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THE SONG OF SONGS
(DAS HOHE LIED)
BY HERMANN SUDERMANN
TRANSLATED BY
THOMAS SELTZER
NEW YORK
THE VIKING PRESS
MCMXXVI
Copyright, 1909, by
J. G. COTTA'SCHE BUCHHANDLUNG NACHFOLGER, Stuttgart
_All rights reserved_
Published in Germany, November 21, 1908
Privilege of copyright in the United States reserved
under the act approved March 3, 1905,
by J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger
Published November 20, 1909
Second printing, January, 1910
Third printing, February, 1910
Fourth printing, April, 1910
Fifth printing, September, 1910
Sixth printing, September, 1911
Seventh printing, March, 1913
Eighth printing, December, 1913
Ninth printing, January, 1915
Tenth printing, June, 1916
Eleventh printing, 1919
Twelfth printing, April, 1921
Thirteenth printing, September, 1923
Fourteenth printing, December, 1926
THE SONG OF SONGS
PART I
CHAPTER I
Lilly was fourteen years old when her father, Kilian Czepanek, the
music-master, suddenly disappeared.
It happened in this way. He had been giving piano lessons the whole day,
in the interim swearing and drinking Moselle and Selters, for it was
intensely hot. Occasionally he had slipped into the dining-room to take
a cognac or arrange his Windsor necktie. He had pulled Lilly's brown
curls as she sat labouring over her French vocabulary, and had
disappeared again into the best room, where the girl pupils changed from
hour to hour, and only the dissonances and the curses remained.
When the last victim had stumbled through her lesson and closed the hall
door behind her, Czepanek failed to reappear in his usual bad temper and
with his usual appetite. He remained in the front room, where this day
he neither whistled nor whined nor played out his rage on the keyboard,
as he sometimes did after a day's labour. In fact, he gave scarcely a
sign of life. Now and then a deep sigh--that was all.
Lilly, who took warm interest in everything her handsome father did or
did not do, let her French textbook slip from her lap, and stole up to
the keyhole.
Through it she saw him standing before the large pier-glass, absorbed in
a close study of himself. From time to time he raised his left hand and
pressed it as if in despair against his soft, silky, dark artist's
curls, which Lilly's mother devotedly fostered every day with bay-rum
and French oils.
He and his reflection gazed at each other's moist red face with wild,
eager eyes, and Lilly's heart expanded in love of her adored papa.
To Lilly his standing before the mirror was a familiar sight. It was his
manner of squaring accounts for his lost life and wasted love, his
manner of charming back the great world, in which duchesses and prima
donnas yearningly cherished the memory of their vanished idol.
He stood there like an elderly god of love, with small alcoholic puffs
under his eyes, and a tendency toward a paunch.
Both mama and Lilly cared for him with unremitting zeal. They regarded
him as a sort of bird of paradise, who by a lucky chance had been caught
between the walls of a room, and who required the greatest effort, the
utmost circumspection, to keep him safe in the cage.
By right, Lilly should long ago have been sitting at the piano, for in
the house of Czepanek a quiet keyboard was a waste of time and a sin
before the Lord. She had to practice four or five hours every day. Often
when her father was seized by the holy spirit of creativeness and forgot
the time set aside for her practicing, she did not begin until nearly
midnight. Then she sat at the piano frozen, with heavy eyes, striking
out in all directions until the small hours of the morning. Sometimes
her mother found her the next day lying with her arms crossed on the
keyboard in that profound child's sleep from which there is almost no
rousing.
Thus it happened that she cared little for the artistic future for which
her father's ambition had destined her. She preferred to dally with
some old forbidden book, and often drove her father to despair by a
false pretence at cleverness in playing at first sight. But to-day she
had the Sonata Pathetique to do, and there is no trifling with that, as
any babe in arms knows.
So she was just about to interrupt her father as he stood there plunged
in dreamy self-observation, when she heard a click at the door from the
kitchen. She bounded away from the keyhole with one great leap of her
long legs, and the next instant her mother entered, carrying the supper
dishes.
The mother's prematurely faded cheeks were now glowing from the heat of
the kitchen fire. She held her lean figure erect, taut as a whip cord,
which seemed to be tied in a knot at the abdomen by a protrusion, the
result of abortive child-bearing. Dull marital sorrow had long ago
transformed her eyes, once beautiful, into two lustreless slits. But at
this moment they were beaming with pride and expectation.
For to-day Mrs. Czepanek hoped to satisfy her lord and his palate.
At the clatter of the plates on the table, the door to the parlour
opened, and papa's dark curly head, about which the evening sunlight
cast a halo, appeared in the bright opening.
