Swallowdale

by Arthur Ransome

  Inside the cave nobody breathed, except the parrot.

  Nancy’s voice came again, with the noise of a stone dropping on stones.

  “Hullo! they can’t have been gone long. These stones are hot. Susan’s had a fire here, and cleared it away in a hurry. There’s a burnt stick in the beck. No ashes in the fireplace and yet the stones are too hot to touch. They’ve thrown the embers in the beck. Yes. There’s another burnt stick. They must have seen us, put the fire out, and sloped”

  “I’d have seen them if they tried to get down to Horseshoe Cove. I couldn’t have helped seeing them, unless they went long ago, because all the time I was working round I could see the place where the beck drops into the woods.”

  “Well,” said Nancy’s voice again, “they must have gone up to Trout Tarn, where Uncle Jim said they caught the big fish. They could have done that without being seen if they crept along the beck. But with all their tents and everything! It’s a rum go. Shiver my timbers if it isn’t.”

  John had been scribbling on a bit of paper. Without moving from his place, lying close to the very mouth of the cave, he passed the scrap of paper back and waved it behind him. Susan took it quietly and read it in the light of the candle.

  “Can you make the parrot say something?”

  Susan showed it to Titty, and Titty, moving on tiptoe, lifted the parrot’s cage off the woodstack and took it to the mouth of the cave. She tapped John’s shoulder, and he glanced back, saw the cage, wriggled to one side and made room for it, and Titty put it close to the doorway so that all the light that came through the doorway fell on the blue cover that was keeping the parrot quiet.

  Outside there was the voice of Peggy. “We’re very late already.”

  “Come on,” said Nancy’s voice, “at the trot. They can’t be gone farther than the tarn.”

  There was the noise of hurried steps going up the side of the stream towards the bathing-pool.

  “Now,” whispered John.

  Titty pulled off the blue cover from the parrot’s cage.

  “Pieces of eight!” yelled the startled parrot, and then, as Titty hurriedly pulled the cover on again, he gave a long, angry scream, more like a wild forest parrot in a rage than like a tame and learned one who knew how to talk and even a small bit of the multiplication table.

  “Where are they?” came the voice of Nancy outside, coming nearer again down the valley.

  “The parrot sounded close here,” said Peggy’s voice.

  “I know that, you tame galoot. Of course it’s close here. But where? They’ve hidden the parrot somewhere in the heather. Anybody can see they can’t be here themselves.”

  “Let’s go and climb the watch-tower and look round from there.”

  “That’s the best idea you’ve had yet. We’ll spot them then wherever they are.”

  There was a splash as someone slipped in crossing the stream, and then the clattering of the loose screes as the Amazons ran up the farther side of the valley.

  Just for a moment John waited. Then he cautiously moved the heather and peeped out.

  “All clear,” he said. “Come on. Quick.”

  A moment later everybody was blinking in the sunshine outside.

  “Half a minute,” said Susan, “I’ve forgotten the sticks.”

  She dived into the cave again and came out with a handful of firewood and a bundle of the dry leaves she used for kindling. John put the clumps of heather back into place behind her.

  “I’ve got the matches,” he said.

  Susan hurried across to the fireplace and in a moment had her fire ready for lighting.

  The others settled round the fireplace as if they had been lying there all day. Susan lit the dry leaves. Smoke poured up. Titty pulled the cover once more off the parrot’s cage, and the parrot made up for lost time by a long series of shrieks and all the words it could remember. “Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly. Pieces of eight. Two. Twice. Polly. Two. Two. Two,” and then shrieked again.

  The puzzled faces of the Amazons looked down into Swallowdale from the edge of the valley.

  CHAPTER XVII

  LATER AND LATER AND LATER

  “BARBECUED billygoats!” said Captain Nancy, “but however did you do it?”

  “Where were you?” said Peggy.

  “You had us all right,” said Captain Nancy. “One up to you. But where are all your things? What have you done with the tents?”

  “Let’s tell them,” said Roger.

