Lawrence and my mother were fond of one another; she was a wonderful mother to us, her three daughters. We were all three different and yet she helped and understood us, and was there for us in our hours of need — alas, there were plenty of them for the three of us. But she was equal to all the awful situations we found ourselves in. My eldest sister Else wanted to study, when studying for women in Germany was still infra dig. I remember walking through the crowds of men students into a lecture hall at Heidelberg with my sister at sixteen and feeling like a real martyr. My sister Johanna had lovely names for my mother, like 'Goldfasanchen,' my little golden pheasant — it was so quaint to hear her, worldly and elegant, being so tender with my mother, and she half loving it and saying: 'What do you want now?' She had taught me the love for poetry from early childhood. Especially after the war she and Lawrence became great friends. She lived in her 'Stift,' at Baden-Baden, a kind of home for women, mostly widows of distinguished men, Excellencies and so on. It was a very dignified life. We three sisters loved to meet there and stay with my mother. We had to be on our best behaviour, except in my mother's beautiful rooms, where all the wildness of our childhood came back, especially for my sister Johanna and me. Lawrence sat on the sofa, happily, while my mother tried to give him all the things for tea that he liked - 'Pumpernickel' and 'Truffelleberwurst' - and we played wild games of bridge.
Sometimes, when Lawrence wanted to complain about me she would say: 'I know her longer than you, I know her.'
He wrote his 'Fantasia of the Unconscious' in the woods behind the Altes Schloss. We stayed in a rough little inn at Ebersteinburg. I remember that we had some friends to dinner and a chicken flew into the soup tureen.
Then Lawrence, in the meagre after-the-war days, would scour the country for some cream for her.
She was very happy in Lawrence's life and mine, it meant so much to her, but she always trembled that the women in the Stift might read his books.
He was so polite to them and they liked him, again he was the Herr Doktor.
At Ebersteinburg he would go out in the morning and take his book and fountain pen. I would find him later on, leaning against a big pine tree; it was as if the tree itself helped him to write his book, and poured its sap into it.
Then we would go down to Baden to my mother in the afternoon and take her our wildflowers or some honey or fruit or nuts; or we would go for long walks and make the place our own as usual. Looking over the Rheintal or listening to the music in the Kurpark. Baden was no longer the Baden of Turgeniev and archdukes and grand dukes and the Prince of Wales; no, it was after the war, would-be elegant.
Lawrence and my mother in her wisdom and ripeness understood each other so well. She said to me: 'It's strange that an old woman can still be as fond of a man as I am of that Lorenzo.'
Happy was their relationship. Only the last time, when my mother was so frail and old herself, being with Lawrence who was so very ill, they got on each other's nerves, and when she saw him often so irritable with me, she said: 'He isn't grateful to you for all you do for him.' But I did not feel like that myself; I was glad to do everything for him I possibly could. It seemed little enough.
Then when she and I were going to meet for the first time after his death, we were afraid to meet. She knew what his death meant to me and I what it meant to her. So we avoided our common grief; there was no need of words.
I remember after she had been indoors for weeks, coming to Baden and taking her out on one of those first tender spring days we get in the north, just the first whisper of spring. To feel her respond to this coming renewal of the earth in an almost sacred happiness was very moving to me.
I think after Lawrence's death her desire to live left her. Less than a year after he died telling me: 'You have many friends, you have much to live for yet,' I got a telegram: 'Come.'
I went but it was too late. In the train I listened as it were to the sound of the wheels: 'Is she still alive? Is she dead?' At the door of the Stift I was told: 'The Frau Baronin died two hours ago.'
She lay for the last time in her bedroom, the rocks of the Altes Schloss looking in through the window. 'Lawrence is there for me,' she had said. We, her three daughters, stood by her bedside, she for the first time not welcoming me with open arms as always. She lay with her silver hair like thistledown, in gentle and peaceful death.
She who had sustained our lives for half a century with the strength and harmony of her nature.
I remember my mother saying to me once: 'But it's always you in Lorenzo's books, all his women are you.' There was an expression on her face I could not get. Is she pleased at this or is she not? My sister Nusch was the only person that ever could take a liberty with him. She could lightly jump on his knee and say in her broken English:
'O Lorenzo, you are so nice, I like your red beard.' He felt happy in the atmosphere of my mother and of us three sisters, so free and open and gay. Only when my sister Nusch and I had our long female talks, he did not like it, he had to be in it.
We spent some weeks at Zell-am-See with Nusch, her husband and children at her villa. We bathed and boated and Lawrence wrote his 'Captain's Doll' there.
One day the peasants from my sister's shooting-lodge high up in the mountains brought us some honey and left. The honey was found to be full of worms. 'Hadu,' said Lawrence, full of rage, to my nephew, 'you and I will take this honey back to them.' So up they marched to the lodge, in the heat of the afternoon, Lawrence and Hadu, and arrived at the peasant's hut to find them in the midst of a meal; in the very middle of the table Lawrence planted the jar of honey and left without a word. The peasants remained petrified. 'If honesty, common-and-garden honesty goes,' Lawrence told me once, 'then all is lost, life becomes impossible.'