The Willows in Winter Read online

  “Yes,” said the Rat softly, very surprised and a little awed.

  “Well, as I slipped towards what I had thought was eternal sleep, I had the strangest feeling, almost a vision really, that there was a Before, just as we have said there may be a Beyond. And no sooner had I remembered some dim memory of Before, and something that had happened, than I felt, or thought I felt, Him there.”

  The Rat remained very still and quiet when the Mole spoke these words, as did the Mole himself, so that the only sound in his parlour was the soft crackling and shifting of the fire.

  “I felt I was taken up in His arms out of the dark flow of the river, up into the night, and then placed down somewhere warm and dry where I could go to sleep knowing that when I was ready I would wake once more in a place where the river meanders up into a blue distance, and where there are mountains shining with the sun, and —O Ratty, do you understand?”

  The Rat nodded slowly, his eyes never straying from the fire.

  “As I was thinking that, knowing that, I said, ‘Stay with me’ and He said — He said — O, I wish I could be sure of this, or remember it better, but it flows and ebbs in my mind, it shifts and swirls, like the dark currents of the river itself, coming from who knows where, and going to somewhere else. Yet I am sure that He replied, ‘They’re still there, your friends, and they will be waiting for you, Mole. Your time is not yet, nor theirs.’“

  Mole was quiet again and slowly sat back, tears on his face.

  “Ratty, I don’t know quite what He meant by that, but when those words were spoken I thought of Badger, and of Toad, and of my Nephew, and of you, Ratty, of you — and all the animals of the River Bank, and the Wild Wood. I thought of all the places, and the things, and the people that I know and love — and I let myself slip into a different kind of sleep then, for I knew they would be there, waiting for me, when I came back. Just as I knew that the place I thought I saw —“

  “Beyond,” murmured the Rat.

  “Yes, Beyond — just as I knew then as I know now that it will be there for us, waiting for when we’re finally ready to go to it —”

  The Mole said little more, for it seemed he was exhausted by striving to regain these memories. He slept awhile, and the Water Rat watched over him, building up the fire when it began to die, and placing a warm plaid about his friend, for the wind was getting up outside, and there was a draught from beneath the door.

  The Mole had not wanted him to leave, nor would he, for he knew he was needed for a time and might yet be needed more, for his friend’s sleep was restless and sometimes he muttered to himself, and seemed to push out his arms and legs as if to ward off the waters of the river, and to struggle away once more from that endless darkness that had so nearly taken him.

  “No!” he cried out more than once, and “I cannot —and then finally, before he slipped into a more peaceful sleep, saying, “Yes —” and “O yes —”

  All of which made the Rat feel surprised, even disturbed, when rather later it was he who found himself coming out of sleep, and the Mole who was tending to him in a most concerned way.

  “Are you all right, Ratty? You were quite distressed and your cries woke me up!”

  “My cries? I — I must have dozed,” said the Rat a little grumpily.

  “A long enough doze to call it a sleep!” said the Mole, who sounded very much more like his normal self. “Look, I have made some peppermint tea and toasted a little of the bread that was left.”

  The two animals tucked in and when they had done so to their satisfaction, the Mole said, “We’ve talked quite enough of what happened to me and now it’s your turn. What’s been happening since I had my mishap? Nothing unusual, I hope?”

  “Ah!” said the Rat cautiously “Not unusual if you have been expecting, as I have for a very long time, that Toad would show some of his old form again.

  “Toad!” exclaimed the ever tolerant and trusting Mole, “but is he not altered and reformed? He has been for so long that I would be very surprised if he had slipped back.”

  “Then be surprised, Mole; allow surprise to overtake you: Toad has done something even more dreadful than anything he has done before. Something I hardly dare to mention on so happy an occasion as your safe return.”

  “But what?” cried the Mole. “Surely, whatever it is it cannot be so bad that it cannot soon be forgiven and forgotten!”

