The Happy Mariners Page 11

  ‘We’ve got better rooms than this, you know,’ said the girl. ‘But they think this is good enough for Cinderella to mope in while her sisters go to the ball. But I’m going to the ball too, so there! What do you think of that, Martin? Do you like my new dress? My fairy godmother gave it me. If you’d been a minute sooner you’d have seen her. She’s a dear old thing. I say, you do like my dress, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’ murmured Martin shyly.

  Cinderella put out her tiny feet towards him, first the left one and then the right, so that he might see her glass slippers. ‘Many people about to-night,’ she asked, ‘as you came along?’

  ‘I … I didn’t notice anybody. Who do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, Old King Cole, Mother Hubbard, Simple Simon, Miss Muffet, Jack Horner, Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant Killer—they all live in this street. And Little Red Riding Hood, she’s one of the oldest inhabitants. The Wolf doesn’t really eat her, you know,’ added Cinderella confidentially. ‘It’s quite a nice Wolf when you get to know it. We often have a chat together. Oh, only in the street, of course. We never go into each other’s houses. That’s against the rules. Well, I’m glad you’ve called for your cat, Martin. How did you know he was here?’

  ‘I didn’t exactly know,’ Martin confessed. ‘I just thought he might be. He’s a very nice cat, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh my!’ cried Cinderella, glancing at the clock. ‘I must be off to the ball at once. Would you like to come with me? There’s a coach-and-four waiting, with the grandest coachman and the grandest footman you ever saw in your life.’

  ‘I should like to come,’ sighed Martin. ‘But the others will be wondering where I am. They’re in the log-cabin, you know. They were asleep when I came out, but they may be awake now. We built the log-cabin yesterday. At least we finished it. And I must go back at once because of the pirates…’

  ‘I tell you what would be fun,’ said Cinderella, interrupting him. ‘I’ll drive you back to the log-cabin before I go to the ball….’

  So Cinderella took him by the arm and whisked him (with Fandy still on his shoulder) out of the house, but not into the street he had entered from. Oh no, it was a very different one. It was a dark night with only a pale slip of moon visible, and there were no houses to be seen except Cinderella’s own. There, waiting for them, was the coach, richly ornamented with gold outside, and with scarlet silk inside; the coachman sat looking very prim and stiff, as though he were having his photograph taken; and as for the footman, Martin trembled with awe at sight of him and wondered if Cinderella would ever dare to ride with her back to so magnificent a person. Both coachman and footman wore buckled shoes and knee breeches, a yellow velvet coat, a powdered periwig, and a cocked hat. At the four fine chestnut horses Martin hardly had time to look, for Cinderella with an imperious order to the coachman—‘The log-cabin, John’—stepped nimbly into the coach without an instant’s delay.

  The coach carried them swiftly and smoothly through the night. They sat side by side and hand in hand, and Martin said: ‘I’m glad you’re going to the party, Cinderella. But please do remember not to stay after twelve o’clock. And don’t lose your glass slippers, whatever you do.’

  Before she could answer, the coach came to a standstill, and the footman stood like an image at the door.

  ‘The log-cabin, madam!’ said the footman. And his manner was so proud that to speak at all seemed to hurt his dignity.

  Martin jumped out of the coach; then turned back to say good-bye. ‘I’ll take you to your door,’ whispered Cinderella. And she got out too.

  ‘It doesn’t look a bit the same,’ said Martin, rather uneasily.

  They stood outside a house on the door of which was written: ‘The Robinson Log-Cabin.’ But where was the forest? And where the sound of the sea breaking on the shore of Gunpowder Creek? ‘It’s not like our island at all,’ added Martin. ‘How did I get here?’ And then he noticed that the name on the next door was Cinderella. ‘Why, here’s your house next door! What a long way round we’ve come! It’s been a funny night altogether. First I walked out of the log-cabin into the forest. And it was all Christmas trees. And then I came to a wide road and fields covered in snow. And then I got to a little town. And there was your street, Cinderella. How did I get there? Can you tell me?’

  Cinderella wrinkled up her pretty nose and frowned thoughtfully. ‘It’s like those Indian boxes,’ she said, ‘all different sizes, one inside the other. The forest of firs was like the first box; inside that was the snow country; and inside the snow country was the little town of moonshine where I live. The funny thing is, though, that they get bigger instead of getting smaller. And the one right in the middle is biggest of all.’

