumbria seem attractive. And here I had fascinating Sonderburg,
with its broad-eaved houses of carved woodwork, each fresh with
cleansing, yet reverend with age; its fair-haired Viking-like men, and rosy,
plain-faced women, with their bullet foreheads and large mouths;
Sonderburg still Danish to the core under its Teuton veneer. Crossing the
bridge I climbed the Dybbol—dotted with memorials of that heroic defence
—and thence could see the wee form and gossamer rigging of the
Dulcibella on the silver ribbon of the Sound, and was reminded by the sight
that there were stores to be bought. So I hurried down again to the old
quarter and bargained over eggs and bread with a dear old lady, pink as a
débutante, made a patriotic pretence of not understanding German, and
called in her strapping son, whose few words of English, being chiefly
nautical slang picked up on a British trawler, were peculiarly useless for the
purpose. Davies had tea ready when I came aboard again, and, drinking it
on deck, we proceeded up the sheltered Sound, which, in spite of its
imposing name, was no bigger than an inland river, only the hosts of
rainbow jelly-fish reminding us that we were threading a highway of ocean.
There is no rise and fall of tide in these regions to disfigure the shore with
mud. Here was a shelving gravel bank; there a bed of whispering rushes;
there again young birch trees growing to the very brink, each wearing a
stocking of bright moss and setting its foot firmly in among golden leaves
and scarlet fungus.
Davies was preoccupied, but he lighted up when I talked of the Danish
war. “Germany’s a thundering great nation,” he said; “I wonder if we shall
ever fight her.” A little incident that happened after we anchored deepened
the impression left by this conversation. We crept at dusk into a shaded
back-water, where our keel almost touched the gravel bed. Opposite us on
the Alsen shore there showed, clean-cut against the sky, the spire of a little
monument rising from a leafy hollow.
“I wonder what that is,” I said. It was scarcely a minute’s row in the
dinghy, and when the anchor was down we sculled over to it. A bank of
loam led to gorse and bramble. Pushing aside some branches we came to a
slender Gothic memorial in grey stone, inscribed with bas-reliefs of battle
scenes, showing Prussians forcing a landing in boats and Danes resisting

with savage tenacity. In the failing light we spelt out an inscription: “Den
bei dem Meeres Uebergange und der Eroberung von Alsen am 29. Juni
1864 heldenmüthig gefallenen zum ehrenden Gedächtniss.” “To the
honoured memory of those who died heroically at the invasion and
storming of Alsen.” I knew the German passion for commemoration; I had
seen similar memorials on Alsatian battlefields, and several on the Dybbol
only that afternoon; but there was something in the scene, the hour, and the
circumstances, which made this one seem singularly touching. As for
Davies, I scarcely recognised him; his eyes flashed and filled with tears as
he glanced from the inscription to the path we had followed and the water
beyond. “It was a landing in boats, I suppose,” he said, half to himself. “I
wonder they managed it. What does heldenmüthig
mean?”—“Heroically.”—“Heldenmüthig gefallenen,” he repeated, under
his breath, lingering on each syllable. He was like a schoolboy reading of
Waterloo.
Our conversation at dinner turned naturally on war, and in naval warfare I
found I had come upon Davies’s literary hobby. I had not hitherto paid
attention to the medley on our bookshelf, but I now saw that, besides a
Nautical Almanack and some dilapidated Sailing Directions, there were
several books on the cruises of small yachts, and also some big volumes
crushed in anyhow or lying on the top. Squinting painfully at them I saw
Mahan’s Life of Nelson, Brassey’s Naval Annual, and others.
“It’s a tremendously interesting subject,” said Davies, pulling down (in
two pieces) a volume of Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power.
Dinner flagged (and froze) while he illustrated a point by reference to the
much-thumbed pages. He was very keen, and not very articulate. I knew
just enough to be an intelligent listener, and, though hungry, was delighted
to hear him talk.
“I’m not boring you, am I?” he said, suddenly.
“I should think not,” I protested. “But you might just have a look at the
chops.”
They had indeed been crying aloud for notice for some minutes, and
drew candid attention to their neglect when they appeared. The diversion
they caused put Davies out of vein. I tried to revive the subject, but he was
reserved and diffident.

The untidy bookshelf reminded me of the logbook, and when Davies had
retired with the crockery to the forecastle, I pulled the ledger down and
turned over the leaves. It was a mass of short entries, with cryptic
abbreviations, winds, tides, weather, and courses appearing to predominate.
The voyage from Dover to Ostend was dismissed in two lines: “Under way
7 p.m., wind W.S.W. moderate; West Hinder 5 a.m., outside all banks;
Ostend 11 a.m.” The Scheldt had a couple of pages very technical and
staccato in style. Inland Holland was given a contemptuous summary, with
some half-hearted allusions to windmills, and so on, and a caustic word or
two about boys, paint, and canal smells.
At Amsterdam technicalities began again, and a brisker tone pervaded the
entries, which became progressively fuller as the writer cruised on the
Frisian coast. He was clearly in better spirits, for here and there were quaint
and laboured efforts to describe nature out of material which, as far as I
could judge, was repellent enough to discourage the most brilliant and
observant of writers; with an occasional note of a visit on shore, generally
reached by a walk of half a mile over sand, and of talks with shop people
and fishermen. But such lighter relief was rare. The bulk dealt with
channels and shoals with weird and depressing names, with the centre-plate,
the sails, and the wind, buoys and “booms”, tides and “berths” for the night.
“Kedging off” appeared to be a frequent diversion; “running aground” was
of almost daily occurrence.
It was not easy reading, and I turned the leaves rapidly. I was curious,
too, to see the latter part. I came to a point where the rain of little sentences,
pattering out like small shot, ceased abruptly. It was at the end of September
9. That day, with its “kedging” and “boom-dodging”, was filled in with the
usual detail. The log then leapt over three days, and went on: “Sept. 13.
Wind W.N.W. fresh. Decided to go to Baltic. Sailed 4 a.m. Quick passage E.
1/2 S. to mouth of Weser. Anchored for night under Hohenhörn Sand. Sept.
14, nil. Sept. 15, under way at 4 a.m. Wind East moderate. Course W. by S.;
four miles; N.E. by N. fifteen miles. Norderpiep 9.30. Eider River 11.30.”
This recital of naked facts was quite characteristic when “passages” were
concerned, and any curiosity I had felt about his reticence on the previous
night would have been rather allayed than stimulated had I not noticed that
a page had been torn out of the book just at this point. The frayed edge left
had been pruned and picked into very small limits; but dissimulation was
not Davies’s strong point, and a child could have seen that a leaf was

missing, and that the entries, starting from the evening of September 9
(where a page ended), had been written together at one sitting. I was on the
point of calling to Davies, and chaffing him with having committed a grave
offence against maritime law in having “cooked” his log; but I checked
myself, I scarcely know why, probably because I guessed the joke would
touch a sensitive place and fail. Delicacy shrank from seeing him compelled
either to amplify a deception or blunder out a confession—he was too easy
a prey; and, after all, the matter was of small moment. I returned the book
to the shelf, the only definite result of its perusal being to recall my promise
to keep a diary myself, and I then and there dedicated a notebook to the
purpose.
We were just lighting our cigars when we heard voices and the splash of
oars, followed by a bump against the hull which made Davies wince, as
violations of his paint always did. “Guten Abend; wo fahren Sie hin?”
greeted us as we climbed on deck. It turned out to be some jovial fishermen
returning to their smack from a visit to Sonderburg. A short dialogue proved
to them that we were mad Englishmen in bitter need of charity.
“Come to Satrup,” they said; “all the smacks are there, round the point.
There is good punch in the inn.”
Nothing loth, we followed in the dinghy, skirted a bend of the Sound, and
opened up the lights of a village, with some smacks at anchor in front of it.
We were escorted to the inn, and introduced to a formidable beverage,
called coffee-punch, and a smoke-wreathed circle of smacksmen, who
talked German out of courtesy, but were Danish in all else. Davies was at
once at home with them, to a degree, indeed, that I envied. His German was
of the crudest kind, bizarre in vocabulary and comical in accent; but the
freemasonry of the sea, or some charm of his own, gave intuition to both
him and his hearers. I cut a poor figure in this nautical gathering, though
Davies, who persistently referred to me as “meiner Freund”, tried hard to
represent me as a kindred spirit and to include me in the general talk. I was
detected at once as an uninteresting hybrid. Davies, who sometimes
appealed to me for a word, was deep in talk over anchorages and ducks,
especially, as I well remember now, about the chance of sport in a certain
Schlei Fiord. I fell into utter neglect, till rescued by a taciturn person in
spectacles and a very high cap, who appeared to be the only landsman
present. After silently puffing smoke in my direction for some time, he

asked me if I was married, and if not, when I proposed to be. After this
inquisition he abandoned me.
It was eleven before we left this hospitable inn, escorted by the whole
party to the dinghy. Our friends of the smack insisted on our sharing their
boat out of pure good-fellowship—for there was not nearly room for us—
and would not let us go till a bucket of fresh-caught fish had been emptied
into her bottom. After much shaking of scaly hands, we sculled back to the
Dulcibella, where she slept in a bed of tremulous stars.
Davies sniffed the wind and scanned the tree-tops, where light gusts were
toying with the leaves.
“Sou’-west still,” he said, “and more rain coming. But it’s bound to shift
into the north.”
“Will that be a good wind for us?”
“It depends where we go,” he said, slowly. “I was asking those fellows
about duck-shooting. They seemed to think the best place would be Schlei
Fiord. That’s about fifteen miles south of Sonderburg, on the way to Kiel.
They said there was a pilot chap living at the mouth who would tell us all
about it. They weren’t very encouraging though. We should want a north
wind for that.”
“I don’t care where we go,” I said, to my own surprise.
“Don’t you really?” he rejoined, with sudden warmth. Then, with a slight
change of voice. “You mean it’s all very jolly about here?”
Of course I meant that. Before we went below we both looked for a
moment at the little grey memorial; its slender fretted arch outlined in
tender lights and darks above the hollow on the Alsen shore. The night was
that of September 27, the third I had spent on the Dulcibella.

CHAPTER VI.
Schlei Fiord

I make no apology for having described these early days in some detail. It is
no wonder that their trivialities are as vividly before me as the colours of
earth and sea in this enchanting corner of the world. For every trifle, sordid
or picturesque, was relevant; every scrap of talk a link; every passing mood
critical for good or ill. So slight indeed were the determining causes that
changed my autumn holiday into an undertaking the most momentous I
have ever approached.
Two days more preceded the change. On the first, the southwesterly wind
still holding, we sallied forth into Augustenburg Fiord, “to practise
smartness in a heavy thresh,” as Davies put it. It was the day of dedication
for those disgusting oilskins, immured in whose stiff and odorous angles, I
felt distressfully cumbersome; a day of proof indeed for me, for heavy
squalls swept incessantly over the loch, and Davies, at my own request,
gave me no rest. Backwards and forwards we tacked, blustering into coves
and out again, reefing and unreefing, now stung with rain, now warmed
with sun, but never with time to breathe or think.
I wrestled with intractable ropes, slaves if they could be subdued, tyrants
if they got the upper hand; creeping, craning, straining, I made the painful
round of the deck, while Davies, hatless and tranquil, directed my
blundering movements.
“Now take the helm and try steering in a hard breeze to windward. It’s
the finest sport on earth.”
So I grappled with the niceties of that delicate craft; smarting eyes,
chafed hands, and dazed brain all pressed into the service, whilst Davies,
taming the ropes the while, shouted into my ear the subtle mysteries of the
art; that fidgeting ripple in the luff of the mainsail, and the distant rattle
from the hungry jib—signs that they are starved of wind and must be given

more; the heavy list and wallow of the hull, the feel of the wind on your
cheek instead of your nose, the broader angle of the burgee at the masthead
—signs that they have too much, and that she is sagging recreantly to
leeward instead of fighting to windward. He taught me the tactics for
meeting squalls, and the way to press your advantage when they are
defeated—the iron hand in the velvet glove that the wilful tiller needs if you
are to gain your ends with it; the exact set of the sheets necessary to get the
easiest and swiftest play of the hull—all these things and many more I
struggled to apprehend, careless for the moment as to whether they were
worth knowing, but doggedly set on knowing them. Needless to say, I had
no eyes for beauty. The wooded inlets we dived into gave a brief respite
from wind and spindrift, but called into use the lead and the centreboard
tackle—two new and cumbrous complexities. Davies’s passion for intricate
navigation had to be sated even in these secure and tideless waters.
“Let’s get in as near as we can—you stand by the lead,” was his formula;
so I made false casts, tripped up in the slack, sent rivers of water up my
sleeves, and committed all the other gaucheries that beginners in the art
commit, while the sand showed whiter beneath the keel, till Davies
regretfully drew off and shouted: “Ready about, centre-plate down,” and I
dashed down to the trappings of that diabolical contrivance, the only part of
the Dulcibella’s equipment that I hated fiercely to the last. It had an odious
habit when lowered of spouting jets of water through its chain-lead on to
the cabin floor. One of my duties was to gag it with cotton-waste, but even
then its choking gurgle was a most uncomfortable sound in your dining-
room. In a minute the creek would be behind us and we would be thumping
our stem into the short hollow waves of the fiord, and lurching through
spray and rain for some point on the opposite shore. Of our destination and
objects, if we had any, I knew nothing. At the northern end of the fiord, just
before we turned, Davies had turned dreamy in the most exasperating way,
for I was steering at the time and in mortal need of sympathetic guidance, if
I was to avoid a sudden jibe. As though continuing aloud some internal
debate, he held a onesided argument to the effect that it was no use going
farther north. Ducks, weather, and charts figured in it, but I did not follow
the pros and cons. I only know that we suddenly turned and began to
“battle” south again. At sunset we were back once more in the same quiet
pool among the trees and fields of Als Sound, a wondrous peace succeeding
the turmoil. Bruised and sodden, I was extricating myself from my oily

prison, and later was tasting (though not nearly yet in its perfection) the
unique exultation that follows such a day, when, glowing all over,
deliciously tired and pleasantly sore, you eat what seems ambrosia, be it
only tinned beef; and drink nectar, be it only distilled from terrestrial hops
or coffee berries, and inhale as culminating luxury balmy fumes which even
the happy Homeric gods knew naught of.
On the following morning, the 30th, a joyous shout of “Nor’-west wind”
sent me shivering on deck, in the small hours, to handle rain-stiff canvas
and cutting chain. It was a cloudy, unsettled day, but still enough after
yesterday’s boisterous ordeal. We retraced our way past Sonderburg, and
thence sailed for a faint line of pale green on the far south-western horizon.
It was during this passage that an incident occurred, which, slight as it was,
opened my eyes to much.
A flight of wild duck crossed our bows at some little distance, a wedge-
shaped phalanx of craning necks and flapping wings. I happened to be
steering while Davies verified our course below; but I called him up at
once, and a discussion began about our chances of sport. Davies was
gloomy over them.
“Those fellows at Satrup were rather doubtful,” he said. “There are
plenty of ducks, but I made out that it’s not easy for strangers to get
shooting. The whole country’s so very civilised; it’s not wild enough, is it?”
He looked at me. I had no very clear opinion. It was anything but wild in
one sense, but there seemed to be wild enough spots for ducks. The shore
we were passing appeared to be bordered by lonely marshes, though a
spacious champaign showed behind. If it were not for the beautiful places
we had seen, and my growing taste for our way of seeing them, his
disappointing vagueness would have nettled me more than it did. For, after
all, he had brought me out loaded with sporting equipment under a promise
of shooting.
“Bad weather is what we want for ducks,” he said; “but I’m afraid we’re
in the wrong place for them. Now, if it was the North Sea, among those
Frisian Islands——” His tone was timid and interrogative, and I felt at 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 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 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’s 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.

CHAPTER VII.
The Missing Page

I woke (on the 1st of 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 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 September 9. 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 sympathised 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, on the 12th
of 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 have 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 pocket for his
pipe. It was not meant for a 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 realised 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.”

CHAPTER VIII.
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
midday 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
makeshift. 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 criticising 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 up 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 mispronounced 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, naïvely. “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 can 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 the 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.

CHAPTER IX.
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 apologise?”
“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 apologise,” 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.”
“H’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 civilised 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.

CHAPTER X.
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 harmonise 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, but 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”.

CHAPTER XI.
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
countersigning 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 economise,” 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 recognise 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 October 5, 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 centreboard, will you?” he remarked abstractedly,
adding, “and hand me up the glasses as you are 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
longer, and the depths, which I registered, shallower. All went well for some
time though, and we made better progress. Then came a longer reach than
usual.
“Two and a half—two—one and a half—one—only five feet,” I gasped,
reproachfully. The water was growing thick and frothy.
“It doesn’t matter if we do,” said Davies, thinking aloud. “There’s an
eddy here, and it’s a pity to waste it—ready about! Back the jib!”
But it was too late. The yacht answered but faintly to the helm, stopped,
and heeled heavily over, wallowing and grinding. Davies had the mainsail
down in a twinkling; it half smothered me as I crouched on the lee-side
among my tangled skeins of line, scared and helpless. I crawled out from
the folds, and saw him standing by the mast in a reverie.
“It’s not much use,” he said, “on a falling tide, but we’ll try kedging-off.
Pay that warp out while I run out the kedge.”
Like lightning he had cast off the dinghy’s painter, tumbled the kedge-
anchor and himself into the dinghy, pulled out fifty yards into the deeper
water, and heaved out the anchor.
“Now haul,” he shouted.
I hauled, beginning to see what kedging-off meant.
“Steady on! Don’t sweat yourself,” said Davies, jumping aboard again.
“It’s coming,” I spluttered, triumphantly.

“The warp is, the yacht isn’t; you’re dragging the anchor home. Never
mind, she’ll lie well here. Let’s have lunch.”
The yacht was motionless, and the water round her visibly lower.
Petulant waves slapped against her sides, but, scattered as my senses were, I
realised that there was no vestige of danger. Round us the whole face of the
waters was changing from moment to moment, whitening in some places,
yellowing in others, where breadths of sand began to be exposed. Close on
our right the channel we had left began to look like a turbid little river; and
I understood why our progress had been so slow when I saw its current
racing back to meet the Elbe. Davies was already below, laying out a more
than usually elaborate lunch, in high content of mind.
“Lies quiet, doesn’t she?” he remarked. “If you do want a sit-down lunch,
there’s nothing like running aground for it. And, anyhow, we’re as handy
for work here as anywhere else. You’ll see.”
Like most landsmen I had a wholesome prejudice against running
aground, so that my mentor’s turn for breezy paradox was at first rather
exasperating. After lunch the large-scale chart of the estuaries was brought
down, and we pored over it together, mapping out work for the next few
days. There is no need to tire the general reader with its intricacies, nor is
there space to reproduce it for the benefit of the instructed reader. For both
classes the general map should be sufficient, taken with the large-scale
fragment [See Chart A] which gives a fair example of the region in detail. It
will be seen that the three broad fairways of the Jade, Weser, and Elbe split
up the sands into two main groups. The westernmost of these is
symmetrical in outline, an acute-angled triangle, very like a sharp steel-
shod pike, if you imagine the peninsula from which it springs to be the
wooden haft. The other is a huge congeries of banks, its base resting on the
Hanover coast, two of its sides tolerably clean and even, and the third, that
facing the north-west, ribboned and lacerated by the fury of the sea, which
has eaten out deep cavities and struck hungry tentacles far into the interior.
The whole resembles an inverted E, or, better still, a rude fork, on whose
three deadly prongs, the Scharhorn Reef, the Knecht Sand, and the Tegeler
Flat, as on the no less deadly point of the pike, many a good ship splinters
herself in northerly gales. Following this simile, the Hohenhörn bank,
where Davies was wrecked, is one of those that lie between the upper and
middle prongs.

Our business was to explore the Pike and the Fork and the channels
which ramify through them. I use the general word “channel”, but in fact
they differ widely in character, and are called in German by various names:
Balje, Gat, Loch, Diep, Rinne. For my purpose I need only divide them into
two sorts—those which have water in them at all states of the tide, and
those which have not, which dry off, that is, either wholly or partly at low-
tide.
Davies explained that the latter would take most learning, and were to be
our chief concern, because they were the “through-routes”—the connecting
links between the estuaries. You can always detect them on the chart by
rows of little Y-shaped strokes denoting “booms”, that is to say, poles or
saplings fixed in the sand to mark the passage. The strokes, of course, are
only conventional signs, and do not correspond in the least to individual
“booms”, which are far too numerous and complex to be indicated
accurately on a chart, even of the largest scale. The same applies to the
course of the channels themselves, whose minor meanderings cannot be
reproduced.
It was on the edge of one of these tidal swatchways that the yacht was
now lying. It is called Sticker’s Gat, and you cannot miss it [See Chart A] if
you carry your eye westward along our course from Cuxhaven. It was, so
Davies told me, the last and most intricate stage of the “short cut” which the
Medusa had taken on that memorable day—a stage he himself had never
reached. Discussion ended, we went on deck, Davies arming himself with a
notebook, binoculars, and the prismatic compass, whose use—to map the
angles of the channels—was at last apparent. This is what I saw when we
emerged.

CHAPTER XII.
My Initiation

The yacht lay with a very slight heel (thanks to a pair of small bilge-keels
on her bottom) in a sort of trough she had dug for herself, so that she was
still ringed with a few inches of water, as it were with a moat.
For miles in every direction lay a desert of sand. To the north it touched
the horizon, and was only broken by the blue dot of Neuerk Island and its
lighthouse. To the east it seemed also to stretch to infinity, but the smoke of
a steamer showed where it was pierced by the stream of the Elbe. To the
south it ran up to the pencil-line of the Hanover shore. Only to the west was
its outline broken by any vestiges of the sea it had risen from. There it was
astir with crawling white filaments, knotted confusedly at one spot in the
north-west, whence came a sibilant murmur like the hissing of many
snakes. Desert as I call it, it was not entirely featureless. Its colour varied
from light fawn, where the highest levels had dried in the wind, to brown or
deep violet, where it was still wet, and slate-grey where patches of mud
soiled its clean bosom. Here and there were pools of water, smitten into
ripples by the impotent wind; here and there it was speckled by shells and
seaweed. And close to us, beginning to bend away towards that hissing knot
in the north-west, wound our poor little channel, mercilessly exposed as a
stagnant, muddy ditch with scarcely a foot of water, not deep enough to
hide our small kedge-anchor, which perked up one fluke in impudent
mockery. The dull, hard sky, the wind moaning in the rigging as though
crying in despair for a prey that had escaped it, made the scene
inexpressibly forlorn.
Davies scanned it with gusto for a moment, climbed to a point of vantage
on the boom, and swept his glasses to and fro along the course of the
channel.

“Fairly well boomed,” he said, meditatively, “but one or two are very
much out. By Jove! that’s a tricky bend there.” He took a bearing with the
compass, made a note or two, and sprang with a vigorous leap down on to
the sand.
This, I may say, was the only way of “going ashore” that he really liked.
We raced off as fast as our clumsy sea-boots would let us, and followed up
the course of our channel to the west, reconnoitring the road we should
have to follow when the tide rose.
“The only way to learn a place like this,” he shouted, “is to see it at low
water. The banks are dry then, and the channels are plain. Look at that
boom”—he stopped and pointed contemptuously—“it’s all out of place. I
suppose the channel’s shifted there. It’s just at an important bend too. If you
took it as a guide when the water was up you’d run aground.”
“Which would be very useful,” I observed.
“Oh, hang it!” he laughed, “we’re exploring. I want to be able to run
through this channel without a mistake. We will, next time.” He stopped,
and plied compass and notebook. Then we raced on till the next halt was
called.
“Look,” he said, “the channel’s getting deeper, it was nearly dry a
moment ago; see the current in it now? That’s the flood tide coming up—
from the west, mind you; that is, from the Weser side. That shows we’re
past the watershed.”
“Watershed?” I repeated, blankly.
“Yes, that’s what I call it. You see, a big sand such as this is like a range
of hills dividing two plains, it’s never dead flat though it looks it; there’s
always one point, one ridge, rather, where it’s highest. Now a channel
cutting right through the sand is, of course, always at its shallowest when
it’s crossing this ridge; at low water it’s generally dry there, and it gradually
deepens as it gets nearer to the sea on either side. Now at high tide, when
the whole sand is covered, the water can travel where it likes; but directly
the ebb sets in the water falls away on either side the ridge and the channel
becomes two rivers flowing in opposite directions from the centre, or
watershed, as I call it. So, also, when the ebb has run out and the flood
begins, the channel is fed by two currents flowing to the centre and meeting
in the middle. Here the Elbe and the Weser are our two feeders. Now this

current here is going eastwards; we know by the time of day that the tide’s
rising, therefore the watershed is between us and the yacht.”
“Why is it so important to know that?”
“Because these currents are strong, and you want to know when you’ll
lose a fair one and strike a foul one. Besides, the ridge is the critical point
when you’re crossing on a falling tide, and you want to know when you’re
past it.”
We pushed on till our path was barred by a big lagoon. It looked far more
imposing than the channel; but Davies, after a rapid scrutiny, treated it to a
grunt of contempt.
“It’s a cul de sac,” he said. “See that hump of sand it’s making for,
beyond?”
“It’s boomed,” I remonstrated, pointing to a decrepit stem drooping over
the bank, and shaking a palsied finger at the imposture.
“Yes, that’s just where one goes wrong, it’s an old cut that’s silted up.
That boom’s a fraud; there’s no time to go farther, the flood’s making fast.
I’ll just take bearings of what we can see.”
The false lagoon was the first of several that began to be visible in the
west, swelling and joining hands over the ribs of sand that divided them. All
the time the distant hissing grew nearer and louder, and a deep, thunderous
note began to sound beneath it. We turned our backs to the wind and
hastened back towards the Dulcibella, the stream in our channel hurrying
and rising alongside of us.
“There’s just time to do the other side,” said Davies, when we reached
her, and I was congratulating myself on having regained our base without
finding our communications cut. And away we scurried in the direction we
had come that morning, splashing through pools and jumping the infant
runnels that were stealing out through rifts from the mother-channel as the
tide rose. Our observations completed, back we travelled, making a wide
circuit over higher ground to avoid the encroaching flood, and wading shin-
deep in the final approach to the yacht.
As I scrambled thankfully aboard, I seemed to hear a far-off voice saying,
in languid depreciation of yachting, that it did not give one enough exercise.
It was mine, centuries ago, in another life. From east and west two sheets of

water had overspread the desert, each pushing out tongues of surf that met
and fused.
I waited on deck and watched the death-throes of the suffocating sands
under the relentless onset of the sea. The last strongholds were battered,
stormed, and overwhelmed; the tumult of sounds sank and steadied, and the
sea swept victoriously over the whole expanse. The Dulcibella, hitherto
contemptuously inert, began to wake and tremble under the buffetings she
received. Then, with an effort, she jerked herself on to an even keel and
bumped and strained fretfully, impatient to vanquish this insolent invader
and make him a slave for her own ends. Soon her warp tightened and her
nose swung slowly round; only her stern bumped now, and that with
decreasing force. Suddenly she was free and drifting broadside to the wind
till the anchor checked her and she brought up to leeward of it, rocking
easily and triumphantly. Good-humoured little person! At heart she was
friends alike with sand and sea. It was only when the old love and the new
love were in mortal combat for her favours, and she was mauled in the
fracas, that her temper rose in revolt.
We swallowed a hasty cup of tea, ran up the sails, and started off west
again. Once across the “watershed” we met a strong current, but the trend of
the passage was now more to the north-west, so that we could hold our
course without tacking, and consequently could stem the tide. “Give her just
a foot of the centre-plate,” said Davies. “We know the way here, and she’ll
make less leeway; but we shall generally have to do without it always on a
falling tide. If you run aground with the plate down you deserve to be
drowned.” I now saw how valuable our walk had been. The booms were on
our right; but they were broken reeds, giving no hint as to the breadth of the
channel. A few had lost their tops, and were being engulfed altogether by
the rising water. When we came to the point where they ceased, and the
false lagoon had lain, I should have felt utterly lost. We had crossed the
high and relatively level sands which form the base of the Fork, and were
entering the labyrinth of detached banks which obstruct the funnel-shaped
cavity between the upper and middle prongs. This I knew from the chart.
My unaided eye saw nothing but the open sea, growing dark green as the
depths increased; a dour, threatening sea, showing its white fangs. The
waves grew longer and steeper, for the channels, though still tortuous, now
begin to be broad and deep.

