Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

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 boite, 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 have 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