Читать книгу Swallows & Amazons (ALL 12 Adventure Novels) - Arthur Ransome - Страница 75

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Roger had been very sure that he would like to stop with the old charcoal-burner and spend the night in the wigwam. It was the sort of thing that anybody might plan for himself, like crossing a roaring torrent on a bridge made of a single tree-trunk, meeting a bear half-way and somehow waggling the trunk so that the bear fell in and the hero did not. It was the sort of thing that anybody might safely plan for himself because it was not likely to happen. Never for a minute had he believed that he would be allowed to stay and at the very moment when he was saying hopefully that Susan would not mind, he was expecting that Titty, who, as able-seaman, was in command, would say that he must not. And then what with the woodmen being in a hurry to be off, and Young Billy arranging that they should give Titty a lift down the valley and along the lake road to Swainson’s farm, and Titty, instead of forbidding it, being really glad to have Roger in a safe place, everything had been settled so fast that Young Billy had gone down to the road to see Titty start on her way with the woodmen before Roger realised that he was alone and already in the middle of a new adventure from which he could not possibly draw back.

Lying by the fire he looked out over the green tops of the trees below him to see Kanchenjunga heaving up into the sky on the other side of the valley. Where everything else was strange that, at least, he knew. He had been on the top of it only that morning. He tried to see the little gorge where they had made their half-way camp. It was hidden by a spur of the great hill. It had seemed natural enough to sleep in such a place, in the open air, without even a tent, but with Susan and John and Titty sleeping beside him. It was not at all the same thing as sleeping in a charcoal-burner’s hut, with an old man nearly as old as Kanchenjunga, and a snake hissing in a cigar-box somewhere under the blankets. Roger knew suddenly that it would be only too easy to begin thinking of the old charcoal-burner as of a sort of ogre who might take a fancy for eating ship’s boys. Of course, Young Billy was nothing of the sort. But Roger knew that it would be easy to begin thinking of him in that way. He must not do that. There could be no turning back now. For one thing he could not very well run for his life with his ankle made up into a huge bundle with bracken and a damp red handkerchief that did not belong to him. For another thing, he did not know where to run. And, for a third thing, he knew very well that the Billies were the friendliest of savages.

All the same it would not do to think too much, just in case he began to think of the old man in the wrong way, when it would be difficult to stop. He looked at the hut. It looked newly built, not like the old hut they had seen last year when they had left Swallow and climbed through the woods to see the charcoal-burners and their snake. But he could not be sure. The moss that had been pushed between the logs to keep out the rain was still green, but perhaps it was an old hut with new moss on it. “It’s a very good wigwam, anyway,” said Roger to himself, almost as if it was his own.

The old charcoal-burner came climbing up the wood again.

“The lass’ll be all right,” he said, “and how’s the lad?”

“Very well, thank you,” said Roger.

“Bracken’s rare stuff for taking the hurt out of a sprain.”

“Is this a new wigwam?” asked Roger. “Have you just built it?”

“New what?”

“Wigwam. Log hut. No. It isn’t a log hut, because all the logs stand on end instead of lying sideways. And it’s round instead of square. I don’t see what else you can call it.”

“It’s been called a hut for long enough,” said the old man. “Not but what your word may be right. And this hut’s old and new. They’ve always burned charcoal here when there’s been any burning done in Heald Wood. Happen some of those logs have seen a good few seasons. But huts don’t last so long. They generally fall in a bit between one burning and another. It’ll be a good few years like before we come back to them. And a winter storm’ll easy shift them if they’re not cared for. And then when we come to build them up there’ll be new logs put in with the old and new moss to make all tight, and the time all’s done you’d be hard put to it to say whether hut’s old or new. Fire-spot’s old enough. You can say that without lying.”

Roger began to feel that to the old charcoal-burner it did not seem at all odd to be sleeping in a wigwam in the woods on the side of the fells. For him, in summer that was the natural place to sleep. And why not? Roger stopped worrying about it, and after that everything went easily.

