The Willows
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.
IV.
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