The Willows in Winter

by William Horwood

  But now, even that chaise-longue, upholstered as it had been in the finest scarlet silk to set off Toad’s legs to the best advantage, was ruined by water and the filth it had brought down with it. In place after place the water had run down the walls, or dripped through the ceiling roses and thence onto the floor beneath, there to ruin the carpet, or the polished oak boards.

  “O dear!” was all the Mole or any of them could bring themselves to say when they pushed open the door in the great banqueting hall. Here the floor had not been carpet or oak boards, but beautifully laid and much polished parquet flooring which seemed to stretch its shining reflective way forever till, by great gilded double doors at the far end, which led on towards the kitchens, it reached its end in a huge moulded skirting board, with a wainscot above.

  But the floor shone no longer! The water had come down here as well, had flooded the floor, soaked into it, and then on one of those dark and bitter nights past had frozen once more, and in the ensuing expansion had lifted the floor all over. It looked now like the ruts and hollows of a fallow field, ploughed up and left to fend for itself the seasons through.

  As if to heighten this effect, and showing the great power of something as innocent-seeming as water, chairs and dining tables, stools and card tables, had been lifted up as well, and were crazily tilted this way and that.

  “To think that we had that great banquet here to celebrate the re-capture of Toad Hall from the weasels and stoats those years ago!” said the Mole, while the Badger and the Rat could only sigh and shake their heads, their gaze shifting from one distressing scene to another.

  With foreboding the three animals decided to embark upon a thorough exploration of the Hall to see if they might find the source of the trouble, and set in train some temporary repairs. In this, the Rat was glad to note, the Badger took the lead, though less from a desire to please Toad (should he ever return) than from a desire for order and propriety, for it distressed his austere and simple heart to see such ruin and disorder.

  Of the journey into the upper floors of the now deserted Toad Hall none of the three was ever prepared to say much, so distressing and terrible did they find it. The flood of water seemed to have come down in two places rather than one, affecting the central part of the Hall, and its right wing. But many of the bedrooms had fared no better than the reception rooms below, and one of the finest was in much disarray because the great velvet curtains had become waterlogged, and dragged down their fittings and half the ceiling with them.

  They finally climbed one of the narrow staircases that led into the attic rooms in something like despair, their way lit only by the flickering candle which the Rat, ever the resourceful planner for such ventures, had thought to provide.

  As they reached the last few steps there was a sudden blast of cold wind from above and the candle went out.

  “Hmmph!” said the Rat, pushing on upwards and thrusting open an attic door.

  Cold white light flooded down on them, and wintry draughts, and they immediately saw the reason why: there was a huge hole in the roof with many tiles missing or fallen on the attic floor, and everything was open to wind and rain and snow.

  The attic room stretched a long way, leading to others, and that hole in the roof was not the only one, though it was by far the biggest. Nor was it hard to find the burst pipe, or one of them, for the more they explored the more frost damage they found. Here and there, where the water had spread out across the floors and collected in pools, sheets of slippery ice had formed, and both the Mole and the Rat took tumbles before they learnt that it was best to grasp the rafters above for support.

  “There’s nothing we can do here,” said the Badger finally, “and precious little we can do in the rooms below.”

  “We can cover some of Toad’s valuables, and some of the furniture against any further damage,” said the Mole thoughtfully.

  “Yes, we can, and perhaps put some of the more valuable things and his papers and suchlike into a room which we’ll lock, to protect them from thieves,” said the Rat.

  It was with heavy hearts that they returned to the ground floor and got the Otter and Nephew to help them with these tasks — work which seemed to add up to very little indeed when set against the extensive damage and ruin they had discovered.

  “Toad will be heart-broken,” said the kindly Mole, who had never for one moment doubted that Toad would return.

  “Well, it may seem a hard thing to say’ said the Badger, “but I fear that wealth and extravagance does bring this kind of disaster in its wake. What Toad wants with all this space and all these things I cannot imagine. But I cannot deny that I feel sorry for what we have seen today. And —”

  But he paused and then stopped, unwilling for the moment to say more.

  Their tasks complete, they gathered those few modest wants they had for their tea party into boxes, feeling, sadly, that these few objects — a tea service, a hot water urn, some silver — were likely to be better protected with them than if they left them where they were.

  Then, closing the great doors behind them, they went outside once more, breathing the clean air of winter and taking in the ordered scene of the river and the trees beyond with considerable relief after the dank ruin they had left inside.

  “What was it you were going to say, Badger, but which you didn’t quite finish?” asked the Water Rat.

  Badger sighed.

  “I was going to say, I was going to suggest rather, that perhaps, after all, it might be kinder upon Mr Toad, for all his folly and his faults and his selfishness, if he never came back to Toad Hall to witness what we have seen today. As Mole has rightly said, it would surely break his heart.”

  They all nodded sadly, sharing Badger’s sentiment, and with heavy hearts and slow steps set off across Toad’s great lawn with their few burdens, and thence along the bank towards the peace and harmony, the order and the warmth of their own much humbler homes.

  X

  Toad’s Luck Runs Out

  Toad’s self-congratulation upon his escape from His Lordship’s House was short-lived, for he soon discovered that stealing a chimney sweep’s bicycle is a very different thing from riding one.

