“They’ll last ten days,” he said, as we followed the throng, still clinging like a barnacle to the side of the Johannes. We spent the few minutes while the lock was emptied in a farewell talk to Bartels. Karl had hitched their main halyards on to the windlass and was grinding at it in an acharnement of industry, his shock head jerking and his grubby face perspiring. Then the lock-gates opened; and so, in a Babel of shouting, whining of blocks, and creaking of spars, our whole company was split out into the dingy bosom of the Elbe. The Johannes gathered way under wind and tide and headed for midstream. A last shake of the hand, and Bartels reluctantly slipped the head-rope and we drifted apart. “Gute Reise! Gute Reise!” It was no time for regretful gazing, for the flood-tide was sweeping us up and out, and it was not until we had set the foresail, edged into a shallow bight, and let go our anchor, that we had leisure to think of him again; but by that time his and the other craft were shades in the murky east.
We swung close to a glacis of smooth blue mud which sloped up to a weed-grown dyke; behind lay the same flat country, colourless, humid; and opposite us, two miles away, scarcely visible in the deepening twilight, ran the outline of a similar shore. Between rolled the turgid Elbe. “The Styx flowing through Tartarus,” I thought to myself, recalling some of our Baltic anchorages.
I told my news to Davies as soon as the anchor was down, instinctively leaving the sex of the inquirer to the last, as my informant had done.
“The Medusa called yesterday?” he interrupted. “And outward bound? That’s a rum thing. Why didn’t he inquire when he was going up?”
“It was a lady,” and I drily retailed the official’s story, very busy with a deck-broom the while. “We’re all square now, aren’t we?” I ended. “I’ll go below and light the stove.”
Davies had been engaged in fixing up the riding-light. When I last saw him he was still so engaged, but motionless, the lantern under his left arm and his right hand grasping the forestay and the half-knotted lanyard; his eyes staring fixedly down the river, a strange look in his face, half exultant, half perplexed. When he joined me and spoke he seemed to be concluding a difficult argument.
“Anyway, it proves,” he said, “that the Medusa has gone back to Norderney. That’s the main thing.”
“Probably,” I agreed, “but let’s sum up all we know. First, it’s certain that nobody we’ve met as yet has any suspicion of us——”
“I told you he did it off his own bat,” threw in Davies.
“Or, secondly, of him. If he’s what you think it’s not known here.”