The Sound of His Horn

6

Von Eichbrunn was as good as his word. I was roused very early the morning after next, and before I had finished putting on the suit of forest clothes he had sent in to me I heard him calling me from the verandah. It was a fine fresh morning; the scent of the forest was intoxicatingly strong and sweet. I had heard no horns in the night; my sleep had been unbroken and dreamless; now the loud bird-song, the awakening quiver of the woods, the strengthening light on leaves and boles and grassy glades, exhilarated me.

The Doctor was dressed for the forest in a pair of close-fitting dark green trousers with broad gold braid, half-boots of suede-like material, and a jerkin that looked like a doe-skin richly frogged and ornamented with gold. He had a green velvet cap sporting a heron's feather on his head and swinging from a belt a long dirk or hunting sword with an ivory hilt. The suit he had lent me was after the same style, but plain.

He led me along one of the little paths winding away from the hospital, and I noticed he had caused two of the Slav serfs to follow us.

We had not gone more than a quarter of a mile when we came in sight of the first buildings of the Schloss. It is difficult for me to describe the place because I never had a general a view of it. In fact, it would be impossible to see it as a whole, for the forest grew not only close up to it but within its courts and alleys and arched over it in places like a tent. It was far from being a castle, as I had imagined it. The buildings were all low, half-timbered or built entirely of wood, exceedingly irregular in design, as if the architects had been obliged not to fell a single tree, but to make their plans conform to the shape and site of all the existing glades and open spaces in the area. In some places, indeed, enormous beeches or oaks were actually knitted into the fabric of the buildings, and there were turrets and little chambers contrived like nests among their spreading boughs.

There was something curiously secret about the place in this still and early morning. It was not simply that there was no one about: I had been prepared for that. I think it was that the austere, bright smartness of the hospital had led me to expect something of the same style in the Schloss, and instead I found a mediaeval waywardness, a fantastic crabbedness and contortion. These low, rambling buildings with their gables and dormers, their overhangs and nooks, odd windows and recessed doorways, seemed to have writhed in and out of the forest trees of their own accord, to have sought the shade and privacy of the groves like woodland beasts. They were forest dwellings through and through, their beams and boards, their lime and plaster, their grey foundation-stones and doorsills, were native to the earth about them. They were as sylvan as an Iroquois teepee or backwoodsman's cabin; and yet they were not rude. There was a kind of sly art in their construction; their baffling irregularity, their flight, as it were, from expected proportions and planes, had yet a Gothic cunning and mastery in it. We penetrated into a maze of courts and narrow walks, moss-grown and cobbled, tip-toed through pannelled passages and oaken galleries, and the fancy grew on me that we were stealing through a deserted and lost little German town of the Middle Ages which the forest had overgrown while time, by a miracle, had allowed it to defy ruin.

Von Eichbrunn spoke little and in a low voice, answering few of my questions, dropping only the briefest word of explanation as he showed me dwellings and dormitories, kitchens, kennels and stables. I would have liked to linger and look at the hounds and horses, at the carriages in the coach-houses and at the racks of old hunting arms and gear in some of the galleries, but he hurried me on, nervously anxious, I thought, to be out in the open, or the comparative open, of the forest again. So, I could see only that the Master Forester of the Reich appeared to keep a variety of hounds: one pack of stag-hounds of the black and white French St Hubert breed; some bloodhounds and some great creatures like boar-hounds, short-haired, brindled, tremendously strong and ferocious as tigers, which hurled themselves with savage snarling at the bars of their kennels as we passed. I have never seen such villainy, such determination to attack, even in the police dogs that our prison-camp guards kept. The Doctor glided by, as far from their fangs and their pale, glaring eyes as he could get.

The fury we had drawn on ourselves seemed to unnerve the Doctor so much that he forgot his way. We had come out, beyond the boar-hounds' kennel, into a little court, dimmed by the foliage of overhanging trees, out of which ran several dark little passages. Von Eichbrunn turned about, hesitating which one to take, then glanced back and made a questioning sign to one of the serfs who had followed us. Before the man could respond, a clear voice called challengingly from one of the passages. Von Eichbrunn started, then, with an unconvincing smile, dived into the passage, pulling me with him. He turned almost immediately through a doorway into a long, light room, of which one window gave on to the court we had left, while others, high up, looked to the blue sky through gaps in the tree-tops.

I saw that it was a young man who had challenged us; a youth dressed much as the Doctor was dressed, except that he had laid aside his jerkin and was in his shirtsleeves. Observing him from behind the Doctor, I thought him almost too perfect a specimen of what we used to consider the typical young Nazi to be true: not heavily built, but with a suggestion of the bruiser in his figure and pose; hair and lashes so fair he would have passed for albino but for his grey eyes; a face which, in the moment of haughty enquiry before he recognised von Eichbrunn, was a mask of exaggerated arrogance and cold authority, but which, when he briefly returned the Doctor's greeting, looked only selfish and sneering, with a suggestion of careless brutality about the eyes and mouth.

They spoke in German, the Doctor evidently explaining something about me. I felt the young man's eyes on me and carefully avoided them, looking round the room instead.

It appeared to be a keeper's or huntsman's room, stored with a strange variety of equipment, all having the air of being in use, well-kept, neatly arranged and ready to hand. Even the boar-spears standing in their racks by the wall were bright and serviceable-looking: that was the oddity of the place–so much of the gear did not fit into von Eichbrunn's chronology at all. Why was there a row of cross-bows, their steel parts shining, their strings new and strong, lances and short swords, and, in a farther corner, arranged on wooden stands, what looked like several suits of armour, though rather made of tough leather, or material resembling it, than of steel? The Graf von Hackelnberg seemed to be a determined mediaevalist. There was one concession to modernity: a stand of short, single-barrelled guns of very wide bore, far wider than one of our eight-bores or anything I have seen used for wild-fowling; and there were stacks of metal boxes which, I guessed contained cartridges. Besides these there was hunting gear of the sort which I suppose time has modified only a little: hound leashes and couples, collars and whips.

