The Sound of His Horn Read online

  I seized her and jerked her to her feet, to a human posture, and when I saw my roughness startled her, I could only mumble nervously that her costume seemed so strange.

  "I suppose it does, to you," she said soberly. "I've seen it often enough. It's what the slaves wear in winter: it will keep out the bitterest wind and the snow and rain won't go through it."

  "Let's get away from here," I said, and picking up the tools I led the way, behind the rocks, away from the open sward and the dark grove of birches beyond it.

  It was still not too late to tell her, and I should have told her; I should have told her that my plan was no good, that it was unthinkable than von Hackelnberg would leave us in peace for the weeks that would be necessary to dig a tunnel. But I had fired her with enthusiasm for the plan; not by my words only, but by my very presence and my tenderness I had convinced her that escape was possible: practicable because it was so desired now; and she was so pleased and proud of the way she had carried out her part of it, I had not the heart to break the illusion.

  We walked quickly along the moonlit rides, Kit talking rapidly in a low voice all the time, arguing in favour of this or that place that she remembered near the fence, but I was listening with only half my attention. I had to think of another plan, and I could not. Covertly I felt the sharp edge of the spade; the bill-hook was the better weapon, but the spade was heavier. I asked Kit to carry the bill.

  We were making for a part of the forest which Kit said was as far from the Schloss as one could get; a wilder tract, less trodden than the rest, where the undergrowth and fallen trees were not cleared away. She had hidden there on a mock deer-hunt and had eluded the hounds and the retrievers for a week. She had learnt to find her way back there in the dark by coming down by night to feeding tables in the more frequented part of the forest. As she recollected, scrub and tall heath in that wild part grew quite close to the fence. That was the place for our tunnel; there we would work by night and hide by day, and to get us food she would improve on her stratagem at Kranichfels and penetrate to the slave-quarters of the Schloss itself. The way to defeat German thoroughness, Kit declared, was to do something boldly absurd: the German boys would never conceive that an Aryan would deliberately impersonate an Under-Race slave.

  So, Kit running on with gay confidence and I racking my brains to think of some other expedient, we came at length to some high ground thinly wooded with oaks and deep with bracken and coarse grass. The night was very still and by no means cold. Kit blew out a long breath and loosened her suit at the throat. "Lord!" she exclaimed, "I'm boiled in this thing. I wish I'd..."

  She broke off suddenly and seized my arm, and the moon showed me her eyes shining very wide. "Did you hear?" she whispered.

  I had heard it. At last, the sound I had been listening for since I found those poor rags of the Frenchman's clothes. Distant, yet very clear in the stillness, the horn had sounded. It came to us across the moonlit woods, a gay and prancing note, a call that on an autumn morning would have set my blood dancing. We stood stock still, listening and listening after it had ceased, not daring to look at each other again. It rang out again, triumphant, exulting, stirring, and there mingled with it now the brief eager baying of hounds that have found their line.

  I gripped Kit by the shoulders. "You must go back! You must go back! Go back to Kranichfels. Go and give yourself up. That is the Count hunting me. You'll be safe if you're not with me!"

  I was fierce in my insistence, but she would not be persuaded.

  "No! I won't leave you. I can show you where to hide. They won't do anything to me even if I'm with you. I know the sound of those dogs. They're not the savage ones. They're just the ones they use for tracking. They won't loose them. We can shake them off. Come on! Oh, come on!"

  There seemed a chance that what she said was true. In any case, our best hope of safety seemed to lie in reaching those thickets that she knew. We fled then, running steadily along a path through the thin oak woods.

  I soon had proof that my past was not hallucination, for it betrayed me in this unbelievable present. I should have been able to keep up a controlled cross-country pace without distress, but I found again, as on my walk from Oflag XXIX Z, that two years of captivity, underfeeding and lack of exercise had robbed me of my strength and endurance. I began to stream with sweat in the first mile; I laboured for breath and my legs were like splints of wood. I tried no more to persuade Kit to part from me, not only because I could not spare the breath, but the hard fact was that I should never have made the speed I did without her. And yet it was bitter to think that even in fleeing from him we were doing von Hackelnberg's will. He had had Kit trained for just such work as this; I had a mental image of him admiring her long stride and easy breathing and grinning with malicious pride in his handiwork.

