In the grey of the morning, Philip Hands heard the hoofs of horses strike hard and clattering on the cobbles of that small inner courtyard. He strode to the window and fell back with an oath of horror that seemed to be shaken out of the very pit of his stomach. He grasped at both his eyes with the palms of his hands. In the dim white small courtyard stood two grotesque shapes, two indescribable, ghostly, black simulacra of horses. Black trappings covered them from their heads right down to the ground, so that they resembled the sable ghosts of chargers upon which medieval knights must have ridden, whilst from socketless eyeholes they appeared to shed hollow, forbidding, and unspeakably mournful glances. They seemed to be the apparitions of horses that had been dead five hundred years, and for the moment Philip Hands’ whole brain seemed to be turning round inside his head. What was he looking at? There was no knowing what didn’t survive, what mightn’t survive in this extraordinary, oldfashioned Grand Duchy. It was one half modern quick-firing guns of deadly precision and the other half peasants in three cornered hats, short jackets, knee-breeches and stockings with ribands at the knee, practising the most old-fashioned ceremonials, gifted as they were said to be, all of them, with second sight, and perceiving daily in their thick and fantastic woods all the hob-goblins of Grimm, the spectres of the Brocken and the ghostly charcoal burners of the Harz mountains. There was no knowing what old, forgotten horrors, what dim fragments of the spectral past might not here survive along with the high explosives of the forbidden valley. In Central Africa, as he had read that morning, in a deep lake, they had discovered, still surviving, a monstrous prehistoric lizard that was said to be a survival of the first slime of the world—a monstrous scaled animal like a winged tortoise, as large as a town hall, and with jaws as deep as a cathedral portal. And this absurd forgotten country was as little explored as Central Africa. Why, the peasants still sacrificed mares and buried them beneath the corner posts of their houses, as they had done in the pagan days of Odin, thousands of years before the birth of Christ.
***
Altogether, Mr. Philip Hands passed a very bad night of it—a night of which not even his morning bath could altogether wash out the traces. Of course, upon taking a second view of the horses, he had perceived behind them an elaborate, ebony, gilded and glazed structure, and shortly afterwards four men in their shirtsleeves carrying down a coffin of polished brass, with bright steel handles. And he had realised that they were merely carrying away to an early train, for trans-shipment to Berlin, where the funeral was to take place in the Hedwigskirche, the body of Hofrath von Kellermann who had died, according to the official bulletin, of lesion of the brain the day before. But even that, though it was commonplace, was disagreeable. For, in spite of the discreet official silence and the removal of the body in early hours of the morning, the rumour ran among the assistants and servants of the place that the body of the Hofrath had been horribly mangled and crushed out of all human semblance. He was supposed, in fact, to have escaped from his attendants and, wandering into the forbidden valley, to have been crushed by one of the huge rocks that hurtled through space from the blastings in the forgotten fir woods.
Whilst Philip Hands sat in the large courtyard in the rain beneath the awning of the bandstand, waiting in the drip and depression of it all for the Sanitätsrath to come from his mother’s room, a new and equally horrible surmise crossed his mind. Supposing that Annette, wandering too, into the deep woods, had been crushed by such a fall of rock, or had even witnessed the death of that unfortunate man? And the thought of this was so much more than he could bear, that he got up and began to pace up and down amongst the wet tables and chairs beneath the dripping awning. From the distant fir woods to right and to left the mysterious sounds of the quarries in the Driesel called from time to time like immense, rustling, human voices.
And suddenly, Mr. Hands perceived Annette von Droste in her white dress, half covered in a brown mackintosh. She came out of the door of her father’s rooms on the opposite side of the courtyard, and made for the small nun’s postern that gave on to the deep woods.
Philip followed her over the wet gravel of the Platz. He soon checked himself, but he could not have told you exactly why. Yesterday, perhaps he would have followed her without hesitation; to-day he was a rejected suitor! And yet he could not but feel, he had an irresistible impulse to believe, that in her white dress and brown mackintosh she was going into danger. The idea, indeed, came to him that she was going to meet the mad Grand Duke!
Suddenly, round the corner that led to his mother’s room, there came, with an odd air of its being a procession, Dr. von Salzer, with his long, foamlike beard, and Philip Hands’ little, old, and much loved, mother. Behind them followed Dr. Salzer’s assistant, a short-sighted blond young man with a face like a bun, and large gold spectacles. He was called Schultz, and he was pushing before him a light bath-chair with spider wheels and rubber tyres. It was usual at this hour for Dr. Salzer to approach Philip, and to give him encouraging news of his mother’s progress. To-day, therefore, Philip hurried towards them. The rain had ceased, though heavy drops fell from all the gutters, and the noises no longer came from the forbidden valley.
Philip’s mother was a little old woman, very bent with age, but with a quaint manner that was half dictatorial and half humourous.Her eyes always twinkled; her cheeks were of the texture of a red and shrivelled apple and she spoke always with a very clear and fluting intonation, turning her head a little on one side, like a bird that surveys you from its perch. But for all her quaint precision and her air of tranquil widowhood, Philip Hands was aware that this most sane of creatures heard voices and saw appalling visions of demons that resembled the images of Buddhist temples. She had heard and seen them ever since his father had been murdered beneath her eyes in China.
“Tell Dr. von Salzer,” she cried, before Philip had reached them, “that I am perfectly capable of walking two and a half miles. I do not need this grotesque machine to follow behind me.” The Sanitätsrath combed his long beard with three fingers, and holding its ends together, looked with a long glance at Philip Hands. “Ah!” he said. “Yes.” He spoke very slowly, but with a sort of lisp. “But this is a very special duty, this is a very special test. This is, if you will be pleased to let me call it so, the great test of the cure that I make.”
“Nevertheless,” the little old woman piped out, “I am perfectly able to walk two and a half miles.”
“Ah, gracious lady,” the doctor said, and he surveyed her a long time and enigmatically. “But will you be able to walk back, that is the question?”
“If I am not able to walk back,” she replied, “I shan’t be worth carrying back upon a velocipede.”
The Sanitätsrath slowly shrugged his shoulders up to his ears, and as slowly let them fall. He glanced at her and then quickly at her son.
“But it is I that must take the responsibility,” he said, “and I prefer not to take it.”
“Then, if I am to faint or do anything unseemly,” Mrs. Hands exclaimed in English, “I am not going to have this young man with the spectacles observing me in disorder.”
The Sanitätsrath bowed his back so that his beard appeared to be about to sweep the ground.
“Gracious lady,” he said, “it was my intention from the first to wheel you back myself, for I do not permit even my excellent colleague Schultz to penetrate into the arcana of my mysteries. Besides,” he added, “it is very dangerous.”
“If there is any danger for my mother—” Philip Hands exclaimed.
“Very excellent Mr. Second Secretary of Legation,” the Sanitätsrath said, very softly, “it is impossible that there should be no danger. In all the things of this life there is danger, and living itself is a dangerous operation. But it is equally impossible that you should accompany us.”
Philip’s mother’s cheek balls were of a flush that indicated very much of inward excitement.
“It’s quite impossible that you should come with me,” she said to her
son. “It’s kill or cure, as they used to say with the Kildarragh hounds, and it’s not I that am going to cumber the ground.”
“Oh, it will be cure, it will be cure,” the Sanitätsrath lisped softly, and he appeared to push the little old woman gently by the arm across the Platz. They moved away from Philip very slowly, as if they were a shooting party going to execution with the passive and silent Dr. Schultz pushing the bath-chair in the rear for all the world as if he were carrying the coffin in which to bring back a corpse. They were going towards the main archway of the convent, and Philip Hands suddenly strode off towards the postern gate, through which half an hour before Annette von Droste had disappeared. His mother and the Sanitätsrath refused to allow him to follow them and he was too well disciplined to attempt to disobey their orders. But now he was going to do something.
He was in an extraordinary state of nervous tension. As soon as he was outside the gate, the silence of the deep fir woods closed upon him. The dark branches of the trees brushed against the very walls. From the gate a dark path through the woods led straight to the village of Bortshausen five miles away in an open valley beyond the range. The woods and paths on the right-hand side—those that descended the valley—were all open to the guests of the Bath. But on the left the woods were forbidden ground, for they ascended into the valley behind the convent. On this side every second tree bore a label with the word Schonung painted upon it, and the word Schonung meant that this was preserved land—as who should say “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” And it occurred to Mr. Hands at that moment that the ground upon which the convent stood must have been built right across the valley like a dam, a bulwark erected even in the old days when the convent had been first built, to prevent access to the valley itself. This was absurd—for parts of the convent were six hundred years old, and there could not have been at that date any quarries or high explosives. Nevertheless, the thought was oppressive.
It was as if for centuries and centuries the valley with its deep woods had concealed secrets which the nuns and the Church formerly, and now Dr. Salzer and the authorities of the Grand Duchy, desired to keep from the world. Absurd! Yet there the convent was upon its high dam right across the valley, with the fir woods brushing its walls. And at the bottom of the embankment was a tunnel through which the mountain torrents from the valley burst downwards towards the open plains. Thus, upon the one side of the buildings it was all light and openness, for they stood very high; to the rear it was all silence, darkness and deep woods. An ominous and depressing thought—for Philip Hands was certain that it was into these woods that Annette had gone. Placards bearing the words Schonung would be sufficient to prevent an army of orderly Germans from penetrating into those woods, but Annette, for all her good old German name, was three parts of a gipsy. She was certainly there. And Philip Hands was so assured of this that he climbed the hill sharply along the path that led to Bortshausen. Half-way up this he knew, there was a pathway leading to the left before which, upon a tree, there was a placard with the words “Entrance Absolutely Forbidden. Very Dangerous Path.” Here also, there was a sort of shelter of boughs beneath which there stood always a man in the grey-green uniform of a ducal forester, with a blond bearded face, and a dark green hat decorated with a tuft of feathers. This man’s name was Hans Jorgenheim, and Philip knew him very well; he stopped almost every day to chat with him a little about the deer, wild boar, and wild cat, with which the forest abounded.
Philip Hands was going to ask him whether he had seen Annette pass that way, or whether he had heard her going through the woods below, for he knew perfectly well that the forester’s keen ears let him know from the cries of disturbed birds whatever passed in the woods immediately beneath his care.
But, even whilst he mounted the steep path, he heard the sound of heavy footsteps descending in a sort of clumsy gallop, as if a frightened beast were coming down the hill. And suddenly there burst upon him Hans Jorgenheim, his honest blue eyes dilated, his mouth open, his face all one great panic.
“Das Fraulein!” he exclaimed, and he caught heavily at a tree trunk to stop his downward career. “Das Fraulein! She has gone up the path amongst the horrible beasts that the Sanitätsrath keeps there.”
“And what then, idiot! Dog!” Philip Hands exclaimed. “Why did you not stop her?”
“Could I use physical force? Against an Excellency? A highborn lady? It is unthinkable.”
“But, where is she? Why did you not follow her?” Philip Hands shouted.
“That is against discipline,” the forester answered. “I have to find the Sanitätsrath and tell him.”
“Forester, you are a coward,” Philip Hands cried out. “You should have followed the lady, but you were afraid.”
The forester let go the tree and drew himself up to his six foot of green and grey.
“Well, yes, I was afraid!” he said. “Very afraid. I have my orders from the Grand Duke. From the Grand Duke himself. Excellency, go you yourself, and if I have the Sanitätsrath’s orders I will follow you.”
Philip thought quickly.
“The Sanitätsrath,” he said, “has gone out with my mother and a bath chair.” For it came into his mind that without doubt the forester would know which way the doctor had gone and would thus get orders from him the more quickly.
