“Come to Satrup,” they said; “all the smacks are there, round the point. There is good punch in the inn.”
Nothing loth, we followed in the dinghy, skirted a bend of the Sound, and opened up the lights of a village, with some smacks at anchor in front of it. We were escorted to the inn, and introduced to a formidable beverage, called coffee-punch, and a smoke-wreathed circle of smacksmen, who talked German out of courtesy, but were Danish in all else. Davies was at once at home with them, to a degree, indeed, that I envied. His German was of the crudest kind, bizarre in vocabulary and comical in accent; but the freemasonry of the sea, or some charm of his own, gave intuition to both him and his hearers. I cut a poor figure in this nautical gathering, though Davies, who persistently referred to me as “meiner Freund”, tried hard to represent me as a kindred spirit and to include me in the general talk. I was detected at once as an uninteresting hybrid. Davies, who sometimes appealed to me for a word, was deep in talk over anchorages and ducks, especially, as I well remember now, about the chance of sport in a certain Schlei Fiord. I fell into utter neglect, till rescued by a taciturn person in spectacles and a very high cap, who appeared to be the only landsman present. After silently puffing smoke in my direction for some time, he asked me if I was married, and if not, when I proposed to be. After this inquisition he abandoned me.
It was eleven before we left this hospitable inn, escorted by the whole party to the dinghy. Our friends of the smack insisted on our sharing their boat out of pure good-fellowship—for there was not nearly room for us—and would not let us go till a bucket of fresh-caught fish had been emptied into her bottom. After much shaking of scaly hands, we sculled back to the Dulcibella, where she slept in a bed of tremulous stars.
Davies sniffed the wind and scanned the tree-tops, where light gusts were toying with the leaves.
“Sou’-west still,” he said, “and more rain coming. But it’s bound to shift into the north.”
“Will that be a good wind for us?”
“It depends where we go,” he said, slowly. “I was asking those fellows about duck-shooting. They seemed to think the best place would be Schlei Fiord. That’s about fifteen miles south of Sonderburg, on the way to Kiel. They said there was a pilot chap living at the mouth who would tell us all about it. They weren’t very encouraging though. We should want a north wind for that.”
“I don’t care where we go,” I said, to my own surprise.
“Don’t you really?” he rejoined, with sudden warmth. Then, with a slight change of voice. “You mean it’s all very jolly about here?”
Of course I meant that. Before we went below we both looked for a moment at the little grey memorial; its slender fretted arch outlined in tender lights and darks above the hollow on the Alsen shore. The night was that of September 27, the third I had spent on the Dulcibella.