Captain Flint closed the sextant in its case, went quickly out on the verandah and glanced at the sun. He came back, stepping over the legs of Titty and Susan, who were hurriedly picking up the parrot’s husks.
“Let’s have a look at that almanac,” he said. “It’s not noon yet. We’ve time to do it, if we can only get a sea horizon. I can make a good guess at the longitude. Wish I was surer of the day. One night in that junk, one in the fort, three in Chang’s zoo. How many days have I been cramming Latin?” He turned the pages of the almanac, tore out the table of corrections, folded it carefully and put it in his pocket, and then tore out an advertisement page and scribbled some figures in the margin.
“What are you going to do?” asked John.
“Take an observation if we get a chance,” said Captain Flint.
In the shadows of the inner room they saw Miss Lee with a lit match. A thin stream of bluish smoke curled upwards from a stick of incense on the oblong chest that they knew now was not an altar but a grave. Miss Lee, with her back to them, was bowing again and again.
She came out and, seeing her students busy rolling up sleeping-bags, became again the happy smiling schoolmistress on holiday. “That is light,” she said. “You can leave your things on the velandah. My amah will see them safe aboard and you will find them this evening when we come home.”
“But is the Shining Moon going back without us?” said Nancy.
“We go to visit the Taicoon Wu,” said Miss Lee. “The Shining Moon must go back now, before wind dlop. She needs the wind to take her up the liver.”
“Bother the Taicoon Wu,” said Nancy, but not so that Miss Lee could hear her.
“And now,” said Miss Lee, “we will go acloss the island to my father’s chair.”
Miss Lee and her students set out along the path through the trees.
“You’re not going to carry that all the time, Uncle Jim?” said Peggy.
“I’m not going to risk losing it twice,” said Captain Flint, who was walking in front of her, holding the mahogany box by its brass handle.
“But she said we could leave everything on the verandah,” said Peggy.
“Peggy, my dear,” said Captain Flint. “Shut up. When Nancy calls you a galoot she’s often wrong but sometimes very right.”
When they came out on the rocky point at the other side of the island, Miss Lee bowed in memory of her father, and sat herself in the great stone chair overlooking the open sea.
“Here,” she said, “my father loved to sit. Here he watched his ships go out and come in. No one has sat here, only my father and now I, his daughter.”
Roger and Titty, both of whom had used the chair as a lookout post, glanced at each other but said nothing. Miss Lee, her mind full of old memories, began talking of fights between one junk and another, of battles between whole fleets of junks, grappling, setting fire to each other, filling the quiet bay with the thunder of their guns. Her students, lying on the ground about the chair, listened, and as one story ended, Nancy begged for another.
John saw Captain Flint beckon from behind the chair. They slipped quietly away.
“Just about time,” said Captain Flint, glancing at the sun, taking the sextant lovingly from its case, as they came down on the shore at a place where the others could not see them. Ten minutes later they came back with triumphant smiles. The navigators, even if without a ship, had been at work once more.
“What are you grinning about?” asked Nancy.
“Oh just this,” said Captain Flint, waving towards the sea.
“It is a velly fine view,” said Miss Lee.
“Sorry I interrupted,” said Nancy. “Miss Lee, do go on, about that time when your father was taken prisoner and captured the junk that had captured him. How did he get her away when she was in the middle of an enemy fleet?”
Miss Lee went on, told that story and another after that, and at last, with a glance at Roger, said that they would go back to the temple to picnic Cambridge fashion. By now, she thought, the amah would have the picnic ready.
“I knew there was something in those baskets,” said Roger.
They came back to find that the Shining Moon was already gone, though the guards were still waiting on the jetty. All their things were gone too, and a picnic meal was waiting on the verandah. It was a queer mixture of China and Cambridge. For China there were persimmons, queer fruits with squashy red insides, and bowls of rice and chopped chicken. For Cambridge there were fat ham sandwiches which tasted unlike any sandwiches that Cambridge ever knew, made with spiced bread that might have been a sort of cake. A kettle for tea was boiling on the Primus stove which, as Susan tried to explain to the silent and hostile amah, she had meant to clean after their last breakfast.