"The deuce, supper already?" he said, and his eyes wandered with a
peculiar, confused gaze.
"In ten minutes," the mother replied, joy at the surprise in store for
him playing about her parched, chapped lips like secret bliss.
He entered the room, took a few deep breaths, and said with the air of a
man to whom speech comes hard:
"I've just noticed that one of the straps of my hand-bag is torn."
"Why, do you want it?" asked his wife.
"One's hand-bag must always be kept in readiness," he answered, his eyes
continuing to rove about the room. "Suppose I were suddenly to be called
to act as substitute somewhere. I must have my bag ready."
As a matter of fact, he had been called upon the previous winter to take
the place of a Berlin virtuoso, who had undertaken to "do" the towns in
eastern Germany and whose train had been snow-bound near Bromberg. The
committee telegraphed to papa requesting him to play in his stead. But
now, in midsummer, when the concert season was dead, such an emergency
was scarcely within the realm of the possible.
"I'll tell Minna to take it to the saddler's right after supper," said
mama, who took good care not to contradict her choleric husband.
He nodded meditatively and walked into his bedroom, while the mother ran
to the kitchen to do the final honours in her own person to the titbit
she had prepared for him.
A few minutes later he returned with the bag in his hand. It looked
rather bulgy. He stopped before the linen chest.
"Lilly, dear," he said, "I wonder whether the score would go into the
grip crosswise? In case I am called to a concert, you know--"
The score of the Song of Songs was kept in the linen chest, so that,
should fire break out during papa's absence, anyone in the family might
easily get at this greatest of treasures.
Lilly looked for the keys, but could not find them.
"I'll go ask mama," she said.
"No, no," he cried hastily, and a shiver went through his body, such as
Lilly had often noticed when mother was mentioned to him. "I'll first
take this old thing to the saddler."
Lilly was shocked at the idea that her celebrated father should himself
go to the saddler's dingy workshop.
"Mercy!" she cried, and reached out for the handle of the bag. She would
take it to the saddler herself.
But he warded her off.
"You're too grown up now for such things, my girl," he said, and his
eyes lighted up as they scanned her tall, virginal body, her hips and
bosom, already beginning to show delicate curves. "Why, you're almost a
_signora_."
He patted her cheeks and pulled a little at the lock of the linen chest,
gnawing his lips the while in intense bitterness. Then suddenly he shook
himself, and with a shy, contemptuous look toward the kitchen--Lilly
knew that look, too--went quickly out of the room.
He went and never came back.
* * * * *
The night following that red summer evening remained graven in Lilly's
memory hour by hour.
Her mother sat on the window-sill in her nightgown, and her fervid,
anxious eyes kept glancing up and down the street. Whenever she heard
steps at a distance knocking on the pavement, she would start and cry:
"There he is."
Lilly felt there was no need to bother about the Pathetique to-day. A
dull oppression in her left breast determined her to turn to St. Joseph,
to whom she had stood in tender relations since her confirmation. She
had already passed many a dreamy, idle hour before his altar at St.
Anne's--right front, second chapel--and secretly sent up many an
abstract sigh to the dear, good face with the beautiful beard. But
to-night he failed her utterly. She could get no consolation from him,
and vexed and disillusioned, she dismissed him.
At twelve o'clock the last vehicle passed the house.
At one the pedestrians, too, grew less frequent.
At half-past two a dusty wind arose, smelling of sand and threatening to
blow out the lamp.
Between two and three only the night watchman was heard shuffling along
the narrow, echoing street.
At three the early delivery wagons began to rattle, and it grew light.
Between three and four Lilly prepared a boiling hot cup of coffee for
her mother, and ate up all the cold supper. Long waiting and crying had
made her ravenously hungry.
Between four and five a band of young night revellers passed by,
throwing kisses to her mother, and when their importunities forced her
to withdraw from the window they serenaded her. Fine, pure voices, Lilly
had to admit despite her grief; rendition good and precise, without that
pedantic stop-like effect which papa so detested in the singing
societies. Perhaps they were even pupils of his who did not know his
residence.
Scarcely were they gone when the mother was again at her post.
Lilly struggled against sleep.
She saw as through a veil the thin blond hair waving over her mother's
forehead in the morning breeze, saw the pointed nose, red with weeping,
turn now to the right, now to the left, according to the direction from
which a sound came; saw the nightgown fluttering like a white flag, and
the lean legs incessantly rubbing against each other in nervous
agitation. Then she had to retell, perhaps for the hundredth time, the
story of the hand-bag and the linen chest, but her eyes closed.
And then suddenly she started up with a cry; her mother had dropped back
in a swoon, and lay supine on the floor like a log of wood.