Missee Lee: The Swallows and Amazons in the China Seas

by Arthur Ransome

  “We none of us are,” said Captain Flint. “But we soon will be.”

  “Mensa, mensa, mensam,” said Nancy ruefully.

  They worked hard till supper-time. And after supper, when the amah and a guard came for Captain Flint to lock him up, he begged for a lantern, took the Latin Grammar with him into the sleeping-box at the back of his cage and late at night could be heard chanting verbs and things till the guards at the gateway came and told him to shut up.

  [NOTE. “Susan says you ought to have put in somewhere how the Chinese took all our clothes one night and brought them back next morning washed and dried and ready to put on. I told her it wasn’t important, but Susan says it made all the difference. N. Blackett, Capt.”]

  CHAPTER XVIII

  MODEL STUDENTS

  NEXT morning Miss Lee had a class of model students.

  When Cambridge breakfast had been cleared away ready for the lesson, she had no need to send the amah for them. She came back into her study from the garden to find that they were already at their places round the table.

  “Velly good,” said Miss Lee.

  “Salve, domina!” they said in return.

  “Salvete, discipuli!” said Miss Lee.

  Captain Flint stood up, put his hands behind his back and began to recite at high speed

  “Common are to either sex

  Artifex and opifex. …”

  And so on, right through to the end of the rhyme.

  Miss Lee listened in astonishment.

  “But I thought that you …”

  “I learnt it again last night,” said Captain Flint simply, and sat down.

  “Mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae, mensae, mensa,” recited Nancy, and nudged Peggy who took up the tale . … “Mensae, mensae, mensas . …” She hesitated, got a glare from Nancy, who prompted her in a fierce whisper, and, in duet, hurried to the end . … “Mensarum, mensis, mensis.”

  “If you would hear me through the second conjugation,” said John. … “I got muddled with it yesterday.”

  “And Susan?” asked Miss Lee presently.

  “She’s been doing second declension with me,” said Titty.

  “We’ve done all that bit about the snakes coming over the sea and Laocoon and his two sons,” said Roger.

  “Velly, velly good,” said Miss Lee.

  *

  The keynote had been struck, and they kept on sounding it day after day. In all the world Miss Lee could not have found a class of harder workers. There were groans in private, mostly from Nancy, but none in the presence of the happy lecturer. Even Roger, not very keen on lessons as a rule, finding his place at the head of the class challenged by John and Captain Flint, both of whom, brushing up their grammar, were soon hard on his heels, worked as never in his life and in the evenings was inclined to protest when other people wanted the use of the dictionary. It was not easy for them because there was only one Latin-English Dictionary, one English-Latin, one grammar and one Virgil. Also there was too wide a gap between the learned Roger and the unlucky ones who were learning Latin for the first time. But they did their best. Captain Flint used to copy out the bits he wanted to learn by heart and take them away with him when the time came for him to be locked into his cage. Nancy and Peggy used up two stumps of pencils when they found that copying bits was almost half-way to learning them. Writing with a brush in the Chinese way, though Titty enjoyed it, took too long to be really useful, but on one of their walks they came on an old woman plucking a goose. John begged a handful of the long feathers from her, and next time Miss Lee came into their house at preparation time, she found all seven of her eager pupils working away with good quill pens.

  CAPTAIN FLINT RECITES HIS PIECE

  Each day, after their morning’s work, they went for a walk, but they were careful now never to go to any of the places where they were likely to be stopped by a guard. They learnt a good deal of the geography of Dragon Island, but they never did anything that might look as if they wished to leave it. They never went near the ferry. They never tried to cross the bridge over the gorge. They kept well away from the place where the junk was being built on one side of the island, and on the other they never tried to go near the shore of the creek, but contented themselves with looking through the telescope to see that Swallow and Amazon were still lying there on the mud. Though they could not talk with them they became quite friendly with the people who were working on the dragon near the gateway to the ferry, who even let Roger splash some red paint on the dragon’s gaping jaws.