There was a profusion of stuff in the room and I had time to observe only the more obvious things; I noticed, however, that though there were no trophies, such as stags' heads, foxes' masks, and so on, that one might expect to see in such a room, there was a number of skins, or parts of skins, all apparently of the same sort, hanging on the wall at the farther end near the strange suits of armour. They were not displayed as trophies but hanging on a row of pegs. I could see the down-dangling tails, and I thought they looked like leopard skins; but perhaps they were brindled wild-cat skins. It seemed likely enough that wild-cats might be fairly common vermin in a great forest like Hackelnberg.

One other thing I noticed: The fair-haired youth had been standing at a long broad table in the middle of the room, doing something with some gear among the litter of the things that strewed it. He laid down the object he had been working on as he moved a little aside to talk to the Doctor; it was some small piece of metal apparatus and he had been working on it with a file. Edging a little closer, I saw that it was a queer-looking arrangement of steel hooks, arranged like fingers of a hand, and just about the size of my hand, or a bit less. It was, in fact, remotely suggestive of a steel gauntlet without any cuff. There were several such things lying on the table, one or two fitted somehow with straps. I suppose that in another moment I should have got close enough to pick the thing up and examine it in my hands, but the Doctor took me by the arm and led me out with him.

He seemed to have allayed the suspicions of the young keeper, for he went out with us and chatted amiably enough to von Eichbrunn, though he did not address a single word to me. No doubt he knew nothing but German, and though, you know, I can just stumble along in German and understand it if it is spoken slowly enough, I had never let von Eichbrunn know that.

The keeper accompanied us across the little court and let us out into a park-like area of well-spaced trees. Here I caught a glimpse of much the biggest single building I had yet seen. Nearly hidden by the trees as it was, I could make out that it was a great, stone-built hall, Gothic in style, steep-roofed, pinnacled and turreted, complexly ornamented like a fanciful reproduction of some sixteenth-century Rathaus in the Rhineland.

I would have liked to go close and look at it, but again, von Eichbrunn steered me away: what the keeper was about to show us lay in another direction. He led us by little paths between hedges of clipped forest trees among a group of corrals–his game-farm, I supposed, for the enclosures were stocked with numbers of very tame roes, fallow-deer and red-deer, all does and hinds, fawns and calves, as far as I could see. They came running from among the trees and bushes at his call and fed from his hand, and he felt their backs and haunches like a farmer judging a pig. The Graf never lacked venison, I guessed.

How extensive this game-farm was I did not discover, but there must have been other pens hidden from us by the tall hedges, containing less docile creatures than deer, for at one point, while we were stroking the noses of some fallow fawns, a curious whining broke out some little distance from us. The fawns took sudden fright and ran to cover: the keeper laughed shortly, but von Eichbrunn looked as unnerved as he had done when we passed the boarhounds and for an instant I thought he was going to flee like the fawns. It was a curious sound, and not a pleasant one: I have called it a whining but it was really more of a subdued and modulated screaming, with a babbling undertone and occasional shrill yowls of excitement and eagerness that sounded almost human; but it was wholly wild. It sounded like no hounds I have ever heard, and yet, I had the strongest impression of having heard it before and of having thought of hounds while I listened. Only some minutes after it had stopped did I remember where I had heard, or thought I had heard it before. It was exactly like the sounds my ear had seemed to catch mingled with the noises of the wind-stirred forest that night when I listened at my window to Hans von Hackelnberg's horn. I had fancied a whine of hounds then, and had reasoned that it must be the wind. But it was certainly neither hounds nor the wind.

I did not venture to ask a question before the keeper had led us out of his game-farm and set us upon a lane of the forest which the Doctor, evidently relieved to be alone with me again, followed at a rapid pace, uphill. Then to my asking if we were not going to look at the Hall, he grunted briefly, «Nein,» and explained no further until we came to the top of the hill.

He leaned against a pine tree and wiped his brow, for the day was very warm and he was unused to exercise. «No,» he said, with some ill-humour. «I have had enough of the Schloss on an empty stomach. Franck, the gamekeeper, tells me that the Gauleiter's party are going to have their luncheon at the Kranichfels pavilion–that's a good hour's walk from here. It will be a damned good luncheon too. They are a paunchy, gorging lot by all accounts and I have every intention of getting my share before they come back from shooting. Then I am going to get out of this verfluchte heat and sleep.»

«I thought you were going to show me the Schloss,» I reminded him.

«Ja, no doubt you did,» he replied; then, becoming less irritable as he cooled off, «if you promise not to run away this afternoon, perhaps I will sneak you into the Hall this evening. But I'm not answering for any consequences, mind!» he ended sharply.

I think I had taken the Doctor's measure by now; I thought him something of a child, so answered calmly that I supposed he would take care to avoid any unpleasant consequences to himself, and as for myself I was prepared to take the risk. On that understanding we carried on along our road.

He began to talk again after a while, in his usual airy, conceited vein, but now I could not resist the temptation to deflate him by remarking that for all his superior contempt for mere sportsmen and hunt servants he must allow that they must have some skill–not to mention nerve–that he lacked if they handled dogs like the boar-hounds we had seen a while ago.

The effect surprised me. He seemed to swerve away from me, fetched a deep sigh and said something in German which sounded very like a curse on the day he ever took this job; then, very soberly he said: «The dogs are bad enough, but God defend me from the cats.»

I was astonished at the real fear in his voice.

«Do you mean,» I asked, «die things we heard squalling when we were looking at the deer?»

But he was offended with me for having made him admit his nervousness and he walked on in a glum silence.

