"But never fear, I shall give them a beautiful sermon! The text will be the passage about Joshua and the spies, and the first hymn will be, 'Onward, Christian Sailors.'"
He threw me a humorous glance and went out. I smiled back, but I confess I was not very much amused. Neither the irreverence nor the jest about the sailors (since it referred apparently to me) struck me as in the best of taste.
That morning was one of the dreariest I ever spent. The wind rose to half a gale, and the fine rain beat in torrents on the panes. I wrote diligently for some time, but after a while I grew tired of that and paced the floor in my stockinged feet (for the sake of quietness) like a caged animal. My one consolation was that to-morrow would see the end of my visit. Already I longed for the cramped quarters and perpetual risks of the submarine, and detested these islands even more bitterly than I hated any other part of Britain.
In the early afternoon I had a pleasant surprise. Tiel came in and told me that his servant had gone out for the rest of the day, and that I could safely come down to the parlour. There I had a late luncheon in comparative comfort, and moreover I could look out of the windows on to the sea. And what a dreary prospect I saw! Under a heavy sky and with grey showers rolling over it, that open treeless country looked desolation itself. As for the waters, whitecaps chased each other over the wind-whipped expanse of grey, fading into a wet blur of moving rain a few miles out. Through this loomed the nearer lines of giant ships, while the farther were blotted clean out. I thought of the long winters when one day of this weather followed another for week after week, month after month; when the northern days were brief and the nights interminable, and this armada lay in these remote isles enduring and waiting. The German navy has had its gloomy and impatient seasons, but not such a prolonged purgatory as that. We have a different arrangement. Probably everybody knows what it is—still, one must not say.
After lunch, when we had lit our cigars, Tiel said—
"By the way, you will be pleased to hear that my efforts this morning were so successful that the people want me to give them another dose next Sunday."
I stared at him.
"Really?" I exclaimed.
He nodded.
"But I thought there would be another preacher next Sunday."