  For one thing, at their greatest extension, its pedals were rather further off than his toes could comfortably reach; for another the hard leather saddle seemed to have all sorts of bumps, knots and protuberances that made Toad sore in places where he preferred not to be sore; and for a third, the handlebars and frame were made of crude wrought iron and therefore very heavy indeed, rather than the fine, strong, light tubular steel he might have hoped for — and for which he would have been only too happy to pay had he had the chance.

  As it was this was not a bicycle made for Toad, and his progress down the long — to him almost endless —carriageway was sporadic and wearisome. So that by the time he reached the metalled road beyond, and turned thankfully southwards in what he hoped would be the general direction of home, he was already tired.

  Yet flawed though Toad’s character was in so many ways, it had certain strengths and resources upon which he could draw if the occasion demanded, and no occasion was more demanding of him than a threat to his life, to his limbs and to his liberty.

  It will be no surprise, therefore, that weary and saddle-sore though he already was, and very ready to abandon the bicycle altogether, when soon after leaving the private road and joining the public one he heard the unwelcome baying and barking of a pack of hounds heading in his direction, vigour returned to his thin spent legs. More than vigour indeed, for the baying grew more fearsome, and the barking closer and more vicious.

  Toad’s legs veritably pumped like pistons at the awkward pedals, and what had been slow progress soon became very rapid indeed as, gasping with that most stimulating of combinations, fear laced with terror, he sought desperately to escape the blood-thirsty beasts that seemed now to be upon his trail.

  To add to his alarm there came the dread sounds of a hunting horn, sharp and terrifyi
ng, and worse still, the thunder of approaching hooves, and the sickening yodels and cries of huntsmen and women. Then, the final remorseless horror, along the road behind him, and near enough for him to hear, the soft pant pant pant of their mouths, and the gentle pad pad pad of their paws as the hounds came ever closer. Ahead, appallingly, the road steepened and his pace began to slow, and it suddenly dawned on Toad that somewhere along this anonymous, wintry, miserable stretch of road he might finally meet his end.

  It was not a pleasant thought, for on those occasions in the past when he had imagined what his end might be — and there had been a good few such occasions, some quite recent — he had always believed that his demise would be a glorious one, a great one, heroic to the last.

  A calm came upon him which (though it made the panting and the slavering of the hounds just behind seem all the more inexorable) gave him pause to say to himself what he imagined might be his last words: “I shall stop and turn and face them! I shall confront them! I shall be a terrifying Toad and they shall flee before my courage and ferocity.”

  In the madness of his desperation — for the calm he felt was entirely illusory — Toad convinced himself that the chimney sweep’s broom, if wielded with sufficient confidence and power, would serve as cutlass and blunderbuss combined, and he readied himself for his last stand.

  A moment more, indeed, and he might have leapt from his metal mount, broom in hand, climbed the adjacent verge to gain height, and turned to rout the baying hordes — but it was not to be.

  Even as he loosened his grip on the handlebars and reached down to take the brush, there was an ear-splitting blast on the hunting horn, a surge of canine paws and snarling yelps just behind his rear wheel, a clatter of horses’ hooves onto the road behind him, and in his abject fear and fright Toad’s front wheel wobbled and mounted the verge that was to have been his bulwark and front line.

  Toad shot forward over the handlebars, turned head over heels through the air, and plunged deep into the leafless and prickly hedge.

  He had some final sense of slobbering tongues about his face, and scenting snouts upon his clothes, and a fleeting image of the bellies of flying horses, and the flapping of hunting red, before all was darkness, and all a growing silence made the deeper for the gradual retreat of those sounds and persons and animals that had brought him so very near his end.

  Painfully, achingly, Toad pulled himself from the blackthorn hedge and looked about. Not a person, nor a horse, nor a solitary hound in sight: only his sweep’s brush and bag, and the bicycle, buckled now and useless.

  “I fooled them!” cried the panting, bruised and bloodied Toad. “I put them off the scent! So near death, and yet I have escaped! Who would dare not agree that I am the greatest, cleverest Toad alive! Were the hounds of hell itself after me I would escape them! Ha! Ha!” Thus Toad, sitting on the verge, dressed and sooted as a chimney sweep, satisfied himself that his luck was the product of his own cleverness. Then, triumphant once more, he rose unsteadily to his feet and eyed the bicycle.

  “O metal steed’ said he, “it grieves me to leave you here, for you were faithful, like no other, and you gave your life for me! I shall give you an honourable burial, and ever remember you in my prayers!”

  With some difficulty, for it was heavy and every muscle and bone of his body ached, Toad took up the bicycle and portered it across the road to the ditch, into which he unceremoniously threw it, lest some busybody or other passing by should see it, and use it as evidence that he had passed that way.

  As for the hunt, and what its quarry might have been, which had been of such life and death importance to Toad moments before, it mattered not one whit to him now He had lived to tell the tale, and tell it he certainly would in the most heroic terms at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, he must away!

