Читать книгу The Picts & the Martyrs - Arthur Ransome - Страница 16

CHAPTER VI

“SHE’S HERE!”

THE NOISE of footsteps died away below them in the wood. Dorothea stood listening till she could hear them no more. Everything had happened with such a rush, there had been no time to think. Now, suddenly she began to wonder if after all they were doing the right thing, and, even worse, if they were going to be able to do it. She was sure they were right in clearing out from Beckfoot. What else could they have done? Nancy and Peggy were older than they were and had wanted them to go. Even old Cook had been thinking they would be better gone. But wouldn’t it have been better to go away altogether? Down at Beckfoot it had seemed quite simple, just to go and live in a hut in the wood. It had seemed easy till Nancy and Peggy had gone. Now, just for a moment, she found herself wanting to run after them.

She turned to look at the Dogs’ Home that was now to be a house for Picts. Were they really going to live in that old hut, alone, high in the wood, with no one else within sight or call? Were they going this very night to sleep in it, and wake in it tomorrow alone and secret, like escaping prisoners hiding in a hostile country? They had never even camped except with other tents close by and with John and the capable Susan taking charge and doing the housekeeping for everybody. Was she going to be able to manage by herself ? Wasn’t the whole idea a mistake?

She looked at Dick and saw that he had no doubts at all. For him there had been a problem to solve and a solution found for it. If they could not live at Beckfoot, they must live somewhere else. Why not here? And she saw that Dick was already looking warily into the trees and trying to get a better view of some bird of which he had caught a glimpse. Dorothea pulled herself together. Nancy and Peggy down there at Beckfoot with the Great Aunt were going to have the really difficult time. And, whatever happened, she and Dick must not be the ones to let them down.

“Come on, Dick,” she said. “Let’s see what wants doing to our house.”

They walked round it and decided that the wall was so thick that there was no need to worry about the few stones that had fallen from it. A little moss well pushed in would stop any holes in the roof. “It’s a good solid house,” said Dick, “and quite big enough, and it couldn’t be in a better place.” Dorothea, after walking round it, and remembering that at least there was no danger of its blowing away like a tent, half thought they would make a bit of a garden for it, but decided that the few foxgloves growing close to the hut were really better then anything planted on purpose. “We’ll not bother about a window box,” she said, “but we’ll have some flowers in a jam-pot. I found an empty one when we were clearing the sticks out. I wish I’d thought of taking some roses when I was picking them to go in the spare room.”

“I wonder who left the jam-pot,” said Dick.

“Some Pict or other before us,” said Dorothea. “It doesn’t matter so long as he doesn’t come back while we’re here.” She looked in at the door of the hut. “I’m sure Susan would say we ought to have brushed it out first, before putting the furniture in. But we haven’t a brush.”

“I can make one,” said Dick. “Where’s that saw the other Pict left?”

In a very few minutes he had cut some young birch shoots and tied them into a firm bundle round one end of a straight ash sapling. Meanwhile Dorothea had pulled all the furniture out once more, the packing-case table, the soap-box larder, the three-legged stool, the chair with a broken back, the two suitcases. Then she set to work with her new broom and the hut filled with choking clouds of dust.

“Better not sweep all the floor away,” said Dick.

“I’ll just get the top layer off. It’s mostly twigs. I’ll sweep it into the fireplace ready for when I start the fire again for supper. Look here. You’d better be cutting logs.”

Dick, while the dust came rolling from the door and window of the hut, set to work outside on the huge pile of dead branches. There was an old tree stump in the clearing, just the right height for him to use in sawing the thicker ends of the branches into short lengths. The thinner branches he broke across his knee, or by putting a foot on them and lifting. He had made two piles, one of small stuff for firelighting, and one of thicker bits, and was resting for a moment, to open and shut his fingers, cramped with holding the saw, when Dorothea came out to him with something in her hand.

“Dick,” she said. “Somebody really has been using our house. Look at this.” She held out an open clasp knife with a bone handle.

“Not very rusty,” said Dick. “Where did you find it?”

“I nearly brushed it into the fireplace,” said Dorothea and stiffened … “Listen!”

“Only a motor car,” said Dick.

“It’s her,” said Dorothea.

Dick stood listening, the knife forgotten in his hand. Above the noise of the little beck, above the noise of rustling leaves, above the harsh shouting of some jays below them in the wood, they could hear a motor car coming along the road. They heard it hoot at a bend. They heard it passing.

