The Willows at Christmas (22 page)

“Look here,” said the Rat, chuckling even as he put down the tureen and took up the glass once more. “Perhaps I had presumed too much in thinking you understood my plan! Now, see what happens if we invert this glass and put it in the water in my sink, so. The air is trapped inside as I push it underwater, leaving sufficient to breathe for anyone whose head is inside such a vessel. Of course, it needs to be bigger than a glass — hence the tureen.”

“Well I never!” cried the Otter who saw the implications at once. “You think we might take these through the culvert and persuade Toad and Mole to escape with tureens on their heads to help them breathe?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said the Rat.

“Do you have a second tureen?”

“This one will do for Toad, for his head is very big, and somewhere or other I have a pan I used to use for jam-making, before Mole came to the River Bank and took it upon himself to supply me with jam and other conserves.”

He found the pan and set it alongside the other.

“But will it work?” mused the Otter.

“It will, provided one does not allow the vessel holding the air to tilt too much, for if you do…”

He tilted the glass, the air escaped in two or three bubbles, and water immediately rushed in to replace it.

“Hmm. We’d better test it ourselves,” said the Rat.

“Capital!” cried the Otter.

Taking a length of rope from his boathouse, the Rat tied it about his waist and, giving the loose end to the Otter, clambered down the muddy bank till his ankles were in the water.

“Hand me down the tureen, there’s a good fellow” he sang out, “and if I tug at the rope three times haul me in without further ado. Otherwise, be sure to let it out so that I may make what progress I can under the water, and don’t worry if I am longer than you expect. Time is slower for those who watch than for those who do.”

With this philosophical thought the Rat placed the tureen over his head, held fast to its handles with each hand, and boldly waded through the muddy water. The Otter watched with very mixed feelings and his heart gave a jolt when, with a muffled cry of farewell, the Rat disappeared beneath the water.

The glint of the submerged tureen was soon lost to view and the rope pulled away from the Otter’s hands erratically. The Otter was tempted to haul him in at once, or better still dive in and rescue him, but he recognized that the experiment was for Toad and the Mole’s benefit rather than their own. After all, he and the Water Rat were such expert swimmers that they had no need of air supplies.

Eventually, after an uncomfortably long wait, and astonished that the Rat could still find air to breathe, the Otter saw the tureen break the surface of the water near the other bank. Letting forth an involuntary cheer, he watched as his friend took the tureen off his head and turned to wave most cheerfully.

Shortly afterwards, as he dried off in his house and changed his clothes, the Water Rat told the Otter of the experience.

“I couldn’t see anything at all, of course, unless 1 pulled my head out of the vessel and looked about. That’s why I stumbled a couple of times. But where the river flows in the Village the bottom is clear and gravelly and even Toad should be able to find a footing. We must be practical, however. I doubt that we will be able to persuade Toad to set forth from his cell into the culvert willingly, so between us the Mole and I will have to force him.”

“I could come and help too,” said the Otter.

The Rat shook his head. “No, I want you to stay nearby with the boat we secreted away near the Village against such an eventuality as this. But we must blacken it so that the guards don’t see it…”

“I’ve done that already,” said the excellent Otter.

“Good fellow Now then, when we get out you can help Toad and Mole aboard, and we can make our getaway I think it might be wise to take some flotation aids for Mole and Toad, for the river by the Gaol runs fast and if they lose their footing they might be glad of some artificial help. I have just the thing…”

He went back into the boathouse and emerged moments later with some pigs’ bladders, which he kept as an aid to winter fishing. Then they made their final preparations and set out for the Village as darkness fell, to recover the boat and position themselves in good time for the rescue attempt.

It was a cold night and the two animals were chilled to the bone by the time they heard the clock of the Village church strike ten. But they did not have to wait long for evidence of the diversion.

The members of the Committee, acting on the Rat’s instruction to the letter, adopted the stratagem of extending their normal bar-room merriment to the street outside, and there allowing matters to get so out of hand that it soon became a brawl. When nearby weasels and stoats tried to restore order, the brawl turned nasty, and other guards, including those watching over Toad and the Mole, had to be hastily summoned.

Their departure was the signal the resourceful Rat had waited for, and he slipped out of the rescue boat into the rushing river, with a bag containing the tureen, the jam pan and assorted pigs’ bladders on his back.

The Mole and Toad were fast asleep when the Rat appeared in the culvert below the cell and called up to them. He did so as quietly as he could against the rush of the water in the hope that the Mole would wake first, for otherwise the alarmed Toad might easily have given the game away.

“Is that really you, Ratty?” whispered a very nervous Mole into the watery gloom below.

“It is,” whispered the Rat, “and I’ve come to get you out of here. Now listen, Mole, this is not a time for niceties but resolute action…”

He quickly told Mole the plan, warning him that they must find a way of getting Toad into the noisome culvert, and quickly.

“Once you’ve got him down here leave me to do the rest,” said the Rat grimly.

