Adventures, according to the proverb, are to the adventurous. Quite as
often they are to the non-adventurous, to the retiring, to the
constitutionally timid. John James Abbleway had been endowed by Nature
with the sort of disposition that instinctively avoids Carlist intrigues,
slum crusades, the tracking of wounded wild beasts, and the moving of
hostile amendments at political meetings. If a mad dog or a Mad Mullah
had come his way he would have surrendered the way without hesitation.
At school he had unwillingly acquired a thorough knowledge of the German
tongue out of deference to the plainly-expressed wishes of a
foreign-languages master, who, though he taught modern subjects, employed
old-fashioned methods in driving his lessons home. It was this enforced
familiarity with an important commercial language which thrust Abbleway
in later years into strange lands where adventures were less easy to
guard against than in the ordered atmosphere of an English country town.
The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic
business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there,
continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of
commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even
misadventure, jostling at his elbow. After two and a half years of
exile, however, John James Abbleway had embarked on only one hazardous
undertaking, and that was of a nature which would assuredly have
overtaken him sooner or later if he had been leading a sheltered,
stay-at-home existence at Dorking or Huntingdon. He fell placidly in
love with a placidly lovable English girl, the sister of one of his
commercial colleagues, who was improving her mind by a short trip to
foreign parts, and in due course he was formally accepted as the young
man she was engaged to. The further step by which she was to become Mrs.
John Abbleway was to take place a twelvemonth hence in a town in the
English midlands, by which time the firm that employed John James would
have no further need for his presence in the Austrian capital.
It was early in April, two months after the installation of Abbleway as
the young man Miss Penning was engaged to, when he received a letter from
her, written from Venice. She was still peregrinating under the wing of
her brother, and as the latter’s business arrangements would take him
across to Fiume for a day or two, she had conceived the idea that it
would be rather jolly if John could obtain leave of absence and run down
to the Adriatic coast to meet them. She had looked up the route on the
map, and the journey did not appear likely to be expensive. Between the
lines of her communication there lay a hint that if he really cared for
her—
Abbleway obtained leave of absence and added a journey to Fiume to his
life’s adventures. He left Vienna on a cold, cheerless day. The flower
shops were full of spring blooms, and the weekly organs of illustrated
humour were full of spring topics, but the skies were heavy with clouds
that looked like cotton-wool that has been kept over long in a shop
window.
“Snow comes,” said the train official to the station officials; and they
agreed that snow was about to come. And it came, rapidly, plenteously.
The train had not been more than an hour on its journey when the
cotton-wool clouds commenced to dissolve in a blinding downpour of
snowflakes. The forest trees on either side of the line were speedily
coated with a heavy white mantle, the telegraph wires became thick
glistening ropes, the line itself was buried more and more completely
under a carpeting of snow, through which the not very powerful engine
ploughed its way with increasing difficulty. The Vienna-Fiume line is
scarcely the best equipped of the Austrian State railways, and Abbleway
began to have serious fears for a breakdown. The train had slowed down
to a painful and precarious crawl and presently came to a halt at a spot
where the drifting snow had accumulated in a formidable barrier. The
engine made a special effort and broke through the obstruction, but in
the course of another twenty minutes it was again held up. The process
of breaking through was renewed, and the train doggedly resumed its way,
encountering and surmounting fresh hindrances at frequent intervals.
After a standstill of unusually long duration in a particularly deep
drift the compartment in which Abbleway was sitting gave a huge jerk and
a lurch, and then seemed to remain stationary; it undoubtedly was not
moving, and yet he could hear the puffing of the engine and the slow
rumbling and jolting of wheels. The puffing and rumbling grew fainter,
as though it were dying away through the agency of intervening distance.
Abbleway suddenly gave vent to an exclamation of scandalised alarm,
opened the window, and peered out into the snowstorm. The flakes perched
on his eyelashes and blurred his vision, but he saw enough to help him to
realise what had happened. The engine had made a mighty plunge through
the drift and had gone merrily forward, lightened of the load of its rear
carriage, whose coupling had snapped under the strain. Abbleway was
alone, or almost alone, with a derelict railway waggon, in the heart of
some Styrian or Croatian forest. In the third-class compartment next to
his own he remembered to have seen a peasant woman, who had entered the
train at a small wayside station. “With the exception of that woman,” he
exclaimed dramatically to himself, “the nearest living beings are
probably a pack of wolves.”
Before making his way to the third-class compartment to acquaint his
fellow-traveller with the extent of the disaster Abbleway hurriedly
pondered the question of the woman’s nationality. He had acquired a
smattering of Slavonic tongues during his residence in Vienna, and felt
competent to grapple with several racial possibilities.
“If she is Croat or Serb or Bosniak I shall be able to make her
understand,” he promised himself. “If she is Magyar, heaven help me! We
shall have to converse entirely by signs.”
He entered the carriage and made his momentous announcement in the best
approach to Croat speech that he could achieve.
