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Famous Modern Ghost Stories by Various

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"What a river!" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had
traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how we had often been
obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a
little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a
nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the
elements--water, wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun--thinking of
the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us
to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and
charming traveling companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than
any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its
_aliveness_. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the
pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to
play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps,
unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the growth
of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent
desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some
huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our
little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes,
yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come
inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its
secret life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our
tent, uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be
caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is
its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools,
suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its
shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere
surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the
banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its
face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew upstream and
tried to stop its growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its
tumblings and foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges;
that self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the
affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns,
far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when
the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till
the steam rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world
knew it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian
forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it,
where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear
again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new
river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed
that we had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of
shallows!

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth,
was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent
tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge
them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well
marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to
recognize the new-comer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this
particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power
impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that
there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows,
and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and
forced to hurry itself with great waves and much dashing to and fro in
order to get through in time. And during the fight our canoe slipped
down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its life among
the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and
after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know
other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain
of Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we
could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there
moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines,
passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too,
lest they be discovered.

Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and
animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely
places in rows like short black palings; gray crows crowded the
shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that
opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all
sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It
was impossible to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing a
deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows
of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush,
or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt
round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too,
everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and
disappearing so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed
it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the
Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was halfway to the
Black Sea, within scenting distance almost of other, stranger countries
where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly
grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into
three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers
farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was
intended to be followed.

"If you take a side channel," said the Hungarian officer we met in the
Pressburg shop while buying provisions, "you may find yourselves, when
the flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may
easily starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you
not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will
increase."

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being
left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious,
and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the
rest, the officer's prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a
perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a
westerly gale.

It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or
two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot
sand, I wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The
island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank
standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The far
end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the
tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was
triangular in shape, with the apex upstream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood
bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as
though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming
streams on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and
rush while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured
over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually
moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending
upon me: it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with
foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make
walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end
the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only
the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and
pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from
behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the
islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which
closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding
down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that
sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from
sight. They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its
bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular
emotion began stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight
of the wild beauty, there crept unbidden and unexplained, a curious
feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous: many
of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept
away by the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched
the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than
the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it
directly to do with the power of the driving wind--this shouting
hurricane that might almost carry up a few acres of willows into the air
and scatter them like so much chaff over the landscape. The wind was
simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to
stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of
pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with
the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I experienced, that
it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it
accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my
realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power
of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with
it too--a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these
great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the
day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play
together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself
more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of
willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye
could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing
in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting,
listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected
themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously
somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or
other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power,
moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way
or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains
overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises
a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another,
somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They
stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole
to exalt.

With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different,
I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense
of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror.
Their serried ranks growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows
deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the
curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the
borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world
where we were not wanted or invited to remain--where we ran grave risks
perhaps!

The feeling, however, though it refused to yield its meaning entirely to
analysis, did not at the time trouble me by passing into menace. Yet it
never left me quite, even during the very practical business of putting
up the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a fire for the stew-pot.
It remained, just enough to bother and perplex, and to rob a most
delightful camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my
companion, however, I said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid
of imagination. In the first place, I could never have explained to him
what I meant, and in the second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if
I had.

There was a slight depression in the center of the island, and here we
pitched the tent. The surrounding willows broke the wind a bit.

"A poor camp," observed the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent
stood upright; "no stones and precious little firewood. I'm for moving
on early to-morrow--eh? This sand won't hold anything."

But the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many
devices, and we made the cosy gipsy house as safe as possible, and then
set about collecting a store of wood to last till bedtime. Willow bushes
drop no branches, and driftwood was our only source of supply. We hunted
the shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks were crumbling as the
rising flood tore at them and carried away great portions with a splash
and a gurgle.

"The island's much smaller than when we landed," said the accurate
Swede. "It won't last long at this rate. We'd better drag the canoe
close to the tent, and be ready to start at a moment's notice. _I_ shall
sleep in my clothes."

He was a little distance off, climbing along the bank, and I heard his
rather jolly laugh as he spoke.

"By Jove!" I heard him call, a moment later, and turned to see what had
caused his exclamation; but for the moment he was hidden by the willows,
and I could not find him.

"What in the world's this?" I heard him cry again, and this time his
voice had become serious.

I ran up quickly and joined him on the bank. He was looking over the
river, pointing at something in the water.

"Good Heavens, it's a man's body!" he cried excitedly. "Look!"

A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly
past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was
about twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where
we stood it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes
reflecting the sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned
over. Then it gave a swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a
flash.

"An otter, by gad!" we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.

It _was_ an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly
like the body of a drowned man turning helplessly in the current. Far
below it came to the surface once again, and we saw its black skin, wet
and shining in the sunlight.