Davies had his bearings, and struck on his course confidently. “Now for
the lead,” he said; “the compass’ll be little use soon. We must feel the edge
of the sands till we pick up more booms.”
“Where are we going to anchor for the night?” I asked.
“Under the Hohenhörn,” said Davies, “for auld lang syne!”
Partly by sight and mostly by touch we crept round the outermost alley of
the hidden maze till a new clump of booms appeared, meaningless to me,
but analysed by him into two groups. One we followed for some distance,
and then struck finally away and began another beat to windward.
Dusk was falling. The Hanover coast-line, never very distinct, had utterly
vanished; an ominous heave of swell was under-running the short sea. I
ceased to attend to Davies imparting instruction on his beloved hobby, and
sought to stifle in hard manual labour the dread that had been latent in me
all day at the prospect of our first anchorage at sea.
“Sound, like blazes now!” he said at last. I came to a fathom and a half.
“That’s the bank,” he said; “we’ll give it a bit of a berth and then let go.”
“Let go now!” was the order after a minute, and the chain ran out with a
long-drawn moan. The Dulcibella snubbed up to it and jauntily faced the
North Sea and the growing night.
“There we are!” said Davies, as we finished stowing the mainsail, “safe
and snug in four fathoms in a magnificent sand-harbour, with no one to
bother us and the whole of it to ourselves. No dues, no stinks, no traffic, no
worries of any sort. It’s better than a Baltic cove even, less beastly
civilization about. We’re seven miles from the nearest coast, and five even
from Neuerk—look, they’re lighting up.” There was a tiny spark in the east.
“I suppose it’s all right,” I said, “but I’d rather see a solid breakwater
somewhere; it’s a dirty-looking night, and I don’t like this swell.”
“The swell’s nothing,” said Davies; “it’s only a stray drain from outside.
As for breakwaters, you’ve got them all round you, only they’re hidden.
Ahead and to starboard is the West Hohenhörn, curling round to the sou’-
west for all the world like a stone pier. You can hear the surf battering on its
outside over to the north. That’s where I was nearly wrecked that day, and
the little channel I stumbled into must be quite near us somewhere. Half a
mile away—to port there—is the East Hohenhörn, where I brought up, after
dashing across this lake we’re in. Another mile astern is the main body of

the sands, the top prong of your fork. So you see we’re shut in—practically.
Surely you remember the chart? Why, it’s——”
“Oh, confound the chart!” I broke out, finding this flow of plausible
comfort too dismally suggestive for my nerves. “Look at it, man! Supposing
anything happens—supposing it blows a gale! But it’s no good shivering
here and staring at the view. I’m going below.”
There was a mauvais quart d’heure below, during which, I am ashamed
to say, I forgot the quest.
“Which soup do you feel inclined for?” said Davies, timidly, after a black
silence of some minutes.
That simple remark, more eloquent of security than a thousand technical
arguments, saved the situation.
“I say, Davies,” I said, “I’m a white-livered cur at the best, and you
mustn’t spare me. But you’re not like any yachtsman I ever met before, or
any sailor of any sort. You’re so casual and quiet in the extraordinary things
you do. I believe I should like you better if you let fly a volley of deep-sea
oaths sometimes, or threatened to put me in irons.”
Davies opened wide eyes, and said it was all his fault for forgetting that I
was not as used to such anchorages as he was. “And, by the way,” he added,
“as to its blowing a gale, I shouldn’t wonder if it did; the glass is falling
hard; but it can’t hurt us. You see, even at high water the drift of the sea
——”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t begin again. You’ll prove soon that we’re
safer here than in an hotel. Let’s have dinner, and a thundering good one!”
Dinner ran a smooth course, but just as coffee was being brewed the hull,
from pitching regularly, began to roll.
“I knew she would,” said Davies. “I was going to warn you, only—the
ebb has set in against the wind. It’s quite safe——”
“I thought you said it would get calmer when the tide fell?”
“So it will, but it may seem rougher. Tides are queer things,” he added, as
though in defence of some not very respectable acquaintances.
He busied himself with his logbook, swaying easily to the motion of the
boat; and I for my part tried to write up my diary, but I could not fix my
attention. Every loose article in the boat became audibly restless. Cans

clinked, cupboards rattled, lockers uttered hollow groans. Small things
sidled out of dark hiding-places, and danced grotesque drunken figures on
the floor, like goblins in a haunted glade. The mast whined dolorously at
every heel, and the centreboard hiccoughed and choked. Overhead another
horde of demons seemed to have been let loose. The deck and mast were
conductors which magnified every sound and made the tap-tap of every
rope’s end resemble the blows of a hammer, and the slapping of the
halyards against the mast the rattle of a Maxim gun. The whole tumult beat
time to a rhythmical chorus which became maddening.
“We might turn in now,” said Davies; “it’s half-past ten.”
“What, sleep through this?” I exclaimed. “I can’t stand this, I must do
something. Can’t we go for another walk?”
I spoke in bitter, half-delirious jest.
“Of course we can,” said Davies, “if you don’t mind a bit of a tumble in
the dinghy.”
I reconsidered my rash suggestion, but it was too late now to turn back,
and some desperate expedient was necessary. I found myself on deck,
gripping a backstay and looking giddily down and then up at the dinghy, as
it bobbed like a cork in the trough of the sea alongside, while Davies settled
the sculls and rowlocks.
“Jump!” he shouted, and before I could gather my wits and clutch the
sides we were adrift in the night, reeling from hollow to hollow of the steep
curling waves. Davies nursed our walnut-shell tenderly over their crests,
edging her slantwise across their course. He used very little exertion,
relying on the tide to carry us to our goal. Suddenly the motion ceased. A
dark slope loomed up out of the night, and the dinghy rested softly in a
shallow eddy.
“The West Hohenhörn,” said Davies. We jumped out and sank into soft
mud, hauled up the dinghy a foot or two, then mounted the bank and were
on hard, wet sand. The wind leapt on us, and choked our voices.
“Let’s find my channel,” bawled Davies. “This way. Keep Neuerk light
right astern of you.”
We set off with a long, stooping stride in the teeth of the wind, and
straight towards the roar of the breakers on the farther side of the sand. A
line of Matthew Arnold’s, “The naked shingles of the world,” was running

in my head. “Seven miles from land,” I thought, “scuttling like sea-birds on
a transient islet of sand, encircled by rushing tides and hammered by ocean,
at midnight in a rising gale—cut off even from our one dubious refuge.” It
was the time, if ever, to conquer weakness. A mad gaiety surged through me
as I drank the wind and pressed forward. It seemed but a minute or two and
Davies clutched me.
“Look out!” he shouted. “It’s my channel.”
The ground sloped down, and a rushing river glimmered before us. We
struck off at a tangent and followed its course to the north, stumbling in
muddy rifts, slipping on seaweed, beginning to be blinded by a fine salt
spray, and deafened by the thunder of the ocean surf. The river broadened,
whitened, roughened, gathered itself for the shock, was shattered, and
dissolved in milky gloom. We wheeled away to the right, and splashed into
yeasty froth. I turned my back to the wind, scooped the brine out of my
eyes, faced back and saw that our path was barred by a welter of surf.
Davies’s voice was in my ear and his arm was pointing seaward.
“This—is—about where—I—bumped first—worse then—nor’-west
wind—this—is—nothing. Let’s—go—right—round.”
We galloped away with the wind behind us, skirting the line of surf. I lost
all account of time and direction. Another sea barred our road, became
another river as we slanted along its shore. Again we were in the teeth of
that intoxicating wind. Then a point of light was swaying and flickering
away to the left, and now we were checking and circling. I stumbled against
something sharp—the dinghy’s gunwale. So we had completed the circuit
of our fugitive domain, that dream-island—nightmare island as I always
remember it.
“You must scull, too,” said Davies. “It’s blowing hard now. Keep her
nose up a little—all you know!”
We lurched along, my scull sometimes buried to the thwart, sometimes
striking at the bubbles of a wave top. Davies, in the bows, said “Pull!” or
“Steady!” at intervals. I heard the scud smacking against his oilskin back.
Then a wan, yellow light glanced over the waves. “Easy! Let her come!”
and the bowsprit of the Dulcibella, swollen to spectral proportions, was
stabbing the darkness above me. “Back a bit! Two good strokes. Ship your
scull! Now jump!” I clawed at the tossing hull and landed in a heap. Davies
followed with the painter, and the dinghy swept astern.

“She’s riding beautifully now,” said he, when he had secured the painter.
“There’ll be no rolling on the flood, and it’s nearly low water.”
I don’t think I should have cared, however much she had rolled. I was
finally cured of funk.
It was well that I was, for to be pitched out of your bunk on to wet oil-
cloth is a disheartening beginning to a day. This happened about eight
o’clock. The yacht was pitching violently, and I crawled on all fours into
the cabin, where Davies was setting out breakfast on the floor.
“I let you sleep on,” he said; “we can’t do anything till the water falls. We
should never get the anchor up in this sea. Come and have a look round. It’s
clearing now,” he went on, when we were crouching low on deck, gripping
cleats for safety. “Wind’s veered to nor’-west. It’s been blowing a full gale,
and the sea is at its worst now—near high water. You’ll never see worse
than this.”
I was prepared for what I saw—the stormy sea for leagues around, and a
chaos of breakers where our dream-island had stood—and took it quietly,
even with a sort of elation. The Dulcibella faced the storm as doggedly as
ever, plunging her bowsprit into the sea and flinging green water over her
bows. A wave of confidence and affection for her welled through me. I had
been used to resent the weight and bulk of her unwieldy anchor and cable,
but I saw their use now; varnish, paint, spotless decks, and snowy sails were
foppish absurdities of a hateful past.
“What can we do to-day?” I asked.
“We must keep well inside the banks and be precious careful wherever
there’s a swell. It’s rampant in here, you see, in spite of the barrier of sand.
But there’s plenty we can do farther back.”
We breakfasted in horrible discomfort; then smoked and talked till the
roar of the breakers dwindled. At the first sign of bare sand we got under
way, under mizzen and headsails only, and I learned how to sail a reluctant
anchor out of the ground. Pivoting round, we scudded east before the wind,
over the ground we had traversed the evening before, while an archipelago
of new banks slowly shouldered up above the fast weakening waves. We
trod delicately among and around them, sounding and observing; heaving to
where space permitted, and sometimes using the dinghy. I began to see
where the risks lay in this sort of navigation. Wherever the ocean swell
penetrated, or the wind blew straight down a long deep channel, we had to

be very cautious and leave good margins. “That’s the sort of place you
mustn’t ground on,” Davies used to say.
In the end we traversed the Steil Sand again, but by a different
swatchway, and anchored, after an arduous day, in a notch on its eastern
limit, just clear of the swell that rolled in from the turbulent estuary of the
Elbe. The night was fair, and when the tide receded we lay perfectly still,
the fresh wind only sending a lip-lip of ripples against our sides.

CHAPTER XIII.
The Meaning of our Work

Nothing happened during the next ten days to disturb us at our work.
During every hour of daylight and many of darkness, sailing or anchored,
aground or afloat, in rain and shine, wind and calm, we studied the bed of
the estuaries, and practised ourselves in threading the network of channels;
holding no communication with the land and rarely approaching it. It was a
life of toil, exposure, and peril; a struggle against odds, too; for wild
autumnal weather was the rule, with the wind backing and veering between
the south-west and north-west, and only for two placid days blowing gently
from the east, the safe quarter for this region. Its force and direction
determined each fresh choice of ground. If it was high and northerly we
explored the inner fastnesses; in moderate intervals the exterior fringe,
darting when surprised into whatever lair was most convenient.
Sometimes we were tramping vast solitudes of sand, sometimes scudding
across ephemeral tracts of shallow sea. Again, we were creeping gingerly
round the deeper arteries that surround the Great Knecht, examining their
convolutions as it were the veins of a living tissue, and the circulation of the
tide throbbing through them like blood. Again, we would be staggering
through the tide-rips and overfalls that infest the open fairway of the Weser
on our passage between the Fork and the Pike. On one of our fine days I
saw the scene of Davies’s original adventure by daylight with the banks dry
and the channels manifest. The reader has seen it on the chart, and can, up
to a point, form his opinion; I can only add that I realised by ocular proof
that no more fatal trap could have been devised for an innocent stranger; for
approaching it from the north-west under the easiest conditions it was hard
enough to verify our true course. In a period so full of new excitements it is
not easy for me to say when we were hardest put to it, especially as it was a
rule with Davies never to admit that we were in any danger at all. But I

think that our ugliest experience was on the 10th, when, owing to some
minute miscalculation, we stranded in a dangerous spot. Mere stranding, of
course, was all in the day’s work; the constantly recurring question being
when and where to court or risk it. This time we were so situated that when
the rising tide came again we were on a lee shore, broadside on to a gale of
wind which was sending a nasty sea—with a three-mile drift to give it force
—down Robin’s Balje, which is one of the deeper arteries I spoke of above,
and now lay dead to windward of us. The climax came about ten o’clock at
night. “We can do nothing till she floats,” said Davies; and I can see him
now quietly smoking and splicing a chafed warp while he explained that her
double skin of teak fitted her to stand anything in reason. She certainly had
a terrific test that night, for the bottom was hard, unyielding sand, on which
she rose and fell with convulsive vehemence. The last half-hour was for me
one of almost intolerable tension. I spent it on deck unable to bear the
suspense below. Sheets of driven sea flew bodily over the hull, and a score
of times I thought she must succumb as she shivered to the blows of her
keel on the sand. But those stout skins knit by honest labour stood the trial.
One final thud and she wrenched herself bodily free, found her anchor, and
rode clear.
On the whole I think we made few mistakes. Davies had a supreme
aptitude for the work. Every hour, sometimes every minute, brought its
problem, and his resource never failed. The stiffer it was the cooler he
became. He had, too, that intuition which is independent of acquired skill,
and is at the root of all genius; which, to take cases analogous to his own, is
the last quality of the perfect guide or scout. I believe he could smell sand
where he could not see or touch it.
As for me, the sea has never been my element, and never will be;
nevertheless, I hardened to the life, grew salt, tough, and tolerably alert. As
a soldier learns more in a week of war than in years of parades and pipeclay,
so, cut off from all distractions, moving from bivouac to precarious
bivouac, and depending, to some extent, for my life on my muscles and
wits, I rapidly learnt my work and gained a certain dexterity. I knew my
ropes in the dark, could beat economically to windward through squalls,
take bearings, and estimate the interaction of wind and tide.
We were generally in solitude, but occasionally we met galliots like the
Johannes tacking through the sands, and once or twice we found a fleet of

such boats anchored in a gut, waiting for water. Their draught, loaded, was
from six to seven feet, our own only four, without our centre-plate, but we
took their mean draught as the standard of all our observations. That is, we
set ourselves to ascertain when and how a vessel drawing six and a half feet
could navigate the sands.
A word more as to our motive. It was Davies’s conviction, as I have said,
that the whole region would in war be an ideal hunting-ground for small
free-lance marauders, and I began to know he was right; for look at the
three sea-roads through the sands to Hamburg, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven,
and the heart of commercial Germany. They are like highways piercing a
mountainous district by defiles, where a handful of desperate men can arrest
an army.
Follow the parallel of a war on land. People your mountains with a
daring and resourceful race, who possess an intimate knowledge of every
track and bridle-path, who operate in small bands, travel light, and move
rapidly. See what an immense advantage such guerillas possess over an
enemy which clings to beaten tracks, moves in large bodies, slowly, and
does not “know the country”. See how they can not only inflict disasters on
a foe who vastly overmatches them in strength, but can prolong a semi-
passive resistance long after all decisive battles have been fought. See, too,
how the strong invader can only conquer his elusive antagonists by learning
their methods, studying the country, and matching them in mobility and
cunning. The parallel must not be pressed too far; but that this sort of
warfare will have its counterpart on the sea is a truth which cannot be
questioned.
Davies in his enthusiasm set no limits to its importance. The small boat in
shallow waters played a mighty rôle in his vision of a naval war, a part that
would grow in importance as the war developed and reach its height in the
final stages.
“The heavy battle fleets are all very well,” he used to say, “but if the
sides are well matched there might be nothing left of them after a few
months of war. They might destroy one another mutually, leaving as
nominal conqueror an admiral with scarcely a battleship to bless himself
with. It’s then that the true struggle will set in; and it’s then that anything
that will float will be pressed into the service, and anybody who can steer a
boat, knows his waters, and doesn’t care the toss of a coin for his life, will

have magnificent opportunities. It cuts both ways. What small boats can do
in these waters is plain enough; but take our own case. Say we’re beaten on
the high seas by a coalition. There’s then a risk of starvation or invasion. It’s
all rot what they talk about instant surrender. We can live on half rations,
recuperate, and build; but we must have time. Meanwhile our coast and
ports are in danger, for the millions we sink in forts and mines won’t carry
us far. They’re fixed—pure passive defence. What you want is boats—
mosquitoes with stings—swarms of them—patrol-boats, scout-boats,
torpedo-boats; intelligent irregulars manned by local men, with a pretty free
hand to play their own game. And what a splendid game to play! There are
places very like this over there—nothing half so good, but similar—the
Mersey estuary, the Dee, the Severn, the Wash, and, best of all, the Thames,
with all the Kent, Essex, and Suffolk banks round it. But as for defending
our coasts in the way I mean—we’ve nothing ready—nothing whatsoever!
We don’t even build or use small torpedo-boats. These fast ‘destroyers’ are
no good for this work—too long and unmanageable, and most of them too
deep. What you want is something strong and simple, of light draught, and
with only a spar-torpedo, if it came to that. Tugs, launches, small yachts—
anything would do at a pinch, for success would depend on intelligence, not
on brute force or complicated mechanism. They’d get wiped out often, but
what matter? There’d be no lack of the right sort of men for them if the
thing was organised. But where are the men?
“Or, suppose we have the best of it on the high seas, and have to attack or
blockade a coast like this, which is sand from end to end. You can’t
improvise people who are at home in such waters. The navy chaps don’t
learn it, though, by Jove! they’re the most magnificent service in the world
—in pluck, and nerve, and everything else. They’ll try anything, and often
do the impossible. But their boats are deep, and they get little practice in
this sort of thing.”
Davies never pushed home his argument here; but I know that it was the
passionate wish of his heart, somehow and somewhere, to get a chance of
turning his knowledge of this coast to practical account in the war that he
felt was bound to come, to play that “splendid game” in this, the most
fascinating field for it.
I can do no more than sketch his views. Hearing them as I did, with the
very splash of the surf and the bubble of the tides in my ears, they made a

profound impression on me, and gave me the very zeal for our work he, by
temperament, possessed.
But as the days passed and nothing occurred to disturb us, I felt more and
more strongly that, as regards our quest, we were on the wrong tack. We
found nothing suspicious, nothing that suggested a really adequate motive
for Dollmann’s treachery. I became impatient, and was for pushing on more
quickly westward. Davies still clung to his theory, but the same feeling
influenced him.
“It’s something to do with these channels in the sand,” he persisted, “but
I’m afraid, as you say, we haven’t got at the heart of the mystery. Nobody
seems to care a rap what we do. We haven’t done the estuaries as well as I
should like, but we’d better push on to the islands. It’s exactly the same sort
of work, and just as important, I believe. We’re bound to get a clue soon.”
There was also the question of time, for me at least. I was due to be back
in London, unless I obtained an extension, on the 28th, and our present rate
of progress was slow. But I cannot conscientiously say that I made a serious
point of this. If there was any value in our enterprise at all, official duty
pales beside it. The machinery of State would not suffer from my absence;
excuses would have to be made, and the results braved.
All the time our sturdy little craft grew shabbier and more weather-worn,
the varnish thinner, the decks greyer, the sails dingier, and the cabin roof
more murky where stove-fumes stained it. But the only beauty she ever
possessed, that of perfect fitness for her functions, remained. With nothing
to compare her to she became a home to me. My joints adapted themselves
to her crabbed limits, my tastes and habits to her plain domestic economy.
But oil and water were running low, and the time had come for us to be
forced to land and renew our stock.

CHAPTER XIV.
The First Night in the Islands

A low line of sandhills, pink and fawn in the setting sun, at one end of them
a little white village huddled round the base of a massive four-square
lighthouse—such was Wangeroog, the easternmost of the Frisian Islands, as
I saw it on the evening of October 15. We had decided to make it our first
landing-place; and since it possesses no harbour, and is hedged by a mile of
sand at low water, we had run in on the rising tide till the yacht grounded, in
order to save ourselves as much labour as possible in the carriage to and fro
of the heavy water-breakers and oil-cans which we had to replenish. In faint
outline three miles to the south of us was the flat plain of Friesland, broken
only by some trees, a windmill or two, and a church spire. Between, the
shallow expanse of sea was already beginning to shrink away into lagoons,
chief among which was the narrow passage by which we had approached
from the east. This continued its course west, directly parallel to the island,
and in it, at a distance of half a mile from us, three galliots lay at anchor.
Before supper was over the yacht was high and dry, and when we had
eaten, Davies loaded himself with cans and breakers. I was for taking my
share, but he induced me to stay aboard; for I was dead tired after an
unusually long and trying day, which had begun at 2 a.m., when, using a
precious instalment of east wind, we had started on a complete passage of
the sands from the Elbe to the Jade. It was a barely possible feat for a boat of
our low speed to perform in only two tides; and though we just succeeded, it
was only by dint of tireless vigilance and severe physical strain.
“Lay out the anchor when you’ve had a smoke,” said Davies, “and keep
an eye on the riding-light; it’s my only guide back.”
He lowered himself, and I heard the scrunch of his sea-boots as he
disappeared in the darkness. It was a fine starry night, with a touch of frost
in the air. I lit a cigar, and stretched myself on a sofa close to the glow of the

stove. The cigar soon languished and dropped, and I dozed uneasily, for the
riding-light was on my mind. I got up once and squinted at it through the
half-raised skylight, saw it burning steadily, and lay down again. The cabin
lamp wanted oil and was dying down to a red-hot wick, but I was too drowsy
to attend to it, and it went out. I lit my cigar stump again, and tried to keep
awake by thinking. It was the first time I and Davies had been separated for
so long; yet so used had we grown to freedom from interference that this
would not have disturbed me in the least were it not for a sudden
presentiment that on this first night of the second stage of our labours
something would happen. All at once I heard a sound outside, a splashing
footstep as of a man stepping in a puddle. I was wide awake in an instant,
but never thought of shouting “Is that you, Davies?” for I knew in a flash
that it was not he. It was the slip of a stealthy man. Presently I heard another
footstep—the pad of a boot on the sand—this time close to my ear, just
outside the hull; then some more, fainter and farther aft. I gently rose and
peered aft through the skylight. A glimmer of light, reflected from below,
was wavering over the mizzen-mast and bumpkin; it had nothing to do with
the riding-light, which hung on the forestay. My prowler, I understood, had
struck a match and was reading the name on the stern. How much farther
would his curiosity carry him? The match went out, and footsteps were
audible again. Then a strong, guttural voice called in German, “Yacht ahoy!”
I kept silence. “Yacht ahoy!” a little louder this time. A pause, and then a
vibration of the hull as boots scraped on it and hands grasped the gunwale.
My visitor was on deck. I bobbed down, sat on the sofa, and I heard him
moving along the deck, quickly and confidently, first forward to the bows,
where he stopped, then back to the companion amidships. Inside the cabin it
was pitch dark, but I heard his boots on the ladder, feeling for the steps. In
another moment he would be in the doorway lighting his second match.
Surely it was darker than before? There had been a little glow from the
riding-lamp reflected on to the skylight, but it had disappeared. I looked up,
realised, and made a fool of myself. In a few seconds more I should have
seen my visitor face to face, perhaps had an interview: but I was new to this
sort of work and lost my head. All I thought of was Davies’s last words, and
saw him astray on the sands, with no light to guide him back, the tide rising,
and a heavy load. I started up involuntarily, bumped against the table, and set
the stove jingling. A long step and a grab at the ladder, but just too late! I
grasped something damp and greasy, there was tugging and hard breathing,
and I was left clasping a big sea-boot, whose owner I heard jump on to the

sand and run. I scrambled out, vaulted overboard, and followed blindly by
the sound. He had doubled round the bows of the yacht, and I did the same,
ducked under the bowsprit, forgetting the bobstay, and fell violently on my
head, with all the wind knocked out of me by a wire rope and block whose
strength and bulk was one of the glories of the Dulcibella. I struggled on as
soon as I got some breath, but my invisible quarry was far ahead. I pulled off
my heavy boots, carried them, and ran in my stockings, promptly cutting my
foot on some cockle-shells. Pursuit was hopeless, and a final stumble over a
bit of driftwood sent me sprawling with agony in my toes.
Limping back, I decided that I had made a very poor beginning as an
active adventurer. I had gained nothing, and lost a great deal of breath and
skin, and did not even know for certain where I was. The yacht’s light was
extinguished, and, even with Wangeroog Lighthouse to guide me, I found it
no easy matter to find her. She had no anchor out, if the tide rose. And how
was Davies to find her? After much feeble circling I took to lying flat at
intervals in the hopes of seeing her silhouetted against the starry sky. This
plan succeeded at last, and with relief and humility I boarded her, relit the
riding-light, and carried off the kedge anchor. The strange boot lay at the
foot of the ladder, but it told no tales when I examined it. It was eleven
o’clock, past low water. Davies was cutting it fine if he was to get aboard
without the dinghy’s help. But eventually he reappeared in the most prosaic
way, exhausted with his heavy load, but full of talk about his visit ashore. He
began while we were still on deck.
“Look here, we ought to have settled more about what we’re to say when
we’re asked questions. I chose a quiet-looking shop, but it turned out to be a
sort of inn, where they were drinking pink gin—all very friendly, as usual,
and I found myself under a fire of questions. I said we were on our way back
to England. There was the usual rot about the smallness of the boat, etc. It
struck me that we should want some other pretence for going so slow and
stopping to explore, so I had to bring in the ducks, though goodness knows
we don’t want to waste time over them. The subject wasn’t quite a success.
They said it was too early—jealous, I suppose; but then two fellows spoke
up, and asked to be taken on to help. Said they would bring their punt;
without local help we should do no good. All true enough, no doubt, but
what a nuisance they’d be. I got out of it——”
“It’s just as well you did,” I interposed. “We shall never be able to leave
the boat by herself. I believe we’re watched,” and I related my experience.

“H’m! It’s a pity you didn’t see who it was. Confound that bobstay!” (his
tactful way of reflecting on my clumsiness); “which way did he run?” I
pointed vaguely into the west. “Not towards the island? I wonder if it’s
someone off one of those galliots. There are three anchored in the channel
over there; you can see their lights. You didn’t hear a boat pulling off?”
I explained that I had been a miserable failure as a detective.
“You’ve done jolly well, I think,” said Davies. “If you had shouted when
you first heard him we should know less still. And we’ve got a boot, which
may come in useful. Anchor out all right? Let’s get below.”
We smoked and talked till the new flood, lapping softly round the
Dulcibella, raised her without a jar.
Of course, I argued, there might be nothing in it. The visitor might have
been a commonplace thief; an apparently deserted yacht was a tempting bait.
Davies scouted this possibility from the first.
“They’re not like that in Germany,” he said. “In Holland, if you like,
they’ll do anything. And I don’t like that turning out of the lantern to gain
time, if we were away.”
Nor did I. In spite of my blundering in details, I welcomed the incident as
the first concrete proof that the object of our quest was no mare’s nest. The
next point was what was the visitor’s object? If to search, what would he
have found?
“The charts, of course, with all our corrections and notes, and the log.
They’d give us away,” was Davies’s instant conclusion. Not having his faith
in the channel theory, I was lukewarm about his precious charts.
“After all, we’re doing nothing wrong, as you’ve often said yourself,” I
said.
Still, as a true index to our mode of life they were the only things on board
that could possibly compromise us or suggest that we were anything more
than eccentric young Englishmen cruising for sport (witness the duck-guns)
and pleasure. We had two sets of charts, German and English. The former we
decided to use in practice, and to hide, together with the log, if occasion
demanded. My diary, I resolved, should never leave my person. Then there
were the naval books. Davies scanned them with a look I knew well.
“There are too many of them,” he said, in the tone of a cook fixing the fate
of superfluous kittens. “Let’s throw them overboard. They’re very old

anyhow, and I know them by heart.”
“Well, not here!” I protested, for he was laying greedy hands on the shelf;
“they’ll be found at low water. In fact, I should leave them as they are. You
had them when you were here before, and Dollmann knows you had them. If
you return without them, it will look queer.” They were spared.
The English charts, being relatively useless, though more suitable to our
rôle as English yachtsmen, were to be left in evidence, as shining proofs of
our innocence. It was all delightfully casual, I could not help thinking. A
seven-ton yacht does not abound in (dry) hiding-places, and we were
helpless against a drastic search. If there were secrets on this coast to guard,
and we were suspected as spies, there was nothing to prevent an official visit
and warning. There need be no prowlers scuttling off when alarmed, unless
indeed it was thought wisest to let well alone, if we were harmless, and not
to arouse suspicions where there were none. Here we lost ourselves in
conjecture. Whose agent was the prowler? If Dollmann’s, did Dollmann
know now that the Dulcibella was safe, and back in the region he had
expelled her from? If so, was he likely to return to the policy of violence?
We found ourselves both glancing at the duck-guns strung up under the
racks, and then we both laughed and looked foolish. “A war of wits, and not
of duck-guns,” I opined. “Let’s look at the chart.”

Map B

The reader is already familiar with the general aspect of this singular
region, and I need only remind him that the mainland is that district of
Prussia which is known as East Friesland. It is a [See Map B] short, flat-
topped peninsula, bounded on the west by the Ems estuary and beyond that
by Holland, and on the east by the Jade estuary; a low-lying country,
containing great tracts of marsh and heath, and few towns of any size; on the
north side none. Seven islands lie off the coast. All, except Borkum, which is
round, are attenuated strips, slightly crescent-shaped, rarely more than a mile
broad, and tapering at the ends; in length averaging about six miles, from
Norderney and Juist, which are seven and nine respectively, to little Baltrum,
which is only two and a half.
Of the shoal spaces which lie between them and the mainland, two-thirds
dry at low-water, and the remaining third becomes a system of lagoons
whose distribution is controlled by the natural drift of the North Sea as it
forces its way through the intervals between the islands. Each of these
intervals resembles the bar of a river, and is obstructed by dangerous banks,

over which the sea pours at every tide scooping out a deep pool. This fans
out and ramifies to east and west as the pent-up current frees itself, encircles
the islands, and spreads over the intervening flats. But the farther it
penetrates the less coursing force it has, and as a result no island is girt
completely by a low-water channel. About midway at the back of each of
them is a “watershed”, only covered for five or six hours out of the twelve. A
boat, even of the lightest draught, navigating behind the islands must choose
its moment for passing these. As to navigability, the North Sea Pilot sums up
the matter in these dry terms: “The channels dividing these islands from each
other and the shore afford to the small craft of the country the means of
communication between the Ems and the Jade, to which description of
vessels only they are available.” The islands are dismissed with a brief note
or two about beacons and lights.
The more I looked at the chart the more puzzled I became. The islands
were evidently mere sandbanks, with a cluster of houses and a church on
each, the only hint of animation in their desolate ensemble being the
occasional word “Bade-strand”, suggesting that they were visited in the
summer months by a handful of townsfolk for the sea-bathing. Norderney, of
course, was conspicuous in this respect; but even its town, which I know by
repute as a gay and fashionable watering-place, would be dead and empty
for some months in the year, and could have no commercial importance. No
man could do anything on the mainland coast—a monotonous line of dyke
punctuated at intervals by an infinitesimal village. Glancing idly at the
names of these villages, I noticed that they most of them ended in siel—a
repulsive termination, that seemed appropriate to the whole region. There
were Carolinensiel, Bensersiel, etc. Siel means either a sewer or a sluice, the
latter probably in this case, for I noticed that each village stood at the outlet
of a little stream which evidently carried off the drainage of the lowlands
behind. A sluice, or lock, would be necessary at the mouth, for at high tide
the land is below the level of the sea. Looking next at the sands outside, I
noticed that across them and towards each outlet a line of booms was
marked, showing that there was some sort of tidal approach to the village,
evidently formed by the scour of the little stream.
“Are we going to explore those?” I asked Davies.
“I don’t see the use,” he answered; “they only lead to those potty little
places. I suppose local galliots use them.”
“How about your torpedo-boats and patrol-boats?”

“They might, at certain tides. But I can’t see what value they’d be, unless
as a refuge for a German boat in the last resort. They lead to no harbours.
Wait! There’s a little notch in the dyke at Neuharlingersiel and
Dornumersiel, which may mean some sort of a quay arrangement, but what’s
the use of that?”
“We may as well visit one or two, I suppose?”
“I suppose so; but we don’t want to be playing round villages. There’s
heaps of really important work to do, farther out.”
“Well, what do you make of this coast?”
Davies had nothing but the same old theory, but he urged it with a force
and keenness that impressed me more deeply than ever.
“Look at those islands!” he said. “They’re clearly the old line of coast,
hammered into breaches by the sea. The space behind them is like an
immense tidal harbour, thirty miles by five, and they screen it impenetrably.
It’s absolutely made for shallow war-boats under skilled pilotage. They can
nip in and out of the gaps, and dodge about from end to end. On one side is
the Ems, on the other the big estuaries. It’s a perfect base for torpedo-craft.”
I agreed (and agree still), but still I shrugged my shoulders.
“We go on exploring, then, in the same way?”
“Yes; keeping a sharp look-out, though. Remember, we shall always be in
sight of land now.”
“What’s the glass doing?”
“Higher than for a long time. I hope it won’t bring fog. I know this district
is famous for fogs, and fine weather at this time of the year is bad for them
anywhere. I would rather it blew, if it wasn’t for exploring those gaps, where
an on-shore wind would be nasty. Six-thirty to-morrow; not later. I think I’ll
sleep in the saloon for the future, after what happened to-night.”

CHAPTER XV.
Bensersiel

[For this chapter see Map B.]
The decisive incidents of our cruise were now fast approaching. Looking
back on the steps that led to them, and anxious that the reader should be
wholly with us in our point of view, I think I cannot do better than give
extracts from my diary of the next three days:
“Oct. 16 (up at 6.30, yacht high and dry). Of the three galliots out at
anchor in the channel yesterday, only one is left.... I took my turn with the
breakers this morning and walked to Wangeroog, whose village I found half
lost in sand drifts, which are planted with tufts of marram-grass in
mathematical rows, to give stability and prevent a catastrophe like that at
Pompeii. A friendly grocer told me all there is to know, which is little. The
islands are what we thought them—barren for the most part, with a small
fishing population, and a scanty accession of summer visitors for bathing.
The season is over now, and business slack for him. There is still, however,
a little trade with the mainland in galliots and lighters, a few of which come
from the ‘siels’ on the mainland. ‘Had these harbours?’ I asked. ‘Mud-
holes!’ he replied, with a contemptuous laugh. (He is a settler in these wilds,
not a native.) Said he had heard of schemes for improving them, so as to
develop the islands as health-resorts, but thought it was only a wild
speculation.
“A heavy tramp back to the yacht, nearly crushed by impedimenta. While
Davies made yet another trip, I stalked some birds with a gun, and obtained
what resembled a specimen of the smallest variety of jack-snipe, and small
at that; but I made a great noise, which I hope persuaded somebody of the
purity of our motives.
“We weighed anchor at one o’clock, and in passing the anchored galliot
took a good look at her. Kormoran was on her stern; otherwise she was just

like a hundred others. Nobody was on deck.
“We spent the whole afternoon till dark exploring the Harle, or gap
between Wangeroog and Spiekeroog; the sea breaking heavily on the banks
outside.... Fine as the day was, the scene from the offing was desolate to the
last degree. The naked spots of the two islands are hideous in their sterility:
melancholy bits of wreck-wood their only relief, save for one or two
grotesque beacons, and, most bizarre of all, a great church-tower, standing
actually in the water, on the north side of Wangeroog, a striking witness to
the encroachment of the sea. On the mainland, which was barely visible,
there was one very prominent landmark, a spire, which from the chart we
took to be that of Esens, a town four miles inland.
“The days are growing short. Sunset is soon after five, and an hour later
it is too dark to see booms and buoys distinctly. The tides also are awkward
just now.[1] High-water at morning and evening is between five and six—
just at twilight. For the night, we groped with the lead into the Muschel
Balge, the tributary channel which laps round the inside of Spiekeroog, and
lay in two fathoms, clear of the outer swell, but rolling a little when the ebb
set in strong against the wind.
[1] I exclude all the technicalities that I can, but the reader should take note that
the tide-table is very important henceforward.

