They passed Berlin without stopping, because the colonel had no desire
to encounter his military friends so soon after his _mesalliance_.
From here in three hours they reached Dresden, and took up their
quarters at Sendig's, where the hotel proprietors had arranged to
provide the newly-married pair with the comforts and privacy of a home.
Drawing-room, bedroom, and dressing-room were all they needed, for the
closer their outer intimacy the nearer would their inward relations
approximate. And, indeed, the colonel had every reason to be satisfied
with his honeymoon. He, who in the course of his not too short life had
held hundreds of girls on his knee, who thought he knew every type
through and through, the sweetly clinging, the coyly coquettish, the
brazenly bold, the sham and the true, and all their different kinds of
kisses--this old amorous hand, who ought to have been surprised at
nothing, was simply full of incredulous amazement at his last lovely
find. In his whole carefully cultivated career as a _roue_ he had never
come across so much yielding and so much pride, so much fire, ready
wit, and quick understanding, so much naive simplicity, as were
comprised in this one dreamily smiling Madonna-faced child.
Perhaps he was most taken aback and puzzled by her utter
unpretentiousness. When they dined _a la carte_, she invariably
selected for herself the very cheapest items on the menu, and would ask
if she might have lemonade to drink with as much shy modesty as if she
were making a love confession.
Once, on their way back from the public gardens, when they wandered
home through queer little back streets, Lilly, who resolutely declined
as a rule to look in at shop-windows, stood transfixed before a small
greengrocer's. The colonel, on inquiring what interested her, elicited
gradually that she loved eating sunflower seeds, and would he mind very
much if she bought some?
The mote he loaded her with presents, the less able did she seem to
realise that money was being spent on her account. So long had been the
dearth of money in her life, that now she had no discrimination as to
the value of it. However big the sum he placed in her purse, she did
not hesitate to hand it out to the first beggar they met. But when he
paid a flower-girl two marks for a rose she thought it wicked
extravagance.
Once when she had tickled his fastidious palate beyond belief by her
_naivete_, he asked in sudden distrust, "I say, little woman, are you
acting?"
She didn't know what he meant, and with the wide melancholy eyes of
childlike innocence, which she used to turn on him at such questions,
she replied, "Acting indeed! Since papa went away I haven't seen any
acting, or been inside a theatre once."
The same day he took a box for the play, and she danced about the room
with the little blue tickets in her hand, half mad with delight. But
her joyous enthusiasm was somewhat damped by being told that the
occasion demanded evening dress. It was incomprehensible to her that to
appreciate Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" you should be obliged to bare
your neck and shoulders. The evening gowns, besides, seemed far too
grand for her. In selecting one to wear, she hovered round them with
their glittering, jewelled trimmings and exquisite lace as gingerly as
if they were a bed of nettles. In a generous mood the colonel had
ordered the gowns, for no particular reason, for to take Lilly into
society as yet was not to be thought of.
When she came to him dressed, stiff and stern-eyed from embarrassment,
yet glowing with a feverish joy in her finery, taller and more of a
budding Venus than ever, her delicate rounded breast half hidden in a
mass of soft lace, the fabulously beautiful chain of pearls on her
swan-like throat, the elderly robber went into such ecstasies over his
booty that he was near ordering the finery back into the wardrobe, and
throwing the theatre tickets into the waste-paper basket; but she
implored him so fervently to keep his promise that he thought better of
it and got into the carriage with her.
Then, he, who imagined he had long ago outlived the commonplace vanity
of delighting to show off his possessions in public, experienced a
triumph. The _blase_ old bachelor found himself enjoying the sensation
of being envied, and, though he accepted it disdainfully as a matter of
course, he was tremendously flattered.
Directly Lilly entered the box she was the cynosure of all eyes.
Everyone speculated as to what the relationship could be between this
extraordinarily handsome and distinguished pair, and when after the
first act a thousand tongues of light leapt out again from the ceiling,
opera-glasses were levelled at them, and a hubbub of questioning
comment passed from mouth to mouth.
