Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome
“All the same,” said John, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they hadn’t thought better of it.”
“They couldn’t think better of it than we do,” said Roger.
And just then they passed the northern point of Houseboat Bay. There before them lay the Fram, solid in the ice, and from the little stovepipe in the cabin roof a steady stream of blue smoke was pouring up into the winter sky.
“Hurrah!” shouted Peggy. “I knew they were there. Three cheers for the D.’s! Come on!”
*
“Hullo!” said John. “What’s that notice?”
A big piece of board had been fixed on the side of the Fram, close by the ladder. On it, in big black letters, was printed the word “TRESPASSERS”. As the skaters came nearer they were able to read the second line, which was in rather smaller letters, “WILL BE HANGED”, and when they were already close to the Fram they could read a third line, of letters smaller still, “LIKE THE LAST”
“What cheek!” said Peggy.
“Perhaps some seals have been trying to come aboard again,” said Titty.
“Cheek, all the Same,” said Peggy, “to put up a notice like that. It’s all very well Captain Nancy doing things like that. But not the D.’s.”
“Well, they’re in charge,” said John. “I don’t see why they shouldn’t.”
Skates were being unscrewed in a hurry. Several sound slaps had been given to the cold planking of the Fram, sparkling all over with a film of frost crystals. But there had been no answer from inside.
There was no shout of welcome. There was no sound at all. There was no sign of anybody aboard when they looked through the windows.
“They’ll have got hungry and gone off to Dixon’s Farm to get breakfast without waiting for us,” said Susan.
“That’s why they’ve left that notice,” said Titty. “In case somebody came before they got back.”
“It’s not half a bad idea really,” said John. “But saying ‘Hanged’ is a bit stiff. And they ought not to have left the ladder down.”
Peggy was first on deck. She rattled at the cabin door.
“Bother them!” she cried. “You’re right, Susan. They’ve gone off for the milk and taken the key with them.”
“We’ll just have to wait for them,” said Susan.
In a moment of silence that followed, while some were looking at the place where the cart track came out of the trees on the shore, and some were looking out of the bay, as if they thought the D.’s might appear at any moment, Peggy heard something stirring in the cabin.
“Listen!” she said. “’Sh!”
Everybody heard some small thing drop on the cabin floor.
Peggy rattled the handle of the door and thumped on the panels. “Hi!” she shouted. “Buck up and open! It’s us!”
Nothing happened.
“Hurry up,” she called again, “or we’ll drop some icicles down the chimney and put the stove out! Be quick! Don’t be donks. It isn’t funny at all.”
And just then the door opened.
Peggy started back. Her jaw dropped. She let out a queer little groan of astonishment.
“Hullo!” said Titty cheerfully. “It’s Captain Flint!”
“Hullo, Skipper!” said Captain Flint. “Hullo, A.B. And the mate. And the ship’s boy!” Then he turned to his niece. “But by jove, Peggy, you’re not much of a hand at keeping an eye on things. Talk about burglars. Why, someone’s got in here while I was away, and turned the whole place upside down, and eaten all the stores, and piled the place up with dirty sheepskins, and generally played ninepins with everything. And that’s not the worst. I caught some of them in the very act. They’ve been living here. I came back to find a boy and girl, utter strangers of course, camped down here to spend the night in my cabin as calm as you like. Well, it didn’t take long to settle them . . .”
“But look here, Uncle Jim,” said Peggy. “It’s all of us. At least, it’s Nancy and me. We thought you’d be glad to have the houseboat properly aired and all that while she was frozen in. Besides, she would have been simply wasted with the lake frozen and you away and nobody using her at all.”
“What?” said Captain Flint. “Do you mean to say it was you who got in here and made such a horrible mess?”
“It wasn’t Peggy alone,” said John. “It was all of us.”
“We were going to make everything perfectly tidy again before we left,” said Susan.
Just the beginning of a smile showed round Captain Flint’s eyes, but it flickered there only for a moment and then was gone.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose I could have trusted Mate Susan to see to that. But I do think that, between the lot of you, you might have seen that the door was properly locked at night, and not left it open, so that I had a couple of burgling scallawags to deal with when I got back. You must have gone away and left the key in the door or they could never have dared to break in. As a matter of fact, I know you did, for I found the key in the door when I came here, and those two ragamuffins making themselves at home. Well they won’t go burgling again in a hurry . . . I can tell you that.”
“But I say,” said John, “it was our fault they were here. They never would have come if we hadn’t brought them.”
Peggy flared up. “Look here, Uncle Jim! They were our friends. We left them here ourselves. What have you done with them?”
“You read the notice, didn’t you?” said Captain Flint. “They were the last . . .”
“But he can’t have hanged them,” said Roger. “He’s probably got them in the fo’c’sle.”
“You ought to let them out at once,” said Titty.
“Too late now,” said Captain Flint. “There they were in all this mess, treating my boat as if it belonged to them. How could I tell they were friends of yours?”
