present conjuncture of circumstances I should profit by your being lost,
your feeling that you need protection. But I'm not a calculating nature.
In matters of emotion I'm like a child. I take whatever the heavens rain
down on me. Aren't you the same way?"
"I'm too heavy," replied Lilly, ready to bare her soul to him. "I'm full
of scruples. I think a lot over everything."
"The question is _what_ you think," he said gaily.
She wanted to reply and talk to him--tell him all her thoughts. She felt
like holding out her heart on her open palm, so that nothing should
remain concealed from him. But shame before his great wisdom sealed her
lips.
"Why do you take the trouble to bother with a stupid thing like me?" she
asked, to show him her humility at least.
"Perhaps because I have a mission to fulfil in your life. 'Perhaps,' I
say, because one can never be sure whether there is such a thing as
reflex action of the emotions. Certain _moments psychologiques_ will
teach us."
Though his meaning was not at all clear to Lilly, a hesitating sense of
happiness stole over her that so mighty a man should actually concern
himself with her.
"You are entirely in his power," she thought, "and you will be whatever
he wants you to be."
At that moment he drew her arm a little closer, and her pressure in
response brought his hand for an instant on her breast.
She was overwhelmed with fright. He might think she was offering herself
to him. If he were to take her home, were to ask--
"I'd like to get into a tram," she faltered. "I'm very tired."
He whistled for a cab, which just then came swaying out of the fog.
"No, no," she burst out, thinking of nothing but that she must not
lightly forego the joy of his friendship. "Not with you--I must go home
alone--on account--"
She tore her arm from his and ran to the next stopping place so quickly
that he was just about able to reach her before she jumped on the first
tram that came along. She scarcely said good-by.
The smile with which he looked after her was by no means melancholy.
He might, he should triumph.
She, Lilly Czepanek, was once again aspiring to the heights.
* * * * *
Three days later they met again; this time in a large company which had
visited a _cafe chantant_, and was to wind up the evening at a
respectable bodega.
Unluckily somebody else took the seat at her side, which she had
carefully reserved for him.
That upset her.
The champagne heated up everybody's spirits.
Lilly, out of spite and boredom, drank more than was good for her.
Provocative merriness burned in her eyes. Her cheeks took on the Baldwin
apple hue that they all dearly loved. Her laughter rang out clear, her
body moved more nonchalantly.
Suddenly she heard a general outcry: "Lilly! Lilly! We want Lilly!"
Terror stopped her pulse.
She had never ventured to perform in his presence. In fact, she had not
been asked to when he had been there, for then _he_ formed the centre of
attraction.
But she felt:
"I can do it to-day. To-day I will show him what I am."
She rose, brushed her hair from her forehead, and gave herself a little
shake, as was her wont when she jerked aside the everyday Lilly, the
craven-hearted Lilly, the Lilly of the oppressed feelings, the Lilly who
feared to face her fellow-beings, the stiff-jointed Lilly.
She made a dash and began.
First she imitated the beautiful Otero, and crowed and cuckooed. Her
auditors rolled with laughter. Then she hit off certain cabaret stars.
Sucking her fingers like an innocent babe, she sang in flute tones:
"Please let me in your room."
She croaked in a droll, bull-frog bass: "Once I was ambassador," and
peeping from behind the clothes rack she cooed the song of the
passionate dove: "Coo--coo--coo--kiek!"
They insisted on her concluding with a fandango. She protested. In vain.
They shoved the tables against the wall, and Lilly, making her own music
through her teeth, whirled about the room more madly than ever before,
and finally collapsed in a corner almost swooning.
The tumult of applause promised never to subside.
The women kissed her again and again, the men stroked her hair and arms,
the stiff district attorney sounded a trumpet blast, and Richard, quite
pale with pride, stood there in his Napoleon attitude, tugging at his
moustache.
But Dr. Salmoni remained at a distance, sad and modest, as if it all
concerned him not in the least.
The only sign by which she knew he realised it was all meant for him was
a rapid glance of understanding which he threw to her like a laurel
wreath.
She was still rocking in the tempest when the company prepared to break
up.
That had been intoxication, the sort of which he had spoken. It hissed
like a flame through her heart and limbs.
Dr. Salmoni himself helped her on with her fur coat--Richard was busy
paying the waiter--and while he deliberately laid the sable scarf about
her shoulders, he whispered close to her ear:
"May I come to-morrow?"
"Yes," she screamed, alarmed at herself.
Then in defiance of her own cowardice, she turned abruptly on her heels
and shouted sharply, as in anger, directly in his face:
"Yes, yes, yes, yes!"
"What's the matter?" everybody asked.
She merely laughed shortly. What did she care for the others? Wasn't she
aspiring to the heights again?
* * * * *
The next morning it was all a spectral dream. The one clear point was:
"He's coming."
With the applause still ringing in her ears she had stretched herself
and thought:
"Now he knows what I am. Now he knows I'm no dull, shrivelled, half-way
creature for the valleys, no slave nature, no sheep that runs with the
flock, no Mrs. Grundy-made fool, who voluntarily conforms to each and
every convention. Now he knows I'm a free, proud woman, who, like
himself, drinks in the light on the heights, one of those complete
women, those maenads who dance a wild dance over abysms and mock at death
even when he has them in his clutches."
Then her faintheartedness crept over her again. What after all had she
done besides drink herself into a champagne mood, sing a few comic
songs, and dance an abandoned dance? She had behaved like a music-hall
danseuse, and had harvested the very doubtful approval of a
semi-intoxicated audience.
If that alone was required for belonging to the elect, to the mighty,
laughing, chosen ones, of whom Dr. Salmoni's books spoke!
No, oh, no! After last night's performance he could feel nothing but
contempt for her, or, at most, pity. It was to tell her this to her face
that he would come to visit her, if at all. He would let her feel her
lowness and then go his own way, benevolent but untouched.
She would not suffer him to go. She would cling to him and cry:
"You promised to lead me up to the heights out of these depths of
distress, out of this insipid existence, out of this void! Be true to
your word. Do not desert me. I will do whatever you wish. I will be your
thing, your creature. But don't desert me."
In feverish expectancy she dressed, waved her hair, and rouged her lips,
pale from nights of pleasure. She made herself as beautiful as she
could.
A little before twelve the bell rang.
He?
No. Mrs. Jula.
As if by mutual agreement she and Mrs. Jula had avoided each other since
that evening of confidences. And now, without having announced her
visit, here she stood, wearing her most cordial expression, and asking
for a brief interview.
Lilly hesitated.
"Really I shan't keep you long, my dear. I understand--you're expecting
some one."
"Not that I know of," replied Lilly, aware she was blushing.
"Don't deny it. Dr. Salmoni is coming. I know the joke. I once stood the
same way, pale one instant, the next instant red, and waited for him.
The only difference is, my house gown wasn't such an angelic red. I was
plain Bordeaux red. All the same to him. He takes us in Bordeaux red,
too."'
"What do you mean?" Lilly faltered.
"What do I mean? Do you know what our circle with all our pretty legeres
women is to Dr. Salmoni? It's a sort of fishing pool, where he angles
from time to time to land something for which he just then happens to
have an appetite. There you have it, my dear!"
"That's slander!" cried Lilly, flaring up. "He's never made approaches
to me. We've never so much as mentioned the word love to each other."
"No need," replied Mrs. Jula, and laughed exultingly. "He doesn't bother
with such petty things. He knows when the time comes we shall swim into
his net without it."
Lilly felt herself getting still angrier.
"We've always spoken of pure, noble things, of a proud humanity. And if
you and your like cannot understand his language, if you insist--"
"One moment, my dear," Mrs. Jula interrupted her. "No need to be
insulting. I came to you out of good motives. As for the others--it was
_toute meme chose_ to me. I even licked my chops. But _you_, I love
you, even if you don't want to have anything to do with me. _You_ he's
to leave as you are. And last night, when I saw how far things had gone,
I couldn't quiet down. I had to come to you before he--"
"Really, you're mistaken," said Lilly, though unable to refrain from a
furtive glance at the clock.
Mrs. Jula, upon whom the glance was not lost, made a little grimace.
"Never mind. When the bell rings I'll slide out through the guest room.
But before then I am in hopes of having completed my work. See here,
child"--she seated herself at one end of the sofa and drew Lilly down
beside her--"why, all of us poor women crave to rise again, or once did,
when like you we were tolerably faithful to the one. At the
psychological moment, enter Dr. Salmoni. He doesn't have to work so hard
for some of us, but he seems to like it. He must first salivate on us
like an adder on a sparrow. He has various methods. With a cold mug like
Karla, of course, he behaves very differently from the way he behaves
with such as you or me. To us he says in the beginning: 'I cannot get
over my astonishment at seeing you in these surroundings. Tell me, what
seek you here?'"
Lilly started.
"Well, did he, or didn't he?"
"Yes--but--"
"Very well, yes. That's all I want to know. Then he describes the
dangers threatening us provided we continue to live in chains. His pet
abomination is duty. He cannot bear it. As if we were so awfully
particular about our little bit of duty. Lordy! Well, is that the way it
went?"
"Yes--but--" stammered Lilly.
"Good. Then _he_ will deliver us. _He_ will guide us. He's the mountain
guide ordained. 'Upward--up to the heights!' _N'est-ce pas?_"
Lilly turned her face away to conceal her blush of shame.
"Next in turn come the books. Miserable palaver written by immature
little scribblers in imitation of the great Nietzsche. Nevertheless we
all fall into the trap. It gets into our blood like Spanish fly. It
quite befuddles us. The thing that so infuriates us afterwards is that
we actually believed in the scoundrel's woebegone pathos, although the
mangiest cynicism crops out of every pore of his body. But we're such
sheep, and he's so clever--so clever. Yes, he is clever. You must give
the devil his due."
"But how does he manage," asked Lilly, who no longer dared to shield
him, "how does he manage to make it appear that he lived through our
entire past with us?"
"Yes, child. People in similar circumstances usually have similar
experiences. He can easily reconstruct our past--of those of us who came
from the country. I'm a landed proprietor's daughter. Didn't he tell you
in a by-the-way that he had passed a great part of his youth in
castles?"
Lilly assented.
"Later I learned he had been private tutor to a Jew living on a leased
estate near Breslau. But they bounced him pretty soon because he was
saucy."
In the midst of her sad disenchantment Lilly had to burst out laughing.
"Fine," said her friend in approval, stroking her hands. "You may well
feel happy. I wish someone had come to me the same way. Because
afterwards, oh, how it hurts!"
"Yes, tell me, how is it--afterwards?" asked Lilly, hesitatingly.
"Very simple. After he's gotten what he wants, finis. He buttons up his
coat, says in a voice quivering with emotion, '_au revoir_,' but there
never is a _revoir_. You never see him again."
"Impossible!" cried Lilly, horror-stricken. "A man can't treat a woman
so currishly."
"You--_never--see--him--again_, I tell you. What do you suppose? The man
has weightier matters to attend to. I wrote my fingers sore--not a line
in reply. Mrs. Welter lay on his threshold. Karla got the jaundice, she
was so furious. And so on. But his name is eel. When you meet him later
in company, you don't read the faintest recollection in his eyes. At the
very most he 'jollies' you like the rest."
Lilly, alarmed, brought it home to herself that she, too, had "later"
encountered a conscience in company and had forcibly extinguished every
recollection, no matter how much the conscience besought her with his
comically mournful glances. One person behaved like the other in this
world where you threw your dignity away like an ill-fitting dress.
She hid her face on the sofa arm shaken with a storm of shame and guilt.
"Never mind," Mrs. Jula comforted her. "Nothing has happened yet."
The bell rang.
Lilly hurried to the kitchen to tell the maid to dismiss the visitor,
but Mrs. Jula restrained her.
"What's gotten into your head?" she whispered. "Would you have him think
you're afraid of him? That way you'll never be rid of him. Laugh at him.
Do you understand? _Laugh_ at him--long and hard."
Lilly wanted to run after her and beg her to remain. Was she, Lilly,
his match? He was already entering the room.
Drawn to her full height she looked at him as at a dead enemy.
