of a somewhat unusual pattern. As a matter of fact, the decorative
effect was rather pretty. It's queer--the way some things stick in your
memory and others vanish. I believe that my most vivid impression of the
few months I passed in Germany is that blessed table, waiting for its
guests, with the peaches in the champagne glasses. I didn't see the
guests arrive. Wish I had now. There's always something a little stagey,
don't you think, about a table waiting for its guests; but this was more
so. It affected me like the throne of melodrama waiting for its emperor.
Funny that it should have made such an impression, isn't it?"
I thought not; for it was part of Duncan's business to be impressed by
unusual things--more especially when they were symptomatic of something
else. It was this that made him so useful, for instance, in that
exciting little episode of the cargo of onions which was
intercepted--owing to one of his impressions--in a Scandinavian ship.
They were perfectly good onions, the first few layers of them; and they
looked like perfectly good onions when you burrowed into the lower
layers. But Duncan had been seized by an absurd desire to see whether
they would bounce or not; and when he experimented on the deck, they did
bounce, bounce like cricket balls, as high as the ship's funnels.
This capture of one of the largest cargoes of contraband rubber was due
to an impression he got from two innocent cablegrams which had been
intercepted and brought to him at the Admiralty,--one of them apparently
concerning an operation for appendicitis, and the other announcing the
death of the patient. His intuitions, indeed, resembled those of the
artist; and, though he was one of the smartest sailors in the Navy, he
looked more like a pre-Raphaelite painter's conception of Galahad than
any one I had ever seen in the flesh. He looked exceedingly youthful,
and the dead whiteness of his face, which his Philistine brethren
described as lantern-jawed, was lighted by the alert eyes of the new
age. They had that peculiar glitter which one sees in the eyes of
aviators, and sometimes in those of the business men accustomed to the
electric cities of the new world. His hands were like those of a
musician, long and quick and nervous. But I could easily imagine them
throttling an enemy.
We turned in early that night, and I dozed fitfully, revolving fragments
of our somewhat disconnected conversation. The beautiful sea-cry "All's
well" came to me from the watch in the bow, as the bell tolled the
passage of the hours; and it was not till daybreak that I slept, only to
dream of that table in Berlin, waiting for its guests, with a peach in
every champagne glass.
II
As we waited in the cold brilliance of New York harbor, a few mornings
later, and looked with considerable satisfaction at the German steamers
that were huddled like gigantic red and black cattle in the docks of the
Hamburg-Amerika and North German-Lloyd, a telegram was brought aboard
which settled our plans.
Duncan was to go down to Washington that night, while I was to go up to
Rockport, a little fishing village on the coast of Maine. At this place
I was to take a motor-car and drive some fifteen miles to a certain
lonely strip of pine-clad coast. There we were to camp out in a tiny
cottage, which we could rent from an old sea-captain whom I knew before
the war. Two artists, in quest of a quiet place for work, could hardly
find a happier hunting-ground. I was particularly glad to find that we
could hire a trim little motor-launch, in which we could go exploring
among the islands that dotted the blue sea for scores of miles. It was a
beautiful coast, and their dark peaks of pine were printed like tiny
black feathers against a sky of unimaginable sapphire. Nothing could
seem more remote from the devilries of modern war.
Duncan joined me, a week later, in Captain Humphrey's cottage--it was a
small white-painted wooden house among the pine trees on the main land,
built on the rocks which overhung a deep blue inlet of the Atlantic. We
discussed our plans on the little veranda, from which we could see half
a dozen of those pine-crowned islands, which were the objects of
suspicion. There were scores of others we could not see, to north and
south of us, and we checked them off on the map as we sat there under
the dried sunfish and the other queer marine trophies, which the old
skipper had brought back with him from the South Seas.
The nights were quite cold enough for a fire, though it was only
mid-July; and we finished all our plans that evening round the big
stove, the kind of thing you see in the foc'sle of a steam trawler,
which stood in the center of Captain Humphrey's parlor. We were more
than a little glad indeed to let our pipes and the good-smelling pine
logs waft their incense abroad; for--like all the dwellers in those
parts--the old skipper subsisted through the winter on the codfish which
he had salted and stored during the summer in his attic; and though his
abode was clean and neat as himself, it had the healthy reek of a
trawler, as well as its heating apparatus. A large oil lamp, which hung
from the ceiling, was none the worse, moreover, for the moderating
influence of a little wood-smoke.