Those few miles were full of interest to me. There was little life to see: no animals other than a red squirrel or two, and very few birds in this part of the forest, but I was most intent to mark the lie of the land, to memorise the way we took and impress on my mind each little side-path and noticeable tree or rock. We crossed a couple of little streams, from both of which the Doctor drank, and then climbed again, gently, up a long slope of ground to a ridge where the bushes grew very thick. There I suddenly heard the baying of a hound not far off. Von Eichbrunn seemed not to notice it, but a moment later started and swore as a man stepped quietly out of hiding in a brake and confronted us in the narrow way.

He was a green-clad forester carrying a light crossbow in his hand: a young boy, not at all ill-looking, who spoke briefly to von Eichbrunn and then watched him with amusement in his eyes as the Doctor grumbled ill-temperedly at what he heard. I half guessed what had happened, and had my guess confirmed as the Doctor, unwilling to be balked of his lunch, questioned the young forester again. We had arrived too late. They had begun to drive the game, it appeared, and if we continued along our road there was a risk of heading off the buck from the guns. The forester was evidently stationed there to turn back any game that might bolt away from the line of the drive down our path.

The hound bayed again; the forester cocked his head and listened; then a gun went off close to us, somewhere on our left hand. The forester still listened for a moment and then grinned. He raised his crossbow imagining a buck in range and shook his head regretfully. 'Had that fellow missed,' he seemed to say, 'I would have had him.'

Abruptly then, he turned to von Eichbrunn, and, as I gathered, asked him why he did not go to the butt near at hand and wait, since the drive would not last long. Von Eichbrunn shook his head, but the boy laughed and, inserting a finger into his mouth, produced so realistic an imitation of the pop of a champagne cork that the Doctor was immediately converted and allowed himself to be guided through the bushes without more ado.

It was by a kind of winding tunnel through tangled undergrowth that the young forester led us down the farther slope of the ridge. It was impossible to see more than a yard or two ahead, and the bushes on either side were so thick and interlaced that I could not imagine anything bigger than a polecat worming its way through them. It occurred to me that the place had been chosen and adapted specially for this reason, so that the driven game would be forced to follow known lines where the guns would be posted. When we came to the butt, I saw that this was so.

It was such a butt as no preserver of game in England would ever have contrived. A little copse, from the centre of which the undergrowth had been carefully cleared, leaving the saplings standing, was surrounded by a breast-high bank of earth well grassed over and topped by a fringe of low bushes. The front of the butt was a sort of demilune, having openings in its screen of bushes so disposed that from one or the other of them a gun might cover any part of the glade in front. It was, in fact, more a ride, or alley, than a glade, for the opposite side was a continuous thick hedge of bushes, looking natural enough to the eye, but no doubt layered and interlaced artificially in order to confine the game to the ride and force it to run straight past the butt within easy range. We were in a valley, and the ride, running lengthwise up it, ended where the ground sloped up more steeply and the sides of the valley, walled there with steep grey rocks, converged and appeared to meet or to leave only a very narrow pass between their crags. It was clear that any game being driven up the valley along this ride or others, if it escaped the guns posted oh them, must be stopped by the converging cliffs and either driven back again, past the guns, or shot by keepers stationed at the head of the valley. We had a clear view of a large part of that triangle formed by the cliffs, for the trees grew only thinly there. In the other direction, from which the game must come, the ride ran straight for perhaps a hundred yards, so that the guns would see the buck in ample time to be able to fire deliberately when it came in range.

It wanted only tame deer to make the worst shooter's success a certainty. And, having looked at the principal occupant of the butt I guessed that that was mainly the type of guest the Reich Master Forester had to cater to.

He was a short, grossly fat man in a pair of new lederhosen, with fancy braces, white stockings and an embroidered shirt. He was almost bald, square-headed and heavy-jowled; a thick roll of fat bulged over his shirt collar at the back of his neck and he had a stern on him like a canal barge. I could not have imagined a more absurd contrast to the three or four young foresters who occupied the butt with him: they so trim and fit-looking, dressed richly in their greens and golds, but most serviceably for the forest. The pale puffiness of his legs and arms, contrasted with their sunburned hardness, made him look like a different species of creature.

He turned his head as we came into the butt from the back, giving us a blinking, uncomprehending glance through rimless spectacles, then resumed his watch on the glade again. He was seated before one of the gaps in the bushes, on a folding stool whose seat disappeared under the shining curves of his leather shorts, and leaning against the turfed bank beside him were two or three guns–one of them of the very large-bore pattern I had seen in the Schloss. At the next loop-hole stood a forester with a crossbow, keeping a careful eye both on the glade and on the guest.

Von Eichbrunn and I retired to the back of the butt, where he was greeted in whispers by the other foresters. There, on a broad divan of turf, surrounded by comforting flasks and capacious ice-containers, under a tent of green leaves, the Doctor reclined at ease and I had leisure to observe what was going on.

The guest had had some sport already, for a fallow-buck, newly gralloched, hung from the bough of a birch tree. He had evidently had more practise than game, for I could see three or four empty cartridge cases lying on the turf behind him. His companions were getting their share, also; for at short intervals we heard the brief baying of a hound and shots at varying distances from us beyond the long thicket that bounded our view across the valley.

Our own man seemed to be getting bored. He took out a cigar case and was about to light up when the forester in charge made a sign. The guest's loader handed him his gun and respectfully turned him in the right direction. The boy next to me nudged me and, rising, showed me where I could look over the bank and have a fair view down the glade. A couple of hounds were giving tongue, hunting in our direction; then a red-deer stag came into sight, running easily up the valley. He stopped fifty yards from the butt, a little suspicious, but after snuffing and shaking his head, came on again at a trot, passing at a range of twenty yards from our earthwork. He had been driven neither hard nor far, and he looked quite tame to me–so trusting I would have instinctively lowered my gun had I been shooting. Our guest, however, blazed away. The stag had passed out of my line of vision then and I did not see the effect of the three or four shots our man fired, but, while the other youths leaped out of the butt, I saw the forester in charge retire behind a tree and furtively rewind his crossbow. He then gravely congratulated the guest, and while the boys brought in the stag, he stepped over to von Eichbrunn and chatted.

