Part 9

"Probably,--in his own clothes; for it's quite true that we did find a lot of Dayrell's old clothes in a sea-chest in the cabin. Funny idea, isn't it, a man ghosting himself like that?"

"Yes, but what did Harper mean by saying he heard Mrs. Burgess singing in the cabin that night?"

"Ah, that's another section of the log recorded in a different way."

Moreton Fitch made a sign to the little Japanese, and told him to get a package out of his car. He returned in a moment, and laid it at our feet on the floor.

"Dayrell was very proud of his wife's voice," said Fitch as he took the covers off the package. "Just before he was taken ill he conceived the idea of getting some records made of her songs to take with him on board ship. The gramophone was found amongst the old clothes. The usual sentimental stuff, you know. Like to hear it? She had rather a fine voice."

He turned a handle, and, floating out into the stillness of the California night, we heard the full rich voice of a dead woman:

"_Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low, And the flickering shadows softly come and go._"

At the end of the stanza, a deep bass voice broke in with, "_Encore! Encore!_"

Then Fitch stopped it.

When we were in the car on our way home, I asked if there were any clue to the fate of the Japanese cook, in the last sentence of the log of the _Evening Star_.

"I didn't want to bring it up before his brother," said Knight, "they are a sensitive folk; but the last sentence was to the effect that the _Evening Star_ had now been claimed by the spirit of Captain Dayrell, and that the writer respectfully begged to commit _hari kari_."

Our road turned inland here, and I looked back toward the fishing village. The night was falling, but the sea was lilac-colored with the afterglow. I could see the hut and the little birdhouse black against the water. On a sand dune just beyond them, the figures of the fisherman Kato and his wife were sitting on their heels, and still watching us. They must have been nearly a mile away by this time; but in that clear air they were carved out sharp and black as tiny ebony images against the fading light of the Pacific.

VII

GOBLIN PEACHES

The big liner was running like a ghost, with all lights out on deck and every porthole shrouded. This might seem to the layman almost humorously inconsistent; for, every minute or two the blast of her foghorn went bellowing away into the night, loudly enough to disturb the slumbers of any U-boat lying "doggo" within five miles.

Duncan Drew and I were alone in the smoking-room when the steward brought us our coffee. There were very few passengers; and the first cabin-folk were curiously different from those of peace-time. Most of them, I fancied, were crossing the Atlantic on some business directly connected with the war. There was a Belgian professor from Louvain, for instance, who was taking his family over to the new post that had been found for him at an American University; and there was the wife of an Italian statesman, an American woman, who was returning home to raise funds for the Red Cross of her adopted country. There were others whom it was not so easy to place; and Duncan Drew would have been among them, I think, if I had not known him. Nobody could have looked more like a civilian and less like an officer of the British Navy than Duncan did at this moment. But I knew the job on which he was engaged. When he found that I knew the Maine coast, he asked me to help him in a certain matter.

It was in the days before America entered the war; and his mission was to present certain evidence of a widespread German conspiracy to the United States Government. If they approved, he was to cooperate in unearthing the ring-leaders. The conspiracy was a very simple one. It seemed likely, at the time, that the U-boats would soon be unable to operate from European bases; and the German admiralty, always looking a few months ahead, though perhaps ignoring remoter possibilities, was calmly planning, with the help of its agents in America, to work from the other side of the water. The thousand-mile coast line of the United States had many advantages from the German point of view, especially in its lonelier regions, where there are hundreds of small islands, either uninhabited or privately owned, and not necessarily owned by American citizens. The U-boats, it is true, would have to travel further if they were to work in European waters. But already they had been forced by the British patrols to travel more than fifteen hundred miles from their European bases, far to the north of Scotland and west of Ireland, before they could operate against the Atlantic shipping. The slight increase in the distance would be more than repaid by the comparative safety of the submarines. They planned, in short, to work from American bases, while a dull-witted British Navy should be vainly endeavoring to close European doors, which the enemy was no longer using.

We didn't talk "shop" in the smoking-room, even when we were alone, for the ground had been covered so often. On this particular evening, I remember, we talked chiefly about food. The dinner had been excellent; and it had been a curious sensation to pass from the slight but obvious restrictions of London, to a ship which seemed to possess all the resources of the United States.

"I've only been in Berlin once," said Duncan, "but I was there long enough to know that they will feel the pinch first, and feel it worst. They are rum beggars, the Boches. Think of the higher command marking out the early stages of the war by the dinners it was going to have,--every menu carefully planned, one for Brussels, one for Paris, and probably one for London! I remember lunching at a hotel when I was in Berlin, and seeing rather a curious thing. There was a table in the center of the room, laid for what was evidently going to be a very grand affair. It was laid for about twenty people, and I saw a thing I had never seen before. Every champagne glass contained a peach. I asked my waiter what it meant, and he said that von Schramm, the fellow who is one of the moving spirits behind this new submarine campaign, was entertaining some of his pals that day; and this was one of his pretty little fads. He thought it improved the wine, and also that it prevented gout, or some rot of that sort."

