“Prenez …,” said Titty. “Prenez nous à une porte …”
“But perhaps he won’t know French,” said John. “And we ought to tell him what port we want to go to. And we don’t know. It’s going to be jolly difficult. If we let out we don’t know, he may just turn beastly and take charge, and Jim’ll have to pay salvage, and you know he couldn’t buy oil because he had only just enough money for petrol.”
“But can a pilot grab us for salvage?” said Roger.
“Anyone could,” said John, “if they knew what had happened. It’s all of us being so beastly young.”
“Let’s not have him on board,” said Titty. “Can’t we manage without? He may not have seen the signal yet. Let’s take it down.”
“We must have him,” said Susan. “We can’t help it, with Mother not knowing what’s become of us. And the weather may go bad again. And every minute matters. We’ve simply got to get somewhere where we can telegraph.”
All minds turned to Pin Mill, and the quiet anchorage, and the barges on the hard, and the Butt and Oyster, and Miss Powell’s cottage, and Mother probably making sketches of boats, watching to see the Goblin come sailing up the river and Bridget splashing about in her sea-boots in the little stream by the boat-builder’s sheds. They thought of Jim coming to Pin Mill with the news that he had lost them, Goblin and all.
“And I wouldn’t be surprised if Daddy was in that steamer that called us fishmongers last night,” said Roger.
“It’s too late now, anyway,” said John. “They’ve seen it. They’ve lowered a boat.”
A boat, lowered on the other side of the steamer, dropped astern of her, and came rowing to meet them.
“Two men in her,” said Roger. “Oh, bother these glasses.”
Now and then the boat almost disappeared, and then showed again on the top of a sea, spray spirting from under it and two pairs of oars lifting it along.
“I say,” said Roger. “The pilot is French. Look at the stern of the steamer. Her ensign is red, white and blue.”
Titty looked through the glasses. There was doubt in her voice as she asked, “Don’t the French red, white and blue go up and down? These go crosswise.”
“She’s Dutch,” said John. “And those fishing boats were Dutch too. I thought they were.”
“Gosh!” said Roger. “Holland!”
“Windmills,” said Titty, “and dykes to keep out the sea … And wooden shoes …”
“So long as they’ve got telegraph offices,” said Susan.
“Look here,” said John. “We’ve not got to let him know what’s happened. There’s only one thing to do. You’d better all go below.”
“Below?” said Roger. “Oh, I say!”
“Can’t be helped,” said John. “With all four of us in the cockpit anyone would begin to ask questions. I’ve got to stay, because somebody has to be steering. But you’d better go below. And shut the doors. And close the hatch. You’ll be able to see out through the portholes.”
“Pretend not to be there?” said Titty.
“No. No. Make a noise. Make noises as native as ever you can. So that he’ll think there’s a captain and crew in the cabin and that I’m a sort of Roger …”
“Shall I play my whistle?” asked the real Roger.
“Good idea,” said John. “Lots of natives play it quite as badly. You can’t tell how old a person is by listening to a penny whistle. And stamp with your feet. Kick up all the grown-up row you can.”
“Come on,” said Susan. “John’s right … Once we’re in harbour they can’t grab us … If only the pilot doesn’t guess something’s wrong and want to come down into the cabin.”
“Come on Sinbad,” said Titty.
“You’ll have to mew like an old cat,” said Roger.
A moment later John was alone in the cockpit, watching the rowing boat bouncing nearer and nearer over the waves. Susan closed the hatch over her head and pulled the doors to.
One door opened again. John saw her serious face.
“John. If you do have to explain, it can’t be helped. Getting in matters more than anything else. Even if we have to save up for years and years to pay for the salvage.”
“It’ll be all right if only he doesn’t guess,” said John. “But I wish I knew enough Dutch even to say Good morning.”
