Читать книгу Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series) - Arthur Ransome - Страница 59

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The explorers slept rather late in the morning. When they waked there was a rush to the head of the valley to see if the dam had been washed away. It had not. Not a stone of it had stirred, and everybody had a dip in the new bathing-pool. They had come back and Susan was just reminding them that it was a long way down to Swainson’s farm, and that somebody must fetch the milk before they could have breakfast, when a cheerful voice said, “Well, you have made yourselves comfortable. Did you have a good night?” and they saw Mary Swainson looking down on them from the top of the slope above the cave. She had a milk-can in one hand and a big market basket in the other.

“Rice pudding,” she said, “from Holly Howe. And Mrs. Walker’s coming to tea with you to-morrow and bringing another pudding with her, so you’ve to eat this to-day.”

“Don’t try to get down there,” said John. “It’s slippery.”

But Mary Swainson seemed to know the valley very well. She went a few yards farther on along the edge of it and then came down by a sheep-track that ended close by the bathing pool.

“That’s a good weir you’ve made,” she said, as John and Susan met her and took the milk-can and the basket. “Slippery you may well say that rock is. Many’s the pair of breeches my brothers wore out on that rock sliding from top to bottom of it.”

THE KNICKERBOCKERBREAKER

Roger had not thought of the side of the valley from this point of view. He went off to try it, first from half-way up, and then from the top. It was a very good slide.

“There’s a better over here,” said Mary a few minutes later, pointing up the other side of the valley. “Not so steep,” she added, “and not so hard on cloth.”

“Skin,” said Roger, feeling the damage already done by two or three slides down the steep rock that hid Peter Duck’s.

“You come down to the farm,” said Mary, “and I’ll darn that. It won’t be the first by a long count. And you’ve found the way into the cave, have you? I thought you would have, when Mr. Turner looked in yesterday to say where you were. Have you been in?”

“Come and look,” said Susan. Nobody could mind Mary Swainson, and even Titty thought it did not matter that she had known about the cave. John told her it was a secret now, and she promised to say nothing about it.

From that moment Mary Swainson, though she lived at the farm down below the moor and was busy from morning to night, seemed to the explorers more like an ally than a native. You could always be sure of Mary. She took a cup of tea with them that first morning, and after breakfast Roger, Susan, and Titty went down with her to the farm when John went down to meet Captain Flint to begin work on the mast. Roger was down at the farm next day to be darned again. Mary darned him about twice a day until at last he was tired of the “Knickerbockerbreaker,” which, Titty said, was much the best name for it.

Soon after John had left the cart-track in the wood by the lake and was making his way through the trees to Horseshoe Cove, he heard the noise of a hand-saw. Captain Flint was there before him and was hard at work shaping the foot of the mast, making it exactly like the foot of the mast that had been broken, so that it would fit cleanly into the socket in the keelson. That was soon done. John had brought the shaping plane down from the camp in his knapsack, and now Captain Flint showed him how to use it. The plane was curved, so that it would take shavings off a rounded surface as evenly as an ordinary plane takes shavings off a plank. He had also brought down the callipers, big pincers that opened and shut and had a small screw to keep them just as much open or as much shut as you wanted. Captain Flint showed John how to measure the same distance along both masts, and then how to fix the callipers just so much open that both curved points touched the wood when they were used to measure the thickness of the old mast. Then he set to work planing down the new mast evenly, all round, until it too exactly fitted between the points of the callipers.

“Remember one thing,” he said. “Never take off too much. If you take off too little you can always take off a bit more, but if you take off too much you can never put it back.”

They worked hard at the mast all that morning until nearly dinner-time, when the others came from the farm and told of how they had been singing choruses with old Mr. Swainson, and sewing a patch into Mrs. Swainson’s new patchwork quilt, and seeing pigs and calves and a foal, and the biggest tabby cat that ever was seen in the world. “He follows Mary about, but she isn’t going to let him come near Swallowdale. But she says he’s frightened of parrots, so it wouldn’t matter if he did come.” And, of course, the mate invited Captain Flint to stop for dinner, and he said he would be delighted and had indeed brought five pork pies from Rio and five fruit pies to match, which he hoped would not come amiss. He brought the parcel with these good things in it out of the shade of a bush where he had put it to keep cool, and took a fishing-rod, a fishing-basket and a landing-net out of his boat. He put the parcel in the basket for easy carrying.

