"The Willows" is a
novella by English author Algernon Blackwood, originally published as part of
his 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories. It is one of Blackwood's
best known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Horror
author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in
English literature.
"The Willows" is an example of early
modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.
After leaving Vienna, and long
before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness
and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main
channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a
vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in
a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it
may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.
In high flood this great acreage
of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water,
but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing
their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering
beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid
trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying
on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as
grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that
the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and
falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water,
green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then
silvery white as their underside turns to the sun.
Happy to slip beyond the control
of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate
network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down
which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and
foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and
willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size
and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time
obliterates their very existence.
Properly speaking, this
fascinating part of the river's life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and
we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board, reached it
on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the
sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping
Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the
blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below
Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then
swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman
Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on
a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and
the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.
Racing along at twelve kilometers
an hour soon took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters—sure sign of
flood—sent us aground on many a shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many
a sudden belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszony)
showed against the sky; and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew
at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the
Fliegende Brucke ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on
yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp-land
beyond—the land of the willows.
The change came suddenly, as when
a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts
without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of
desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor
fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and
civilization within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind,
the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds,
and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed
laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special
kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come
without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a
kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with
everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination
to discover them.
Though still early in the
afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel
weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable camping-ground for the
night. But the bewildering character of the islands made landing difficult; the
swirling flood carried us in shore and then swept us out again; the willow
branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many
a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great
sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a
cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot
yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun,
a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow
bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their
thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.
"What a river!" I said
to my companion, thinking of all the way we had traveled from the source in the
Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to wade and push in the upper
shallows at the beginning of June.
"Won't stand much nonsense
now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up
the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.
I lay by his side, happy and
peaceful in the bath of the elements—water, wind, sand, and the great fire of
the sun—thinking of the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch
before us to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and
charming traveling companion as my friend, the Swede.
We had made many similar journeys
together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from
the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the
world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it
began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps,
unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some
living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it
became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being,
through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty
shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and
well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great
Personage.
How, indeed, could it be
otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it
singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering that odd sibilant note
peculiar to itself and said to be caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles
along its bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its
gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm;
the roar of its shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below
all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the
banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And
how its laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its
growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings,
its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when
there were hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed
through the little towns, far too important to laugh; and all these faint,
sweet whisperings when the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured
down upon it till the steam rose.
It was full of tricks, too, in
its early life before the great world knew it. There were places in the upper
reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny
had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground,
to appear again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new
river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we
had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.
And a chief pleasure, in those
early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just
before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to
refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the
dividing line well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly
declining to recognize the newcomer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this
particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power impossible
to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that there is hardly
room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved
this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great
waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during
the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the
time of its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a
lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.
This was many days back, of
course, and since then we had come to know other aspects of the great creature,
and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so slowly under
the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches were
water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army
of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely
too, lest they be discovered.
Much, too, we forgave her because
of her friendliness to the birds and animals that haunted the shores.
Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black palings;
grey crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of
shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh
birds of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant
cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing
a deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of
the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or looked
straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner
and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere haunted the
banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly that
it was impossible to see how they managed it.
But now, after leaving Pressburg,
everything changed a little, and the Danube became more serious. It ceased
trifling. It was half-way to the Black Sea, within seeming distance almost of
other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It
became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke
out into three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers
farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended
to be followed.
"If you take a side
channel," said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop while
buying provisions, "you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides,
forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are
no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too,
is still rising, and this wind will increase."
The rising river did not alarm us
in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a sudden subsidence
of the waters might be serious, and we had consequently laid in an extra stock
of provisions. For the rest, the officer's prophecy held true, and the wind,
blowing down a perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the
dignity of a westerly gale.
It was earlier than usual when we
camped, for the sun was a good hour or two from the horizon, and leaving my
friend still asleep on the hot sand, I wandered about in desultory examination
of our hotel. The island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere
sandy bank standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The
far end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the
tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in
shape, with the apex up stream.
I stood there for several
minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood bearing down with a shouting
roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it bodily away, and
then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to
shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes
as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island
itself actually moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river
descending upon me; it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white
with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.
The rest of the island was too
thickly grown with willows to make walking pleasant, but I made the tour,
nevertheless. From the lower end the light, of course, changed, and the river
looked dark and angry. Only the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked
with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them
from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the
islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed
about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to
drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river
up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there
together in such overpowering numbers.
Altogether it was an impressive
scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long
and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me.
Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained,
a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.
A rising river, perhaps, always
suggests something of the ominous; many of the little islands I saw before me
would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering
flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay
deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had
it directly to do with the power of the driving wind—this shouting hurricane
that might almost carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them
like so much chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for
nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of
sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel
emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of
distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and
deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my
realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the
elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with it too—a
vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental
forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For
here, indeed, they were gigantically at play together, and the sight appealed
to the imagination.
But my emotion, so far as I could
understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes,
to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there,
swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to
suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky,
watching, waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows
connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously
somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to
represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not
altogether friendly to us.
Great revelations of nature, of
course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to
moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of
great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point
or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience.
They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to
exalt.
With this multitude of willows,
however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from
them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched
somewhere by a vague terror. Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker
about me as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke
in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the
borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we
were not wanted or invited to remain—where we ran grave risks perhaps!
The feeling, however, though it
refused to yield its meaning entirely to analysis, did not at the time trouble
me by passing into menace. Yet it never left me quite, even during the very
practical business of putting up the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a
fire for the stew-pot. It remained, just enough to bother and perplex, and to
rob a most delightful camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my
companion, however, I said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid of
imagination. In the first place, I could never have explained to him what I
meant, and in the second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if I had.
There was a slight depression in
the center of the island, and here we pitched the tent. The surrounding willows
broke the wind a bit.
"A poor camp," observed
the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent stood upright, "no stones
and precious little firewood. I'm for moving on early tomorrow—eh? This sand
won't hold anything."
But the experience of a
collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many devices, and we made the cozy
gipsy house as safe as possible, and then set about collecting a store of wood
to last till bed-time. Willow bushes drop no branches, and driftwood was our only
source of supply. We hunted the shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks
were crumbling as the rising flood tore at them and carried away great portions
with a splash and a gurgle.
"The island's much smaller
than when we landed," said the accurate Swede. "It won't last long at
this rate. We'd better drag the canoe close to the tent, and be ready to start
at a moment's notice. I shall sleep in my clothes."
He was a little distance off,
climbing along the bank, and I heard his rather jolly laugh as he spoke.
"By Jove!" I heard him
call, a moment later, and turned to see what had caused his exclamation. But
for the moment he was hidden by the willows, and I could not find him.
"What in the world's
this?" I heard him cry again, and this time his voice had become serious.
I ran up quickly and joined him
on the bank. He was looking over the river, pointing at something in the water.
"Good heavens, it's a man's
body!" he cried excitedly. "Look!"
A black thing, turning over and
over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly past. It kept disappearing and coming
up to the surface again. It was about twenty feet from the shore, and just as
it was opposite to where we stood it lurched round and looked straight at us.
We saw its eyes reflecting the sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body
turned over. Then it gave a swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a
flash.
"An otter, by gad!" we
exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.
It was an otter, alive, and out
on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like the body of a drowned man turning
helplessly in the current. Far below it came to the surface once again, and we
saw its black skin, wet and shining in the sunlight.
Then, too, just as we turned
back, our arms full of driftwood, another thing happened to recall us to the
river bank. This time it really was a man, and what was more, a man in a boat.
Now a small boat on the Danube was an unusual sight at any time, but here in
this deserted region, and at flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute
a real event. We stood and stared.
Whether it was due to the
slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the wonderfully illumined water, I
cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found it difficult to focus my sight
properly upon the flying apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing
upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being
carried down the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking
across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light too
uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me
that he was gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the
water to us shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no
single word was audible. There was something curious about the whole
appearance—man, boat, signs, voice—that made an impression on me out of all
proportion to its cause.
"He's crossing
himself!" I cried. "Look, he's making the sign of the
Cross!"
"I believe you're
right," the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand and watching the
man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment, melting away down there
into the sea of willows where the sun caught them in the bend of the river and
turned them into a great crimson wall of beauty. Mist, too, had begun to ruse,
so that the air was hazy.
