CHAPTER XXVI.

The Seven Siels

Selecting the very humblest _Gasthaus_ I could discover, I laid down my

bundle and called for beer, bread, and _Wurst._ The landlord, as I had

expected, spoke the Frisian dialect, so that though he was rather

difficult to understand, he had no doubts about the purity of my own

German high accent. He was a worthy fellow, and hospitably interested:

“Did I want a bed?” “No; I was going on to Bensersiel,” I said, “to

sleep there, and take the morning _Postschiff_ to Langeoog Island.” (I

had not forgotten our friends the twin giants and their functions.) “I

was not an islander myself?” he asked. “No, but I had a married sister

there; had just returned from a year’s voyaging, and was going to visit

her.” “By the way,” I asked, “how are they getting on with the Benser

Tief?” My friend shrugged his shoulders; it was finished, he believed.

“And the connexion to Wittmund?” “Under construction still.” “Langeoog

would be going ahead then?” “Oh! he supposed so, but he did not believe

in these new-fangled schemes.” “But it was good for trade, I supposed?

Esens would benefit in sending goods by the ‘tief’—what was the

traffic, by the way?” “Oh, a few more barge-loads than before of

bricks, timber, coals, etc., but it would come to nothing _he_ knew:

_Aktiengesellschaften_ (companies) were an invention of the devil. A

few speculators got them up and made money themselves out of land and

contracts, while the shareholders they had hoodwinked starved.”

“There’s something in that,” I conceded to this bigoted old

conservative; “my sister at Langeoog rents her lodging-house from a man

named Dollmann; they say he owns a heap of land about. I saw his yacht

once—pink velvet and electric light inside, they say——”

“That’s the name,” said mine host, “that’s one of them—some sort of

foreigner, I’ve heard; runs a salvage concern, too, Juist way.”

“Well, he won’t get any of my savings!” I laughed, and soon after took

my leave, and inquired from a passer-by the road to Dornum. “Follow the

railway,” I was told.

With a warm wind in my face from the south-west, fleecy clouds and a

half-moon overhead, I set out, not for Bensersiel but for Benser Tief,

which I knew must cross the road to Dornum somewhere. A mile or so of

cobbled causeway flanked with ditches and willows, and running cheek by

jowl with the railway track; then a bridge, and below me the “Tief”;

which was, in fact, a small canal. A rutty track left the road, and

sloped down to it one side; a rough siding left the railway, and sloped

down to it on the other.

I lit a pipe and sat on the parapet for a little. No one was stirring,

so with great circumspection I began to reconnoitre the left bank to

the north. The siding entered a fenced enclosure by a locked gate—a

gate I could have easily climbed, but I judged it wiser to go round by

the bridge again and look across. The enclosure was a small coal-store,

nothing more; there were gaunt heaps of coal glittering in the

moonlight; a barge half loaded lying alongside, and a deserted office

building. I skulked along a sandy towpath in solitude. Fens and field

were round me, as the map had said; willows and osier-beds; the dim

forms of cattle; the low melody of wind roaming unfettered over a

plain; once or twice the flutter and quack of a startled wild-duck.

Presently I came to a farmhouse, dark and silent; opposite it, in the

canal, a couple of empty barges. I climbed into one of these, and

sounded with my stick on the off-side—barely three feet; and the

torpedo-boat melted out of my speculations. The stream, I observed

also, was only just wide enough for two barges to pass with comfort.

Other farms I saw, or thought I saw, and a few more barges lying in

side-cuts linked by culverts to the canal, but nothing noteworthy; and

mindful that I had to explore the Wittmund side of the railway too, I

turned back, already a trifle damped in spirits, but still keenly

expectant.

Passing under the road and railway, I again followed the tow-path,

which, after half a mile, plunged into woods, then entered a clearing

and another fenced enclosure; a timber-yard by the look of it. This

time I stripped from the waist downward, waded over, dressed again, and

climbed the paling. (There was a cottage standing back, but its

occupants evidently slept.) I was in a timber-yard, by the stacks of

wood and the steam saw-mill; but something more than a timber-yard, for

as I warily advanced under the shadow of the trees at the edge of the

clearing I came to a long tin shed which strangely reminded me of

Memmert, and below it, nearer the canal, loomed a dark skeleton

framework, which proved to be a half-built vessel on stocks. Close by

was a similar object, only nearly completed—a barge. A paved slipway

led to the water here, and the canal broadened to a siding or

back-water in which lay seven or eight more barges in tiers. I scaled

another paling and went on, walking, I should think, three miles by the

side of the canal, till the question of bed and ulterior plans brought

me to a halt. It was past midnight, and I was adding little to my

information. I had encountered a brick-field, but soon after that there

was increasing proof that the canal was as yet little used for traffic.