“And you turned them out,” said Peggy. “It’s the beastliest thing you’ve ever done. It wasn’t their fault at all. And Dorothea’d never understand why you were being beastly . . .”
“Where are they?” said John. “We’re awfully sorry if we oughtn’t to have come into your houseboat, but those two had nothing whatever to do with it. Where are they? We must go and explain it to them right away.”
“They aren’t in here,” said Roger, who had wriggled in past Captain Flint and gone straight through the cabin and opened the door into the fo’c’sle.
“Of course they aren’t,” said Captain Flint.
“If you’ve gone and done anything horrid to them we’ll never speak to you again,” said Peggy. “I don’t care a bit about getting into your beastly boat. I’m sorry we didn’t make a real mess of it. You don’t deserve to have a boat at all if you were nasty to them. You just wait till Nancy hears about it . . .” Peggy was so angry that she was on the very edge of weeping in a most unpiratical manner, and not at all like an Arctic explorer either. “Come along, everybody,” she said. “Let’s leave him. We’ll never come back. We ought to go to Dixon’s Farm at once.”
But at that moment there was a cheerful shout from the ice, and Dick and Dorothea came skating up to the Fram towing their sledge behind them.
“Hullo!” Dorothea called out. “Hullo, Susan! Has he already had his breakfast? Mrs Dixon’s sent some rashers of bacon in case he’s forgotten to get any.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE USES OF AN UNCLE
DOROTHEA never quite got the hang of what had been happening that morning. Everybody was looking in a queer, anxious way at Dick and herself; everybody, that is to say, except Captain Flint, who seemed quite at his ease, smiled in the friendliest manner and thanked her for bringing the bacon from Mrs Dixon. John and Susan seemed to be worried about something. Titty and Roger were staring at her almost as if she were a ghost. And then there was Peggy, to whom Captain Flint really belonged, as he was her uncle, looking almost as if she had been thinking of tears, and as if she was ashamed and indignant at the same time.
“Look here, Dorothea,” Peggy said. “Was h
Everybody was staring at her. Even Captain Flint. It was as if the whole air was full of question marks. Dorothea tried to remember exactly what had happened after the arrival of the tall Dutchman.
“We had tea,” she said, “and afterwards they looked at stars.”
“Then why did you pretend you were such a beast?” said Peggy furiously, turning to her uncle.
Dorothea listened with grave interest. This seemed to her a queer way of talking to an uncle, though, as she and Dick had no uncles of their own, she had had no personal experience of dealing with them. However, in a very few minutes, all was peace, and Susan was in the fo’c’sle frying his bacon for him, while everybody else was promising to tidy things up that very morning, and meanwhile sucking the oranges of which he seemed to have a large supply. One thing was clear at once and that was that she had been right not to treat him as a mere Eskimo yesterday afternoon. It would have been impossible, anyhow, when his own ship was being used for the Fram, and she had had to explain how it was that his cabin was littered with Arctic equipment. She had been a little troubled, thinking it over afterwards in bed, lest she had let him know too much; but this morning, once hostilities were over, it was clear that all the others were in a hurry to tell him even more.
“Well,” he said at last, when he had had his breakfast and smoked a pipe and heard a good deal of what they had to say, “the best thing I can do is to go and have a talk with the chief culprit and find out what she’s really up to . . . No . . . I’ll not forget she’s had to put up with a face like a water-melon . . . beg your pardon, Roger . . . pumpkin, if you like it better . . . and now will one of you slip away to the shore and bring my sledge. You’ll find it just to the right of the old cart track. Yes . . . I hid it there last night so as not to give things away too soon this morning. One surprise deserves another, eh, Peggy? . . .”
“Where did you find the sledge?” asked Peggy. “Nancy and I hunted all over for it. We could only find the big one.”
“Where I put it,” said Captain Flint. “The last two years it’s been on the beams under the roof of the boathouse, and you’re a couple of duffers not to have found it yourselves.”
“What do you want it for now?”
“Going shopping,” said Captain Flint. “Poor dogs like me must have their bones, even if their cupboards have been eaten bare.”
Everybody said they were dreadfully sorry, but he only laughed at them and presently was gone, after telling them they had better stay to cook his dinner for him when he came back.
Susan took complete command the moment he had gone, and the Fram was given a regular spring cleaning, middle of winter though it was. A whole sledge-load of Arctic gear, and the rubbish and scraps left over after making it, was taken up to Holly Howe where it was dumped, though not too warmly welcomed. The D.’s’ sledge was loaded, too, with things that had to go back to Dixon’s Farm, and the Beckfoot sledge was already piled with a second load when Captain Flint came skating back, towing his own small sledge with a cargo of provisions to make up for, those the explorers had already eaten.
“Did you see Nancy?” everybody asked him.
