Swallowdale

by Arthur Ransome

  In Swallowdale he found Susan, Titty and Roger more disappointed at his missing Captain Flint than pleased to hear that the mast was nearly done.

  “Why didn’t he come up to Swallowdale?” said John.

  “Perhaps he’s gone native, too,” said Roger.

  “Oh, no, he wouldn’t,” said Titty. “Not this year. Not unless he had to.”

  “He’s done the masthead most beautifully,” said John. “If he’d gone native he wouldn’t have bothered.”

  There was something in that, but not enough to raise the spirits of the explorers very much.

  After dinner Roger said he wanted to fish. Titty said she would come too. Susan said that she was busy, with all that wood to stack in Peter Duck’s. Roger and Titty said they would help for a bit. Susan said they needn’t bother. John said he was going down to the cove to go on rubbing down the mast.

  Down in the cove he forgot about tea, and went on rubbing away with the sandpaper until the whole mast felt like soft velvet. He tried it with his fingers, looked at it sideways, to see if there was the slightest roughness, and decided at last that it would do. It seemed almost a pity to put the oil on. But he soon found that the oil made the mast look even better. He rubbed it with a handful of cotton waste that he had found pushed into the handle of the can, and the mast shone under the oil like a gleaming pebble from the lake before it has had time to dry. The clean Norway pole was thirsty for oil, and John rubbed away and rubbed away, turning the mast a quarter of a turn every now and then on the chocks of wood on which it lay.

  “It’s a better mast than the old one, I do believe,” said John to himself. “I wonder what Captain Nancy would think of it now?”

  And with that he remembered that, except for Mary Swainson’s gossip, there was still no news from the Amazon River.

  Just then, while he was resting and looking at the shining yellow mast, he heard the chug, chug of a motor launch. It was coming down the lake, and it sounded as if it were coming much nearer along the shore than most of the launches and steamers he had heard during the day. Or perhaps it was that he had been too busy to listen to the others. Now the whole mast was done and oiled and he had to give it a little time to let this first coat of oil soak in. So his ears were awake to noises, and this chug, chug sounded to him so near the shore that he slipped out on the rocks on the northern side of the cove to see just what it was.

  Yes, it was a motor launch, and he was right, it was very near the shore.

  “They’ll have to turn out again before they get here,” Captain John was saying to himself, “or they’ll be running on the Pike Rock, just like we did.”

  He was watching for the launch to alter course, when he began to think that there was something familiar about it. Suddenly, he knew. It was the Blacketts’ motor launch, from Beckfoot, the launch that he had seen first by the light of a torch in the boathouse in the Amazon River, and seen again when Mrs Blackett came down to Wild Cat Island in it on the morning after the great storm nearly a year ago.

  “Hurrah,” he said aloud, “it’s all right. They’re forgiven. They’re coming here.” He jumped up and was going to wave to them when he thought that perhaps he had better not. There were several people in the open forepart of the launch, and, after all, he might be mistaken. Better wait till he was sure. There would be plenty of time to wave later. So he dropped into hiding, and wriggled his way like a snake towards the mouth of the cove. The chug, chug of the launch came rapidly nearer and nearer. When, at last, John cautiously lifted his head among the heather and rocks of the northern of the two headlands the launch was hardly a dozen yards away.

  He was right. It was the launch from the boathouse up the Amazon. But he was glad he had not waved.

  The forward part of the launch was open, with seats running round it, and here were seated Mrs Blackett and that same grim, elderly lady whom the Swallows had seen driving that afternoon when they had looked down on the road from among the trees. They were both sitting with their backs towards Horseshoe Cove, and Peggy Blackett, looking not at all like a pirate mate, but like an ordinary little girl at a school speech-day or a garden-party, was pointing towards Wild Cat Island or the woods on the far side of the lake, so that all their attention was drawn that way.

  Nancy Blackett was nowhere to be seen, and John wondered whether she was in such awful disgrace that she had been left behind. He was thinking that perhaps she would have liked best to be left behind when, suddenly, he saw her.