«Das ist der Letzte,» I heard him say. «Jetzt haben wir nur noch the Voegel, dann wollen wir sehen ob's was zu essen gibt.»

While some of them disemboweled and hung up the stag, two of the lads busied themselves with iced drink and sandwiches for the guest, who, weary of his exiguous shooting-stool, sank gratefully onto the cool, soft turf of the broad bench at the back of the butt. The lads flattered him outrageously, but, though he replied with a loud geniality and affected heartiness, it was plain that he had not particularly enjoyed his morning. He cheered up and began to show much more interest, however, when the head-boy, taking up and demonstrating to him the curious large-bore gun, began to explain the next part of the programme to him. I could not catch what was being said then, for I had moved aside, not wishing to attract the guest's notice, and was, in any case, more interested in some extraordinary new arrivals in our butt.

They had come quietly out of the bushes behind us and taken up a position on top of the earthwork, concealed by the bushy screen, yet able to watch the glade through the openings in the leaves. They were a young forester carrying a little whip and holding in leash two large creatures which, at first sight of their heads and fore-parts, I took for baboons. But when he allowed them to rise and stretch themselves, I saw that they were boys. Their heads were wholly encased in most life-like masks representing the dog-headed baboon you get in Abyssinia and those parts; the lips were writhed back in a realistic snarl, showing great, strong teeth. A mantle of silky grey hair mingled with golden brown covered their shoulders, backs and breasts and fell nearly to their waists; below that they were stark naked except for the narrow belt round their middles by which the keeper held them in leash. The exposed skin was very brown, but whether from the sun or by natural colouring, I could not guess.

The stout sportsman noticed them and gave a loud grunt of surprise. The keeper leapt down into the butt with them, and slipping them from the leash, set them capering about the space with a few flicks of his whip. They gambolled and postured on all fours and erect, imitating, to the guest's vast amusement, all the less delicate habits and gestures of their originals, and refining on some of the tricks with an ingenuity that put their membership of the human species beyond doubt. The guest guffawed and wobbled with joy, until at a word from the forester in charge, their keeper ordered them to come in, which they did at once, squatting and holding up their muzzles. He then handed them a fine strong net, which they swiftly took between them and threw over their shoulders like a rope.

This had scarcely been done when a bugle note sounded from down the valley. The keeper and his baboon-boys jumped up to their station on the earthwork again; the guest was led to his position at the front of the butt, and I slipped to the vacant loop-hole again to watch the glade.

All was very quiet for some time, then I heard dogs in the distance, more volume and a different note this time. Silence again for a space, then a shot, sounding somewhat faint.

One of the young foresters was standing beside me.

«Da schiesst der Gauleiter los,» he murmured.

I looked up, not knowing what birds they meant by Voegel but expecting something like black game or capercailzie. Another faint shot or two followed, and suddenly the dogs sounded much closer to us. They were driving up our ride, and now I recognised the voices of the boar-hounds, the savage brutes that had flown at the bars of their kennel in rage when we looked at them. I still had my eyes on the tree-tops and was listening for the rush of wings, when the forester nudged me and pointed down the glade.

A figure had come into sight, running hard over the shock grass: a human figure, but fantastically decked. It came on, running for dear life, and the unseen hounds clamoured close behind; there was no mistaking their intention to rend and kill now. The figure held my gaze; it was a tall, long-limbed girl, her head and features concealed by a brilliantly coloured beaked mask, which yet allowed her dark hair to stream out behind. To see her racing up the glade was as astounding as if you had seen one of the bird-headed goddesses of Old Egypt suddenly break from carven stillness into panic flight. A gorget of glossy gold and scarlet feathers covered her breasts; down her arms were fastened pinion feathers of chestnut and iridescent green, and from her waist behind swept out long, curving tail-feathers of brown and gold. These adornments and the yellow shoes she had on her feet were her only dress.

There was none of the tameness of the stag about her; she was terrified and she ran with a speed I could scarcely have bettered myself in the days when I was in training. I saw the desperation in the effort she was making as she tore past our butt and I knew she could not keep up that pace for another hundred yards. She passed beyond my line of vision and then I heard our sportsman fire.

Horrified, I was about to jump up on to the earthwork, but the forester, who had already raised himself so that he could see up the glade, exclaimed in a low voice, «Missed! Here comes the other!»

I looked back and saw another 'bird' running up, this one in white feathers, with a high golden crest and a short, up-cocked fan-tail. She was plumper than the first, not making so good a pace and beginning to show distress, but she made a spurt as the cruel clamour of the dogs swelled out anew behind her, and she swerved very near our butt.

I heaved myself up in the instant that the sportsman fired, and saw something that looked like a web of fine, brilliant yellow filaments–something like the tail of a comet–sweep through the air towards her. The girl bounded and screamed; the web seemed to open out, spreading as if it were carried forward by a great number of small projectiles about its rim, as a circular cast-net is spread, in the throwing, by the little lead weights at its edge. The 'bird' whirled about, slapping at her bare flesh as though stung, and, in doing so, entangled her arms in those fine filaments; she staggered and struggled, evidently smarting from the impact of the projectiles; ran on again a few yards, but with difficulty, for the filaments seemed to be viscous and, though so fine, exceedingly strong; they wrapped about her thighs and knees.

Our forester in charge now blew a cheery note on his little silver horn, and the young keeper slipped his baboon-boys. With loud, yelping cries they bounded down from the butt and raced towards the struggling girl. At the new terror she made the most desperate effort to run on and succeeded in breaking the trammelling threads about her legs, but the boys in a few yards were upon her. They threw her and whisked their net about her, subdued her struggles and rolled her tight and helpless in the meshes.