  He picked up his bag and brushes, liberally dusted his face and clothes with soot again to maintain his disguise, and with a resigned and weary sigh, as of the hero who has survived another crisis but expects to face many more ere his return home, he set off down the road once more, this time by foot.

  It must be said that by that same evening Toad’s heroic view of himself had declined somewhat, for already saddle-sore, he was now footsore as well, and hungry, and thirsty. He had hoped that some opportunity for respite might have come from a passer-by, but there had been none at all. His escape from the hunt had convinced him that his disguise was a good one, and so far from having any fear of meeting people he now positively yearned to, and was coming to the conclusion that the road he was on was as minor and as unimportant as could be.

  But just as passers-by were absent, so were crossroads, and, therefore, any hope of changing direction towards somewhere busier, which might offer him greater opportunity. He had no inclination at all to try crossing country, not only because he had little idea where he was, but also because a chimney sweep upon a road might pass muster, but one perambulating the fallow fields and jumping the dykes was sure to arouse suspicion in a hostile world. So Toad plodded on, hopeful if not fully confident that his persistence would finally be rewarded.

  The glimmer of a chance did not come till dusk began to settle in, by when in addition to various aches and pains, hunger and thirst, there came upon Toad the first painful tinglings of the bitter cold which would only get worse as the winter’s night drew in.

  It was indeed a glimmer that he saw, in the gathering gloom, to the right of the road ahead. Coming nearer he saw it was the light at the windows of a delightful roadside cottage which even in the near-dark Toad could see was of the kind whose simple garden borders would burgeon forth with snowdrops and daffodils the moment winter was past, and whose elevations would be bedecked with honeysuckle once summer had come. For now, he told himself that he could surely expect a warm if simple welcome from whatever common peasant or labourer lived there, and perhaps the overnight use of the barn he espied nearby. Surely all the more so, he mused as he went confidently up the garden path, seeing that he himself would appear a common fellow from a similar station in life to those in this humble house and thus worthy of their sympathy and temporary support.

  “On my return to Toad Hall,” Toad vowed silently as he rat—tat-tatted at the door, “I shall send these poor folk some provisions to see them through the winter, out of gratitude for what they are about to do for me.

  But any further good intentions Toad may have had were nipped in the bud when he heard a rough and assertive female voice on the far side of the door say, “Is that you, ducks?” followed by something even more odd as far as Toad was concerned: “Look lively, you lot, Pa’s home!”

  The door was quickly opened, and Toad got a much warmer welcome than even his normal over-confidence gave him any right to expect.

  For there she was, vast in a lateral sense, huge in her greeting, monumental in her embrace.

  “Lord’s me!” said she, grasping the surprised Toad with a brace of arms as rotund as plump pheasants, “it’s my beloved come home at last!”

  Nor did this mistake in identity falter one bit when thrusting him from her, but holding him upright with a passion that was almost savage, she said “Ducks!” again, and kissed him first on one sooty cheek and then the other.

  This greeting so astonished Toad that for some moments he was quite incapable of speech, let alone rational thought, and all he could do (as she held him up and eyed her Adonis adoringly) was to stare dumbfounded, first at her, and then beyond the threshold of her — no, their — home.

  The children — his children, as she seemed to accept —stood by the bright hearth, all five of them, all boys of descending size, all rotund, and all sooty replicas of something between her and, well, himself. On the mantel, quite unmistakable, was a daguerreotype of a bewhiskered sweep complete with brushes, beneath whose sooty form were inscribed in an uneducated hand the words, “Our Gramp”.

  Above this, attached to the walls as if it might be a hunter’s trophy from the good years gone by, or a weapon broug
ht home from the crusades, was the final evidence Toad needed to tell him to where Fate, so malign, so unjust, so malevolent, had brought him: an ancient sweep’s brush of polished hickory, its brass screws and ferrules as bright as a sergeant major’s buttons.

  “Welcome home, Pa!” chorused the quintet of youths, their smiles bright as the brass above their heads.

  It must be said that for a moment Toad actually weakened. He was perhaps over-tired from the long day, and over-strained from his close shave with the pack of hounds. So that, though he realised that he had arrived at the very cottage where the sweep he had earlier duped actually made his home, and that due to the brilliance of his disguise the sweep’s wife had mistaken him for the sweep himself, Toad was tempted not to disabuse her of her mistake.

  In this moment of weakness Toad saw the advantages of his plan in a rosy light. For one thing there was the hot meal that was undoubtedly his for the asking, for he could smell it, and see and hear something like a thick stew with dumplings simmering away upon the range. For another, drink was certainly to hand as well, for there hanging above the hob, ready and willing, was a large pewter tankard all ready to be filled with beer or cider or some other rustic brew.

  But the temptations were not purely gluttonous. There was a large and comfortable armchair in full view of where Toad stood, upon which, had he had the chance to examine it more closely, he would not have been surprised if in such a warmly domestic establishment as this, there might have been a plaque upon which was inscribed, “Pa’s Own”.

  Lastly, and in some ways the most tempting of all, was a little door that stood ajar and through which Toad could see a simple staircase leading to the rooms above, in one of which, he had no doubt at all, was a large, comfortable, soft bed awaiting his hard-used body.