"But what in the world is he
doing at nightfall on this flooded river?" I said, half to myself.
"Where is he going at such a time, and what did he mean by his signs and
shouting? D'you think he wished to warn us about something?"
"He saw our smoke, and
thought we were spirits probably," laughed my companion. "These
Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish; you remember the shopwoman at
Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed here because it belonged to some
sort of beings outside man's world! I suppose they believe in fairies and
elementals, possibly demons, too. That peasant in the boat saw people on the
islands for the first time in his life," he added, after a slight pause, "and
it scared him, that's all."
The Swede's tone of voice was not
convincing, and his manner lacked something that was usually there. I noted the
change instantly while he talked, though without being able to label it
precisely.
"If they had enough
imagination," I laughed loudly—I remember trying to make as much noise as
I could—"they might well people a place like this with the old gods of
antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all this region more or less with their
shrines and sacred groves and elemental deities."
The subject dropped and we
returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was not given to imaginative
conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I remember feeling distinctly glad
that he was not imaginative; his stolid, practical nature suddenly seemed to me
welcome and comforting. It was an admirable temperament, I felt; he could steer
down rapids like a red Indian, shoot dangerous bridges and whirlpools better
than any white man I ever saw in a canoe. He was a grand fellow for an
adventurous trip, a tower of strength when untoward things happened. I looked
at his strong face and light curly hair as he staggered along under his pile of
driftwood (twice the size of mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief.
Yes, I was distinctly glad just then that the Swede was—what he was, and that
he never made remarks that suggested more than they said.
"The river's still rising,
though," he added, as if following out some thoughts of his own, and
dropping his load with a gasp. "This island will be under water in two
days if it goes on."
"I wish the wind would go
down," I said. "I don't care a fig for the river."
The flood, indeed, had no terrors
for us; we could get off at ten minutes' notice, and the more water the better
we liked it. It meant an increasing current and the obliteration of the
treacherous shingle-beds that so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our
canoe.
Contrary to our expectations, the
wind did not go down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the darkness,
howling overhead and shaking the willows round us like straws. Curious sounds
accompanied it sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon
the water and the island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think
of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through
space.
But the sky kept wholly clear of
clouds, and soon after supper the full moon rose up in the east and covered the
river and the plain of shouting willows with a light like the day.
We lay on the sandy patch beside
the fire, smoking, listening to the noises of the night round us, and talking
happily of the journey we had already made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay
spread in the door of the tent, but the high wind made it hard to study, and
presently we lowered the curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight
was enough to smoke and see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about
overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and hissed, and
from time to time a heavy splash announced the falling away of further portions
of the bank.
Our talk, I noticed, had to do
with the faraway scenes and incidents of our first camps in the Black Forest,
or of other subjects altogether remote from the present setting, for neither of
us spoke of the actual moment more than was necessary—almost as though we had
agreed tacitly to avoid discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the
otter nor the boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention,
though ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater part of
the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a place.
The scarcity of wood made it a
business to keep the fire going, for the wind, that drove the smoke in our
faces wherever we sat, helped at the same time to make a forced draught. We
took it in turn to make some foraging expeditions into the darkness, and the
quantity the Swede brought back always made me feel that he took an absurdly
long time finding it; for the fact was I did not care much about being left
alone, and yet it always seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or
scramble along the slippery banks in the moonlight. The long day's battle with
wind and water—such wind and such water!—had tired us both, and an early bed
was the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for the tent. We lay
there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion, peering about us into
the dense willow bushes, and listening to the thunder of wind and river. The loneliness
of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after
a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering
would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice,
always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it
something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in
some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.
The eeriness of this lonely
island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by
hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost
unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on
the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only
and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even
to make use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me
as I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the
stars. For the last time I rose to get firewood.
"When this has burnt
up," I said firmly, "I shall turn in," and my companion watched
me lazily as I moved off into the surrounding shadows.
For an unimaginative man I
thought he seemed unusually receptive that night, unusually open to suggestion
of things other than sensory. He too was touched by the beauty and loneliness
of the place. I was not altogether pleased, I remember, to recognize this
slight change in him, and instead of immediately collecting sticks, I made my
way to the far point of the island where the moonlight on plain and river could
be seen to better advantage. The desire to be alone had come suddenly upon me;
my former dread returned in force; there was a vague feeling in me I wished to
face and probe to the bottom.
When I reached the point of sand
jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a
positive shock. No mere "scenery" could have produced such an effect.
There was something more here, something to alarm.
I gazed across the waste of wild
waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the
tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this
sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went
on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying
out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged
to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien
to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me
think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution
altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I
watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads,
twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their
own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own
keen sense of the horrible.
There they stood in the
moonlight, like a vast army surrounding our camp, shaking their innumerable
silver spears defiantly, formed all ready for an attack.
The psychology of places, for
some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps
have their "note" either of welcome or rejection. At first it may not
always be apparent, because the busy preparations of tent and cooking prevent,
but with the first pause—after supper usually—it comes and announces itself.
And the note of this willow-camp now became unmistakably plain to me; we were
interlopers, trespassers; we were not welcomed. The sense of unfamiliarity grew
upon me as I stood there watching. We touched the frontier of a region where
our presence was resented. For a night's lodging we might perhaps be tolerated;
but for a prolonged and inquisitive stay—No! by all the gods of the trees and
wilderness, no! We were the first human influences upon this island, and we
were not wanted. The willows were against us.
Strange thoughts like these,
bizarre fancies, borne I know not whence, found lodgment in my mind as I stood
listening. What, I thought, if, after all, these crouching willows proved to be
alive; if suddenly they should rise up, like a swarm of living creatures,
marshaled by the gods whose territory we had invaded, sweep towards us off the
vast swamps, booming overhead in the night—and then settle down! As I looked it
was so easy to imagine they actually moved, crept nearer, retreated a little,
huddled together in masses, hostile, waiting for the great wind that should
finally start them a-running. I could have sworn their aspect changed a little,
and their ranks deepened and pressed more closely together.
The melancholy shrill cry of a
night-bird sounded overhead, and suddenly I nearly lost my balance as the piece
of bank I stood upon fell with a great splash into the river, undermined by the
flood. I stepped back just in time, and went on hunting for firewood again,
half laughing at the odd fancies that crowded so thickly into my mind and cast
their spell upon me. I recalled the Swede's remark about moving on next day,
and I was just thinking that I fully agreed with him, when I turned with a
start and saw the subject of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me. He
was quite close. The roar of the elements had covered his approach.
II
"You've been gone so
long," he shouted above the wind, "I thought something must have
happened to you."
But there was that in his tone,
and a certain look in his face as well, that conveyed to me more than his usual
words, and in a flash I understood the real reason for his coming. It was
because the spell of the place had entered his soul too, and he did not like
being alone.
"River still rising,"
he cried, pointing to the flood in the moonlight, "and the wind's simply
awful."
He always said the same things,
but it was the cry for companionship that gave the real importance to his
words.
"Lucky," I cried back,
"our tent's in the hollow. I think it'll hold all right." I added
something about the difficulty of finding wood, in order to explain my absence,
but the wind caught my words and flung them across the river, so that he did
not hear, but just looked at me through the branches, nodding his head.
"Lucky if we get away
without disaster!" he shouted, or words to that effect; and I remember
feeling half angry with him for putting the thought into words, for it was
exactly what I felt myself. There was disaster impending somewhere, and the
sense of presentiment lay unpleasantly upon me.
We went back to the fire and made
a final blaze, poking it up with our feet. We took a last look round. But for
the wind the heat would have been unpleasant. I put this thought into words,
and I remember my friend's reply struck me oddly: that he would rather have the
heat, the ordinary July weather, than this "diabolical wind."
Everything was snug for the
night; the canoe lying turned over beside the tent, with both yellow paddles
beneath her; the provision sack hanging from a willow-stem, and the washed-up
dishes removed to a safe distance from the fire, all ready for the morning
meal.
We smothered the embers of the
fire with sand, and then turned in. The flap of the tent door was up, and I saw
the branches and the stars and the white moonlight. The shaking willows and the
heavy buffetings of the wind against our taut little house were the last things
I remembered as sleep came down and covered all with its soft and delicious
forgetfulness.