It was the first time Lilly had ever witnessed a play from a box, and
her first instinct was to hide herself at the back, but she had already
learnt blind obedience to his commands, and when he pointed to the
chair beside him she meekly subsided into it. Then, as she became aware
of the universal notice she attracted, that strange numbness and
feeling of detachment came over her. It seemed to her when she moved,
smiled, or spoke, someone else was doing it all--another person with
whom she herself had only a chance connection.
Not till the lights were lowered and the curtain went up again did she
awake from her lethargy. Then she followed the poet into his enchanted
realms with breathless excitement and delicate thrills of suspense.
After this two Lillies sat in the box--one Lilly in blissful
self-oblivion flitted through heaven and hell on the rainbow wings of
her childhood's phantasy; the other, like a wound-up doll, made stilted
gestures and strove unconsciously to imitate the manners of the
well-bred, feeling all the time a hot sweet torturing sensation
creeping over her, the intoxication of vanity.
Afterwards the colonel, not satisfied with his triumph at the theatre,
instead of having supper as usual served upstairs, went with Lilly on
his arm into the public dining-room where an Hungarian band was
playing, and elegant people supped and displayed their fine feathers.
Here the little drama of the box was enacted over again, save that
Lilly, carried away by the wild dreamy melodies of the violins, let her
awkward shyness drop from her, and expanding a little, with flaming
cheeks and shining eyes, dared to play her small part.
Opposite them, two tables further on, sat a fair young man, with
expansive white shirt-front and black tie, like all the others. He
stared at her with unflinching persistence, as if she were some rare
wild animal.
She writhed under the fire of this gaze, that caressed and hurt her at
the same time and spoke a foreign language to her with the violins, the
notes of which quivered down her spine and throbbed feverishly through
her being.
Suddenly her husband turned round and caught the admirer in the act of
staring. He pierced him with his dagger-like glance to such effect that
the fair-haired man speedily rose and disappeared. But the colonel's
pleasure seemed spoilt. "Come, it's late," he said, and led her away.
As soon as he had her to himself again his pride in his treasure broke
out anew. It became a sort of unbridled frenzy. Lilly had to undress,
as she had often done before, and pose in numerous attitudes, both
classical and the reverse. Then, to wind up, she was compelled to don
the silver-spangled gauze garment, which he had bought for her during
their first days in Dresden, arrayed in which he liked her to dance to
him before going to bed. The metal threads sent ice-cold shivers down
her limbs, and pricked her skin like needles, but as it was his wish,
and his wish was law, she made no demur.
In bed he lit another cigarette, and while she sat on the edge of the
bed he amused himself by telling her risque anecdotes, which he
described as "his little girl's lullaby."
After this, the colonel preferred to take meals regularly in the
dining-room. He wished to enjoy to the full the piquant pleasure of
seeing his young wife openly admired and unblushingly desired. The
value of his property seemed to rise in proportion to the extent that
he was envied by others for its possession.
And Lilly, for her part, could watch for the intoxicated sensations of
that evening to awake in her ever anew. She might under drooping lids
see and feel all those young, hot pairs of eyes around her hang
burningly on hers, full of hopeless passion and desire; might,
accompanied by the sad wail of the violins and the clash of the
cymbals, take flight into those Elysian fields whither her road had
been barred--she knew not how or why--since her great good fortune had
come to her.
Never did she dream of permitting herself, even by the quiver of an
eyelash, to return any of those ardent glances. The young men who gazed
at her were only accessories to the scene, as indispensable as the
lights, the band, the flowers, the white tablecloths, and the cigarette
smoke which rose to the ceiling in little blue columns.
Nevertheless, one day, as she was walking arm-in-arm with her husband
in the street, one of those glances shot her through the heart like an
arrow. It proceeded from a pair of dark eyes, which even from a
distance were fixed on her inquiringly, and flared up as they came
nearer into a flash of melancholy fire and recognition.
