The Sound of His Horn

7

They carried out the Count's instructions there and then. Though they had been, if not friendly, at least not openly hostile when I had been in the Doctor's company among them that morning, now they handled me with no more attention to my questions than if I had been an animal. They dealt with me with a brusque, callous efficiency, not actually striking me when I was slow to obey, but letting me see plainly and promptly enough how expert they were in dealing with any show of resistance.

They took me to some room in that collection of buildings near the game park, and there they made me strip off the clothes the Doctor had lent me and put on a strange costume which they took from a store that seemed well furnished with similar outfits. It consisted of a pair of knee-breeches made of some peculiar stuff, which might be taken at first sight for deerskin, but which I found to be a fabric, elastic as a living skin and with a nap on its face, short, thick and lying close like an animal's hair. They gave me a tight-fitting jersey of the same material with long sleeves, and then, taking a surprising amount of trouble over the job, fitted me with a pair of real deerskin moccasins which laced firmly and comfortably on my feet.

As soon as I was thus fitted out, they bundled me outside again into a yard where there stood a kind of small, horse-drawn van, or not so much a van as a square wooden cage on wheels. I was thrust inside, the door fastened on me, and with a couple of foresters sitting on top, I was driven off along a dark lane of the forest.

We went smartly, up hill and down dale over a fairly good earth road for something like four or five miles, all through thick beech and oak woods. Then we stopped, and I was made to walk, the driver of the van going ahead with a lantern from his vehicle, the others marching on with a gun muzzle held in the small of my back. We followed a narrow, sandy path in an open glade. There was some cloud over the moon; I might by a sudden spring have broken away and given them the slip but that I was convinced they meant to do me no bodily harm immediately: strange as von Hackelnberg's orders were, they had been plain and obviously meant to be literally carried out. I knew now that the forest of Hackelnberg was most effectively fenced; to be free in it was only to be in a wider prison, but to be master of my own movements within those limits seemed to me to be a long step forward towards complete escape; I was not going to ruin my chances by risking a shot in the legs.

We stopped and the lantern shone on a tiny hut just within a grove of trees. It was made of a neat, close trellis of boughs and deeply thatched with reeds. They pushed me to the dark little doorway and one of them said harshly:

«Here you stay. You'll find food near-by. But if we see you we shall shoot you like a wild beast, or set the hounds on you!»

He lunged suddenly with the gun barrel and sent me flying forward into the dark hut, where I lay for a moment on the floor, winded and helpless from the blow. When I straightened up the lantern was already disappearing far down the glade.

I groped about in the hut and suddenly recoiled in fright as my hand touched a mass of hair that moved. I heard a gasping, suppressed shriek, and realised that the thing was more afraid than I was myself. There was a loud rustling of straw or dead leaves and something big blundered against my legs in a scrambling bolt for the doorway. I grabbed at it and found myself clutching a man.

He collapsed weakly on the ground, sobbing and muttering in so low and broken a voice that I could not tell whether he was uttering words or only those distorted sounds which were all that the Count's slaves could produce. Then, as I got my hands under his shoulders and lifted him up, he became calmer and I distinguished that he was speaking French.

He allowed me to pass my hands over his head and body, though he trembled and groaned a little in fear. His hair and beard were long, and he was wearing the same kind of skin-like garments as I was myself. He was a small man, and, I guessed, a good deal older than I. Doing my best to reassure him in my bad French, I drew him over to sit down beside me on a pile of dry straw which I felt at the back of the hut.

At length he was confident enough to begin timidly feeling my features and clothes in turn, and to ask me who I was. I answered him very briefly that I was an Englishman who had escaped from a prison camp, that in running away I had blundered into the fence of rays round Hackelnberg forest, and after being treated by the Doctor had now been turned loose in the forest by the orders of the Count von Hackelnberg. He shuddered at the name and groaned very deeply.

«They will kill you,» he said, half weeping. «They will kill you. They will kill us all. They drive me from place to place. They drive me and there is no rest. I cannot sleep. I am going mad!» And he repeated the word 'mad' a dozen times, his voice rising to a shriek of terror and despair that appalled me.

I soon became convinced that he was in fact very near to madness, crazed by some abominable terror that I could not get him to describe explicitly. I thought to calm him more by asking him his history, but he could not keep his mind for more than a moment on anything but the horror that haunted and hunted him in the woods. He started like a wild animal at the slightest sound among the trees outside the hut; hushed me with a hissing intake of breath, and held himself rigidly clenched together to listen to faint, unidentifiable noises far away.

All I could gather was that he was an educated man –a writer, it would seem, for he babbled disjointedly, crying like a child explaining a misdemeanour for which it has been beaten, about some letters or articles he had written, jumbling together a collection of ill-pronounced German names and wailing: «I only followed them. I didn't know it was wrong. Why did they punish me? Why didn't they let me recant? They know I would never have written it if I'd known it was wrong. They misled me on purpose to have me tortured, on purpose to kill me to make them laugh. Oh, God! They're going to kill me for sport!»

I think half the night must have passed with my sitting there on the straw with that poor maniac, now trying to comfort him, now trying to elicit from him some clearer account of what it was he so feared–though God knows, I had seen my share of the horrors of Hackelnberg and could guess at others enough to send a man out of his mind. I could feel that the man, besides being under such mental strain, was mortally fatigued; but when I asked him what he did in the woods in the daytime, and where he found his food and whether this hut was his resting-place, he either did not answer, or muttered low with a kind of selfish, crazy cunning, that he would not tell me lest I betray him.

I was hungry enough, but there was nothing to eat in the hut; I was tired too, and feeling at last that I could help the man no more, nor he me, and believing that I had nothing to fear from him, I stretched myself on the straw and slept.

