CHAPTER XIII

THE START

Martia was awakened by the maid of the _Anchor_ opening the bedroom door and turning on the light.

It was still dark outside--the sun would not rise for another half an hour or more--and this hurried dressing by lamplight in order to catch the tide and a little boat that would take her to distant and unknown places was the weirdest experience that had yet befallen Martia.

It was the same when she found herself outside the inn, with Bowler carrying her small baggage and making for the quay, against which no big steamer was moored.

Bowler with the luggage, the smell of the harbour, the quay, all called up journeys to the Continent from Dover or Folkestone; but here there was no mail-boat to receive her, no great funnels belching smoke, no crowd, nothing but the stick-like masts of the _Lorna Doone_ against the fading night, and a lantern moving furtively by the quay edge.

There was no need for secrecy or concealment, at least at present. The _Lorna's_ papers were in order, and it was only a question of getting out. All the same there was a suggestion of a hurried and surreptitious departure, not without its charm, in that atmosphere of night and sea scents and sounds.

It was full flood, and the old quay gang-plank used for excursion boats had been rigged leading to the deck of the _Lorna_, raised by the tide almost to the quay level. Martia crossed the plank and was received on the little deck by Bobby.

She stood for a moment looking around her. The deck looked smaller than it was in reality, and the spars and rigging more fragile and unreliable than daylight would show them. Forward she could see a great bulk. It was Glastonbury. Church and Atherfield were beside him, waiting to attend to the shore fasts. On the quay, talking to them, stood a longshoreman, ready to haul up the gangway and attend to the mooring ropes.

"We'll be off now in a minute," said Bobby. "Sam's below tinkering with the engine. Wouldn't you like to come down and see your cabin?"

"Oh, that can wait," said she. "I wouldn't go down just now for worlds. I want to see it all. It's more like a fairy tale or a dream than anything real I have ever known. Listen to the gulls."

The gulls were clanging against the brightening east beyond Brownsea Island and the sandbanks, and the wind, freshening with the dawn, came charged with their voices and the smell of the open sea. The longshoreman came to the gang-plank, and hauled it in just as Sam rose from the hatch, wiping his hands with a piece of cotton waste, which he flung over the port rail as he turned to the girl and greeted her.

"It's a fair wind," said Sam, "and the glass is as steady as a rock. All your luggage on board?"

"Yes, everything."

"Aren't you going to get any sail on her?" asked Bobby.

"Not till we're out," replied the skipper of the _Lorna Doone_.

Bobby looked at the other, now fully visible in the morning light.

Sam on his quarter-deck, so to speak, in command of a ship, and about to give orders, was quite a different person from the Sam he had hitherto known. The new Sam was short of speech, a bit aloof, heedless of the girl as though she had been a mere man, and seeming absolutely indifferent to everything but the work in hand. And that was a fact. He was in the grip of the _Lorna Doone_ just as she was in his grip now, as he stood with his hands on the wheel-spokes giving his last orders.

The shore fasts came in, the little engine began to mutter, and the _Lorna_, gliding gently and dropping the wharf behind her, fronted the sunrise.

Martia did not look back. She was held by the view before her. For in all the world there is nothing lovelier than Poole Harbour in the sunrise of a perfect morning.

Gulls raced them as they glided over the golden water, where the stakes and sea-marks that outlined the passage rippled to the first of the ebb. They passed the _Sandfly_, deserted and snugged down in her winter dress, and Brownsea Island hailed them with a chanting of gulls, ring-dottrel and herons crossed their course to the lamentable wheezing of guillemots, whilst to complete the picture two white swans from Abbotsbury circled in the sunlight, the boom of their flight feathers filling the air.

Then the sandbanks slid by, and the Isle of Wight showed the white sharpness of the Needles and the banded tubular tower of their lighthouse across the sparkling water, whilst, with the engine shut off, the canvas rose thrashing in the breeze.

Then Martia, to whom all this was as new as it was strange, watched as the great main boom, upheld by the topping lifts, shook and bucked and then swung to port, straining at the main sheet, whilst the great sail, ceasing its struggles, filled hard against the blue, and the _Lorna Doone_, almost before the wind, drove into the swell to a sound like the fizzing of soda-water.

