Then I stood still and listened again. Once more a distant sea bird cried and I decided to make for the sound on the chance of finding the coast line and getting at least one bearing. I followed the line of the wall, crossed another low wall and another field of thin rough grass, and then I realised that I was almost on the brink of the sea. The wash of the swell on rocks met my ear and the dull misty green of the land faded into the misty grey of wide waters.
I stepped over yet another of those low tumbledown walls and now I was on the crisp short grass that fringes coasts, with rocks before me and the sea quite visible about thirty feet below. So I had just made land and no more! Poor Rutherford; I guessed his fate at once.
A little aimlessly I set out to the left. Somehow or other I had got it into my head that I was nearer the Dutch than the Danish border and my idea was to head for a neutral country. The coast line swung inland round a cove and at the same time dipped sharply, and hardly had I turned to follow it when a figure seemed to spring up out of the dip.
Whether the man had been squatting down, or whether it was the slope of the ground that suddenly revealed him, I know not, but there he was not ten paces away. I could see that he wore an oilskin and sou’wester and judged him at once as a fisherman.
“Good evening!” I cried genially in my best German. “It’s a fine night!”
“Good evening!” said he, also in German and quite involuntarily it seemed, for the next instant he spoke again in a very different key, and in English.
“My God! Are you insane?” he said in a low intense voice and with a distinct trace of guttural accent. “Don’t speak German here! Have you no other language? Don’t you speak English?”
I don’t know whether you could have literally knocked me down with a feather, but a stout feather would certainly have come pretty near doing it. I simply gaped at him.
Again he spoke; this time in German, but almost in a whisper.
“Do not speak German here so loudly! Do you not know any English?”
A dim perception of the almost incredible truth began to dawn on me and I did my best to grapple with the situation. I had to account for my astonished stare; that was the first thought that flashed through my head.
“Of course I speak English,” I said, and by the favour of Heaven I found myself instinctively saying those words in the very accents of the German waiter in Bill’s All Right (my first offence on the professional stage), “but I thought you were Hans Eckstein. I could hardly believe my own eyes!”
“Hans Eckstein? Who is he?” demanded my new acquaintance, and I was pleased to observe no suspicion in his voice, merely a little astonishment.
“A friend,” I answered glibly, “one of us.”
He looked at me for a moment, very narrowly, and in those seconds of silence I began to realise more exactly what must have happened. The upper current of air had been blowing westwards—not eastwards as the wind blew on the surface. The good land under my feet was assuredly not Germany; almost certainly it must be part of my own blessed native island, or why this insistence on my speaking English, rather than, say, Dutch or Danish? And then the man I was speaking to, what must he obviously be? There was only one answer possible.
I may add that I had the presence of mind not to stare blankly at him while I thought these thoughts. I let him do the staring while I fished my pipe out of my oilskin pocket and began to fill it.
“So!” he murmured, and I thought he seemed satisfied enough, especially as he asked with manifest curiosity but without any apparent suspicion in his voice, “And how did you get here?”
Yet when I looked up from my pipe-filling to answer him I could almost swear that he had done something to make his features less visible—pulled his sou’wester further down and sunk his chin into the high collar of his oilskin, it certainly seemed to me. As I had gathered a very insufficient impression of him before, this was a little provoking. Still, I told myself that our acquaintance was only beginning. How to ripen it—that was the problem. I tried the effect of merely winking and saying with a cool, knowing air:
“The usual way. Do you have to ask?”
He looked sharply up and down the rocks and out to sea and I saw instantly what was in his mind.
“Impossible! There was no signal. I have been looking out all the time,” said he.
I merely laughed.
“How else do you think I could have come?”
“So!” he murmured again, and then he asked a curious question.
“Do you know if there are many sheep on this island?”
So I had landed on an island! That was the first and chief deduction I drew from this enquiry. The second was that the man’s English must be a little weak. Obviously he meant something rather different from what he said.
“Sheep?” I said with a laugh. “No, my friend, I have something else to do than count sheep.”
Again he looked at me for a moment, his face now almost completely hidden by the peak of his sou’wester. If by any chance he were still doubting me the best thing seemed to be a touch of candour and