Suddenly I found myself lying
awake, peering from my sandy mattress through the door of the tent. I looked at
my watch pinned against the canvas, and saw by the bright moonlight that it was
past twelve o'clock—the threshold of a new day—and I had therefore slept a
couple of hours. The Swede was asleep still beside me; the wind howled as
before; something plucked at my heart and made me feel afraid. There was a
sense of disturbance in my immediate neighborhood.
I sat up quickly and looked out.
The trees were swaying violently to and fro as the gusts smote them, but our
little bit of green canvas lay snugly safe in the hollow, for the wind passed
over it without meeting enough resistance to make it vicious. The feeling of
disquietude did not pass, however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see
if our belongings were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion.
A curious excitement was on me.
I was half-way out, kneeling on
all fours, when my eye first took in that the tops of the bushes opposite, with
their moving tracery of leaves, made shapes against the sky. I sat back on my
haunches and stared. It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and
slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows,
and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about
these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly
beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.
My first instinct was to waken my
companion, that he too might see them, but something made me hesitate—the
sudden realization, probably, that I should not welcome corroboration; and
meanwhile I crouched there staring in amazement with smarting eyes. I was wide
awake. I remember saying to myself that I was not dreaming.
They first became properly
visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes—immense,
bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches.
I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they
were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance
proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the
moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted
independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky,
vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were
interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and
huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that
bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed
trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves
almost—rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could
see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a
hue of dull bronze upon their skins.
I stared, trying to force every
atom of vision from my eyes. For a long time I thought they must every moment
disappear and resolve themselves into the movements of the branches and prove
to be an optical illusion. I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when
all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.
For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real
and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and
the biologist would insist upon.
Far from feeling fear, I was
possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed
to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval
region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was
we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with
stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been
acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history. But,
before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go
farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the
ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and
the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I
knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the
figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great
spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep
emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship—absolutely
worship.
Perhaps in another minute I might
have done so, when a gust of wind swept against me with such force that it blew
me sideways, and I nearly stumbled and fell. It seemed to shake the dream
violently out of me. At least it gave me another point of view somehow. The
figures still remained, still ascended into heaven from the heart of the night,
but my reason at last began to assert itself. It must be a subjective
experience, I argued—none the less real for that, but still subjective. The
moonlight and the branches combined to work out these pictures upon the mirror
of my imagination, and for some reason I projected them outwards and made them
appear objective. I knew this must be the case, of course. I took courage, and
began to move forward across the open patches of sand. By Jove, though, was it
all hallucination? Was it merely subjective? Did not my reason argue in the old
futile way from the little standard of the known?
I only know that great column of
figures ascended darkly into the sky for what seemed a very long period of
time, and with a very complete measure of reality as most men are accustomed to
gauge reality. Then suddenly they were gone!
And, once they were gone and the
immediate wonder of their great presence had passed, fear came down upon me
with a cold rush. The esoteric meaning of this lonely and haunted region
suddenly flamed up within me, and I began to tremble dreadfully. I took a quick
look round—a look of horror that came near to panic—calculating vainly ways of
escape; and then, realizing how helpless I was to achieve anything really
effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy
mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows
in the moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the
blankets to deaden the sound of the terrifying wind.
As though further to convince me
that I had not been dreaming, I remember that it was a long time before I fell
again into a troubled and restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of
me slept, and underneath there was something that never quite lost
consciousness, but lay alert and on the watch.
But this second time I jumped up
with a genuine start of terror. It was neither the wind nor the river that woke
me, but the slow approach of something that caused the sleeping portion of me
to grow smaller and smaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found
myself sitting bolt upright—listening.
Outside there was a sound of multitudinous
little patterings. They had been coming, I was aware, for a long time, and in
my sleep they had first become audible. I sat there nervously wide awake as
though I had not slept at all. It seemed to me that my breathing came with
difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my body. In
spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely
was pressing steadily against the sides of the tent and weighing down upon it
from above. Was it the body of the wind? Was this the pattering rain, the
dripping of the leaves? The spray blown from the river by the wind and
gathering in big drops? I thought quickly of a dozen things.
Then suddenly the explanation
leaped into my mind: a bough from the poplar, the only large tree on the
island, had fallen with the wind. Still half caught by the other branches, it
would fall with the next gust and crush us, and meanwhile its leaves brushed
and tapped upon the tight canvas surface of the tent. I raised a loose flap and
rushed out, calling to the Swede to follow.
But when I got out and stood
upright I saw that the tent was free. There was no hanging bough; there was no
rain or spray; nothing approached.
A cold, grey light filtered down
through the bushes and lay on the faintly gleaming sand. Stars still crowded
the sky directly overhead, and the wind howled magnificently, but the fire no
longer gave out any glow, and I saw the east reddening in streaks through the
trees. Several hours must have passed since I stood there before watching the
ascending figures, and the memory of it now came back to me horribly, like an
evil dream. Oh, how tired it made me feel, that ceaseless raging wind! Yet,
though the deep lassitude of a sleepless night was on me, my nerves were
tingling with the activity of an equally tireless apprehension, and all idea of
repose was out of the question. The river I saw had risen further. Its thunder
filled the air, and a fine spray made itself felt through my thin sleeping
shirt.
Yet nowhere did I discover the
slightest evidence of anything to cause alarm. This deep, prolonged disturbance
in my heart remained wholly unaccounted for.
My companion had not stirred when
I called him, and there was no need to waken him now. I looked about me
carefully, noting everything; the turned-over canoe; the yellow paddles—two of
them, I'm certain; the provision sack and the extra lantern hanging together
from the tree; and, crowding everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows,
those endless, shaking willows. A bird uttered its morning cry, and a string of
duck passed with whirring flight overhead in the twilight. The sand whirled,
dry and stinging, about my bare feet in the wind.
I walked round the tent and then
went out a little way into the bush, so that I could see across the river to
the farther landscape, and the same profound yet indefinable emotion of
distress seized upon me again as I saw the interminable sea of bushes
stretching to the horizon, looking ghostly and unreal in the wan light of dawn.
I walked softly here and there, still puzzling over that odd sound of infinite
pattering, and of that pressure upon the tent that had wakened me. It must have
been the wind, I reflected—the wind bearing upon the loose, hot sand, driving
the dry particles smartly against the taut canvas—the wind dropping heavily
upon our fragile roof.
Yet all the time my nervousness
and malaise increased appreciably.
I crossed over to the farther
shore and noted how the coast-line had altered in the night, and what masses of
sand the river had torn away. I dipped my hands and feet into the cool current,
and bathed my forehead. Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the
exquisite freshness of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath
the very bushes where I had seen the column of figures rising into the air, and
midway among the clumps I suddenly found myself overtaken by a sense of vast
terror. From the shadows a large figure went swiftly by. Someone passed me, as
sure as ever man did….
It was a great staggering blow
from the wind that helped me forward again, and once out in the more open
space, the sense of terror diminished strangely. The winds were about and
walking, I remember saying to myself, for the winds often move like great
presences under the trees. And altogether the fear that hovered about me was
such an unknown and immense kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt
before, that it woke a sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to
counteract its worst effects; and when I reached a high point in the middle of
the island from which I could see the wide stretch of river, crimson in the
sunrise, the whole magical beauty of it all was so overpowering that a sort of
wild yearning woke in me and almost brought a cry up into the throat.
But this cry found no expression,
for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted
our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out
at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at
all.
For a change, I thought, had
somehow come about in the arrangement of the landscape. It was not that my
point of vantage gave me a different view, but that an alteration had apparently
been effected in the relation of the tent to the willows, and of the willows to
the tent. Surely the bushes now crowded much closer—unnecessarily, unpleasantly
close. They had moved nearer.
Creeping with silent feet over
the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly nearer by soft, unhurried movements,
the willows had come closer during the night. But had the wind moved them, or
had they moved of themselves? I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings
and the pressure upon the tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in
terror. I swayed for a moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep
my upright position on the sandy hillock. There was a suggestion here of
personal agency, of deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it
terrified me into a sort of rigidity.
Then the reaction followed
quickly. The idea was so bizarre, so absurd, that I felt inclined to laugh. But
the laughter came no more readily than the cry, for the knowledge that my mind
was so receptive to such dangerous imaginings brought the additional terror
that it was through our minds and not through our physical bodies that the
attack would come, and was coming.
