It was hard even to guess how many of these candles there were, each giving barely more than the light of a tiny taper, though visibly far sturdier than that. The candles were in the hands of men; and inside the irregular ring the men made, were other men, without candles: the bearers (Rosa rejected the word "porters"), now in process of being changed. And at the centre of all was that which was being borne: of itself, apparently, not without luminosity.
After Rosa had opened the door, very far from quietly, owing to the clumsiness of her fear, the men on that side of the ring, whether the light-bearers or the burden-bearers, had slowly and gravely moved aside, so that a wide way lay open before her.
Already she was part of it all, and had no refuge. She went delicately and timidly out, stepping like a girl.
And what she saw lying before her, though gilded and decked and perfumed and beflowered as any saint, was the twin, the image, the double of herself. Not even of herself when a girl or of herself when a hag, but, she had no doubt about it, of herself as she was now. On the instant she sank to her knees beside the litter and diffidently touched the hand that lay there, which at once responded with a gentle clasp.
"Who am I?" whispered Rosa. "And who are you?"
"I am your soul," replied a remote voice she did not know.
"But," cried Rosa, "where then are you going?"
"To the church. Where else should a soul go?"
"Shall I see you no more?"
"One day."
"When will that be?"
"I do not know."
"And until then?"
"Live. Forget and live."
"How can I forget? How can anyone? How can anyone forget?"
Here Rosa glanced upwards and around her; and the idea passed through her mind that these silent men, all somehow ministering, it was to be supposed, to her soul, might be those same men for whom earlier that evening she had sometimes found names and sometimes found recollections only.
Whatever the truth of that, Rosa's last question found no answer. The new bearers were assuming their task. (Who, Rosa wondered, in that case—if that case were conceivable—could they be?) With hands and arms, they had already drawn Rosa away; and now they were raising the litter on to their shoulders. The entire faintly lighted throng were moving on towards the hilltop, where the church had replaced the temple, where the temple had been surrogate for the goddess personally in the grove.
"Farewell." Rosa never knew whether she had actually spoken that word.
Remarkably soon, the rough lane was silent, with all life stilled, and starlessly dark. But Rosa saw through the curtained windows that the lamps inside her living-room burned as usual; and when, not too hurriedly, she went to look and listen, the clock was ticking, and implying that the time was only ten minutes after midnight.
It was no occasion for giving further thought to the problem of the wet clothes. That could wait for the morning, when Rosa would be packing anyway, with a view to returning to London, at least as a first move. It was impossible to know where she would go thereafter.
Niemandswasser (1975)
Shortly after 3 A.M., when the September air was thinly strewn with drizzle, the young Prince Albrecht von Allendorf, known as Elmo to his associates, because of the fire which to them emanated from him, entered the Tiergarten from the Liechtensteinallee, leaping over the locked gate; then found his way to the shore of the big lake to his left; and there, in the total darkness, made to shoot himself.
For upwards of an hour he had strode and stumbled, not always by the most direct route, for he was unused to making the journey on foot, northwards from Schöneberg, where within the small, low room in which the two of them were in the long habit of meeting, Elvira Schwalbe still lay across the big bed in her chemise. She was neither happy to be rid of Elmo, this time surely for ever, nor unhappy to have lost him; certainly not dead, which, considering the apparent intensity of Elmo's feelings, was perhaps surprising, but not fully alive either. The principal upshot of it all was a near-paralysis of will and feeling. Thus she was very, very cold, but for many hours made no movement of any kind. Not until the middle of that afternoon did she gather herself together. Then she spent a considerable time making her hair even more beautiful, put on her taffeta dress with the wide grey and white stripes (very wide), locked up the magic apartment for ever and a day, and proceeded round the corner to the Konditorei, where she ate more cakes than she would normally have done, and drank more coffee, and even concluded with a concoction of hot eggs, having found herself still hungry. Happy, happy Elvira, renewed, strengthened, and made lovelier than ever by just a little suffering; happy to leave us with the wide world once more spread freely before her from which to pick and choose! So endet alles. Later, at a suitable moment, she threw the key of the room into the Spree.
Elmo, the young prince, was perhaps young only by comparison; in that he had four elder brothers, all of whom had always seemed old beyond their years. All were in the army, and all were doing well in their careers, by no means only because of their excellent connections. When not on the parade ground or manoeuvres, they were at lectures and courses, or even reading military books. All were married to ladies of precise social equilibrium, and all had children, in no case only one, and in every case with boys predominating. Despite the demands of service, there was usually at least one son at Allendorf to support their elderly father in what for most of the year were the daily pleasures of chase and gun. Thus too they in turn learnt to rule; especially, of course, the eldest.
The Hereditary Prince of Allendorf had managed to escape mediatization and still exercised a surprising degree of authority over his moderately-sized patriarchy; neither so small as to be something of a joke, nor so large as to negate the personal touch. The survival of so much individual authority in a changed world was not unconnected with the fact that almost all his subjects loved him; and that in turn was because he was an excellent ruler, carefully reared to it from birth, and completely unselfconscious in his procedures. The few who were dissatisfied made tracks for Berlin in any case. It would be absurd to set about the making of trouble in Allendorf.
The Hereditary Prince had long been a widower (Elmo could hardly remember his mother), but he was well looked after by the Countess Sophie-Anna, long a widow herself, a distant cousin (and her late husband had been another cousin), and still quite attractive, including in some cases to those younger than herself. She resided in a large, rococo house, just across the Schlossplatz. When she had first arrived, the elder boys had been doubtful, but Elmo, aged ten, and very tired of masterful matrons (and not yet called Elmo), had fallen for her completely, and could hardly be kept out of her abode, where, among other things, and when opportunity offered, he stole away and, in awe and wonder, went repeatedly through the soft dresses and perfumed underclothes in her bedroom presses and closets. Things were much less formal and ordered than in the Schloss, and no one here ever thought to say him nay in anything. None the less, Schloss Allendorf itself was a beautiful and romantic structure, fantastic as a dream; and the Hereditary Prince took care that the aged, the apparently sempiternal Emperor was as often as practicable his guest.
As well as the Allendorfpalast in Berlin, quite near to where Elmo now sat in darkness, the family properties included, confusingly, a second, and much older, Schloss Allendorf, this time on the shores of Lake Constance, the Bodensee. No senior member of the family had seemingly found the time to go there since the present Hereditary Prince, when a quite small child, had spent a week there with his father. This apparently universal family indifference to the place was normal enough behaviour, but, in the present instance, it happens that there was a specific reason for it: some particular thing (of which details were never disclosed) had happened when the quite small child had visited the Schloss, which had had the effect of his never either being taken there again, or himself wanting to go there when he had become his own master. His attitude influenced those around him, his family and others,
without, probably, a word being ever clearly spoken. Probably few of those affected were accustomed to showing much enterprise in such matters as visiting remote family properties in any case. There were elderly dependables to look after the place, year in and year out, and that sufficed.
Elmo alone formed a habit of going there, incognito, or as near to that as could be managed. He had been drawn in the first place by the knowledge that it was from this semi-ruinous lakeside congeries that his family, which was a family to be proud of, had come to importance at the beginning. The family were too closely knit for his elder brothers ever to be actually unkind to him, but, undeniably, there were differences, and Elmo found it particularly felicitous that at almost any time he could withdraw from father and brothers and the wives and children of brothers, to a spot where there was no element of betrayal or disloyalty, and which was of such wondrous beauty also.
If, when the moon is shining and near the full, you scull over, alone, or with some single quietly beloved and beautiful person, from Konstanz, past the Staad peninsula with its lighthouse, to Meersburg, you will experience a peace and acceptance of all things that the wider oceans of the world cannot offer. For some of the time, the scale seems to be maritime, with land, at such an hour, almost out of sight, even beneath the moon; but all the while you are conscious that the smooth and silky water is not saline but the current of the great Rhine, newly released from the Alps. And, of course, there is the clear air; the Bodensee being set at 400 metres above the restless sea. Every ripple is poetry and every zephyr a tender release.
Naturally, Elmo, as well as his brothers, was in the army; but in his case more ornamentally, as was still possible, though becoming less so. In the course of his service, he had met Viktor, whose position in the world was perfectly accommodable to his own (Viktor's father commanded the guard in one of the kingdoms); and in Viktor for the first time he had found a friend who actually enhanced (instead of slightly spoiling and diminishing) the experience of boating on the lake, more often than not at night. Viktor, who was olive-skinned and black-haired, sometimes dressed as a girl for this purpose, and it was as if Elmo had mysteriously, albeit but momentarily, acquired the sister he had so much lacked.
One night or early morning when the circumstances were such, there was an odd episode. Viktor was trailing his hand in the water while Elmo worked intermittently at the sculls. It was hard to tell where exactly they were on the lake. This is always one of the most delightful things on the Bodensee, in that the agreeable uncertainty contains little element of actual risk: soon one always sees land somewhere, sometimes all too soon. But that night or early morning, a risk did emerge, unexpectedly, devastatingly, and literally; because the hand that the relaxed Viktor was gently trailing through the water was, with all quiet around, suddenly bitten half away. He lost his fourth and fifth fingers altogether, and, even when the doctors had finished, was left without a portion of his hand—and, worse still, of his right hand, with which he wrote his verses and fingered the strings of his guitar. Furthermore, the experience had a marked emotional effect also: one proof of which was that Elmo and Viktor quarrelled.
Even so, Viktor, who had resigned his commission (he was offered a job of consequence in an army office, but declined it—as henceforth he was to decline most things); Viktor, then, seemed to commit himself to sitting in solitude and without occupation, each day and every day, on the Bodensee shore. He was not always in the same spot, was indeed seldom to be found in the same spot on two consecutive days; but always he was in the locality, for the most part as near to the fringe of the lake itself as possible, though often half hidden away in a coppice or in the lee of a fisherman's hut. Everyone knew that he had taken up a lodging with an elderly couple who lived in a respectable homestead three miles away from Schloss Allendorf, and that he took all his meals alone, as he did not wish people to see him eat, owing to his maimed right hand, the hand in which one holds the knife.