“The train has broken away and left us!”
The woman shook her head with a movement that might be intended to convey
resignation to the will of heaven, but probably meant noncomprehension.
Abbleway repeated his information with variations of Slavonic tongues and
generous displays of pantomime.
“Ah,” said the woman at last in German dialect, “the train has gone? We
are left. Ah, so.”
She seemed about as much interested as though Abbleway had told her the
result of the municipal elections in Amsterdam.
“They will find out at some station, and when the line is clear of snow
they will send an engine. It happens that way sometimes.”
“We may be here all night!” exclaimed Abbleway.
The woman nodded as though she thought it possible.
“Are there wolves in these parts?” asked Abbleway hurriedly.
“Many,” said the woman; “just outside this forest my aunt was devoured
three years ago, as she was coming home from market. The horse and a
young pig that was in the cart were eaten too. The horse was a very old
one, but it was a beautiful young pig, oh, so fat. I cried when I heard
that it was taken. They spare nothing.”
“They may attack us here,” said Abbleway tremulously; “they could easily
break in, these carriages are like matchwood. We may both be devoured.”
“You, perhaps,” said the woman calmly; “not me.”
“Why not you?” demanded Abbleway.
“It is the day of Saint Mariä Kleophä, my name-day. She would not allow
me to be eaten by wolves on her day. Such a thing could not be thought
of. You, yes, but not me.”
Abbleway changed the subject.
“It is only afternoon now; if we are to be left here till morning we
shall be starving.”
“I have here some good eatables,” said the woman tranquilly; “on my
festival day it is natural that I should have provision with me. I have
five good blood-sausages; in the town shops they cost twenty-five heller
each. Things are dear in the town shops.”
“I will give you fifty heller apiece for a couple of them,” said Abbleway
with some enthusiasm.
“In a railway accident things become very dear,” said the woman; “these
blood-sausages are four kronen apiece.”
“Four kronen!” exclaimed Abbleway; “four kronen for a blood-sausage!”
“You cannot get them any cheaper on this train,” said the woman, with
relentless logic, “because there aren’t any others to get. In Agram you
can buy them cheaper, and in Paradise no doubt they will be given to us
for nothing, but here they cost four kronen each. I have a small piece
of Emmenthaler cheese and a honey-cake and a piece of bread that I can
let you have. That will be another three kronen, eleven kronen in all.
There is a piece of ham, but that I cannot let you have on my name-day.”
Abbleway wondered to himself what price she would have put on the ham,
and hurried to pay her the eleven kronen before her emergency tariff
expanded into a famine tariff. As he was taking possession of his modest
store of eatables he suddenly heard a noise which set his heart thumping
in a miserable fever of fear. ‘There was a scraping and shuffling as of
some animal or animals trying to climb up to the footboard. In another
moment, through the snow-encrusted glass of the carriage window, he saw a
gaunt prick-eared head, with gaping jaw and lolling tongue and gleaming
teeth; a second later another head shot up.
“There are hundreds of them,” whispered Abbleway; “they have scented us.
They will tear the carriage to pieces. We shall be devoured.”
“Not me, on my name-day. The holy Mariä Kleophä would not permit it,”
said the woman with provoking calm.
The heads dropped down from the window and an uncanny silence fell on the
beleaguered carriage. Abbleway neither moved nor spoke. Perhaps the
brutes had not clearly seen or winded the human occupants of the
carriage, and had prowled away on some other errand of rapine.
The long torture-laden minutes passed slowly away.
“It grows cold,” said the woman suddenly, crossing over to the far end of
the carriage, where the heads had appeared. “The heating apparatus does
not work any longer. See, over there beyond the trees, there is a
chimney with smoke coming from it. It is not far, and the snow has
nearly stopped, I shall find a path through the forest to that house with
the chimney.”
“But the wolves!” exclaimed Abbleway; “they may—”
“Not on my name-day,” said the woman obstinately, and before he could
stop her she had opened the door and climbed down into the snow. A
moment later he hid his face in his hands; two gaunt lean figures rushed
upon her from the forest. No doubt she had courted her fate, but
Abbleway had no wish to see a human being torn to pieces and devoured
before his eyes.
When he looked at last a new sensation of scandalised astonishment took
possession of him. He had been straitly brought up in a small English
town, and he was not prepared to be the witness of a miracle. The wolves
were not doing anything worse to the woman than drench her with snow as
they gambolled round her.
A short, joyous bark revealed the clue to the situation.
“Are those—dogs?” he called weakly.
“My cousin Karl’s dogs, yes,” she answered; “that is his inn, over beyond
the trees. I knew it was there, but I did not want to take you there; he
is always grasping with strangers. However, it grows too cold to remain
in the train. Ah, ah, see what comes!”
A whistle sounded, and a relief engine made its appearance, snorting its
way sulkily through the snow. Abbleway did not have the opportunity for
finding out whether Karl was really avaricious.