"To-morrow, then," said Duncan, "we take the motor-launch and have a
look at all the islands between this place and Rockport. They've been
awfully decent down in Washington about it. The only trouble is that
they don't and can't believe it. Exactly the state of mind we were in,
before the war. Everybody laughing at exactly the same things, from
spy-stories to signals on the coast. I met a man in the Government who
had been taken to a window at midnight to see a light doing the Morse
code, off this very coast, and he laughed at it. Didn't believe it.
Thought it was the evening-star. We were like that ourselves. No decent
man can believe certain things, till they are beyond question.
"It's our own fault. We told them all was well before the war; and I
don't see how we can blame them for thinking their own intervention
unnecessary now. We keep on telling America that it's all over except
the shouting. We paint the rosiest kind of picture to-day about the
prospects of the allies; and then we grumble amongst ourselves because
Americans don't turn the whole of their continent upside down to come
and help us. We deliberately lulled America to sleep, and then we kicked
because we heard that she had only one eye open.
"Well,--they've given us a blessing on our wild-goose chase. We may do
all the investigating we like, as I understand the position, so long as
we leave any resultant action to the United States. This means, I
suppose,--in old Captain Humphrey's language--that we may be
'rubber-necks,' but we mustn't shoot. All the same, I brought the guns
with me." He laid two automatic pistols on the table. "It's more than
likely, from what I've been able to gather, that we may have to defend
our own skins; and I suppose that's permissible. Oh, damn that
mosquito!" He slapped his ankle, and complained bitterly that the old
sea-captain's faith in his own tough exterior had prevented him from
providing his doors and windows with mosquito netting.
* * * * *
It was on the fourth morning of our search that things began to happen.
For my own part, I had already begun to be so absorbed in the peace of
the world about us, that the whole business of the war seemed unreal and
our own quest futile. I could no longer wonder at those inhabitants of
the new world who were said to look upon our European Armageddon as a
bad dream, or a morbid tale in a book, which it was better not to open.
As we chug-chugged along the coast, close under the thick pine woods,
which grew almost to the edge of the foam, I thought I had never
breathed an air so fragrant, or seen color so brilliant in earth and sky
and sea. Once or twice, as we shut off the motor and lay idle, we heard
a hermit-thrush in the woods, breaking the silence with a peculiarly
plaintive liquid call, quite unlike the song of our thrushes at home,
but very beautiful. Here and there we passed the little red, blue and
green buoys of lobster-pots, shining like jewels as the clear water
lapped about them in that amazing sunlight.
We were making for a certain island about which we had obtained some
interesting details from Captain Humphrey himself. He told us that it
had been purchased two or three years ago by a New Yorker who was
building himself quite a fine place on it. He seemed to be a somewhat
mysterious character, for he was never seen on the mainland, and all his
supplies were brought up to him on his own large private yacht.
"There's a wharf on the island," said Captain Humphrey, "with deep water
running up to it, so that a yacht can sail right up to his porch, as you
might say, and you wouldn't know it was there. The cove runs in on the
slant, and the pines grow between it and the sea. You wouldn't notice
it, unless you ran right in at the mouth. It makes a fine private harbor
for a yacht, and I believe it has held two at a time. There's a good
beach for clams on the west shore, but of course, it's private."
We certainly saw no sign of yacht or harbor as we approached the island
from the landward side; but we made no departure from our course to look
for either. We were bound for clam-beach, where we intended to do a
little clam-poaching.
"It doesn't look promising," said Duncan, as we approached the shore.
"There doesn't seem to be anybody to warn trespassers off. But perhaps
clam-beach is not regarded as dangerous, and the trespassing begins
further on."
In a few moments we had moored the launch in four feet of water, and
were ashore with a couple of clam-rakes. We had dug a hundred, as we
walked towards the pine-wood, when Duncan straightened up and said:
"This makes my back ache, and it's blazing hot. I'm going to have a pipe
in the shade, up there."