The sun woke me, and I found myself alone. Outside the forest was a wonder of fresh green and gold, cool, gay and delightful. I looked down the fair green glade, listened to the bird-song, stretched myself and breathed deep. My freedom might be only comparative, but it felt like real freedom; and in that broad early sunlight, with the sweet trees of the forest so real, so true to their own nature, so calmly and perfectly fulfilling the timeless cycles of universal nature, I could not believe that the evil perversions of natural beauty I had seen in the torchlight, the deformation and abasement of human beings I had witnessed the day before, were real. I looked about me for my little fellow-lodger, laughing to myself at his terrors, but I could not see him. I laughed at my own appearance: in those furry breeches I looked like a close-shorn Robinson Crusoe.

It amazed me that the Count's establishment should lavish such extremely good material on a criminal–as I must assume myself to be reckoned. It did not seem at all the Nazi way: they did not waste good clothes on human rubbish they intended to liquidate. But then I thought of the richness and elaborateness of the game-girls' costumes. Though I could not believe the little French writer's fears of violent death were justified, I had no doubt that he and I were destined for a part in some fantastic game of the Count's.

A little way off I could hear the faint murmur of running water. I pushed through the bushes and descended a wooded bank towards the sound. In a shady tract of beech wood, with little undergrowth, a small, clear stream came splashing over some rocks into an inviting basin of sand and pebbles. But before I could reach it, a savage burst of barking made me skip up the slope again and, peering from the bushes, I saw that there were two or three keepers with a couple of boar-hounds doing something at a rough rustic table a little way downstream from the pool. One of them was looking in my direction, and without any warning, he suddenly lifted his gun and fired. I ducked instinctively the instant I saw the motion, and I heard the small shot go cutting through the twigs above my head. I ran crouching back towards the hut again, and did not venture down until I heard the snarling hounds being dragged off into the further woods. Then I went with great caution, warily listening and looking before I left the cover of the bushes.

I found that they had left on the rough table a good quantity of food–bread, cheese, potatoes, raw vegetables and apples. I was hungry, and was on the point of snatching up a loaf, when a sudden suspicion ran like a thrill of cold water over my body, and I darted back into cover again: it had come to me that I was being lured out to give the keepers a better target.

Nearly an hour, I suppose, I lurked in the bushes, famished, but afraid to venture near the table. They had succeeded by a mere threat in turning me into a wild creature. No, I would not confess that I was afraid either of their shot or their dogs, but the necessity to risk no injury that would wreck my chance of escape was overriding. The effect was the same; call it cowardice or caution, I lay with the patience of an animal, waiting until I was absolutely sure that the coast was clear. Then I ran down, drank hurriedly, and snatched up an armful of the provisions and retreated. I did not go back into the hut, but found an open, grassy space where I could look well about me while I ate.

That was the bitterness of my 'freedom'–knowing that I was turned loose for some cruel amusement of the Count's, but not knowing what form it would take, what sort of malice or trick to guard against. The forest was fairer than heaven in my eyes, but I had no delight in it; all my senses were stretched all the time for signs of the danger that might be stalking me.

Nevertheless, I had a purpose. I flattered myself that I was made of different stuff from that broken-nerved French writing-fellow. I don't claim to enjoy being shot at, but I have been in a few actions and had bigger stuff than buck-shot whistling past my ears. So, feeling a good deal better for the food, I set off on my first reconnaissance.

I found the forest not at all as wild and tangled as I had expected. There were plenty of signs that it was well tended; except for thickets here and there the undergrowth was cleared away, fallen trees were sawn up and stacked beside the rides, and the grass of the rides themselves was kept mown short. Apart from its seemingly great extent, Hackelnberg forest was just such a piece of woodland as you would expect to find on a country estate in England. It had that air of privacy, and exclusion, too.

During the whole morning I did not see a living thing except a few small birds and a squirrel or two. That, too, astonished me, until I reflected on the manner of shooting practised there. What von Hackelnberg's guests wanted was game without effort, not the uncertainties of driving or hunting wild deer. But I had heard the Count himself riding abroad at night and winding his horn in the forest. What game did he pursue there, under the moon? I knew the answer to that question now, I thought, and I measured with my eye the hours the sun had yet to travel down the sky.

It must have been about the middle of the afternoon when I came to the fence. I had skirted a broad, gently undulating heath fringed with pines, and I had been keeping in the cover of the trees, making towards a tract of woods that lay beyond the heath. I came to the tip of my belt of pines and found between me and the other trees a very broad zone of short grass, bending round in a long, gradual curve as far as I could see to right and left. There were at least two hundred yards with no cover that would hide anything bigger than a fox, but more important, and immediately attracting my attention, was a kind of high wooden sentry perch in the middle of the open zone some four or five hundred yards from me. The top of the tower was enclosed and I could not see whether it was occupied or not, but I was morally certain that binoculars and rifle-sights were covering that open ground.

The defence itself seemed ridiculously inadequate: a single row of slender steel pickets supporting three strands of thin wire which shone bright in the sunlight. I wormed my way on my belly as near as I dared, taking advantage of the heath that grew a little beyond the pines. It did not look like barbed-wire, even, and in the daylight I could see none of that strange radiance which I had seen, or thought I had seen, in the moonlight the night I came to Hackelnberg.

I crawled a few inches nearer, and at my movement a brace of black-game rose with a whirr from the heath a couple of yards in front of me. I watched them sail away, making for that other woodland beyond the fence. The cock flew high, but the hen, a little behind, was much lower; I could see that if she did not rise she would barely clear the top strand of wire, about ten feet from the ground. But she did rise a little: I saw she had seen the wire and was going clean over. Then suddenly she dropped, killed as cleanly as if she had been knocked down by a good shot with twelvebore. I heard the «plump!» of her body hitting the hard, bare ground at the foot of the fence. And yet I will swear she had never touched the wire; I am certain that she was two feet in front of it when she dropped; and then, if she had touched it–a big bird going at a fair rate–I should have seen it vibrate, for it was bright stuff, quite visible. I glanced quickly at the sentry-perch to see if there was any sign of the bird's having been observed there, but nothing stirred.

