Seven Gothic Tales (43 page)

At these words of the Baron, Pilot cried out: “What! What are you saying?”

“I said,” said the Baron patiently, pleased with the impression made by his tale, “that from her left ear to the collar bone ran a scar, like a snake.”

“I heard it,” cried Pilot. “Why are you repeating my words? The milliner of Lucerne, Madame Lola, had on her neck just such a scar, and I have this hour described it to you.”

“You have not said one word of it,” said the Baron.

“Have I not?” cried Pilot to me.

I said nothing at all. I thought: I am dreaming. By now I am quite sure that I am dreaming. This hotel, Pilot, and the Swedish
Baron are all parts of a dream. Good God, what a nightmare! I have at last lost my reason for good and all, and the next thing that will happen will be that Olalla will walk in through that door, swiftly, as she always comes in dreams. With that thought I kept my eyes on the door.

From time to time, while we had been talking, new guests had come in from the outside, to sit down or to walk through the room to the inner apartments of the hotel. Now a lady and her maid came in, and passed us quickly and quietly. The lady wore a black cloak, which disguised her face and figure. The maid had her hair wrapped around her head in the Swiss way, and carried the shawls. Both looked so demure that not even the Baron gave them more than one glance. It was not till they were already gone that Pilot, suddenly stopping in his heated debate with the Baron, stood up like a statue, staring in their direction. When we asked him, laughing—for we had drunk enough to think one another ridiculous—what was the matter with him, he turned his big face toward us. “That,” he cried, deeply moved, and even more so by the sound of his own voice, “was she. That was Madame Lola of Lucerne.”

The lightning of madness had struck, then, but it had hit Pilot and not me. Still no one could tell what would happen next; and indeed at his words it seemed to me that there had been something familiar about the lady. Pilot began to pull his hair. “Come, my boy,” I said, taking hold of his arm. “It is not necessary to be mad. We will go together and ask the porter, who will know her, if this lady be not the midwife of Andermatt, who will be found to have nothing whatever in common with the Maid of Orléans.” Still laughing, I dragged him to the porter’s
loge
and began to question the bald old Swiss about the newcomers. The porter was at first busy counting up various pieces of elegant luggage, and did not pay much attention to us.

“Come,” I said to him, “here is a handsome reward for a little favor. Is that lady, in the black
juste-au-corps
, a revolutionist, who
inspired the murder of the Bishop of St. Gallen’s curate? Or is she a mystic who has dedicated her life to the memory of General Zumala Carregui? Or is she a prostitute of Rome?” The old man dropped his pencil and stared at me.

“God help me, Sir, of what are you talking?” he exclaimed. “The lady who has just gone through the dining room, and who is occupying our number nine, is no other than the wife of Herr Councilor Heerbrand, of Altdorf. The Councilor is the greatest man of the town, and was a widower with a large family. The present Frau Councilor Heerbrand is the widow of an Italian wine-grower, and owns a property in Tuscany, which obliges her to travel back and forth in this way. At Altdorf, where my own three granddaughters are in service, she is highly respected. She gives tone to all the town, and is known as a very fine card player.”

“Well, Pilot,” I said, as I guided him back, for he was so stupefied that he would have stood where he was left had I let go my hold, “this is a prosaic solution to our enigma. We may sleep calmly tonight in rooms eight and ten with the Frau Councilor in the bed next to the other side of the wall.”

I did not look much where I was going, and knocked into a person who, with a little stick in his hand, was walking slowly through the dining room, in our own direction. As I apologized he lifted his tall hat a little to me, and I saw that it was the old Jew of Rome, Marcus Cocoza. At the same second he went on, and passed through the same door as had the lady.

“After my first moment of sheer terror at looking into his pale face and deep dark eyes I was seized with a fury which shook me from head to foot. I am slow to get angry, as you know, Mira, and was so even as a young man. When I really become so, it is a great relief to me. I had been depressed, disappointed, and made a fool of, and inactive for a very long time, and my despair had reached its climax in my meeting with the two friends at the hotel. Now, I thought, if all things in the world were really against me, and all of them equally damnable, the moment had come for a fight.
At least that was how I felt it at the time. Later on I reflected that it was nothing in myself which worked the change, but just the nearness of the woman. She had passed within six feet of me, and had liberated my heart by the waft of her petticoat, and I had once more the winds of life in my sails, and its currents under my keel.

