Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

They gathered up their print skirts and ran like young does for the shelter of the house. It was an example of dignified Georgian, with a pillared porch and square windows. People said there was no nonsense about Overdean Manor; and others remarked that that was a pity. The front was masked by trees from the carriage drive. Some people said that it was just as well that this was so; it gave the horses a chance. No horse could maintain a trot in view of so dignified a front.

But it had an ample porch, and into its sheltering embrace the two girls plunged with only breath enough left for their laughter.

“Not a dozen drops,” they gasped, pinching each other’s blouses at their arms. “Actually not a dozen drops—practically dry—but hot—oh, goodness, wasn’t it hot!” And now they were going to have it in earnest.

They had it in earnest, but only as a spectacle. They were glowing after their race, but the porch contained no seats, and so they leant against the pillars and looked out at the rollicking Spring storm. It came with all the overdone vehemence of a practical jester—a comical bellow and a swirl and a swish; the topmost branches began complaining of their ill-treatment, bending and waving at first gracefully, then wildly—panic-stricken. Then the rain came—a comical flood suggesting the flinging of buckets of water—the rough play of grooms in the stable yard. The air became dark where the first swish of the rain swept by—dark and silent among the trees, while that madcap wind rushed on and made its fun on the fringe of the plantation. Out of the darkness a flash, and out of the distance a bombastic roar of thunder, but not the thunder of a storm that meant devastation; it was more like the laughter of good-humoured gods over some boy’s joke—something that had to do with the bursting of a cistern, or the turning on of a standpipe in the centre of a score of unsuspecting gentlemen wearing tall hats. The girls joined in the laughter of that boisterous thunder; but only for a moment. They became aware of an extraordinary pause—the suspicious silence of a room where the schoolboys are in hiding and ready to jump out on you. Then came the sound of a mighty rushing in the air that was not the rushing of the wind. Half-a-dozen rooks whirled in a badly-balanced flight across the tops of the nearest trees, cawing frantically; and the next instant they were seen by the girls like fish in the tanks of an aquarium. The world had become a world of waters. They were looking out upon a solid wall of water, and a hurricane of hail made up the plate glass in front of the tank.

They watched its changes for the five minutes that it lasted, and the lightning became more real and the thunder more in earnest. Then it went slamming away into the distance, leaving the big sweep of the carriage drive in front of the house the glistening lake of a minute, and transforming the Georgian mansion into an Alpine mountain of innumerable rushing torrents. It seemed as if a thousand secret springs of water had been set free in a moment, and all rushing down through their runnels to the valley.

“It will all be over in a few minutes, now; but wasn’t it a squelcher while it lasted!” cried Rosa, taking a cautious step outside to look round for the rainbow.

“I knew that we could just dodge it if we were slippy,” said Priscilla. “I wish we had some place to sit down.”

“Not worth while. We’ll be off in a minute.”

But it soon became plain that they would not be off quite so soon. When the thunderstorm with its wild blustering had departed, it left behind it, not the blue sky that might reasonably have been expected, but a tame flock of clouds that lumbered onward, discharging their contents upon the earth beneath with no great show of spirit, but with the depressing persistency of the mediocre.

“Hopeless!” sighed Priscilla.