Priscilla's Spies
miles of it, show this pale sea grass instead of water. Only the few
deep channels remain, with their foolish stranded buoys and their high
useless perches, to witness to the fact that at evening time the sea
will claim its own again.
Very wonderful are the changes of the bay. The southwest wind sweeps
rain over it in slanting drifts. The islands show dimly grey amid a
welter of grey water, breaking angrily in short, petulant seas, which
buffet boats confusedly and put the helmsmen’s skill to a high test. Or
chilly, curling mists wrap islands and promontories from sight. Terns,
circling somewhere up above, cry to each other shrilly. Gulls flit
suddenly into sight and out of sight again, uttering sorrowful wails.
Now and again cormorants, low flying with a rushing noise, break the
oily surface of the water with every swift downward flapping of their
wings. Then the boatman needs something more than skill, must rely upon
an inborn instinct for locality if he is not to find himself embayed and
aground in some strange land-locked corner far from his home. Or, in
the splendid summer days the islands seem poised a foot or two above the
glistening water. The white terns hover and plunge, re-emerge amid the
joyful callings of their fellows, each with some tiny silver fish to
feed to the yellow chicks which gape to them from the short, coarse
grass among the rocks. Curlews call to each other from island to island,
and high answering calls come from the sea-saturated fields of the
mainland. Small broad billed guillemots and puffins float at ease upon
the water, swelling with obvious pride as they display the flocks of
little ones which swim with infantile solemnity around them. Gulls
cluster and splash noisily over shoals of fry. Then boats drift lazily
along; piled high perhaps with brown turf, store of winter fuel for some
home; or bearing stolid cattle from the cropped pasturage of one island
to the untouched grass of another; or, paddled, noisily, carry a crowd
of boys and girls home from school, mightily enriched no doubt with
knowledge only to be obtained when the water is calm enough for
children’s sea-going in the summer days.
On such days all the drama of the flowing and ebbing tides may be
watched with ever increasing wonder and delight. The sea is caught by the
islands and goes whirling down the channels. It is turned backwards by
some stray spit of land and set beating against some other current of
the same tide which has taken a different way and reached the same point
in strong opposite flow. The little glistening wavelets leap to meet
each other, like lovers reunited whose mouths are hungry for the
pressure of glad greetings. There are places where the water eddies
round and round, where smooth eager lips, rising from the whirlpools,
seem as if they reached up for something to kiss, and are sucked down
again into the depths with voiceless passion. Foot by foot the water
gains on the rocks beside the channels, on the fringes of the boulders,
on the stony shores, and covers the stretches of mud:
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pale ablution round earth’s human shore.
But they do not escape without defilement. On the surface of the tide,
when it ebbs from the mudbanks, there gathers an iridescent slime. Tiny
particles of floating sand catch and reflect the light. Fragments of
dead weed, black or brown, are borne along. The tide has stolen across
the beaches below the cottages and carried away the garbage cast there.
It has passed where a little while before the cattle strayed, and
passing has been stained. Here is no breaking of clear green waves
against black defiant rocks, no tumultuous pitched battle between the
ocean, inspired by the supreme passion of the tide, and the sullen
resistance of unyielding cliffs. Instead a dubious sea wanders in and
out amid scenes which the experience of many centuries has not made
familiar to it.
It was into this shining bay that the Tortoise sped, her white sails
bellied with the pleasant wind. Priscilla exulted, with flushed cheeks
and sparkling eyes.
Frank, yielding a little to the fascination of the sailing, was yet ill
at ease. His conscience troubled him, the acutely sensitive conscience
of a prefect who had been responsible for the tone of Edmondstone
House. He feared that he had done wrong in going with Priscilla in the
Tortoise, wrong of a particularly flagrant kind. He thought of himself
as a man of responsibility placed in the position of trust. Had he been
guilty of a breach of trust? It seemed remotely unlikely, so cheerful
and sparkling was the sea, that any accident could possibly occur. But
with what feelings could he face a broken and reproachful father should
anything happen and Priscilla be drowned? The blame would justly rest on
him. The fault would be entirely his.
“Priscilla,” he said, “I wish we hadn’t come. I ought not to have come
when Uncle Lucius has forbidden you to use this boat.”
“Oh,” said Priscilla, “don’t you fret. Father doesn’t really mind a
bit. He only pretends to, has to, you know, on account of Aunt Juliet He
knows jolly well that I can sail the Tortoise, any one could.”
Frank could not; but Priscilla’s tone comforted him a little. Yet his
conscience was ill at ease.
“But Miss Lentaigne,” he said, “your Aunt Juliet----”
“She’ll object, all right, of course,” said Priscilla. “If she knew
where we are this minute she’d be dead, cock sure that we’d be drowned.
She’d probably spend the afternoon planning out nice warm ways of
wrapping up our clammy corpses when she got them back. But she doesn’t
know, so that’s all right.”
“She will know, this evening. We shall have to tell her.”
On one point Frank was entirely decided. Priscilla should neither
lure nor drive him into any kind of deceit about the expedition. But
Priscilla had no such intention.
“We’ll tell her right enough,” she said, “when we get home. She’ll be
pretty mad, of course, inwardly; but she can’t say much on account of
her principles.”
