cheaply run little freighter of her class. In addition to the second
officer whose watch it was, and the look-out man on the opposite corner
of the bridge were three others. Two of them, young men oilskin-clad
like their companions, stood close together in an attitude which
indicated a personal acquaintanceship independent of the working of the
vessel. The third man held himself aloof, his back to them, staring
over the troubled sea to a point on the starboard quarter. Somewhere
in that direction, wrapped in the mists of rain and trailing cloud the
last rocky outposts of England whitened the waves which surged and fell
back about them in ceaseless and ever-baffled attack.
The buoyant twist and roll which accompanied the lift and plunge of
the _Upsal_, the frequent racing of her propeller, indicated that
she was running in ballast. Almost for the first time in her drab,
maid-of-all-work career, indeed, the _Upsal_ carried no cargo. She was
on a special mission. A Scandinavian salvage syndicate, having come to
an arrangement with the underwriters of a few out of the hundreds of
vessels which strew the bottoms of the entrances to the British seas,
had chartered her to locate and survey a group of promising wrecks,
preparatory to more extended operations. The two young men were their
technical engineers; Jensen, the taller of the pair, and Lyngstrand,
his assistant.
The third man, who stood aloof from them, was Captain Horst, the master
of the ship. He was, of course, primarily responsible to his owners
and not to the syndicate who had chartered his vessel. Until they
reached the location of the wrecks the submarine engineers were merely
passengers. Reticent and sombre as he had been since the commencement
of the voyage, he ignored them now, stood apparently lost in abstract
contemplation of the gray waste of sea. But one who could have looked
into his face would have been impressed and puzzled by his expression.
The cruel mouth under the little red moustache was curiously twisted.
In the haggard eyes which roved around the restricted horizon was
an oddly apprehensive uncertainty, unexpected in such a determined
countenance. His glance looked down, apparently fascinated, upon the
seas which raced below him as the _Upsal_ lifted on yet another crest,
as though there were something strange in being so high above them--and
then jerked up, automatically, to the horizon as in swift, instinctive
doubt of impunity. A psychologist would have suspected that he allowed
a fear of some kind, so long abiding as to have become a subconscious
mental habit, the relief of free play when he knew himself unwatched.
The two submarine engineers paid no attention to him. They gazed
across the untenanted sea ahead to where the white spray leaped,
almost lantern-high, in unsuccessful embraces of the tall column of
The Bishop. Then, when the lighthouse, loftily unmoved above the eager
seas, ascetically alone in the wide desolation of foam-streaked gray,
had slipped abeam, had receded into the mist behind them, when there
was no object to claim the eye on all the tumultuous stretch of ocean
ahead, Jensen turned to his companion and pointed downward. Lyngstrand
nodded assent, and they both staggered across the wet, reeling bridge
toward the ladder which led below.
The skipper, staring aft, his back on them, blocked their passage.
Jensen touched him on the shoulder. He swung round abruptly, with a
startled curse. Then, recognizing them, he moved aside grudgingly. His
face was turned from them as they passed.
The two young men descended to the deck below. They were berthed
in the saloon under the poop, but they took their meals in the
charthouse immediately beneath the bridge, in company with the skipper
who slept there. In addition to meal-times, the charthouse was a
convenient refuge from the weather common to all of them. It was their
objective now, and, just dodging a flying sea that fell with a heavy
far-scattered splash upon the deck, they flung themselves inside and
shut the door. Then, removing and hanging up their dripping oilskins,
they slid round to a final seat upon the leather-covered lockers which
filled the space between two sides of the walls and the screwed-down
centre table.
“Filthy weather!” said Jensen, producing pipe and tobacco-pouch. “But
we ought to get there to-night. We’re changing course now to the
north-west. Feel it?”
In effect, even as he spoke the _Upsal_ swung round to starboard. A
long lurching roll substituted itself for the corkscrew plunges which
had been the predominant motion, and the spray flung itself viciously
at the port side of the ship to the exclusion of the other.
Jensen, having lit his pipe, produced a type-written sheet of paper
from his pocket. It was a list of ships, followed by indications of
latitude, longitude, and other particulars.
“No. 1--_Gloucester City_, 7,500 tons, Latitude 50 degrees 55 minutes
North, Longitude 9 degrees 14 minutes West, 60 fathoms, torpedoed 20th
September, 1918,” he read out. “Get the chart, Lyngstrand, and let us
prick down its exact position.”