"How very German! My chief objection would be that there wouldn't be much room left for the champagne."

"Trust the German for that, my lad. The glasses were extra large, and of a somewhat unusual pattern. As a matter of fact, the decorative effect was rather pretty. It's queer--the way some things stick in your memory and others vanish. I believe that my most vivid impression of the few months I passed in Germany is that blessed table, waiting for its guests, with the peaches in the champagne glasses. I didn't see the guests arrive. Wish I had now. There's always something a little stagey, don't you think, about a table waiting for its guests; but this was more so. It affected me like the throne of melodrama waiting for its emperor. Funny that it should have made such an impression, isn't it?"

I thought not; for it was part of Duncan's business to be impressed by unusual things--more especially when they were symptomatic of something else. It was this that made him so useful, for instance, in that exciting little episode of the cargo of onions which was intercepted--owing to one of his impressions--in a Scandinavian ship. They were perfectly good onions, the first few layers of them; and they looked like perfectly good onions when you burrowed into the lower layers. But Duncan had been seized by an absurd desire to see whether they would bounce or not; and when he experimented on the deck, they did bounce, bounce like cricket balls, as high as the ship's funnels.

This capture of one of the largest cargoes of contraband rubber was due to an impression he got from two innocent cablegrams which had been intercepted and brought to him at the Admiralty,--one of them apparently concerning an operation for appendicitis, and the other announcing the death of the patient. His intuitions, indeed, resembled those of the artist; and, though he was one of the smartest sailors in the Navy, he looked more like a pre-Raphaelite painter's conception of Galahad than any one I had ever seen in the flesh. He looked exceedingly youthful, and the dead whiteness of his face, which his Philistine brethren described as lantern-jawed, was lighted by the alert eyes of the new age. They had that peculiar glitter which one sees in the eyes of aviators, and sometimes in those of the business men accustomed to the electric cities of the new world. His hands were like those of a musician, long and quick and nervous. But I could easily imagine them throttling an enemy.

We turned in early that night, and I dozed fitfully, revolving fragments of our somewhat disconnected conversation. The beautiful sea-cry "All's well" came to me from the watch in the bow, as the bell tolled the passage of the hours; and it was not till daybreak that I slept, only to dream of that table in Berlin, waiting for its guests, with a peach in every champagne glass.

II

As we waited in the cold brilliance of New York harbor, a few mornings later, and looked with considerable satisfaction at the German steamers that were huddled like gigantic red and black cattle in the docks of the Hamburg-Amerika and North German-Lloyd, a telegram was brought aboard which settled our plans.

Duncan was to go down to Washington that night, while I was to go up to Rockport, a little fishing village on the coast of Maine. At this place I was to take a motor-car and drive some fifteen miles to a certain lonely strip of pine-clad coast. There we were to camp out in a tiny cottage, which we could rent from an old sea-captain whom I knew before the war. Two artists, in quest of a quiet place for work, could hardly find a happier hunting-ground. I was particularly glad to find that we could hire a trim little motor-launch, in which we could go exploring among the islands that dotted the blue sea for scores of miles. It was a beautiful coast, and their dark peaks of pine were printed like tiny black feathers against a sky of unimaginable sapphire. Nothing could seem more remote from the devilries of modern war.

Duncan joined me, a week later, in Captain Humphrey's cottage--it was a small white-painted wooden house among the pine trees on the main land, built on the rocks which overhung a deep blue inlet of the Atlantic. We discussed our plans on the little veranda, from which we could see half a dozen of those pine-crowned islands, which were the objects of suspicion. There were scores of others we could not see, to north and south of us, and we checked them off on the map as we sat there under the dried sunfish and the other queer marine trophies, which the old skipper had brought back with him from the South Seas.

The nights were quite cold enough for a fire, though it was only mid-July; and we finished all our plans that evening round the big stove, the kind of thing you see in the foc'sle of a steam trawler, which stood in the center of Captain Humphrey's parlor. We were more than a little glad indeed to let our pipes and the good-smelling pine logs waft their incense abroad; for--like all the dwellers in those parts--the old skipper subsisted through the winter on the codfish which he had salted and stored during the summer in his attic; and though his abode was clean and neat as himself, it had the healthy reek of a trawler, as well as its heating apparatus. A large oil lamp, which hung from the ceiling, was none the worse, moreover, for the moderating influence of a little wood-smoke.