  It was some time before we heard the horn again, and then it was fainter. We had gained on the hounds. But we had come into rougher country now and were scrambling down paths that were more like the beds of little torrents--places where one might easily fall and sprain or break an ankle. But my deer-hide mocassins and Kit's supple shoes gave us sure footing on the smooth stones, and with that fear behind us we took bold leaps downwards. I had a notion that the scent would not lie so well on the cold stones, so where we could we slithered down the wide slabs of rock that strewed the valley side. Our surest ally was water, and that, I saw, was Kit's intention. We plunged into tall grass and thin growth of birches and poplars at the bottom of the slope, and then I felt the ground yield and squelch beneath me. Soon we were in a weedy morass, wading deeper and deeper until the water rose to my breast. There we found a moderately firm bottom and, oaring with our arms, we went the length of a narrow pond that filled the middle of the marsh. We continued until we found the inlet stream, then followed that, stumbling and splashing among its stones and holes, climbing gradually up its course between the valley sides. It brought us out upon an upland bog and there we rested, sitting on the quaking turf.

  "They'll lose time in the marsh," Kit gasped. "They'll have to circle it all to pick up the scent again. Come on!"

  But she had lost her direction now, and we ourselves lost time floundering across that boggy plain, stopping, trying to recognise the shape of the low wooded hills about us in the moonlight. As we reached the firm ground again and Kit declared she recognised the place, we heard the hounds give tongue again.

  We toiled on, running a little where we could, but most of the time going at a shambling, stumbling walk. Kit was spent now. We had no energy for speech, but went dumbly on, close together but each isolated by our own body's distress, by the imperious need to concern ourselves with our own thumping heart and labouring lungs and aching limbs. I still held on to my spade, hampering though it was, but Kit had dropped the billhook. I was too exhausted to say anything about it.

  There was no path now. We were struggling blindly through tangled undergrowth so thick that in places it forced us to go on our hands and knees. I do not know how long we spent fighting our way through that scrub; I do not know what distance we had covered in our flight; the stages of it were confused and jumbled in my mind; our present toil seemed to have continued for an age, and our wading through the long pond was something we had done long ago when we were strong and fresh.

  I blundered into Kit. She was lying still upon the earth and she groaned at my touch. "I can't go on," she whispered. I lay down beside her, too spent myself to urge her on, and listened. Beyond our own panting I could hear nothing. We lay until we began to get our breath a little more easily, and still the silence was unbroken.

  We lay there, exactly as that mad hunter would have us: turned by the terror of his horn and hounds into frightened animals cowering, pitifully hopeful of escape, in the heart of the thicket. We could do no more than hope that the hounds would fail; we could run no more. I felt the edge of my spade again and gripped the shaft. I would at least settle the business of a hound or two before they tore my throat out. But this was
no place to stand at bay; I must have room to swing. Here the interlaced boughs of the scrub held me fast; a hound could come worming on its belly to seize me like a ferret fastening to a rat in a hole. I tried to move Kit to crawl on to some more open place.

  "This is the thickest part," she said wearily. "The fence can't be far away. Our best chance is to lie still here. It's only more sport for them if they get you in the open."

  I lay till I had recovered my strength somewhat, but then the inaction, the waiting in that silence, was too much for me. Dragging my spade along I began to creep forward to find how far our thicket extended.

  I called softly back once or twice as I went and heard Kit answer. I did not intend to go out of range of her voice lest we lose one another. The scrub grew a little thinner after some distance and I found I could go erect, pushing through with my shoulders, though I could still see nothing about me, only glimpses of the moon above. I did not think I had gone very far from Kit when I pushed right out of the bushes into open heath. I dropped down at once into the low cover, for there was a watch-tower three or four hundred yards away from me on my flank. In front, only fifty or sixty yards across the heath, I could see the fence: a wall of faint radiance as I had seen it that other moonlight night, though I thought now that I could distinguish the paler lines of the wires running through it. I crawled along the edge of the scrub to my left away from the watch-tower, keeping, as I thought, at about the same radius from the place where I had left Kit.