His fair-haired junior obediently spread out a chart of the exit to the
English Channel upon the table.
“20th of September!” he said, reflectively. “That’s curious, Jensen!
Exactly a year ago to-day!”
“Coincidences must happen sometimes,” replied Jensen with the superior
indifference of three or four years’ seniority. “I see nothing
remarkable in it.”
“It just struck me,” said Lyngstrand, apologetically. “No--I suppose
there’s nothing remarkable in it--it might just as well have been any
other day.”
Jensen threw a cursory glance at the chart.
“You’ve brought the wrong one,” he said, snappily. “This doesn’t go far
enough north. Look in the drawer there--there must be another one.”
“It is up in the wheelhouse, I think, Jensen,” demurred the young man,
mildly.
“Yes--I know--but old Horst is certain to have a duplicate. Look in
the drawer and see!” replied Jensen, with an impatience invited by the
docility of his junior.
Lyngstrand obeyed, rummaging among a number of charts in the drawer of
the locker under Captain Horst’s bunk.
“Here we are!” he cried at last, unrolling one of them. “This is a
special one, evidently! Someone has marked it all over with red ink.”
Jensen snatched it from him, spread it out. In fact, as Lyngstrand
said, it was marked in many places with little red-ink crosses, and
under each was a date. Jensen ran his finger across it, stopped just
off the south coast of Ireland.
“By all that’s wonderful!” he cried in a slow, long-drawn accent
of amazement, raising his head and looking at his companion. “_He
has marked our wreck!_ Look!--Fifty-fifty-five North, Nine-fourteen
West--and there’s the date under it 20/9/18!”
“Then all those other crosses----?” queried Lyngstrand, in a voice of
puzzled interest.
“They must be---- Wait a minute!” He compared some of them with the
indications on his list. “Yes! They are wrecks, too--all torpedoed
ships--look! this and this and this are marked on the chart! There are
others not marked--but there are many more marks than there are ships
on our list. They must be all torpedoed ships!”
“But why?” asked Lyngstrand. “Why has he got them all marked like
this?--Where did he get this chart, I wonder?”
Jensen glanced to the bottom of the sheet.
“_This is a German chart!_” he exclaimed.
Lyngstrand stared at him.
“German----!” he began, and stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes
in a long moment when suspicion defined itself as almost certitude. For
that moment they forgot the sickly rolling of the ship threshing and
wallowing on her way to one of those tragic little red crosses. They
forgot everything except the slowly dawning possible corollaries of
this discovery.
Before either could utter another word, the lee door of the charthouse
opened and Captain Horst stood framed in the entrance. He glared across
at them, his face livid with a sudden anger, his eyes blazing. Then,
with a scarcely articulate but vehemently muttered oath, he sprang
across the little room, snatched the chart from the table, thrust it
into the drawer, locked it up and put the key in his pocket. He turned
and scowled at them in a silence which they were too awed to break. His
eyes, fiercely blue, seemed to search into their very souls. Theirs
dropped under the intolerable scrutiny. He uttered an exclamation
of angry contempt and, without further speech, walked out of the
charthouse.
The two young men looked at each other.
“That is the second time this morning!” said Jensen, at last, glancing
toward the door now once more closed on them.
“What is?” asked Lyngstrand, curiously.
“_That he has cursed in German!_--Lyngstrand! I am beginning to see
into this!”
“But it’s impossible!” exclaimed Lyngstrand, his mind leaping to
his friend’s deduction and then rejecting it. “He is a Swede, like
ourselves!”
“He is a German!” said Jensen, positively.
“But he speaks Swedish without a trace of accent!”
“And other languages also, I expect--French and English, as
well--better than you or I speak them, I have no doubt. Swedish would
much facilitate service in the Baltic--and your German naval officer
was linguistically well equipped for any possible campaign.”
“German naval officer!” echoed Lyngstrand, incredulously.
“I will bet on it!” asserted his friend.
“But--a German naval officer commanding a rotten little tramp like
the _Upsal?_” said Lyngstrand, emphasizing his incredulity. “I can’t
believe it!”
