Читать книгу Winter Holiday - Arthur Ransome - Страница 7

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Steps sounded on the wooden stairs, and counting, “Seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and that’s the dozen.” Mrs Dixon was coming to tell the Callum children that it was time to get up. They had come to Dixon’s Farm only the night before. Mrs Dixon had been their mother’s nurse when she was a little girl, and Dorothea and Dick had come to stay at the farm for the last week of the winter holidays.

For some time already they had been lying half asleep, listening to the strange noises down in the yard, so very different from the roar of the traffic in the streets at home. They heard the grunting of the pigs, the clucking of hens, the anxious quacking of ducks, the hiss of an angry gander, the mooing of cows and the regular trilling of the milk spirting into a bucket. Now, waked properly by Mrs Dixon, they were out of bed and into each other’s rooms, to find that the two windows looked out on exactly the same view, a corner of the farmyard, a low stone wall, a gate, and beyond it a frosty field sloping down to the lake, an island covered with trees, and away on the farther shore, the wooded side of the fells and farther still the snow-covered tops of the big hills sparkling in the first of the morning sun. “There’ll be ice in the jugs this morning,” Mrs Dixon had said, “and I’ve brought you up a can of hot water apiece. No need to start the day freezing.”

A few minutes later they were hurrying downstairs. (“There are twelve steps,” said Dick, “she was quite right.”) They came down into the big farm kitchen, where Mrs Dixon had their breakfast ready for them, two bowls of hot porridge on the kitchen table, that was covered with a red-and-white chequered table-cloth, and some rashers of bacon sizzling in the frying-pan that she was holding over the fire. “I’m not going to make visitors of you,” she said.

Mr Dixon, who had had his breakfast long ago, looked in at the door but, on seeing the children, said, “Good morning to you,” and shyly slipped away. Mrs Dixon laughed. “He’s not one for talking, isn’t Dixon,” she said, and then asked what they meant to do with themselves that day.

Dick, who had brought with him a telescope, a microscope and a book about astronomy, wiped away the mist that kept settling on his spectacles every time he took a drink from his big mug of tea. “I’ve got to find a good place for an observatory,” he said.

“Eh?”

“For looking at stars.”

“And there are a million other things we want to look at, too,” said Dorothea. “We want to look at everything.”

“That’s your mother all over,” said Mrs Dixon. “Well, look as much as you like, but dinner’ll be ready at half-past twelve, and you’d best be here if you want any.”

After breakfast they put on their coats and went out into the yard and made a round of it, visiting all the things they had listened to, lying in bed. Milking was over, but they met old Silas, the farm hand, crossing the yard with a great truss of red bracken for the cowshed. And Roy, the dog, rushed barking out at them, but stopped at once and wagged his tail.

“Just showing what he would do if we didn’t belong,” said Dorothea.

“It’s a fine frosty morning,” said Silas. “You’ll be having some skating if it goes on.”

Dick looked through the yard gate towards the lake.

“Nay, if it’ll be a while yet before the lake freezes. It’s not often it does, but it’s been a grand year for hollyberry, and that’s a sign. But you’ll be skating on the tarn up above yonder if we have another night or two like last.”

“Where is it?” asked Dick. “We’ve got our skates packed.”

Old Silas pointed up the fell behind the house.

“Let’s go down to the lake first,” said Dorothea.

From the yard gate a narrow footpath went down the sloping field to the edge of the lake. Dick and Dorothea went down it for the first time. They did not even know the name of the island that lay there, with its leafless winter trees, and the tall pine tree above the little cliff at the northern end of it. It had been dark when they arrived, and everything was new to them.

“I wish we’d thought of asking if they had a boat,” said Dick.

“They probably have,” said Dorothea. “What’s that, down by the water?”

Dick stopped. His telescope was meant for stars, but it was good practice to use it for other things.

“Upside down,” he said.

“It’s a boat, anyhow,” said Dorothea.

Down at the bottom of the field there were reeds, some on land and some growing in the water. There was a small landing-place. A narrow belt of dried bits of reed, sticks and other jetsam marked the point to which the lake had risen during the autumn floods. Half a dozen yards above this there was an old brown rowing boat, upside down, resting on trestles, a couple of feet clear of the ground.

“They must have put it like that for the winter,” said Dick, walking round it, “to keep rain and snow out of it.”

“What a pity,” said Dorothea, who, as usual, was making up a story. She tried a sentence or two on Dick. “They launched their trusty vessel, put out their oars, and rowed towards the mysterious island. No human foot had ever trod . . .”

“Well, look,” said Dick. “There’s somebody coming now.”

A rowing boat was coming down the lake, the only thing moving on the water under the pale, winter fields, the dark woods, and the distant snow-topped hills. It was moving fast. There seemed to be four rowers, two to a thwart, each pulling on a single oar.

“Where’s your telescope?” said Dorothea.

She watched the boat cutting its way through the reflections of the hills. The story she had begun to plan was gone. Instead, she was finding another to explain this solitary boat, with its four rowers, and the two passengers seated in the stern. Carrying a sick man to the doctor, perhaps. A matter of life and death. Or were they racing some other boat not yet in sight?

Dick pulled out his telescope again. He rested it on the keel of the overturned boat and with a little difficulty focussed it on that other boat that was coming so swiftly down the lake.

“Hullo,” he said. “Dot! They aren’t grown up.”

“Let’s see.”

But she gave him back the telescope at once. “Bother the thing,” she said. “I can see just as well without it.”

“What’s happening now?”

The four oars had stopped, as if at a word of command, and the two who had been sitting in the stern were changing places with two of the rowers. A moment later all four oars shot forward, and paused. The blades dipped, the four rowers pulled together and the boat, which had been gliding slowly on, gathered speed once more.

“Put your coat on, now you’re not rowing.”

The words sounded clearly over the water, as well as the reply.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Dick and Dorothea could see a small boy in the stern of the rowing boat, trying to put his coat on without really standing up, as the strong strokes of the rowers sent the boat shooting forward. There were four girls in the boat and two boys. Two of the girls had red woolly caps like Dorothea’s green one, and two of them had white. The larger of the boys and a girl in a red cap were rowing in the middle of the boat. Two girls were rowing in the bows, and a small girl with a white woolly cap was sitting in the stern with the small boy, who sat down suddenly just when it seemed he had got into his coat without an accident.

The boat came straight for the island. The watchers on the shore saw it pass under the little cliff, below the tall pine, and close along the island shore.

“Easy all!” they heard someone call.

The boat slid on with oars lifted from the water.

“Let’s go to the old harbour,” came another voice.

“Give way!” The first voice sounded again, a clear, confident, ringing voice, and the oars dipped once more.

“They’ve gone,” said Dick, as the boat swung round the low southern end of the island and disappeared behind a shoulder of rock. For a long time he watched, so long that he had to put his hands in his pockets in turn to get them warm again after holding the telescope.

“Of course they may have rowed away behind the island,” said Dorothea.

“I do wish this boat was in the water,” said Dick.

“Even if it was, we can’t row,” said Dorothea.

“It looks easy,” said Dick. “I’m sure we could manage.”

“It’s no good thinking about it,” said Dorothea. “Look, there’s one of them. They’ve landed . . .”

Three or four of them could be seen hurrying about on the island beneath the leafless trees. Then, suddenly, at the northern end, the boat showed again. Only two were in it, the bigger of the two boys, and the smaller of the red-capped girls. They rowed out from the island towards the middle of the lake. On the island there was great activity, and presently a thin blue wisp of smoke climbed up among the trees, a flicker of flame showed low down, then more smoke and more flames as the sticks caught and the fire gathered strength. A girl with a kettle came down to the water’s edge and dipped water from the lake.

“They must be making tea,” said Dorothea, dancing first on one foot and then on another, because her toes were very cold.

“Scientific expedition,” said Dick. “Landed to cook a meal. But . . . Hullo! . . . What are they doing now?”

Only one was left by the fire. The bigger red-capped girl, with the two children who had been sitting in the stern of the boat when they reached the island, came out on the cliff under the tall pine. She began waving a small flag on the end of a stick.

“Is it for us?” said Dorothea hopefully.

“No,” said Dick. “Look!”

