The Sound of His Horn (5 page)

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.

* * *

4

Day Nurse bustled in with my breakfast, and I noticed a distinct change in her manner. She was taut with self-importance and insufferably authoritarian. I was not greatly surprised, when, having whisked away my breakfast things and rearranged the speckless vessels on my bedside-table, she announced that the Doctor was coming to see me. She made me nervous by the exaggerated importance she gave to the visit, but, as if to console me for her brusqueness, a little before the hour she confided that he might let me get up if he was satisfied by his examination. I was shaved and washed, my pyjamas were changed, the bed fresh-made, the dustless room dusted, new flowers were brought in and the shining floor given a super shine by the broad-backed serf who went at the job like clockwork. Finally Day Nurse removed the dressings from my hands, produced the steriliser and various bright instruments and then, as a light footfall sounded outside, stood to rigid attention at the foot of my bed. The Doctor came in humming a jaunty tune, glanced quickly round the room and addressed Day Nurse, who seemed frozen there, with a glazed look in her eyes. I'd seen nurses in England overdo the yessir-nosir business with a surgeon, and I'd seen a little of German discipline, but this out-prussianed them all. A quartermaster answering an Admiral on an inspection day was nothing to Day Nurse; she looked as brittle and unbending as a figure of glass and the short replies came snapping out like whip-cracks. The Doctor was anything but officer-like. He lounged, rather than stood, and he looked the nurse up and down as he questioned her with more of a lazy interest in her figure and dress than in what she was saying. He was a young man, with a pasty face, intelligent-looking enough, but self-indulgent and domineering. He was dressed in white trousers and a cream silk shirt with a bright silk handkerchief tied loosely round his throat. I could imagine him having leaned his tennis-racket just outside the door.

After hearing Day Nurse's report and giving a glance at my temperature chart, he moved over and looked at me, knitted his brows for a second and then waggled his head and looked rather pleased with himself. His examination was perfunctory; he listened to my heart, felt my pulse, lifted my lids and peered into my eyes, and, after a final hard stare at my hands, straightened up and said in very good English:

"You can get up now. Come and have a chat in my office."

Day Nurse thawed the moment he was out of the room and in her relief that the ordeal was over she was almost gushing. She brought me a rich brocade dressing gown and a pair of slippers made of the same soft synthetic leather that I had seen the Slav servant wearing.

For all I felt so well, my knees, of course, were like water from lying so long in bed and I was glad of Day Nurse's arm. It was the first time I had been outside my room and I had something to do to control my eagerness to see what the place looked like. I had no more than a hurried glimpse of my surroundings, for the Doctor's office was close by, across a broad verandah. I saw, however, that my room was at the corner of a spacious, one-storey wooden building raised above the ground by a high brick base. The forest came very close; there was no garden, only the natural lawns of the woodland in the openings of the trees.

The Doctor's room was more shaded by the trees than my own. The light that came in was leaf-green, yet the effect of the white-painted walls and the high polish on all the woodwork was such that the room looked light. It seemed half study, half surgery; bookcases and instrument cabinets alternated round the walls and a vast wooden desk stood in the middle. The Doctor invited me to sit in an easy chair beside the desk and swivelled his desk-chair round to face me, dismissing the nurse with a nod.

I suppose I talked far more than a prisoner of war ought that morning. After the baffling 'humouring' to which I had been subjected by the nurses it was a great relief to talk to someone who appeared, at least, to treat me as a sane and normal person. It was naive of me, no doubt, but it did not occur to me that he was encouraging me to talk in order to study me; I believed that he just wanted the pleasure of a chat. He gave me the impression of not having enough work to do, of being bored and glad to see a stranger. I forgot how much he must have known about me already. I don't know how many canons of security I offended against, but, with his prompting, and under the stimulus of his interest, I told him the whole story of my escape, concealing only the fact that Jim Long had escaped with me. He drew with a pencil on a pad in front of him while was talking, but took no notes. When I had finished he gave me a long stare. It was only then, I think, when I looked back into his eyes that I became aware of some kind of calculation in his manner, something not so easy and trustworthy as I had thought at first.

"Tell me this," I blurted out. "Why don't you hand me over to the police? I've admitted that I'm a British prisoner."

"The police?" he repeated thoughtfully. "It is not necessary. The Master Forester has jurisdiction in the Reich forest."

"But I'm a prisoner of war," I persisted. "I should be under military law."

"Ja, ja,"
he said. "I understand. There is no hurry. We must get you well first."