“A galliot passed us, going west, just as we were stowing sails; too dark
to see her name. Later, we saw her anchor-light higher up our channel.
“The great event of the day has been the sighting of a small German
gunboat, steaming slowly west along the coast. That was about half-past
four, when we were sounding along the Harle.
“Davies identified her at once as the Blitz, Commander von Brüning’s
gunboat. We wondered if he recognised the Dulcibella, but, anyway, she
seemed to take no notice of us and steamed slowly on. We quite expected to
fall in with her when we came to the islands, but the actual sight of her has
excited us a good deal. She is an ugly, cranky little vessel, painted grey,
with one funnel. Davis is contemptuous about her low freeboard forward;
says he would rather go to sea in the Dulce. He has her dimensions and
armament (learnt from Brassey) at his fingers’ ends: one hundred and forty
feet by twenty-five, one 4.9 gun, one 3.4, and four maxims—an old type.
Just going to bed; a bitterly cold night.

“Oct. 17.—Glass falling heavily this morning, to our great disgust. Wind
back in the SW and much warmer. Starting at 5.30 we tacked on the tide
over the ‘watershed’ behind Spiekeroog. So did the galliot we had seen last
night, but we again missed identifying her, as she weighed anchor before
we came up to her berth. Davies, however, swore she was the Kormoran.
We lost sight of her altogether for the greater part of the day, which we
spent in exploring the Otzumer Ee (the gap between Langeoog and
Spiekeroog), now and then firing some perfunctory shots at seals and sea-
birds . . . (nautical details omitted). . . . In the evening we were hurrying
back to an inside anchorage, when we made a bad mistake; did, in fact,
what we had never done before, ran aground on the very top of high water,
and are now sitting hard and fast on the edge of the Rute Flat, south of the
east spit of Langeoog. The light was bad, and a misplaced boom tricked us;
kedging-off failed, and at 8 p.m. we were left on a perfect Ararat of sand,
and only a yard or two from that accursed boom, which is perched on the
very summit, as a lure to the unwary. It is going to blow hard too, though
that is no great matter, as we are sheltered by banks on the sou’-west and
nor’-west sides, the likely quarters. We hope to float at 6.15 to-morrow
morning, but to make sure of being able to get her off, we have been
transferring some ballast to the dinghy, by way of lightening the yacht—a
horrid business handling the pigs of lead, heavy, greasy, and black. The
saloon is an inferno, the deck like a collier’s, and ourselves like sweeps.
“The anchors are laid out, and there is nothing more to be done.
“Oct. 18—Half a gale from the sou’-west when we turned out, but it
helped us to float off safely at six. The dinghy was very nearly swamped
with the weight of lead in it, and getting the ballast back into the yacht was
the toughest job of all. We got the dinghy alongside, and Davies jumped in
(nearly sinking it for good), balanced himself, fended off, and, whenever he
got a chance, attached the pigs one by one on to a bight of rope, secured to
the peak halyards, on which I hoisted from the deck. It was touch and go for
a few minutes, and then easier.
“It was nine before we had finished replacing the pigs in the hold, a filthy
but delicate operation, as they fit like a puzzle, and if one is out of place the
floor-boards won’t shut down. Coming on deck after it, we saw to our
surprise the Blitz, lying at anchor in the Schill Balje, inside Spiekeroog,
about a mile and a half off. She must have entered the Otzumer Ee at high-

water for shelter from the gale; a neat bit of work for a vessel of her size, as
Davies says she draws nine-foot-ten, and there can’t be more than twelve on
the bar at high-water neaps. Several smacks had run in too, and there were
two galliots farther up our channel, but we couldn’t make out if the
Kormoran was one.
“When the banks uncovered we lay more quietly, so landed and took a
long, tempestuous walk over the Rute, with compass and notebooks.
Returning at two, we found the glass tumbling down almost visibly.
“I suggested running for Bensersiel, one of the mainland villages south-
west of us, on the evening flood, as it seemed just the right opportunity, if
we were to visit one of those ‘siels’ at all. Davies was very lukewarm, but
events overcame him. At 3.30 a black, ragged cloud, appearing to trail into
the very sea, brought up a terrific squall. This passed, and there was a
deathly pause of ten minutes while the whole sky eddied as with smoke-
wreaths. Then an icy puff struck us from the north-west, rapidly veering till
it reached north-east; there it settled and grew harder every moment.
“‘Sou’-west to north-east—only the worst sort do that,’ said Davies.
“The shift to the east changed the whole situation (as shifts often have
before), making the Rute Flats a lee shore, while to windward lay the deep
lagoons of the Otzumer Ee, bounded indeed by Spiekeroog, but still
offering a big drift for wind and sea. We had to clear out sharp, to set the
mizzen. It was out of the question to beat to windward, for it was blowing a
hurricane in a few minutes. We must go to leeward, and Davies was for
running farther in well behind the Jans sand, and not risking Bensersiel. A
blunder of mine, when I went to the winch to get up anchor, settled the
question. Thirty out of our forty fathoms of chain were out. Confused by the
motion and a blinding sleet-shower that had come on, and forgetting the
tremendous strain on the cable, I cast the slack off the bitts and left it loose.
There was then only one turn of the chain round the drum, enough in
ordinary weather to prevent it running out. But now my first heave on the
winch-lever started it slipping, and in an instant it was whizzing out of the
hawse-pipe and overboard. I tried to stop it with my foot, stumbled at a
heavy plunge of the yacht, heard something snap below, and saw the last of
it disappear. The yacht fell off the wind, and drifted astern. I shouted, and
had the sense to hoist the reefed foresail at once. Davies had her in hand in

no time, and was steering south-west. Going aft I found him cool and
characteristic.
“‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said; ‘anchor’s buoyed. (Ever since leaving the Elbe
we had had a buoy-line on our anchor against the emergency of having to
slip our cable and run. For the same reason the end of the chain was not
made permanently fast below.) We’ll come back to-morrow and get it. Can’t
now. Should have had to slip it anyhow; wind and sea too strong. We’ll try
for Bensersiel. Can’t trust to a warp and kedge out here.’
“An exciting run it was, across country, so to speak, over an unboomed
watershed; but we had bearings from our morning’s walk. Shoal water all
the way and a hollow sea breaking everywhere. We soon made out the
Bensersiel booms, but even under mizzen and foresail only we travelled too
fast, and had to heave to outside them, for the channel looked too shallow
still. We lowered half the centreboard and kept her just holding her own to
windward, through a most trying period. In the end had to run for it sooner
than we meant, as we were sagging to leeward in spite of all, and the light
was failing. Bore up at 5.15, and raced up the channel with the booms on
our left scarcely visible in the surf and rising water. Davies stood forward,
signalling—port, starboard, or steady—with his arms, while I wrestled with
the helm, flung from side to side and flogged by wave-tops. Suddenly found
a sort of dyke on our right just covering with sea. The shore appeared
through scud, and men on a quay shouting. Davies brandished his left arm
furiously; I ported hard, and we were in smoother water. A few seconds
more and we were whizzing through a slit between two wood jetties. Inside
a small square harbour showed, but there was no room to round up properly
and no time to lower sails. Davies just threw the kedge over, and it just got
a grip in time to check our momentum and save our bowsprit from the
quayside. A man threw us a rope and we brought up alongside, rather
bewildered.
“Not more so than the natives, who seemed to think we had dropped
from the sky. They were very friendly, with an undercurrent of
disappointment, having expected salvage work outside, I think. All showed
embarrassing helpfulness in stowing sails, etc. We were rescued by a fussy
person in uniform and spectacles, who swept them aside and announced
himself as the Custom-house officer (fancy such a thing in this absurd mud-
hole!), marched down into the cabin, which was in a fearful mess and

wringing wet, and producing ink, pen, and a huge printed form, wanted to
know our cargo, our crew, our last port, our destination, our food, stores,
and everything. No cargo (pleasure); captain, Davies; crew, me; last port,
Brunsbüttel; destination, England. What spirits had we? Whisky, produced.
What salt? Tin of Cerebos, produced, and a damp deposit in a saucer. What
coffee? etc. Lockers searched, guns fingered, bunks rifled. Meanwhile the
German charts and the log, the damning clues to our purpose, were in full
evidence, crying for notice which they did not get. (We had forgotten our
precautions in the hurry of our start from the Rute.) When the huge form
was as full as he could make it, he suddenly became human, talkative, and
thirsty; and, when we treated him, patronising. It seemed to dawn on him
that, under our rough clothes and crust of brine and grime, we were two
mad and wealthy aristocrats, worthy protégés of a high official. He insisted
on our bringing our cushions to dry at his house, and to get rid of him we
consented, for we were wet, hungry, and longing to change and wash. He
talked himself away at last, and we hid the log and charts; but he returned,
in the postmaster’s uniform this time before we had finished supper, and
haled us and our cushions up through dark and mud to his cottage near the
quay. To reach it we crossed a small bridge spanning what seemed to be a
small river with sluice-gates, just as we had thought.
“He showed his prizes to his wife, who was quite flustered by the
distinguished strangers, and received the cushions with awe; and next we
were carried off to the Gasthaus and exhibited to the village circle, where
we talked ducks and weather. (Nobody takes us seriously; I never felt less
like a conspirator.) Our friend, who is a feather-headed chatterbox, is
enormously important about his ridiculous little port, whose principal
customer seems to be the Langeoog post-boat, a galliot running to and fro
according to tide. A few lighters also come down the stream with bricks and
produce from the interior, and are towed to the islands. The harbour has
from five to seven feet in it for two hours out of twelve! Herr Schenkel
talked us back to the yacht, which we found resting on the mud—and here
we are. Davies pretends there are harbour smells, and says he won’t be able
to sleep; is already worrying about how to get away from here. Ashore, they
were saying that it’s impossible, under sail, in strong north-east winds, the
channel being too narrow to tack in. For my part I find it a huge relief to be
in any sort of harbour after a fortnight in the open. There are no tides or
anchors to think about, and no bumping or rolling. Fresh milk to-morrow!”

CHAPTER XVI.
Commander von Brüning

To resume my story in narrative form.
I was awakened at ten o’clock on the 19th, after a long and delicious
sleep, by Davies’s voice outside, talking his unmistakable German. Looking
out, in my pyjamas, I saw him on the quay above in conversation with a
man in a long mackintosh coat and a gold-laced navy cap. He had a close-
trimmed auburn beard, a keen, handsome face, and an animated manner. It
was raining in a raw air.
They saw me, and Davies said: “Hullo, Carruthers! Here’s Commander
von Brüning from the Blitz—that’s ‘meiner Freund’ Carruthers.” (Davies
was deplorably weak in terminations.)
The Commander smiled broadly at me, and I inclined an uncombed head,
while, for a moment, the quest was a dream, and I myself felt unutterably
squalid and foolish. I ducked down, heard them parting, and Davies came
aboard.
“We’re to meet him at the inn for a talk at twelve,” he said.
His news was that the Blitz’s steam-cutter had come in on the morning
tide, and he had met von Brüning when marketing at the inn. Secondly, the
Kormoran had also come in, and was moored close by. It was as clear as
possible, therefore, that the latter had watched us, and was in touch with the
Blitz, and that both had seized the opportunity of our being cooped up in
Bensersiel to take further stock of us. What had passed hitherto? Nothing
much. Von Brüning had greeted Davies with cordial surprise, and said he
had wondered yesterday if it was the Dulcibella that he had seen anchored
behind Langeoog. Davies had explained that we had left the Baltic and were
on our way home; taking the shelter of the islands.
“Supposing he comes on board and asks to see our log?” I said.

“Pull it out,” said Davies, “It’s rot, this hiding, after all, I say. I rather
funk this interview; what are we to say? It’s not in my line.”
We resolved abruptly on an important change of plan, replaced the log
and charts in the rack as the first logical step. They contained nothing but
bearings, courses, and the bare data of navigation. To Davies they were
hard-won secrets of vital import, to be lied for, however hard and distasteful
lying was. I was cooler as to their value, but in any case the same thing was
now in both our minds. There would be great difficulties in the coming
interview if we tried to be too clever and conceal the fact that we had been
exploring. We did not know how much von Brüning knew. When had our
surveillance by the Kormoran begun? Apparently at Wangeroog, but
possibly in the estuaries, where we had not fired a shot at duck. Perhaps he
knew even more—Dollmann’s treachery, Davies’s escape, and our
subsequent movements—we could not tell. On the other hand, exploration
was known to be a fad of Davies’s, and in September he had made no secret
of it.
It was safer to be consistent now. After breakfast we determined to find
out something about the Kormoran, which lay on the mud at the other side
of the harbour, and accordingly addressed ourselves to two mighty sailors,
whose jerseys bore the legend “Post”, and who towered conspicuous among
a row of stolid Frisians on the quay, all gazing gravely down at us as at a
curious bit of marine bric-à-brac. The twins (for such they proved to be)
were most benignant giants, and asked us aboard the post-boat galliot for a
chat. It was easy to bring the talk naturally round to the point we wished,
and we soon gained some most interesting information, delivered in the
broadest Frisian, but intelligible enough. They called the Kormoran a
Memmert boat, or “wreck-works” boat. It seemed that off the western end
of Juist, the island lying west of Norderney, there lay the bones of a French
war-vessel, wrecked ages ago. She carried bullion which has never been
recovered, in spite of many efforts. A salvage company was trying for it
now, and had works on Memmert, an adjacent sandbank. “That is Herr
Grimm, the overseer himself,” they said, pointing to the bridge above the
sluice-gates. (I call him “Grimm” because it describes him exactly.) A man
in a pilot jacket and peaked cap was leaning over the parapet.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked.

They answered that he was often up and down the coast, work on the
wreck being impossible in rough weather. They supposed he was bringing
cargo in his galliot from Wilhelmshaven, all the company’s plant and stores
coming from that port. He was a local man from Aurich; an ex-tug skipper.
We discussed this information while walking out over the sands to see the
channel at low water.
“Did you hear anything about this in September?” I asked.
“Not a word. I didn’t go to Juist. I would have, probably, if I hadn’t met
Dollmann.”
What in the world did it mean? How did it affect our plans?
“Look at his boots if we pass him,” was all Davies had to suggest.
The channel was now a ditch, with a trickle in it, running north by east,
roughly, and edged by a dyke of withies for the first quarter of a mile. It
was still blowing fresh from the north-east, and we saw that exit was
impossible in such a wind.
So back to the village, a paltry, bleak little place. We passed friend
Grimm on the bridge; a dark, clean-shaved, saturnine man, wearing shoes.
Approaching the inn:
“We haven’t settled quite enough, have we?” said Davies. “What about
our future plans?”
“Heaven knows, we haven’t,” I said. “But I don’t see how we can. We
must see how things go. It’s past twelve, and it won’t do to be late.”
“Well, I leave it to you.”
“All right, I’ll do my best. All you’ve got to do is to be yourself and tell
one lie, if need be, about the trick Dollmann played you.”
The next scene: von Brüning, Davies, and I, sitting over coffee and
Kümmel at a table in a dingy inn-parlour overlooking the harbour and the
sea, Davies with a full box of matches on the table before him. The
Commander gave us a hearty welcome, and I am bound to say I liked him at
once, as Davies had done; but I feared him, too, for he had honest eyes, but
abominably clever ones.
I had impressed on Davies to talk and question as freely and naturally as
though nothing uncommon had happened since he last saw von Brüning on
the deck of the Medusa. He must ask about Dollmann—the mutual friend—

at the outset, and, if questioned about that voyage in his company to the
Elbe, must lie like a trooper as to the danger he had been in. This was the
one clear and essential necessity, where much was difficult. Davies did his
duty with precipitation, and blushed when he put his question, in a way that
horrified me, till I remembered that his embarrassment was due, and would
be ascribed, to another cause.
“Herr Dollmann is away still, I think,” said von Brüning. (So Davies had
been right at Brunsbüttel.) “Were you thinking of looking him up again?”
he added.
“Yes,” said Davies, shortly.
“Well, I’m sure he’s away. But his yacht is back, I believe—and Fräulein
Dollmann, I suppose.”
“H’m!” said Davies; “she’s a very fine boat that.”
Our host smiled, gazing thoughtfully at Davies, who was miserable. I
saw a chance, and took it mercilessly.
“We can call on Fräulein Dollmann, at least, Davies,” I said, with a
meaning smile at von Brüning.
“H’m!” said Davies; “will he be back soon, do you think?”
The Commander had begun to light a cigar, and took his time in
answering. “Probably,” he said, after some puffing, “he’s never away very
long. But you’ve seen them later than I have. Didn’t you sail to the Elbe
together the day after I saw you last?”
“Oh, part of the way,” said Davies, with great negligence. “I haven’t seen
him since. He got there first; outsailed me.”
“Gave you the slip, in fact?”
“Of course he beat me; I was close-reefed. Besides——”
“Oh, I remember; there was a heavy blow—a devil of a heavy blow. I
thought of you that day. How did you manage?”
“Oh, it was a fair wind; it wasn’t far, you see.”
“Grosse Gott! In that.” He nodded towards the window whence the
Dulcibella’s taper mast could be seen pointing demurely heavenwards.
“She’s a splendid sea-boat,” said Davies, indignantly.
“A thousand pardons!” said von Brüning, laughing.

“Don’t shake my faith in her,” I put in. “I’ve got to get to England in
her.”
“Heaven forbid; I was only thinking that there must have been some sea
round the Scharhorn that day; a tame affair, no doubt, Herr Davies?”
“Scharhorn?” said Davies, who did not catch the idiom in the latter
sentence. “Oh, we didn’t go that way. We cut through the sands—by the
Telte.”
“The Telte! In a north-west gale!” The Commander started, ceased to
smile, and only stared. (It was genuine surprise; I could swear it. He had
heard nothing of this before.)
“Herr Dollmann knew the way,” said Davies, doggedly. “He kindly
offered to pilot me through, and I wouldn’t have gone otherwise.” There
was an awkward little pause.
“He led you well, it seems?” said von Brüning.
“Yes; there’s a nasty surf there, though, isn’t there? But it saves six miles
—and the Scharhorn. Not that I saved distance. I was fool enough to run
aground.”
“Ah!” said the other, with interest.
“It didn’t matter, because I was well inside then. Those sands are difficult
at high water. We’ve come back that way, you know.”
(“And we run aground every day,” I remarked, with resignation.)
“Is that where the Medusa gave you the slip?” asked von Brüning, still
studying Davies with a strange look, which I strove anxiously to analyse.
“She wouldn’t have noticed,” said Davies. “It was very thick and squally
—and she had got some way ahead. There was no need for her to stop,
anyway. I got off all right; the tide was rising still. But, of course, I
anchored there for the night.”
“Where?”
“Inside there, under the Hohenhörn,” said Davies, simply.
“Under the what?”
“The Hohenhörn.”
“Go on—didn’t they wait for you at Cuxhaven?”

“I don’t know; I didn’t go that way.” The Commander looked more and
more puzzled.
“Not by the ship canal, I mean. I changed my mind about it, because the
next day the wind was easterly. It would have been a dead beat across the
sands to Cuxhaven, while it was a fair wind straight out to the Eider River.
So I sailed there, and reached the Baltic that way. It was all the same.”
There was another pause.
“Well done, Davies,” I thought. He had told his story well, using no
subtlety. I knew it was exactly how he would have told it to anyone else, if
he had not had irrefutable proof of foul play.
The Commander laughed, suddenly and heartily.
“Another liqueur?” he said. Then, to me: “Upon my word, your friend
amuses me. It’s impossible to make him spin a yarn. I expect he had a bad
time of it.”
“That’s nothing to him,” I said; “he prefers it. He anchored me the other
day behind the Hohenhörn in a gale of wind; said it was safer than a
harbour, and more sanitary.”
“I wonder he brought you here last night. It was a fair wind for England;
and not very far.”
“There was no pilot to follow, you see.”
“With a charming daughter—no.”
Davies frowned and glared at me. I was merciful and changed the
subject.
“Besides,” I said, “we’ve left our anchor and chain out there.” And I
made confession of my sin.
“Well, as it’s buoyed, I should advise you to pick it up as soon as you
can,” said von Brüning, carelessly; “or someone else will.”
“Yes, by Jove! Carruthers,” said Davies, eagerly, “we must get out on this
next tide.”
“Oh, there’s no hurry,” I said, partly from policy, partly because the ease
of the shore was on me. To sit on a chair upright is something of a luxury,
however good the cause in which you have crouched like a monkey over a
table at the level of your knees, with a reeking oil-stove at your ear.

“They’re honest enough about here, aren’t they?” I added. While the
words were on my lips I remembered the midnight visitor at Wangeroog,
and guessed that von Brüning was leading up to a test. Grimm (if he was
the visitor) would have told him of his narrow escape from detection, and
reticence on our part would show we suspected something. I could have
kicked myself, but it was not too late. I took the bull by the horns, and,
before the Commander could answer, added:
“By Jove! Davies, I forgot about that fellow at Wangeroog. The anchor
might be stolen, as he says.”
Davies looked blank, but von Brüning had turned to me.
“We never dreamed there would be thieves among these islands,” I said,
“but the other night I nearly caught a fellow in the act. He thought the yacht
was empty.”
I described the affair in detail, and with what humour I could. Our host
was amused, and apologetic for the islanders.
“They’re excellent folk,” he said, “but they’re born with predatory
instincts. Their fathers made their living out of wrecks on this coast, and the
children inherit a weakness for plunder. When Wangeroog lighthouse was
built they petitioned the Government for compensation, in perfect good
faith. The coast is well lighted now, and windfalls are rare, but the sight of a
stranded yacht, with the owners ashore, would inflame the old passion; and,
depend upon it, someone has seen that anchor-buoy.”
The word “wrecks” had set me tingling. Was it another test? Impossible
to say; but audacity was safer than reserve, and might save trouble in the
future.
“Isn’t there the wreck of a treasure-ship somewhere farther west?” I
asked. “We heard of it at Wangeroog” (my first inaccuracy). “They said a
company was exploiting it.”
“Quite right,” said the Commander, without a sign of embarrassment. “I
don’t wonder you heard of it. It’s one of the few things folk have to talk
about in these parts. It lies on Juister Riff, a shoal off Juist. [See Map B]
She was a French frigate, the Corinne, bound from Hamburg to Havre in
1811, when Napoleon held Hamburg as tight as Paris. She carried a million
and a half in gold bars, and was insured in Hamburg; foundered in four
fathoms, broke up, and there lies the treasure.”

“Never been raised?”
“No. The underwriters failed and went bankrupt, and the wreck came into
the hands of your English Lloyd’s. It remained their property till ’75, but
they never got at the bullion. In fact, for fifty years it was never scratched
at, and its very position grew doubtful, for the sand swallowed every stick.
The rights passed through various hands, and in ’86 were held by an
enterprising Swedish company, which brought modern appliances, dived,
dredged, and dug, fished up a lot of timber and bric-à-brac, and then broke.
Since then, two Hamburg firms have tackled the job and lost their capital.
Scores of lives have been spent over it, all told, and probably a million of
money. Still there are the bars, somewhere.”
“And what’s being done now?”
“Well, recently a small local company was formed. It has a depôt at
Memmert, and is working with a good deal of perseverance. An engineer
from Bremen was the principal mover, and a few men from Norderney and
Emden subscribed the capital. By the way, our friend Dollmann is largely
interested in it.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Davies’s tell-tale face growing
troubled with inward questionings.
“We mustn’t get back to him,” I said, laughing. “It’s not fair to my friend.
But all this is very interesting. Will they ever get those bars?”
“Ah! that’s the point,” said von Brüning, with a mysterious twinkle. “It’s
an undertaking of immense difficulty; for the wreck is wholly disintegrated,
and the gold, being the heaviest part of it, has, of course, sunk the deepest.
Dredging is useless after a certain point; and the divers have to make
excavations in the sand, and shore them up as best they can. Every gale
nullifies half their labour, and weather like this of the last fortnight plays the
mischief with the work. Only this morning I met the overseer, who happens
to be ashore here. He was as black as thunder over prospects.”
“Well, it’s a romantic speculation,” I said. “They deserve a return for
their money.”
“I hope they’ll get it,” said the Commander. “The fact is, I hold a few
shares myself.”
“Oh, I hope I haven’t been asking indiscreet questions?”

“Oh, dear no; all the world knows what I’ve told you. But you’ll
understand that one has to be reticent as to results in such a case. It’s a big
stake, and the title is none too sound. There has been litigation over it. Not
that I worry much about my investment; for I shan’t lose much by it at the
worst. But it gives one an interest in this abominable coast. I go and see
how they’re getting on sometimes, when I’m down that way.”
“It is an abominable coast,” I agreed heartily, “though you won’t get
Davies to agree.”
“It’s a magnificent place for sailing,” said Davies, looking wistfully out
over the storm-speckled grey of the North Sea.
He underwent some more chaff, and the talk passed to our cruising
adventures in the Baltic and the estuaries. Von Brüning cross-examined us
with the most charming urbanity and skill. Nothing he asked could cause us
the slightest offence; and a responsive frankness was our only possible
course. So, date after date, and incident after incident, were elicited in the
most natural way. As we talked I was astonished to find how little there was
that was worth concealing, and heartily thankful that we had decided on
candour. My fluency gave me the lead, and Davies followed me; but his
own personality was really our tower of strength. I realised that as I
watched the play of his eager features, and heard him struggle for
expression on his favourite hobby; all his pet phrases translated crudely into
the most excruciating German. He was convincing, because he was himself.
“Are there many like you in England?” asked von Brüning once.
“Like me? Of course—lots,” said Davies.
“I wish there were more in Germany; they play at yachting over here—
on shore half the time, drinking and loafing; paid crews, clean hands, white
trousers; laid up in the middle of September.”
“We haven’t seen many yachts about, said Davies, politely.
For my part, I made no pretence of being a Davies. Faithful to my lower
nature, I vowed the Germans were right, and, not without a secret zest, drew
a lurid picture of the horrors of crewless cruising, and the drudgery that my
remorseless skipper inflicted on me. It was delightful to see Davies wincing
when I described my first night at Flensburg, for I had my revenge at last,
and did not spare him. He bore up gallantly under my jesting, but I knew

very well by his manner that he had not forgiven me my banter about the
“charming daughter”.
“You speak German well,” said von Brüning.
“I have lived in Germany,” said I.
“Studying for a profession, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said I, thinking ahead. “Civil Service,” was my prepared answer to
the next question, but again (morbidly, perhaps) I saw a pitfall. That letter
from my chief awaiting me at Norderney? My name was known, and we
were watched. It might be opened. Lord, how casual we have been!
“May I ask what?”
“The Foreign Office.” It sounded suspicious, but there it was. “Indeed—
in the Government service? When do you have to be back?”
That was how the question of our future intentions was raised,
prematurely by me; for two conflicting theories were clashing in my brain.
But the contents of the letter dogged me now, and “when at a loss, tell the
truth”, was an axiom I was finding sound. So I answered, “Pretty soon, in
about a week. But I’m expecting a letter at Norderney, which may give me
an extension. Davies said it was a good address to give,” I added, smiling.
“Naturally,” said von Brüning, dryly; the joke had apparently ceased to
amuse him. “But you haven’t much time then, have you?” he added, “unless
you leave your skipper in the lurch. It’s a long way to England, and the
season is late for yachts.”
I felt myself being hurried.
“Oh, you don’t understand,” I explained; “he’s in no hurry. He’s a man of
leisure; aren’t you, Davies?”
“What?” said Davies.
I translated my cruel question.
“Yes,” said Davies, with simple pathos.
“If I have to leave him I shan’t be missed—as an able seaman, at least.
He’ll just potter on down the islands, running aground and kedging-off, and
arrive about Christmas.”
“Or take the first fair gale to Dover,” laughed the Commander.
“Or that. So, you see, we’re in no hurry; and we never make plans. And
as for a passage to England straight, I’m not such a coward as I was at first,

but I draw the line at that.”
“You’re a curious pair of shipmates; what’s your point of view, Herr
Davies?”
“I like this coast,” said Davies. “And—we want to shoot some ducks.”
He was nervous, and forgot himself. I had already satirised our sporting
armament and exploits, and hoped the subject was disposed of. Ducks were
pretexts, and might lead to complications. I particularly wanted a free hand.
“As to wild fowl,” said our friend, “I would like to give you gentlemen
some advice. There are plenty to be got, now that autumn weather has set in
(you wouldn’t have got a shot in September, Herr Davies; I remember your
asking about them when I saw you last). And even now it’s early for
amateurs. In hard winter weather a child can pick them up; but they’re wild
still, and want crafty hunting. You want a local punt, and above all a local
man (you could stow him in your fo’c’sle), and to go to work seriously.
Now, if you really wish for sport, I could help you. I could get you a
trustworthy——”
“Oh, it’s too good of you,” stammered Davies, in a more unhappy accent
than usual. “We can easily find one for ourselves. A man at Wangeroog
offered——”
“Oh, did he?” interrupted von Brüning, laughing. “I’m not surprised. You
don’t know the Frieslanders. They’re guileless, as I said, but they cling to
their little perquisites.” (I translated to Davies.) “They’ve been cheated out
of wrecks, and they’re all the more sensitive about ducks, which are more
lucrative than fish. A stranger is a poacher. Your man would have made
slight errors as to time and place.”
“You said they were odd in their manner, didn’t you, Davies?” I put in.
“Look here, this is very kind of Commander von Brüning; but hadn’t we
better be certain of my plans before settling down to shoot? Let’s push on
direct to Norderney and get that letter of mine, and then decide. But we
shan’t see you again, I suppose, Commander?”
“Why not? I am cruising westwards, and shall probably call at
Norderney. Come aboard if you’re there, won’t you? I should like to show
you the Blitz.”
“Thanks, very much,” said Davies, uneasily.
“Thanks, very much,” said I, as heartily as I could.

Our party broke up soon after this.
“Well, gentlemen, I must take leave of you,” said our friend. “I have to
drive to Esens. I shall be going back to the Blitz on the evening tide, but
you’ll be busy then with your own boat.”
It had been a puzzling interview, but the greatest puzzle was still to come.
As we went towards the door, von Brüning made a sign to me. We let
Davies pass out and remained standing.
“One word in confidence with you, Herr Carruthers,” he said, speaking
low. “You won’t think me officious, I hope. I only speak out of keen regard
for your friend. It is about the Dollmanns—you see how the land lies? I
wouldn’t encourage him.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but really——”
“It’s only a hint. He’s a splendid young fellow, but if anything—you
understand—too honest and simple. I take it you have influence with him,
and I should use it.”
“I was not in earnest,” I said. “I have never seen the Dollmanns; I
thought they were friends of yours,” I added, looking him straight in the
eyes.
“I know them, but”—he shrugged his shoulders—“I know everybody.”
“What’s wrong with them?” I said, point-blank.
“Softly! Herr Carruthers. Remember, I speak out of pure friendliness to
you as strangers, foreigners, and young. You I take to have discretion, or I
should not have said a word. Still, I will add this. We know very little of
Herr Dollmann, of his origin, his antecedents. He is half a Swede, I believe,
certainly not a Prussian; came to Norderney three years ago, appears to be
rich, and has joined in various commercial undertakings. Little scope about
here? Oh, there is more enterprise than you think—development of bathing
resorts, you know, speculation in land on these islands. Sharp practice? Oh,
no! he’s perfectly straight in that way. But he’s a queer fellow, of eccentric
habits, and—and, well, as I say, little is known of him. That’s all, just a
warning. Come along.”
I saw that to press him further was useless.
“Thanks; I’ll remember,” I said.

