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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 fair-way 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 naive 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 cooperation, 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 СКАЧАТЬ