“Ah, then,” the forester exclaimed, “he has gone there by the lower path.” And suddenly he plunged in amongst the trees, crashing his way down behind the rear of the convent in the deep woods.
Philip Hands ran quickly up the steep path. It was a very steep ascent for a man not much in training, and the blood drummed in his ears. By the placard that bore the words “Entrance Absolutely Forbidden,” he paused to listen. There was nothing but the silence of the deep woods. There was no brook; there were no birds, even the heavy drip from the trees had ceased with the ceasing of the rain and a heavy mist clung all around him.
He turned into the narrow lateral path. He shuffled along as fast as he could, for he was very much out of breath still with the ascent. The path was very narrow and winding, and, as he got deeper in, the woods appeared infinitely old. The trees were black and twisted with age; ghostly lichen seemed to drip from their extended branches. They towered immensely high, so that their tops whispered unseen amongst the mists. And even as he hurried, Philip Hands was overwhelmed with the sense that he was being watched. He imagined that in all the shadows there were eyes, and from behind the stiff columnar trunks, unknown and forgotten men appeared to peep out at him. The doctor kept horrible beasts in these woods! The forester had said it. At any moment he might come upon them. . . . What might he not come upon? Two or three times he stopped to listen, but always there was the deep silence. The intolerable silence so absolutely solemn and assured, that it was a folly to imagine for your own comfort a sound that did not exist. Suddenly the path divided into two.
One arm went downwards sharply into the huge pines, and huge pines descended as sharply at his right hand without any path. He must be upon the top of the ridge of the valley divided into two. Before him the other arm of the path wound very steeply upwards, between a desolate underwood of brambles and beneath primeval hornbeams. Amongst flakes of shale and slaty rock, it climbed, almost erect, and zigzagging. There was no doubt about the path. There was a footstep in the black mud of a little rill and some bright scarlet toadstools that had formed a circle were broken, scattered, and gleamed white. Annette’s dress had brushed them like that. Annette had gone up that way. He panted up its tortuous steepness.
The bushes gleamed with drops of dew and spiders’ webs. In amongst a tangle of brambles he perceived the white skeleton of some beast. From the tusks in the skull it must have been that of a wild boar. Great fragments of rock were crushed all round it. Here and there branches had been ripped from the ancient trees, and white fissures showed down their green-grey trunks. He panted up the very steep and very slippery path. As high as he was, a considerable breeze was blowing and scattered the mist. T
he trees became thinner like old grey hair. He had glimpses of immense panoramas, of grey mountains, of long marching armies, of black fir woods. He was immensely high—so high up that he could perceive no villages. It was all grey silences and grey heights, and he was highest of them all. He felt himself to be in the highest place in the world, amongst the oldest silences. The path climbed still more steeply and suddenly in a desolate and mournful greyness of sky he came out upon a bare ridge of slate and shale like a hog’s back. This ridge descended, with a terrifying, slippery steepness of loose stones, upon each side into an odd, bare valley—each valley like a cup, lined with grey loose slates and thinly clothed with torn and shattered pines. A high ridge; the two desolate valleys—and above all the grey slag!
And forty yards before him, upon a pinnacle of basalt, silent and motionless, like a listening chamois, he perceived Annette von Droste. She gazed down first into one valley and then into another. Then, slowly she put her hands over her eyes. He ran towards her at the end of his breath, hardly keeping his feet upon the slippery and scattering flakes of stone, that seemed hideously set on letting him fall into the cup-like valleys. He would have fallen a hundred feet down into the shattered pines.
He climbed the pinnacle of basalt that went up like a building. Up there the footing was at least firm and flat as if it were a platform. He caught her in his arms. She screamed, a shrill and violent sound like the cry of an eagle, that dissipated itself in the tenuous and desolate air.
“Do not touch me,” she cried out. “I am mad. I have gone mad. Do not touch me! Look down! What do you see?”
The Best Crime Stories Ever Told Page 27