“Have they left that behind?” asked Miss Lee suddenly, seeing the mahogany box on the ground beside Captain Flint.
“That’s all right, ma’am,” said Captain Flint hurriedly. “It weighs almost nothing. I’ll carry it.”
They had finished their picnic meal when they saw three sampans coming across to the jetty, and a lot of people at the landing place at the foot of the cliff.
“And now,” said Miss Lee, “we go to see the Taicoon Wu. I hope you have had a happy picnic.”
“First rate,” said Nancy. “Specially the sailing, and those stories.”
“It’s not over yet,” said Roger. “We’re going to cross that bridge.”
“It has been very pleasant,” said Captain Flint, “but, of course, it’s not like lessons.”
“Ah,” said Miss Lee, “there is no pleasure like learning. Labor ipse voluptas. Work is a pleasure itself.” It was the only time she had used a Latin word that day.
The sampans were coming into the jetty. The amah was bundling the empty bowls into their baskets. Her students waited while Miss Lee went once more into the inner room to bow before her father’s grave. A few minutes later the whole holiday party and the guards, with Captain Flint still clinging to his sextant, were being ferried across to the landing-place under the black cliff of Turtle Island.
CHAPTER XXI
OLD SEAMAN WU SEES IT
MISS LEE, going for a picnic, had slipped away from Dragon Town without formality. It was different now that she was going to pay a visit to the Taicoon Wu. A crowd of people were waiting at the landing-place under the cliff. There were more men with rifles, some who had come over from Dragon Island and some sent by Wu himself as a guard of honour. There was Miss Lee’s travelling chair, and eight others, each with its bearers. As Miss Lee stepped ashore, a man unfurled a black banner with a golden dragon, like the tiger banner that had been carried in front of the Taicoon, Chang, on the march home after giving an airing to his birds.
“Gosh,” said Roger, “we’re all going to be Taicoons. … I say, I’m sorry for the ones who have to carry Captain Flint.”
“Don’t you think, ma’am, I’d better walk?” said Captain Flint himself.
“Evellything allanged,” said Miss Lee, who was already sitting among the golden cushions of her chair. “We visit the Taicoon, Wu. Please …”
“It’s all right,” called Roger. “There’s one with four men to carry it, specially for you. All ours have only two.”
A moment or two later they had started. The man with the dragon banner walked in front. Then came half a dozen guards. Then Miss Lee, in her gold-cushioned chair. Then the old amah in a rather plainer chair lined with blue silk. Then one after another in chairs like the amah’s came six of the model students. Then, in a larger chair Captain Flint, still firmly clutching his sextant. Then the rest of the guards.
Some of the guards in front set up a chant, taken up by those at the rear, tossed to and fro as it were, from one end of the procession to the other and back again. There could be no talking. Swinging in their chairs, slung from bamboos on the shoulders of the coolies, the students had enough to do to pretend they did not mind as the procession began to climb the narrow track cut in the face of the cliff.
Up and up they went, the wall of the cliff above them on one side, a precipice below them on the other. Up and up, till they could see the blue water over the topmost trees of the little island they had left. Up and up, till the island looked no more than a small green blot on the water beneath them, and the green roof of the temple no more than a pinpoint different in colour from the trees. Again and yet again the track twisted back upon itself climbing always till it reached the top of the cliff.
Here the men rested, but only for a moment, and then went swinging on along a wider road now dropping gently into a wide valley. On the further side of the valley they could see the road again climbing over bare rock. But in the middle of the valley they could see paddy-fields, with women working among the rice, trees, and a walled village. The procession, with the dragon banner waving before it, hurried down the road towards the fields.
At the gate in the wall of the village a gong sounded, twenty-two times. The procession was growing like a snowball. The women in the rice-fields left their work and ran to join it. Men and women poured out of the one-storied houses, to bow, to shout “Missee Lee” and to run beside the chair-carriers, staring at the students. Men and women, getting their dragon ready for the feast, left their work to join the crowd.
