The Box of Delights (31 page)

‘That’s a pity,’ Cole said. ‘You are not much bigger than my thumb.’

‘Yes, and the water’s roaring in,’ Kay said; ‘and he’s got you all chained up here in these caves. How can I help?’

‘I told you, Master Harker,’ Cole said, ‘that the Wolves were coming very close and now they are here.’

‘Could you suggest something, Mr Cole, please,’ Kay said, ‘that I could do to help?’

‘It is not so easy, is it?’ Cole said: ‘hard rock floor, hard rock ceiling, and thick iron bars in the walls. From the sound of the water, too,’ Cole said, ‘the
lower cellars are pretty nearly full up already. There’s a lot of water coming in. And it is nearly here, mark me; the air hasn’t been coming past in such a draught for some minutes. Do
you remember the time, Master Harker,’ Cole said, ‘when the Wolves came very close at Seekings, yet I got away?’

‘I do, indeed,’ Kay said. ‘Could you do something of that sort now?’

‘Why, I am not so sure, Master Kay,’ Cole said. ‘Have you such a thing as a pencil and a bit of paper?’

‘No, I have not,’ Kay said.

‘That’s a pity,’ Cole answered; ‘but if you’d come up into my cell here through the bars . . . That’s the style: well climbed indeed, sir. Now you see in the
corner there, my coat that they took from me: I can’t reach it: I am chained. If you can rummage in the pockets you should find a bit of paper and a pencil.’

Kay went to the corner of the cell. There was Cole’s coat tossed in the corner. To such a tiny being as himself it looked like the mainsail of a line-of-battle ship. Sticking from one of
the pockets was a piece of timber, which looked like a bridge pile sharpened for driving or a newly cut larch sapling. Near it was a pocketbook some four times bigger than himself.

‘I can’t use these,’ Kay said. ‘I can’t lift the pencil nor open the pocketbook.’

‘Get down into the pocket, Master Harker,’ Cole said, ‘for inside, if you grope, you may find a bit of lead that was broken off, and a crumpled sheet or two.’

Kay crept into the pocket. It was rather like going into a coalmine. There were some crumbs, so dry that they were now rough and sharp, like lumps of rock; further down, beside a penknife bigger
than himself, and a spectacle case that might have been a coffin for him, he found a piece of lead, in weight and shape like a poker; near it was a piece of folded paper. He dragged these out into
the light.

‘I have got them,’ he said.

‘Good, Master Harker,’ Cole said. ‘And now, perhaps, it may just be that the wind will set a little in the favour of a travelling man. Now are you a good hand at drawing,
Master Harker?’

‘No, I am not very good,’ Kay said, ‘except at horses going from right to left.’

‘Well, I am not very good at drawing,’ Cole said, ‘with two hundredweight of chain on each wrist, but can you unfold that paper, Master Harker, and draw on it two men with
hammers and cold chisels, smiting off these irons?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not very good at drawing men,’ Kay said. ‘I can draw horses going from right to left, and trains going a bit the other way.’

‘Well, suppose you draw horses, Master Harker,’ Cole said, ‘coming to bite these chains in two.’

Kay opened the folded sheet of paper, which was Mr Hawlings’s bill at the
Drop of Dew
by Henry Cockfarthings.

He had never before realised how troublesome a sheet of paper can be when it is rather bigger than a blanket, naturally of a stiff quality, and already crumpled from some days in a pocket. As he
drew it out, opened it and bent back the crumpled corners, he became suddenly aware that the Wolves were Running with a little whirring snarl. Little motor cars with wolf heads rushed at him from
different points of the cave, and snapped at him.

‘Don’t heed those, Master Kay,’ Cole Hawlings said.

It was not so easy not to heed them, for they came at him with such malice that the snapping of their bonnets was very terrifying. Any bonnet of them all was big and strong enough to snap him
down into the engines, where he would have been champed up in no time.

For about half a minute he wrestled with the paper, trying to get it flat. The little motor cars snapped at him all the time. Snap, snap. One of them would run behind him and snap at his ankles,
while another darted at him to bite his toes. Then he realised that though they snapped very near, they never really bit him; he himself was in some way safe, they could only annoy and hinder.
Presently, he straightened out one corner of the paper; instantly, one of these snapping motor cars rushed over it and crushed it back.

