The Sound of His Horn

5

It amazes me now that I preserved so unruffled a faith in my own sanity all the time I was at Hackelnberg. Perhaps I did it by achieving a kind of suspension of judgment: I was in a set of curious circumstances for which I could find no immediate and satisfying explanation, but there must be an explanation and I felt I should eventually arrive at it by patient observation and reasoning. I felt an immense patience in myself. Perhaps that was a legacy of the prison camp; you can't plan and execute a tunnelling project without having or acquiring patience. Still, it is surprising how easy I found it to leave this whole matter of chronology in abeyance. The Doctor believed he was living a hundred years after the war, I believed I was living in it: time would show which of us was right. Time, yes, and space too. If I could go about a bit and see the other people at Hackelnberg, I felt I should soon know one way or the other.

Yet, of course, I reasoned from my inner conviction, even supposing the Doctor was right, that would not prove that I was mad. The Doctor thought I was suffering from some harmless delusion, but there would be another possible explanation: might not my unconsciousness have covered a century of time? Might I not have slept in the forest now called Hackelnberg for a hundred years like Rip Van Winkle in the Catskills?

Well, you'll probably say there was no doubt about my state of mind if I could consider such an explanation seriously. But what is a man to think when he feels so well, so balanced, so sane, and above all, when his senses are working so perfectly and he is taking such a lively interest in everything round him? Never in my life had I been so intent on observing and memorising everything I saw. I tell you, my memories of what I saw at Hackelnberg, what I felt and did there, are more vivid and real to me than anything else in my whole life.

It was all so real, and–though it's a queer thing to say, seeing what happened–so interesting.

I don't mean that all the discoveries were pleasant. They were not by any means. In fact, they would have appalled me if I had kept leaping back and forth across the time-gap, as it were, to look at them with the eyes of 1943. But I didn't do that. I accepted the apparent history of the last hundred years as known to Hackelnberg, and later, escape meant not escape in time, but escape in space. The problem was to get across that fence of rays again.

After all, facing it honestly, could a humble Lieutenant of the Royal Navy in mid-1943 have been blamed for admitting, to himself, that Germany might win the war? It looked uncommonly as if she'd already won it, to us, in our prison camp. And if she had won it, and a hundred years had consolidated her victory, then the leaders of the Nazis were literally lords of the world. And the Nazi bosses, as we all knew, had in them the makings of most fantastic tyrants, whose extravagances of despotism when the world was theirs would make the annals of Roman Emperors and Mongol Khans read like the minutes of a Parish Meeting.

Unfortunately, if you look at it that way, I landed in a secluded part of the German Empire, a private preserve from which I had no chance of observing what had happened to the world in general. I could only deduce the world-wide and absolute power of the lords of the Master Race.

In practice, I was the prisoner-patient–guest, he chose to call it–of the Herr Professor-Doktor Wolf von Eichbrunn, but I was left in no doubt that the ultimate disposal of my person was at the discretion of the Master Forester, Count Johann von Hackelnberg. I did not much like the way all the hospital staff lowered their voices and cringed slightly when they spoke the Count's name. I remembered the Night Nurse's frightened whisper when she caught me listening to the horn.

Only the Doctor spoke lightly of the Master Forester, but I could detect a real uneasiness under his affected superiority and, also, when he mocked the rigid discipline he enforced in his own place and blamed it on the system, his insincerity was patent.

After my first meal at his table I found myself paying less attention to his self-centred remarks and studying the staff. I had discovered that only half the girls were trained nurses, the other six were housemaids, though what work they had to do beyond waiting at his table was not easy to see, since there were about the place at least a dozen men–young men, all extraordinarily similar in build and appearance to the fellow who cleaned my room. Two of them used to bring in the dishes from the kitchen to the Doctor's dining-room and then stand by the sideboard while two maids took over and served us at table. They were always naked to the waist, so that I could observe their well-fed, sleek bodies; the livery trousers they wore of green or brown stuff were so tight as to mould their haunches and legs; they all looked as if they were running to fat, and were only kept in condition by a lot of hard work, though none of them seemed above twenty-two or so. I noticed that each wore a thin collar of bright metal round his neck.

