The Sound of His Horn

3

The body, with all its limitations, is a safe and reassuring thing to hold to. I had jumped the gap, no doubt, but I was still aware of the other side. I did not remember it in more or less definite pictures or words, you understand, as you remember the events of last week or one day a year ago, but I was conscious of having existed before, of having had a fairly full and complicated history before I woke up in that clean and comfortable bed. It was my hands that bridged the gap. They were incontrovertibly mine, and they hurt a little. I kept looking at them as they lay on the sheet in front of me, neatly bandaged all over and quite useless to me, but very dear to me.

Apart from the slight pain in my hands I have rarely felt so well and tranquil and at ease in my body as I did that morning when I first began to speculate about where I was. It was not by any means my first day of consciousness. I knew that I had been in that bright and airy room, with its scent of flowers mingling with the fainter odour of drugs and disinfectant and floor-polish, for quite a number of days. The white painted door and window-frame, the pretty curtain and the white wood furniture were all familiar to me, and I knew the faces of my two nurses quite well; they had been looking after me for a long time. It was just that that day I completed a gradual transition from passive perception to active observation.

Had it not been that the nurses were in uniform I should have said that I was in a private house rather than a hospital: the room was too individual in its clean attractiveness for a private ward in any hospital that I have seen. The crockery, the glasses, the dishes and instruments they brought in had not the much-used look such things have in hospitals; and the food was far too good. A light breeze through the open window blew the curtain aside and when the day-nurse propped me up on my pillows in the morning I could see green tree-tops and blue sky, and all day long, from first light to dark, the birds sang loud and near.

I could not use my hands to feed myself; the day-nurse cut up my food and fed me with a spoon; she shaved and washed and bathed me, did everything for me with a professional sureness and cheerful competence.

I had enough experience of nurses not to expect these to gratify my curiosity very fully or easily, but that morning I did ask the day-nurse where I was, and received, of course, the briskly facetious answer: «In bed!» It is a convention, I suppose, among nurses the world over that the most elementary exercise of intelligence by the patient obstructs their task, or else impairs their authority. I tried again, however, and asked her her name.

«It doesn't matter,» she said. «You just call me Day Nurse.»

The answer, nevertheless, gave me something to work on. She spoke English: extremely good English, but yet with a German accent. That consolidated the bridge across to that very dim and distant other side of the fissure.

I began to reason from my observations methodically and quite calmly. I guessed, of course, what might have happened to me, but it did not alarm me in the least. I jumped to the conclusion, then put it away as a possibility which would be confirmed or not at leisure. I was convinced that I was going to have a great amount of leisure. The impression that I had passed a good few days in semi-consciousness was so strong as to be a certainty; then, I had concrete evidence that an even longer time than I was in any way aware of must have passed since my accident, for the pain in my hands, had diminished to little more than an itching and occasional throbbing, while the one thing that I remembered with extraordinary vividness from across the gap was the intensity of the pain I suffered when I first touched that infernal fence or whatever it was. The burns must have been severe; now they were almost healed; only a long lapse of time could have achieved that. The day after my resumption of observation, to call it so, I looked carefully at my hands while the Day Nurse changed the dressings. It was clear that they had been badly burned, but they were healing remarkably well. The scars, in fact, vanished altogether in a short time. You can see nothing now.

That at any rate gave me some measure of time. Without medical knowledge I could not make a very exact estimate, but common sense and ordinary experience suggested that not less than three or four weeks must have elapsed. The state of my feet when I examined them confirmed that. My blisters were all healed, and I know roughly how long it takes a blister to heal.

To fix my position in space was not so easy. If I was in such an institution as I suspected I could not hope to have straight questions answered. The nurses would fob me off with the most preposterous lies. I should therefore have to rest quietly using my eyes, unhurriedly through the long days, piecing scattered data together until I could draw a true deduction.

Naturally enough I began with my nurses–or rather, Day Nurse. Night Nurse I saw only for a few minutes after sunset and perhaps fleetingly in the early morning. I slept soundly all night and never needed to call her. Day Nurse, then, was obviously German, and just as obviously a professional nurse; yet I could not believe she was a military nursing sister or that she belonged to a public civilian hospital. There was something wrong about her. It was not just that her excellent command of English indicated a better education than nurses usually have–after all, there are plenty of bilingual people about the world. It was her dress, I think. It was too smart, too individual, like the room itself. It was uniform, true, neat and smart and most suggestive of hygiene and asepsis, but at the same time pretty, and worn with a taste and a purpose to look attractive that no hospital, or even private nursing-home that I could conceive, would ever have allowed.