The guest was now helped out of the butt and the foresters prepared to pursue the first 'bird', whom we could see labouring up between the thinly growing trees towards the head of the valley, her reds and golds conspicuous against the cool green. The keeper called up his baboon-boys for the chase, and another handed the guest his gun, but our sportsman had had enough: he was not built to trot after such a runner, spent though she was. He examined his bag, squirming in the tight net, chuckled and snorted, ejaculated his 'fabelhafts!' and 'Maerchenhafts!' with tremendous gusto, but made it perfectly plain that all he was now interested in was luncheon. Von Eichbrunn was unhesitatingly of the same mind.

So the keeper and another forester went off to pursue the runner alone, cheering their baboon-boys on very merrily. A party of serfs was whistled up from the thickets to carry both the dead deer and the netted girl between them on poles, and we all trooped off to the Kranichfels pavilion.

My hopes of seeing the Count von Hackelnberg at the luncheon were disappointed. I did not even see the Gauleiter of Gascony and the rest of his party, for von Eichbrunn drew me away to eat with some of the under foresters in a quiet corner of the garden of the pavilion, while the great men made a very loud party of it inside. The young boys looked a little curiously at me and did not try to converse with me, but from their few quiet remarks I understood that the Count had left the conduct of the morning's shoot to his second in command. He had earlier shown his guests, none of whom had visited Hackelnberg before, his bison and his elks, and had then left them to the amusement we had seen in the valley. The Count, I divined, was too jealous of his game, both animal and human, to enjoy seeing it shot by outsiders. As for such attractions as the bird-shooting, a plentiful supply of fine slave-girls from the Slav lands and the Mediterranean gave the Count material for many ingenious variations in venery with which to entertain the Satraps of the Reich, but his choicest game and his most curious inventions were reserved for his private pleasure.

I asked von Eichbrunn what would be done with the live game. He sniggered. «They'll be served up for dinner tonight! Ach–alive and kicking, all right! That was a fine plump pigeon our little man got. It will be a sight worth seeing how he deals with her....»

The luncheon was extensive. The young foresters did themselves very well, and our meal, I suspected, was but a summary of the entertainment inside the pavilion. Von Eichbrunn drank champagne until his English became so slurred that I could no longer converse with him reasonably and I resigned myself to losing the afternoon. There was much I should have liked to do and see. I should have liked to examine one of those filament-throwing cartridges and one of the guns that fired them; I should have liked to talk with the organisers of the drive and to have gone over the ground; but neither talking nor walking was possible.

The boys left us before the Gauleiter's party had finished, but the Doctor lay in the shade another half-hour until a lad came to say that a carriage was going down to the Schloss empty and we could ride back in it if we liked. Sleepy and obstinate from the wine, von Eichbrunn insisted on our going back to the hospital to enjoy a siesta, and I had no choice but to comply. There he obliged me to give my parole that I would not go off without him; so, while he turned in to snore off the effects of his luncheon and the heat and the unwonted exercise, I also lay down in my room and waited as patiently as I could until the evening.

It was after dark when he called to me, and he was in a bilious, peevish mood, so that I exerted myself to mollify and humour him, afraid lest he change his mind about going before we reached the Hall. However, much as he complained of his head and his insides, he seemed keen on the idea–anxious, in fact, lest through his oversleeping we might have missed the fun.

The high windows of the Hall were lit with an orange glow when we came out from the labyrinth of the Schloss and crossed the little park before the great building. People were moving about in the gloom in front of the high main doors, and von Eichbrunn led me with much circumspection round one end of the building, where, behind a buttress, we found a narrow doorway admitting us to a spiral staircase.

We climbed a short distance, then followed an extremely narrow passage faintly lit by a filtering of light through little slits from the Hall. This passage brought us to a small hexagonal chamber in one wall of which, about breast-high, was a round window, unglazed and barred, spokewise with delicate stonework. Obeying the Doctor's nudges, I peeped down through this and found that I had an excellent view of the interior of the great Hall, our window being situated in one of the angles, about thirty feet above the floor.

There was no electricity here, but the Hall was well and richly lit. Ten feet or so from the floor a stone cornice ran all round the walls, and on this, at short, regular intervals, stood more than forty figures which I took at first to be identical statues of silver, each holding a shining pole terminating in a cresset filled with steady yellow flames. When I looked more narrowly, however, I saw the figures breathe and stir slightly: they were girls whose bodies were either coated with a silver paint or cased in a skin of material so smooth and so exactly fitted that each living girl perfectly counterfeited a shining sculpted nude. The combined light of all their torches flooded the hall below and threw a mellow glow upwards to touch the salient carved work of the hammer-beam roof and bint at dark intricacies beyond.

On the two long sides of the Hall the cornice on which the torch-bearers stood formed the top of an entablature supported by a row of pilasters, and between each pair of pilasters was a shallow alcove. Along the whole length of the room before these alcoves ran a broad bench or dais of stone, thickly covered with pelts of bison, bear and deer, while in the alcoves themselves, on top of similar skins, were spread robes of soft furs-fox, otter and marten. Between these two daises, though a broad space distant from each other, stood the great Hall table that would have seated a hundred people with ample elbow-room for all. The Gauleiter and his friends were no more than a dozen; with them were dining some dozen or fourteen of the Count's officers. All sat, well spaced out, towards the head of the table, and at the head itself, facing our window, in a huge carved wooden chair, sat Hans von Hackelnberg.

