The Riddle of the Sands (Spy Thriller). Erskine Childers

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 6th 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 sand-banks 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 taint 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. СКАЧАТЬ