“Even German ex-naval officers have to live, my friend,” responded
Jensen, axiomatically. “And--I ask you--what is open to them but to
take service in the mercantile marine of other nations? There is no
more German fleet--there are not enough merchant vessels left under the
German flag to employ all their trained officers. On the other hand,
all the Scandinavian nations have multiplied their trading fleets--they
cannot find officers enough for them. A first-class seaman like Horst,
speaking Swedish like a native, would find plenty of owners only too
willing to employ him.”
“It sounds plausible,” agreed Lyngstrand, but somewhat doubtfully.
“Plausible!” repeated Jensen, scornfully. “It is more than
plausible--the more I think of it, the more certain I am. Consider!
Is Horst the typical rough merchant skipper? You know perfectly well
he is not. You said yourself, the first evening we came aboard, that
although he had the soul of a pig he had the manners of a gentleman.
How does he speak Swedish--like a man who has spent half his life
knocking about harbour drinking-shops? No! He expresses himself with
that precise accuracy of the man employing a language well learnt,
indeed, but nevertheless foreign to him--like you and I speak English,
my friend. And his clothes!--Did you ever know the skipper of a tramp
steamer wear a stiff white collar while at sea? Then his curt way of
giving orders--no question about discipline, but you should see some of
our Swedish forecastle-hands stare at him! One of them stared a moment
too long just before you came aboard. He knocked him clean out!--He
is a German naval officer, I will swear to it!--More than that, I am
convinced that he commanded a submarine!”
“That chart, then----?”
“Is the chart of his sinkings!”
“By God!” said Lyngstrand, solemnly, setting his teeth and staring
sternly at the charthouse wall. “If I were sure of it----!”
“What do you mean?” asked Jensen, struck by this sudden change from his
friend’s ordinarily meek demeanour. “What has it to do with you?”
Lyngstrand turned to him with a bitter little laugh. He seemed, indeed,
a different man.
“More than you think, my friend,” he said, briefly. “I am not good
company for U-boat commanders!”
“But why?--You lost no one----?”
Lyngstrand’s serious eyes held his.
“You remember I went to America in 1917, Jensen? I met a girl there--we
were betrothed. She was coming to Europe to me last year. She never
arrived. Her ship--a neutral--a small Norwegian ship, the _Trondhjem_,
on which I had arranged for her passage--was torpedoed in the Atlantic
last September--_spurlos versenkt_!” He finished in a tone of bitter
mimicry, and then suddenly hid his face in his hands through a silence
which Jensen felt incapable of breaking. At last he looked up again.
“If ever I trace the scoundrel who murdered her----!” The ugly menace
in his voice supplied the final clause to his unfinished sentence.
“A difficult task!” murmured Jensen, sympathetically.
Lyngstrand glanced at the closed drawer of the locker.
“When I think that perhaps on that chart--one of those little red
crosses----” He crashed his hand upon the table. “By God, Jensen! I
would give something to have another look at it!”
Jensen laid a friendly hand on his shoulder.
“We will do our best, Lyngstrand, to see it again. But don’t torture
yourself about it now. Come out on deck. The barometer is rising, and
if the sea goes down to-morrow we shall want to keep clear heads for
our investigation of the _Gloucester City_.--Come!”
He rose and held out his friend’s oilskins, helped him on with them.
They went out and stood in the shelter of the lee-deck, watching the
foam-froth sink down and melt in the depths of the malachite waves that
rolled away from them, until soon after eight bells the white-jacketed
steward clanged out his announcement of dinner.
They found Captain Horst already at his place at the table in the
charthouse. It was significant of the unexpressed but clearly felt
antipathy which in the past few days had grown up between the skipper
and his passengers that he had commenced his meal without waiting
for them. Jensen, however, was a level-headed young man who had not
the least intention of jeopardizing the enterprise for which he was
responsible by ill-timed open bad-temper. He nodded a greeting with a
smile which totally ignored the strained circumstances of their last
meeting.
“I think the weather is moderating, Captain Horst,” he said,
pleasantly, as he sat down.
“_Ja_,” responded Captain Horst, gruffly, throwing a perfunctory glance
through the unshuttered forward windows of the charthouse.
“We ought to reach the neighbourhood of our wreck some time to-night?”
pursued Jensen in affable enquiry.
Lyngstrand had addressed himself in silence to the food the steward set
before him, but he glanced up as though some undertone of significance
in his friend’s voice had caught his ear.
