“Did you also get a dousing, Krappohl?” I asked. “Then you didn’t look out, either. That rascal soaked my cigarette just as he did the lenses on your spy-glass. That’s the dickens of a trick.”
With the word “rascal” I meant the splashing wave, which, while the sea was in a perfect calm, without any reason climbed up to us on the tower. If there had been a storm it would have been nothing to mention. Then we often did not have a dry thread on our bodies. But such a shameless scoundrel, which in the midst of the most beautiful weather suddenly throws himself over a person, is something to make one angry.
We made good speed. The water, which was thrown aside by the bow, passed by us in two wide white formed streaks. The motor rattled and rumbled, and the ventilation machine in the so-called “Centrale” right under our feet made a monotonous buzzing. Through the only opening where the air could pass out, the open tower hatch, all kinds of odors flowed one after another from the lower regions right by our noses. First we smelled smear-oil. Then the fragrance of oranges (we had with us a large shipment, which we had received as a gift of love), and now—ah! Now it was coffee, a strong aromatic coffee odor.
Lieutenant Petersen moved back and forth unrestingly on the “swimwest,” with which he had tried to make it a little more comfortable for himself on the hard sitting place, bent deeper and deeper down into the hatch inhaling with greed the odor from below, and said, as he in pleasant anticipation began to rub his hands together:
“Now we’ll have coffee, Herr Captain-Lieutenant!”
I had just with a great deal of trouble pulled out a cigarette-case from the inside pocket of my skin jacket and was groping in my other pockets for matches, when a hand (the gloves number 9½) with outstretched forefinger reached towards me from behind and the subordinate officer’s excited voice announced:
“A cloud of smoke four points port.”
As quickly as lightning the spy-glass was placed to the eye. “Where? Oh, yes, there. I can see it!”
“As yet, only smoke can be seen. Isn’t it so?”
In what a suspense we were now. Leaning forward, and with the glasses pressed to the eye, we gazed on the little, distant, cloud of smoke. It curled, then bent with the wind and slowly dissolved in a long, thin veil-like streak. Nothing but smoke could be seen, a sign that the air was clear, and one could see all the way to the extreme horizon.