I shouldered my rake, and followed him into the wood. As soon as we were
well among the trees, we began to walk quickly up the thin winding path,
which we supposed would lead us to the neighborhood of the house.
"Not at all promising," said Duncan. "They would never let us ramble
about like this if they had anything to conceal. Just for the fun of it,
we'll go up to the house, and ask if Mr. Chutney Bilge, the novelist,
doesn't live there. You want his autograph, don't you?"
In five minutes, we had emerged from the pines, and saw before us a very
pleasant looking wooden house with a wide veranda, screened all round
with mosquito-netting, and backed by glimpses of blue sea between dark
pine-trunks. There was not a soul to be seen, and no sign of its
occupants anywhere. We walked up to the porch, pulled open the netted
door in the outer screen, and knocked on the door of the house, which
stood wide open. We waited and listened; but there was no sound except
the ticking of a clock. There was another open door on the right side of
the hall. Duncan felt a sudden impulse to look through it, and tip-toed
quietly forward. He had no sooner looked than he stood as if turned to
stone, with so queer an expression on his face that I instantly came to
his side to see what Medusa had caused it. It seemed a very harmless
Medusa; but I doubt if anything could have startled me more at the
moment. We stood there, staring at a table, laid for lunch. There were
twelve champagne glasses, of a somewhat unusual pattern; and each of
these glasses contained a peach.
III
Before I could be quite sure whether I was dreaming or waking, Duncan
had dashed into the room on the other side of the hall, and grabbed up a
bundle of papers that had been dropped as if by some one in a great
hurry, all over the table. He glanced at one or two.
"But this,--this--settles it," he cried. "Come out of it quickly." And,
in a few seconds, we were in the cover of the woods again.
"Schramm himself is over here, apparently. He must have come by U-boat,"
Duncan muttered, as we hurried down the path towards our launch. "If
they catch us, we're simply dead and buried, and past praying for."
"But what does it mean? Where are they? Why the devil have they left
everything open to the first-comer?"
"Beats me completely. But we'd better not wait to inquire. The next move
is up to Washington."
"Look here, Duncan, we'd better be careful about our exit from the
woods. If any one happens to have spotted the launch, we may run our
heads into a trap."
I had an uneasy feeling that we were being watched, and that every
movement we made was plainly seen by a gigantic but invisible spectator,
very much the kind of feeling, I suppose, that insects must have under
the microscope. I felt sure that we were not going to have it all our
own way with this quiet island. Duncan hesitated for a moment, but I was
insistent that we should take a look at our landing place before we left
our cover. It was a characteristic of Duncan that as soon as he had
discovered what he wanted, he became as forthright a sailor as you could
wish to find; and I knew that if we were to escape with whole skins, or
even to make use of our discovery, I should have to exercise my own
wits. Fortunately, my own "impressions" began when his finished; for,
after he had yielded to my persuasion, we made a slight circuit through
the woods, and crept out through the long grass on the top of the
little cliff, overlooking the beach where we had landed. Our clams were
still there, in two neat little dumps. So was the launch, but in the
stern of it there sat a tall red-bearded man, who looked like a
professor, and a couple of sailors. They were all three talking German
in low, excited tones, and they were all three armed with rifles.
The launch lay almost directly below us, and we could hear some of their
conversation. I gathered that the luncheon party had gone on board a
U-boat which had just arrived, to inspect the latest improvements.
Something had gone wrong. They had submerged; and it seemed to be
doubtful whether they could get her up again. That, of course, was why
the house was deserted and our trespassing unforbidden. It was probably
also the reason why the sentries had been absent, and had only just
discovered our launch on their rounds. One of the sailors was aggrieved,
it seemed to me, that no effort was being made to obtain other help for
the submerged men than the island itself could lend. His best friend was
aboard; and he thought it wicked not to give them a chance, even if it
meant their internment. The red-bearded professor was explaining to
him, however, in the most highly approved style of modern Germany, that
his feelings were by no means logical; and that it was far nobler to
sacrifice one's friends than to endanger the State.
"But, if the State is a kind of devil," said the sailor, who was a bit
of a logician himself, "I prefer my friends, who in the meantime are
being suffocated."
"That is a fallacy," the professor was answering. Then, from the
direction of the house, there came a confused sound of shouting.