She felt as if she must run after him as he walked on, and ask, "Who
are you? Do you belong to me? ... Do you want me to belong to you?"
Then she committed the indiscretion of turning round to look at him. It
was only for the fraction of a second, but her husband had remarked it,
for when she again looked in front of her, she felt his vigilant eye
was upon her, full of threatening suspicion. He nodded two or three
times as if to say, "So it's come to this already." For the rest of the
day he was preoccupied and bad-tempered.
The incident was but the first of a series for Lilly. Not that she ever
met that identical youth again, though she kept on the lookout for him.
He was succeeded by innumerable others. Those she met, from this time,
were no longer unsubstantial shadows of a vision she saw as if they
were not there. Now, when she beheld a slight youthful figure coming
towards them, she wondered what he would be like near, and if he would
look at her. And should his aspect please her, and his gaze without
being impertinent express admiring astonishment and longing, she would
often feel a pang at her heart and say to herself, "You are far more
suited to him than to the old man on whose arm you are leaning." And
every time it happened she felt very sad.
Still sadder did she feel when someone, whose appearance she liked,
took no notice of her. "I am not good enough for him," she would think.
"He despises me. I wonder why he despises me?"
In fashionable resorts, such as the dining-room of the Bruehlische
Terrace, where there was a perpetual crossfire of covert glances, her
attitude towards the outside world began gradually to alter. She would
acknowledge the incense burnt at her shrine by an ever so slight
grateful uplifting of her eyes. She returned without shyness the
scrutiny of ladies, and in spite of being blessed with sight as keen as
a falcon's, she would dearly have loved to possess a lorgnette like
theirs.
She was often tormented with a desire to look deep into eyes that
rested on her without reserve, fear or restraint. It would have been a
mystical union of souls, which would have done her infinite good; for
she could not disguise the fact from herself any longer--she was
hungering for something, hungering as she had never hungered in her
life before.
The colonel appeared perfectly oblivious of what was passing within
her. But he waged bitter warfare with all who laid siege to her with
their glances. The old Uhlan was incessantly on the watch, and was
ready to stab on the instant with his eye's deadly darts the too
persistent and ardent adorers. But there were some who were not in the
least discomposed by his threatening demeanour, and who even had the
audacity to return the compliment and look daggers at him. This made
him uneasy, and he would fidget with his card-case, look as if he were
going to write something, then put the pencil away; and generally he
ended by saying, "We seem in undesirable company here. Come, let us
go!" Yet, despite these uncomfortable experiences out of doors, he
found it less and less possible to live at home completely _a deux_
with his young wife. From his youth upwards he had been accustomed to
gay society, and he liked noise, laughter, and light around him.
Nevertheless, his suspicions grew and centred on Lilly.
One day he put a stop to her early church-going, in which she found her
greatest solace. The impulse she had followed on the first morning that
she awakened by his side had become by degrees a habit. While he slept
on in profound slumber, she softly rose and dressed herself and glided
out in the freshness of the dawn. It is true that her church-going
consisted often of merely dipping her fingers in the holy water and
curtseying three times. Now and then she contented herself by passing
the church door with an untroubled conscience and not going in at all.
This was her hour of freedom, precious to her as gold, the only one
that she had entirely to herself in the course of the whole day. She
hurried first to the Augustus Bridge, offered her face to the breezes
that blew there from every point of the compass, and watched the water
rolling under her feet. Next she flew along the bank, like a whirlwind,
for she wanted to take in as many fresh impressions and pictures as she
could, before creeping back into the connubial yoke. Everything that
happened in this blessed hour was fraught with significance.
It was all experience, all happiness--the rosy early morning mist
hanging over the hills and descending in golden shafts on to the river;
the jangle of bells from the Altstadt; the first coy bursting of the
buds on the russet boughs; the big waggons rumbling to market; the
hissing of the swaying electric wires overhead when a tramcar passed.
On these excursions she might even indulge in shop-gazing, as there was
no fear of Nemesis in the shape of a present. How greedily she gloated
over pictures and _objets d'art_!
