Elmo refilled the glasses, lavishly.
"Jurgen, my man here, rough, very rough, but not a conscious liar I should say, has been telling me a wild tale about there being a part of the lake which belongs to no one. To no state or ruler; to no one of any kind, as I gather. Have you ever heard of that?"
"Oh yes, your Highness," replied Spalt. "It is perfectly true."
"Really? You astonish me. How can it be possible?"
"There was not always an international law governing the ownership of open water between different states, and even now that law is very imperfect. It is distinctly controversial in various parts of the world. In our case, the international law has never been deemed to apply. The ownership of the lake's surface has been governed by treaty and even by convention. One consequence, doubtless unintended, is that part of the lake's surface belongs to no one. It is quite simple."
"What about beneath the water?"
The same, your Highness, I imagine. Exactly the same."
"The lake is very deep, I have always understood?"
"In places, your Highness. Very deep indeed in places. There has never been a complete hydrographical survey."
"Indeed! Do you not think there should be?"
"It is hard to see what practical purpose could be served."
"The acquisition of new knowledge is surely a sufficient end in itself?"
"So it is said, your Highness."
"But you must agree? You are our local savant."
Instead of replying, Spalt said: "Your Highness was not then aware that the baron's terrible injury happened on that part of the lake?"
"Of course I was not. Though perhaps since this afternoon I may have suspected it. Perhaps that is why you are here now. But how do you know, in any case? You were not there."
"I was not there. And indeed I do not know in the ordinary sense. No one knows in that sense, except perhaps your Highness, who was there. None the less, I am sure of it."
"Why are you sure of it?"
"Because it is the part of the lake where all strange things happen."
"What else has happened there?"
"Fishermen have seen treasure ships there. Sailors in the service once fought a big battle there — suffered deaths and casualties too. Men whose lives were due to end have crossed the lake on calm nights and perished there, or at least vanished there."
"Anything else, Spalt?"
"Yes, your Highness. A boy I was fond of, already a brilliant scholar, saw a phantom there, and is now screaming in the Margrave's madhouse."
"How often do you suggest that these things happen?"
"Rarely, your Highness. Or so I suppose. But when they do happen it is always in that region of the water. However infrequently it be. I have sometimes thought there have been unacknowledged reasons why that part of the lake has been left unpossessed."
"Yes," said Elmo. "I'm not sure I don't accept every word you say."
"There is believed to be a certain truth among us peasants," said Spalt quietly, and pulling heavily on the long glass of spirits, which, indeed, he emptied.
"I don't see you as a peasant, Spalt, splendid fellows though most of them are."
"None the less, I am a peasant, your Highness."
"Be that as it may," said Elmo, "you are a very deep man. I've always known that."
"There is hardly a man on the lakeside who cannot tell a story about No Man's Water, your Highness, often many stories."
"In that case, why have I never heard of this before?"
"It is unheimlich, your Highness. Men do not speak of it. It is like the secrets of the heart, the true secrets which one man only knows."
"An exalted comparison, Spalt."
"We are most of us two people, your Highness. There is something lacking in the man who is one man only, and so, as he believes, at peace with the world and with himself."
"Is there, Spalt?"
"And the two people within us seldom communicate. Even when both are present together in consciousness, there is little communication. Neither can confront the other without discomfort."
"One of the two sometimes dies before the other," observed Elmo.
"Life is primarily directed to seeing that that happens, your Highness. Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them. There are the children to think of; the mothers who breed them and thus enable our race to endure; the economy; the ordered life of society. Of such factors as these your Highness will be always particularly aware, in view of your Highness's station and responsibilities."
"Yes," said Elmo. "As you say, it is my duty, which, naturally, we all perform as best we can." He came over with the bottle. "Fill up, Spalt. Let me rekindle the dying fire." But Elmo's hand was shaking as he poured, so that he splashed the drink on the table, already in need of a finer polish; and even on the schoolmaster's worn trousers, though Spalt remained motionless.
"Men's dreams, their inner truth, are unhelmlich also, your Highness. If any man examines his inner truth with both eyes wide open, and his inner eye wide open also, he will be overcome with terror at what he finds. That, I have always supposed, is why we hear these stories about a region of our lake. Out there, on the water, in darkness, out of sight, men encounter the image within them. Or so they suppose. It is not to be expected that many will return unscathed."
"Thus with men, Spalt. What about women?"
"Women have no inner life that is so decisively apart. With women the inner life merges ever with the totality. That is why women seem to men either deceitful and elusive, or moralistic and uninteresting. Women have no problem comparable with the problem of merely being a man. They do not need our lake."
"Have you ever been married, Spalt? I imagine not at all."
"Certainly, I have been married, your Highness. As I reminded your Highness, I am but a peasant."
"And what happened?"
"She died in childbirth. Our first-born."
"I am sorry, Spalt."
"No doubt it also saved much sadness for both of us. There is always that to remember."
"Did the child die too?"
"No, your Highness. She did not. The father had no inclination to remarry; and a woman to look after the child — the little girl — would have led at once to malice when the father was a schoolmaster, and required to be an example. I was fortunate in being able to leave the child in a good home. As schoolmaster, I was of course informed about all the homes. She is now in your Highness's employ, but she has no idea that I am her father, and would suffer much if she knew, so that I request your Highness to be silent, if the occasion ever occurs."
"Of course, of course, Spalt. I grieve for you that things did not work out better."
"All things must go ill one day, your Highness, or what seems to be ill. That is the message of the memento mori. And usually it is one day soon." His long glass was empty again, and he was gazing with apparent absorption at the patches of discoloration on the backs of his hands.
The Bodensee is not precisely a mountain lake. Only at the eastern end, in the territory of the Austrian Empire, above and around Bregenz, are the mountains immediate. Elsewhere they are but background, sometimes distant; occasionally fanciful, as behind Bodman, where the primitives live; often invisible through the transforming atmosphere. None the less, around the wider perimeter the mountains wait and watch, as do the immense, unknowable entities that on and within them dwell. When the moon is clouded or withdrawn, there are those areas where the lake seems as large as the sea, as black, as treacherous, as omnipotent; and no one can tell how cold who has not been afloat there in a small boat alone.