The Willows at Christmas (15 page)

But Toad did not speak. He could only stare at the fire and at the portrait of his father, now askew, and clasp the Mole’s basket to his lap as if it were the nicest, kindest gift he had ever had.

But speak? That he could not do. Nor suddenly could his friends.

How long they stayed thus would be hard to say, but they remained so till Miss Bugle knocked on the door and brought in a tray of tea and mince pies. As they tucked in, they could hear Mrs Ffleshe in another room making plain that she thought it time that Toad’s guests left, for hers would soon be arriving.

Miss Bugle dared close the library door upon this unseasonal cacophony, as the Mole and the Badger poured tea for Toad, and tried to comfort him.

It was some time later, when Toad was somewhat fortified and seemed to be on the road to recovery, that something happened which seemed to bring to a head all his years of failing struggle with Mrs Ffleshe.

He had finally found enough strength to raise a third cup of tea to his lips when with a slide and crash his father’s portrait, which must have worked loose, fell on to the mantel, and from there towards the ground.

In fact, it did rather more than that. It was in a heavy gilded frame and a corner of this crashed unerringly into the portrait of Nanny Fowle and dealt as severe a death blow as can be dealt to an inanimate object. It seemed to tear the portrait apart, frame and all, leaving it in tatters on the carpet, made subjugate by Toad Senior, who quite unharmed smiled benignly at them all, and particularly at his son.

For a long time Toad stayed mute and dumbstruck. Then, suddenly, he decided to take this accident as a sign from beyond the grave — or more accurately a call to action. But to what action, to what purpose?

“I am undone and broken, the wreck of the Toad I once was,” he cried, leaping up and scattering tea cups and presents everywhere. “It is my fault! All is lost! The Hall and the River Bank are ruined and I am to blame, for I can never be my father’s son!”

“Badger, perhaps you should fetch him a glass of water,” said the sensible Mole.

“Water?” cried Toad, turning and turning about in his distress. “What can water do against the awful might of Mrs Ffleshe? Niagara Falls would not trouble her nor a regiment of Hussars subdue her! Arsenic would be as ambrosia to such a one as she, and a stake in the heart would merely be taken as encouragement. No, the combined force of the Roman and Protestant churches could not make her know the meaning of generosity and kindness, and now this has happened to the portrait of Nanny Fowle my life is not worth living. And it is all
my
fault for not standing up to her!”

“Toad!” cried the Mole, who was finding it very hard to hold his friend down. “Toad, please try to be calm, because —These, never a wise choice of words with the excitable Toad, were the very worst just then.

“Calm!”
cried Toad, throwing the Mole back against the fireplace and rushing for the door. “I cannot and will not and must not and shall not be calm!”

“Sir!” cried Miss Bugle, who appeared at that moment with the Badger. “Try this — or this!”

She offered him a glass of water with one hand and attempted to waft a bottle of smelling salts under his nose with the other.

“There is no other solution now!” he said, muttering more to himself than them. “Farewell, Miss Bugle! Farewell, Badger! Farewell, my home!”

Rushing to the great front door, he pulled it open violently and found himself facing the party of Mrs Ffleshe’s guests, who were just then arriving and who, judging by the cut of their shoes and coats, and the imperiousness of their gaze, were very important personages indeed.

“Farewell to you all,” he cried inclusively, knocking them all back down the steps they had just come up. “For now I must leave you and my home for ever!”

With that, he set off across his lawn at a fast pace, heading straight towards the swollen River.

“Quick, after him!” shouted the Mole. “He intends to jump in and he will not survive in such a flood! Badger, try to catch him for you are faster than I, while I make haste to the Iron Bridge and alert Otter and Rat, who are working there.”

Without another word, the Badger did as the sensible Mole suggested, calling after Toad and begging, ordering,
demanding
that he stop.

But it was too little, too late, and with hardly a pause in his progress the overwrought Toad ran down to the bank near his boathouse and with a despairing cry flung himself into the flooding waters.

Naturally, this spurred the Badger on still more and though he was by no means a competent swimmer he knew that if he had to he would risk his own life by diving in after Toad.

Meanwhile, Mole had hurried out of Toad’s gates and was running as fast as he could towards the Iron Bridge, where he knew that Otter and the Water Rat were carrying out some repairs to damage caused by the weasels and stoats. When he arrived, he was in a state of exhaustion, so breathless that he could only cry out to Rat, “It’s Toad! He’s in the…” before pointing upstream. At that same moment they heard Badger’s shouts and saw him standing on Toad’s lawn, pointing at the swirling, rushing waters, and they deduced at once that the worst had happened.

“Can you see him?” called the Otter, who was on the bank below.

The Rat was still, staring grimly upstream at the raging waters, eyes travelling from one side to another, from ripple to wave, from swirl to turning current.

“Get the boathook, Otter,” he cried, “and pass it up to me. If he surfaces it’ll be me who sees him first. I’ll try and arrest his passage. There he is!
There!”

