Читать книгу Arthur Ransome - Ultimate Collection - Arthur Ransome - Страница 54

Table of Contents

It was difficult to believe that the enormous pile of things on the beach at Horseshoe Cove could ever disappear into five tents and leave room for four explorers.

“We shall never get straight if we don’t set to at once,” said Susan.

“It’ll go like smoke with Peggy and me to help stow it,” said Nancy.

“We were jolly lucky to be able to save so much from the wreck,” said Roger.

“Why, that’s nothing,” said Titty. “Robinson Crusoe saved rafts and rafts full. He brought chests of drawers ashore. And barrels full of gunpowder.”

“But he lost some things,” said Roger, “and we’ve got everything we had.”

Mate Susan looked about her, to make up her mind where best to pitch the tents. There was not really much choice. The thick jungle of trees came right down to the narrow beach of the cove, leaving no open space for a camp except on the wide pebbly flat where the stream left the trees to run out into the lake.

“It’s a fine place to lurk in,” said Captain Nancy, “but it’s not much good for a camp. It’s not going to rain to-day, but when it does the beck comes rushing down in a brown spate and all this dry bit is under water. But there’s nowhere else to put all four sleeping-tents. Of course, you could have them separately, here and there in the jungle.”

“We can’t do that,” said Susan, “because of the crew. We can’t have the able-seaman and the boy sleeping all alone.”

“Specially on the mainland,” said Titty. “There might be anything prowling round. On an island it’s different. Let’s not stop here at all. Let’s go on. Let’s go on to our valley, Roger’s and mine, the one we were going to show you if the shipwreck hadn’t stopped us.”

“Let’s go there at once,” said Roger.

“Rubbish,” said Susan. “We’ve got to get the camp made quickly. To show mother we really are all right. Captain Flint’s going to bring her. There’s no time to lose. This’ll have to do. We’ll find a better place to-morrow, if mother lets us stop. But when she comes it’s got to look as if we’d been here ages. And just look at it!”

There was no more discussion. It certainly did look hopeless, that great pile of bundles and tin boxes, with the parrot cage on the top of it and the green parrot inside chattering about pieces of eight and calling himself pretty. Susan threatened to put his cover over the parrot if he didn’t keep quiet, but she let Titty shut his noisy beak with a lump of sugar instead.

There was no doubt about it; the Amazons knew all about pitching tents. They had the stores tent slung between two trees in no time, and then, while Susan and Peggy stowed the things away in it, Nancy helped Titty with the little sleeping-tents, and Roger lent a hand now here now there, handing out the pegs one by one as Nancy and Titty needed them, or galloping from the beach to the store tent with a biscuit box or something else important. Horseshoe Cove began to look less like the scene of a shipwreck and more like an explorers’ camp. Pretty soon it was altogether like a camp, and all that had to be done was to turn it from an untidy camp to a tidy one. No one was better than Susan at doing that, but while Susan was tidying she did not like having too many people about. People had to be tidied away too, only the worst of tidying people away was that they wouldn’t keep still, and as soon as you had tidied them away from one place you found yourself falling over them somewhere else. So Susan gratefully remembered that they had not yet got any milk and that one of the Amazons would have to show them the way to the farm.

Roger had been tidied out of a tent because he had come into it all dripping after doing a little swimming. After that he went into the water again and did some more. He felt he had been rescued rather too quickly after the wreck, so he had had himself rescued two or three times over, swimming across the cove and being hauled ashore by Peggy, who was also losing interest in mere tidiness. Then Roger tried what it would be like to be the only one saved from the wreck. He swam until his feet touched bottom, crawled on through the shallow water, dragged himself just beyond the reach of the breakers (this was easy, because there were none) and lay exhausted on the beach, until he heard Susan say something about the farm, and Peggy say she would show Titty the way, when he jumped up at once and said he wanted to go too.

Susan, feeling their clothes carefully, pulled them down from the clothes-line and said they were dry enough to put on.

“It’s a jolly good thing,” said Nancy, “that you chose the tropics to be wrecked in. The stones themselves are almost too hot to touch to-day, and things dry at once. But just think what it would have been like if you had had to swim ashore in the Arctic, in winter, with no sun and no wood to make a fire, and nothing but snow and seals and polar bears. There’d have been some proper shivering of timbers. You’d never have got dry at all.”

“That wouldn’t have mattered to the bears,” said Roger. “They’d have liked us better wet.”