CHAPTER XX
GROWN-UP NOISES BELOW
JOHN TRIED HIS best to feel that he was not in charge of the ship but was only a ship’s boy with nothing to worry about except his steering. Whatever happened he must not look bothered when the pilot came aboard. He tried to whistle, but remembered in time that sailors did not whistle unless for a wind, and, for the time being, he had all the wind he wanted. He tried to sing, but something went wrong with the words of the only tunes that came into his head. “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” That started all right, but the second line ought to be the same as the first, and instead it came rather differently. “What shall we do with a drunken pilot?” John bit his tongue and went off into “Spanish Ladies,’’ but found himself singing Holland instead of Scilly … “From Ushant to Holland is thirty-five leagues.” And, of course, it isn’t. Just about right, though, counting from Harwich, though it had seemed much further … “From Harwich to Holland is thirty-five leagues.” But whereabouts in Holland? If he only knew … What was he to say when the pilot asked him where he wanted to go? To a harbour. To a port. But what port? And in another minute he would have to be ready with the answer …
He was steering to meet the little broad-beamed rowing boat that had left the pilot steamer. One of the men in the boat was pulling in his oars. He stowed them and moved to the stern-sheets, while the other went on rowing. That man in the stern was signalling to the Goblin. Telling her to heave-to. It couldn’t be anything else. But how? Jim had never shown him anything about that. Better not to try than to make a mess of it and betray how little he really knew. But he would have to stop the Goblin somehow. She was going much too fast through the water. The only thing he could think of was to bring her right up into the wind as Jim had done when he was bringing her up to her mooring buoy. He swung her round, bit hard on his own teeth, looked out of the corner of his eye at the boat tossing close by, pretended not to see the signals, and kept the jib flapping and the mainsail all of a shake. They were shouting at him from the rowing boat. The man at the oars was pulling like mad. John let go of the tiller, grabbed one of the rope fenders and dangled it over the side.
Bump.
What would Jim have said to that? Another bump. A round bundle of oilskin landed in the cockpit with a thud. Big hairy hands, with mottlings of blue under the hair, grasped the coaming. There was a shout in a foreign language. The rowing boat drifted astern. A broad, blue-clothed, red-faced man scrambled into the cockpit.
The moment had come. What harbour was John to name? Awful if it happened to be a hundred miles away on some other part of the coast. The pilot would know at once that there was something wrong. John thought of one Dutch harbour after another. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hook …
“Good day, mynheer,” said the pilot, reaching for the tiller, “You want me to take you into Flushing? …”
John felt his ears grow suddenly hot with relief. The question had been answered for him. And in English too. The pilot had seen the little scarlet ensign fluttering from the jackstaff in the stern.
“Yes, please,” he said, moving forward in the cockpit to leave more room for the pilot, who had already taken the tiller, glanced at the compass, swung the little vessel round, quieting her sails, and now headed her not on her old course towards the distant sand dunes, but well to southward of it where John could see no land but only a thin line of haze.
John picked up the oilskin bundle and put it on the lee seat in the cockpit.
“Thank you, mynheer,” said the pilot. “Where from?”
“Harwich.”
“Your capten pick his weather bad to make crossing in so little boat.”
John said nothing. He was listening for a good grown-up noise from the cabin, to keep the pilot thinking there was indeed a captain aboard.
“Bad blow we had yesternight. Where was you?”
“Outside Harwich,” said John. That, at least, he knew for certain.
“No hurt? Many fishing boat lost sails.”
“We were all right,” said John. “Reefed …” He made a motion to show sails coming down.
Why wouldn’t those donkeys in the cabin make themselves heard?
“Little boat,” said the pilot. “But ver’ good.” He patted the oaken tiller.
“Yes. Jolly good,” said John.
And then, at last, the noise of a penny whistle came from the cabin, clear, though not very loud, through the open porthole by the compass. There was a noise of thumping. Of course, they had had to hunt for that whistle among all the things that had got swept on the floor in the worst of the storm and been bundled together anyhow in tidying up. They had not liked to sing or talk, for fear their voices might not be native enough. But now, a little jerkily, and not too certain of his fingering, Roger was playing the tune he thought he was best at … “We won’t go home till morning.” This is a tune that is not too bothersome about the high notes, and a lot of it is easy to remember and to play, just running up the scale and down again. The others were helpfully banging with their feet on the cabin floor.
“Merry barty,” said the pilot.