And now all this was to end. It was over. The gates through which she
escaped for one single hour from the perfumed idleness and hothouse
closeness of her gilded prison clanged behind her. But so pliable and
yielding was her nature that not once in the secret depths of her heart
did she complain. He wished it, and that was enough. Such powers of
love lay idle within her, crying out for employment, that at this
period of inward struggle she was obliged, whether she liked it or not,
to give him a double share of tenderness, even whether her thoughts
were with him or cantering off on a secret path of dreams.
She was his slave, his plaything, his attentive audience. She valeted
him, praised his personal beauty, massaged his thighs with salves,
arranged the hare-skin on his loins to charm away his gout, gave him
his carbonate of soda to correct indiscretions in diet, dressed his
grizzled locks with a hairwash, the pungent odour of which turned her
sick, and looked on, giving him the benefit of her artistic taste and
advice, while he tinted his moustache. And she did it all with eager
zeal and naive self-reliance, as if in tending and coaxing him she had
found the very aim and end of her existence.
In the process, however, he became divested for her of every rag of his
godlike attributes, so that nothing was left but a once soldierly,
though now vain, and capricious man--mentally effete, for all his
vaunted intellect; brutal, for all his refined tastes, with his
appetites prematurely sated and enervated.
Not that she was really clear in her mind with regard to these defects
of his qualities. If she had been, it is possible that she might have
loathed and despised him. She was too young and ignorant of the world
to know that life is like a witch's cauldron, which brews out of the
souls of all men much the same mess, when ideals bleach with their hair
and they have no altar on which to gain salvation through sacrifice.
The pictures her imagination painted of him faded and shifted from day
to day, first in one direction, then in another, until something like
pity mingled with her childlike respectful awe of him, and a certain
motherliness that would have been unnatural, had it not had its
foundations in the goodness of heart that found in the weaknesses of
others an object for its fostering care.
Ah! if only she did not long for so much. Every day she sat at a
sumptuously spread table and longed for more!
She read eagerly every morning the notices posted up in the vestibule
of the hotel, giving a list of the evening's amusements. But the
colonel would hurry her on--in the narrow groove of his small garrison
he and the arts had become estranged. The organs necessary for the
enjoyment of such things from long disuse had become decayed, and he
shrank from the mental exertion required to galvanise them into
activity once more.
The music-hall variety performances, boxing matches, ballets, and
garish living-pictures, in which he took pleasure, were abhorrent to
Lilly after she had once witnessed them out of curiosity. He declared
that wild horses should not drag him again to Shakespeare or Wagner,
nor to the concert-room, where Lilly longed to go.
One day Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor was among the
announcements--the great work which was associated by a thousand tender
ties with her childhood. She said nothing at the time, but afterwards
she threw herself on her bed and cried bitterly. When he asked the
cause of her grief she told him, and with a laugh he consented to be
bored for once, and took her to the concert.
She had not been into a concert-room since her father's last pianoforte
recital. She trembled as they took their places, fought back her tears
and drew in the atmosphere in deep-drawn draughts.
"You are snorting like a horse when he smells oats," the colonel said
jocularly.
"Haven't you noticed that it always smells the same in concert-rooms?"
she asked in joyous excitement. "It was just like this in ours at
home."
He couldn't remember what the concert-hall atmosphere was like, nor
could he remember anything about the Symphony in C Minor.
"It's all rot," he said.
The part of the programme that preceded the Symphony was of no interest
to her. She only wanted to listen to the trumpet-blast of fate--the
call that she had heard first as she stood on the threshold of
womanhood, and had been shaken to the foundations of her soul by a
feeling of presentiment. And it came--came and thundered at every
heart, and set trembling the knees of all those who were bound up
together as fellow-combatants in the struggle against the mighty
strokes of fate, and set them writhing as impotently as worms under the
spell of a great power and a common fear.
Her husband hummed to himself, half-amused, "Ti-ti-ti-tum." That was
all it meant to him: "Ti-ti-ti-tum."
As she turned to rebuke him softly into being quiet, she observed a
tuft of yellowish-grey hair sprouting out of the cavity of his ear. She
had never noticed it before, and it revolted her.
"What can you expect, when he has hair growing out of his ears?" she
thought, as if this physical defect accounted for his lack of an ear
for music. A profound feeling of dejection came over her. Never again
would she be able to rejoice in the beautiful; never again stretch out
her arms in worship of great heroic deeds; never again slack her thirst
for higher and purer things at the fountains of inspiration.
The man who hummed "Ti-ti-ti-tum" and had hair growing out of his ears
would be a barrier for evermore between her and all lofty living.
The soothing sound of the violins did not console, the melancholy
self-surrender of the Andante awoke no responsive echoes within her,
the victorious jubilation of the Finale brought her no victory.
She left the hall with her yawning husband, humiliated, miserable, and
disgusted with herself. But her joy in life was of too robust a growth,
her faith in the sunny side of human nature too unwavering, for such
moods of depression to be of long duration. Soon after the concert
something happened, which gave her hopes new wings and raised her again
to giddy heights.
Without having made any definite plans, it had seemed to be an
understood thing that they were to stay in Dresden, or some other large
town, till May, when they would proceed to Lischnitz, where, in the
absence of the master of the castle, the often talked of Fraeulein von
Schwertfeger held the reins of management. One evening, however, the
colonel, who was eternally vacillating between confidence in and
distrust of his girl-wife, was seized with a panic of doubt, and in
order to lay bare the innermost secrets of her soul he began to
cross-examine her on her previous love affairs.
Lilly, as usual, unsuspecting, related glibly first the story of Fritz
Redlich, because he was the more important love, and, secondly, that of
the poor consumptive assistant master.
Her husband, in spite of his jealous misgivings, had retained his
clearness of judgment sufficiently to appreciate the guilelessness of
Lilly's conscience, and he now threw his suspicions to the wind with a
laugh that he generally reserved for his broadest jokes.
Lilly, having begun, was anxious to play further on her husband's
emotions, so she went on to describe the wonderful lectures on the
history of art, and how the poor invalid lecturer had infected her with
his own burning yearnings to see Italy.
Her cheeks flamed, her eyes swam under her heavily drooping lids, as
she went on giving voice to her dreams and drawing word-pictures,
almost forgetful that she had a listener.
Suddenly he asked, "Shall we go there?"
She couldn't answer. The very proposal seemed too much bliss. Then he
began to think it over seriously. A man might just as well get into the
train and be landed at Milan or Verona as mope in one place and be
worried to death by stupid fools dogging your footsteps. Lilly flung
her arms round his neck, then threw herself at his feet. This was
indeed too much happiness.
Her life now became an alternate dream of ecstasy and a fever of
anxiety, for something might always happen to prevent their going.
First, they had to wait for the knickerbocker suit, which he ordered at
a tailor's as the correct get-up for travelling, and then there were a
dozen other delays. The truth may have been that he was pondering
whether he could command enough youthful agility to keep pace with her
excessive _elan_ and capacity for enjoyment.
Then a certain incident hurried on their departure. For several days
they had been shadowed by a fair-haired, bull-necked young man, six
feet in height, who with stubborn pertinacity tried to attract Lilly's
attention. Judging by his appearance he was probably an Anglo-Saxon
tourist. There was in his manner a lofty nonchalance which rendered him
absolutely indifferent to the threatening darts of the colonel's eyes.
For the first time Lilly saw her husband plunged in deep thought. He
paced the room, muttering to himself repeatedly, "I shall have to box
his ears"; or, "I must find a second."
The next day, when this irrepressible person followed them at a few
yards' distance across the Schlossplatz, the colonel wheeled round and
confronted him.
The fair giant measured him from top to toe without removing his short
pipe from between his lips.
"I may look at anyone I choose to," he said in broken German, "and I
may go anywhere I choose to."
