The Rescuers Read online

  The cat Mamelouk yawned, stretched, and finally leaped up into the Head Jailer’s armchair. He was an enormous black half-Persian, with a coat like a thunder-cloud and eyes like dirty emeralds. When veiled, they were menacing; when wide open, hypnotic. Even for a cat, his self-assurance was staggering. With the Head Jailer under his thumb, he was King of the Black Castle, and well he knew it.

  “Nasty customer, eh?” muttered Nils.

  “We must keep Miss Bianca out of his way,” said Bernard.

  “No more than a couple of mouthfuls,” agreed Nils, “she’d make for him . . .”

  It crossed their minds that neither of them would make more than a couple of mouthfuls either. They watched Mamelouk in silence for a few minutes longer, and then thoughtfully rejoined Miss Bianca, and warned her that she was never, in any circumstances, to go out of the hole alone.

  3.

  The hole was their home.

  It had several disadvantages. Mamelouk was always liable to turn up in the sitting room outside, and the necessary smell of cigar butts at the entrance made Miss Bianca almost ill. But when Nils and Bernard, after several daring reconnaissances, discovered that there was absolutely no other accommodation available, they sensibly made the best of it, and at least it was a splendid listening post.

  They made it really very nice.

  The entrance passage, which ran directly at right angles from the wainscot, was quite two and a half inches long, and this was their lobby, where were kept Bernard’s cudgel, Nils’s sea boots and cutlass, and Miss Bianca’s valise. (It was essential to be tidy; and they had the Head Jailer’s awful example.) Beyond, between the wainscot and the original granite, and from the stove to the outer wall, stretched a quite commodious apartment. Bernard cleverly divided it with match-boarding — the sitting room floor was quite littered with empty matchboxes — to make Miss Bianca a bedroom by the stove, a slightly larger one for himself and Nils at the other end, and a parlor for general use in between. There Miss Bianca took charge. She had always had a taste for interior decoration, and the lack of professional assistance but sharpened her wits. Soon gay chewing-gum wrappers papered the walls, while upon the floor used postage stamps, nibbled off envelopes in the Head Jailer’s wastebasket, formed a homely but not unsuitable patchwork carpet. Miss Bianca with her own hands fashioned several flower pieces — so essential to gracious living — from bread crumbs dyed pink or blue with red or blue-black ink.

  At least they had no need to economize where food was concerned: the Head Jailer had all his meals sent up on trays, and was a very untidy eater. Miss Bianca even made one or two daffodils out of cheese.

  All heavy work was of course done by Nils and Bernard — the carpentry and paperhanging and so on; Miss Bianca just had the ideas.

  Naturally such an amount of work took time, but it was well they were kept busy, otherwise their spirits might have sunk unendurably low.

  4.

  As it was, they sank low enough.

  One of the mice’s first acts had of course been to constitute themselves into a subsection of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, Black Castle Branch. Nils and Bernard voted Miss Bianca Madam Chairwoman, Bernard was Secretary, and they held a General Meeting once a week. As meeting succeeded meeting, however, these grew shorter and shorter and gloomier and gloomier; for the more information the mice gathered, the more hopeless their mission appeared.

  As witness the following digest of several earlier Minutes:

  Each prisoner occupied a separate dungeon deep down in the rock, and these dungeons were never opened. Food (black bread and treacle) was let down, but once a day, each morning, through grids in the ceilings; and these grids were set in the floor of a long stone corridor itself cut off from the rest of the Castle by a locked iron door.

  (SOURCE: Instructions from Head Jailer to new common sort of jailer, in H.J.’s sitting room: overheard by all Members.)

  (QUERY: How were the prisoners got into their dungeons? The Members couldn’t think.)

  The door fitted too closely for even a mouse to run under.

  (SOURCE: Nils.)

  Once a day, of course, it was unlocked by the jailer with the food pans, and then Nils was pretty certain he could have got in too — if it hadn’t been for Mamelouk the cat, see below.

  Mamelouk regularly accompanied the jailer on his rounds. It was his horrible amusement to jump down into a dungeon, as soon as the grid was opened, and torment the prisoner by spitting at him while he ate, and then ride up again on the food pan.