I realised, angrily, that this was the same vein of 'humouring' the lunatic that the nurses had practised.

I said defiantly:

"You think I'm mad, don't you?"

"My dear fellow," he answered, and something jarred on me in the glib way he brought the phrase out in his German accent, "my dear fellow, I don't think you're insane at all. Not that I should care much if you were. Your case interested me physiologically. You were affected by Bohlen Rays. They are usually fatal, but you have responded to my treatment. I am pleased with you. From my point of view you are cured, you need only a little time and some exercise to recover the use of your muscles completely."

"But you think I'm unbalanced," I insisted. "Even though you're not interested, you're a doctor; you know when a person's mad. Am I?" He looked out of the window and drew down the corners of his mouth, seeming to find my question irrelevant or impossible to answer. Then in a bored, offhand way, he said:

"There's bound to be some cerebral disturbance. A temporary amnesia would be normal and some kind of delusions could be expected. In your case it seems to take the form of believing that you are living in a former period of history. I suppose you have read a good deal of history, about the War of German Rights and so forth, haven't you?"

"History?" I said, bewildered. "Yes...."

He interrupted me airily.

"I should not worry. It will pass." He looked at me with very much the same indolent appreciation in his eyes as when he had surveyed Day Nurse, interested in nothing but my physical state. "What does it matter if it doesn't?" he asked. "You have the use of your body again. I don't know that you'll find anyone particularly interested in your mind here."

Even though I had by now seen through the sham geniality of his first manner, the brutality of this remark astonished me. Puzzled and alarmed though I was at what he said about my delusion, I was convinced in my own mind that I was sane and I determined to meet his brutality with composure.

"I'm not so conceited, Doctor, as to imagine that my mind is of much interest to anybody but myself," I said. "But I should like to thank you for taking such very good care of my body; it feels quite well now and I think my only worry is what you intend to do with it now you've repaired it. Am I to be treated as a prisoner of war, or not?"

He put his elbows on the desk, propped his chin on his folded hands and arched his brows, looking at me with a certain disquieting relish.

"You know, I like you," he said. "I find your conversation refreshing. Besides, I think you are probably a good listener and it will be excellent for me to practice my English a little. I have no idea what the Graf intends to do with you, but in my own little hospital here I am Der Fuehrer--and in case your period doesn't come as far up to modern times as that, that means God--and as I like your company I shall keep you here as long as possible. You have no idea how depressing it is for a solitary intellectual surrounded entirely by sportsmen and slaves. I am sure you will stimulate me to make a great many observations about this establishment, and luckily your--er--infirmity will enable me to express them with comparative safety. You may keep your room until I need it for another casualty, but I beg that you will honour my own table. I shall try to show you something of the estate as opportunity offers, but I must warn you against going out by yourself, particularly at night. It would grieve me very much to have my first real success with the anti-Bohlen Ray treatment un-professionally dissected by the Graf's hounds or those other creatures that he keeps."

He rose, and coming swiftly round clapped me on the shoulder, grinning down at me.

"So, Herr Lieutenant, accept the fortune of war like a soldier of those old heroic times you live in, and share a piece of venison and a bottle of Bordeaux with your enemy at half-past twelve precisely. Ach, though!" he exclaimed. "I must get you something to wear. Your own clothes have gone to the incinerator, I believe."

He bent and spoke softly into a small apparatus on his desk. While he was occupied I got up and looked at the fine electric clock on the bookcase to which he had pointed when he invited me to lunch. It was a handsome instrument, comprising not only a clock but a thermometer and barometer, and it exhibited certain additional figures in small illuminated apertures which I did not at once understand. Then, I saw that one combination must give the day of the month. It was evidently the twenty-seventh of July. But under this was the isolated figure '102.'

The Doctor came across while I was peering at this.

"So," he said. "You admire my chronometer? As an officer of the old-time Navy that should interest you. But what puzzles you about it?"

I pointed to the small figure '102.'

"Ach, ja,"
he said. "The year also. Hardly necessary, one would have thought."

"The year?" I repeated, staring at him.

He threw back his head and laughed aloud, then apologised with exaggerated courtliness.

"Alas, it is so difficult to be consistent when two people are living in different centuries at the same time. Forgive me, I should explain that I--solely for purposes of practical convenience, of course--subscribe to the convention that we are living in the hundred and second year of the First German Millenium as fixed by our First Fuehrer and Immortal Spirit of Germanism, Adolf Hitler."

* * *

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.