The Horn of Roland

by Edith Pargeter

  It must be that marvellous high work on the horn, Una thought, touched and amused. Lu doesn’t always go to the trouble to charm the young. If only this boy could realise it, he has him tamed already. She saw the slightly dazed, childishly gratified glance that was flashed upwards into Lu’s face almost too quickly to be registered. She also saw the wide, candid mouth suppress its dazzled smile and set into even more obstinate determination. She had almost added her own persuasions, but she thought philosophically: If he won’t for Lu, he won’t for me!

  ‘I’m sorry!’ said Michael. ‘I’ve shut up shop for the night.’

  ‘I warn you,’ said Geestler with a shrug, ‘if you refuse to answer I shall have no choice but to keep you here until morning. I can’t send you ashore now to check your story, I simply haven’t the man-power. Supply all the details I’m asking for, and you can go. Refuse them, and you’ll have to stay here until morning.’

  ‘I’ve slept in worse places,’ Mike Brace admitted, and the irrepressible grin surfaced for a moment, and again submerged. He looked round appreciatively at the regal absurdities of the Himmelhof, and the dazed look reappeared. ‘They really lived like this?’

  ‘A handful did,’ said Lucas tartly. ‘The rest slaved for a bare existence, as usual. Don’t be silly, child! Trot out your credentials like a sensible fellow, and we’ll put you ashore by motor-boat, and tow your boat back to town tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he said, with every appearance of meaning it, ‘but no deal. I’ve stopped talking. You may as well accept that, because I mean it.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Geestler grimly. ‘If you change your mind, let us know. We’ll leave you within earshot, just in case. Take him along to the first empty room, Richard, the one with the sheer drop under the window. Lock him in.’

  ‘May I have my horn?’ asked Michael, too meekly.

  ‘On the whole,’ said Lucas, catching the irresponsible glint in the blue eye, ‘I think not. Some members of this household may want to sleep. And I don’t think any lullabies will be needed.’

  ‘Impossible!’ said Lucas firmly. ‘The passport is undoubtedly genuine, and the boy is unquestionably British, and almost certainly exactly what he says he is. He can’t be Valentine Gelder.’

  ‘I agree. So does my chief. But don’t forget this man has been in Austria three months, and refuses to tell us anything about his moves until he came to Gries. It is by no means impossible that he has been in contact with Gelder, and is being used by him now to sound out the approaches to this house. His connection with the orchestra may be for the same purpose. It is a way of getting close to you. If he had nothing to hide he would answer questions.’

  ‘He’s an extremely able musician, as we’ve heard for ourselves, and he wanted a job. I don’t feel we need any better reasons than that for his applying for an audition. After all, this festival has been widely advertised, and musical openings don’t grow on trees anywhere. I don’t deny,’ said Lucas ruefully, ‘he may well have something to hide. Which of us hasn’t? But criminal? – I doubt it! And certainly not as accomplice to Valentine Gelder.’

  It was past midnight, and they had argued back and forth over the same ground twice already, since the boy had been hustled away, and Dieter Wehrle, fully informed and to a large extent reassured, had approved his lieutenant’s proceedings and left the case of Michael Brace to his discretion. Lucas looked up at Crista Lohr, sitting withdrawn into the background as she always did, seeming to be at once among them and apart from them, her unsmiling quietness wrapped round her like a veil. When he caught her eyes they looked back at him with a shining gravity.

  ‘What do you think, Miss Lohr?’

  He was surprised himself that he had appealed to her. He had grown so accustomed to having her there close to him that he could no longer go on looking upon her simply as a piece of office equipment, without opinions. It began to annoy him that she should seem to be called into positive life only by the telephone, or an entry in her duty diary. Sometimes he even wanted her silence to be broken merely because the voice that emerged was so serious and warm; like her eyes, despite their determined aloofness.

  ‘I think,’ she said, after a moment’s hesitation, and very gravely, ‘that Valentine Gelder would not take an accomplice. I think he would not involve anyone but himself.’

  ‘And I agree with you entirely,’ said Lucas warmly. ‘An opponent punctilious enough to issue his challenges publicly and confirm them privately, as he’s done, isn’t the man to hire casual labour to help him out, or to entangle his friends, either. Whatever he means to do, I believe he intends this clash to be single combat – man to man.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Geestler firmly, ‘I can’t take any chances. If the young man had provided the details of his movements, I should have felt justified in letting him go back to his lodgings, though I should also have called my chief and seen to it that he was kept under observation until his story is checked. Since he apparently has something he feels compelled to hide, I cannot do anything else but hold him here until he can be escorted back to the town tomorrow, and his credentials tested. His presence here still seems to me suspicious.’

  ‘Musically,’ said Lucas with a faint smile, ‘it’s logical enough. Can you imagine practising the horn in a furnished room in the Kirchgasse? But I suppose sleeping overnight here won’t do him any harm.’ He rose, threading his fingers wearily through his hair, and looked at his watch. ‘Lord, it’s tomorrow already, I see!’

  ‘Heut’ oder Morgen!’ Today or tomorrow. If Valentine kept strictly and successfully to his timetable, this very day they would know.

  ‘Time I was in bed,’ he said. ‘Time we were all in bed. Whatever else happens, I’ve got a rehearsal this afternoon.’

  ‘You can sleep in peace, Richard and I will be keeping watch in turns. But behind locked doors,’ said Geestler drily, ‘if you please.’

  Lucas went out along the colonnade to his own room, and the other young man, patrolling the terrace below, gave him a quick smile and an airy salute in passing. Richard Schwalbe, the ‘dark swallow’. Valentine had been dark, that he had not forgotten, dark and lean, like this one. Gay and yet taciturn, like this one. Did Wehrle know the antecedents of all his young men, back to their fathers and grandfathers?

  The trouble with his situation, he thought, closing the door of his room behind him, and remembering for Geestler’s sake rather than his own to turn the key in the lock, was that one began to peer into the face of every young man one met, looking for an enemy. At first with understandable wariness, even fear. But to some degree that seemed to be passing. He thought the time might even come when he would be scrutinising the young faces he encountered just as intently, looking for a friend, since he would by that time be looking not merely for the physical likeness of Valentine, but for his flesh and blood and the inheritor of his mind, a second Valentine. What did one say to such a match, such an opponent, on recognition?

  He had brought Mike Brace’s horn away with him into this locked sanctuary, unconsciously making it a duty to take care of another man’s treasure as he would of his own. It had no case here, that must be in the boat, he supposed. They hadn’t given the boy much time to think of details like that, the least Lucas could do was to make himself responsible. He ran a finger round the bell, and ran a finger-nail against its rim, drawing a small, rounded note of music.

  At least he had heard that death-song played superlatively, and not even in innocence of its difficulties, as heaven-protected idiots skate happily immune over tissue-thin ice. No, the boy knew what he had done, knew what he meant to do. Somewhere at the back of a mind too young and blithe to brood about it, he had even grasped the significance of those cries which were not of defiance, not of heroic resolution, not of superhuman welcome to death and glory, but something much stranger and dual: the passionate protest of an ordinary, life-loving creature resisting and rejecting death with all his force, and at the same time the involuntary cry of
self-realisation and wonder, as he found himself moving implacably, not away from it, but towards it.

  Half-asleep, Lucas thought: I’m glad I was never a hero. They don’t even know how much goes by them unrecognised!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Una waited until everything was silent, sitting fully-dressed on her bed. She was glad now that Crista, after her self-effacing fashion, had taken it for granted she should not presume to share this room, though there were two beds in it. More surprising was that she herself had not overruled these scrupulous arrangements; perhaps because she did not care to give the impression that she needed company for reassurance in this situation, perhaps because of a lingering doubt whether Crista did not, in reality, prefer to be alone. Now it suited her very well that she occupied, in splendid isolation, the last of the rooms prepared for their accommodation, next to the first of the long sequence that were empty – though to judge by the general state of the house it would be empty only of modern amenities, otherwise rather over-furnished than under. In the room next door to hers the young man called Mike Brace was incarcerated.