It grew narrower, and there were many signs of recent labour for its

improvement. In one place a dammed-off deviation was being excavated,

evidently to abridge an impossible bend. The path had become atrocious,

and my boots were heavy with clay. Bearing in mind the abruptly-ending

blue line on the map, I considered it useless to go farther, and

retraced my steps, trying to concoct a story which would satisfy an

irritable Esens inn-keeper that it was a respectable wayfarer, and not

a tramp or a lunatic, who knocked him up at half-past one or

thereabouts.

But a much more practical resource occurred to me as I approached the

timber-yard; for lodging, free and accessible, lay there ready to hand.

I boarded one of the empty barges in the backwater, and surveyed my

quarters for the night. It was of a similar pattern to all the others I

had seen; a lighter, strictly, in the sense that it had no means of

self-propulsion, and no separate quarters for a crew, the whole

interior of the hull being free for cargo. At both bow and stern there

were ten feet or so of deck, garnished with bitts and bollards. The

rest was an open well, flanked by waterways of substantial breadth; the

whole of stout construction and, for a humble lighter, of

well-proportioned and even graceful design, with a marked forward

sheer, and, as I had observed in the specimen on the stocks, easy lines

at the stern. In short, it was apparent, even to an ignorant landsman

like myself, that she was designed not merely for canal work but for

rough water; and well she might be, for, though the few miles of sea

she had to cross in order to reach the islands were both shallow and

sheltered, I knew from experience what a vicious surf they could be

whipped into by a sudden gale. It must not be supposed that I dwelt on

this matter. On limited lines I was making progress, but the wings of

imagination still drooped nervelessly at my sides. Otherwise I perhaps

should have examined this lighter more particularly, instead of

regarding it mainly as a convenient hiding-place. Under the stern-deck

was stored a massive roll of tarpaulin, a corner of which made an

excellent blanket, and my bundle a good pillow. It was a descent from

the luxury of last night; but a spy, I reflected philosophically,

cannot expect a feather bed two nights running, and this one was at any

rate airier and roomier than the coffin-like bunk of the _Dulcibella_,

and not so very much harder.

When snugly ensconced, I studied the map by intermittent match-light.

It had been dawning on me in the last half-hour that this canal was

only one of several; that in concentrating myself on Esens and

Bensersiel, I had forgotten that there were other villages ending in

siel, also furnished on the chart with corkscrew streams; and,

moreover, that Böhme’s statistics of depth and distance had been

marshalled in seven categories, A to G. The very first match brought

full recollection as to the villages. The suffix _siel_ repeated itself

all round the coast-line. Five miles eastward of Bensersiel was

Neuharlingersiel, and farther on Carolinensiel. Four miles westward was

Dornumersiel; and farther on Nessmersiel and Hilgenriedersiel. That was

six on the north coast of the peninsula alone. On the west coast,

facing the Ems, there was only one, Greetsiel, a good way south of

Norden. But on the east, facing the Jade, there were no less than

eight, at very close intervals. A moment’s thought and I disregarded

this latter group; they had nothing to do with Esens, nor had they any

imaginable _raison d’étre_ as veins for commerce; differing markedly in

this respect from the group of six on the north coast, whose outlook

was the chain of islands, and whose inland centre, almost exactly, was

Esens. I still wanted one to make seven, and as a working hypothesis

added the solitary Greetsiel. At all seven villages streams debouched,

as at Bensersiel. From all seven points of issue dotted lines were

marked seaward, intersecting the great tidal sands and leading towards

the islands. And on the mainland behind the whole sevenfold system ran

the loop of railway. But there were manifold minor points of

difference. No stream boasted so deep and decisive a blue lintel as did

Benser Tief; none penetrated so far into the Hinterland. They varied in

length and sinuosity. Two, those belonging to Hilgenriedersiel and

Greetsiel, appeared not to reach the railway at all. On the other hand,

Carolinensiel, opposite Wangeroog Island, had a branch line all to

itself.

Match after match waxed and waned as I puzzled over the mystic seven.

In the end I puzzled myself to sleep, with the one fixed idea that

to-morrow, on my way back to Norden, I must see more of these budding

canals, if such they were. My dreams that night were of a mighty chain

of redoubts and masked batteries couching _perdus_ among the sand-dunes

of desolate islets; built, coral-like, by infinitely slow and secret

labour; fed by lethal cargoes borne in lighters and in charge of

stealthy mutes who, one and all, bore the likeness of Grimm.