It was certain, too, that no nurses in a public institution would have been able to give me such constant attention or would have treated me with such consideration–within the nursing convention, of course. These two did not seem in the least overworked. In fact, I soon became sure that they had no other patient but me. Day Nurse was able to spend unlimited time with me, and I never heard a bell ring about the place. Indeed, beyond the voices of my nurses, their soft steps on the polished wooden floor and the song of birds outside my window, I heard no noise whatever of the world for some time.

I think it was that unnatural silence of the first few days that convinced me that I was in a private mental home. I settled on that identification of the place and set myself to discover, if I could, by the same process of observation and deduction, how I had come there, and why I was being treated like a private patient of considerable means instead of as a prisoner of war, for, you understand, there was no true amnesia: I knew all the time that I was a British Naval officer and I could remember my name and my ship and my prison camp.

Questioning Day Nurse was no use at all, though I tried as subtly as I knew. She wasn't taciturn, but she had a peculiar gift for appearing bright and talkative while saying almost nothing outside the things to do with her job of looking after my bodily needs.

Only one fact emerged: the name of the place, she told me, was Hackelnberg. That gave me matter for a day's reflection. It was a satisfying, concrete fact, but it led me on to no deduction, or rather, it led me only to another fact without explaining it. I found, to my great pleasure, that by deliberate concentration I could recall, little by little, the whole of the sketch-map that I had had from the Escape Committee, and, lying there, seeing the map behind my closed eyes, I assured myself that there was no such name as Hackelnberg on it. I had then, it seemed, been taken a good way, more than forty miles, which was the radius of my map, from Oflag XXIX Z.

There seemed no point in trying to find out whether Day Nurse knew that I was a British prisoner of war. I had been speaking English ever since I regained consciousness, and had no doubt spoken it in my coma. The Doctor would have told the police; the Intelligence officers would have had a look at me–I could imagine them, a couple of S. S. boys, no doubt, going through my few belongings, my papers, the map, the button compass which would tell them the whole story, then conferring with the Doctor and finally accepting his diagnosis of my mental state and leaving me.

Yes, but leaving me to whose care? Whose was this place? Why should the managers or the owners treat and care for me? Such places are not generally run by philanthropists. I revolved this question for hours, and the end of it was only to bring a shade of doubt into my first belief that the place was a private mental home. If it was, then the likeliest explanation of my being taken in was that my case must seem to the Doctor to present some peculiarly interesting features and he was keeping me and treating me out of scientific curiosity. But I did admit the 'if,' now. If it was not a mental home it could only be the house of some rich person endowed with the eccentricity of compassion–and possessing some considerable pull with the authorities; perhaps an invalid himself, or herself: that would explain both the presence of the trained nurses and their un-institutional air.

I have said 'rich person'; well, I was aware of material wealth in the whole atmosphere. There was nothing worn or shabby about the room; nurses, to be so smartly dressed, so very well groomed, must be well paid; the spotless cleanliness of the floor and high polish of the waxed wooden furniture betokened an ample staff of servants, and I knew that the nurses themselves did none of the cleaning. In fact, though I had not consciously observed it until I began to reason in this fashion, I knew who did the cleaning.

I had seen him in the early mornings–a stout young man, silent and very busy on hands and knees, polishing away at the shining floor. After what I call my full awakening I observed him more closely. He was fleshy and well-fed, and though he kept his head averted most of the time, I had an occasional glimpse of his features as I lay in bed. They were smooth and blank, and he had close-cropped brown hair and pale blue eyes; the thickness of his body, his dumbness and calflike look, his quadrupedal posture, all gave him the air of some strong, mild domestic animal–a bullock or a plough-ox; and that was emphasised by the way he was dressed that particular early morning when I paid attention to him. He wore no shirt, only a pair of rather tight trousers of some good, substantial-looking brown stuff, and on his feet a pair of good shoes which appeared to be made all of rubber, or perhaps of some kind of artificial leather that was new to me. It looked strong, supple and comfortable.

I spoke to him that morning while the nurse was out, but he paid no more attention to me than a bullock would have done. It was not difficult to guess, all the same, what he must be. A German of his age could not have been employed as a domestic servant: he would have been in the army, or making munitions. Had this been a military institution anywhere one would have said at once he was a P. O. W. But I was in Germany, I knew the German system of drafting what we called slave-labour from the occupied countries and making it available to private employers. This fellow was clearly a Slav prisoner of war hired out in service. He had the right muzhik look.

