Swallowdale

by Arthur Ransome

  John climbed up the rocky side of the valley, pushed the broom handle in again, so that the broom fell on the floor of the cave, and cut away a little of the heather, enough to let more air through the hole, but not enough to make anyone notice it.

  Then everybody went into the cave. Susan had made a different place of it. The dust was gone. She had brought water from the beck and slopped it on the ground before brushing. “Another time, I’m going to use tea-leaves,” she said. “To-day I’d thrown them away before thinking of it.” The biscuit-tins and all the other loose bits of luggage were already neatly packed along the walls. The biscuit-tins would do for seats, as Titty and Roger found at once. Along the side of one wall there was a deep fault in the stone which made a shelf, not quite level, but level enough in places for a candle lantern to stand there, well out of the way. “Just right,” said John. “Except in the dark, no one would see a glimmer of it from the doorway.” The air-hole up above gave very little light, even after John had cut the heather.

  “Now,” said the mate, when everybody had admired enough, “we’ve used all the wood for to-day’s dinner. The camp’s ready. Let’s settle down to work. All hands to gather fuel. And after that what about holiday tasks?”

  “There’s the bathing-pool to make,” said John.

  “A dam to build,” said Roger.

  “We must do that, or we shan’t be able to bathe to-morrow,” said Titty.

  “Well, I suppose we ought to have a proper bath,” said the mate. “But we must pile up a store of wood first.”

  By tea-time there was a wood-stack in the cave as good as the stack the Amazons had made for them on Wild Cat Island. By supper-time the explorers, splashed from head to foot, were resting from their labours, and watching the water lapping over the edge of a dam firmly built of large stones, with small ones between them, smaller stones scraped up from the bottom of the pool to fill in the gaps, flat turfs laid against all this and yet another layer of big stones to keep all firm. The dam raised the water more than a foot, and the waterfall at the head of the valley fell now with a new note into a pool not perhaps big enough to swim in, but far better than any ordinary bath. The explorers wriggled down in their tents that night with the knowledge of a good day’s work behind them. Life in Swallowdale had begun.

  CHAPTER XV

  LIFE IN SWALLOWDALE

  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 tomorrow 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.”

  THE KNICKERBOCKERBREAKER

  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.”

  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 and 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!”

&nbs
p; “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.

  ROGER FELL ON IT

  They looked back 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.

  “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.