In these days Lilly bloomed into a tall, well-developed girl, who
carried her satchel of books through the streets to school with the air
of a princess. She was generally dressed in a green plaid woollen frock
much cockled from rain, which, despite perpetual letting down, always
remained too short. Her feet were shod in a pair of down-at-heel and
worn boots. She wore woollen gloves, which, pull them up as she would,
left below her sleeves a hiatus of bare slender red arm.
No one who saw her swinging down the street, with her easy graceful
carriage, a picture of radiant health and youth, with her vivacious
small head--too small for her tall figure--set on a long stemlike
throat rising from broad shoulders, her white and rather prominent
teeth beneath her smiling short upper lip, and with those eyes,
afterwards known as "Lilly eyes"--no one noticed the poverty of her
dress, or suspected that those erect, delicately formed shoulders
stooped for hours over a sewing-machine. Who could guess that this
magnificent young frame, with the vigorous blood coursing visibly
through it, prone to blushing and paling without cause, was reared on
salt potatoes, stale bread, and bad sausage?
The college students went mad about her, and the verses written to her
in the lower school were legion. Lilly was not indifferent to their
boyish homage. When she saw a batch of students coming towards her in
the street, her eyes grew dim from self-consciousness. When they
saluted her--for she had made their acquaintance on the ice--she felt
dizzy and ready to sink through the earth to hide her blushes. But the
sensation felt after such meetings was quite lovely. She recalled for
hours with delight the face of the boy who had greeted her most
courteously, or the one who had blushed as rosy red as herself. He was
her chosen cavalier till next time, when she fell in love with another.
In spite of her numerous admirers, her school-fellows did not torment
her as much as might have been expected. There was an innocent
defencelessness about her which made it impossible to be her enemy. If
her satchel was hidden, she only said, "Please, don't," and when the
girls perched her on top of the stove, she sat there and laughed, and
in addition to letting them copy her English exercises she did their
sums for them. The only trouble was jealousy among her bosom friends,
who flew at each other's throats on her account, for she was fickle,
and dropped old friendships to take up new with an ease which startled
herself. She could not help responding to every fresh overture of
friendliness made to her.
With her masters, too, she was popular. The rebuke, "Lilly, you are
dreaming again," that came sometimes from the dais, had no sting, but a
tone of playfulness in it. And when she was a new-comer, and had sat at
the end of the sixth row in Class I, B, more than one hand had stroked
her brown head with paternal fondness.
Her nickname was "Lilly of the Eyes." Her school-fellows declared such
eyes were uncommon to the point of being uncanny. They had never seen
eyes like them. Sometimes they called them "witch's eyes," sometimes
"cat's eyes." They said their colour was violet, and some were sure she
darkened the lids with a pencil. However that might be, to look at
Lilly meant looking at her eyes, and not caring much to look at
anything else.
Lilly went into the advanced class, called "Selecta," when she was
fifteen and a half, for it had been settled that she was to earn her
living as a governess. This was a great change; everything was
different--teachers, girls, lessons, and friendship meant a different
thing. You were not called by your Christian name. There was no
throwing of paper pellets and going home to find blotting-paper in your
hair. Much was said about "the sacredness of vocation," of "noble
living," and consecration of life to work, and at the same time there
was no end of chatter about love affairs and secret engagements.
Lilly felt for the first time in her life a little envious. She was
neither engaged nor had she any love affair to boast of. Anonymous
presents of flowers, with verses signed "Thine for ever," of course
didn't count. But in time it came. Love began to dawn in an imaginary
atmosphere of marble statues and pillars, of dusky cypresses and
eternally blue skies; it was the adoration of a schoolgirl for a
master, and the longing to be a benefactress to the adored one. He was
the assistant science-master, and taught in the junior school, where
knuckles were rapped with the ruler and tongues thrust out in retort.
He did nothing in the higher school, but he gave lectures to the young
ladies of the Selecta on the history of Art. The very name of "Art"
fills the budding soul of a young girl with ecstasy; how much more
intense then was the sentiment when Art was associated with an
interesting young man of delicate health, with deep-set burning eyes,
and a snow-white brow--a young man who was called Arpad?
