Kilian Czepanek did not come back. Of course, there were
kindly-intentioned friends who said they had always foreseen it would
happen; indeed it was a wonder that a man, so divinely gifted, with the
brand of genius imprinted on his stormy brow, could have endured the
trammels of convention as long as he had. Others called him a scamp and
a good-for-nothing, who corrupted innocent girls and led young men
astray. They considered Frau Czepanek lucky in being rid of him, and
advised Lilly to pluck her father's image from her memory. Worst of all
were the people who held their tongues, but sent in bills.
Frau Czepanek pawned or sold all the little articles of luxury
belonging to her bourgeois youth, and every present that her husband
in moods of sheer wanton extravagance had lavished on her. These soon
came to an end, and furniture, dress, and linen--all save absolute
necessities--followed. Then at last the duns were satisfied.
The choral society, which Kilian Czepanek had conducted for fifteen
years, and which under his _regime_ had won no less than half a dozen
prizes, expressed its appreciation of the decamped conductor's services
and talents by holding the post open for six months, and paying the
widow a half-year's salary. But this gracious grant came to an end
also. And then began the heart-sickening begging expeditions to the
houses of local magnates and wealthy residents in the town; the timid
pulling of front-door bells, and scraping of feet on strangers'
door-mats; the long, anxious waiting in shadowy halls and ante-rooms;
the sitting down on the extreme edges of chairs; the sighing,
stammering petitions, accompanied by wiping of eyes, meant to be
sincere yet sounding all the time hypocritically mercenary, and failing
to make the intended impression.
Next came the hunt for work in shops and factories where sewing was
given out--depots of sweated industries where cheap _lingerie_ was
turned out by the gross, cheap lace sewn on to cheap nightgowns and
chemises, and the whole galvanised for use by the addition of buttons
and buttonholes, ribbons and tapes.
Now followed the period of eternal grinding at the sewing-machine,
fingers covered with needle-pricks; inflamed eyes, swollen knees,
vinegar and brown-paper bandages for fevered temples; the stewed tea at
four in the morning; the sweet diluted coffee, warmed up three times,
the so-called bread-and-butter instead of the midday roast meat, and
the evening eggs--in fact, the period of wretchedness and approaching
destitution.
And, strange as it may seem, the further the day on which Kilian
Czepanek had vanished receded into the past, the more surely did the
forsaken wife count on his return. The six months had passed, and a new
conductor was appointed to challenge comparisons with the old. For a
fortnight the newcomer was annoyed by flattering eulogies of his
predecessor in the provincial press. Then these too ceased. Oblivion
followed, and the man who had so mysteriously disappeared seemed to be
almost entirely forgotten. Only in a restaurant-bar here and there, or
a girl's heart, did his image linger. But the wife, who at first had
bitten her lips in silent anguish when his name was mentioned, now
began to talk of his return as an assured and long-planned future
event.
What was more, she became vain again, she who in the course of married
life had let her youthful prettiness and sprightly gaiety--all that he
had married her for--pass under a cloud, and had fretted and worn
herself to a shadow by needless self-reproaches and anxieties. After
not having decked her shrunken breast with ribbon or jewel for years,
or curled a lock of her straight hair, she screwed and scraped out of
her meagre earnings something to spend on powder and cosmetics. When
she could hardly stand for tiredness, she would paint her thin lips,
and at eight o'clock in the morning come to the sewing-machine from the
kitchen hearth with a freshly frizzed fringe covering the forehead that
she had before allowed to get higher and balder every day.
Thus she prepared for the moment of reunion. Rouged, and adorned like a
bride to meet her bridegroom, she would hold out her arms to meet the
repentant profligate. For it was certain he must come back. Where else
would he be greeted with a smile of such perfect sympathy as hers,
where else find the understanding soul whose silence is consolation and
whose prayers bring peace and happiness? Would there be anywhere else
one who without complaint or regret slaved for him body and soul, and
submitted, as she did, to be taken or left according to his whim?
So it was that she had given herself to him when she was a fair young
laughing thing, careless and unsuspecting. Without conditions she had
let him take her, simply because it pleased him. She had not regarded
it in the light of a just recompense when her father, an honest
attorney, had insisted on his leading her to the altar, a measure which
had saved him from being ostracised by the whole town as a seducer. She
had only cared to know that she was happy, and had not the slightest
presentiment of the consequences of her gentle yielding. She accepted
what came uncomplainingly, as the natural cost of the gift he had
bestowed on her in himself.
