David Blaize and the Blue Door

by E. F. Benson

‘Makes no odds,’ said the second. ‘Eight o’clock to-morrow morning then, mate. Turn off the light in his tent, will you?’

David, under his table, shook with rage.

‘The beastly fellows,’ he whispered. ‘And I’ve treated them very kindly, too. See if I don’t melt them all down over the nursery fire!’

That was all very well, but it was still possible that he would be hung, shot, beheaded and buried first, and that was the business he had to attend to now. He was not anywhere near being able to get to the nursery fire, and in the meantime he was in a tent in the middle of the hostile camp, with any amount of barbed wire round him, and nothing to cut it with except a baton and some sausages.

‘Oh, it’s a horrid position,’ thought David very seriously, ‘but I must say it’s exciting.’

When the whispers had died away he went very cautiously to the door-flap and peeped out. The moon had risen, and by its light he could see lumps and chunks of barbed wire piled up high right across the entrance, like a thicket of blackberry bushes without any leaves on. There was no possibility of getting out that way, and he walked round his tent, pressing quietly with his finger against the canvas, and always getting pricked by the barbed wire which evidently had been heaped up all round him. Then he came to the fire-place, where the fire had burned a hole in the canvas, before the Brigadier-General blew it out; and, looking cautiously out, he saw that there was a gap here between the hedges of barbed wire, for it had never occurred to anybody that he should get out right through the middle of the fire.

‘That’s the only chance,’ thought David, his eyes sparkling with excitement.

He made a quantity of awful snore-noises again after that, and then very cautiously put his leg through the hole that the fire had burned in the canvas. Nobody interfered with it, and so he put the other leg through too, and presently stood outside his tent in a narrow alley between other tents. David had often sent himself to sleep by imagining himself escaping from positions of horrible danger, but now that it was necessary to escape without imagining anything, he felt extremely wide-awake. Probably there would be sentries guarding the camp, past whom he must somehow slip, but here in the camp itself there was no sign of life. Once or twice he ran a few steps in the hope that he might remember how to fly, but he had no longer any idea now, in the middle of the night, how to tread air, or paddle with his hands, and he made up his mind that he must escape on his two feet. The ground was encumbered with tent-ropes, and the guard of honour appeared to have dropped all their accoutrements about, for golf-clubs and toasting forks and other irregular weapons lay around among trench mortars and machine-guns and the more usual apparatus of battle. Then he came across the grey parrot, who looked at him with suspicion, and immediately began walking away with its toes crossed, sneezing continuously. David went on more quickly and cautiously after that: it was more than possible that this horrid bird was spying on him. He never had considered parrots to be real birds, else they would not for ever be trying to make themselves sound like cats and dogs and Mabel the kitchenmaid.

He had come close to the gravel path by the lake where he had held his foolish inspection of the guard of honour, and where the camp ended, without seeing anybody, when suddenly he came upon a large letter, propped up against a rope and addressed to him. He knew quite well that this might be some trap, and that it might explode in his face when he opened it; but, on the other hand, it might be some valuable communication from the birds. So he bent down to pick it up, but hardly had he touched it when thousands and thousands of electric bells and gongs and watchmen’s rattles went off all over the camp, and out of every tent there came the noise of people getting up and washing their faces, and brushing their teeth.

There was not a moment to lose, and without any attempt at concealing himself any more, he rushed across the gravel path, dodged a sentry, and ran down the bank to the edge of the lake. Since his Brigadier-General had fallen into the water (indeed, probably, in consequence of that), the fishes had put up their glass roof, and all over the lake below he saw the glimmer of their fires of red leaves.