The Sound of His Horn (7 page)

I saw that it was a young man who had challenged us; a youth dressed much as the Doctor was dressed, except that he had laid aside his jerkin and was in his shirtsleeves. Observing him from behind the Doctor, I thought him almost too perfect a specimen of what we used to consider the typical young Nazi to be true: not heavily built, but with a suggestion of the bruiser in his figure and pose; hair and lashes so fair he would have passed for albino but for his grey eyes; a face which, in the moment of haughty enquiry before he recognised von Eichbrunn, was a mask of exaggerated arrogance and cold authority, but which, when he briefly returned the Doctor's greeting, looked only selfish and sneering, with a suggestion of careless brutality about the eyes and mouth.

They spoke in German, the Doctor evidently explaining something about me. I felt the young man's eyes on me and carefully avoided them, looking round the room instead.

It appeared to be a keeper's or huntsman's room, stored with a strange variety of equipment, all having the air of being in use, well-kept, neatly arranged and ready to hand. Even the boar-spears standing in their racks by the wall were bright and serviceable-looking: that was the oddity of the place--so much of the gear did not fit into von Eichbrunn's chronology at all. Why was there a row of cross-bows, their steel parts shining, their strings new and strong, lances and short swords, and, in a farther corner, arranged on wooden stands, what looked like several suits of armour, though rather made of tough leather, or material resembling it, than of steel? The Graf von Hackelnberg seemed to be a determined mediaevalist. There was one concession to modernity: a stand of short, single-barrelled guns of very wide bore, far wider than one of our eight-bores or anything I have seen used for wild-fowling; and there were stacks of metal boxes which, I guessed contained cartridges. Besides these there was hunting gear of the sort which I suppose time has modified only a little: hound leashes and couples, collars and whips.

There was a profusion of stuff in the room and I had time to observe only the more obvious things; I noticed, however, that though there were no trophies, such as stags' heads, foxes' masks, and so on, that one might expect to see in such a room, there was a number of skins, or parts of skins, all apparently of the same sort, hanging on the wall at the farther end near the strange suits of armour. They were not displayed as trophies but hanging on a row of pegs. I could see the down-dangling tails, and I thought they looked like leopard skins; but perhaps they were brindled wild-cat skins. It seemed likely enough that wild-cats might be fairly common vermin in a great forest like Hackelnberg.

One other thing I noticed: The fair-haired youth had been standing at a long broad table in the middle of the room, doing something with some gear among the litter of the things that strewed it. He laid down the object he had been working on as he moved a little aside to talk to the Doctor; it was some small piece of metal apparatus and he had been working on it with a file. Edging a little closer, I saw that it was a queer-looking arrangement of steel hooks, arranged like fingers of a hand, and just about the size of my hand, or a bit less. It was, in fact, remotely suggestive of a steel gauntlet without any cuff. There were several such things lying on the table, one or two fitted somehow with straps. I suppose that in another moment I should have got close enough to pick the thing up and examine it in my hands, but the Doctor took me by the arm and led me out with him.

He seemed to have allayed the suspicions of the young keeper, for he went out with us and chatted amiably enough to von Eichbrunn, though he did not address a single word to me. No doubt he knew nothing but German, and though, you know, I can just stumble along in German and understand it if it is spoken slowly enough, I had never let von Eichbrunn know that.

The keeper accompanied us across the little court and let us out into a park-like area of well-spaced trees. Here I caught a glimpse of much the biggest single building I had yet seen. Nearly hidden by the trees as it was, I could make out that it was a great, stone-built hall, Gothic in style, steep-roofed, pinnacled and turreted, complexly ornamented like a fanciful reproduction of some sixteenth-century Rathaus in the Rhineland.

I would have liked to go close and look at it, but again, von Eichbrunn steered me away: what the keeper was about to show us lay in another direction. He led us by little paths between hedges of clipped forest trees among a group of corrals--his game-farm, I supposed, for the enclosures were stocked with numbers of very tame roes, fallow-deer and red-deer, all does and hinds, fawns and calves, as far as I could see. They came running from among the trees and bushes at his call and fed from his hand, and he felt their backs and haunches like a farmer judging a pig. The Graf never lacked venison, I guessed.