A fourth sailor came tearing down the beach like a maniac.
"Where are the clam-fishers?" he called to the three philosophers. "They
are to be taken, dead or alive."
At the same moment, I saw the glint of the sun on the revolvers of
several other men, who were advancing through the woods towards the
beach, peering to right and left of them. Without a whisper between us,
Duncan and I crawled off along the cliff, through the thick undergrowth.
Obviously, the submarine had come to the surface again, and the whole
merry crowd was on our track. The island was not more than a quarter of
a mile in diameter; and I saw no hope of evading our pursuers, of whom
there must be at least twenty, judging from the cries that reached us.
There was nothing for it, but to choose the best place for putting up a
fight; and, as luck would have it, we were already on the best line of
defense. The undergrowth between the cliff's edge and the woods was so
thick that nobody could discover us, except by crawling up the trail by
which we had ourselves entered. It proved to be the only way by which
the cliff's edge could be explored, and we had a full half-mile of the
island's circumference, a long ledge, only a few feet wide, on which we
could crawl in security for the time being, till the hunt came up behind
us. I remember noticing--even in those moments of peril--that the ground
and the bushes were littered with big crab claws and clam shells that
had been dropped and picked there by the sea gulls and crows; and I was
thinking--in some queer way--of the easy life that these birds lead,
when I almost put my hand on a human skull, protruding from a litter of
loose earth, white flakes of shell and crabs' backs. Duncan pulled a
heap of the evil-smelling stuff away with his clam-rake, and bared the
right side of the skeleton. There was a half-rotten clam-rake in the
bony clutch of the dead man. Evidently, somebody else had paid the
penalty before us. The body had been buried, and rain, snow, or the
insatiable sea-gulls had uncovered the yellow-toothed head.
A few yards further on, the cliff projected so far out that even when
one hung right over the edge, it was only just possible to see where it
met the swirling water, which seemed very deep here. About fifteen yards
out, there was a big boulder of rock, covered with brown sea-weed.
"Look here, Duncan," I said, "there's only one real chance for us. We've
got to swim to the mainland, but we can't do it by daylight. We've got
to pass six hours till it's dark enough, and there's only one way to do
it. How far can you swim under water?"
"About fifty feet," he said. "You're going crazy, old man, it's a mile
and a half to the mainland."
"Duncan, you're a devil of a man for getting into a scrape. But when it
comes to getting out of one, I feel a little safer in my own hands. Can
you get as far as that rock under water?"
"I think so," he said, and caught on to the suggestion at once.
The cries were coming along the cliff's edge now, and it was a question
of only half a minute before some of our pursuers would be on the top of
us.
"Hurry, then. Swim to the north of the rock, and don't come up till
you're on the other side. If you feel yourself rising, grab hold of the
sea-weed, and keep yourself down till you've hauled round the rock.
Quick!"
There was a crashing in the bushes, not fifty yards away, along the
cliff, as we dived into the clear green water. The plunge carried one
further than I expected, and four or five strokes along the bottom of
the sea brought me to the base of the rock. It was quite easy to turn
it, and I was relieved to find that there was a good ledge for landing
on the further side, only an inch or two above the level of the water,
and quite screened from the island by the rock itself, which was about
ten feet in length, and curved in a half-moon shape, with the horns
pointing towards the mainland. In fact, it was like a large
Chesterfield couch of stone, covered with brown sea-weed, and resolutely
turning its back on the island. We were luckier than I had dared to
hope; and when, in a few seconds, Duncan had coiled himself on the ledge
beside me, I saw by his grin that he thought we had solved the problem
of escape. For five minutes we lay dead still, listening to the clamor
along the cliff from which we had just dived.
"Thank the Lord, we get the sun here," said Duncan at last, as the
sounds died away. "There's only one thing that worries me now. What are
we to do when they come round in a boat?"
"They won't think of that for some time," I said, "but when they do, we
must take to the water again, and work round behind the rock. We ought
to be able to keep it between us and the blighters, with any luck. We've
only got to keep enough above water to breathe with; and I've seen some
fine camouflage done with a little sea-weed before now."