I moved off, exploring, to my left, keeping within the bushy fringe of the woods. I found some places where I could approach much nearer to the fence under cover, and from there I could see that for a distance of about two feet on each side of the bottom strand of wire the earth was completely bare for the whole length of the fence; here and there on this hard-baked, naked strip I noticed little bunches of fur and feathers: the remains of other birds and small animals that had tried to cross the fence.

A half-mile or so farther on I sighted another tall wooden sentry perch; it was a good enough guess that they would be situated at intervals all round the perimeter so that the whole line of the fence would be under observation. Had it not been so, I reasoned, I should clearly not have been alive to lie here and observe them this day from inside the fence. I lay there some time in concealment, reasoning on my observations and making my deductions about that fence. I thought I had evidence now of the effective range of the Bohlen Rays, which, I supposed, were carried and discharged by the strands of wire. If the effective radius of activity of each wire were two feet, then, obviously, the whole fence constituted a lethal obstacle four feet wide and twelve feet high. A tunnel was clearly the answer. That the rays were not conducted any appreciable distance by the earth itself seemed to me to be proved by the fact that the grass grew thick and healthy just outside the two-foot zone. But the nearest I had been to the fence so far was about forty yards. Should I have time to dig, by myself, and with such implements as I could fashion, a tunnel at least fifty yards long?

I began to work my way back towards the hut quite early. I had kept fair track of my direction, marking trees and scoring patches of bare earth with a stone as I came, and so, in spite of some blunders, I reached my clearing again before dark. I had been debating in my mind the possibilities of evading whatever unpleasantness the Count planned for me, and had considered acting on the hint the Frenchman had dropped–that is, changing my sleeping place. But then, some instinct–call it obstinacy or pride–revolted against being driven like an animal, running like a cat before a dog and providing them with the very sport they wanted. If they were coming to torment me, better to be found in my lair and fight it out there. I wanted my freedom desperately, but I think I was genuinely more afraid of becoming such a timid, crazy wreck as that Frenchman than I was of an unequal fight.

So I returned, went boldly down to the table, seeing and hearing no one, and ate heartily of the provisions there and carried the remainder back to the hut. Then I collected a number of long straight sticks and contrived to fix them in the form of a rough lattice to block the door, so that, though they would not stand assault, I should at least be woken up by their cracking if someone tried to get in. Finally, I laid the stoutest stick I could find and a good heavy flint beside my bed and lay down.

It was an uneasy night. It spite of my long walk I could not sleep. All the fears that my occupation during the day had helped me to subdue raced freely now, and the unceasing whispering, sighing, rustling and pattering of the forest were a fine field for them. My imagination interpreted even identifiable sounds, like the screeches of owls, as the voices of those abominable creatures from von Hackelnberg's kennels; I heard some small animal pattering among the dry leaves in the grove and fancied the baboon-boys circling round my hut.

Still, it was no fancy that brought me bolt upright just before daylight, staring at the grey square of my door and straining my ears to hear the sound repeated. I had caught the unmistakable note of the Count's horn, very far away, drawing out on just such a long note of finality as a huntsman would blow to call off his hounds at the end of the day. It had been a cloudless night; the moon was in its second quarter; the rides of the forest would have been light enough. The air of dawn crept chilly through my trellised walls and I shivered.

As soon as the sun was up I did my best to throw off that feeling of numb helplessness. My plans were scarcely formed as yet; I had only some general ideas which I dared not test against the facts as I so far knew them, for fear of total discouragement. I set myself, therefore, the limited task of procuring some sort of implement or weapon, and the best scheme I could devise for this was to see if I could not beg or steal one from the Doctor's household. I could not believe that the nurses who had tended me so well would be devoid of pity or so mechanically subservient and priggish as the Doctor boasted.

I waited in the cover of the bushes until the keepers had been with a fresh supply of food to the table; then, taking a small loaf and some apples and stuffing them inside my jersey as rations for the day, I set off to find my way to the hospital. It was a long and tiring business, and it had its alarms. For though I avoided every ride and path which might have led me direct to the Schloss, I several times heard parties moving near me: heard voices of keepers and tramp of horses, and once I had to lie still as a stone in the long grass at the top of a bank while a band passed slowly up a stream-bed below me– two bloodhounds held in leash, four of the baboon-boys with their nets scrambling along in front of their keepers, and a couple more foresters bringing up the rear, carrying those filament-throwing guns and looking sharply about them.

I caught a glimpse of some of the buildings of the Schloss through the trees some time after noon, and, guessing at my direction, worked slowly round through the woods. It was only by luck that I found the place, I suppose, but quite suddenly, when the afternoon light was mellow among the leaves I found myself looking down a little tunnel of a path at the white walls of the hospital and the narrow strip of turf and moss where I used to walk with the nurses.

Again, I had no cut-and-dried plan. I knew where the kitchen was; my idea was to scout it from the trees and seize any chance that offered to slip in and make off with a chopper, a shovel, a big knife–or any handy-looking bit of hardware. If the slaves gave me no opportunity to slip in unobserved in the daylight, I intended to lurk under the trees until they had gone to bed and then try to break in.

As I crept round through the trees and peeped out on the side of the building where the nurses' dormitory was, I saw my Day Nurse sitting by herself on a wooden bench by the wall, reading a picture-paper. On the impulse of the moment, I stepped boldly out and said, «Hello, Day Nurse!»

She jumped up with a shuddering little scream and stopped her mouth with the back of her hand when she recognised me. She stared at me in horror, with eyes so shockingly full of mortal fear that had I appeared to her by moonlight draped in the earthy cerements of the grave I do not think I could have affected her more. She returned not a word–did not even hear what I was saying, I suspect, but just stood there, frozen with terror, the backs of her fingers pressed to her lips. I don't know whether I should have convinced her that I was alive, or that I meant her no harm: I had no chance. A step behind me made me wheel just in time to see one of the other nurses turn and flee round the corner of the building with a loud shriek. Foolishly I ran after her, thinking to catch her and stop her raising the alarm; but she had already raised it: three stout slaves came running down the verandah steps with brooms in their hands and began to swipe at me, gurgling rough snarls in their throats. I fought back, but several more slaves joined them, better armed with cudgels, and I suffered some severe blows on my head and arms and shoulders. Then a window was flung open and I saw out of the corner of my eye the Doctor himself, with a pallid face, look out and scream encouragement to the slaves. I shouted to him in English, but he only screamed back at me with a kind of panic violence. I fled then, shielding my head from the blows and dashing for the cover of the woods.