“I thought of going up to Trout Tarn after dinner,” he said, “and I’ll show you how to cast a fly.”

“Let’s all fish,” said Roger.

“You won’t do much in the tarn except with fly,” said Captain Flint, “but if you had a good worm or two you would soon get trout out of the beck.”

“We’ve got our fishing-rods,” said Roger.

“Well, see what you can do in the way of worms.”

It was during that dinner in Swallowdale that Roger asked Captain Flint the question that for one reason or another he had not asked before, though it had been in his mind since the first day.

“Captain Flint,” he began.

“Hullo!”

“Why did you cover up your cannon with a black sheet?”

“To keep strangers and dust off it.”

“A cannon’s better than a sheet to keep strangers off.”

“It didn’t keep you off, did it, when you captured the houseboat and made me walk the plank? Why, I wake in the night even now thinking of the sharks.”

“Well, we wanted you to fire it this year.”

“But I’m not living in the houseboat just now.”

“Why not?”

Captain Flint said nothing just for a moment. Everybody was listening. At last he said, “Look here, Roger, the very first minute I can I’ll be back there with a barrel of gunpowder and you shall come and fire the thing yourself.”

“Let’s go and do it now.”

“He can’t,” said Titty. “It’s the great-aunt. Captain Nancy said so.”

“She isn’t going to stop for ever,” said Captain Flint.

Trout Tarn was nearly a mile beyond Swallowdale, high on the top of the moor, a little lake lying in a hollow of rock and heather. When the Swallows saw it, they wished almost that they had made their camp on its rocky shores. But Titty said that it had no cave, and Susan said that if it was a bother bringing wood to Swallowdale it would be miles more bother bringing it to Trout Tarn. “Two miles more bother. One each way,” said Roger. “And besides,” said Susan, “it would be that much farther from Swainson’s farm. We’d have had to spend all our time fetching wood and milk.” John and Captain Flint were talking of something quite different, and that was the catching of trout, and when Captain Flint sat down and began to put his tackle together, the others stopped talking to look. This was not at all like the perch fishing down on the big lake. There was no float for one thing, no minnow, and no worm. Instead, Captain Flint opened a little tin box, took three flies from it, and gave them to Roger to hold.

“What are they made of?” asked John.

“Feathers and silk. All small flies,” said Captain Flint. “It’s no good fishing big ones up here. That’s woodcock and orange silk. That’s dark snipe and purple, and this is a black spider—brown silk and one of the black, shiny burnished feathers from the neck of a cock pheasant. Best fly of the lot on a hot day up here, and the easiest to tie.”

“Did you make them yourself?” asked John.

“Of course I did,” said Captain Flint.

“Can we have a fly to fish with?” asked Titty. “Roger’s got his rod.”

“No good, Able-seaman, you can’t throw a fly with a perch rod, and you’ll frighten the trout away if you chuck a big red float at them. If you’ve got a good lot of worms you could catch some in the beck.”

“We’ve only got one worm,” said Roger, “but he’s a beauty.”

“Well, see what you can do with him in the beck,” said Captain Flint, who was himself impatient to be fishing, while the wind rippled the surface of the tarn. “Come on, John. Keep well out of the way, Mister Mate, and keep the others clear. We don’t want to hook an explorer instead of a trout.”

He began moving slowly up the southern side of the tarn, the side from which the wind was coming, swishing his rod backwards and forwards, letting out line, and then letting the flies drop on the water far out along the edge of the ripples, waiting a moment, and then slowly, slowly, inch by inch, lifting the point of the rod, bringing the flies in again until with a steady upward lift he picked the line from the water, sent it flying up in the air behind him, paused a half-second for it to straighten and then, switching the point of the rod forward again, sent the flies out to fall light as scraps of down one behind the other, a yard farther up the tarn. The third or fourth time his flies dropped on the water there was a splash at the woodcock and orange, the rod bent, and a moment later a fat little trout was being drawn over the net that John was holding ready for him quite still and well below the surface. Roger and Titty wanted to rush in to look at the trout, but Susan knew that trout fishing is serious business, and that a crowd of explorers haring along the bank is not likely to encourage the fish to rise. So she stopped them in time, and they watched the fishing from a distance. Then Captain Flint gave John the rod, and for a minute or two John tried to make the line straighten high in air behind him and then shoot forward, unrolling itself until once more it straightened out, this time in front of him and well above the water, so that the flies should drop like snowflakes. “Up, now. . . . Pause. . . . Forward again,” Captain Flint was saying. “Aim about two feet above the water. . . . Don’t take the rod too far back. . . . No need for force. . . . Make the tip of the rod do the work. . . . Look here. Let me hold your hand and show you the way to do it. Now then.” It was not a very good cast, for two hands on a rod are not better than one if they belong to different people. Still, the flies did, at last, go out instead of landing in a mess only a yard or two from the shore. There was a splash, John struck, the flies flew back over his head and caught in the heather behind him. Captain Flint crawled back and freed them.

