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.

Chapter 7

The Missing Page

I WOKE (on the 1st of October) with that dispiriting sensation that a hitch has occurred in a settled plan. It was explained when I went on deck, and I found the Dulcibella wrapped in a fog, silent, clammy, nothing visible from her decks but the ghostly hull of a galliot at anchor near us. She must have brought up there in the night, for there had been nothing so close the evening before; and I remembered that my sleep had been broken once by sounds of rumbling chain and gruff voices.

‘This looks pretty hopeless for to-day,’ I said, with a shiver, to Davies, who was laying the breakfast.

‘Well, we can’t do anything till this fog lifts,’ he answered, with a good deal of resignation. Breakfast was a cheerless meal. The damp penetrated to the very cabin whose roof and walls wept a fine dew. I had dreaded a bathe and yet missed it, and the ghastly light made the tablecloth look dirtier than it naturally was, and all the accessories more sordid. Something had gone wrong with the bacon, and the lack of egg-cups was not in the least humorous.

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 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.’

Was I never to be at an end of the puzzles which Davies presented to me? All the impulsive heartiness died out of his voice and manner as he uttered the last few words, and there he was, nervously glancing from the visitor to me, like one who, against his will or from tactlessness, has introduced two persons who he knows will disagree.

There was a pause, while he fumbled with the cups, poured some cold coffee out and pondered over it as though it were a chemical experiment. Then he muttered something about boiling some more water, and took refuge in the forecastle. I was ill at ease at this period with seafaring men, but this mild little person was easy ground for a beginner. Besides, when he took off his oilskin coat, he reminded me less of a sailor than of a homely draper of some country town, with his clean turned-down collar and neatly fitting frieze jacket. We exchanged some polite platitudes about the fog and his voyage last night from Kappeln, which appeared to be a town some fifteen miles up the fiord.

Davies joined in from the forecastle with an excess of warmth which almost took the words out of my mouth. We exhausted the subject very soon, and then my vis-à-vis smiled paternally at me as he had done at Davies, and said confidentially:

‘It is good that the Captain is no more alone. He is a fine young man – heaven, what a fine young man! I love him as my son – but he is too brave, too reckless. It is good for him to have a friend.’

I nodded and laughed, though in reality I was very far from being amused.

‘Where was it you met?’ I asked.

‘In an ugly place, and in ugly weather,’ he answered gravely, but with a twinkle of fun in his eye. ‘But has he not told you?’ he added with ponderous slyness. ‘I came just in time. No! What am I saying? He is brave as a lion and quick as a cat. I think he cannot drown; but still it was an ugly place and ugly—’

‘What are you talking about, Bartels?’ interrupted Davies, emerging noisily with a boiling kettle.

I answered the question. ‘I was just asking your friend how it was you made his acquaintance.’

‘Oh, he helped me out of a bit of a mess in the North Sea, didn’t you, Bartels?’ he said.

‘It was nothing,’ said Bartels. ‘But the North Sea is no place for your little boat, Captain. So I have told you many times. How did you like Flensburg? A fine town, is it not? Did you find Herr Krank, the carpenter? I see you have placed a little mizzen-mast. The rudder was nothing much, but it was well that it held to the Eider. But she is strong and good, your little ship, and – heaven! – she had need be so.’ He chuckled and shook his head at Davies as at a wayward child.

This is all the conversation that I need record.