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.»

I told her my own experience of the rays. «But I don't intend to rush the fence,» I explained. «My idea is a tunnel.»

She looked blank, and so I discoursed on the art of moling as understood by prisoners of war. She listened attentively and saw the obvious flaws in my plan at once.

«It'll take too long,» she pointed out. «Even with two of us working at it. They'll not leave you alone long enough.»

«But there must be other criminals in the forest besides me,» I argued. I told her about the Frenchman. He seemed to have been free a long time. He seemed to know where to hide.

She bent her head until her face was quite hidden by the grass. «I don't know,» she said in a low, hesitating voice, «I don't know what happened to him. I heard the horn...»

«Well,» I said, «I'm going to have a shot at it. The thing is to get some tools. You know the ropes here better than I do. Where do they keep the spades?»

Then, when I showed so bold a purpose, she took up the idea with enthusiasm, and began excitedly planning how to get hold of some implement. She knew the place, she declared: the Kranichfels pavilion. The men who looked after the valley where the butts were kept tools there. She knew her way about there, for the game-girls were kept there when a drive was being prepared. I proposed to go there that night and see what I could lift.

«No, no!» she exclaimed. «I will do that! You'll be spotted at once in those things. I can slip in at dusk without them noticing. There are slave-girls there and I can pass for one of them. Help me only to get rid of this headpiece.»

The different parts of a game-girl's costume were so sewn on that the wearer could not remove them herself–at least without scissors or a knife. I hunted about until I found two flints and cracked one to make a sharp edge, then sawed through the stitching that fastened the mask to her gorget. The fine, solid workmanship of her trappings amazed me now when I could examine them closely. «Ah! German thoroughness!» she exclaimed scornfully and pitched the beaked mask into the thicket. «It's beyond belief what pains they'll take to get every detail just right. These forester officers are monomaniacs, and the most inhuman thing about them is the way they fail completely to see that you are a human being: they'll fuss and fiddle about with you for hours to get you exactly dressed for your part in one of their shows, and yet you feel that they understand nothing at all about girls, or human beings of any sort.»

She had a fine steel chain bearing a numbered tag round her neck. I turned it over; there was no name-just a group of letters and a number. My fingers were against the warm, soft skin of her neck, and while she spoke I was moved to mark the new hesitancy, the deeper resentment in her tone; she was so much a child still and she had been so brutally arrested at the very beginning of the road that should have led her into the ever widening country of love and understanding and free human relationships. The current of her life had been diverted into such queer, cramped, twisted channels. And yet she had preserved a marvellous sanity and unwarped spirit. I admired at every moment her courage and cool defiance, but what moved me most, what at once humbled me and gave me a new hope and purpose was, I think, her innocence and freshness in this world of distorted things. In this forest of Hackelnberg she was like one of the fair trees themselves that all the Master Forester's mad ingenuity could not force to grow false to its own nature.

You see, until then I knew that I had been forcing myself to limit my speculations only to the problem of getting across the fence; but all the time the thing I dare not think about had been weighing on my soul– that appalling slave-world, I mean, that I thought I should find outside the fence of Hackelnberg. Now I knew that there was still some truth, some courage and pride, some of the old glory of humanity left in the world. We must get out of Hackelnberg now; we would escape, I vowed, and find her Friends.

I turned that little tag over and over, while she held up her head, tilting back her chin, accepting with a kind of quiet, trusting wonder, the caress of my fingers on her throat.

«There's no name on it,» I said, and I was vividly aware what feelings towards her she recognised in my voice.

«I'm called Christine North,» she said. «But I always got just Kit at home.»

Well, it was not long we had together: a day, from the forenoon until after moonrise; a long summer day. The longest of my life. I feel now that I have never known anyone so well as I knew Kit; I feel that if I began to tell the tale of every little thing that I noticed and delighted in that day I should never end though I spent the rest of my life unloading my memory. My mind's eyes are still so full of that intricate sunlit forest. I think I can recall exactly the bend of every grass-stem, the shape of every leaf, and tuft of pine-needles, every pattern of light and shade, every beetle and butterfly that my eye fell on that day; the scent of earth and grass and pines is in my nostrils now; the summery singing of the insects is in my ears. And there was about it some rare quality that belonged neither to her times nor to mine: something like the mellow magic that lights your recollection of a summer day in childhood–the glow and loveliness of the lost age when you lived and played protected, secure from all harm and trouble, free to give all your heart and soul to the rare, immediate wonders of the living earth.

We roamed Hackelnberg like two lovers who have newly found each other in an enchanted forest. To each of us our immediate past seemed as remote and unreal as if it had been an ugly sorcery whose spell the morning sunbeams had broken. Hans von Hackelnberg seemed an ogre in a fairy-tale: we only half-believed in him–only enough to make our adventure more exciting. And we laughed and planned our escape as if it were a game.

We suspended our belief in the existence of a morrow; we had such delight in the discovery of our own pleasure in each other, such wonder in the boundlessness of our new-found country, and the excitement of exploring all the domain of our new-opened hearts was so wild and sweet that we seemed to contain the whole of the significant real world in our two selves; we alone, wandering in the joyful summer forest, were all the world.

All day we saw not a soul, heard never a sound of human being or hound. Our unbroken privacy bred such a feeling of security in us that we went slowly, carelessly, arm in arm along the grassy rides, played in the clearings and laughed aloud. So we spent all the hours of daylight, talking, playing, strolling idly, but moving in our meanderings later in the afternoon towards Kranichfels. We lingered to gather wild blueberries in heathy dells that Kit knew, and stood there waist-deep in the bushes, eating the berries from the hollows of our hands, laughing to see the purple stains on each other's lips.