  This puzzled Martin, and he was becoming too sleepy to try to understand it. ‘Well, I must go now. Come on, Fandy. Thank you very much for driving me home, Cinderella.’

  ‘And they’re all inside there,’ finished Cinderella, letting her slim hand fall gently on his head. ‘The forest, the snow country, the little moonshine town—all of them.’

  ‘What, in the log-cabin?’ asked Martin.

  ‘No, goose!’ She bent down and lightly kissed him on the forehead. ‘In there,’ she said. Then she stepped into her coach and rode off.

  Chapter 15

  Furious Fandy

  Martin stood watching Cinderella and waving to her till the coach was out of sight. He wanted to run after it and remind her again of the Fairy Godmother’s warning not to stay at the ball after twelve o’clock; but when he remembered the end of the story—how Cinderella runs from the ballroom just as the clock is striking, and how one of her glass slippers falls off, and how the Prince picks it up and finds Cinderella, and how the Prince and Cinderella marry each other and live happily ever after—when Martin remembered this he was comforted, deciding that everything was so well planned that he needn’t concern himself any more about it. ‘Now then, Fandy,’ said Martin, ‘don’t you go running away again. You’re a bad cat, but I’m glad to see you all the same.’ Fandy stuck up his tail like a flagstaff and arched his back and rubbed himself against his young master’s legs and purred like tearing carpets. ‘And don’t purr,’ commanded Martin, ‘or you’ll wake the others up.’ At that Fandy purred louder than ever. Martin pushed open the door, though he still couldn’t quite believe that it was the door of their own log-cabin.

  ‘Who goes there?’ said a voice sharply. ‘Answer or you’re a dead man.’

  Martin recognized Rex’s voice, and very nice it was to hear it again after his travels in strange countries. ‘It’s only me,’ he said.

  ‘Young Martin!’ exclaimed Guy, sitting up. ‘Now where the dickens have you been, young Martin?’

  ‘In the forest looking for Fandy,’ answered Martin, confidently. ‘And I found him too. Look!’

  ‘Fandy!’ cried Elizabeth. ‘How nice! I can’t see him, but I can hear him purring. Oh yes, there he is! Hullo, Fandy!’

  ‘Now look here, Martin!’ It was Rex speaking, and his voice sounded ominous. ‘This has jolly well not got to happen again. We can’t have you wandering in the forest at night, all alone, with pirates and hyenas and I don’t know what prowling about. You wait till we’re all asleep and then you go and sneak out. If you do it again, young Martin, you’ll have a most frightful licking, so I warn you.’

  ‘But I’ve had perfectly lovely adventures,’ protested Martin, very crestfallen. ‘And there weren’t any pirates or hyenas, Rex, not a single one.’

  ‘I don’t care about that,’ said Rex. ‘You oughtn’t to have gone, and you’d better not let me catch you at it again. Pretty fine thing if we had to go home and tell Mother we’d lost you! We’d never hear the end of it.’

  Martin had come in brimful of his wonderful story, and now he was in disgrace. He was bitterly disappointed. ‘Anyhow,’ he said sulkily, ‘Elizabeth’s captain, not you.’

  ‘I tell you what, everybody,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’ve been considering a bit. I don’t think
I’d better be captain on shore. I’d rather Rex. I’m not very good at pirates.’

  ‘Then that’s settled,’ remarked Guy. ‘Elizabeth captain of the ship, Rex captain on shore. Now, Martin, tell us all about these adventures of yours. There’s no more sleep for us to-night, by the look of it.’

  Martin came out of his sulks at once. He knew that there was sense in what Rex had said, and he was eager to be friends again with every one. ‘I went out into the forest,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t like our forest at all. It was full of Christmas trees, and there was a lot of moonlight, and …’ So he went on, telling them everything that had happened to him except one thing; for about the orange tree he said nothing, the dwarf having taken all memory of it out of his mind. ‘And then,’ he finished breathlessly, ‘Cinderella brought me and Fandy back to the log-cabin in a coach with four chestnut horses and gold on it and red cushions and two proud-looking men in their best clothes, and then Cinderella went on to the ball and I pushed open the door and … here I am, you see.’

