The Luck of the Vails: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

A turn in the stream bed, and he saw it rushing up toward him like an approaching train, the water already nearly on a level with its arch, and soon to be how vastly higher with the wave of the flood that carried him, he in the van of the torrent from the broken sluice. His first instinct was a resolve to clutch at it, in order to stop himself; but in a moment realizing that, if he wished to make death certain, this was the way of it, he huddled himself together, burying his head in the water. He just saw the first of the flood strike against the bridge in a huge feather of broken turbulence, and then came a darkness full of loud chucklings and suckings, as if the water laughed inwardly with evil merriment. Once, in that blind moment, his shoulder was banged against the gorged arch, once he felt his coat catch against some projecting stone, and it was as if the weight of the whole world was pressed against him, as for a half second he checked the stream, the next he was torn free again, and out into daylight once more.

Not till then did the chance of his possible ultimate escape strike him with a sense that he might possibly have a share in that matter; hitherto the wild pace had given a certain bewilderment to his thoughts not unpleasant in itself. All reasoning power, all remembrance of what had gone before, all realization of what might follow after had been choked; his consciousness, a mere pin point, did not do more than receive the sensation of the passing moment. But after the bridge had been passed it sprouted and grew, he became Harry Vail again, a man with wits and limbs that were meant to be used, and therewith the will to use them. But the power to use them was a thing arbitrarily directed by the flood; breath was the prime necessity, and it was a matter requiring both effort and an ebb of the encircling wave to fling his face free from that surging and broken van of water and get air. Only with this returning increase of consciousness was he aware that he was out of breath with his prolonged ducking, for, broadly speaking, he had not decently breathed once since he had tumbled with the tumbling sluice. So with a downward and backward kick, the instinct of treading water, he raised his head from the yellow race, and felt the air sweet and essential. Three long breaths he took, throat-filling, lung-filling, like a man half dead with drought, and, as he struggled to overlook the water for the fourth time, it was for the purpose of using eyes as well as lungs; and what he saw caused hope to leap high in his heart, though he had not known he had been hopeless. For here the stream had already widely overflowed its banks, now no longer held in by the masonry of the first stretch below the sluice, and every gallon of water that came down spread itself over a widely increased area; speed and the concentrated volume were even now diminishing. The sense that he was bound and helpless, a swathed child, passed from him, and, pushing steadily with his arms and feet (so random a stroke could scarcely be called swimming), he soon saw that he was appreciably leaving the main rush of the stream. Before long he was brought up with a violent jerk; his foot had struck the ground, and the water stood up over his head like a yellow frill. But that was no more than a playful buffet, after the grimness of his struggle; he staggered to his feet again, and, now no longer swimming, after a few more splashing efforts, stood firm and upright in waist-high water, leaning with all his weight against the press of the flood. Then step by plunging step he got to land, and at last stood utterly free on the good safe earth.

He stood and dripped for a moment, the water running from all points of himself and his clothes, as if off the ribs of an umbrella; then wringing out the baggier folds with his hands, he tried to start running toward the house. But twenty paces told him he was dead beat, and dropping to a soberer pace, he made his splashing way across the fields. Suddenly he stopped.

"The Luck," he cried aloud to the weeping sky; "it was the rain that did it! Blooming old, futile old Luck! It couldn't kill a bluebottle."

This was an inspiring thought, and he went the more lightly for it, taking note, with a delightful sense of danger past, of the distance of his water journey. And what was that spouting column of yellowness and foam three hundred yards farther up, standing like a fountain in mid stream? And with a sudden gasp of reasoned recognition he knew it to be the bridge over which the road passed, under which so few minutes ago he had himself been whirled. Cold and shivering as he was, he could not resist a moment's pause when he came opposite it, and he turned away again with a sense of respect for the Luck which his last words, shouted to the streaming heavens, had lacked. Under that he had blindly burrowed, helpless as a baby in an express, to stop his headlong course.

"Not such a bad attempt of the Luck, after all," he said to himself.

Five minutes later he had cast his water trail over the gravel and into the hall. Geoffrey was deep in an armchair, reading.

"Geoffrey, old chap, the Luck's been having another go," he cried, almost triumphantly. "But it can't pull it off, it simply can't. Get me some hot whisky and water, will you, and come to my room. I'm going to get between blankets a bit. Nothing like taking care of one's self, and running no risks. I'll tell you all about it. Can't stop now."

Geoffrey's book flew on to the floor as he sprang out of his chair.