  “The great thing is,” said Captain Flint, “to make everybody think we don’t ever want to go away. What we’ve got to do is to make Miss Lee herself sick of lessons.”

  But it seemed an almost hopeless task. Far from tiring of her class, it seemed that she could never have enough of it. The idea had been that Captain Flint was to teach mathematics, but Miss Lee sat by during his first lesson, more and more impatient. She never let him give a second. She announced that there was really no hurry about mathematics, that it was better to study one subject at a time, and that for the first year or so they would stick to Latin. Not content with the mornings, she was always ready to do a little extra coaching. Hopefully the prisoners used to choose a victim for the sacrifice, usually Roger, Captain Flint or Titty, to go round to Miss Lee’s house, book in hand, and ask for learned help. Every time the victim was received with joy and Miss Lee would get going about irregular verbs or Latin quantities, or something like that, and would not stop until her amah came in to say that it was time for evening rice or that the guards were waiting to lock Captain Flint into his cage.

  Miss Lee, far from getting tired of them, grew more and more pleased with her students and, in her own way, tried to show it. One day at breakfast Roger had been talking about the dragons they had seen at Chang’s and here in Miss Lee’s own town, and Miss Lee had been telling him about the Dragon Festival for which they were being made ready, and how the Three Islands kept the festival, dragons from the other islands coming to Dragon Town and prancing round the streets together. “Gosh, what fun!” Roger had said. That evening, when they were hard at work, Miss Lee paid them a surprise visit.

  “Velly good students,” she said as she came in from the garden. “Loger wants a dlagon, I think. Each island has its dlagon. Why not my students? Come and see before it is too dark.”

  Wondering, they left their work, all but Captain Flint who, as Miss Lee turned to lead the way out, settled again to his copying of a page of grammar, the perfect, virtuous student.

  “Better come too,” said Miss Lee. “You will carry the head. John or Nan-see not stlong enough.”

  They went out into the garden just in time to see an enormous dragon’s head dumped on the path by two men who were carrying it. Four others were carrying, on a sort of stretcher, something like a roll of carpet from the middle of which stuck out a stiff and scaly tail.

  “Last year’s dlagon,” said Miss Lee. “You have seen they are making a new dlagon for this year. Fifty men will cally him. A hundled legs.”

  The dragon’s body was being unrolled. It stretched the whole way along the path to the further end of the garden on the other side of Miss Lee’s house and back again.

  “Too long for you,” said Miss Lee. “Seven. No. Six. Loger will dance in flont offeling a pearl to the dlagon.” She pointed to a silver-painted gourd hanging from a golden rope and a small round lantern. “Day pearl and night pearl,” she said. “But you will have only twelve legs. You must cut a big piece out of the body and then join up.”

  “Three cheers,” said Roger. “Susan’s jolly good at sewing.”

  “You shall have needles and thread.”

  Miss Lee, a tiny figure in her black silk coat and trousers, showed them, ten feet apart, the places for each pair of legs. Captain Flint, she explained, would carry the head and be the first pair of legs. With five others, and with the long stiff tail swinging behind it, the dragon would be small as dragons go, but still a drago
n. Under her directions the long body was cut in two places. The part not wanted was rolled up to be carried away. The head, with one good length of body, and the tail with another, were stored in the large room of the students’ house.

  “Good students,” said Miss Lee, “will have a good dlagon. And I think all my men will be velly pleased when they see. Good night, evellybody.”

  “Well,” said Captain Flint when she had gone. “Roger, you young scoundrel, you seem to have wished a bit more work on some of us.”

  “I’ll do the sewing myself,” said Roger.

  Susan laughed. “That means Peggy and me,” she said. “And it’ll take ages. I don’t know how we’ll manage to learn our grammar at the same time.”

  “Never mind,” said Captain Flint. “We’ll lend a hand. It may be well worth while. The more of these people we can please, the better.”