“I don’t see what her principles have to do with it.”
“Don’t you? Then you must be rather stupid. Can’t you see that if you
haven’t really got a sprained ankle, but only believe you have, and
wouldn’t have it if you believed you hadn’t, then we shouldn’t really be
drowned, supposing we were drowned, I mean, which, of course, we’re not
going to be--if we believed we weren’t drowned? And Aunt Juliet, with
her principles, would be bound to believe we weren’t, even if we were.
We’ve only got to put it to her that way and she won’t have a ghost of a
grievance left. It’s the simplest form of Christian Science. But in
any case, whatever silliness Aunt Juliet may indulge in, we were simply
bound to have the Tortoise today. It’s a matter of duty. I don’t see how
you can get around that, Cousin Frank, no matter how you argue.”
Frank did not want to get behind his duty. He had been brought up with a
very high regard for the word. If it had been clearly shown him that it
was his duty to take an ocean voyage in the Tortoise, with Priscilla as
leader of the expedition, he would have bidden a long farewell to
his friends and gone forth cheerfully. But he did not see that this
particular sail, which seemed, indeed, little better than a humiliating,
though agreeable, act of truancy, could possibly be sheltered under the
name of duty. Priscilla enlightened him.
“I daresay you don’t know,” she said, “that there is a German spy at the
present moment making a chart of this bay. We are hunting him.”
There is something intensely stimulating to every healthy mind in the
idea of hunting a spy. No prefect in the world, no master even, not Mr.
Dupré himself, not the remote divine head-master in the calm Elysium of
his garden, could have escaped a thrill at the mention of such a sport.
Frank was conscious of a sudden relapse from the serenity of the grown
man’s common sense. For an instant he became a normal schoolboy.
“Rot!” he said. “What spy?”
“It’s not rot,” said Priscilla. “You’ve read ‘The Riddle of the Sands,’
I suppose. You must have. Well, that’s exactly what he’s at, mapping
out mud-banks and things so as to be able to run a masked flotilla of
torpedo boats in and out when the time comes. There was one of the same
lot caught the other day sketching a fortification in Lough Swilly.
Father read it to me out of a newspaper.”
Frank had seen a report of that capture. German spies have of late,
been appearing with disquieting frequency. They are met with in the most
unlikely places. Frank was a little shaken in his scepticism.
“What makes you say there’s a German spy?” he said
“I saw him. So did Peter Walsh. So did Joseph Antony Kinsella. You heard
Peter Walsh talking about him this morning. I saw him yesterday. I
was bathing at the time and he ran his boat on a rock off the point of
Delginish. If it hadn’t been for me he’d have been there still, only
drowned, of course, for his boat floated away from him. I wish now that
I’d left him there, but, of course, I didn’t know at the time that he
was a spy. That idea only came to me afterwards. I say, Cousin Frank,
wouldn’t it be absolutely spiffing if it turned out that he really was?”
It was impossible for any one to deny that such a thing would be
spiffing in the very highest possible degree.
“If he is,” said Priscilla, “and I don’t see any reason why he
shouldn’t--anyhow it’s jolly good sport to pretend--and if he is, it’s
our plain duty to hunt him down at any risk. Sylvia Courtney says that
Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Duty’ is quite the most thrillingly impressive poem
in the whole ‘Golden Treasury’ so you won’t want to go back on it.”
Frank’s prize had been won for Greek Iambics, not for English
literature. He was not in a position to discuss the value of
Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” as a guide to conduct in ordinary life.
“My plan,” said Priscilla, “is to begin at the south of the bay and work
across to the north, investigating every island until we light on the
one where he is. That’s the reason I had to take the Tortoise. The Blue
Wanderer wouldn’t have done it for us. She won’t go to windward. But the
Tortoise is a racing boat. Father bought her cheap at Kingstown because
she never won any races, which is the reason why he called her the
Tortoise. But she can sail faster than Flanagan’s old boat, anyhow. And
that’s the one which the spy has got.”
Frank was not inclined to discuss the appropriateness of the Tortoise’s
new name. He was just beginning to recover from the feeling of
bewildered annoyance induced by the sudden introduction of Wordsworth’s
poem into the conversation.
“But what makes you say he’s a spy?” he said. “I know there are spies,
and I saw about the capture of that one in Lough Swilly. But why should
this man be one?”
“I don’t say he is,” said Priscilla. “All I say is that until we’ve
hunted him down we can’t possibly be sure that he isn’t. You never can
be sure about anything until you’ve actually tried it. And, anyway,
what else can he be? You can’t deny that there’s some mystery about him.
Remember what Peter Walsh said about his looking as innocent as a child.
That’s the way spies always look. Besides, I don’t think his clothes
really belonged to him. I could see that at a glance. He had a pair of
white flannel trousers with creases down the fronts of the legs, quite
as swagger as yours, if not swaggerer, and a white sweater. He didn’t
look a bit comfortable in them, not as if they were the kind of clothes
he was accustomed to wear. That’s Rossmore head on the left there,
Cousin Frank. He’s not there. I didn’t expect he would be, and he isn’t.
I don’t expect he’s in that bay to the southwest of it either. But we’ll
just run in a bit and make sure.”