The Willows
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 mere 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.
“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