  (SOURCE: Gossip of jailers: overheard by Nils and Bernard.)

  (MINORITY OPINION: Perhaps Mamelouk was trying to cheer the prisoners? — M. B.)

  The jailer mightn’t notice Nils, but Mamelouk certainly would.

  “One of these days I’ll risk it all the same!” cried Nils desperately. “I’m no nearer getting in touch with the poor chap than if I’d never left Norway!”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” said Bernard, “you wouldn’t stand a chance. There can’t be an inch of cover down there: it’s just one big trap.”

  As the whole Castle was an even bigger trap.

  Except for the great gate, there was no way out at all. The wagons had approached from the south: on the northern side, it was as though the mountain range had been sliced clean away; the Castle rose straight up from the very verge of a tremendous cliff. Below flowed the River, bridgeless as far as eye could see, and on the farther bank stretched the same sort of country as The Barrens. No wonder that side was never guarded! But indeed there seemed as little reason for the jailers in the watch-tower above the gate . . .

  “Even suppose we could rescue him from his dungeon,” said Bernard gloomily — “him” always meant the Norwegian prisoner — “how on earth would we get him out?”

  This particular conversation took place not at a meeting but in the parlor, where they were all sitting round a fire of cedarwood. (Cigar boxes burn beautifully.) The leaping flames made it look very cozy, playing over the fresh wallpaper and the gay carpet and Miss Bianca’s flower pieces. No amount of physical comfort, however, can lighten the burden of responsibility to a truly conscientious mind.

  “Cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Nils shortly.

  “You mean you can’t think of anything,” said Bernard. “I’m not blaming you; I can’t either.”

  “What troubles me —” began Miss Bianca. She hesitated. What was in her mind was something so dreadful, she felt she really ought to keep it to herself. Then she felt she really couldn’t. “What troubles me,” whispered Miss Bianca, “is that we don’t know . . . we have no means of knowing . . . whether he’s even still alive!”

  She looked anxiously at Nils and Bernard; they were looking at each other.

  “We hoped you wouldn’t think of it,” said Bernard reluctantly.

  “You mean you and Nils have?”

  Nils nodded. “Stands to reason,” he said gravely. “Put me in a dungeon, I wouldn’t last a week!”

  “But we won’t give up hope,” said Bernard quickly. “We don’t know one way or the other. Remember the luck of the mice!” he added cheerfully. “Hasn’t it brought us all the way here — found us this splendid hole — kept us all fighting-fit and readv for anything? Remember how beastly we thought the wagon ride was going to be, and how jolly it turned out! And you, Nils, remember that chap Harald Fairhair you’re always singing about, remember ‘Up the Norwegians!’ ”

  Nils reached across and grasped him by the hand; Miss Bianca slipped hers into his other. Whate’er befell, at least they were three united, loyal companions. At the moment, it was their only consolation.

  POEM BY MISS BIANCA, WRITTEN IN THE BLACK CASTLE

  Black as the Castle press my mournful thoughts!

  What ray of hope can e’er their gloom dispel?

  Again, dear Boy, your Miss Bianca fond

  Bids you a last, an ultimate farewell!

  M. B.

  Actually this was the most de
pressing poem she ever wrote, but even at the time, because it so exactly expressed her feelings, she was rather cheered up by it. Poets have uncommon advantages — as will be seen later on.

  8.

  Waiting

  THE pleasantest place in the Black Castle — or rather the least depressing — was a little stone ledge outside the Head Jailer’s window. It wasn’t a proper window sill, it couldn’t have taken a flowerpot, but it was wide enough for a mouse to sit on, in the fresh air. Every afternoon, before setting out on his rounds, the Head Jailer used to raise the sash a couple of inches — his was the only window in the Castle without bars — and as soon as his back was turned Nils and Bernard and Miss Bianca used to run up and sit outside. It was really quite nice, though one of them had always to keep watch for the Head Jailer’s return; he closed the window again immediately. Like most wicked people, he hated fresh air; this was the only airing his room ever got. So the three mice had to be careful to regain their hole in time, otherwise they would have had to make a long, dangerous journey round by a corridor window and back through the sitting room door. Nils and Bernard took turns watching — they took fair turns at everything — while the others looked at the view. In time it grew very, very familiar.