Suddenly, a little way ahead, the students saw another banner, grey and scarlet, coming out of a gateway, and knew it for the turtle banner of the Taicoon Wu that they had seen once before in the courtyard at Miss Lee’s. The Taicoon Wu was coming out to meet his chief. They saw him, the same little stout man with the wrinkled face, in his blue and purple robe, whom they had last seen sitting beside Miss Lee in the council hall. The crowd came no further but waited. The banner-bearers met. The Taicoon Wu was bowing to Miss Lee, and pointing towards the gateway. He bowed to the old amah but took no notice of the students. Miss Lee, in her chair, was carried in, the stout little man walking, bandy-legged, beside her. “Boom, boom …” Twenty-two times a gong was sounded. Miss Lee and Wu disappeared under the gateway. The amah was carried in after them, and the chairbearers lowered the chairs of the students, stretched their arms and squatted on their heels.
“Great chopsticks,” exclaimed Nancy, getting out of her chair. “Call that manners! I do think he might have invited us in too.”
“How did you like being a Taicoon?” said Roger, running up to join Titty.
“I wish they weren’t humans,” said Titty, thinking of the coolies.
“They’re much better than donks,” said Roger.
Peggy, still a little shaky, joined them. “Again and again I thought we’d be over the edge,” she said.
“So did I,” said Nancy. “till I saw they were as good as goats.”
“There’s still that bridge to cross,” said Roger. “I say, they’re bringing out something to drink.”
They were, but it was not for the students. A huge bowl was brought out from the gateway, and a great pile of small ones; guards and coolies crowded round, dipped, drank and smacked their lips.
“Mr. Wu didn’t look too pleased to see us,” said Captain Flint, strolling up with John and Susan.
“I wonder how long she’s going to stay in there talking to him,” said Susan. “There won’t be light enough to do much at the dragon by the time we get home. I simply can’t sew with those lanterns.”
“Did you spot the dragon they’ve got here?” said Roger. “It looks about ready.”
“Well, they’ve got about a dozen people working at it,” said Susan. “Not only Peggy and me.”
“I put in at least a hundred stitches yesterday,” said Nancy.
“I wonder what they’re talking about,” said John.
“I had a sort of idea she was going to talk to him about us,” said Captain Flint. “I think it was in her mind to get him on her side against the old counsellor. Hullo. Cheer up, Roger. This looks as if he’s relented.”
A man was coming out of the gateway carrying a tray with a row of little bowls on it.
“It isn’t as if we were really thirsty,” said Roger. “And anyway, it won’t have sugar in it.”
All the same they felt a little less like unwanted guests when the man came up to them and they were sipping pale tea out of the little bowls.
Ten minutes later it seemed that the Taicoon had relented a little further, for a man came out to them with a tray heaped with sweet and sticky lumps, each pierced with a thin bamboo with which to lift it to the mouth.
Perhaps twenty minutes after that there was a stir among the guards. The old amah in her chair was coming out of the gateway. As soon as they saw who it was the guards settled again in their places. The amah was set down close to the little group of waiting students. Her face was grimmer than ever. They all wanted to ask questions, but even Roger thought it better not. “No relenting there,” said Captain Flint.
Suddenly coolies and guards sprang to their feet. Miss Lee and the Taicoon Wu were walking towards them together, followed by the bearers with Miss Lee’s empty chair.
“She’s talked him round,” said Captain Flint.
“She doesn’t need to,” said Nancy. “She’s a twenty-two gonger and he’s only a measly ten.”
Miss Lee was talking happily, and the Taicoon, Wu, was smiling all over his wrinkled walnut of a face. They came up to the group of waiting students.
“I am telling the Taicoon, Wu, how happy I am with my students,” said Miss Lee. “My velly good students. I am telling how you love your work, how quick you learn. …”
The students shifted uncomfortably on their feet. This was a little too much like prize-giving day at school when people who had spent most of the term in trouble were being given prizes for good conduct before a lot of admiring visitors. Then Miss Lee began introducing them one by one.
