The Sound of His Horn Page 8

  The keepers kept their cats racing round the walls of the pit until the sweat glistened on their thighs and their breasts heaved. Then the Count winded his horn once more, standing and blowing a long-drawn-out note with a dying close, the lamenting and receding music of the Mort.

  As soon as he began to blow, the unbearable screaming in the pit below diminished to an eager whimpering, and as he finished the three keepers leapt aside and darted to the open grille.

  Immediately and quite silently, more terrifying in their silent, swift intentness than in all their rage, the cats rushed in upon the two does. The poor animals sprang high into the air, but the bright steel claws swept and slashed, gripped and sank deep into neck and legs and ripped open belly and flanks. There was a moment of horrible, packed writhing of bodies, of vigorous thrusting of legs and haunches as heads and arms went down fiercely busy into the centres of two groups of cats; my nostrils were filled suddenly with the stench of warm entrails and I backed from the edge of the pit. A moment or two later the cats were scattered all about the turf, oblivious of their keepers now, tearing and gulping raw flesh gripped in their reddened talons. The only sound was the sucking and slobbering of their mouths or a low snarl as one brushed by another. Blood dabbled all their faces, the breasts and arms of their sleek coats and the clear bright brown of their bellies and smooth thighs.

  Hans von Hackelnberg gave a hearty shout: "Es ist zu Ende! Komm, meine Herren!" The foresters jumped up, the torch-bearers turned and began to march off in two files back to the Hall again; the guests, in complete silence, shuffled with averted heads past the towering Count who stood waiting to bring up the rear, grinning and shaking with laughter, looking down on his deflated little flock of bullies with ferocious amusement. They had not the air of men going to enjoy the rest of a night's frolic I saw our own fat little sportsman of the morning, held up between two foresters, being miserably sick under a tree.

  I lingered until the last pairs of torch-bearers were moving off from the bank of turf, hoping that von Hackelnberg would follow his guests, but some brilliant white lanterns were beginning to shine at the edge of the pit now, and fearing to be shown up, isolated and conspicuous, I attached myself to the last knot of four or five young foresters and marched past the Count with my head bent.

  I thought I had passed him unnoticed, when a great hand on my shoulder stopped me as suddenly as if I had collided with the down-bending branch of an oak-tree. He wheeled me about, demanding to know who I was, and I found myself looking into that tawny forked beard, that wide, grinning mouth and those hot eyes from a distance of two feet. Abruptly, with his other hand he arrested the last torch-bearer, whose cresset swung above us and then shone steadily down on my face. The Count repeated his question in a voice of loud menace. The foresters closed in round us and, looking helplessly from side to side, I recognised one of the boys who had been in the butt with us that morning. Before I could collect enough German in my mind to begin to answer, he had explained. But I saw him tap his forehead as he talked, and the Count interrupted him, crying: "I know! I know!" Then, to me, gripping as though he would break the bones of my shoulder: "So! Thou art an escaper from prisons? Eh? Thy lust is to be free? So thou shalt be. Free of the forest! Drive him to the woods, boys! Turn him loose to find his fodder with the deer!"

  He sent me staggering with a thrust of his arm, and the foresters at once seized me. I resisted them, instinctively, but they overpowered me. I had the sense to see the futility of exhausting myself in a struggle there and so controlled my temper and allowed them to lead me away.

  * * *

  7

  They carried out the Count's instructions there and then. Though they had been, if not friendly, at least not openly hostile when I had been in the Doctor's company among them that morning, now they handled me with no more attention to my questions than if I had been an animal. They dealt with me with a brusque, callous efficiency, not actually striking me when I was slow to obey, but letting me see plainly and promptly enough how expert they were in dealing with any show of resistance.

  They took me to some room in that collection of buildings near the game park, and there they made me strip off the clothes the Doctor had lent me and put on a strange costume which they took from a store that seemed well furnished with similar outfits. It consisted of a pair of knee-breeches made of some peculiar stuff, which might be taken at first sight for deerskin, but which I found to be a fabric, elastic as a living skin and with a nap on its face, short, thick and lying close like an animal's hair. They gave me a tight-fitting jersey of the same material with long sleeves, and then, taking a surprising amount of trouble over the job, fitted me with a pair of real deerskin moccasins which laced firmly and comfortably on my feet.

  As soon as I was thus fitted out, they bundled me outside again into a yard where there stood a kind of small, horse-drawn van, or not so much a van as a square wooden cage on wheels. I was thrust inside, the door fastened on me, and with a couple of foresters sitting on top, I was driven off along a dark lane of the forest.

  We went smartly, up hill and down dale over a fairly good earth road for something like four or five miles, all through thick beech and oak woods. Then we stopped, and I was made to walk, the driver of the van going ahead with a lantern from his vehicle, the others marching on with a gun muzzle held in the small of my back. We followed a narrow, sandy path in an open glade. There was some cloud over the moon; I might by a sudden spring have broken away and given them the slip but that I was convinced they meant to do me no bodily harm immediately: strange as von Hackelnberg's orders were, they had been plain and obviously meant to be literally carried out. I knew now that the forest of Hackelnberg was most effectively fenced; to be free in it was only to be in a wider prison, but to be master of my own movements within those limits seemed to me to be a long step forward towards complete escape; I was not going to ruin my chances by risking a shot in the legs.