  The amah, looking very sour, was standing in the doorway. “Belong walkee plison,” she said.

  “Coming, coming,” said Captain Flint. He hurriedly scribbled a sentence from the Latin grammar, and meekly followed her out to the waiting guards.

  *

  Miss Lee was growing more and more pleased with her model students, but it was very different with the amah and the old counsellor. The old counsellor, they knew, had been against them from the first. They were on good grinning terms with the guards and with the people they met about the town, but from the old counsellor they had never won a smile. At first, when they passed him in the garden, sitting on a chair combing his thin beard, he had looked through them as if they were not there. Now they sometimes caught him looking at them, as Roger put it, “as if we were snakes instead of human beings”. As for the amah, it had seemed at first that she was pleased to have them about the place. She had been Miss Lee’s nurse, and it had almost seemed she was pleased to have children to look after once more. She had fussed after them, chattered to them proudly in her “velly good English”, and been rather like a hen with chickens, treating even Captain Flint like a large duckling who had somehow got in among the rest. Now, day by day, as Miss Lee spent more and more time over her class, the amah had turned silent. She never spoke a word to them unless she had to. And her face grew more and more grim.

  “Have we done anything to offend the amah?” Susan asked one day when the old nurse had called them to breakfast as if she thought they did not deserve any.

  “No,” said Miss Lee. “You are velly good students. It is me she is not pleased with. She thinks I take more tlouble with my class than with my father’s business. She is like Cassandla plophesying doom. She is as bad as the counsellor. He visits Chang. He visits Wu. And then he tells me I shall lose the Thlee Islands. It is all lubbish. My father told me to make my own judgements and I do.”

  “Hoc volo, sic jubeo,” said Roger, and she laughed.

  That day, when the whole class were at work, and Miss Lee, for a change, was showing them how translation should be done, reading the story of the fight in burning Troy into a lively English of her own, English with a slight tang of Chinese as, for example, when she spoke of Priam’s palace as his yamen, and of Hector as a Greek Taicoon, the amah came to the door and said something in Chinese. Miss Lee waved her impatiently away. She came back again later and, once more, Miss Lee frowned, pointed to the door and went on with her reading. Then, at last, the counsellor himself came, and Miss Lee slammed the book shut and broke up the class.

  The students, hearing a noise in the courtyard, went out to find a crowd listening to a man who was talking angrily, with his eyes all the time turning to the verandah. The counsellor came out and spoke to him. He ran off shouting. There was a rush of men out of the gateway and down to the ferry. The students followed the crowd, and saw four of the great junks making ready for sea. Men were rowing off to them in sampans. Sails were going up. Capstans were creaking. One after another the big junks hauled up their anchors and were away, beating down the river against an easterly wind. Later that day, Miss Lee took up her interrupted reading, but anybody could see she was uneasy. Next day there was a lesson as usual, but in the afternoon when the students were taking their walk, they saw the junks driving slowly up the river over the current.

  “There’ll be fireworks,” said Roger.

  But there was only a meagre crackle let off by small boys at the landing-place and it stopped almost at once. On their way home the students saw the men from the junks pouring angrily back into the town.

  Primed by Captain Flint, Roger was sent in to Miss Lee on the excuse that he wanted to know something about Virgil, himself, the poet who had written the book. The others waited, unable to think about Latin, while Susan and Peggy went on with the slow business of stitching together the two halves of their dragon. Roger was not gone as long as usual.

  “I say,” he said when he came back, “I asked her why everybody looked so cross. I thought she wasn’t going to tell me but she did. You know what happened yesterday? A junk came in with news of a lot of traders sailing past who hadn’t paid their dues. …”

  “I thought it was that,” said Titty. “A pinnace like a fluttered bird came flying from far away. …”

  “That was just it,” said Roger. “Only Sir Richard Grenville wasn’t giving Latin lessons like Miss Lee. You remember how she wouldn’t listen to the amah. Well, by the time the counsellor came in and told her and she gave the orders it was too late. They’d got past and the junks couldn’t catch them. That’s why everybody looked so mad when they came back.”