Elmo, who had not felt himself responsible in any way for their quarrel, though in a manner understanding that it was unavoidable, was concerned as to how Viktor would fare during the coming autumn and winter, the accident having happened on a sultry night in August, and the Bodensee being often an inclement region during at least half the year. One of the doctors with whom Elmo spoke expressed the medical view that the entity which had inflicted the terrible injury had also infected the entire physiology of the victim with some bacillus, perhaps unknown, which had in a measure unbalanced his judgement. On the evidence, this seemed very likely.
As to the entity itself, opinions inevitably differed. Among the unsophisticated, reference was made to the monster known to have inhabited the deepest depths of the lake from earliest time, and to have been actually seen by Carolus Magnus, and both seen and interviewed by Paracelsus. The more general and representative view was that Viktor's injury had been done by a freshwater shark. It was just the sort of random tearing that a shark goes in for, said those who had met sharks in the East and places like that.
There would have been a far greater popular sensation had Viktor been a more popular and acceptable figure, or had he lived more according to his rank, instead of, like Elmo, as far as possible incognito. The nicer people even felt that Viktor would not want to be the centre of a major and long-enduring sensation. Even so, in many quarters at that part of the lakeside, the children were provided with a list of precise prohibitions. Perhaps in consequence, there seemed to occur no record of any child being attacked as Viktor had been attacked. Sooner than might have been expected, there was little trace of what had happened to Viktor, other than Viktor himself, who continued forlornly to haunt the shores of the lake, even, as Elmo had apprehended, on many days during the cold of winter.
Viktor's strange way of life inspired the great poetess who resided in one of the best situated of the lakeside castles to write a symbolic poem, though not all who know and love the poem, are informed about how it came to be written, or would believe if told.
Elmo no longer felt the same about Schloss Allendorf, and went back to Berlin and his regiment almost with relief. But he then met Elvira at a place where the younger officers mingled with aspirant actresses, singers, and (especially) dancers, after the fall of the curtain.
Elvira was a dancer, though she danced less often and regularly after she passed within Elmo's protection. Beneath Elvira's spell, Elmo nearly forgot about Viktor and a dozen others. He was deeply in love with her, and seemingly more and more so as the years passed. He never doubted either that she felt the same about him or that it would go on for ever, even though in the nature of things he could never marry her. He was surrounded by such relationships, even among older people; and in some cases a relationship of the kind had seemed to endure, even though persons who knew nothing about it claimed in a general way that duration was always impossible. As for practicalities, Elmo, being one to whom only the ideal was entirely existent, sincerely believed it to suffice that he had money, where Elvira had little or none, and even less in the way of prospects. Moreover, Elvira was not a dancer in a Paris boîte, but in a minor opera house. There was an inspirational force within Elmo of which the sensitive soon became aware, and which had led to his Spottname or nickname. Even in a tight corner on a battlefield, he might conceivably have accomplished more than any of his robuster, better-trained relations, and sacrificed fewer lives.
However, when the setting was a tight corner by the large lake in the Tiergarten, all decision was virtually taken out of his hands, though not immediately. Elmo, who thought that by now he knew himself through and through, had never doubted his capacity to destroy himself on the instant in the terrible circumstances that had descended upon him at once so conclusively and so unexpectedly; nor did he lack the means.
Never for one instant, by day or by night, had he lacked the means, since, on his fourteenth birthday, his distant cousin, Sophie-Anna, had given him her own, small, delicately lacquered pistol, and bidden him always thereafter to hav
e it with him. She was wearing a lilac dress with a pattern of large, vague, white roses for the family celebration of which he was the centre. "A woman should always have money," she had said in her boudoir before they went down. "A man should always have—this." It was perhaps because of the circumstances in which he had received the pretty pistol that Elmo had never, as yet, once discharged it, though he took care that one of his men regularly maintained and oiled it; but he had been given plenty of practice at the range with weapons of a generally similar kind. Elmo knew how to shoot straight and on the instant and to kill.
But he found that it was difficult to kill himself in the almost total darkness. He was astonished that the effulgence of the city lights, albeit renowned, should make so little impression upon the heart of the Tiergarten. The trees must be far denser than he had ever supposed; and a lake does imply either a moon or a storm. Probably the truth was that Elmo had succumbed to the same near-paralysis of will and feeling as was at that moment depriving Elvira even of the purpose to keep herself warm, and which, with supposed mercifulness, always supervenes at the end of a great love before the months and years of loss and deprivation set in. Sometimes this almost total numbness lasts for as long as 48 hours. But for Elmo it was the darkness that seemed to be the trouble. It was like trying to act decisively in limbo.
Then Elmo actually began to shiver. Partly, he realized, it was the first of the dawn at which hour so many pass that even the insensitive, if in an open space at the centre of a large city, are aware of their passing.
There was a strange, faint, even light descended upon the water, acceptable, perhaps, as the last of evening, but infinitely perturbing as the first of day. All with hearts must shiver to see it and close their minds to thought.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 55