Part 19

“By God!” said Lyngstrand, solemnly, setting his teeth and staring sternly at the charthouse wall. “If I were sure of it----!”

“What do you mean?” asked Jensen, struck by this sudden change from his friend’s ordinarily meek demeanour. “What has it to do with you?”

Lyngstrand turned to him with a bitter little laugh. He seemed, indeed, a different man.

“More than you think, my friend,” he said, briefly. “I am not good company for U-boat commanders!”

“But why?--You lost no one----?”

Lyngstrand’s serious eyes held his.

“You remember I went to America in 1917, Jensen? I met a girl there--we were betrothed. She was coming to Europe to me last year. She never arrived. Her ship--a neutral--a small Norwegian ship, the _Trondhjem_, on which I had arranged for her passage--was torpedoed in the Atlantic last September--_spurlos versenkt_!” He finished in a tone of bitter mimicry, and then suddenly hid his face in his hands through a silence which Jensen felt incapable of breaking. At last he looked up again. “If ever I trace the scoundrel who murdered her----!” The ugly menace in his voice supplied the final clause to his unfinished sentence.

“A difficult task!” murmured Jensen, sympathetically.

Lyngstrand glanced at the closed drawer of the locker.

“When I think that perhaps on that chart--one of those little red crosses----” He crashed his hand upon the table. “By God, Jensen! I would give something to have another look at it!”

Jensen laid a friendly hand on his shoulder.

“We will do our best, Lyngstrand, to see it again. But don’t torture yourself about it now. Come out on deck. The barometer is rising, and if the sea goes down to-morrow we shall want to keep clear heads for our investigation of the _Gloucester City_.--Come!”

He rose and held out his friend’s oilskins, helped him on with them.

They went out and stood in the shelter of the lee-deck, watching the foam-froth sink down and melt in the depths of the malachite waves that rolled away from them, until soon after eight bells the white-jacketed steward clanged out his announcement of dinner.

They found Captain Horst already at his place at the table in the charthouse. It was significant of the unexpressed but clearly felt antipathy which in the past few days had grown up between the skipper and his passengers that he had commenced his meal without waiting for them. Jensen, however, was a level-headed young man who had not the least intention of jeopardizing the enterprise for which he was responsible by ill-timed open bad-temper. He nodded a greeting with a smile which totally ignored the strained circumstances of their last meeting.

“I think the weather is moderating, Captain Horst,” he said, pleasantly, as he sat down.

“_Ja_,” responded Captain Horst, gruffly, throwing a perfunctory glance through the unshuttered forward windows of the charthouse.

“We ought to reach the neighbourhood of our wreck some time to-night?” pursued Jensen in affable enquiry.

Lyngstrand had addressed himself in silence to the food the steward set before him, but he glanced up as though some undertone of significance in his friend’s voice had caught his ear.

“Thereabouts,” conceded Captain Horst in a tone which sufficiently indicated that he was disinclined for conversation.

But Jensen was cheerfully loquacious.

“I wonder whether we shall hit on some other wreck instead?” he surmised. “These seas must be strewn with them.”

Captain Horst shrugged his shoulders.

Lyngstrand looked up.

“If I were a German U-boat commander,” he said, with a quiet deliberation, his eyes straight on Captain Horst’s face, “I should not dare to sail over these seas again. I should see drowning faces sinking through every wave.”

His last sentence seemed to ring through the silence which followed it. Captain Horst sat impassive, but his brutal jaw looked hard and his cruel mouth thinned during the moment in which he returned Lyngstrand’s glance.

“Bah!” he said. “The dead don’t come back!” There was something of defiance in his harshly contemptuous tone. “They are finished with--for ever!”

The blood went out of Lyngstrand’s face as he bent down again to his plate.

There was no further conversation during the meal.

The afternoon was spent by the two young men, in company with the half-dozen divers under their orders, in overhauling the diving-dresses, air-pumps, etc., which might be required on the morrow.