  We stopped and the lantern shone on a tiny hut just within a grove of trees. It was made of a neat, close trellis of boughs and deeply thatched with reeds. They pushed me to the dark little doorway and one of them said harshly:

  "Here you stay. You'll find food near-by. But if we see you we shall shoot you like a wild beast, or set the hounds on you!"

  He lunged suddenly with the gun barrel and sent me flying forward into the dark hut, where I lay for a moment on the floor, winded and helpless from the blow. When I straightened up the lantern was already disappearing far down the glade.

  I groped about in the hut and suddenly recoiled in fright as my hand touched a mass of hair that moved. I heard a gasping, suppressed shriek, and realised that the thing was more afraid than I was myself. There was a loud rustling of straw or dead leaves and something big blundered against my legs in a scrambling bolt for the doorway. I grabbed at it and found myself clutching a man.

  He collapsed weakly on the ground, sobbing and muttering in so low and broken a voice that I could not tell whether he was uttering words or only those distorted sounds which were all that the Count's slaves could produce. Then, as I got my hands under his shoulders and lifted him up, he became calmer and I distinguished that he was speaking French.

  He allowed me to pass my hands over his head and body, though he trembled and groaned a little in fear. His hair and beard were long, and he was wearing the same kind of skin-like garments as I was myself. He was a small man, and, I guessed, a good deal older than I. Doing my best to reassure him in my bad French, I drew him over to sit down beside me on a pile of dry straw which I felt at the back of the hut.

  At length he was confident enough to begin timidly feeling my features and clothes in turn, and to ask me who I was. I answered him very briefly that I was an Englishman who had escaped from a prison camp, that in running away I had blundered into the fence of rays round Hackelnberg forest, and after being treated by the Doctor had now been turned loose in the forest by the orders of the Count von Hackelnberg. He shuddered at the n
ame and groaned very deeply.

  "They will kill you," he said, half weeping. "They will kill you. They will kill us all. They drive me from place to place. They drive me and there is no rest. I cannot sleep. I am going mad!" And he repeated the word 'mad' a dozen times, his voice rising to a shriek of terror and despair that appalled me.

  I soon became convinced that he was in fact very near to madness, crazed by some abominable terror that I could not get him to describe explicitly. I thought to calm him more by asking him his history, but he could not keep his mind for more than a moment on anything but the horror that haunted and hunted him in the woods. He started like a wild animal at the slightest sound among the trees outside the hut; hushed me with a hissing intake of breath, and held himself rigidly clenched together to listen to faint, unidentifiable noises far away.

  All I could gather was that he was an educated man--a writer, it would seem, for he babbled disjointedly, crying like a child explaining a misdemeanour for which it has been beaten, about some letters or articles he had written, jumbling together a collection of ill-pronounced German names and wailing: "I only followed them. I didn't know it was wrong. Why did they punish me? Why didn't they let me recant? They know I would never have written it if I'd known it was wrong. They misled me on purpose to have me tortured, on purpose to kill me to make them laugh. Oh, God! They're going to kill me for sport!"

  I think half the night must have passed with my sitting there on the straw with that poor maniac, now trying to comfort him, now trying to elicit from him some clearer account of what it was he so feared--though God knows, I had seen my share of the horrors of Hackelnberg and could guess at others enough to send a man out of his mind. I could feel that the man, besides being under such mental strain, was mortally fatigued; but when I asked him what he did in the woods in the daytime, and where he found his food and whether this hut was his resting-place, he either did not answer, or muttered low with a kind of selfish, crazy cunning, that he would not tell me lest I betray him.

  I was hungry enough, but there was nothing to eat in the hut; I was tired too, and feeling at last that I could help the man no more, nor he me, and believing that I had nothing to fear from him, I stretched myself on the straw and slept.

  The sun woke me, and I found myself alone. Outside the forest was a wonder of fresh green and gold, cool, gay and delightful. I looked down the fair green glade, listened to the bird-song, stretched myself and breathed deep. My freedom might be only comparative, but it felt like real freedom; and in that broad early sunlight, with the sweet trees of the forest so real, so true to their own nature, so calmly and perfectly fulfilling the timeless cycles of universal nature, I could not believe that the evil perversions of natural beauty I had seen in the torchlight, the deformation and abasement of human beings I had witnessed the day before, were real. I looked about me for my little fellow-lodger, laughing to myself at his terrors, but I could not see him. I laughed at my own appearance: in those furry breeches I looked like a close-shorn Robinson Crusoe.

  It amazed me that the Count's establishment should lavish such extremely good material on a criminal--as I must assume myself to be reckoned. It did not seem at all the Nazi way: they did not waste good clothes on human rubbish they intended to liquidate. But then I thought of the richness and elaborateness of the game-girls' costumes. Though I could not believe the little French writer's fears of violent death were justified, I had no doubt that he and I were destined for a part in some fantastic game of the Count's.

