The Sound of His Horn (12 page)

The slaves did not follow beyond the first trees, but I carried on for some little distance further before sitting down to rub my bruises and think the situation out.

I clearly stood no chance of breaking into the hospital this night. Not only would they secure all the windows now, but the slaves would be on the look-out, and I would not put it beyond the Doctor to warn some of the foresters that I was in the neighbourhood. Obviously, this livery I wore marked me as the Count's game and they were all terrified of harbouring or succouring me against his orders.

In what remained of the daylight I travelled back some way towards my hut, but as the night came down, finding a patch of tall, dry grass beside a thicket of bushes, I decided to stay there. It was a miserably cold night and it rained a little towards morning, but at least I did not hear the Count's horn.

Hunger, I suppose, drove me to find my way back to the hut next morning. I had turned over in my mind a plan for stealing into the Schloss itself, getting hold of some other clothes, somehow, to change for this damning livery of imitation deerskin, and obtaining some weapon or tool from the stores there. If I could only manage to steal a forester's costume I thought that in such a mazy place as the Schloss, with so great a number of people about, I might come and go a few times in the dusk without being discovered. But I had to have some more food: that project would have to wait until the next night.

It was fairly late in the morning when I got back to my hut, and I assumed that the keepers would already have been with a fresh supply of food to the table by the stream, and gone away again long since. Yet, as I crept through the bushes in the bank, my eye caught a movement down there in the subdued light of the wood. I parted the leaves to get a better look and saw that it was not the keepers, but a single girl, tensely poised, turning her head rapidly from side to side, ready to spring away at the slightest sound, but wolfing down the provisions with a famished eagerness.

The rags of her costume were still recognisable, and I was sure I knew that thick black hair and those long legs. I remembered the party I had seen with bloodhounds and baboon-boys the day before, and felt extraordinarily cheered that they could fail--that they had not yet caught the 'bird' whom our fat sportsman's first shot had missed. She had managed to tear open her beaked mask and had thrust back the front of it on to the top of her head where the beak rose now like a helmet spike; she had stripped the wing-feathers from her arms and torn away her gold and brown tail-plumes, though the narrow, feathered girdle to which they had been attached still remained. The feathers of her gorget were sadly bedraggled and she was smeared from feet to waist with dried mud as though she had waded through ponds and marshes.

I puzzled how to reveal myself to her without frightening her away, and concluded that the best thing was to show myself boldly some distance up the stream where she could see me plainly and assure herself I was not a forester before I came near her. I moved round behind the bushes, therefore, then stepped down carelessly to the stream bank.

She fled before I reached it, bounding away between the trees like a very doe. Without hurrying I walked down and stood by the table, picked up some bread and ate and looked carefully about. I could see no sign of her. Then, after a few moments I called out in English. I caught a movement then of the leaves thickly clothing some low-hanging boughs and knew that she was watching me. I spoke again, in English, thinking that even though she did not understand it, the sound of a foreign language would convince her that I was a fellow-prisoner or slave. But there was no response and no movement. I looked steadily at the place where I had seen the leaves move: it seemed to me that she must have climbed up the drooping boughs of a great beech and hidden in the thick foliage.

Then, without thinking of that atrocious gap of history I had so strangely leapt, or indeed, having any precise memory of where and when in my past I had seen the gesture, I made the 'V' sign; you know, Churchill's gesture, that the propagandists told us was current in occupied Europe.

The leaves stirred again; an arm and shoulder emerged and returned my sign. At that I walked over until I stood by the ends of the boughs and began to say, as best I could in German, that I had seen her escape the shot during the drive, that I too was a prisoner of the Count's.... A very firm voice speaking pure English interrupted me:

"If you know a comparatively safe place let's go there and talk. You go; I'll follow you."

Marvelling at the coolness and control of her voice, and strangely stirred to find my own countrywoman sharing the forest with me, I walked slowly back to the hut; but instead of entering, I went on to the open place where my first morning in the woods I had sat and ate. There, on three sides the view was open for some distance, and on the fourth was a dense thicket before which was a low jungle of rank weeds that would provide admirable cover for a quick escape. I carried on through the weeds, not looking round, and when I stopped and squatted down, I found the girl close behind me, crouching low so that she was almost entirely hidden by the herbage. She cowered close there, like a partridge, only her head with its bizarre beaked helmet visible to me. She had a comely face, lightly freckled, with intelligent grey eyes. She had brought an armful of the provisions with her and as we talked she ate, studying me all the while in an appraising way, with an expression neither frightened nor haggard as I would have expected, but wary and sometimes, as she told me her adventures, defiant.

My own tale sounded lame and incomplete, for I felt I could not attempt to explain--or rather describe--my incredible leap through time. I wanted her to have no doubts about my sanity. Therefore I told her simply that I had escaped from a prison camp, assuming that something like concentration-camps would be still a feature of the Reich. I could see that to her the imprisonment of an Englishman in Germany was a banal enough occurrence. But she wanted to question me about my camp, my offence, my comrades, then checked herself as if suddenly realising and respecting the reasons for my reticence. I had reflected enough now on my unthinking gesture to be astonished that the sign was still used after a hundred years of Nazi domination, and cautiously I enquired how she came to understand it.

