The Big Six: A Novel

by Arthur Ransome

“But they aren’t culprits,” said Tom.

  “Better make sure,” said Dr. Dudgeon. “I’ll get to my work. I don’t want to ask questions and be told lies….”

  “They won’t tell you any,” said Tom.

  “I don’t want to give them the chance,” said his father. “But you’d better talk seriously to them and find out if they’ve had a hand in this or not.”

  He walked back to the house, leaving Tom and Dick and Dorothea at the water’s edge, watching the Death and Glory which was coming down the river, not under sail but rowed by Bill and Joe, who were standing in the cockpit, each working an oar, while Pete sat on the forward end of the cabin top, with his head in his hands.

  “They’re in an awful stew,” said Dorothea.

  CHAPTER XI

  “WE GOT TO EMIGRATE”

  JOE AND Bill were almost too short of breath to speak and Pete was biting his lips and trying to look as if he didn’t care when the Death and Glory rounded up by the Doctor’s lawn, and Tom and Dick took their ropes.

  “What happened?” asked Tom.

  “Somebody cast off Sir Garnet while we was asleep,” said Pete.

  “Pete wake first and we chivvy him out to put his head in a bucket,” said Joe, “and he sing out she’ve gone.”

  “We come up and look,” said Bill, “but we didn’t think nothing of it, only they’d been quiet getting away. We know she weren’t tied up with no slip knots or nothing, because we look at ’em after you was gone, just before we turn in.”

  “We didn’t think nothing,” said Joe. “We has our brekfuss, and we was just about finished when we hear old Simon on the staithe, singing out to know if Jim had left a message for him. And then come Jim Wooddall and he were fair out of his mind when he see she gone. And he come ranting at us thinking we done it. And there was somebody fetch Tedder. They was all shouting and saying we ought to be kept off the river. And George Owdon go telling how he catch us casting off that yacht we was tying up. And there was chaps from Jonnatt’s telling about that cruiser. And somebody say ‘Fetch their Dads’, and Bill say to me we better get out, and we begin to cast off and get our ropes, and then somebody grab hold of the old ship and won’t let go, and Jim Wooddall were shouting to know what time of tide we push her off, and we was telling him we didn’t push her off, and there was everybody come across the road from the shops hearing the shouting and yelling, and our Dads wasn’t nowheres handy and whatever we say get shouted under, and then that young Phil come from his milk round and say he seen her down river and not so far neither, and Jim and old Simon they grab a dinghy and was off after her, and Jim saying he’d settle with us proper when he come back.

  “And then we try to shove off again, but there was half a dozen Of ’em grab hold. Somebody sing out to know where we was off to, and we tell ’em we was only going to Ranworth with you. I will say that for George Owdon. He were the only one to speak for us. He say to let us go, we couldn’t do no harm in Ranworth being out of the river. And they start arguin’, and we see our chance and give a shove off. They was still arguin’ when we get away.”

  “We’ll get stopped off the river,” said Pete bitterly. “And we ain’t done nothing at all.”

  “We got to emigrate like you say,” said Bill, looking at Dorothea.

  *

  Mrs. Dudgeon came across the grass to the waterside carrying the baby.

  “Tell me all about it,” she said.

  ESCAPE FROM THE STAITHE

  “We try all her ropes after Tom go home last night,” said Joe. “Fit to hold a battleship they was. And this morning she ain’t there and everybody think we done it. And we ain’t done nothing.”

  “You don’t think you could have loosened the ropes when you were trying them,” asked Mrs. Dudgeon but, at the look on their faces, went on: “No, of course you couldn’t have done that. I was forgetting you are shipowners yourselves. And so Jim Wooddall thought you had cast off his wherry and taken his coil of rope. You didn’t touch that by any chance?”

  “He ain’t lost his new warp!” exclaimed Joe. “Why, it were brand new. They was towing it yesterday and we see old Simon coiling it down.”

  “It had gone,” said Tom.

  “And this ain’t Yarmouth,” said Joe indignantly. “My Dad always say them Yarmouth sharks’d grab the bottle from a baby, but there ain’t nobody here like them chaps.”