‘Hit them with the pencil, Master Kay,’ Cole Hawlings said. This was very much like saying, ‘Hit them with the lamppost’, or, ‘Whack them with the telegraph
pole’.

‘I don’t think I can lift the pencil,’ Kay said; ‘it’s too heavy.’

‘Well, try now,’ Cole said.

Kay tried, and to his great delight found that he could lift this great fir tree of a pencil. For a moment he felt like one of those heroes at the Scottish Games tossing the fir tree for a
haggis. As the motor car came at him once more, trying to force the paper from under him, he smote the bonnet a lusty blow. The car at once upset and rolled over and over and over with a puncture
in all four wheels. A little whimper of pain came from its klaxon, and the other little wolf motor cars drew to one side and clashed their bonnets at Kay, snap, snap.

‘Now draw, Master Harker,’ Cole Hawlings said, ‘two horses coming to bite the chains in two.’

‘D’you mean coming head-on?’ Kay said. ‘I don’t think I have ever drawn horses coming head-on. I always make them look so like cows.’

‘Well, try it, Master,’ Cole said.

Kay went at it with the piece of lead like a poker on the crumpled paper big as a blanket which kept rolling up and hitting him. Somehow it seemed to him that what he drew was (for once) rather
like a horse. Then, suddenly, at him out of the air, with a whirring yap, came little aeroplanes with heads like wolves. They snapped their propellers at him and tried to knock the lead from his
hand. This was very much worse than being attacked by hornets, and, while he was dodging their attacks, the wolf motor cars began again.

‘Bat them with the pencil, Master Harker,’ Cole said.

Kay put down the lead and seized the pencil, but the creatures were as cunning as wolves; they skipped away. When he put down the pencil they were at him again: the motors snapping at his heels,
the aeroplanes all round him. Kay lifted the lead with which he was drawing and smote with it on the propeller of one of the aeroplanes. The propeller snapped, the aeroplane crashed into two
others, they spun round and round in flames and set fire to one of the motor cars, which exploded.

‘That’s the way, Master Harker,’ Cole said. ‘Now the other horse.’ The Wolves stood aside while Kay finished the second horse. ‘There you are, Master
Kay,’ Cole Hawlings said. ‘You come over to my side now a moment, and stand that paper up on its end so that we may take a good look at it.’

Kay propped the paper on its end and stood beside the old man, who was indeed laden down with chains: there were great shackles on his ankles and knees; which were chained to ringbolts in the
stone; a great weight of chains secured his wrists to his ankles. ‘Watch the paper, Master Harker,’ Cole said, ‘don’t heed the chains.’

Kay looked at the horses in his drawing. Sometimes, in earlier days, when he had drawn horses, he had felt that his effort had some merit. These today were the first end-on horses drawn by him;
somehow they did really look liker horses than cows. They hadn’t got the Newfoundland dog look that some of his horses had. He thought, ‘I’d like to keep those drawings. They are
the best I’ve done.’

In fact, the drawings did stand out from the paper rather strangely. The light was concentrated on them; as he looked at them the horses seemed to be coming towards him out of the light, and,
no, it was not seeming, they were moving; he saw the hoof casts flying and heard the rhythmical beat of hoofs. The horses were coming out of the picture, galloping fast, and becoming brighter and
brighter. Then he saw that the light was partly fire from their eyes and manes, partly sparks from their hoofs. ‘They are real horses,’ he cried. ‘Look.’

It was as though he had been watching the finish of a race with two horses neck and neck coming straight at him at the winning-post. They were two terrible white horses with flaming mouths. He
saw them strike great jags of rock from the floor and cast them, flaming, from their hoofs. Then, in an instant, there they were, one on each side of Cole Hawlings, champing the chains as though
they were grass, crushing the shackles, biting through the manacles and plucking the iron bars as though they were shoots from a plant.

‘Steady there, boys,’ Cole said to the horses, as he rose and stretched himself. He put on his coat, pocketed the paper, pencil and lead, and placed Kay on one of the horses.
‘Now, Master Harker, I will put you up on this one,’ he said. ‘Hang on to the mane. I will take the other; we will see if we can get out of this. I will lead the way,
Master,’ he said. ‘Hang on to the mane; for you are rather small for a horse this size.’

He turned the horse along the rocky corridor. No light burned in that part, but the horses gave such light that it was like daylight wherever they went. They had not gone far down the corridor
when Cole said, ‘No, we are a little too late to go this way. The water’s coming in.’