  Susan looked at John.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “We were in Peter Duck’s cave,” said Titty.

  “Peter Duck’s?”

  “His cave.”

  “Not a real one?”

  “Of course a real one,” said Roger.

  “Titty and Roger found it,” said John.

  “But where is it?”

  “Here,” said all the Swallows at once.

  The Amazons stared about them.

  John pulled aside the loose clumps of heather that partly hid the doorway.

  “Go in and look at it,” he said.

  “No tricks. No capturing?” said Nancy. “We’ve got to hurry back.”

  “No, no. Peace,” said John. “Just go in and have a look. There’s a light inside.”

  Nancy first, followed by Peggy, stooped and went in through the hole in the rock. The others crowded in after them. The Amazons were as surprised as even Titty could have wished when they saw the candle-lantern burning on its shelf, and by its yellow, flickering light saw the rough walls of the cave, the woodstack, and the piled boxes, the bundles, the fishing-rods and the cooking things. Then John pulled some of the heather back into place and showed how they had lain in wait, able to hear all that went on outside. Then they went out again, blinking in the sunlight, and John covered the entrance with the big heather clumps, when really, unless you knew, you were hardly likely to guess that the doorway of the cave was there.

  “No wonder you wanted to come up here instead of staying down by the lake,” said Nancy. “Barring Wild Cat Island, it’s the best place for miles round.”

  “You could almost live in a cave like that.”

  “Nobody’d ever find you there,” said Nancy.

  “Well,” said John, “you saw how it was when the Amazon pirates attacked the camp.”

  Nancy laughed.

  “If you hadn’t come out, and if the parrot hadn’t shouted, we’d have gone home and told Uncle Jim you’d gone away.”

  They went into the cave again.

  “Let’s come and hide here from the great-aunt,” said Peggy.

  “No good,” said Nancy, “because of mother.”

  “I wish we had a cave on the island,” said Titty.

  “Let’s make one when we get back there.”

  “Why not?”

  “I wish we could get the great-aunt into a cave like this and shut her up and forget about her,” said Nancy. “We could write ‘Leave Hope Behind’ over the doorway, and shove her in and wall her up.”

  “Now, then, you fo’c’sle hands,” said Mate Susan to the able-seaman and the boy, “let’s see how long it takes you to get the tents up again.”

  “We’ll help,” said Nancy.

  “And then we’ll see about dinner,” said Susan.

  “We haven’t brought much,” said Peggy. “We ought to be getting back.”

  “Iron rations,” said Nancy. “Just things to be eaten on the march.”

  “That’s all right,” said Susan, “we’ve got lots. The potatoes are in the sack in the far corner. And we’re not sick of pemmican if you aren’t.”

  “We’re homesick for pemmican,” said Nancy. “We’ve been sitting up and saying please and thank you till we didn’t want to come to meals at all.”

  Swallowdale was soon full of bustle. Susan was hurrying on the fire, boiling water in kettle and saucepan at the same time, and opening a large-sized pemmican tin. Peggy was peeling potatoes. John and Nancy and Titty were putting
up tents, bringing things out of the cave and sorting them out, some for one tent and some for another. They wanted to help Roger, but Roger would not be helped. He was working slowly but making no mistakes, putting up his own tent by himself for the first time. This was a good deal more difficult than taking it down.

  *

  When the camp was itself again, with the tents up and the parrot cage once more on its stone pedestal (“Oh, that’s what it’s for,” said Nancy. “We couldn’t think.”), and they were watching Roger carefully tightening his guy-ropes, Titty asked Nancy, “Has the great-aunt been getting worse? Is that why you want to wall her up? But it ought to be in a new bridge or a castle or something like that. It would be waste to do it with a cave.”

