“He had no head, your father,” said Aunt Caroline scornfully.
“He had a head all right,” replied Aunt Matilda, “but it was always in the clouds.”
“And this is the result. Debts . . . I never saw such debts. And when you think of that wine cellar of his and the wine bills. What he did with it all, I can’t imagine.”
“He liked to entertain his friends from the university and they liked to come,” I explained.
“I don’t wonder at it, with all the wine he was fool enough to give them.”
Aunt Caroline saw everything in that way. People did things for what they got, never for any other reason. I think she had come to look after my father to make sure of her place in heaven. She suspected the motives of everyone. “And what is he going to get out of that?” was a favorite comment. Or “What good does she think that will do her?” Aunt Matilda was of a softer nature. She was obsessed with her own state of health and the more irregular it was the better pleased she seemed to be. She could also be quite happy discussing other people’s ailments and brightened at the mention of them; but nothing pleased her so much as her own. Her heart was often “playing her up.” It “jumped,” it “fluttered,” it rarely achieved the required number of beats per minute for which she was constantly testing it. She frequently had a touch of heartburn or there was a numb freezing feeling all round it. In a fit of exasperation I once said: “You have a most accommodating heart, Aunt Matilda.” And for a moment she thought that was a new kind of disease and was quite cheered.
So between the self-righteous virtue of Aunt Caroline and the hypochondriacal fancies of Aunt Matilda I was far from content.
I wanted the old security and love which I had taken for granted, but it was more than that. Since my adventure in the mist I would never be the same again. I thought constantly of that encounter which seemed to be growing more and more unreal in my mind as time passed but was none the less vivid for that. I went over every detail that had happened: his face in the candlelight, those gleaming eyes, that grip on my hand, the feel of his fingers on my hair. I thought of the door handle slowly turning and I wondered what would have happened if Hildegarde had not warned me to bolt it.
Sometimes when I awoke in my room I would imagine I was in the hunting lodge and was bitterly disappointed when I looked round my room and saw the wallpaper with the blue roses, the white ewer and basin, the straight wooden chair and the text on the wall which said “Forget yourself and live for others,” and which had been put there by Aunt Caroline. The picture which had always been there still remained. A golden-haired child in a flowing white dress was dancing along a narrow cliff path beside which was a long drop onto the rocks below. Beside the child was an angel. The title was The Guardian Angel. The girl’s flowing dress was not unlike the nightdress I had worn in the hunting lodge; and although I did not possess the pretty features of the child and my hair was not golden, and Hildegarde did not resemble the angel in the least, I associated the picture with us both. She had been my guardian angel for I had been ready to plunge to disaster—ably assisted by my wicked baron who had dressed himself up in the guise of Siegfried to deceive me. It was like one of the forest fairy tales. I would never forget him. I wanted to see him again. If I had a wishbone again, my wish—in spite of my guardian angel—would still be: Let me see him again.
That was the main cause of my discontent. There was a quality about him which no one else had. It fascinated me so much that I was ready to face any danger to experience it again.
So how could I settle down to this dreary existence?
Mr. Clees had come next door with Miss Amelia Clees. They were pleasant and kind and I often went into the bookshop to see them. Miss Clees knew a great deal about books and it was for her sake that Mr. Clees had bought the shop. “So that I shall have a means of livelihood when he is gone,” she told me. Sometimes they came to dine with us and Aunt Matilda was quite interested in Mr. Clees because he had confided to her that he had only one kidney.
That Christmas Day was dreary. The Cleeses had not yet taken possession of the shop and I had to spend the time with Aunt Caroline and Aunt Matilda. There were no trees, and our presents to each other had to be useful. There were no roasted chestnuts, no ghost stories round the fire, no legends of the forest, no stories of my father’s undergraduate days; nothing but an account of the good deeds Aunt Caroline used to perform for the poor in her Somerset village and from Aunt Matilda the effects of too rich feeding on the digestive organs. I realized that the reason they were more intimate with each other than they were with anyone else was that they never listened to each other and they carried on a conversation independently of each other. I would listen idly.
“We did what we could for them but it’s no use helping people like that.”
“Congestion of the liver. She went all yellow.”
“The father was constantly drunk. I told her that the child must not go about in torn garments. ‘We’ve got no pins, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Pins!’ I cried. ‘Pins!’ What is wrong with a needle and thread?’ ”
“The doctor gave her up. It had led to congestion of the lungs. She lay like a corpse.”
And so on, happily pursuing their individual lines of thought.
I was amused and then exasperated; I would take my mother’s book called Gods and Heroes of the Northlands and read of those fantastic adventures of Thor and Odin and Siegfried, Beowulf and the rest of them. And I fancied I was there with that unmistakable scent of the fir and pine trees, the rushing of little mountain streams and the sudden descent of the mist.