  She had already examined the outlook from her window, earlier in the evening, and the curve of the outer wall turned the neighbouring window somewhat away from her own. Better, probably, from the room on the other side, which was smaller, and less affected by the alignment of the wing. There, too, she would be further away from her father and Crista, who, she hoped, were already sleeping.

  Though she did not herself believe in it, it was still a possibility that this supposedly English boy somehow had access to papers forged with sufficient expertise to make him whatever he wanted to be. It was even a possibility – stretching drama to its limit, and why not, when they were operating so near the limit already? – that he was Valentine Gelder. How can you find out for certain? Ask him a question like that, and whatever the truth, he must and will say no, of course he isn’t. Ask him if he knows the name, and whatever he answers, the tone of his voice may have something to say. But Una wanted to talk to him, whether he was or not. He was a captive audience now, he would have to listen. If he was sane, he could be convinced; and if she could manage to convince him, there was everything to gain. For him, as well as for Lucas.

  And if, as she felt in her bones, he wasn’t Valentine? What was there to lose, in that case? And perhaps an ally to gain. They could do with genuine allies.

  She unlocked the door of her room cautiously, bracing her left hand over her right to ease the turning of the key. There was almost no sound. When it was done she opened the door a crack, and again listened, but everything was silent. She slipped out into the corridor, taking the key with her, felt her way in the faintly luminous darkness past the one door between, and let herself into the room she had chosen, shutting herself in silently.

  The lambent light from the water, still fed with a few fixed stars from the distant shore, lanced in through the window and trembled across the painted ceiling. Una groped her way between draped furniture that smelled of satin upholstery, and wood-gilt, and dust. The window gave easily to her hand, and she looked out over the rocky drop below, not sheer but descending in broken ledges and spiky pinnacles towards the water. She didn’t know whether she would be able to reach the window of the room next door, or whether she would have to call to him. If she did, would he hear? Without waking anyone else? If there was a bed in there he might be fast asleep, with the window half-closed against the night, and tired young men sleep soundly.

  She need not have worried. As soon as she leaned out and looked along the peeling outer wall to the next window on her right, she saw that he was there, leaning on his folded arms, contemplating the distant and inaccessible prospect of Gries, now reduced to a few scattered lights on the far shore. She pushed the window wide, and leaned out on a level with him, kneeling as he must be kneeling; and at the slight sound she made he looked round sharply, his head braced warily.

  ‘Oh!’ he said blankly. ‘It’s you.’ And he smiled; even in the dark it was a wide, bright smile. ‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘Nice to see you again so soon.’

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Una, just above a whisper.

  ‘Nothing I’d like better. I wish you’d begin,’ he said plaintively, ‘by telling me what all this is about. What am I supposed to have done, and to whom, and how does Lucas Corinth figure in it? If he really is Lucas Corinth?’

  ‘He is,’ she said. ‘He’s my father.’ She was wondering how to set about this, and how much of what seemed crystal truth about this young man could safely be believed. ‘Didn’t you really know, until Crista called him by his name?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t. Why should I? I suppose I must have seen pictures of him sometimes, but not all that often, and he didn’t strike me as much like them, even now. And anyhow, why should I expect to find him here? I didn’t know there was anyone here. And I thought he was staying at the Grand. I must have come in fairly close before your house lights were on – they didn’t show, anyhow, or I wouldn’t have come any nearer. I wasn’t aiming to annoy anybody.’ The slight smart of offence in his voice was wonderfully convincing; if it had been acted, it might have been overdone. This was a sunny soul, he didn’t hold anything against anybody for long, and he was given to finding awkward situations also very funny. What was funny, at this moment, about being Valentine Gelder? Could one carry what he was carrying, and laugh?

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ she demanded in the same forceful undertone, ‘that you haven’t even read yesterday’s papers? I didn’t think there was anyone in Gries by this time who didn’t know all about it.’

