On the Night of the Seventh Moon Read online

  “You must never do that again,” I told her. “You’ll find a way. We all do.”

  “You’re all right . . .”

  “I . . . I haven’t a husband to go to.”

  “Oh, so you’re a widow? That’s sad. But you have money I suppose. Most people who come to Dr. Kleine’s have. I don’t know why he has taken me in. When I was brought in half-drowned and they were scolding me about having done harm to my child he said he would take me in here and look after me.”

  “That was kind of him. But I haven’t any money either. I shall have to support myself and my child. I may be teaching English at a convent.”

  “You are accomplished. I have nothing to recommend me. I’m just a simple girl.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Gretchen,” she said. “Gretchen Swartz.”

  “I’ll come and see you again, Gretchen,” I said. “We’ll talk to each other. We’ll discuss what you can do when you have a child and no money. I’m sure there’s always a way.”

  “You will come back then?” she said.

  I promised.

  We talked for some time and when I left her I had forgotten about the women on the lawn.

  Dr. Kleine came to see me later that day. He was pleased, he said, that everything seemed to be going well. He thought the birth was imminent and we must be prepared for that.

  I slept well and the next morning I felt comparatively well. After I had breakfasted in my own room I put on my loose dressing gown and went to the window and there were the women on the lawn again. I immediately thought of Gretchen Swartz and decided to go along and talk to her.

  I found my way to her room. I mounted the stairs and knocked. There was no answer so I opened the door and looked in.

  There was no one there. The bed was made, and there was an impersonal look about it. The floor was highly polished, the window slightly open; the room looked as though it had been prepared for the next occupant.

  Disappointed I went back to my room. Then it occurred to me that Gretchen must have been taken somewhere to have her baby. Perhaps at that very moment it was being born.

  I sat at the window for some little time watching the women below and I could not get poor Gretchen out of my mind.

  That afternoon my pains started and for the second time in a very brief period I suffered tragedy.

  I can remember the agony. I can remember thinking: It will all be worth while when I have my child . . . everything . . . everything.

  I lost consciousness and when I was aware again I was no longer in pain.

  “How is she?” I heard a voice say.

  There was no answer.

  My first thought was for my child, and I held up my arms.

  Someone was bending over me.

  I said: “My baby . . .”

  There was no answer. Then from a long way off I heard someone say: “Shall she be told?”

  And somebody else said: “Wait.”

  I was terribly frightened. I tried to cling to consciousness but it had gone again.

  . . .

  Dr. Kleine was at my bedside. Ilse was with him. I saw Dr. Carlsberg too. They all looked very grave.

  Ilse had taken my hand.

  “It was for the best,” she said. “In the circumstances.”

  “What?” I cried.

  “My dear Helena, in view of everything you will see in time . . . it will be easier.”

  I could not endure the terrible fear. I must know the truth.

  “Where is my child?” I cried.

  “The child,” said Dr. Kleine, “was born dead.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, dear,” said Ilse tenderly. “All the horror, all the anxiety. It was inevitable.”

  “But I wanted my child. I wanted my little . . . was it a boy?”

  “It was a girl,” said Ilse.

  I saw her so clearly—my little daughter. I could see her in a little silk dress—aged one, aged two—and then growing up and going to school. I felt the tears on my cheeks.

  “She was alive,” I said. “I used to smile because she was so lively. I used to feel her there. Oh no, there is some mistake.”

  Dr. Carlsberg bent over me. “The shock of everything,” he said, “was too much for you. We expected this. Please, do not fret. Remember that you are free now to live a happy life.”

  A happy life! I wanted to scream at them. My lover you tell me never existed. I dreamed of my marriage. But the child was there—a living thing and now you tell me she is dead.

  Ilse said: “We will take care of you, Helena . . .”

  I wanted to cry out: “I don’t need taking care of. I want my child. How dare you experiment with me! How dare you give me dreams that are without reality!” If I have been abused I want to know it. There is nothing worse than uncertainty. Oh, yes, there is. There is this terrible loss. The baby who was to have been my consolation has been taken from me.

  I lay there limply. I had not known such desolation since they had told me that Maximilian, whom I had believed to be my husband, was a myth.

  I was very weak, they told me. I must not leave my bed. I did not feel physically weak, only mentally exhausted and in deep despair.

  All these months I had lived for my child. I had made a dream in which Maximilian came back to me and proudly I showed him the child. I had believed that, just as I had always really believed in those three days of perfect happiness. It was only when Ilse smothered me with her goodness that I wavered. But I was never convinced. I could not be convinced.

  “I must see my child,” I said.

  Dr. Kleine was horrified. “It would increase your distress.”

  I insisted that I wanted to see my baby.

  “We were burying her today,” said Dr. Kleine.

  “I should be there!”

  “It is a simple ceremony, and you must not leave your bed. You have to concentrate on getting well now.”

  I repeated that I wanted to see my child.

  Ilse came to see me. “Helena, dear,” she said, “it is all over. What you have to do now is forget. You can go back to your home. You can forget all this . . . nightmare. In a little while it will be as though it never happened. You are so young.”