  I found the scrub inclining gradually away from the fence as I went and suddenly I had a clear view down a long open space, a kind of broad, though much neglected, ride that cut straight through this tract of wild forest. It might have been an old fire lane, and it led straight up to the fence. Realising that had we been a hundred yards or so to our left we could have reached our present hiding-place without all that long toil through the scrub, and realising also, with a sinking heart, that on two sides we were very near the edge of our cover, I sat down to think out what was best to do. I had scarcely settled myself in the tall herbage when I heard the baying of the hounds somewhere behind me.

  They were terribly near now, and I knew that full, sure note of their voices well. I strained my ears and caught another sound--the cracking of dry twigs under human feet. A long, cheerful "Halloo!" sounded clearly from the scrub and was taken up by someone more distant down the ride. I dare not risk a call to Kit, but began to crawl into the bushes again to try to rejoin her. Then I stopped, reflected and went back into the ride and crouched in the withered weeds again. The hounds were laid on my line--of that I was certain, for they did not hunt game-girls by night. Kit also knew that. Surely, then, I reasoned, she would think of crawling away from our line; the bloodhounds would not change quarry when my scent was so hot: they would pass her in the scrub, follow my scent out and circle round to find me in the open. I took a good grip on my spade and waited.

  I heard them baying again, and now they seemed to me to have surely passed the place where I had left Kit. I half rose, changing my plans, thinking now that I had got my wind again I could run down the ride and draw them clear away from her. But before I could straighten up there came a loud, ringing clamour of sound from down the ride: the high, exulting pealing of the Count's horn, imperiously rousing and commanding, the thudding beat of horses' hooves and, terrifyingly near and shrill, appalling in its unexpectedness, that torrent of mad screaming and babbling distortion of human utterance that I had heard twice before in Hackelnberg.

  Hans von Hackelnberg was riding up the long glade with all his cats screeching for blood. They came nearer with dreadful speed and in my horror I could neither stand nor flee. I saw dark shapes of horsemen cantering up through the long grass and heath, and saw in front of them a dozen--no, a score and more--of human shapes, but shapes that bounded rather than ran, covering the rough tangle of herbage with long, flying leaps. I saw those panther heads shoot up in black silhouette against the moonlit sky; I saw the shapes bend, tawny-grey against the grass, and saw again their leaping limbs flash pale in the milky light. The hounds bayed behind me, hunting somewhere close to the fence where I had been, but I paid them no attention now. I could only watch those shapes bounding on towards me; could think of nothing but the glint of steel at the end of their dark arms. Then I saw ride forward among them a man who looked gigantic in the moonlight: one who wore round his breast a gleaming coil of silver. He blew another blast, loudly and insolently proclaiming the right to slaughter for lust. I wiped my palms on the hair of my breeches and slowly rose and backed against a thick bush and swung my weapon.

  There was a sudden loud shout from someone behind Hans von Hackelnberg; the Count himself reined in his horse and blew one sharp call on his horn. The screaming and babbling of the cats concentrated all at once in a sustained screech. But it was not I that they had seen.

  A dark form had slipped out of the scrub and was crossing the moonlit open a few yards in front of the pack. It turned and fled straight up the ride towards the fence.

  The cats flew forward over the heath and tussocks. Their screeching ceased, but as they hurtled past me I heard one loud sob as if it were one common intake of breath, or as if every fierce mouth had suddenly drunk in at once a draught of air already heavy with the odour of their victim's blood. The black figure still led them, running as a human being runs for life, but straight towards that wall of pale radiance, that whiter light within the blue-white of the moonlight. Too late, I saw that she would not swerve. Without knowing what I was going to do, without caring for Hans von Hackelnberg or his cats or his hounds, I cried out and began to run after her.

  Von Hackelnberg had seen Kit's purpose, too. He thundered after his pack, cursing at the top of his great voice, then began to blow wild short blasts, calling the cats off. His followers galloped after him; I heard long, loud whistles shrilling above the Count's horn.