"She steers," said Sam, seeming to address the universe in general. "A child might handle her. Oh, lord, no!" in answer to a question of Martia's. "We won't start the engine again till we're going into harbour at Genoa. That's all the use auxiliaries are for, or if there's a flat calm close to port. Here you are, Bowler, take the wheel and keep her as she goes."

He handed the wheel over to Bowler, and stood for a moment beside the girl, looking at the distant coast to starboard.

Bobby, who had just come up to tell them that breakfast was ready, stood also to look whilst Sam pointed out the shoremarks to the girl.

"That's Corfe Castle," said he, "and away right over there is St. Alban's head, beyond that is Weymouth Bay and Portland Bill. That? Oh, she's a Union Castle liner."

"What's all that stuff on the sea there?" asked the girl, pointing across the port bow.

"That's oil refuse from some ship. Full of tangled-up seabirds, maybe."

"Tangled-up seabirds?"

"Guillemots. It's generally the guillemots that get caught. They get in the oil, and it tangles their feathers so's they can't fly or swim."

"And what happens to them?"

"They drift about and die of starvation."

"Oh, how frightful! Do people _know_?"

"Of course they do," replied Sam. "But they don't see it as we see it who use the coast. Nothing is done, though it could be easily stopped. Only just the question of putting oil-separators, that would pay for themselves, on board the ships."

Bobby listened to this talk, thinking less of the conversation than the manner of it. These two were quite easy with one another, like old acquaintances. They _were_ old acquaintances. And yet they had met like dead strangers, and Sam had indicated that he wanted to say nothing about his past relationship with the girl. There was no possible solution of this extraordinary state of things--at least none that Bobby could discover or imagine--and, leaving it at that, he gave them word that breakfast was ready.

Down below, the pleasant sunlight streaming through port and skylight lit the cabin, the white-painted bulkheads, the breakfast things laid out, and a little jar of October flowers provided by Bowler, of all people in the world.

Bowler, who, to look at, seemed as destitute of all the finer feelings as a derrick, hearing that a lady was coming as passenger, had procured the flowers from his brother the longshoreman's garden. An angel could not have done better, for they made the girl feel instantly at home.

"And this is your cabin," said Bobby, opening the door of the cubby-hole and exposing to view the bunk with its neat coverlet, the gadgets for holding things secure against the roll of the ship, and a bookshelf with a tiny library--an after-thought provided only the day before at Bournemouth.

She looked in, lost in admiration. Then, turning and casting her eyes over everything, from the cabin carpet to the lamps swaying on their gimbals, she heaved a sigh and tried to find words to express her feelings.

"Why, it's just like a little steamboat," she said. "It's absolutely and perfectly wonderful!"

A little steamboat!

Sam's jaw fell. His _Lorna Doone_ compared with a steamboat! However, he swallowed the insult, knowing that it proceeded from ignorance not malice, and they sat down to table.

They had lots to talk about.

It was the first real meeting of the board of directors of this expedition, and Sam, without putting himself into the chair, soon exhibited the qualities of chairman and leader. He had received the ship's money from Martia and had locked it up in the safe. It would only be needed for accidents, harbour dues, pilotage, and, in the remote event of the auxiliary breaking down on approaching a harbour, towage charges; the crew, who had received advances on their wages, would not be paid off till the _Lorna_ returned to Poole.

They talked this matter over, and then came the question of a Mediterranean base. Neither Bobby nor Martia had thought of this part of the business. They had imagined the _Lorna_ sailing straight ahead to the Greek archipelago without stopping anywhere. Why should they stop? Sam answered that question very easily.

"You see," he said, "we've got to take water on somewhere. Hyalos may have a water supply on it or it mayn't. The fact remains that when we get there our water-tanks will be getting too low unless we touch at some port on the way and fill up. Genoa is the best place for us to touch at. First of all, I know it. Secondly, I can speak Italian of sorts. Thirdly, the port authorities are pretty easy-going. Leaving the water alone, let's come to the question of this stuff you want to salve, and which seems to me pretty much like contraband.