“Very jolly,” said John, and just then Roger, thinking it well to change his tune, began his next best, which was “Home, Sweet Home!” This was not so successful, for in the short choppy sea the long-drawn notes of “Home, Sweet Home!” did not sound quite as they should, when unexpected lurches of the boat made the musician take his fingers from the holes of the whistle and grab for something solid. There would be a short silence and then a few notes played very fast while Roger was trying to catch up. Then, when he felt he had drawn level, there would be slow time again to recover the pathos he had lost by the necessary burst of speed.
The pilot smiled. “Someone play trick, hey?” he said. “Music not so good.”
John did not know how to answer. He was still trying to think of something to say, when the pilot flung up a large hand and pointed forward.
“Deurloo buoy,” he said.
It was a big buoy, with red and black stripes on it going up and down, and a staff with a big triangle sticking up above it, and a square on the top of everything.
John nodded, as if he had been expecting to see it.
Then he saw other buoys, black can buoys and red buoys with pointed tops. The haze seemed to be clearing ahead of them. Land, a long low line of it, was showing to starboard. Those sand dunes which they had left far away to port were closing in on them. There were houses. He knew they must be coming up the channel in the mouth of a huge river. Where was Flushing? John tried to remember the names of the rivers of Holland, but could not think of any except the Maas.
There were more steamers now, close along the land in the south, and others far ahead. John leaned on the closed hatch above the companion, blinking in the sunshine, wondering what he had better do when the pilot asked for the captain. He might ask for him at any minute.
There had been a pause in the penny-whistling. Roger had been looking out of a salt-crusted porthole. Now he was working away again at one of his latest show pieces, a great part of which he knew almost for certain, though in other parts he still had to find his way by experiment. “Way down upon the Swanee river.” He could perform one of the twiddley bits in that at astonishing speed, and anybody could have guessed that he was making of it a song of triumph, a fanfarronade of victory. Holland in sight! Houses! Windmills! “Way down upon the Swanee river … Way …” A note well held. Diddle, diddle dee dee diddle at racing pace. “Far, far away …” Notes held so long that at least one was cracked in the middle. John knew what the tune was meant to be, but the pilot listened with a puzzled face.
They came close by a large cage buoy with a light on the top of it like the Beach End buoy off Harwich. The shore on the port side was now quite near … Hotels … À pier hung with flags fluttering in the sun … A man on a bicycle who seemed to be riding along the top of a wall … A short grey tower rising out of the water … A fort … Guns …
“Where will you go, mynheer?” said the pilot … “Middelburg Canal?”
“Is there a consul at Flushing, a British consul?” stammered John.
“Very fine man,” said the pilot. “Now you go call your capten.”
John shook his head. He did not know what to do. They would have to pay the pilot. And after paying him, would there be enough money to send the telegram? He felt the half-crown in his trouser pocket. How much had Susan got? And how much would a telegram cost from Holland to Pin Mill? And what, oh what would happen when the pilot found out that there was no captain and that the four of them were alone on board? They were not in harbour yet. John shook his head, not by way of answer, but just because he had too many questions to think of at once.
The pilot laughed. “Your capten give orders not to disturb. Very fierce man, hey? I knew such one when I was boy in sailing ship.” He waggled an end of the mainsheet and blew between his half-closed lips. “Very sore.” He laughed again. “Ver’ well. You say nodings. I call your capten mine self. When we want engine. Till den, merry barty and we leave him be.”
“We’ve run out of petrol,” said John. “No petrol.”
“Ach,” said the pilot. “Good wind. We sail into Outer Harbour. Old style. Hey?”
It seemed now to be understood that the captain was below, making merry in the cabin, and that the pilot, in order not to get John into trouble, would put off calling him on deck until the last possible moment. In some ways this seemed almost worse than if the truth had come out at once. John worked his way forward along the side deck. He wanted to be as far away from the pilot as he could get, so that there would be less chance of having questions to answer.
