by John Buchan
*
The happy people were Anna and Peter John. The old stiffness between the two had gone, and they had become like brother and sister. She was the mistress of the island, and she had a guest who was worthy of its treasures, for the boy had a whole new world to explore and was wildly excited. A good deal of the place was like Scotland, except that the heather was poor. There were pastures beside the burns, as bright with flowers as any English meadow. I never saw a better bloom of mint and meadow-sweet, ragged robin and cranes-bill; flag-irises and a kind of marsh-marigold were everywhere, and the drier slopes were gay with ragwort. The hay was mostly tall clover. On the hills the tormentil grew as I have never seen it grow elsewhere, and the old women used to pound its root in querns as a substitute for hops. The birds were mostly familiar, but the quantity of them was unbelievable – guillemots and razorbills, puffins as tame as sparrows, and gannets from a colony on the western cliffs. That was on the water, and on the land there was every moor bird known to Peter John except the grouse. There were no hawks, except one Iceland falcon which we got a fleeting glimpse of in the Channel. Peter flew Morag a good deal, and she brought in snipe and curlews for the pot; and she was nearly the end of one of the funny little blue Iceland cats at a cottage door.
I think I have mentioned that my son was no horseman, but under Anna’s coercion he got himself on one of the Norland ponies, and they quartered the island together. But the real passion of both was the sea, a novelty to Peter, who was inland bred. In the soft, bright weather, they were hours in or on the water. Peter was a fair swimmer, but Anna was magnificent – old Arnason had a joke that she was web-footed, being descended from seals, which she refuted by displaying her shapely feet.
There was no great variety of craft to play about in – only the motor-boat which Jacob Gregarsen looked after, and which was never used except for an emergency trip to Hjalmarshavn for supplies and once a week to fetch the mail; and one or two ancient Norland boats, double-ended things with high sterns and stern posts, about twenty feet long and very broad in the beam. But there were a couple of kayaks in the houses, the Eskimo kind like a Rob Roy canoe, and these were taken down to the water and launched, and provided the children with their chief amusement. Anna could handle hers brilliantly, and make it turn over like a turtle and right itself, and Peter John was an apt pupil. The two of them racing about in the voe and adventuring out into the Channel were like nothing so much as a pair of diving ducks. The trouble was to get them home for meals, for those long-lighted days were deceptive, and, since neither had a watch, they would wander in about midnight, thinking they were in time for dinner. Anna’s great hope was for a shoal of whales to come in and the whole Norlands to assemble for a whale hunt. She had only seen one in her life, but the memory of it was vivid. The whale was the small pilot-whale – what they call the ‘ca’in whale’ in Scotland – and I heard her discoursing to Peter John of the wild excitement of the chase, and its manifold perils. She spoke like a bloodthirsty young Viking, and was determined that they should join the hunt in their kayaks and be in at the death. I was determined in my own mind that there should be no such escapade.
Anna was wholly care-free, for Haraldsen had not told her the reason for his return to the island, and Peter John was under bond not to enlighten her. He, of course, knew the whole story, and since he was always on the move, I warned him to keep his eyes open for anything that seemed suspicious. He always carried his field glasses, and I was confident that nothing was likely to come to the island without his spotting it. It was well to have such a scout, for the place, except for the House and the village, was at the moment wholly unpeopled. He saw that I was anxious, and he did his best to live up to my instructions. The first day of the fine weather he had nothing to report. The second day he announced that in a voe on the other side of the island he had discovered signs of a visit from some petrol-driven craft. When I told Haraldsen this he paid no attention. ‘Some trawler put in for water,’ he said; ‘many of them carry boats with out-board motors.’
But on the third day the boy came to me with a grave face.
‘Gregarsen says that the motor-boat is out of order. Something has gone wrong with the engine – something bad – and he’ll have to get a man from Hjalmarshavn to repair it.’
