The Willows

mustkeep them out of our minds at all costs if possible."

  I raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its ownway. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awfulblackness 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 followhis instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, "but the wind, ofcourse--"

  "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 somethingtremendous, 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 beenaltered--had increased enormously, so that we should have been crushed."

  "And that," I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwardswhere 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 leaksthrough somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's not aboveso much as around us. It's in the willows. It's the willows themselveshumming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces thatare against us."

  I could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and ideain my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his. I realizedwhat he realized, only with less power of analysis than his. It was on thetip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination of theascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust his faceagain close into mine across the firelight and began to speak in a veryearnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparentcontrol 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 thoughnothing 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 themind, 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 thestrangeness of it all; "all right, I'll try, but tell me one more thingfirst. 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 amglad. Don't try to. They have put it into my mind; try your hardest toprevent their putting it into yours."

  He sank his voice again to a whisper before he finished, and I did notpress him to explain. There was already just about as much horror in me asI could hold. The conversation came to an end, and we smoked our pipesbusily in silence.

  Then something happened, something unimportant apparently, as the way iswhen the nerves are in a very great state of tension, and this small thingfor a brief space gave me an entirely different point of view. I chanced tolook down at my sand-shoe--the sort we used for the canoe--and something todo with the hole at the toe suddenly recalled to me the London shop where Ihad bought them, the difficulty the man had in fitting me, and otherdetails of the uninteresting but practical operation. At once, in itstrain, followed a wholesome view of the modern skeptical world I wasaccustomed to move in at home. I thought of roast beef, and ale,motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things thatproclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediateand astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply asudden and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere ofthings that to the normal consciousness must seem impossible andincredible. But, whatever the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell frommy heart, and left me for the short space of a minute feeling free andutterly unafraid. I looked up at my friend opposite.

  "You damned old pagan!" I cried, laughing aloud in his face. "Youimaginative idiot! You superstitious idolater! You--"

  I stopped in the middle, seized anew by the old horror. I tried to smotherthe sound of my voice as something sacrilegious. The Swede, of course,heard it too--the strange cry overhead in the darkness--and that suddendrop in the air as though something had come nearer.

  He had turned ashen white under the tan. He stood bolt upright in front ofthe fire, stiff as a rod, staring at me.

  "After that," he said in a sort of helpless, frantic way, "we must go! Wecan't stay now; we must strike camp this very instant and go on--down theriver."

  He was talking, I saw, quite wildly, his words dictated by abjectterror--the terror he had resisted so long, but which had caught him atlast.

  "In the dark?" I exclaimed, shaking with fear after my hysterical outburst,but still realizing our position better than he did. "Sheer madness! Theriver's in flood, and we've only got a single paddle. Besides, we only godeeper into their country! There's nothing ahead for fifty miles butwillows, willows, willows!"

  He sat down again in a state of semi-collapse. The positions, by one ofthose kaleidoscopic changes nature loves, were suddenly reversed, and thecontrol of our forces passed over into my hands. His mind at last hadreached the point where it was beginning to weaken.

  "What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?" he whispered with the aweof 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 thenight. At sunrise we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourselftogether 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 thedarkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost touching, gropingamong the bushes and along the bank. The humming overhead never ceased, butseemed to me to grow louder as we increased our distance from the fire. Itwas shivery work!

  We were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows wheresome driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches, whenmy body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand. It wasthe Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for support. Iheard his breath coming and going in short gasps.

  "Look! By my soul!" he whispered, and for the first time in my experience Iknew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointingto 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 gauzedrop-curtain used at the back of a theater--hazily a little. It was neithera human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of beingas large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three,moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing itdifferently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willowbushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface--"coilingupon 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 shadowyform was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsedbackwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, tosupport my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in astruggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. Iwas conscious only of
a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear thatplucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way andthat, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something inmy throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding,extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I waslosing it altogether, and about to die.

  An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swedehad hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way hecaught at me in falling.

  But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me toforget them and think of something else at the very instant when they wereabout to find me. It concealed my mind from them