"My dear child," he said, kissing her hand, which she quickly withdrew.
He had exercised great care in dressing. He wore straw-coloured gloves,
and held his silk hat pressed to his breast. His monocle danced on his
white waistcoat. An air of smug self-confidence, of unpretentious
mastery enveloped his being like a mild glory. The way he settled
himself comfortably in his chair, the way he amiably crossed his legs
indicated that of course she had been subjugated.
Lilly was no longer fearful or timid, nor did she experience the pangs
of disillusionment. She was simply possessed of cool, conscious
curiosity.
She followed each of his movements with astonished eyes, as he passed
his hand over his shining hair cut brush fashion, and pulled his
trousers up and exposed the red-dotted stockings on his ankles.
She kept saying to herself:
"So _that's_ what you are, _that's_ what you are."
He began to speak in a soft, compassionate, caressing voice, while his
peering eyes glided up and down her body.
"You're excited, dear child. I understand. When two people like us are
brought alone together for the first time in their lives, their feelings
run away with them. Don't be ashamed. What led us to each other is such
a delicate, subtle understanding--the fluid between us is of such a
rare, fleeting quality--"
"Yes--fleeting, especially," thought Lilly, "--that it would really be
a shame if we did not taste every drop of it. And a superabundance of
feelings would simply be a hindrance to the spiritual epicureanism in
both of us, particularly in me."
As he spoke, slightly smacking his lips and swaying back and forth, the
refrain of a Viennese ditty in her repertoire occurred to her: "I have
much too much sentiment."
"He has much too much sentiment," she said to herself, and smiled
involuntarily.
He saw the smile, which she tried to conceal by lowering her face, but
he misinterpreted it.
"There is a coy virginity about you," he said with an admiring shake of
his head, "which always fills me with astonishment."
"Oh, you jackanapes," thought Lilly, and smiled again.
Now he hesitated a bit. He had not had all his experience for nothing,
and a flash of greed and suspicion darted from between his lids.
"Oh," he continued, "has some of the delightful humour that you
surprised us with last night remained over for to-day?"
"Perhaps," she replied with an upward glance which was almost
coquettish.
"Oh, splendid!" he cried. His face now brightened into a mischievous
smile, in which gaiety and devilishness counterbalanced each other. "Are
you one of those who can laugh in her sleeve at--at--how shall I
say?--at the whole humbuggery of it all--and at yourself? At yourself,
my child, that's the main thing. Then you and I are one--nothing divides
us. Then--"
"May God forgive me," she thought, and held her handkerchief to her
mouth to suppress her tittering.
"Laugh at him," Mrs. Jula had said.
But he seemed to take it as an invitation, as a delicate, friendly hint
to cut the preamble short; for he sprang toward her and clasped her
body.
She pushed him back--she wrestled with him.
Tears of shame and indignation welled up in her eyes.
"What sort of a thing have I become?" a voice within her cried, while
she struck at him with her fists.
In the midst of the struggle she succeeded in reaching the bell.
The maid appeared.
He picked up his hat from the carpet, murmured something like
"riffraff," and disappeared.
Disappeared also from the little circle that he had sometimes honoured
with his presence.
* * * * *
Henceforth Lilly ceased to aspire to the heights.
CHAPTER XI
The next year Lilly went through two little love affairs which were of
no significance in her after life.
During a four weeks' stay in the Riesengebirge, she met a novelist whose
name was then on everybody's lips. He was airing his newly acquired fame
in the Bohemian resorts and plucking what flowers he found by the
roadside. He forced himself upon Lilly without much ceremony, and a few
days later went his way in search of pastures new.
And in Berlin she favoured a handsome, extremely elegant hussar of the
Guards, who had flirted with her from his seat at the next table in an
aristocratic restaurant. But he wounded her pride by attempting to repay
her with a little leather box which came from the jeweler's. She sent
back the box and turned him off.
She disliked the thought of both adventures, and soon wiped them
entirely from her memory.
At Christmas a companion came to live with her. She had frequently
complained to Richard that her life was empty; she craved something
alive and loving to take care of. So he gave her a little naked monkey
which could not warm itself even in her bosom. When angry, the monkey
spat his scorn of her yearning in her face.
Every now and then a marriage scheme was again propounded.
Lilly knew the signs perfectly.
When Richard paced through all the rooms, taciturn and distraught,
wrinkling his forehead; when apropos of nothing he began to philosophise
on the futility of all things earthly; when mama required the carriage
at unwonted hours, and little packages of concert and opera tickets
filled his purse, she knew something was impending.
And then it seldom lasted long before Richard broke silence.
One had two millions, the other three. Influential relatives, mines,
factories, legacies, government contracts, whole blocks of houses, and
innumerable building lots nodded in the distance.
Sometimes Lilly's drawing-room hummed with so many figures that it might
have been a stockbroker's office.
One of the prospective brides even was poor. But she was a general's
daughter, and mama adored her.
"I'm a general's widow," said Lilly.
Whether rich or poor, they all disappeared, because none of them was
good enough for him.
Lilly meditated and schemed; this is the way she should be, and this
way, and this way. She must have white, column-like arms such as the
Danish girl at the carnival; and she must have an extremely delicate,
scarcely perceptible bosom--her own seemed to Lilly to have become too
voluptuous--and when she laughed, two dimples must form in her cheeks,
because dimples were a sign of peaceableness.
Peace she demanded for him above all. She knew he could not bear
disputes. As a matter of fact they never did quarrel. But if a little
disagreement arose, he went about for days looking miserable, spoke in a
woebegone, sick tone, and had to be petted like a child. Which she did
with joy, though he by no means deserved it.
For, whatever the standpoint from which you viewed such things, he had
become an out and out good-for-nothing.
He might be pardoned the very respectable sums he lost at the club, but
he debauched like a married man, and his experiences were none of the
purest.
One day a pretty young thing with an eight weeks' old baby on her arm
came to Lilly and wept and screamed, and declared Lilly must cede her
place to her because she had the child by him and so the greater right.
Lilly comforted her and gave her some wine, and, filled with envy,
tickled the baby's wet little chin until it laughed. Whereupon the girl
left quieted, and even kissed Lilly's hand on parting.
That afternoon Richard listened to an eloquent discourse.
Lilly felt herself to be entirely free from jealousy.
Whenever he appeared looking embarrassed or with a crafty expression in
his eyes, his head inclined all the way to the left, and radiating an
odour of cheap perfumes, she always received him with an indulgent
smile, which he understood very well and feared like a plague.
However valiant his resolve to maintain silence, it scarcely lasted half
an hour before he sat there hopelessly stranded, making partly veiled
confessions and asking for praise and comfort.
In a life of this sort, which reflected all the faults and perfidies of
marriage without bestowing its sense of dignity and natural rights, it
was inevitable that Lilly should withdraw into herself more and more and
look forward to her future with increasing gloom.
She passed her days as on a swaying bough in momentary expectation of
being blown into the depths. Then again her life seemed to her like a
straight, bare road, which gave no signs of coming to an end, but ever
unrolled hopeless stretches ahead.
Always the same pleasures, the same faces, the same aimless drifting
from place to place until dawn.
Sometimes she felt so weary--as if after a day's hard labour.
Sometimes, too, she went on strike, and remained in bed reading the
_Fliegende Blaetter_, or dreaming of old times with closed eyes.
Mrs. Asmussen's sunless hole among the books became a paradise, her
mush, food for the gods. Lilly's thoughts stepped cautiously about the
pictures of her girlhood loves, as if it were a crime to charm them back
into being. From this arose a happy, yet fearful presentiment that one
or the other of them would return, and hold out his hand, and say: "Now
you have strayed in strange lands long enough. Come back home."
Which of them it was she did not venture to say. But one of them it must
be. Something, something _must_ happen. It could _not_ go on the same
way.
Now and then, when her secret disquiet filled her with unrest, she took
again to her nocturnal strolls. In the electric tram she would ride to
distant districts, where, with a guilty soul, she sauntered along lively
streets.
Just like Mrs. Jula.
Yet she could never bring herself to listen to any of her pursuers.
* * * * *
It was on one such excursion in May far out on the north side, somewhere
near the Rosentaler Tor, that she met a young man who paid not the
slightest attention to her, who did not look like a gentleman, and yet
seemed familiar.
So familiar that her heart pained her.
She racked her brain, but could not place him.
Making up her mind quickly she turned about and followed him.
He wore a brown, sweat-soaked hat and a salt and pepper suit with a
yellow tinge to it, which had seen better days. His coat collar was
shiny, and his knees had worked great bags into his trousers, the bottom
of which hung in black fringes over his crooked heels.
None of her friends in disguise. Her friends wore different trousers.
He stopped in front of various display windows--a cigar shop, a
butcher's, and, longest of all, a haberdasher's. From which Lilly
concluded his undergarments also required a change.
When he turned his profile toward her, she saw a lean, bony face with a
prominent nose and a bush of reddish-brown hair on either side of his
chin. He did not appear to be sickly; rather seedy or withered. But the
lids of his small, slit-like eyes were swollen and inflamed, and before
he stepped into the garish illumination of the shop window, he planted
dark-blue goggles on his nose.
He carried a thin cane, which he pressed into the shape of a bow on the
pavement and then let shoot out straight again. The silver handle of
this cane, which did not harmonise with the shabbiness of his clothing,
recalled something to Lilly connected with chilliness, warm rolls,
autumnal glow, and Sunday chimes.
She cried aloud. Now she remembered.
Fritz Redlich! Yes, it was Fritz Redlich. No doubt of it. Her girlhood
love! Her girlhood love! Her great warrior in life's battles! Her St.
Joseph's protege!
Oh, God, her St. Joseph! And the revolver! And the potato soup with
sliced sausage! And the three graves at Ottensen!
"Mr. Redlich! Mr. Redlich!"
Trembling, laughing, she stood behind him and stretched out both hands.
He dropped his goggles and blinking his weak eyes, suspiciously
scrutinised the tall, elegant lady from behind whose lace veil two
great, tear-filled eyes were shining a blissful greeting. Then he
awkwardly pulled at the brim of his hat.
"Mr. Redlich--I'm Lilly--Lilly Czepanek. Don't you remember me any
more?"
Yes, now he remembered.
"Certainly," he said, "why shouldn't I?"
As he spoke he gave a furtive jerk at his waistcoat, as if that were the
readiest way of improving the poverty of his appearance.
"Dear me, Mr. Redlich! We haven't seen each other for an eternity. I
think it must be seven or eight years. No, not quite. But it seems much
longer. Everything's gone well with you in the meantime, hasn't it? And
I suppose you're dreadfully busy. But if you're not, we might spend a
little time together now."
He really was quite busy, but if she so desired, they might remain
together a while.
"How would it be if we went to a restaurant and took a glass of beer?"
she suggested, still between laughter and tears. "Well, well, Mr.
Redlich, who'd have thought it possible?"
He was decidedly opposed to taking a glass of beer.
"Restaurants are always so stuffy and full of people, and the beer here
is so wretched--unfit to drink."
"The poor fellow has no money to pay for it," Lilly thought, and
proposed sitting on a bench instead. It made no difference, just so they
were together.
"That's worth considering," he said, "although--" He looked about warily
on all sides to see if anyone was scandalised at the ill-matched couple.
They turned into the quieter Weinbersgsweg. Lilly, looking at him
sidewise with pride and emotion, as if she had created him out of
nothingness, kept murmuring:
"Is it possible? Is it possible?"
In a dark spot near a church they found a pleasant bench overhung with
lilac buds which a love couple had just vacated.
"Well, now tell me all about yourself, Mr. Redlich. My, the things we
have to say to each other!"
"There _is_ a good deal to tell," he replied, hesitating, "but perhaps
my lady will begin."
"Oh, pshaw, I haven't been a 'my lady' for a long time," cried Lilly,
blushing consciously.
"Yes, to be sure--I heard something of the sort," he replied.
Lilly felt there was a note of blame in his tone, as if his
susceptibilities had been offended.
