The Sound of His Horn Read Free

constant, but there'd be little hope for man if experience didn't alter behaviour and opinions. You've had six years of war and imprisonment. I can well understand a man having different views about all sorts of things after that."
    "Yes," he said. "You'd understand. Or at any rate, you'd be interested. Look here!" He straightened up abruptly and turned round. "You're not tired, are you? Mind if I tell you something? Let me fill your glass, then sit down and I'll tell you a tale."
    He poured out some beer for us both and switched off the light, then stirred the fire till it broke into flame.
    "I can tell it better like this, by firelight," he said as he settled himself in the armchair opposite me, "and if I bore you you can go quietly to sleep without my noticing it."
    We filled our pipes and I waited.
    "I've not told this to anybody," he began. "Not to my mother, or Elizabeth. And before I tell it to you, I want to make the point that it is a tale: just a tale, you understand, that I'm telling you because I think it'll entertain you; I'm not asking you to listen so that you can tell me what my trouble is. I know that perfectly well myself, and there's nothing anybody can do about it It's just a question of waiting to see if it happens again. It hasn't recurred in three years; if I get through another year without it happening I shall take it that it won't happen again and I shall feel I can safely ask Elizabeth to marry me and all will be well. She can ride to hounds and I shan't quarrel with her over that--so long as she doesn't expect me to; and she won't."
    * * *
    2
    'I am not mad, most noble Festus.' No. But I have been. Not just unbalanced, or queer, but beautifully barmy; certifiable beyond the shadow of a doubt. I'm all right again now. Really all right, I believe. Only, having slipped into the other gear very suddenly once, I know how easily and swiftly it can happen, and sometimes an unexpected thing frightens me for a moment--until I've made sure that I am still on this side of the wall, so to speak.
    It's not unknown, of course, for a man in a prisoner-of-war camp to go round the bend. It can happen to anybody, and not necessarily to the highly strung ones, or the ones with most worries. I'd seen them before it happened to me. We called them happy. I think I know the reason for that peculiarly indifferent air they have: they just don't know what's going on in this world while they're so busy in the other. And you feel extraordinarily sane, you know. I am sure, in my own case at least, that I was twice as active in mind, twice as sensitive to what was going on while I was round the bend as I was after I came into the straight again and was back in the cage once more.
    I was glad it was a different cage they put me back in. None of the fellows there knew that I had been off my head, and the psychiatrists passed me as perfectly normal when we all got out. Of course, I didn't tell 'em what I'm telling you.
    We were dive-bombed and sunk off Crete in 1941, and I had two years in a camp in Eastern Germany: Oflag XXIX Z. Very familiar it all grew to me, that very little world: barbed wire, of course, jerry-built huts, too cold in winter, too hot in summer, the messy washing-places, the smelly latrines, the light sandy soil, the black pine-forest in the distance and the goons on the sentry-perches: all the little contrivances and tricks and studies and inventions that seemed so important to us--well, that
were
important when your world was reduced to such dimensions.
    I flattered myself that I stood prison life a good deal better than most people. I'm never really unhappy anywhere if I can find something to do with my hands, and it's surprising what a busy artisan you can turn yourself into in such circumstances if you have a bent that way. I'm really proud of some of the things I made out of old tins. I kept my mind working objectively, too. I set out to re-learn my Greek. It would have been more sensible, perhaps, to