The Sound of His Horn Page 10

  "But they track you down afterwards?" I said, and I told her about the party I had seen out with bloodhounds and baboon-boys.

  "Oh, yes," she said coolly. "They were after me most of yesterday, but I gave them the slip in the marshes. They'll get me in the end, of course, by watching the feeding places, but I shall have had a good long run."

  "But aren't you afraid of what they'll do when they do catch you?"

  "They won't do anything. True, they let the apes play with you a bit and that's loathsome. But they don't punish you for running--after all, that's what they want you to do. It's no sport for them if you give up."

  "But if you do refuse to run?"

  "Then the dogs eat you," she said with calm finality. "But once you've had one of those darts in you you'll do your best to dodge them the next time. They put something on them to make them smart more."

  We crouched there in the long grass through most of that warm, sunny forenoon, and it was the strangest of wonders to me to listen to that pleasant young voice, speaking my own language, talking with such an odd mixture of naivete and experience, with such frank acceptance of fantastic circumstances. After a while I realised that she had fully made up her mind that I had been a member of an English resistance organisation: there was a kind of deference, almost respect, in her tone when she hinted at my 'work'--as though I had been a master in underground activities while she was just a beginner. She called me 'Friend' so often and with such an air of conscientiousness that I perceived that the word must be the consecrated form of address among members of the resistance movement, and I fell into using it to her and saw how that pleased her.

  "But what are we to do about you?" she repeated.

  "I'm going to escape," I said, with confidence.

  "How?"

  "Across the wire."

  She shook her head very solemnly. "It can't be done. It's charged with Bohlen Rays, you know. One touch of that and you're done for. We've talked about that-some of the other Aryan malignants and I. There was a girl who'd been hunted once and was so afraid of being caught again that she said the next time they chased her she'd make straight for the fence and throw herself on it and kill herself. Well, she was turned out again as a deer one of the times that I was. She hid near the fence. They found her and she was hit as she dashed out. I saw it. She ran straight at the fence. But she wasn't killed--not outright, that is. I saw her fall and I heard her screaming from the burns. But what they do, you know, is to switch the rays off if something big goes into them. They can do that from the watch-towers. They picked this girl up and brought her in again. I expect she died from the burns. We never saw her again."

  I told her my own experience of the rays. "But I don't intend to rush the fence," I explained. "My idea is a tunnel."

  She looked blank, and so I discoursed on the art of moling as understood by prisoners of war. She listened attentively and saw the obvious flaws in my plan at once.

  "It'll take too long," she pointed out. "Even with two of us working at it. They'll not leave you alone long enough."

  "But there must be other criminals in the forest besides me," I argued. I told her about the Frenchman. He seemed to have been free a long time. He seemed to know where to hide.

  She bent her head until her face was quite hidden by the grass. "I don't know," she said in a low, hesitating voice, "I don't know what happened to him. I heard the horn..."

  "Well," I said, "I'm going to have a shot at it. The thing is to get some tools. You know the ropes here better than I do. Where do they keep the spades?"

  Then, when I showed so bold a purpose, she took up the idea with enthusiasm, and began excitedly planning how to get hold of some implement. She knew the place, she declared: the Kranichfels pavilion. The men who looked after the valley where the butts were kept tools there. She knew her way about there, for the game-girls were kept there when a drive was being prepared. I proposed to go there that night and see what I could lift.

  "No, no!" she exclaimed. "I will do that! You'll be spotted at once in those things. I can slip in at dusk without them noticing. There are slave-girls there and I can pass for one of them. Help me only to get rid of this headpiece."

  The different parts of a game-girl's costume were so sewn on that the wearer could not remove them herself--at least without scissors or a knife. I hunted about until I found two flints and cracked one to make a sharp edge, then sawed through the stitching that fastened the mask to her gorget. The fine, solid workmanship of her trappings amazed me now when I could examine them closely. "Ah! German thoroughness!" she exclaimed scornfully and pitched the beaked mask into the thicket. "It's beyond belief what pains they'll take to get every detail just right. These forester officers are monomaniacs, and the most inhuman thing about them is the way they fail completely to see that you are a human being: they'll fuss and fiddle about with you for hours to get you exactly dressed for your part in one of their shows, and yet you feel that they understand nothing at all about girls, or human beings of any sort."

  She had a fine steel chain bearing a numbered tag round her neck. I turned it over; there was no name-just a group of letters and a number. My fingers were against the warm, soft skin of her neck, and while she spoke I was moved to mark the new hesitancy, the deeper resentment in her tone; she was so much a child still and she had been so brutally arrested at the very beginning of the road that should have led her into the ever widening country of love and understanding and free human relationships. The current of her life had been diverted into such queer, cramped, twisted channels. And yet she had preserved a marvellous sanity and unwarped spirit. I admired at every moment her courage and cool defiance, but what moved me most, what at once humbled me and gave me a new hope and purpose was, I think, her innocence and freshness in this world of distorted things. In this forest of Hackelnberg she was like one of the fair trees themselves that all the Master Forester's mad ingenuity could not force to grow false to its own nature.