Where was the pilot taking them? They passed the mouth of a harbour. John saw the crowded masts of fishing boats. No. They were not going in there. The penny-whistling had stopped. John looked down between his feet and saw a nose flattened on the glass of a porthole. Titty. He looked down at the porthole on the other side of the mast and saw another flattened nose. That was why the penny-whistling had suddenly come to an end. Well, there was no need for it now.
The little Goblin was swooping along under the steep grey wall of a stone pier. A Dutch boy in wide blue trousers shouted from the top of the jetty and waved. The pilot solemnly lifted a huge hand and dropped it again. They passed a beacon on the end of the breakwater. The pilot was hauling in the mainsheet. Jibing. John wanted to go and help, but it was over too quickly. He wriggled himself out of the way on the cabin roof as the pilot brought the headsails over. A huge open space of smooth water opened before them. The Goblin was on an even keel. Away to the left behind the breakwater were the gates of a lock and a couple of steam ferryboats. The high breakwater shut off the wind. There was an almost startling peace. But only for a moment. There was the sudden roar of a chain as a crane lowered a crate into the hold of a liner, a huge, two-funnelled liner, that was lying alongside a pontoon. It was the last crate of the cargo. The pilot pulled out his watch and looked at it, and pointed towards the liner.
“Sailing for Harwich … Where you come from,” he called out proudly to John. “Nederland steamer.”
And John looked up at the steep black sides of the great steamship, at her funnels with their bands of the Dutch red, white and blue, at the high bridge, where an officer paused in his walk and looked down. Below the bridge was the rail of the boat deck, and below that yet another rail, with passengers leaning on it, and stewards bustling by. Yes. The pilot was right. The liner was on the point of leaving. A crowd of people on the pontoon were waving handkerchiefs and cheering their friends. That big crane was moving off. A bell struck. Someone ashore was blo
wing a tin trumpet. A whistle sounded. Huge wire warps that had been taut, drooped slack from the liner’s bows. She was casting off. A wild idea came into John’s head. If only they could have put one of them aboard her, Titty, or Roger, to go home and explain what had happened. But with only a few shillings between the lot of them, they could do nothing of the sort. And anyhow it was too late. And there was the pilot to pay, and that telegram.
They were slipping up the harbour past the great liner, when John noticed a ship’s officer and a passenger come to the rail of one of the upper decks, and lean over it, talking together. The passenger was in light grey clothes, not looking at all as if he had anything to do with the sea. But his face was sunburnt to a dark brown, and he flicked off his soft tweed hat and shot his fingers upwards through his hair with a trick that seemed to John somehow familiar. The passenger far away up there high above the little Goblin was looking down at her, staring. Suddenly he seemed to stiffen. A voice accustomed to be heard in a gale of wind rang out across the water:
“Ahoy there! JOHN!”
“Daddy!” John gasped. “Ahoy! Ahoy!”
Neither John on the foredeck of the Goblin, nor Daddy aboard the liner, could have heard another word. There was a spirt of steam from beside one of the funnels, and the big steamship’s siren loosed a terrific throbbing shriek that seemed to go on for ever.
John, hardly knowing what he was doing, raced back to the cockpit. The liner was beginning to move. Daddy had disappeared. Was that him on the deck below, dodging through stewards and luggage and passengers? He was gone again.
“Fine voice,” said the pilot genially. “Sailor, eh? You know him?”
“Yes,” said John. There was nothing to be done. Oh, if only the Goblin had got in ten minutes earlier.
“Very fast ship,” said the pilot. “Dey will have quick passage to England. Fine weather. What de matter?” And then the pilot chuckled to himself, and beckoned John to come nearer. The pilot bent towards John and half hid his mouth with a huge hand.
“I understand,” he said in a great windy whisper. “Your capten very glad. Great storm. Very little boat. And all right … Prosit!” And then he made as if he were tipping a bottle down his throat … “But not right to leave boy to bring ship in alone wid de pilot. We will show him, hey? What he say, mynheer, when he find we tie up ship widout him? I will den have one small word wid him. But now, mynheer, we say nodings. We bring de ship in. Anchor, no need. We tie to buoy. You have rope ready forrard. You will bring down sails fore de mast when I make so …” He made a sweeping downward motion with his free hand.