Mate Susan gave them the milk-can and in this way got rid of everybody except Captain Nancy and the ship’s parrot. That was better. After all, she could ask Captain Nancy to take the telescope and go out on one of the headlands to see if Captain Flint’s rowing boat was in sight. And the parrot was in his cage, and the cage, at least, could be counted on to stay where she put it. She settled down now, while the kettle was boiling, to see that all the right things were in the right tents, that each sleeping-bag was properly unrolled in the tent to which it belonged, that the flaps of the tent doors were neatly tied back, and that everything else was exactly as it ought to be.

Mate Peggy took the boy and the able-seaman a little way up the beck and then struck across to the left by a fallen tree to a green cart-track through the wood, the same cart-track that Titty and Roger had found when they were exploring. They followed the cart-track till they came to the road, and then, crossing the road (for going to get milk was a sort of native business, not at all like exploring), they went through a gap in the stone wall on the other side. The cart-track did the same. It climbed away to the left and came out of the wood by an old white-washed farmhouse with a spring beside it and a stone trough, and a lot of ducks noisily enjoying the overflow from the trough. They could hear someone singing in a creaky, small voice an old hunting song that young folks sing in a great shout:

“One morning last winter to Holmbank there came

A brave, noble sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name.

Came a-hunting the fox. Bold reynard must die.

And he flung out his train and began for to cry,

‘Tally-ho! Tally-ho! Hark, forward away! Tally-ho!’ ”

“That’s old Mr. Swainson,” said Peggy Blackett. “He’s ninety years old.”

“What’s that other noise?” said Roger.

“Someone’s making butter,” said Peggy.

She went into the cool white porch and knocked at the open door.

The song stopped suddenly.

“Come in, then,” said two voices at once.

Peggy and Titty and Roger went in. There was a fire burning in the low-beamed farm kitchen, though it was such a hot day outside. On each side of the fire were two old people, an old man leaning forward on his stick, sitting in a high-backed chair doing nothing, except that he had been singing, and an old woman in a chair on rockers, working at a patchwork quilt which was spread over her knees and over a good deal of the floor. Close beside her on the floor was a big shallow apple-basket full of scraps and rags of all colours, which were some day going to be part of the quilt.

“Why, my dear,” said Mrs. Swainson, looking at them over her spectacles, “it’s one of Mrs. Blackett’s lasses. And who are these others? I thought there were only two of you. My word, and you are coming on. Why it seems no time since your mother’s mother came in at that door no bigger than you are now, and I was a grown woman then and married, too.”

“Sixty years. Sixty-five,” said old Mr. Swainson. “It’ll be nearer seventy since I brought her up here from the church down by Bigland, and she sat her down in that chair for the first time.”

“But who are the others, my dear?” said Mrs. Swainson. “They don’t look to me like Blacketts, nor yet like Turners.”

“They’re friends,” said Peggy, “and they’ve been shipwrecked.”

“Shipwrecked?” said old Mr. Swainson. “Now that reminds me of a song . . .”

“Now then, Neddy,” said Mrs. Swainson, “keep your song a minute or two, and let me be hearing. . . . What was it you said, my dear?”

“Shipwrecked,” said Peggy. “And we want some milk if you can let us have any. We’ve brought our can.”

“We had plenty of milk,” said Roger, “only it went down with the ship and got away in the water.”

Titty said nothing. She was looking all round the low-beamed farm kitchen. There was a grandfather clock in the corner with a moon showing in a circle at the top, and a wreath of flowers all round the clock face. Then there was a curled hunting horn on the black chimney shelf, and above that, on pegs jutting out from the wall, an old gun, and a very long coach horn, nearly as long as a man. There were white lace curtains to the low windows, and in the deep window-seats there were fuchsias in pots, and big spotted shells. Each shell had its own thick knitted mat, and the pots were in saucers, and each saucer had its knitted mat, just as if it were a spotted shell. Titty looked back to the chimney-shelf to see if the curly hunting horn was standing on a knitted mat. But it was too high for her to see. Close beside it on the chimney-shelf were some pewter mugs, and china candlesticks, and a copper kettle that Titty thought would be just the thing to please Susan.

As soon as old Mrs. Swainson understood that they wanted milk, she shouted in a much louder voice than anyone would have thought possible:

“Mary. Mareee. Mareee.”

The noise of the butter-churn stopped, and clogs clattered on a stone floor, and through the passage leading from the dairy came a tall young woman, with her sleeves rolled to her elbows, and her cheeks very pink from turning the handle of the churn.

“And how are you, Miss Peggy?” she said.

“Very well, thank you,” said Peggy. “These are our friends. This is Titty. This is Roger. They’ve both been shipwrecked.”

“In the same ship,” said Roger. “We swam ashore.”

“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Swainson to Titty, “what do you think of my youngest grandchild?”

Mary Swainson laughed.

“That’s the question she always asks,” she said.

“I think she’s very nice,” said Titty.