  ‘About what? No, I didn’t buy a paper yesterday. Or all the week, for that matter. To tell you the truth,’ he said in a burst of candour, ‘I’ve got just enough money to keep me in thinnish meals until I draw my next pay. Etceteras like drinks and papers are out. So are cigarettes, that’s why I couldn’t resist scrounging one from your dad just now. So no, I don’t know what the hell this is all about. So suppose you tell me.’

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘The truth and the whole truth. And do something for me, because believe me, I’m not playing games. Even if your name isn’t Michael Brace, and you’re not as innocent as you make out, and even if you don’t regard me as an unbiased reporter, will you at least, for God’s sake, go on listening, and entertain, just as a remote possibility, the idea that what I’m telling you may be true? That’s all I’m asking.’

  She had shaken him clean out of any desire to laugh, or to take this matter, whatever it might be, lightly. He was silent for a long moment, staring at her, leaning well out to his left to see her more closely and search her face more earnestly. They were straining towards each other, in fact, like imprisoned lovers trying to embrace, and the rest of the world had receded into the farthest recesses of the night, leaving them alone.

  ‘Look,’ he said gently and slowly, ‘are you in some kind of trouble? You and your old man? I do know about him – a bit – what everybody knows. I shouldn’t like anything to go wrong now. I mean, of course, very much for my own sake, now I’ve got my hands on this plum, but hell, not for his sake, either. Well, it’s kind of a feudal relationship, if you know what I mean. I’m his man.’

  Una thought, dazedly, that music had a lot to answer for. How powerful the mediaeval element in her father’s writing must be, to climb out of its grave, brush past the bitter intent that denied it, and still clamp Lucas’s hands over this young man’s hands, and exact a kind of fealty. Even if he didn’t mean it quite literally – as how could he? – even so it was a miracle. Lu had judged, isolated, subjected to the bitter light of human reason all those myths of heroism and loyalty and self-sacrifice, and his strictures were just and justified, and seen to be so, and yet this indestructible value rose again valid as ever. Mike Brace might be quite capable of laughing at it, but it was still significant to him, and he was just as likely to act on it.

  ‘You know about his wartime record, too?’ she said. ‘When he was j
ust a boy?’

  ‘Yes, I know. They wrote it all up in the festival hand-out, the one that brought me here.’

  He was, of course, too young to have known, otherwise. And he was exactly who and what he represented himself to be; by then she was certain of that. In a sense there was now no need to tell him anything, for what could he do in the matter, and what need was there now to convince him of anything? All the same, she took a deep breath, and told him everything, from the first unexplained telephone call, through the sudden eruption of the whole struggle into the ungentle light of day, and of public controversy, to this refuge at the Himmelhof, and the mystery and threat of the horn-calls from the water. On the way to this ending she had also told him, briefly but faithfully, the story according to Lucas.

  When she stopped talking there was a brief and thoughtful silence. Then he said intently:

  ‘So when I showed up, I was cast for this fellow Gelder?’

  ‘You came just after that warning. And you came playing that horn music – the death music. Music nobody but the orchestra should have known. And ominous in the circumstances. You can see why they were suspicious. And then refusing to say where you’d been and what you’d been doing before you came to Gries. Why did you? If you’d told them, they were ready to let you go. You had them convinced, until you clammed up so suddenly about your movements.’

  ‘I had my reasons,’ said the young man sombrely, and brooded a moment in his window, chin on crossed wrists. ‘In a few days, if all goes well, I could tell you. But nothing to do with any Valentine Gelder.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘I know that now.’

  ‘In a way, I’m even sorry. If I were him, I’d give you best and swear off the whole thing, like a shot. But I’m just Mike Brace. That’s not much immediate help, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I didn’t expect you,’ she owned with a sigh, ‘to be able to help. I just thought that if you were … Well, it was an opportunity to talk to you, to try to make you see reason. It’s nice,’ she said truthfully, ‘even that Mike Brace believes me.’