“And look here,” he added, as we walked down the passage, “if you take
my advice, you’ll omit that visit to the Medusa altogether.” He gave me a
steady look, smiling gravely.
“How much do you know, and what do you mean?” were the questions
that throbbed in my thoughts; but I could not utter them, so I said nothing
and felt very young.
Outside we joined Davies, who was knitting his brow over prospects.
“It just comes of going into places like this,” he said to me. “We may be
stuck here for days. Too much wind to tow out with the dinghy, and too
narrow a channel to beat in.”
Von Brüning was ready with a new proposal.
“Why didn’t I think of it before?” he said. “I’ll tow you out in my launch.
Be ready at 6.30; we shall have water enough then. My men will send you a
warp.”
It was impossible to refuse, but a sense of being personally conducted
again oppressed me; and the last hope of a bed in the inn vanished. Davies
was none too effusive either. A tug meant a pilot, and he had had enough of
them.
“He objects to towage on principle,” I said.
“Just like him!” laughed the other. “That’s settled, then!” A dogcart was
standing before the inn door in readiness for von Brüning. I was curious
about Esens and his business there. Esens, he said, was the principal town
of the district, four miles inland.
“I have to go there,” he volunteered, “about a poaching case—a
Dutchman trawling inside our limits. That’s my work, you know—police
duty.”
Had the words a deeper meaning?
“Do you ever catch an Englishman?” I asked, recklessly.
“Oh, very rarely; your countrymen don’t come so far as this—except on
pleasure.” He bowed to us each and smiled.
“Not much of that to be got in Bensersiel,” I laughed.
“I’m afraid you’ll have a dull afternoon. Look here. I know you can’t
leave your boat altogether, and it’s no use asking Herr Davies; but will you

drive into Esens with me and see a Frisian town—for what it’s worth?
You’re getting a dismal impression of Friesland.”
I excused myself, said I would stop with Davies; we would walk out over
the sands and prospect for the evening’s sail.
“Well, good-bye then,” he said, “till the evening. Be ready for the warp at
6.30.”
He jumped up, and the cart rattled off through the mud, crossed the
bridge, and disappeared into the dreary hinterland.

CHAPTER XVII.
Clearing the Air

“Has he gone to get the police, do you think?” said Davies, grimly.
“I don’t think so,” said I. “Let’s go aboard before that Customs fellow
buttonholes us.”
A diminished row of stolid Frisians still ruminated over the Dulcibella.
Friend Grimm was visible smoking on his forecastle. We went on board in
silence.
“First of all, where exactly is Memmert?” I said.
Davies pulled down the chart, said “There,” and flung himself at full
length on a sofa.
The reader can see Memmert for himself. South of Juist, [See Map B]
abutting on the Ems delta, lies an extensive sandbank called Nordland,
whose extreme western rim remains uncovered at the highest tides; the
effect being to leave a C-shaped island, a mere paring of sand like a
boomerang, nearly two miles long, but only 150 yards or so broad, of
curiously symmetrical outline, except at one spot, where it bulges to the
width of a quarter of a mile. On the English chart its nakedness was
absolute, save for a beacon at the south; but the German chart marked a
building at the point where the bulge occurs. This was evidently the depôt.
“Fancy living there!” I thought, for the very name struck cold. No wonder
Grimm was grim; and no wonder he was used to seek change of air. But the
advantages of the site were obvious. It was remarkably isolated, even in a
region where isolation is the rule; yet it was conveniently near the wreck,
which, as we had heard, lay two miles out on the Juister Reef. Lastly, it was
clearly accessible at any state of the tide, for the six-fathom channel of the
Ems estuary runs hard up to it on the south, and thence sends off an

eastward branch which closely borders the southern horn, thus offering an
anchorage at once handy, deep, and sheltered from seaward gales.
Such was Memmert, as I saw it on the chart, taking in its features
mechanically, for while Davies lay there heedless and taciturn, a pretence of
interest was useless. I knew perfectly well what was between us, but I did
not see why I should make the first move; for I had a grievance too, an old
one. So I sat back on my sofa and jotted down in my notebook the heads of
our conversation at the inn while it was fresh in my memory, and strove to
draw conclusions. But the silence continuing and becoming absurd, I threw
my pride to the winds, and my notebook on the table.
“I say, Davies,” I said, “I’m awfully sorry I chaffed you about Fräulein
Dollmann.” (No answer.) “Didn’t you see I couldn’t help it?”
“I wish to Heaven we had never come in here,” he said, in a hard voice;
“it comes of landing ever.” (I couldn’t help smiling at this, but he wasn’t
looking at me.) “Here we are, given away, moved on, taken in charge,
arranged for like Cook’s tourists. I couldn’t follow your game—too
infernally deep for me, but——” That stung me.
“Look here,” I said, “I did my best. It was you that muddled it. Why did
you harp on ducks?”
“We could have got out of that. Why did you harp on everything idiotic
—your letter, the Foreign Office, the Kormoran, the wreck, the——?”
“You’re utterly unreasonable. Didn’t you see what traps there were? I
was driven the way I went. We started unprepared, and we’re jolly well out
of it.”
Davies drove on blindly. “It was bad enough telling all about the
channels and exploring——”
“Why, you agreed to that yourself!”
“I gave in to you. We can’t explore any more now.”
“There’s the wreck, though.”
“Oh, hang the wreck! It’s all a blind, or he wouldn’t have made so much
of it. There are all these channels to be——”
“Oh, hang the channels! I know we wanted a free hand, but we’ve got to
go to Norderney some time, and if Dollmann’s away——”
“Why did you harp on Miss Dollmann?” said Davies.

We had worked round, through idle recrimination, to the real point of
departure. I knew Davies was not himself, and would not return to himself
till the heart of the matter was reached.
“Look here,” I said, “you brought me out here to help you, because, as
you say, I was clever, talked German, and—liked yachting (I couldn’t resist
adding this). But directly you really want me you turn round and go for
me.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean all that, really,” said Davies; “I’m sorry—I was
worried.”
“I know; but it’s your own fault. You haven’t been fair with me. There’s a
complication in this business that you’ve never talked about. I’ve never
pressed you because I thought you would confide in me. You——”
“I know I haven’t,” said Davies.
“Well, you see the result. Our hand was forced. To have said nothing
about Dollmann was folly—to have said he tried to wreck you was equal
folly. The story we agreed on was the best and safest, and you told it
splendidly. But for two reasons I had to harp on the daughter—one because
your manner when they were mentioned was so confused as to imperil our
whole position. Two, because your story, though the safest, was, at the best,
suspicious. Even on your own showing Dollmann treated you badly—
discourteously, say: though you pretended not to have seen it. You want a
motive to neutralise that, and induce you to revisit him in a friendly way. I
supplied it, or rather I only encouraged von Brüning to supply it.”
“Why revisit him, after all?” said Davies.
“Oh, come——”
“But don’t you see what a hideous fix you’ve put me in? How caddish I
feel about it?”
I did see, and I felt a cad myself, as his full distress came home to me.
But I felt, too, that, whosesoever the fault, we had drifted into a ridiculous
situation, and were like characters in one of those tiresome plays where
misunderstandings are manufactured and so carefully sustained that the
audience are too bored to wait for the dénouement. You can do that on the
stage; but we wanted our dénouement.
“I’m very sorry,” I said, “but I wish you had told me all about it. Won’t
you now? Just the bare, matter-of-fact truth. I hate sentiment, and so do

you.”
“I find it very difficult to tell people things,” said Davies, “things like
this.” I waited. “I did like her—very much.” Our eyes met for a second, in
which all was said that need be said, as between two of our phlegmatic race.
“And she’s—separate from him. That was the reason of all my indecisions.”
he hurried on. “I only told you half at Schlei. I know I ought to have been
open, and asked your advice. But I let it slide. I’ve been hoping all along
that we might find what we want and win the game without coming to close
quarters again.”
I no longer wondered at his devotion to the channel theory, since, built on
conviction, it was thus doubly fortified.
“Yet you always knew what might happen,” I said. “At Schlei you spoke
of ‘settling with’ Dollmann.”
“I know. When I thought of him I was mad. I made myself forget the
other part.”
“Which recurred at Brunsbüttel?” I thought of the news we had there.
“Yes.”
“Davies, we must have no more secrets. I’m going to speak out. Are you
sure you’ve not misunderstood her? You say—and I’m willing to assume it
—that Dollmann’s a traitor and a murderer.”
“Oh, hang the murder part!” said Davies, impatiently. “What does that
matter?”
“Well, traitor. Very good; but in that case I suspect his daughter. No! let
me go on. She was useful, to say the least. She encouraged you—you’ve
told me that—to make that passage with them.”
“Stop, Carruthers,” said Davies, firmly. “I know you mean kindly; but it’s
no use. I believe in her.”
I thought for a moment.
“In that case,” I said, “I’ve something to propose. When we get out of
this place let’s sail straight away to England.” “(There, Commander von
Brüning,” I thought, “you never can say I neglected your advice.”)
“No!” exclaimed Davies, starting up and facing me. “I’m hanged if we
will. Think what’s at stake. Think of that traitor—plotting with Germans.
My God!”

“Very good,” I said. “I’m with you for going on. But let’s face facts. We
must scotch Dollmann. We can’t do so without hurting her.”
“Can’t we possibly?”
“Of course not; be sensible, man. Face that. Next point; it’s absurd to
hope that we need not revisit them—it’s ten to one that we must, if we’re to
succeed. His attempt on you is the whole foundation of our suspicions. And
we don’t even know for certain who he is yet. We’re committed, I know, to
going straight to Norderney now; but even if we weren’t, should we do any
good by exploring and prying? It’s very doubtful. We know we’re watched,
if not suspected, and that disposes of nine-tenths of our power. The
channels? Yes, but is it likely they’ll let us learn them by heart, if they’re of
such vital importance, even if we are thought to be bona fide yachtsmen?
And, seriously, apart from their value in war, which I don’t deny, are they at
the root of this business? But we’ll talk about that in a moment. The point
now is, what shall we do if we meet the Dollmanns?”
Beads of sweat stood on Davies’s brow. I felt like a torturer, but it could
not be helped. “Tax him with having wrecked you? Our quest would be at
an end! We must be friendly. You must tell the story you told to-day, and
chance his believing it. If he does, so much the better; if he doesn’t, he
won’t dare say so, and we still have chances. We gain time, and have a
tremendous hold on him—if we’re friendly.” Davies winced. I gave another
turn to the screw. “Friendly with them both, of course. You were before,
you know; you liked her very much—you must seem to still.”
“Oh, stop your infernal logic.”
“Shall we chuck it and go to England?” I asked again, as an inquisitor
might say, “Have you had enough?” No answer. I went on: “To make it
easier, you do like her still.” I had roused my victim at last.
“What the devil do you mean, Carruthers? That I’m to trade on my liking
for her—on her innocence, to—good God! what do you mean?”
“No, no, not that. I’m not such a cad, or such a fool, or so ignorant of
you. If she knows nothing of her father’s character and likes you—and you
like her—and you are what you are—oh Heavens! man, face it, realise it!
But what I mean is this: is she, can she be, what you think? Imagine his
position if we’re right about him; the vilest creature on God’s earth—a
disgraceful past to have been driven to this—in the pay of Germany. I want
to spare you misery.” I was going to add: “And if you’re on your guard, to

increase our chances.” But the utter futility of such suggestions silenced me.
What a plan I had foreshadowed! An enticing plan and a fair one, too, as
against such adversaries; turning this baffling cross-current to advantage as
many a time we had worked eddies of an adverse tide in these difficult seas.
But Davies was Davies, and there was an end of it; his faith and simplicity
shamed me. And the pity of it, the cruelty of it, was that his very qualities
were his last torture, raising to the acutest pitch the conflict between love
and patriotism. Remember that the latter was his dominant life-motive, and
that here and now was his chance—if you would gauge the bitterness of that
conflict.
It was in its last throes now. His elbows were on the table, and his
twitching hands pressed on his forehead. He took them away.
“Of course we must go on. It can’t be helped, that’s all.”
“And you believe in her?”
“I’ll remember what you’ve said. There may be some way out. And—I’d
rather not talk about that any more. What about the wreck?”
Further argument was futile. Davies by an effort seemed to sweep the
subject from his thoughts, and I did my best to do the same. At any rate the
air was cleared—we were friends; and it only remained to grapple with the
main problem in the light of the morning’s interview.
Every word that I could recollect of that critical conversation I reviewed
with Davies, who had imperfectly understood what he had not been directly
concerned in; and, as I did so, I began to see with what cleverness each
succeeding sentence of von Brüning’s was designed to suit both of two
contingencies. If we were innocent travellers, he was the genial host,
communicative and helpful. If we were spies, his tactics had been equally
applicable. He had outdone us in apparent candour, hiding nothing which he
knew we would discover for ourselves, and contriving at the same time both
to gain knowledge and control of our movements, and to convey us
warnings, which would only be understood if we were guilty, that we were
playing an idle and perilous game, and had better desist. But in one respect
we had had the advantage, and that was in the version Davies had given of
his stranding on the Hohenhörn. Inscrutable as our questioner was, he let it
appear not only that the incident was new to him, but that he conjectured at
its sinister significance. A little cross-examination on detail would have
been fatal to Davies’s version; but that was where our strength lay; he dared

not cross-examine for fear of suggesting to Davies suspicions which he
might never have felt. Indeed, I thought I detected that fear underlying his
whole attitude towards us, and it strengthened a conviction which had been
growing in me since Grimm’s furtive midnight visit, that the secret of this
coast was of so important and delicate a nature that rather than attract
attention to it at all, overt action against intruders would be taken only in
the last resort, and on irrefragable proofs of guilty intention.
Now for our clues. I had come away with two, each the germ of a distinct
theory, and both obscured by the prevailing ambiguity. Now, however, as
we thumbed the chart and I gave full rein to my fancy, one of them, the idea
of Memmert, gained precision and vigour every moment. True, such
information as we had about the French wreck and his own connection with
it was placed most readily at our disposal by von Brüning; but I took it to be
information calculated only to forestall suspicion, since he was aware that
we already associated him with Dollmann, possibly also with Grimm, and it
was only likely that in the ordinary course we should learn that the trio were
jointly concerned in Memmert. So much for the facts; as for the
construction he wished us to put on them, I felt sure it was absolutely false.
He wished to give us the impression that the buried treasure itself was at the
root of any mystery we might have scented. I do not know if the reader
fully appreciated that astute suggestion—the hint that secrecy as to results
was necessary owing both to the great sum at stake and the flaw in the title,
which he had been careful to inform us had passed through British hands.
What he meant to imply was, “Don’t be surprised if you have midnight
visitors; Englishmen prowling along this coast are suspected of being
Lloyd’s agents.” An ingenious insinuation, which, at the time it was made,
had caused me to contemplate a new and much more commonplace solution
of our enigma than had ever occurred to us; but it was only a passing doubt,
and I dismissed it altogether now.
The fact was, it either explained everything or nothing. As long as we
held to our fundamental assumption—that Davies had been decoyed into a
death-trap in September—it explained nothing. It was too fantastic to
suppose that the exigencies of a commercial speculation would lead to such
extremities as that. We were not in the South Sea Islands; nor were we the
puppets of a romance. We were in Europe, dealing not only with a
Dollmann, but with an officer of the German Imperial Navy, who would
scarcely be connected with a commercial enterprise which could

conceivably be reduced to forwarding its objects in such a fashion. It was
shocking enough to find him in relations with such a scoundrel at all, but it
was explicable if the motive were imperial—not so if it were financial. No;
to accept the suggestion we must declare the whole quest a mare’s nest from
beginning to end; the attempt on Davies a delusion of his own fancy, the
whole structure we had built on it, baseless.
“Well,” I can hear the reader saying, “why not? You, at any rate, were
always a little sceptical.”
Granted; yet I can truthfully say I scarcely faltered for a moment. Much
had happened since Schlei Fiord. I had seen the mechanism of the death-
trap; I had lived with Davies for a stormy fortnight, every hour of which
had increased my reliance on his seamanship, and also, therefore, on his
account of an event which depended largely for its correct interpretation on
a balanced nautical judgement. Finally, I had been unconsciously realising,
and knew from his mouth to-day, that he had exercised and acted on that
judgement in the teeth of personal considerations, which his loyal nature
made overwhelming in their force.
What, then, was the meaning of Memmert? At the outset it riveted my
attention on the Ems estuary, whose mouth it adjoins. We had always rather
neglected the Ems in our calculations; with some excuse, too, for at first
sight its importance bears no proportion to that of the three greater
estuaries. The latter bear vessels of the largest tonnage and deepest draught
to the very quays of Hamburg, Bremerhaven, and the naval dockyard of
Wilhelmshaven; while two of them, the Elbe and the Weser, are commerce
carriers on the vastest scale for the whole empire. The Ems, on the other
hand, only serves towns of the second class. A glance at the chart explains
this. You see a most imposing estuary on a grander scale than any of the
other three taken singly, with a length of thirty miles and a frontage on the
North Sea of ten miles, or one-seventieth, roughly, of the whole seaboard;
encumbered by outlying shoals, and blocked in the centre by the island of
Borkum, but presenting two fine deep-water channels to the incoming
vessel. These roll superbly through enormous sheets of sand, unite and
approach the mainland in one stately stream three miles in breadth. But then
comes a sad falling off. The navigable fairway shoals and shrinks, middle
grounds obstruct it, and shelving foreshores persistently deny it that easy
access to the land that alone can create great seaboard cities. All the ports of

the Ems are tidal; the harbour of Delfzyl, on the Dutch side, dries at low
water, and Emden, the principal German port, can only be reached by a lock
and a mile of canal.
But this depreciation is only relative. Judged on its merits, and not by the
standard of the Elbe, it is a very important river. Emden is a flourishing and
growing port. For shallow craft the stream is navigable far into the interior,
where, aided by tributaries and allied canals (notably the connection with
the Rhine at Dortmund, then approaching completion), it taps the resources
of a great area. Strategically there was still less reason for underrating it. It
is one of the great maritime gates of Germany; and it is the westernmost
gate, the nearest to Great Britain and France, contiguous to Holland. Its
great forked delta presents two yawning breaches in that singular rampart of
islets and shoals which masks the German seaboard—a seaboard itself so
short in proportion to the empire’s bulk, that, as Davies used to say, “every
inch of it must be important.” Warships could force these breaches, and so
threaten the mainland at one of its few vulnerable points. Quay
accommodation is no object to such visitors; intricate navigation no
deterrent. Even the heaviest battleships could approach within striking
distance of the land, while cruisers and military transports could penetrate
to the level of Emden itself. Emden, as Davies had often pointed out, is
connected by canal with Wilhelmshaven on the Jade, a strategic canal,
designed to carry gunboats as well as merchandise.
Now Memmert was part of the outer rampart; its tapering sickle of sand
directly commanded the eastern breach; it must be connected with the
defence of this breach. No more admirable base could be imagined; self-
contained and isolated, yet sheltered, accessible—better than Juist and
Borkum. And supposing it were desired to shroud the nature of the work in
absolute secrecy, what a pretext lay to hand in the wreck and its buried
bullion, which lay in the offing opposite the fairway!
On Memmert was the depôt for the salvage operations. Salvage work,
with its dredging and diving, offered precisely the disguise that was needed.
It was submarine, and so are some of the most important defences of ports,
mines, and dirigible torpedoes. All the details of the story were suggestive:
the “small local company”; the “engineer from Bremen” (who, I wondered,
was he?); the few shares held by von Brüning, enough to explain his visits;
the stores and gear coming from Wilhelmshaven, a naval dockyard.

Try as I would I could not stir Davies’s imagination as mine was stirred.
He was bent on only seeing the objections, which, of course, were
numerous enough. Could secrecy be ensured under pretext of salving a
wreck? It must be a secret shared by many—divers, crews of tugs,
employees of all sorts. I answered that trade secrets are often preserved
under no less difficult conditions, and why not imperial secrets?
“Why the Ems and not the Elbe?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” I replied, “the Elbe, too, holds similar mysteries.” Neuerk
Island might, for all we knew, be another Memmert; when cruising in that
region we had had no eyes for such things, absorbed in a preconceived
theory of our own. Besides, we must not take ourselves too seriously. We
were amateurs, not experts in coast defence, and on such vague grounds to
fastidiously reject a clue which went so far as this one was to quarrel with
our luck. There was a disheartening corollary to this latter argument that in
my new-born zeal I shut my eyes to. As amateurs, were we capable of using
our clue and gaining exact knowledge of the defences in question? Davies, I
knew, felt this strongly, and I think it accounted for his lukewarm view of
Memmert more than he was aware. He clung more obstinately than ever to
his “channel theory”, conscious that it offered the one sort of opportunity of
which with his peculiar gifts he was able to take advantage. He admitted,
however, that it was under a cloud at present, for if knowledge of the
coastwise navigation were a crime in itself we should scarcely be sitting
here now. “It’s something to do with it, anyhow!” he persisted.

CHAPTER XVIII.
Imperial Escort

Memmert gripped me, then, to the exclusion of a rival notion which had
given me no little perplexity during the conversation with von Brüning. His
reiterated advice that we should lose no time in picking up our anchor and
chain had ended by giving me the idea that he was anxious to get us away
from Bensersiel and the mainland. At first I had taken the advice partly as a
test of our veracity (as I gave the reader to understand), and partly as an
indirect method of lulling any suspicions which Grimm’s midnight visit
may have caused. Then it struck me that this might be over-subtlety on my
part, and the idea recurred when the question of our future plans cropped
up, and hampered me in deciding on a course. It returned again when von
Brüning offered to tow us out in the evening. It was in my mind when I
questioned him as to his business ashore, for it occurred to me that perhaps
his landing here was not solely due to a wish to inspect the crew of the
Dulcibella. Then came his perfectly frank explanation (with its sinister
double entente for us), coupled with an invitation to me to accompany him
to Esens. But, on the principle of timeo Danaos etc., I instantly smelt a ruse,
not that I dreamt that I was to be decoyed into captivity; but if there was
anything here which we two might discover in the few hours left to us, it
was an ingenious plan to remove the most observant of the two till the hour
of departure.
Davies scorned them, and I had felt only a faint curiosity in these
insignificant hamlets, influenced, I am afraid, chiefly by a hankering after
terra firma which the pitiless rigour of his training had been unable to cure.
But it was imprudent to neglect the slightest chance. It was three o’clock,
and I think both our brains were beginning to be addled with thinking in
close confinement. I suggested that we should finish our council of war in
the open, and we both donned oilskins and turned out. The sky had

hardened and banked into an even canopy of lead, and the wind drove
before it a fine cold rain. You could hear the murmur of the rising flood on
the sands outside, but the harbour was high above it still, and the Dulcibella
and the other boats squatted low in a bed of black slime. Native interest
seemed to be at last assuaged, for not a soul was visible on the bank (I
cannot call it a quay); but the top of a black sou’wester with a feather of
smoke curling round it showed above the forehatch of the Kormoran.
“I wish I could get a look at your cargo, my friend,” I thought to myself.
We gazed at Bensersiel in silence.
“There can’t be anything here?” I said.
“What can there be?” said Davies.
“What about that dyke?” I said, with a sudden inspiration.
From the bank we could see all along the coast-line, which is dyked
continuously, as I have already said. The dyke was here a substantial brick-
faced embankment, very similar, though on a smaller scale, to that which
had bordered the Elbe near Cuxhaven, and over whose summit we had seen
the snouts of guns.
“I say, Davies,” I said, “do you think this coast could be invaded? Along
here, I mean, behind these islands?”
Davies shook his head. “I’ve thought of that,” he said. “There’s nothing
in it. It’s just the very last place on earth where a landing would be possible.
No transport could get nearer than where the Blitz is lying, four miles out.”
“Well, you say every inch of this coast is important?”
“Yes, but it’s the water I mean.”
“Well, I want to see that dyke. Let’s walk along it.”
My mushroom theory died directly I set foot on it. It was the most
innocent structure in the world—like a thousand others in Essex and
Holland—topped by a narrow path, where we walked in single file with
arms akimbo to keep our balance in the gusts of wind. Below us lay the
sands on one side and rank fens on the other, interspersed with squares of
pasture ringed in with ditches. After half a mile we dropped down and came
back by a short circuit inland, following a mazy path—which was mostly
right angles and minute plank bridges, till we came to the Esens road. We
crossed this and soon after found our way barred by the stream I spoke of.

This involved a détour to the bridge in the village, and a stealthy avoidance
of the post-office, for dread of its garrulous occupant. Then we followed the
dyke in the other direction, and ended by a circuit over the sands, which
were fast being covered by the tide, and so back to the yacht.
Nobody appeared to have taken the slightest notice of our movements.
As we walked we had tackled the last question, “What are we to do?” and
found very little to say on it. We were to leave to-night (unless the Esens
police appeared on the scene), and were committed to sailing direct to
Norderney, as the only alternative to duck-shooting under the espionage of
a “trustworthy” nominee of von Brüning’s. Beyond that—vagueness and
difficulty of every sort.
At Norderney I should be fettered by my letter. If it seemed to have been
opened and it ordered my return, I was limited to a week, or must risk
suspicion by staying. Dollmann was away (according to von Brüning),
“would probably be back soon”; but how soon? Beyond Norderney lay
Memmert. How to probe its secret? The ardour it had roused in me was
giving way to a mortifying sense of impotence. The sight of the Kormoran,
with her crew preparing for sea, was a pointed comment on my diplomacy,
and most of all on my ridiculous survey of the dykes. When all was said and
done we were protégés of von Brüning, and dogged by Grimm. Was it
likely they would let us succeed?
The tide was swirling into the harbour in whorls of chocolate froth, and
as it rose all Bensersiel, dominated as before by Herr Schenkel, straggled
down to the quay to watch the movements of shipping during the transient
but momentous hour when the mud-hole was a seaport. The captain’s
steam-cutter was already afloat, and her sailors busy with sidelights and
engines. When it became known that we, too, were to sail, and under such
distinguished escort, the excitement intensified.
Again our friend of the Customs was spreading out papers to sign, while
a throng of helpful Frisians, headed by the twin giants of the post-boat,
thronged our decks and made us ready for sea in their own confused
fashion. Again we were carried up to the inn and overwhelmed with advice,
and warnings, and farewell toasts. Then back again to find the Dulcibella
afloat, and von Brüning just arrived, cursing the weather and the mud,
chaffing Davies, genial and débonnaire as ever.

“Stow that mainsail, you won’t want it,” he said. “I’ll tow you right out
to Spiekeroog. It’s your only anchorage for the night in this wind—under
the island, near the Blitz, and that would mean a dead beat for you in the
dark.”
The fact was so true, and the offer so timely, that Davies’s faint protests
were swept aside in a torrent of ridicule.
“And now I think of it,” the Commander ended, “I’ll make the trip with
you, if I may. It’ll be pleasanter and drier.”
We all three boarded the Dulcibella, and then the end came. Our tow-
rope was attached, and at half-past six the little launch jumped into the
collar, and amidst a demonstration that could not have been more hearty if
we had been ambassadors on a visit to a friendly power, we sidled out
through the jetties.
It took us more than an hour to cover the five miles to Spiekeroog, for the
Dulcibella was a heavy load in the stiff head wind, and Davies, though he
said nothing, showed undisguised distrust of our tug’s capacities. He at once
left the helm to me and flung himself on the gear, not resting till every rope
was ready to hand, the mainsail reefed, the binnacle lighted, and all ready
for setting sail or anchoring at a moment’s notice. Our guest watched these
precautions with infinite amusement. He was in the highest and most
mischievous humour, raining banter on Davies and mock sympathy on me,
laughing at our huge compass, heaving the lead himself, startling us with
imaginary soundings, and doubting if his men were sober. I offered
entertainment and warmth below, but he declined on the ground that Davies
would be tempted to cut the tow-rope and make us pass the night on a safe
sandbank. Davies took the raillery unmoved. His work done, he took the
tiller and sat bareheaded, intent on the launch, the course, the details, and
chances of the present. I brought up cigars and we settled ourselves facing
him, our backs to the wind and spray. And so we made the rest of the
passage, von Brüning cuddled against me and the cabin-hatch, alternately
shouting a jest to Davies and talking to me in a light and charming vein,
with just that shade of patronage that the disparity in our ages warranted,
about my time in Germany, places, people, and books I knew, and about
life, especially young men’s life, in England, a country he had never visited,
but hoped to; I responding as well as I could, striving to meet his mood,
acquit myself like a man, draw zest instead of humiliation from the irony of

our position, but scarcely able to make headway against a numbing sense of
defeat and incapacity. A queer thought was haunting me, too, that such skill
and judgement as I possessed was slipping from me as we left the land and
faced again the rigours of this exacting sea. Davies, I very well knew, was
under exactly the opposite spell—a spell which even the reproach of the
tow-rope could not annul. His face, in the glow of the binnacle, was
beginning to wear that same look of contentment and resolve that I had seen
on it that night we had sailed to Kiel from Schlei Fiord. Heaven knows he
had more cause for worry than I—a casual comrade in an adventure which
was peculiarly his, which meant everything on earth to him; but there he
was, washing away perplexity in the salt wind, drawing counsel and
confidence from the unfailing source of all his inspirations—the sea.
“Looks happy, doesn’t he?” said the captain once. I grunted that he did,
ashamed to find how irritated the remark made me.
“You’ll remember what I said,” he added in my ear.
“Yes,” I said. “But I should like to see her. What is she like?”
“Dangerous.” I could well believe it.
The hull of the Blitz loomed up, and a minute later our kedge was
splashing overboard and the launch was backing alongside.
“Good-night, gentlemen,” said our passenger. “You’re safe enough here,
and you can run across in ten minutes in the morning and pick up your
anchor, if it’s there still. Then you’ve a fair wind west—to England if you
like. If you decide to stay a little longer in these parts, and I’m in reach,
count on me to help you, to sport or anything else.”
We thanked him, shook hands, and he was gone.
“He’s a thundering good chap, anyhow,” said Davies; and I heartily
agreed.
The narrow vigilant life began again at once. We were “safe enough” in a
sense, but a warp and a twenty-pound anchor were poor security if the wind
backed or increased. Plans for contingencies had to be made, and deck-
watches kept till midnight, when the weather seemed to improve, and stars
appeared. The glass was rising, so we turned in and slept under the very
wing, so to speak, of the Imperial Government.
“Davies,” I said, when we were settled in our bunks, “it’s only a day’s
sail to Norderney, isn’t it?”

“With a fair wind, less, if we go outside the islands direct.”
“Well, it’s settled that we do that to-morrow?”
“I suppose so. We’ve got to get the anchor first. Good-night.”

CHAPTER XIX.
The Rubicon

It was a cold, vaporous dawn, the glass rising, and the wind fallen to a light
air still from the north-east. Our creased and sodden sails scarcely answered
to it as we crept across the oily swell to Langeoog. “Fogs and calms,”
Davies prophesied. The Blitz was astir when we passed her, and soon after
steamed out to sea. Once over the bar, she turned westward and was lost to
view in the haze. I should be sorry to have to explain how we found that
tiny anchor-buoy, on the expressionless waste of grey. I only know that I
hove the lead incessantly while Davies conned, till at last he was grabbing
overside with the boathook, and there was the buoy on deck. The cable was
soon following it, and finally the rusty monster himself, more loathsome
than usual, after his long sojourn in the slime.
“That’s all right,” said Davies. “Now we can go anywhere.”
“Well, it’s Norderney, isn’t it? We’ve settled that.”
“Yes, I suppose we have. I was wondering whether it wouldn’t be
shortest to go inside Langeoog after all.”
“Surely not,” I urged. “The tide’s ebbing now, and the light’s bad; it’s
new ground, with a ‘watershed’ to cross, and we’re safe to get aground.”
“All right—outside. Ready about.” We swung lazily round and headed
for the open sea. I record the fact, but in truth Davies might have taken me
where he liked, for no land was visible, only a couple of ghostly booms.
“It seems a pity to miss over that channel,” said Davies with a sigh; “just
when the Kormoran can’t watch us.” (We had not seen her at all this
morning.)
I set myself to the lead again, averse to reopening a barren argument.
Grimm had done his work for the present, I felt certain, and was on his way
by the shortest road to Norderney and Memmert.

