The Sound of His Horn Read online

  "Go!" he howled at me. "Go free this night. Hans von Hackelnberg spares thee now to hunt thee again under another moon!"

  I did not know or care by what law of his own mad sport he spared me. The foresters fell back and sheathed their falchions. I should have crossed the fence again then and gone to meet the steel-clawed brutes, but the searchlight beam slid back into its tower, the white rays of the fence made one long leap back across all the open, and I saw von Hackelnberg with his burden through that strange screen, colourless, shadowless, robbed of all substance, remote from me as I from the white, tranquil moon. I saw his blank and ghostly form stride on towards the phantom pack, heave the pale body high again and hurl it among them.

  I do not know how long I lay on the heath, staring into that thin, luminous wall. I must have gazed into it until long, long after any shape had ceased to stir beyond it, unable to think or move. I heard nothing, I saw nothing more. There is no record in my brain of what ensued later that night--or many nights after; only my body still has a kind of physical memory that I rose and tore von Hackelnberg's livery off it, and that I walked in a trance of weariness through the woods, walked on and on until moonlight and shadow swung together before my eyes, until I was stone-blind and the earth fled from beneath me.

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  8

  The cat, which had been sleeping quietly on the hearthrug for the last hour of Alan Querdilion's story, woke as he ceased speaking, yawned and jumped on to the arm of his chair. He rose, kicked the end of the last log into the nearly dead fire and shivered with cold.

  "The German police had not much doubt that I was barmy," he said, "when they found me like that, wandering stark naked by the railway line. It was at a little place called Kramersdorf, not far, it seems, from Daemmerstadt--the station I had been making for. They kept me in hospital for a month and then, either because they thought I was cured or because they didn't much care anyway, they put me back in the cage: a different camp, though. That was in September, nineteen-forty-three. I stayed there till the Russians came in May, forty-five."

  "But have you no idea where you'd been?..." I began. "I mean, did the German police not trace what you'd been doing between escaping from your first camp and being picked up on the railway line?"

  "If they did they never told me," he said.

  He was silent a long time, and then sighed.

  "Ah, well, that's all that happened to me while I was round the bend. As I told you, if it doesn't happen again for another year I shall ask Elizabeth to marry me, and I hope I shall forget I was ever mad. You've kept awake through the tale, now you must go to bed and forget you ever heard it. No one else ever will."

  "No," I said. "Elizabeth must hear it. You must tell it to her."

  He went out without replying, and I heard him unfastening the front-door bolts.

  "I don't know," he muttered, as if to himself. "I don't know." He swore suddenly under his breath. "Where's Smut gone to again? Cats are a damn nuisance, whether you let them out or try to keep them in."

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