I was up and away at daylight (the weather mild and showery), meeting

some navvies on my way back to the road, who gave me good morning and a

stare. On the bridge I halted and fell into torments of indecision.

There was so much to do and so little time to do it in. The whole

problem seemed to have been multiplied by seven, and the total again

doubled and redoubled—seven blue lines on land, seven dotted lines on

the sea, seven islands in the offing. Once I was near deciding to put

my pretext into practice, and cross to Langeoog; but that meant missing

the rendezvous, and I was loth to do that.

At any rate, I wanted breakfast badly; and the best way to get it, and

at the same time to open new ground, was to walk to Dornum. Then I

should find a blue line called the _Neues Tief_ leading to

Dornumersiel, on the coast. That explored, I could pass on to Nesse,

where there was another blue line to Nessmersiel. All this was on the

way to Norden, and I should have the railway constantly at my back, to

carry me there in the evening. The last train (my time-table told me)

was one reaching Norden at 7.15 p.m. I could catch this at Hage Station

at 7.5.

A brisk walk of six miles brought me, ravenously hungry, to Dornum.

Road and railway had clung together all the time, and about half-way

had been joined on the left by a third companion in the shape of a puny

stream which I knew from the map to be the upper portion of Neues Tief.

Wriggling and doubling like an eel, choked with sedges and reeds, it

had no pretensions to being navigable. At length it looped away into

the fens out of sight, only to reappear again close to Dornum in a much

more dignified guise.

There was no siding where the railway crossed it, but at the town

itself, which it skirted on the east, a towpath began, and a piled

wharf had been recently constructed. Going on to this was a red-brick

building with the look of a warehouse, roofless as yet, and with

workmen on its scaffolds. It sharpened the edge of my appetite.

If I had been wise I should have been content with a snack bought at a

counter, but a thirst for hot coffee and clues induced me to repeat the

experiment of Esens and seek a primitive beer-house. I was less lucky

on this occasion. The house I chose was obscure enough, but its

proprietor was no simple Frisian, but an ill-looking rascal with shifty

eyes and a debauched complexion, who showed a most unwelcome curiosity

in his customer. As a last fatality, he wore a peaked cap like my own,

and turned out to be an ex-sailor. I should have fled at the sight of

him had I had the chance, but I was attended to first by a slatternly

girl who, I am sure, called him up to view me. To explain my muddy

boots and trousers I said I had walked from Esens, and from that I

found myself involved in a tangle of impromptu lies. Floundering down

an old groove, I placed my sister this time on Baltrum Island, and said

I was going to Dornumersiel (which is opposite Baltrum) to cross from

there. As this was drawing a bow at a venture, I dared not assume local

knowledge, and spoke of the visit as my first. Dornumersiel was a lucky

shot; there _was_ a ferry-galliot from there to Baltrum; but he knew,

or pretended to know, Baltrum, and had not heard of my sister. I grew

the more nervous in that I saw from the first that he took me to be of

better condition than most merchant seamen; and, to make matters worse,

I was imprudent enough in pleading haste to pull out from an inner

pocket my gold watch with the chain and seals attached. He told me

there was no hurry, that I should miss the tide at Dornumersiel, and

then fell to pressing strong waters on me, and asking questions whose

insinuating grossness gave me the key to his biography. He must have

been at one stage in his career a dock-side crimp, one of those foul

sharks who prey on discharged seamen, and as often as not are ex-seamen

themselves, versed in the weaknesses of the tribe. He was now keeping

his hand in with me, who, unhappily, purported to belong to the very

class he was used to victimise, and, moreover, had a gold watch, and,

doubtless, a full purse. Nothing more ridiculously inopportune could

have befallen me, or more dangerous; for his class are as cosmopolitan

as waiters and _concierges,_ with as facile a gift for language and as

unerring a scent for nationality. Sure enough, the fellow recognised

mine, and positively challenged me with it in fairly fluent English

with a Yankee twang. Encumbered with the mythical sister, of course I

stuck to my lie, said I had been on an English ship so long that I had

picked up the accent, and also gave him some words in broken English.

At the same time I showed I thought him an impertinent nuisance, paid

my score and walked out—quit of him? Not a bit of it! He insisted on

showing me the way to Dornumersiel, and followed me down the street.