The gale had obviously blown itself out. The western sky had cleared, the rain had ceased, the wave-tops were no longer torn in flying spume, there was less violence in the rolling surges in whose trough they wallowed. When, a little after four bells, they were summoned to tea, the sun was setting in a golden splendour that promised a peaceful dawn.

Excited by the prospect of the next day’s work, the two young men forgot their suspicions of Captain Horst, could talk of nothing but their plans for diving despite the after-swell of the gale which would surely still be running. The captain listened to their impatience with the ghost of a grim smile, but volunteered no part in the conversation.

“Do you propose to keep under way all night, Captain Horst?” enquired Jensen.

“No,” he replied. “By my dead reckoning we ought to be in the vicinity of the wreck at about eight bells to-night. I shall anchor then if the glass is still rising. To-morrow we will take an observation and get as close as we can to the position of the _Gloucester City_--presuming that you have it correctly stated.”

His tone was perfectly indifferent, but Lyngstrand thought suddenly of that chart with the little red crosses--and particularly that cross on their indicated spot, 50° 55´´ N., 9° 14´´ W, with the fatal date of exactly a year ago--20/9/18. Surely it could not be mere coincidence! He thrilled suddenly with a dramatic perception. If--if it were so--if the man so calmly smiling at him had really sent the _Gloucester City_ to the bottom!--and now, on the anniversary of the crime, was coolly proposing to anchor himself as near as might be over her ocean grave, preparatory to disturbing it on the morrow!--No! He ridiculed himself. It was impossible! No man could have the iron will--he glanced straight into the blue eyes of the impassive Horst, read nothing--no man could stand the strain without betraying himself. The murderer brought back to the scene of his crime broke down into confession--and, if he were the murderer of the _Gloucester City_, Horst was being brought back with ironic inexorability to the site of his assassination, brought back by those subtle, apparently normal, everyday circumstances from which there is no escape.

He wondered to what extent Horst had been informed of the purport of their voyage when the _Upsal_ was chartered. He could not, certainly, have been left in ignorance--but, on the other hand, he could not well refuse to navigate the ship without losing an employment which, however humble, was assuredly to be coveted by a man in his position. A penniless naval officer had poor prospects in Germany. Bah! (he thought to himself in a sudden revulsion) he was accepting Jensen’s unsupported surmises as though they were reality. The thing was impossible! Another glance at the hard but emotionless face opposite him reassured him. He banished his hyper-dramatic idea in a spurn of self-contempt for his too excitable imagination.

Conversation languished. There was no community of thought between the skipper and his passengers, and his presence was a check upon the mutual confidences of the two young men. Meals together were an ordeal escaped from as soon as terminated, and Jensen and Lyngstrand speedily went out on deck again with the murmured allegation that the overhaul of their gear was not yet finished.

They did not come together again until some three hours later, when, her white anchor-light hoisted between her masts, the _Upsal_ was pitching at her cable to the heavy swell which rolled down upon her from the darkness of the night. The two young men had been yarning with the chief engineer in the pleasant warmth of the engine-room, when a glance at the clock reminded them that it was the hour when the steward brought biscuits and cocoa to the charthouse. Light-hearted as boys, their unpleasant thoughts of the captain dissipated by the cheerful talk in which they had been indulging, they scrambled up the iron-runged ladder from the warm, oily depths to the black, damp chill of the outer night.

In this sea-smelling gloom where the wave-tops ran past them with faintly phosphorescent crests, the unwonted stillness of the ship’s engines was suddenly vivid to their consciousness as she eased and tugged at her anchorage.

“Well, here we are!” said Jensen, stopping for a moment to peer around him.

“I wonder what lies beneath us?” queried Lyngstrand, developing his comrade’s thought. As he, too, probed the darkness where the cruel waves ran, easy familiars of the night, he had an uncomfortable little mental picture of the _Gloucester City_ foundering, with torn side, into their chill depths--a year ago. What shrieks and cries had hushed, for ever, into the silence which encompassed them?