He would come back; whether he liked it or not, he must come back. Did
she not possess something that linked her to him for all times,
something that he was bound to cross her threshold to claim? Not Lilly!
No doubt he loved his child, loved her with tenderness, and took
delight in her outward and inward charm. Yet she was but a toy to amuse
him in his idle hours; in his vagabond heart there was no place for a
steady paternal love. Even in hours when he felt most lonely and
depressed, he would never have dreamed of seeking solace in the company
of a child. The tie was something that bound him closer to her than
their child. It was a roll of music in manuscript, and that was all. It
would have been easy enough for him to stuff it into the portmanteau on
the day that he had started on the memorable journey. He had indeed
thought of doing it, but at the last, in his eagerness to seize the
moment of escape without again facing his suspicious wife, he had
forgotten everything else.
This roll of manuscript contained all that had been his anchor during
the fifteen years of stagnation in a narrow middle-class groove, all
that had linked his future with the fiery aspirations of his youth and
the glorious hopefulness of his adolescence. Slender as it was, this
roll of manuscript embraced his whole life's work. It was his "Song of
Songs." As long as Lilly could remember, nothing in the world had ever
been spoken of with such bated breath, such reverent awe, as this
composition, of which no one save Lilly and her mother knew a single
note. It was something as yet altogether unknown and undreamed of; it
opened out new realms of sound, inaugurated the beginning of a musical
development destined to rise to mystic heights and be lost in the
clouds of the unattainable. It embodied the Art of the future as
represented by oratorio, opera, after reaching its culmination in
Wagner, having descended into abysmal depths, and the symphony no
longer meeting the demands for regeneration in modern music. Oratorio
was to accomplish this, not in the old exploded wooden form which
pandered to an outworn ecclesiasticism, but in the new world of harmony
introduced by "The Song of Songs." The score had been completed years
ago, and laid aside. It would have been sacrilege to entrust its
rendering to the tender mercies of provincial performers, so there it
lay and rusted, unperformed. It shed beams, unseen but felt, of hope of
a golden future into the grey present. It filled a child's heart with
such ecstasy, devotion, and love, that it would rather have ceased to
beat than be deprived of this source of noble and exquisite dreams on
which it nourished itself daily.
For Lilly, those sheets, held together by an india rubber band, lying
in the top drawer of the linen-press, were like sacred relics, which
radiated and sanctified the household. She reverenced and adored the
scrawl of curly-headed black notes, and her earliest recollections were
bound up with the melodies they expressed. Lilly's papa, however,
objected to his sublime motifs being dragged into the light of common
day, and when he caught wife or daughter humming them he would tell
them to sing things more on their level. In time there was no need for
his remonstrances. Mamma gave up singing altogether, and Lilly withdrew
into herself. When she was alone in the house she amused herself by
making a kind of drama out of "The Song of Songs," and acting it before
the glass. She arrayed herself in sheets and muslin curtains, braided
her hair low round her brow, and adorned it with tinsel pins. Then she
declaimed, danced, laughed, and cried; went down on her knees and posed
in passionate attitudes, acting Solomon's bridal rhapsody, which papa
had made live again, after a lapse of twenty-five hundred years, in his
great masterpiece.
And now that the master had left his manuscript behind him on his
disappearance from the house, it became more than ever the keystone of
his family's hopes and longings. It was conceivable that he, Bohemian
to the core, might cast off his wife and child, emulating the example
of his own parents, who had turned him out into the streets at a tender
age. But it was not conceivable that he should do anything so
preposterous as weakly abandon the great work of his life, the weapon
with which he might conquer the world.
So the manuscript of "The Song of Songs" reposed in the drawer of the
linen-press, which had been saved from the wreck when Frau Czepanek and
her daughter moved to a humble attic, where the sewing-machine
continued to hum and whir day and night. Here, as a symbol of coming
reunion, it spread a miraculous influence around it; while the deserted
wife became more withered in face and gaunt in form, and paint could no
longer conceal her projecting cheekbones or the hollows beneath her
haggard eyes.