I looked at my two companions and saw that they had both recognized the Jew. In their amazement they looked like two lay figures. Whatever magic I had encountered was encircling them as well as me, or else they were themselves creatures of my imagination. It mattered little to me. I was determined by now to drive fate into a corner. I took out my card, wrote on it the name of the old Jew, and a regular challenge in the best style, asking him to see me at once, and sent the waiter of the hotel to his room with it. I was not a little frightened of the old man whom Ollala had called her shadow. I truly believed that he belonged to the devil, but I had to see him. But the waiter returned to say that it was out of the question. The old gentleman had gone to bed, had had a hot drink brought him by his valet, and now had locked his door and would not be disturbed. I told the man that it was a matter of great importance, but he declined to do anything for me. He knew their guest, who went in his own splendid coach with his own servants, and was a man of unfathomable wealth.

“Has he traveled this way,” I asked the waiter, “in the company of Madame Heerbrand?”

“No, never,” declared the poor fellow, scared, I think, by my looks. He did not think that the lady and the gentleman knew each other at all, he said.

It was a loathsome thought to me that I should have to wait all night before I could do anything in the matter. Still, it could not be helped, and I therefore dragged a chair to the fireplace and stirred up the fire, not daring to go to sleep. I was afraid that the woman might leave the hotel early, so I called the waiter back, gave him money, and enjoined him to let me know when the
lady of number nine should be about to leave the hotel in the morning.

“But, Sir,” said the young man, “the lady has gone.”

“Gone?” I cried, with Pilot and the Baron repeating my exclamation like a double echo. Yes, she had gone. No sooner had she left the room by one door than she had come back to the porter’s
loge
by another, in great distress, and had ordered a coach at once to take her to the monastery even tonight. She had, she told the porter, found a letter for her at the hotel, informing her that her sister lay dying in Italy. It was a matter of life and death to her to get on.

“But is it possible,” I asked, “to go up that road tonight, and in this storm?” The waiter agreed that it would be difficult, but she had insisted, offered to double and triple the fare, and had wrung her hands in such grief that she had moved the heart of the coachman. Besides, it was not easy to disobey Frau Heerbrand. She was no ordinary lady. She had gone. We must ourselves have heard the wheels of her coach. That was true. We had indeed just heard wheels.

There we stood, like three hounds around a fox hole.

I did not doubt but that it was the sight of the old Jew which had driven away the woman. He was, indeed, a conjurer and a devil, the djinn who had somehow got the fair lady into his power. For a moment it threw me into the most terrible distress that I could not get at him and kill him. But it would cause too much stir, and they would prevent it. Now there was nothing to do but to follow her and protect her against him. At this idea my heart flew up like a lark.

We had some trouble in getting a coach, but this in the end was overcome by the Baron, who showed much energy and efficiency in the matter. I understood that my two companions, who were unaware of any personal interest of mine in the matter, felt surprised at my zeal. The Baron, holding me to be very drunk, was still not averse to one more spectator for his exploits. Pilot took
my eagerness as a proof of my friendship for him. He even, although he seemed the whole time to have been struck dumb, tried to give words to his gratitude. “Go to hell, Pilot,” I said to him. He thereupon contented himself with pressing my hand.

At last, at great cost, a coach was produced, and the ‘three of us set off together for the monastery.

The wind was terrible, and the snow was thick on the road. Our coach, in consequence, went very irregularly in bumps and starts, and at times stood quite still. We sat inside it, each in his corner. From the time when we got into the stifling atmosphere of the closed carriage, behind the panes which were swiftly blinded by the snow beating in upon them, we did not talk together. Each of us would, I am sure, willingly have had his two fellow passengers perish on the journey. I myself, however, was soon so entirely swallowed up by the idea of seeing Olalla again that the outside world sank away and disappeared for me. We were going upwards all the time. We might, for all I knew, be driving into heaven. My heaven, had I been free to choose it then, must also have been turbulent, filled with wild galloping air.

As we drove on, the road became steeper and the snow more fierce. Our coachman and groom were unable to see six feet in front of them. Suddenly the coach gave a particularly bad jump, and stopped altogether. The coachman, descending from his box, tore open the carriage door to a great gust of wind and snow, and, himself all covered with snow, roared in, infuriated, that it was impossible to get out of the drift in which the coach was stuck.