Perceiving that he was in liquor, in spite of the early hour, I dared

not risk a quarrelsome scene with a man who already knew so much about

me, and might at any moment elicit more. So I melted, and humoured him;

treated him in a ginshop in the hope of giving him the slip—a

disastrous resource, which was made a precedent for further potations

elsewhere. I would gladly draw a veil over our scandalous progress

through peaceable Dornum, of the terrors I experienced when he

introduced me as his friend, and as his English friend, and of the

abasement I felt, too, as, linked arm in arm, we trod the three miles

of road coastwards. It was his malicious whim that we should talk

English; a fortunate whim, as it turned out, because I knew no fo’c’sle

German, but had a smattering of fo’c’sle English, gathered from

Cutcliffe Hyne and Kipling. With these I extemporised a disreputable

hybrid, mostly consisting of oaths and blasphemies, and so yarned of

imaginary voyages. Of course he knew every port in the world, but

happily was none too critical, owing to repeated _schnappsen._

Nevertheless, it was a deplorable _contretemps_ from every point of

view. I was wasting my time, for the road took a different direction to

the Neues Tief, so that I had not even the advantage of inspecting the

canal and only met with it when we reached the sea. Here it split into

two mouths, both furnished with locks, and emptying into two little

mud-hole harbours, replicas of Bensersiel, each owning its cluster of

houses. I made straight for the _Gasthaus_ at Dornumersiel, primed my

companion well, and asked him to wait while I saw about a boat in the

harbour; but, needless to say, I never rejoined him. I just took a

cursory look at the left-hand harbour, saw a lighter locking through

(for the tide was high), and then walked as fast as my legs would carry

me to the outermost dyke, mounted it, and strode along the sea

westwards in the teeth of a smart shower of rain, full of deep

apprehensions as to the stir and gossip my disappearance might cause if

my odious crimp was sober enough to discover it. As soon as I deemed it

safe, I dropped on to the sand and ran till I could run no more. Then I

sat on my bundle with my back to the dyke in partial shelter from the

rain, watching the sea recede from the flats and dwindle into slender

meres, and the laden clouds fly weeping over the islands till those

pale shapes were lost in mist.

The barge I had seen locking through was creeping across towards

Langeoog behind a tug and a wisp of smoke.

No more exploration by daylight! That was my first resolve, for I felt

as if the country must be ringing with reports of an Englishman in

disguise. I must remain in hiding till dusk, then regain the railway

and slink into that train to Norden. Now directly I began to resign

myself to temporary inaction, and to centre my thoughts on the

rendezvous, a new doubt assailed me. Nothing had seemed more certain

yesterday than that Norden was the scene of the rendezvous, but that

was before the seven _siels_ had come into prominence. The name Norden

now sounded naked and unconvincing. As I wondered why, it suddenly

occurred to me that _all_ the stations along this northern line, though

farther inland than Norden, were equally “coast stations”, in the sense

that they were in touch with harbours (of a sort) on the coast. Norden

had its tidal creek, but Esens and Dornum had their “tiefs” or canals.

Fool that I had been to put such a narrow and literal construction on

the phrase “the tide serves!” Which was it more likely that my

conspirators would visit—Norden, whose intrusion into our theories was

purely hypothetical, or one of these _siels_ to whose sevenfold systems

all my latest observations gave such transcendent significance?

There was only one answer; and it filled me with profound

discouragement. Seven possible rendezvous!—eight, counting Norden.

Which to make for? Out came the time-table and map, and with them hope.

The case was not so bad after all; it demanded no immediate change of

plan, though it imported grave uncertainties and risks. Norden was

still the objective, but mainly as a railway junction, only remotely as

a seaport. Though the possible rendezvous were eight, the possible

stations were reduced to five—Norden, Hage, Dornum, Esens, Wittmund—all

on one single line. Trains from east to west along this line were

negligible, because there were none that could be called night trains,

the latest being the one I had this morning fixed on to bring me to

Norden, where it arrived at 7.15. Of trains from west to east there was

only one that need be considered, the same one that I had travelled by

last night, leaving Norden at 7.43 and reaching Esens at 8.50, and

Wittmund at 9.13. This train, as the reader who was with me in it

knows, was in correspondence with another from Emden and the south, and

also, I now found, with services from Hanover, Bremen, and Berlin. He

will also remember that I had to wait three-quarters of an hour at

Norden, from 7 to 7.43.