  “I don’t wonder,” said Nancy.

  “Um,” said Captain Flint. “One way or another …”

  “You didn’t stay with her very long,” said John.

  “The old beast of a counsellor came in,” said Roger. “I think he was scolding like anything. Miss Lee stamped her foot but he went on, and then she told me to clear out.”

  “It’s working,” said Captain Flint.

  “It’s not working our way,” said Nancy. “The more we sweat the more she wants us to.”

  “It doesn’t matter which way,” said Captain Flint. “Come on, we must stick to it. Where’s that grammar?”

  “Under the dragon somewhere,” said Roger, looking round.

  But it was not. Grammar, Virgil and both dictionaries had disappeared.

  “Three cheers,” said Roger. “She’s giving us a holiday. No prep tonight.”

  “We’ve jolly well earned it,” said Nancy.

  “Not a bit of it,” said Captain Flint. “If she’s getting tired of lessons, now is our time to show we’re greedy for more. Back you go, Roger, and tell her we’re only waiting for the books.”

  Three minutes later Miss Lee was in the room.

  “Nan-see,” she said. “Did you hide the books?”

  “I didn’t,” said Nancy, all the more indignantly because she would have liked to.

  Miss Lee looked suspiciously at her largest student.

  “Not me,” said Captain Flint.

  “We none of us did,” said Titty. “They were here when we went out.”

  “We came back just bursting to get at them,” said Captain Flint. “Irregular verbs?” he added, as if he were Roger talking of his favourite kind of chocolate.

  “We thought you were tired of lessons and wanted a holiday,” said John.

  “We do have holidays at school in England,” said Roger, but caught a look from Captain Flint and shut up.

  Miss Lee clapped her hands, and they heard the padding footsteps of the old amah. She shook her head. Miss Lee’s eyes closed to narrow slits and she spoke through hardly opened lips. The amah broke into a flood of talk. They could not understand a single word of it but they could see that the amah had thrown off twenty years or so and was lecturing Miss Lee as if she were still a nurse and Miss Lee her naughty baby. Miss Lee waited till the amah had finished. Then she said one short sentence. The amah ran out of the room.

  “She took the books,” said Miss Lee. “She and the counsellor say the same
thing. They say my lessons bad for Thlee Islands, bad for me. They say my father would not be pleased. I say, my father is velly pleased.”

  The amah came back into the room, slammed the books on the table and went off angrily weeping.

  “She meant well,” said Miss Lee. “Good amah, but an uncultured woman. And now you can go on with studies leady for tomollow.”

  “Botheration!” said Nancy, when Miss Lee had gone.

  “All for the best,” said Captain Flint. “Come on. Let’s have a bit of paper. Domina Lee amet nos. Let Miss Lee love us. You, too, Roger. Get down to the Virgil. You’re our trump card. Now then, Susan, chuck that dragon for the night. …”

  And they settled dismally to work.

  *

  Next morning they had an unexpected reward.

  Miss Lee had not shown at the time that she had heard what Roger had said about having holidays at school in England. But she had clearly been thinking about it, remembering, perhaps, what had happened when she was at school herself. Breakfast was over. They had come back to the study ready for the lesson to begin. Roger and John were going hurriedly through the Virgil they had prepared. The others were hearing each other reciting bits of grammar. Miss Lee came smiling into the room. “You are velly good students,” she said. “Today we take a holiday. Today I visit the Taicoon Wu. I will take my students with me. But first I go to visit my father’s glave. You will come with me to my island.”

  “Three million cheers,” said Nancy. “I and Peggy have never seen it.”

  “And we can get our things,” said Susan. “And tidy up.”

  “We will go to my father’s glave,” said Miss Lee, “where he made the Thlee Islands men stop fighting, and then we will go to my father’s chair where he watched the ships and the sea.”