The Sound of His Horn

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.»