On the Night of the Seventh Moon

“Who’s there?” said a high-pitched, frightened voice.

“May I come in?” I asked. There was a sound which could have been an affirmative so I opened the door and entered a room rather like my own but smaller, and hunched on the bed was a girl of about my own age, her face swollen with crying, her hair in disorder.

We stared at each other.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Everything,” she replied bleakly.

I approached the bed and sat on it; “I feel so terrible,” she said.

“Should I call someone?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not that. I wish it were. It’s long overdue.

I know I’m going to die. “

“Of course you won’t. You’ll feel better when the baby comes.”

Again she shook her head.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. Last night I thought of jumping out of the window.”

Oh no! “

“It’s different for you. You`’ve got a husband and a home and it’s all going to be wonderful.”

I didn’`t answer. I said: “And you haven’t?”

“We should have been married,” she said.

“He was killed six months ago. He was in the Duke’s Guard and the bomb was meant for the Duke. He would have married me.”

“So he was a soldier.”

She nodded.

“We would have been married if he’d lived,” she reiterated.

In the Duke’s Guard, I was thinking. Duke Carl of Rochenstein and Dorrenig, Count of Lokenberg.

“Your family will look after you,” I soothed.

Again the doleful shake of the head.

“No they won’t. They won’t have me back. They brought me to Dr. Kleine but when it’s over they won’t have me back. I tried to kill myself once before. I walked out into the river but then I was frightened and they rescued me and brought me here.”

She was small and very young and frightened and I longed to help her.

I wanted to tell her that I myself had a future to face which might not be easy; but my story was so fantastic, so different from one of a soldier lover who had come to an untimely end.

She was only sixteen, she told me. I felt so much older and protective. I said it was always wrong to despair. I was of some use to her, I believe, because of my recent suffering. I could recall, because it was so recent, the terrible desolation which had swept over me when I had been told that my romantic marriage was nothing but a myth.

At least, I thought, this girl has a plausible tragedy to relate.

I made her talk and she told me about the town of Rochenburg, the chief city of Rochenstein, where she had lived with her grandmother who remembered the day the present Duke’s father died, and he became the head of the ruling house. He had always been a good and serious-minded Duke-rather different from his son Prince Carl, who was notoriously wild. Her grandmother had been a great loyalist and she would have welcomed a soldier of the Duke’s Guard into the family, but if he had been one of Ludwig’s men she would never have accepted him.

But that made it all the more terrible because if they had not anticipated their marriage vows, if they had waited, they could have been respectably married in due course. But fate had gone against them. Their child was conceived just before the bomb intended for the Duke had destroyed her lover, leaving her desolate for ever-and with a double burden, for to her grief was added shame. She could not endure it; nor would her grandmother. She had no notion how she was going to fend for herself and the child, and the river had seemed an easy solution.

“You must never do that again,” I told her.

“You’ll find a way. We all do.”

“You’re all right.

“I I ha vent 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, ‘wbs 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 a’s . 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.