Beasts and Super-Beasts
drift the compartment in which Abbleway was sitting gave a huge jerk and
a lurch, and then seemed to remain stationary; it undoubtedly was not
moving, and yet he could hear the puffing of the engine and the slow
rumbling and jolting of wheels. The puffing and rumbling grew fainter,
as though it were dying away through the agency of intervening distance.
Abbleway suddenly gave vent to an exclamation of scandalised alarm,
opened the window, and peered out into the snowstorm. The flakes perched
on his eyelashes and blurred his vision, but he saw enough to help him to
realise what had happened. The engine had made a mighty plunge through
the drift and had gone merrily forward, lightened of the load of its rear
carriage, whose coupling had snapped under the strain. Abbleway was
alone, or almost alone, with a derelict railway waggon, in the heart of
some Styrian or Croatian forest. In the third-class compartment next to
his own he remembered to have seen a peasant woman, who had entered the
train at a small wayside station. “With the exception of that woman,” he
exclaimed dramatically to himself, “the nearest living beings are
probably a pack of wolves.”
Before making his way to the third-class compartment to acquaint his
fellow-traveller with the extent of the disaster Abbleway hurriedly
pondered the question of the woman’s nationality. He had acquired a
smattering of Slavonic tongues during his residence in Vienna, and felt
competent to grapple with several racial possibilities.
“If she is Croat or Serb or Bosniak I shall be able to make her
understand,” he promised himself. “If she is Magyar, heaven help me! We
shall have to converse entirely by signs.”
He entered the carriage and made his momentous announcement in the best
approach to Croat speech that he could achieve.
“The train has broken away and left us!”
The woman shook her head with a movement that might be intended to convey
resignation to the will of heaven, but probably meant noncomprehension.
Abbleway repeated his information with variations of Slavonic tongues and
generous displays of pantomime.
“Ah,” said the woman at last in German dialect, “the train has gone? We
are left. Ah, so.”
She seemed about as much interested as though Abbleway had told her the
result of the municipal elections in Amsterdam.
“They will find out at some station, and when the line is clear of snow
they will send an engine. It happens that way sometimes.”
“We may be here all night!” exclaimed Abbleway.
The woman nodded as though she thought it possible.
“Are there wolves in these parts?” asked Abbleway hurriedly.
“Many,” said the woman; “just outside this forest my aunt was devoured
three years ago, as she was coming home from market. The horse and a
young pig that was in the cart were eaten too. The horse was a very old
one, but it was a beautiful young pig, oh, so fat. I cried when I heard
that it was taken. They spare nothing.”
“They may attack us here,” said Abbleway tremulously; “they could easily
break in, these carriages are like matchwood. We may both be devoured.”
“You, perhaps,” said the woman calmly; “not me.”
“Why not you?” demanded Abbleway.
“It is the day of Saint Mariä Kleophä, my name-day. She would not allow
me to be eaten by wolves on her day. Such a thing could not be thought
of. You, yes, but not me.”
Abbleway changed the subject.
“It is only afternoon now; if we are to be left here till morning we
shall be starving.”
“I have here some good eatables,” said the woman tranquilly; “on my
festival day it is natural that I should have provision with me. I have
five good blood-sausages; in the town shops they cost twenty-five heller
each. Things are dear in the town shops.”
“I will give you fifty heller apiece for a couple of them,” said Abbleway
with some enthusiasm.
“In a railway accident things become very dear,” said the woman; “these
blood-sausages are four kronen apiece.”
“Four kronen!” exclaimed Abbleway; “four kronen for a blood-sausage!”
“You cannot get them any cheaper on this train,” said the woman, with
relentless logic, “because there aren’t any others to get. In Agram you
can buy them cheaper, and in Paradise no doubt they will be given to us
for nothing, but here they cost four kronen each. I have a small piece
of Emmenthaler cheese and a honey-cake and a piece of bread that I can
let you have. That will be another three kronen, eleven kronen in all.
There is a piece of ham, but that I cannot let you have on my name-day.”
Abbleway wondered to himself what price she would have put on the ham,
and hurried to pay her the eleven kronen before her emergency tariff
expanded into a famine tariff. As he was taking possession of his modest
store of eatables he suddenly heard a noise which set his heart thumping
in a miserable fever of fear. ‘There was a scraping and shuffling as of
some animal or animals trying to climb up to the footboard. In another
moment, through the snow-encrusted glass of the carriage window, he saw a
gaunt prick-eared head, with gaping jaw and lolling tongue and gleaming
teeth; a second later another head shot up.
“There are hundreds of them,” whispered Abbleway; “they have scented us.
They will tear the carriage to pieces. We shall be devoured.”
“Not me, on my name-day. The holy Mariä Kleophä would not permit it,”
said the woman with provoking calm.