"But I'm not in the least sorry," she hastened to add. "All in all I
lead a much freer and pleasanter life. And I haven't the slightest
cares. I have a charming little home. In fact, I'm in the best of
circumstances. And I'd be ever so happy if you were to come and see for
yourself. I'm always at home in the middle of the day. And I'd like you
to dine with me some time."
"Oh," he said, obviously moved by the pleasant prospect.
She drew a breath of relief at having steered so smoothly past the rocks
of her autobiography.
And he asked no questions. On the other hand he seemed as little
disposed to be communicative in regard to his own situation past or
present.
"Life has a sunny and a shady side," he said, "and he who sits on the
shady side would do well to reflect whether or not he should speak much
of it."
"But you can trust an old friend like me," cried Lilly. "Imagine we're
sitting here on our porch in Junkerstrasse. Do you recollect? That
evening we spoke to each other the first time was an evening just like
this, in May."
"It was warmer," he rejoined quickly, and drew his coat together at his
neck.
"Are you chilly?" she asked, laughing, because she was aglow.
"I didn't bring--" he paused an instant--"I didn't bring my spring
overcoat along to-night."
"Then we'd better get up," she said, becoming meditative.
"We can tell each other all we have to say just as well walking as
sitting."
So they strolled about the dark church a number of times, but no
autobiographical narrative resulted. She evaded and he evaded, and when
forced to speak, they regaled each other with generalities.
Lilly praised her happy lot in life, and he sighed repeatedly.
"Yes, it's hard, very hard!"
Exactly as once during examinations. The rhythm of it still sounded in
her ears, as if she had heard it the day before.
"How are your father and mother?" she asked to change the subject.
His father had died two years before after a short sickness, and his
mother still sewed neckties.
He adjusted something invisible under his raised coat collar, probably a
gayly patterned testimony of maternal skill and goodness.
After Lilly had expressed her sympathy she ventured with throbbing heart
to inquire after Mrs. Asmussen and her daughters.
Mr. Redlich smacked his lips audibly.
"Very unpleasant neighbours. The elder girl married a paymaster, who
will probably be dismissed soon on account of his irregularities. The
younger has charge of the library, the mother is completely in the
clutches of drink."
He spoke with the same offended air as when Lilly had referred to her
divorce.
"He must be extremely moral still!" she thought, with a sense of her own
guilt and unworthiness.
But he was unhappy. That was certain.
And poor, very poor. Poorer than she had ever been in her life. Perhaps
he was suffering the pangs of hunger while he walked at her side
shivering in his thin, shabby jacket.
"How would it be, Mr. Redlich, provided your business permits you to, if
you were to come to dinner to-morrow?"
His business, as a matter of fact, made it practically impossible for
him to get off in the middle of the day, and he hadn't a moment's time
for changing his clothes; but if she would receive him in the suit he
was wearing--
"Oh of course," she laughed. "I'll even serve you with your mother's
potato soup."
With that she pressed both his hands and slipped into a street car.
Oh, what a piece of good fortune!
Now she had the thing she had so long been seeking. Some one whom she
could care for and pet and spoil; some one to whom she meant more than a
toy or a show piece, who needed her as he needed bread and air, who
languished for a gentle hand to lead him back to hope and joy.
Some one all to herself, all to herself!
Out of the grave of her youth he had risen exactly as she had dreamed in
her dreams.
Life would again become rich--and happy--and full of secrets, tiny, gay,
absolutely innocent secrets.
That night she slept little, wakeful as a child the night before
Christmas.
The next morning, to the vast astonishment of the maid, a buxom wench
from the country, who had rapidly fallen into city ways, Lilly rose
early--the maid knew her to be a bit lazy--and went off to market.
"A friend is coming to dinner," Lilly laughingly explained.
She had to buy everything herself, the meat, the radishes, and above all
the sausage that had once been the pride of his mother's potato soup.
She even attended to the cooking herself.
She set the table and removed the palm from beside the aquarium to have
something green in the dining-room in place of flowers, which she had
forgotten to buy.
He was the first dinner guest she had had for two and a half years, and
such a dear one--the dearest, perhaps that life could present her with.
At half past twelve the maid, turning up her nose, announced a young
fellow who insisted upon speaking to the lady.
"Why, that's he!" cried Lilly.
"He doesn't look it," observed the maid with a haughty upward inflection
in her voice. Shrugging her shoulders she dawdled behind her mistress,
who ran to meet the guest.
At first he shyly hesitated to step into the lighter part of the room,
and hugged the door post and pulled at his suit, which really looked
dreadfully frayed, even more so than the night before.
His inflamed eyes, two red rifts, blinking behind his round glasses,
gave him a sheepish, groping, helpless appearance. The bold thinker's
forehead had acquired an unpleasant backward slope because the genius
lock no longer fell over it. And the triumphant blond mane had turned
into a strawy, matted mass, apparently untouched by a comb this many a
day.
He was unable to say much.
He swallowed the potato soup with tremulous devoutness, leaving the
slices of sausage for the last. When his plate was quite dry he spitted
them on his fork one at a time, and on conveying each bit to his mouth
cast suspicious glances to right and left as if somebody were standing
nearby to snatch it away.
The roast he received with greater composure. He heaped his plate high
without paying the least attention to the maid, who grinned
villainously.
He drank Richard's good claret in long draughts. A mottled red flecked
his cheeks; he laughed and felt he was himself again.
At first Lilly had been somewhat depressed; but as he gradually thawed
out, she began to hope he might be made to pass muster after all.
Then it suddenly occurred to her that now at last an opportunity
presented itself for the genuine salvation of a human being, not merely
a game of enamoured self-deception as with Walter von Prell.
The thought filled her with blissful, confident hope.
After the meal they went into the drawing-room. With masterful ease of
manner born of the unwonted drink, he promptly seated himself in the
rocking chair and tickled the snarling monkey.
He sat leaning back in the chair with his legs stretched out. The
fringed ends of his trousers slipped into the expanded tops of his
boots, exposing the tattered rubber drawing loops.
It was an appalling sight.
"I'll have to do something," thought Lilly, and cogitated on the best
way to help him.
As for Mr. Redlich, now that his spirits were in turmoil, he turned his
innermost being outward and aired his views of life.
Oh, what a display of gall and poison!
He had become so embittered by long privation and eternal envy of those
who seemed gay, happy, and favoured by fortune, that no values, no
attainments, no prosperous undertakings could withstand his onslaught.
Everybody was hollow, corrupt and hypocritical. Everything depended on
birth, cliqueism, "pull." Success, no matter in what line, was an
ineradicable stain.
But this time also he said little of his personal experiences. Lilly
could not even discover if he was still a student. He acknowledged only
one thing, with bitter resentment, that his deepest feelings had been
badly damaged in his constant struggle for existence.
While he spoke and laughed spasmodically, two lugubrious, sarcastic
folds cut a deep semicircle in each emaciated cheek. Lilly dimly
recalled that a tendency to those folds had existed in the times long
ago.
"Oh, you poor, poor fellow!" she thought, and vowed soon to make a man
of him again, both outwardly and inwardly.
But his visit left her feeling sad and depressed.
"After all--am I better off?" she thought. "Where is the confidence in
life I used to have? Where is my joy of life? Where is my Song of
Songs?"
* * * * *
The next afternoon, before Richard came, she devised a plan by which
she could give Fritz Redlich new clothes without damage to Richard's
purse or Fritz Redlich's feelings.
"Think of it," she said to Richard while they were drinking tea
together, "two great events occurred to me yesterday, one a very happy
one, the other very sad. The first is, I met a dear old friend I used to
know when I was a girl. Before he went to the university he lived on the
same floor as I did. And this morning a poor student was here. He looked
simply wretched, and he asked for something to eat. In case he comes
again, have you any old clothes to give him? No matter what. He needs
everything."
"With pleasure," said Richard. "I don't know what to do with all the
stuff I have at any rate."
But the other one, the friend of her girlhood, made Richard thoughtful.
"What's he like?" he asked.
In her endeavour to keep the two mythical beings quite distinct, she
began to sing the "other one's" praises much too emphatically. He was a
highly endowed and quite prominent scholar, who had just completed his
university course, and now stood at the entrance to a brilliant
career--a paragon of knowledge and intellect and heaven knows what else.
What was his specialty?
She really did not know. Something awfully erudite, at any rate. And he
would surely choose an academic career. Nothing else was worth while for
him.
Lilly talked herself into such a tangle of lies that finally she
scarcely knew what she was saying.
Richard, who in the consciousness of his intellectual poverty, felt a
tremendous respect for a great mind, grew red in the face and looked
uneasy and nettled.
"I suppose he'll be wanting to visit you?" he asked.
"Certainly," she replied, rejoiced at having steered in this direction
so smoothly.
"Congratulate you on your affinity," he said with a mocking bow, and
added, laughing: "Provided I needn't meet him."
Perfect.
The next morning a man employed in the factory brought Lilly a huge
bundle from Mr. Dehnicke. It contained a fine summer suit in the latest
style looking almost new; shirts, a pair of boots, and blue, silky
underwear.
Richard seemed to want to prove his magnanimity in a particularly
striking way, because prodigality toward the poor was not in his line.
The next difficulty was to turn the garments over to Fritz Redlich
without offending him and having him refuse them.
When he visited her three days later she took occasion, after dinner, to
show him through the rooms. He must see how she lived, she said.
When she came to the door of a lumber room she opened it quite naturally
as she had the others. There among discarded waists, broken vases,
withered plants, and similar litter, hung the suit.
"I brought it along by mistake, and some more men's clothes, when I left
the general's house," she explained. "It's getting worn just hanging
here."
Mr. Redlich's small, sickly eyes became bright and greedy.
Perhaps he knew some one who could make use of them?
"Not that I know of," he replied disdainfully, though unable to withhold
a glance at his own trousers.
Perhaps he had met some one to whom he would be doing a favour if he
gave him the suit?
No, he could think of no one.
Despite her fear of hurting him, Lilly said straight out, she didn't
believe she was mistaken--a remarkable similarity of figure--though the
general had measured a bit more about the waist--and if he wanted to
entrust the suit to an inexpensive tailor--
The suggestion angered him. Did she think he was a charity case? Nobody
could class him so low as that. He was a man of firm principles, and his
principles would never permit him to wear a person's cast-off clothes.
With a sigh Lilly desisted from her project.
But he could not make up his mind to take leave. He sat in the
drawing-room an interminable time. Finally she had to hint to him to go,
because Richard might enter any moment.
At the head of the stairs outside her door, he turned and asked,
stuttering, whether the next time he might come in the evening.
"Haven't you leisure any more in the middle of the day?" she demanded,
taken aback. For Richard's sake she did not care to receive visitors
late in the day.
No, not that. So far as leisure was concerned, it was--it was--. He hung
on, and Lilly listened fearfully for sounds on the staircase below.
"Then what is it?"
"I should like to think the matter over very carefully, and--and--"
"Well, and?"
"And if it's dark, perhaps I could take the package right along with
me."
With that he jumped down the steps.
"The poor fellow, how he must choke down his pride!" she thought,
looking after him.
The same evening she sent him all the clothes by express, and pinned a
letter inside, in which she excused herself again and again for
enclosing a twenty mark note, in the first place, for a hat, in the
second place, to spare him difficulties with the tailor.
When he reappeared a few days later, he was scarcely recognisable. The
suit fitted him to perfection, and in order to keep the tips of his
boots from turning up--they were too long for him--he had stuffed them
with cotton wads.
Even the maid sent him friendlier glances.
A pity he would not part with his beard and the tousled shock of hair.
But for that disfigurement you might even appear on the street with him.
His cheeks had filled out, and his eyes had improved, thanks to the help
of the physician to whom Lilly had dragged him by main force; and
gradually his manners softened down. He no longer gulped his food, or
picked his teeth with his finger nails; and he learned how to drink
claret.
His inner being, like his external appearance, also began to reflect the
peaceful comfort of the hospitable home. He abused with discrimination,
and sometimes even the crime of happiness seemed pardonable in his eyes.
He displayed delightful tact in never probing into Lilly's situation,
and she was grateful to him.
Although she avoided questioning him as to his own doings, occasional
allusions and complaints of his enabled her to piece together a picture
of his unsuccessful career.
