Читать книгу Arthur Ransome - Ultimate Collection - Arthur Ransome - Страница 34

Table of Contents

The houseboat man, Captain Flint, sometimes known as Uncle Jim, was alone with his green parrot in the cabin of his ship grimly trying to put things straight after his visitors. First there had been the burglars, and then this morning there had been all the people who wanted to see what damage had been done, besides Sammy and the other policeman and the sergeant from Rio, who had sent Sammy to the foot of the lake and the other policeman up to the other end to make inquiries. The burglars had turned everything upside down. Every one of the neat lockers and cupboards had its door swinging open and its contents raked out. The assegais and tomahawks and shark’s-tooth necklaces and boomerangs and green and scarlet painted gourds, that were relics of Captain Flint’s travels and had hung in honoured places on the cabin walls, had been torn down. It was like trying to tidy up after a whirlwind. Captain Flint trod on a little ebony elephant from Colombo. He picked it up, thinking of glue, but it had lost its tusks, its trunk and two of its legs, and he threw it desperately through the open cabin window.

The green parrot, perched on the edge of the cabin table, was trying to bite off the head of a little jade image of Buddha that Captain Flint had bought in Hong-Kong.

“Go ahead, Polly,” said Captain Flint, “smash it up.”

“Pretty Polly,” said the parrot, and holding the little idol in one claw twisted at it with its strong curved beak.

“Why on earth they couldn’t have taken some of these things if they wanted them, beats me,” said Captain Flint, who from living alone so much was accustomed to talk a good deal to himself and to the parrot. “And then they go and take the one thing that could be of no possible use to them but mattered a great deal to me. Never lock anything up, Polly, and you’ll never lose it. Whoever the thief was, he took that box simply because it was heavy and he couldn’t open it. If it was that boy he must be a strong one. But perhaps he had others to help him. Well, when he does open it he’ll be sorry he didn’t take something else. Mixed Moss, by ‘A Rolling Stone,’ won’t mean much to him, Polly, though it meant a lot of hard work to me.”

“Pretty Polly,” said the parrot, as the head of the idol dropped on the floor.

Captain Flint bent to pick up the fallen head, and a broken emu’s egg cracked under his feet.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” said Captain Flint, “won’t put Humpty Dumpty together again and won’t make me sit down to write Mixed Moss a second time.”

The green parrot gave a loud, angry shriek when Captain Flint picked up the little jade head.

“Oh well, take it, then,” said Captain Flint. The parrot waddled towards him along the table, and, gripping the edge of the table with one claw, took the head from him with the other.

“It’s just a summer wasted,” said Captain Flint. “And all my diaries gone too.”

“Pretty Polly,” said the parrot.

“There is one thing about it,” said Captain Flint, picking up an armful of clothes and shoving them into one of the cupboards, “those nieces of mine had nothing to do with it. They do play the game, and they’d never have wrecked my cabin for me. But that boy. I didn’t like his lying to me about his firework on my cabin roof. Boys are capable of anything, Polly, even good ones. I was a bad one myself, so they say, but at least I didn’t tell lies.”

At that moment a small folded piece of paper flew through the cabin window and dropped on the table. The parrot shuffled towards it and picked it up. It seemed to be better material for beak work than the remains of the little jade image. Captain Flint looked out.

“Hullo, Nancy,” he said. “Come to gloat?”

“I won’t speak to you,” said Nancy. “I’ve tipped you the Black Spot. Read it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I won’t speak to you till you’ve said you’re sorry. Read the Black Spot and you’ll see why.”

Captain Flint was just in time to save the paper from the parrot. It was already in two pieces. Captain Flint untwisted them and put them together. On one side was a large round smudge made with the charred wood. On the other was a letter.

“To Captain Flint (alias Uncle Jim),

John never touched the houseboat. When you told him he was a liar, he wasn’t. You were. He had come at risk of his life to warn you that savage natives were planning an attack on your houseboat. The Billies had given him a message for you. You wouldn’t listen. Instead you called him a liar. Talk about being ungrateful. Now you’ve been burgled. I’m glad. Very glad. If you want to know who singed your beard (see Philip of Spain) by exploding a mine on your cabin roof, it was the undersigned. You deserved it. This is the Black Spot. You are deposed from being an uncle or anything decent.

Nancy Blackett (Amazon pirate).”

“Hi! Nancy!” shouted Captain Flint out of the cabin window.

But Captain Nancy, anxious to show the Swallows that she was holding no parley with the enemy, was already rowing out of the bay.

“By Jove!” said Captain Flint, “so it was those young harum-scarums all the time. What a brute that boy must have thought me. And I was a brute too. And now I’ve gone and told the police that I thought he might have something to do with this mess. Into your private cabin with you, Polly. There’s too much about to leave you in charge here.”

He put the parrot, squawking wildly, into its cage, ran up on deck, jumped down into his rowing boat, cast off the painter and set off after Captain Nancy, rowing as hard as he could. Whatever happened, he must see that boy at once and put things right.