“Thereabouts,” conceded Captain Horst in a tone which sufficiently
indicated that he was disinclined for conversation.
But Jensen was cheerfully loquacious.
“I wonder whether we shall hit on some other wreck instead?” he
surmised. “These seas must be strewn with them.”
Captain Horst shrugged his shoulders.
Lyngstrand looked up.
“If I were a German U-boat commander,” he said, with a quiet
deliberation, his eyes straight on Captain Horst’s face, “I should not
dare to sail over these seas again. I should see drowning faces sinking
through every wave.”
His last sentence seemed to ring through the silence which followed it.
Captain Horst sat impassive, but his brutal jaw looked hard and his
cruel mouth thinned during the moment in which he returned Lyngstrand’s
glance.
“Bah!” he said. “The dead don’t come back!” There was something of
defiance in his harshly contemptuous tone. “They are finished with--for
ever!”
The blood went out of Lyngstrand’s face as he bent down again to his
plate.
There was no further conversation during the meal.
The afternoon was spent by the two young men, in company with
the half-dozen divers under their orders, in overhauling the
diving-dresses, air-pumps, etc., which might be required on the morrow.
The gale had obviously blown itself out. The western sky had cleared,
the rain had ceased, the wave-tops were no longer torn in flying spume,
there was less violence in the rolling surges in whose trough they
wallowed. When, a little after four bells, they were summoned to tea,
the sun was setting in a golden splendour that promised a peaceful dawn.
Excited by the prospect of the next day’s work, the two young men
forgot their suspicions of Captain Horst, could talk of nothing but
their plans for diving despite the after-swell of the gale which would
surely still be running. The captain listened to their impatience with
the ghost of a grim smile, but volunteered no part in the conversation.
“Do you propose to keep under way all night, Captain Horst?” enquired
Jensen.
“No,” he replied. “By my dead reckoning we ought to be in the vicinity
of the wreck at about eight bells to-night. I shall anchor then if the
glass is still rising. To-morrow we will take an observation and get
as close as we can to the position of the _Gloucester City_--presuming
that you have it correctly stated.”
His tone was perfectly indifferent, but Lyngstrand thought suddenly of
that chart with the little red crosses--and particularly that cross on
their indicated spot, 50° 55´´ N., 9° 14´´ W, with the fatal date of
exactly a year ago--20/9/18. Surely it could not be mere coincidence!
He thrilled suddenly with a dramatic perception. If--if it were so--if
the man so calmly smiling at him had really sent the _Gloucester City_
to the bottom!--and now, on the anniversary of the crime, was coolly
proposing to anchor himself as near as might be over her ocean grave,
preparatory to disturbing it on the morrow!--No! He ridiculed himself.
It was impossible! No man could have the iron will--he glanced straight
into the blue eyes of the impassive Horst, read nothing--no man could
stand the strain without betraying himself. The murderer brought back
to the scene of his crime broke down into confession--and, if he were
the murderer of the _Gloucester City_, Horst was being brought back
with ironic inexorability to the site of his assassination, brought
back by those subtle, apparently normal, everyday circumstances from
which there is no escape.
He wondered to what extent Horst had been informed of the purport of
their voyage when the _Upsal_ was chartered. He could not, certainly,
have been left in ignorance--but, on the other hand, he could not
well refuse to navigate the ship without losing an employment which,
however humble, was assuredly to be coveted by a man in his position. A
penniless naval officer had poor prospects in Germany. Bah! (he thought
to himself in a sudden revulsion) he was accepting Jensen’s unsupported
surmises as though they were reality. The thing was impossible! Another
glance at the hard but emotionless face opposite him reassured him. He
banished his hyper-dramatic idea in a spurn of self-contempt for his
too excitable imagination.
Conversation languished. There was no community of thought between
the skipper and his passengers, and his presence was a check upon the
mutual confidences of the two young men. Meals together were an ordeal
escaped from as soon as terminated, and Jensen and Lyngstrand speedily
went out on deck again with the murmured allegation that the overhaul
of their gear was not yet finished.