"To-morrow, then," said Duncan, "we take the motor-launch and have a look at all the islands between this place and Rockport. They've been awfully decent down in Washington about it. The only trouble is that they don't and can't believe it. Exactly the state of mind we were in, before the war. Everybody laughing at exactly the same things, from spy-stories to signals on the coast. I met a man in the Government who had been taken to a window at midnight to see a light doing the Morse code, off this very coast, and he laughed at it. Didn't believe it. Thought it was the evening-star. We were like that ourselves. No decent man can believe certain things, till they are beyond question.

"It's our own fault. We told them all was well before the war; and I don't see how we can blame them for thinking their own intervention unnecessary now. We keep on telling America that it's all over except the shouting. We paint the rosiest kind of picture to-day about the prospects of the allies; and then we grumble amongst ourselves because Americans don't turn the whole of their continent upside down to come and help us. We deliberately lulled America to sleep, and then we kicked because we heard that she had only one eye open.

"Well,--they've given us a blessing on our wild-goose chase. We may do all the investigating we like, as I understand the position, so long as we leave any resultant action to the United States. This means, I suppose,--in old Captain Humphrey's language--that we may be 'rubber-necks,' but we mustn't shoot. All the same, I brought the guns with me." He laid two automatic pistols on the table. "It's more than likely, from what I've been able to gather, that we may have to defend our own skins; and I suppose that's permissible. Oh, damn that mosquito!" He slapped his ankle, and complained bitterly that the old sea-captain's faith in his own tough exterior had prevented him from providing his doors and windows with mosquito netting.

* * * * *

It was on the fourth morning of our search that things began to happen. For my own part, I had already begun to be so absorbed in the peace of the world about us, that the whole business of the war seemed unreal and our own quest futile. I could no longer wonder at those inhabitants of the new world who were said to look upon our European Armageddon as a bad dream, or a morbid tale in a book, which it was better not to open. As we chug-chugged along the coast, close under the thick pine woods, which grew almost to the edge of the foam, I thought I had never breathed an air so fragrant, or seen color so brilliant in earth and sky and sea. Once or twice, as we shut off the motor and lay idle, we heard a hermit-thrush in the woods, breaking the silence with a peculiarly plaintive liquid call, quite unlike the song of our thrushes at home, but very beautiful. Here and there we passed the little red, blue and green buoys of lobster-pots, shining like jewels as the clear water lapped about them in that amazing sunlight.

We were making for a certain island about which we had obtained some interesting details from Captain Humphrey himself. He told us that it had been purchased two or three years ago by a New Yorker who was building himself quite a fine place on it. He seemed to be a somewhat mysterious character, for he was never seen on the mainland, and all his supplies were brought up to him on his own large private yacht.

"There's a wharf on the island," said Captain Humphrey, "with deep water running up to it, so that a yacht can sail right up to his porch, as you might say, and you wouldn't know it was there. The cove runs in on the slant, and the pines grow between it and the sea. You wouldn't notice it, unless you ran right in at the mouth. It makes a fine private harbor for a yacht, and I believe it has held two at a time. There's a good beach for clams on the west shore, but of course, it's private."

We certainly saw no sign of yacht or harbor as we approached the island from the landward side; but we made no departure from our course to look for either. We were bound for clam-beach, where we intended to do a little clam-poaching.

"It doesn't look promising," said Duncan, as we approached the shore. "There doesn't seem to be anybody to warn trespassers off. But perhaps clam-beach is not regarded as dangerous, and the trespassing begins further on."

In a few moments we had moored the launch in four feet of water, and were ashore with a couple of clam-rakes. We had dug a hundred, as we walked towards the pine-wood, when Duncan straightened up and said:

"This makes my back ache, and it's blazing hot. I'm going to have a pipe in the shade, up there."

I shouldered my rake, and followed him into the wood. As soon as we were well among the trees, we began to walk quickly up the thin winding path, which we supposed would lead us to the neighborhood of the house.

"Not at all promising," said Duncan. "They would never let us ramble about like this if they had anything to conceal. Just for the fun of it, we'll go up to the house, and ask if Mr. Chutney Bilge, the novelist, doesn't live there. You want his autograph, don't you?"

In five minutes, we had emerged from the pines, and saw before us a very pleasant looking wooden house with a wide veranda, screened all round with mosquito-netting, and backed by glimpses of blue sea between dark pine-trunks. There was not a soul to be seen, and no sign of its occupants anywhere. We walked up to the porch, pulled open the netted door in the outer screen, and knocked on the door of the house, which stood wide open. We waited and listened; but there was no sound except the ticking of a clock. There was another open door on the right side of the hall. Duncan felt a sudden impulse to look through it, and tip-toed quietly forward. He had no sooner looked than he stood as if turned to stone, with so queer an expression on his face that I instantly came to his side to see what Medusa had caused it. It seemed a very harmless Medusa; but I doubt if anything could have startled me more at the moment. We stood there, staring at a table, laid for lunch. There were twelve champagne glasses, of a somewhat unusual pattern; and each of these glasses contained a peach.