  There was silence for a while. Then Elizabeth said: ‘He’s been dreaming, poor lamb!’

  ‘Has he though?’ mused Guy. ‘We can’t be sure of that. One thing’s certain—this is not an ordinary island. It’s funny, isn’t it, how everything so far has turned out much as we planned it the day we drew the map? And yet there’s differences. No, it’s not an ordinary island. We didn’t know it would be like this. All kinds of things we didn’t think of. P’r’aps the island is different at nights.’

  ‘Only what you’d expect,’ said Rex. ‘We were out all last night, Guy, so we ought to know.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Guy, sticking to his point, ‘p’r’aps it’s different sometimes and not other times. P’r’aps it has a sort of night out and goes a bit mad and plays tricks.’

  Rex went to the door and flung it wide open. ‘Everything’s the same as before,’ he said.

  Guy was stubborn. ‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘We’re in our own box, that’s why,’ ventured Martin. ‘Cinderella explained it all, but I was too sleepy to understand properly. It was something about those Indian boxes that you buy in toyshops—you open the first and there’s another, and then you open the next and there’s another, and then you open that one and …’

  ‘We know the rest,’ said Guy.

  ‘And Cinderella said …’

  ‘Oh, you and your Cinderella!’ laughed Rex. ‘Let’s try to get a bit more sleep. Work to do in the morning, and I shall pipe all hands at crack of dawn.’

  Martin, in spite of having so many exciting things to think about, was the first to fall asleep; Rex was next, and Guy last of all. As for Elizabeth, she lay awake tossing and turning, thinking first of this, then of that, wondering what her mother was doing, wishing Captain Blackheart would put in another appearance, and trying to remember exactly how deep the treasure had been hidden. Finally, giving up the idea of sleep, she got up to pour out some water for Fandy to drink, and to crumble some ship’s biscuit for Fandy to eat. ‘Poor cat! We forgot all about you.’ But Fandy himself displayed not the slightest interest in these preparations, and when they were completed he could not be persuaded to do more than sniff at his meal. ‘Very well!’ said Elizabeth good-humouredly; and she lay down again and made one last effort to sleep.

  She had not been lying down many minutes when a sudden sound startled her, so that she opened her eyes and half got up. At first she thought that morning must have come; but the next moment she realized her mistake. The door was wide open; the place was flooded with moonlight; from just outside came the sound of husky whispers. Fear made her dumb and gripped her limbs, so that for one terrible moment she could neither call out nor move. Her lips parted, but no sound came from them but a sharp sigh. Then a man’s head appeared in the doorway, and a man’s arm came groping into the cabin. It was Bill Murder, but a very different Bill Murder from the mild-mannered, craven-hearted creature she had seen in the daytime. Moonlight slanted upon his face, which was twisted into a cruel villainous leer.

  ‘All asleep,’ muttered Bill Murder. ‘Very nice indeed. Now where’s that young lubber with the daggers?’ His roving eye did not notice that Elizabeth, crouching in the shadows, was awake and watching him; he merely nodded in her direction, counting her in with the sleepers: ‘One, two, three, four. All present and correct, sir. And—aha!—here’s the young lubber with the daggers.’

  Guy was lying asleep quite near the door, well within reach of the villain’s hand, and his belt, bristling with the six daggers he had taken from the pirates, lay beside him. This pleased Bill Murder mightily; his eyes flashed triumph and savage glee. With a swift, stealthy movement he snatched up a dagger from the ground, tried its point critically on the ball of his thumb, and then, grinning from ear to ear, he raised it to strike. The next instant Guy would have been stabbed to the heart … but just then something else happened. Two things happened at once. Elizabeth screamed, and Fandy, from his hiding-place in the shadows, jumped. Hissing and spitting and scratching, Fandy jumped right into the face of Bill Murder. He scratched quickly and furiously with all his sharp claws at once.

  Bill Murder yelled with pain and fear. ‘Mercy!’ he bellowed. ‘Mercy! Help! Murder! The devil’s after me! Help, Nautical, help!’