“It’s time you took your nose out of that book and did something useful,” commented Aunt Caroline.
“Bending over books will send you into a decline,” Aunt Matilda told me. “It stops the expansion of the chest.”
My great solace at that time was the Grevilles. They could talk of the pine forests. They had a feeling for them. They had spent a holiday there some years ago and often went back to visit them. It was they who had brought me back and forth from the Damenstift for they had been great friends of my parents. Their son Anthony was studying for the Church. He was such a good son, the delight of his parents, who were so proud of him. They were very kind and sorry for me. I spent Boxing Day with them and it was a relief to escape from the aunts. They tried to make it gay for me and there were little individual Christmas trees just as my mother had arranged them.
Anthony was there, and when he spoke his parents listened in a hushed silence which amused me while it endeared me to them. We played guessing games, and games with paper and pencil but Anthony was so much more learned than the rest of us that we came nowhere near him.
It was quite pleasant and Anthony walked home with me and said rather shyly that he hoped I would visit his parents’ home whenever I wished to.
“Is that what you would like?” I asked.
He assured me that he would.
“Then they would want it too,” I said, “because they always want what you do.”
He smiled. He had a quick understanding and was very pleasant, but not in the least exciting to be with and it was impossible for me now to avoid comparing any man with Siegfried. If Anthony had found a girl in the mist he would have taken her straight back to where she belonged and if he could not, to his mother; and she would have no need to utter warnings and to take on the role of guardian angel.
I would be pleased to go to the Grevilles and see them and their son; but the desire to be again in that hunting lodge sitting opposite my wicked baron was so intense that it was sometimes like a physical pain.
There were more visits to the Grevilles. The Cleeses came to the shop and I heard that I had fifteen-hundred pounds clear when all debts were paid.
“A nest egg,” said Aunt Caroline, and invested wisely it would give me a small income which would enable me to live like a lady. I would continue under their care and they would teach me how to become a good housewife, an art in which it was o
bvious to them I was by no means accomplished. I was disturbed. I saw myself growing like the aunts: learning how to run a house, speaking to Ellen so that she cringed, making rows of jams, preserves and jellies and lining them up in chronological order with labels on them denoting that they were blackberry jelly, raspberry jam or orange marmalade, of the 1859, 1860 variety and so on through the century while I grew into a good housewife with banisters which held not a speck of dust and tables in which I could see my reflection, making my own beeswax and turpentine, salting my own pork, gathering my black currants for jelly and brooding over the quality of my ginger wine.
And somewhere in the world Siegfried would be pursuing his adventures and if we met again after many rows of jars in my stillroom he would not know me—but I should always know him.
Escape was at the Grevilles’ house where I was always welcome and sometimes Anthony was there to talk about the past, for he was as enamored of the past as I was of the pine forests; I found it interesting to learn what the Queen’s marriage had meant to the country, how the Consort had ousted Lord Melbourne, what he had done for the country—of the great Exhibition in Hyde Park which Anthony described so vividly that I could see the Crystal Palace and the little Queen so proud beside her husband. He talked of the war in the Crimea and the great Palmerston and how our country was growing into a mighty Empire.
I should have been very unhappy during that period but for the Grevilles.
But Anthony was not always there and I found it tiring to hear an account of his virtues which his parents never failed to give me; I was restless and unhappy and felt sometimes as though I were in limbo, waiting . . . for what I was not sure.
I told Mrs. Greville that I wanted to do something.
“Young girls really have plenty to do in the house,” she said. “They learn how to be good wives when they marry.”
“It seems very little,” I replied.
“Oh no, being a housewife is one of the important jobs in the world . . . for a woman.”
I didn’t take to it. My jam burned the pans; the labels came off.
Aunt Caroline tut-tutted. “This is what comes of going to outlandish schools.”
“Outlandish” was a favorite word to be applied to anything of which she did not approve.
My father had made that “outlandish” marriage. I had “outlandish” notions about doing something in life. “What could you do? Go and be a governess to children? Miss Grace, the vicar’s daughter in our old home, went as a companion when her father died.”
“She went into a decline soon after,” added Aunt Matilda grimly.
“To that Lady Ogilvy. She was the one who stopped giving soup to the poor because she said they gave it to the pigs as soon as her back was turned.”
“I knew what was wrong with her long before,” put in Aunt Matilda. “She was that transparent color. You can tell. ‘You’ll go into a decline, my girl,’ I said to myself. ‘And it won’t be very long before you do either.’ ”
I was thoughtful. I didn’t fancy looking after children or being a companion to some fratchetty old lady who might well be worse than Aunt Caroline and Aunt Matilda; at least the incongruity of their conversation and the predictability of their views gave me a little amusement.
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 o
ld 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.