16

Sinking The Well

IN THE MORNING there were doubts.

Titty woke to hear people talking outside her tent.

‘You know it may be just Titty,’ Susan was saying, ‘and she won’t like it if we go up with spades and it turns out to be all Peter Duck.’

‘Um.’ That was Nancy’s voice. ‘Bet you anything she tried it last night. Couldn’t you see what a dither she was in?’

And afterwards, when breakfast was over, and the prospectors were nearly ready to start, John came to Titty and asked her privately, ‘I say, Titty. What about taking spades? We don’t want to cart them up there for nothing.’

‘I’ll carry a spade,’ said Titty.

‘Anyway, she thinks she did,’ said John to Nancy as they went off to see what they could borrow from Mrs Tyson.

‘Spades?’ said Mrs Tyson. ‘You’re not going digging in the orchard, now are you?’

‘Oh no,’ said Nancy.

‘Up in the wood,’ said John.

‘Better see what Robin can do for you,’ said Mrs Tyson.

Robin Tyson, Mrs Tyson’s grown-up son, who managed the farm, found them a couple of spades. He also hoped they were not going to dig in the orchard, and laughed when he heard they meant to dig in the wood.

‘You won’t do much with a spade, I reckon,’ he said. ‘It’s a crowbar’s what you want. More stones than earth you’ll find.’

‘Can we take a crowbar?’ asked John.

‘Bit of a weight,’ said Robin Tyson. ‘Best let me carry it up the wood for you.’

‘Oh no,’ said Nancy. ‘We’ll manage, two of us. Thank you very much all the same.’ The very last thing anybody wanted was to have natives butting helpfully in, especially in such a business as well-sinking where, after all, there might be no water.

In the end, they took two ordinary spades, a small gardening spade of Mrs Tyson’s, which they found in the lean-to behind the beehives, and an enormous crowbar which John and Nancy carried between them.

‘Which pigeon?’ said Roger.

‘One we can count on,’ said Nancy. ‘There may be some tremendous news.’

‘I’m taking Homer,’ said Titty, and set off knapsack on back, the small spade over her shoulder and Homer in the travelling-basket in her free hand. Would there be tremendous news or would there not? Waiting in the yard another minute was more than she could bear.

Dorothea ran after her and caught her up. They climbed the steep winding path together.

‘It will be lovely if you’ve found a spring,’ said Dorothea.

‘But what if I haven’t?’ said Titty. ‘We can’t tell till they’ve tried.’

‘I’m going to put it in a story,’ said Dorothea. ‘Different, of course. I’m making you a boy, and you do that business with the stick all by yourself and you’ve got a spade with you and you start digging. It’s at night, and the moon rises through the clouds, and all of a sudden you’ve dug deep enough and the water comes spouting up into the moonlight. …’

‘Go on,’ said Titty. ‘What happened next?’

‘I’m not quite sure yet,’ said Dorothea.

Hot and breathless, the prospectors came at last to the place where the track divided. They pushed through the overgrown path under the tall ash tree and out into the open pitstead of the charcoal-burners.

‘Where’s the stick?’ said Nancy.

Titty, with all the others close behind her, hurried across the clearing, and in among the bushes and small trees that grew between it and the steep rock face that marked the edge of High Topps.

‘It’s through here, somewhere,’ she said. ‘There were two rocks, and a clump of rushes growing in a dip.’

‘Here’s a clump of rushes,’ said Dick.

‘Not those,’ said Titty. ‘That’s where I tried first and nothing happened.’

Today, somehow, Titty felt altogether different about the hazel twig. The first time she had held it, it had startled her most horribly. The second time, by herself in the dusk, she had had a hard fight to bring herself to try. But now the trial had been made. She was ready to try again. She wanted to convince the doubters. She wanted to be sure herself that she had not gone through that struggle for nothing. They must find water now. They simply must.

‘There’s the stick,’ she cried. ‘It’s all right. It’s just where I left it. At least I think so.’

Nancy picked it up, and held it in dowsing fashion.

‘Go on, Titty,’ she said. ‘Try it again. It doesn’t give a wriggle with me.’