  The launch was passing close by the mouth of the cove. John could even see the remains of a tea spread on the table in the little cabin amidships. Aft of the cabin was an open well, and there was Captain Flint, dreadfully smartly dressed, steering the launch. And there, too, was Nancy Blackett. She was crouching low so that nobody in the forepart of the launch should see what she was doing. Captain Flint, somehow, seemed to be too much taken up with the steering to notice her. She was in a best frock, as unnatural as Peggy’s. But, as she crouched there, John saw that she had a crossbow in her hand. He saw her take one look forward through the glass-windowed cabin. Everybody seemed to be following Peggy’s finger and watching something far away on the other side of the lake. Just as the launch had passed the entrance to the cove Nancy loosed her arrow. John thought he heard the twang of the bowstring even through the noise of the motor, but perhaps he didn’t. The arrow flew over the water and stuck in a heather bush among the rocks of the southern headland, where they had landed after the shipwreck.

  Again, for a moment, John thought of jumping up and waving, this time to show that he had seen. But, after loosing her arrow, Captain Nancy was no longer looking towards the shore. In a moment she had pushed her crossbow out of sight, under a seat in the steerage, slipped through the cabin and was already looking as proper as Peggy, talking to the natives in the forepart of the launch. Not even Captain Flint was looking towards Horseshoe Cove. A moment later the launch was hidden behind the southern headland and John could not see it, though he could hear it chug, chugging away towards the foot of the lake.

  He heard a shout from among the trees where the beck ran out into the cove. “Hullo!”

  “Hullo!” he called back, hurrying over the rocks on his way round the cove to look for the arrow.

  Roger came out of the wood, smelling his hand after touching the newly oiled mast.

  “Titty’s close behind,” he said, “and Susan says we’re to tell you you’ve had no tea and she’s cooking supper early. She’s cooking it now. And she says, Don’t be late. And you mustn’t. Titty and I caught two trout each, fat ones, one for each of us, and Susan’s cooking them, and …”

  “Did you see the launch?” asked John.

  “I can hear one,” said Roger, just as Titty joined them on the beach.

  “It was the Amazons’ launch from the Amazon River. The one we saw in the boathouse last year. And Captain Nancy was in it, and she shot an arrow from it. It’s on the south cape. Mrs Blackett was there too, and Peggy, and Captain Flint and …”

  “Was the great-aunt all right?” asked Titty.

  “She was there,” said John. “Come and get the arrow. It’s sticking in the heather out there.”

  “Did Nancy really shoot at you?” said Roger. “Is it war?”

  “I don’t think she saw me,” said John. “But of course she knew I’d be down there finishing the mast. Come on and let’s get the arrow.”

  Titty was already scrambling out over the rocks. If the great-aunt was going for picnics in launches, the candle-grease couldn’t have done much harm. John and Roger hurried after her.

  She found the arrow easily enough, sticking in the heather with its feathered end high in air.

  “It’s a new arrow,” said John. “It’s not a good one like the arrows they had last year. It’s not half so well made.”

  Titty was looking at its green feathers.

  “They must have just made it,” she said. “This is one of the feathers I brought them this year. I kno
w it, because it got clipped with the scissors when I was cutting something else.”

  “The ship’s parrot wouldn’t like it if he knew they were using his feathers to shoot at us,” said Roger.

  “It didn’t look exactly as if she was,” said John. “It was too secret from the others.”

  He looked carefully at the arrow. There was a curious wide band on it, near the green feathers. It had been neatly spliced with red string. In a moment John had his knife out and had cut the end of the splice and begun unwinding the string.

  “Don’t spoil their arrow,” said Titty.

  “Well, they shot it at us,” said Roger.

  John unwound the red string and almost at once they could see the end of a narrow, folded strip of paper that had been wound round the arrow and fastened to it by the very splice that hid it.

  “It’s a message,” said Titty. “Be quick. Now we shall know.”

  The little strip of paper that had been wound round the arrow and then hidden by the splicing of red string curled up tightly the moment it was taken off. John straightened it out. They looked at it together.

  On it was written in capital letters and the usual red pencil of the Amazon pirates:

  “SHOW THE PARROT HIS FEATHERS.”

  There was no signature, but only a skull and crossbones drawn in black ink.

