The Collected Short Fiction Part 45

His master's words were still all of a piece. Downstairs most had come to the view that their master was simply a little out of his mind, poor gentleman. It was common enough among the great families; and elsewhere for that matter. He was always identifying things and recollecting things and staring at things.

"How are you so sure where this piece of water is?" asked Elmo, not looking at Jurgen, but still staring. "How can you tell?"

"All of us know, your Highness. We know all our lives. Near enough leastways, your Highness. So that we don't find ourselves there by mistake like. "

"Would it matter so much if you did?"

"Oh yes, your Highness. As I said to your Highness, it's a piece of water that belongs to no one. That's not natural, is it, your Highness?"

"If this had been a year ago," said Elmo, "I should first have had the whole story properly looked into, and then, if there had proved to be anything true about it, I should have sailed out there myself."

Jurgen was obviously about to demur, and there was a slight but detectable pa.s.sage of time before he replied, "As your Highness says."

"But I don't believe a word of it," commented Elmo petulantly. It was difficult to decide to what extent he was still staring out at the lake and to what extent he was staring at the blackness inside him.

Jurgen bowed more formally and clattered downstairs again.

The survival of the lost beloved being so incomparably more afflicting than his or her death, the bereaved is the more likely to vary bitter grief with occasional episodes of hysterical elation, as the dying man, isolated amid the Polar or Himalayan snows, has quarter hours of almost peaceful confidence that of course he will emerge, even believing that he sees how.

So it was that afternoon with Elmo. He found himself growing more and more wildly excited by what Jurgen had a.s.serted, nonsense though it was. The world seemed to be suddenly lighted up with liberation, as in that case of the Polar or Himalayan castaway. Inwardly he knew that any motion on his part, however minute or merely symbolic, would at once dim and then rapidly extinguish the light: he must simply hold on to the excitement as long as he could, for its own sake. Indeed, he had been through such interludes before during the past year, through two or three of them; and he knew how transitory they were. All the same, if the castle library had offered a modern reference book, he might have consulted it. As it was, it contained nothing of the kind later than works left behind (or "presented") by the French officers at the time of the Napoleonic occupation.

When one is dead as Elmo was dead, ideas cease to be big or small, true or false, weighty or trivial: the only distinction is between irritant and anodyne. Long after his false elation had worn off (such conditions seldom last as long as an hour), Jurgen's fantasy still lingered in Elmo's mind as anodyne.

Shortly after three o'clock that afternoon, he picked up the bell and shook it. The wiring of the castle bells had become so defective that Elmo found he did better with a handbell, but it had to be a big, heavy, and noisy one, a veritable crier's bell, or it would not have been heard through the thick walls, and down the corridors.

"Jurgen. I should like to see Herr Spalt. After dinner, of course."

"But, your Highness-" After all, Jurgen's master had not merely seen no one from the outside world for a twelvemonth, but had given particular directions, with serious penalties attached, that no one was even to be told he was in residence.

"After dinner, Jurgen, I should like to see Herr Spalt."

"I shall see what can be done, your Highness. I shall do my best."

"No man can do more," commented Elmo with a spectral smile.

Herr Spalt was the schoolmaster. In other days, Elmo had not infrequently asked him in, to share some evening concoction he, Elmo, had himself prepared according to regimental tradition. Indeed, Elmo considered that he had learned much from Spalt, whom he deemed to be palpably no ordinary village disciplinarian. He a.s.sumed that, at some point in his career or in his life, Spalt had been in trouble, so that he had sunk below his proper position in scholarship.

As has been said, the grief-stricken sometimes gorge and sometimes starve. That evening Elmo ate little. Some new impulse had entered his bloodstream, though he could not decide whether it helped or harmed, especially as there was so little difference between the two.

It was past eight o'clock when Spalt arrived. The walk from the village was not inconsiderable, notably in the dark. Spalt now was a corpulent man, grey-skinned and bald, and with an overall air of neglect. There was even a triangular tear in the left leg of his trousers. He was noticeably what is described as "a confirmed bachelor".

"Spalt, have some Schnapps." Elmo poured two large measures. "It's cold in the evenings. It's cold always."

Spalt made a fat little bow.

Elmo said: "I do not wish to go into things. There are reasons for all I do and all I do not."

Spalt bowed again, sucking at the Schnapps. "Your Highness's confidences are his own."

"Tell me how is Baron Viktor von Revenstein?"

"As before, your Highness. There is no change that we are aware of."

"What did you make of it, Spalt?"

"The baron endured a terrible experience, your Highness. Terrible." Spalt's expression had seldom been seen to change. Possibly this was a qualification for his profession. The young have to be strengthened, especially the young men and boys.

"If I remember rightly, you were among those who thought it was done by a shark?"

"Something like that, your Highness. What else could it have been?"

"A freshwater shark?"

Spalt said nothing.

"Are there such things? You are a well-informed man, Spalt. I have found that you know almost everything. Are there such things as freshwater sharks? Do they exist?"

