So Kilian Czepanek never came back.
Good friends were not wanting, of course, who had for years foreseen the
event. In fact, they failed to understand how he could have endured it
so long--he, the man of genius, of God-given fancy, with the hall-mark
of creative restlessness on his thunder-headed brow. Others called him a
good-for-nothing, a dirty scoundrel, who ran after innocent girls and
enticed young men to gamble. They declared Mrs. Czepanek lucky to be rid
of him, and charged Lilly to erase her unworthy father from her memory.
Most unpleasant of all, however, were those who said nothing, but
presented bills. Mrs. Czepanek sold or pawned all the articles of luxury
left her from the middle-class comfort of her youth, or from her
husband's liberal moods. But these soon gave out. Furniture, dress and
linen not absolutely indispensable followed; then at last the creditors
were stilled.
The singing society, to the leadership of which Kilian Czepanek had been
called fifteen years before, and which, during that period, had carried
off no less than six prizes, expressed its satisfaction with the
accomplishments of its conductor by holding the position open for half a
year and paying the salary in full to his wife.
But this period of grace also came to an end. Now began the bitter
begging pilgrimages to the eminent citizens and officials of the city,
the sorry pulling of bells, the anxious scraping of shoes before
strangers' doors, the half-hour waitings in dark corridors, the abashed
sitting down on the narrow edges of chairs, the sighs, the stammering,
the wiping of eyes, which, however honestly meant, came to have somewhat
the appearance of professional hypocrisy. The more it was calculated to
produce an impression the more it failed of its purpose.
Now came the chase for work in shop and factory, in all places where
bed-linen and shirts and nightgowns are made, where cheap lace is added
to cheap underwear, where white goods is vitalised with hems and yokes
and bindings and strings. Now came the whizz of the sewing machine the
whole day and the whole night. Now came pricked fingers, inflamed eyes,
swollen knees, vinegar compresses about feverish temples, a simmering
tea-kettle at four o'clock in the morning, watery coffee heated three
times over, with bread and butter instead of the midday roast and the
evening eggs. In short, now came poverty.
And strange to say, the more remote the day on which Kilian Czepanek had
disappeared, the more confidently his abandoned wife looked forward to
his return. The first half year had passed; another conductor appeared
and challenged comparison. For a couple of weeks the papers contented
themselves with mortifying him by flattering allusions to the former
leader. But this also passed. And now followed the great silence of the
grave. At most, Czepanek's picture remained alive only in a few
bar-rooms and a few girls' hearts.
Mrs. Czepanek, however, who had so long compressed her lips in smothered
shame when the conversation turned upon her husband, began to speak of
his coming back as of an established fact definitely prearranged. More
than that, she who in the course of fifteen years had gradually lost her
youth, her beauty, her ready wit and laughter, everything she had
brought as a marriage dowry to her husband, sinking it, for no reason
at all, in a grey pool of self-reproach and anxiety; she who for many
years had not tried a coloured ribbon on her sunken breast, who had not
troubled to arrange a lock of hair on her forehead, which kept growing
higher and higher--this woman became vain again. Each time she received
her meagre pay she made haste to invest part of it in powder and beauty
creams. In moments of exhaustion, when she could no longer stand on her
feet, she quickly whipped a red stick from her pocket and passed it over
her thin lips. And about eight o'clock every morning she bustled between
the kitchen fire and the sewing machine with a freshly burned wreath of
curls.
In this way she prepared herself for his return. She would receive her
repentant husband in her outstretched arms, bedecked and radiant as a
bride.
For he was bound to return; that was certain. Where else would he find a
comprehending smile like hers, where else the secret soul-harmony which
consoles by silence and compels happiness by prayer, which, with the
dropping of the rosary beads, secretly insinuates dreamy stipulations
with Providence, and dissolves the whole universe into one great minor
harmony of yearning? Where else was there a human being who served as
she did, without malice and without regret, with body and with soul, who
allowed herself to be taken or rejected according to impulse or desire?
Thus she had once welcomed him, a young, blond, laughing, unsuspecting
thing. She had given herself to him without stint and without
questioning; just because he desired it. And she had scarcely felt it as
her right and his atonement, when he led her to the altar at the command
of her father, an honest subordinate in a court of justice. In fact,
Czepanek had been forced into marriage by half the city, which
otherwise would have ostracised the seducer and ousted him from his soft
berth.