How extensive this game-farm was I did not discover, but there must have been other pens hidden from us by the tall hedges, containing less docile creatures than deer, for at one point, while we were stroking the noses of some fallow fawns, a curious whining broke out some little distance from us. The fawns took sudden fright and ran to cover: the keeper laughed shortly, but von Eichbrunn looked as unnerved as he had done when we passed the boarhounds and for an instant I thought he was going to flee like the fawns. It was a curious sound, and not a pleasant one: I have called it a whining but it was really more of a subdued and modulated screaming, with a babbling undertone and occasional shrill yowls of excitement and eagerness that sounded almost human; but it was wholly wild. It sounded like no hounds I have ever heard, and yet, I had the strongest impression of having heard it before and of having thought of hounds while I listened. Only some minutes after it had stopped did I remember where I had heard, or thought I had heard it before. It was exactly like the sounds my ear had seemed to catch mingled with the noises of the wind-stirred forest that night when I listened at my window to Hans von Hackelnberg's horn. I had fancied a whine of hounds then, and had reasoned that it must be the wind. But it was certainly neither hounds nor the wind.

I did not venture to ask a question before the keeper had led us out of his game-farm and set us upon a lane of the forest which the Doctor, evidently relieved to be alone with me again, followed at a rapid pace, uphill. Then to my asking if we were not going to look at the Hall, he grunted briefly,
"Nein,"
and explained no further until we came to the top of the hill.

He leaned against a pine tree and wiped his brow, for the day was very warm and he was unused to exercise. "No," he said, with some ill-humour. "I have had enough of the Schloss on an empty stomach. Franck, the gamekeeper, tells me that the Gauleiter's party are going to have their luncheon at the Kranichfels pavilion--that's a good hour's walk from here. It will be a damned good luncheon too. They are a paunchy, gorging lot by all accounts and I have every intention of getting my share before they come back from shooting. Then I am going to get out of this
verfluchte
heat and sleep."

"I thought you were going to show me the Schloss," I reminded him.

"Ja,
no doubt you did," he replied; then, becoming less irritable as he cooled off, "if you promise not to run away this afternoon, perhaps I will sneak you into the Hall this evening. But I'm not answering for any consequences, mind!" he ended sharply.

I think I had taken the Doctor's measure by now; I thought him something of a child, so answered calmly that I supposed he would take care to avoid any unpleasant consequences to himself, and as for myself I was prepared to take the risk. On that understanding we carried on along our road.

He began to talk again after a while, in his usual airy, conceited vein, but now I could not resist the temptation to deflate him by remarking that for all his superior contempt for mere sportsmen and hunt servants he must allow that they must have some skill--not to mention nerve--that he lacked if they handled dogs like the boar-hounds we had seen a while ago.

The effect surprised me. He seemed to swerve away from me, fetched a deep sigh and said something in German which sounded very like a curse on the day he ever took this job; then, very soberly he said: "The dogs are bad enough, but God defend me from the cats."

I was astonished at the real fear in his voice.

"Do you mean," I asked, "die things we heard squalling when we were looking at the deer?"

But he was offended with me for having made him admit his nervousness and he walked on in a glum silence.

Those few miles were full of interest to me. There was little life to see: no animals other than a red squirrel or two, and very few birds in this part of the forest, but I was most intent to mark the lie of the land, to memorise the way we took and impress on my mind each little side-path and noticeable tree or rock. We crossed a couple of little streams, from both of which the Doctor drank, and then climbed again, gently, up a long slope of ground to a ridge where the bushes grew very thick. There I suddenly heard the baying of a hound not far off. Von Eichbrunn seemed not to notice it, but a moment later started and swore as a man stepped quietly out of hiding in a brake and confronted us in the narrow way.

