On the Night of the Seventh Moon (6 page)

I was drifting. It was as though I were waiting. Life was dull; my high spirits were taking a waspish turn because I was frustrated. I provoked the aunts: I refused to learn what Aunt Caroline was so desperate to teach, I was flippant over the ailments of the body. Yes, I was frustrated. I yearned for something and I was not sure what. I felt that but for that adventure in the forest I might have felt differently. If Siegfried had not robbed me of my virtue (as he had put it), he had robbed me of my peace of mind. I felt that I had glimpsed something which I would not have known existed if he had not shown me; and now I could never clearly be content again.

When the Cleeses came in the spring life was more tolerable. They were as serious as Anthony Greville. I went into the shop quite a bit and grew very friendly with them. The aunts quite liked them too. I was nearly nineteen—not yet of age; the aunts were my guardians, and life seemed to promise me very little.

And then the Gleibergs appeared in Oxford.

 

I was helping Aunt Caroline make strawberry jam when they arrived. There was a knock on the door and Aunt Caroline cried: “Who on earth is that at this hour of the morning?”

It was about eleven o'clock and I was surprised afterwards that I had no premonition of how important this meeting was going to prove.

Aunt Caroline stood, her head on one side, listening to the voices in the hall, to make sure that Ellen was making the necessary inquiries as to the visitors' identity in the correct manner.

She came into the kitchen. “Oh, mum . . .”

“Madam,” corrected Aunt Caroline.

“Madam, they say they're your cousins so I put them in the drawing room.”

“Cousins!” cried Aunt Caroline indignantly. “What cousins? We have no cousins.”

Aunt Matilda came into the kitchen. Unexpected callers were an event and she had seen them arrive.

“Cousins!” repeated Aunt Caroline. “They say they're our cousins!”

“Our only cousin was Albert. He died of liver,” said Aunt Matilda. “He drank. We never heard what became of his wife. She was as fond of the liqueur as he was. Sometimes it affects the heart and she was always a funny color.”

“Why not go and see them,” I said. “You'll probably find they're some long lost relations who have suffered all the diseases that the flesh is heir to.”

Aunt Caroline gave me that look which meant that I was showing signs of my outlandish education; Aunt Matilda, who was more simple, never tried to analyze the workings of my mind, although she kept a close watch on my physical condition.

I followed them into the drawing room because after all if the cousins were theirs they were probably some relation to me also.

I was unprepared for the visitors. They looked foreign. “Outlandish!” I knew Aunt Caroline was thinking.

They were a man and a woman. The woman was of middle height and carried herself well; the man, of the same height, was inclined to rotundity. She wore a black gown and elegant bonnet on her fair hair. The man clicked his heels and bowed as we entered.

They were both looking at me and the woman said in English: “This must be Helena.” And my heart began to beat fast with excitement because I recognized her accent; I had heard it many times while I was in the
Damenstift.

I went forward expectantly and she took my hands in hers and looked earnestly into my face. “You have a look of your mother,” she said. She turned to the man: “It is so, don't you agree, Ernst?”

“I think I see it,” he replied rather slowly.

Aunt Caroline said: “Won't you sit down?”

“Thank you.”

They sat. “We are here for a short visit,” said the woman in rather laborious English. “Three weeks or so. We came to London. My husband has seen a doctor.”

“A doctor?” Aunt Matilda's eyes glistened.

“It is a complaint of the heart. So he came to London and I thought while we are in England we must go to Oxford and see Lili. We have called at the bookshop and they tell us this sad news. We did not know, you see, that she was dead. But at least we can see Helena.”

“Oh,” said Aunt Caroline coldly, “so you're relations of Helena's mother.”

“Would it be the valves?” asked Aunt Matilda. “I knew somebody who was born with valve trouble.”

Nobody was listening to her. In fact I doubted the visitors knew what she was talking about.

“Soon after her marriage when she came to England,” said the woman, “we began to lose touch. There were a few letters and then—nothing more. I knew there was a daughter, Helena.” She smiled at me. “I felt we couldn't be so near and not look you up.”