After two years of starvation, he gave up the teaching profession, and,
consciously sacrificing his convictions, took up the study of theology
in his native city for the sake of one or two scholarships.
"After all!" thought Lilly, deeply stirred. She recalled the red, sunny
morning when the Sunday chimes sent up their greeting from out of the
green valley.
But his supreme sacrifice seemed to have done no permanent good. During
the last year he had kept himself alive by occasionally addressing
envelopes, and in other mysterious ways, concerning which he was not
explicit.
"Nevertheless," he said, "I maintained my dignity. And even if I am poor
and despised, I know my worth, indeed I do."
He paced the room, fiery and lowering. When he threw out his chest and
ran his hand through his mane, he almost resembled the young hero who
had once filled Lilly's enthusiastic fancy with pictures of inordinate
ambition.
To complete her work and lead him entirely back to happiness, she tried
to find out what lot in life he desired for himself.
He wanted to go away. Leave Berlin! He wanted to feel himself a man
again, who does his duty and knows where he belongs and is permitted to
breathe pure air.
"All of us want something lovely like that," she thought.
It would have to be a tutorship in a family, anywhere in the country,
preferably with a minister of whose library he could avail himself.
"And round about the linden trees will bloom," thought Lilly, "and the
wheat will wave in the breeze, and the cattle will wind their way to
water."
She nearly cried with envy.
From that day on she worked industriously to satisfy his heart's desire.
She gave him money to insert advertisements in the _Kreuzzeitung_, wrote
letters herself in reply to all sorts of offers, and asked her little
circle of friends to do what they could for him.
All these transactions had to be carried on in secret to avoid
attracting Richard's attention. Even so she had much to suffer from him
these days.
He found her wanting in attentiveness to him; he rebuked her for being
cold and loveless, and detected a hostile influence in her every word.
"That's probably what your intellectual friend says." "You should ask
your brilliant scholar." Thus it went without cease.
One day the bomb exploded.
Despite his promise to have the maid announce him when strangers were
present, Richard stepped into the dining-room while Lilly was at table
with her girlhood friend. He had neither rung nor knocked, and a frown
of revenge puckered his brow.
Lilly jumped from her seat, paling.
As if caught in guilt, Fritz Redlich also jumped up. He stood there
awkward and sheepish, while the corner of his napkin slowly glided from
his buttonhole into his soup plate.
For a moment silence prevailed. Nothing but the tittering of the maid in
the kitchen was to be heard.
"I beg pardon," said Richard in the same threatening manner. "I merely
wanted to make sure how you are really getting along."
"Mr. Dehnicke, a good friend of mine--Mr. Redlich, my old friend," said
Lilly.
Now Richard scrutinised his dread rival more closely--looked in
amazement and disapproval at the rank growth of his beard and shaggy
mane--his gaze travelled downwards--and brightened--a nonplussed look,
but also a joyous look of recognition, betrayed itself in his features.
Wasn't that _his_ suit and _his_ shirt?
His eyes dropped lower without halting at the napkin in the soup plate.
Weren't those _his_ trousers? Weren't those _his_ discarded boots which
the brilliant intellectual scholar was wearing?
"Oh, that's it," he said. "Nothing more." With a wicked grin of scorn
he turned to Lilly, who could scarcely keep on her feet. "May I speak to
you alone for an instant?"
"Will you excuse me, Mr. Redlich?" she said, and in her confusion and
from force of habit, she opened the door to--the bedroom, as if that
were the prescribed place for single ladies to receive their gentlemen
friends. Richard, who was as accustomed to the way as she, followed her,
unconscious of the exposure of intimacy.
"Listen," he said upon shutting the door. "I was a donkey for having
been jealous of your affinity. But now I swear to you, your friends may
come and go, morning or evening, any time you wish. I'll always keep old
suits on hand for them. Good-by--goosie!"
He left. She could hear him laughing even after the door fell shut
behind him.
She was frightfully ashamed. How would she ever summon the courage to
appear before her girlhood friend again, before that moral person who
had shrunk at the mere mention of her divorce?
Then she realised she was standing in the bedroom.
Everything was revealed, all the disgrace of her existence, all, all.
No matter how unworldly he might be, the role of the man who had so
suddenly intruded in the apartment and as suddenly disappeared, must be
patent.
A long time she hesitated, the knob in her hand, listening to what Fritz
Redlich was doing. She feared his tread, the clearing of his throat. His
very silence boded evil.
At last, trembling, ready to confess everything amid tears of
contrition, she stepped into the dining-room.
Lo and behold! He sat quietly at his accustomed place rubbing at the
spot the wet napkin had made on his waistcoat. The blue goggles lay next
to his plate, and he blinked at her amiably with no air of constraint.
"Has the gentleman left already?" he asked innocently.
At that moment the roast was brought in, and he fell to with avidity,
making no further mention of the interlude.
Actually--so pure was his conscience that he did not detect the impure
even if thrust under his very nose.
Oh, how grateful she was to him!
To prove her gratitude she told him he might come evenings also--Richard
permitted it--without waiting to be invited.
If she should happen to be out, the maid would prepare supper for him,
and see to it that he lacked nothing, absolutely nothing. And mindful of
the wry face the maid had cut the first day he came, she enjoined her
emphatically:
"Now be real pleasant and friendly to him, so that he always feels at
home here."
The buxom wench turned down the corners of her mouth and said nothing.
* * * * *
Lilly now went to work in behalf of Fritz Redlich with redoubled zeal.
She again found a ready assistant in Mrs. Jula.
"Leave the thing to me," said Mrs. Jula one day "There's somebody up
there I've known a long time"--she hesitated a bit--"he's all-powerful,
and has taken the Good Lord's place in many a minister's family. If I
were to write to him--but, of course my name must be kept out, it's
still a red rag to the bull up there."
The next day Lilly sent her one of the advertisements that Fritz Redlich
had inserted in the paper. Mrs. Jula was to forward it to a certain
person, and the response would then go directly to Fritz Redlich without
the intermediation of a third party. Lilly preferred that his future
fortune should appear to be due entirely to his own efforts.
And behold! Mrs. Jula was successful.
One evening the next week Fritz Redlich appeared at Lilly's
unexpectedly--a frequent occurrence now, whether she was at home or
not--and complacently informed her his advertisement had been so
convincing that he had immediately received an invitation from a
minister in Further Pomerania to send his references and be ready to
leave Berlin at short notice. The minister seemed to be quite keen for
him.
Lilly's heart throbbed with pride. Nothing in the world would have
induced her to betray that she was at the bottom of his good luck.
His happiness was her work! He himself, therefore, was her possession,
more absolutely her possession than anything in the world.
During the meal an exalted, blissful silence prevailed. Since he had not
announced his coming, there was no potato soup, the usual first course.
She excused herself for the omission, and added with a little pang:
"At any rate you won't take many more meals with me."
"Probably," he said with an embarrassed glance at the maid, whose
presence evidently troubled him. Had she not been there, he would very
likely have given warmer expression to his feelings.
After the meal they seated themselves in the drawing-room.
It was July, and a hot breeze blew through the open windows. But the
naked little monkey, whose cage stood next to the aquarium, shivered
even at this season, and had to be wrapped in a cloak, an attention to
which he submitted, snarling all the while.
The canary sang its evening song, and twilight fell.
Fritz Redlich sat in the rocking chair, in which he liked to lounge
after a meal. Lilly walked up and down the room agitatedly.
"Now I'll be lonely again," she thought, "and I'll fling myself about as
before."
Yet, what a piece of good fortune it had been. What good fortune!
She told him so for about the hundredth time.
"Yes," he rejoined, "what I managed to achieve here through my struggles
is really a piece of good fortune." He emphasised "my struggles." "When
I think what dreadful years those were, how often I had to do violence
to my real character, how often my principles were endangered. And not
only that," he added after a melancholy pause, "if one considers the
doubtful, impure situations into which life throws one, it is really no
wonder that one is infected with the prevailing spirit and commits acts
one would rather have left undone. I tell you, Mrs. Czepanek, it's hard,
very hard."
"Oh, don't always call me Mrs. Czepanek. Say Lilly right straight out.
We're old friends."
"I will gladly if you wish it."
Lilly felt a tenderness for him such as she had not experienced since
her days in the library. Yet it was different from then. It was a
motherly, sisterly tenderness. No, not exactly that either. It was a bit
of everything, and something in addition, which drew nearer and nearer
hesitatingly, like a light in the distance.
"Tell me something, Fritz," she said, standing in front of him. "Have
you ever been in love?"
He started as if he had been hit.
"In love? What do you mean?"
"Well--what do you think--I mean?" she laughed, scratching the arm of
the rocking chair with her thumb nail.
He seemed to breathe more easily.
"For that which one calls real love I've never had the time or the
desire."
"And hasn't any woman ever loved you?"
"Do I look as if a woman could love me?" he rejoined, shrugging his
shoulders.
His embittered dejection annoyed her.
"Well, well," she said, shaking her finger to comfort him with a little
teasing.
He started again, as if the mere thought of such a possibility filled
him with dread.
Poor fellow! A girl's eyes had never sought his in a glow, a woman's arm
had never clasped his neck in bliss. He had been denied the supreme
delight that makes life worth the while both for man and woman.
An avowal burnt on her lips drifting down from times long, long ago,
which would prove to him how mistaken he was.
She choked it down.
Not to-day. Later. Perhaps when he came to say good-by before leaving
Berlin.
Darkness fell, and the light of the street lamps played on the walls and
ceiling. The monkey had rolled himself into a ball in his cloak, and the
little canary also slept.
Lilly still paced to and fro, gently grazing his elbow each time she
passed the rocking chair.
She halted in front of him again.
There he sat, he whom she had once loved so hotly, and suspected
nothing. Suspected nothing of what women's arms could bestow.
Poor, poor fellow!
"You must really have that shock of hair of yours trimmed," she said
with a constrained laugh, "then you'll succeed better with the women."
With difficulty, as if she were drawing up a hundred pound weight, Lilly
raised her left hand, and laid it on his hard, crisp hair, which sank
under the light touch like a cushion.
He stopped rocking abruptly, looked about on all sides uneasily, and
coughed a little.
"Why, yes," he said after a pause. "That's good advice. If I want to
make a pleasant impression in my new position--"
As he spoke he turned to the window, causing her hand to slip down on
his neck.
Lilly swallowed a sigh, and he jumped up to take leave.
She was too embarrassed to invite him to remain.
The maid was already standing outside with a lamp to light his way down
the stairs.
"Day after to-morrow!" Lilly called to him from the window.
He nodded up his thanks, and disappeared in the dark.
Poor, poor fellow! Engulfed in bitterness and despondency, he walked
away little divining what happy gardens blossomed about him.
The rest of the evening Lilly was absorbed in anxious, confused
thoughts.
"I ought not to have laid my hand on his head," she said to herself.
Nevertheless she was glad she had.
* * * * *
The next morning a postal card came from Mrs. Jula saying she had
gotten word from "up there." Everything was proceeding smoothly. Lilly's
protege was to enter his position immediately. Money for his travelling
expenses had already been forwarded to him.
Lilly wept tears of joy.
Her work was complete. Her girlhood friend had been saved and won back
to life. With work and effort, with deception and fear she had made him
her own.
And when he came the next evening, as had been arranged, she would tell
him all: that about her loving him when she was a girl--everything.
And once again--before parting--she would lay her hand on his mass of
hair. Then what would might follow.
The next evening she exercised greater care in dressing than was her
wont when she and Fritz Redlich were together. She herself had cooked
his potato soup and cut the right amount of beefsteak for him--he no
longer devoured such huge portions. All the maid had to do was put it in
the saucepan.
The clock struck eight. He had not come.
"He's busy packing," she comforted herself.
The clock struck ten. Hopeless. He was not coming. But perhaps he was
standing on the street outside the locked door clapping the way Richard
sometimes did.
Lilly remained leaning out of the window until the clock struck eleven.
Then she went to bed sad and weary.
