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.