  A little way off I could hear the faint murmur of running water. I pushed through the bushes and descended a wooded bank towards the sound. In a shady tract of beech wood, with little undergrowth, a small, clear stream came splashing over some rocks into an inviting basin of sand and pebbles. But before I could reach it, a savage burst of barking made me skip up the slope again and, peering from the bushes, I saw that there were two or three keepers with a couple of boar-hounds doing something at a rough rustic table a little way downstream from the pool. One of them was looking in my direction, and without any warning, he suddenly lifted his gun and fired. I ducked instinctively the instant I saw the motion, and I heard the small shot go cutting through the twigs above my head. I ran crouching back towards the hut again, and did not venture down until I heard the snarling hounds being dragged off into the further woods. Then I went with great caution, warily listening and looking before I left the cover of the bushes.

  I found that they had left on the rough table a good quantity of food--bread, cheese, potatoes, raw vegetables and apples. I was hungry, and was on the point of snatching up a loaf, when a sudden suspicion ran like a thrill of cold water over my body, and I darted back into cover again: it had come to me that I was being lured out to give the keepers a better target.

  Nearly an hour, I suppose, I lurked in the bushes, famished, but afraid to venture near the table. They had succeeded by a mere threat in turning me into a wild creature. No, I would not confess that I was afraid either of their shot or their dogs, but the necessity to risk no injury that would wreck my chance of escape was overriding. The effect was the same; call it cowardice or caution, I lay with the patience of an animal, waiting until I was absolutely sure that the coast was clear. Then I ran down, drank hurriedly, and snatched up an armful of the provisions and retreated. I did not go back into the hut, but found an open, grassy space where I could look well about me while I ate.

  That was the bitterness of my 'freedom'--knowing that I was turned loose for some cruel amusement of the Count's, but not knowing what form it would take, what sort of malice or trick to guard against. The forest was fairer than heaven in my eyes, but I had no delight in it; all my senses were stretched all the time for signs of the danger that might be stalking me.

  Nevertheless, I had a purpose. I flattered myself that I was made of different stuff from that broken-nerved French writing-fellow. I don't claim to enjoy being shot at, but I have been in a few actions and had bigger stuff than buck-shot whistling past my ears. So, feeling a good deal better for the food, I set off on my first reconnaissance.

  I found the forest not at all as wild and tangled as I had expected. There were plenty of signs that it was well tended; except for thickets here and there the undergrowth was cleared away, fallen trees were sawn up and stacked beside the rides, and the grass of the rides themselves was kept mown short. Apart from its seemingly great extent, Hackelnberg forest was just such a piece of woodland as you would expect to find on a country estate in England. It had that air of privacy, and exclusion, too.

  During the whole morning I did not see a living thing except a few small birds and a squirrel or two. That, too, astonished me, until I reflected on the manner of shooting practised there. What von Hackelnberg's guests wanted was game without effort, not the uncertainties of driving or hunting wild deer. But I had heard the Count himself riding abroad at night and winding his horn in the forest. What game did he pursue there, under the moon? I knew the answer to that question now, I thought, and I measured with my eye the hours the sun had yet to travel down the sky.

  It must have been about the middle of the afternoon when I came to the fence. I had skirted a broad, gently undulating heath fringed with pines, and I had been keeping in the cover of the trees, making towards a tract of woods that lay beyond the heath. I came to the tip of my belt of pines and found between me and the other trees a very broad zone of short grass, bending round in a long, gradual curve as far as I could see to right and left. There were at least two hundred yards with no cover that would hide anything bigger than a fox, but more important, and immediately attracting my attention, was a kind of high wooden sentry perch in the middle of the open zone some four or five hundred yards from me. The top of the tower was enclosed and I could not see whether it was occupied or not, but I was morally certain that binoculars and rifle-sights were covering that open ground.

  The defence itself seemed ridiculously inadequate: a single row of slender steel pickets supp
orting three strands of thin wire which shone bright in the sunlight. I wormed my way on my belly as near as I dared, taking advantage of the heath that grew a little beyond the pines. It did not look like barbed-wire, even, and in the daylight I could see none of that strange radiance which I had seen, or thought I had seen, in the moonlight the night I came to Hackelnberg.

  I crawled a few inches nearer, and at my movement a brace of black-game rose with a whirr from the heath a couple of yards in front of me. I watched them sail away, making for that other woodland beyond the fence. The cock flew high, but the hen, a little behind, was much lower; I could see that if she did not rise she would barely clear the top strand of wire, about ten feet from the ground. But she did rise a little: I saw she had seen the wire and was going clean over. Then suddenly she dropped, killed as cleanly as if she had been knocked down by a good shot with twelvebore. I heard the "plump!" of her body hitting the hard, bare ground at the foot of the fence. And yet I will swear she had never touched the wire; I am certain that she was two feet in front of it when she dropped; and then, if she had touched it--a big bird going at a fair rate--I should have seen it vibrate, for it was bright stuff, quite visible. I glanced quickly at the sentry-perch to see if there was any sign of the bird's having been observed there, but nothing stirred.