We were soon outside and heading west, our boom squared away and the
island sand-dunes just apparent under our lee. Then the breeze died to the
merest draught, and left us rolling inert in a long swell. Consumed with
impatience to get on I saw fatality in this failure of wind, after a fortnight of
unprofitable meanderings, when we had generally had too much of it, and
always enough for our purpose. I tried to read below, but the vile squirting
of the centreboard drove me up.
“Can’t we go any faster?” I burst out once. I felt that there ought to be a
pyramid of gauzy canvas aloft, spinnakers, flying jibs and what not.
“I don’t go in for speed,” said Davies, shortly. He loyally did his best to
“shove her” along, but puffs and calms were the rule all day, and it was only
by towing in the dinghy for two hours in the afternoon that we covered the
length of Langeoog, and crept before dark to an anchorage behind Baltrum,
its slug-shaped neighbour on the west. Strictly, I believe, we should have
kept the sea all night; but I had not the grit to suggest that course, and
Davies was only too glad of an excuse for threading the shoals of the
Accumer Ee on a rising tide. The atmosphere had been slowly clearing as
the day wore on; but we had scarcely anchored ten minutes before a blanket
of white fog, rolling in from seaward, swallowed us up. Davies was already
afield in the dinghy, and I had to guide him back with a foghorn, whose
music roused hosts of sea birds from the surrounding flats, and brought
them wheeling and complaining round us, a weird invisible chorus to my
mournful solo.
The fog hung heavy still at daybreak on the 20th, but dispersed partially
under a catspaw from the south about eight o’clock, in time for us to
traverse the boomed channel behind Baltrum, before the tide left the
watershed.
“We shan’t get far to-day,” said Davies, with philosophy. “And this sort
of thing may go on for any time. It’s a regular autumn anti-cyclone—glass
thirty point five and steady. That gale was the last of a stormy equinox.”
We took the inside route as a matter of course to-day. It was now the
shortest to Norderney harbour, and scarcely less intricate than the Wichter
Ee, which appeared to be almost totally blocked by banks, and is, in fact,
the most impassable of all these outlets to the North Sea. But, as I say, this
sort of navigation, always puzzling to me, was utterly bewildering in hazy
weather. Any attempt at orientation made me giddy. So I slaved at the lead,

varying my labour with a fierce bout of kedge-work when we grounded
somewhere. I had two rests before two o’clock, one of an hour, when we
ran into a patch of windless fog; another of a few moments, when Davies
said, “There’s Norderney!” and I saw, surmounting a long slope of weedy
sand, still wet with the receding sea, a cluster of sandhills exactly like a
hundred others I had seen of late, but fraught with a new and unique
interest.
The usual formula, “What have you got now?” checked my reverie, and
“Helm’s a-lee,” ended it for the time. We tacked on (for the wind had
headed us) in very shoal water.
Suddenly Davies said: “Is that a boat ahead?”
“Do you mean that galliot?” I asked. I could plainly distinguish one of
those familiar craft about half a mile away, just within the limit of vision.
“The Kormoran, do you think?” I added. Davies said nothing, but grew
inattentive to his work. “Barely four,” from me passed unnoticed, and we
touched once, but swung off under some play of the current. Then came
abruptly, “Stand by the anchor. Let go,” and we brought up in mid-stream
of the narrow creek we were following. I triced up the main-tack, and
stowed the headsails unaided. When I had done Davies was still gazing to
windward through his binoculars, and, to my astonishment, I noticed that
his hands were trembling violently. I had never seen this happen before,
even at moments when a false turn of the wrist meant death on a surf-
battered bank.
“What is it?” I asked; “are you cold?”
“That little boat,” he said. I gazed to windward, too, and now saw a scrap
of white in the distance, in sharp relief.
“Small standing lug and jib; it’s her, right enough,” said Davies to
himself, in a sort of nervous stammer.
“Who? What?”
“Medusa’s dinghy.”
He handed, or rather pushed, me the glasses, still gazing.
“Dollmann?” I exclaimed.
“No, it’s hers—the one she always sails. She’s come to meet m—, us.”

Through the glasses the white scrap became a graceful little sail, squared
away for the light following breeze. An angle of the creek hid the hull, then
it glided into view. Someone was sitting aft steering, man or woman I could
not say, for the sail hid most of the figure. For full two minutes—two long,
pregnant minutes—we watched it in silence. The damp air was fogging the
lenses, but I kept them to my eyes; for I did not want to look at Davies. At
last I heard him draw a deep breath, straighten himself up, and give one of
his characteristic “h’ms”. Then he turned briskly aft, cast off the dinghy’s
painter, and pulled her up alongside.
“You come too,” he said, jumping in, and fixing the rowlocks. (His hands
were steady again.) I laughed, and shoved the dinghy off.
“I’d rather you did,” he said, defiantly.
“I’d rather stay. I’ll tidy up, and put the kettle on.” Davies had taken a
half stroke, but paused.
“She oughtn’t to come aboard.” he said.
“She might like to,” I suggested. “Chilly day, long way from home,
common courtesy——”
“Carruthers,” said Davies, “if she comes aboard, please remember that
she’s outside this business. There are no clues to be got from her.”
A little lecture which would have nettled me more if I had not been
exultantly telling myself that, once and for all, for good or ill, the Rubicon
was passed.
“It’s your affair this time,” I said; “run it as you please.”
He sculled away with vigorous strokes. “Just as he is,” I thought to
myself: bare head, beaded with fog-dew, ancient oilskin coat (only one
button); grey jersey; grey woollen trousers (like a deep-sea fisherman’s)
stuffed into long boots. A vision of his antitype, the Cowes Philanderer,
crossed me for a second. As to his face—well, I could only judge by it, and
marvel, that he was gripping his dilemma by either horn, as firmly as he
gripped his sculls.
I watched the two boats converging. They would meet in the natural
course about three hundred yards away, but a hitch occurred. First, the sail-
boat checked and slewed; “aground,” I concluded. The rowboat leapt
forward still; then checked, too. From both a great splashing of sculls
floated across the still air, then silence. The summit of the watershed, a

physical Rubicon, prosaic and slimy, had still to be crossed, it seemed. But
it could be evaded. Both boats headed for the northern side of the creek:
two figures were out on the brink, hauling on two painters. Then Davies
was striding over the sand, and a girl—I could see her now—was coming to
meet him. And then I thought it was time to go below and tidy up.
Nothing on earth could have made the Dulcibella’s saloon a worthy
reception-room for a lady. I could only use hurried efforts to make it look
its best by plying a bunch of cotton-waste and a floor-brush; by pitching
into racks and lockers the litter of pipes, charts, oddments of apparel, and so
on, that had a way of collecting afresh, however recently we had tidied up;
by neatly arranging our demoralised library, and by lighting the stove and
veiling the table under a clean white cloth.
I suppose about twenty minutes had elapsed, and I was scrubbing
fruitlessly at the smoky patch on the ceiling, when I heard the sound of oars
and voices outside. I threw the cotton-waste into the fo’c’sle, made an
onslaught on my hands, and then mounted the companion ladder. Our own
dinghy was just rounding up alongside, Davies sculling in the bows, facing
him in the stern a young girl in a grey tam-o’-shanter, loose waterproof
jacket and dark serge skirt, the latter, to be frigidly accurate, disclosing a
pair of workman-like rubber boots which, mutatis mutandis, were very like
those Davies was wearing. Her hair, like his, was spangled with moisture,
and her rose-brown skin struck a note of delicious colour against the sullen
Stygian background.
“There he is,” said Davies. Never did his “meiner Freund, Carruthers,”
sound so pleasantly in my ears; never so discordantly the “Fräulein
Dollmann” that followed it. Every syllable of the four was a lie. Two honest
English eyes were looking up into mine; an honest English hand—is this
insular nonsense? Perhaps so, but I stick to it—a brown, firm hand—no, not
so very small, my sentimental reader—was clasping mine. Of course I had
strong reasons, apart from the racial instinct, for thinking her to be English,
but I believe that if I had had none at all I should at any rate have
congratulated Germany on a clever bit of plagiarism. By her voice, when
she spoke, I knew that she must have talked German habitually from
childhood; diction and accent were faultless, at least to my English ear; but
the native constitutional ring was wanting.

She came on board. There was a hollow discussion first about time and
weather, but it ended as we all in our hearts wished it to end. None of us
uttered our real scruples. Mine, indeed, were too new and rudimentary to be
worth uttering, so I said common-sense things about tea and warmth; but I
began to think about my compact with Davies.
“Just for a few minutes, then,” she said.
I held out my hand and swung her up. She gazed round the deck and
rigging with profound interest—a breathless, hungry interest—touching to
see.
“You’ve seen her before, haven’t you?” I said.
“I’ve not been on board before,” she answered.
This struck me in passing as odd; but then I had only too few details from
Davies about his days at Norderney in September.
“Of course, that is what puzzled me,” she exclaimed, suddenly, pointing
to the mizzen. “I knew there was something different.”
Davies had belayed the painter, and now had to explain the origin of the
mizzen. This was a cumbrous process, and his hearer’s attention soon
wandered from the subject and became centred in him—his was already
more than half in her—and the result was a golden opportunity for the
discerning onlooker. It was very brief, but I made the most of it; buried
deep a few regrets, did a little heartfelt penance, told myself I had been a
cynical fool not to have foreseen this, and faced the new situation with a
sinking heart; I am not ashamed to admit that, for I was fond of Davies, and
I was keen about the quest.
She had never been a guilty agent in that attempt on Davies. Had she
been an unconscious tool or only an unwilling one? If the latter, did she
know the secret we were seeking? In the last degree unlikely, I decided.
But, true to the compact, whose importance I now fully appreciated, I flung
aside my diplomatic weapons, recoiling, as strongly, or nearly as strongly,
let us say, from any effort direct or indirect to gain information from such a
source. It was not our fault if by her own conversation and behaviour she
gave us some idea of how matters stood. Davies already knew more than I
did.
We spent a few minutes on deck while she asked eager questions about
our build and gear and seaworthiness, with a quaint mixture of professional

acumen and personal curiosity.
“How did you manage alone that day?” she asked Davies, suddenly.
“Oh, it was quite safe,” was the reply. “But it’s much better to have a
friend.”
She looked at me; and—well, I would have died for Davies there and
then.
“Father said you would be safe,” she remarked, with decision—a slight
excess of decision, I thought. And at that turned to some rope or block and
pursued her questioning. She found the compass impressive, and the
trappings of that hateful centreboard had a peculiar fascination for her. Was
this the way we did it in England? was her constant query.
Yet, in spite of a superficial freedom, we were all shy and constrained.
The descent below was a welcome diversion, for we should have been less
than human if we had not extracted some spontaneous fun from the
humours of the saloon. I went down first to see about the tea, leaving them
struggling for mutual comprehension over the theory of an English lifeboat.
They soon followed, and I can see her now stooping in at the doorway,
treading delicately, like a kitten, past the obstructive centreboard to a place
on the starboard sofa, then taking in her surroundings with a timid rapture
that broke into delight at all the primitive arrangements and dingy amenities
of our den. She explored the cavernous recesses of the Rippingille, fingered
the duck-guns and the miscellany in the racks, and peeped into the fo’c’sle
with dainty awe. Everything was a source of merriment, from our cramped
attitudes to the painful deficiency of spoons and the “yachtiness” (there is
no other word to describe it) of the bread, which had been bought at
Bensersiel, and had suffered from incarceration and the climate. This fact
came out, and led to some questions, while we waited for the water to boil,
about the gale and our visit there. The topic, a pregnant one for us, appeared
to have no special significance to her. At the mention of von Brüning she
showed no emotion of any sort; on the contrary, she went out of her way,
from an innocent motive that anyone could have guessed, to show that she
could talk about him with dispassionate detachment.
“He came to see us when you were here last, didn’t he?” she said to
Davies. “He often comes. He goes with father to Memmert sometimes. You
know about Memmert? They are diving for money out of an old wreck.”
“Yes, we had heard about it.”

“Of course you have. Father is a director of the company, and
Commander von Brüning takes great interest in it; they took me down in a
diving-bell once.”
I murmured, “Indeed!” and Davies sawed laboriously at the bread. She
must have misconstrued our sheepish silence, for she stopped and drew
herself up with just a touch of momentary hauteur, utterly lost on Davies. I
could have laughed aloud at this transient little comedy of errors.
“Did you see any gold?” said Davies at last, with husky solemnity.
Something had to be said or we should defeat our own end; but I let him say
it. He had not my faith in Memmert.
“No, only mud and timber—oh, I forgot——”
“You mustn’t betray the company’s secrets,” I said, laughing;
“Commander von Brüning wouldn’t tell us a word about the gold.”
(“There’s self-denial!” I said to myself.)
“Oh, I don’t think it matters much,” she answered, laughing too. “You are
only visitors.”
“That’s all,” I remarked, demurely. “Just passing travellers.”
“You will stop at Norderney?” she said, with naïve anxiety. “Herr Davies
said——”
I looked to Davies; it was his affair. Fair and square came his answer, in
blunt dog-German.
“Yes, of course, we shall. I should like to see your father again.”
Up to this moment I had been doubtful of his final decision; for ever
since our explanation at Bensersiel I had had the feeling that I was holding
his nose to a very cruel grindstone. This straight word, clear and direct,
beyond anything I had hoped for, brought me to my senses and showed me
that his mind had been working far in advance of mine; and more, shaping a
double purpose that I had never dreamt of.
“My father?” said Fräulein Dollmann; “yes, I am sure he will be very
glad to see you.
There was no conviction in her tone, and her eyes were distant and
troubled.
“He’s not at home now, is he?” I asked.

“How did you know?” (a little maidenly confusion). “Oh, Commander
von Brüning.”
I might have added that it had been clear as daylight all along that this
visit was in the nature of an escapade of which her father might not
approve. I tried to say “I won’t tell,” without words, and may have
succeeded.
“I told Mr Davies when we first met,” she went on. “I expect him back
very soon—to-morrow in fact; he wrote from Amsterdam. He left me at
Hamburg and has been away since. Of course, he will not know your yacht
is back again. I think he expected Mr Davies would stay in the Baltic, as the
season was so late. But—but I am sure he will be glad to see you.”
“Is the Medusa in harbour?” said Davies.
“Yes; but we are not living on her now. We are at our villa in the
Schwannallée—my stepmother and I, that is.” She added some details, and
Davies gravely pencilled down the address on a leaf of the log-book; a
formality which somehow seemed to regularise the present position.
“We shall be at Norderney to-morrow,” he said.
Meanwhile the kettle was boiling merrily, and I made the tea—cocoa, I
should say, for the menu was changed in deference to our visitor’s tastes.
“This is fun!” she said. And by common consent we abandoned ourselves,
three youthful, hungry mariners, to the enjoyment of this impromptu picnic.
Such a chance might never occur again—carpamus diem.
But the banquet was never celebrated. As at Belshazzar’s feast, there was
a writing on the wall; no supernatural inscription, but just a printed name;
an English surname with title and initials, in cheap gilt lettering on the back
of an old book; a silent, sneering witness of our snug party. The catastrophe
came and passed so suddenly that at the time I had scarcely even an inkling
of what caused it; but I know now that this is how it happened. Our visitor
was sitting at the forward end of the starboard sofa, close to the bulkhead.
Davies and I were opposite her. Across the bulkhead, on a level with our
heads, ran the bookshelf, whose contents, remember, I had carefully
straightened only half an hour ago, little dreaming of the consequence.
Some trifle, probably the logbook which Davies had reached down from the
shelf, called her attention to the rest of our library. While busied with the
cocoa I heard her spelling out some titles, fingering leaves, and twitting
Davies with the little care he took of his books. Suddenly there was a

silence which made me look up, to see a startled and pitiful change in her.
She was staring at Davies with wide eyes and parted lips, a burning flush
mounting on her forehead, and such an expression on her face as a sleep-
walker might wear, who wakes in fear he knows not where.
Half her mind was far away, labouring to construe some hideous dream
of the past; half was in the present, cringing before some sickening reality.
She remained so for perhaps ten seconds, and then—plucky girl that she
was—she mastered herself, looked deliberately round and up with a circular
glance, strangely in the manner of Davies himself, and spoke. How late it
was, she must be going—her boat was not safe. At the same time she rose to
go, or rather slid herself along the sofa, for rising was impossible. We sat
like mannerless louts, in blank amazement. Davies at the outset had said,
“What’s the matter?” in plain English, and then relapsed into stupefaction. I
recovered myself the first, and protested in some awkward fashion about
the cocoa, the time, the absence of fog. In trying to answer, her self-
possession broke down, poor child, and her retreat became a blind flight,
like that of a wounded animal, while every sordid circumstance seemed to
accentuate her panic.
She tilted the corner of the table in leaving the sofa and spilt cocoa over
her skirt; she knocked her head with painful force against the sharp lintel of
the doorway, and stumbled on the steps of the ladder. I was close behind,
but when I reached the deck she was already on the counter hauling up the
dinghy. She had even jumped in and laid hands on the sculls before any
check came in her precipitate movements. Now there occurred to her the
patent fact that the dinghy was ours, and that someone must accompany her
to bring it back.
“Davies will row you over,” I said.
“Oh no, thank you,” she stammered. “If you will be so kind, Herr
Carruthers. It is your turn. No, I mean, I want——”
“Go on,” said Davies to me in English.
I stepped into the dinghy and motioned to take the sculls from her. She
seemed not to see me, and pushed off while Davies handed down her jacket,
which she had left in the cabin. Neither of us tried to better the situation by
conventional apologies. It was left to her, at the last moment, to make a
show of excusing herself, an attempt so brave and yet so wretchedly lame

that I tingled all over with hot shame. She only made matters worse, and
Davies interrupted her.
“Auf Wiedersehen,” he said, simply.
She shook her head, did not even offer her hand, and pulled away; Davies
turned sharp round and went below.
There was now no muddy Rubicon to obstruct us, for the tide had risen a
good deal, and the sands were covering. I offered again to take the sculls,
but she took no notice and rowed on, so that I was a silent passenger on the
stern seat till we reached her boat, a spruce little yacht’s gig, built to the
native model, with a spoon-bow and tiny lee-boards. It was already afloat,
but riding quite safely to a rope and a little grapnel, which she proceeded to
haul in.
“It was quite safe after all, you see,” I said.
“Yes, but I could not stay. Herr Carruthers, I want to say something to
you.” (I knew it was coming; von Brüning’s warning over again.) “I made a
mistake just now; it is no use your calling on us to-morrow.”
“Why not?”
“You will not see my father.”
“I thought you said he was coming back?”
“Yes, by the morning steamer; but he will be very busy.”
“We can wait. We have several days to spare, and we have to call for
letters anyhow.”
“You must not delay on our account. The weather is very fine at last. It
would be a pity to lose a chance of a smooth voyage to England. The season
——”
“We have no fixed plans. Davies wants to get some shooting.
“My father will be much occupied.”
“We can see you.”
I insisted on being obtuse, for though this fencing with an unstrung girl
was hateful work, the quest was at stake. We were going to Norderney,
come what might, and sooner or later we must see Dollmann. It was no use
promising not to. I had given no pledge to von Brüning, and I would give
none to her. The only alternative was to violate the compact (which the
present fiasco had surely weakened), speak out, and try and make an ally of

her. Against her own father? I shrank from the responsibility and counted
the cost of failure—certain failure, to judge by her conduct. She began to
hoist her lugsail in a dazed, shiftless fashion, while our two boats drifted
slowly to leeward.
“Father might not like it,” she said, so low and from such tremulous lips
that I scarcely caught her words. “He does not like foreigners much. I am
afraid . . . he did not want to see Herr Davies again.”
“But I thought——”
“It was wrong of me to come aboard—I suddenly remembered; but I
could not tell Herr Davies.”
“I see,” I answered. “I will tell him.”
“Yes, that he must not come near us.”
“He will understand. I know he will be very sorry, but,” I added, firmly,
“you can trust him implicitly to do the right thing.” And how I prayed that
this would content her! Thank Heaven, it did.
“Yes,” she said, “I am afraid I did not say good-bye to him. You will do
so?” She gave me her hand.
“One thing more,” I added, holding it, “nothing had better be said about
this meeting?”
“No, no, nothing. It must never be known.”
I let go the gig’s gunwale and watched her tighten her sheet and make a
tack or two to windward. Then I rowed back to the Dulcibella as hard as I
could.

CHAPTER XX.
The Little Drab Book

I found Davies at the cabin table, surrounded with a litter of books. The
shelf was empty, and its contents were tossed about among the cups and on
the floor. We both spoke together.
“Well, what was it?”
“Well, what did she say?”
I gave way, and told my story briefly. He listened in silence, drumming
on the table with a book which he held.
“It’s not good-bye,” he said. “But I don’t wonder; look here!” and he held
out to me a small volume, whose appearance was quite familiar to me, if its
contents were less so. As I noted in an early chapter, Davies’s library,
excluding tide-tables, “pilots”, etc., was limited to two classes of books,
those on naval warfare, and those on his own hobby, cruising in small
yachts. He had six or seven of the latter, including Knight’s Falcon in the
Baltic, Cowper’s Sailing Tours, Macmullen’s Down Channel, and other less
known stories of adventurous travel. I had scarcely done more than look
into some of them at off-moments, for our life had left no leisure for
reading. This particular volume was—no, I had better not describe it too
fully; but I will say that it was old and unpretentious, bound in cheap cloth
of a rather antiquated style, with a title which showed it to be a guide for
yachtsmen to a certain British estuary. A white label partly scratched away
bore the legend “3d.” I had glanced at it once or twice with no special
interest.
“Well?” I said, turning over some yellow pages.
“Dollmann!” cried Davies. “Dollmann wrote it.” I turned to the title-
page, and read: “By Lieut. X——, R.N.” The name itself conveyed nothing

to me, but I began to understand. Davies went on: “The name’s on the back,
too—and I’m certain it’s the last she looked at.”
“But how do you know?”
“And there’s the man himself. Ass that I am not to have seen it before!
Look at the frontispiece.”
It was a sorry piece of illustration of the old-fashioned sort, lacking
definition and finish, but effective notwithstanding; for it was evidently the
reproduction, though a cheap and imperfect process, of a photograph. It
represented a small yacht at anchor below some woods, with the owner
standing on deck in his shirt sleeves: a well-knit, powerful man, young, of
middle height, clean-shaved. There appeared to be nothing remarkable
about the face; the portrait being on too small a scale, and the expression,
such as it was, being of the fixed “photographic” character.
“How do you know him? You said he was fifty, with a greyish beard.”
“By the shape of his head; that hasn’t changed. Look how it widens at the
top, and then flattens—sort of wedge shaped—with a high, steep forehead;
you’d hardly notice it in that” (the points were not very noticeable, but I
saw what Davies meant). “The height and figure are right, too; and the dates
are about right. Look at the bottom.”
Underneath the picture was the name of a yacht and a date. The
publisher’s date on the title-page was the same.
“Sixteen years ago,” said Davies. “He looks thirty odd in that, doesn’t
he? And fifty now.”
“Let’s work the thing out. Sixteen years ago he was still an Englishman,
an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy. Now he’s a German. At some time
between this and then, I suppose, he came to grief—disgrace, flight, exile.
When did it happen?”
“They’ve been here three years; von Brüning said so.”
“It was long before that. She has talked German from a child. What’s her
age, do you think—nineteen or twenty?”
“About that.”
“Say she was four when this book was published. The crash must have
come not long after.”
“And they’ve been hiding in Germany since.

“Is this a well-known book?”
“I never saw another copy; picked this up on a second-hand bookstall for
threepence.”
“She looked at it, you say?”
“Yes, I’m certain of it.”
“Was she never on board you in September?”
“No; I asked them both, but Dollmann made excuses.”
“But he—he came on board? You told me so.”
“Once; he asked himself to breakfast on the first day. By Jove! yes; you
mean he saw the book?
“It explains a good deal.”
“It explains everything.”
We fell into deep reflexion for a minute or two.
“Do you really mean everything?” I said. “In that case let’s sail straight
away and forget the whole affair. He’s only some poor devil with a past,
whose secret you stumbled on, and, half mad with fear, he tried to silence
you. But you don’t want revenge, so it’s no business of ours. We can ruin
him if we like; but is it worth it?”
“You don’t mean a word you’re saying,” said Davies, “though I know
why you say it; and many thanks, old chap. I didn’t mean ‘everything’. He’s
plotting with Germans, or why did Grimm spy on us, and von Brüning
cross-examine us? We’ve got to find out what he’s at, as well as who he is.
And as to her—what do you think of her now?”
I made my amende heartily. “Innocent and ignorant,” was my verdict.
“Ignorant, that is, of her father’s treasonable machinations; but aware,
clearly, that they were English refugees with a past to hide.” I said other
things, but they do not matter. “Only,” I concluded, “it makes the dilemma
infinitely worse.”
“There’s no dilemma at all,” said Davies. “You said at Bensersiel that we
couldn’t hurt him without hurting her. Well, all I can say is, we’ve got to.
The time to cut and run, if ever, was when we sighted her dinghy. I had a
baddish minute then.”
“She’s given us a clue or two after all.”

“It wasn’t our fault. To refuse to have her on board would have been to
give our show away; and the very fact that she’s given us clues decides the
matter. She mustn’t suffer for it.”
“What will she do?”
“Stick to her father, I suppose.”
“And what shall we do?”
“I don’t know yet; how can I know? It depends,” said Davies, slowly.
“But the point is, that we have two objects, equally important—yes, equally,
by Jove!—to scotch him, and save her.”
There was a pause.
“That’s rather a large order,” I observed. “Do you realise that at this very
moment we have probably gained the first object? If we went home now,
walked into the Admiralty and laid our facts before them, what would be
the result?”
“The Admiralty!” said Davies, with ineffable scorn.
“Well, Scotland Yard, too, then. Both of them want our man, I dare say. It
would be strange if between them they couldn’t dislodge him, and,
incidentally, either discover what’s going on here or draw such attention to
this bit of coast as to make further secrecy impossible.”
“It’s out of the question to let her betray her father, and then run away!
Besides, we don’t know enough, and they mightn’t believe us. It’s a
cowardly course, however you look at it.”
“Oh! that settles it,” I answered, hastily. “Now I want to go back over the
facts. When did you first see her?”
“That first morning.”
“She wasn’t in the saloon the night before?”
“No; and he didn’t mention her.”
“You would have gone away next morning if he hadn’t called?”
“Yes; I told you so.”
“He allowed her to persuade you to make that voyage with them?”
“I suppose so.”
“But he sent her below when the pilotage was going on?”
“Of course.”

“She said just now, ‘Father said you would be safe.’ What had you been
saying to her?”
“It was when I met her on the sand. (By the way, it wasn’t a chance
meeting; she had been making inquiries and heard about us from a skipper
who had seen the yacht near Wangeroog, and she had been down this way
before.) She asked at once about that day, and began apologising, rather
awkwardly, you know, for their rudeness in not having waited for me at
Cuxhaven. Her father found he must get on to Hamburg at once.”
“But you didn’t go to Cuxhaven; you told her that? What exactly did you
tell her? This is important.”
“I was in a fearful fix, not knowing what he had told her. So I said
something vague, and then she asked the very question von Brüning did,
‘Wasn’t there a schrecklich sea round the Scharhorn?’
“She didn’t know you took the short cut, then?”
“No; he hadn’t dared to tell her.”
“She knew that they took it?”
“Yes. He couldn’t possibly have hidden that. She would have known by
the look of the sea from the portholes, the shorter time, etc.”
“But when the Medusa hove to and he shouted to you to follow him—
didn’t she understand what was happening?”
“No, evidently not. Mind you, she couldn’t possibly have heard what we
said, in that weather, from below. I couldn’t cross-question her, but it was
clear enough what she thought; namely, that he had hove to for exactly the
opposite reason, to say he was taking the short cut, and that I wasn’t to
attempt to follow him.”
“That’s why she laid stress on waiting for you at Cuxhaven?”
“Of course; mine would have been the longer passage.”
“She had no notion of foul play?”
“None—that I could see. After all, there I was, alive and well.”
“But she was remorseful for having induced you to sail at all that day,
and for not having waited to see you arrived safely.”
“That’s about it.”
“Now what did you say about Cuxhaven?”

“Nothing. I let her understand that I went there, and, not finding them,
went on to the Baltic by the Eider river, having changed my mind about the
ship canal.”
“Now, what about her voyage back from Hamburg? Was she alone?”
“No; the stepmother joined her.”
“Did she say she had inquired about you at Brunsbüttel?”
“No; I suppose she didn’t like to. And there was no need, because my
taking the Eider explained it.”
I reflected. “You’re sure she hadn’t a notion that you took the short cut?”
“Quite sure; but she may guess it now. She guessed foul play by seeing
that book.”
“Of course she did; but I was thinking of something else. There are two
stories afloat now—yours to von Brüning, the true one, that you followed
the Medusa to the short cut; and Dollmann’s to her, that you went round the
Scharhorn. That’s evidently his version of the affair—the version he would
have given if you had been drowned and inquiries were ever made; the
version he would have sworn his crew to if they discovered the truth.”
“But he must drop that yarn when he knows I’m alive and back again.”
“Yes; but meanwhile, supposing von Brüning sees him before he knows
you’re back again, and wants to find out the truth about that incident. If I
were von Brüning I should say, ‘By the way, what’s become of that young
Englishman you decoyed away to the Baltic?’ Dollmann would give his
version, and von Brüning, having heard ours, would know he was lying,
and had tried to drown you.”
“Does it matter? He must know already that Dollmann’s a scoundrel.”
“So we’ve been supposing; but we may be wrong. We’re still in the dark
as to Dollmann’s position towards these Germans. They may not even know
he’s English, or they may know that and not know his real name and past.
What effect your story will have on their relations with him we can’t
forecast. But I’m clear about one thing, that it’s our paramount interest to
maintain the status quo as long as we can, to minimise the danger you ran
that day, and act as witnesses in his defence. We can’t do that if his story
and yours don’t tally. The discrepancy will not only damn him (that may be
immaterial), but it will throw doubt on us.”