  Far below ran the great River — sometimes angry, sometimes smooth: and when it was smooth huge rafts floated by, so stacked with logs they looked like floating woodpiles. In the stern of each was built a sort of hut or shelter made of reeds, for the raft-men to sleep in; and if there was a raft-woman — a raft-wife — aboard, there would be hens and hencoops as well, and most likely washing out. When it was rough, they evidently tied up somewhere along the banks, for then not a craft was to be seen, and when they reappeared it was in bunches of six or seven at a time.

  “Where can they all be going?” marveled Miss Bianca.

  “Why, to the towns, o’ course,” said Nils, “with winter firing. Don’t you use firewood in these parts?”

  “At the Embassy, we used central heating,” said Miss Bianca.

  Nils laughed loudly.

  “And where d’you suppose the heat comes from?”

  “You forget,” said Bernard quickly, “that Miss Bianca has never had to occupy herself with housekeeping. In these parts, as you call them, ladies don’t.”

  Miss Bianca threw him a grateful look. But she was very anxious there should be no bickering. Tempers fray so easily, when one is anxious and frustrated!

  “Nils can never get used to my incompetence,” said she gently. “But it didn’t stop him being very kind to me, on shipboard!”

  As a matter of fact, and to their great credit, their bickerings were very rare, and never lasted more than a few moments. Just a touch of crossness, now and again, was inevitable, for they were frustrated and anxious indeed. The thought of the poor prisoner was never far from their minds, and yet their anxiety to be doing something for him was coupled with such a complete inability to think what. Bernard relieved himself a little by digs at Madam Chairwoman (not of course referring to Miss Bianca); whenever Nils made his remark about crossing bridges — “I’d like to see Madam Chairwoman cross this one!” Bernard would mutter bitterly; that absent figure became really quite a useful scapegoat. Very much, however, was due to Miss Bianca, whose perfect manners and unfailing savoir-faire would have soothed the tempers of tigers.

  Which was all the more creditable to her, since she in one respect was having the worst of things. By day, the three mice could support each other’s spirits; Bernard and Nils, sharing a room, could talk to each other at night too. Poor Miss Bianca was all alone.

  Quite often she got up, and crept into the parlor, just to hear the sound of their voices. Although the things they talked about weren’t particularly cheerful!

  “I wouldn’t last a week,” she heard Nils mutter sleepily. “Not in a dungeon I wouldn’t . . .”

  “I’d last a month,” mumbled Bernard. “I’d last two months . . .”

  Nils evidently woke up.

  “Bet you you wouldn’t!”

  Bernard woke up too.

  “Bet you I would!”

  “Bet you a double six of dominoes,” said Nils, “you’d be dead and gone, and carried out feet first, inside ONE WEEK.”

  “And I bet you,” countered Bernard, “two potatoes and a walnut, that I’d still be there to shout ‘Up the Norwegians!’ as they shoveled you under — having still ONE MONTH AND THREE WEEKS TO GO.”

  “I take you,” said Nils.

  “And I take you,” said Bernard.

  There was a slight pause.

  “Who’s to hold the stakes?”

  “Miss Bianca.”

  Miss Bianca shuddered. — But in the morning, neither Nils nor Bernard said a word about it, and with a mixture of relief and irritation she concluded that they had just been playing a masculine game, like golf.

  She still envied them. And how she envied them even more, when the thunderstorms began!

  Each year, it seemed, as winter approached, such unnatural storms buffeted the Castle unceasingly. All too soon the pattern became familiar: first an ominous stillness in the air, as though presaging snow — not a sound in all the Castle save the coughing of the jailers — then a little stir of wind, the storm’s outrider, then the first lightning flash, and then — crash! — instead of snow the thunderbolts, banging like artillery fire against the Castle walls. From watchtower to dungeons the whole place shook; and Miss Bianca, in bed, put her head under her pillow. Or else she got up and sat in the parlor — and once at least met Bernard, coming to see if she was all right.