John and Susan looked with surprise to see Titty almost eagerly take the stick. Dick was watching to see exactly how her fingers gripped it. Dorothea was watching her face. Peggy and Roger were looking at the ground almost as if they expected the water to come shooting up.

‘I’ll start a bit on one side,’ said Titty. ‘Nothing happened last night when I was here. … It was when I began to get near those rushes. … It’s beginning. … It’s pulling.’

‘Look here, Titty, you’re making it do it yourself.’

‘I’m not,’ said Titty.

‘Keep quiet,’ said John.

‘It’s going right down. … Look at it,’ said Peggy.

‘Does it hurt?’ asked Dorothea.

‘Don’t bother her,’ said Nancy.

‘This is the place,’ said Titty. ‘I simply can’t hold it any more.’ And as she spoke the forked stick sprang free and dropped almost at her feet.

‘Mark the place all round,’ said Nancy. ‘With the crowbar. Go on, John. Oh well, the spade’ll do. Let’s get going.’ She flung off her knapsack, grabbed one of the big spades and drove it as hard as she could into the ground almost before John and Peggy had finished scraping a line all round Titty and the stick. The spade went in about an inch and a half before being brought up hard by a stone.

‘Good thing we brought that crowbar,’ said John. ‘Look out for your feet, everybody.’

The crowbar had a sharpened end, and John brought it down point first into the ground. Again and again he brought it stabbing down, loosening earth and small stones.

‘Who’s got the little spade?’ said Nancy. ‘Let’s clear that bit while John’s jabbing up some more.’

‘Let me,’ said Roger, and lifted the first spadeful of loosened stuff.

Dry as the earth was, it was hard work breaking it up, because it was so full of stones. John drove in the crowbar here and there to make work easier for the spades. Then Nancy took over the crowbar, and Peggy jumped to save her toes.

‘Look out,’ said Peggy.

‘Sorry,’ said Nancy. ‘I didn’t mean to come so near.’

Presently the crowbar rang on something that sounded and felt like solid rock.

‘We’re done,’ said Nancy.

‘We can’t get through rock without a drill,’ said Dick.

‘Let’s have another jab,’ said John.

He drove in the pointed end of the crowbar now in one place and now in another. At last it went in rather further than usual and without the sharp ring of striking rock.

‘I’ve got to the edge of it,’ said John.

He began wriggling the crowbar in the hole it had made.

‘It’s not solid rock,’ he said. ‘I can feel the thing shifting.’ A few minutes of hard work with spades and fingers cleared the earth from the top of a huge stone. John worked the crowbar in at one side of it and swung sideways with all his strength. Nancy added her weight to his.

‘It’s moving! It’s moving!’

‘Shove the spades in to hold it,’ said John.

Spades were shoved in. The crowbar was shifted to another place and driven in once more.

‘Now then!’ said Nancy.

‘Beef!’ cried Roger.

The stone was lifting. One more terrific heave loosened it altogether. It rose up on end, was grabbed by half a dozen hands, and a moment later was pulled clear of the deep, smooth socket it had filled so long.

‘That earth’s wet,’ said Dick.

‘Water! Water at last!’ cried Dorothea.

There was no water, but everybody could see that the bottom of the hole out of which they had lugged the stone was dark and damp. Nancy dropped on her knees and felt it with her hand.

‘She’s got it all right,’ she shouted. ‘Good for the dowser! Well done, Titty! Come on. We’ve only got to dig deep enough. Nothing else matters! No prospecting today. …’

And then, for the first time that day, they remembered Squashy Hat. Roger and Peggy were sent up the gully to the top of the rock. Far away on Grey Screes they could see that splash of white paint among the rocks. But there was no sign of the rival. John handed over the crowbar to Nancy and shinned up the old ash tree to the look-out branch and reported that Squashy Hat was walking up and down, smoking, in the Atkinsons’ garden.

‘Somebody’d better go down there to keep watch,’ said Nancy. ‘Somebody who can be spared from the digging.’

‘Dorothea,’ said Peggy.

‘I’ll go, too,’ said Titty, and seeing the surprise in Nancy’s eyes, added, ‘I’d like to, really. I’ll come back again later on.’

‘Well,’ said Nancy, ‘there aren’t enough spades to go round and you’ll be much more useful there.’

