Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

could entirely account for.

Punching at the wet objects that touched her face and head, Rosa ran for the outer door. Though it too seemed to have become faintly transparent, it opened quite normally. Rosa was in flight, and in flight that was unorganized and demented. No longer was she capable of resignation or acquiescence, let alone of meeting events with anything more positive. But at the doorway, she managed to stop herself. She stood there for a moment, gasping and staring.

She had half expected that the light would be very bright. After all, there had been evidence that it might be.

In fact, however, it was quite faint; only half as bright again, perhaps, as it had been inside the room. Remote might have been the word for the quality of it; even though the source, or seeming source, was almost under Rosa's nose; le vrai chemin de l'eglise not being at all wide. The light came from candles, but, mysteriously, it still manifested that wan pinkness and pale blueness that Rosa had already discerned. 'Inexplicable,' said Rosa softly, 'inexplicable.'

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

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 Schoneberg, 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