“Why?”
“Because if the short cut was so dangerous that he dared not own to
having led you to it, it was dangerous enough to make you suspect foul
play; the very supposition we want to avoid. We want to be thought mere
travellers, with no scores to wipe out, and no secrets to pry after.”
“Well, what do you propose?”
“Hitherto I believe we stand fairly well. Let’s assume we hoodwinked
von Brüning at Bensersiel, and base our policy on that assumption. It
follows that we must show Dollmann at the earliest possible moment that
you have come back, and give him time to revise his tactics before he
commits himself. Now——”
“But she’ll tell him we’re back,” interrupted Davies.
“I don’t think so. We’ve just agreed to keep this afternoon’s episode a
secret. She expects never to see us again.”
“Now, he comes to-morrow by the morning boat, she said. What did that
mean? Boat from where?”
“I know. From Norddeich on the mainland opposite. There’s a railway
there from Norden, and a steam ferry crosses to the island.”
“At what time?”
“Your Bradshaw will tell us—here it is: ‘Winter Service, 8.30 a.m., due
at 9.5.’”
“Let’s get away at once.”
We had a tussle with the tide at first, but once over the watershed the
channel improved, and the haze lightened gradually. A lighthouse appeared
among the sand-dunes on the island shore, and before darkness fell we
dimly saw the spires and roofs of a town, and two long black piers
stretching out southwards. We were scarcely a mile away when we lost our
wind altogether, and had to anchor. Determined to reach our destination that
night we waited till the ebb stream made, and then towed the yacht with the
dinghy. In the course of this a fog dropped on us suddenly, just as it had
yesterday. I was towing at the time, and, of course, stopped short; but
Davies shouted to me from the tiller to go on, that he could manage with the
lead and compass. And the end of it was that, at about nine o’clock, we
anchored safely in the five-fathom roadstead, close to the eastern pier, as a

short reconnaissance proved to us. It had been a little masterpiece of adroit
seamanship.
There was utter stillness till our chain rattled down, when a muffled shout
came from the direction of the pier, and soon we heard a boat groping out to
us. It was a polite but sleepy port-officer, who asked in a perfunctory way
for our particulars, and when he heard them, remembered the Dulcibella’s
previous visit.
“Where are you bound to?” he asked.
“England—sooner or later,” said Davies.
The man laughed derisively. “Not this year,” he said; “there will be fogs
for another week; it is always so, and then storms. Better leave your yawl
here. Dues will be only sixpence a month for you.
“I’ll think about it,” said Davies. “Good-night.”
The man vanished like a ghost in the thick night.
“Is the post-office open?” I called after him.
“No; eight to-morrow,” came back out of the fog.
We were too excited to sup in comfort, or sleep in peace, or to do
anything but plan and speculate. Never till this night had we talked with
absolute mutual confidence, for Davies broke down the last barriers of
reserve and let me see his whole mind. He loved this girl and he loved his
country, two simple passions which for the time absorbed his whole moral
capacity. There was no room left for casuistry. To weigh one passion against
the other, with the discordant voices of honour and expediency dinning in
his ears, had too long involved him in fruitless torture. Both were right;
neither could be surrendered. If the facts showed them irreconcilable, tant
pis pour les faits. A way must be found to satisfy both or neither.
I should have been a spiritless dog if I had not risen to his mood. But in
truth his cutting of the knot was at this juncture exactly what appealed to
me. I, too, was tired of vicarious casuistry, and the fascination of our
enterprise, intensified by the discovery of that afternoon, had never been so
strong in me. Not to be insincere, I cannot pretend that I viewed the
situation with his single mind. My philosophy when I left London was of a
very worldly sort, and no one can change his temperament in three weeks. I
plainly said as much to Davies, and indeed took perverse satisfaction in
stating with brutal emphasis some social truths which bore on this

attachment of his to the daughter of an outlaw. Truths I call them, but I
uttered them more by rote than by conviction, and he heard them unmoved.
And meanwhile I snatched recklessly at his own solution. If it imparted into
our adventure a strain of crazy chivalry more suited to knights-errant of the
Middle Ages than to sober modern youths—well, thank Heaven, I was not
too sober, and still young enough to snatch at that fancy with an ardour of
imagination, if not of character; perhaps, too, of character, for Galahads are
not so common but that ordinary folk must needs draw courage from their
example and put something of a blind trust in their tenfold strength.
To reduce a romantic ideal to a working plan is a very difficult thing.
“We shall have to argue backwards,” I said. “What is to be the final
stage? Because that must govern the others.”
There was only one answer—to get Dollmann, secrets and all, daughter
and all, away from Germany altogether. So only could we satisfy the double
aim we had set before us. What a joy it is, when beset with doubts, to find a
bed-rock necessity, however unattainable! We fastened on this one and
reasoned back from it. The first lesson was that, however many and strong
were the enemies we had to contend with, our sole overt foe must be
Dollmann. The issue of the struggle must be known only to ourselves and
him. If we won, and found out “what he was at”, we must at all costs
conceal our success from his German friends, and detach him from them
before he was compromised. (You will remark that to blithely accept this
limitation showed a very sanguine spirit in us.) The next question, how to
find out what he was at, was a deal more thorny. If it had not been for the
discovery of Dollmann’s identity, we should have found it as hard a nut to
crack as ever. But this discovery was illuminating. It threw into relief two
methods of action which hitherto we had been hazily seeking to combine,
seesawing between one and the other, each of us influenced at different
times by different motives. One was to rely on independent research; the
other to extort the secret from Dollmann direct, by craft or threats. The
moral of to-day was to abandon the first and embrace the second.
The prospects of independent research were not a whit better than before.
There were only two theories in the field, the channel theory and the
Memmert theory. The former languished for lack of corroboration; the latter
also appeared to be weakened. To Fräulein Dollmann the wreck-works were
evidently what they purported to be, and nothing more. This fact in itself

was unimportant, for it was clear as crystal that she was no party to her
father’s treacherous intrigues, if he was engaged in such. But if Memmert
was his sphere for them, it was disconcerting to find her so familiar with
that sphere, lightly talking of a descent in a diving-bell—hinting, too, that
the mystery as to results was only for local consumption. Nevertheless, the
charm of Memmert as the place we had traced Grimm to, and as the only
tangible clue we had obtained, was still very great. The really cogent
objection was the insuperable difficulty, known and watched as we were, of
learning its significance. If there was anything important to see there we
should never be allowed to see it, while by trying and failing we risked
everything. It was on this point that the last of all misunderstandings
between me and Davies was dissipated. At Bensersiel he had been
influenced more than he owned by my arguments about Memmert; but at
that time (as I hinted) he was biased by a radical prejudice. The channel
theory had become a sort of religion with him, promising double salvation
—not only avoidance of the Dollmanns, but success in the quest by
methods in which he was past master. To have to desert it and resort to
spying on naval defences was an idea he dreaded and distrusted. It was not
the morality of the course that bothered him. He was far too clear-headed to
blink at the essential fact that at heart we were spies on a foreign power in
time of peace, or to salve his conscience by specious distinctions as to our
mode of operation. The foreign power to him was Dollmann, a traitor.
There was his final justification, fearlessly adopted and held to the last. It
was rather that, knowing his own limitations, his whole nature shrank from
the sort of action entailed by the Memmert theory. And there was strong
common sense in his antipathy.
So much for independent research.
On the other hand the road was now clear for the other method. Davies
no longer feared to face the imbroglio at Norderney; and that day fortune
had given us a new and potent weapon against Dollmann; precisely how
potent we could not tell, for we had only a glimpse of his past, and his exact
relations with the Government were unknown to us. But we knew who he
was. Using this knowledge with address, could we not wring the rest from
him? Feel our way, of course, be guided by his own conduct, but in the end
strike hard and stake everything on the stroke? Such at any rate was our
scheme to-night. Later, tossing in my bunk, I bethought me of the little drab
book, lit a candle, and fetched it. A preface explained that it had been

written during a spell of two months’ leave from naval duty, and expressed
a hope that it might be of service to Corinthian sailors. The style was
unadorned, but scholarly and pithy. There was no trace of the writer’s
individuality, save a certain subdued relish in describing banks and shoals,
which reminded me of Davies himself. For the rest, I found the book dull,
and, in fact, it sent me to sleep.

CHAPTER XXI.
Blindfold to Memmert

“Here she comes,” said Davies. It was nine o’clock on the next day, October
22, and we were on deck waiting for the arrival of the steamer from
Norddeich. There was no change in the weather—still the same stringent
cold, with a high barometer, and only fickle flaws of air; but the morning
was gloriously clear, except for a wreath or two of mist curling like smoke
from the sea, and an attenuated belt of opaque fog on the northern horizon.
The harbour lay open before us, and very commodious and civilised it
looked, enclosed between two long piers which ran quite half a mile out
from the land to the roadstead (Riff Gat by name) where we lay. A stranger
might have taken it for a deep and spacious haven; but this, of course, was
an illusion, due to the high water. Davies knew that three-quarters of it was
mud, the remainder being a dredged-out channel along the western pier. A
couple of tugs, a dredger, and a ferry packet with steam up, were moored on
that side—a small stack of galliots on the other. Beyond these was another
vessel, a galliot in build, but radiant as a queen among sluts; her varnished
sides and spars flashing orange in the sun. These, and her snow-white
sailcovers and the twinkle of brass and gun-metal, proclaimed her to be a
yacht. I had already studied her through the glasses and read on her stern
Medusa. A couple of sailors were swabbing her decks; you could hear the
slush of the water and the scratching of the deck-brooms. “They can see us
anyway,” Davies had said.
For that matter all the world could see us—certainly the incoming steamer
must; for we lay as near to the pier as safety permitted, abreast of the berth
she would occupy, as we knew by a gangway and a knot of sailors.
A packet boat, not bigger than a big tug, was approaching from the south.
“Remember, we’re not supposed to know he’s coming,” I said; “let’s go
below.” Besides the skylight, our “coach-house” cabin top had little oblong

side windows. We wiped clean those on the port side and watched events
from them, kneeling on the sofa.
The steamer backed her paddles, flinging out a wash that set us rolling to
our scuppers. There seemed to be very few passengers aboard, but all of
them were gazing at the Dulcibella while the packet was warped alongside.
On the forward deck there were some market-women with baskets, a
postman, and a weedy youth who might be an hotel-waiter; on the after-
deck, standing close together, were two men in ulsters and soft felt hats.
“There he is!” said Davies, in a tense whisper; “the tall one.” But the tall
one turned abruptly as Davies spoke and strode away behind the deck-house,
leaving me just a lightning impression of a grey beard and a steep tanned
forehead, behind a cloud of cigar-smoke. It was perverse of me, but, to tell
the truth, I hardly missed him, so occupied was I by the short one, who
remained leaning on the rail, thoughtfully contemplating the Dulcibella
through gold-rimmed pince-nez: a sallow, wizened old fellow, beetlebrowed,
with a bush of grizzled moustache and a jet-black tuft of beard on his chin.
The most remarkable feature was the nose, which was broad and flat,
merging almost imperceptibly in the wrinkled cheeks. Lightly beaked at the
nether extremity, it drooped towards an enormous cigar which was pointing
at us like a gun just discharged. He looked wise as Satan, and you would say
he was smiling inwardly.
“Who’s that?” I whispered to Davies. (There was no need to talk in
whispers, but we did so instinctively.)
“Can’t think,” said Davies. “Hullo! she’s backing off, and they’ve not
landed.”
Some parcels and mail-bags had been thrown up, and the weedy waiter
and two market-women had gone up the gangway, which was now being
hauled up, and were standing on the quay. I think one or two other persons
had first come aboard unnoticed by us, but at the last moment a man we had
not seen before jumped down to the forward deck. “Grimm!” we both
ejaculated at once.
The steamer whistled sharply, circled backwards into the roadstead, and
then steamed away. The pier soon hid her, but her smoke showed she was
steering towards the North Sea.
“What does this mean?” I asked.

“There must be some other quay to stop at nearer the town,” said Davies.
“Let’s go ashore and get your letters.”
We had made a long and painful toilette that morning, and felt quite shy of
one another as we sculled towards the pier, in much-creased blue suits,
conventional collars, and brown boots. It was the first time for two years that
I had seen Davies in anything approaching a respectable garb; but a
fashionable watering-place, even in the dead season, exacts respect; and,
besides, we had friends to visit.
We tied up the dinghy to an iron ladder, and on the pier found our
inquisitor of the night before smoking in the doorway of a shed marked
“Harbour Master”. After some civilities we inquired about the steamer. The
answer was that it was Saturday, and she had, therefore, gone on to Juist. Did
we want a good hotel? The “Vier Jahreszeiten” was still open, etc.
“Juist, by Jove!” said Davies, as we walked on. “Why are those three
going to Juist?”
“I should have thought it was pretty clear. They’re on their way to
Memmert.”
Davies agreed, and we both looked longingly westward at a straw-
coloured streak on the sea.
“Is it some meeting, do you think?” said Davies.
“Looks like it. We shall probably find the Kormoran here, wind-bound.”
And find her we did soon after, the outermost of the stack of galliots, on
the farther side of the harbour. Two men, whose faces we took a good look
at, were sitting on her hatch, mending a sail.
Flooded with sun, yet still as the grave, the town was like a dead butterfly
for whom the healing rays had come too late. We crossed some deserted
public gardens commanded by a gorgeous casino, its porticos heaped with
chairs and tables; so past kiosques and cafés, great white hotels with boarded
windows, bazaars and booths, and all the stale lees of vulgar frivolity, to the
post-office, which at least was alive. I received a packet of letters and
purchased a local time-table, from which we learned that the steamer sailed
daily to Borkum via Norderney, touching three times a week at Juist
(weather permitting). On the return journey to-day it was due at Norderney
at 7.30 p.m. Then I inquired the way to the “Vier Jahreszeiten”. “For
whatever your principles, Davies,” I said, “we are going to have the best
breakfast money can buy! We’ve got the whole day before us.”

The “Four Seasons” Hotel was on the esplanade facing the northern
beach. Living up to its name, it announced on an illuminated signboard,
“Inclusive terms for winter visitors; special attention to invalids, etc.” Here
in a great glass restaurant, with the unruffled blue of ocean spread out before
us, we ate the king of breakfasts, dismissed the waiter, and over long and
fragrant Havanas examined my mail at leisure.
“What a waste of good diplomacy!” was my first thought, for nothing had
been tampered with, so far as we could judge from the minutest scrutiny,
directed, of course, in particular to the franked official letters (for to my
surprise there were two) from Whitehall.
The first in order of date (October 6) ran: “Dear Carruthers.—Take
another week by all means.—Yours, etc.”
The second (marked “urgent”) had been sent to my home address and
forwarded. It was dated October 15, and cancelled the previous letter,
requesting me to return to London without delay—“I am sorry to abridge
your holiday, but we are very busy, and, at present, short-handed.—Yours,
etc.” There was a dry postscript to the effect that another time I was to be
good enough to leave more regular and definite information as to my
whereabouts when absent.
“I’m afraid I never got this!” I said, handing it to Davies.
“You won’t go, will you?” said he, looking, nevertheless, with
unconcealed awe at the great man’s handwriting under the haughty official
crest. Meanwhile I discovered an endorsement on a corner of the envelope:
“Don’t worry; it’s only the chief’s fuss.—M——” I promptly tore up the
envelope. There are domestic mysteries which it would be indecent and
disloyal to reveal, even to one’s best friend. The rest of my letters need no
remark; I smiled over some and blushed over others—all were voices from a
life which was infinitely far away. Davies, meanwhile, was deep in the
foreign intelligence of a newspaper, spelling it out line by line, and referring
impatiently to me for the meaning of words.
“Hullo!” he said, suddenly; “same old game! Hear that siren?” A curtain
of fog had grown on the northern horizon and was drawing shorewards
slowly but surely.
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” I said.
“Well, we must get back to the yacht. We can’t leave her alone in the fog.”

There was some marketing to be done on the way back, and in the course
of looking for the shops we wanted we came on the Schwannallée and noted
its position. Before we reached the harbour the fog was on us, charging up
the streets in dense masses. Happily a tramline led right up to the pier-head,
or we should have lost our way and wasted time, which, in the event, was of
priceless value. Presently we stumbled up against the Harbour Office, which
was our landmark for the steps where we had tied up the dinghy. The same
official appeared and good-naturedly held the painter while we handed in
our parcels. He wanted to know why we had left the flesh-pots of the “Vier
Jahreszeiten”. To look after our yacht, of course. There was no need, he
objected; there would be no traffic moving while the fog lasted, and the fog,
having come on at that hour, had come to stay. If it did clear he would keep
an eye on the yacht for us. We thanked him, but thought we would go
aboard.
“You’ll have a job to find her now,” he said.
The distance was eighty yards at the most, but we had to use a scientific
method, the same one, in fact, that Davies had used last night in the
approach to the eastern pier.
“Row straight out at right angles to the pier,” he said now. I did so, Davies
sounding with his scull between the strokes. He found the bottom after
twenty yards, that being the width of the dredged-out channel at this point.
Then we turned to the right, and moved gently forward, keeping touch with
the edge of the mud-bank (for all the world like blind men tapping along a
kerbstone) and taking short excursions from it, till the Dulcibella hove in
view. “That’s partly luck,” Davies commented; “we ought to have had the
compass as well.”
We exchanged shouts with the man on the pier to show we had arrived.

“It’s very good practice, that sort of thing,” said Davies, when we had
disembarked.
“You’ve got a sixth sense,” I observed. “How far could you go like that?”
“Don’t know. Let’s have another try. I can’t sit still all day. Let’s explore
this channel.”
“Why not go to Memmert?” I said, in fun.
“To Memmert?” said Davies, slowly; “by Jove! that’s an idea!”
“Good Heavens, man! I was joking. Why, it’s ten mortal miles.”
“More,” said Davies, absently. “It’s not so much the distance—what’s the
time? Ten fifteen; quarter ebb—— What am I talking about? We made our
plans last night.”
But seeing him, to my amazement, serious, I was stung by the splendour
of the idea I had awakened. Confidence in his skill was second nature to me.
I swept straight on to the logic of the thing, the greatness, the completeness
of the opportunity, if by a miracle it could be seized and used. Something
was going on at Memmert to-day; our men had gone there; here were we, ten

miles away, in a smothering, blinding fog. It was known we were here—
Dollmann and Grimm knew it; the crew of the Medusa knew it; the crew of
the Kormoran knew it; the man on the pier, whether he cared or not, knew it.
But none of them knew Davies as I knew him. Would anyone dream for an
instant——?
“Stop a second,” said Davies; “give me two minutes.” He whipped out the
German chart. “Where exactly should we go?” (“Exactly!” The word tickled
me hugely.)
“To the depôt, of course; it’s our only chance.”
“Listen then—there are two routes: the outside one by the open sea, right
round Juist, and doubling south—the simplest, but the longest; the depôt’s at
the south point of Memmert, and Memmert’s nearly two miles long.” [See
Chart B]
“How far would that way be?”
“Sixteen miles good. And we should have to row in a breaking swell most
of the way, close to land.”
“Out of the question; it’s too public, too, if it clears. The steamer went that
way, and will come back that way. We must go inside over the sands. Am I
dreaming, though? Can you possibly find the way?”
“I shouldn’t wonder. But I don’t believe you see the hitch. It’s the time
and the falling tide. High water was about 8.15: it’s now 10.15, and all those
sands are drying off. We must cross the See Gat and strike that boomed
channel, the Memmert Balje; strike it, freeze on to it—can’t cut off an inch
—and pass that ‘watershed’ you see there before it’s too late. It’s an
infernally bad one, I can see. Not even a dinghy will cross it for an hour each
side of low water.”
“Well, how far is the ‘watershed’?”
“Good Lord! What are we talking for? Change, man, change! Talk while
we’re changing.” (He began flinging off his shore clothes, and I did the
same.) “It’s at least five miles to the end of it; six, allowing for bends; hour
and a half hard pulling; two, allowing for checks. Are you fit? You’ll have to
pull the most. Then there are six or seven more miles—easier ones. And then
—What are we to do when we get there?”
“Leave that to me,” I said. “You get me there.”
“Supposing it clears?”

“After we get there? Bad; but we must risk that. If it clears on the way
there it doesn’t matter by this route; we shall be miles from land.”
“What about getting back?”
“We shall have a rising tide, anyway. If the fog lasts—can you manage in
a fog and dark?”
“The dark makes it no more difficult, if we’ve a light to see the compass
and chart by. You trim the binnacle lamp—no, the riding-light. Now give me
the scissors, and don’t speak a word for ten minutes. Meanwhile, think it out,
and load the dinghy—(by Jove! though, don’t make a sound)—some grub
and whisky, the boat-compass, lead, riding-light, matches, small boathook,
grapnel and line.”
“Foghorn?”
“Yes, and the whistle too.”
“A gun?”
“What for?”
“We’re after ducks.”
“All right. And muffle the rowlocks with cotton-waste.”
I left Davies absorbed in the charts, and softly went about my own
functions. In ten minutes he was on the ladder, beckoning.
“I’ve done,” he whispered. “Now shall we go?”
“I’ve thought it out. Yes,” I answered.
This was only roughly true, for I could not have stated in words all the
pros and cons that I had balanced. It was an impulse that drove me forward;
but an impulse founded on reason, with just a tinge, perhaps, of superstition;
for the quest had begun in a fog and might fitly end in one.
It was twenty-five minutes to eleven when we noiselessly pushed off. “Let
her drift,” whispered Davies, “the ebb’ll carry her past the pier.”
We slid by the Dulcibella, and she disappeared. Then we sat without
speech or movement for about five minutes, while the gurgle of tide through
piles approached and passed. The dinghy appeared to be motionless, just as a
balloon in the clouds may appear to its occupants to be motionless, though
urged by a current of air. In reality we were driving out of the Riff Gat into
the See Gat. The dinghy swayed to a light swell.

“Now, pull,” said Davies, under his breath; “keep it long and steady,
above all steady—both arms with equal force.”
I was on the bow-thwart; he vis-à-vis to me on the stern seat, his left hand
behind him on the tiller, his right forefinger on a small square of paper which
lay on his knees; this was a section cut out from the big German chart. [See
Chart B] On the midship-thwart between us lay the compass and a watch.
Between these three objects—compass, watch, and chart—his eyes darted
constantly, never looking up or out, save occasionally for a sharp glance over
the side at the flying bubbles, to see if I was sustaining a regular speed. My
duty was to be his automaton, the human equivalent of a marine engine
whose revolutions can be counted and used as data by the navigator. My
arms must be regular as twin pistons; the energy that drove them as
controllable as steam. It was a hard ideal to reach, for the complex mortal
tends to rely on all the senses God has given him, so unfitting himself for
mechanical exactitude when a sense (eyesight, in my case) fails him. At first
it was constantly “left” or “right” from Davies, accompanied by a bubbling
from the rudder.
“This won’t do, too much helm,” said Davies, without looking up. “Keep
your stroke, but listen to me. Can you see the compass card?”
“When I come forward.”
“Take your time, and don’t get flurried, but each time you come forward
have a good look at it. The course is sou’-west half-west. You take the
opposite, north-east half-east, and keep her stern on that. It’ll be rough, but
it’ll save some helm, and give me a hand free if I want it.”
I did as he said, not without effort, and our progress gradually became
smoother, till he had no need to speak at all. The only sound now was one
like the gentle simmer of a saucepan away to port—the lisp of surf I knew it
to be—and the muffled grunt of the rowlocks. I broke the silence once to say
“It’s very shallow.” I had touched sand with my right scull.
“Don’t talk,” said Davies.
About half an hour passed, and then he added sounding to his other
occupations. “Plump” went the lead at regular intervals, and he steered with
his hip while pulling in the line. Very little of it went out at first, then less
still. Again I struck bottom, and, glancing aside, saw weeds. Suddenly he got
a deep cast, and the dinghy, freed from the slight drag which shallow water

always inflicts on a small boat, leapt buoyantly forward. At the same time, I
knew by boils on the smooth surface that we were in a strong tideway.
“The Buse Tief,” [See Chart B] muttered Davies. “Row hard now, and
steady as a clock.”
For a hundred yards or more I bent to my sculls and made her fly. Davies
was getting six fathom casts, till, just as suddenly as it had deepened, the
water shoaled—ten feet, six, three, one—the dinghy grounded.
“Good!” said Davies. “Back her off! Pull your right only.” The dinghy
spun round with her bow to N.N.W. “Both arms together! Don’t you worry
about the compass now; just pull, and listen for orders. There’s a tricky bit
coming.”
He put aside the chart, kicked the lead under the seat, and, kneeling on the
dripping coils of line, sounded continuously with the butt-end of the
boathook, a stumpy little implement, notched at intervals of a foot, and often
before used for the same purpose. All at once I was aware that a check had
come, for the dinghy swerved and doubled like a hound ranging after scent.
“Stop her,” he said, suddenly, “and throw out the grapnel.”
I obeyed and we brought up, swinging to a slight current, whose direction
Davies verified by the compass. Then for half a minute he gave himself up
to concentrated thought. What struck me most about him was that he never
for a moment strained his eyes through the fog; a useless exercise (for five
yards or so was the radius of our vision) which, however, I could not help
indulging in, while I rested. He made up his mind, and we were off again,
straight and swift as an arrow this time, and in water deeper than the
boathook. I could see by his face that he was taking some bold expedient
whose issue hung in the balance.... Again we touched mud, and the artist’s
joy of achievement shone in his eyes. Backing away, we headed west, and
for the first time he began to gaze into the fog.
“There’s one!” he snapped at last. “Easy all!”
A boom, one of the usual upright saplings, glided out of the mist. He
caught hold of it, and we brought up.
“Rest for three minutes now,” he said. “We’re in fairly good time.”
It was 11.10. I ate some biscuits and took a nip of whisky while Davies
prepared for the next stage.

We had reached the eastern outlet of Memmert Balje, the channel which
runs east and west behind Juist Island, direct to the south point of Memmert.
How we had reached it was incomprehensible to me at the time, but the
reader will understand by comparing my narrative with the dotted line on the
chart. I add this brief explanation, that Davies’s method had been to cross the
channel called the Buse Tief, and strike the other side of it at a point well
south of the outlet of the Memmert Balje (in view of the northward set of the
ebb-tide), and then to drop back north and feel his way to the outlet. The
check was caused by a deep indentation in the Itzendorf Flat; a cul-de-sac,
with a wide mouth, which Davies was very near mistaking for the Balje
itself. We had no time to skirt dents so deep as that; hence the dash across its
mouth with the chance of missing the upper lip altogether, and of either
being carried out to sea (for the slightest error was cumulative) or straying
fruitlessly along the edge.
The next three miles were the most critical of all. They included the
“watershed”, whose length and depth were doubtful; they included, too, the
crux of the whole passage, a spot where the channel forks, our own branch
continuing west, and another branch diverging from it north-westward. We
must row against time, and yet we must negotiate that crux. Add to this that
the current was against us till the watershed was crossed; that the tide was
just at its most baffling stage, too low to allow us to risk short cuts, and too
high to give definition to the banks of the channel; and that the compass was
no aid whatever for the minor bends. “Time’s up,” said Davies, and on we
went. I was hugging the comfortable thought that we should now have
booms on our starboard for the whole distance; on our starboard, I say, for
experience had taught us that all channels running parallel with the coast and
islands were uniformly boomed on the northern side. Anyone less confident
than Davies would have succumbed to the temptation of slavishly relying on
these marks, creeping from one to the other, and wasting precious time. But
Davies knew our friend the “boom” and his eccentricities too well; and
preferred to trust to his sense of touch, which no fog in the world could
impair. If we happened to sight one, well and good, we should know which
side of the channel we were on. But even this contingent advantage he
deliberately sacrificed after a short distance, for he crossed over to the south
or unboomed side and steered and sounded along it, using the ltzendorf Flat
as his handrail, so to speak. He was compelled to do this, he told me
afterwards, in view of the crux, where the converging lines of booms would

have involved us in irremediable confusion. Our branch was the southern
one, and it followed that we must use the southern bank, and defer obtaining
any help from booms until sure we were past that critical spot.
For an hour we were at the extreme strain, I of physical exertion, he of
mental. I could not get into a steady swing, for little checks were constant.
My right scull was for ever skidding on mud or weeds, and the backward
suck of shoal water clogged our progress. Once we were both of us out in the
slime tugging at the dinghy’s sides; then in again, blundering on. I found the
fog bemusing, lost all idea of time and space, and felt like a senseless
marionette kicking and jerking to a mad music without tune or time. The
misty form of Davies as he sat with his right arm swinging rhythmically
forward and back, was a clockwork figure as mad as myself, but didactic and
gibbering in his madness. Then the boathook he wielded with a circular
sweep began to take grotesque shapes in my heated fancy; now it was the
antenna of a groping insect, now the crank of a cripple’s self-propelled
perambulator, now the alpenstock of a lunatic mountaineer, who sits in his
chair and climbs and climbs to some phantom “watershed”. At the back of
such mind as was left me lodged two insistent thoughts: “we must hurry on,”
“we are going wrong.” As to the latter, take a link-boy through a London fog
and you will experience the same thing: he always goes the way you think is
wrong. “We’re rowing back!” I remember shouting to Davies once, having
become aware that it was now my left scull which splashed against
obstructions. “Rubbish,” said Davies. “I’ve crossed over”; and I relapsed.
By degrees I returned to sanity, thanks to improved conditions. It is an ill
wind that blows nobody good, and the state of the tide, though it threatened
us with total failure, had the compensating advantage that the lower it fell
the more constricted and defined became our channel; till the time came
when the compass and boathook were alike unnecessary, because our
handrail, the muddy brink of the channel, was visible to the eye, close to us;
on our right hand always now, for the crux was far behind, and the northern
side was now our guide. All that remained was to press on with might and
main ere the bed of the creek dried.
What a race it was! Homeric, in effect; a struggle of men with gods, for
what were the gods but forces of nature personified? If the God of the
Falling Tide did not figure in the Olympian circle he is none the less a
mighty divinity. Davies left his post, and rowed stroke. Under our united
efforts the dinghy advanced in strenuous leaps, hurling miniature rollers on

the bank beside us. My palms, seasoned as they were, were smarting with
watery blisters. The pace was too hot for my strength and breath.
“I must have a rest,” I gasped.
“Well, I think we’re over it,” said Davies.
We stopped the dinghy dead, and he stabbed over the side with the
boathook. It passed gently astern of us, and even my bewildered brain took
in the meaning of that.
“Three feet and the current with us. Well over it,” he said. “I’ll paddle on
while you rest and feed.”
It was a few minutes past one and we still, as he calculated, had eight
miles before us, allowing for bends.
“But it’s a mere question of muscle,” he said.
I took his word for it, and munched at tongue and biscuits. As for muscle,
we were both in hard condition. He was fresh, and what distress I felt was
mainly due to spasmodic exertion culminating in that desperate spurt. As for
the fog, it had more than once shown a faint tendency to lift, growing thinner
and more luminous, in the manner of fogs, always to settle down again,
heavy as a quilt.
Note the spot marked “second rest” (approximately correct, Davies says)
and the course of the channel from that point westward. You will see it
broadening and deepening to the dimensions of a great river, and finally
merging in the estuary of the Ems. Note, too, that its northern boundary, the
edge of the now uncovered Nordland Sand, leads, with one interruption
(marked A), direct to Memmert, and is boomed throughout. You will then
understand why Davies made so light of the rest of his problem. Compared
with the feats he had performed, it was child’s play, for he always had that
visible margin to keep touch with if he chose, or to return to in case of doubt.
As a matter of fact—observe our dotted line—he made two daring
departures from it, the first purely to save time, the second partly to save
time and partly to avoid the very awkward spot marked A, where a creek
with booms and a little delta of its own interrupts the even bank. During the
first of these departures—the shortest but most brilliant—he let me do the
rowing, and devoted himself to the niceties of the course; during the second,
and through both the intermediate stages, he rowed himself, with occasional
pauses to inspect the chart. We fell into a long, measured stroke, and covered

the miles rapidly, scarcely exchanging a single word till, at the end of a long
pull through vacancy, Davies said suddenly:
“Now where are we to land?”
A sandbank was looming over us crowned by a lonely boom.
“Where are we?”
“A quarter of a mile from Memmert.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly three.”

CHAPTER XXII.
The Quartette

His tour de force was achieved, and for the moment something like collapse
set in.
“What in the world have we come here for?” he muttered; “I feel a bit
giddy.”
I made him drink some whisky, which revived him; and then, speaking in
whispers, we settled certain points.
I alone was to land. Davies demurred to this out of loyalty, but common
sense, coinciding with a strong aversion of his own, settled the matter. Two
were more liable to detection than one. I spoke the language well, and if
challenged could cover my retreat with a gruff word or two; in my woollen
overalls, sea-boots, oilskin coat, with a sou’-wester pulled well over my
eyes, I should pass in a fog for a Frisian. Davies must mind the dinghy; but
how was I to regain it? I hoped to do so without help, by using the edge of
the sand; but if he heard a long whistle he was to blow the foghorn.
“Take the pocket-compass,” he said. “Never budge from the shore without
using it, and lay it on the ground for steadiness. Take this scrap of chart, too
—it may come in useful; but you can’t miss the depôt, it looks to be close to
the shore. How long will you be?”
“How long have I got?”
“The young flood’s making—has been for nearly an hour—that bank (he
measured it with his eye) will be covering in an hour and a half.”
“That ought to be enough.”
“Don’t run it too fine. It’s steep here, but it may shelve farther on. If you
have to wade you’ll never find me, and you’ll make a deuce of a row. Got
your watch, matches, knife? No knife? Take mine; never go anywhere
without a knife.” (It was his seaman’s idea of efficiency.)