We held a short consultation inside, which meant nothing to any of us, as no one would give up the journey. We tumbled out, buttoning our coats and turning up the collars, and, doubling over like old men, we took up the pursuit.

It had stopped snowing. The sky was almost clear. The moon, running along behind thin clouds, showed us the way. But the wind was terrible here. I remembered, just as I got out of the
coach, a fairy tale, which I had been told as a child, in which an old witch keeps all the winds of heaven imprisoned in a sack. This pass, I thought, must be the sack. The locked-up winds were raging wildly in it, jumping down straight, like fighting dogs chained by their collars. Sometimes they seemed to beat down vertically upon our heads, again they rose from the ground, whirling the snow sky-high. In the carriage it had been cold, but here, as we were already high up in the mountains, the air felt as frigid as if someone had emptied a bucket of iced water over our heads. We could hardly breathe in it. But all this wildness of the elements did me good. In such a world and night I should find her, and she would need me.

The figures of my fellow travelers, even at arm’s length dim and vague like shadows on the snowy road, were insignificant to me. This search I felt to be mine alone, and soon I was a good bit in front of them. Pilot dropped out of sight. The Baron kept fairly close to me, but did not reach me.

Suddenly, after perhaps an hour’s walk, as the road turned around a rock, a large square object, slanting on the edge of the track, loomed like a large tower in front of me. It was Olalla’s carriage. It was standing there, stuck like our own and half upset, and there were neither horses nor coachman with it. I jerked open the door, and a woman inside gave a terrible shriek. It was the maid whom I had seen in the hotel. She was crouching on the carriage floor with shawls pulled over her. She was alone, and when she saw that I did not mean to kill or rob her, she cried to me that the coachman had unhitched the horses to get them into a shelter, after he had had to give up, like our own coachman, the hope of getting any farther. But where, I cried back to her, was her mistress? She had, the maid told me, gone ahead on foot. The girl was horribly scared, and in describing her lady’s flight and danger she sobbed and cried, and could hardly get her words out. I tore myself loose from her, for she did not want to let me go, and banged the door upon her. What terror, what danger, I
thought, had there been in that coach to drive a woman out of it, alone, in the dead of the night and amongst wild mountains? What could it be that threatened her at the hands of the old Jew of Amsterdam?

I had stopped beside the coach for a quarter of an hour, perhaps, and this had enabled the Baron to catch up with me. The two lanterns on the coach were still burning, and as he came up behind me and spoke to me it was curious to see, in the moon-cold night, his face appear, flaming scarlet in the light of them. In the shelter of the coach we exchanged a few words. We started again, going for a while side by side.

At a place where the road got steeper, through the mist of the loose whirling snow which was driven along the ground like the smoke from a cannon, I caught sight of a dark shadow in front of me, not a hundred yards away, which might be a human figure. At first it seemed to disappear and to appear again, and it was difficult in the night and in the storm to keep your eyes fixed upon it. But after a time, although I got no nearer, my eyes became used to their task, and I could follow her steadily. She walked, on this steep and heavy road, as quickly as I myself did, and my old fancy about her, that she could fly if she would, came back. The wind whirled her clothes about. Sometimes it filled them and stretched them out, so that she looked like an angry owl on a branch, her wings spread out. At other times it screwed them up all around her, so that on her long legs she was like a crane when it runs along the ground to catch the wind and get on the wing.

At the sight of her I felt the Baron’s nearness intolerable. If I had chased Olalla for six months, to run her down in this mountain pass, I must have her alone to myself. It would be of no use to try to explain this to him. I stopped, and as he stopped with me, I seized him by the front of his cloak and threw him back. He was tired by our climb. He was breathing heavily, and had stopped a couple of times. But he came to life at my grip and on seeing the expression of my face. Now he would by no means let me go
on alone. His eyes and teeth glinted at me. We had a few minutes’ fight on the stony road, and he knocked off my hat, which rolled away. But, still gripping his clothes with my left hand, I struck him a strong blow in the face, which made him lose his balance. The road was slippery, and he fell and rolled backwards. As he fell he had taken hold of a muffler around my neck, and had nearly strangled me. Cursing the delay, I sprang on, hot and shaking from the effort.