The Willows
III
At length, after a long pause, he began to talk.
"Queer thing," he added in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted tosay something and get it over. "Queer thing. I mean, about that otter lastnight."
I had expected something so totally different that he caught me withsurprise, and I looked up sharply.
"Shows how lonely this place is. Otters are awfully shy things--"
"I don't mean that, of course," he interrupted. "I mean--do you think--didyou think it really was an otter?"
"What else, in the name of Heaven, what else?"
"You know, I saw it before you did, and at first it seemed--so much biggerthan an otter."
"The sunset as you looked up-stream magnified it, or something," I replied.
He looked at me absently a moment, as though his mind were busy with otherthoughts.
"It had such extraordinary yellow eyes," he went on half to himself.
"That was the sun too," I laughed, a trifle boisterously. "I suppose you'llwonder next if that fellow in the boat--"
I suddenly decided not to finish the sentence. He was in the act again oflistening, turning his head to the wind, and something in the expression ofhis face made me halt. The subject dropped, and we went on with ourcaulking. Apparently he had not noticed my unfinished sentence. Fiveminutes later, however, he looked at me across the canoe, the smoking pitchin his hand, his face exceedingly grave.
"I did rather wonder, if you want to know," he said slowly, "what thatthing in the boat was. I remember thinking at the time it was not a man.The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water."
I laughed again boisterously in his face, but this time there wasimpatience, and a strain of anger too, in my feeling.
"Look here now," I cried, "this place is quite queer enough without goingout of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and theman in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fastas they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play thefool about it!"
He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in theleast annoyed. I took courage from his silence.
"And, for Heaven's sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hearthings, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear butthe river and this cursed old thundering wind."
"You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That'sjust the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well asI do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "Thebest thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm aspossible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harderwhen you're forced to meet it."
My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knewquite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to acertain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think Ifelt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, lesssensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorantall the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the verybeginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of hiswords about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselveswere destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward,but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.
"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subjectpassed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even tothink about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and whatone says, happens."
That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying tofish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood ofrising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes, and wefished for them with long willow branches. The island grew perceptiblysmaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and splashes. Theweather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and then for thefirst time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds began togather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.
This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessantroaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the silencethat came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a mannerquite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in its own waythen; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the windnoises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes, rising,falling always beating out some sort of great elemental tune; whereas theriver's song lay between three notes at most--dull pedal notes, that held alugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed to me, in mythen nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.
It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlighttook everything out of the landscape that made for cheerfulness; and sincethis particular landscape had already managed to convey the suggestion ofsomething sinister, the change of course was all the more unwelcome andnoticeable. For me, I know, the darkening outlook became distinctly morealarming, and I found myself more than once calculating how soon aftersunset the full moon would get up in the east, and whether the gatheringclouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the little island.
With this general hush of the wind--though it still indulged in occasionalbrief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to standmore densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independentmovement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, andshaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imaginationfar more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowdinghuddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie ofappearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and livingcreatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant andhostile to us. The forces of the region drew nearer with the coming ofnight. They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly uponourselves. For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did myreally indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place presentthemselves.
I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recoveredsomewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only servedapparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing spellof the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as absurd andchildish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet, in spite ofevery effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I dreaded the nightas a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of darkness.
The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the day,and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to thebase of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From five o'clockonwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations for dinner, itbeing my turn to cook that night. We had potatoes, onions, bits of baconfat to add flavor, and a general thick residue from former stews at thebottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it the result was mostexcellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with sugar and a brew ofstrong tea with dried milk. A good pile of wood lay close at hand, and theabsence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily watching me,dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving uselessadvice--an admitted privilege of the off-duty man. He had been very quietall the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tentropes, and fishing for driftwood while I slept. No more talk aboutundesirable things had passed between us, and I think his only remarks hadto do with the gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was notfully a third smaller than when we first landed.
The pot had just begun to bubble when I heard his voice calling to me fromthe bank, where he had wandered away without my noticing. I ran up.
"Come and listen," he said, "and see what you make of
it." He held his handcupwise to his ear, as so often before.
"Now do you hear anything?" he asked, watching me curiously.
We stood there, listening attentively together. At first I heard only thedeep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent surface.The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound began toreach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound--something like the humming of adistant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the darkness from the wasteof swamps and willows opposite. It was repeated at regular intervals, butit was certainly neither the sound of a bell nor the hooting of a distantsteamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to the sound of an immensegong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating incessantly its muffledmetallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly