The Sound of His Horn (3 page)

I had no illusions about the difficulty of pushing through forest at night, and I had tried to get in as much road-travelling as I thought was safe. I felt I might risk an encounter with peasants or the civil police on the small country roads, for the news of our escape would possibly be late in reaching them and I was cheerfully confident of being able to give a passable imitation of a foreign first mate who'd been on the booze and missed his train, or got out at the wrong station and was setting off to find the right one. I've met a number of such in my time.

There's something to be said for pine-forests. They're infernally dark, but they're much freer of undergrowth than broad-leaved woods. It was not at all easy going on that first leg of my hike and I began to feel that I had underestimated the effect two years of prison fare had had on my strength, but, though it took me nearer five hours than three to reach my road, I did reach it, and, what surprises me more when I look back on it, pretty well at the exact spot where I had reckoned I should. True, I had my compass, but I think I must have had more than my due of what they used to say was the most useful of the Mariner's Aids to Navigation--a bit of damn good luck.

It was a relief to be on the road and to have something to check my position by. I rested a little and ate something, but I dare not take it easy if I was to get into the forest again by daylight. Well, you can imagine the ache of that night hike for yourself: it was worse than any of the trips we ever did together in the old days. Every time I saw a car's headlights I had to creep into an orchard or crouch in the ditch till it was past, and those changes from straight rhythmic slogging became more and more of an agony as the night went on. Once or twice, when I forced myself to get up out of the ditch again, I thought I should never get my legs to work or beat down the burning pain of my blisters again. I can tell you, by the time the sky was turning grey I didn't much care how soon they recaptured me. All I really cared about was stopping walking and getting a drink.

That was my second miscalculation. I had not brought a bottle of water with me so as not to have too much to carry; I had reckoned that in Europe one would never be far from some moderately potable water. It's not so: at least, it seems not to be so in Eastern Europe. I was dodging the villages, of course, and in that sandy region I suppose you don't get brooks and ponds, only wells, and those, naturally, are where the farms are.

I reached my further belt of forest without any very serious alarm, though the sun was well up when I got there. I could see a small farm not far away, with a very tempting-looking cattle-trough in a paddock, but I daren't try to sneak down and have a drink: the day was too far advanced, and even though I could see no one about, there was sure to have been a dog. The best I could do was to limp up into the shade of the pine-trees and crawl about gathering and chewing blades of the pale grass that grew here and there under them.

I rested all that day in the coolest place I could find; I was too parched and sick with fatigue to eat, but I slept--in the uneasy way you do when you are overstrained. The blisters and the aching muscles and the drought of your throat seem to stimulate your brain to activity, while the will, or whatever it is that selects and disciplines thought, is too weary to assert itself. You know the feeling--as if your mind were a cinema projector that has suddenly become animate, taken charge of the proceedings, kicked the operator downstairs and settled down to churn out miles and miles of film for its own devilish amusement, accelerating all the time. I can't remember any of the details of the near-nightmares I had that day in the fringes of that pine-forest, but I can remember the burden of them on my mind, the awful number and speed of them.

Well, perhaps it was that that began it--the great physical strain and the acute anxiety underlying it all. It had not occurred to me that I shouldn't be strong enough. Perhaps I should have stuck with Jim Long.

When it was dusk I pulled myself together and set off again. But this night it was very different. I had lost confidence in my physical ability to carry the thing through, and that was a great shock to me. It was the first time in my life that my body had refused to do something I demanded of it, and the revolt demoralised me. Instead of studying to economise my strength I perversely over-drove myself. And it's no wonder, I suppose, if I got off my course. I had to steer due north, but time and again I came to deep gulleys and ravines that made me wander far off to one side or the other, looking for easy crossing-places; sometimes I saw a light in a clearing and still had determination and courage enough to make a painful detour instead of groping straight towards it and giving myself up.

My memory became confused; the clearings were the only things I had to check my course and progress by and I could not remember how many I had passed or identify them on the map. I used up all my matches trying to study the thing, but I was in such a state of exhaustion and distress that I could scarcely read, let alone reason.

At length, I came into a sandy track on which the moonlight fell clear and strong. It ran somewhat east of north, but the smooth straight way and the light, after the roughness of the dark forest, were such a temptation to me that I could not resist following it. There were wagon-ruts and hoofmarks in the sand. I supposed the track must lead to a farm, but I was beyond caring. I trudged straight along it.