Here romance ended. What remained behind it was a poor consumptive
young fellow who had painfully accomplished his university career by
private tutoring, only to be doomed to an early grave at the moment
that he hoped to reap the fruits of his drudgery. The authorities did
the best they could for him. They gave him easy work, and when they saw
the hectic flush on his cheek they supplied his place and sent him home
for a term. But this could not last, and, feeling that he was becoming
a burden to the staff, he strove by suicidal efforts to show himself
still capable of working. He volunteered to undertake all sorts of
duties outside his province, and what men in health shirked he with one
foot in the grave cheerfully took on his shoulders.
Lilly never forgot the day on which the principal brought him into the
Selecta. It was between three and four, and the last lesson was in
progress. The stout figure of the principal was closely followed by the
slim, rather handsome young man with a slight stoop, who had stood
during prayers in the big hall at Fraeulein Hennig's side, and turned
down the leaves of his book while the hymn was being sung. He wore a
tight-fitting grey frock-coat, which revealed the lines of his
emaciated figure, and a fashionable silk waistcoat that gave a false
impression of the world to which he belonged. He made a series of
abrupt military bows, and appeared shy and embarrassed.
"This is Dr. Maelzer," said the principal, introducing him. "He will
initiate you ladies in the art of the Renaissance. I hope you will pay
particular attention to the subject, which, though not obligatory, and
one you will not be examined in, is of the greatest importance to
general culture, and by-and-by will accelerate your progress in the
study of Lessing, Goethe, and Winckelmann."
The principal, with these words, retired, leaving the young lecturer
nervously tugging at the blond moustache, the thin ends of which
drooped on either side of his mouth. A half-sarcastic, half-shy smile
hovered about his lips. He looked uncertain whether he should sit or
stand on the dais. Meta Jachmann, who was always inclined to be silly,
began to giggle, and set half the class giggling too. His transparent
face flushed. In a voice which, weak as it was, shook his whole narrow
person, he said:
"Yes, ladies, laugh. You can afford to laugh in your position, for life
lies before you full of possibilities of endeavour and attainment. I
too may laugh over the privilege of being allowed to address you soul
to soul. That does not often fall to the lot of a man at the outset of
his teaching career. You will soon experience for yourselves what a
happiness it is."
The whole class became quiet as mice, and from that moment onwards he
held it spellbound.
"But my good fortune does not end there," he went on; "the authorities
of this institution have been generous enough to place such confidence
in my poor abilities as to entrust me with a theme that is the noblest
in existence. Till the Renaissance, every thinker in history, no matter
how much a revolutionist and free-lance at heart, has been made by the
interpretations of history to play to the gallery in the personal
expression of his ideas. The sages have labelled Plato as a mere
shield-bearer of Christianity, Horace as a pedant, and Jesus as the Son
of God; but no one has attempted to show Michael Angelo, Alexander
Borgia, Machiavelli in any other light than that of an ego defying the
world and relying on its own power in its lust for creative or
destructive activity."
The pupils pricked up their ears and listened. They had never heard
anything like this before. They felt that he was talking out his life's
blood, and at the same time that this established a tie of protective
freemasonry between him and them. He continued in bold, rapid outline
to draw vivid pictures of the men and period, making dead bones live.
What had long been repressed and dammed up within him poured from him
now in passionate eloquence. His hearers realised that this was
something more than an ordinary school lesson, more even than the
fruits of ripe scholarship. It was a confession of faith, and they hung
on his lips with all the abandon of woman's enthusiasm for what she
doesn't understand.
Lilly, being a younger pupil, sat close under the dais, and she felt
vaguely as if a vast flood of new melody was floating over her head;
music having always played the supreme part in her life and
imagination, pictures and thoughts came to her first through the world
of sound. She grew pale, and gazed up at him in dawning appreciation.
Through a mist of tears, her handkerchief crushed into a ball in her
hand, she saw the nervous heaving of his chest, the drops on his
forehead, the burning excitement that flamed in his cheeks, and she
longed to laugh and cry together, to call out "Stop!" But, as she
couldn't do this, she sat motionless, listening to the poor, thin voice
as it proclaimed the gospel of that ancient yet ever-glorious time, and
then she heard another voice deep down in her heart crying jubilantly,
"It's coming!"