Both shuddered.

“Come along,” said Jensen. “Our cocoa will be cold.”

At the charthouse door they hesitated for a moment on an indefinable impulse, peeped through the unshuttered window which allowed a broad ray of light to fall across the deck.

Captain Horst was seated at the table, his head in his hands, his back to them. Spread out before him was the chart with the little red crosses. He sat motionless, staring at it, as though absorbed in reverie. The three cups of cocoa were steaming on the table. His was untouched.

For one wild moment Lyngstrand thought he might be able to surprise a glance at the chart. He turned the handle of the door as stealthily as he could. Slight as the sound had been, however, Captain Horst had heard it. When they entered he was stuffing something into his breast pocket, and the chart was no longer on the table.

They drank their cocoa in silence, Horst staring moodily at the floor, Jensen and Lyngstrand risking a glance of mutual comprehension. Suddenly two loud, sharp knocks broke the stillness--knocks that seemed to be on the charthouse wall.

Captain Horst raised his head.

“_Herein!_” he cried, automatically, obviously without thinking.

Jensen shot a swift look at his friend, eyebrows raised at this German permission of entry. Horst bit his lip, suddenly self-conscious. He repeated the authorization in Swedish.

No one entered.

Expectation was just passing into a vague surprise, when the knocks were repeated--three heavy blows, obviously deliberate, upon the after-wall of the charthouse.

Horst sprang up, with a savage curse of exasperation. He was self-controlled enough, however, to utter his thought in Swedish. “I’ll teach them!” he exclaimed, as he flung open the charthouse door. “Fooling around here!”

He disappeared into the night and they heard the tramp of his heavy sea-boots as he ran round the charthouse. But no other sound woke upon his passage. The circuit completed, they heard his angry yell to the look-out man on the bridge above, heard the quietly normal response, the surprised denial. The interior of the charthouse was a hushed stillness where Jensen and Lyngstrand sat exchanging a smile of malicious enjoyment. Horst vituperated the stammering look-out man in a flood of ugly oaths that were plainly a break-down of nervous control.

The door opened again for his entry.

“Extraordinary thing!” he scowled across at them. “No one there! You heard them, didn’t you?” He seated himself with an angry grunt.

Before they could answer, the knocks recommenced in a sudden vehemence--not slow and deliberate this time, but in a rapid succession which quickened to a fast and furious fusillade from origins that seemed to play, flitting arbitrarily, all over the walls and roof. The charthouse reverberated with them. Their intensity varied at every moment from sharp, hammer-like blows to rapid, nervous taps from what might have been a feverishly agitated pencil. The wild and uncanny tattoo culminated in three crashing blows that seemed to be on the underside of the table itself. There was silence.

“What are you playing at?” cried Horst, glaring at them in fierce suspicion of a hoax.

For answer, they both lifted up their hands, obviously unoccupied, into the air. Even as they did so, the knocks started again, still rapid, but with a certain deliberate rhythm, and much less violent. Again they seemed to be on the underside of the table. Horst looked, with a scowl of distrust, under it to their immobile feet. The two young men glanced at each other, as puzzled and alarmed as Horst himself.

“What in the name of Heaven is it?” cried Jensen.

The knocks swelled suddenly louder as though in answer to his voice.

“Listen!” said Horst, holding up his hand. The colour had gone suddenly out of his face, his eyes fixed themselves in a recognition charged with vague fear. “It’s----!”

“Yes!” cried Jensen, “by all that’s wonderful----!”

“The Morse code!” Lyngstrand completed the sentence.

Once perceived, there was no doubt of it. That succession of irregular taps and pauses coming from the table as from a sounding-board was a plain language to all three of them, unmistakable, not more to be banished from cognition than the reiteration of spoken words.

“But,” cried Lyngstrand, “where does it come from?--We have no wireless--and even wireless could not produce that!”

