The Riddle of the Sands | Page 7

little suspected the fact as I
crumpled it into my pocket and started languidly on the voie
douloureuse which I nightly followed to the club. In Pall Mall there
were no dignified greetings to be exchanged now with well-groomed
acquaintances. The only people to be seen were some late stragglers
from the park, with a perambulator and some hot and dusty children
lagging fretfully behind; some rustic sightseers draining the last dregs
of the daylight in an effort to make out from their guide-books which of
these reverend piles was which; a policeman and a builder's cart. Of
course the club was a strange one, both of my own being closed for
cleaning, a coincidence expressly planned by Providence for my
inconvenience. The club which you are 'permitted to make use of' on
these occasions always irritates with its strangeness and discomfort.
The few occupants seem odd and oddly dressed, and you wonder how
they got there. The particular weekly that you want is not taken in; the
dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils
oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere
within me there was a faint lightening of the spirits; causeless, as far as
I could discover. It could not be Davies's letter. Yachting in the Baltic
at the end of September! The very idea made one shudder. Cowes, with
a pleasant party and hotels handy, was all very well. An August cruise
on a steam yacht in French waters or the Highlands was all very well;
but what kind of a yacht was this? It must be of a certain size to have
got so far, but I thought I remembered enough of Davies's means to
know that he had no money to waste on luxuries. That brought me to
the man himself. I had known him at Oxford--not as one of my
immediate set; but we were a sociable college, and I had seen a good
deal of him, liking him for his physical energy combined with a certain
simplicity and modesty, though, indeed, he had nothing to be conceited
about; liked him, in fact, in the way that at that receptive period one
likes many men whom one never keeps up with later. We had both
gone down in the same year--three years ago now. I had gone to France
and Germany for two years to learn the languages; he had failed for the
Indian Civil, and then had gone into a solicitor's office. I had only seen

him since at rare intervals, though I admitted to myself that for his part
he had clung loyally to what ties of friendship there were between us.
But the truth was that we had drifted apart from the nature of things. I
had passed brilliantly into my profession, and on the few occasions I
had met him since I made my triumphant _début_ in society I had
found nothing left in common between us. He seemed to know none of
my friends, he dressed indifferently, and I thought him dull. I had
always connected him with boats and the sea, but never with yachting,
in the sense that I understood it. In college days he had nearly
persuaded me into sharing a squalid week in some open boat he had
picked up, and was going to sail among some dreary mud-flats
somewhere on the east coast. There was nothing else, and the funereal
function of dinner drifted on. But I found myself remembering at the
_entrée_ that I had recently heard, at second or third hand, of
something else about him--exactly what I could not recall. When I
reached the savoury, I had concluded, so far as I had centred my mind
on it at all, that the whole thing was a culminating irony, as, indeed,
was the savoury in its way. After the wreck of my pleasant plans and
the fiasco of my martyrdom, to be asked as consolation to spend
October freezing in the Baltic with an eccentric nonentity who bored
me! Yet, as I smoked my cigar in the ghastly splendour of the empty
smoking-room, the subject came up again. Was there anything in it?
There were certainly no alternatives at hand. And to bury myself in the
Baltic at this unearthly time of year had at least a smack of tragic
thoroughness about it.
I pulled out the letter again, and ran down its impulsive staccato
sentences, affecting to ignore what a gust of fresh air, high spirits, and
good fellowship this flimsy bit of paper wafted into the jaded
club-room. On reperusal, it was full of evil presage-- 'Al scenery'--but
what of equinoctial storms and October fogs? Every sane yachtsman
was paying off his crew now. 'There ought to be duck'--vague, very
vague. 'If