The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [963]
'I'm lying a little way down the fiord, you see,' said Davies. 'I hate to be too near a town, and I found a carpenter handy here--There she is! I wonder how you'll like her!'
I roused myself. We were entering a little cove encircled by trees, and approaching a light which flickered in the rigging of a small vessel, whose outline gradually defined itself.
'Keep her off,' said Davies, as we drew alongside.
OTE
In a moment he had jumped on deck, tied the painter, and was round at my end.
'You hand them up,' he ordered, 'and I'll take them.'
It was a laborious task, with the one relief that it was not far to hand them - a doubtful compensation, for other reasons distantly shaping themselves. When the stack was transferred to the deck I followed it, tripping over the flabby meat parcel, which was already showing ghastly signs of disintegration under the dew. Hazily there floated through my mind my last embarkation on a yacht; my faultless attire, the trim gig and obsequious sailors, the accommodation ladder flashing with varnish and brass in the August sun; the orderly, snowy decks and basket chairs under the awning aft. What a contrast with this sordid midnight scramble, over damp meat and littered packing-cases! The bitterest touch of all was a growing sense of inferiority and ignorance which I had never before been allowed to feel in my experience of yachts.
CKQUOTEDavies awoke from another reverie over my portmanteau to say, cheerily: 'I'll just show you round down below first, and then we'll stow things away and get to bed.'
He dived down a companion ladder, and I followed cautiously. A complex odour of paraffin, past cookery, tobacco, and tar saluted my nostrils.
'Mind your head,' said Davies, striking a match and lighting a candle, while I groped into the cabin. 'You'd better sit down; it's easier to look round.'
There might well have been sarcasm in this piece of advice, for I must have cut a ridiculous figure, peering awkwardly and suspiciously round, with shoulders and head bent to avoid the ceiling, which seemed in the half-light to be even nearer the floor than it was.
'You see,' were Davies's reassuring words, 'there's plenty of room to _sit_ upright' (which was strictly true; but I am not very tall, and he is short). 'Some people make a point of head-room, but I never mind much about it. That's the centre-board case,' he explained, as, in stretching my legs out, my knee came into contact with a sharp edge.
I had not seen this devilish obstruction, as it was hidden beneath the table, which indeed rested on it at one end. It appeared to be a long, low triangle, running lengthways with the boat and dividing the naturally limited space into two.
'You see, she's a flat-bottomed boat, drawing very little water without the plate; that's why there's so little headroom. For deep water you lower the plate; so, in one way or another, you can go practically anywhere.'
I was not nautical enough to draw any very definite conclusions from this, but what I did draw were not promising. The latter sentences were spoken from the forecastle, whither Davies had crept through a low sliding door, like that of a rabbit-hutch, and was already busy with a kettle over a stove which I made out to be a battered and disreputable twin brother of the No. 3 Rippingille.
'It'll be boiling soon,' he remarked, 'and we'll have some grog.'
My eyes were used to the light now, and I took in the rest of my surroundings, which may be very simply described. Two long cushion-covered seats flanked the cabin, bounded at the after end by cupboards, one of which was cut low to form a sort of miniature sideboard, with glasses hung in a rack above it. The deck overhead was very low at each side but rose shoulder high for a space in the middle, where a 'coach-house roof'