At last he rose with a convulsive jerk. “Will I need my stethoscope?”

Thinking he spoke to me, I said, “Why, I should think so, sir!”

He laughed self-consciously. “I talk to myself. It is the privilege of an old man.” And abruptly he pinched my chin between his thumb and forefinger.

Ivan’s illness was diagnosed as bronchitis. The doctor prescribed mustard poultices and a benzoin kettle. “Keep him well covered up and put on the mustard as hot as he can stand it. It’s not a bad attack and the fever isn’t high. Call me if he seems to fail, but he won’t, he’ll be all right, quite all right.”

He left some sleeping powders with us and these we gave Ivan every eight hours so that for several days we kept him asleep save when we woke him to pour a little water or broth down his parched throat. We made a tent of an old sheet and kept a pot of benzoin bubbling on a kerosene stove beside his bed. He was never himself but muttered and groaned and stared at us without recognition. His bright cheeks blazed under my fingers as I tried to stroke away the illness that racked him, hooped his body with a cough and cast it down, gasping.

My mother remained in the kitchen, sleeping on the floor occasionally, but for the most part making feather-stitched pot-holders. As she worked, she sang Fräulein Lili’s song in a soft but penetrating voice, over and over again until I begged her, bursting into tears, to cease. And when she did not, Mrs. Henderson laid her hand on mine and shook her head.

When I came home at noon and later after school and then in the evening, I could hear her before I had left the road to turn into the lane:

Well they know without my telling

Where she lives, for whom I long.

Round their hoofs the snow is swirling.

Loud the coachman sings his song.

Round their flying hoofs the snow is swirling.

Loud the coachman sings his song.

Or, in the night, half asleep but alert to every noise, I could hear her sorrowing, for she had changed the gay tune into a dirge:

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!

Quick, my flying hawks, away!

Days and hours like these are golden—

We must seize them while we may.

Golden days are these and golden minutes—

We must seize them while we may.

She never spoke to me. She might look me full in the face as if she were about to say something. Then, if I spoke, she drowned out my words with another verse of her song or, instead, repeated one line again and again with a passionate monotony:

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!