Titty and Dorothea went off with their knapsacks along the edge of the wood and down to Roger’s lair in the bracken opposite the gate where the cart track to Atkinson’s left the Dundale road.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Dorothea. ‘I’ve got The Outlaw of the Broads in my knapsack, and I’ll read you some of that to take your mind off the digging.’

And so, while Titty lay in the bracken, looking across the road and down the cart track among the trees, watching for Squashy Hat, Dorothea lay beside her, propped on her elbows above her exercise books, and read in a voice little above a whisper how the Outlaw of the Broads hid in the reeds and slipped down river under the very noses of his enemies.

‘The reeds shivered and parted. … The outlaw’s boat nosed her way stealthily into the moonlit river. … The coast was beautifully clear but only just. …’

Titty listened sometimes with half, sometimes with three-quarters and sometimes with the whole of her mind when the tremble in Dorothea’s voice showed that she was getting near an exciting moment. But she found it hard to forget the furious digging that was going on under the trees at the top of Tyson’s wood. What was happening up there? How deep had they dug? Had they been held up by solid rock? She had seen the damp earth with her own eyes. Would that be all? Perhaps everywhere it was damp if you got below the surface. Or would they really find water? What was that story the friendliest of all natives used to tell about the blackfellows in the Australian bush who found water by magic in the year of the great drought when the sheep were dying by thousands on the sheep stations? Here, too, there was a dead sheep, and the hedgehog from the bramble thicket had to go half-way down to the valley to drink in the stagnant puddle left from the dried-up beck.

The morning was over when the sight of Squashy Hat coming up the cart track brought the reading to a sudden stop. But he was not going prospecting. He turned down the road instead of going up towards the Topps. They watched him out of sight.

‘We ought to let them know,’ said Titty. ‘And one of us ought to stop here in case he comes back. Look here, Dot, do you mind if I go? I simply must see how deep they’ve got.’

Dorothea did not mind at all. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘There’s a bit just coming that wants rewriting. I’ll get it done so that it’ll be all right to read by the time you come back. It’s no good reading aloud when you have to keep changing things in your head as you go along.’

Titty came back along the edge of the Topps. The well-sinkers seemed strangely quiet. She listened for the ring of the crowbar on a stone. There was not a sound. They were not even talking. For one dreadful minute she thought the dowsing had been a failure after all. She came down the gully and through the trees below the rock. What were they doing, all in a bunch together? A great pile of stones and earth showed that they had dug a long way down before giving up. Had they done all that for nothing?

‘Hullo, Titty,’ cried Nancy. ‘Come and look. You’ve done it all right.’

‘We’ve got the first mug of water,’ said Peggy. ‘Pretty thick, but it’s settling down. Dick’s dropped a white stone in and you can see it already.’

‘It’s a spring,’ said John. ‘And you found it. Come on, Nancy. We’ve only got to keep on digging. Keep the stones separate. We’ll want them later.’

‘Let her have a look,’ said Nancy.

They made room for her, and Titty, staring into the mug, saw a brown liquid, and looking closer saw that the top half inch of it was almost clear.

She found herself, most oddly, biting hard at her own lips and feeling a strange hotness in her eyes.

She made her report.

‘Good,’ said Nancy. ‘He’s wasting his last chance. We’ll be camping up here tomorrow. Barbecued billygoats, but won’t he be sick when he finds we’re on the Topps before him and after him and all the time.’

Nancy hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘Do you think Mrs Tyson will let us?’ said Susan.

‘Where’s that pigeon?’ she said. ‘We’ll send him off at once.’

‘What are you going to say?’ asked Roger, pulling out a stump of pencil and a slip of paper cut to the right size.

Nancy put the paper on a stone, sucked the pencil and wrote:

‘ALL WELL. TITTY FOUND WATER BY THE TOPPS. SHIFTING CAMP TOMORROW. PLEASE COME AND TALK TO MRS TYSON. AND BRING THE PIGEONS. S’S, A’S and D’S for ever.’

‘How’s that?’ she said, handing it round. It was approved and as Titty set off along the Topps to join Dorothea, Homer, tossed into the air from the top of the rock, was already flying to Beckfoot with the news.

