Swallowdale. Arthur Ransome
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so that she could see that all was well for the first night. It was no good waiting for those Amazons. Nancy and Peggy were probably in the houseboat with Captain Flint. Or, more likely still, they were already on Wild Cat Island, plotting either a welcome or an ambush. With Nancy you never really knew. So the four explorers had set sail. The thing they had been planning for a year was at last beginning. It had indeed begun, for once more they were afloat in Swallow, and sleeping at home in beds had already come to an end.
*
“I do think he ought to be flying his flag,” said Roger, the look-out.
“Perhaps he didn’t think we’d be sailing so soon,” said Titty, the able-seaman, who was resting a telescope on the cage of her parrot, and looking through it at the distant houseboat.
“He’ll hoist his flag all right when he sees us coming,” said Susan the mate.
John, the eldest of the four of them, said nothing. He was too busy with the sailing, now that Swallow had left the shelter of the bay and had begun to beat down the lake against the southerly wind. He was looking straight forward, feeling the wind on his cheek, enjoying the pull of sheet and tiller and the “lap, lap” of the water under Swallow’s forefoot. Sometimes he glanced up at the little pennant at the masthead, a blue swallow on a white ground (cut out and stitched by Able-seaman Titty), to be sure that he was making the most of the wind. It takes practice to know from the feel of the wind on your cheekbone exactly what your sail is doing, and this was the first sail of these holidays. Sometimes he glanced astern at the bubbling ribbon of Swallow’s wake. At the moment, it did not seem to matter whether Captain Flint was flying a flag from the masthead of his houseboat or not. To be on the lake again and sailing was enough for John.
Mate Susan, too, did not mind that there was no flag on the old houseboat. She had had a tiring time the day before, looking after her mother and Bridget and nurse and the others and all the small luggage during the long railway journey from the south. She always took charge on railway journeys and was always very tired next day. But nothing had been forgotten, and the number of things that would have been forgotten if Susan had not remembered them was very great. And then, this morning, there had been lists of stores to make out and check, besides the stowage of cargo in Swallow. So Susan was resting and happy, glad that for the moment everything was done that she could do, glad no longer to hear the din of railway stations, and glad, too, not to have to listen to strange voices in that din to make sure that they ought not to be changing trains.
Even Able-seaman Titty was less disturbed than Roger at seeing no flag on the houseboat’s stumpy little mast. She had so much else to think about. At one moment she felt that this was still last year and that they had never left the lake and gone away. All that long time of lessons and towns was as if it had never been. And then, the next moment, that was the time which seemed real, and she could not believe that it was the same Titty who had had such awful troubles with her French verbs who was now once more the able-seaman, sitting in Swallow with the parrot cage and the knapsacks and the stores, looking back at the Peak of Darien from which she had first seen Wild Cat Island, and looking down the lake at the island itself, sketches of which with its tall lighthouse tree had filled, almost without her knowing how they came there, the two blank pages at the end of her French Grammar. This feeling of being two people at once in a jumble of two different times made her a little breathless.
But Roger, wedged in his old place in the bows, had been sure that their old friend, Captain Flint, would have had his flag at the masthead, even if he had not dressed ship to welcome them back, and he had been looking forward to seeing the houseboat’s great flag dip and Swallow’s little pennant dip in answer. After that, of course, there would be a puff of smoke and a saluting bang from the little yacht cannon on the houseboat’s foredeck. And now, there was the houseboat without any flag at all.
“He may be asleep,” said Titty.
“He can’t be asleep if Nancy and Peggy are with him,” said Susan.
“They’ve probably gone on to the island. We’ll know in a minute or two,” said John. “This next tack’ll take us into Houseboat Bay. Ready about.”
The little Swallow came up into the wind, Titty and the mate ducked as the boom swung over, the brown sail filled again, and the Swallow, now on the starboard tack, headed across the lake towards Houseboat Bay.
“Steamer on the starboard bow,” called the look-out. “Miles away though.”
“There’s one much nearer coming up astern,” said Captain John, “out of Rio.”
Looking back they could see the wooded islands off the busy little port they called Rio, and through the islands glimpses of the broad waters of the northern part of the lake. The steamer was coming out of the Rio channel between Long Island and the mainland.
“Fisherman broad on the beam,” said the look-out, as they passed a rowing boat with two natives in it, one at the oars and the other holding a fishing-rod.
“Towing a spinner for pike,” said the captain.
“Shark,” corrected the look-out.
The Swallow crossed the bows of the steamer that was going south from Rio. She crossed them with plenty of room to spare. The steamer swept past, the captain on the bridge of the steamer waved a cheerful hand, and the crew of the Swallow waved back. They got a tossing in the steamer’s wash that made them feel they really were at sea.
They were now nearing the sheltered bay where the old blue houseboat was lying to a mooring buoy.
“There’s nobody on deck,” said the look-out.
Last year, when they had seen the houseboat for the first time and Titty had guessed that Captain Flint was a retired pirate, they had seen him sitting, writing, on the after deck with his green parrot perched on the rail beside him. This year there was no pirate to be seen. As for the parrot, he could not be on the houseboat for he had joined another ship. Titty was talking to him.
“Look, Polly,” she was saying, “that’s your old ship. That’s where you used to live before you came to live with us.”
“Two, Two, Twice, Twice, Two, Two, Two,” said the green parrot.
“Pieces of eight,” said Titty. “Say ‘pieces of eight.’ Don’t bother about ‘Twice Two.’ It isn’t term time any more.”
“Let’s have the telescope, Titty,” said the mate.
“I can’t see his rowing boat,” said John. “It isn’t there unless he’s got it hauled up along the port side.”
“The houseboat’s shut up altogether,” said Mate Susan, looking through the telescope. “The curtains are drawn in all the windows.”
Captain John and Mate Susan looked at each other. Even if they had not, like Roger, been dreaming of dipping flags and salutes of guns, they had been as sure that Captain Flint would be in his houseboat as that the big hills would be in their places round the head of the lake.
The Swallow sailed right into the bay, under the houseboat’s stern and then, coming about, easily cleared the mooring buoy on her way out again into the open lake. Everybody had a good look at the houseboat, but they could see no sign of life aboard.
“He’s covered up the cannon,” cried the ship’s boy with indignation. Indeed the whole of the foredeck of the houseboat was protected from the weather with black tarpaulin sheets.
“It does look rather as if he wasn’t there at all,” said Captain John, as the Swallow slipped out of the smooth water of Houseboat Bay to buffet once more with the little waves of the lake.
“I know what he’s done,” said Titty. “He’s shut up the houseboat and he’s on the island with the others.”
The others were really more important than Captain Flint, and, after all, it was just like Captain Nancy Blackett to plan that they should meet once more not in any mere railway station, or even in her uncle’s houseboat, but on the desert island where they had met