“Wait a bit, we must settle a place to meet at in case I’m late and can’t
reach you here.”
“Don’t be late. We’ve got to get back to the yacht before we’re missed.”
“But I may have to hide and wait till dark—the fog may clear.”
“We were fools to come, I believe,” said Davies, gloomily. “There are no
meeting-places in a place like this. Here’s the best I can see on the chart—a
big triangular beacon marked on the very point of Memmert. You’ll pass it.”
“All right. I’m off.”
“Good luck,” said Davies, faintly.
I stepped out, climbed a miry glacis of five or six feet, reached hard wet
sand, and strode away with the sluggish ripple of the Balje on my left hand.
A curtain dropped between me and Davies, and I was alone—alone, but how
I thrilled to feel the firm sand rustle under my boots; to know that it led to
dry land, where, whatever befell, I could give my wits full play. I clove the
fog briskly.
Good Heavens! what was that? I stopped short and listened. From over the
water on my left there rang out, dulled by fog, but distinct to the ear, three
double strokes on a bell or gong. I looked at my watch.
“Ship at anchor,” I said to myself. “Six bells in the afternoon watch.” I
knew the Balje was here a deep roadstead, where a vessel entering the
Eastern Ems might very well anchor to ride out a fog.
I was just stepping forward when another sound followed from the same
quarter, a bugle-call this time. Then I understood—only men-of-war sound
bugles—the Blitz was here then; and very natural, too, I thought, and strode
on. The sand was growing drier, the water farther beneath me; then came a
thin black ribbon of weed—high-water mark. A few cautious steps to the
right and I touched tufts of marram grass. It was Memmert. I pulled out the
chart and refreshed my memory. No! there could be no mistake; keep the sea
on my left and I must go right. I followed the ribbon of weed, keeping it just
in view, but walking on the verge of the grass for the sake of silence. All at
once I almost tripped over a massive iron bar; others, a rusty network of
them, grew into being above and around me, like the arms of a ghostly
polyp.
“What infernal spider’s web is this?” I thought, and stumbled clear. I had
strayed into the base of a gigantic tripod, its gaunt legs stayed and cross-

stayed, its apex lost in fog; the beacon, I remembered. A hundred yards
farther and I was down on my knees again, listening with might and main;
for several little sounds were in the air—voices, the rasp of a boat’s keel, the
whistling of a tune. These were straight ahead. More to the left, seaward,
that is, I had aural evidence of the presence of a steamboat—a small one, for
the hiss of escaping steam was low down. On my right front I as yet heard
nothing, but the depôt must be there.
I prepared to strike away from my base, and laid the compass on the
ground—NW. roughly I made the course. (“South-east—south-east for
coming back,” I repeated inwardly, like a child learning a lesson.) Then of
my two allies I abandoned one, the beach, and threw myself wholly on the
fog.
“Play the game,” I said to myself. “Nobody expects you; nobody will
recognise you.”
I advanced in rapid stages of ten yards or so, while grass disappeared and
soft sand took its place, pitted everywhere with footmarks. I trod carefully,
for obstructions began to show themselves—an anchor, a heap of rusty
cable; then a boat bottom upwards, and, lying on it, a foul old meerschaum
pipe. I paused here and strained my ears, for there were sounds in many
directions; the same whistling (behind me now), heavy footsteps in front,
and somewhere beyond—fifty yards away, I reckoned—a buzz of guttural
conversation; from the same quarter there drifted to my nostrils the acrid
odour of coarse tobacco. Then a door banged.
I put the compass in my pocket (thinking “south-east, south-east”), placed
the pipe between my teeth (ugh! the rank savour of it!) rammed my sou’-
wester hard down, and slouched on in the direction of the door that had
banged. A voice in front called, “Karl Schicker”; a nearer voice, that of the
man whose footsteps I had heard approaching, took it up and called “Karl
Schicker”: I, too, took it up, and, turning my back, called “Karl Schicker” as
gruffly and gutturally as I could. The footsteps passed quite close to me, and
glancing over my shoulder I saw a young man passing, dressed very like me,
but wearing a sealskin cap instead of a sou’-wester. As he walked he seemed
to be counting coins in his palm. A hail came back from the beach and the
whistling stopped.
I now became aware that I was on a beaten track. These meetings were
hazardous, so I inclined aside, but not without misgivings, for the path led

towards the buzz of talk and the banging door, and these were my only
guides to the depôt. Suddenly, and much before I expected it, I knew rather
than saw that a wall was in front of me; now it was visible, the side of a low
building of corrugated iron. A pause to reconnoitre was absolutely necessary;
but the knot of talkers might have heard my footsteps, and I must at all costs
not suggest the groping of a stranger. I lit a match—two—and sucked
heavily (as I had seen navvies do) at my pipe, studying the trend of the wall
by reference to the sounds. There was a stale dottle wedged in the bowl, and
loathsome fumes resulted. Just then the same door banged again; another
name, which I forget, was called out. I decided that I was at the end of a
rectangular building which I pictured as like an Aldershot “hut”, and that the
door I heard was round the corner to my left. A knot of men must be
gathered there, entering it by turns. Having expectorated noisily, I followed
the tin wall to my right, and turning a corner strolled leisurely on, passing
signs of domesticity, a washtub, a water-butt, then a tiled approach to an
open door. I now was aware of the corner of a second building, also of zinc,
parallel to the first, but taller, for I could only just see the eave. I was just
going to turn off to this as a more promising field for exploration, when I
heard a window open ahead of me in my original building.
I am afraid I am getting obscure, so I append a rough sketch of the scene,
as I partly saw and chiefly imagined it. It was window (A) that I heard open.
From it I could just distinguish through the fog a hand protrude, and throw
something out—cigar-end? The hand, a clean one with a gold signet ring,
rested for an instant afterwards on the sash, and then closed the window.

My geography was clear now in one respect. That window belonged to the
same room as the banging door (B); for I distinctly heard the latter open and
shut again, opposite me on the other side of the building. It struck me that it
might be interesting to see into that room. “Play the game,” I reminded
myself, and retreated a few yards back on tiptoe, then turned and sauntered
coolly past the window, puffing my villainous pipe and taking a long
deliberate look into the interior as I passed—the more deliberate that at the
first instant I realised that nobody inside was disturbing himself about me.
As I had expected (in view of the fog and the time) there was artificial light
within. My mental photograph was as follows: a small room with varnished
deal walls and furnished like an office; in the far right-hand corner a
counting-house desk, Grimm sitting at it on a high stool, side-face to me,
counting money; opposite him in an awkward attitude a burly fellow in
seaman’s dress holding a diver’s helmet. In the middle of the room a deal
table, and on it something big and black. Lolling on chairs near it, their
backs to me and their faces turned towards the desk and the diver, two men
—von Brüning and an older man with a bald yellow head (Dollmann’s
companion on the steamer, beyond a doubt). On another chair, with its back
actually tilted against the window, Dollmann.

Such were the principal features of the scene; for details I had to make
another inspection. Stooping low, I crept back, quiet as a cat, till I was
beneath the window, and, as I calculated, directly behind Dollmann’s chair.
Then with great caution I raised my head. There was only one pair of eyes in
the room that I feared in the least, and that was Grimm’s, who sat in profile
to me, farthest away. I instantly put Dollmann’s back between Grimm and
me, and then made my scrutiny. As I made it, I could feel a cold sweat
distilling on my forehead and tickling my spine; not from fear or excitement,
but from pure ignominy. For beyond all doubt I was present at the meeting
of a bona-fide salvage company. It was pay-day, and the directors appeared
to be taking stock of work done; that was all.
Over the door was an old engraving of a two-decker under full sail;
pinned on the wall a chart and the plan of a ship. Relics of the wrecked
frigate abounded. On a shelf above the stove was a small pyramid of
encrusted cannon-balls, and supported on nails at odd places on the walls
were corroded old pistols, and what I took to be the remains of a sextant. In a
corner of the floor sat a hoary little carronade, carriage and all. None of these
things affected me so much as a pile of lumber on the floor, not firewood but
unmistakable wreck-wood, black as bog-oak, still caked in places with the
mud of ages. Nor was it the mere sight of this lumber that dumbfounded me.
It was the fact that a fragment of it, a balk of curved timber garnished with
some massive bolts, lay on the table, and was evidently an object of earnest
interest. The diver had turned and was arguing with gestures over it; von
Brüning and Grimm were pressing another view. The diver shook his head
frequently, finally shrugged his shoulders, made a salutation, and left the
room. Their movements had kept me ducking my head pretty frequently, but
I now grew almost reckless as to whether I was seen or not. All the
weaknesses of my theory crowded on me—the arguments Davies had used
at Bensersiel; Fräulein Dollmann’s thoughtless talk; the ease (comparatively)
with which I had reached this spot, not a barrier to cross or a lock to force;
the publicity of their passage to Memmert by Dollmann, his friend, and
Grimm; and now this glimpse of business-like routine. In a few moments I
sank from depth to depth of scepticism. Where were my mines, torpedoes,
and submarine boats, and where my imperial conspirators? Was gold after all
at the bottom of this sordid mystery? Dollmann after all a commonplace
criminal? The ladder of proof I had mounted tottered and shook beneath me.

“Don’t be a fool,” said the faint voice of reason. “There are your four men.
Wait.”
Two more employés came into the room in quick succession and received
wages; one looking like a fireman, the other of a superior type, the skipper of
a tug, say. There was another discussion with this latter over the balk of
wreck-wood, and this man, too, shrugged his shoulders. His departure
appeared to end the meeting. Grimm shut up a ledger, and I shrank down on
my knees, for a general shifting of chairs began. At the same time, from the
other side of the building, I heard my knot of men retreating beachwards,
spitting and chatting as they went. Presently someone walked across the
room towards my window. I sidled away on all fours, rose and flattened
myself erect against the wall, a sickening despondency on me; my intention
to slink away south-east as soon as the coast was clear. But the sound that
came next pricked me like an electric shock; it was the tinkle and scrape of
curtain-rings.
Quick as thought I was back in my old position, to find my view barred by
a cretonne curtain. It was in one piece, with no chink for my benefit, but it
did not hang straight, bulging towards me under the pressure of something—
human shoulders by the shape. Dollmann, I concluded, was still in his old
place. I now was exasperated to find that I could scarcely hear a word that
was said, not even by pressing my ear against the glass. It was not that the
speakers were of set purpose hushing their voices—they used an ordinary
tone for intimate discussion—but the glass and curtain deadened the actual
words. Still, I was soon able to distinguish general characteristics. Von
Brüning’s voice—the only one I had ever heard before—I recognised at
once; he was on the left of the table, and Dollmann’s I knew from his
position. The third was a harsh croak, belonging to the old gentleman whom,
for convenience, I shall prematurely begin to call Herr Böhme. It was too old
a voice to be Grimm’s; besides, it had the ring of authority, and was dealing
at the moment in sharp interrogations. Three of its sentences I caught in their
entirety. “When was that?” “They went no farther?” and “Too long; out of
the question.” Dollmann’s voice, though nearest to me, was the least audible
of all. It was a dogged monotone, and what was that odd movement of the
curtain at his back? Yes, his hands were behind him clutching and kneading
a fold of the cretonne. “You are feeling uncomfortable, my friend,” was my
comment. Suddenly he threw back his head—I saw the dent of it—and

spoke up so that I could not miss a word. “Very well, sir, you shall see them
at supper to-night; I will ask them both.”
(You will not be surprised to learn that I instantly looked at my watch—
though it takes long to write what I have described—but the time was only a
quarter to four.) He added something about the fog, and his chair creaked.
Ducking promptly I heard the curtain-rings jar, and: “Thick as ever.”
“Your report, Herr Dollmann,” said Böhme, curtly. Dollmann left the
window and moved his chair up to the table; the other two drew in theirs and
settled themselves.
“Chatham,” said Dollmann, as if announcing a heading. It was an easy
word to catch, rapped out sharp, and you can imagine how it startled me.
“That’s where you’ve been for the last month!” I said to myself. A map
crackled and I knew they were bending over it, while Dollmann explained
something. But now my exasperation became acute, for not a syllable more
reached me. Squatting back on my heels, I cast about for expedients. Should
I steal round and try the door? Too dangerous. Climb to the roof and listen
down the stove-pipe? Too noisy, and generally hopeless. I tried for a
downward purchase on the upper half of the window, which was of the
simple sort in two sections, working vertically. No use; it resisted gentle
pressure, would start with a sudden jar if I forced it. I pulled out Davies’s
knife and worked the point of the blade between sash and frame to give it
play—no result; but the knife was a nautical one, with a marlin-spike as well
as a big blade.
Just now the door within opened and shut again, and I heard steps
approaching round the corner to my right. I had the presence of mind not to
lose a moment, but moved silently away (blessing the deep Frisian sand)
round the corner of the big parallel building. Someone whom I could not see
walked past till his boots clattered on tiles, next resounded on boards.
“Grimm in his living-room,” I inferred. The precious minutes ebbed away—
five, ten, fifteen. Had he gone for good? I dared not return otherwise.
Eighteen—he was coming out! This time I stole forward boldly when the
man had just passed, dimly saw a figure, and clearly enough the glint of a
white paper he was holding. He made his circuit and re-entered the room.
Here I felt and conquered a relapse to scepticism. “If this is an important
conclave why don’t they set guards?” Answer, the only possible one,
“Because they stand alone. Their employés, like everyone we had met

hitherto, know nothing. The real object of this salvage company (a poor
speculation, I opined) is solely to afford a pretext for the conclave.” “Why
the curtain, even?” “Because there are maps, stupid!”
I was back again at the window, but as impotent as ever against that even
stream of low confidential talk. But I would not give up. Fate and the fog
had brought me here, the one solitary soul perhaps who by the chain of
circumstances had both the will and the opportunity to wrest their secret
from these four men.
The marlin-spike! Where the lower half of the window met the sill it sank
into a shallow groove. I thrust the point of the spike down into the interstice
between sash and frame and heaved with a slowly increasing force, which I
could regulate to the fraction of an ounce, on this powerful lever. The sash
gave, with the faintest possible protest, and by imperceptible degrees I lifted
it to the top of the groove, and the least bit above it, say half an inch in all;
but it made an appreciable difference to the sounds within, as when you
remove your foot from a piano’s soft pedal. I could do no more, for there
was no further fulcrum for the spike, and I dared not gamble away what I
had won by using my hands.
Hope sank again when I placed my cheek on the damp sill, and my ear to
the chink. My men were close round the table referring to papers which I
heard rustle. Dollmann’s “report” was evidently over, and I rarely heard his
voice; Grimm’s occasionally, von Brüning’s and Böhme’s frequently; but, as
before, it was the latter only that I could ever count on for an intelligible
word. For, unfortunately, the villains of the piece plotted without any regard
to dramatic fitness or to my interests. Immersed in a subject with which they
were all familiar, they were allusive, elliptic, and persistently technical.
Many of the words I did catch were unknown to me. The rest were, for the
most part, either letters of the alphabet or statistical figures, of depth,
distance, and, once or twice, of time. The letters of the alphabet recurred
often, and seemed, as far as I could make out, to represent the key to the
cipher. The numbers clustering round them were mostly very small, with
decimals. What maddened me most was the scarcity of plain nouns.
To report what I heard to the reader would be impossible; so chaotic was
most of it that it left no impression on my own memory. All I can do is to tell
him what fragments stuck, and what nebulous classification I involved. The
letters ran from A to G, and my best continuous chance came when Böhme,
reading rapidly from a paper, I think, went through the letters, backwards,

from G, adding remarks to each; thus: “G. . . completed.” “F. . . bad. . . 1.3
(metres?). . .2.5 (kilometres?).” “E . . . thirty-two. . . 1.2.” “D. . . 3 weeks. . .
thirty.” “C. . .” and so on.
Another time he went through this list again, only naming each letter
himself, and receiving laconic answers from Grimm—answers which
seemed to be numbers, but I could not be sure. For minutes together I caught
nothing but the scratching of pens and inarticulate mutterings. But out of the
muck-heap I picked five pearls—four sibilant nouns and a name that I knew
before. The nouns were “Schleppboote” (tugs); “Wassertiefe” (depth of
water); “Eisenbahn” (railway); “Lotsen” (pilots). The name, also sibilant and
thus easier to hear, was “Esens”.
Two or three times I had to stand back and ease my cramped neck, and on
each occasion I looked at my watch, for I was listening against time, just as
we had rowed against time. We were going to be asked to supper, and must
be back aboard the yacht in time to receive the invitation. The fog still
brooded heavily and the light, always bad, was growing worse. How would
they get back? How had they come from Juist? Could we forestall them?
Questions of time, tide, distance—just the odious sort of sums I was unfit to
cope with—were distracting my attention when it should have been wholly
elsewhere. 4.20—4.25—now it was past 4.30 when Davies said the bank
would cover. I should have to make for the beacon; but it was fatally near
that steamboat path, etc., and I still at intervals heard voices from there. It
must have been about 4.35 when there was another shifting of chairs within.
Then someone rose, collected papers, and went out; someone else, without
rising (therefore Grimm), followed him.
There was silence in the room for a minute, and after that, for the first
time, I heard some plain colloquial German, with no accompaniment of
scratching or rustling. “I must wait for this,” I thought, and waited.
“He insists on coming,” said Böhme.
“Ach!” (an ejaculation of surprise and protest from von Brüning).
“I said the 25th.”
“Why?”
“The tide serves well. The night-train, of course. Tell Grimm to be ready
——” (An inaudible question from von Brüning.)
“No, any weather.” A laugh from von Brüning and some words I could not
catch.

“Only one, with half a load.”
“.....meet?”
“At the station.”
“So—how’s the fog?”
This appeared to be really the end. Both men rose and steps came towards
the window. I leapt aside as I heard it thrown up, and covered by the noise
backed into safety. Von Brüning called “Grimm!” and that, and the open
window, decided me that my line of advance was now too dangerous to
retreat by. The only alternative was to make a circuit round the bigger of the
two buildings—and an interminable circuit it seemed—and all the while I
knew my compass-course “south-east” was growing nugatory. I passed a
padlocked door, two corners, and faced the void of fog. Out came the
compass, and I steadied myself for the sum. “South-east before—I’m farther
to the eastward now—east will about do”; and off I went, with an error of
four whole points, over tussocks and deep sand. The beach seemed much
farther off than I had thought, and I began to get alarmed, puzzled over the
compass several times, and finally realised that I had lost my way. I had the
sense not to make matters worse by trying to find it again, and, as the lesser
of two evils, blew my whistle, softly at first, then louder. The bray of a
foghorn sounded right behind me. I whistled again and then ran for my life,
the horn sounding at intervals. In three or four minutes I was on the beach
and in the dinghy.

CHAPTER XXIII.
A Change of Tactics

We pushed off without a word, and paddled out of sight of the beach. A
voice was approaching, hailing us. “Hail back,” whispered Davies; “pretend
we’re a galliot.”
“Ho-a,” I shouted, “where am I?”
“Off Memmert,” came back. “Where are you bound?”
“Delfzyl,” whispered Davies.
“Delf-zyl,” I bawled.
A sentence ending with “anchor” was returned.
“The flood’s tearing east,” whispered Davies; “sit still.”
We heard no more, and, after a few minutes’ drifting, “What luck?” said
Davies.
“One or two clues, and an invitation to supper.”
The clues I left till later; the invitation was the thing, and I explained its
urgency.
“How will they get back?” said Davies; “if the fog lasts the steamer’s
sure to be late.”
“We can count for nothing,” I answered. “There was some little
steamboat off the depôt, and the fog may lift. Which is our quickest way?”
“At this tide, a bee-line to Norderney by compass; we shall have water
over all the banks.”
He had all his preparations made, the lamp lit in advance, the compass in
position, and we started at once; he at the bow-oar where he had better
control over the boat’s nose; lamp and compass on the floor between us.
Twilight thickened into darkness—a choking, pasty darkness—and still we
sped unfalteringly over that trackless waste, sitting and swinging in our

little pool of stifled orange light. To drown fatigue and suspense I conned
over my clues, and tried to carve into my memory every fugitive word I had
overheard.
“What are there seven of round here?” I called back to Davies once
(thinking of A to G). “Sorry,” I added, for no answer came.
“I see a star,” was my next word, after a long interval. “Now it’s gone.
There it is again! Right aft!”
“That’s Borkum light,” said Davies, presently; “the fog’s lifting.” A keen
wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog
rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry
dome of heaven, still bright with the western after-glow, and beginning to
redden in the east to the rising moon. Norderney light was flashing ahead,
and Davies could take his tired eyes from the pool of light.
“Damn!” was all he uttered in the way of gratitude for this mercy, and I
felt very much the same; for in a fog Davies in a dinghy was a match for a
steamer; in a clear he lost his handicap.
It was a quarter to seven. “An hour’ll do it, if we buck up,” he
pronounced, after taking a rough bearing with the two lights. He pointed out
a star to me, which we were to keep exactly astern, and again I applied to
their labour my aching back and smarting palms.
“What did you say about seven of something?” said Davies.
“What are there seven of hereabouts?”
“Islands, of course,” said Davies. “Is that the clue?”
“Maybe.”
Then followed the most singular of all our confabulations. Two memories
are better than one, and the sooner I carved the cipher into his memory as
well as mine the better record we should have. So, with rigid economy of
breath, I snapped out all my story, and answered his breathless questions. It
saved me from being mesmerised by the star, and both of us from the
consciousness of over-fatigue.
“Spying at Chatham, the blackguard?” he hissed.
“What do you make of it?” I asked.
“Nothing about battleships, mines, forts?” he said.
“No.”

“Nothing about the Ems, Emden, Wilhelmshaven?”
“No.”
“Nothing about transports?”
“No.”
“I believe—I was right—after all—something to do—with the channels
—behind islands.”
And so that outworn creed took a new lease of life; though for my part
the words that clashed with it were those that had sunk the deepest.
“Esens,” I protested; “that town behind Bensersiel.”
“Wassertiefe, Lotsen, Schleppboote,” spluttered Davies.
“Kilometre—Eisenbahn,” from me, and so on.
I should earn the just execration of the reader if I continued to report such
a dialogue. Suffice to say that we realised very soon that the substance of
the plot was still a riddle. On the other hand, there was fresh scent,
abundance of it; and the question was already taking shape—were we to
follow it up or revert to last night’s decision and strike with what weapons
we had? It was a pressing question, too, the last of many—was there to be
no end to the emergencies of this crowded day?—pressing for reasons I
could not define, while convinced that we must be ready with an answer by
supper-time to-night.
Meantime, we were nearing Norderney; the See Gat was crossed, and
with the last of the flood tide fair beneath us, and the red light on the west
pier burning ahead, we began insensibly to relax our efforts. But I dared not
rest, for I was at that point of exhaustion when mechanical movement was
my only hope.
“Light astern,” I said, thickly. “Two—white and red.”
“Steamer,” said Davies; “going south though.”
“Three now.”
A neat triangle of gems—topaz, ruby, and emerald—hung steady behind
us.
“Turned east,” said Davies. “Buck up—steamer from Juist. No, by Jove!
too small. What is it?”
On we laboured, while the gems waxed in brilliancy as the steamer
overhauled us.

“Easy,” said Davies, “I seem to know those lights—the Blitz’s launch—
don’t let’s be caught rowing like madmen in a muck sweat. Paddle inshore a
bit.” He was right, and, as in a dream, I saw hurrying and palpitating up the
same little pinnace that had towed us out of Bensersiel.
“We’re done for now,” I remember thinking, for the guilt of the runaway
was strong in me; and an old remark of von Brüning’s about “police” was in
my ears. But she was level with and past us before I could sink far into
despair.
“Three of them behind the hood,” said Davies: “what are we to do?”
“Follow,” I answered, and essayed a feeble stroke, but the blade scuttered
over the surface.
“Let’s wait about for a bit,” said Davies. “We’re late anyhow. If they go
to the yacht they’ll think we’re ashore.”
“Our shore clothes—lying about.”
“Are you up to talking?”
“No; but we must. The least suspicion’ll do for us now.”
“Give me your scull, old chap, and put on your coat.”
He extinguished the lantern, lit a pipe, and then rowed slowly on, while I
sat on a slack heap in the stern and devoted my last resources of will to the
emancipation of the spirit from the tired flesh.
In ten minutes or so we were rounding the pier, and there was the yacht’s
top-mast against the sky. I saw, too, that the launch was alongside of her,
and told Davies so. Then I lit a cigarette, and made a lamentable effort to
whistle. Davies followed suit, and emitted a strange melody which I took to
be “Home, Sweet Home,” but he has not the slightest ear for music.
“Why, they’re on board, I believe,” said I; “the cabin’s lighted. Ahoy
there!” I shouted as we came up. “Who’s that?”
“Good evening, sir,” said a sailor, who was fending off the yacht with a
boathook. “It’s Commander von Brüning’s launch. I think the gentlemen
want to see you.”
Before we could answer, an exclamation of: “Why, here they are!” came
from the deck of the Dulcibella, and the dim form of von Brüning himself
emerged from the companionway. There was something of a scuffle down
below, which the Commander nearly succeeded in drowning by the

breeziness of his greeting. Meanwhile, the ladder creaked under fresh
weight, and Dollmann appeared.
“Is that you, Herr Davies?” he said.
“Hullo! Herr Dollmann,” said Davies; “how are you?”
I must explain that we had floated up between the yacht and the launch,
whose sailors had passed her a little aside in order to give us room. Her
starboard side-light was just behind and above us, pouring its green rays
obliquely over the deck of the Dulcibella, while we and the dinghy were in
deep shadow between. The most studied calculation could not have secured
us more favourable conditions for a moment which I had always dreaded—
the meeting of Davies and Dollmann. The former, having shortened his
sculls, just sat where he was, half turned towards the yacht and looking up
at his enemy. No lineament of his own face could have been visible to the
latter, while those pitiless green rays—you know their ravaging effect on
the human physiognomy—struck full on Dollmann’s face. It was my first
fair view of it at close quarters, and, secure in my background of gloom, I
feasted with a luxury of superstitious abhorrence on the livid smiling mask
that for a few moments stooped peering down towards Davies. One of the
caprices of the crude light was to obliterate, or at any rate so penetrate,
beard and moustache, as to reveal in outline lips and chin, the features in
which defects of character are most surely betrayed, especially when your
victim smiles. Accuse me, if you will, of stooping to melodramatic
embroidery; object that my own prejudiced fancy contributed to the result;
but I can, nevertheless, never efface the impression of malignant perfidy
and base passion, exaggerated to caricature, that I received in those few
instants. Another caprice of the light was to identify the man with the
portrait of him when younger and clean-shaven, in the frontispiece of his
own book; and another still, the most repulsively whimsical of all, was to
call forth a strong resemblance to the sweet young girl who had been with
us yesterday.
Enough! I shall never offend again in this way. In reality I am much more
inclined to laugh than shudder over this meeting; for meanwhile the third of
our self-invited guests had with stertorous puffing risen to the stage, for all
the world like a demon out of a trapdoor, specially when he entered the
zone of that unearthly light. And there they stood in a row, like delinquents
at judgement, while we, the true culprits, had only passively to accept

explanations. Of course these were plausible enough. Dollmann having seen
the yacht in port that morning had called on his return from Memmert to
ask us to supper. Finding no one aboard, and concluding we were ashore, he
had meant to leave a note for Davies in the cabin. His friend, Herr Böhme,
“the distinguished engineer,” was anxious to see over the little vessel that
had come so far, and he knew that Davies would not mind the intrusion. Not
at all, said Davies; would not they stop and have drinks? No, but would we
come to supper at Dollmann’s villa? With pleasure, said Davies, but we had
to change first. Up to this point we had been masters of the situation; but
here von Brüning, who alone of the three appeared to be entirely at his ease,
made the retour offensif.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Oh, rowing about since the fog cleared,” said Davies.
I suppose he thought that evasion would pass muster, but as he spoke, I
noticed to my horror that a stray beam of light was playing on the bunch of
white cotton-waste that adorned one of the rowlocks: for we had forgotten
to remove these tell-tale appendages. So I added:
“After ducks again”; and, lifting one of the guns, let the light flash on its
barrel. To my own ears my voice sounded husky and distant.
“Always ducks,” laughed von Brüning. “No luck, I suppose?”
“No,” said Davies; “but it ought to be a good time after sunset——”
“What, with a rising tide and the banks covered?”
“We saw some,” said Davies, sullenly.
“I tell you what, my zealous young sportsmen, you’re rash to leave your
boat at anchor here after dark without a light. I came aboard to find your
lamp and set it.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Davies; “we took it with us.”
“To see to shoot by?”
We laughed uncomfortably, and Davies compassed a wonderful German
phrase to the effect that “it might come in useful”. Happily the matter went
no farther, for the position was a strained one at the best, and would not
bear lengthening. The launch went alongside, and the invaders evacuated
British soil, looking, for all von Brüning’s flippant nonchalance, a rather
crestfallen party. So much so, that, acute as was my anxiety, I took courage

to whisper to Davies, while the transhipment of Herr Böhme was
proceeding: “Ask Dollmann to stay while we dress.”
“Why?” he whispered.
“Go on.”
“I say, Herr Dollmann,” said Davies, “won’t you stay on board with us
while we dress? There’s a lot to tell you, and—and we can follow on with
you when we’re ready.”
Dollmann had not yet stepped into the launch. “With pleasure,” he said;
but there followed an ominous silence, broken by von Brüning.
“Oh, come along, Dollmann, and let them alone,” he said brusquely.
“You’ll be horribly in the way down there, and we shall never get any
supper if you keep them yarning.”
“And it’s now a quarter-past eight o’clock,” grumbled Herr Böhme from
his corner behind the hood. Dollmann submitted, and excused himself, and
the launch steamed away.
“I think I twig,” said Davies, as he helped, almost hoisted, me aboard.
“Rather risky though—eh?”
“I knew they’d object—only wanted to make sure.”
The cabin was just as we had left it, our shore clothes lying in disorder on
the bunks, a locker or two half open.
“Well, I wonder what they did down here,” said Davies.
For my part I went straight to the bookshelf.
“Does anything strike you about this?” I asked, kneeling on the sofa.
“Logbook’s shifted,” said Davies. “I’ll swear it was at the end before.”
“That doesn’t matter. Anything else?”
“By Jove!—where’s Dollmann’s book?”
“It’s here all right, but not where it should be.” I had been reading it, you
remember, overnight, and in the morning had replaced it in full view among
the other books. I now found it behind them, in a wrenched attitude, which
showed that someone who had no time to spare had pushed it roughly
inwards.
“What do you make of that?” said Davies.

He produced long drinks, and we allowed ourselves ten minutes of
absolute rest, stretched at full length on the sofas.
“They don’t trust Dollmann,” I said. “I spotted that at Memmert even.”
“How?”
“First, when they were talking about you and me. He was on his defence,
and in a deuce of a funk, too. Böhme was pressing him hard. Again, at the
end, when he left the room followed by Grimm, who I’m certain was sent to
watch him. It was while he was away that the other two arranged that
rendezvous for the night of the 25th. And again just now, when you asked
him to stay. I believe it’s working out as I thought it would. Von Brüning,
and through him Böhme (who is the “engineer from Bremen”), know the
story of that short cut and suspect that it was an attempt on your life.
Dollmann daren’t confess to that, because, morality apart, it could only
have been prompted by extreme necessity—that is, by the knowledge that
you were really dangerous, and not merely an inquisitive stranger. Now we
know his motive; but they don’t yet. The position of that book proves it.”
“He shoved it in?”
“To prevent them seeing it. There’s no earthly reason why they should
have hidden it.”
“Then we’re getting on,” said Davies. “That shows they know his real
name, or why should he shove the book in? But they don’t know he wrote a
book, and that I have a copy.”
“At any rate he thinks they don’t; we can’t say more than that.”
“And what does he think about me—and you?”
“That’s the point. Ten to one he’s in tortures of doubt, and would give a
fortune to have five minutes’ talk alone with you to see how the land lies
and get your version of the short cut incident. But they won’t let him. They
want to watch him in our company and us in his; you see it’s an interesting
reunion for you and him.”
“Well, let’s get into these beastly clothes for it,” groaned Davis. “I shall
have a plunge overboard.”
Something drastic was required, and I followed his example, curious as
the hour was for bathing.

