Frank opened the lemonade bottle and then glanced at the island. The female spy was packing a holdall. Her companion was staggering down the beach towards the place where Flanagan’s old boat lay high and dry on her side. He carried the packing case on his shoulder. Priscilla, tilting her head back, drank the lemonade from its bottle in large gulps. Then she opened the parcel of biscuits and munched a macaroon contentedly.
“It’s dashed annoying,” said Frank, “having to sit here and watch them escape, just as we had them cornered too.”
The inside of his lip hurt him a good deal while he ate. He wanted to grumble about something; but the fear of being compared to Sylvia Courtney kept him silent about the broken glass. Priscilla took another macaroon.
“We were doing Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ last term,” she said, “in English literature, and there’s a long tract of it called ‘Despondency Corrected.’ I wish I had it here now. It’s just what would do you good.”
Frank nibbled a biscuit with his eyes on the island. The man was carrying down a bundle of rugs to the boat. The woman followed him with one of the tents. Then they went back together to their camping ground and collected a number of small objects which were scattered about. Frank became desperate.
“Priscilla,” he said, “don’t you think you could wade across to that island. There’s only about an inch and a half of water round the boat now. I’d do it myself if it wasn’t for this infernal ankle. I simply can’t walk.”
“I could,” said Priscilla, “and what’s more, I would, only that there’s a deep channel between us and them. If I’d jibed that time instead of trying to stay her I should have kept in the channel and not run on to this bank. I knew it was here all right, but I forgot it just at the moment. That’s the worst of moments. They simply make one forget things, however hard one tries not to. I daresay you’ve noticed that.”
Frank had as a matter of fact noticed this peculiarity of moments very often. It had turned up in the course of his experience both on cricket and football fields. But it seemed to him that the consequences of being entrapped by it were much more serious in sailing boats than elsewhere. He was so far from blaming Priscilla for the plight of the Tortoise that he felt very grateful to her for not blaming him. His moment had come when she gave him the order about the centreboard. Then not only memory, but all power of coherent thought had deserted him.
“Let’s have at the Californian peaches,” said Priscilla. “But we’d better eat a bit slower now that the first pangs of hunger are allayed. If we hurry up too much we’ll have no food left soon and we have absolutely nothing else to do except to eat until five o’clock this afternoon. We can’t expect to get off before that.”
The spies packed their belongings into Flanagan’s old boat and then set to work to push her down to the sea. Frank, with the point of the opener driven through the top of the peach tin, paused to watch them. They shoved and pulled vainly. The boat remained where she was. Frank began to hope that they, too, might have to wait for the rising tide. They sat down on a large stone and consulted together. Then they took everything out of the boat and tried pushing and pulling her again. Her weight was still too great for them. They moved her forward in short jerks, but each time they moved her the keel at her stern buried itself deeper in the soft mud. They sat down, evidently somewhat exhausted, and had another consultation. Then the man got the oars and laid them out as rollers. He lifted the boat’s stern on to the first of them.