The next morning she received the following letter:
"My dear Mrs. Czepanek:--
After I have succeeded through my own efforts in establishing a
livelihood for myself, I deem it my duty to terminate my former
life, which, as I pointed out to you several times, too
frequently forced me into circumstances conflicting with my
principles. My firm character was led into temptations from
which, I will candidly confess, it did not always emerge
intact.
I am well aware that I am under great obligations to you, and I
hereby duly express my thanks. Nobody shall say Fritz Redlich
is an ingrate.
I have kept an accurate account of the cash that circumstances
compelled me to accept from you. I will return it, also the
suit I am wearing, as soon as my salary will enable me to. But
had you really respected me, you would have spared me that
humiliating encounter with the gentleman to whom the garment in
question evidently once belonged.
I may not conclude without making the following remarks:
improve your ways, Mrs. Czepanek. They are a slap in the face
of all the laws of morality. I believe, in giving you this
advice, I prove myself to be a truer friend than if I had
continued to let you think me a dunce.
I remain your ever grateful
Fritz Redlich,
cand. phil. et theol."
* * * * *
Lilly suffered long and deeply from this experience.
It was not until some months later, when the maid gave notice because
the solitary evenings with the very moral young student had not remained
without consequences, that Lilly could get herself to see that the
incident had its humorous aspect.
CHAPTER XII
Early in the autumn of the same year Richard went to Ostend to have a
married man's vacation, while Lilly cheaply and innocently passed for a
widow of rank in a hall resort on the Baltic sea.
She accepted the homage of several old maids, allowed a young missionary
to dedicate a volume of verse to her, and respectfully declined the
honourable proposal of a widower, the city treasurer of Pirna. Those
were six weeks to her liking.
The following winter went in much the same way as the preceding.
At Christmas Richard presented her with a hired carriage, the door of
which, of course, was decorated with the seven-pointed coronet. He had
engaged it in order to avoid disagreeable encounters with his mother,
who spoke of Lilly with increasing severity, and had frequently demanded
the equipage when he was out driving with his mistress.
He also gave Lilly a sable cloak, one of the new-fashioned sort, with
countless tails, which cost a small fortune.
Despite Richard's reproaches she made little use of either. That feeling
of dread, never to be stilled, told her that such false display would
drive her ever on into the world which she wanted to flee.
And while Richard endeavoured with dogged greed to drain the cup of
worldly delights to the very dregs, Lilly's desires went out more and
more to middle-class respectability. She clung to it as the last hope,
which enabled her to drag through her existence, the complete poverty
of which tormented her increasingly there amid the lights and music and
laughter.
The only one in her circle who now and then stimulated her
intellectually was Mrs. Jula. Mrs. Jula could tell stories, and she
showed familiarity with other worlds, her experiences in which she
elaborated with a lively fancy.
But for some time a veil of impenetrable mysteries have shrouded that
foolish curly head of hers. The erotic verse she was wont to publish
disappeared from the new-school magazines, and her nymphomaniac little
tales were nowhere to be found.
When her friends asked her teasingly: "What's become of your art?" she
would laugh coyly, like a bride, and reply: "Wait; you'll see."
Lilly would now have liked to become more intimate with Mrs. Jula,
having long ceased to consider herself morally superior; but she could
not succeed in approaching her and so she locked her distress and her
longing in her own soul, and went her way thirsting.
* * * * *
It happened on the nineteenth of March. Lilly never forgot the date,
because it was St. Joseph's day.
A day of rough spring winds and reddish sunshine.
One of those days on which the world's orchestra seems to tune its
instruments before thrilling our senses again with its great spring
symphony.
The grass on the canal embankments was already turning green, the ducks
going in pairs rocked themselves on the wavelets, and great foamy
shimmering slabs of melting ice floated to annihilation.
Lilly, overwrought by her painful, confused longings, could not endure
remaining indoors. She wanted to run, cry aloud, climb over fences,
throw herself on the bare earth--no matter what--but get away for a few
hours from her prison, which smelled of powder and perfumes and was
burdened by the spirit of idleness.
She dressed herself for going out, gave a few directions to the
maid--this time an elderly, patronising person, thoroughly accustomed to
service with single ladies--and without troubling to order her carriage,
took the electric tram to the Grunewald.
At the fencing where the spick-and-span houses of the rich come to an
end, and the abused woods rise high above the restraining yoke of man,
Lilly got out and walked rapidly without caring in what direction.
A few automobiles whizzed past. Some gentlemen in one of them laughed
and beckoned to her, perhaps merely in sport; perhaps they actually
recognised her. In either case it was best to leave the public road. So
she turned into the path leading along the lake to the old Jagdschloss.
Here nobody was to be seen far or near.
The cold March wind swept across the milky water and whirled in the
reeds, causing the dry stalks to rattle and crackle. Ice still glittered
near the edge, though the crust was so thin and sieve-like that each
little wave striving for the shore sent tiny springs shooting up through
the holes.
Here and there from a pine bough came a bird's song, sorry enough to
extinguish timid spring hopes.
"In the city streets it looks more like spring than here," thought
Lilly.
But the freshness of the wind redolent of moss and pine needles did her
good. She battled against its might, taking long strides. Her cheeks
tingled, her frozen blood thawed, and sent fresh life pulsating through
her fallow body.
And her fallow soul.
Suddenly she shook with a fit of laughter. It was all nonsense, her
regret and her yearning, Richard's snobbish ambition, his mother's
eternal marriage schemes. Even the respectability she desired was
utterly vapid.
What would she do with it? She, Lilly the free, the wild, the ruined?
There was something else, something higher. There must be. Not in Dr.
Salmoni's sense. No, oh, no. Something as hard and pure and
life-bringing as this March wind sweeping through her limbs.
Above her in a pine tree she heard a chipping sound which she had
learned to recognise at Lischnitz. It was a call both of fear and
invitation, which ended in a snappy "Tshek-tshek."
Lilly stood still, looked up, and whistled.
A pair of squirrels had been chasing about the trunk in corkscrew lines,
and now, at her appearance, stood stock still in fright.
"Tshek-tshek," Lilly clucked to incite the little red coats to play. She
did not succeed, and picked up a pebble from the ground.
Just as she was about to throw it, she saw, behind a tree trunk, two
eyes fastened on her, large, questioning astonished eyes, which narrowed
under her gaze, and darkened, and tried to turn away, but could not. She
knew those eyes. She had looked into them long, long, long ago.
But, no, she had not; she had never before seen them.
The young man who, like herself, had been watching the squirrels play
and was still standing half-concealed behind the trunk, his hat in his
hand, was an utter stranger. Impossible that she had ever in her life
met him. If she had, she would never have forgotten him.
It was not easy to forget that serious, reserved Greek face, with the
nervous nose narrow across the bridge and the shining dreamer's eyes.
His appearance was not extremely elegant. It pleased Lilly better so.
He wore a brown, somewhat old-fashioned overcoat, and the suit beneath,
of which she caught a glimpse, was of a woolly material sprinkled with
little tufts, by no means of German make and certainly not English.
Gradually life came into him. He put on his hat, and stepped from behind
the tree.
"Now he'll speak to me," the sickening thought shot through Lilly's
mind.
No. He merely raised his hat, glanced at her again for the fraction of a
second with an expression of query, astonishment, and, at the same time
recognition, walked past her, and took the way she had just come.
Lilly also wanted to leave the spot, but she was unable to; and since
she must not be discovered looking after him she hid behind the same
tree that had concealed him.
"I wonder whether he will look back."
No. He did not look back either. She felt hurt and neglected.
The tall figure dwindled in the distance. "Never been in the army," she
thought, judging from his rather heavy gait. Then it seemed to her that
he stooped, drew himself up again, and looked back. In fact, he spied
about a long time as if compelled to discover her.
But she kept herself carefully hidden and did not move.
He walked on and disappeared behind a curve.
"What a pity I didn't take the carriage," thought Lilly.
She might be overtaking him now without appearing to follow him, and the
seven-pointed coronet would not have failed of its effect. As it was, he
naturally cherished a bad opinion of the lady who walked about alone
whistling like a boy and throwing pebbles at poor enamoured squirrels.
Nevertheless, while walking homeward, she felt as if she had been
presented with a lovely gift.
Where could she have seen him before?
She recalled a young man of the Dresden days. It was once when she was
out walking arm in arm with the colonel along the Prager Strasse. She
had seen eyes fixed upon her with the very same sad flash of recognition
in them.
Then--she remembered it well--she had wanted to look back and ask him:
"Who are you? Do you belong to me? Do you want me to belong to you?"
But even the partial turn of her head would have been a crime in her
husband's eyes.
And now, now that she was free, free to choose her friends according to
her heart's desire, she had let him go, him, the one--whether the same
as the Dresden man or another--who belonged to her, perchance, as she to
him.
She walked along with half-closed eyes, and conjured up his image. A
small, dark, two-cornered beard, so close-cut on his cheeks as to give
them a blue sheen. Such beards were seldom to be seen in Berlin.
Frenchmen and Italians affected them. Full, firm, tightly compressed
lips, lips such as a sculptor chisels. A high, square forehead, on which
something like wrath seemed to be imprinted, not ordinary wrath against
herself or any poor mortal. It was not of this world, and it really was
divine love.
Thus Lilly's enthusiasm fed itself. She forgot the way, and strayed
about, finally arriving at a spot in an entirely different direction
from that which she should have taken. The most dreadful things might
have happened to her in the woods, where solitary ladies are exposed to
encounters with tramps at any hour of the day. But she scarcely gave
heed to her danger. She reached home two hours too late, tired, but in a
glow.
She could not eat. She threw herself on the chaise longue and dreamt.
The bell rang. She heard a man's voice.
It could not be Richard. He never came before half past four.
Adele entered. There was a strange gentleman outside who wished to know
whether the lady had lost her card-case. He had found one in the woods.
Lilly jumped to her feet. Actually the little brocade case which she had
held in her hand with her silver net purse was gone. In her excitement
she had not missed it.
"Like what does the gentleman look?"
Tall and young and handsome, in fact, very handsome.
"A short, dark beard?"
"Yes."
Lilly reeled.
"Let him come in," she stammered. She did not think of beautifying
herself. She merely ran her hands over her face and hair in a dazed way.
When he appeared in the doorway she scarcely recognised him, so thick
was the red mist before her eyes.
"I beg pardon," she heard him say--it was the serene voice of a man
whose ways are not impure--"I would not have disturbed you had your
address been on your cards. I found your number in the directory, but I
couldn't be certain whether there were not more of the same name in the
city."
"You're very kind to have taken all that trouble," she replied, inviting
him to be seated.
"My name is Dr. Rennschmidt," he said, waiting behind the back of his
chair until she had settled herself in a corner of the sofa. On sitting
down he drew the card-case from his pocket and laid it on the table.
She smiled her thanks; and feeling she must enhance the value of his
courtesy, she said the case was a memento she prized highly, the loss of
which would have distressed her.
"A memento of my husband," she added.
His face grew a shade more serious.
A little pause ensued, during which his eyes rested steadily on her
face, reading, questioning, comparing, and wondering. Nothing of that
bold groping of other men's glances. A clean, unconscious joy amounting
to devoutness lay in his look.
"Didn't we meet just a little while ago at the edge of the woods?" Lilly
asked warily.
"Yes," he replied with animation. "And if I hadn't been so awkward I
should have begged your pardon immediately for having unintentionally
spied on you. I saw how startled you were. But I myself was so--how
shall I say? All I thought was: 'Clear out. You'll be serving the lady
best that way.'"
His frank, blithe manner did her good, though it shamed her a little.
"Now you've done me a much greater service," she said, feeling as
appreciative as if he had saved her life.
"Oh, don't speak of it. If only I had turned back instantly. But the
earth seemed to have swallowed you up. I was worried about you."
She smiled to herself, fearful in her happiness. A little more, and she
would have acknowledged where she had stowed herself.
"What did you think of me when you saw me strolling about the woods
alone?" she asked.
"That you don't feel alone when you're with nature. Otherwise you'd have
had company with you."
"You're right," she replied eagerly. "Besides, my carriage was waiting
in the Hundekehlenrestaurant"--after all the carriage would play its
part--"but it was imprudent of me. I suppose you are also very fond of
nature?"