The heads dropped down from the window and an uncanny silence fell on the
beleaguered carriage. Abbleway neither moved nor spoke. Perhaps the
brutes had not clearly seen or winded the human occupants of the
carriage, and had prowled away on some other errand of rapine.
The long torture-laden minutes passed slowly away.
“It grows cold,” said the woman suddenly, crossing over to the far end of
the carriage, where the heads had appeared. “The heating apparatus does
not work any longer. See, over there beyond the trees, there is a
chimney with smoke coming from it. It is not far, and the snow has
nearly stopped, I shall find a path through the forest to that house with
the chimney.”
“But the wolves!” exclaimed Abbleway; “they may—”
“Not on my name-day,” said the woman obstinately, and before he could
stop her she had opened the door and climbed down into the snow. A
moment later he hid his face in his hands; two gaunt lean figures rushed
upon her from the forest. No doubt she had courted her fate, but
Abbleway had no wish to see a human being torn to pieces and devoured
before his eyes.
When he looked at last a new sensation of scandalised astonishment took
possession of him. He had been straitly brought up in a small English
town, and he was not prepared to be the witness of a miracle. The wolves
were not doing anything worse to the woman than drench her with snow as
they gambolled round her.
A short, joyous bark revealed the clue to the situation.
“Are those—dogs?” he called weakly.
“My cousin Karl’s dogs, yes,” she answered; “that is his inn, over beyond
the trees. I knew it was there, but I did not want to take you there; he
is always grasping with strangers. However, it grows too cold to remain
in the train. Ah, ah, see what comes!”
A whistle sounded, and a relief engine made its appearance, snorting its
way sulkily through the snow. Abbleway did not have the opportunity for
finding out whether Karl was really avaricious.
THE LUMBER ROOM
The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands at
Jagborough. Nicholas was not to be of the party; he was in disgrace.
Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on
the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it. Older and
wiser and better people had told him that there could not possibly be a
frog in his bread-and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense; he
continued, nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, and
described with much detail the colouration and markings of the alleged
frog. The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog
in Nicholas’ basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he
felt entitled to know something about it. The sin of taking a frog from
the garden and putting it into a bowl of wholesome bread-and-milk was
enlarged on at great length, but the fact that stood out clearest in the
whole affair, as it presented itself to the mind of Nicholas, was that
the older, wiser, and better people had been proved to be profoundly in
error in matters about which they had expressed the utmost assurance.
“You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there
_was_ a frog in my bread-and-milk,” he repeated, with the insistence of a
skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.
So his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his quite uninteresting younger
brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to
stay at home. His cousins’ aunt, who insisted, by an unwarranted stretch
of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also, had hastily invented
the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the delights
that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the
breakfast-table. It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell
from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the
offender would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned
collectively they were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighbouring
town, a circus of unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants, to which, but
for their depravity, they would have been taken that very day.
A few decent tears were looked for on the part of Nicholas when the
moment for the departure of the expedition arrived. As a matter of fact,
however, all the crying was done by his girl-cousin, who scraped her knee
rather painfully against the step of the carriage as she was scrambling
in.
“How she did howl,” said Nicholas cheerfully, as the party drove off
without any of the elation of high spirits that should have characterised
it.
“She’ll soon get over that,” said the _soi-disant_ aunt; “it will be a
glorious afternoon for racing about over those beautiful sands. How they
will enjoy themselves!”
“Bobby won’t enjoy himself much, and he won’t race much either,” said
Nicholas with a grim chuckle; “his boots are hurting him. They’re too
tight.”
“Why didn’t he tell me they were hurting?” asked the aunt with some
asperity.
“He told you twice, but you weren’t listening. You often don’t listen
when we tell you important things.”
“You are not to go into the gooseberry garden,” said the aunt, changing
the subject.
“Why not?” demanded Nicholas.
“Because you are in disgrace,” said the aunt loftily.
Nicholas did not admit the flawlessness of the reasoning; he felt
perfectly capable of being in disgrace and in a gooseberry garden at the
same moment. His face took on an expression of considerable obstinacy.
It was clear to his aunt that he was determined to get into the
gooseberry garden, “only,” as she remarked to herself, “because I have
told him he is not to.”
Now the gooseberry garden had two doors by which it might be entered, and
once a small person like Nicholas could slip in there he could
effectually disappear from view amid the masking growth of artichokes,
raspberry canes, and fruit bushes. The aunt had many other things to do
that afternoon, but she spent an hour or two in trivial gardening
operations among flower beds and shrubberies, whence she could keep a
watchful eye on the two doors that led to the forbidden paradise. She
was a woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration.
Nicholas made one or two sorties into the front garden, wriggling his way