"But what of the world," he went on, "in which that exalted life
developed? Like Moses on the mountain-top, I have only seen it from
afar, only lingered in its outer courts; but I have seen enough to know
that, as long as breath is left in my body, my soul's yearning for it
will never cease. There, gleaming palaces and temples rise like part of
the soil, white among dark cypresses and evergreen leafy oaks. All that
is clay here is marble there; what is here cribbed and cabined by
convention, there flourishes in free creative opulence; here we have
barren imitativeness, there spontaneous growth; here laboured culture,
there Nature's happy abundance; here the deadening sense of utility,
there luxuriant revelling in the beautiful; here, plain hard,
matter-of-fact Protestantism, there the joyous _naivete_ of Catholic
paganism."
Lilly's heart bounded at the compliment to her faith. In a Protestant
country she had been brought up a Catholic, and though there was not
much time, and never had been, for piety in her home, her soul was
capable of a fair amount of religious fervour. It warmed her heart to
hear her faith praised, but why it should be coupled with heathenism,
which she had always been taught was wicked and deplorable, puzzled
her. A whirl of chaotic, questioning thoughts distracted her attention;
she found herself unable any longer to follow the speaker, and it was
only after some time that she woke up to a consciousness that he was
painting the South in low, loving tones. Now she took up the threads of
his discourse again, and saw a gold and blue summer heaven rising above
the Elysian isles, and the sun's blood-red globe drop into a violet
sea, ruffled by the sirocco. She saw the shepherds feeding their goats
in meadows of shining asphodel, playing on their flutes like Pan--saw
the ever-verdant beech-woods stretching up to the snow-clad summits of
the Apennines; breathed in the perfume of laurel, arbutus, and olive,
and heard the music of the Angelus ascending heavenwards in the glow of
eventide; and as she gazed up once more into his face, she was almost
frightened at the martyred expression of devouring longing with which
his eyes stared beyond the heads of the class into space.
The school-bell sounded; the lecture was over. He looked round him
bewildered, like one who had been walking in his sleep, seized his
hat, and rushed out of the room. The class-room was silent as the
grave. Then the tension was broken by shy whispers and fumbling for
school-satchels. Lilly, without speaking a word to anyone, escaped
into the street to hide her emotion. Sobbing and singing softly to
herself she ran home.
* * * * *
The next morning excitement reigned in the Selecta. No one thought or
talked of anything else but what had happened the day before.
Anna Marholz, the daughter of a doctor, had interesting particulars to
impart about the young teacher, who was a patient of her father's. She
said it was urgently necessary that he should go to the Italian Riviera
for the winter, as it was probable he could not live through it in his
native climate.
Lilly's heart stood still. The others laid their heads together to
think of how he was to be helped. It could only be accomplished in a
private way, because he had no money and no official position, and the
town would therefore not bear the expenses of his foreign trip.
"We will start a committee," someone proposed, and all the others
agreed to the proposal with acclamation.
"Thank God!" Lilly said to herself, and felt that now his life would be
prolonged to fifty or sixty, at least. During the ten o'clock break a
council of war was held, and Lilly, to her great delight, was appointed
secretary of the committee.
The first meeting was held at Klein's, the confectioner's, a few days
later. They dared not go to Frangipani's, the resort of young officers
and barristers. Fifteen girls consumed fifteen iced meringues and
fifteen cups of chocolate, the cost of which they shared, and at the
same time brought forward some practical suggestions. Emilie Faber's
idea was to get up a Shakespeare reading in the town-hall and to assign
the part of Romeo to the leading "star" of the provincial theatre.
Everyone approved, because all the girls were crazy about the favourite
actor. Not less well received was a scheme of Kaethe Vitzing's, whose
cousin sang tenor in the college choir, to organise an amateur concert.
Rosalie Katz, more businesslike than the rest, thought of getting blank
subscription-forms printed and taking them round to all the well-to-do
people in the town. This plan was not so popular, but finally it was
decided to accept it and to try and put all three plans into execution.