"Very? I hardly know. I must say in Cordelia's words: I love it
'according to my bond; nor more nor less.' To love nature is really no
merit nor peculiarity. It is simply a vital function. Don't you agree
with me?"
"Certainly," she faltered, and thought, "Oh, how clever he is? How will
I acquit myself?"
"But to be quite frank," he continued, "I am having a strange experience
with nature here. I cannot accustom myself to it. Its poverty oppresses
me. I am like one who has outgrown his home and reproaches himself for
it. I try to get back to my old attitude, and I admire and flatter
German nature whenever I possibly can. But first other pictures in my
mind must fade. You see I have just returned from Italy, where I spent
the last two years."
Heaving a deep sigh Lilly stared at him. She felt as if now he were
absolutely unearthly.
"Two whole years?" she asked in astonishment.
"I am working on a large scientific work, on account of which--no, I was
really sent to Italy on account of my health. My uncle, who's a father
to me, wanted me to go. I didn't think of the work until I got there.
Then my own country and my studies, everything, fell into the
background."
As he spoke his eyes glowed and stared into space, full of will and
enthusiasm. The old, slumbering desire for Italy began to beat its wings
again in Lilly's breast.
"Yes," she cried with the same enthusiasm as he, "isn't it so? There
all ideas grow, and you feel what you can do, and you become what you
wanted to be from the first. Isn't it so? I've never been there, but
I feel what I say strongly. There, in the home of everything
great and beautiful, you yourself become greater and more
beautiful--and--everything--sordid passes away. Isn't it so?"
He listened dumbfounded, and embraced her with a beaming gaze.
"Yes," he replied almost solemnly. "It is so, exactly."
She tingled with delight. Did it not seem that with these words he made
an avowal of the inner union between them, the avowal she had hoped for
from the very first instant of their meeting? Did it not seem that
nothing now separated them?
She looked down helplessly.
Was he really the embodiment of that shade which had so senselessly
fastened itself upon her soul since the Dresden days?
"I feel as if we had met before," she said softly without raising her
eyes.
"Exactly the way I feel," he rejoined hastily. "But it cannot be, for I
should know where and when."
"Were you in Dresden six years ago at about this time?"
"No," he said. "Six years ago I was studying at Bonn. The semester came
to an end at this season, but I went directly to my uncle, who was
having his castle restored."
"Where is his castle?"
"Near Coblenz."
So they had not met in Dresden.
"But if we both have the same feeling--" said Lilly.
"There are pictures in our souls which seem to be recollections, but in
fact are previsions."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that one--that one--walks as on the edge of a knife between the
past and the present, and reels and falls into a void the instant--"
"What?"
"The instant--" he broke off--"I beg your pardon, are you an artist?"
"Why?" she asked, unpleasantly taken aback. Did he want to make merry at
her expense?
"I read your sign outside."
The sign! "Pressed Flower Studio."
Violently torn out of sweet dreams and plunged into bitter reality!
But now she must be on her guard. She must not lose his esteem.
"In a way," she replied. "A very modest sort of art which I used to
pursue. But it made me very happy. I learned it just after I lost my
husband"--the fatal "divorce" would not pass her lips--"less for the
sake of a livelihood than to lend my life content. But then I had to
give it up--because--of a trouble with my eyes."
Three lies in the same breath.
Why not? She was lies within and lies without. Every gesture, every
thought was a lie. But the great cry of her soul vibrating through her
entire being, "You shall be mine; I will be yours," was _not_ a lie. And
for his sake she continued to lie.
"I don't like to speak of it." She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.
"It still pains me. And please don't ever again refer to it in the
future."
"Again," "in the future," she had said, as if taking it for granted that
they would continue to meet. Her words filled her with shame and
confusion.
She rose and turned her face aside.
"I beg pardon," he said, abashed. "I could not have divined--" He rose
to take leave.
"Stay, stay, stay!" her soul cried. But she was unable to speak. She was
benumbed.
Perhaps he had seen through her lies, and had instantly realised who
she was, and did not care to remain. She felt haughtiness congealing her
features.
"It was very kind of you," she said, graciously extending her finger
tips.
The moment had come in which to invite him to visit her, but the words
froze on her lips.
He had turned very pale and looked straight into her face expectantly.
"I hope we meet some time again," he said finally.
"I hope so," she replied very formally.
He lightly touched her hand with his lips and left.
Over! Over! And her fault!
Happiness had come, had laid its blessing hand on her forehead, and had
flown away again, leaving behind nothing but this pain, a wild pain,
such as she had never before felt. It fairly tore at her throat and
heart like a physical affliction.
During the night she devised a thousand schemes for hunting him up and
meeting him again.
He was a scholar and probably frequented the library. She would go there
and read and study, and some day she would surely meet him.
Or, simpler still, she would write to him.
"I don't love you," she would say. "Why should I? I scarcely know you.
But I am confident that I could be something in your life. Therefore--"
Then, disgusted with her lack of dignity, she rejected every plan.
No, Lilly Czepanek after all would not throw herself away in such
fashion.
Once more it became impossible for her to remain at home.
In the daytime she walked along the Potsdamer Strasse and Leipziger
Strasse, where the metropolitan bustle is the greatest. In the evenings
she did not visit distant districts as formerly, but with a busy air
hurried incessantly up and down the lonely banks of the canal near her
home.
Despite her strict economy she always kept the light burning in her
drawing-room, and did not confess to herself why.
* * * * *
It was about eight o'clock in the evening four days after the meeting.
The stars hung like lamps in the heavens. Lilly was pacing along the
further bank of the canal, when she noticed the figure of a young man
who was looking fixedly in the direction in which her home lay.
She could not distinguish his features, because he kept his back turned.
Besides, he had selected a dark spot for his coign of observation.
With a slight throbbing of her heart she continued on her way, though
after a while her legs refused to carry her further in the same
direction. She had to turn about.
She found the dark figure still standing motionless among the trees.
From across the water the light in her drawing-room peered through the
bare branches.
This time he heard her tread, and faced about.
She recognised his features and started.
He also thrilled with the shock of surprise. For an instant he foolishly
pretended not to see her, but then he drew a deep breath and took off
his hat with an abashed smile.
Lilly trembled so, she could not hold out her hand.
"Dr.--Rennschmidt," she managed to say.
He was the first to recover his composure.
"You will wonder," he began, stepping alongside of her, "why I stand
here in the dark and look over there. If I were to say it was a mere
chance, you wouldn't believe me. So I will frankly confess I could not
rid myself of the thought that at our parting something went
wrong--there was a misunderstanding--precipitancy--I felt I ought to beg
your pardon for something."
"If you felt that way, why didn't you come up to me, and tell me so?"
"Was I permitted to?"
"Why not?"
"You see, we men have no rights with women except such as they give us.
No others exist for us. To be sure, we may stand in the dark here, and
bite our lips--"
"Did you?"
"Don't ask me."
His voice did not quiver, but a tremour ran through his arm, which
grazed hers.
Lilly, alarmed, stopped and helplessly looked back at the dark way she
had come.
"That means--I--I must say good-by?" he asked.
In the light of the lamp she saw his eyes clinging to her with a look of
fearsome inquiry.
"Oh, no," she replied slowly, as if some one else were speaking in her
stead. "Now that we are together, we will remain together."
"I think so, too," he said. The same gravity of an oath lay in his words
as she had put into hers.
They walked along in silence.
Then he began in a lighter tone.
"But I must call your attention to something. Your light is burning. If
you really do want to favour me with an hour, I'm afraid the thought of
the waste will disquiet you."
"Well, we'll put it out!" she replied gaily, and turned on her heels so
abruptly that he continued to make two or three steps forward.
As they crossed the slender arch of the Hohenzollernbruecke, he pointed
up to the heavens.
"Jupiter shines on our undertaking. I like him better than Venus, who
runs after the sun and needs a rosy flooring for her feet."
"Which is Jupiter?" asked Lilly standing still.
He eagerly showed her the lord of the heavens and five or six
constellations. Lilly clapped her hands like a pleased child.
"Now I'll always feel at home up there when I'm alone evenings and look
out of the window." She refrained from saying more of what was in her
mind.
While he waited in front of the door, she ran upstairs, turned off the
light, put the key in her pocket, and hastily told Adele she would take
supper out that evening. She lingered for nothing else and came hurrying
down again.
Outside the apartment door she reeled with joy and clung to the post and
sobbed.
But by the time she reached the street her bearing had become quite
proper.
"If you are willing to entrust yourself to my guidance," he said, "I
know a little corner no one would dream of finding us in. It's
practically in Italy."
She drew a deep breath.
"If only he wouldn't speak so much of Italy," she thought, though for
nothing in the world would she have gone elsewhere than to his Italian
restaurant.
They walked along the canal for about five minutes talking nonsense. The
medley of lights of the Potsdamer Bruecke was quite near when he paused
in front of a narrow, dimly lighted shop window, where about two dozen
wine bottles wreathed with green cotton vines grew like asparagus out of
sand.
"Here Signor Battistini serves a Chianti, than which none better is to
be had in Florence," he explained.
They entered the shop and crossed a small anteroom, in which the
proprietor, black as the ace of spades, was pasting labels behind the
bar.
"_Sera, padrone_," Lilly's friend greeted him.
From the anteroom they passed into a rather long, hall-like room filled
with simple tables and chairs. The only decoration consisted of
crisscrossed garlands of shiny green paper bits, evidently ambitious of
being considered vine leaves, which twined about the bare gas brackets
and fell over hooks in the walls. To inform the guests of the occasion
for this luxuriant display, a placard hung from the centre wishing them
on this March evening a "Happy New Year."
"What do you say to this fairy garden?" asked Lilly's friend, while the
waiter, black as his master, with an improbable pair of fiery wheels in
his face, beseechingly held out his hands for her cloak.
At the other tables sat young fellows with thick hair, who rolled long,
thread-like cigarettes between their teeth and nearly thrust the
knuckles of their clenched fists in one another's eyes while spouting
Italian with fascinating rapidity.
"Marble cutters," Dr. Rennschmidt explained in a low voice. "Our great
sculptors employ them as assistants. They earn a great deal of money,
and as soon as they have saved enough they return to Italy to establish
a household."
Two women sat apart from the men. Their black, lustreless hair drawn
very low on their foreheads gave their eyes the appearance of torches
burning in sombre woods. Gold rings hung in their ears, and their
dresses, cut too deep at the throat, were held together by roughly made
brooches. They looked at Lilly's tall figure in envious admiration, then
fell to whispering busily.
Dr. Rennschmidt nodded to them cordially, yet with an indifferent air,
as one who has nothing to conceal or reveal.
"Ballad singers belonging to a Neapolitan folk-song troupe. Their leader
deserted them, and they're now looking for an engagement."
"Where am I?" thought Lilly.
It was like a dream, as if an Aladdin's lamp had transported her to a
strange land. The one thing by which she knew she was in Berlin,
Germany, near the Potsdamer Bruecke, was the placard's complacent "Happy
New Year."
"I've been coming here every day since my return," said Dr. Rennschmidt,
after they had settled themselves comfortably in a corner. "I cannot
cure myself of homesickness for the south. The best German cookery has
no charms for me, and I must have my Chianti. But to-day we'll order
some other wine, because you have to cultivate a taste for Chianti."
He nodded to the waiter, Francesco by name--Francesco, as if he had just
stepped from a romance about knights and brigands. The two held a lively
conference, the result of which was a dusty, light-coloured bottle.
The dishes were strange confections of macaroni and meat swimming in
yellowish red gravy.
Lilly could not recall ever having eaten anything so delicious. She told
him so. But what she did not tell him was that she had never in her
life, never since she could remember, felt so good.
The last course was a "_giardinetto_," a "little garden," of mandarins,
dates, and Gorgonzola cheese.
The frothy, yellow wine with an aroma of nutmeg bubbled into the glasses
scattering bright drops.
Leaning against the wall, Lilly let her eyes rest dreamily on her new
friend's face.