“Perhaps it isn’t going to stop,” said Dick.

They heard it hoot again.

“It’s turned into Beckfoot,” said Dorothea. “She’s getting out now. This very minute. Nancy and Peggy are saying ‘How do you do?’ They’re carrying her things in and asking if she’s had a pleasant journey … just like they asked us … ”

Presently they heard the motor car hoot again. They heard it pass once more along the road below the wood. They heard the noise grow fainter in the distance.

“They’re in for it now,” said Dorothea. “We all are.”

Things felt suddenly different, even for Dick. Before, somehow, the Great Aunt had hardly seemed a real person. All these preparations, the turmoil at Beckfoot, the sudden change from being visitors into being Picts hiding in a hut in the forest, might have been just part of one of Nancy’s games. The noise of that motor car coming along the road to Beckfoot and going away again had altered everything. It was like the moment in a game of hide and seek when a whistle blows far away and the hider knows that the search has begun and that it is not safe for him to stir.

For some minutes they stood silent.

“It’s no good wondering what’s happening,” said Dorothea at last. “We can’t do anything to help them.”

Dick found suddenly that he was holding a knife in his hand.

“It isn’t one of their knives,” he said, looking at it carefully. “At least, I don’t think so. Nancy’s has a lot of tweaks in it, tin-openers and corkscrews and things. And Peggy’s is a scout knife with a marline spike.”

“If there’s another Pict … ” Dorothea shook herself. “Anyway, that string on the door had been there a long time. The only thing to do is to hope he won’t turn up. I’ve done the floor. You’ve got a grand lot of wood ready. Give me a hand in getting the things in again, and then I’ll get the fire going and you take the kettle and find a good place to fill it from the beck.”

They were given yet another hint that someone else had been using the hut when, after the furniture had been taken in and arranged on the floor now swept clear of rubbish, Dick went off to fill the kettle.

He crossed the clearing to the beck and only a few steps from the path found what he wanted, a tiny pool with a foothigh waterfall dropping into it over the edge of a rock. He filled the kettle by holding it under the waterfall and saw that, though there are always plenty of little pools in a beck finding its way down a steep hillside, this pool had been improved by someone who had built a dam across it at its lower end. “Wash basin,” said Dick to himself. “And we’ll be able to wash up by putting plates and things where the waterfall drips on them.” He went back to the hut and found Dorothea on her knees before the fire, blowing at the rubbish, which had not flamed up as easily as she had expected.

“But this is awful,” she said, when Dick told her about the pool. “It’s that other Pict again.”

“Well, it’s going to be very useful,” said Dick.

Then, as the flames began to leap, and Dorothea hung the kettle on the iron hook and begun to look among the stores, he turned to the hammocks. How, exactly, had Nancy fastened the ends that were to be let go in the day-time?

“I’m not going to do anything difficult the first night,” said Dorothea. “We’ll start on the beef roll. It’ll go bad if we try to keep it. I won’t open a tin. Beef roll. Bread and butter. And there’s any amount of cake for pudding.”

“All right,” said Dick. “I’ve found out about the hammocks, how she fastened them, I mean. The only thing I haven’t found out is how to get into them.”

“They’re a long way off the floor,” said Dorothea.

“We’ll have to use the stool for a step.”

“I say. Do take care,” said Dorothea two minutes later, reaching for the loaf of bread which had been kicked out of her hands almost into the fireplace.

“Sorry,” panted Dick, who was lying on his stomach across a hammock that had somehow twisted itself into a rope. Flying legs felt desperately for the stool, but it had fallen over. The only thing to do was to go on. He held tight to the hammock and went over it in a somersault, landing safely on his feet. “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s no use trying to get into it head first. Of course it won’t be so bad when the rugs are in it. But I think the proper way must be stern first.”

“We’ve got to learn everything,” said Dorothea, who had began by cutting the first slice of bread before putting the butter on, and only then remembered watching Susan who always spread the butter on the loaf and then cut off the buttered slice.

“Stern first is the way,” said Dick, “and it’s much easier if you get on the packing case first.”

Dorothea turned round to see Dick lying in his hammock and looking very pleased.

“It’s quite easy,” he said, “once you know. You pull one side of the hammock down and go at it stern first till you’re sitting in it, and then you swing your legs up.”

“How about getting out?”