A little before sunset we came to an outcrop of limestone rocks overhanging a brook which filled a little basin at their foot. We climbed up there and sat on a ledge of fine turf from where, peering down through the leaves beyond, we could see a few yards of the narrow path leading down to Kranichfels pavilion, which Kit said was not more than half a mile away. It was a perfectly still evening with the sun departing from a sky of cloudless blue. The rocks glowed in the last rays and warmed us with the heat they had drunk from the broad sunshine all day.

«Ah,» Kit said, after a long silence, «with all the power that they have, if they could have preserved so easeful and lovely a forest as this for love: for you and me and for all other lovers to wander in while youth lasts....»

We sat quietly there until there was dusk under the trees. Then Kit began to pluck with her nails at the seams of her feathered gorget. I found a sharp splinter of stone and sawed the stitches and freed her of the last of her trappings. Such slave-girls as might be idling about the lawns of Kranichfels in this summer evening's warm dusk would be unclad, Kit said; that was the distinguishing mark of an Under-Race slave: except when she was performing a part in some display her summer livery was her skin. In the failing light, should any forester notice Kit, his eye would catch the glint of her bright steel chain and he would take it for a slave collar. For her return, after the hour when the slaves were normally confined for the night, she would trust to the protection of the thick darkness under the trees.

She slipped down from the rocks and bathed in the little pool, washing all the earth-stains from her skin. I went with her a little way along the path until she would allow me to go no farther; then we parted and I returned slowly to the rocks that were to be our rendezvous.

Still in that strange mood of confidence that no evil thing could befall us, still believing that the savage sorcerer's spell was somehow broken by my finding Kit, I walked openly in the grassy space beyond the brook. The sense that we were only playing a game was so strong I could not feel alarm or anxiety for Kit; I was full of a trembling impatience for her to come back, but it was impatience to take her in my arms again and feel her lips again. The task we planned to do together seemed less serious than that.

The dusk thickened and still I prowled about, listening sharply for the low call we had agreed she should give to warn me. The night noises of the forest had begun: the soft whisperings, the distant cryings and near rustlings that were now growing familiar to me. I stepped quietly into the thin grove of birches beyond the open space and stood listening there; it was not cold among the trees, but there was a clinging coolness held like an invisible fabric between the faintly visible pale boles. I moved on a little, and in the brooding gloaming of the grove I began to feel that wild-deer wariness, that readiness to start and flee which I had felt before when I was alone, come back into my body.

In a patch of long grass, which, very dimly, I saw to be laid and trampled as if deer or cattle had lain there, I trod on something that was neither stick nor stone. Picking it up, I perceived, more by feel than sight, that it was a deer-skin mocassin like the ones on my own feet. It was cold and damp and my fingers told me that the sole was almost worn through. An old shoe, thrown away in the forest–yet it made my heart beat quick with fear. I wanted to flee away with all my speed from that patch of trampled grass, but I forced myself to hunt about there, groping and peering for what would put my guess beyond doubt. I found it: scattered rags of stuff that feeling and smelling told me were exactly the same material as that I wore myself–the hairy garb of one of von Hackelnberg's condemned criminals. But the hair on these torn pieces was matted close; the stuff had been soaked in something that had caked and dried hard. As I fingered them I heard again in memory that long note of the Count's horn sounding lonely and final in the dark of dawn. I dared search for no more proof: there was no need; I knew too well the feel of the stuff that had congealed on those remnants. I threw them down, wiped my fingers, dry though they were, on the cool grass and went blundering out of the birch grove into the open.

The moon, within a night of full, had risen above the tree-tops and was whitening our pile of rocks. Fearful of the light now as much as of the grove's darkness, I crouched in the shadow of the rock and washed my hands again and again in the brook, as if by washing them I could cleanse my mind of its dreadful picture of the Frenchman's death.

I could wait no longer for Kit to return, but went groping down the path under the thick summer canopy of leaves which the moonlight could not penetrate, with some idea of warning her, of begging her to run back to Kranichfels, to give herself up again to slavery, to endure anything for the sake of a strong wall between her body and the cruel fangs.

I made slow progress, for in the pitch dark of the wood I was afraid of losing the path, and I blundered continually into the trees; but at length I saw the moon again, and, winking through the leaves, a spark of yellow light which must be from a window of the pavilion. I hid close there, where I could watch a yard or two of moonlit path, and waited.

A long time passed, and though I listened in vain for Kit's footsteps, I slowly took courage from the fact that I heard nothing else. The moon was rising higher and higher, yet no voice but the forest's own spoke to her.

Then I heard a faint clink of steel not very far away down the path, A dead branch cracked and that brief little noise of metal on metal was repeated. I softly called Kit's name and saw a figure step into the patch of moonlight, stand stock-still for a second, then glide into the shadow. I slipped close to her, speaking softly to reassure her. I found her arm, and felt that she was clothed: the soft stuff my hands encountered felt like some thick fine wool, or velvety fur, as short and fine as moleskin. She was laughing softly with excitement and elation, but she would not speak until we reached our rocks again. There she leaned, panting, and put into my hands a small-bladed, sharp spade and a bill-hook.

«It's taken me a long time,» she said. «I'd forgotten where the tool-shed was. I dared not move about much till it was dark, and then the buildings were locked up. But I knew where the Ankleidezimmer was even in the dark–that's where they rig us out in our costumes when we're to be hunted. I knew there were all sorts of things there. It was locked up, but they'd left a window open. I climbed in and got these clothes, and then I found a door into a store was open and I got the tools there–they're new! I couldn't find anything for you to wear, though.»