We looked at the yard-long fringes of brown sea-weed, and decided that
it would be possible to defy anything but the closest inspection of our
rock by the simple process of sliding down into the water and pulling
the sea-weed over our heads, on the side next to the island. There was a
reef which would prevent a boat passing on that side.
Our clothes were almost dried by the blazing sun before we were
disturbed again. Duncan was ruefully contemplating a corn-cob pipe,
which he affirmed had been ruined by the salt water. He poked the stem
at a huge sea-anemone, which immediately sucked it in, and held it as
firmly as a smoker's mouth, with so ludicrous an effect that Duncan's
risible faculties were dangerously moved. I was half afraid of one of
his volcanic guffaws, when we both heard a sound that struck us
dumb,--the sound of oars coming steadily in our direction. We slipped
into the water, according to plan, hauled ourselves round behind the
rock, and drew the long thick fringes of sea-weed over our heads. We
held ourselves anchored there by the brown stems, and kept little more
than our noses above the water. No concealment could have been more
complete. The boat passed on; and in five minutes we were back again on
our ledge, and drying in the sun.
"Good Lord," said Duncan, suddenly, "that was a near shave. I'd
forgotten that beastly thing."
He pointed to the sea-anemone, which was still sucking at the yellow
corn-cob pipe. It looked like the bristling red mouth of some drunken
and half-submerged sea-god, and could hardly have been missed by the
boat's crew, if they had been looking for anything like it.
"Lord, what a shave!" he said again. "What would Schramm have said if he
had seen it!"
Then, as we stared at the absurd marine creature, we rocked in silent
spasms of mirth--human beings are made of a very queer clay--picturing
the bewildered faces of the Boches at a sight which would have meant our
death.
The sense of humor was benumbed in both of us before long. The sun was
dropping low, and we did not dry as quickly as before. There was a
stillness on the island, which boded no good, I thought, though our
pursuers evidently believed that we had escaped them.
"They probably think we swam ashore earlier in the game," said Duncan.
"They must be sick at not having spotted us."
"I wonder what they are up to now?"
"Probably destroying evidence, and getting ready to clear out, if they
really have a notion that their big men over here may be involved.
Unfortunately, these papers don't give anything away, so far as I can
see except that they're addressed to Schramm; but it's quite obvious
what they were doing."
We lay still and waited, listening to the strangely peaceful lapping of
the water round our rock, and watching the big sea-perch and rock-cod
that moved like shadows below.
"I wonder if that fellow suspects mischief," said Duncan, pointing over
the cliff. "By Jove! isn't he splendid?"
Over the highest point of the island a white-headed eagle was mounting,
in great, slow, sweeping circles, without one beat of the long, dark
wings that must have measured seven feet from tip to tip.
"It's too splendid to be the German eagle. Praise the Lord, it's the
native species; and he's taking his time because he has to take wide
views. He has to soar high enough to get his bearings."
Up and up, the glorious creature circled, till he dwindled in the
dazzling blue to the size of a sea-gull; and still he wheeled and
mounted, till he became a black dot no bigger than an English sky-lark.
Then he moved, like a bullet, due east.
"I almost believe in omens," said Duncan. "Ah, look out! There they
come!"
The masts of a large yacht, which must have emerged from the private
harbor of which Captain Humphrey spoke, came slowly round the island. We
had only just time to slip into the water, behind our rock, before she
came into full view. She passed so near to us that the low sun cast the
traveling shadows of her railing almost within reach of my hand; and the
shadows of her two boats on the port side came along the clear green
water between us and the island, like the gray ghosts of some old
pirate's dinghies.
She must have been still in sight, and we were still in our
hiding-place, when it seemed as if the island tried to leap towards the
sky, and we were deafened by a terrific concussion. Fragments of wood,
and great pieces of stone, dropped all round us in the poppling water,
and more than one deadly missile struck the rock itself.
"They've blown up the whole show!" cried Duncan. "There can't be
anybody left alive on the island!"
We waited--ten minutes or more--to see if other explosions were to
follow. Then we swam for clam-beach to investigate. It was littered with
fragments of the buildings that had been destroyed. The tarred roof of a
shed had been dropped there almost intact, as if from the claws of some
gigantic eagle. The pine-wood looked as if it had been subjected to a
barrage fire; and, in many places, the undergrowth was burning
furiously.