The Man from the Clouds | Page 5

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."