  “Forgiveness! Forgetting! You would be wise not to mention such things to Badger when next you see him. No, Toad has gone far beyond the limits of our endurance, so far indeed that I think I may safely say that we shall never see Toad in these parts again. If he is still alive, which I very much doubt, we may hazard that he is lost to the River forever!”

  These were final words indeed, and despite the Rat’s reluctance to say anything at that moment the Mole would not let the matter rest till he heard it all, and more. For despite everything, Toad was surely as much a part of river-bank life as they themselves were. “Anyway,” added the Mole finally, “he may be exasperating, and the things he does vexatious, but he is, in the end, always fun!”

  “Fun?” repeated the Water Rat with some heat. “Fun! Do you call being dragged up into the air fun? Do you call being hurled across the skies fun? Do you dare suggest that being thrown at an ever increasing velocity back towards the ground is fun?”

  The Rat glared at the surprised Mole and clenched his pipe between his teeth so hard that it cracked.

  “Fun!” he exclaimed finally, falling into a brooding silence.

  “I think, perhaps, you had better begin at the beginning,” said the Mole in a quiet and conciliatory way, so as not to provoke the Rat into another outburst.

  The Rat duly began his tale with the discovery that Mole was missing, continuing with the first searches for him, and thence to the monstrous appearance of the airborne Toad, and all that it was to lead to.

  “And all for me!” exclaimed the Mole more than once during this recital. “All for me!”

  Of Toad’s trickery regarding the Badger and the pilot-mechanic, and the Rat’s subsequent abduction, the truth had to be told, and the Rat did not stint in telling it.

  But the more dramatic his account became, the more terrifying his developing ordeal, the more difficult it was for the impressionable Mole not to feel a little of the excitement and adventure that his friend Toad must have experienced.

  “I trust, Mole, you are not enjoying this at my expense,” growled the Rat, interrupting himself.

  “No, no, of course not!” declared the Mole, though without much conviction. “What you say Toad did was wrong, I’m sure, quite wrong, but —”

  “But? But what?” said the Rat warningly.

  “Well …” faltered the Mole, “I mean that — you see —I have never seen a flying machine and though I imagine they are quite dangerous things, nevertheless they do seem quite exciting and it’s no good me pretending otherwise.”

  “Hmmph!” said the Rat, frowning. “Be that as it may, having stolen the flying machine, for we may be sure he had not paid for it despite his claims, Toad then abducted me and up into the air we went. Needless to say he forgot all about looking for you, so excited and absorbed did he become in flying the thing.”

  “So he didn’t actually crash it, then?” said the Mole. “I mean he did succeed in flying it?”

  “Mole, you are trying my patience too far. Of course he flew it — if he crashed it I wouldn’t be here, would I? Or if he did crash it, and some of us might think that is the very least he deserved, he did not do so till the machine and I had parted company at altitude.”

  Mole’s eyes widened in astonishment, and his mouth silently opened and closed, words utterly failing him.

  “Yes,” continued the Rat rather more slowly, glad to see that his report was finally having a properly sobering effect on the Mole, “I fell out of the machine, high above the ground, very high.”

  “But Ratty!” exclaimed the bewildered Mole. “Are you all right? Y
ou look all right. Have you broken bones, perhaps, or bruises I cannot see?”

  “Broken bones!Bruises. My dear Mole, if I had fallen to the ground from that height without being slowed down I would have a lot of broken bones, and a great many bruises. Too many, in fact.”

  “Yes,” said the Mole weakly, “I suppose you would have.”

  “I had a parachute.”

  “Ah!” said the Mole with relief, not quite sure what a parachute was. “That was just as well then. You think of everything, Ratty!”

  Patiently the Water Rat explained the workings of a parachute, and how he came to have one, and how he now rather regretted securing Toad’s parachute, for it might mean that he too survived that dreadful flight!

  The Rat described how he had come out of the machine, dropped like a stone for what seemed a very long time, and then had his descent suddenly arrested when the parachute opened.