Little by little, I remember, my mind became calmer, and no doubt because of the easier going, and the regular rhythm that was possible, I fell into a kind of automatic action. I began the old, childish trick of repeating something to myself to keep time with my footfalls: meaningless phrases at first, and then, verses. You know the ballad of the Nut Brown Maid? Four lines of that went thump, thump, thump, through my brain, like the dull beat of an engine carrying me on God knows how many miles:

"For an Outlaw this is the law,

That men him take and bind,

And hanged be without pitee,

To waver with the wind."

It's still a wonder to me that under the mechanical, syllabic pounding I made of the verses I did think of the sense sometimes, and I felt a queer, new pathos in them. That coupling of outlawry and pity: I had never thought of that before. The man who wrote that ballad knew that outlaws weren't romantic heroes, all they wanted was pity. Ah, the great cruelty of outlawry in shutting the gates of common men's pity against you.

Had that narrow track led me to a farm, I think I would have leant with my head upon the door and begged for the peasants' pity; but it led to no human habitation.

After a very long time, I felt the dark walls of the forest recede from me. I stopped and became aware that my track had led me up on to a low wide ridge, bare of trees, covered with coarse grass as high as my knees. I have often wondered how much of that scene I really saw that night. I can say what I later knew to be there--or thought I knew. I know exactly how it looked to the eyes I had on the other side--if you understand me--but I'd give anything to be able to recollect precisely what I saw with my real vision--the vision I'm using now. The trouble is, I suppose, that I had been going gradually round the bend all that night. The fatigue and anxiety had found out my flaw and were extending it all the time, until, just about when I reached that open ridge the fissure in my mind was complete. When the earth is opening under you, what decides which side you jump to?

The moonlight seemed bright enough. I thought I saw a long, grassy hog's-back running north-west and south-east. The grass was ungrazed and untrodden, grey under the moon with the white grass-flowers seeming to make a milky shimmer over it. My track had faded away. It occurred to me, I know, that for some time past I had not been following the wagon-ruts, but where they had turned off I could not recall.

I must have advanced to the middle of that broad open ride--fire-lane, or whatever it was--before I stopped, because I could see the forest on the other side, sloping far away, down from the bare ridge. But no real moonlight, in Europe, at least, could have been strong enough to allow me to see those other woods so clearly: it was as if I saw them under a fresh, gay summer's morning, and ah--they were such different woods; not black, monotonous pine-forest, but a fair greenwood of oak and beech and ash and sweet white-flowering hawthorn. It was so enormous a contrast: the difference between night and day, between prison and freedom, between death and life. And looking down from my low ridge, I could just see, over the tops of the nearer trees on that side, a pleasant open glade and in that glade the pale shining of water in a little lake. It was agony to set my legs in motion once more; it felt as if my muscles had turned to stone; but I moved, straight down towards that glint of water.

There was one other thing I saw, and, again, I'd give so much to know which eyes I saw it with; for in my heart I'm still not convinced that the shock I received was real. But all I know is that I did notice something there, between me and those inviting woods, something at odds with experience; a phenomenon that would have been unremarkable enough in a dream and which might yet be not impossible in reality. I felt, as I stumped so painfully down that gentle slope, that in front of me there was a kind of weaker light within the moonlight, some zone of faint luminosity stretching far away on either hand, not straight, like a searchlight beam, but slightly meandering as though it followed the contour of the ridge. I know it's inconsistent with physical laws that so feeble a radiance could be visible in the stronger light of the moon, and yet I swear I was aware of it. Was I outlawed indeed by then, not from man's laws but from Nature's?

Nothing could have kept me from trying to reach that water. Once over the first agony of moving my limbs again, I broke into a stumbling run. I must have gone like a blind man, with my arms stretched out, groping, in front of me, for it was in my hands that I felt the shock first. It was a searing burn across my hands and wrists, then a shock that jarred along every bone in my body and shattered its way upwards, tearing out at the top of my skull; my eyes were pierced by a pain of yellow light, and my body, bereft of all its weight and cohesion, went whirling and spiralling upwards like a gas into the dark.

* * *

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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