The wind buffeted me about, and,
very quickly it seemed, the sun came up over the horizon, for it was after four
o'clock, and I must have stood on that little pinnacle of sand longer than I
knew, afraid to come down to close quarters with the willows. I returned
quietly, creepily, to the tent, first taking another exhaustive look round
and—yes, I confess it—making a few measurements. I paced out on the warm sand
the distances between the willows and the tent, making a note of the shortest
distance particularly.
I crawled stealthily into my
blankets. My companion, to all appearances, still slept soundly, and I was glad
that this was so. Provided my experiences were not corroborated, I could find
strength somehow to deny them, perhaps. With the daylight I could persuade
myself that it was all a subjective hallucination, a fantasy of the night, a
projection of the excited imagination.
Nothing further came in to
disturb me, and I fell asleep almost at once, utterly exhausted, yet still in
dread of hearing again that weird sound of multitudinous pattering, or of
feeling the pressure upon my heart that had made it difficult to breathe.
The sun was high in the heavens
when my companion woke me from a heavy sleep and announced that the porridge
was cooked and there was just time to bathe. The grateful smell of frizzling
bacon entered the tent door.
"River still rising,"
he said, "and several islands out in mid-stream have disappeared
altogether. Our own island's much smaller."
"Any wood left?" I
asked sleepily.
"The wood and the island
will finish tomorrow in a dead heat," he laughed, "but there's enough
to last us till then."
I plunged in from the point of
the island, which had indeed altered a lot in size and shape during the night,
and was swept down in a moment to the landing-place opposite the tent. The
water was icy, and the banks flew by like the country from an express train.
Bathing under such conditions was an exhilarating operation, and the terror of
the night seemed cleansed out of me by a process of evaporation in the brain.
The sun was blazing hot; not a cloud showed itself anywhere; the wind, however,
had not abated one little jot.
Quite suddenly then the implied
meaning of the Swede's words flashed across me, showing that he no longer
wished to leave post-haste, and had changed his mind. "Enough to last till
tomorrow"—he assumed we should stay on the island another night. It struck
me as odd. The night before he was so positive the other way. How had the
change come about?
Great crumblings of the banks
occurred at breakfast, with heavy splashings and clouds of spray which the wind
brought into our frying-pan, and my fellow-traveler talked incessantly about
the difficulty the Vienna-Pesth steamers must have to find the channel in
flood. But the state of his mind interested and impressed me far more than the
state of the river or the difficulties of the steamers. He had changed somehow
since the evening before. His manner was different—a trifle excited, a trifle
shy, with a sort of suspicion about his voice and gestures. I hardly know how
to describe it now in cold blood, but at the time I remember being quite
certain of one thing—that he had become frightened?
He ate very little breakfast, and
for once omitted to smoke his pipe. He had the map spread open beside him, and
kept studying its markings.
"We'd better get off sharp
in an hour," I said presently, feeling for an opening that must bring him
indirectly to a partial confession at any rate. And his answer puzzled me
uncomfortably: "Rather! If they'll let us."
"Who'll let us? The
elements?" I asked quickly, with affected indifference.
"The powers of this awful
place, whoever they are," he replied, keeping his eyes on the map.
"The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world."
"The elements are always the
true immortals," I replied, laughing as naturally as I could manage, yet
knowing quite well that my face reflected my true feelings when he looked up
gravely at me and spoke across the smoke:
"We shall be fortunate if we
get away without further disaster."
This was exactly what I had
dreaded, and I screwed myself up to the point of the direct question. It was
like agreeing to allow the dentist to extract the tooth; it had to come anyhow
in the long run, and the rest was all pretence.
"Further disaster! Why,
what's happened?"
"For one thing—the steering
paddle's gone," he said quietly.
"The steering paddle
gone!" I repeated, greatly excited, for this was our rudder, and the
Danube in flood without a rudder was suicide. "But what—"
"And there's a tear in the
bottom of the canoe," he added, with a genuine little tremor in his voice.
I continued staring at him, able
only to repeat the words in his face somewhat foolishly. There, in the heat of
the sun, and on this burning sand, I was aware of a freezing atmosphere
descending round us. I got up to follow him, for he merely nodded his head
gravely and led the way towards the tent a few yards on the other side of the
fireplace. The canoe still lay there as I had last seen her in the night, ribs
uppermost, the paddles, or rather, the paddle, on the sand beside her.
"There's only one," he
said, stooping to pick it up. "And here's the rent in the
base-board."
It was on the tip of my tongue to
tell him that I had clearly noticed two paddles a few hours before, but a
second impulse made me think better of it, and I said nothing. I approached to
see.
There was a long, finely made
tear in the bottom of the canoe where a little slither of wood had been neatly
taken clean out; it looked as if the tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten
down her length, and investigation showed that the hole went through. Had we
launched out in her without observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At
first the water would have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but
once out in mid-stream the water must have poured in, and the canoe, never more
than two inches above the surface, would have filled and sunk very rapidly.
"There, you see an attempt
to prepare a victim for the sacrifice," I heard him saying, more to
himself than to me, "two victims rather," he added as he bent over
and ran his fingers along the slit.
I began to whistle—a thing I
always do unconsciously when utterly nonplussed—and purposely paid no attention
to his words. I was determined to consider them foolish.
"It wasn't there last
night," he said presently, straightening up from his examination and
looking anywhere but at me.
"We must have scratched her
in landing, of course," I stopped whistling to say. "The stones are
very sharp."
I stopped abruptly, for at that
moment he turned round and met my eye squarely. I knew just as well as he did
how impossible my explanation was. There were no stones, to begin with.
"And then there's this to
explain too," he added quietly, handing me the paddle and pointing to the
blade.
A new and curious emotion spread
freezingly over me as I took and examined it. The blade was scraped down all
over, beautifully scraped, as though someone had sand-papered it with care,
making it so thin that the first vigorous stroke must have snapped it off at the
elbow.
"One of us walked in his
sleep and did this thing," I said feebly, "or—or it has been filed by
the constant stream of sand particles blown against it by the wind,
perhaps."
"Ah," said the Swede,
turning away, laughing a little, "you can explain everything."
"The same wind that caught
the steering paddle and flung it so near the bank that it fell in with the next
lump that crumbled," I called out after him, absolutely determined to find
an explanation for everything he showed me.
"I see," he shouted
back, turning his head to look at me before disappearing among the willow
bushes.
Once alone with these perplexing
evidences of personal agency, I think my first thoughts took the form of
"One of us must have done this thing, and it certainly was not I."
But my second thought decided how impossible it was to suppose, under all the
circumstances, that either of us had done it. That my companion, the trusted
friend of a dozen similar expeditions, could have knowingly had a hand in it,
was a suggestion not to be entertained for a moment. Equally absurd seemed the
explanation that this imperturbable and densely practical nature had suddenly
become insane and was busied with insane purposes.
Yet the fact remained that what
disturbed me most, and kept my fear actively alive even in this blaze of
sunshine and wild beauty, was the clear certainty that some curious alteration
had come about in his mind—that he was nervous, timid, suspicious, aware of
goings on he did not speak about, watching a series of secret and hitherto
unmentionable events—waiting, in a word, for a climax that he expected, and, I
thought, expected very soon. This grew up in my mind intuitively—I hardly knew
how.
I made a hurried examination of
the tent and its surroundings, but the measurements of the night remained the
same. There were deep hollows formed in the sand I now noticed for the first
time, basin-shaped and of various depths and sizes, varying from that of a tea-cup
to a large bowl. The wind, no doubt, was responsible for these miniature
craters, just as it was for lifting the paddle and tossing it towards the
water. The rent in the canoe was the only thing that seemed quite inexplicable;
and, after all, it was conceivable that a sharp point had caught it when we
landed. The examination I made of the shore did not assist this theory, but all
the same I clung to it with that diminishing portion of my intelligence which I
called my "reason." An explanation of some kind was an absolute
necessity, just as some working explanation of the universe is
necessary—however absurd—to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do
his duty in the world and face the problems of life. The simile seemed to me at
the time an exact parallel.
I at once set the pitch melting,
and presently the Swede joined me at the work, though under the best conditions
in the world the canoe could not be safe for traveling till the following day.
I drew his attention casually to the hollows in the sand.
"Yes," he said, "I
know. They're all over the island. But you can explain them, no doubt!"
