Famous Modern Ghost Stories | Page 7

banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its
face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew upstream and tried to stop its
growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings, its
unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were
hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns,
far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun caught it
fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.
It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it. There were places
in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny
had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear
again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another
name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and wade and

push the canoe through miles of shallows!
And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like
Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to
refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line
well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the
new-comer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn
comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes
the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows,
and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself
with great waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during
the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its
life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after
Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.
This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know other aspects
of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so
slowly under the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches
were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of
Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be
discovered.
Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and animals that
haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black
palings; gray crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of
shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds
of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It was impossible
to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash into the
water at sunrise and swim past the bows of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at
us from the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged
full tilt round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere
haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly
that it was impossible to see how they managed it.
But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the Danube became
more serious. It ceased trifling. It was halfway to the Black Sea, within scenting distance
almost of other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It
became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into
three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers farther down, and for
a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be followed.
"If you take a side channel," said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop
while buying provisions, "you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides, forty miles
from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are no people, no farms,
no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will
increase."

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a
sudden subsidence of the waters