‘How on earth did that happen?’ I asked crossly, for the motor-boat was our only transport to the outer world. ‘He has not had it out.’
‘It happened in the night, he thinks. He says some fools have been monkeying with it.’
I went down to the harbour and had a look at it. Sure enough there was bad mischief. The sparking plug had gone, and the main feed pipe had been cut through. Gregarsen was a stupid elderly fellow, with a game leg which he had got at the Greenland fishing, and he had only an elementary knowledge of mechanics.
‘How did this happen?’ I demanded, for he could speak a kind of American-English, having once been a hand on a Boston tramp. ‘Have you been walking in your sleep?’
He shook his head. ‘Hulda’s Folk,’ he said darkly.
The thing made me very uneasy, for the damage had been done by someone who had had tools for the purpose. There was nothing for it but to telephone to the little shipyard at Hjalmarshavn and get them to send up a man. I did not do this at once, for I was trysted with Haraldsen to walk to the north end of the island, and put it off till we returned to luncheon.
I did not enjoy that walk, for I kept puzzling over the motor-boat, and I could not shake off the feeling that something was beginning to flaw the peace of the island. The accident was utterly incomprehensible to me, except on the supposition that Gregarsen had been drunk, or had gone temporarily insane and forgotten what he had done. It was a nuisance, for the next day we should have been sending to Hjalmarshavn for letters, and I longed for some word from Sandy. I felt myself set down on a possible battlefield with no sign of the commander-in-chief. Haraldsen’s conversation did not cheer me. He was as mysterious as a spae-wife, and his only answer to my complaint was, ‘What must be, will be.’ Also the weather suddenly began to change. By midday the blue of the sky had dulled, and the heavens seemed suddenly to drop lower. The clear outlines of the Halder hills had gone, and the Channel, instead of a shining crystal, became an opaque pebble. ‘Ran is stoking his ovens,’ was all Haraldsen said on the subject and it did not comfort me to know that Ran was a sea-god.
Immediately after luncheon I rang up Hjalmarshavn, but could not get through. There was nothing wrong with the apparatus in the House, and the trouble was probably at the other end, but the motor-boat business had filled me with suspicions, and I set out alone in the afternoon to trace the telephone line. It ran on low posts by the back of the garden and then down a shallow cleft to the beach not a quarter of a mile south of the village. It was clearly all right as far as the water’s edge. But then I had a shock. It entered the sea in a copper casing from a little concrete platform. There seemed something odd about the look of that take-off, and I ran my hand down the cable. I lifted up an end which had been neatly cut through.
That put the lid on my discomfort. The fog was thickening. While walking with Haraldsen I had been able to see the other side of the Channel and witness the Tjaldar, returning from one of her dredging expeditions, settling snugly into her little harbour. But now Halder was blotted out, and I could only see a few hundred yards of sea. I felt as if we were being shut into a macabre world where anything might happen. We and our enemies, for that our enemies were near I had no manner of doubt. They had cut our communications and had us at their mercy – three men, two children, and a batch of ancients. Where they were, how they had got here, I never troubled to think. I felt them in the fog around me – Hulda’s Folk, who had their own ways of moving by land and sea.
I ran back to the House in what was pretty near a panic. Lombard and Haraldsen had gone for a walk, and to give myself something to do I overhauled our armoury. We had half a dozen rifles, four shot-guns, and plenty of ammunition. There was a r
evolver for each of us, and a spare one which I had destined for Peter John.
At the thought of him all my anxiety was switched on to the children. If there were evil things afoot in the island they might be at their mercy. Haraldsen and Lombard came back for tea, but not Anna and Peter John. When he heard my story Haraldsen came out of his Nordic dreams and became the distracted, parent. The fog had drawn closer, and our search could only be blind, but we got together the garden staff and Gregarsen, and set out in different directions.