DARNING ROGER

“I say, that was a trout, wasn’t it?” said John.

“Of course it was. Try again in the same place. Steady. Remember not to hurry when the line is behind you. It’ll be all right if the point of your rod didn’t go too far back. There he is. Got him. Well done!” and presently Captain Flint was holding the net while John pulled his first trout over it, when Captain Flint lifted it out.

This was too much for Roger.

“Let’s go and fish, too,” he said, opening the tobacco tin in which he had his worm. “The tarn is crammed with fish. Look at the way they’re pulling them out. Two already.”

“We haven’t got any flies,” said Titty.

“Yes, but what a worm!” said Roger. “He’s the best worm I ever caught.”

“Captain Flint said we’d better try him in the beck,” said Titty.

“The beck’s not big enough,” said Roger.

They left Susan and turned back towards the place at which the beck flowed out of the tarn. Susan slowly followed the fly-fishers. “We’ll fish here,” said Roger. “It’s a lovely place for a float.” He and Titty were crawling round the edge of a little bay, where the rock fell steeply into dark water. Together they put up Roger’s perch rod. Together, not without some awful difficulties, they put the giant worm on the perch hook. They pulled the float up the line so that the worm should be deep in the water. Then Roger swung the worm and float out from the rock. They tugged a lot more line off the reel. The red float, moved by wind or the slight current, moved away from the shore and stopped when the line would let it go no farther. Roger held the rod and Titty stood beside him watching it. But the red float moved no more. They sat down to it. Then Roger gave the rod to Titty. After a bit Titty gave the rod to Roger. Then they propped the rod across a clump of heather with its butt wedged under a rock. That was better. They watched it for some time, and began talking of other things. Then they decided that it would be all right by itself, and they went scouting over the rocks till they could see far up the tarn. There were John and Captain Flint and Susan. They saw the splashing as John caught a fish. They saw it put into Captain Flint’s basket. Then they saw John give the rod to Susan and take the basket, while Susan learnt to cast. For a long time they watched, and at last they saw Susan catch a fish. “Perhaps he’d have let us fish too, if we’d gone on,” said Roger.

They looked back down into their little bay.

“I can’t see our float,” said Titty.

“There it is,” shouted Roger. “It’s moving. Titty! Titty! Something’s pulling like anything. Look at the rod.”

There was a frantic race back to the rod which was jerking angrily up and down.

The others had made between them a nice basket of plump little trout, a dozen, perhaps, all about a quarter of a pound apiece, and all very much the same size. “You don’t often get them bigger than this up here,” said Captain Flint, as they walked back together, “but they’re very sweet. Sometimes in the evening you may see a monster moving, but nobody ever catches one of them. A half-pound fish is a very good one, and the quarter-pounders are good enough. The really big ones never seem to come up.”

“What’s the matter with Roger?” cried Susan suddenly.

They heard Titty’s voice, shrill and desperate, “Help, help!”

“They’re all right,” said John. “They’re both there. But what on earth are they doing?”

“Help, help!” shrilled Titty.

“They’ve got a fish,” shouted Captain Flint. “Hang on to the rod, John. Let’s have the net.” And in a moment he was leaping over rocks and heather as hard as he could go, forgetting altogether how much he weighed and how many years had passed since first he fished.

“Hang on to it,” he shouted.

“Roger’s fallen in,” said Susan. “Oh, oh! I ought never to have left them.”