“I'm glad you did,” I said. “Where do you live? Near my mother's old home? She talked about it a good deal.”

“Did she ever mention me?”

“Tell me your name.”

“Ilse . . . Ilse Gleiberg now but not then of course.”

“Ilse,” I said. “There were some cousins, I know.”

“There were several of us. Oh dear, it seems so long ago. And then everything changed when she married and went away. People should never really lose touch.”

“Whereabouts do you live?”

“We have just taken a little summer place temporarily. It's in the Lokenwald.”

“The Lokenwald!” There was a lilt in my voice. Aunt Caroline
would notice it and think it unbecoming. Aunt Matilda would be aware of my high color and think I was developing heart disease. I wanted to laugh, I was suddenly so lighthearted.

“I was educated at a
Damenstift
near Leichenkin.”

“Really . . . well that's quite close to the Lokenwald.”

“Loke's forest!” I said gaily.

“Ah, you know something of our old legends.”

Aunt Caroline was restive. These people seemed to forget that she was the mistress of the house, because they were so excited to have discovered me.

To turn the attention from me Aunt Caroline suggested that the visitors might like a glass of her elderberry wine. They accepted and Aunt Caroline summoned Ellen and then, afraid that she would not dust the glasses or in some way not carry out the order to her liking, went off to superintend the ceremony. Aunt Matilda cornered Ernst Gleiberg and talked to him about hearts but his English was not as good as his wife's which didn't worry Aunt Matilda who never needed replies, only an audience.

Meanwhile I turned to Ilse, more excited than I had been since I came home. She was about the age my mother would have been and she talked of life at the
Damenstift
and the games they had played in the little
Schloss
where they had lived and how my mother's family had visited hers and how they had ridden their ponies in the forest.

I felt a deep sense of nostalgia.

The wine was brought—last year's brew which Aunt Caroline reckoned would be ready for the drinking and the fresh wine biscuits which she had baked the day before. She glanced significantly at me to make sure that I was realizing how important it was to be prepared with wine and biscuits for unexpected visitors.

Ilse then turned her attention to Aunt Caroline, praised the wine which pleased her, and asked for a recipe for the biscuits.

So altogether the three of us were pleased with the visit.

That was a beginning. They had taken lodgings in the town and the aunts and myself were soon invited to dine with them. This was
exciting and the aunts enjoyed it although Aunt Caroline did think they had some outlandish ways.

I enjoyed most the times when I could be alone with them. I talked constantly about my mother and how she had met my father when he was on his walking tour. They were very interested. I told them about the
Damenstift
and the different nuns; in fact I realized that I talked a great deal about myself—far more than they did about their lives. They did though bring back to me very vividly the enchantment of the forest, and I could sense the change in myself. I was more like the girl I had been before I came back to find my life so sadly changed. Not a word did I say of my adventure in the mist but I was thinking of it, and the night after that first day of their arrival I dreamed of it all so vividly that it was like living it again.

The days passed all too quickly and not one of them without a meeting with the Gleibergs. I told them how very sad I was that they would soon be leaving; Ilse said she would miss me too. It was Ilse to whom I had grown so close—identifying her with my mother. She began to tell me stories of their childhood together, all the little jaunts and customs which my mother had mentioned, and little incidents concerning Lili, as she called her, of which I had never heard before.

About a week before they were due to leave she said to me: “How I wish you could come back with us for a visit.”

The joy in my face seemed to startle her. “Would you really like it so much?” she asked, well pleased.

“More than anything on earth,” I said vehemently.

“Perhaps it could be arranged.”

“The aunts . . .” I began.

She put her hand on one side and lifted her shoulders, a gesture she used frequently.

“I could pay my fare,” I said eagerly. “I have some money.”

“That would not be necessary. You would be our guest, of course.”

She put her finger to her lips as though something had occurred to her.