“I did,” said Captain Flint. “Very disappointing. I seem to have come back too late to see her in bloom. Her face is no bigger than usual.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“From one end of the lawn to the other. Semaphore, mostly.”
“We’re not allowed even to do that,” said Peggy.
“I shall have to rub up my signalling,” said Captain Flint. “She goes a lot too fast for me.”
“We’d been doing signals all these holidays until she got mumps,” said Peggy, “and she’d be jolly glad to have someone to practise with.”
“I kept on signalling ‘Go slow’ and ‘Repeat’ for the first five minutes or so, and in the end I got her down to a reasonable speed.”
“Well, well! And what did she say? What’s going to happen?”
To that he gave no very definite answer. It seemed that just at first Nancy had been mainly interested to know what had happened the day before when he had found strangers in the houseboat. Then, certainly, there had been talk about the Pole.
“The trouble is,” said Captain Flint, “that in these days everything belongs to someone, even the North Pole.”
“Polar bears,” said Roger.
“Well,” said Captain Flint, “I’ve got to make sure that these particular bears will let us have the key.”
“Key?” said Dick – “Key to the North Pole?”
“It’s all right,” said Peggy. “You wait till you see it and then you’ll know.”
“And what about Nancy herself?” asked John.
“She says the doctor’s promised that in another week he’ll let her haul down the plague flag and meet the rest of us.”
“And we’ve got another ten days before going back to school,” said Titty.
“Unless somebody else goes and starts it,” said Susan, “and then there’ll be another month.”
There was a general opening and shutting of mouths to test the stiffness of jaws.
“The frost won’t last all that time,” said Captain Flint.
“But will Nancy be able to come to the Pole even if nobody starts mumps?” asked Titty.
“With any luck she will,” said Captain Flint. “But it’ll be a near thing if a thaw comes. At the first sign of a thaw we shall have to start at once if we’re going to do it at all.”
Dick and John looked anxiously at the barometer, which at the moment was high and steady, prophesying good weather.
*
There had been fears at first that the return of Captain Flint would mean that the houseboat would no longer be the Fram, and that the explorers would have to return to life ashore. But it was not so. Captain Flint had come back for the skating, and to enjoy seeing the lake frozen from end to end as he had seen it when he was a boy. But skating is always better when it has an object; and after that first morning he was invited to join the North Polar Expedition, and at once threw himself into Arctic exploration as keenly as anybody else.
The houseboat was now a much tidier Fram than it had been, but it was still the Fram. Dinner was eaten there nearly every day. Indeed, the only difference was that, after Captain Flint’s return, dinners had rather a tendency to turn into feasts. Also, he got his accordion smuggled out of Beckfoot, where it had been stored for fear of damp; and after that there was sometimes so much noise in the cabin of the Fram and such hearty stamping on her deck that the explorers no longer had any right to complain of the rowdiness of the Eskimos dancing in Rio Bay. He was taken up the hillside, and admired the igloo very much, though he said that if they ever built another he would take it kindly if they made a rather larger doorway. One evening, he and Dick took glasses and the telescope up to the observatory and came back late for supper at Dixon’s Farm, when Mrs Dixon, who had known Captain Flint when he was a boy, said that growing older and travelling round the world brought no sense to some folk. There was very little wind these days, too little even for the ice yachts, and not enough to move the Beckfoot sledge. But Captain Flint had a good look at it, and showed John a better way of rigging the mast, and told him that for sledge work the nearer he could come to making his sail a square sail the better it would be. And Dick watched and listened, and, when he came home in the evening talked it all over with Mr Dixon.
At the same time everybody knew that Captain Flint was keeping, in close touch with Captain Nancy. Every day he skated over to Beckfoot. Mrs Blackett would not let him into the house until the doctor should say that all danger of infection was over. So Nancy and Captain Flint consulted each other through a window pane, or from opposite sides of the garden, noiselessly, by semaphoring or by talking deaf and dumb language with their fingers. Shouting, of course, would have given secrets away. Nancy had been very angry to find herself so weak after being in bed with mumps, which really
Plans for the final journey were growing clearer. It had been all but decided that there should be three separate parties. After all, there were now three sledges and, as Captain Flint pointed out, it was no good thinking of their all starting together, because it would be too much for Nancy to come down the lake to the Fram and then, the same day, race for the head of the lake. Not that it was to be a race. Simply, on the day, everybody would set out for the north, the big Beckfoot sledge with its five husky dogs, Dick and Dorothea with their sledge, and Captain Flint and Nancy going together, all to get to the Arctic as fast as they could and to meet at the North Pole.
“But what if we don’t know it when we see it?” said Dick.
“Anybody would know it the moment they saw it,” said Peggy. “It’s right at the head of the lake. The extreme north of the Arctic, and only a few yards off the ice. You can’t mistake it.”
“And as soon as the first party gets there they hoist a flag,” said Titty. “A quarantine flag, because we shall still be lepers till the very day we go back to school.”