«They are cheaper than machines,» was the Doctor's comment when I said something about them. «Besides, the Graf has a prejudice against mechanisation. He concedes a point or two on the apparatus of destruction, but he would rather give me three slaves than one vacuum-cleaner.»

«What are they, what nationality are they?» I asked. He shrugged. «Slavs, I suppose. I've never really gone into their breeding. They seem to me very much just lumps of undifferentiated Under-Race. They are breeding them extensively in the South Russian Gau nowadays. I suppose your little lapse from contemporaneity does not permit you to be acquainted with the discoveries of Wessler in mechanically induced conception and the application of the Roeder-Schwab process for the acceleration of growth? It's pleasant, isn't it, to think that the father of both those oxen there was perhaps the same piece of copper-wire–and what age would you estimate them?»

I guessed about twenty-two.

«Not more than fifteen, and twelve more likely. Precocious infants, aren't they? But the precocity is physical only, fortunately, I should say.»

«I don't know that I should feel very happy to have the command of twelve bulky men with the minds of children, nevertheless,» I remarked.

He sniggered. «Oh, some physical precautions are taken. In time, I've no doubt, they'll breed them without unnecessary organs, but at present the breeders trim off the ones that might cause trouble, soon after birth. You observe also that they don't talk? The Graf thinks it a convenience to have a small operation done on their vocal cords before we get them.»

I looked from the serfs to the two young girls in smart green and white uniforms who were waiting on us and asked if they too were slaves.

«Indeed, no!» he answered, eyeing them with pride. «Pure German maidens. The Graf uses a good number of slave-girls, but I would not have the trouble of them. If you have properly educated German children discipline is automatic. If any girl breaks a rule the others at once report it. Selbstzeuchtigung! The culprit usually anticipates that and reports her own fault and proposes the proper punishment.» He let his eyes slide across the two trim young maids and added complacently, with a suggestion of lip-smacking in his tone: «They know better than to propose too little, tool»

The more I lived in that polished, aseptic place, in that atmosphere of rigidly disciplined slavery, the more interesting the night-hunting Count seemed to me with his hints of eccentricity. From time to time I still heard his horn in the woods and it still had that strange, disturbing and vaguely alarming effect on me; but so far I had seen no sign of him or the company he kept. I knew, from walking round the hospital building daily with one or other of the nurses, that the Schloss, as they called it, lay a short distance through the trees to the north of us, but as I was never allowed out alone, or without one of the dumb serfs hovering within sight, I made no attempt to cross the belt of woodland between. The Doctor had told me what would happen to the girl if she lost sight of me.

The best I could do was to protest to von Eichbrunn that this limited exercise was not enough for me. He countered with the reply that it was as much as he ever took. But it was so tantalising to have the wide forest at one's door and be denied the freedom of it that I persisted, until, finally, one day, after hearing me with some discontent and impatience, he resigned himself.

«I can see,» he said, «that if I don't satisfy your curiosity you'll do something very foolish like trying to run off by yourself. I suppose you're revolving some romantic piece of Anglo-Saxon adventurousness, aren't you? And if that's so I can't expect either your old-world feelings of chivalry towards my maedels or a regard for your own skin to deter you. Well, if nothing will satisfy but to see Hans von Hackelnberg it is better that I should take you to the Schloss. Better for you, my friend,» he said, spacing his words with great emphasis, «better for you to see him than for him to see you.»

He spilt his wine–the red Bordeaux–I remember, as he said the last words, and it seemed to me that the action was deliberate. It might have been a libation he poured there, a prayer to the gods to interpose between him and an evil power; it might have been a dramatic trick of rhetoric, whose force I could not mistake as I gazed at the red pool glinting on the wood between us. One of the maids swiftly mopped it up with a napkin and he pushed aside his chair and laughed uneasily.

«Ach, well,» he said, after a pause, in a lighter and friendlier tone. «I will arrange it. Ja, I will tell you what. The day after tomorrow the Count is entertaining the Gauleiter of Gascony and some of his friends. They will make a tour of the forest and do some shooting. The Schloss will be empty all morning. Ja, I can show you the Schloss, perhaps also some game; you will not have seen such game as the Count preserves for his guests. Then, later, perhaps–but I do not promise, mind,–I will let you have a look at Hans von Hackelnberg in his hall.»