  “He never think we take his warp,” said Bill. “He never say nothing about that.”

  “He didn’t know about it till he came down here to get aboard Sir Garnet,” said Tom.

  “He got her all right?” said Joe with relief.

  “We just caught her drifting past,” said Tom.

  “When did you first see she had gone?” asked Mrs. Dudgeon.

  “Pete were up first,” said Joe, and between them they told her the whole story again. She listened quietly, jiggling the baby every now and then.

  “And Honest Injun you had nothing to do with it?” she said when they had run out of breath describing their escape from the staithe.

  “Honest Injun we ain’t never touched her only last night when we make sure how she were moored,” said Joe.

  She looked at Bill.

  “Honest Injun we didn’t,” said Bill.

  She looked at Pete.

  “Honest Injun,” said Pete.

  “I believe you,” she said, and the eyes of the Death and Glories were like those of three grateful dogs.

  “It’s just a bit of bad luck,” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “And it’ll come right in time. What are you going to do now?”

  “Coot Club cruise to Ranworth,” said Tom.

  “And never come back no more,” said Pete. “Then they’ll be sorry they try patching it all on us.”

  “Rubbish,” said Mrs. Dudgeon.

  “We’ll stop the night in Ranworth,” said Joe. “No good our coming back.”

  “We just got to emigrate,” said Bill.

  “Do your mothers know?” asked Mrs. Dudgeon.

  “We didn’t have time to run round,” said Bill. “We was lucky just to get away. But they won’t have nothing against our going. Our Dads say why not us cruising when others do.”

  “What about food?” said Mrs. Dudgeon.

  “We got plenty of that,” said Joe more cheerfully, remembering the well-stocked cupboards.

  “Now, look here,” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “I shall be going up the village later on, and I’ll see your mothers and tell them where you are. Perhaps it’s just as well for you to be away from the staithe when people seem to have got a wrong idea into their heads. But don’t get into any more trouble if you can help it. Dick and Dot have got to be back at Mrs. Barrable’s by dark, and Tom’s got to bring them, but I dare say they’ll sail down again and bring you news in the morning. Photographing old nests is the idea, isn’t it?”

  “Just for practice,” said Dick.

  “Well, off you go,” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “I dare say everything’ll be cleared up before Jim Wooddall gets back.”

  “It ain’t only Sir Garnet,” said Joe. “There was boats loosed at Potter and they’re on to us about that.”

  “And all them other boats,” said Bill gloomily.

  “Forget them for the day anyhow,” said Mrs. Dudgeon. “Come on, Tom, and you two, and load up the Titmouse. Your sandwiches are all ready.”

  Five minutes later Tom sculled his little Titmouse out of the Coot Club dyke just below the lawn. Then with Dorothea at the tiller, Tom and Dick got the sail up, and they took a short tack up the river while the Death and Glories pushed off. Presently the sails were set in both boats, the water was rippling under the bows, and the six members of the Coot Club were on their way, sailing together for the first time since their adventures in the spring.

  *

  The klop, klop of water under the bows of a small boat will cure most troubles in this world, and if another small boat is klop, klopping along within talking distance, and first one and then the other s
eems to be getting the best out of the wind, worries, however bad, simply disappear.

  The wind was south-westerly so that just at the start the two boats were reaching easily along and, in spite of the Death and Glory being a clumsy old craft, were going at about the same speed. Then, when the river bent to meet that south-west wind they had to tack, and the Titmouse, nipping to and fro across the river, was soon ahead. The Death and Glory sailed all right with a fair wind or on a broad reach but, being an old ship’s boat with a long, straight keel, one thing she could not do was to go close to the wind, and another thing she could not do was to spin on her heel and make short tacks. There was nothing for it but to ring up the engines for full steam ahead, which meant that Joe and Bill took to the oars and drove her with flapping sail straight into the wind. Pete steered, sitting on the gunwale in the stern to be out of the way of the engines who stood in the cockpit to work their oars. Even he, who had been wretcheder than any of them, cheered up.

