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

horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He

was pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in

the water and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some

twisted willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away. A few

hours before the spot must have been under water.

“See,” he said quietly, “the victim that made our escape possible!”

And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on

the body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant,

and the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned,

but a few hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our

island somewhere about the hour of the dawn—_at the very time the fit

had passed._

“We must give it a decent burial, you know.”

“I suppose so,” I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for

there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that

turned me cold.

The Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable expression on his

face, and began clambering down the bank. I followed him more

leisurely. The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing

from the body, so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.

Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his

hand in warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much

momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and

sent him forward with a sort of leap to save himself. We tumbled

together on to the hard sand so that our feet splashed into the water.

And, before anything could be done, we had collided a little heavily

against the corpse.

The Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back as if I had been shot.

At the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud

sound of humming—the sound of several hummings—which passed with a vast

commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared

upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally

ceased in the distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some

living yet invisible creatures at work.

My companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either

of us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw

that a movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it

became released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment later it

had turned completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the

sky. It lay on the edge of the main stream. In another moment it would

be swept away.

The Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch

about a “proper burial”—and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the

sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was beside him in an

instant.