In the boat, far out on the lake, the boy was resting on his oars. The red-capped girl who was with him was standing up. She, too, had a flag and had begun to wave it.

A shout of laughter sounded on the island.

“Peggy, you donk. You’ve got that one all wrong. Try it again.” That clear voice they had heard before rang out over the water.

There was more flag-waving in the boat, and more from the island. Then there was a pause, and a moment later the signalling began again, only this time the signallers had two flags apiece, and did not wave them but held the flags at arm’s length, first in one position and then in another.

“It’s awfully cold,” said Dorothea at last. “Standing about like this.” She had been very happy, waking up in this new place, but those children in the boat had somehow spoilt things. What fun they were having, six of them, all together. A new story began to shape itself in her mind, one that nobody would be able to read without tears . . . The Outcasts. By Dorothea Callum. Chapter I. “The two children, brother and sister, shared their last few crumbs and looked this way and that along the deserted shore. Was this to be the end?”

“IS IT FOR US?”

“Oh well,” said Dick. “We can’t help not having a boat. Let’s go and find a really good place for an observatory.”

Time had passed quicker than they thought, while they had been looking at pigs and cows and enviously watching the children on the island. Mrs Dixon called them in for dinner just when they were asking Mr Dixon whether it would be all right for them to go up the cart track that seemed to climb up the fell from the gate on the opposite side of the main road. Mrs Dixon was in a hurry to get dinner over, because she was baking pork pies for which she had a name throughout the district. Her mind was in the oven and they got only the vaguest answers when they asked her about the children they had seen. “Yes. Staying at the farm along the road. Six of them? That would be the Blackett lasses as well . . . Dixon, do keep yon door shut, with pies in the oven and a cold wind enough to ruin all.” And then, after dinner, looking over her shoulder with her hand on the knob of the oven door wrapped in a fold of her apron, she told them, “Come you in at four o’clock for a cup of hot tea. You’ll be wanting dark for your star-gazing, and I’ll give you your supper later.”

The main road, along which they had come from the station the night before, after their railway journey with Mrs Dixon, ran close past the front of the house, where there was a strip of garden and a front door that was hardly ever used, for the Dixons and all their friends went through the farmyard to the door that opened into the big farm kitchen. Dick and Dorothea came round the house and out into the road between the garden and a huge barn. They looked both ways along the road, but they could not see far because, to the right, it bent sharply round towards the lake and, to the left, it disappeared in a wood. They crossed the road, went through a gate exactly opposite the farmyard, and followed a cart track up a steep little pasture, through another gate, and then to the left, up the fell, between patches of dead bracken and grey lumps of rock that thrust up here and there out of the short-cropped grass. “Not limestone,” said Dick, picking up a bit and putting it in his pocket. Dorothea smiled to see him do it. The stone would wear a hole in his pocket, of course, but it was no use saying so when Dick was thinking about geology.

They climbed up and up, and with every step they could see more of the lake beyond the woods, while, on the farther side, the snow-topped mountains seemed to rise higher and higher. Suddenly, as the track came over a shoulder of the hill, they saw on the open fell ahead of them an old grey barn.

“It’s the very place for an observatory,” said Dick. Geology was forgotten in a moment and he ran on up the track.

Dorothea followed, not so fast. She was looking at the barn and thinking what sort of story she could make to fit it. It was built of rough grey stones, and she could see a big dark doorway and stone steps outside the wall going up to a smaller doorway above. The doors seemed to have gone. The place must at one time have been used for something or other, but now it was falling into ruin.

The barn stood on the top of a ridge of hill coming down from the fells towards the lake. There was a shout from Dick. He beckoned to her with his telescope and stood there, beside the barn, looking down at the country on the other side of the ridge. In a few moments Dorothea stood beside him. Now for the first time they saw the great ring of hills above the head of the lake. There was the lake, like a wide river. There were a group of islands, and a cloud of smoke above the village. Then, nearer to them, just below the barn, was a little frozen tarn, cupped in a shallow hollow in the side of the hill. Beyond it to the right, woods climbed the hill-side. Below them they could see woods going down to the lake, and beyond the woods they caught glimpses of the main road between the fields. And down there, between the road and the lake, was a white farm-house and some out-buildings, not far above what seemed to be a narrow bay.