“Legs first. Then slide. Like this … ” And Dick stood breathless on the floor beside her.

“Kettle’s boiling,” said Dorothea.

They were a long time over that first meal in their own house. Somehow, though there was no cooking to be done, the different courses fell apart. In that big fireplace wood burned very fast, and by the time they had eaten their slices of beef roll, they had to bring in more of the logs Dick had sawn, and once they had begun doing that, they went on till they had a good pile waiting ready in a corner of the hut. Then they ate their cake. After that they still felt hungry, wondered what supper had been like at Beckfoot, and went on to eat bread and marmalade. By the time they took their dirty plates, mugs, spoons and the one sticky knife that had been used for everything, and went out to the washing basin in the beck, the sun had gone far round and the clearing in the wood was in shadow.

Washing up was not a success.

“It’s doing it with cold water,” said Dorothea. “I ought to have remembered that Susan always uses hot.”

“Leave everything under the waterfall,” said Dick, “and it’ll be clean by morning.”

“We’ll have hot water another time,” said Dorothea.

It was growing dusk when they heard steps coming up the path from the road.

“It’s that Pict,” said Dorothea. “What are we going to do if we have to clear out now?”

“It’s somebody pretty large,” said Dick.

“She’s found out already,” whispered Dorothea. “It’s the Great Aunt herself coming up to bring us back.”

“Mercy me, it’s a pull up that brow,” panted old Cook as she came up out of the trees into the clearing. “And the path grown over with trees and underfoot them stones enough to break your legs. There’s one thing. We shan’t have Miss Turner walking up here. I thought I’d drop that dish a dozen times. Eh me, I hope we’re doing right.”

“Come in and look at our house,” said Dorothea, able to breathe once more.

“I’ve brought you the apple pie they had to their suppers. They didn’t eat much. Happen it’ll put you on a bit … ”

“Thank you very much. Has she really come? We thought we heard the motor car but we couldn’t be sure.”

“Aye, she’s come,” said Cook grimly. “She’s come, and trouble with her. Girt auld hen ’at wants to be cock o’ t’ midden. She’s begun by clearing Miss Nancy off from the head of the table and taking the mistress’s place herself. And I’d put Miss Nancy’s napkin ring there, so there could be no mistake. And it isn’t as if Miss Nancy’s the little lass she was.”

“What did she say?” asked Dorothea.

“Miss Nancy? I couldn’t have believed it. ‘Cook,’ she says, ‘Aunt Maria likes that end of the table better. And she’s the visitor so she must choose. Peggy and I’ll sit one each side of her.’ Miss Turner looked at her a bit flummoxed, but she didn’t oppen her gob … I mean, she didn’t say nowt about it, and after that Miss Nancy was saying how she hoped the weather would keep fine for her visit, and Miss Peggy chipped in asking if she liked sitting facing the engine in the train or the other way and did she have a corner seat?”

Cook was looking this way and that round the inside of the hut. “Not but what it’s better’n I thought,” she said. “But there’s Mrs. Blackett trusted me to look after you, and here’s two of you gone already. Miss Nancy does fair rush a body off their feet. Not but what Miss Turner wouldn’t be letting her tongue off if she knew you were staying at Beckfoot with the mistress away. But it’ll be worse if she finds out now, and how we’ll keep it from her, I don’t know. There’s one thing. You’ve a roof over your heads … not but what it could do with patching … ”

“Will you have a cup of tea?” said Dorothea. “I can make one in a minute.”

“Not I,” said Cook hurriedly. “Thank you kindly, but I must away down. I had to run up to see where Miss Nancy’d put you before I could be easy in my mind. Not that I’m that easy now. But it’s better’n I thought. Nay, nay, I mustn’t stop. Miss Turner’ll be ringing that bell, and no one to answer it … Not but what no one can say I haven’t as much right as other folk to put my nose out of doors.”

“What are they doing now?” asked Dorothea.

“When I slipped out they were sitting in the drawing-room,” said Cook. “Good thing I dusted that piano. Miss Turner run her finger over it first thing.”

They went down with her as far as the road. Somehow, old Cook, stumbling down that rocky path and grumbling at the branches that met across it, made Dorothea feel that they were not yet altogether out of touch with Beckfoot.

By the gap into the road they stopped, and waited there while Cook hurried away in the dusk.

“Listen,” said Dick suddenly.

In the quiet evening they could hear the faint tinkling of the Beckfoot piano.

