I never went back to the pension in Salzburg to pick up my case. Wearing only a light cloak and carrying the doll in her box, I set off down a long dusty road, across a stream, blundered along footpaths — and found myself in a neighbouring valley.
Here there was a lake and I stopped to throw the doll into the water. I watched her float and bob in her plaid travelling suit, losing her tam-o-shanter before she sank at last into the reeds. After her, I threw the red evening cape, the lace-trimmed skirts, the blouses, Alice’s pretty fragile hats.
But not myself. With the obstinacy of the deranged I had fixed my mind on the Danube and I trudged on in what I believed was the direction of the city.
By nightfall I was in a wood and it had begun to rain. I found a forester’s hut and lay there for a few hours, and then I stumbled on again. The rain had grown heavier; my hair was streaming, my cloak torn.
By midday my legs simply stopped working and I sank down against a tree. What happened next was that someone tried to shoot me. Not deliberately; he was aiming at a boar. I had collapsed in the grounds of Count Osterhofen’s shooting box in which Gernot (reluctantly because the sport was poor and the Count stupid) was staying for informal discussions on some point of foreign policy.
But I didn’t see him then. I came round to find a soldier in the rough grey of a corporal’s field uniform staring down at me. A round face, huge ears… and for the first time — bringing me back to consciousness — the smell of the raw onions that Corporal Hatschek loved to chew.
The dogs were called off. Huntsmen in green hats arrived. A litter was fetched. I hadn’t in fact been hit, but no one believed I could walk.
The Count, fair and moon-faced, looked concerned. ‘Such a beautiful girl to come to this,’ he kept saying. It was generally assumed that I was either dead or deaf.
Then a grim-faced, clean-shaven man, thin to the point of emaciation, appeared and took charge of the operation. He wore a loden coat but his superior rank and authority were evident at once.
I was carried into the house — a gloomy place surrounded by trees — and up to a bedroom. Warming pans were brought; the housekeeper removed my clothes.
‘She’s not a common girl, look at those underclothes,’ she said to the maid.
They brought me hot soup which I drank. Then a doctor came with a syringe. Although I was supposedly about to end my life, I minded the prick of the needle.
I woke the next morning in a clean nightgown, my hair brushed. I had a memory — or was it a dream? — of a thin, grim-faced man coming in once with a candle.
All that day they questioned me: the housekeeper, the doctor, and the fair-haired Count who owned the house, but I shook my head and would tell them nothing. I knew that if once I began to speak I couldn’t stop, and I thought, too, that if I spoke I would realize afresh what I had done: parted for ever from the only person I could really love.
On the second day I tried to get up, and looked for my clothes which they had taken. It was then that they sent for Gernot von Lindenberg.
‘You can leave when we know of your circumstances,’ he said. ‘That you have a home to go to and people to care for you.’
‘I have a place to live. And a job. At least I had.’
‘Very well. My servant goes to Vienna tomorrow with some papers. He will escort you — but first you must tell me how you came here in this condition.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
He then introduced himself formally, giving himself his full rank and title. ‘So you will be aware that anything you say to me will by treated in the strictest confidence.’
‘Please don’t make me… It would be of no interest…’
‘You are mistaken.’
He sat there some way from the bed in a hard-backed chair and waited. Just waited.
I held out a long time. The clock ticked, the wind blew and rattled the shutters and still he sat there. Midnight struck… Then suddenly I began to talk.
Strange, that. The strangest thing of all, almost, that to this austere, grim-looking man whom I had never set eyes on before and never expected to see again, I gave the whole story of my daughter’s birth, her loss, the agony and depressions… the sudden hope and joy as I realized I could care for her. I told him things I could scarcely remember myself: the woman in the next bed in the House of Refuge saying ‘Her skin is the colour of apricots.’
I told him about Sappho who had chided her daughter for anticipating grief, and how every child I’d seen for six long years had been her: every little girl bowling her hoop in the park, every waif in a painting looking out of the canvas at the world.
By now I was crying so much that I don’t know how he understood me, but he seemed to. Then I told him about what happened three days ago. How I’d seen her and she was everything I’d dreamed of… and how I let her go.
‘You acted rightly.’
The quiet words goaded me into a rage that almost transcended my wretchedness. ‘Do you think I care? Do you think that helps?’
He didn’t answer. Then he said something so strange that at first I thought I’d misheard. ‘I envy you.’
That stopped me. ‘What?’
His head was turned away from me towards the one candle that burnt in the room. ‘I had a son. He died when he was five months old. He died, but I did not grieve as you grieve now.’ Then in an entirely different voice: ‘Tomorrow you may go home — on one condition.’
‘What is that?’
‘You know, I’m sure. That you give me your word not to take your life.’
I gave it. I had no wish to spend my days in a hunting lodge shut in by gloomy trees.
The next day Hatschek took me back to Vienna. Even with the Count’s excellent horses it was a long drive and Hatschek used it to inform me of the Field Marshal’s importance, position and stature. This embraced, of course, his military exploits in places of which I had never heard, and his decorations — but in Hatschek’s eyes depended also on more arduous and less spectacular feats. Going without food once for eight days, getting proper horse blankets out of the obstinate bumblers at the Ministry, telling the Archduke Franz Ferdinand where he could put his plots. The Marshal’s wife and daughter were scarcely mentioned. Hatschek’s passionate loyalty lay only with the man.
When I got back I found that von Lindenberg had done his staff work. Alice knew what had happened and was waiting with a meal. My employer had been told I would be returning to work a few days late. My suitcase had arrived from the pension in Salzburg.
So I resumed my life. The anguish went on, growling away, sometimes suppressed, sometimes getting me by the throat, but as the months passed I could attend to my work and even my pleasures, except on those sudden black days which even now I have not outgrown.
And as the months passed, beneath the anguish there was another and entirely discreditable emotion. Chagrin? Irritation? Surprise? How could the Feldherr von Lindenberg, who had sat by my bed throughout a long night, so entirely forget my presence?
For he made no attempt at all to get in touch with me. A formal inquiry, even a note acknowledging the letter of thanks I sent him would have been appropriate, but he made no reply.
Odd how they can exist side by side: anguish and pique.
Almost a year had passed when a tall, narrow-faced, angular young woman walked into Madame Hermine’s shop, and with her a man in his forties dressed in mufti: dark suit, a bowler hat, a monocle.
The young woman was Fräulein Charlotte von Lindenberg and the man her father, the Field Marshal, who (most unaccustomedly as it turned out) had decided to buy her a dress for her birthday.
He seated himself, his daughter consulted with Madame Hermine. Three dresses were brought out.