Well, thought Tom, even that was better than nothing. If not a friend, at least the sister of a victim, not an absolute foreigner. All the same he was in a hurry to go. He answered a lot of questions from Dick about coots and their nests. He explained to Dorothea that it wasn’t the Titmouse that was at the bottom of the river, but only the old punt. And then he told Mrs. Barrable that he ought to go. They listened.
“They’ve gone right down the river,” said Mrs. Barrable, “or we’d be able to hear them whether their engine was running or not.”
Tom hurried along to the Teasel’s foredeck. Dick and Dorothea hurried after him. Already he was hauling up the Teasel’s mud-weight. Up it came, with the painter fast to the rope above it, and after it, with a tremendous stirring of mud, the Dreadnought herself rose slowly through the water, like a great shark. Up she came, and lay waterlogged, now one end of her and now the other lifting an inch above the surface.
“May I use your peak halyards?” asked Tom.
“Anything you like,” said Mrs. Barrable. “But keep the mud off the awning if you can.”
Tom, with Dick anxiously watching, unlaced the awning by the mast, freed the peak halyards, used the painter to make them fast to the Dreadnought’s thwarts, and delighted Dick and Dorothea by asking them to haul away, while he and Mrs. Barrable, who, after one moment’s hesitation, seemed not to mind getting her hands muddy, fended off from the deck of the Teasel.
“Steady,” said Tom. “Don’t lift her out of the water. She’s very old and the thwarts won’t bear it.”
Up came the punt, tilting over on one side. Water and mud poured out.
“Lower away,” called Tom, and the Dreadnought, no longer a submarine, floated with a few inches of freeboard.
Dick, his mind for once on the business in hand, saw what was wanted before anybody had time to tell him, hurried aft, hauled in the Teasel’s little dinghy, and was back in a moment with a baler.
“Good,” said Tom, who was already in the punt, thick brown water sloshing to and fro as he moved. He took the baler and settled down to scooping up the water and throwing it out with a quick swinging motion.
“What would you have done without a baler?” asked Mrs. Barrable.
“Used a sea-boot,” said Tom, without a moment’s stop in his work. “I’d got water into one already, when I was kicking her under.”
“Good boy,” said Mrs. Barrable, and then, lightly, as if it was a question that did not really matter, “You are sailing most of the time, aren’t you?”
“All the time,” said Tom, “except when I have to be at school.”
“Could you make anything of sailing a boat as big as ours?”
Tom looked up at the Teasel’s mast.
“She isn’t bigger than the one the three of us sail when Uncle Frank has his holiday. Of course I couldn’t manage her all by myself.”
“Three of you?”
“Port and Starboard.”
Dorothea’s eyes sparkled. Always those two seemed to be coming in.
“She’ll do all right now,” said Tom, handing back the baler and tugging at his paddle which he had firmly wedged before sinking his ship. “And thank you very much. I know I ought not to have come aboard and borrowed that mud-weight. And thank you very much indeed for not minding. Some people would have been pretty fierce about it.”
“You can’t sit on those wet thwarts,” said Mrs. Barrable.
“I’ll stand up,” said Tom.
“Isn’t she very crank?”
“Not if you know her,” said Tom. “She’s really much steadier than some.” And, perhaps just a little because of the spectators watching from the Teasel, he stood in the stern of the old punt and drove her up the river, using his paddle as if he were a gondolier or one of the old-time marshmen who, they say, could keep their balance on a floating plank.
*
Mrs. Barrable, Dick, Dorothea and William watched him out of sight.
“That’s a very good boy,” said Mrs. Barrable at last.
“Wouldn’t it have been awful if they’d caught him,” said Dorothea.
“He deserved not to be caught,” said Mrs. Barrable.
All the rest of the evening, they went on talking of Tom and the pirates, and the Hullabaloos, and the little racing boats they had seen in the afternoon. It was very late that night before Dick and Dorothea were stowed away in their bunks in the little fore-cabin, and Dick had tired of experimenting with the electric light above his head by switching it on and off, and Mrs. Barrable had taken out her letter to their mother, and was sitting at the folding table, finishing it up.