Mole certainly would not have recognised what Rat was pointing at. It looked like a log, or perhaps a scruffy branch as it turned, but then he saw a hand.

“It’s Toad!” cried the Mole.

Rat tore off his jacket and leapt over the railings into the water. The current was so strong that the Mole saw at once he would not be able to swim against it to reach Toad, but Rat knew his work, and Otter understood the strategy.

That sturdy animal deftly passed the great boathook to the Rat as he was swept past and then dived in himself and quickly had Toad’s inert body in his firm grasp. Meanwhile, downstream the Rat had used the boathook to haul himself to the bank, and he now stood ready to haul in Otter and Toad when they came past.

They did not have to wait long to discover if Toad was still breathing, for moments after Otter had brought him to the surface, Toad began to talk.

“Unhand me! Let me float away to my fate! Let me sink to my Shangri-La! Leave me!”

“O Toad, do be quiet and keep still till we have you back on the bank, or else I
shall
let you go!” gasped the Otter as he strained to pull their struggling friend to safety.

“There’s no law in the land to stop a gentleman from going for a swim on Christmas Day!” cried Toad, who seemed suddenly light-headed.

“Push him this way a little, Otter!” cried the Rat from the bank. “That’s it!”

Then he expertly hooked Toad by his shirt collar and with the Otter’s help heaved him to safety.

“Liberty was so near that I saw its golden beams!” cried Toad as he slumped wetly on to the grass and the others gathered round. “But now — now — I feel a terrible chill upon me, and my limbs are growing numb!”

With that he began to shiver, and his teeth began to rattle, and they judged it best to get him home to bed as swiftly as they could. The resourceful Rat took up one of the larger planks he kept under the bridge for the purpose of shoring up the bank and together they laid the bedraggled Toad upon it. Then, sharing the weight between them, as if they were a funeral cortege and he the corpse, they carried Toad the short distance up the public road to his gates and thence across his drive to his front door.

“The Master’s drownded!” cried the stable boy, who had come to see what the fuss was about. “Drownded, soaked and sopping and — by the look of ‘im — it’s all too late for the doctor!”

This alarming pronouncement brought the household staff outside, where many took off their hats and caps, bowed their heads in grief, weeping openly at the sight of the prone Toad.

A very different diagnosis was made by Toad’s long-suffering friends, who concluded that there was nothing much wrong with Toad that a warm bed, a hot drink, some good food and a fire would not soon put right.

“But — but —” cried Mrs Ffleshe, who having shown her guests into the drawing room after Toad’s sudden departure now suffered the embarrassment of having them all come out again to see what the fuss was about.

“There are no buts about it, Mrs Ffleshe,” said the Badger, taking charge. “The master and, I believe, owner of this establishment, has suffered a slight accident and needs to rest, and I intend to see that he does.”

“Sir!” said Mrs Ffleshe, barring their way. “You are a brute to speak to a lady so!”

“Madam!” said the Badger, “I command you to get out of our way or I shall be forced to conclude that the only brute in this establishment is of the female gender!”

“How dare you, sir!” said she, but back away she did, and in they went, with Miss Bugle following, leaving Toad’s tormentor and her guests fuming by the door.

VIII

Councils of War

“We must do something about this situation, for it simply cannot be allowed to continue a moment longer!” said the Badger later that day, when Toad had recovered somewhat.

They were in Toad’s bedroom, and Toad was now warm and comfortable, his lower half encased by damask sheets and the best lamb’s-wool blankets, and his top half propped up by a good many lace-edged pillows, which Miss Bugle had brought in for him.

Spread about the room were the remnants of the luncheon that Mrs Ffleshe’s guests had enjoyed more formally in the dining room below. It had been evident even to her that Toad could not be left to recover alone, or his friends left unfed, and so — with some firm prompting from Miss Bugle — trays of food had been brought up, and an enjoyable time had by all.

There had been apologies to Mole, for he had had everything ready for his own party, but though he was grateful for their concern he was, in truth, much happier that Toad was sharing this part of the day with them, albeit in unusual and dramatic circumstances. His own party could wait a day or two longer.

No reference was made by any of them at first to Toad’s flight and desperate leap into the River. The circumstances of his doing so had been witnessed and understood by the Mole and the Badger, and the drama had served most of all to underline the extremes to which he had been finally pushed by Mrs Ffleshe.

It was as well that they had been there, as well that they had known how to act, and that the Badger had the firmness to insist on Toad’s return to Toad Hall and the privacy of his bedroom. The foolhardiness of Toad’s action and the fact that it had endangered the lives of others was not discussed, least of all by Toad himself.

However, lying there at his ease as he now was, the centre of attention, his friends clustered about what might have been his death bed, and clutching a glass of his very best champagne (which, as he explained, was for medicinal rather than celebratory reasons), he had begun to see his action in an heroic light.