"Wind, of course," I
answered without hesitation. "Have you never watched those little
whirlwinds in the street that twist and twirl everything into a circle? This
sand's loose enough to yield, that's all."
He made no reply, and we worked
on in silence for a bit. I watched him surreptitiously all the time, and I had
an idea he was watching me. He seemed, too, to be always listening attentively
to something I could not hear, or perhaps for something that he expected to
hear, for he kept turning about and staring into the bushes, and up into the
sky, and out across the water where it was visible through the openings among
the willows. Sometimes he even put his hand to his ear and held it there for
several minutes. He said nothing to me, however, about it, and I asked no
questions. And meanwhile, as he mended that torn canoe with the skill and
address of a red Indian, I was glad to notice his absorption in the work, for
there was a vague dread in my heart that he would speak of the changed aspect
of the willows. And, if he had noticed that, my imagination could no longer be
held a sufficient explanation of it.
III
At length, after a long pause, he
began to talk.
"Queer thing," he added
in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted to say something and get it
over. "Queer thing. I mean, about that otter last night."
I had expected something so
totally different that he caught me with surprise, and I looked up sharply.
"Shows how lonely this place
is. Otters are awfully shy things—"
"I don't mean that, of
course," he interrupted. "I mean—do you think—did you think it really
was an otter?"
"What else, in the name of
Heaven, what else?"
"You know, I saw it before
you did, and at first it seemed—so much bigger than an otter."
"The sunset as you looked
up-stream magnified it, or something," I replied.
He looked at me absently a
moment, as though his mind were busy with other thoughts.
"It had such extraordinary
yellow eyes," he went on half to himself.
"That was the sun too,"
I laughed, a trifle boisterously. "I suppose you'll wonder next if that
fellow in the boat—"
I suddenly decided not to finish
the sentence. He was in the act again of listening, turning his head to the
wind, and something in the expression of his face made me halt. The subject
dropped, and we went on with our caulking. Apparently he had not noticed my
unfinished sentence. Five minutes later, however, he looked at me across the
canoe, the smoking pitch in his hand, his face exceedingly grave.
"I did rather wonder, if you
want to know," he said slowly, "what that thing in the boat was. I
remember thinking at the time it was not a man. The whole business seemed to
rise quite suddenly out of the water."
I laughed again boisterously in
his face, but this time there was impatience, and a strain of anger too, in my
feeling.
"Look here now," I
cried, "this place is quite queer enough without going out of our way to
imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the man in it was an
ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast as they could lick.
And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the fool about it!"
He looked steadily at me with the
same grave expression. He was not in the least annoyed. I took courage from his
silence.
"And, for Heaven's
sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hear things, because it
only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but the river and this
cursed old thundering wind."
"You fool!" he answered
in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's just the way all victims
talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as I do!" he sneered with
scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The best thing you can do
is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt
at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet
it."
My little effort was over, and I
found nothing more to say, for I knew quite well his words were true, and that
I was the fool, not he. Up to a certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of
me easily, and I think I felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less
psychic, less sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and
half ignorant all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew
from the very beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the
point of his words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we
ourselves were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence
thenceforward, but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the
climax.
"But you're quite right
about one thing," he added, before the subject passed, "and that is
that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to think about it, because what
one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens."
That afternoon, while the canoe
dried and hardened, we spent trying to fish, testing the leak, collecting wood,
and watching the enormous flood of rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near
our shores sometimes, and we fished for them with long willow branches. The
island grew perceptibly smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps
and splashes. The weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and
then for the first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds
began to gather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.
This lessening of the wind came
as a great relief, for the incessant roaring, banging, and thundering had
irritated our nerves. Yet the silence that came about five o'clock with its
sudden cessation was in a manner quite as oppressive. The booming of the river
had everything in its own way then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more
musical than the wind noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held
many notes, rising, falling always beating out some sort of great elemental
tune; whereas the river's song lay between three notes at most—dull pedal
notes, that held a lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed
to me, in my then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.
It was extraordinary, too, how
the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlight took everything out of the landscape
that made for cheerfulness; and since this particular landscape had already
managed to convey the suggestion of something sinister, the change of course
was all the more unwelcome and noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening
outlook became distinctly more alarming, and I found myself more than once
calculating how soon after sunset the full moon would get up in the east, and
whether the gathering clouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the
little island.
With this general hush of the
wind—though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts—the river seemed to me
to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too,
kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves
when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common
objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they
stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these
bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre
grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful
and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was
malignant and hostile to us. The forces of the region drew nearer with the
coming of night. They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon
ourselves. For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my really
indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present themselves.
I had slept a good deal in the
early afternoon, and had thus recovered somewhat from the exhaustion of a
disturbed night, but this only served apparently to render me more susceptible
than before to the obsessing spell of the haunting. I fought against it,
laughing at my feelings as absurd and childish, with very obvious physiological
explanations, yet, in spite of every effort, they gained in strength upon me so
that I dreaded the night as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of
darkness.
The canoe we had carefully
covered with a waterproof sheet during the day, and the one remaining paddle
had been securely tied by the Swede to the base of a tree, lest the wind should
rob us of that too. From five o'clock onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot
and preparations for dinner, it being my turn to cook that night. We had
potatoes, onions, bits of bacon fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue
from former stews at the bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it
the result was most excellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with
sugar and a brew of strong tea with dried milk. A good pile of wood lay close
at hand, and the absence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily
watching me, dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving
useless advice—an admitted privilege of the off-duty man. He had been very
quiet all the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the
tent ropes, and fishing for driftwood while I slept. No more talk about
undesirable things had passed between us, and I think his only remarks had to
do with the gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was not fully
a third smaller than when we first landed.
The pot had just begun to bubble
when I heard his voice calling to me from the bank, where he had wandered away
without my noticing. I ran up.
"Come and listen," he
said, "and see what you make of it." He held his hand cupwise to his
ear, as so often before.
"Now do you hear anything?"
he asked, watching me curiously.
We stood there, listening
attentively together. At first I heard only the deep note of the water and the
hissings rising from its turbulent surface. The willows, for once, were
motionless and silent. Then a sound began to reach my ears faintly, a peculiar
sound—something like the humming of a distant gong. It seemed to come across to
us in the darkness from the waste of swamps and willows opposite. It was
repeated at regular intervals, but it was certainly neither the sound of a bell
nor the hooting of a distant steamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to
the sound of an immense gong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating
incessantly its muffled metallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly
struck. My heart quickened as I listened.
"I've heard it all
day," said my companion. "While you slept this afternoon it came all
round the island. I hunted it down, but could never get near enough to see—to
localize it correctly. Sometimes it was overhead, and sometimes it seemed under
the water. Once or twice, too, I could have sworn it was not outside at all,
but within myself—you know—the way a sound in the fourth dimension is supposed
to come."
I was too much puzzled to pay
much attention to his words. I listened carefully, striving to associate it
with any known familiar sound I could think of, but without success. It changed
in the direction, too, coming nearer, and then sinking utterly away into remote
distance. I cannot say that it was ominous in quality, because to me it seemed
distinctly musical, yet I must admit it set going a distressing feeling that
made me wish I had never heard it.
"The wind blowing in those
sand-funnels," I said determined to find an explanation, "or the
bushes rubbing together after the storm perhaps."
"It comes off the whole
swamp," my friend answered. "It comes from everywhere at once."
He ignored my explanations. "It comes from the willow bushes
somehow—"
"But now the wind has
dropped," I objected. "The willows can hardly make a noise by
themselves, can they?"
His answer frightened me, first
because I had dreaded it, and secondly, because I knew intuitively it was true.
"It is because the wind has
dropped we now hear it. It was drowned before.
It is the cry, I believe, of
the—"
I dashed back to my fire, warned
by the sound of bubbling that the stew was in danger, but determined at the
same time to escape further conversation. I was resolute, if possible, to avoid
the exchanging of views. I dreaded, too, that he would begin about the gods, or
the elemental forces, or something else disquieting, and I wanted to keep
myself well in hand for what might happen later. There was another night to be
faced before we escaped from this distressing place, and there was no knowing
yet what it might bring forth.
"Come and cut up bread for
the pot," I called to him, vigorously stirring the appetizing mixture.
That stew-pot held sanity for us both, and the thought made me laugh.