“Loger,” she said and, after naming him, turned to the Taicoon with a lot of talk in Chinese. The Taicoon listened, and smiled at Roger. Roger, hardly knowing what he ought to do, put out his hand. The Taicoon laughed and shook it heartily.
“John,” said Miss Lee and went on in Chinese, perhaps telling how fast John was picking up the Latin he had forgotten. John too shook hands with the Taicoon.
“Tittee” was the next name. Miss Lee was evidently going through the list of her pupils in order of merit. There followed “Su-san”, “Peggee” and “Nansee”. Each in turn shook hands with the little smiling brown-faced man.
Miss Lee turned to Captain Flint, and Captain Flint, ready for the handshaking, shifted the mahogany box from his right hand to his left.
“Captain Flint,” she began and stopped.
The smile had left the Taicoon’s face. Much shorter than Captain Flint, though no less stout, he was pointing at the polished wooden box. His brown, wrinkled face looked almost black. He spoke to Miss Lee and pointed angrily at the box. Miss Lee answered him, and said in English, “The Taicoon, Wu, asks what you are carrying. I tell him it is part of the luggage John and Su-san left in my father’s temple.”
The Taicoon, scowling furiously at Captain Flint, spoke to Miss Lee.
“He asks to see what is in it,” said Miss Lee. “Please show him.”
There was nothing to be done. Captain Flint put the box on the ground, flicked back the catches and opened it. Wu stopped, snatched away the bit of chamois leather, took hold of the sextant and tried to lift it out. It stuck.
“Let me,” said Captain Flint, and tenderly lifted his precious instrument from its case. Wu put out his hand and Captain Flint unwillingly let him have it, waiting to save it if the Taicoon should let it drop.
The Taicoon stamped his foot.
“Six-tant,” he said and began talking something like English. “Six-tant,” he said. “Missee Lee tell my she keep you … you stay here. … Safe. … You no can find Thlee Islands. … You no can tell gunboats where to find Thlee Islands. … This is six-tant. You take melidian altitude. … You put finger on map … so. …”
Captain Flint started, and John, remembering what they had done on
ly a few hours earlier, turned a deep red.
“Here, I say,” said Captain Flint, “what do you know about meridian altitudes?”
“Olo seaman,” said the Taicoon Wu, setting his bandy legs wide apart and looking through the sextant at the sun, which was now well down in the west. “Olo seaman. … Blitish ships. China Merchants. … Boy … Deckhand … Bo’sun. Take time for my captain when him take melidian altitude. I olo seaman. Know sixtant velly well. You fool Taicoon Chang. … You fool Missee Lee. You no fool Taicoon Wu. … I tell Missee Lee. … I tell Taicoon Chang. … Not safe keep you here. Moa betta chop you head. …”
He showed the sextant to Miss Lee, talking angrily in Chinese. His voice grew louder as he talked. The guards and bearers were listening. The amah, in her chair, leaned forward, listening too. The Taicoon made as if to throw the sextant on the ground. Miss Lee put out her hand for it. He gave it to her.
“The box, please,” said Miss Lee coldly.
“I’ll put it in,” said Captain Flint. She let him have it and he lowered it carefully into the felt-lined box, found the chamois leather on the ground, laid it over the sextant and closed the catches.
Wu put out his hand for it. Miss Lee shook her head without a smile and herself took the box from Captain Flint, and put it on the footboard of her chair. Polite farewells were being said. Wu and Miss Lee were bowing to each other. There were no farewells for the model students, who seated themselves silently and nervously in their chairs. The banner-bearer waited for the signal. It came. One after another the twenty-two gong strokes sounded from Wu’s gateway. The banner-bearer marched ahead, followed by Miss Lee in her chair, using the sextant for a footstool. The procession was on the move again. The Taicoon Wu, standing with his men, watched Captain Flint being carried away and made that same quick gesture that they had seen for the first time in Chang’s yamen, a sharp cutting motion with his hand at the back of his neck.
Missee Lee: The Swallows and Amazons in the China Seas Page 23
