Chapter 42
The limousine glided northward. A cold rain was falling. Behind the glistening windowpanes the scene was continually melting from one blackness into another. At each flash of radiance Madame Zanidov was revealed motionless in her corner, muffled in her cloak, with closed eyes.
"Is she reading my thoughts?" Lilla wondered.
No matter: by this time the whole world must know them, released as they had been, into that eager public air, like a deafening cry of confession. "What's to be the end of this?" she asked herself, appalled, as she felt her life being whirled along from one fatal impulse to another, just as she was being whisked by the limousine from darkness to darkness. To check that inexorable progress! to see some constant light!
Anna Zanidov turned her wedge-shaped face toward Lilla, with the words:
"I have thought of you many times."
"I can say the same."
"To be sure," the Russian declared, "I have stopped doing that, you know. I didn't want to end by being shunned."
"I suppose you still have the gift?"
"No doubt."
The limousine halted. Across its path rumbled a street car mistily bright behind the rain, crowded with people who represented a rational humanity aloof from the little compartment in which were shut up these two victims of remarkable beliefs. Then, the limousine moving on, the blurred phantasmagoria closed in again:--and the northern vista took on the ambiguity of Lilla's life, a compound of darknesses and deceptive gleams, stretching away toward what? She uttered:
"Nevertheless, to know the future!" And as the Russian remained mute and motionless, she faltered, "No matter what one learned, the suspense would be over."
"Would it, indeed?"
"I am desperate," Lilla responded in low tones.
After a while Madame Zanidov, with a compassionate austerity, responded:
"Remember, then, that it is you who wished this."
Their hands touched. In the rushing limousine, in this fluidity of lights and darkness, they were intent on the phenomenon that both believed to be a revelation of fate. At last the clairvoyant quietly began:
"I am out of doors, far away."
The glare of passing headlights displayed her closed, oblique eyes, her parted, flat lips, her idol-like aspect, which bestowed on her the impressiveness, the seeming infallibility, of those oracles that were anciently supposed to describe some future mood of the chaotic ebb and surge that human beings call life.
"Very old tree trunks. Great trailing vines. Huge flowers black in the moonlight. It is the very same place. Here is that clearing, and the squatting black men. Their hands are folded; their heads are bowed forward; they are filled with sadness. Near them, on the ground, lies the dead man whose body is covered with a cloth. It is the man who has loved you." She dropped Lilla's hand, protesting, "This is incredible!"
"Incredible?"
"Yes, because this scene appears to be still in the future. Do you understand me? Hasn't happened yet."
The limousine stopped before the Russian's door as Lilla, disgusted by this anticlimax, replied:
"You've repeated your old prophecy because it has haunted my mind ever since you made it that night at the Brassfields'. You've merely gotten back from me the impression that you stamped on my consciousness then."
"Then that is something new. These perceptions of mine have never referred to the past. Besides, I had just now--but how shall I explain it?--a powerful sense of the future. Ah, well, maybe this gift of mine is leaving me, since I've refused to use it. I sha'n't be sorry." As she got out of the car, she amended, "At least, I don't think I'm sorry to have disappointed you."
The door snapped shut on that hope: the world became fluid again: and Lilla was borne away toward another pity and another remorse.