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.