“And, for Heaven’s sake,” I went on, “don’t keep pretending you hear
things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there’s nothing to hear
but the river and this cursed old thundering wind.”

“You _fool!_” he answered in a low, shocked voice, “you utter fool. That’s just the way all victims talk. As if you didn’t understand just
as well as I do!” he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of
resignation. “The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to
hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at
self-deception only makes the truth harder when you’re forced to meet
it.”

My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew
quite well his words were true, and that _I_ was the fool, not _he_. Up
to a certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I
think I felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic,
less sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half
ignorant all the time of what was going on under my very nose. _He
knew_ from the very beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly
missed the point of his words about the necessity of there being a
victim, and that we ourselves were destined to satisfy the want. I
dropped all pretence thenceforward, but thenceforward likewise my fear
increased steadily to the climax. “But you’re quite right about one thing,” he added, before the subject
passed, “and that is that we’re wiser not to talk about it, or even to
think about it, because what one _thinks_ finds expression in words,
and what one _says_, happens.”

That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to
fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous
flood of rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores
sometimes, and we fished for them with long willow branches. The island
grew perceptibly smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps
and splashes. The weather kept brilliantly fine till about four
o’clock, and then for the first time for three days the wind showed
signs of abating. Clouds began to gather in the south-west, spreading
thence slowly over the sky. This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant
roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the
silence that came about five o’clock with its sudden cessation was in a
manner quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in
its own way then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical
than the wind noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held
many notes, rising, falling always beating out some sort of great
elemental tune; whereas the river’s song lay between three notes at
most—dull pedal notes, that held a lugubrious quality foreign to the
wind, and somehow seemed to me, in my then nervous state, to sound
wonderfully well the music of doom. It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright
sunlight took everything out of the landscape that made for
cheerfulness; and since this particular landscape had already managed
to convey the suggestion of something sinister, the change of course
was all the more unwelcome and noticeable. For me, I know, the
darkening outlook became distinctly more alarming, and I found myself
more than once calculating how soon after sunset the full moon would
get up in the east, and whether the gathering clouds would greatly
interfere with her lighting of the little island. With this general hush of the wind—though it still indulged in
occasional brief gusts—the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the
willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort
of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no
wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common
objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they
stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance;
and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the
darkness a bizarre _grotesquerie_ of appearance that lent to them
somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very
ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us. The
forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of night. They were
focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon ourselves. For
thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my really
indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present
themselves. I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered
somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served
apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing
spell of the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as
absurd and childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet,
in spite of every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I
dreaded the night as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach
of darkness. The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the
day, and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede
to the base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From
five o’clock onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations
for dinner, it being my turn to cook that night. We had potatoes,
onions, bits of bacon fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue
from former stews at the bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up
into it the result was most excellent, and it was followed by a stew of
plums with sugar and a brew of strong tea with dried milk. A good pile
of wood lay close at hand, and the absence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily watching me, dividing his attentions between
cleaning his pipe and giving useless advice—an admitted privilege of
the off-duty man. He had been very quiet all the afternoon, engaged in
re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tent ropes, and fishing for
driftwood while I slept. No more talk about undesirable things had
passed between us, and I think his only remarks had to do with the
gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was not fully a
third smaller than when we first landed. The pot had just begun to bubble when I heard his voice calling to me
from the bank, where he had wandered away without my noticing. I ran
up. “Come and listen,” he said, “and see what you make of it.” He held his
hand cupwise to his ear, as so often before. “_Now_ do you hear anything?” he asked, watching me curiously. We stood there, listening attentively together. At first I heard only
the deep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent
surface. The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a
sound began to reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound—something like
the humming of a distant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the
darkness from the waste of swamps and willows opposite.