  “And then — and then, Mole —”

  Mole saw immediately that a change had come over his friend. Till that moment his account had been straightforward enough, if occasionally rather inclined to irritation and annoyance, but now it became something else. There was a curious distance in his voice, and a far-off gaze in his eyes which settled, as the Mole’s had earlier, into the ever moving and mysterious depths of the fire.

  “Why, what is it, Ratty?!” exclaimed the Mole. “What happened to you up there?”

  “It was not what happened to me,” said the Rat quietly, “it was what I saw on the way down.”

  “A very long way, I should think,” said the Mole matter-of-factly, not yet quite understanding the extent of the Rat’s wonderment.

  “Mole,” said the Rat, turning his gaze slowly to the eyes of his friend, who saw a look of awe, and a touch of loss, on his face, “I saw more than a long way I saw Beyond.”

  “Beyond!” whispered the Mole.

  The Water Rat slowly nodded his head, his eyes very serious, and then turned his gaze back to the fire.

  “I tell you, Mole, I saw Beyond.”

  “But what was it like?” asked the Mole.

  “It was not unlike a description you gave earlier —there was the river, stretching on and on, curving one way and then another, first between the fields beyond Toad Hall, and then beyond the Wild Wood, and then ever further, on and on till the landscape was strange greens and blues, reds and pinks, and there were hills that were more than hills, Mole —”

  “More than hills!” echoed the Mole.

  “— and mountains that were far more than mountains, where the river seemed to reach up into the sky to the place which was Beyond —”

  “— up into the sky!” said the Mole breathlessly.

  “And I knew, Mole, I knew, that it was there waiting, as it always was and always will be, waiting for —”

  “— waiting for us all —” said the Mole very quietly and dreamily.

  “I’m not sure, but I think so’ said the Rat in a very subdued way “But from the moment I saw it I knew, or I felt, all sorts of things, strange, vague things that seemed unconnected and yet are not at all. One thing I knew was that you would be all right. I knew it. And I was very surprised when Badger, who has always been so wise, did not know it, or want to believe it. Then, for another — for another —”

  “What is it, Ratty?” asked the Mole, for his friend seemed almost as moved now as he himself had been much earlier.

  “For another,” said the Rat, “I knew I would one day go there. Since then I have thought of almost nothing else. Indeed, were it not for you being lost, and the winter upon us and travelling foolish and dangerous, I would have long since left to go up-river to find Beyond.”

  “Well then,” said the Mole firmly, “I’m glad I was lost! And I’m very glad it is winter!”

  “But I’ve got this hankering, this restlessness —”

  “Ratty, you’ve always been like that, you know you have. Don’t you remember once how after you met a relative of yours, the Sea Rat, it was all I could do to get you to stay here with us? I had to be quite firm about it, and that’s not something I’m good at.”

  “I remember very well indeed,” said the Water Rat, “but this was different. You see, Mole, though you and I have talked of Beyond from time to time, Badger has often warned against even thinking about it. That’s why I couldn’t tell him what I had seen. But you — I knew you’d understand.”

  “‘Beyond’,” repeated the Mole slowly, finding as he did so that all kinds of curious half-memories came into his mind, of summer days when he and the Rat had talked and mused, of that time long ago when they had gone in search of Portly and somehow they had found him on the island, but quite where, or how or — and his own recent experience with the river and the memory of He that saved him. Was that Beyond as well?

  “Yes,” said the Mole at last, “I think I understand. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens, Rat. Perhaps you did see something, and perhaps it will ache in your heart for a time, and perhaps it’s as well that such sights and memories fade with time, and become less irksome. Why, the spring will be with us soon, and the sooner the better with the severe winter we’re having. When it comes we’ll forget all those dreams again in the excitement of going out and about once more.

  “I’ll never forget!” declared the Rat. “And nor will you!”

  “Perhaps not,” agreed the Mole finally; “now tell me what happened after that!”

