On the Night of the Seventh Moon

As for Aunt Matilda, she had changed. Bodily ailments still supplied her main excitement but she had become very friendly with the Clees 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’s 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 dees’ 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 and 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 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 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 nothing. 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 no 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 keeping 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 under stand these things.”

Too young! Beside Aunt Caroline I felt old in experience. If she but knew! I thought. If I said to her: But I have been a wife and mother, what would she make of my implausible tale? One thing I was sure of: she must never get a chance to make anything of it.

And that started the yearning again. Indeed, everything seemed to lead back to it.

When Aunt Matilda ceremoniously brought Mr. Clees into the house. Aunt Caroline merely sniffed and satisfied herself with contemptuous looks, but I had noticed the hot colour in her cheeks and the way the veins knotted at her temples.

I said that we ought to drink to the health and happiness of the affianced couple and without Aunt Caroline’s permission I took out a bottle of her best elderberry wine and served it.

It was rather pleasant to see Aunt Matilda looking ten years younger and I wondered, with a return of my old frivolity, whether she would have fallen in love with Albert Clees if he had not been deprived of a kidney. Amelia was pleased too. She whispered to me that she had seen it coming for a long time and that it was the best thing that could happen to her father.

The wedding was to be soon, for as Matilda said there was no sense in waiting, and Mr. Clees gallantly added that he had waited long enough, which made Aunt Matilda blush prettily.

When the Clees had left Aunt Caroline let forth a burst of scorn and abuse.

“Some people thought they were seventeen instead of forty-seven.”

“Forty-five,” said Aunt Matilda.

“And what’s the difference?”

“Two years,” said Aunt Matilda spiritedly.

“Making fools of themselves! I suppose there’ll be a white wedding with bridesmaids in wreaths of rosebuds.”

“No. Albert thinks a quiet wedding would be best.”

“He’s got sense enough to realize you don’t want to make a fool of yourself parading in white, then.”