He came over slowly and took the
provision sack from the tree, fumbling in its mysterious depths, and then
emptying the entire contents upon the ground-sheet at his feet.
"Hurry up!" I cried;
"it's boiling."
The Swede burst out into a roar
of laughter that startled me. It was forced laughter, not artificial exactly,
but mirthless.
"There's nothing here!"
he shouted, holding his sides.
"Bread, I mean."
"It's gone. There is no
bread. They've taken it!"
I dropped the long spoon and ran
up. Everything the sack had contained lay upon the ground-sheet, but there was
no loaf.
The whole dead weight of my
growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I burst out laughing too. It was
the only thing to do: and the sound of my laughter also made me understand his.
The stain of psychical pressure caused it—this explosion of unnatural laughter
in both of us; it was an effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a
temporary safety-valve. And with both of us it ceased quite suddenly.
"How criminally stupid of
me!" I cried, still determined to be consistent and find an explanation.
"I clean forgot to buy a loaf at Pressburg. That chattering woman put
everything out of my head, and I must have left it lying on the counter
or—"
"The oatmeal, too, is much
less than it was this morning," the Swede interrupted.
Why in the world need he draw
attention to it? I thought angrily.
"There's enough for
tomorrow," I said, stirring vigorously, "and we can get lots more at
Komorn or Gran. In twenty-four hours we shall be miles from here."
"I hope so—to God," he
muttered, putting the things back into the sack, "unless we're claimed
first as victims for the sacrifice," he added with a foolish laugh. He
dragged the sack into the tent, for safety's sake, I suppose, and I heard him
mumbling to himself, but so indistinctly that it seemed quite natural for me to
ignore his words.
Our meal was beyond question a
gloomy one, and we ate it almost in silence, avoiding one another's eyes, and
keeping the fire bright. Then we washed up and prepared for the night, and,
once smoking, our minds unoccupied with any definite duties, the apprehension I
had felt all day long became more and more acute. It was not then active fear,
I think, but the very vagueness of its origin distressed me far more that if I
had been able to ticket and face it squarely. The curious sound I have likened
to the note of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of
the night with a faint, continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct
notes. At one time it was behind and at another time in front of us. Sometimes
I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again from the clumps
on our right. More often it hovered directly overhead like the whirring of
wings. It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front, at our sides and
over our heads, completely surrounding us. The sound really defies description.
But nothing within my knowledge is like that ceaseless muffled humming rising
off the deserted world of swamps and willows.
We sat smoking in comparative
silence, the strain growing every minute greater. The worst feature of the
situation seemed to me that we did not know what to expect, and could therefore
make no sort of preparation by way of defense. We could anticipate nothing. My
explanations made in the sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their
foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to us
that some kind of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked
it or not. After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the
same tent side by side. I saw that I could not get along much longer without
the support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative. As
long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to ignore
or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.
Some of these sentences,
moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me, coming as they did to
corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration, too—which made it so much
more convincing—from a totally different point of view. He composed such
curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such an inconsequential sort of
way, as though his main line of thought was secret to himself, and these
fragments were mere bits he found it impossible to digest. He got rid of them
by uttering them. Speech relieved him. It was like being sick.
"There are things about us,
I'm sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction,"
he said once, while the fire blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a
safe line somewhere."
And, another time, when the gong
sounds had come nearer, ringing much louder than before, and directly over our
heads, he said as though talking to himself:
"I don't think a gramophone
would show any record of that. The sound doesn't come to me by the ears at all.
The vibrations reach me in another manner altogether, and seem to be within me,
which is precisely how a fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make
itself heard."
I purposely made no reply to
this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire and peered about me into the
darkness. The clouds were massed all over the sky, and no trace of moonlight
came through. Very still, too, everything was, so that the river and the frogs
had things all their own way.
"It has that about it,"
he went on, "which is utterly out of common experience. It is unknown.
Only one thing describes it really; it is a non-human sound; I mean a sound
outside humanity."
Having rid himself of this
indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time, but he had so admirably expressed
my own feeling that it was a relief to have the thought out, and to have
confined it by the limitation of words from dangerous wandering to and fro in
the mind.
The solitude of that Danube
camping-place, can I ever forget it? The feeling of being utterly alone on an
empty planet! My thoughts ran incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I
would have given my soul, as the saying is, for the "feel" of those
Bavarian villages we had passed through by the score; for the normal, human
commonplaces; peasants drinking beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine,
and a ruined castle on the rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the
tourists would have been welcome.
Yet what I felt of dread was no
ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise
from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than
anything I had known or dreamed of. We had "strayed," as the Swede
put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great,
yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close
about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of
peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point
where the veil between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long
a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we
called "our lives," yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that
sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure—a sacrifice.
It took us in different fashion,
each according to the measure of his sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I
translated it vaguely into a personification of the mightily disturbed
elements, investing them with the horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose,
resentful of our audacious intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my
friend threw it into the unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient
shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional
forces of former worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him
yielded to the old pagan spell.
At any rate, here was a place
unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a
place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before
or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a
"beyond region," of another scheme of life, another revolution not parallel
to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the
awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world.
Small things testified to the
amazing influence of the place, and now in the silence round the fire they allowed
themselves to be noted by the mind. The very atmosphere had proved itself a
magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the
current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all
had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its
other aspect—as it existed across the border to that other region. And this
changed aspect I felt was now not merely to me, but to the race. The whole
experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new
order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly.
"It's the deliberate,
calculating purpose that reduces one's courage to zero," the Swede said
suddenly, as if he had been actually following my thoughts. "Otherwise
imagination might count for much. But the paddle, the canoe, the lessening
food—"
"Haven't I explained all
that once?" I interrupted viciously.
"You have," he answered
dryly; "you have indeed."
He made other remarks too, as
usual, about what he called the "plain determination to provide a
victim"; but, having now arranged my thoughts better, I recognized that
this was simply the cry of his frightened soul against the knowledge that he
was being attacked in a vital part, and that he would be somehow taken or
destroyed. The situation called for a courage and calmness of reasoning that
neither of us could compass, and I have never before been so clearly conscious
of two persons in me—the one that explained everything, and the other that
laughed at such foolish explanations, yet was horribly afraid.
Meanwhile, in the pitchy night
the fire died down and the wood pile grew small. Neither of us moved to
replenish the stock, and the darkness consequently came up very close to our
faces. A few feet beyond the circle of firelight it was inky black.
Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the willows shivering about us, but apart
from this not very welcome sound a deep and depressing silence reigned, broken
only by the gurgling of the river and the humming in the air overhead.
We both missed, I think, the
shouting company of the winds.
At length, at a moment when a
stray puff prolonged itself as though the wind were about to rise again, I
reached the point for me of saturation, the point where it was absolutely necessary
to find relief in plain speech, or else to betray myself by some hysterical
extravagance that must have been far worse in its effect upon both of us. I
kicked the fire into a blaze, and turned to my companion abruptly. He looked up
with a start.
"I can't disguise it any
longer," I said; "I don't like this place, and the darkness, and the
noises, and the awful feelings I get. There's something here that beats me
utterly. I'm in a blue funk, and that's the plain truth. If the other shore was—different,
I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!"
The Swede's face turned very
white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He stared straight at me and
answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge excitement by its unnatural
calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was the strong man of the two. He was
more phlegmatic, for one thing.
"It's not a physical
condition we can escape from by running away," he replied, in the tone of
a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; "we must sit tight and wait. There
are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily
as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our
insignificance perhaps may save us."
I put a dozen questions into my
expression of face, but found no words. It was precisely like listening to an
accurate description of a disease whose symptoms had puzzled me.
"I mean that so far,
although aware of our disturbing presence, they have not found us—not 'located'
us, as the Americans say," he went on. "They're blundering about like
men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe and provisions prove that.
I think they feel us, but cannot actually see us. We must keep our minds quiet—it's
our minds they feel. We must control our thoughts, or it's all up with
us."
"Death, you mean?" I
stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.
"Worse—by far," he
said. "Death, according to one's belief, means either annihilation or
release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of
character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's gone. But this
means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by
substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have
camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has
worn thin"—horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual
words—"so that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood."
"But who are aware?" I
asked.
I forgot the shaking of the
willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I
was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can possibly explain.