  But the Rat had lost interest in the rest of his tale, and finished it in no time at all, ending with how the Badger had found him, and how the Badger had behaved most peculiarly and had seemed in a great hurry to bury Mole into memory and be done with it all.

  “Then you appeared from the river, and you know the rest —”

  “Not all of the rest,” said the Mole, “for there’s Toad to worry about.”

  “You mean there’s Toad not to worry about any more.

  Mole laughed.

  “Old Toad will come back, just as I did,” said the Mole. “I was saying to my Nephew only the other day that life wouldn’t be the same without Toad. I’m sure Badger will forgive him, as he always does — as you yourself have surely begun to do already”

  “If he does return then I pity him, for Badger will be ready and waiting, and so will I. And so should you be. Badger may forgive him as you say, but not too easily, I hope!”

  “He’ll still come back, and we’ll be glad when he does,” said the Mole finally.

  “Hmmph!” said the Water Rat, and that was the last thing either of them said before sleep finally overtook both right where they were, and the candles guttered about them, and the fire died, and they fell into the deepest, kindest, most blissful of slumberings, which lasted all the longer that they had both been through so much, and needed time to rest and recuperate, just as wise Badger had guessed they would.

  IX

  Rack and Ruin

  The Mole was right to warn his Nephew about that winter. It was a hard and savage one, so much so that the high tea the Badger had promised to hold for the weasels and stoats was first delayed for a few days, and then postponed “till the weather grew more clement”.

  The Water Rat spent a few more days at Mole End before he sensed that the time had come for the Mole to be left alone again, while he himself wished to get back to his own house and make any repairs necessary following the flooding of the river.

  Such matters, so tiresome and difficult to the Mole, were as nothing to the Water Rat, for he enjoyed the vicissitudes that living so near the river brought him, and without them so restless an animal might easily have grown bored.

  A good many days passed, and finally became some weeks, during which the winter storms raged, bringing rain and hail, and wind and sleet of a kind and variety that made Mole and Badger and Rat, in their different homes, feel grateful that they were as safe and snug as they wished to be.

  The Rat was the most active of them all, and once in a while he would cross the river, if
it was safe to do so, and make his way up to Mole End to make sure his friend was all right. He had been more troubled than he cared to admit by the Mole’s misadventure and now, with a new relish, he was glad to have him as a friend and neighbour to call upon, and looked forward more than ever to sharing the coming busy days of spring, and the lazy days of summer.

  Then too, when the weather looked settled and a little less cold and wet for a time, if only for a few hours, the Rat would stroll along the bank by way of Otter’s home, casting an expert eye on the river’s flow, and the clarity or otherwise of the water, before going on into the Wild Wood to see if the Badger had decided on a date for the tea he had so rashly agreed to host.

  “Can’t keep putting it off forever, Badger,” he observed during one such visit, “and the sooner you get it over the better. Some of the weasels are beginning to complain, and as for the stoats, well, you know how awkward they can be if they get irritated.”

  “I’ll decide about it tomorrow, or the next day,” grumbled the Badger, who rarely had guests in his home, which was what had made his invitation so appealing in the first place.

  “After all, they did help as they said they would,” prompted the Rat.

  “They did, they did,” continued the Badger, fixing Mole’s Nephew with a frowning stare as if it was all his fault, though in fact he was enjoying the youngster’s company, “but it’s not easy, what with the weather being unpredictable, and me being not quite ready to mount a feast, the winter being a poor time for such affairs —”

  “Just a cup of tea will do, I’m sure,” said the Rat. “And some scones,” added Mole’s Nephew who, like his uncle, was fond of his food.

  “And clotted cream, no doubt, and strawberry jam!” exclaimed the exasperated Badger. “Where am I to find such things, as well as plates and saucers and teaspoons? My dear Rat, you are a very unreasonable fellow if you think my larder and cupboards are packed ready and waiting for such an occasion!”