Observing his shoes and the stuff of his trousers so closely led me to study the other fabrics and materials surrounding me, and I found some matter for wonder there. I cannot claim to know much about fabrics, or even to have noticed them much in my life before, but all these struck me as being extremely good and costly. The pyjamas I had on, for instance, were silk–or some stuff I could not distinguish from silk; the sheets were of the very finest linen; the coverlet, silk again; the china I ate off was most delicate; the glass–well, I peered at the tumbler, medicine-glass, and other things on the table beside my bed and came to the conclusion that they were not glass at all, but some admirably manufactured plastic, capable of being as finely cut and polished as glass, but unbreakable. I proved that by pushing one of the more delicate vessels off the table with my bandaged hand on to the floor. It suffered no hurt.

Such little things impress you. They are such convincing evidence of a highly developed industry, of abundant material wealth which enables people to keep all their domestic equipment new and perfect. The Germans, of course, had a reputation in industrial chemistry, in plastics and synthetic fabrics, and so on, but it was disconcerting to find such things so abundant in civilian life after nearly four years of war.

The furniture and the floor of the room, at any rate, were not made from coal-tar or milk or wood-pulp– but of natural wood with the beauty and variety of the forest in their grain. The timber had been chosen and worked by people who loved it. I began to feel I knew something of the character of the owner of this place of Hackelnberg. He was rich, obviously; perhaps an old Junker or one of the princes of the old Empire whom the Nazis found it politic to leave alone; one who was not only able to buy the best products of the factories, but who also had the taste to combine them with the best of country craftsmanship using woodland materials. He would be a lover of forest things.

Well, all that, you may say, was as much fancy as deduction. Sherlock Holmes, no doubt, would have done much better with the data provided by one room and three people, but I flatter myself that the broad lines were pretty accurate.

I had my first positive confirmation from the source where I least looked for it: from Night Nurse, to whom I scarcely spoke more than to say good evening or good morning. But it was an odd thing that got it out of her.

I have mentioned that the extraordinary quietness of the place was one of the things that formed the basis of my reasonings. It fitted the other explanation, too, of course: that I was a guest, a prisoner-guest if you like, in a country house. The property was obviously a large one. How large, I had no idea, for even when, in the nurses' absence, I crept out of bed to the window, I could see no distance at all: the trees just outside were too tall and their foliage too thick to give me any view except of their own green complexity. There was, however, no noise of traffic, not even the most distant sound of a car horn or an engine whistle. I did not even hear an aeroplane, and that, in Germany in 1943, struck me as peculiar. True enough, the Third Reich at the point of expansion it had then reached was a much wider land than England; airfields would not necessarily be so thick on the ground in Eastern Germany as they were at that time in East Anglia, for example. And I supposed Hackelnberg was far enough east to be out of range of our own bombers; there was certainly no black-out curtain in my room, no precautions about showing lights were ever taken, and you could never have suspected from anything in the nurses' conversation that they so much as knew that Germany was at war. That was deliberate, of course: part of the business of nursing me and avoiding topics that might excite me. Whenever I mentioned the war Day Nurse pretended a complete misunderstanding of what I was saying, told me I was not to bother my head with old past things and tried to interest me in the flowers.

Then about a week after this full awakening of mine I began to hear things. My hands were almost completely healed and I was perfectly well in myself. I wanted to get up; lying in bed all day began to bore me. The result was that I no longer slept soundly all night.

At first I thought the sounds were dream-sounds, for I heard them in a doze, slept again and only recollected them in the morning. They were such remote, isolated sounds, so unconnected with the restricted life going on round me. They were notes of a horn, sounded at long intervals, each one as lonely in the pitch dark and utter silence, as one single sail on a wide sea. I've heard bugles in the dark and loneliness of the sea and I've heard an English huntsman's horn, and I know how sometimes their music can tighten like a hand-grip on your heart. But these notes were different. I could not picture the scene where they were being sounded, I could only feel the profound melancholy, the wildness and strangeness of them; they spoke through the dullness of my half-sleep with a most desolating sorrow and pain.

I remembered their sadness long into the cheerful day, and I found myself listening for them the next night, wide awake in the dark, waiting for them, yet hoping I should not hear them.

