"Ransome, Arthur - Swallows and Amazons 05 - Coot Club 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ransome Arthur)

Third Day
This plan came to nothing, because in the morning they woke to the steady drumming of rain-drops on stretched canvas. It was no day for a trial trip. Neither Tom nor the Admiral wanted to get sails wet at the very start. Awnings were left up all day. Dick and Dorothea wore their oilskins and sea-boots and got some rowing practice in the rain. Dorothea planned a story, 'The Outlaw of the Broads'. Dick helped Tom in the Titmouse, and between them they finished up the lockerdoors. William, for fear of chills, was given a spoonful of cod-liver oil.
In the afternoon, when the rain was at its worst, Port and Starboard, in oilskins and sou'westers, came rowing into the Broad.
'What are you doing tomorrow?' said Mrs Barrable.
'We've got to hang about at home tomorrow. The A.P.'s got people coming to tea, and we have to be there to pour out.'
'Next day, then?' said Mrs Barrable. 'What about coming with us for a day or so just to help Tom to put us all in the way of handling the Teasel?'
'We'll have to be back the night before the first of the championship races,' said Starboard.
'We could do a tremendous lot in three days,' said Tom.
'Potter Heigham, I thought,' said the Admiral.
'Bridge to go through. Two bridges. Just what's wanted,' said Tom.
'And then through Kendal Dyke and up to Horsey. It used to be a wonderful place for birds.'
'It still is,' said Tom.
'Good,' said Dick.
That night, in the cabin of the Teasel, the Admiral, Tom, Dick, and Dorothea pored over the map together. The Admiral, with the wrong end of a paint-brush, was tracing the curling blue line that marked the River Bure past the mouth of the Ant and on to the place where it was joined by the Thurne, and the blue line thickened and curled away down the map towards Acle and Yarmouth. Tom's eye followed it down there, thinking of tides and the other dangers of Yarmouth and Breydon which make a cruise on the rivers of the south as exciting an adventure for the children of Horning or Wroxham as a cruise on the rivers of the north is for the children who live down at Oulton or Beccles.
But Mrs Barrable's paint-brush was moving up that other river, the Thurne ... Potter Heigham ... 'such a pretty little place it used to be' ... two bridges, road and railway ... on and on and then sharp to the north-west through the narrow line that marked Kendal Dyke, and into a largish blue blot that meant the widening waters of Heigham Sound, and on again through a narrow wriggling line into another blue blot that was Horsey Mere. At one side of this blot was a short line marking a dyke, and at the end of it the sign for a windmill. 'That's where we'll spend the night,' said the Admiral, 'in the little cut close by that windmill...'
The others leant over the cabin table. Closer and closer they put their heads to the paper. It was very hard to see, all of a sudden. Dimmer and dimmer.
'What's happened to the light?' said the Admiral.
They looked up at the two little glass bulbs that usually lit the whole cabin. They dazzled no longer. A curly red wire was slowly fading in each bulb.
'The battery must be run down,' said Dick at once. He switched off one light, and, for a moment, got a rather brighter glow out of the other.
'Well,' said the Admiral, 'we've been looking at the wrong end of the map. We can't set out on a voyage with no light. Candles are all right in the well, but I don't like them in the cabin. We'll have to sail up to Wroxham to get the battery renewed.'
Dorothea felt a pang of disappointment as she went into the well for the candlestick. They had come from Wroxham that first day and so had seen that part of the river already. Sailing to Horsey would have been sailing into the unknown.
Help came, unexpectedly, from Tom.
Dorothea lit her candle, and brought it into the cabin, setting it on the table where it threw its queer flickering light over the faces round the map. She saw at once that Tom had something to say.
'Wroxham's a bad place for sailing. Specially now that the leaves are beginning to come. Get blanketed altogether in some reaches. It's no good going up there for a trial trip. Much better get it done tomorrow. It's safe enough with the Margoletta away through Yarmouth. I'll take the battery up to Wroxham first thing in the morning. I'll be back by tea-time.'
The Admiral looked at him in the candlelight, and laughed.
'Tired of lying low?' she asked.
'I'd like to give Titmouse a run,' said Tom. 'And it's perfectly safe now with somebody watching at Acle.'
'It certainly would be rather waste of Port and Starboard not to have some real sailing while we've got them,' said the Admiral. 'And there are no bridges on the way to Wroxham.'
'It's stopped raining,' said Tom, putting his hand out through a porthole to feel.
A few minutes later he was baling out the Teasel's dinghy for the third time that day. Dick ferried him across to the Titmouse. Tom lit his lantern and looked about him. 'Bone dry,' he said, 'in spite of all that rain. That's the first time the awning's had a proper wetting.'
He watched Dick vanish into the darkness, listened for his safe arrival aboard the Teasel, and turned in for the night, feeling extraordinarily happy. Jolly good that the twins were coming in the Teasel, at least to Horsey and back. It was all very well, but he really did not much like the idea of handling a boat as big as the Teasel for the first time, with only Dick and Dorothea to help. And jolly good, too, to think that tomorrow, Hullabaloos or no Hullabaloos, the little Titmouse would herself be voyaging once more.










CHAPTER I I
TOM IN DANGER
It was a fine clear morning with a north-westerly breeze. Tom was up early, and long before breakfast was ready in the Teasel he had come alongside. He and Dick made a double sling with the end of the Teasel's mainsheet, and lowered the heavy battery carefully into the Titmouse.
'Do you really think it's safe?' said Dorothea. 'They may be just waiting to pounce.'
'Not they,' said Tom. 'And we'd know if they were. Joe's got a friend watching at Acle. And, anyway, I'll be back in no time. No tacking. I'm going to row every yard I can't either run or reach.'
It was a dullish morning without him. They washed up. They swabbed the decks. They took William with them as a passenger to Ranworth Staithe when they went to get some fresh water. On the way back they looked in on two coots' nests, and met a pair of crested grebes out fishing, but, with William aboard, they found it harder to come near the grebes than when they were alone. William sat up on a thwart, put his paws on the gunwale and looked out as keenly as Dick, but he could not see a bird on the water without barking. They went back to the Teasel at last and found the Admiral busy preparing a canvas. Dick settled down in the cabin, making a fair copy of his roughly scribbled list of birds he had seen in Norfolk. Dorothea tried to write some of the new book that had seemed almost half done when she had put down a list of its chapter headings ... The Secret Broad, The Outlaw in the Reeds, The Black Coot's Feather, The Bittern's Warning, and so on. What a book it was to be, and yet, somehow, the first chapter had ended after a paragraph or two, and the second would not go beyond the first gorgeous sentence: 'Parting the reeds with stealthy, silent hand, the outlaw peered into the gathering dusk. Away, across the dark water ...' Well, what was it that he saw? Dorothea found herself wondering instead what Tom was seeing on his voyage up to Wroxham to change the Teasel's battery. Had he managed to see Port and Starboard on his way through Horning? The morning slipped away, and still the outlaw in the book was peering out of the reeds across the dark water. Dorothea had to leave him there, for suddenly it was too late to do any more writing. The Admiral wanted to get dinner over, to have a long afternoon for painting.
After the meal, Dorothea hurried Dick into the dinghy to give the Admiral a fair chance, and asked if it would be all right if they rowed up to the main river.
'Don't fall in,' said the Admiral. 'Better leave William with me. Where did I put that turpentine?'