She laughed again and was so gay and pleased with her success that though I had been about to tell her of what I had found and implore her to go back, my heart failed me. Only when she knelt to drink from the brook and the moonlight fell full on her, I saw that there was such maniacal consistency in every detail of the life Hans von Hackelnberg ordained of his slaves that there was no escaping the trammels of his one mad theme: the clothes were a single suit of overall tights, such as a dancer might wear for practise, fashioned to mould the contours of a human form, yet made of stuff woven with marvelous cunning to simulate an animal's skin. As Kit crouched there on all fours with her head bent low to the water and her face hidden, with the moonlight glinting on that strange, glossy dark coat which clothed her uniformly from head to toe, she looked like a lithe and sleek wild beast that had slipped out from the darkness of the woods to drink. For a second she seemed utterly strange to me, and with a shock of fright I felt the net of sorcery fall round us once again and saw von Hackelnberg's red lips laughing wickedly as he put a term to our brief holiday as human beings.

I seized her and jerked her to her feet, to a human posture, and when I saw my roughness startled her, I could only mumble nervously that her costume seemed so strange.

«I suppose it does, to you,» she said soberly. «I've seen it often enough. It's what the slaves wear in winter: it will keep out the bitterest wind and the snow and rain won't go through it.»

«Let's get away from here,» I said, and picking up the tools I led the way, behind the rocks, away from the open sward and the dark grove of birches beyond it.

It was still not too late to tell her, and I should have told her; I should have told her that my plan was no good, that it was unthinkable than von Hackelnberg would leave us in peace for the weeks that would be necessary to dig a tunnel. But I had fired her with enthusiasm for the plan; not by my words only, but by my very presence and my tenderness I had convinced her that escape was possible: practicable because it was so desired now; and she was so pleased and proud of the way she had carried out her part of it, I had not the heart to break the illusion.

We walked quickly along the moonlit rides, Kit talking rapidly in a low voice all the time, arguing in favour of this or that place that she remembered near the fence, but I was listening with only half my attention. I had to think of another plan, and I could not. Covertly I felt the sharp edge of the spade; the bill-hook was the better weapon, but the spade was heavier. I asked Kit to carry the bill.

We were making for a part of the forest which Kit said was as far from the Schloss as one could get; a wilder tract, less trodden than the rest, where the undergrowth and fallen trees were not cleared away. She had hidden there on a mock deer-hunt and had eluded the hounds and the retrievers for a week. She had learnt to find her way back there in the dark by coming down by night to feeding tables in the more frequented part of the forest. As she recollected, scrub and tall heath in that wild part grew quite close to the fence. That was the place for our tunnel; there we would work by night and hide by day, and to get us food she would improve on her stratagem at Kranichfels and penetrate to the slave-quarters of the Schloss itself. The way to defeat German thoroughness, Kit declared, was to do something boldly absurd: the German boys would never conceive that an Aryan would deliberately impersonate an Under-Race slave.

So, Kit running on with gay confidence and I racking my brains to think of some other expedient, we came at length to some high ground thinly wooded with oaks and deep with bracken and coarse grass. The night was very still and by no means cold. Kit blew out a long breath and loosened her suit at the throat. «Lord!» she exclaimed, «I'm boiled in this thing. I wish I'd...»

She broke off suddenly and seized my arm, and the moon showed me her eyes shining very wide. «Did you hear?» she whispered.

I had heard it. At last, the sound I had been listening for since I found those poor rags of the Frenchman's clothes. Distant, yet very clear in the stillness, the horn had sounded. It came to us across the moonlit woods, a gay and prancing note, a call that on an autumn morning would have set my blood dancing. We stood stock still, listening and listening after it had ceased, not daring to look at each other again. It rang out again, triumphant, exulting, stirring, and there mingled with it now the brief eager baying of hounds that have found their line.

I gripped Kit by the shoulders. «You must go back! You must go back! Go back to Kranichfels. Go and give yourself up. That is the Count hunting me. You'll be safe if you're not with me!»

I was fierce in my insistence, but she would not be persuaded.

«No! I won't leave you. I can show you where to hide. They won't do anything to me even if I'm with you. I know the sound of those dogs. They're not the savage ones. They're just the ones they use for tracking. They won't loose them. We can shake them off. Come on! Oh, come on!»

There seemed a chance that what she said was true. In any case, our best hope of safety seemed to lie in reaching those thickets that she knew. We fled then, running steadily along a path through the thin oak woods.

I soon had proof that my past was not hallucination, for it betrayed me in this unbelievable present. I should have been able to keep up a controlled cross-country pace without distress, but I found again, as on my walk from Oflag XXIX Z, that two years of captivity, underfeeding and lack of exercise had robbed me of my strength and endurance. I began to stream with sweat in the first mile; I laboured for breath and my legs were like splints of wood. I tried no more to persuade Kit to part from me, not only because I could not spare the breath, but the hard fact was that I should never have made the speed I did without her. And yet it was bitter to think that even in fleeing from him we were doing von Hackelnberg's will. He had had Kit trained for just such work as this; I had a mental image of him admiring her long stride and easy breathing and grinning with malicious pride in his handiwork.

It was some time before we heard the horn again, and then it was fainter. We had gained on the hounds. But we had come into rougher country now and were scrambling down paths that were more like the beds of little torrents–places where one might easily fall and sprain or break an ankle. But my deer-hide mocassins and Kit's supple shoes gave us sure footing on the smooth stones, and with that fear behind us we took bold leaps downwards. I had a notion that the scent would not lie so well on the cold stones, so where we could we slithered down the wide slabs of rock that strewed the valley side. Our surest ally was water, and that, I saw, was Kit's intention. We plunged into tall grass and thin growth of birches and poplars at the bottom of the slope, and then I felt the ground yield and squelch beneath me. Soon we were in a weedy morass, wading deeper and deeper until the water rose to my breast. There we found a moderately firm bottom and, oaring with our arms, we went the length of a narrow pond that filled the middle of the marsh. We continued until we found the inlet stream, then followed that, stumbling and splashing among its stones and holes, climbing gradually up its course between the valley sides. It brought us out upon an upland bog and there we rested, sitting on the quaking turf.

«They'll lose time in the marsh,» Kit gasped. «They'll have to circle it all to pick up the scent again. Come on!»