  I said stonily: “It will never be as though it has not happened. Nothing that can possibly happen to me will ever be so real, so important to me as this. Do you think I can ever forget?”

  “That is not what Dr. Carlsberg wants. His object has been achieved. Now he would like you to go back to normality.”

  “Dr. Carlsberg is too glib with his dream-producing drugs. I want to see my baby.”

  “My dear Helena, it would be better not.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that I have given birth to some monster?”

  “Certainly not. A little girl, who was born dead.”

  “I was so much aware of her alive.”

  “It was a difficult birth. All that you had suffered . . . and you suffered far more than you realized . . . has taken its toll. This is what the doctors feared. In such circumstances it is much better so.”

  I said: “They are going to bury my baby today. I must see her before they do so.”

  “It would be better . . .”

  I raised myself on my elbow. I cried: “I will not be told any more what I must do. I will not be the victim of your experiments.”

  Ilse looked frightened. “I will speak to the doctors,” she said.

  They put me in a wheel chair because the doctor would not allow me to walk. I was taken into a room in which stood a tiny coffin on trestles; the venetian blinds had been arranged so that a little light came through the slats. And there she lay—my little baby—a small pinched face framed by a little white bonnet. I wanted to pick her up, to hold her to me, to breathe life into that limp little body.

  Hot tears were in my eyes and bitter despair in my heart.

  They wheeled me silently back to my room. They put me to bed; they smoothed my pillows and tucked
in the bedclothes, they did everything they could to comfort me, but there was no comfort.

  I lay in my bed; I could hear the voices of the women on the lawn.

  It was over. The dream and the nightmare. I was not yet nineteen years old and I felt I had had a greater experience than many people encountered in a lifetime.

  Ilse was with me every day. She constantly stressed the fact that I was free now. I could take up my life again as it had been before the Night of the Seventh Moon. She would take me back to England: and there I would find everything was as it had been. It was the best thing for me.

  I thought about it a good deal and I could see that it was what I should have to do.

  I had to grow away from this mad adventure. I had to forget. I would have to start again.

  I stayed in Dr. Kleine’s nursing home for two weeks and it was almost when I was on the point of leaving—so immersed in my own tragedy had I been—that I remembered Gretchen Swartz.

  I told Ilse how I had found her sobbing in her room and Ilse said she would ask the doctor or Mrs. Kleine about the girl.

  It was the doctor who mentioned her to me.

  “You were asking about Gretchen Swartz. So you had a word with her? Did she tell you her story?”

  “Yes, poor girl. She was very unhappy.”

  “She didn’t come through. She died but the child was all right. A fine boy.”

  “And what happened to the boy?”

  “Her family took him. The old grandmother will look after him and then he will go to an uncle.”

  “Poor Gretchen! I was so sorry for her.”

  “Now you are going to stop being sorry. You are going to get well and Frau Gleiberg tells me that in a few weeks’ time she will be taking you back to your home.”

  He seemed almost gleeful. I had an impression that he had ticked my name off a list. A difficult case which had been satisfactorily settled.

  And then I felt the tears pricking my eyelids—they had come very easily in the last few days—and I was weeping for the loss of my dream and my child.

  The Years Between

  1861–1869

  ONE

  A month after I had looked on that little dead face Ilse took me back to England.

  How normal everything seemed. If ever I could grow to believe that I had imagined the whole incredible adventure, I could do it there. On the journey Ilse had talked to me of the future and the theme of her discourse was: Forget. The sooner I did this the sooner I should begin to lead a new life. She did not see it as I had seen it. To her it was a horrible misadventure with a climax she could only regard as fortunate. Death, she would say, had solved my problems. She did not know that the ecstatic memory of three days with Maximilian lived on; she did not understand that while a child lives within its mother, love is born.

  But I could see that she was right about putting it all behind me. I had to go on living. I had to pick up the threads of my life.

  Ilse stayed with us only a few days, then she said goodbye. I fancied there was a certain relief in her attitude. Perhaps she was regretting that she had asked me to accompany her and Ernst on that day some ten months ago, but when I saw her off at the station she made me promise to write to her and tell her how I was getting on and she seemed as concerned as ever.

  Everyone agreed that I had changed. I knew that they were right. Gone was the gay effervescent girl; in her place was a rather withdrawn woman. I looked older too—older than my nineteen years whereas before I had looked younger than my age.

  There were changes at home. Aunt Caroline was slightly different. She had always been critical of society, now she was angry with it. No one seemed right to her; Aunt Matilda came in for a good deal of castigation but I very soon became the butt for it. What I had thought I was doing gallivanting about for nearly a year, she did not know. Improving my German! English was good enough for her and should have been for anyone. I’d come back bone idle, as far as she could see. Had I any new recipes to tell her? Not that she would want a lot of foreign ways of cooking in her kitchen. I developed a talent for appearing to listen to her and not hearing a thing she said.