"The ichthyologists do not know of them, your Highness. That is true. But there must have been something of the kind out there. If not exactly a shark, then something not dissimilar. What other explanation is possible?"

Elmo refilled the gla.s.ses, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 ent.i.ties 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.

So it was now with Elmo. There was no gleam or spark of light anywhere, but there was a faint swell on the surface of the water, and every now and then the clink of ice against the boat, though one might not have supposed the season for ice quite arrived. Never before in his life had he experienced such total darkness. Never in his childhood had he been locked in a dark cellar or cupboard, and never in manhood had he known serious action in the field. Somewhere between the rickety but, as he embarked, reasonably visible castle jetty, with its prohibitory notices, and the part of the lake where he now was, he had realized that the fabric of the boat had suffered from neglect; but he could not see the water that had seeped in, or for that matter yet hear it swill. It was merely that he could feel dampness, and a little more than dampness, when, having paused in his progress, he had placed his hand on the floor planks; which he had been led to do by the almost uncanny coldness of his ten toes.

Still it was no matter to go back for. Life's challenge (or menace) can, after all, never be evaded; and Elmo realized that, within his world of pain, he was fortunate that to him the contest presented itself in a shape so clear-cut, so four-square, defined with such comparative precision by a schoolmaster. Whatever else might happen (if anything did), the little boat would not sink yet awhile.

Indeed, it was perhaps not such a little boat at that: Elmo was finding it heavier and heavier to pull with every minute that pa.s.sed, or was it with every hour? The darkness was so thick that it impeded his movements like frozen black treacle. The darkness also smelt. Whoever can tell what lies beneath deep waters after all the centuries and millennia; especially under such unmastered and comparatively remote waters as Elmo now traversed?

Soon it seemed as if not merely the darkness but the lake itself were holding him back. It was almost as if he were sweating to pull or push the vessel through frozen mud; through a waste such as only the earliest seekers for the North West Pa.s.sage had had to include among their trials. For all his exertion, Elmo could feel the ice quickly forming not merely on his face, but all over his body. Soon he might be encased, and doubtless the ill-maintained boat also.

The boat was lower in the water. Elmo realized this as he tried to pull. And it was no matter of a possible leak in the hull. There was no more water in the bottom of the boat than formerly. It was still possible for Elmo to check that; which he did with his cold right hand. For the purpose he had to leave hold of the oar or scull; but the boat was so far down that somehow the oar left its rowlock, thereby left the boat also, and vanished into the darkness with an odd crash. Elmo in horror clutched at the other oar with both hands at once; but this action merely swung the boat's course many points to port, and the other oar vanished likewise as she twisted through the mysteriously resistant water. Elmo's hands were too frozen to hold on to the unwieldy object under such conditions.

Elmo realized that something had hold of the bottom of the boat. He could feel the straining of her timbers, robust enough looking on sh.o.r.e, but out here truly matchwood or less. Indeed, the drag and stress on the boat's planks was by now the only thing he could feel, and he felt it through all his muscles. Nor was there a thing to be seen; though the confused odours were being subtly alembicated into one single sweet perfume. The crackling of the ice against the boat seemed to Elmo to be rising to a roar, although, surely, it was yet but autumn.

It was not, he thought, the same lady that he had seen, however momentarily, however dreamily, above the lake in the Tiergarten. But she was visible all the same; and Elmo at once apprehended how and why. It must indeed be that many hours had pa.s.sed, though previously he had not really thought so; because here, once more, was the first, faint, frightening light of dawn. This lady, too, had large eyes and a large mouth; but now the mouth was open, showing white and pointed teeth, as many teeth as a strange fish. Although her mouth was so very open, this lady smiled not. And, of course, as in the earlier instance, she was gone almost as soon as come; but, also as in the earlier instance, she brought back to the eyes of the heart the vision of Elvira, dread and lethal and indestructible.

Elmo laid himself down in the boat. He was an ice-man. "Receive one who is dead already," he half whispered to the spirits of the lake and mountains.

The light was more yellow than grey; the surface ice by no means so dense, or even so serrated as Elmo supposed. It is to be repeated it was no later than autumn.

The few remains were far beyond identification. The body had been gnashed and gnawed and ripped, so that even the bones were mostly sliced away and splintered. And, of course, there was no proper head. All had in truth to be guesswork. "There's nothing in that coffin," men mouthed to each other when, in a few days' time, the hour came for the n.o.ble ceremony. Moreover, from first finding to last disposing, throughout it was freezing winter, authentically and accurately.

And what happened to Viktor, some have wondered? From the time of Elmo's presumed death, he seemed steadily to recapture his wits, until when the world war struck, a generation and a half later, he was deemed fit once more for service of a land, and, though stationed far behind the lines, had the misfortune to be annihilated, with all who were with him, in consequence of a freakish hit by the British artillery; a lucky shot, the British might have called it. Thus Viktor's death too was not without distinction.