  Then he turned and ran as fast as he could go. Elizabeth heard Nautical Tallboy’s refined voice inquiring: ‘Is anything the matter, Mr Murder?’ The boys woke, sat up, and all started talking at once, with Fandy in their midst purring louder than ever before.

  CHAPTER 16

  SPYING OUT THE LAND

  Next morning Rex was all for continuing his building operations, for he said that until the log-cabin was made safe and shot-proof it would be impossible for Elizabeth to stay at home and mend their clothes, and cook, and all that. But Guy answered: ‘All the same I think I ought to go along and spy out the land a bit. Those beastly pirates will come in force sooner or later, the whole jolly lot of them. Meantime we ought to get a rough idea of where we are. There’s that big hill we marked on the map, you remember—Look-out Hill. I shouldn’t wonder if I could see all over the island from up there. So what do you say? Shall I go, or will you?’ Rex said: ‘Oh, you go if you want to. I’ll stay and finish off here. But first we’d better have a bit of firing practice, because you must be armed to the teeth, of course.’ So they got out the muskets and practised shooting till Elizabeth and Martin were both thoroughly frightened. Phineas Dyke had shown Rex how to load and fire the old-fashioned weapon, and Rex, who remembered his lesson very well, undertook to instruct Guy. ‘Oh, and I might run across poor old Phineas,’ said Guy. ‘You never know.’ So Guy, armed to the teeth, and with a spade over his shoulder, set out in search of Look-out Hill. But as he went he was thinking not about the pirates, not about the log-cabin, not even about the possibility of finding Phineas Dyke, but about Martin’s strange tale of his last night’s adventures. He, Guy, had been the only one—except Martin himself—who was not inclined to dismiss it all as mere moonshine, mere dreaming. Moonshine it was, perhaps, but that didn’t mean, thought Guy, that it hadn’t really happened. This island, as he had told the others, was not an ordinary island; it seemed to be a place where things you thought of had a queer trick of coming true when you least expected it. And not only things you thought of, but things you half-thought of, things you had forgotten, and perhaps—who could say?—things that lay buried inside you under all the other thoughts. As he emerged from the belt of trees that surrounded the log-cabin he was telling himself that Martin was a lucky little beast.

  Beyond the belt of trees was a clear space that glittered like brass in the strong morning sunlight, and beyond that clear space the forest began again, at first a mere sprinkling of trees whose shadows made a black pattern on the quivering golden ground, but later a dim cavernous place, darkly glowing with green, into which, here and there, great drops of sunlight filtered and fell, bright buds of fire that opened and flowered and sca
ttered their petals of molten gold among the bronze dead leaves of the forest floor. And soon he came to a little grassy glade, upon which, from a clear blue sky, the sunlight poured steadily as though through a tunnel. The grass was long and luxuriant and sprinkled with scarlet poppies and yellow dandelions. As he came closer, a warm breath of intoxicating scent floated up into his face, and phrases of a distant music stole upon his senses. The leaves of all the trees began to quiver and glow, as though little lamps had been lit inside them; and the whole forest seemed to be singing, murmuring. At any moment something strange and delightful might happen, for near him, within hand’s touch, he was aware of another world, a world both inside and outside the forest that he saw, the sea that he remembered, and the home that he had left so long (it seemed) ago; and he felt that some trifling happy chance—a step, a movement, the flicker of an eyelash, or a single word if only it were the right word—might release him into that world.

  Something told him that if he wanted to get quickly to Look-out Hill he would do well to hurry on; yet the idea of entering this other, this inner world seemed to tug at his sleeve and coax him to adventure. He remembered, however, that Rex and Martin and Elizabeth were in danger and that it was his self-chosen task to spy out the land for them. He decided that he must not waste time in idle enjoyment or private adventures, but must press on and make the best use he could of his eyes and ears. So he crossed the glade at a run and entered again the dim warm murmuring forest. Even then, with the thought of pirates again in his mind, he could not quite dispel the fancy that these tall trees, whose branches arched over his head making a fretted green and gold pattern of the shining sky, were talking among themselves of the time, centuries ago, when they had been tiny seeds buried deep in the soil. In his mind’s eye he saw them so, pictured them as young green shoots thrusting up like spears through the darkness towards that moment of ecstasy when for the first time they should feel the sun’s touch upon their naked bodies.