  “Half ahead, starboard engine,” he shouted. “Full ahead, port engine…. Look out, Bill, you’ll have her into the bank pulling like that…. Rudder won’t hold her…. Full ahead, both engines. Go it. We’re catching ’em. Tom’s losing wind under them trees. Stoke up. Easy, Joe…. Half with the port engine. Full ahead. Hi, Tom! She ain’t half bad under power. Stick to it, both engines. We’ll be sailing again in a minute. Bill, Bill! Full ahead! Full ahead, or you’ll catch the ferry chain with that old oar. We’re up to ’em. What? What? … What’s that? …”

  “Steam gives way to sail,” called Tom. “Look out!”

  “Stop, both engines!” Pete shouted. “Full astern! Yow, that were a near thing….”

  The Titmouse slipped across their bows with an inch or two to spare.

  “Full ahead now,” yelled Pete. “Dig in. Dig in and she’ll have to pass astern of us next tack.”

  “Please take her, please,” begged Dorothea who was steering the Titmouse. Tom grabbed the tiller and did his very best, bringing her round close to the bank and off again on the other tack without losing way. But the Death and Glory’s engines were working fit to burst their boilers and, as the Titmouse shot again out towards the middle of the river, she was pointing not ahead of the Death and Glory’s bows but at them, then amidships, then at the panting engines, and finally clear of her stern.

  “Done it,” said Pete, looking gleefully over his shoulder.

  As the river curved again below the ferry, the wind came clear off the shore again. The flapping sail filled and steadied. Their ship was moving faster than they could row her.

  “Finished with engines,” said Pete, and Bill and Joe thankfully brought their oars inboard and stowed them on the cabin-top.

  “There’s No. 7 nest,” cried Dorothea, and for a moment their troubles came back into their minds as they remembered how in the Easter holidays Tom had cast off the Hullabaloos who had moored their Margoletta close over that nest and had refused to move when they were asked. They all knew that it was because of this that everybody was so ready to believe that the Coots had been casting off boats again.

  Dick alone thought of something else. “What about taking a photograph?” he said. But already the two boats had swept by.

  “Get it in the spring when the coot with the white feather’s sitting on it,” said Tom. “There’ll be lots more in Ranworth.”

  There came another reach where the Death and Glory needed the help of her engines, and then a reach where the wind came dead aft, and they blew together down the middle of the river towards the lawns with the water-hens and the black sheep. Then another bit of careful steering and they came round the big bend to the entrance to Ranworth Broad, where the engines made ready to set to work in earnest to drive her through the narrow dyke into the teeth of the wind.

  “That’s where Port started chasing swans’ feathers to keep the Hullabaloos looking the other way,” said Dorothea. “And it’s round the next bend that the Admiral was moored in Teasel and we saw the Death and Glories for the first time.”

  “We was pirates then,” said Pete a little regretfully.

  Both boats turned into the narrow dyke. The Death and Glory lowered sail, and after a tack or two Tom did the same. Both boats rowed slowly up the dyke together.

  “That fare to rain,” said Bill, looking up at the darkening sky before them.

  “It does look like it,” said Tom. “I say. We never brought our oilies.”

  “It won’t rain yet,” said Dick. “We’ll have plenty of time to get some photographs.”

  “We can change when we get home,” said Dorothea.

  “We’re all right, come wet, come fair,” said Joe.

  “What about your cabin when it rains?” asked Tom.

  “We putty up them leaks,” said Joe. “We putty ’em before that last rain, and there waren’t no more come in, only that drip over Pete’s bunk, and we puttied that after.”

  “That come down on my head like a water-spout,” chuckled Pete.

  Half way along the dyke they came on a couple of men loading reeds into a reed-boat, and they waited while Tom rowed Titmouse into a good position for Dick to take a photograph.

  “Focus fifteen yards,” said Dick aloud, getting his camera ready. “Exposure one fiftieth…. Stop six point three….”

  “You haven’t set the shutter,” said Dorothea.

  “Just in time,” said Dick, stood up in the boat, took his photograph, sat down hurriedly and wound on to be ready for the next photograph. “I keep on forgetting that,” he said, “and then I press the button and nothing happens. The other thing is to remember to wind on after each exposure. And to remember I’ve wound on if I have, so as not to wind on again and waste a bit of film.”