The dinner-hour came and there was no sign of them. In the dim misty brume which was all the northern night, we stumbled about the island. Midnight came and we were still searching. In the small hours of the morning they had not returned.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Marine Biology
That morning Anna and Peter John had gone off for the day with sandwiches in their pockets, to explore in kayaks the voes at the south end of the island. They ate their luncheon on a skerry which the tide had just uncovered, and which was their idiotic notion of comfort. The sea was like a pond, and the mist was slowly coming down, but Anna, after sniffing the air, said that it was only a summer darkening and would clear before evening. Then she proposed an adventure. The Tjaldar had returned to its home at Halder, and over the Channel came the sound of its dropping anchor.
‘Let’s pay a call on it,’ said Anna. ‘Perhaps they’ll ask us to tea. Marine biologists are nice people. I’ve been to tea with them before, when the old Moe was here.’
Peter John demurred. No embargo had been laid on their crossing their Channel, but he dimly felt that the trip would be considered out of bounds.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Anna retorted. ‘We haven’t been forbidden to go. Besides, in this weather they won’t see us from the shore. We’ll be back long before dinner. There’s not a capful of wind, and it’s as safe as crossing a voe. We’re not likely to get such a chance again.’
Peter John said something about currents, but Anna laughed him to scorn. ‘There’s a rip two miles north, but here there’s nothing to trouble about. I’ve been across in a kayak often. You’re a land-lubber, you know, and I’m a sea-dog, and you ought to believe me. I believe you, when it’s about birds.’
Peter John felt this to be true. Children have a great respect for each other’s expertise, and Anna had shown an uncanny knowledge of the ways of boats and tides and the whole salt-water world. She bore down his scruples with another argument. ‘My father would send us across any time we wanted, but it would be with Gregarsen and the motor-boat, which wouldn’t be any fun, or in the long boat which is as slow as a cow. In these wieldy little kayaks we’ll slip over in no time. If you like, I’ll give you five minutes’ start and race you.’
No boy can resist a ‘dare’, so Peter John acquiesced, and they got into their kayaks and headed for Halder, Morag the falcon sitting dejectedly on her master’s knee.
The mist came down closer, but it was only a curtain of silk, through which Halder rose like a wraith. They did not race, but presently fell into an exciting conversation, so that the kayaks often rubbed shoulders. For Anna was telling of the whale-hunts, which she had held forth to Peter John as the chief glory of the Norlands. Only once in her memory had the Grind come to the Island of Sheep, for generally they took the wider channels beyond Halder. But that once was stamped forever on her mind, though she had only been a little girl at the time. She told how the fiery cross was sent through the islands, by means of beacons on every headland; how every man at the signal tumbled into his boat and steered for the rendezvous; how the rendezvous could not be missed, for all the sea-ways were full of people, and the Grind only came in clear weather. She described how the boats guided the school of whales, as dogs headed sheep, trimming their edges and slowly forcing the leader into one of the voes. Once the leader entered the rest followed, and the voe would be churned white with blind and maddened monsters. Then came the killing, which Anna could only imagine, for her nurse had hurried her away from the scene; but all the same she described it as she had heard it from others, and she made a barbaric tale of it. Peter John listened with interest, and at the end with disapproval.
‘It sounds pretty beastly,’ he said.
‘Perhaps it is,’ said the girl; ‘but a lot of good things are beastly, like killing pigs and using live bait. Anyhow, it puts money in the pockets of our poor people, and gives them food and lighting for the long winter.’
‘All the same, I’m sorry for the whales.’
‘That’s silly,’ she replied. ‘You’re not sorry for haddocks and halibut and sea-trout. Fish are cold-blooded things and don’t feel.’
‘Whales aren’t fish,’ said the student of natural history, but he was overborne.
Their discussion had brought them across the still water into the shadow of Halder, and they looked up to see the Tjaldar above them. The kayak is a noiseless thing, and the fog had helped them to approach it unperceived. It sat at anchor very trim and comfortable, with a thin spire of smoke rising from the galley funnel, and a pleasant odour of food drifting from it. Someone was emptying ashes from the stoke-hold.