“Ernst . . .” she said. “I am concerned about his health. If I could have a traveling companion . . .”

It was an idea.

I broached it to the aunts during luncheon.

“Cousin Ilse is worried about Ernst,” I told them.

“I don't wonder at it. Hearts are funny things,” said Aunt Matilda.

“It's traveling. She says it's a burden for one.”

“She might have thought of that before she left her home,” said Aunt Caroline, who thought every adversity which befell others was their own fault and only those which came to her due to unavoidable ill fortune.

“She brought him to see a doctor.”

“The best of them are here,” said Aunt Matilda proudly. “I remember Mrs. Corsair's going up to London to see a specialist. I won't mention what ailed her but . . .” She looked significantly at me.

“Cousin Ilse would like someone to help her on the journey. She suggested I go.”

“You!”

“Well, it would be such a help and in view of Cousin Ernst's complaint . . .”

“Hearts are very funny things,” from Aunt Matilda. “Unreliable . . . more so than lungs, though you can't be sure of lungs either.”

“Well, I've no doubt it would be a help to her but why should you go tramping out to outlandish places?”

“Perhaps because I'd like to. I'd like to be of use to her. After all, she is my mother's cousin.”

“That's what comes of marrying foreigners,” said Aunt Caroline.

“Someone who understands hearts would be very useful now,” said Aunt Matilda speculatively. Good heavens, I thought. She's not suggesting she should go?

She was. Her love of disease would carry her even to such lengths. Aunt Caroline was horrified and this was fortunate for I was sure that because of this veiled suggestion of her sister's she viewed my departure with less dismay.

“How would you get back?” demanded Aunt Caroline trimphantly.

“By train, by sea.”

“Alone! A young girl traveling alone!”

“People do. And it's not as though it's my first visit. The Grevilles might be coming out again. I could wait for them and travel back with them perhaps.”

“It all seems very outlandish to me,” said Aunt Caroline.

But I was determined to go; and I think that Aunt Caroline realized that I had my mother's determination—“stubbornness” she called it—and once I had made up my mind I would go. Aunt Matilda was, in a way, on my side because she was certain that when you traveled with a “heart” more than one pair of hands would be needed if things went wrong. So it happened that at the end of the month of June when the Gleibergs left England I was with them.

I
was in a state of exultation. Some strange transformation had come to me on that night in the hunting lodge and I would never be quite the same again. I sometimes believed that I had supped with the gods—or one of them at least. He belonged in Asgarth with Odin and Thor; he would be as bold and brave and as wicked and ruthless as any of them. He had taken possession of my mind so that I was like the knight-at-arms who had met the belle dame sans merci. “Alone and palely loitering” I would wander the Earth ever more until I found him.

How foolish one could be! Yet on the other hand if I could retrace my steps in some ways, if I could prove to myself that what I had met on that night was not a god but a man who was not very scrupulous and might have submitted me to that which I am sure people like my aunts would think death preferable, I believed I might throw off this spell which now bound me. I would return to Oxford and learn to be a good housewife. I might be a spinster who looked after the aunts for the rest of their lives, or I might marry and have a family and bring them up to be respectable citizens. My daughters should never be sent to a
Damenstift
in the pine forests for fear one day they should be lost in the mist and captured by a wicked baron, for who could be sure that the good angel in the guise of a Hildegarde would always be there?

We traveled through the familiar country and as I smelt the pines my spirits rose. At length we came to the little station of Lokenburg. A trap took us and our luggage to their house.

How excited I was to be in Lokenburg. There were a few new houses which had been recently built on the outskirts in the
Altstadt.
It seemed to have come right out of a fairy tale with its arcaded streets and looked of the Middle Ages.

“It's beautiful!” I cried, gazing at the high roofs and gabled houses, with little domes capping the turrets and the window boxes on the window ledges overflowing with flowers. There was the market place with a pond in the center and in which a fountain played; from the shops hung iron signs creaking in the wind with the quaint pictures on them indicating the various trades.