The Mole nodded and contemplated Toad, upon whose face was a happy smile that suggested he was dreaming of former glories, or of wonderful meals in the world’s best hotels.

“Toad,” said the Mole urgently, shaking him awake, “I’ve found a way out of here.”

Toad sat up woozily.

“Come and look… quickly over here.”

The still sleepy Toad meekly did as he was told and peered down into the culvert.

“What am I meant to see?”

It was at such moments as this, when decisive action was needed, that the normally quiet and modest Mole surprised the other River Bankers. Without more ado, not even an apology, he placed his hand firmly in the small of Toad’s back, and shoved him over the culvert’s edge and down into the waiting arms of the Rat.

As Toad let out a cry, as of one whose dream seems about to turn into a nightmare, the Rat caught him, tied an inflated pig’s bladder to each of his four limbs and cried out to the Mole, “Wait down here till my return!” Then he thrust the tureen on to the bewildered Toad’s head and bodily pulled him down into the water and away through the underwater stone arches of the ancient culvert.

Toad was suddenly aware that his body was very wet and very cold, and his extremities were being pulled in different directions by strange balloons attached with twine, and that in his ears was the rushing sound of water on metal. Certain that he was having a nightmare, he began to fight off his attackers.

As the Rat and he broke the water’s surface, which they did as a cork might burst from a vigorously shaken champagne bottle by virtue of the upward pull of the too-eager bladders, they very nearly capsized the waiting rescue vessel and threw the Otter into the water.

“Hold on to him,” cried the Water Rat, thrusting the struggling Toad to the side of the boat, “I’m going back for Mole.”

As Toad began a relentless assault on his second rescuer, shouting for help as he did so, and running the danger of attracting the attention of those very guards they had been hoping to evade, the brave Rat plunged back into the depths. He effected the Mole’s rescue as sweetly as extracting the last pea from its pod, and the Mole and he reappeared on the surface with plenty of air left in the jam pan — so much indeed that the Mole was rather reluctant to let it go as the Rat pulled him towards the boat, for there was a certain novelty to the situation that he rather enjoyed.

Of the chaotic moments that followed not even a Royal Commission of Enquiry could establish the full and absolute truth, were it to spend twenty years doing so.

Of the participants themselves, the Otter remembered trying to wrest a heavy metal rowlock from Toad’s grasp; the Rat remembered the Otter falling forward upon the Mole; the Mole remembered their rescue craft capsizing right on top of him, and Toad remembered, quite distinctly, a nightmare he had had, which turned into an heroic dream, in which he, brave, brilliant and resourceful as ever, had the brilliant idea of rescuing all three of his friends with pigs’ bladders and letting the river’s rapid flow float them away from the dark, dank walls of the Gaol, and from there, under cover of night and all unseen, right through the Village, past the church, and away to liberty.

Thus began an escapade that was very soon to be described in the national press as rivalling the
Marie Celeste
for mystery, the
Prisoner of Zenda
for daring, and the
Scarlet Pimpernel,
in the form of Toad, for its hero.

When the Rat, the Otter and the Mole had recovered their senses, and restored the now gibbering Toad to some form of normality, they made their way to the boathouse on Toad’s estate. By the time they had dried themselves off, warmed themselves up and gained a little rest, the sun was rising.

Only then did the Parish Clerk and the minions of the Court discover the appalling truth: the birds had flown, and nobody knew how The gentlemen of the press descended in very short order upon the Village, and in no time at all the visages of Toad and his accomplice in crime, the Mole, were emblazoned on the front page of every newspaper in the land, along with various offers of reward, not least a very substantial one from the ticket touts who stood to lose a great deal of money if the trial did not take place as planned.

Although the reports universally condemned Toad for his actions, the fact was that they could not help portraying him as a hero — and a victim too.

Headlines such as
TOAD ESCAPES!
were soon replaced by
TOAD ESCAPES TO PROVE HIS INNOCENCE
. Followed by
IS TOAD A SECRET AGENT?
And then
I AM INNOCENT!!! TOAD’S OWN STORY
.

These fabrications added fuel to the fire of interest in Toad and Mole that swept the land, and was the sole source of conversation and debate from Lords’ libraries to tramps’ park benches; from emporia serving the better classes to those dark taverns serving the lowest.

Thus it was that two days later, having moved from Toad’s boathouse to a safe retreat on the River near the outskirts of the Town lent to them by a boating friend of the Rat, the two fugitives remained in hiding. The Rat and the Otter had long since realized that if they were not to be accused of being party to the escape they must be back in their own homes the day after it.

“You have enough food to lie low for days without showing your faces,” the Rat told Toad and the Mole. “Do not go out or let yourselves be seen. Mole, make sure temptation does not come Toad’s way Let him see no motor-cars, no motor-launches, no flying machines —
nothing
that will lead him into temptation.”

The Mole nodded, more confident of his success because Toad’s friends had deemed it in his best interests to handcuff him to a chain attached to a pillar in the basement of their hiding place. There he might cry out all he liked, but he would be safe.