Lilly, in her _role_ of secretary, made a note of all the suggestions,
and kept saying to herself, "Hurrah, it's for _him_!"
Meanwhile, the lectures on the history of art continued, as well as the
sittings of the committee. The bill for refreshments mounted higher and
higher, but enthusiasm for the object of the meetings became visibly
damped. Not that Dr. Maelzer's lectures were in any degree less
fascinating. They still held his listeners in thrall with their rich
imagery and flowery language, but serious obstacles arose in the
carrying out of the plans to aid him. To begin with: the popular Romeo
had to appear in another town during the autumn season, and was not
available; secondly, the college chorus could not get leave to join
with the Selecta in giving an amateur concert; and the house-to-house
collection could not be set on foot without the sanction of the police,
and this no one had courage to ask for. So the great scheme of lofty
benevolence gradually died out, and Lilly found herself three marks to
the bad for confectionery. She knew the way to the pawnshop, alas! too
well, and it required comparatively little pluck on her part to
sacrifice the small gold cross she wore round her neck--a last relic of
more prosperous days. She did it gladly, because it was done for him.
Autumn came, and Dr. Maelzer grew worse. He coughed a great deal, and
now and then covered his mouth with his pocket-handkerchief, afterwards
examining it with an anxious, furtive eye. And then came the
announcement that the lectures on Art would be discontinued till
further notice. Anna Marholz brought the news to school that he had
broken a blood-vessel. Lilly, without stopping to ask for further
details, jumped to the conclusion that he was dying. After dark she
found her way stealthily to his house, Anna Marholz having got his
address from her father's books. There was a lamp with a green shade
burning faintly in the window. Not a shadow stirred. No hand drew down
the blind, but the lamp went on burning faintly the whole time that
Lilly paced the damp street. Her conscience pricked her for not being
at home helping her hard-worked mother; yet the next evening and the
next she repeated the pilgrimage. She became more and more distressed,
and fancied him lying there in his death-throes with no loving, gentle
woman's hand to minister to him. On Saturday her anxiety took her from
the work-table at home early in the afternoon. It was impossible to
walk up and down before the house in broad daylight, but once there she
didn't like to go back. Then suddenly she acted on an heroic impulse.
She went to a florist's and spent the two marks fifty that was left
over from the pawning of her little gold cross on a bunch of
brownish-yellow autumn roses. With these she sprang up the steps of the
house and rang at the door of the second floor, whence the light of the
green-shaded lamp had proceeded. The door was answered by an old hag in
a dirty blue-check apron. Lilly stammered forth his name.
"He lives at the back," said the old woman, and shut the door.
Then the green lamp wasn't his after all; it belonged instead to an old
woman who wore dirty aprons and champed with her toothless gums. She
had been worshipping at the wrong shrine for more than a week.
Lilly, utterly discouraged, was about to descend the staircase when his
name caught her eye on one of the brass plates inside the lobby. Her
heart gave a bound, and before she realised what she was doing she had
knocked.
A pause ensued and then his head appeared through the half-opened door.
The collar of his grey coat was turned up, apparently because he had no
collar underneath. His hair was dishevelled, and the ends of his
moustache drooped more than ever on either side of his mouth. His eyes
seemed to ask in embarrassed surprise, "What have you come here for?"
"Fraeulein--Fraeulein----" He evidently recognised her, but could not
recall her name. Lilly wanted to give him the roses and run away, but
she was paralysed with shyness, and remained glued to the spot. "I
presume you have been sent by your class?" he asked.
"Yes," assented Lilly eagerly. This saved her.
"I could not invite you to come in otherwise," he said, smiling
nervously. "The consequences might be serious for both of us. But if
you come as an emissary, that makes all the difference. Please come
in."
Lilly had pictured him in a suite of lofty apartments filled with
books, curios, instruments, and statues of great men. She was horrified
to find that he lived in one small room. The bed was still unmade;
besides the bed there was no furniture except a couple of chairs, a
folding-table, a clothes-rack and a stand for books containing a few
shabbily-bound volumes and paper-covered periodicals.