I had expected a striking figure. I had imagined him, I suppose, as a man with something of the distinction of the old Eastern European aristocracy in his face and manner. The only correspondence between my image of von Hackelnberg and the reality was the wildness I had imagined. But the man who sat there, dominating the table, dominating the whole vast hall, had a wildness in his looks far beyond anything I had ever known or fancied. He belonged neither to my century nor the Doctor's; he was remoter from the gross, loudmouthed Nazi politicians round him than they from me. Their brutality was the brutality of an urban, mechanised herd-civilisation, the sordid cruelty of a loud-speaker and tommy-gun tyranny. Hans von Hackelnberg belonged to an age when violence and cruelty were more personal, when right of rule resided in a man's own bodily strength; such individual ferocity as his belonged to the time of the aurochs, to the wild bulls of that dark and ancient German forest which the City had never subdued.

He was a bigger man than any you have seen: a giant who made the great throne he sat on and the mighty oaken board before him look like things of normal size, and made the rest of the company appear like children at table.

His auburn hair was cropped short, which made the power of his immense skull and bull-like brow seem the more monstrous. He wore long moustaches and a forked tawny beard that glinted in the torchlight as he turned his head sullenly from side to side and glowered on his guests. The upper half of his body was clad in a sleeveless green jerkin crossed by a gold-embroidered sword-belt; a massive gold chain was round his neck, and on his upper arm, circling the prodigious muscles, he wore a golden torque of the ancient Celtic design.

He was not eating; but from time to time he snatched up the drinking-horn in front of him, drained it and returned it to its rest again with a fiercely controlled force, as if his arm, once raised, could scarcely be restrained from sweeping down of its own accord to strike and destroy; and now and again he slashed a gobbet of meat from the haunch of beef before him and flung it to the hounds crouching beyond the table, with a violent gesture and a savage glare that plainly said he wished it were the Gauleiter's head he hurled. Occasionally he tilted back his head and stared into the roof-beams, or let his gaze travel slowly and grimly along the ranks of torch-bearers on the walls as though ensuring by the menace of his brow that none dare droop or budge from her station. I saw then that his eyes were tawny brown and the yellow torchlight touched them once or twice with a red glow, like a coal.

We were late in arriving and the feast was nearly over–or at least, the guests' appetite for roast meat was sated. They seemed to have been served with rude enormous lavishness from great joints of beef, mutton and pork as well as game, and there was a true mediaeval disorder of greasy trenchers, vast pewter and silver dishes and plates encumbering the board. Young foresters richly dressed in satins and brocades went round filling wooden stoups with beer, and the big cow-horns at each guest's place with wine.

They were a rowdy company, already three parts drunk; they sprawled and bawled and roared out songs, one group against another with more noise and if anything less grasp of words and tune than twice their number of English undergraduates on a Bump-Supper night. Nor did they quieten much when six tall young foresters, most magnificently clad in green and gold, mounted a low platform behind the Count's throne, and raising up their silver key-bugles, began to blow a succession of tunefully varied hunting-calls. The Count threw himself back in his chair and listened to their music with a gloomy frown, and while they played, a troop of serfs hurried in and quickly cleared the wide table of everything except the drinking vessels.

When all was cleared away the buglers paused for a few minutes, then resumed with a quick, merry tune –some hunting song that was half-familiar to me, a galloping, rousing music which now hushed the boozy roarings of the guests and set them jigging to its own time.

The two wide double doors at the end of the hall were suddenly flung open and the slaves came in again at a trot, each four of them now carrying an enormous bright metal dish fitted with a domed cover. They passed down each side of the table, sliding their burdens on to the black polished board in such a way that each guest soon had before him a monstrous receptacle that might have held a whole sheep or stag. A party of slaves then leapt on the table and arranged themselves one behind each dish, grasping the handle of the cover. The young boys meanwhile went round, placing ready to each guest's hand a hunting knife.

Count Hans von Hackelnberg rose slowly to his feet; his officers sprang up and stepped back from the table, while the guests, more or less steadily, followed their host's example and stood, leaning and swaying and looking wonderingly from the Count to the dishes in front of them. The bugles blew one ringing peal and were silent.

«Gentlemen!» cried the Count in a voice like the bellow of a bull, «I invite you to partake of the game you have shot!»

The serfs in unison heaved up the dish-covers and swung them high above their heads, and then filed swiftly away down the middle of the table.

Exposed on the dish then in front of each guest was the 'bird' he had bagged at the end of the morning's drive, plucked of her feathers now, all but her beaked mask, and trussed tightly, knees to chin, wrists to ankles. The forester officers deftly moved away the chairs behind the guests, and with a gesture or two indicated where the 'bird's' bonds might be slit with the knife; then discreetly nodded towards the convenient alcoves behind.

The guests seemed to be too astonished to take these suggestions in for a moment; then the Gauleiter, on the Count's right, having before him a fine bronzed creature with the vividly ornamented mask of a wild turkey-cock glowing against the pale spread of her own abundant blond hair, broke into loud guffaws and leaned forward to pinch his 'bird's' rounded thigh.

Some of the others cheered lustily and flourished their knives, but before any of them could cut the cords of his fowl, Hans von Hackelnberg had hammered on the table with the pommel of his hanger.

«Gentlemen!» he bellowed again, and complete silence and stillness followed on his command.

«Gentlemen!» said the Count, in a more human tone, though still speaking loudly enough for us to hear every word in our little chamber, and with such deliberation and force that I could follow practically all he said: «I hope you may enjoy the carving of your birds as much as you did the shooting of them. The game is yours; let each man satisfy his appetite in the way he likes best, and if anybody finds the meat not tender enough for his liking, my young men will take some of the tough skin off for him.» He pointed to his chief forester, who, grinning, picked up a dog-whip and drew the lash slowly through his fingers. «But,» roared the Count, suddenly violently imperious again, «before you fall to, I invite you to come with me and see some of this same appetising flesh in a different hide. Restrain your appetites, gentlemen, for ten minutes, and I will show you a spectacle of womanhood which, I warrant, will put a keener edge on them. Bitte! Herr Gauleiter!»