He turned his head now this way, now that, with rapid little movements
like a bird's. He seemed constantly alert to observe and absorb. Or
perhaps his manner was due to his desire to bestow some additional
attention upon her. His eyes gleamed with eagerness and exuberance of
life, and the network of wrinkles on his brow rose and fell nervously.
The cloud of wrath on his forehead apparently was nothing more than his
seething ardour.
He had a dear, droll habit which increased the impression of eagerness.
He would raise his outspread fingers to his head as if to run them
through a heavy mass of hair. But the mass was no longer there, and his
hand clapped against his bare forehead and rested there a second or two.
Everything about him bespoke force and decision--to Lilly's admiration,
well-nigh to her dread. Nevertheless, although a golden brown tinge of
health from the south still coloured his cheeks, his body was not
robust. His throat was delicate, his breath came and went hastily, and
sometimes, when a veil fell over his eyes as if he were looking inward,
a soft weariness crept over his features which gave him an extremely
youthful appearance and evoked motherly feelings.
"So _that's_ what you are," she thought and stretched herself in
blissful peace. "At last."
"Why are you closing your eyes?" he asked solicitously. "Aren't you
feeling well?"
"Yes, oh, yes," she said caressingly. "But speak to me, tell me about
down there where I've always wanted to be and never could be."
Lilly went on to tell him of the great yearning which the consumptive
teacher had awakened in her, and how it had continued to smoulder under
all the ashes life had cast upon it.
"I in your place would have made a pilgrimage there barefoot."
"Pshaw," she said. "I've had money enough. But I've never
been free. Once I got as far as Bozen and had to turn back--as a
punishment--because a young man ogled me."
"Oh, dreadful," he laughed, "that was hard luck. Much harder than you
divine."
"Oh, I divine it," she sighed. "I need merely look at you."
"Why at me?"
"Because you shine like Moses after he witnessed the glory of the Lord."
He became serious.
"There are glories up here, too. But you're right. I have so much life
and light stored up in me from down there, so many sources have been
opened up, so many germs have begun to sprout--sometimes I hardly know
what to do with all my wealth. I write my fingers bloody, and more keeps
coming. I would like ever to give, give, give. But I don't know to
whom."
"To me," she implored, holding out her hands palm upward. "I am so
miserably poor."
He looked at her with great, severe, clairvoyant eyes.
"You are not poor. They have simply let you starve."
"Isn't that the same thing?"
He shook his head, continuing to keep his gaze fixed upon her rigidly.
"What was your husband?" he asked.
"I--am--the divorced wife--of an army officer of high rank," she replied
with downcast eyes.
This time--thank the Lord!--it was not a lie.
Yet, to be accurate, she had lied.
For see what she was _now_!
He clasped her hand, which lay next to his on the table, and held it an
instant.
"If it is difficult for you to speak of your life, don't," he said.
"Later, perhaps, when we know each other better, you will tell me. I
will tell you about myself--and how I--came to do my work."
"The work of which you spoke that time?" Lilly asked, strangely stirred
by the sudden solemnity of his tone.
Drawing a deep breath he stretched out his clenched fists and his eyes
stared into space.
"Yes--the work for which I live, which is my goal and mainstay and
future; which takes the place of father and mother and friends and
lover. For which this draught of wine was vintaged, and this hour
created, and you yourself, you with your lovely, delicate beauty and
your two begging hands, which were really fashioned for giving."
"I thought you wanted to speak of your work," said Lilly, softly.
"I am speaking of it. I always speak of it. I only want to show you how
restlessly it absorbs my experiences. How many, for instance, have sung,
painted and sculptured the Annunciation! And how many scholars have
grubbed over it! Yet when I see the good, humble, astonished, almost
frightened Virgin Mary eyes you are making this very instant, I feel the
final word has not been spoken, the supreme conception is still to be
formed. You see, that is the way everything must serve my work."
"Are you a poet?" asked Lilly, completely taken.
He smiled and shook his head.
"I'm neither a poet nor a painter, nor a historian, nor a psychologist.
Yet I must be something of each, and more to boot. My work requires it."
Then he told his story.
His father had been instructor at a university and an eminent jurist.
His mother had died in giving him birth, and his father did not survive
her long. He then came under the care of his uncle, a rich, experienced
old bachelor, who had passed a lively life in business and
pleasure-seeking, and now dwelt in merry singleness in his castle. He
had given Dr. Rennschmidt an education and had assured him a small
income which enabled him in a modest fashion to indulge his wishes and
whims. Dr. Rennschmidt had intended to follow in his father's footsteps
and enter an academic career, but the examinations, which he had passed
honourably, had tried his health. So, to satisfy his uncle, he had given
up the idea of a university career for the time being, and had gone out
into the world. He had been drawn to Italy by his studies in the history
of art, which he had always pursued with interest, though without
considering them his life work. What fascinated him more than the
churches and the museums was the free, beautiful humanity in which the
lively southern race expressed its personality. He felt as if it had
awakened in him a new, free humanity, conscious of its own powers. He
felt more and more strongly the original unity of artistic and personal
experience, past and present. The heroes of mythology and history, the
characters in poetry and painting, and the poets and painters themselves
all became so real and familiar that they seemed to be part of his own
being. Surrounded by a people saturated with its own history, possessing
the skill of a thousand years' exercise of art, always in touch with the
spirit of the time, it seemed possible to him to penetrate into the
emotional world of past generations. He learned to distinguish
monuments of different periods and follow those related to each other
step by step along the course of time.
His guide always had been and remained art. Art was best able to wring
speech from the silence of death and bid the dust add new forms to the
old. Only one thing was still missing, knowledge of the sources of its
convincing might, the A B C's of the language in which it expressed its
thoughts.
Lilly strained herself to follow him. She had never before listened to
such language; yet it was not strange. Remnants from of old, from
long-forgotten times seemed to cling to the bottom of her soul, which
harmonised with what he said.
"One day," he continued, "while I was staying in Venice, I went off on a
short excursion to Padua. By railroad it's about the same as going from
Berlin to Potsdam. I wasn't keen about seeing the art there, because I
was still in the honeymoon intoxication of my love for the early
Venetians. It was only for the sake of completeness. I got into a little
church in which there are frescoes by Giotto. Do you know who he was?"
"Certainly--Giotto and Cimabue," she said proudly.
"Then I needn't say more. I really had little left in me for him and his
people, because, as I said, the quattrocentists had heated my
imagination. Now just conceive a Roman amphitheatre completely ruined
and overgrown with ivy, nothing but the outer walls still standing, like
the walls of a garden. In the enclosure is the little church built of
brick, as sober and prosaic as a Prussian Protestant praying barn."
Lilly smiled gratefully. A side-thrust at Protestantism was still a
personal favour to her.
"Services are no longer held there. It has been set aside as a national
monument. When I entered I saw nothing at first but a blue radiance from
the walls, a sort of modest background, with long rows of pictures on
it, the story of Christ told quite simply, the way a preacher speaking
to poor people would tell it on Good Friday, provided he is the right
preacher for poor people."
"But aren't we all poor people in the presence of Christ?" Lilly
ventured to interpose.
He paused, looked at her with large eyes, then assented eagerly.
"Certainly. But not only in the presence of Christ, in the presence also
of every great personality, of every great truth. But it isn't easy for
us to cultivate that feeling--to make it clear to ourselves that we must
be poor when what is given to us ought to enrich us. Religion is best
able to inspire us with the feeling, if it finds the correct means of
expression. And the Italians did. A poor man spoke to poor men. Therein
lay the wealth of Giotto's gift. For what moves us to tears is not his
vast competence, it is his incompetence. Do you get what I mean?"
"I think I do," said Lilly, her face lighting up. "If a man desires
something of us, and can merely stammer and stutter his desire, he
affects us more than if he says it in a prepared discourse."
"Exactly!" he cried joyously. "That's why Giotto's scant speech, his
stammering created the whole language of art. Everything before him had
simply been learned by heart from dead, Byzantine models. For the first
time a man read life with simple eyes and a simple heart, and extracted
from it what he had to say. That is why he became the universal master.
To this very day if anyone succeeds in portraying supreme suffering and
supreme delight with his brush, he owes his skill to that little
church."
"I can conceive," cried Lilly, "that if the ocean had a source and a
man were suddenly to come upon it, he would feel as you do."
In the exuberance of his emotion Dr. Rennschmidt seized Lilly's arm with
both hands.
"That's the missing figure. It's strong enough to express what took
place in me. But I came upon another source. While I walked along those
frescoed walls, something suddenly stood before me clearly--and my work
was there, sprung from nothing: the history of emotions. Emotions, you
know, as art has seen and portrayed them in all generations. Not only
the pictorial and plastic arts. They are only a fraction. Literature
also. Poetry as well as painting, sculpture as well as music. I thought
in that way I might succeed in creating a true, genuine history of the
development of the human heart, which no moralist, no historian, no
psychologist has yet attempted. Why not? The documents are at hand; just
as fossils lie embedded in rocks for the guidance of zooelogists. They
need merely be cut out. What do you think? Isn't it a work worth
spending a lifetime on?"
"It is," said Lilly, with the same solemnity.
"Oh, but there's much to be thought over first," he went on. "You cannot
make an impetuous onslaught like a bull on a red rag. Often art leads us
astray because it strove to reproduce something entirely different from
the emotional life of its time. Whether it succeeded or not is another
question. And often it was wanting in the necessary means of expression.
Oh, you and I will speak of this many more times. Don't look so
frightened. I need you. After this evening I could not get along without
you. Nobody before you ever listened with such faith and understanding.
Besides, I've grown to be an utter stranger here. The people I know are
full of their own interests, and scarcely listen to me. Then, too,
there's a bit of madness in my undertaking, of which I really ought to
be ashamed. But one thing comforts me: a bit of madness has underlain
every great work until that work was completed and had compassed its
end. Of course everybody has the same idea of his own work. So some time
I'll rise above that feeling. But now, while I'm wrestling, and every
day I think I have discovered a new vein of gold and then am compelled
to throw a good deal away because it's pinchbeck, if I have nobody on
whom I can pour out what oppresses and torments me, why the jumble
fairly chokes me. So fate sent me to you. It was like an inner voice,
which would not let me rest at my desk, but sent me out to watch your
light. Now I have you, and I won't let you go. God knows, I shouldn't be
so bold in my own behalf, but it's for my work. It is clamouring for
you. For heaven's sake, why are you crying?"
"I'm not crying," said Lilly, and smiled at him.
But the tears kept rising, and veiled his lovely picture.
"I know what it is," he said sadly. "I wasn't considerate. You are
regretting your lost art, because I spoke so happily of my own work."
Lilly started back as if she had seen a ghost, and made vehement denial.
"No, no, it isn't that! Really not!"
But he persisted in his belief; which drove the thorn of her own
unworthiness all the deeper into her soul.
"Let us go," she requested. "There is so much assailing me--happiness
and unhappiness and all sorts of things--outside I'll be calmer."
It was long after midnight. A cold wind swept across the water and
soughed in the bare branches.
He offered her his arm, and Lilly nestled in it as if she had been at
home there from times immemorial.
For a while they were both silent
"In five minutes he'll leave me," she thought. She could not bear the
grief of impending loss.
"One thing is lying heavy on my conscience," he began. "You might think
me overweening because I make so much of myself. But I don't wish to
appear more important than others. I know every vigorous young fellow
must have a similar work to bring purpose into his life. One has a book
to write, another a business to carry on, another a dependent to
support. For some it's enough if they keep their heads above water. It
doesn't matter what. If you let yourself go, you're lost. And none of us
want to be lost, do we?"
"I think I lost myself long ago," whispered Lilly, shuddering and
crouching like a whipped dog.
He burst out laughing.
"You, the best, the finest, the noblest."
She knew how undeserved his praise was. Yet how delicious, oh, how
delicious.
They were now walking so closely pressed against each other that their
cheeks almost touched. She closed her eyes and ardently drank in the
warm breath of his life. She felt she was being wafted to unknown
blessed distances.
She did not come to herself until they reached her home.
"When?" he asked her.
She had no time the next day. She was invited out. But the day after.
