The Riddle of the Sands

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.

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 naive apprehension of their effect on me. There was a check in our mobilization.

“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 tonight.” 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 tomorrow. 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.

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.”

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 clubroom, spelling out that crabbed scrawl from Davies, and fastidiously criticizing 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.

“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 seabirds 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.