He took the Gauleiter by the arm and marched him off to the main door of the hall, below the range of our view. The officers took the other guests in hand, and these, more bewildered by this sudden balking of their sport than they had been even by the unexpected offer of it, were shepherded in a puzzled and ineffectually enquiring flock from the hall, leaving their untasted delicacies to cool, as it were, on the plate under the eyes of the young forester-pages, who prepared to lounge out the interval which wine-cups in their hands on the skin-covered daises.

As the guests herded out of the hall the torch-bearers on the two long cornices turned left and right, and marched out through openings in the angles at the ends of their stone shelves, leaving only a third of their number still immobile on the end cornices to illuminate the hall.

The Doctor swore petulantly at finding the entertainment interrupted when it had scarcely begun. Then he plucked me urgently by the sleeve, whispering, «Let's go down and get a drink, at least, before they come back.» And he promptly began to pull me along the narrow passage from our chamber.

I had no choice but to follow, but managed to enquire why we should not go and see the other spectacle. «No, no, no!» cried the Doctor with surprising vehemence. «I will not! For God's sake, let's get a drink!»

He tumbled down the spiral staircase, and I hard on his heels, but before we reached the outer air I had resolved to give him the slip. The yellow torches, formed into two regular lines, were moving with a steady pace through the dark some little distance from the hall; there was a considerable crowd of serfs and other indistinctly seen people standing about the end of the building, and as the Doctor scurried round to gain the main door, I had no difficulty in shaking off his hold on my sleeve and mingling with the silent crowd. I did not even hear him call after me as I shouldered my way through the serfs and hurried after the torches. I think he was too afraid of the darkness of the Schloss to stay out of the Hall by himself.

I caught the tail of the procession in a few minutes and attached myself to a knot of forester officers who were bringing up the rear. No one took any notice of me, though the light from the torches that flanked the party must have shown them my face and my plain costume. The silver-skinned girls, who looked as tall as grenadiers now that I was close beside them, marched with a deliberate ceremonial step, lifting their knees high at each pace, staring straight to their front and bearing their torches stiffly and steadily. The foresters conversed a little among themselves in low tones, but the guests, cooled by the night air, were strangely silent, and Count von Hackelnberg, still gripping the Gauleiter by the arm, stalked ahead, towering over everyone, and offering not a word of explanation.

We proceeded in this way for some hundreds of yards, until, judging by the tall hedges we had passed, I guessed that we had gone somewhere to one side of the game-park I had seen that morning. The two files of torch-bearers here began to wheel left and right, while the Count and the rest of us stopped and watched them until they had inclined again and formed a large oval ahead of us. Then the Count, with the first note of joviality I had heard from him, bade his guests be seated.

I edged forward and saw under the torchlight a broad bank of turf rimming the lip of a curious oval pit. The Count drew down the Gauleiter to sit beside him on the inner edge of the bank, and the rest of the company ranged themselves, with a little guidance by the foresters, to left and right. I moved quietly off to one end of the line and looked down. The girls now sloped their long torches forward so that the cressets overhung the pit and brightly illuminated it The sides were fifteen or twenty feet high, revetted with smooth white boards, and the floor of the pit was carpeted with closely cropped turf. At each end was an iron grille closing a subterranean passage, It was in miniature a Roman circus, though plain and rustic.

A horn suddenly blew with a high, wild blast that pierced and chilled me. I jerked my head involuntarily round, as everyone else did–as even the torch-bearers must have done, for a dipping wave of movement ran round the ring of cressets. Count von Hackelnberg had risen to his feet and had put his lips to a great, curling silver horn whose shining circle passed over his shoulder and round his body. He blew with all the power of his lungs, and the loud, clamouring urgency of his blast, so near, so wildly returned upon us by the close crowding woods, was well-nigh unbearable.

As it died I heard the rattle of one of the grilles opening. Out into the redly lit oval of turf came three young men, all clad from head to foot in suits of that strange armour I had seen in the keeper's room in the morning. I saw now it was not steel or other metal, but some material which, though obviously hard and tough, was flexible enough to allow them to move easily and lightly. The foremost two carried whips with long, heavy lashes of plaited leather, the third led two fallow does, two gentle, fat, dappled creatures, with silk ribbons round their necks.

They walked into the centre of the arena and stood there. The does trembled a little and pressed close to the keeper who held them by their ribbons; they turned their large ears apprehensively and lifted their heads with big, liquid, dark eyes that shone green for a second now and again as the torchlight filled them.

Von Hackelnberg blew another blast, short, high, peremptory, and before it had ceased I heard the response to it. That same savage caterwauling that I had heard in the morning, rising now to a shrill pitch of lust or hunger, came screaming nearer and nearer behind the second grille; there was the same horrible undertone of half-human babbling, but louder and more insistent now, the high, spiteful screeching which had so jangled the Doctor's nerves.

The grille was raised with a jerk and a clang, and there bounded into the pit some twenty large animals.

Cheetahs, I thought them for a second, springing forward with such eagerness they seemed to run upon their hind legs. But even before I clearly saw that they were not animals I heard great gusts of laughter from the Count and knew what he had intended by interrupting the lecherous pleasure of his flabby guests. The beautiful spotted coats shining sleek in the light below us were taut-stretched on the backs and full-rounded breasts of a troop of young women so matched in size and age and proportions that they must have been sought and selected with connoisseur's care among all the slave-breeding farms of the Greater Reich. They were strong and shapely, not fat, but in such perfect fullness of health and condition that the smooth curves of their limbs and bodies roused all the excitement that rare feminine beauty can, while the play of the muscles, flexing and flowing under the bright sun-tanned skin awoke in me something beyond admiration, an awe-no, ultimately a fear– of the power, the wild-beast power of sudden savage exertion, that those superficially lovely and womanly forms possessed. In repose they would have been models for a sculptor of ideal feminine beauty, but as they bounded into that arena, circling it with a fluid speed of movement almost too quick for the eye to follow, they were utterly unhuman: women transformed by a demonic skill in breeding and training into great, supple, swift and dangerous cats.

