“They’ll last ten days,” he said, as we followed the throng, still clinging like a barnacle to the side of the _Johannes_. We spent the few minutes while the lock was emptied in a farewell talk to Bartels. Karl had hitched their main halyards on to the windlass and was grinding at it in an _acharnement_ of industry, his shock head jerking and his grubby face perspiring. Then the lock-gates opened; and so, in a Babel of shouting, whining of blocks, and creaking of spars, our whole company was split out into the dingy bosom of the Elbe. The _Johannes_ gathered way under wind and tide and headed for midstream. A last shake of the hand, and Bartels reluctantly slipped the head-rope and we drifted apart. “Gute Reise! Gute Reise!” It was no time for regretful gazing, for the flood-tide was sweeping us up and out, and it was not until we had set the foresail, edged into a shallow bight, and let go our anchor, that we had leisure to think of him again; but by that time his and the other craft were shades in the murky east.
We swung close to a _glacis_ of smooth blue mud which sloped up to a weed-grown dyke; behind lay the same flat country, colourless, humid; and opposite us, two miles away, scarcely visible in the deepening twilight, ran the outline of a similar shore. Between rolled the turgid Elbe. “The Styx flowing through Tartarus,” I thought to myself, recalling some of our Baltic anchorages.
I told my news to Davies as soon as the anchor was down, instinctively leaving the sex of the inquirer to the last, as my informant had done.
“The _Medusa_ called yesterday?” he interrupted. “And outward bound? That’s a rum thing. Why didn’t he inquire when he was going _up_?”
“It was a lady,” and I drily retailed the official’s story, very busy with a deck-broom the while. “We’re all square now, aren’t we?” I ended. “I’ll go below and light the stove.”
Davies had been engaged in fixing up the riding-light. When I last saw him he was still so engaged, but motionless, the lantern under his left arm and his right hand grasping the forestay and the half-knotted lanyard; his eyes staring fixedly down the river, a strange look in his face, half exultant, half perplexed. When he joined me and spoke he seemed to be concluding a difficult argument.