He was a green-clad forester carrying a light crossbow in his hand: a young boy, not at all ill-looking, who spoke briefly to von Eichbrunn and then watched him with amusement in his eyes as the Doctor grumbled ill-temperedly at what he heard. I half guessed what had happened, and had my guess confirmed as the Doctor, unwilling to be balked of his lunch, questioned the young forester again. We had arrived too late. They had begun to drive the game, it appeared, and if we continued along our road there was a risk of heading off the buck from the guns. The forester was evidently stationed there to turn back any game that might bolt away from the line of the drive down our path.

The hound bayed again; the forester cocked his head and listened; then a gun went off close to us, somewhere on our left hand. The forester still listened for a moment and then grinned. He raised his crossbow imagining a buck in range and shook his head regretfully. 'Had that fellow missed,' he seemed to say, 'I would have had him.'

Abruptly then, he turned to von Eichbrunn, and, as I gathered, asked him why he did not go to the butt near at hand and wait, since the drive would not last long. Von Eichbrunn shook his head, but the boy laughed and, inserting a finger into his mouth, produced so realistic an imitation of the pop of a champagne cork that the Doctor was immediately converted and allowed himself to be guided through the bushes without more ado.

It was by a kind of winding tunnel through tangled undergrowth that the young forester led us down the farther slope of the ridge. It was impossible to see more than a yard or two ahead, and the bushes on either side were so thick and interlaced that I could not imagine anything bigger than a polecat worming its way through them. It occurred to me that the place had been chosen and adapted specially for this reason, so that the driven game would be forced to follow known lines where the guns would be posted. When we came to the butt, I saw that this was so.

It was such a butt as no preserver of game in England would ever have contrived. A little copse, from the centre of which the undergrowth had been carefully cleared, leaving the saplings standing, was surrounded by a breast-high bank of earth well grassed over and topped by a fringe of low bushes. The front of the butt was a sort of demilune, having openings in its screen of bushes so disposed that from one or the other of them a gun might cover any part of the glade in front. It was, in fact, more a ride, or alley, than a glade, for the opposite side was a continuous thick hedge of bushes, looking natural enough to the eye, but no doubt layered and interlaced artificially in order to confine the game to the ride and force it to run straight past the butt within easy range. We were in a valley, and the ride, running lengthwise up it, ended where the ground sloped up more steeply and the sides of the valley, walled there with steep grey rocks, converged and appeared to meet or to leave only a very narrow pass between their crags. It was clear that any game being driven up the valley along this ride or others, if it escaped the guns posted oh them, must be stopped by the converging cliffs and either driven back again, past the guns, or shot by keepers stationed at the head of the valley. We had a clear view of a large part of that triangle formed by the cliffs, for the trees grew only thinly there. In the other direction, from which the game must come, the ride ran straight for perhaps a hundred yards, so that the guns would see the buck in ample time to be able to fire deliberately when it came in range.

It wanted only tame deer to make the worst shooter's success a certainty. And, having looked at the principal occupant of the butt I guessed that that was mainly the type of guest the Reich Master Forester had to cater to.

He was a short, grossly fat man in a pair of new
lederhosen,
with fancy braces, white stockings and an embroidered shirt. He was almost bald, square-headed and heavy-jowled; a thick roll of fat bulged over his shirt collar at the back of his neck and he had a stern on him like a canal barge. I could not have imagined a more absurd contrast to the three or four young foresters who occupied the butt with him: they so trim and fit-looking, dressed richly in their greens and golds, but most serviceably for the forest. The pale puffiness of his legs and arms, contrasted with their sunburned hardness, made him look like a different species of creature.

He turned his head as we came into the butt from the back, giving us a blinking, uncomprehending glance through rimless spectacles, then resumed his watch on the glade again. He was seated before one of the gaps in the bushes, on a folding stool whose seat disappeared under the shining curves of his leather shorts, and leaning against the turfed bank beside him were two or three guns--one of them of the very large-bore pattern I had seen in the Schloss. At the next loop-hole stood a forester with a crossbow, keeping a careful eye both on the glade and on the guest.