Their heads and necks were covered by a close-fitting helmet of spotted skin which bore the neat, rounded ears of a leopard, but the oval of the face was exposed, and each face as I saw it upturned to the lights was contorted in a grin, with red lips drawn back from strong white teeth, and in each pair of eyes a pale glitter of pure madness. Their screaming whimper now sounded like a lunatic song, and the babbling undercurrent seemed a crazy, tumultuous speech. I remembered the Doctor's remark about the dumb slaves and guessed that the surgeons had operated on these women too.

The tight skin jerkins covered their shoulders and arms and their bodies as far as the lower ribs; behind, they were shaped to a point terminating just above the buttocks, and from this swung a short-haired tail. Their feet and ankles were cased in a kind of high moccasins of the same spotted skin. But the feature of their costume that caught my eye at once and held it most was the queer gloves in which their tight sleeves ended. There was a shine of metal there, and hard as it was to keep my eye on the hands of any one of them as they raced and bounded about the pit, I could make out that each had fastened on her hands a pair of the strange, hook-like contraptions I had seen in the keeper's room. Imagine four curving strips of steel joined to some kind of flexible base-plate and one opposable strip fixed at the side, all arranged exactly in the pattern of a human hand, but each strip provided with a leopard-claw of steel with a hollow base to admit the last joint of each finger and thumb, and the whole thing worn inside the hand and fastened firmly with straps across the wrist, the back of the hand and each finger. I saw that the steel must be of spring temper, for they could half double their fists, and in their running they frequently went for a moment or two on all fours, touching the ground with their knuckles, and I distinctly heard then the slight click of the steel claws glancing together as one ran in that way beneath me.

As soon as the 'cats' had entered the pit the three foresters had come together in a knot in the middle; there, two of them, like a pair of ring-masters in a circus, facing outwards, kept the troop circling round, the length of their whip-lashes away from the centre, while the third held the two does, which plunged and struggled in an extreme of terror. The 'cats' were only half-trained, and it was as much as both keepers could do by constant exercise of their whips to keep them from breaking their sinuously flowing circuits and rushing into the centre. Each time one darted in, the heavy lash shot out, expertly cutting at her unprotected loins and rump, and at each crack and sound of the biting impact the screaming of all the rest rose wildly higher and higher, while she who felt the whip bounded high, dancing with pain and rage, shrieking and spitting and shaking her flashing steel claws in fury at the keepers. And above all that screaming I heard, gust upon gust, the tremendous laughter of Hans von Hackelnberg.

The keepers kept their cats racing round the walls of the pit until the sweat glistened on their thighs and their breasts heaved. Then the Count winded his horn once more, standing and blowing a long-drawn-out note with a dying close, the lamenting and receding music of the Mort.

As soon as he began to blow, the unbearable screaming in the pit below diminished to an eager whimpering, and as he finished the three keepers leapt aside and darted to the open grille.

Immediately and quite silently, more terrifying in their silent, swift intentness than in all their rage, the cats rushed in upon the two does. The poor animals sprang high into the air, but the bright steel claws swept and slashed, gripped and sank deep into neck and legs and ripped open belly and flanks. There was a moment of horrible, packed writhing of bodies, of vigorous thrusting of legs and haunches as heads and arms went down fiercely busy into the centres of two groups of cats; my nostrils were filled suddenly with the stench of warm entrails and I backed from the edge of the pit. A moment or two later the cats were scattered all about the turf, oblivious of their keepers now, tearing and gulping raw flesh gripped in their reddened talons. The only sound was the sucking and slobbering of their mouths or a low snarl as one brushed by another. Blood dabbled all their faces, the breasts and arms of their sleek coats and the clear bright brown of their bellies and smooth thighs.

Hans von Hackelnberg gave a hearty shout: «Es ist zu Ende! Komm, meine Herren!» The foresters jumped up, the torch-bearers turned and began to march off in two files back to the Hall again; the guests, in complete silence, shuffled with averted heads past the towering Count who stood waiting to bring up the rear, grinning and shaking with laughter, looking down on his deflated little flock of bullies with ferocious amusement. They had not the air of men going to enjoy the rest of a night's frolic I saw our own fat little sportsman of the morning, held up between two foresters, being miserably sick under a tree.

I lingered until the last pairs of torch-bearers were moving off from the bank of turf, hoping that von Hackelnberg would follow his guests, but some brilliant white lanterns were beginning to shine at the edge of the pit now, and fearing to be shown up, isolated and conspicuous, I attached myself to the last knot of four or five young foresters and marched past the Count with my head bent.

I thought I had passed him unnoticed, when a great hand on my shoulder stopped me as suddenly as if I had collided with the down-bending branch of an oak-tree. He wheeled me about, demanding to know who I was, and I found myself looking into that tawny forked beard, that wide, grinning mouth and those hot eyes from a distance of two feet. Abruptly, with his other hand he arrested the last torch-bearer, whose cresset swung above us and then shone steadily down on my face. The Count repeated his question in a voice of loud menace. The foresters closed in round us and, looking helplessly from side to side, I recognised one of the boys who had been in the butt with us that morning. Before I could collect enough German in my mind to begin to answer, he had explained. But I saw him tap his forehead as he talked, and the Count interrupted him, crying: «I know! I know!» Then, to me, gripping as though he would break the bones of my shoulder: «So! Thou art an escaper from prisons? Eh? Thy lust is to be free? So thou shalt be. Free of the forest! Drive him to the woods, boys! Turn him loose to find his fodder with the deer!»

He sent me staggering with a thrust of his arm, and the foresters at once seized me. I resisted them, instinctively, but they overpowered me. I had the sense to see the futility of exhausting myself in a struggle there and so controlled my temper and allowed them to lead me away.