  “It’s a very silly message,” said Roger.

  “I don’t see what it means,” said Titty.

  “It doesn’t explain anything,” said John. “You can’t call it even a declaration of war.”

  They went slowly back into the cove to the old camp, and John gave another dose of linseed oil to the mast, and the others helped to rub it in.

  “There they are,” said John suddenly, pointing out through the trees and between the headlands of the little cove. Far away on the other side of the lake the Beckfoot launch was moving along the farther shore. The Swallows ran out of the trees, climbed up among the rocks, and watched the launch disappear behind Wild Cat Island.

  “They’re going to land there without us,” said Titty bitterly.

  But they did not. The launch soon showed again beyond the island, and they watched it going fast up the lake, not stopping even in Houseboat Bay, and vanishing at last behind the Peak of Darien.

  “The thing that’s so funny about it,” said John, “is that Nancy did it as if it really mattered.”

  “Perhaps it does,” said Titty, “and we can’t see how. I wish Captain Nancy wasn’t so awfully clever.”

  “She isn’t cleverer than John,” said Roger.

  John said nothing. “Show the parrot his feathers.” It did not seem to him to mean anything at all.

  At last Roger reminded them that Susan had said supper was to be early, and after giving one more rub down to the mast, the captain, the able-seaman, and the boy set off on their way back to Swallowdale. There were the four trout to think of, as well as Susan. Roger at least was not likely to forget them, though the others might. They hurried up the side of the beck, crossed by the road instead of under the bridge, and climbed the steep woods to the moor, carrying the arrow with them.

  CHAPTER XXI

  SHOWING THE PARROT HIS FEATHERS

  THEY found the mate in a very native mood, due to the cleaning and cooking of the four trout. Fried trout ought to be eaten the moment they are cooked. You can’t go on hotting them up for people. If you keep them frying too long they dry up and you might as well throw them away. It was enough to turn anybody native to have cleaned them and salted them and got the fire just right and the butter melted in the frying-pan and the four little trout sizzling noisily as if in a hurry to be eaten, and then not a sign of the crew in spite of all the trouble taken. Susan had made the frying spread out as long as she possibly could, and really it was a little too much when the others came up into Swallowdale at least twenty minutes after the trout were at their best, and Roger sniffing the good smell of them said, very happily, “Just in time.”

  “You aren’t,” said Susan. “You ought to have been here half an hour ago. I told you to come back straight away. Another time you’d better cook your own fish and I’ll be the one to play round and to come back ‘just in time.’”

  Roger was going to say that perhaps there wouldn’t be any fish left if she did that, when he caught John’s eye, and saw that the captain thought it would be just as well to take no risks with the mate.

  “I’ve seen the Amazons,” said John.

  “They’re not coming to supper are they?” said the mate. “We’ve only got the four fish.”

  “I didn’t see them to talk to,” said John. “They were in the launch. Nancy shot an arrow at the point by the Pike Rock. An arrow with a message on it.”

  “It’s all right about the great-aunt,” said Titty. “John saw her.”

  “Let’s get supper done,” said the mate.

  “We’ve got the arrow,” said Roger. “Here it is.”

  “That’s your bit of bread and butter,” said the mate.

  “These are jolly good fish,” said John. “They couldn’t be better cooked. They’re better even than the ones we had the day we went fishing with Captain Flint.”

  After that for some time nobody talked of anything but the trout and the supper. Titty and Roger told how the trout had been caught, one in the bathing-pool and the other three in the small pools between the top of Swallowdale and the Trout Tarn. Roger told of the bigger ones there would have been if only they had not dropped off. Everybody said how good they were to eat. When the bones of the last trout had been emptied into the campfire, Susan showed them just how lucky they were to have so good a cook as mate to the expedition. She had baked four apples to go with the rice pudding, burying them in a biscuit tin under the hot ashes. They liked their supper so much that when it was over Susan herself brought the talk back to the arrow. She had no sooner mentioned it than Roger handed it across to her and everybody began to talk at once of the launch and of the shooting of the arrow which John alone had seen.

  “It had a message fastened to it,” said John, “but it doesn’t seem to mean much … ‘Show the parrot his feathers’ … Look at it.” He gave the mate the little curled slip of paper.