“Do you think we’ll see him again?” asked Dick’s voice out of the darkness.
“I don’t see why not?” said Mrs. Barrable.
“And Port and Starboard, too?” said Dorothea.
“They seem to hang together,” said Mrs. Barrable. “Now, go to sleep, both of you.” And she crossed out a couple of sentences or so in her letter and added a few more. Then, listening to the quiet lapping of the water under the bows of the dinghy astern, she began drawing pictures as usual, and before she knew what she was doing, she had drawn a little sketch of the Teasel, with the awning gone, and her sails set, and a much larger crew than three aboard her, a little old woman at the tiller, Dick and Dorothea at the sheets, two girls on the foredeck, a boy at the mast-head, and a row of three pirates, all with turbans and ferocious knives, sitting on the cabin roof.
CHAPTER VI
PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE
TOM paddled the Dreadnought up the river. Considering that she was a flat-bottomed, homemade punt, she really was fairly steady, but, on the whole, he thought it safer not to turn round and wave good-bye. She was very wet and rather slimy after being at the bottom of the river, and Tom was content to be able to keep his balance and to keep her going at the same time. He was still feeling the narrowness of his escape from the Hullabaloos. Things had certainly turned out much better than had seemed likely. How lucky that the Teasel had been moored there. How lucky, too, that the little old lady had taken his boarding of her yacht in the way she had. Why, she had played up against those Hullabaloos almost as if she had had a share herself in clearing them away from the coot’s nest. Of course, the old lady and those two children were foreigners, too, in a way, but not like the Hullabaloos. And her brother had had his head mended by Tom’s father. Anyway, it was very lucky that not even the pug had been on deck. There would not have been time for explanation. If he had not thought the yacht was empty he would never have dared to go aboard, but would have kept on down the river and, as sure as eggs were eggs, would have been caught at the next bend.
The sun had gone down. The tide was on the point of turning, and up-river a calm green-and-golden glow filled the sky and was reflected on the scarcely moving water. A heron came flying downstream with long slow flaps of his great wings. Only twenty yards away he lifted easily over the tall reeds and settled with a noisy disturbance of twigs on the top of a tree in a little wood at the edge of the marshes. The heron had a little difficulty in balancing himself on the thin, swaying branch, and Tom, watching him, dark against the glowing sky, very nearly forgot that he, too, had an uncertain perch. Balancing like this was tiring, too, and, anyhow, Tom did not want to be standing up when he came to No. 7. Putting down his paddle and letting the Dreadnought drift, he slipped out of his jacket, folded it on the wet thwart, sat down on it and paddled away in good earnest. For a moment he pretended to himself that he could hear the Hullabaloos far away coming up the river, but he knew they were not, and no amount of pretence could make him send the old Dreadnought flying along as he had when it really was a question whether or no he would get away.
He slowed down as he came near No. 7. One great advantage of paddling a punt is that you face the way you are going. Tom, as he paddled, was searching the side of the river opposite the little opening that the coots had chosen. He was looking for round black shadows stirring on that golden water under
the reeds. He saw only the broad bulging ripple of a water-rat. No. At least the coots were no longer scuttering up and down in terror as he had seen them last. Quietly he edged the old punt over towards the other bank so as to be able to look into the opening as he passed it. There was an eddy here or nearly dead water, and Tom never lifted his paddle high enough to drip. He slid by as silently as a ghost. He knew exactly where to look into the shadows. There was the clump of reeds, and there at the base of them, among them, the raised platform of the nest. Was it deserted? Or not? Tom peered through the twilight. No. It was as if the centre of the nest was capped with a black dome, and on the dome he had just seen the white splash of a coot’s forehead. And what was that other shadow working along close under the bank? It was enough. Tom did not want to frighten them again. He paddled quietly on. One thing was all right, anyhow. The coots of No. 7 were at home once more.