  “Anything would be too good for her,” said Nancy. “It isn’t as if it was only us. We can stand it. But she will go for mother. There was an awful row again just because we ran into a calm the day we helped you to move camp. And, anyway, who can help being late in summer? But the moment she looks at her watch and thinks there ought to be a meal she doesn’t wait decently till the gong’s been banged once or twice in the house and then taken out in the garden and banged good and proper in case we’re up on the fell. She just goes into the dining-room and waits. And ten to one cook isn’t ready. And the old gong doesn’t go until she is. And mother doesn’t know what to do between the great-aunt and poor old cook. And even when her food’s shoved under her nose the great-aunt won’t begin until we’ve been rounded up. And when Uncle Jim isn’t there she’s even worse. Last night she made mother cry.”

  Titty stared and her mouth stayed open. She tried to think what she would do if anybody ever tried to make the best of all natives cry.

  “It was about us, of course. She dragged father in. We knew because after we’d gone to bed we couldn’t help hearing Uncle Jim talking to mother just outside our window, and he said, ‘Bob would have liked them as they are.’ And he called mother ‘Mops,’ which he only does sometimes. Then we made a noise and mother said, ‘Go to sleep, you donkeys,’ and pretended to laugh. But she couldn’t.”

  Nancy walked suddenly away, but she came back in a moment with her face very red.

  “If only we could get the G.A. to go,” she said. “I thought of putting little stones in her bed between the mattress and the sheet. And Peggy thought of putting drops of codliver oil in her morning tea. But it’s no good. It would only be worse for mother.”

  “In some places,” said Titty, “the natives do this sort of thing when they have an enemy. I found it in a book. They make a doll and call it the name of the person. Then they stick pins in it, and every pin they stick in the doll is felt by the person, and if they stick the pins right through, the person dies. You could do that, and stick the pins in just a little way every night until she was so uncomfortable she would go of her own accord.”

  Nancy laughed bitterly. “You could fill a doll cram full of pins. You could use it as a pin-cushion and it wouldn’t hurt the great-aunt. She wouldn’t notice it. Pins would blunt on her.”

  “Perhaps they ought to be silver,” said Titty. “It said that in the same book about shooting witches and were-wolves. They always had to use a silver bullet.”

  “Susan’s pins look like silver ones,” said Roger, who was listening now that his tent was properly pitched.

  “They might do,” said Titty. “How could the great-aunt find out they weren’t really silver? She wouldn’t see you sticking the pins in.”

  “All that’s rubbish,” said Susan. “Nobody believes in it now.”

  “It must have worked or people wouldn’t have gone on doing it,” said Titty.

  “Anyway it’s a bad sort of magic,” said Susan.

  “But it would be good magic if it made the great-aunt go away and stop being beastly to Mrs Blackett.”

  “Well, nobody’s going to try it,” said Susan.

  “She’ll go sooner or later,” said Nancy. “She doesn’t usually stay more than a week. I believe she’s only stopping now because she knows mother would let us come and camp with you if she wasn’t here.”

  *

  The potatoes, unluckily, were in one of their bad moods. Peggy and Susan kept on prodding them, almost as if each potato was a Voodoo doll being prodded to make a great-aunt uncomfortable, but for one reason or another they would not get soft. And the two mates had set themselves to make a really good dinner, with the hotted pemmican and the potatoes coming along at the same moment instead of letting the potatoes lag behind and come dawdling in when the meat course was over, so that they spoilt the taste of chocolate or apples that might be meant for dessert.

  The result of this was that dinner started very late and took a very long time. People were making the pemmican last out in hopes that the potatoes would be ready before the last mouthful of pemmican had gone down. It was very late in beginning, and lasted indeed so long that, by the time it was done and Captain Nancy threw the core of her apple into the camp fire and asked Captain John to look at his chronometer, it was already past eight bells, and it was clear that even if Captain Nancy and Mate Peggy ran the whole way home, they had not the smallest chance of being back for tea.

  They looked at each other in dismay, and were on the point of bolting home over the moor when Nancy remembered that drawing-room teas did not wait, so that they would do no good by running home now and putting on best frocks when everything was over. “We’re late now whatever happens,” she said. “It can’t be helped. Besides, if we do go now there’ll be no tea.”