There was a fearful splashing away by the foot of the tarn. Titty was holding the rod now, and they had moved round the point of the little bay where they had left their float, and were at the edge of the shallows close above the place where the beck left the tarn. Into these shallows Roger had splashed, and a few moments later, splashing worse than ever, he scrambled ashore with a big trout clasped in his arms. He slipped as he was getting out. The trout fell, but Roger fell on it, and by the time Captain Flint arrived with the net Roger, Titty and the trout were a safe dozen yards from the water.

ROGER FELL ON IT

“He’s two pounds if he’s an ounce,” said Captain Flint. “You’ve got one of the grandfathers. Beaten the lot of us. Float-tackle and all.”

Titty’s and Roger’s big fish was far too big to go in the basket. They carried it between them in Captain Flint’s landing-net.

“Isn’t it a pity mother isn’t coming to tea to-day?” said Titty.

“She ought to see it,” said Captain Flint, and in the end they sent it to Holly Howe. Captain Flint was to leave it there on his way up the lake. Very soon after tea he was off.

“I don’t want to be late,” he said. “Those two pirates were twenty minutes late for lunch yesterday. They ran into a calm. Not their fault, but their mother hadn’t heard the last of it when I ran away this morning.”

“Ran away?” said Titty.

“Well, hurried,” said Captain Flint. “I had to be down here early if we were to get going with the new mast.”

“Will the Amazons be coming to-morrow?” asked Susan.

“Don’t tell us, if they’re going to make their surprise attack,” said John.

“From what I heard I don’t think they’ll be able to get away. No, I’m sure they won’t be here to-morrow. But I’ll do my very best for them the day after that.”

“Perhaps it’s a good thing they can’t come to-morrow,” said John. “There’s a lot to do on the mast.”

“They don’t think it’s a good thing,” said Captain Flint.

“I think it’s horrid that they can’t come,” said Titty.

“So do I,” said Captain Flint, “but it can’t be helped.”

The big trout was wrapped in bracken, together with a bit of paper on which Titty had written, “Mother. With love from Titty and Roger”; and Roger had written, “We caught it ourselves.” For a moment, indeed, he found it hard to say good-bye to the fish and to see its rounded, spotted sides for the last time, but, after all, mother was going to have it for supper, probably, and Captain Flint could not wait. Roger took a last look, and then held the bracken leaves together while Captain Flint made a neat lacing round them with string so that the big trout made a very handsome parcel.

Captain Flint left the rod and flies, a cast or two and the net and basket for John and Susan to look after, and they were carefully stored in Peter Duck’s. “Don’t waste time fishing the tarn unless there’s a good southerly wind like to-day’s,” he said as he went off. “You’ll do much better in the beck.”

There was a little gloom that evening at the thought of the native trouble that was bothering the Amazons, but it was difficult to think of fish and trouble at the same time, and Susan had more helpers than she needed when she was cleaning the little trout for supper. Each fish was admired, though no one could be sure which was John’s first fish and which Susan’s. “I wish we’d caught some of them,” said Roger, but John said he was a greedy little beast, seeing that he and Titty between them had caught a trout nearly as big as all the others put together. The sizzling and spitting of the boiling butter as Susan fried the trout in batches over the camp-fire reminded them of last year’s perch fishing.

For the next two days Roger could think of very little but trout. He spent that evening, between supper and bed, partly in sliding down the Knickerbockerbreaker and partly in turning over the loose stones at the side of the beck, looking for worms and mostly finding ants. Next morning, after going down with Susan for the milk and being darned, he went up again to Trout Tarn, and tried to tempt another monster, but caught nothing, and gave it up when he found that Titty, fishing the little pools of the beck just below the tarn, and using the less important worms, had caught four little trout in a way John had shown her before going down to work on the mast. After dinner he too began fishing the pools without a float, and by the time John came up from the cove, at the end of a hard day’s work on the mast, bringing with him mother and the ship’s baby, who had rowed into the cove in time to come up to Swallowdale for tea, Roger had himself caught two, and there was a good deal of hurry in getting them cleaned and cooked in time for mother to try with the bunloaf and butter.