"Why," she said, looking surprised, "it's the sign they used in the Old Resistance, isn't it? I'm not very good at underground things--I didn't have time to learn much before they got me, but I heard somebody give a talk in our Study Group at Exeter once, and he told us how the old Jerry-Potters used to give that sign to one another, in the Troubles, you know, after the Invasion of 'Forty-Five. It's supposed to stand for the nick in the back-sight of the old sort of rifle they used then, he said. I didn't know any Friends still used it, but I took a chance on your being a Friend when I saw it."

She looked very young when she explained about her 'study group' with such a serious air. She talked with sudden rushes of confidence and equally sudden baffling reticences or allusions to groups of letters-initials standing for underground patriotic organisations, I suppose. But I gathered that even after a century of authoritarian German rule, resistance was still alive in England, at any rate among young people, university students, such as herself. It seemed, however, to be no longer an armed resistance: rather, a matter of deliberate deviations on subtle points of doctrine and party theory--fine distinctions that had a burning significance for her, but which seemed as pedantic to me as the disputes of mediaeval theologians. Still, I reflected, deviations from religious orthodoxy in the middle ages had led from the study to the stake. My job had been to fight Nazism in a man-of-war, but it was just as much a battle when she and her like fought it by perverting a party slogan at a Student Rally. It must have needed more courage, for I and my comrades were free, trained fighting-men with a mighty nation behind us. And the risks were the same: not death only, but all the torture and indignity that a vicious absolutism might choose to inflict.

I asked how she came to Hackelnberg.

She shrugged: "Usual thing, I expect: carelessness and an informer. I was lucky, though, because they couldn't prove anything definite against me. So I was just sent for re-education to a Bund-leader School in East Prussia. That's the sort of place, you know, where they train the officers of the Youth Leagues. They send foreign recalcitrants there--Nordics, of course, I mean. The mental climate is supposed to purge their minds of error. Besides, the cadet officers need material to practise Leader-Art on--they like to get Aryan recalcitrants, especially girls."

"But how did you get into von Hackelnberg's hands?" I asked.

"I ran away from the School," she said calmly. "That was wrong, I know. The Friends' line is that if they get you in a re-education school you must stick it and learn all the tricks and be passed out as a sound Nazi so that you can do covert work when you come back. But it was hell. I couldn't stick it. So I ran away. Of course, they caught me. They class you as a malignant if you run away, and that means you're drafted for service in a Reich Institution and you're under the same discipline as Under-Race
Stuecke.
That's how I got here. And that's enough about me. The point is, what can we do about you? You're in a much tighter corner than I am."

I said we seemed to be pretty much in the same boat.

"Oh no!" she said, with a very youthful and downright practicality. "I'm a valuable property, you're just a Criminal--a liquidation-piece. I don't know just what the Master Forester does with the Criminals they give him, but I do know it's something slow and messy. How much have you seen here?"

I told her.

She nodded. "I haven't seen those cat-women, but I've heard about them. And heard them. They'll be doctored pieces, I expect." The casualness of her tone shocked me more than the thing she suggested. The surgical excision from a perfect human body of the element that lights it with a human soul was not a nightmare fancy to her but a commonplace practice.

"I've been here six months," she told me. "I'm a
Jagdstuck--
a game-girl, kept specially for these hunts. They pick out the good runners for that: there's a whole collection of us--Aryans as well as Under-Race. In between hunts it's not so bad. The forester boys aren't bad fellows in their way, until there's a shooting party. Then it's the dogs that terrify you; you know you ought not to run, but you can't control your fear when you hear the dogs behind you. And you know they'd let them get you if you didn't run, because you'd be no use for sport and they'd make an example of you to frighten the others. And even the best of the foresters go mad when they're hunting you. I've been hunted different ways. Sometimes they have guests who want more exercise than this Gauleiter's party. They take them shooting wild deer in the outer forest, and then for fun they have a mock deer hunt here. They turn you loose a day beforehand and then track you with hounds. You try to hide in the thickest places you can find, but when the hounds find you they send in those savage dogs and of course you break out and run for it. They shoot at you then with a sort of little dart that sticks fast in your flesh and has a long coloured thread attached to it, so that they know which man has shot you. They dress you like a deer for that in this tough skin sort of stuff and just leave you bare where the darts will stick without doing any permanent damage. The things sting like the devil, though, and you can't get them out without stopping; but then, as soon as they see you're hit they loose the retrievers--those ape-boys--to catch you and truss you up. But you have more chance at that game: they have to shoot you in the right place because the darts won't go through the deerskin stuff, and if it's not a fair hit they won't loose the apes. I've been hunted three times like that and got away twice."

"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."