The Wind in the Willows
With difficulty he turned to look for his friend and saw him at his
side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was
utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and
still the light grew and grew.
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though
the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still
dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting
to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things
rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head;
and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature,
flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath
for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw
the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing
daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were
looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a
half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay
across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the
pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid
curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw,
last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in
entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form
of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and
intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived;
and still, as he lived, he wondered.
“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”
“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love.
“Afraid! Of _Him?_ O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am
afraid!”
Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did
worship.
Sudden and magnificent, the sun’s broad golden disc showed itself over
the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level
water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When
they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air
was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.
As they stared blankly in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised
all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze,
dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the
dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with
its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift
that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has
revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the
awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and
pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the
after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that
they should be happy and lighthearted as before.
Mole rubbed his eyes and stared at Rat, who was looking about him in a
puzzled sort of way. “I beg your pardon; what did you say, Rat?” he
asked.
“I think I was only remarking,” said Rat slowly, “that this was the
right sort of place, and that here, if anywhere, we should find him.
And look! Why, there he is, the little fellow!” And with a cry of
delight he ran towards the slumbering Portly.
But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly
from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture
nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that,
too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard,
cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his
memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.
Portly woke up with a joyous squeak, and wriggled with pleasure at the
sight of his father’s friends, who had played with him so often in past
days. In a moment, however, his face grew blank, and he fell to hunting
round in a circle with pleading whine. As a child that has fallen
happily asleep in its nurse’s arms, and wakes to find itself alone and
laid in a strange place, and searches corners and cupboards, and runs
from room to room, despair growing silently in its heart, even so
Portly searched the island and searched, dogged and unwearying, till at
last the black moment came for giving it up, and sitting down and
crying bitterly.
The Mole ran quickly to comfort the little animal; but Rat, lingering,
looked long and doubtfully at certain hoof-marks deep in the sward.
“Some—great—animal—has been here,” he murmured slowly and thoughtfully;
and stood musing, musing; his mind strangely stirred.
“Come along, Rat!” called the Mole. “Think of poor Otter, waiting up
there by the ford!”
Portly had soon been comforted by the promise of a treat—a jaunt on the
river in Mr. Rat’s real boat; and the two animals conducted him to the
water’s side, placed him securely between them in the bottom of the
boat, and paddled off down the backwater. The sun was fully up by now,
and hot on them, birds sang lustily and without restraint, and flowers
smiled and nodded from either bank, but somehow—so thought the
animals—with less of richness and blaze of colour than they seemed to
remember seeing quite recently somewhere—they wondered where.
The main river reached again, they turned the boat’s head upstream,
towards the point where they knew their friend was keeping his lonely
vigil. As they drew near the familiar ford, the Mole took the boat in
to the bank, and they lifted Portly out and set him on his legs on the
tow-path, gave him his marching orders and a friendly farewell pat on
the back, and shoved out into mid-stream. They watched the little
animal as he waddled along the path contentedly and with importance;
watched him till they saw his muzzle suddenly lift and his waddle break
into a clumsy amble as he quickened his pace with shrill whines and
wriggles of recognition. Looking up the river, they could see Otter
start up, tense and rigid, from out of the shallows where he crouched
in dumb patience, and could hear his amazed and joyous bark as he
bounded up through the osiers on to the path. Then the Mole, with a
strong pull on one oar, swung the boat round and let the full stream
bear them down again whither it would, their quest now happily ended.
“I feel strangely tired, Rat,” said the Mole, leaning wearily over his
oars as the boat drifted. “It’s being up all night, you’ll say,
perhaps; but that’s nothing. We do as much half the nights of the week,
at this time of the year. No; I feel as if I had been through something
very exciting and rather terrible, and it was just over; and yet
nothing particular has happened.”
“Or something very surprising and splendid and beautiful,” murmured the
Rat, leaning back and closing his eyes. “I feel just as you do, Mole;
simply dead tired, though not body tired. It’s lucky we’ve got the
stream with us, to take us home. Isn’t it jolly to feel the sun again,
soaking into one’s bones! And hark to the wind playing in the reeds!”
“It’s like music—far away music,” said the Mole nodding drowsily.