“I believe I know what happened just now,” said I, as we plied rough
towels in the warmth below. “They steamed up and found nobody on board.
‘I’ll leave a note,’ says Dollmann. ‘No independent communications,’ say
they (or think they), ‘we’ll come too, and take the chance of inspecting this
hornets’ nest.’ Down they go, and Dollmann, who knows what to look for
first, sees that damning bit of evidence staring him in the face. They look
casually at the shelf among other things—examine the logbook, say—and
he manages to push his own book out of sight. But he couldn’t replace it
when the interruption came. The action would have attracted attention then,
and Böhme made him leave the cabin in advance, you know.”
“This is all very well,” said Davies, pausing in his toilet, “but do they
guess how we’ve spent the day? By Jove, Carruthers, that chart with the
square cut out; there it is on the rack!”
“We must chance it, and bluff for all we’re worth,” I said. The fact was
that Davies could not be brought to realise that he had done anything very
remarkable that day; yet those fourteen sinuous miles traversed blindfold, to
say nothing of the return journey and my own exploits, made up an
achievement audacious and improbable enough to out-distance suspicion.
Nevertheless, von Brüning’s banter had been disquieting, and if an inkling
of our expedition had crossed his mind or theirs, there were ways of testing
us which it would require all our effrontery to defeat.
“What are you looking for?” said Davies. I was at the collar and stud
stage, but had broken off to study the time-table which we had bought that
morning.
“Somebody insists on coming by the night train to somewhere, on the
25th,” I reminded him. “Böhme, von Brüning, and Grimm are to meet the
Somebody.”
“Where?”
“At a railway station! I don’t know where. They seemed to take it for
granted. But it must be somewhere on the sea, because Böhme said, ‘the
tide serves.’”
“It may be anywhere from Emden to Hamburg.” [See Map B]
“No, there’s a limit; it’s probably somewhere near. Grimm was to come,
and he’s at Memmert.”

“Here’s the map.... Emden and Norddeich are the only coast stations till
you get to Wilhelmshaven—no, to Carolinensiel; but those are a long way
east.”
“And Emden’s a long way south. Say Norddeich then; but according to
this there’s no train there after 6.15 p.m.; that’s hardly ‘night’. When’s high
tide on the 25th?”
“Let’s see—8.30 here to-night—Norddeich’ll be the same. Somewhere
between 10.30 and 11 on the 25th.”
“There’s a train at Emden at 9.22 from Leer and the south, and one at
10.50 from the north.”
“Are you counting on another fog?” said Davies, mockingly.
“No; but I want to know what our plans are.”
“Can’t we wait till this cursed inspection’s over?”
“No, we can’t; we should come to grief.” This was no barren truism, for I
was ready with a plan of my own, though reluctant to broach it to Davies.
Meanwhile, ready or not, we had to start. The cabin we left as it was,
changing nothing and hiding nothing; the safest course to take, we thought,
in spite of the risk of further search. But, as usual, I transferred my diary to
my breast-pocket, and made sure that the two official letters from England
were safe in a compartment of it.
“What do you propose?” I asked, when we were in the dinghy again.
“It’s a case of ‘as you were’,” said Davies. “To-day’s trip was a chance
we shall never get again. We must go back to last night’s decision—tell
them that we’re going to stay on here for a bit. Shooting, I suppose we shall
have to say.”
“And courting?” I suggested.
“Well, they know all about that. And then we must watch for a chance of
tackling Dollmann privately. Not to-night, because we want time to
consider those clues of yours.”
“‘Consider’?” I said: “that’s putting it mildly.”
We were at the ladder, and what a languid stiffness oppressed me I did
not know till I touched its freezing rungs, each one of which seared my sore
palms like red-hot iron.

The overdue steamer was just arriving as we set foot on the quay. “And
yet, by Jove! why not to-night?” pursued Davies, beginning to stride up the
pier at a pace I could not imitate.
“Steady on,” I protested; “and, look here, I disagree altogether. I believe
to-day has doubled our chances, but unless we alter our tactics it has
doubled our risks. We’ve involved ourselves in too tangled a web. I don’t
like this inspection, and I fear that foxy old Böhme who prompted it. The
mere fact of their inviting us shows that we stand badly; for it runs in the
teeth of Brüning’s warning at Bensersiel, and smells uncommonly like
arrest. There’s a rift between Dollmann and the others, but it’s a ticklish
matter to drive our wedge in; as to to-night, hopeless; they’re on the watch,
and won’t give us a chance. And after all, do we know enough? We don’t
know why he fled from England and turned German. It may have been an
extraditable crime, but it may not. Supposing he defies us? There’s the girl,
you see—she ties our hands, and if he once gets wind of that, and trades on
our weakness, the game’s up.”
“What are you driving at?”
“We want to detach him from Germany, but he’ll probably go to any
lengths rather than abandon his position here. His attempt on you is the
measure of his interest in it. Now, is to-day to be wasted?” We were passing
through the public gardens, and I dropped on to a seat for a moment’s rest,
crackling dead leaves under me. Davies remained standing, and pecked at
the gravel with his toe.
“We have got two valuable clues,” I went on; “that rendezvous on the
25th is one, and the name Esens is the other. We may consider them to
eternity; I vote we act on them.”
“How?” said Davies. “We’re under a searchlight here; and if we’re
caught——”
“Your plan—ugh!—it’s as risky as mine, and more so,” I replied, rising
with a jerk, for a spasm of cramp took me. “We must separate,” I added, as
we walked on. “We want, at one stroke, to prove to them that we’re
harmless, and to get a fresh start. I go back to London.”
“To London!” said Davies. We were passing under an arc lamp, and, for
the dismay his face showed, I might have said Kamchatka.
“Well, after all, it’s where I ought to be at this moment,” I observed.

“Yes, I forgot. And me?”
“You can’t get on without me, so you lay up the yacht here—taking your
time.”
“While you?”
“After making inquiries about Dollmann’s past I double back as
somebody else, and follow up the clues.”
“You’ll have to be quick,” said Davies, abstractedly.
“I can just do it in time for the 25th.”
“When you say ‘making inquiries’,” he continued, looking straight before
him, “I hope you don’t mean setting other people on his track?”
“He’s fair game!” I could not help saying; for there were moments when
I chafed under this scrupulous fidelity to our self-denying ordinance.
“He’s our game, or nobody’s,” said Davies, sharply.
“Oh, I’ll keep the secret,” I rejoined.
“Let’s stick together,” he broke out. “I shall make a muck of it without
you. And how are we to communicate—meet?”
“Somehow—that can wait. I know it’s a leap in the dark, but there’s
safety in darkness.”
“Carruthers! what are we talking about? If they have the ghost of a notion
where we have been to-day, you give us away by packing off to London.
They’ll think we know their secret and are clearing out to make use of it.
That means arrest, if you like!”
“Pessimist! Haven’t I written proof of good faith in my pocket—official
letters of recall, received to-day? It’s one deception the less, you see; for
those letters may have been opened; skilfully done it’s impossible to detect.
When in doubt, tell the truth!”
“It’s a rum thing how often it pays in this spying business,” said Davies
thoughtfully.
We had been tramping through deserted streets under the glare of
electricity, I with my leaden shuffle, he with the purposeful forward stoop
and swinging arms that always marked his gait ashore.
“Well, what’s it to be?” I said. “Here’s the Schwannallée.”
“I don’t like it,” said he; “but I trust your judgement.”

We turned slowly down, running over a few last points where prior
agreement was essential. As we stood at the very gate of the villa: “Don’t
commit yourself to dates,” I said; “say nothing that will prevent you from
being here at least a week hence with the yacht still afloat.” And my final
word, as we waited at the door for the bell to be answered, was: “Don’t
mind what I say. If things look queer we may have to lighten the ship.”
“Lighten?” whispered Davies; “oh, I hope I shan’t bosh it.”
“I hope I shan’t get cramp,” I muttered between my teeth.
It will be remembered that Davies had never been to the villa before.

CHAPTER XXIV.
Finesse

The door of a room on the ground floor was opened to us by a man-servant.
As we entered the rattle of a piano stopped, and a hot wave of mingled
scent and cigar-smoke struck my nostrils. The first thing I noticed over
Davies’s shoulder, as he preceded me into the room, was a woman—the
source of the perfume I decided—turning round from the piano as he passed
it and staring him up and down with a disdainful familiarity that I at once
hotly resented. She was in evening dress, pronounced in cut and colour; had
a certain exuberant beauty, not wholly ascribable to nature, and a notable
lack of breeding. Another glance showed me Dollmann putting down a
liqueur glass of brandy, and rising from a low chair with something of a
start; and another, von Brüning, lying back in a corner of a sofa, smoking;
on the same sofa, vis-à-vis to him, was—yes, of course it was—Clara
Dollmann; but how their surroundings alter people, I caught myself
thinking. For the rest, I was aware that the room was furnished with
ostentation, and was stuffy with stove-engendered warmth. Davies steered a
straight course for Dollmann, and shook his hand with businesslike
resolution. Then he tacked across to the sofa, abandoning me in the face of
the enemy.
“Mr——?” said Dollmann.
“Carruthers,” I answered, distinctly. “I was with Davies in the boat just
now, but I don’t think he introduced me. And now he has forgotten again,” I
added, dryly, turning towards Davies, who, having presented himself to
Fräulein Dollmann, was looking feebly from her to von Brüning, the picture
of tongue-tied awkwardness. (The Commander nodded to me and stretched
himself with a yawn.)
“Von Brüning told me about you,” said Dollmann, ignoring my allusion,
“but I was not quite sure of the name. No; it was not an occasion for

formalities, was it?” He gave a sudden, mirthless laugh. I thought him
flushed and excitable; yet, seen in a normal light, he was in some respects a
pleasant surprise, the remarkable conformation of the head giving an
impression of intellectual power and restless, almost insanely restless,
energy.
“What need?” I said. “I have heard so much about you from Davies—and
Commander von Brüning—that we seem to be old friends already.”
He shot a doubtful look at me, and a diversion came from the piano.
“And now, for Heaven’s sake,” cried the lady of the perfume, “let us join
Herr Böhme at supper!”
“Let me present you to my wife,” said Dollmann.
So this was the stepmother; unmistakably German, I may add. I made my
bow, and underwent much the same sort of frank scrutiny as Davies, only
that it was rather more favourable to me, and ended in a carmine smile.
There was a general movement and further introductions. Davies was led
to the stepmother, and I found myself confronting the daughter with
quickened pulses, and a sudden sense of added complexity in the issues. I
had, of course, made up my mind to ignore our meeting of yesterday, and
had assumed that she would do the same. And she did ignore it—we met as
utter strangers; nor did I venture (for other eyes were upon us) to transmit
any sign of intelligence to her. But the next moment I was wondering if I
had not fallen into a trap. She had promised not to tell, but under what
circumstances? I saw the scene again; the misty flats, the spruce little sail-
boat and its sweet young mistress, fresh as a dewy flower, but blanched and
demoralised by a horrid fear, appealing to my honour so to act that we three
should never meet again, promising to be silent, but as much in her own
interest as ours, and under that implied condition which I had only
equivocally refused. The condition was violated, not by her fault or ours,
but violated. She was free to help her father against us, and was she helping
him? What troubled me was the change in her; that she—how can I express
it without offence?—was less in discord with her surroundings than she
should have been; that in dress, pose and manner (as we exchanged some
trivialities) she was too near reflecting the style of the other woman; that, in
fact, she in some sort realised my original conception of her, so brutally
avowed to Davies, so signally, as I had thought, falsified. In the sick
perplexity that this discovery caused me I dare say I looked as foolish as

Davies had done, and more so, for the close heat of the room and its tainted
atmosphere, succeeding so abruptly to the wholesome nip of the outside air,
were giving me a faintness which this moral check lessened my power to
combat. Von Brüning’s face wore a sneering smile that I winced under; and,
turning, I found another pair of eyes fixed on me, those of Herr Böhme,
whose squat figure had appeared at a pair of folding doors leading to an
adjoining room. Napkin in hand, he was taking in the scene before him with
fat benevolence, but exceeding shrewdness. I instantly noticed a faint red
weal relieving the ivory of his bald head; and I had suffered too often in the
same quarter myself to mistake its origin, namely, our cabin doorway.
“This is the other young explorer, Böhme,” said von Brüning. “Herr
Davies kidnapped him a month ago, and bullied and starved him into
submission; they’ll drown together yet. I believe his sufferings have been
terrible.”
“His sufferings are over,” I retorted. “I’ve mutinied—deserted—haven’t
I, Davies?” I caught Davies gazing with solemn gaucherie at Miss
Dollmann.
“Oh, what?” he stammered. I explained in English. “Oh, yes, Carruthers
has to go home,” he said, in his vile lingo.
No one spoke for a moment, and even von Brüning had no persiflage
ready.
“Well, are we never going to have supper?” said Madame impatiently;
and with that we all moved towards the folding doors. There had been little
formality in the proceedings so far, and there was less still in the supper-
room. Böhme resumed his repast with appetite, and the rest of us sat down
apparently at random, though an underlying method was discernible. As it
worked out, Dollmann was at one end of the small table, with Davies on his
right and Böhme on his left; Frau Dollmann at the other, with me on her
right and von Brüning on her left. The seventh personage, Fräulein
Dollmann, was between the Commander and Davies on the side opposite to
me. No servants appeared, and we waited on ourselves. I have a vague
recollection of various excellent dishes, and a distinct one of abundance of
wine. Someone filled me a glass of champagne, and I confess that I drained
it with honest avidity, blessing the craftsman who coaxed forth the essence,
the fruit that harboured it, the sun that warmed it.

“Why are you going so suddenly?” said von Brüning to me across the
table.
“Didn’t I tell you we had to call here for letters? I got mine this morning,
and among others a summons back to work. Of course I must obey.” (I
found myself speaking in a frigid silence.) “The annoying thing was that
there were two letters, and if I had only come here two days sooner I should
have only got the first, which gave me an extension.”
“You are very conscientious. How will they know?”
“Ah, but the second’s rather urgent.” There was another uncomfortable
silence, broken by Dollmann.
“By the way, Herr Davies,” he began, “I ought to apologise to you for
——”
This was no business of mine, and the less interest I took in it the better;
so I turned to Frau Dollmann and abused the fog.
“Have you been in the harbour all day?” she asked, “then how was it you
did not visit us? Was Herr Davies so shy?” (Curiosity or malice?)
“Quite the contrary; but I was,” I answered coldly; “you see, we knew
Herr Dollmann was away, and we really only called here to get my letters;
besides, we did not know your address.” I looked at Clara and found her
talking gaily to von Brüning, deaf seemingly to our little dialogue.
“Anyone would have told you it,” said Madame, raising her eyebrows.
“I dare say; but directly after breakfast the fog came on, and—well, one
cannot leave a yacht alone in a fog,” I said, with professional solidity.
Von Brüning pricked up his ears at this. “I’ll be hanged if that was your
maxim,” he laughed; “you’re too fond of the shore!”
I sent him a glance of protest, as though to say: “What’s the use of your
warning if you won’t let me act on it?”
For, of course, my excuses were meant chiefly for his consumption, and
Fräulein Dollmann’s. That the lady I addressed them to found them
unpalatable was not my fault.
“Then you sat in your wretched little cabin all day?” she persisted.
“All day,” I said, brazenly; “it was the safest thing to do.” And I looked
again at Fräulein Dollmann, frankly and squarely. Our eyes met, and she

dropped hers instantly, but not before I had learnt something; for if ever I
saw misery under a mask it was on her face. No; she had not told.
I think I puzzled the stepmother, who shrugged her white shoulders, and
said in that case she wondered we had dared to leave our precious boat and
come to supper. If we knew Frisian fogs as well as she did——
Oh, I explained, we were not so nervous as that; and as for supper on
shore, if she only knew what a Spartan life we led——
“Oh, for mercy’s sake, don’t tell me about it!” she cried, with a grimace;
“I hate the mention of yachts. When I think of that dreadful Medusa coming
from Hamburg——” I sympathised with half my attention, keeping one
strained ear open for developments on my right. Davies, I knew, was in the
thick of it, and none too happy under Böhme’s eye, but working manfully.
“My fault”—“sudden squall”—“quite safe”, were some of the phrases I
caught; while I was aware, to my alarm, that he was actually drawing a
diagram of something with bread-crumbs and table-knives. The subject
seemed to gutter out to an awkward end, and suddenly Böhme, who was my
right-hand neighbour, turned to me. “You are starting for England to-
morrow morning?” he said.
“Yes,” I answered; “there is a steamer at 8.15, I believe.”
“That is good. We shall be companions.”
“Are you going to England, too, sir?” I asked, with hot misgivings.
“No, no! I am going to Bremen; but we shall travel together as far as—
you go by Amsterdam, I suppose?—as far as Leer, then. That will be very
pleasant.” I fancied there was a ghoulish gusto in his tone.
“Very,” I assented. “You are making a short stay here, then?”
“As long as usual. I visit the work at Memmert once a month or so, spend
a night with my friend Dollmann and his charming family” (he leered round
him), “and return.”
Whether I was right or wrong in my next step I shall never know, but
obeying a strong instinct, “Memmert,” I said; “do tell me more about
Memmert. We heard a good deal about it from Commander von Brüning;
but——”
“He was discreet, I expect,” said Böhme.
“He left off at the most interesting part.”

“What’s that about me?” joined in von Brüning.
“I was saying that we’re dying to know more about Memmert, aren’t we,
Davies?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Davies, evidently aghast at my temerity; but I
did not mind that. If he roughed my suit, so much the better; I intended to
rough his.
“You gave us plenty of history, Commander, but you did not bring it up
to date.” The triple alliance laughed, Dollmann boisterously.
“Well,” said von Brüning; “I gave you very good reasons, and you
acquiesced.”
“And now he is trying to pump me,” said Böhme, with his rasping
chuckle.
“Wait a bit, sir; I have an excuse. The Commander was not only
mysterious but inaccurate. I appeal to you, Herr Dollmann, for it was à
propos of you. When we fell in with him at Bensersiel, Davies asked him if
you were at home, and he said ‘No.’ When would you be back? Probably
soon; but he did not know when.”
“Oh, he said that?” said Dollmann.
“Well, only three days later we arrive at Norderney, and find you have
returned that very day, but have gone to Memmert. Again (by the way) the
mysterious Memmert! But more than ever mysterious now, for in the
evening, not only you and Herr Böhme——”
“What penetration!” laughed von Brüning.
“But also Commander von Brüning, pay us a visit in his launch, all
coming from Memmert!”
“And you infer?” said von Brüning.
“Why, that you must have known at Bensersiel—only three days ago—
exactly when Herr Dollmann was coming back, having an appointment at
Memmert with him for to-day.”
“Which I wished to conceal from you?”
“Yes, and that’s why I’m so inquisitive; it’s entirely your own fault.”
“So it seems,” said he, with mock humility; “but fill your glass and go
on, young man. Why should I want to deceive you?”

“That’s just what I want to know. Come, confess now; wasn’t there
something important afoot to-day at Memmert? Something to do with the
gold? You were inspecting it, sorting it, weighing it? Or I know! You were
transporting it secretly to the mainland?”
“Not a very good day for that! But softly, Herr Carruthers; no fishing for
admissions. Who said we had found any gold?”
“Well, have you? There!”
“That’s better! Nothing like candour, my young investigator. But I am
afraid, having no authority, I cannot assist you at all. Better try Herr Böhme
again. I’m only a casual onlooker.”
“With shares.”
“Ah! you remember that? (He remembers everything!) With a few shares,
then; but with no expert knowledge. Now, Böhme is the consulting
engineer. Rescue me, Böhme.”
“I cannot disclaim expert knowledge,” said Böhme, with humorous
gravity; “but I disclaim responsibility. Now, Herr Dollmann is chairman of
the company.”
“And I,” said Dollmann, with a noisy laugh, “must fall back on the
shareholders, whose interests I have to guard. One can’t be too careful in
these confidential matters.”
“Here’s one who gives his consent,” I said. “Can’t he represent the rest?”
“Extorted by torture,” said von Brüning. “I retract.”
“Don’t mind them, Herr Carruthers,” cried Frau Dollmann, “they are
making fun of you; but I will give you a hint; no woman can keep a secret
——”
“Ah!” I cried, triumphantly, “you have been there?”
“I? Not I; I detest the sea! But Clara has.” Everyone looked at Clara, who
in her turn looked in naïve bewilderment from me to her father.
“Indeed?” I said, more soberly, “but perhaps she is not a free agent.”
“Perfectly free!” said Dollmann.
“I have only been there once, some time ago,” said she, “and I saw no
gold at all.”
“Guarded,” I observed. “I beg your pardon; I mean that perhaps you only
saw what you were allowed to see. And, in any case, the Fräulein has no

expert knowledge and no responsibility, and, perhaps, no shares. Her
province is to be charming, not to hold financial secrets.”
“I have done my best to help you,” said the stepmother.
“They’re all against us, Davies.”
“Oh, chuck it, Carruthers!” said Davies, in English.
“He’s insatiable,” said von Brüning, and there was a pause; clearly, they
meant to elicit more.
“Well, I shall draw my own conclusions,” I said.
“This is interesting,” said von Brüning, “in what sense?”
“It begins to dawn on me that you made fools of us at Bensersiel. Don’t
you remember, Davies, what an interest he took in all our doings? I wonder
if he feared our exploring propensities might possibly lead us to
Memmert?”
“Upon my word, this is the blackest ingratitude. I thought I made myself
particularly agreeable to you.”
“Yes, indeed; especially about the duck-shooting! How useful your local
man would have been—both to us and to you!”
“Go on,” said the Commander, imperturbably.
“Wait a moment; I’m thinking it out.” And thinking it out I was in deadly
earnest, for all my levity, as I pressed my hand on my burning forehead and
asked myself where I was to stop in this seductive but perilous fraud. To
carry it too far was to court complete exposure; to stop too soon was
equally compromising.
“What is he talking about, and why go on with this ridiculous mystery?”
said Frau Dollmann.
“I was thinking about this supper party, and the way it came about,” I
pursued, slowly.
“Nothing to complain of, I hope?” said Dollmann.
“Of course not! Impromptu parties are always the pleasantest, and this
one was delightfully impromptu. Now I bet you I know its origin! Didn’t
you discuss us at Memmert? And didn’t one of you suggest——?
“One would almost think you had been there,” said Dollmann.

“You may thank your vile climate that we weren’t,” I retorted, laughing.
“But, as I was saying, didn’t one of you suggest—which of you? Well, I’m
sure it wasn’t the Commander——”
“Why not?” said Böhme.
“It’s difficult to explain—an intuition, say—I am sure he stood up for us;
and I don’t think it was Herr Dollmann, because he knows Davies already,
and he’s always on the spot; and, in short I’ll swear it was Herr Böhme,
who is leaving early to-morrow, and had never seen either of us. It was you,
sir, who proposed that we should be asked to supper to-night—for
inspection?”
“Inspection?” said Böhme; “what an extraordinary idea!”
“You can’t deny it, though! And one thing more; in the harbour just now
—no—this is going too far; I shall mortally offend you.” I gave way to
hearty laughter.
“Come, let’s have it. Your hallucinations are diverting.”
“If you insist; but this is rather a delicate matter. You know we were a
little surprised to find you all on board; and you, Herr Böhme, did you
always take such a deep interest in small yachts? I am afraid that it was at a
certain sacrifice of comfort that you inspected ours!” And I glanced at the
token he bore of his encounter with our lintel. There was a burst of pent-up
merriment, in which Dollmann took the loudest share.
“I warned you, Böhme,” he said.
The engineer took the joke in the best possible part.
“We owe you apologies,” he conceded.
“Don’t mention it,” said Davies.
“He doesn’t mind,” I said; “I’m the injured one. I’m sure you never
suspected Davies, who could?” (Who indeed? I was on firm ground there.)
“The point is, what did you take me for?”
“Perhaps we take you for it still,” said von Brüning.
“Oho! Still suspicious? Don’t drive me to extremities.”
“What extremities?”
“When I get back to London I shall go to Lloyd’s! I haven’t forgotten that
flaw in the title.” There was an impressive silence.

“Gentlemen,” said Dollmann, with exaggerated solemnity, “we must
come to terms with this formidable young man. What do you say?”
“Take me to Memmert,” I exclaimed. “Those are my terms!”
“Take you to Memmert? But I thought you were starting for England to-
morrow?”
“I ought to; but I’ll stay for that.”
“You said it was urgent. Your conscience is very elastic.”
“That’s my affair. Will you take me to Memmert?”
“What do you say, gentlemen?” Böhme nodded. “I think we owe some
reparation. Under promise of absolute secrecy, then?”
“Of course, now that you trust me. But you’ll show me everything—
honour bright—wreck, depôt, and all?”
“Everything; if you don’t object to a diver’s dress.”
“Victory!” I cried, in triumph. “We’ve won our point, Davies. And now,
gentlemen, I don’t mind saying that as far as I am concerned the joke’s at an
end; and, in spite of your kind offer, I must start for England to-morrow
under the good Herr Böhme’s wing. And in case my elastic conscience
troubles you (for I see you think me a weather-cock) here are the letters
received this morning, establishing my identity as a humble but respectable
clerk in the British Civil Service, summoned away from his holiday by a
tyrannical superior.” (I pulled out my letters and tossed them to Dollmann.)
“Ah, you don’t read English easily, perhaps? I dare say Herr Böhme does.”
Leaving Böhme to study dates, postmarks, and contents to his heart’s
content, and unobserved, I turned to sympathise with my fair neighbour,
who complained that her head was going round; and no wonder. But at this
juncture, and very much to my surprise, Davies struck in.
“I should like to go to Memmert,” he said.
“You?” said von Brüning. “Now I’m surprised at that.”
“But you won’t be staying here either, Davies,” I objected.
“Yes, I shall,” said Davies. “Why, I told you I should. If you leave me in
the lurch like this I must have time to look round.”
“You needn’t pretend that you cannot sail alone,” said von Brüning.
“It’s much more fun with two; I think I shall wire for another friend.
Meanwhile, I should like to see Memmert.”

“That’s only an excuse, I’m afraid,” said I.
“I want to shoot ducks too,” pursued Davies, reddening. “I always have
wanted to; and you promised to help in that, Commander.”
“You can’t get out of it now,” I laughed.
“Certainly not,” said he, unmoved; “but, honestly, I should advise Herr
Davies, if he is ever going to get home this season, to make the best of this
fine weather.”
“It’s too fine,” said Davies; “I prefer wind. If I cannot get a friend I think
I shall stop cruising, leave the yacht here, and come back for her next year.
There was some mute telegraphy between the allies.
“You can leave her in my charge,” said Dollmann, “and start with your
friend to-morrow.”
“Thanks; but there is no hurry,” said Davies, growing redder than ever. “I
like Norderney—and we might have another sail in your dinghy, Fräulein,”
he blurted out.
“Thank you,” she said, in that low dry voice I had heard yesterday; “but I
think I shall not be sailing again—it is getting too cold.”
“Oh, no!” said Davies, “it’s splendid.” But she had turned to von
Brüning, and took no notice.
“Well, send me a report about Memmert, Davies,” I laughed, with the
idea of drawing attention from his rebuff. But Davies, having once
delivered his soul, seemed to have lost his shyness, and only gazed at his
neighbour with the placid, dogged expression that I knew so well. That was
the end of those delicate topics; and conviviality grew apace.
I am not indifferent at any time to good wine and good cheer, nor was it
for lack of pressing that I drank as sparingly as I was able, and pretended to
a greater elation than I felt. Nor certainly was it from any fine scruples as to
the character of the gentleman whose hospitality we were receiving—
scruples which I knew affected Davies, who ate little and drank nothing. In
any case he was adamant in such matters, and I verily believe would at any
time have preferred our own little paraffin-flavoured messes to the best
dinner in the world. It was a very wholesome caution that warned me not to
abuse the finest brain tonic ever invented by the wit of man. I had finessed
Memmert, as one finesses a low card when holding a higher; but I had too
much respect for our adversaries to trade on any fancied security we had

won thereby. They had allowed me to win the trick, but I credited them with
a better knowledge of my hand than they chose to show. On the other hand I
hugged the axiom that in all conflicts it is just as fatal to underrate the
difficulties of your enemy as to overrate your own. Their chief one—and it
multiplied a thousandfold the excitement of the contest—was, I felt sure,
the fear of striking in error; of using a sledge-hammer to break a nut. In
breaking it they risked publicity, and publicity, I felt convinced, was death
to their secret. So, even supposing they had detected the finesse, and
guessed that we had in fact got wind of imperial designs; yet, even so, I
counted on immunity so long as they thought we were on the wrong scent,
with Memmert, and Memmert alone, as the source of our suspicions.
Had it been necessary I was prepared to encourage such a view, admitting
that the cloth von Brüning wore had made his connexion with Memmert
curious, and had suggested to Davies, for I should have put it on him, with
his naval enthusiasms, that the wreck-works were really naval-defence
works. If they went farther, and suspected that we had tried to go to
Memmert that very day, the position was worse, but not desperate; for the
fear that they would take the final step and suppose that we had actually got
there and overheard their talk, I flatly refused to entertain, until I should
find myself under arrest.
Precisely how near we came to it I shall never rightly know; but I have
good reason to believe that we trembled on the verge. The main issue was
fully enough for me, and it was only in passing flashes that I followed the
play of the warring under-currents. And yet, looking back on the scene, I
would warrant there was no party of seven in Europe that evening where a
student of human documents would have found so rich a field, such noble
and ignoble ambitions, such base and holy fears, aye, and such pitiful
agonies of the spirit. Roughly divided though we were into separate camps,
no two of us were wholly at one. Each wore a mask in the grand imposture;
excepting, I am inclined to think, the lady on my left, who, outside her own
well-being, which she cultivated without reserve, had, as far as I could see,
but one axe to grind—the intimacy of von Brüning and her stepdaughter—
and ground it openly.
Not even Böhme and von Brüning were wholly at one; and as moral
distances are reckoned, Davies and I were leagues apart. Sitting between
Dollmann and Dollmann’s daughter, the living and breathing symbols of the

two polar passions he had sworn to harmonise, he kept an equilibrium
which, though his aims were nominally mine, I could not attain to. For me
the man was the central figure; if I had attention to spare it was on him that
I bestowed it; groping disgustfully after his hidden springs of action, noting
the evidences of great gifts squandered and prostituted; questioning where
he was most vulnerable; whom he feared most, us or his colleagues;
whether he was open to remorse or shame; or whether he meditated further
crime. The girl was incidental. After the first shock of surprise I had soon
enough discovered that she, like the rest, had assumed a disguise; for she
was far too innocent to sustain the deception; and yesterday was fresh in my
memory. I was forced to continue turning her assumed character to account;
but it would be pharisaical in me to say that I rose to any moral heights in
her regard—wine and excitement had deadened my better nature to that
extent. I thought she looked prettier than ever, and, as time passed, I fell
into a cynical carelessness about her. This glimpse of her home life, and the
desperate expedients to which she was driven (whether by compulsion or
from her own regard for Davies) to repel and dismiss him, did not strike me
as they might have done as the crowning argument in favour of the course
we had adopted the night before, that of compassing our end without noise
and scandal, disarming Dollmann, but aiding him to escape from the allies
he had betrayed. To Davies, the man, if not a pure abstraction, was at most a
noxious vermin to be trampled on for the public good; while the girl, in her
blackguardly surroundings, and with her sinister future, had become the
very source of his impulse.
And the other players? Böhme was my abstraction, the fortress whose
foundations we were sapping, the embodiment of that systematised force
which is congenital to the German people. In von Brüning, the personal
factor was uppermost. Callous as I was this evening, I could not help
wondering occasionally, as he talked and laughed with Clara Dollmann,
what in his innermost thoughts, knowing her father, he felt and meant. It is
a point I cannot and would not pursue, and, thank Heaven, it does not
matter now; yet, with fuller knowledge of the facts, and, I trust, a mellower
judgement, I often return to the same debate, and, by I know not what
illogical bypaths, always arrive at the same conclusion, that I liked the man
and like him still.
We behaved as sportsmen in the matter of time, giving them over two
hours to make up their minds about us. It was only when tobacco-smoke