"But, monsieur," we said, "if we were swimming in the sea, or cast off on a desert island, you would rescue us."
He admitted it.
"Well, what is the difference? Here we cannot get away; the food is growing less and less."
He objected that he had no boats, and no life-saving apparatus.
"That is nothing. We must get away from here. We will give you a paper saying that it is on our own responsibility. In this country one cannot telegraph, the telegrams never arrive. You know the Balkans."
He smiled.
"Oui, oui, c'est un pays où le Bon Dieu n'a pas passé, ou au moins il a peut-être passé en aeroplane."
At last he agreed to take us if we could get a letter from Fabiano, and so take the responsibility from his shoulders. This we got. Fabiano said "Au revoir, bon voyage" for the fifth time, and at dawn we got a call, and quitted the bar-room floor for ever. Fabiano wished us "bon voyage" for the sixth time in the chilly dawn, and we embarked.
The mate, a little round man, greeted us, and in the moments when they were not rushing about with ropes and chains the cook explained the Austrian submarine attack.
"You see, monsieur et dame," said he, "they came in over there. The Benedetto was lying outside of that sandbank, and that is the torpedo which is lying on the beach. The one aimed at us came straight, one could see the whorls of the water coming straight at us, but it just tipped the sandbank and dived underneath our keel. It stuck in the mud then, and the water boiled over it for a long while."