Her limbs had become a little stiff, but she was surprised that things were not far worse. She had felt herself to be slightly exalted ever since her conversation on the cliffs, and this unreasonable restlessness seemed to confirm it.
AH the same, she moved to a more comfortable chair. "Why ever not?" she enquired vaguely, and once more aloud. She noticed that the rain had stopped. Perhaps it had stopped hours ago.
The room seemed peculiarly warm. "Perhaps delusions are setting in." Rosa had read about explorers marooned on icefloes who dreamed of the Savoy Grill. Ted had once worked as a waiter in a place like that, as she was unlikely to forget — though, as a waiter, Ted was understood to be rather good. Rosa cast off her dressing gown.
The clock struck half past ten, eleven, and half past eleven. Rosa was now half-asleep for much of the time. She had abandoned all idea of special preparation for what lay ahead. She lay empty and resigned.
Some time after that, the flame in both lamps began to flicker and waver. Rosa had filled the lamps herself and knew well that they held enough oil to last through two nights and more. But she rose to her feet very conventionally, in order to make an inspection. Immediately, the two lamps went out. The flame in both seemed to vanish at exactly the same moment, as if by pre-arrangement.
Rosa realized that, in the dark, her brow was covered with moisture. She was uncertain whether this was fear, or a medical consequence of her previous soaking, or simply the temperature of the room. Certainly the room was quite unaccountably hot.
Then Rosa became aware that behind the patterned curtains she had drawn across the two windows before throwing off her clothes, was now a gleam that seemed more than the contrast between the blackness of the room and the perhaps slightly more luminous night outside. Moreover, it was as if the gleam were moving. The faint light was strengthening, as, presumably, it moved towards her.
So far she had heard nothing but the ticking of the clock; and now she ceased to hear even that. She had not noted the clock's last tick. She simply realized that it was ticking no longer.
"Oh God," said Rosa, "please protect me." She had not chosen either the words or the voice. She had, in fact, no idea where they had come from. She sank, not upon her knees, but in a heap on the floor, burying her face between her legs, and holding her hands over her ears. She seemed to squat, in desperate discomfort, for an appreciable time. In an earlier year, she had known something like that hopeless, inhuman posture when she had been so badly seasick — and on more than one occasion — in the Baltic.
Then there was a faint fluttering knock, not necessarily at the outer door. Rosa could not tell where it came from. It might have been made by a small creature which had been entrapped in the room with her.
It seemed worse not to know than to know. Rosa unwound herself. She looked and listened.
There was still not much to hear, but the light had grown strong enough for the shapes she had hung from strings to be dimly and strangely visible. Another new development was, however, that these distorted forms seemed no longer to be entirely within the room, but to continue outside it, as if she could see faintly through the wall. The weak light, moreover, was wanly pink and wanly blue, in a way that not even the pattern of the curtains 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'église 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.