Nothing disturbed my rest that night, so adaptable1 is youth and so masterful is nature. At times I was remotely aware of a threshing of rain and a humming of wind, with a nervous kicking of the little hull2, and at one moment I dreamt I saw an apparition3 by candle-light of Davies, clad in pyjamas4 and huge top-boots, grasping a misty5 lantern of gigantic proportions. But the apparition mounted the ladder and disappeared, and I passed to other dreams.
A blast in my ear, like the voice of fifty trombones, galvanised me into full consciousness. The musician, smiling and tousled, was at my bedside, raising a foghorn6 to his lips with deadly intention. “It’s a way we have in the Dulcibella,” he said, as I started up on one elbow. “I didn’t startle you much, did I?” he added.
“Well, I like the mattinata better than the cold douche,” I answered, thinking of yesterday.
“Fine day and magnificent breeze!” he answered. My sensations this morning were vastly livelier than those of yesterday at the same hour. My limbs were supple7 again and my head clear. Not even the searching wind could mar8 the ecstasy9 of that plunge10 down to smooth, seductive sand, where I buried greedy fingers and looked through a medium blue, with that translucent11 blue, fairy-faint and angel-pure, that you see in perfection only in the heart of ice. Up again to sun, wind, and the forest whispers from the shore; down just once more to see the uncouth12 anchor stabbing the sand’s soft bosom13 with one rusty14 fang15, deaf and inert16 to the Dulcibella’s puny17 efforts to drag him from his prey18. Back, holding by the cable as a rusty clue from heaven to earth, up to that bourgeoise little maiden’s bows; back to breakfast, with an appetite not to be blunted by condensed milk and somewhat passé bread. An hour later we had dressed the Dulcibella for the road, and were foaming20 into the grey void of yesterday, now a noble expanse of wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills, their every outline vivid in the rain-washed air.
I cannot pretend that I really enjoyed this first sail into the open, though I was keenly anxious to do so. I felt the thrill of those forward leaps, heard that persuasive21 song the foam19 sings under the lee-bow, saw the flashing harmonies of sea and sky; but sensuous22 perception was deadened by nervousness. The yacht looked smaller than ever outside the quiet fiord. The song of the foam seemed very near, the wave crests23 aft very high. The novice24 in sailing clings desperately25 to the thoughts of sailors—effective, prudent26 persons, with a typical jargon27 and a typical dress, versed28 in local currents and winds. I could not help missing this professional element. Davies, as he sat grasping his beloved tiller, looked strikingly efficient in his way, and supremely29 at home in his surroundings; but he looked the amateur through and through, as with one hand, and (it seemed) one eye, he wrestled30 with a spray-splashed chart half unrolled on the deck beside him. All his casual ways returned to me—his casual talk and that last adventurous31 voyage to the Baltic, and the suspicions his reticence32 had aroused.
“Do you see a monument anywhere?” he said, all at once; and, before I could answer; “We must take another reef.” He let go of the tiller and relit his pipe, while the yacht rounded sharply to, and in a twinkling was tossing head to sea with loud claps of her canvas and passionate33 jerks of her boom, as the wind leapt on its quarry34, now turning to bay, with redoubled force. The sting of spray in my eyes and the Babel of noise dazed me; but Davies, with a pull on the fore-sheet, soothed35 the tormented36 little ship, and left her coolly sparring with the waves while he shortened sail and puffed37 his pipe. An hour later the narrow vista38 of Als Sound was visible, with quiet old Sonderburg sunning itself on the island shore, and the Dybbol heights towering above—the Dybbol of bloody39 memory; scene of the last desperate stand of the Danes in ’64, ere the Prussians wrested40 the two fair provinces from them.
“It’s early to anchor, and I hate towns,” said Davies, as one section of a lumbering41 pontoon bridge opened to give us passage. But I was firm on the need for a walk, and got my way on condition that I bought stores as well, and returned in time to admit of further advance to a “quiet anchorage”. Never did I step on the solid earth with stranger feelings, partly due to relief from confinement42, partly to that sense of independence in travelling, which, for those who go down to the sea in small ships, can make the foulest43 coal-port in Northumbria seem attractive. And here I had fascinating Sonderburg, with its broad-eaved houses of carved woodwork, each fresh with cleansing44, yet reverend with age; its fair-haired Viking-like men, and rosy45, plain-faced women, with their bullet foreheads and large mouths; Sonderburg still Danish to the core under its Teuton veneer46. Crossing the bridge I climbed the Dybbol—dotted with memorials of that heroic defence—and thence could see the wee form and gossamer47 rigging of the Dulcibella on the silver ribbon of the Sound, and was reminded by the sight that there were stores to be bought. So I hurried down again to the old quarter and bargained over eggs and bread with a dear old lady, pink as a débutante, made a patriotic48 pretence49 of not understanding German, and called in her strapping50 son, whose few words of English, being chiefly nautical51 slang picked up on a British trawler, were peculiarly useless for the purpose. Davies had tea ready when I came aboard again, and, drinking it on deck, we proceeded up the sheltered Sound, which, in spite of its imposing52 name, was no bigger than an inland river, only the hosts of rainbow jelly-fish reminding us that we were threading a highway of ocean. There is no rise and fall of tide in these regions to disfigure the shore with mud. Here was a shelving gravel53 bank; there a bed of whispering rushes; there again young birch trees growing to the very brink54, each wearing a stocking of bright moss55 and setting its foot firmly in among golden leaves and scarlet56 fungus57.
Davies was preoccupied58, but he lighted up when I talked of the Danish war. “Germany’s a thundering great nation,” he said; “I wonder if we shall ever fight her.” A little incident that happened after we anchored deepened the impression left by this conversation. We crept at dusk into a shaded back-water, where our keel almost touched the gravel bed. Opposite us on the Alsen shore there showed, clean-cut against the sky, the spire59 of a little monument rising from a leafy hollow.
“I wonder what that is,” I said. It was scarcely a minute’s row in the dinghy, and when the anchor was down we sculled over to it. A bank of loam60 led to gorse and bramble. Pushing aside some branches we came to a slender Gothic memorial in grey stone, inscribed61 with bas-reliefs of battle scenes, showing Prussians forcing a landing in boats and Danes resisting with savage62 tenacity63. In the failing light we spelt out an inscription64: “Den bei dem Meeres Uebergange und der Eroberung von Alsen am 29. Juni 1864 heldenmüthig gefallenen zum ehrenden Gedächtniss.” “To the honoured memory of those who died heroically at the invasion and storming of Alsen.” I knew the German passion for commemoration; I had seen similar memorials on Alsatian battlefields, and several on the Dybbo............