Then, too, just as we turned back, our arms full of driftwood, another
thing happened to recall us to the river bank. This time it really was a
man, and what was more, a man in a boat. Now a small boat on the Danube
was an unusual sight at any time, but here in this deserted region, and
at flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute a real event. We
stood and stared.

Whether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the
wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I
found it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying
apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort
of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down
the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking
across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light
too uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about. It
seemed to me that he was gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice
came across the water to us shouting something furiously but the wind
drowned it so that no single word was audible. There was something
curious about the whole appearance--man, boat, signs, voice--that made
an impression on me out of all proportion to its cause.

"He's crossing himself!" I cried. "Look, he's making the sign of the
cross!"

"I believe you're right," the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand
and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment,
melting away down there into the sea of willows where the sun caught
them in the bend of the river and turned them into a great crimson wall
of beauty. Mist, too, had begun to rise, so that the air was hazy.

"But what in the world is he doing at nightfall on this flooded river?"
I said, half to myself. "Where is he going at such a time, and what did
he mean by his signs and shouting? D'you think he wished to warn us
about something?"

"He saw our smoke, and thought we were spirits probably," laughed my
companion. "These Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish: you
remember the shopwoman at Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed
here because it belonged to some sort of beings outside man's world! I
suppose they believe in fairies and elementals, possibly demons too.
That peasant in the boat saw people on the islands for the first time in
his life," he added, after a slight pause, "and it scared him, that's
all." The Swede's tone of voice was not convincing, and his manner
lacked something that was usually there. I noted the change instantly
while he talked, though without being able to label it precisely.

"If they had enough imagination," I laughed loudly--I remember trying to
make as much _noise_ as I could--"they might well people a place like
this with the old gods of antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all
this region more or less with their shrines and sacred groves and
elemental deities."

The subject dropped and we returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was
not given to imaginative conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I
remember feeling distinctly glad that he was not imaginative; his
stolid, practical nature suddenly seemed to me welcome and comforting.
It was an admirable temperament, I felt: he could steer down rapids like
a red Indian, shoot dangerous bridges and whirlpools better than any
white man I ever saw in a canoe. He was a grand fellow for an
adventurous trip, a tower of strength when untoward things happened. I
looked at his strong face and light curly hair as he staggered along
under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of mine!), and I experienced
a feeling of relief. Yes, I was distinctly glad just then that the Swede
was--what he was, and that he never made remarks that suggested more
than they said.

"The river's still rising, though," he added, as if following out some
thoughts of his own, and dropping his load with a gasp. "This island
will be under water in two days if it goes on."

"I wish the _wind_ would go down," I said. "I don't care a fig for the
river."

The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten
minutes' notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an
increasing current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds
that so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe.

Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It
seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the
willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes,
like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the
island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the
sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through
space.

But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full
moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting
willows with a light like the day.

We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the
noises of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had
already made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of
the tent, but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we
lowered the curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was
enough to smoke and see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about
overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and
hissed, and from time to time a heavy splash announced the falling away
of further portions of the bank.

Our talk, I noticed, had to do with the far-away scenes and incidents of
our first camps in the Black Forest, or of other subjects altogether
remote from the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the actual
moment more than was necessary--almost as though we had agreed tacitly
to avoid discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor
the boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention,
though ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater
part of the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a
place.

The scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going, for the
wind, that drove the smoke in our faces wherever we sat, helped at the
same time to make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make foraging
expeditions into the darkness, and the quantity the Swede brought back
always made me feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for
the fact was I did not care much about being left alone, and yet it
always seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or scramble
along the slippery banks in the moonlight. The long day's battle with
wind and water--such wind and such water!--had tired us both, and an
early bed was the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for
the tent. We lay there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion,
peering about us into the dense willow bushes, and listening to the
thunder of wind and river. The loneliness of the place had entered our
very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our
voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the
fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always
rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it
something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church,
or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite _safe_, to
be overheard.

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept
by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both,
I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath
the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world,
an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of
willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make
use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as
I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the
stars. For the last time I rose to get firewood.

"When this has burnt up," I said firmly, "I shall turn in," and my
companion watched me lazily as I moved off into the surrounding
shadows.

For an unimaginative man I thought he seemed unusually receptive that
night, unusually open to suggestion of things other than sensory. He too
was touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I was not
altogether pleased, I remember, to recognize this slight change in him,
and instead of immediately collecting sticks, I made my way to the far
point of the island where the moonlight on plain and river could be seen
to better advantage. The desire to be alone had come suddenly upon me;
my former dread returned in force; there was a vague feeling in me I
wished to face and probe to the bottom.

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell
of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere "scenery"
could have produced such an effect. There was something more here,
something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering
willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one
and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange
distress. But the _willows_ especially: for ever they went on chattering
and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out,
sometimes sighing--but what it was they made so much to-do about
belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it
was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet
kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another
plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a
mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together,
oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even
when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive,
and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the
_horrible_.

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