  “There mustn’t be any mistake about supper,” said Peggy.

  “There’ll be a dreadful shivering of timbers if there is,” said Nancy.

  So they stayed on, and, to lose no time, Susan kept the fire going strongly and had water boiling for tea almost as soon as washing-up was done after dinner. Dinner had been late and tea came very soon after it, but the hot August day made it a good one. The pirates and explorers were just finishing their second mugs, when they heard a big stone crash down among the rocks by the upper waterfall.

  They looked up. A native was just dropping down into the valley. Hot, tired, panting, he came trotting down the beckside dragging a bundle of dusty sacking after him at the end of a rope. He stumbled as he ran, and was in the middle of the camp before he saw what it was. He pulled up short.

  “You’ll be having the hounds through here, but don’t you mind them.”

  “Hullo!” Nancy had jumped eagerly up. “Is it a hound trail?”

  “Aye,” said the man. “Practice-like. Maybe a score of hounds from Low End and round about.”

  “What is a hound trail?” asked John.

  “You’ll see it,” said Nancy. “When’ll they be off?”

  “Happen before I get down to Low End.”

  “Will you have some tea?” asked Susan, who had quickly washed out her mug.

  “I will that, and thank you,” said the native. “It’s a hot day and all.” He drank the whole mug in one gulp, and went trotting on his way.

  “Never you mind the dogs and dogs won’t mind you,” he called back as he disappeared down the beck.

  “What is it?” asked Roger. “Is someone coming after him.”

  “Bloodhounds?” said Titty.

  “No, no. It’s the loveliest thing,” said Nancy. “That sack he was lugging round is full of some smelly stuff. And they let all the hounds go together, no one with them, and they race over the trail made by the sack, right round over the fells and back again into the bottom. And when they’re coming in, you’ll hear all the men shouting to their own hounds, and each man has his own noise and each hound knows the noise that belongs to him. Listen! Listen! You can hear the hounds away at Low End, down by the steamer pier, wanting to start.”

  They listened, and far away in the valley below, down by the foot of the lake, they could hear gusts of hound noises.

  “Won’t they tear the tents to pieces?” said Susan.

  “Not they,” said Nancy.
“They’ll run right through the camp. They’ll stop for nothing. We’ll go up to your watch-tower and see them coming far away, and then we’ll come back here and see them come leaping down by the waterfall.”

  She told the Swallows of the great hound-trails of the district, of the guides races where the young men row in boats across the lake, race up to the top of a big hill and down again each to his boat, and so back. She told them of the wrestling and the pole-jumping. She told them of the sheep-dog trials, where the sheepdogs gather sheep, pen them in a field, take one sheep from among the others, and all at no more than a sign or a whistle from the shepherd. Then she was back again talking of the hound-trails, of the white specks flying through the heather, dropping down through the bracken on the steep hillside, getting larger and larger, until at last with the whole world yelling itself hoarse the winning hounds come loping into the sports field and the hound-trail is over. The missed meals at Beckfoot, the great-aunt, and everything else was forgotten.

  Nancy was still in full cry, when the chorus of hound noises far away in the valley swelled out very loud and urgent and then came suddenly to an end.

  “They’re off,” she shouted. “Come on.”

  “What about the telescope?” said Titty.

  “Bring it. Bring it,” said Nancy, who was already scrambling up the side of Swallowdale.

  For some time after they had all climbed up on the Watch Tower Rock, there was nothing to be seen. Then, suddenly, Nancy, who had borrowed the telescope and was searching the hills with it, called out, “There they are!”

  “Where? Where?”

  “Coming up out of Longfell Wood. Look! They’re all pouring up out of the trees into the heather.”

  “Close together,” said Peggy.

  “No. There’s another lot.”

  “Where? Where?” said Roger. “Longfell Wood” meant nothing to him because he did not know where it was. Nancy gave him the telescope, let him see where they were, but presently took it again, looked through it, and gave it back. It passed from hand to hand. Everybody had a look through it.