The platform at Norden Junction, therefore, between 7.15, when I should

arrive at it _from_ the east, and 7.43 when Böhme and his unknown

friend should leave it _for_ the east; there, and in that half-hour,

was my opportunity for recognising and shadowing two at least of the

conspirators. I must take the train they took, and alight where they

alighted. If I could not find them at all I should be thrown back on

the rejected view that Norden itself was the rendezvous, and should

wait there till 10.46.

In the meantime it was all very well to resolve on inaction till dusk;

but after an hour’s rest, damp clothes and feet, and the absence of

pursuers, tempted me to take the field again. Avoiding roads and

villages as long as it was light, I cut across country

south-westwards—a dismal and laborious journey, with oozy fens and

knee-deep drains to course, with circuits to be made to pass clear of

peasants, and many furtive crouchings behind dykes and willows. What

little I learnt was in harmony with previous explorations, for my track

cut at right angles the line of the Harke Tief, the stream issuing at

Nessmersiel. It, too, was in the nature of a canal, but only in embryo

at the point I touched it, south of Nesse. Works on a deviation were in

progress, and in a short digression down stream I sighted another

lighter-building yard. As for Hilgenriedersiel, the fourth of the

seven, I had no time to see anything of it at all. At seven o’clock I

was at Hage Station, very tired, wet, and footsore, after covering

nearly twenty miles all told since I left my bed in the lighter.

From here to Norden it was a run in the train of ten minutes, which I

spent in eating some rye bread and smoked eel, and in scraping the mud

off my boots and trousers. Fatigue vanished when the train drew up at

the station, and the momentous twenty-eight minutes began to run their

course. Having donned a bulky muffler and turned up the collar of my

pea-jacket, I crossed over immediately to the up-platform, walked

boldly to the booking-office, and at once sighted—von Brüning—yes, von

Brüning in mufti; but there was no mistaking his tall athletic figure,

pleasant features, and neat brown beard. He was just leaving the

window, gathering up a ticket and some coins. I joined a _queue_ of

three or four persons who were waiting their turn, flattened myself

between them and the partition till I heard him walk out. Not having

heard what station he had booked for, I took a fourth-class ticket to

Wittmund, which covered all chances. Then, with my chin buried in my

muffler, I sought the darkest corner of the ill-lit combination of bar

and waiting-room where, by the tiresome custom in Germany, would-be

travellers are penned till their train is ready. Von Brüning I

perceived sitting in another corner, with his hat over his eyes and a

cigar between his lips. A boy brought me a tankard of tawny Munich

beer, and, sipping it, I watched. People passed in and out, but nobody

spoke to the sailor in mufti. When a quarter of an hour elapsed, a

platform door opened, and a raucous voice shouted: “Hage, Dornum,

Esens, Wittmund!” A knot of passengers jostled out to the platform,

showing their tickets. I was slow over my beer, and was last of the

knot, with von Brüning immediately ahead of me, so close that his

cigar-smoke curled into my face. I looked over his shoulder at the

ticket he showed, missed the name, but caught a muttered double

sibilant from the official who checked it; ran over the stations in my

head, and pounced on _Esens._ That was as much I wanted to know for the

present; so I made my way to a fourth-class compartment, and lost sight

of my quarry, not venturing, till the last door had banged, to look out

of the window. When I did so two late arrivals were hurrying up to a

carriage—one tall, one of middle height; both in cloaks and comforters.

Their features I could not distinguish, but certainly neither of them

was Böhme. They had not come through the waiting-room door, but,

plainly, from the dark end of the platform, where they had been

waiting. A guard, with some surly remonstrances, shut them in, and the

train started.

Esens—the name had not surprised me; it fulfilled a presentiment that

had been growing in strength all the afternoon. For the last time I

referred to the map, pulpy and blurred with the day’s exposure, and

tried to etch it into my brain. I marked the road to Bensersiel, and

how it converged by degrees on the Benser Tief until they met at the

sea. “The tide serves!” Longing for Davies to help me, I reckoned, by

the aid of my diary, that high tide at Bensersiel would be about

eleven, and for two hours, I remembered (say from ten to twelve

to-night), there were from five to six feet of water in the harbour.

We should reach Esens at 8.50. Would they drive, as von Brüning had

done a week ago? I tightened my belt, stamped my mud-burdened boots,

and thanked God for the Munich beer. Whither were they going from

Bensersiel, and in what; and how was I to follow them? These were

nebulous questions, but I was in fettle for anything; boat-stealing was

a bagatelle. Fortune, I thought, smiled; Romance beckoned; even the sea

looked kind. Ay, and I do not know but that Imagination was already

beginning to unstiffen and flutter those nerveless wings.