Happier she could not be, that she knew. Of the nameless misfortune
bound to come she had not the least presentiment; and when it came she
took it without complaint; she loved him so very much, she regarded it
as the natural indemnity for the unnatural gift of having possessed him.
Yet he would come back in spite of all. Whether he wished to or not, he
would come. She had in her possession a pledge which chained him to her
for all time, and which, sooner or later, must force him to cross her
threshold.
It was not Lilly. True, he loved his child, loved her with a tenderness
strangely compounded of pleasure in a toy for idle hours, and of
aesthetic delight in her inner and outer loveliness. But for a real
father's love, she knew, there was no room in his gypsy heart. Even in
hours when he would feel himself most alone and abandoned, the thought
would never occur to him to seek solace and comfort with a child of his.
But the wife had something else in her keeping which gave her a far
stronger hold upon him--a roll of music; that was all. He might easily
have put it in the bag with which he had departed on his great journey.
In fact, he had attempted to. But so great at the decisive moment was
his desire to escape that he did not dare to face his suspicious wife.
This roll of music contained everything that had linked his past with
his future during the fifteen years of his Philistine life, everything
remaining from the titanic storm and stress of his youth, from the giddy
hopes and ambitions of the days when he starved.
This roll of music--it was slender enough--contained the work of his
life; it contained the Song of Songs.
Since Lilly could think, nothing in the world had been spoken of with
such respect, with such tender and reverent awe, as this work, of which,
with the exception of the two women, no one knew a note.
It was something that had never yet been, something unheard of, a new
world of sound, the beginning of a musical development, of which the end
was lost in the twilight of mystic anticipation.
The opera had reached its culmination in Wagner, the road from which
pointed straight down into the abyss; symphonic composition no longer
answered modern requirements for sense music; the song had been split up
by the newest school into a series of small subtle effects. The art of
the future belonged to the oratorio, but not that constrained wooden
production hitherto suffered to pass by the name from a false belief
that we have to make concessions to a misunderstood ecclesiasticism,
but--and here it was that the new world of sound, the Song of Songs,
began.
The score had been completed years ago. To entrust it to the heavy
execution of the musicians of Czepanek's provincial town would have been
desecration. So it lay there and lay there, and interwove the day with a
mild, mysterious light, which no one saw, yet every one felt. It shot
rays of light into the distant future, and so filled a child's
palpitating heart with anticipation, prayer and love that that heart
would rather have stood still than exist without this fountain of the
good and the noble, from which the acting forces of life daily drew
their sustenance.
For Lilly the roll of music lying in the upper drawer of the linen
chest, held together by two rubber bands, was a kind of household
divinity, which gave purity and sanctity to the home. She had imbibed
reverence for the sheets of paper, scrawled over with curly-headed
runes, since the dawn of her recollections, and their music was
familiar to her from her early childhood.
Papa, it is true, did not like to have the themes of his creation
bandied about in everyday life. "Why don't you sing 'O du lieber
Augustin' or 'Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan?'" he used to say when
he caught one of them dreamily humming his arias. "They are plenty good
enough for you."
Later his warnings grew unnecessary. Mama gradually forgot everything
sounding like a song, and Lilly withdrew more and more into herself.
She had arranged a sort of mass from the Song of Songs, which she
celebrated before the mirror when she knew she was alone in the house.
She draped a sheet about her waist like a skirt, hung window-curtains
over her shoulders, wound old lace about her neck, and wove spangles
taken from shoes into her hair. Singing, weeping, and uttering shouts of
joy, with genuflections, magic dances and airy embraces, she lived
through Sulamith's bridal yearning and ecstasy as awakened to life again
in papa's Song of Songs after a slumber of twenty-five hundred years.
The manuscript of this song became the anchor to which the hopes of
Kilian Czepanek's family were henceforth fastened. It was conceivable
that he, a vagabond, cast out by his own parents when a child, might
abandon wife and daughter to want and pining--but to believe that he
would desert the work of his lifetime, the sword wherewith he was to
fight his way back into the great world, was sheer folly.
And while the sewing-machine whizzed and whirred day and night in the
attic to which Mrs. Czepanek and her daughter had removed, while the
body of the forsaken woman dried up entirely and grew ever more
deformed, and the layer of paint with which she kept herself young
rested upon cheekbones sharpening from week to week, there lay in the
upper drawer of the linen chest (the chest had been saved from
bankruptcy) an earnest of future reunion, working miracles by its
proximity, the Song of Songs.