  You see, until then I knew that I had been forcing myself to limit my speculations only to the problem of getting across the fence; but all the time the thing I dare not think about had been weighing on my soul--that appalling slave-world, I mean, that I thought I should find outside the fence of Hackelnberg. Now I knew that there was still some truth, some courage and pride, some of the old glory of humanity left in the world. We must get out of Hackelnberg now; we would escape, I vowed, and find her Friends.

  I turned that little tag over and over, while she held up her head, tilting back her chin, accepting with a kind of quiet, trusting wonder, the caress of my fingers on her throat.

  "There's no name on it," I said, and I was vividly aware what feelings towards her she recognised in my voice.

  "I'm called Christine North," she said. "But I always got just Kit at home."

  Well, it was not long we had together: a day, from the forenoon until after moonrise; a long summer day. The longest of my life. I feel now that I have never known anyone so well as I knew Kit; I feel that if I began to tell the tale of every little thing that I noticed and delighted in that day I should never end though I spent the rest of my life unloading my memory. My mind's eyes are still so full of that intricate sunlit forest. I think I can recall exactly the bend of every grass-stem, the shape of every leaf, and tuft of pine-needles, every pattern of light and shade, every beetle and butterfly that my eye fell on that day; the scent of earth and grass and pines is in my nostrils now; the summery singing of the insects is in my ears. And there was about it some rare quality that belonged neither to her times nor to mine: something like the mellow magic that lights your recollection of a summer day in childhood--the glow and loveliness of the lost age when you lived and played protected, secure from all harm and trouble, free to give all your heart and soul to the rare, immediate wonders of the living earth.

  We roamed Hackelnberg like two lovers who have newly found each other in an enchanted forest. To each of us our immediate past seemed as remote and unreal
as if it had been an ugly sorcery whose spell the morning sunbeams had broken. Hans von Hackelnberg seemed an ogre in a fairy-tale: we only half-believed in him--only enough to make our adventure more exciting. And we laughed and planned our escape as if it were a game.

  We suspended our belief in the existence of a morrow; we had such delight in the discovery of our own pleasure in each other, such wonder in the boundlessness of our new-found country, and the excitement of exploring all the domain of our new-opened hearts was so wild and sweet that we seemed to contain the whole of the significant real world in our two selves; we alone, wandering in the joyful summer forest, were all the world.

  All day we saw not a soul, heard never a sound of human being or hound. Our unbroken privacy bred such a feeling of security in us that we went slowly, carelessly, arm in arm along the grassy rides, played in the clearings and laughed aloud. So we spent all the hours of daylight, talking, playing, strolling idly, but moving in our meanderings later in the afternoon towards Kranichfels. We lingered to gather wild blueberries in heathy dells that Kit knew, and stood there waist-deep in the bushes, eating the berries from the hollows of our hands, laughing to see the purple stains on each other's lips.

  A little before sunset we came to an outcrop of limestone rocks overhanging a brook which filled a little basin at their foot. We climbed up there and sat on a ledge of fine turf from where, peering down through the leaves beyond, we could see a few yards of the narrow path leading down to Kranichfels pavilion, which Kit said was not more than half a mile away. It was a perfectly still evening with the sun departing from a sky of cloudless blue. The rocks glowed in the last rays and warmed us with the heat they had drunk from the broad sunshine all day.

  "Ah," Kit said, after a long silence, "with all the power that they have, if they could have preserved so easeful and lovely a forest as this for love: for you and me and for all other lovers to wander in while youth lasts...."

  We sat quietly there until there was dusk under the trees. Then Kit began to pluck with her nails at the seams of her feathered gorget. I found a sharp splinter of stone and sawed the stitches and freed her of the last of her trappings. Such slave-girls as might be idling about the lawns of Kranichfels in this summer evening's warm dusk would be unclad, Kit said; that was the distinguishing mark of an Under-Race slave: except when she was performing a part in some display her summer livery was her skin. In the failing light, should any forester notice Kit, his eye would catch the glint of her bright steel chain and he would take it for a slave collar. For her return, after the hour when the slaves were normally confined for the night, she would trust to the protection of the thick darkness under the trees.

  She slipped down from the rocks and bathed in the little pool, washing all the earth-stains from her skin. I went with her a little way along the path until she would allow me to go no farther; then we parted and I returned slowly to the rocks that were to be our rendezvous.

  Still in that strange mood of confidence that no evil thing could befall us, still believing that the savage sorcerer's spell was somehow broken by my finding Kit, I walked openly in the grassy space beyond the brook. The sense that we were only playing a game was so strong I could not feel alarm or anxiety for Kit; I was full of a trembling impatience for her to come back, but it was impatience to take her in my arms again and feel her lips again. The task we planned to do together seemed less serious than that.