“Listen!” Jensen reproved him. “It’s a message of some kind!” He glanced across to Horst who sat speechless, his face gray, his eyes terrified. “Not Swedish!--Take it down, Lyngstrand, while I spell it out!”

The young man feverishly produced pencil and paper from his pocket. “Listen!” he cried. “Good God! Do you catch it?”

Three sharp taps--three more widely spaced--three sharp taps again--the series was reiterated insistently--_S--O--S!--S--O--S!--S--O--S!_

“Ready, Lyngstrand?” queried Jensen in the sharp tone of a man concentrating himself for action. His comrade nodded.

Jensen rapped sharply upon the table the wireless operator’s signal of reception. In immediate answer the raps from the invisible source renewed themselves, continued evidently in a message. Lyngstrand jotted down the letters as Jensen spelled them out.

“‘_s-t-e-a-m-s-h-i-p_’--it’s English!” he interjected. “Got it?----” The raps had continued, noted by his brain and coalesced by it into definite words. “‘_Gloucester City_’----”

“_What----?_” ejaculated Lyngstrand, in incredulous amazement, as he rapidly wrote the words.

Jensen continued, his attention fixed upon the unceasing raps.

“--_torpedoed 50-55 north 9-14 west--sinking fast--come quickly--done in_----”

He glanced up to see Horst springing at them like a maddened animal.

“Stop that!” cried the captain. “It’s a trick!--it’s a trick!” In another second he had snatched paper and pencil from Lyngstrand’s hand.

A formidable series of violent crashes, emanating from walls, roof, and table, was the instant response to his action. He shrank back, appalled, crouching with eyes that searched the surrounding walls in agonized apprehension. “It’s a trick!--it’s a diabolical trick!” he muttered. “_It must be!_”

“Captain Horst!” said Jensen, with sternly level authority. “Be good enough to sit down and remain quiet. All matters relating to the _Gloucester City_ come within my province.”

Horst, his arms up as though to guard himself, went slowly backward to his seat but did not sit. There was madness in his eyes. “How could they know?” he said to himself in a sharp-breathed whisper, “--_the exact words!_----”

“What do you mean?” queried Lyngstrand, curiously. Horst replied without thinking, more to himself than to his questioner.

“The exact words of her call for help--a year ago! My wireless picked it up after we had left her----” He stopped suddenly, realized that he had betrayed himself.

“Then----!” cried Lyngstrand, jumping up from his seat and taking a step forward. His eyes, full of menace, searched the ex-U-boat commander’s face.

“Be quiet--both of you!” commanded Jensen, holding up his hand. The regular succession of raps had commenced again. Jensen listened to them, nodded. Then he himself rapped a message in English on the table--“_who are you?_”

Horst and Lyngstrand listened in dead silence as the answer spelled itself out upon the table.

“_h-e-n-r-y s-m-i-t-h w-i-r-e-l-e-s-s o-p-e-r-a-t-o-r g-l-o-u-c-e-s-t-e-r c-i-t-y._”

Jensen turned a glance of wonderment to his comrade. Horst, reading the message as currently as the others, looked as though about to faint.

“Stop it!” he said, hoarsely. “Stop it!”

Jensen ignored him, rapped again upon the table--“_where are you now?_”

The answer came immediately.

“_a-t y-o-u-r s-i-d-e_”

The three of them sprang back simultaneously, as from the presence of a ghost. Their eyes probed empty air.

Jensen spoke aloud, still in English.

“Can you see us--hear us?”

The raps of the invisible hand upon the table replied at once.

“_y-e-s_”

“_Mein Gott!_” muttered Horst. “I shall go mad!” Jensen continued his colloquy.

“Where is the _Gloucester City_?” He smiled to himself as though setting a trap for this unseen intelligence. “Is she still afloat?”

The raps recommenced without hesitation.