‘Couth little craft,’ said Anna appreciatively. ‘I smell tea. Let’s hail her. Tjaldar ahoy!’
The voice brought a face to the bulwark. It was the face of an elderly man, dark and aquiline and rather puffy. He wore a yachting-cap, and a flannel suit, but he did not look any kind of sailor. He seemed puzzled and a little startled.
‘That will be one of the Danish scientists,’ Anna whispered. Then she raised her voice.
‘You’re the Marine Biologists, aren’t you? We’ve come to call on you from the Island of Sheep across the Channel.’
She spoke in Danish, but the face showed no intelligence. Then she repeated her words in English, and the man seemed to understand.
‘Wait. I will ask,’ he said, and disappeared.
He was back in a minute accompanied by another man, a tall fellow with a sunburnt face, wearing an old Harris tweed jacket, and with a pipe in his teeth.
‘Where did you youngsters spring from?’ the second man asked.
‘I’m Miss Haraldsen from the Island of Sheep – and this is my friend, Peter John. We’re visitors. May we come aboard?’
‘You certainly may,’ said the man with the pipe, and he seemed to wink at his companion. The port ladder was lowered and the children tied up the kayaks to its bottom rung, and carefully transshipped themselves. It takes some skill to get out of a kayak.
When they reached the much-encumbered deck they found that three sailors had joined the party.
‘Just wait here a second, my dears,’ said the man with the pipe, and he and the others went forward, leaving Anna and Peter John with the three sailors. The boy saw nothing but a rather untidy deck, very different from the ship-shape vessels of his fancy. There seemed to be uncommonly little free space, and what looked like a gigantic net clumsily heaped abaft of a stumpy mast. The deckhands were busy at the vessel’s side. But the girl’s experienced eyes darted about, and saw more.
‘This is a funny place,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t much like it, Peter John. These men aren’t a trawler’s crew – they’ve no sores on their hands. Trawlers’ men are always getting stung, and poisoned. They aren’t Danes either – at least, they don’t look like it. What are they doing with our kayaks?’
‘They’re getting them aboard.’
‘Whatever for?’ The girl’s voice had suddenly a startled note in it. ‘Look here, I don’t like this… Just look at the trawl. It’s absurd. It has no otter-boards… There’s something wrong with this ship. Let’s make them launch the kayaks again and get off.’
‘We can’t quite do that,’ said Peter John. ‘I think we must see it through now – wait, anyhow, till these men come back.’ But Anna’s suspicions had infected him, and he looked uneasily at the little kayaks as they were swung up on deck.
He turned in obedience to a smothered squawk from Anna. A woman was comin
g towards them – a woman in a white serge frock with a fur cape thrown over her shoulders. She was bare-headed and had wonderful red hair. It was now Peter John’s turn to long for the kayaks, for he recognized someone he had seen before, the beautiful Miss Ludlow who, two months ago, had come to tea at Fosse.
The pretty lady advanced smiling. At the sight of her Morag the falcon showed the most lively displeasure. Had Peter John not tightened the lead she would have sought to perch with malevolent purpose on an exquisite red coiffure.
‘What a wicked bird!’ said the lady. ‘You’re sure you’ve got it safe… How nice of you to come to see us! You must be ravenous for tea. Come along, my dears, but I think you’d better leave the bird here.’
So Morag’s lead was fastened to a stanchion, and she was left in a very ill temper ruffling her wings on a spare yard. The children followed the lady to a deck-house, which was half chart-room and half cabin. It was a snug little place, and on an oilskin-covered table tea was set out, an ample meal for which their souls hungered. There were three men sitting there, the dark, sallow one to whom they had first spoken, the sunburnt one with the pipe, and another, a tall, slim man with a thin face, high cheek-bones and a moustache which was going grey at the tips. All three rose politely at their entrance and bowed to Anna.