“That shows you’ve got good taste,” said old Mr. Swainson. “And that reminds me. There’s a rare good song about that. . . .”

“Never mind the song,” said Mrs. Swainson. “Have you got any of this morning’s milk, Mary? The cows won’t be in for a while yet.”

“You come along with me,” said Mary, “while I get you some. Nothing’ll stop grandad from singing if there’s strangers about.”

“But I liked his song,” said Roger.

The old man slapped his knee and laughed till there were tears on his red cheeks.

“You and me would get on champion together,” he said, and laughed and laughed again.

But Mary Swainson swept them all out of the kitchen, across the passage and into the dairy.

“One of you keep turning that handle,” she said, “while I rinse the can out for you. You mustn’t stop the churn when the butter’s in the way of coming. If we were to stay and let grandad start singing it would be black night and the milk would be sour before ever you got away.”

So they took turns at the butter churn while Mary Swainson washed out the can and filled it from a huge brown earthenware bowl.

“You come and see us again, my dears,” said old Mrs. Swainson, as Mary hurried them through the kitchen on the way out.

“We’d like to, very much,” said Titty.

“And you and me’ll sing songs,” said the old man, winking at Roger, and screwing up one eye so that it disappeared altogether under his white bushy eyebrow.

“I’ll be saying good-bye to you,” said Mary Swainson, “or I’ll have that butter spoiled yet.” And she clattered back into the farmhouse after getting Peggy, Titty and Roger safely beyond the porch.

“I wish he’d sung more songs,” said Roger, as they went off. But they were not more than a few yards on their way before they heard the high creaky old voice singing again:

“Of such a fox chase there niver was known,

The huntsmen and followers were instantly thrown.

To keep within sound didn’t lie in their power,

For hounds chased the fox eighty mile in five hour.”

“He’s always like that,” said Peggy. “And Mrs. Swainson is always making quilts. She must have made hundreds and hundreds.”

“Did you see the copper kettle?” said Titty.

“I’d have liked to hear him blow the horn, the long one,” said Roger. “May I carry the milk? I didn’t have a chance of carrying it this morning.”

“Properly,” said Titty, after walking silently for some way along the cart-track down through the trees—“properly, we couldn’t get milk at a farmhouse. We were cast ashore. There weren’t any houses along that desolate coast. But, of course, we could have caught some of the wild goats and milked them. That’s what we must have done.”

“Yes,” said Roger, “and didn’t they butt? It took two of us to hold a goat while the other one milked.”

That explained the milk well enough. Then the road had to be dealt with. There it was, between the wood along the shore of the lake and the wood that climbed the side of the hill, a broad road with motor cars on it, and motor bicycles and even butchers’ vans. It was a nuisance to have a road like that in newly discovered country. Columbus was never bothered with anything like that when he discovered America.

“What do you do about the road?” Titty asked after they had crossed it and were finding their way to the stream from the cart-track on the other side.

“How?” said Peggy.

“Its being so noisy and native. And not the right kind of native.”

“We just don’t count it,” said Peggy, “not when we come to Horseshoe Cove. It’s the edge of our country. We never bother about it at all. It’s a good long way from the lake.”

“Yesterday,” said Titty, “it was a road of the Aztecs. They were trumpeting to each other along it—the guards, I mean.”

“That was a fine idea,” said Peggy. “I don’t believe even Nancy would have thought of that. But you had to cross it, if you went up on the moor. I suppose you watched for a chance and made a dash for it when they weren’t looking.”

“We didn’t,” said Roger, and was just going to tell how they had found a way under the road instead of across it when they heard Nancy’s voice, loud and clear, though some distance away, through the trees.

“A sail! A sail!”

All three of them started forward at a gallop, but Roger pulled up quickly, as the milk was slopping from the can. The others stopped, and Peggy took the can from him.

“Hurry up,” she said. “I’ll take the milk. It doesn’t spill if you run without bobbing.” And, indeed, though she ran nearly as fast as the others, even in scrambling through the bushes, she spilt very little.

She left the milk-can at the mouth of the stores tent. Titty and Roger raced on out of the trees to the beach, where the parrot in his cage was alone looking after the fire. At the very end of the northern of the two headlands that made the narrow entrance to the cove, a large towel was waving on the top of an oar fixed in the rocks. Under it stood Nancy and Susan, taking turns with the telescope. The others joined them.

“It isn’t exactly a sail,” said Roger.

It was, in fact, a rowing boat. And even eyes without telescopes could see that Captain Flint and Captain John were rowing and that mother and Bridget were sitting in the stern.

“You got the milk all right?” asked Susan, as the others clambered out over the rocks. “Good. Everything’s all ready for them. But only just . . .”