The Willows in Winter (24 page)

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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 terrifying, 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 brought
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.