It was growing dark now. Nobody but Tom was moving on the river, and the only noise was the loud singing of the birds on both banks and over the marshes, whistling blackbirds, throaty thrushes, starlings copying first one and then the other, a snipe drumming overhead. Everything was all right with everybody. And then a pale barn owl swayed across the river like a great moth, and with her, furiously chattering, a little crowd of small birds, for whom the owl was nothing but an enemy. And suddenly into Tom’s head came a picture of the Margoletta as a hostile owl, mobbed by a lot of small birds, the Death and Glories and himself.
Was that what had really been happening? It looked very like it if you chose to think of it that way. The Hullabaloos, horrid as they were, had only asked to be left alone. What would his father think of it? There were so few rules for the fortunate children of the river-side. They could do what they liked, more or less, so long as they managed to keep out of any trouble with the foreigners. That was the one thing that really mattered. A quarrel with George Owdon, for example, would not matter at all. Everybody knew who George was, and everybody knew what he was. Grown-up people would say something about “Boys will be boys,” and think no more about it. But a quarrel with foreigners, with visitors to the Broads, was altogether different. “Don’t get mixed up with foreigners” was the beginning and the end of the law. “Help them to set their sails if they ask for help. If they don’t know they need help, leave them alone. Show them the way when they ask it. Tow them off when they get themselves aground. Answer their questions no matter how stupid they seem. But do not get mixed up with them.”
And Tom, remembering what he had seen and heard while he was lurking in the reeds beside the Teasel, knew that the Hullabaloos of the Margoletta were very angry indeed. To say that he had got mixed up with them was to put it much too mildly. He had made enemies of them. They had not sounded at all as if they were the kind of people who would forget what had happened or forgive it. And what if they found out who he was and went and made a row about it? The doctor’s son casting loose a moored boat full of perfect strangers.… His cheeks went hot at the thought. But at least no one who knew him had seen him … and then, suddenly, Tom remembered George Owdon lounging on the ferry raft when he had been paddling the Dreadnought on his way to the rescue of No. 7. Would George tell? Hardly. George was a beast, but, after all, he was a Norfolk coot, like the rest of them, though, of course, not a member of the Coot Club, which was an affair of Tom and the twins. No, not even George Owdon would do a thing like that.
But, as he paddled on and on up the river, Tom grew more and more bothered about what had happened. It was not a question of being found out. Why, even Mrs. Barrable, the old lady of the Teasel who had joined in so splendidly on his side, was a visitor. And those two children he had met in the train and had now met again.… Mixed up with foreigners? He seemed to be head over ears in them. And it had all come about so quickly. What ought he to have done? Let No. 7 be ruined at the last moment, after all that watching and the careful way in which the coots had fought the floods by building up their nest? Again he saw those anxious scutterings at the far side of the river. He could not have allowed them to be kept off their eggs until it was too late. What else could he have done? Tom wanted advice, and when he passed the Ferry, and was coming up towards Horning village, he was very glad to see the glow of a cigarette at the edge of the lawn, and to find his father, resting from victims at last, watching or rather listening to the big bream that come up in the evening and turn over on the top of the water to stir the heart of any fisherman who sees or hears them.
“Hullo, old chap,” said his father. “Where have you been? And what have you done with the twins? I thought you had one of your meetings on. Be quiet while you’re coming ashore. Your mother says we’re to be careful not to wake the monster.”
Tom switched his paddle across and held it and turned the old Dreadnought neatly into the dyke. Usually he protested when his father spoke of the new baby as “the monster”. Tonight he hardly noticed it.
Dr. Dudgeon strolled round through the bushes and was there in the dusk beside the dyke, ready to help Tom to moor the punt.
“I thought you’d have given up the old Dreadnought altogether,” he said, “after last night’s sleeping in the Titmouse.”
“I had something special to do,” said Tom, “and, anyhow, there wasn’t any wind.… I say, dad.…”
“All right at your end?”
“Right.”
“Your mother says we must keep quiet another five minutes and then creep in to supper.”
