The Willows
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.
V.
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