The old man picked up his axe and went on chopping sticks to the right length for the round stack that he was building, putting sticks of the right length in one pile and letting the little odd bits lie to be picked up afterwards and used in his own fire. Roger lay watching him, sniffing the pleasant smell from the embers still smouldering away under the kettle. He felt very sleepy, but he was not going to say anything about that unless the old man said something about it first.

And as the old charcoal-burner chopped away at his sticks, he kept stopping from time to time and talking. He talked of what his old dad might be seeing at Bigland besides the hound trail. There would likely be some wrestling, and when Roger asked what that was, Young Billy said it was high time he was taken to see some. And then he told of how long ago he was taken, when no bigger than Roger, to see his old dad wrestle for a belt with a bit of a silver buckle on it, and then of how the time came when he was wrestling in that place himself. And with that his back straightened and he swung his old arms and rubbed his old hands and clapped them together and rambled away with talk that Roger could not understand at all, about half-Nelsons and cross-buttocks and fair throws and lost handgrips. But Roger did not say that he did not understand. He just listened and the words went over his head like great poetry, only leaving him the feeling that the old man who was talking was very much stirred up by something or other that had happened a very long time ago.

And then, suddenly, the old man stooped again. “Fifty years ago, that was,” he sighed, “but I could show some of them a trick or two yet.”

And now the sun began to go down behind Kanchenjunga, and the old man picked up some of the small bits that had fallen from his chopping and threw them on the fire. And he wiped his axe on the palm of his hand and wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers, and asked Roger what he thought about a duck egg to his supper.

“I’ve never eaten one,” said Roger.

“There’s no hen can lay an egg to touch them,” said the old man, “not for meat and virtue. And with dad being over to Bigland there’ll be one for you and one for me and then we shan’t be clemmed for hunger in our sleep.”

He stirred the dry sticks till they blazed up under the kettle which he had filled with fresh water from the beck after Titty and the woodmen had gone. He went into the wigwam and came out with two huge greenish-white eggs and a big spoon with which he lowered them into the kettle. Roger knew that Susan said you ought not to boil eggs in the kettle if you could help it, and he was just going to ask a question about that, but stopped himself, remembering that different tribes have different customs and that he really knew very little about this one.

Then the old man brought out a lot of blankets from the wigwam and shook them and took them back again. Then he came out with a loaf of bread and he opened his pocket knife and cut two big hunks off the loaf. Then he slapped his knee and said he was forgetting the salt and went in again and came out with an old tobacco tin full of salt. Then he took the eggs out of the kettle and put in some tea and put the kettle back on the fire with the tea in it, a thing that Susan never did.

“There’s enough milk left for both of us,” he said, lifting the green bottle, “with dad away.”

The big eggs were almost too hot to touch, but the old charcoal-burner rolled a foxglove leaf and held his egg in that while he began peeling off the shell after battering it a little with the big spoon. He showed Roger how to do the same. By the time half the shell had been peeled off the egg was not so hot and the other half was managed without the leaf, and there were the two eggs, ready to be eaten, bluish, quivering things, like egg-shaped corn-flower moulds. The old man took a bite off the top of his egg, and there was the dark orange yolk trying to pour itself out. Roger did the same to his egg, and both the old man and Roger licked at the orange yolk of their eggs as it ran down over the edge of the white. Then the old man took a huge bite of his bread, and Roger did the same.

“Rare things are duck eggs,” said the old man, dropping a pinch of salt into his.

“Jolly good,” said Roger, “and plenty in them.”

Soon after that the old charcoal-burner began to make things ready for the night.

“You’ll be wanting a pillow,” he said to Roger. “Dad’s taken his coat with him.”

“I’ll put my clothes inside my knapsack,” said Roger.

“You’ll be cold without them,” said the old man.