“So I was thinking,” murmured the Rat, dreamful and languid.
“Dance-music—the lilting sort that runs on without a stop—but with
words in it, too—it passes into words and out of them again—I catch
them at intervals—then it is dance-music once more, and then nothing
but the reeds’ soft thin whispering.”
“You hear better than I,” said the Mole sadly. “I cannot catch the
words.”
“Let me try and give you them,” said the Rat softly, his eyes still
closed. “Now it is turning into words again—faint but clear—_Lest the
awe should dwell—And turn your frolic to fret—You shall look on my
power at the helping hour—But then you shall forget!_ Now the reeds
take it up—_forget, forget_, they sigh, and it dies away in a rustle
and a whisper. Then the voice returns—
“_Lest limbs be reddened and rent—I spring the trap that is set—As I
loose the snare you may glimpse me there—For surely you shall forget!_
Row nearer, Mole, nearer to the reeds! It is hard to catch, and grows
each minute fainter.
“_Helper and healer, I cheer—Small waifs in the woodland wet—Strays I
find in it, wounds I bind in it—Bidding them all forget!_ Nearer, Mole,
nearer! No, it is no good; the song has died away into reed-talk.”
“But what do the words mean?” asked the wondering Mole.
“That I do not know,” said the Rat simply. “I passed them on to you as
they reached me. Ah! now they return again, and this time full and
clear! This time, at last, it is the real, the unmistakable thing,
simple—passionate—perfect——”
“Well, let’s have it, then,” said the Mole, after he had waited
patiently for a few minutes, half-dozing in the hot sun.
But no answer came. He looked, and understood the silence. With a smile
of much happiness on his face, and something of a listening look still
lingering there, the weary Rat was fast asleep.
VIII.
TOAD’S ADVENTURES
When Toad found himself immured in a dank and noisome dungeon, and knew
that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and
the outer world of sunshine and well-metalled high roads where he had
lately been so happy, disporting himself as if he had bought up every
road in England, he flung himself at full length on the floor, and shed
bitter tears, and abandoned himself to dark despair. “This is the end
of everything” (he said), “at least it is the end of the career of
Toad, which is the same thing; the popular and handsome Toad, the rich
and hospitable Toad, the Toad so free and careless and debonair! How
can I hope to be ever set at large again” (he said), “who have been
imprisoned so justly for stealing so handsome a motor-car in such an
audacious manner, and for such lurid and imaginative cheek, bestowed
upon such a number of fat, red-faced policemen!” (Here his sobs choked
him.) “Stupid animal that I was” (he said), “now I must languish in
this dungeon, till people who were proud to say they knew me, have
forgotten the very name of Toad! O wise old Badger!” (he said), “O
clever, intelligent Rat and sensible Mole! What sound judgments, what a
knowledge of men and matters you possess! O unhappy and forsaken Toad!”
With lamentations such as these he passed his days and nights for
several weeks, refusing his meals or intermediate light refreshments,
though the grim and ancient gaoler, knowing that Toad’s pockets were
well lined, frequently pointed out that many comforts, and indeed
luxuries, could by arrangement be sent in—at a price—from outside.
Now the gaoler had a daughter, a pleasant wench and good-hearted, who
assisted her father in the lighter duties of his post. She was
particularly fond of animals, and, besides her canary, whose cage hung
on a nail in the massive wall of the keep by day, to the great
annoyance of prisoners who relished an after-dinner nap, and was
shrouded in an antimacassar on the parlour table at night, she kept
several piebald mice and a restless revolving squirrel. This
kind-hearted girl, pitying the misery of Toad, said to her father one
day, “Father! I can’t bear to see that poor beast so unhappy, and
getting so thin! You let me have the managing of him. You know how fond
of animals I am. I’ll make him eat from my hand, and sit up, and do all
sorts of things.”
Her father replied that she could do what she liked with him. He was
tired of Toad, and his sulks and his airs and his meanness. So that day
she went on her errand of mercy, and knocked at the door of Toad’s
cell.
“Now, cheer up, Toad,” she said, coaxingly, on entering, “and sit up
and dry your eyes and be a sensible animal. And do try and eat a bit of
dinner. See, I’ve brought you some of mine, hot from the oven!”