“_y-o-u-r a-n-c-h-o-r f-i-x-e-d- i-n u-p-p-e-r w-o-r-k-s_”

Lyngstrand uttered an ejaculation of awed astonishment. He looked to see the sweat pearling on Captain Horst’s forehead.

The raps spelled out, spontaneously, an explanatory afterward.

“_w-e l-e-d y-o-u t-o i-t_”

“_We?_” queried Jensen. “Who are ‘_we_’?”

“_t-h-e d-r-o-w-n-e-d_” The raps were decisive.

“Why?” Lyngstrand admired his comrade’s steely self-control. “Why did you lead us to it?”

“_h-e c-a-n g-u-e-s-s_”

“Who?”

“_t-h-e m-u-r-d-e-r-e-r_”

Both glanced swiftly at Horst. He was speechless, his face a study in blanched terror.

“_h-e k-n-o-w-s_” added the raps. There was something indefinably malicious about their sound.

“Stop it!” Horst’s voice was strangled, scarcely audible. “Stop it!”

Jensen was unmoved.

“How many of you?” he asked.

Lyngstrand, fascinated by this conversation with the unseen, was grateful for the question.

“_t-h-r-e-e h-u-n-d-r-e-d a-n-d e-i-g-h-t g-l-o-u-c-e-s-t-e-r c-i-t-y h-u-n-d-r-e-d a-n-d f-i-v-e r-e-s-c-u-e-d o-t-h-e-r s-h-i-p-s f-o-u-r h-u-n-d-r-e-d a-n-d t-h-i-r-t-e-e-n i-n a-l-l_”

“All men?” queried Jensen.

“_t-w-e-n-t-y-f-i-v-e w-o-m-e-n_”

“My God!” muttered Lyngstrand, in a sudden vivid remembrance that stabbed him like a pain. He glanced at Horst.

Jensen glanced also, and was merciless.

“Are you all here?” he asked.

“_y-e-s_” There was a little pause, “_h-u-n-d-r-e-d-s m-o-r-e I d-o-n-t k-n-o-w d-r-o-w-n-e-d o-t-h-e-r s-u-n-k s-h-i-p-s a-l-l h-e-r-e_”

Lyngstrand shivered, looked around him uneasily. Jensen’s voice scarcely betrayed a tremor as he pursued.

“What have you come for?”

“_w-e h-a-v-e c-o-m-e f-o-r h-i-m_”

“No!--no!” screamed Horst, suddenly. “No!--_Ach, Gott, schütze mich!_”

Both Lyngstrand and Jensen had a sense of inaudible mocking laughter in the air about them. There was an awful silence.

The raps recommenced spontaneously.

“_t-e-l-l h-i-m t-h-e-y a-r-e f-i-l-i-n-g p-a-s-t h-i-m i-d-e-n-t-i-f-y-i-n-g h-i-m_”

Jensen turned to Horst.

“You hear?” he asked, grimly.

But Horst, with a blood-curdling scream of terror, had flung himself at the charthouse door, thrown it open. They heard the hiss and sough of the dark seas. He plunged out, blindly, head-foremost. Then, just beyond the threshold, he stopped, recoiled, staggered back into the charthouse.

“No!” he gasped, hoarsely. “No!--_I can’t face them! I can’t face them!_--I can’t die!--I dare not!”

He shook in a palsy of the faculties. His eyes agonizedly sought their unsympathetic faces. The German submarine commander is a pariah among seafaring men, whatever their nationality. He realized it, hopelessly, as he met their hard eyes. With a sob of self-pity, he stumbled across to a corner of the charthouse, sank down upon the seat, covered his face with his hands.

Lyngstrand’s young features were sternly set as he glanced at him. Then he took a long breath, the preparatory oxygen-renewal of the man who dares an experiment that will tax him. He rapped the wireless “call-up” upon the table.

“Can the others communicate also?” he asked, loudly, in English. He, also, was trembling.

The answer came at once.

