He looked at me. I had no very clear opinion. It was anything but wild in one sense, but there seemed to be wild enough spots for ducks. The shore we were passing appeared to be bordered by lonely marshes, though a spacious champaign showed behind. If it were not for the beautiful places we had seen, and my growing taste for our way of seeing them, his disappointing vagueness would have nettled me more than it did. For, after all, he had brought me out loaded with sporting equipment under a promise of shooting.
“Bad weather is what we want for ducks,” he said; “but I’m afraid we’re in the wrong place for them. Now, if it was the North Sea, among those Frisian Islands——” His tone was timid and interrogative, and I felt at once that he was sounding me as to some unpalatable plan whose nature began to dawn on me.
He stammered on through a sentence or two about “wildness” and “nobody to interfere with you,” and then I broke in: “You surely don’t want to leave the Baltic?”
“Why not?” said he, staring into the compass.
“Hang it, man!” I returned, tartly, “here we are in October, the summer over, and the weather gone to pieces. We’re alone in a cockle-shell boat, at a time when every other yacht of our size is laying up for the winter. Luckily, we seem to have struck an ideal cruising-ground, with a wide choice of safe fiords and a good prospect of ducks, if we choose to take a little trouble about them. You can’t mean to waste time and run risks” (I thought of the torn leaf in the log-book) “in a long voyage to those forbidding haunts of yours in the North Sea.”
“It’s not very long,” said Davies, doggedly. “Part of it’s canal, and the rest is quite safe if you’re careful. There’s plenty of sheltered water, and it’s not really necessary——”
“What’s it all for?” I interrupted, impatiently. “We haven’t tried for shooting here yet. You’ve no notion, have you, of getting the boat back to England this autumn?”
“England?” he muttered. “Oh, I don’t much care.” Again his vagueness jarred on me; there seemed to be some bar between us, invisible and insurmountable. And, after all, what was I doing here? Roughing it in a shabby little yacht, utterly out of my element, with a man who, a week ago, was nothing to me, and who now was a tiresome enigma. Like swift poison the old morbid mood in which I left London spread through me. All I had learnt and seen slipped away; what I had suffered remained. I was on the point of saying something which might have put a precipitate end to our cruise, but he anticipated me.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he broke out, “for being such a selfish brute. I don’t know what I was thinking about. You’re a brick to join me in this sort of life, and I’m afraid I’m an infernally bad host. Of course this is just the place to cruise. I forgot about the scenery, and all that. Let’s ask about the ducks here. As you say, we’re sure to get sport if we worry and push a bit. We must be nearly there now—yes, there’s the entrance. Take the helm, will you?”
He sprang up the mast like a monkey, and gazed over the land from the cross-trees. I looked up at my enigma and thanked Providence I had not spoken; for no one could have resisted his frank outburst of good nature. Yet it occurred to me that, considering the conditions of our life, our intimacy was strangely slow in growth. I had no clue yet as to where his idiosyncrasies began and his self ended, and he, I surmised, was in the same stage towards me. Otherwise I should have pressed him further now, for I felt convinced that there was some mystery in his behaviour which I had not yet accounted for. However, light was soon to break.