They did not come together again until some three hours later, when,
her white anchor-light hoisted between her masts, the _Upsal_ was
pitching at her cable to the heavy swell which rolled down upon her
from the darkness of the night. The two young men had been yarning
with the chief engineer in the pleasant warmth of the engine-room,
when a glance at the clock reminded them that it was the hour when the
steward brought biscuits and cocoa to the charthouse. Light-hearted
as boys, their unpleasant thoughts of the captain dissipated by the
cheerful talk in which they had been indulging, they scrambled up the
iron-runged ladder from the warm, oily depths to the black, damp chill
of the outer night.
In this sea-smelling gloom where the wave-tops ran past them with
faintly phosphorescent crests, the unwonted stillness of the ship’s
engines was suddenly vivid to their consciousness as she eased and
tugged at her anchorage.
“Well, here we are!” said Jensen, stopping for a moment to peer around
him.
“I wonder what lies beneath us?” queried Lyngstrand, developing his
comrade’s thought. As he, too, probed the darkness where the cruel
waves ran, easy familiars of the night, he had an uncomfortable little
mental picture of the _Gloucester City_ foundering, with torn side,
into their chill depths--a year ago. What shrieks and cries had hushed,
for ever, into the silence which encompassed them?
Both shuddered.
“Come along,” said Jensen. “Our cocoa will be cold.”
At the charthouse door they hesitated for a moment on an indefinable
impulse, peeped through the unshuttered window which allowed a broad
ray of light to fall across the deck.
Captain Horst was seated at the table, his head in his hands, his
back to them. Spread out before him was the chart with the little
red crosses. He sat motionless, staring at it, as though absorbed in
reverie. The three cups of cocoa were steaming on the table. His was
untouched.
For one wild moment Lyngstrand thought he might be able to surprise a
glance at the chart. He turned the handle of the door as stealthily
as he could. Slight as the sound had been, however, Captain Horst had
heard it. When they entered he was stuffing something into his breast
pocket, and the chart was no longer on the table.
They drank their cocoa in silence, Horst staring moodily at the floor,
Jensen and Lyngstrand risking a glance of mutual comprehension.
Suddenly two loud, sharp knocks broke the stillness--knocks that seemed
to be on the charthouse wall.
Captain Horst raised his head.
“_Herein!_” he cried, automatically, obviously without thinking.
Jensen shot a swift look at his friend, eyebrows raised at this German
permission of entry. Horst bit his lip, suddenly self-conscious. He
repeated the authorization in Swedish.
No one entered.
Expectation was just passing into a vague surprise, when the knocks
were repeated--three heavy blows, obviously deliberate, upon the
after-wall of the charthouse.
Horst sprang up, with a savage curse of exasperation. He was
self-controlled enough, however, to utter his thought in Swedish.
“I’ll teach them!” he exclaimed, as he flung open the charthouse door.
“Fooling around here!”
He disappeared into the night and they heard the tramp of his heavy
sea-boots as he ran round the charthouse. But no other sound woke
upon his passage. The circuit completed, they heard his angry yell
to the look-out man on the bridge above, heard the quietly normal
response, the surprised denial. The interior of the charthouse was a
hushed stillness where Jensen and Lyngstrand sat exchanging a smile of
malicious enjoyment. Horst vituperated the stammering look-out man in a
flood of ugly oaths that were plainly a break-down of nervous control.
The door opened again for his entry.
“Extraordinary thing!” he scowled across at them. “No one there! You
heard them, didn’t you?” He seated himself with an angry grunt.
Before they could answer, the knocks recommenced in a sudden
vehemence--not slow and deliberate this time, but in a rapid succession
which quickened to a fast and furious fusillade from origins that
seemed to play, flitting arbitrarily, all over the walls and roof. The
charthouse reverberated with them. Their intensity varied at every
moment from sharp, hammer-like blows to rapid, nervous taps from what
might have been a feverishly agitated pencil. The wild and uncanny
tattoo culminated in three crashing blows that seemed to be on the
underside of the table itself. There was silence.
“What are you playing at?” cried Horst, glaring at them in fierce
suspicion of a hoax.
For answer, they both lifted up their hands, obviously unoccupied, into
the air. Even as they did so, the knocks started again, still rapid,
but with a certain deliberate rhythm, and much less violent. Again they
seemed to be on the underside of the table. Horst looked, with a scowl
of distrust, under it to their immobile feet. The two young men glanced
at each other, as puzzled and alarmed as Horst himself.
“What in the name of Heaven is it?” cried Jensen.
The knocks swelled suddenly louder as though in answer to his voice.