It was evening. The two boys had already gone with Tini into the lodgings opposite. Thomas slept. Anne and the old servant sat up with him; they did not dare to look at each other.
The windows were open; in the corridor, near the wall, the marble clock ticked, on the floor. The last thing left in the old house. Florian insisted on carrying it over himself into the new lodgings.
Anne counted the strokes of the clock. “In three hours ... in two hours....” She rose quietly, slid along the corridor, down the stairs. In the back garden, between the high, ugly walls, the old chestnut tree, the winged pump, the bushes were all still in their places ... and one could rest on the circular seat of the apple tree. Everything was as of old, even the ticking of the old clock came down into the garden.
Anne leaned her head against the trunk of the tree; without taking her eyes off Thomas’s window, she took leave of all things around her.
Suddenly, as if somebody’s speech had broken off in the act of saying farewell, the silence became absolute. The clock had stopped.
Anne ran up the stairs. Now she remembered. Last night she had forgotten the clock and now the butterfly pendulum, which she had seen alive, lay dead between the marble pillars. She passed her hand wearily over her brow. So the little dwarf had gone too! Had Time itself forsaken the old house?
She opened the door of the green room. The candle light floated round her up and down. Her steps echoed sharply from the empty walls. She stopped in front of the tall white doors with the glass panes. On the panel rising notches were visible. When they were children, Christopher and she, their father had marked their growth every year. She went further, trying the door-handles carefully. Some were meek and obedient, others creaked and resisted. She knew them ... they had had their say in her life. She knew the voice of everything in the house. The windows spoke to her when they were opened; the board of the threshold too had something to say beneath her tread, always the same thing, ever since she could remember. But that was part of its destiny.
She slipped along the walls. She passed her hand over the faded wallpaper, over the grey stove, even over the window sills. She put the candle down and looked through the small panes of glass towards the Danube, just like old times. But the fronts of the houses opposite repelled her looks.
A carriage rattled through the street: it sounded like the crack of a whip. Anne clung close to the walls and under the harmonizing influence of the quiet night, the intimate physical contact brought something suddenly home to her that had lived in her unconscious self dimly unexpressed, for the whole of her existence. In that moment she understood the bond that existed between her and the doomed old house. The bricks under the whitewash, the beams, the arches, all were creations of one single force and she felt herself one with them as if she had grown from between the walls, as if she were just a chip of them, a chip privileged to move and say aloud what they had to suffer in silence.
She thought of the finished lives, continued in her who had survived everybody. Mysterious memories of events she had never witnessed invaded her mind. Grafts from memories treasured up by the house of the Ulwings.