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!»