III

Before I could be quite sure whether I was dreaming or waking, Duncan had dashed into the room on the other side of the hall, and grabbed up a bundle of papers that had been dropped as if by some one in a great hurry, all over the table. He glanced at one or two.

"But this,--this--settles it," he cried. "Come out of it quickly." And, in a few seconds, we were in the cover of the woods again.

"Schramm himself is over here, apparently. He must have come by U-boat," Duncan muttered, as we hurried down the path towards our launch. "If they catch us, we're simply dead and buried, and past praying for."

"But what does it mean? Where are they? Why the devil have they left everything open to the first-comer?"

"Beats me completely. But we'd better not wait to inquire. The next move is up to Washington."

"Look here, Duncan, we'd better be careful about our exit from the woods. If any one happens to have spotted the launch, we may run our heads into a trap."

I had an uneasy feeling that we were being watched, and that every movement we made was plainly seen by a gigantic but invisible spectator, very much the kind of feeling, I suppose, that insects must have under the microscope. I felt sure that we were not going to have it all our own way with this quiet island. Duncan hesitated for a moment, but I was insistent that we should take a look at our landing place before we left our cover. It was a characteristic of Duncan that as soon as he had discovered what he wanted, he became as forthright a sailor as you could wish to find; and I knew that if we were to escape with whole skins, or even to make use of our discovery, I should have to exercise my own wits. Fortunately, my own "impressions" began when his finished; for, after he had yielded to my persuasion, we made a slight circuit through the woods, and crept out through the long grass on the top of the little cliff, overlooking the beach where we had landed. Our clams were still there, in two neat little dumps. So was the launch, but in the stern of it there sat a tall red-bearded man, who looked like a professor, and a couple of sailors. They were all three talking German in low, excited tones, and they were all three armed with rifles.

The launch lay almost directly below us, and we could hear some of their conversation. I gathered that the luncheon party had gone on board a U-boat which had just arrived, to inspect the latest improvements. Something had gone wrong. They had submerged; and it seemed to be doubtful whether they could get her up again. That, of course, was why the house was deserted and our trespassing unforbidden. It was probably also the reason why the sentries had been absent, and had only just discovered our launch on their rounds. One of the sailors was aggrieved, it seemed to me, that no effort was being made to obtain other help for the submerged men than the island itself could lend. His best friend was aboard; and he thought it wicked not to give them a chance, even if it meant their internment. The red-bearded professor was explaining to him, however, in the most highly approved style of modern Germany, that his feelings were by no means logical; and that it was far nobler to sacrifice one's friends than to endanger the State.

"But, if the State is a kind of devil," said the sailor, who was a bit of a logician himself, "I prefer my friends, who in the meantime are being suffocated."

"That is a fallacy," the professor was answering. Then, from the direction of the house, there came a confused sound of shouting.

A fourth sailor came tearing down the beach like a maniac.

"Where are the clam-fishers?" he called to the three philosophers. "They are to be taken, dead or alive."

At the same moment, I saw the glint of the sun on the revolvers of several other men, who were advancing through the woods towards the beach, peering to right and left of them. Without a whisper between us, Duncan and I crawled off along the cliff, through the thick undergrowth.

Obviously, the submarine had come to the surface again, and the whole merry crowd was on our track. The island was not more than a quarter of a mile in diameter; and I saw no hope of evading our pursuers, of whom there must be at least twenty, judging from the cries that reached us. There was nothing for it, but to choose the best place for putting up a fight; and, as luck would have it, we were already on the best line of defense. The undergrowth between the cliff's edge and the woods was so thick that nobody could discover us, except by crawling up the trail by which we had ourselves entered. It proved to be the only way by which the cliff's edge could be explored, and we had a full half-mile of the island's circumference, a long ledge, only a few feet wide, on which we could crawl in security for the time being, till the hunt came up behind us. I remember noticing--even in those moments of peril--that the ground and the bushes were littered with big crab claws and clam shells that had been dropped and picked there by the sea gulls and crows; and I was thinking--in some queer way--of the easy life that these birds lead, when I almost put my hand on a human skull, protruding from a litter of loose earth, white flakes of shell and crabs' backs. Duncan pulled a heap of the evil-smelling stuff away with his clam-rake, and bared the right side of the skeleton. There was a half-rotten clam-rake in the bony clutch of the dead man. Evidently, somebody else had paid the penalty before us. The body had been buried, and rain, snow, or the insatiable sea-gulls had uncovered the yellow-toothed head.

A few yards further on, the cliff projected so far out that even when one hung right over the edge, it was only just possible to see where it met the swirling water, which seemed very deep here. About fifteen yards out, there was a big boulder of rock, covered with brown sea-weed.