“Oh! we’ll anchor anywhere here, we’re just at the mouth of the fiord; I’ll tow her inshore if you’ll steer in that direction.” He pointed vaguely at a blur of trees and cliff. Then he jumped into the dinghy, cast off the painter, and, after snatching at the slack of a rope, began towing the reluctant yacht by short jerks of the sculls. The menacing aspect of that grey void, combined with a natural preference for getting to some definite place at night, combined to depress my spirits afresh. In my sleep I had dreamt of Morven Lodge, of heather tea-parties after glorious slaughters of grouse, of salmon leaping in amber pools—and now——
“Just take a cast of the lead, will you?” came Davies’s voice above the splash of the sculls.
“Where is it?” I shouted back.
“Never mind—we’re close enough now; let—— Can you manage to let go the anchor?”
I hurried forward and picked impotently at the bonds of the sleeping monster. But Davies was aboard again, and stirred him with a deft touch or two, till he crashed into the water with a grinding of chain.
“We shall do well here,” said he.
“Isn’t this rather an open anchorage?” I suggested.
“It’s only open from that quarter,” he replied. “If it comes on to blow from there we shall have to clear out; but I think it’s only rain. Let’s stow the sails.”
Another whirlwind of activity, in which I joined as effectively as I could, oppressed by the prospect of having to “clear out”—who knows whither?—at midnight. But Davies’s sang froid was infectious, I suppose, and the little den below, bright-lit and soon fragrant with cookery, pleaded insistently for affection. Yachting in this singular style was hungry work, I found. Steak tastes none the worse for having been wrapped in newspaper, and the slight traces of the day’s news disappear with frying in onions and potato-chips. Davies was indeed on his mettle for this, his first dinner to his guest; for he produced with stealthy pride, not from the dishonoured grave of the beer, but from some more hallowed recess, a bottle of German champagne, from which we drank success to the Dulcibella.
“I wish you would tell me all about your cruise from England,” I asked. “You must have had some exciting adventures. Here are the charts; let’s go over them.”