But she had lost her direction now, and we ourselves lost time floundering across that boggy plain, stopping, trying to recognise the shape of the low wooded hills about us in the moonlight. As we reached the firm ground again and Kit declared she recognised the place, we heard the hounds give tongue again.

We toiled on, running a little where we could, but most of the time going at a shambling, stumbling walk. Kit was spent now. We had no energy for speech, but went dumbly on, close together but each isolated by our own body's distress, by the imperious need to concern ourselves with our own thumping heart and labouring lungs and aching limbs. I still held on to my spade, hampering though it was, but Kit had dropped the billhook. I was too exhausted to say anything about it.

There was no path now. We were struggling blindly through tangled undergrowth so thick that in places it forced us to go on our hands and knees. I do not know how long we spent fighting our way through that scrub; I do not know what distance we had covered in our flight; the stages of it were confused and jumbled in my mind; our present toil seemed to have continued for an age, and our wading through the long pond was something we had done long ago when we were strong and fresh.

I blundered into Kit. She was lying still upon the earth and she groaned at my touch. «I can't go on,» she whispered. I lay down beside her, too spent myself to urge her on, and listened. Beyond our own panting I could hear nothing. We lay until we began to get our breath a little more easily, and still the silence was unbroken.

We lay there, exactly as that mad hunter would have us: turned by the terror of his horn and hounds into frightened animals cowering, pitifully hopeful of escape, in the heart of the thicket. We could do no more than hope that the hounds would fail; we could run no more. I felt the edge of my spade again and gripped the shaft. I would at least settle the business of a hound or two before they tore my throat out. But this was no place to stand at bay; I must have room to swing. Here the interlaced boughs of the scrub held me fast; a hound could come worming on its belly to seize me like a ferret fastening to a rat in a hole. I tried to move Kit to crawl on to some more open place.

«This is the thickest part,» she said wearily. «The fence can't be far away. Our best chance is to lie still here. It's only more sport for them if they get you in the open.»

I lay till I had recovered my strength somewhat, but then the inaction, the waiting in that silence, was too much for me. Dragging my spade along I began to creep forward to find how far our thicket extended.

I called softly back once or twice as I went and heard Kit answer. I did not intend to go out of range of her voice lest we lose one another. The scrub grew a little thinner after some distance and I found I could go erect, pushing through with my shoulders, though I could still see nothing about me, only glimpses of the moon above. I did not think I had gone very far from Kit when I pushed right out of the bushes into open heath. I dropped down at once into the low cover, for there was a watch-tower three or four hundred yards away from me on my flank. In front, only fifty or sixty yards across the heath, I could see the fence: a wall of faint radiance as I had seen it that other moonlight night, though I thought now that I could distinguish the paler lines of the wires running through it. I crawled along the edge of the scrub to my left away from the watch-tower, keeping, as I thought, at about the same radius from the place where I had left Kit.

I found the scrub inclining gradually away from the fence as I went and suddenly I had a clear view down a long open space, a kind of broad, though much neglected, ride that cut straight through this tract of wild forest. It might have been an old fire lane, and it led straight up to the fence. Realising that had we been a hundred yards or so to our left we could have reached our present hiding-place without all that long toil through the scrub, and realising also, with a sinking heart, that on two sides we were very near the edge of our cover, I sat down to think out what was best to do. I had scarcely settled myself in the tall herbage when I heard the baying of the hounds somewhere behind me.

They were terribly near now, and I knew that full, sure note of their voices well. I strained my ears and caught another sound–the cracking of dry twigs under human feet. A long, cheerful «Halloo!» sounded clearly from the scrub and was taken up by someone more distant down the ride. I dare not risk a call to Kit, but began to crawl into the bushes again to try to rejoin her. Then I stopped, reflected and went back into the ride and crouched in the withered weeds again. The hounds were laid on my line–of that I was certain, for they did not hunt game-girls by night. Kit also knew that. Surely, then, I reasoned, she would think of crawling away from our line; the bloodhounds would not change quarry when my scent was so hot: they would pass her in the scrub, follow my scent out and circle round to find me in the open. I took a good grip on my spade and waited.

I heard them baying again, and now they seemed to me to have surely passed the place where I had left Kit. I half rose, changing my plans, thinking now that I had got my wind again I could run down the ride and draw them clear away from her. But before I could straighten up there came a loud, ringing clamour of sound from down the ride: the high, exulting pealing of the Count's horn, imperiously rousing and commanding, the thudding beat of horses' hooves and, terrifyingly near and shrill, appalling in its unexpectedness, that torrent of mad screaming and babbling distortion of human utterance that I had heard twice before in Hackelnberg.

Hans von Hackelnberg was riding up the long glade with all his cats screeching for blood. They came nearer with dreadful speed and in my horror I could neither stand nor flee. I saw dark shapes of horsemen cantering up through the long grass and heath, and saw in front of them a dozen–no, a score and more–of human shapes, but shapes that bounded rather than ran, covering the rough tangle of herbage with long, flying leaps. I saw those panther heads shoot up in black silhouette against the moonlit sky; I saw the shapes bend, tawny-grey against the grass, and saw again their leaping limbs flash pale in the milky light. The hounds bayed behind me, hunting somewhere close to the fence where I had been, but I paid them no attention now. I could only watch those shapes bounding on towards me; could think of nothing but the glint of steel at the end of their dark arms. Then I saw ride forward among them a man who looked gigantic in the moonlight: one who wore round his breast a gleaming coil of silver. He blew another blast, loudly and insolently proclaiming the right to slaughter for lust. I wiped my palms on the hair of my breeches and slowly rose and backed against a thick bush and swung my weapon.

There was a sudden loud shout from someone behind Hans von Hackelnberg; the Count himself reined in his horse and blew one sharp call on his horn. The screaming and babbling of the cats concentrated all at once in a sustained screech. But it was not I that they had seen.