  She unrolled it and looked at it.

  “It doesn’t look as if it meant anything at all,” she said.

  “But when Nancy shot the arrow, she hid behind the cabin and looked as if it was something that mattered very much.”

  “It isn’t like the arrows they had last year,” said Roger. “It isn’t shiny.”

  This was true. The arrow they were looking at in the camp was very rough, as if it had been made in a hurry. It was blunt at the end and the wood had never been varnished.

  “I suppose those are the parrot’s feathers,” said Susan.

  “Yes,” said Titty. “This one is the first that came out after we went home last year. I’d been saving it ever since the winter. I know it because it got snipped in the scissors by mistake. The other one came out just before we came here. They were both in the lot I gave Nancy when they came to the island the day Roger and I discovered Swallowdale.”

  “HI! HI! STOP HIM!”

  “So it must be a new arrow.”

  “It looks as if they’d only just made it,” said John, “with nobody to help.”

  “Let’s do just what the message says,” said Titty.

  “What?”

  “Show the feathers to Polly. He’s awfully clever.”

  “He isn’t as clever as all that,” said John. “If we don’t know what it all means, he won’t.”

  “Anyhow, let’s do what Nancy said. She’ll probably ask whether we did it or not.”

  Titty took the arrow with the green feathers and walked across with it to the ship’s parrot, who was on his perch making the most of the evening sunshine.

  Instantly the parrot screamed aloud and seized the arrow with its beak and one of its claws.

  “Take care,” said John. “Stop
him. He’ll pull the feathers out. There’s only a narrow splice at each end to hold the thing together. He’ll smash it up and then what’ll Nancy say?”

  But he was too late.

  There was a noise of splitting wood, and in a moment the ship’s parrot had not only torn his own old feathers out of the arrow but had broken the arrow itself at the splice just below the place where the feathers had been fastened in.

  “Hi! Hi! Stop him! Look at that!” shouted John, jumping up.

  “No, Polly, no,” said Titty. “Give it me. You don’t want it.”

  Something beside the feathers had been torn from the split and now broken arrow. Titty rescued it just in time.

  “Well done, Polly,” she said. “Of course Nancy knew you’d do it, because she’s seen you do it before.”

  The ship’s parrot took no notice. It did not want the scrap of closely folded paper that Titty had in her hand.

  “Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly,” it said contentedly, tearing shreds of wood off the arrow and dropping them round its perch.

  Nobody bothered about the arrow now. Titty with trembling fingers unfolded the paper. She saw the skull and crossbones at the top of it and a lot of writing in red pencil underneath, and she gave the paper to Captain John.

  “Read it aloud,” she said.

  “It’s meant for all of us,” said John, and began to read.

  “TO THE CAPTAIN AND CREW OP THE SHIP ‘SWALLOW.’ GREETING. FROM FELLOW MARINERS IN SORE DISTRESS. WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO GO ANYWHERE OUT OF SIGHT OF THE NATIVES. THE GREAT-AUNT LIKES TO SEE US ALL THE TIME. WE WERE LATE THAT DAY WE KNEW WE WOULD BE AND WE ARE LIVING IT DOWN. BUT CLOUDS HAVE SILVER LININGS (THIS IS A QUOTATION) AND EVEN LESSONBOOKS HAVE LAST PAGES. IT’S NEARLY OVER NOW. IMPORTANT. START EARLY TO-MORROW BY THE WAY WE CAME. KEEP ON THE TOP OF THE MOOR HEADING DUE NORTH UNTIL YOU SEE FOUR FIRS IN WHAT USED TO BE A WOOD. FOLLOW THE WAY THEY POINT AND KEEP TO THE STONE WALL TILL YOU COME TO THE ROAD. THE RIVER IS TWO FIELDS AWAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD. LOOK FOR A STONE BARN. ABOUT A CABLE’S LENGTH ABOVE THE BARN IS AN OAK TREE CLOSE TO THE RIVER. HERE YOU WILL FIND A NATIVE WAR CANOE. BECKFOOT IS THE NAME ON ITS TRANSOM …”