But it's the only one: the other hotels are all full.

STRANGER (to the WAITER). You can go. (The LADY sinks on to a chair
without taking off her hat and coat.) What is it you want?

LADY. I wish you'd kill me.

STRANGER. I don't wonder! Thrown out of hotels, because we're not
married, and pestered by the police, we're forced to come to this place,
the last I'd have wished. To this very room, number eight.... Someone
must be against me!

LADY. Is this eight?

STRANGER. What? Have you been here before?

LADY. Have you?

STRANGER. Yes.

LADY. Then let's get away. Onto the road, into the woods. It doesn't
matter where.

STRANGER. I should like to. But after this terrible time I'm as tired as
you are. I felt this was to be our journey's end. I resisted, I tried to
go in the opposite direction, but trains were late, or we missed them,
and we had to come here. To this room! The devil's in it--at least what
I call the devil. But I'll be even with him yet.

LADY. It seems we'll never find peace on earth again.

STRANGER. Nothing's been changed. The dying Christmas roses. (Looking
at two pictures.) There he is again. And that's the Hotel Breuer in
Montreux. I've stayed there, too.

LADY. Did you go to the post office?

STRANGER. I thought you'd ask me that. I did. And as an answer to five
letters and three telegrams I found a telegram saying that my publisher
had gone away for a fortnight.

LADY. Then we're lost.

STRANGER. Very nearly.

LADY. The waiter will be back in five minutes and ask for our passports.
Then the landlord will come up and tell us to go.

STRANGER. Then only one course remains.

LADY. Two.

STRANGER. The second's impossible.

LADY. What is the second?

STRANGER. To go to your parents in the country.

LADY. You're beginning to read my thoughts.

STRANGER. We no longer have any secrets from one another.

LADY. Then the whole dream's at an end.

STRANGER. It maybe.

LADY. You must telegraph again.

STRANGER. I ought to, I know. But I can't stir from here. I no longer
believe that what I do can succeed. Someone's paralysed me.

LADY. And me! We decided never to speak of the past and yet we drag it
with us. Look at this carpet. Those flowers seem to form....

STRANGER. Him! It's him. He's everywhere. How many hundred times has
he.... Yet I see someone else in the pattern of the table cloth. No,
it's an illusion! Any moment now I'll hear my funeral march--then
everything wil