  “He gets very good photographs,” said Dorothea…. “The ones that do come out.”

  “What about getting a photograph of the Death and Glory?” said Tom.

  “Wait till we’re out on the Broad,” said Joe. “Get her when she’s sailing.”

  There were trees now on each side of them instead of only reeds. The dyke divided, one branch, with chains across it, leading to some private water, the other gradually widening, leading to the open Broad.

  “It’s the Straits,” cried Dorothea. “There’s the place where Titmouse was when Tom came back after dark, and we saw the outlaw’s lonely light. Here’s where we were in Teasel. There’s the place where the Admiral painted out Titmouse’s name. There’s Ranworth….”

  The Broad opened before them, trees and off-lying islands of reeds to the right. Straight ahead of them on the far side of the Broad was Ranworth staithe, with the inn and the old malt houses and the little village and, away to the right, the square tower of the old church rising above the trees.

  Up went the sails again and away went both boats, no banks to worry about, a steady wind and open sailing water. Dick took a photograph of the Death and Glory foaming along at her best speed, with Joe steering, Bill at the main sheet, and Pete peering through his big telescope as if they had just sighted land for the first time after a month of ocean voyaging. Then, none too easily, Tom brought him alongside while the Death and Glories kept their sail idly flapping, and Dick clambered across from one boat to the other, passing his camera across first. Tom sheered off again, and presently Dick, after letting Joe, Bill and Pete look at the tiny picture in the finder of the camera, took a photograph of the Titmouse with Dorothea steering while Tom lay in the bottom of the boat so as not to be seen. Then he took a photograph of Tom sailing Titmouse by himself while Dorothea lay low in the same way. Soon after that, Pete sighted a crested grebe, and Joe did his best to sail the Death and Glory so as to bring the photographer within camera-shot of it, but it dived every time they came near it and did not come up again till it was too far away to be of any use as a picture.

  “Come nesting time, she’ll wait for you,” said Pete. “Sailing quiet, she’ll sit her eggs till you can come near touching her.”

  “Not rowing, she won�
�t,” said Bill.

  “Sailing,” said Pete. “And the same with coots, specially if it’s one what know us. No. 7, now, she’d never stir while we sail close by.”

  “Do you think we’ll have any chance of photographing a bittern?” asked Dick.

  “Got to find ’em first,” said Joe. “But old buttle, he don’t fly if he don’t have to. He sit tight, and he straighten up his neck and he straighten up his bill atop, and you might be looking at him near as I am to you and think he were a bunch of reeds.”

  “Is buttle another name for a bittern?” asked Dick and pulled out his pocket-book.

  Joe laughed as he watched him write down “Buttle = Bittern”.

  “And Harnsey’s a heron,” he said, “and Frank’s a heron….”

  “Hear him go ‘Fraaaank’ when you stop his fishing,” said Pete.

  Dick took more notes.

  SAILING ON RANWORTH

  “We’ll get photographs of all of them,” he said, “and keep the whole collection in the Coot Club shed.”

  “What if there ain’t no Coot Club?” said Joe, suddenly gloomy again. “And if we get stopped off the river who’s to watch the nests? That George Owdon’ll be selling bitterns’ eggs and warblers’ and beardies’ and no one to stop him. Who’s to stop him taking eggs if no one knows what nests there are and where to find ’em?”

  “Hullo. Tom’s coming back,” said Bill.

  Tom and Dorothea had taken the Titmouse far away to the other end of the Broad and were now foaming back towards the Death and Glory.

  “What about grub?” he called as he came near. “Where shall we tie up?”

  “Let’s anchor instead,” said Pete. “We got a mud-weight.”

  “I haven’t,” said Tom.

  “Tie alongside,” said Joe. “Anchor in the open sea. You get our weight, Bill.”

  He ran forward, and lowered the sail. Bill got out the heavy mud-weight. They made it fast to a rope and lowered it over the bows. Down it went into the soft mud at the bottom of the Broad, and presently the Death and Glory was lying quietly head to wind. Tom brought Titmouse alongside and tied up.