A dark form had slipped out of the scrub and was crossing the moonlit open a few yards in front of the pack. It turned and fled straight up the ride towards the fence.

The cats flew forward over the heath and tussocks. Their screeching ceased, but as they hurtled past me I heard one loud sob as if it were one common intake of breath, or as if every fierce mouth had suddenly drunk in at once a draught of air already heavy with the odour of their victim's blood. The black figure still led them, running as a human being runs for life, but straight towards that wall of pale radiance, that whiter light within the blue-white of the moonlight. Too late, I saw that she would not swerve. Without knowing what I was going to do, without caring for Hans von Hackelnberg or his cats or his hounds, I cried out and began to run after her.

Von Hackelnberg had seen Kit's purpose, too. He thundered after his pack, cursing at the top of his great voice, then began to blow wild short blasts, calling the cats off. His followers galloped after him; I heard long, loud whistles shrilling above the Count's horn.

But the cats had their quarry clear in sight; they were gaining on her fast and I knew nothing could call them back now. I saw Kit leap at that insubstantial luminous barrier as if it had been a solid wall that she could scale, and I shouted out her name, cold with horror to see her, who had seemed by her sanity to prove my own, driven mad by fear. But in the next moment I knew it was not so. Even as she sprang at the fence she called to me. I heard her, above all the shouting and the whistling and the blowing of the horn, I heard her calling, not madly but with a terrible devotion: «Alan! Alan! Cross, cross; oh, cross!»

Then below her, against that screen of faint white light, the pack piled in a mass of twisting bodies and wildly upflung arms, all black against the radiance. And now I heard them cry again–short, frantic shrieks and moans of agony. The shadowy shapes of the horsemen plunged and danced on this side, between the fence and the scrub; the whistles blew continuously and von Hackelnberg's horn rang out, peal upon peal.

I kept on towards them, running up through the thin bushes on the edge of the thicket, and all the time my eyes were fixed on that black figure above the writhing body of the pack; for it hung there, very still, both arms straight stretched out as though lying along the topmost wire, her head fallen forward and her legs hanging limply down. She hung there, dead in the very sign of sacrifice and salvation. And as I halted, knee-deep in the rough grass and ling that ran away to the fence, I saw Kit's figure shine with a dim incandescence as if each fine hair of the velvet pelt that sheathed her were touched with hoar-frost.

My brain and heart both were so bruised by that blow that I forgot the danger she had tried to draw from me. I think I had begun to stumble across the open towards her, crying her name, when, as real as an actual echo, her voice sounded again in my ear: «Alan! Cross!» And then I saw why she had rushed on death and I remembered how she herself had seen the thing happen once before. The radiance of the fence faded swiftly away and the whistles stopped shrilling. I caught a glimpse of the wire glinting cold in the moon and had a second's impression of heather and birches beyond it and a black mass of pine forest farther away before a searchlight beam shot down from the watch-tower. It fingered the fence for a moment, then found the group by the wire and held it.

I saw then quite coolly what I must do. The foresters had ridden in close to the fence. I heard the slashing of their heavy whips and sharp howls of pain cutting the demented screaming and the moaning. The tangle of bodies and limbs rolled back, away from the fence, and broke up into a dozen cats who scattered among the horsemen, snarling, spitting, screeching, flying back to claw and tear at their injured mates, while their keepers hewed and swore, flogging them off and herding them away to the edge of the scrub again. I ran forward under the searchlight beam, sure that all who were held in it were blind to me, sure that the dog-boys were holding in their bloodhounds believing their work to be finished and sure that the sentries in the tower had all their attention fixed on the wreck of the pack. I crossed those two yards of bare earth at the fence, felt the wire with my hand, slipped through and ran crouching through the heather on the other side towards Kit's body.

Before I reached it Hans von Hackelnberg and a couple of his foresters had sprung down from their horses. They strode among the forms that lay upon the earth, some still, some squirming, and with short, violent thrusts of their falchions the two boys quietened each cat that still moved. Hans von Hackelnberg marched straight to that body hanging on the fence. He plucked it from the wire and swung it above his head in his huge hands. I had been invisible to him for I was outside the dazzling beam, but now I started forward and he saw me in the penumbra, not twelve feet from him, with the slight fence between.

The boys too saw me and advanced their blades as though to charge on me, but von Hackelnberg halted them with a short bellow. He stood there, holding the limp body with all its shroud of ashy velvet shimmering in the beam, then slowly turned and looked towards the whimpering remnant of the pack which the mounted foresters could scarcely keep at bay. He checked himself and half turned towards me again. The brilliant light made of his features a caricature of rage and cruelty more inhuman even than the creatures of his own evil ingenuity, but I was not afraid of him any more. I looked from his ferocious strength to the pitiful dead thing he held, and learned then for the first time how such a loss uproots all other agonies from the soul and makes of the heart a desert where fear and pain can never grow again. I was indifferent to his violent shout at me and did not understand it until long after he had turned away.

«Go!» he howled at me. «Go free this night. Hans von Hackelnberg spares thee now to hunt thee again under another moon!»

I did not know or care by what law of his own mad sport he spared me. The foresters fell back and sheathed their falchions. I should have crossed the fence again then and gone to meet the steel-clawed brutes, but the searchlight beam slid back into its tower, the white rays of the fence made one long leap back across all the open, and I saw von Hackelnberg with his burden through that strange screen, colourless, shadowless, robbed of all substance, remote from me as I from the white, tranquil moon. I saw his blank and ghostly form stride on towards the phantom pack, heave the pale body high again and hurl it among them.

I do not know how long I lay on the heath, staring into that thin, luminous wall. I must have gazed into it until long, long after any shape had ceased to stir beyond it, unable to think or move. I heard nothing, I saw nothing more. There is no record in my brain of what ensued later that night–or many nights after; only my body still has a kind of physical memory that I rose and tore von Hackelnberg's livery off it, and that I walked in a trance of weariness through the woods, walked on and on until moonlight and shadow swung together before my eyes, until I was stone-blind and the earth fled from beneath me.