  “Are you all right, Miss Bianca?” asked Bernard anxiously.

  Miss Bianca pulled herself together.

  “Thunderstorms always have played havoc with my nerves!” she apologized. “Even under the Boy’s pillow, they used to set me quaking! — Actually I just came to see that the fire was out.”

  Bernard kicked at the hearth, and said yes it was, at least there was no danger from fire.

  “Then I’ll go back to bed,” said Miss Bianca bravely. She paused a moment, however, and heaved a little sigh. “Oh, Bernard,” she added wistfully, “how long ago it seems, that night we first met, in my beautiful, safe Porcelain Pagoda!”

  2.

  Indeed it seemed long; and indeed it was long — from full summer until almost midwinter. First there had been Miss Bianca’s air trip to Norway, then the long voyage back, then the wagon journey, and now nearly two months in the Black Castle. And without achieving anything! That was the hardest to bear of all. “If only something would happen!” they began to think . . .

  Something did.

  They had been in the Black Castle exactly two months and a day, when a most terrible event occurred.

  Bernard was sitting on the Ledge alone. Miss Bianca had one of her headaches, and since they never left her by herself, Nils was staying indoors too. It was his turn. Bernard would have been the one gladly, but in any situation of danger it is always best to keep strictly to rules. — Imagine his amazement, therefore, to wake from a light doze and see Nils coolly seated beside him!

  “Don’t worry,” said Nils easily. “Miss Bianca didn’t want me, so I thought I’d join you for a breath of air. She can, you know, be just a bit of a nuisance!”

  Bernard was so horrified, he nearly fell off the Ledge.

  “But suppose Mamelouk comes in?” he cried.

  “Even if he does —” began Nils.

  At that very moment, Mamelouk appeared inside.

  Bernard dashed towards the window — too late! In that very moment, an old sash cord irretrievably frayed, and down the window slammed.

  “Looks like we’ll have to take the long passage round,” said Nils, still unperturbed.

  “And what about Miss Bianca?” shouted Bernard. “Alone in there with Mamelouk?”

  “She’s only to keep safe in the hole,” said Nils reasonably. “Stands to reason, she won’t venture out —”

  Bernard caug
ht him by the scruff and shook him till his teeth rattled.

  “You idiot!” he shouted. “You irresponsible idiot! Not venture out! Don’t you know that Miss Bianca isn’t afraid of cats?”

  They stared at each other in horror.

  “Come quick!” gasped Bernard. “We can do nothing here — and I couldn’t bear,” he sobbed, “to watch!”

  9.

  Cat-and-Mouse

  HIS fears were only too well founded. Scarcely had he and Nils rushed from the Ledge, when Miss Bianca innocently walked forth into the very jaws of death!

  And not because she didn’t see Mamelouk; because she did see him.

  She was feeling bored. Her headache was better, and when she looked for Nils he had gone. Miss Bianca didn’t particularly mind, she wasn’t frightened, but all by herself she felt bored. If only she’d a book to read! — but she hadn’t. The Head Jailer was practically illiterate, there was nothing to be borrowed from his shelves save one dog-eared pamphlet entitled Cut Your Own Corns, which Miss Bianca would have sooner died — O ominous phrase! — than look at.

  She was bored, she had nothing to read: thus when a shadow fell across the entrance to the hole, she naturally put her head out.

  About three feet away, big and black as a thundercloud, crouched Mamelouk.

  This was the first time Miss Bianca had ever seen him — Nils and Bernard being so careful to keep her out of his way — but she recognized him immediately from their description, and thought it a very unfair one. Indeed Mamelouk, except for color, was so like her old Persian friend, Miss Bianca was prejudiced in his favor at once. Nils and Bernard said he had a horrible leer; Miss Bianca thought it a rather nice smile. — It will be remembered, also, that though Mamelouk’s tormenting of the prisoners, by leaping into their dungeons, was down in the Minutes in black and white, Miss Bianca had never been able to credit it, such was her misguided trust in feline chivalry. So she now looked out with no more than pleasurable excitement!