He made a gesture as if he meant to turn up his coat-sleeves and struck
an extremely pugilistic attitude, which discouraged all idea of
inflicting on him a chivalrous correction.
The colonel, with a final attempt to bring the matter to an honourable
issue, handed him his visiting-card, which the stranger put in his
pocket with a friendly "Thank you, sir," without evidently the least
notion of what this formality portended. A little crowd began to
collect, and there was nothing left for the colonel but to turn his
back on him.
The result of this passage of arms was, that in future the Englishman
considered it his right to bestow on Lilly and her husband a greeting
when they met. And the colonel, who tried unsuccessfully to stifle his
consciousness of having made himself ridiculous in a torrent of oaths,
resolved to leave Dresden on the spot.
In Munich, where they stopped a few days, it being the middle of April,
to pay their respects at the Hofbraeuhaus, nothing happened of a
ruffling nature. But the colonel had become nervous. He cast furious
and intimidating glances at the most harmless admirers, and began to
heap reproaches on Lilly's head. It seemed as if everyone at a first
glance, he said, could divine she was not a lady, otherwise she would
not attract so much vulgar notice. At another time Lilly would have
been bitterly grieved, but now she was unmoved. She only smiled
absently, for her spirit was far away, and already she fancied that she
breathed the air of the promised land, on whose threshold she believed
she was standing. One night more in the train, a short day in Bozen,
and then the magic gates would swing back. Nothing now could prevent
the fulfilment of bliss.
* * * * *
They were in a compartment of the express, which leaves Munich late in
the evening and crosses the Brenner Pass in the gloom of early morning.
Lilly and her husband sat in the corner seats by the windows. Not far
from them, on the corridor side, a young man had taken his place with a
pleasant smile, and then, without heeding his fellow-travellers, had
soon become deep in a book that appeared to be written in Italian.
Probably he was Italian too, an ambassador from that earthly paradise
come to bid her welcome. Her interest in him was thus instantly
arrested. From under her lowered lids, apparently asleep, she studied
him. His severely cut even features were of a peculiar milky ivory
colour. There was not a line or wrinkle in his clear skin, which looked
as smooth as enamel. A small, dark, slightly curled moustache adorned
his upper lip. The crisp hair on his temples was so closely cropped
that the skin underneath gleamed through. She wanted to see what his
eyes were like, but these were kept obstinately bent on his book,
though he seemed to be only skimming the pages.
What excited her admiring wonder about him most was the finished grace
of his movements. It was almost as if a young woman were disguised in
that black and white check suit, which charmed her eye with its
_distingue_ cut. His throat disclosed a peep of a violet and dark-red
striped silk shirt, under the soft collar of which a green tie was
carelessly knotted.
All this was not in the least bizarre in effect, but harmonised
perfectly. The costume apparently had been chosen with care and taste,
and, together with his total disregard of herself, it exercised a
fascination on Lilly. She could almost believe that this young
stranger, by his dress, bearing, and especially by his disregard of her
presence, was compelling her notice.
Absurd as it was, she felt quite nervous. When they reached the
Austrian frontier and the custom-house officials entered the carriage,
he said a few foreign words in a low tone, which the officials
evidently understood, for they turned away from him with low bows.
At the same moment he raised his eyes and let them wander round the
carriage, and while the colonel was opening his bag, they rested for a
second on her. What curious eyes they were! A dark, diamond-like
radiance shot from them, yet they caressed, yes, caressed with a wicked
confident tenderness, full of impatient questions--questions that made
you blush.
The next minute it was as if nothing had happened. He bent over his
book as before, and appeared not to have seen her.
Her husband gave her a look of watchful cunning as if he had discovered
something in her face for which he had long been searching. Then, when
the train went on again, he settled himself to sleep. For greater
comfort he moved to the unoccupied seat next to the corridor. The
stranger, wishing to avoid being opposite him, involuntarily shifted
his position more towards the middle, so that the distance between
himself and Lilly was appreciably diminished. A little more, and he
would have been sitting directly opposite her.