  But the cats had their quarry clear in sight; they were gaining on her fast and I knew nothing could call them back now. I saw Kit leap at that insubstantial luminous barrier as if it had been a solid wall that she could scale, and I shouted out her name, cold with horror to see her, who had seemed by her sanity to prove my own, driven mad by fear. But in the next moment I knew it was not so. Even as she sprang at the fence she called to me. I heard her, above all the shouting and the whistling and the blowing of the horn, I heard her calling, not madly but with a terrible devotion: "Alan! Alan! Cross, cross; oh, cross!"

  Then below her, against that screen of faint white light, the pack piled in a mass of twisting bodies and wildly upflung arms, all black against the radiance. And now I heard them cry again--short, frantic shrieks and moans of agony. The shadowy shapes of the horsemen plunged and danced on this side, between the fence and the scrub; the whistles blew continuously and von Hackelnberg's horn rang out, peal upon peal.

  I kept on towards them, running up through the thin bushes on the edge of the thicket, and all the time my eyes were fixed on that black figure above the writhing body of the pack; for it hung there, very still, both arms straight stretched out as though lying along the topmost wire, her head fallen forward and her legs hanging limply down. She hung there, dead in the very sign of sacrifice and salvation. And as I halted, knee-deep in the rough grass and ling that ran away to the fence, I saw Kit's figure shine with a dim incandescence as if each fine hair of the velvet pelt that sheathed her were touched with hoar-frost.

  My brain and heart both were so bruised by that blow that I forgot the danger she had tried to draw from me. I think I had begun to stumble across the open towards her, crying her name, when, as real as an actual echo, her voice sounded again in my ear: "Alan! Cross!" And then I saw why she had rushed on death and I remembered how she herself had seen the thing happen once before. The radiance of the fence faded swiftly away and the whistles stopped shrilling. I caught a glimpse of the wire glinting cold in the moon and had a second's impression of heather and birches beyond it and a black mass of pine fore
st farther away before a searchlight beam shot down from the watch-tower. It fingered the fence for a moment, then found the group by the wire and held it.

  I saw then quite coolly what I must do. The foresters had ridden in close to the fence. I heard the slashing of their heavy whips and sharp howls of pain cutting the demented screaming and the moaning. The tangle of bodies and limbs rolled back, away from the fence, and broke up into a dozen cats who scattered among the horsemen, snarling, spitting, screeching, flying back to claw and tear at their injured mates, while their keepers hewed and swore, flogging them off and herding them away to the edge of the scrub again. I ran forward under the searchlight beam, sure that all who were held in it were blind to me, sure that the dog-boys were holding in their bloodhounds believing their work to be finished and sure that the sentries in the tower had all their attention fixed on the wreck of the pack. I crossed those two yards of bare earth at the fence, felt the wire with my hand, slipped through and ran crouching through the heather on the other side towards Kit's body.

  Before I reached it Hans von Hackelnberg and a couple of his foresters had sprung down from their horses. They strode among the forms that lay upon the earth, some still, some squirming, and with short, violent thrusts of their falchions the two boys quietened each cat that still moved. Hans von Hackelnberg marched straight to that body hanging on the fence. He plucked it from the wire and swung it above his head in his huge hands. I had been invisible to him for I was outside the dazzling beam, but now I started forward and he saw me in the penumbra, not twelve feet from him, with the slight fence between.

  The boys too saw me and advanced their blades as though to charge on me, but von Hackelnberg halted them with a short bellow. He stood there, holding the limp body with all its shroud of ashy velvet shimmering in the beam, then slowly turned and looked towards the whimpering remnant of the pack which the mounted foresters could scarcely keep at bay. He checked himself and half turned towards me again. The brilliant light made of his features a caricature of rage and cruelty more inhuman even than the creatures of his own evil ingenuity, but I was not afraid of him any more. I looked from his ferocious strength to the pitiful dead thing he held, and learned then for the first time how such a loss uproots all other agonies from the soul and makes of the heart a desert where fear and pain can never grow again. I was indifferent to his violent shout at me and did not understand it until long after he had turned away.