One night I heard them before ever I had gone to sleep. There could be no question of a dream then. It was a light night with the moon near full and only a few small islands of white cloud. I slipped out of bed and listened at the open window. There was some wind and that played with the horn notes, lifting them to me one moment, then changing and bearing them far away; that surging and dying seemed to give their music a different quality this night The sadness and pain were still there, but the wildness was dominant; the horn seemed to be roving about the woods, beating back and forth, questing, calling, sometimes with a stirring fierceness, sometimes with the long, withdrawing note of failure.

The night was full of noises. The forest was as restless as the ocean. The wind stirred the beeches outside my window; the trees conversed in a multitude of tongues; a whole woodland orchestra was playing, with the horn leading. I could fancy all sorts of voices and instruments within that wild discourse; imagination could turn the whine of swaying branches into the whimper of hounds and the sudden loud shuddering rustle of leaves in a gust could be the racing patter of their feet. I leaned there a long time, listening, intent on the horn above all the other sounds, and I felt a strange disturbance of spirits increasing within me; it was not the sadness the horn had induced in me before, but a nervousness, an apprehension–that enfeebling sense of danger you may have sometimes before you have realised from what quarter, by what weapon you are threatened.

I listened until the horn had died far away and my ear could no longer distinguish it above the soughing and sighing of the uneasy trees, then I crept back into bed and lay for a long time, looking at the moon-lit square of my window, listening still for the notes to sound again, but at length I fell asleep.

Before it was well light I was out of bed again, torn suddenly from sleep by the horn very loud and close. The wind had fallen now, the moon had set; the morning was quiet and grey; and then I heard the loud horn ringing arrogantly through the grave twilight of the dawn. The note of triumph was insistent. I leaned out and tried to pierce the screen of trees with my vision; the oft-repeated blasts were passing through the woods not far from my window, passing away to somewhere beyond my room to the right.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a white form gliding through the dusk of my room and I gave a great start of fright before I recognised Night Nurse.

«Go back to bed!» she whispered, making the low, urgent tone sound more peremptory than any I had heard her use before. She moved between me and the window and stood with her back to the opening, as though to prevent me throwing myself out, and all the time I could see that she was listening intently to those prancing, exultant notes of the horn, diminishing now as they passed on through the forest.

«What is it?» I asked, when I had obeyed her and covered myself with the sheet again. Utterly unexpectedly she gave me a straight, serious answer:

«It is the Count coming home.»

It was a true answer, I was certain; she had forgotten for the moment that I was her patient and had let slip into her voice an expression of just that vague alarm that I myself had felt when listening to the horn the night before.

«The Count?» I asked. «Who is the Count?» She came and looked down at me, so that I could just make out her features in the grey light from the window.

She murmured something in German, then explained in English:

«Count Johann von Hackelnberg.»

«And who is he?» I persisted, being determined to make the most of this opportunity when she seemed to have been startled into treating me as a sane person. But she paused and considered me before replying, as if my ignorance had reminded her that I was not normal after all; still, she did answer:

«Well, he is the Reich Master Forester.»

«Is he?» I said. «I thought Marshal Goering was that.»

I might have mentioned the name of our ship's cat for all the recognition she showed. She had got over her lapse into sincerity, I saw, and was back again in this pretence that the contemporary world did not exist–the pretence which was part of my treatment, I supposed.

She looked quite blank and repeated the name absently once or twice, evidently thinking of something entirely different. Then with an effort she became brisk and shook up my pillows.

«Come now!» she ordered. «You must go to sleep. You must not wake so early. It is not good for you.» And she went smartly out of the room.

I reviewed the whole matter in the sunlight with some satisfaction. I had at last got something definite. It was news to me that Hermann Goering had divested himself of one of his functions, but it was more than likely that we should never have heard of that event in Oflag XXIX Z. What was settled was that I was the guest of the Reich Master Forester, and that seemed to me to explain more than it left unexplained. But what a queer character the Graf von Hackelnberg must be to go a-hunting in the forest by moonlight. A breakneck business, I should have thought; then I began to recall tales of our English eccentrics of the eighteenth century. It might well have been not a hunt I heard, but a drunken ride, a wild spree by young Nazis full of wine, with the old Count winding them on with his hunting horn. It was a plausible picture, but it did not quite convince me. The horn had sounded too often; it had gone on too long, and the nurse had not been shocked in the way she would have been by the drunken wildness of a gang of young bloods; that home-coming horn was familiar to her; she was frightened of something she knew very well.