"This is a worse place than ours," she thought, and felt less shy as
she sat down on one of the two chairs. Poverty seemed a bond between
them.
"How very kind of the young ladies to think of me!" he said.
Lilly remembered the flowers that she held in her hand. "Will you
accept these?" she asked, offering them to him.
He took the bunch of roses and held them against his face without a
word of thanks.
"They have no smell," he remarked. "They are the last roses, but my
first, so you can imagine how much I appreciate them."
Lilly's eyes grew dim with delight. "Are you still in great pain, Dr.
Maelzer?" she stammered forth.
He laughed. "Pain? ... Oh dear no! I am feverish now and then, that's
all. It's quite amusing to be feverish. One's soul floats away in an
airship far away over cities, land, and sea, over centuries; one is
visited by distinguished persons, if not so beautiful as----"
He paused in the middle of his compliment, thinking of their relations
as master and pupil. His confusion seemed to clear his vision. He fixed
his eyes, which burned like two flames in blue cavities, on her and
asked in a voice which sounded higher pitched and hoarser than usual:
"What's your name?"
"I am Lilly--Lilly Czepanek."
The name conveyed nothing to him, because he had not lived long in the
town.
"You think of taking up teaching?"
"Yes, doctor."
"Listen to my advice. Don't! Go to Russia and hurl bombs. Go to a
hospital and wash feet. Marry a drunken scoundrel who'll ill-treat you
and sell the very bed you lie on. Anything rather than being a teacher.
You mustn't be a teacher, not _you_."
"But why shouldn't I?" she asked.
"I'll tell you.... The qualifications for a teacher are a flat chest,
weak eyes, poor hair, and a character that can see one side of a
question only. People whose nerves and blood are too feeble to live
their own lives are good enough to teach others, but those whose blood
courses through their veins like molten fire, whose eyes are filled
with longing, to whom the problems of life are there for seeing and
knowing, not for blind mechanical vivisection, they--but I mustn't go
on, though I should like to."
"Oh, please go on--please," Lilly besought him.
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"And a woman already!" He looked at her with an expression of tortured
admiration.
"Look at me!" he exclaimed. "I too was once a human being, though you'd
hardly believe it. I held my arms stretched out to heaven, full of
burning desires. I too looked into a girl's eyes with longing, though
they were not such a pair of eyes as yours. Let me chatter. You see, I
am a dying man, and it'll do you no harm."
"You mustn't die! you shall not die, Dr. Maelzer!" she cried, jumping to
her feet.
"Sit down, child," he said with a laugh; "don't excite yourself about
me. A friend of mine once broke the backbone of a wild-cat with one
blow of a stick. The cat couldn't run away, couldn't cry or do anything
till the next blow came. It just crouched on all-fours, coughing and
choking. That's like me. There's nothing to be done. You had better go,
child. I've made my peace, but when I look at you it becomes difficult
again."
She turned her face away not to show her tears.
"Must I?" she asked.
"Must?" he laughed again. "I'll devour greedily every minute of your
presence here as the hungry beggar devours the crumbs he turns out of
his pockets. You sat, didn't you, at the end of the first form on the
left? ... Yes, of course I remember. I said to myself, 'What
extraordinary eyes!' They are like the eyes of the magic dog in
Andersen's fairy tale, which grew bigger the more they were asked not
to."
It was Lilly's turn to laugh.
"There, you see," he said, "I've made you merry again. You shall
not carry away from here nothing but the memory of a corpse and
death's-head. We enjoyed our lectures, didn't we?"
Lilly answered with a sigh.
"You gasped for sheer longing when I talked of Italy. I used to think:
she gasps like yourself, though she has no need to gasp."
"You want to go there very much, doctor?"
"You might as well ask a man on fire whether he'd like a cold bath."
"And it's the only thing that can do you any good?"
He looked at her for a moment with a dark savage expression.
"What are you cross-examining me for? Have you come to find out
something? I am very indebted to you and the young ladies of the class
for such sympathetic interest but----"
A fit of coughing stifled his voice.
