The Willows
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.