There before them, the water was coming in. Little wave followed little wave, each marking the rocky walls at a higher level. It came in, muttering and snarling, from somewhere far away to the
left. Angry little eddies spun away with dead leaves and bits of twig; the corridor was windy with the air displaced by the water; everywhere in that expanse of caverns there was the booming,
roaring, drumming of water echoes. The horses shied at the water. When their hoofs touched the stream, they hissed and smoked, as white-hot metal will when wetted.

‘Back a little, Master Harker,’ the old man said. ‘These horses are fiery. They can’t abide water, which puts out fire, as you know. We must get back up the passage a
piece, and we have not too much time by the look of things. The water’s coming in very fast.’ He swung himself down from the horse and helped Kay down. ‘Steady there, boys, and
give us light,’ Cole said. ‘We must proceed once more as before,’ he said, ‘with this paper and pencil. Draw me a long roomy boat with a man in her, sculling her.’

‘I’m not very good at boats, and I’ve never drawn a man sculling,’ Kay said.

‘Draw now,’ Cole Hawlings said; ‘and put a man in the boat’s bows and draw him with a bunch of keys in his hand.’

‘I shan’t make much of a hand at that,’ Kay said.

However, it was not so difficult as the horses had been. Old Cole was there to hold the paper and to keep away the Wolves. They were there, muttering, at some little distance. He could see their
wicked little red lights and hear them snarling. The thing that he was afraid of was the water, that was rising rapidly. He could see that the horses were alarmed.

‘Well, here’s the boat,’ Kay said. ‘And then, here’s the man sculling. Now, this is the man standing in the bows with a bunch of keys.’

‘Won’t you give him a nose?’ Cole said. ‘Men do generally have them and they are fine things to follow on a dark night when you can’t see your way.’

‘I’m afraid the nose is rather like a stick,’ Kay said.

The old man took the drawing to the water, set it afloat, and watched it drifting away. Somewhere far away to the left there came the noise of another rock or barrier collapsing under the
pressure of the stream. Instantly, the swirling of the water intensified and took to itself an angrier note. Bigger waves rushed out of the darkness at them and licked up more of the floor.

‘The sluice-mouth has given way,’ Kay said.

‘That is so,’ Cole Hawlings answered. ‘But the boat is coming too, you see.’

Indeed, down the stream in the darkness of the corridor, a boat was coming. She had a light in her bows; somebody far aft in her was heaving at a scull which ground in the rowlocks. Kay could
see and hear the water slapping and chopping against her advance; the paint of her bows glistened from the water. A man stood above the lantern. He had something gleaming in his hand: it looked
like a bunch of keys. As he drew nearer, Kay saw that this man was a very queer-looking fellow with a nose like a piece of bent stick.

The boat drove up into the corridor beside them. The man with the nose like a piece of stick steadied her with a boat-hook. The sculler was a bushy-bearded man with his face hidden under a boat
cloak. He bent down in the stern of the boat and thrust over a plank. Cole lifted Kay into a safe place in the stern-sheets and then turned to fetch on board the horses, who stamped, snorted and
backed, not liking the water. Kay, who was always thrilled by the presence of horses, clambered up on to the gunwale to see them come on board. He half expected to see the boat upset, but Cole and
the boatman so trimmed the boat that the first horse clambered on board without trouble. The second horse was more nervy and made the boat rock. Cole brought it on board and soothed it down in the
stern-sheets. His eyes stared and his crest rose at the rising water.

‘There, there,’ old Cole said. ‘And now, perhaps, we’d better shove off to see if we can save some other prisoners. We haven’t too much time, the way the
water’s coming in.’

Kay looked along the corridor in the direction from which the water was pouring. It was now so brightly lit that he recognised stalactites which he had passed earlier in the day with Abner.
There, near one of the stalactites which he had specially noticed, something was shining on the floor just above the edge of the stream. It caught the light and sparkled. Kay looked at it with
attention. ‘It must be some of Abner’s diamonds,’ he thought. Then he thought that the thing was shining not from reflected light, but from light of its own. He wondered for a
moment whether this were an underground snail or slug that had a power of phosphorescence: he seemed to have read that there were such things. Then the lipping water touched it and seemed to lick
it away an inch or two; then, as the next gush of water came, it sidled from its place on to the current, drifted a couple of feet towards them, stuck an instant, and then came dallying along on
the edge of the stream.