  As for Aunt Matilda, she had changed. Bodily ailments still supplied her main excitement but she had become very friendly with the Cleeses in the bookshop.

  “What I wonder,” said Aunt Caroline sarcastically, “is why you don’t go and live there.”

  “You know, Helena,” Aunt Matilda confided in me, “when you think of all there is to do in the shop they don’t get much time for seeing to things about the rooms above it. Amelia’s chest isn’t what it should be and when you consider Mr. Clees’ one kidney trying to do the work of two it makes you think.”

  She was happier than she had been when I left and I grew quite fond of her. She was always smuggling in mending from the Cleeses’ house so that Aunt Caroline wouldn’t see it. She would sit in her room secretly doing it. It was what Aunt Caroline would call “making yourself cheap.”

  The Grevilles were pleased to see me. I was asked to dinner within a few days of my return.

  Mrs. Greville embraced me warmly. “My dear Helena!” she said. “Why you’ve grown thinner!” And she took my face in her hands and looked at it with such close scrutiny that I felt myself flushing.

  “Is everything all right, Helena?”

  “Why yes, of course.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “I’m a year older.”

  “It’s more than that.” She looked rather worried so I kissed her and said: “I haven’t settled in properly yet.”

  “Oh, your aunts,” she said with a little grimace. Then she added: “Anthony’s so pleased you’re back. We all are.”

  It was a happy evening. They were delighted by my return. They kept asking questions about my sojourn and I tried to evade them when they touched on my personal experiences. I told them some of the legends of the forest.

  Anthony could talk very learnedly about this. “These have come from the pre-Christian era,” he said. “I believe some of the beliefs still linger.”

  “I’m sure they do,” I said, and I was back in the square watching the dancers and I saw a figure in the horned headdress and I heard a tender voice whisper: “Lenchen Liebchen.”

  Anthony was looking at me strangely. I must have betrayed something. I warned myself to be careful. So I tried to be very gay and described how the girls dressed on feast days in their satin aprons with bright kerchiefs tied over their heads. Anthony knew something of this because he had visited the Black Forest with his parents before he went to college. He had been fascinated even as I had.

  Yes, it was a pleasant evening but that night I was disturbed by dreams. Maximilian was in them and so was the child, and strangely enough it was not of a dead baby in a coffin I dreamed but of a living child.

  The dreams were so vivid that when I awoke next morning I was plunged into deep melancholy.

  This is how it will be throughout my life, I thought.

  The days passed slowly at first but because one week was so much like another they merged and began to fly. There were the household duties to be performed under Aunt Caroline’s never satisfied authority; there were the occasional visits of friends; sometimes I went into the bookshop and helped when they were busy. I began to acquire a certain knowledge of books. Aunt Matilda, who managed to be there quite often too, was always pleased to see me there. It was such a help for Amelia with her chest and Albert with his solitary kidney.

  Aunt Caroline was not so pleased by the friendship. “What you see in that place, I can’t imagine,” she grumbled. “If they sold something sensible I might understand it more. Books! What are they but time wasters.”

  During the first year of my return, Ilse had written several times. Then there came a letter to say that Ernst had died and she would be leaving Denkendorf. I sent my condolences and expected to be given a new address but I never had another letter from Ilse. I waited and waited but the years passed and there was n
othing. It seemed very strange when I remembered how close we had been.

  My dreams continued to disturb my nights and haunt my days. Time could do nothing to efface my memories. In those dreams my baby lived—a little girl who so resembled Maximilian that she was clearly his daughter. As the time passed she grew up in my dreams. I yearned for the child; and when I awoke after one of my vivid dreams I suffered the loss of my baby afresh.

  We lived perpetually under the cloud of Aunt Caroline’s displeasure, and one day when I had been home for a little more than a year she was not up at her usual time and when I went to her room I found her in bed unable to move. She had had a stroke. She recovered a little and I nursed her for three years, with the help of Aunt Matilda. She was an exacting patient; nothing pleased her. Those were three dreary years when I would drop into my bed exhausted every night to dream. And how I dreamed! My memories were as vivid as ever.

  I well remember the day when Aunt Matilda whispered to me that she was going to marry Albert Clees.

  “I mean,” she said blushing coyly, “where is the sense of my keep going in and out. I might just as well live there.”

  “It’s only a step or two next door,” I reminded her.

  “Oh but it’s not the same.” She was bubbling over with excitement like a young bride. I was happy for her because she had changed so much. Happiness suited Aunt Matilda.

  “When’s the great day to be?” I asked.

  “Oh, I haven’t told Caroline yet.”

  When Caroline was told she was very angry. She talked continually of the folly of old women who ran after men, mending their socks and turning the collars and cuffs of their shirts. What did they think they were going to get out of that!

  “The satisfaction of helping someone perhaps,” I suggested.

  “Now, Helena, there’s no need for you to come into this. If Matilda likes to make a fool of herself let her.”

  “I don’t see that she’s making a fool of herself by helping Mr. Clees.”

  “Perhaps you don’t, but I do. You’re too young to understand these things.”