He lowered his voice at once to
reply, leaning forward a little over the fire, an indefinable change in his
face that made me avoid his eyes and look down upon the ground.
"All my life," he said,
"I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far
removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where
great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry
by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and
fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are
all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the
soul, and not indirectly with more expressions of the soul—"
"I suggest just now—" I
began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I was face to face with a madman.
But he instantly overbore me with his torrent that had to come.
"You think," he said,
"it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old
gods. But I tell you now it is—neither. These would be comprehensible entities,
for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice,
whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with
mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to
touch our own."
The mere conception, which his
words somehow made so convincing, as I listened to them there in the dark
stillness of that lonely island, set me shaking a little all over. I found it
impossible to control my movements.
"And what do you
propose?" I began again.
"A sacrifice, a victim,
might save us by distracting them until we could get away," he went on,
"just as the wolves stop to devour the dogs and give the sleigh another
start. But—I see no chance of any other victim now."
I stared blankly at him. The
gleam in his eye was dreadful. Presently he continued.
IV
"It's the willows, of
course. The willows mask the others, but the others are feeling about for us.
If we let our minds betray our fear, we're lost, lost utterly." He looked
at me with an expression so calm, so determined, so sincere, that I no longer
had any doubts as to his sanity. He was as sane as any man ever was. "If
we can hold out through the night," he added, "we may get off in the
daylight unnoticed, or rather, undiscovered."
"But you really think a
sacrifice would—"
That gong-like humming came down
very close over our heads as I spoke, but it was my friend's scared face that
really stopped my mouth.
"Hush!" he whispered,
holding up his hand. "Do not mention them more than you can help. Do not
refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the inevitable clue, and our
only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that they may ignore us."
"Even in thought?" He
was extraordinarily agitated.
"Especially in thought. Our
thoughts make spirals in their world. We must keep them out of our minds at all
costs if possible."
I raked the fire together to
prevent the darkness having everything its own way. I never longed for the sun
as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night.
"Were you awake all last
night?" he went on suddenly.
"I slept badly a little
after dawn," I replied evasively, trying to follow his instructions, which
I knew instinctively were true, "but the wind, of course—"
"I know. But the wind won't
account for all the noises."
"Then you heard it
too?"
"The multiplying countless
little footsteps I heard," he said, adding, after a moment's hesitation,
"and that other sound—"
"You mean above the tent,
and the pressing down upon us of something tremendous, gigantic?"
He nodded significantly.
"It was like the beginning
of a sort of inner suffocation?" I said.
"Partly, yes. It seemed to
me that the weight of the atmosphere had been altered—had increased enormously,
so that we should have been crushed."
"And that," I went on,
determined to have it all out, pointing upwards where the gong-like note hummed
ceaselessly, rising and falling like wind. "What do you make of
that?"
"It's their sound," he
whispered gravely. "It's the sound of their world, the humming in their
region. The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow. But, if you
listen carefully, you'll find it's not above so much as around us. It's in the
willows. It's the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have
been made symbols of the forces that are against us."
I could not follow exactly what
he meant by this, yet the thought and idea in my mind were beyond question the
thought and idea in his. I realized what he realized, only with less power of
analysis than his. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my
hallucination of the ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly
thrust his face again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak
in a very earnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparent
control of the situation. This man I had for years deemed unimaginative,
stolid!
"Now listen," he said.
"The only thing for us to do is to go on as though nothing had happened,
follow our usual habits, go to bed, and so forth; pretend we feel nothing and
notice nothing. It is a question wholly of the mind, and the less we think
about them the better our chance of escape. Above all, don't think, for what
you think happens!"
"All right," I managed
to reply, simply breathless with his words and the strangeness of it all;
"all right, I'll try, but tell me one more thing first. Tell me what you
make of those hollows in the ground all about us, those sand-funnels?"
"No!" he cried,
forgetting to whisper in his excitement. "I dare not, simply dare not, put
the thought into words. If you have not guessed I am glad. Don't try to. They
have put it into my mind; try your hardest to prevent their putting it into
yours."
He sank his voice again to a
whisper before he finished, and I did not press him to explain. There was
already just about as much horror in me as I could hold. The conversation came
to an end, and we smoked our pipes busily in silence.
Then something happened,
something unimportant apparently, as the way is when the nerves are in a very
great state of tension, and this small thing for a brief space gave me an
entirely different point of view. I chanced to look down at my sand-shoe—the
sort we used for the canoe—and something to do with the hole at the toe
suddenly recalled to me the London shop where I had bought them, the difficulty
the man had in fitting me, and other details of the uninteresting but practical
operation. At once, in its train, followed a wholesome view of the modern
skeptical world I was accustomed to move in at home. I thought of roast beef,
and ale, motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things that
proclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediate and
astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply a sudden
and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere of things that
to the normal consciousness must seem impossible and incredible. But, whatever
the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell from my heart, and left me for the
short space of a minute feeling free and utterly unafraid. I looked up at my
friend opposite.
"You damned old pagan!"
I cried, laughing aloud in his face. "You imaginative idiot! You
superstitious idolater! You—"
I stopped in the middle, seized
anew by the old horror. I tried to smother the sound of my voice as something
sacrilegious. The Swede, of course, heard it too—the strange cry overhead in
the darkness—and that sudden drop in the air as though something had come
nearer.
He had turned ashen white under
the tan. He stood bolt upright in front of the fire, stiff as a rod, staring at
me.
"After that," he said
in a sort of helpless, frantic way, "we must go! We can't stay now; we
must strike camp this very instant and go on—down the river."
He was talking, I saw, quite
wildly, his words dictated by abject terror—the terror he had resisted so long,
but which had caught him at last.
"In the dark?" I
exclaimed, shaking with fear after my hysterical outburst, but still realizing
our position better than he did. "Sheer madness! The river's in flood, and
we've only got a single paddle. Besides, we only go deeper into their country!
There's nothing ahead for fifty miles but willows, willows, willows!"
He sat down again in a state of
semi-collapse. The positions, by one of those kaleidoscopic changes nature
loves, were suddenly reversed, and the control of our forces passed over into
my hands. His mind at last had reached the point where it was beginning to
weaken.
"What on earth possessed you
to do such a thing?" he whispered with the awe of genuine terror in his
voice and face.
I crossed round to his side of
the fire. I took both his hands in mine, kneeling down beside him and looking
straight into his frightened eyes.
"We'll make one more
blaze," I said firmly, "and then turn in for the night. At sunrise
we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourself together a bit, and
remember your own advice about not thinking fear!"
He said no more, and I saw that
he would agree and obey. In some measure, too, it was a sort of relief to get
up and make an excursion into the darkness for more wood. We kept close
together, almost touching, groping among the bushes and along the bank. The
humming overhead never ceased, but seemed to me to grow louder as we increased
our distance from the fire. It was shivery work!
We were grubbing away in the
middle of a thickish clump of willows where some driftwood from a former flood
had caught high among the branches, when my body was seized in a grip that made
me half drop upon the sand. It was the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was
clutching me for support. I heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.
"Look! By my soul!" he
whispered, and for the first time in my experience I knew what it was to hear
tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing to the fire, some fifty feet
away. I followed the direction of his finger, and I swear my heart missed a
beat.
There, in front of the dim glow,
something was moving.
I saw it through a veil that hung
before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater—hazily
a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the
strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like
horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result,
though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a
clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its
surface—"coiling upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.
"I watched it settle
downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look, by God! It's
coming this way! Oh, oh!"—he gave a kind of whistling cry. "They've
found us."
I gave one terrified glance,
which just enabled me to see that the shadowy form was swinging towards us
through the bushes, and then I collapsed backwards with a crash into the
branches. These failed, of course, to support my weight, so that with the Swede
on top of me we fell in a struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew
what was happening. I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of
icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them
this way and that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut;
something in my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was
expanding, extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I
was losing it altogether, and about to die.
An acute spasm of pain passed
through me, and I was aware that the Swede had hold of me in such a way that he
hurt me abominably. It was the way he caught at me in falling.
But it was the pain, he declared
afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to forget them and think of something
else at the very instant when they were about to find me. It concealed my mind
from them at the moment of discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible
seizing of me. He himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and
that was what saved him.
I only know that at a later date,
how long or short is impossible to say, I found myself scrambling up out of the
slippery network of willow branches, and saw my companion standing in front of
me holding out a hand to assist me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the
arm he had twisted for me. Nothing came to me to say, somehow.