Yes, the day after, she had the whole evening free. He need only call
for her.
For fear she might after all ask him to come the very next day, she
hurried into the house, ran up the steps, and concealed her happiness in
the hushed apartment.
She did not turn on the lights. The street lamps, shining on the walls
of the drawing-room and touching rainbow colours on the chandelier
prisms, provided sufficient illumination.
She began to wander through the open doors from room to room, into the
corner where the bed stood, around the dining table, across the
drawing-room, into the cold guest room, which had never received a
guest, up and down, back and forth, singing, crying, exulting.
And from amid her tears and singing and exultation suddenly arose--how
did it go?
Come, my beloved! Let us go forth into the field,
Let us spend the night in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards,
Let us see if the vine have blossomed.
No, not quite--a little different. But she would surely get it.
Impetuously she raised the lid of the piano, which had long remained
closed. As if the neglected instrument, unforced into silence, had
suddenly acquired a life of its own, a flood of sound rushed toward her,
of which she had deemed neither the piano nor herself capable.
Let us see if the young grape have opened,
Whether the pomegranates have budded,
There will I give my young love unto thee.
Yes, that was the way it went. Exactly. She had found each note again.
Where had it kept itself hidden all those long years?
It seemed as if the last time she had sung it had been the very day
before.
Yet worlds of suffering lay between.
No, not suffering.
"If only it had been suffering," thought Lilly, "the Song of Songs would
never have become mute."
CHAPTER XIII
The next morning on awaking Lilly began to worry anew.
Nobody was so blind as not to detect, on coming closer how worm-eaten
was her existence. Least of all he whose fine feelings vibrated under
each spiritual touch and awoke an anxious echo in her soul.
Even if it were possible for her to create a sort of island on which she
might prevent him from coming into contact with her world, wasn't her
very appearance a traitor? All those mad nights could not have passed
over her without leaving traces. Two years before Dr. Salmoni had
already remarked a change in her appearance. "A cold, disdainful look,"
he had said.
She jumped from bed, and ran to the mirror to subject every feature to
suspicious scrutiny.
Her eyes had grown tired. There was no disputing that. But they did not
look disdainful. "Virgin Mary eyes," Dr. Rennschmidt had said, not
"Madonna eyes." Was there a difference? On her brow were faint cobwebby
lines; but she could well-nigh rub them away with her finger. "They will
disappear with a little massaging," she said to herself. But the deep
grooves on either side of her mouth were bad. They gave her face a
haughty, satiated expression. "The paths that consuming passion long has
trod," she quoted from "Tannhaeuser in Rom," which she knew almost by
heart.
And yet--had she not preserved her noblest, her profoundest feelings? As
if to save them up for this One, and now that the One had come, it was
too late perhaps.
She spent the day in misery, and when Richard came for his tea, he found
red eyes.
That afternoon proved to her clearly what she possessed in Richard. He
asked so few questions, and was so sympathetic and full of solicitude,
that for a moment or two she felt comforted and secure. She almost
succumbed to the temptation to tell him a little about her new
acquaintance, as was right between two such good friends. Fortunately
she resisted the impulse. Rather let Adele into the secret, who had
several times observed encouragingly:
"You may trust me fully. I know life far too well not to take the lady's
side."
Wishing to avoid "the whole crew," as she dubbed the circle of her
friends, Lilly pled sickness, and Richard rested satisfied. In the
evening it occurred to her she had told Dr. Rennschmidt she was going
out. She hastily put out the light, and sat brooding in the dark until
bedtime.
The next morning the mail brought her a letter addressed in an unknown
hand.
She tore the envelope open and read:
I cannot rest, I cannot sleep before
I speak to you, before the prayer torn
From out my breast in passionate outpour
Swiftly on wind and wave to you is borne.
I sit and dream by lighted lamp; still lies
My work. With hours stolen I entwine
A crown of flame that heavenly aspires
In tongues of fire up round your head divine.
Oh, chide me not for uttering words uncalled;
Chastise me not for sacred spell I've broken
In which your lofty spirit is enthralled.
I am a struggler--I must needs have spoken.
Good Heavens! Did this refer to her, to Lilly Czepanek, who ate her
heart out in dull self-depreciation?
If any human being in the world could think of her so, above all _he_,
the most glorious--she knew the poem, though unsigned, came from
him--then after all she was not in such a bad way; then perhaps her life
had not taken a permanent hold upon her; probably her innermost being
had remained intact, and values lay strewn in her soul which needed only
to be used in order to sanctify and bless herself and others.
Long after she knew the verses by heart she read them again and again.
She could not tear her eyes from the beloved writing.
Then she tried to set the words to music. She opened the piano, and
fantasied. Her playing came back to her as on the other night;
everything she had known as a girl and had thought long forgotten came
back. She needed merely to drop her fingers on the keys, and there it
was--or nearly so.
But her finger joints were stiff, and the muscles of her lower arm soon
wearied. She would have to practise and limber them.
"When he visits me, I can even play a classic for him," she thought.
Buoyed by the new hope she floated further along on the current of her
newly won self-esteem.
At the same time she kept careful count of each minute that separated
her from the evening.
Richard found her practicing assiduously.
"What's gotten into you to-day?" he asked. "I hadn't the slightest idea
you could play so well."
"Neither had I," laughed Lilly.
"You must play for the others this very evening."
"This evening?" Lilly asked, alarmed. "I thought I had this evening
free."
"Free! What do you mean by free?" he rejoined, evidently annoyed. "You
act just as if our going out in company were heaven knows what a
sacrifice. You keep to yourself whenever you can possibly get a chance.
Yesterday, in fact, Karla said nobody really knows what sort of life you
lead."
"I think that applies much better to Karla than to me. Nobody really
knows her name."
"It doesn't matter. Others have criticised your reserved ways, too. One
man even hinted I'd better keep my eye on you more than I do, and not
let you go your own way so much. So to hush them up I promised I'd bring
you this evening instead of yesterday. There's no getting out of it."
Lilly instantly reflected that a refusal, far from helping, would merely
arouse his dormant suspicions. So she bravely choked down fright and
tears. But when he left the anguish of disappointment was all the
keener.
What would Dr. Rennschmidt think if he came at the appointed time and
found her out? Since he had not mentioned his address, she could not
write to him, and he would have a full day in which to nurse evil
suspicions.
In an agony of apprehension she sought comfort with Adele, whose dry,
peevish face perceptibly brightened. She seemed to be in her element
when it came to deceiving a person, or, better still, two persons.
"The best thing," she said, "would be for you to say a sick friend had
asked you to come. Something sad like that takes them all in." She knew
it from experience, she assured Lilly.
That evening her friends did not get much entertainment out of Lilly.
She disregarded the gentlemen, and gave the ladies rude answers. Mrs.
Jula, the only one whose presence would have pleased her, was absent,
as had become usual of late. They finally left her to herself and
Richard, the dear fellow, who had hoped to parade his possession,
helplessly gnawed the ends of his moustache.
The next morning Lilly again suffered the torments of dread.
When she had come home the night before, despite the late hour, she had
awakened Adele, who said he had come and had looked dreadfully upset. He
had gone away without saying anything.
Another day spent in nervously counting the minutes. She stood in front
of the mirror, utterly despondent, and dressed herself for him. She
would have liked to sink at his feet when he entered. Nevertheless she
determined to maintain in words and gesture, then and in the future, a
certain gentle, melancholy grandeur of manner which would nip suspicion
in the bud, and would correspond with the picture of her he had drawn in
his verses. When she thought that that stupid, much-kissed head of hers
should from now on be a "head divine," she grew thoroughly ill at ease
from sheer sanctity.
At half past seven the bell rang.
She received him with a conventional smile, and the gentle, melancholy
grandeur, which she succeeded in adopting perfectly, concealed her
harassed spirits.
His manner, she saw at the first glance, was also constrained. His eyes
glided past her with a singularly empty expression.
"He has divined everything," her soul cried.
But she bore up nobly.
"I must beg your pardon," she said, "for not having kept our
appointment."
"I hope your friend is feeling better," he said, while a disdainful
smile of doubt played about his lips.
She made all kinds of explanations, said whatever came into her head;
and without looking at him, she knew he believed not a syllable.
"I must beg _your_ pardon," he rejoined after she had finished, with the
same lurking disdain in his voice and smile.
"Why?"
"I sent you some verses which I hope you will consider nothing more than
what they really are, a mere harmless stylistic effort without sense or
significance."
"He's already withdrawing," her guilty conscience cried; and all the
colder and worldlier was her reply.
"I admit your pretty verses did astonish me at first. I couldn't
conceive that I was a fitting subject to inspire them. But then I
thought you probably meant nothing more than what you just now said, and
I did not feel offended. If you wish we won't say more about it."
He looked at her with great questioning eyes, and she rejoiced at having
requited him so bitterly.
Wishing to observe the rules of decorum she invited him to stay for
supper, though absolutely nothing had been prepared for a guest.
"I thought I was to be permitted to take you out," he replied in a hard,
disillusioned tone.
She smiled politely.
"Just as you wish."
They descended the stairs in silence, and in silence paced along the
canal, the same way they had walked three evenings before, pressed close
against each other in drunken bliss. Then, too, they had not spoken;
but, oh, how different had their silence been!
"What have you done the last few days?" Lilly finally asked, to make
conversation.
"Nothing special. I tried to write an article for the _Muenchener
Kunstzeitschrift_, on which I'm a collaborator. My subject was the
Sienna School outside of Sienna. But it didn't turn out very well. The
editor won't be satisfied."
Lilly read reproach of herself in his words. Evidently he wanted to
indicate that her entrance into his life was to blame.
And when he asked to what restaurant she would like to go, she said, her
wounded heart quivering:
"I'm neither hungry nor thirsty, and people and light would hurt me."
She wanted to add something about "not wishing to be a burden" and
similar things, but swallowed the words before they were spoken.
"If you wish to avoid people, we might go to the Tiergarten."
Lilly agreed. Had he said, "Come down into the water of the canal with
me," she would have assented even more willingly.
The hard park roads stretched before them in the light of the electric
lamps like long galleries with garish walls between which one was forced
to run the gauntlet. The pedestrians coming toward Lilly and Dr.
Rennschmidt measured the tall couple with cold, intrusive curiosity.
"It's worse here than in the crowded streets," said Lilly.
Her aching, despondent heart fluttered with excitement
He pointed to a side path leading into darkness; and without speaking
they dipped into solitude.
Above the towering masses of branches the cloudy sky, looking like a
metal whose brilliance has worn off, reflected the invisible sea of city
lights. Through the lattice work of the leafless bushes gleamed the
lamps lining the more public ways; and on all sides the gongs of the
electric trams, shooting hither and thither, sounded like fire alarums.
But there in the interior of the park, quiet and darkness prevailed.
Lilly felt she had sunk into a black sea of mournfulness.
The silence between them became intolerable.
Suddenly Dr. Rennschmidt stepped in front of Lilly and blocked the way.
"What's the matter?" she asked, startled.
"Mrs. Czepanek--Mrs. Czepanek--what I am going to say--what I am going
to say"--his raised hands jerked back and forth before her face--"will
either bring us together again--or--send us apart forever. I was
cowardly before. I thought I could evade the truth. When I said I didn't
mean what I wrote in my poem, I was lying. I felt exactly what I wrote.
And a thousand times more strongly. But I oughtn't to have spoken. I
know I frightened you. You were bewildered. You didn't know how to take
me. You probably think me some enamoured adventurer who wants to exploit
the trust you show. Dear, dear Mrs. Czepanek, I promise you I will never
again annoy you with a display of my feelings. But don't withdraw your
friendship from me. Please don't. Just imagine what would become of me
if I were to lose you!"
So _that's_ what it was!
Oh, God! If nothing else stood between them.
She could not help herself--she had to lean against a tree and cry. Her
tears soon soaked her veil, and she raised it and pressed her finger
tips to her eyes.
"What's the matter?" she heard his voice, hoarse with anxiety. "Did I
wound you so deeply? Was what I said so very bad? I will atone for it.
Just pardon me. You must pardon me."