Yesterday’s big trout had been boiled at Holly Howe, and had made a supper for mother and nurse, and Mr. and Mrs. Jackson had had some too, and there had been some for Bridget to have after her porridge at breakfast. Mother said it was the biggest trout she had ever seen in England, though she had seen much bigger in Australia and New Zealand. The ship’s baby was delighted with the ship’s parrot’s private perch. Mother liked the bathing-pool. She had been all up the valley before, at last, they showed her its secret and pulled aside the heather from the doorway and gave her Susan’s torch and told her to go in to see Peter Duck’s cave. What she said about that pleased everybody.

“Any explorer would be glad if he’d found a cave like that.” This pleased Titty and Roger. “It’s a very neat and well-kept larder.” This pleased Susan. “It wants nothing but a stone table.” (John at once decided he would make one.) “And what a place to hide in.” This pleased all of them. “But no sleeping in it.” Susan explained that nobody was going to sleep in it except the parrot. “And Peter Duck,” said Titty.

“Of course,” said mother. “Hullo. What’s this? Ben Gunn?”

She was looking at a patch of wall lit by Susan’s torch, the very patch on which Captain Flint had carved the name “Ben Gunn,” so many years before. Another name had been added underneath the first and a bracket joined the two.

“You see, Ben Gunn belongs to Captain Flint, and Peter Duck is ours,” said Titty.

The others peered at the wall. This is what they read:

BEN GUNN	}
	}	PARTNERS
PETER DUCK	}

The letters were not all of the same size. Nor were they very straight. But it would have been hard to do better, working with a knife by the light of a candle lantern.

“But when did you do it?” asked Susan.

“When you and Roger went for the milk this morning,” said Titty, “and John had gone up to the Watch Tower Rock.”

“The Watch Tower Rock?” said mother. “What’s that?” and they took her up there and she lifted the ship’s baby up to John and then climbed up herself and looked back over the lake to Holly Howe far away down below, and up over the moor to the big hills. They told her which of them was Kanchenjunga and how some day they were going to join the Amazons and climb that mountain together.

“Poor dears,” said mother, “from what I hear they’re having rather a poor time.”

“Horrible,” said John. “We saw them out driving.”

“With gloves on,” said Titty.

“What’s the great-aunt really like?” asked Susan.

“Didn’t she come to tea to make friends the day after we sailed away to Wild Cat Island?” said Titty.

“I wouldn’t say she came to make friends,” said mother. “It was a curiosity call. She made Mrs. Blackett bring her because she wanted to know what we were like.”

“But didn’t she make friends when she saw how nice you are?”

Mother laughed.

“Perhaps she didn’t think so.” She would say no more about the great-aunt, and all the rest of the time she was up on the Watch Tower Rock and at tea in Swallowdale and on the way down to the cove, when all the explorers went with her to see her safely through the jungle, she talked about fishing and about caves and about camping in the Australian bush, where there were much worse snakes than adders.

All the same, as they climbed through the woods on the way back to the camp that evening, Titty said to John, “Mother doesn’t like her either.”

“No,” said John. “I’m sure she doesn’t. Anyway, perhaps the Amazons’ll manage to get away from her to-morrow and make the attack on Swallowdale.”

Next day, almost sure that the attack would come, John waited most of the morning in Swallowdale or on the Watch Tower Rock. Titty and Roger were sent for the milk by themselves and told not to be a minute longer than they could help, for fear the attack should come while they were away. Later on, Susan said she must have some more wood, and while three of the explorers were gathering wood one was waiting on the Watch Tower Rock to signal to them in case of need, and the wood-gatherers kept near the edge of the forest and kept looking every few minutes to see that the look-out away on the rock above Swallowdale was making no sign. But the whole morning passed, and in the afternoon when John went down to the cove, sure that the Amazons would not think it worth while to cross the moor so late, he found that Captain Flint had been in the cove all morning working on the mast. John worked hard all the afternoon and as Captain Flint had left a note pinned to the mast to say he would not be coming next day, John decided that something ought to be done about the holiday tasks. When he came up to Swallowdale in the evening he said so to Susan, and Susan agreed that with a whole week of the holidays gone and the holiday tasks not yet begun, it was high time that everybody settled down to them.

“I don’t believe the Amazons are really going to attack,” he said. “Not now, anyway. It isn’t as if they were free, like last year.”

“They probably can’t get away,” said Susan.

“Even Captain Flint can’t,” said John.

But on the fourth day after the move to Swallowdale, when nobody was really expecting it, the attack came.