“Let’s go a bit nearer,” said Dorothea. “If they’re all in there it’s quite safe.”

They tiptoed along the road and waited opposite the house. The noise of the piano came clearly through the trees.

“That’s the third time she’s got stuck,” whispered Dorothea. “It must be awful for the one who isn’t playing, just sitting there and watching the Great Aunt’s face.”

“There she goes again,” said Dick.

“It isn’t Nancy’s sort of tune,” said Dorothea. “She’s quite all right with one finger doing that pirate song of Captain Flint’s.”

“Let’s go home,” said Dick suddenly. “I want to have another go at the sailing book. Scarab’s going to be ready the day after to-morrow.”

They tiptoed away round the bend in the road and began to climb once more up into the wood. Dorothea felt suddenly very much alone. Dick was there, of course, but, with his mind on the new boat, or on birds, or on cutting up wood in a scientific way, he did not seem to realize that they were going to sleep in a hut in the wood with nobody in it but themselves, a hut with holes in its roof and no glass in its window. Dorothea did not know which was worse, to think of it as a hut in which for perhaps twenty years no one had lived, or to think of it as a house from which in the middle of the night they might be turned out by the rightful owner coming home. It was not at all like sleeping in a tent in camp with other friendly tents close by.

The first call of an owl sounded in the valley.

“There’s that tawny owl again,” said Dick. “I heard him last night, but I’m not putting him down on my list till I’ve seen him.”

Of course it was all right, thought Dorothea. The ghostly wood all round them was only full of natural history. And Dick knew all about that. All the same … “Alone in the Forest” by Dorothea Callum. She started violently as a couple of woodpigeons clattered out of the branches of a tree close to the path.

“Roosting already,” said Dick.

Back in the hut, Dick lit the hurricane lantern and took his sailing book from the shelf over the fireplace. Dorothea divided the rugs and laid them in the hammocks. There were three for each of them.

“There aren’t any pillows,” she said.

“Knapsacks,” said Dick. “With clothes in them.”

Dorothea shut the door and put more wood on the fire. “We’d better be too hot than too cold the first night. And with no glass the window’s open anyway.” The sticks flamed up and shadows flickered over the walls except for the square gap where there should have been glass. Through it she could see the dim shapes of trees and a patch of sky on which were the first stars. Dick was already sitting on the three-legged stool, reading as much by firelight as by the light of the lantern.

“Let’s put the light out and go to bed,” said Dorothea.

“Just one chapter,” said Dick.

He read steadily on about the theory of sailing till he heard Dorothea again. “Much better go to bed. There’s all tomorrow.”

He looked round and saw Dorothea looking down over the edge of her hammock.

“I say. You got in jolly quietly.”

“It was easier than I thought. Dick, I do believe it’s going to be all right.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” said Dick.

Five minutes later he too had worked himself into his hammock, had put his torch and his spectacles in a safe place on the top of the beam above his head, had folded his rugs over himself and was trying to find a soft place in his knapsack.

“It’s rather like being a caterpillar,” Dorothea heard him say.

“What?”

“Lying in a hammock. Really it would be better to be a caterpillar, because they’ve got joints all the way along.”

Dorothea, lying in her hammock, very tired and already half asleep, was feeling much better about things. They had had their first meal. They had gone to bed. The Great Aunt had not found out about them and come raging up to bring them back to Beckfoot. No other Pict had come to turn them from his home. They had only to go on like that and all would be well. It was Dick and not Dorothea who thought of a new danger ahead.

He had been lying there, thinking of Scarab and of all they had planned to do. Suddenly he started up.

“Dot. We’ve forgotten something. Timothy’s coming tomorrow to take us to the mine. As soon as he comes to Beckfoot he’ll ask where we are.”

“Nancy’s sure to have thought of that,” said Dorothea.

“Listen. Listen,” said Dick a moment later. “There’s that tawny owl again.”

“I heard it.” Dorothea’s voice was muffled by the rug she had pulled over her head. The owl, heard from the hut in the wood, was nothing like so friendly and holiday a sound as it had been when heard from the spare room at Beckfoot. And the thought of Timothy, though she had told Dick that Nancy would have remembered about him, kept her lying awake long after Dick had gone rather uncomfortably to sleep. If Timothy was going to walk into Beckfoot and blurt out the whole secret first thing in the morning, it would have been better, far better, if they had never turned into Picts.