“Dot,” said Dick. “I bet that’s the farm-house where those children are staying, the ones Mrs Dixon knew about.”

“Bother them,” said Dorothea. She had been meaning to think of something else. But if Dick remembered them, when his mind was full of stones and stars, how could she possibly forget them?

“Bother them,” she said again. “What about your observatory?”

“You can see any amount of sky from up here,” said Dick. “And we can have a light in the barn for looking at the maps of the stars by.”

“It’ll be pretty cold,” said Dorothea.

But in the angle between the solid stone steps and the wall they found the remains of a fire, charred sticks, and a few stones to keep the fire in place. Someone had felt cold up there before them.

“What about that?” said Dick.

The barn itself was quite empty, and they decided that they could keep their firewood inside it. They climbed the stone steps. Nothing but the rusty hinges was left of the door that had been at the top of them. Gingerly, pressing with each foot before properly stepping on it, they went in. There were holes in the floor and the old planking creaked beneath them. They picked their way towards a big square opening in the end wall, through which, as it came right down to the level of the floor, they supposed bracken or hay had been pitched from a cart standing below.

“What a place to look out from,” said Dick. “And for all the northern stars . . . I say, you can see that farm even better from up here.”

“Perhaps we wouldn’t like them if we knew them,” said Dorothea.

“Let’s go and get wood ready for the evening,” said Dick, “and see if the ice is bearing.”

They went down the steep slope to the tarn. Dick stepped with one foot on the ice at the edge of it. It sank beneath his foot, and water oozed up at the side of it. He threw a stone towards the middle, and it crashed through the ice into the water.

“No good yet,” he said. “But it soon will be.”

They walked round the tarn, gathered two big bundles of fallen sticks in the outskirts or the wood beyond it, carried them up to the barn and spent a long time breaking them up into short handy lengths and piling them neatly just inside.

“Everything’s ready now,” said Dick. “Let’s go down and get tea over.” They were on the point of starting down the track to Dixon’s Farm when they were reminded of those six strangers yet again.

“There’s that boat,” said Dick, taking a last look down at the lake with his telescope. “There, turning into that bay.”

For some minutes they watched, but most of the bay below the white farm-house was hidden by the pine trees on a little rocky headland. Then, suddenly, Dick spoke again. “Coming up the field,” he half whispered. “Just below the house. Waving at something . . . There’s the boat going away out of the bay. Only two in it. Both red caps . . .”

Dorothea put a hand on the telescope for a moment and then remembered that she could never see through it.

“Where are they now?”

“Disappeared behind the house. Let’s go up into the observatory. Just for one minute.”

They ran up the steps and into the loft. Dick crouched on the floor by the big opening at the end of it and steadied his telescope against the wall.

“Dot,” he cried suddenly. “They do come from that house. Look at this end, two windows one above another. Two of them are hanging out of that top window.”

“What’s the good of thinking about them?” said Dorothea. “They might as well be in some different world.”

Dick started so sharply that he almost dropped his telescope.

“Why not? Why not?” he said. “All the better. Just wait till dark and we can try signalling to Mars.”

“To Mars?” said Dorothea.

“Why not?” said Dick. “Of course they may not see it. And even if they do see it they may not understand. A different world. That makes it all the more like signalling to Mars.”

“We’re going to be late for Mrs Dixon’s tea,” said Dorothea, and a moment later they were down those steep stone steps and hurrying home. As she ran down the cart track beside him, Dorothea was thinking. You never knew with Dick. He always seemed to be bothering about birds, or stars, or engines, or fossils and things like that. He never was able to make up stories like those that came so easily to her, and yet, sometimes, in some queer way of his own, he seemed to hit on things that made stories and real life come closer together than usual.

“It’s worth trying,” she panted, just as they were coming to the gate into the main road.

“What is?” said Dick, who was already thinking of quite other stars. What constellations could they look for? He wished he could keep the star map in his head. But anyway, they would take the book with them, and have a lantern to read it by, in case the firelight was too flickery.

“Signalling to Mars,” said Dorothea.