Lilly sprang up to see if she could do anything for him. Involuntarily
she snatched up a glass filled with a pale fluid from the table and
held it to his lips. He took it eagerly, and after drinking fell back
exhausted and gazed at her tenderly with grateful eyes. She returned
his gaze with a faint smile, feeling it was infinite happiness to be
there.
It was so quiet in the half-dark stuffy little room that she could hear
the tick of his watch, which hung on the opposite wall. He made an
effort to sit up and go on talking, but appeared not yet quite equal to
it. Lilly gave him a look of entreaty and warning; and, smiling, he
leaned back again. So they continued in silence.
"Oh, how happy I am!" thought Lilly. "How happy I am to be here!"
Then he held his hands out to her with a weary gesture. She caught them
in hers eagerly. His skin felt hot and clammy, and it seemed as if his
pulse beat in his fingertips. Hers was beating fast too, but could not
keep pace with it.
"Listen to me, my dear child," he murmured. "I want to give you some
good advice before you go. You overflow with a superfluity of love;
three kinds of love--love emanating from the heart, from the senses,
and from compassion. One or other is necessary to everybody who isn't a
dried-up fossil, but two are dangerous, and all three are likely to
lead to ruin. Be on guard where your power of loving is concerned.
Don't squander your love. That is the advice of one on whom you cannot
squander it, for God knows he needs it."
"Have you no one to take care of you?" she asked, dreading to hear that
anyone but herself was privileged to nurse him.
He shook his head.
"Mayn't I come again?"
He flinched. The fervour of her question was startling. "It depends on
whether the class send you."
Lilly now cast off every shred of deception. "That was not true," she
stammered. "Not true! The class didn't send me. No one knows I've
come."
He bounded to his feet--almost as if he were quite well. His face
lengthened with dismay; his eyes filled with tears. He stretched out a
trembling hand, as if he would ward her off.
"You must go at once," he whispered; "at once!"
Lilly did not stir.
"If you don't go," he went on excitedly, "your prospects will be
ruined. It is not customary for young girls to call on unmarried men in
my position, even when the man is their master, and such a wreck as I
am. Mention to no one that you have been here, not even to your
greatest friend. Remember, your living depends on your reputation, and
I should be taking the bread out of your mouth if I let you stay. Go
instantly!"
"Am I never to come again?" Her eyes pleaded.
"No!" he thundered in a voice of iron resolve.
The next minute Lilly was pushed out of the room and the key turned in
the lock behind her.
* * * * *
She lost no time in disobeying his urgent instructions, and went
straight to Rosalie Katz, her chosen friend for the time being, to whom
she confided everything, and in whose company she relieved herself by
having a good cry. The little brown Jewess was soft-hearted and
desperately in love with him too, so they mingled their tears. They
forgot to shut the door, however, and it happened that the portly and
wealthy Herr Katz, whose waistcoat buttons were always bursting off,
came in to ask his daughter to sew one on. Finding the two girls locked
in a tearful embrace, he tactfully withdrew; but no sooner had Lilly
left the house than he extracted the whole story from Rosalie, of the
invalid master, the abortive committee meetings, and wasted iced
meringues.
"I dare say we can arrange the matter," he said, twisting the thin gold
watch-chain that dangled from the third button of his waistcoat. A
thick gold watch-chain was the insignia of being left behind in the
social race among the gentlemen of the corn trade.
So it happened that Dr. Maelzer received a few days later a registered
letter from two "well-wishers." In it he was told that means had been
found to defray the expenses of his foreign tour. All he had to do was
to draw a cheque on the firm of Goldbaum, Katz & Co. He started on a
chilly October evening, and the staff saw him off at the station. Lilly
and Rosalie, who had found out the time his train departed, were there
too, but they kept in the background. He passed close by them, muffled
in a thick plaid, his eyes aflame, fixed on the distance. After the
train had gone, the two girls threw themselves in each other's arms,
and wept for joy and pride in what they had done for him. Rosalie stood
her friend an _eclair_ on the way home, it being too cold now for iced
meringues. Half an hour later they were sitting in the confectioner's,
smiling happily over pictures in the illustrated papers.