"I lost consciousness for a
moment or two," I heard him say. "That's what saved me. It made me
stop thinking about them."
"You nearly broke my arm in
two," I said, uttering my only connected thought at the moment. A numbness
came over me.
"That's what saved
you!" he replied. "Between us, we've managed to set them off on a
false tack somewhere. The humming has ceased. It's gone—for the moment at any
rate!"
A wave of hysterical laughter
seized me again, and this time spread to my friend too—great healing gusts of
shaking laughter that brought a tremendous sense of relief in their train. We
made our way back to the fire and put the wood on so that it blazed at once.
Then we saw that the tent had fallen over and lay in a tangled heap upon the
ground.
We picked it up, and during the
process tripped more than once and caught our feet in sand.
"It's those
sand-funnels," exclaimed the Swede, when the tent was up again and the
firelight lit up the ground for several yards about us. "And look at the
size of them!"
All round the tent and about the
fireplace where we had seen the moving shadows there were deep funnel-shaped
hollows in the sand, exactly similar to the ones we had already found over the
island, only far bigger and deeper, beautifully formed, and wide enough in some
instances to admit the whole of my foot and leg.
Neither of us said a word. We
both knew that sleep was the safest thing we could do, and to bed we went
accordingly without further delay, having first thrown sand on the fire and
taken the provision sack and the paddle inside the tent with us. The canoe,
too, we propped in such a way at the end of the tent that our feet touched it,
and the least motion would disturb and wake us.
In case of emergency, too, we
again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a sudden start.
It was my firm intention to lie
awake all night and watch, but the exhaustion of nerves and body decreed
otherwise, and sleep after a while came over me with a welcome blanket of
oblivion. The fact that my companion also slept quickened its approach. At
first he fidgeted and constantly sat up, asking me if I "heard this"
or "heard that." He tossed about on his cork mattress, and said the
tent was moving and the river had risen over the point of the island, but each
time I went out to look I returned with the report that all was well, and
finally he grew calmer and lay still. Then at length his breathing became
regular and I heard unmistakable sounds of snoring—the first and only time in
my life when snoring has been a welcome and calming influence.
This, I remember, was the last
thought in my mind before dozing off.
A difficulty in breathing woke
me, and I found the blanket over my face. But something else besides the
blanket was pressing upon me, and my first thought was that my companion had
rolled off his mattress on to my own in his sleep. I called to him and sat up,
and at the same moment it came to me that the tent was surrounded. That sound
of multitudinous soft pattering was again audible outside, filling the night
with horror.
I called again to him, louder
than before. He did not answer, but I missed the sound of his snoring, and also
noticed that the flap of the tent was down. This was the unpardonable sin. I
crawled out in the darkness to hook it back securely, and it was then for the
first time I realized positively that the Swede was not here. He had gone.
I dashed out in a mad run, seized
by a dreadful agitation, and the moment I was out I plunged into a sort of
torrent of humming that surrounded me completely and came out of every quarter
of the heavens at once. It was that same familiar humming—gone mad! A swarm of
great invisible bees might have been about me in the air. The sound seemed to
thicken the very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty.
But my friend was in danger, and
I could not hesitate.
The dawn was just about to break,
and a faint whitish light spread upwards over the clouds from a thin strip of
clear horizon. No wind stirred. I could just make out the bushes and river
beyond, and the pale sandy patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and
fro about the island, calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the
first words that came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the
humming muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. I
plunged among the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots, and scraping
my face as I tore this way and that among the preventing branches.
Then, quite unexpectedly, I came
out upon the island's point and saw a dark figure outlined between the water
and the sky. It was the Swede. And already he had one foot in the river! A
moment more and he would have taken the plunge.
I threw myself upon him, flinging
my arms about his waist and dragging him shorewards with all my strength. Of
course he struggled furiously, making a noise all the time just like that
cursed humming, and using the most outlandish phrases in his anger about
"going inside to Them," and "taking the way of the water and the
wind," and God only knows what more besides, that I tried in vain to
recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with horror and amazement as I
listened. But in the end I managed to get him into the comparative safety of
the tent, and flung him breathless and cursing upon the mattress where I held
him until the fit had passed.
I think the suddenness with which
it all went and he grew calm, coinciding as it did with the equally abrupt
cessation of the humming and pattering outside—I think this was almost the
strangest part of the whole business perhaps. For he had just opened his eyes
and turned his tired face up to me so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it
through the doorway, and said, for all the world just like a frightened child:
"My life, old man—it's my
life I owe you. But it's all over now anyhow.
They've found a victim in our
place!"
Then he dropped back upon his
blankets and went to sleep literally under my eyes. He simply collapsed, and
began to snore again as healthily as though nothing had happened and he had
never tried to offer his own life as a sacrifice by drowning. And when the
sunlight woke him three hours later—hours of ceaseless vigil for me—it became
so clear to me that he remembered absolutely nothing of what he had attempted
to do, that I deemed it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.
He woke naturally and easily, as
I have said, when the sun was already high in a windless hot sky, and he at
once got up and set about the preparation of the fire for breakfast. I followed
him anxiously at bathing, but he did not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping
his head and making some remark about the extra coldness of the water.
"River's falling at
last," he said, "and I'm glad of it."
"The humming has stopped
too," I said.
He looked up at me quietly with
his normal expression. Evidently he remembered everything except his own
attempt at suicide.
"Everything has
stopped," he said, "because—"
He hesitated. But I knew some
reference to that remark he had made just before he fainted was in his mind,
and I was determined to know it.
"Because 'They've found
another victim'?" I said, forcing a little laugh.
"Exactly," he answered,
"exactly! I feel as positive of it as though—as though—I feel quite safe
again, I mean," he finished.
He began to look curiously about
him. The sunlight lay in hot patches on the sand. There was no wind. The
willows were motionless. He slowly rose to feet.
"Come," he said;
"I think if we look, we shall find it."
He started off on a run, and I
followed him. He kept to the banks, poking with a stick among the sandy bays
and caves and little back-waters, myself always close on his heels.
"Ah!" he exclaimed
presently, "ah!"
The tone of his voice somehow
brought back to me a vivid sense of the horror of the last twenty-four hours,
and I hurried up to join him. He was pointing with his stick at a large black
object that lay half in the water and half on the sand. It appeared to be
caught by some twisted willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away.
A few hours before the spot must have been under water.
"See," he said quietly,
"the victim that made our escape possible!"
And when I peered across his
shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the body of a man. He turned it over.
It was the corpse of a peasant, and the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly
the man had been drowned, but a few hours before, and his body must have been
swept down upon our island somewhere about the hour of the dawn—at the very
time the fit had passed.
"We must give it a decent
burial, you know."
"I suppose so," I
replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for there was something about
the appearance of that poor drowned man that turned me cold.
The Swede glanced up sharply at
me, an undecipherable expression on his face, and began clambering down the
bank. I followed him more leisurely. The current, I noticed, had torn away much
of the clothing from the body, so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.
Halfway down the bank my
companion suddenly stopped and held up his hand in warning; but either my foot
slipped, or I had gained too much momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt,
for I bumped into him and sent him forward with a sort of leap to save himself.
We tumbled together on to the hard sand so that our feet splashed into the
water. And, before anything could be done, we had collided a little heavily
against the corpse.
The Swede uttered a sharp cry.
And I sprang back as if I had been shot.
At the moment we touched the body
there rose from its surface the loud sound of humming—the sound of several
hummings—which passed with a vast commotion as of winged things in the air
about us and disappeared upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till
they finally ceased in the distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed
some living yet invisible creatures at work.
My companion clutched me, and I
think I clutched him, but before either of us had time properly to recover from
the unexpected shock, we saw that a movement of the current was turning the corpse
round so that it became released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment
later it had turned completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the
sky. It lay on the edge of the main stream. In another moment it would be swept
away.
The Swede started to save it,
shouting again something I did not catch about a "proper burial"—and
then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the sand and covered his eyes with his
hands. I was beside him in an instant.
I saw what he had seen.
For just as the body swung round
to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and
showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows,
beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels
that we had found all over the island.
"Their mark!" I heard
my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful mark!"
And when I turned my eyes again
from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body
had been swept away into mid-stream and was already beyond our reach and almost
out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like an otter.