“Look here, dad, what would you do if the only way to get to our baby was up this dyke, and mother and you and me were all on the other side of the river, and a huge motor-cruiser was fixed right across the opening of the dyke so that none of us could get in, and our baby was all alone, and we knew that if we didn’t get to him soon he’d go and die?”
“Do?” said the doctor. “Why, we’d scupper that cruiser. We’d blow it sky high. We’d … But what’s it all about, old chap? Don’t you go trapping me into prescribing before diagnosis. Let’s have the symptoms first. Tell me all about it.…”
And Tom, walking up and down with his father in the darkening garden, and already feeling a good deal better, poured out the whole story.
*
An hour or so later, when they had had their supper, and Tom and his father had been allowed to go in on tiptoe and see their baby asleep with a purple fist in its mouth, Tom was back in the Titmouse, making ready for the night. The awning of the Titmouse glowed like a paper lantern, with wild shadows moving on it as Tom pushed things into their places and wriggled himself down into his sleeping-bag.
He heard his father’s voice on the bank.
“Tom.”
“Yes.”
“Thinking it all over, you know, in terms of the monster, and talking it over with your mother, considering her as a coot, I’ve come to a conclusion. It’s a pity it’s happened, of course, and I’ll be very much obliged to you if you can manage not to let those rowdies catch you, but, looking at the case as a whole, your mother on one side of the cruiser and our baby on the other, I don’t really see what else you could have done.”
“I won’t let them catch me,” said Tom.
“I’d much rather they didn’t,” said his father. “Good night, old chap.”
“Good night, dad,” said Tom, and blew out his candle lantern.
“Half a minute, Tom, here’s your mother coming out.”
Mrs. Dudgeon rubbed with her finger on the taut cloth of the awning.
“Still worrying about it, Tom? I don’t think you need. You’ll have all coots and all mothers on your side. Now, go to sleep. We’ll leave the garden door on the latch, so that you can come in early if you want to. Good night.”
“Good night,” said Tom.
He heard their steps going off along the bank, but before they were round the corner of the house he was asleep. Last night had been his first night in the Titmouse. He had had a tremendous day. And now, for the moment at least, his worry about the foreigners was lifted fr
om him. There was nothing now to keep him awake, and he fell into dreamless sleep as suddenly as if he had dropped through a trap-door into a warm, comfortable darkness.
CHAPTER VII
INVITATION
DIFFERENT people in different places woke next morning thinking of what had happened on the river the day before.
Dick and Dorothea, sleeping their first night in the Teasel, were waked by a farm-boy who came alongside with a can of fresh milk. Mrs. Barrable was up already, and they heard her tell the boy that she was not quite sure if they would want milk tomorrow, but that they would let him know at the farm if they were still there.
“But I thought she said the Teasel wasn’t going to move,” whispered Dick.
“I know,” said Dorothea.
And then, after breakfast, Mrs. Barrable had taken the dinghy and rowed away upstream with William.
“Can we come, too?” Dick asked, eager to have another try with oars.
“Not this time,” said Mrs. Barrable. “You and Dot can tidy the boat up, and you’ll find lots of birds to look at in the marsh and among those sallows. Put your sea-boots on if you go ashore. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
*
Port and Starboard, for once, surprised Mrs. McGinty by being awake when she called them, and downstairs at least a minute and a half before she rang the breakfast gong. The night before they had kept watch until it was time to go in to share their father’s evening meal. After that it had been already dark. Port had done some reading aloud while Starboard knitted a row or two on a jersey she had begun the holidays before last, and Mr. Farland had spread a newspaper on the table, taken some patent blocks to pieces and given them a thorough oiling. Every minute the twins had expected to hear a soft tap on the window.… Tom, bringing news of No. 7. But there had been none. They woke, wondering what had happened, and, this morning, were almost ready to hurry their father out of the house. It was their daily business to see that he went off with tidy hat and gloves to spend the day as a solicitor. And today, of all days, he seemed dreadfully inclined to dally.