  The dusk thickened and still I prowled about, listening sharply for the low call we had agreed she should give to warn me. The night noises of the forest had begun: the soft whisperings, the distant cryings and near rustlings that were now growing familiar to me. I stepped quietly into the thin grove of birches beyond the open space and stood listening there; it was not cold among the trees, but there was a clinging coolness held like an invisible fabric between the faintly visible pale boles. I moved on a little, and in the brooding gloaming of the grove I began to feel that wild-deer wariness, that readiness to start and flee which I had felt before when I was alone, come back into my body.

  In a patch of long grass, which, very dimly, I saw to be laid and trampled as if deer or cattle had lain there, I trod on something that was neither stick nor stone. Picking it up, I perceived, more by feel than sight, that it was a deer-skin mocassin like the ones on my own feet. It was cold and damp and my fingers told me that the sole was almost worn through. An old shoe, thrown away in the forest--yet it made my heart beat quick with fear. I wanted to flee away with all my speed from that patch of trampled grass, but I forced myself to hunt about there, groping and peering for what would put my guess beyond doubt. I found it: scattered rags of stuff that feeling and smelling told me were exactly the same material as that I wore myself--the hairy garb of one of von Hackelnberg's condemned criminals. But the hair on these torn pieces was matted close; the stuff had been soaked in something that had caked and dried hard. As I fingered them I heard again in memory that long note of the Count's horn sounding lonely and final in the dark of dawn. I dared search for no more proof: there was no need; I knew too well the feel of the stuff that had congealed on those remnants. I threw them down, wiped my fingers, dry though they were, on the cool grass and went blundering out of the birch grove into the open.

  The moon, within a night of full, had risen above the tree-tops and was whitening our pile of rocks. Fearful of the light now as much as of the grove's darkness, I crouched in the shadow of the rock and washed my hands again and again in the brook, as if by washing them I could cleanse my mind of its dreadful picture of the Frenchman's death.

  I could wait no longer for Kit to return, but went groping down the path under the thick summer canopy of leaves which the moonlight could not penetrate, with some idea of warning her, of begging her to run back to Kranichfels, to give herself up again to slavery, to endure anything for the sake of a strong wall between her body and the cruel fangs.

  I made slow progress, for in the pitch dark of the wood I was afraid of losing the path, and I blundered continually into the trees; but at length I saw the moon again, and, winking through the leaves, a spark of yellow light which must be from a window of the pavilion. I hid close there, where I could watch a yard or two of moonlit path, and waited.

  A long time passed, and though I listened in vain for Kit's footsteps, I slowly took courage from the fact that I heard nothing else. The moon was rising higher and higher, yet no voice but the forest's own spoke to her.

  Then I heard a faint clink of steel not very far away down the path, A dead branch cracked and that brief little noise of metal on metal was repeated. I softly called Kit's name and saw a figure step into the patch of moonlight, stand stock-still for a second, then glide into the shadow. I slipped close to her, speaking softly to reassure her. I found her arm, and felt that she was clothed: the soft stuff my hands encountered felt like some thick fine wool, or velvety fur, as short and fine as moleskin. She was laughing softly with excitement and elation, but she would not speak until we reached our rocks again. There she leaned, panting, and put into my hands a small-bladed, sharp spade and a bill-hook.

  "It's taken me a long time," she said. "I'd forgotten where the tool-shed was. I dared not move about much till it was dark, and then the buildings were locked up. But I knew where the Ankleidezimmer was even in the dark--that's where they rig us out in our costumes when we're to be hunted. I knew there were all sorts of things there. It was locked up, but they'd left a window open. I climbed in and got these clothes, and then I found a door into a store was open and I got the tools there--they're new! I couldn't find anything for you to wear, though."

  She laughed again and was so gay and pleased with her success that though I had been about to tell her of what I had found and implore her to go back, my heart failed me. Only when she knelt to drink from the brook and the moonlight fell full on her, I saw that there was such maniacal consistency in every detail of the life Hans von Hackelnberg ordained of his slaves that there was no escaping the trammels of
his one mad theme: the clothes were a single suit of overall tights, such as a dancer might wear for practise, fashioned to mould the contours of a human form, yet made of stuff woven with marvelous cunning to simulate an animal's skin. As Kit crouched there on all fours with her head bent low to the water and her face hidden, with the moonlight glinting on that strange, glossy dark coat which clothed her uniformly from head to toe, she looked like a lithe and sleek wild beast that had slipped out from the darkness of the woods to drink. For a second she seemed utterly strange to me, and with a shock of fright I felt the net of sorcery fall round us once again and saw von Hackelnberg's red lips laughing wickedly as he put a term to our brief holiday as human beings.