‘How lovely,’ said Dorothea as Titty dropped beside her in the bracken, and told her that they had found water or at least mud. ‘I knew it was going to be all right. And I’ve altered that last chapter altogether. I’ll have to begin reading from a little before the place where I left off. You won’t mind, will you?’

THE FIRST MUG OF WATER

‘Susan says it’s time for grub,’ said Titty.

‘All right,’ said Dorothea. ‘We’ll get it over. It always spoils a story if you have to keep stopping.’

The afternoon slipped by in literary criticism. No novelist ever had a happier audience. ‘It’s a simply splendid story,’ said Titty, when Dorothea had read to the end of her notebooks, and explained what was still to come, and had gone back to the first chapter to remind Titty of the little bits that were going to be important later on.

By the time Squashy Hat had come back, walking slowly up the road, as if he were a little footsore, and had turned through the gate at Atkinson’s, it was already late in the day, and the scouts went back together.

‘I was just going to send Roger for you,’ said Susan.

‘What do you think of it?’ said John. ‘Solid rock at the bottom. We couldn’t get any deeper.’

All the mess of digging had disappeared. The pile of stones painfully dug out had been built into a low wall guarding the well on three sides. On the fourth side three big stones made steps so that people could go comfortably down to fill kettle or bucket.

‘Oh, Titty!’ said Dorothea. ‘And look at the water.’

‘I say,’ said Titty. ‘It’s miles better than I ever thought it could be.’

‘Your well,’ said Nancy. ‘Down it goes on the map. If ever anybody earned a place on a map it’s you. Titty’s Well. And people will be jolly grateful for ever. At least they ought to be. And to us, too, for digging. It’s been an awful sweat.’

Dick had cut notches on a stick to measure the depth of the water in the rocky hole.

‘Just as deep as it was before,’ he said. ‘And we’ve thrown lots of it away to get rid of the mud.’

‘Bubbling up all the time,’ said Roger.

‘Jolly good water,’ said Nancy, sipping the water that had been clearing all afternoon in the mug. ‘Better than at home. This is water worth drinking.’

The others, urged by Susan, put off their first tastes until tomorrow.

‘What about starting down,’ she said. ‘We can’t do any more until it settles.’

‘Don’t want to do any more,’ said Nancy. ‘Giminy, I’m stiff all over.’

‘So am I,’ said John.

‘Dick,’ said Titty. ‘I wonder if the hedgehog’ll come and drink tonight.’

‘Let’s wait and see,’ said Dorothea.

‘He’ll be stirring any time now,’ said Dick.

But, for once, Nancy agreed with Susan.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’d better hurry. We’ve simply got to get Mrs Tyson in a good temper.’

They hurried down to the farm, took turns to wash under the pump, and were in time for Mrs Tyson’s supper. Nancy chose her moment while Mrs Tyson was dealing round large plates of macaroni cheese, to break the news.

‘We’re moving tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We’ve found water in the top of the wood. You won’t have to cook for us any more.’

Mrs Tyson did not believe her.

‘There’s never a drop of water up there but the beck, and that’s dry.’

‘We’ve got a spring of our own,’ said Nancy.

‘You must have your joke, Miss Nancy,’ said Mrs Tyson.

‘It isn’t a joke,’ said Nancy. ‘It’s a proper well. Mother’s coming in the morning on purpose to see it.’

‘Eh,’ said Mrs Tyson. ‘I’m glad your mother’s coming. She’ll talk sense. But you’d no call to bring her chasing up the valley for nothing, and her in a scrow with her papering and painting, and the house thrutched up with the plumbers and all, and your uncle coming home, and only twenty-four hours in a day when all’s said and done.’

Supper was a joyful meal, and soon after it everybody was glad to go early to bed.

‘Last night in the dormitory!’ Nancy called out exultantly by way of saying good night.

‘What if Mrs Blackett says No?’ That was John’s voice.

‘Mother’ll never say No when she sees a well like that.’

Titty, already in her sleeping-bag, clenched her hands as if to feel again the strange pulling of the hazel twig. Was it worth while, that struggle of hers? A million, million times. She could not make out now how it was that she had ever been afraid.