Kalliope held her dripping oars above the water and stared at the writhing hose. The boat lay still. The Queen remembered what her father had said at breakfast. The steamer might have come to the island for water. It was possible that the engine was sucking water in through the hose, not driving some other liquid out through it. But the Queen could not remember any spring or well of fresh water in the cave. She signed to Kalliope. The girl dipped her oars again. The boat moved towards the entrance of the cave.
One of the ship’s boats, with four men in her, lay right under the high archway of the entrance. A man stood up and signed to the Queen, shaking his head.
“Es ist verboten,” he said.
Then, with gestures which could not be mistaken he repeated gruffly, “Verboten.”
To the Queen it seemed absurd that a strange sailor should try to prevent her from rowing into a cave in her own island whenever she chose. She took no notice of the man. Kalliope rowed on. Two of the men in the ship’s boat leaned over her side and caught Kalliope’s oars.
Kalliope was a young woman of imperturbably good temper. She smiled amiably at the men and then turned to the Queen.
“Blighters,” she said. “Bloody blighters.”
She was also a young woman of spirit and ready presence of mind. With a swift jerk she dragged the slippery blade from the man’s hands. She pulled it towards her beyond the man’s reach. Then with a sudden vigorous thrust she drove the blade into the face of the nearest sailor. It took him full in the mouth and knocked him backwards. He picked himself up and spat out the broken fragments of some teeth. Kalliope laughed joyously.
“Bloody blighters,” she said, and for once the epithet was appropriate enough.
The Queen felt that the situation was neither agreeable nor dignified. It is very well, no doubt, for wild, half-barbarous girls like Kalliope to engage in fights with German sailors; but for a civilized American, a graduate of a university, such things are impossible. And for a Queen! Can a queen brawl without hopeless loss of dignity? Her immediate impulse was to appeal to the captain of the steamer, to assert her right to enter the cave, to demand the immediate punishment of the men who had stopped her.