“I slept in them last night,” said Roger.

“Better sleep in them again,” said the old man, “but I’ll put some dry bracken in that bag of yours to make a pillow.”

“Now then,” he said, a few minutes later, and he helped Roger up on one foot, and almost carried him into the hut. The door was too low for that, and Roger had to crawl through it in spite of his bad foot, which did not hurt him as much as he expected. Inside the hut a farm lantern was hanging, for it was growing dusk outside and very little light came through the doorway, even when the sacking was pulled out of the way. The hut was divided in three by two big logs that lay on the floor, cutting off the bed space on each side, and leaving a narrow passage in the middle where there was a small stone fireplace with no fire in it.

“Too hot for that these nights,” said the old man.

The bed on the left of the doorway was waiting for Roger. A blanket lay on the thickly piled bracken, and at one end of it the old man had put Roger’s knapsack.

“Lie you down there,” said the old man, “and I’ll fold blanket over you and you’ll be warm enough.”

Roger hesitated.

“Have you still got an adder in a box?” he asked.

“Never fear for that,” the old man laughed. “Adder’s my side of the hut and he won’t get out.”

“May I see him?”

“I’ll take him out in the morning,” said the old man. “It’s getting too dark for that now.”

Roger lay down on the blanket with his head on his stuffed knapsack. The old man folded the blanket over him and then folded the other side over the first.

“Snug enough like that,” he said. “Now don’t you be waking when you hear me stirring in the morning. Good night to you.”

“You aren’t going away?” said Roger.

“Nay,” said the old man, “I’ll be close outside.”

There was a bitter smell in the hut, of bracken, and burnt wood and newly cut timber, and smoke from the wood-fire outside, and oil from the smoky farm lantern overhead. The lantern had been joggled a little by the old man in tucking up Roger for the night, and for a long time it went on swinging on the end of the long bit of wire on which it hung, so that splashes of light and shadow moved round the edges of the darkness on the sloping walls of the hut. Part of the way up the walls Roger could see and count the poles of which the hut was built, but above the lantern they melted together into blackness.

Outside there was a noise of chopping, not with an axe but with a knife. And the old man grunted as he worked away by the fire in the deepening dark. The old man? It might be something quite different grunting out there. Roger lifted himself on his elbow and listened. “Chop, chop. Grunt, grunt.” Was it the old man or had something else taken his place?

“What are you doing?” he asked at last.

The grunting stopped.

“Aren’t you asleep?” came back the voice of the old charcoal-burner.

“Not quite,” said Roger.

“I’m just fettling up a crutch,” said the old man. “You’ll be wanting to be getting about in the morning, and that foot of yours’ll be all the better for being off the ground for a day or two. Now, get you to sleep.”

“A crutch for me?”

“Aye.”

And in the shadows dancing along the edges of the darkness overhead, Roger saw Long John Silver with his crutch and his parrot, hopping about the Bristol tavern, stumping the decks of the Hispaniola, and being bothered by the point of the crutch sinking in the loose sand of Treasure Island. Titty had the parrot, and now he was going to have the crutch. This was going to be worth a hurt foot and worth it a hundred times over. How soon would he be able to go across the lake to Holly Howe and stump up the field to the farm, as an old sailor back from the sea, to show his crutch to mother and nurse and the ship’s baby? What would Titty say that Peter Duck thought about it?

Later on in the night he woke to find that all was dark. There was the noise of the old man breathing on the bracken bed at the other side of the hut. There was the noise of wind stirring the tree-tops. The sacking did not cover the whole doorway, or, maybe, a corner of it had blown aside, for looking that way, past his own feet, Roger could see a patch of dark blue sky with stars in it. He thought of the others sleeping in the camp in Swallowdale. Little they knew that a one-legged sailor . . . that Long John Silver . . . that . . . that . . . But before his thought was finished even for himself, he was again as fast asleep as the old charcoal-burner at his side.