"We must be able to run straight home with it without touching port. Same time, we may have accidents, or Hyalos mayn't have a water source on it, so that, having taken your cargo of antiques or whatever they are on board, we may have to run to a port for water. The thing to do, of course, is to run to a place you're known in, so that you won't have trouble with the Customs smelling round the ship. That's why I want to touch at Genoa, so that coming back we may be known there."

He took from his pocket the map of Hyalos, which Behrens had sent with the ship's money, and spread it on the table before him.

The map showed the town as it lay beneath the water--the streets, the market-place, the theatre, everything--but of the island of Hyalos, beside which the sunken town lay, the map showed little; just the outline of the bay.

"There you are," said Sam. "The fellow who drew this has put in streets, squares, everything about this town that's supposed to be submerged; details that are quite useless to us, seeing that we have eyes in our heads. But of the most essential thing to a working party, the presence or absence of water on the island, he says nothing."

Martia flushed slightly, and Bobby recognised that Sam had put his hoof into it. He could not say, "Isaac Behrens drew that map and she was engaged to him." He tried to catch Sam's eye, but failed.

"He must have been a silly ass," said Sam, still contemplating the map. "You can see he was an archæologist all right, but no headpiece on him for anything else."

Martia crimsoned.

"He was my best friend," said she, "and cleverer than--than a great many people."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know," said Sam.

"Cleverer than a great many people I could name," she went on, anger possessing her for a minute. "And he had headpiece enough to prevent him going off and spoiling his life just in a fit of temper. Anyhow, let us say no more about him."

"Very well," said Sam. "Let us agree to do so. I did not know you knew him or, of course, I would not have said that."

He put the map away, and they rose from the table and went on deck, Bobby greatly wondering at the girl's words. Was it Sam who had gone off and spoiled his life in a fit of temper? If not, why did she fling the words and the implied fact in his face?

When he had met Hackett first of all in the restaurant he had wondered at the change in him, and at the hermit life he was leading. Was it possible that before Isaac Behrens had come into Martia's life Sam and she had been engaged? That Sam had broken it off in a fit of temper and spoiled his life by taking to the small yacht business? It seemed the only possible solution of the mystery.

* * * * *

Half an hour later, when the girl had gone below, he took Sam forward of the wheel, where Church was steering.

"She was engaged to Isaac Behrens," said he. "That's what made her cut up so rough."

"How the deuce was I to know that?" answered the other.

"How do people know anything? You were a friend of hers before I ever knew her."

"Maybe," said Sam.

"Then why did you and she meet last night as though you were strangers, though I could see quite well you had met before? Why did you get ratty with me, and say you didn't want to talk about her? Why did she speak to you like that at breakfast? What's the mystery?"

"There's no mystery. My affairs are my own and we'll be much better friends, Lestrange, if you will recognise that fact and remember it. One might think you were in love with the girl, the way you keep harping on her. Leave the thing alone. We are out on serious work. Forget that she's a girl, as I do, and we'll all be better friends. This is a deep-sea expedition with, maybe, lots of dangers ahead; not a charabanc ride to Margate."

He turned away, and Bobby, snubbed and feeling a bit small, stood with his hands on the starboard rail watching the distant coast.

Sam had put his finger on the spot. He _was_ in love with Martia, and that was the chief reason of all his suspicions and self-questionings as to her possible past relationship to Sam. But he recognised the truth that this expedition was no holiday trip, but an affair difficult and maybe dangerous, in which there was no room for anything but strict attention to business. He determined to think no more of her as a woman till he had proved himself as a man; to put her from his mind except as a companion till the _Lorna Doone_ was berthed at Poole Wharf and the venture a success.

A decision easier come to than observed.

* * * * *

Half an hour later, when the girl came on deck again, the English coast lay a great distance away across the blue and summer-like October sea. Portland Bill was a point on the starboard beam, and before them lay the great stretch of Lyme Bay, marked by the far-off sails of a fishing fleet and the smoke of a coastwise freighter making for Brixham.

Martia seemed to have forgotten all her anger against Sam, and when Bobby, having gone below for a smoke, returned on deck, she was at the wheel, Sam beside her, and Bowler, one great hand on a spoke, "Larning her to steer."