“_o-n-l-y t-h-r-o-u-g-h m-e_” There was a slight pause, then the raps recommenced again, “_l-a-d-y h-e-r-e h-a-s a m-e-s-s-a-g-e f-o-r p-e-t-e-r_” the raps hesitated “_p-e-t-e-r f-u-n-n-y n-a-m-e c-a-n-t c-a-t-c-h i-t_----”

Lyngstrand’s face went deathly white.

“Yes,” he gasped, just only able to speak, “--Peter--yes--go on!” He looked at the table as though expecting to see the hand that was rapping out the message. Tap-tap-tap, it came.

“_p-e-t-e-r l-i-n-g-s-t-r-a-n-d_”

“Yes--here!” he gasped. “Go on!--who is it?”

“_m-a-r-y t-i-l-l-o-t-s-o-n_”

He reeled against the table, clutched at it.

“My God!” he murmured to himself, his eyes closing, his teeth grinding upon one another in an agony of emotion. Then, with a supreme effort of self-control, he asked, loudly: “The message? Give it me!”

“_s-h-e s-a-y-s s-h-e s-u-r-e l-o-v-e-s y-o-u s-t-i-l-l a-n-d i-s w-a-i-t-i-n-g f-o-r y-o-u_”

“Mary!” The cry burst from him, sobbingly, on a note of poignant anguish. Jensen felt the tears start to his eyes. Horst cowered still, face hidden, in his corner.

There was a long moment in which Lyngstrand failed to bring another sound to utterance. He swayed as though about to faint. Then once more he mastered himself.

“What--what happened?” he asked, unsteadily. “How did she die? Was she torpedoed?”

“_s-h-e s-a-y-s s-t-e-a-m-e-r t-r-o-n-d-h-j-e-m s-u-n-k g-u-n-f-i-r-e r-e-s-c-u-e-d s-m-a-l-l b-o-a-t b-y g-l-o-u-c-e-s-t-e-r c-i-t-y a-f-t-e-r-w-a-r-d t-o-r-p-e-d-o-e-d_”

Lyngstrand reeled with closed eyes. He had a vivid vision of the torn wreck in the depths beneath them, carnivorous fish darting where their anchor grappled its untenanted bridge.

“Did--did they have a chance?” he asked.

“_n-i-g-h-t w-i-t-h-o-u-t w-a-r-n-i-n-g_” came the answer.

Lyngstrand drew another deep breath, glanced at the motionless Horst.

“And--and the man--the man who sank her?”

“_k-a-p-i-t-a-n-l-e-u-t-n-a-n-t h-o-r-s-t_” There was a terrible precision in those raps.

They ceased. There was a deathly stillness. Through long moments, not one of the three men in the charthouse moved. Then Lyngstrand turned slowly. He took three steps toward Captain Horst, stood over him. The only sounds were the creaking of gear as the _Upsal_ rose and subsided on the swell, the swish and suck of the long waves that ran past her in the darkness beyond the open charthouse door.

Lyngstrand’s mouth had set in a thin line. His lips, compressed, opened but slightly as he spoke.

“Captain Horst,” he said, with grim distinctness, “you are certainly going to die. I give you the privilege of the warning you did not extend to your victims.”

Horst looked up suddenly. His eyes, blue still, but crazed with terror, fixed themselves upon the gray eyes that met them pitilessly. His mouth moved under the little red moustache, but no sound came from it.

Lyngstrand continued, an edge of fierce contempt upon his hard voice.

“I even give you a choice: You can, if you like, go out there”--he pointed through the open door to the rayless night--“and throw yourself overboard----”

Horst sprang to his feet, recoiled into the extreme corner of the charthouse.

“No!” he screamed. “No!”

“--or I shall kill you myself,” pursued Lyngstrand, evenly.

Horst’s face contorted suddenly with demoniac passion. Jensen, who had approached and was watching him closely, saw his hand dart to the pocket of his jacket, and he flung himself forward just as the revolver cracked.