Had Lilly been on her guard she would have paid more attention to her
husband's sleep. But all her senses were centred on a desire to elude
the stranger, whose proximity pricked her with a thousand needles.
She drew far back into her corner and looked intermittently out of the
window, on the dark background of which the interior of the carriage
was reflected as in a mirror. In this way she could contemplate him in
peace, untroubled by a fear of his looking up and catching her. The
light from the lamp in the ceiling sharply illumined his smooth, soft
cheeks, with their polished surface merging into blue shadows on the
temples. Such cheeks were surely made to be stroked and pressed
against yours; to pass your hand over them would be a joy. And how
long his eyelashes were--longer than her own--their shadow cast dark
semi-circles as far down as his finely chiselled nostrils.
Suddenly he raised his eyes again and looked at her. There it was
again, that dark caressing glance--cold, and yet how seductive!
She shrank back frightened, and was more frightened still at the
thought that he might have seen her shrinking away from him.
He gave a scarcely perceptible smile, and went on again with his book;
and still she continued to weave anxious and flattering thoughts around
him--thoughts that were criminal in themselves, which descended on her
like an avalanche that she hadn't the power to ward off. And then, all
at once, with an icy chill at her heart, she felt a soft, tender
pressure on her left foot, which she must by accident have thrust
towards the centre of the gangway, for a moment before it had been
resting on her right foot, which was still pressed close to the door of
the compartment.
What was to be done? An indignant "I beg your pardon," an angry rising
from her seat, would have awakened the colonel, and given cause for
fresh suspicion and perhaps a duel. So she slowly, with extreme
caution, withdrew her foot from under his and pressed it against the
cushions, to be quite sure that she had rescued it. But she felt that
the moment of hesitation had made her a participator in the crime, and
this conviction oppressed and weighed on her more than her train of
sinful thoughts had a few minutes before tormented her.
In her own eyes she appeared dishonoured, polluted, a prey to any and
every licentious man who crossed her path. But why blame him? Was not
his impertinently expressed desire merely the fulfilment of her own
impure wishes? The reflection half suffocated her. She wanted to spring
up, cry aloud, and ask to be forgiven. The stranger, however, went on
reading calmly, as if nothing at all had occurred.
There was a glimmer of grey dawn when Lilly started up out of a
half-waking doze. She saw a waterfall tossing its white foam beneath
her; beyond towered huge moss-crowned rocks against the sky. It was a
picture she had dreamed of, but never seen, appealing and impressive in
its rugged grandeur and massive strength. All that had passed before
she fell asleep seemed now a grotesque phantasmagoria devoid of
reality. She glanced round the carriage nervously, and saw the stranger
stretched out at full length, repulsive in sleep, his cheeks inflated
and puffy as his breath came and went in heavy gasps. He looked to her
now pasty and effeminate, and she loathed him.
She turned away in disgust and caught her husband's eyes wide open,
fixed on her in severe reproof. She started guiltily.
"Can't you sleep any longer?" she asked, with a forced smile.
"I have not slept at all," he answered.
There was something in his voice that set her trembling anew. It
accused and condemned at the same time. And how angrily he looked at
her!
The journey was continued in silence, and she paid no further heed to
the stranger.
After taking rooms at Bozen, the colonel came to Lilly and said: "Look
here, my dear girl, this can't go on. I am tired of the unpleasantness
to which I am subjected day after day. How far your appearance and
behaviour or my age are accountable, I cannot say. We will not discuss
the point. I have no charge of glaring misconduct and bad taste to
bring against you. One does not expect the manners of a _grande dame_
from anyone who a few months ago was serving behind a counter. It
requires time to instruct you in such, and I can with confidence hand
over your further education to our excellent Fraeulein von Schwertfeger.
So, if you please, we will change our plans and return to Germany by
the midday train. On the evening of the day after to-morrow, perhaps
earlier, we shall reach my estate."
Lily was too crushed and miserable to make any objection. And the land
of promise, the goal of her dreams, sank beneath the waves.