In conclusion, I had better say that on receiving Herr Sudermann's reply and from Mr. Huebsch his consent, I entered into negotiations with Miss Beatrice Marshall for a new translation of the book, which is now offered to the public with every confidence that it will meet with a wide and enthusiastic reception. I should like too to add my thanks to the various writers who responded to my circular letter with such readiness and sympathy.
John Lane.
The Bodley Head,
Vigo Street, London
1st May, 1913.
PART I
The Song of Songs
CHAPTER I
When Lilly was just fourteen her father, Kilian Czepanek, the music-master, suddenly disappeared. He had been giving lessons all day as usual, cursing the heat--which was terrific--and drinking seltzer water and moselle in the intervals. Now and then he had rushed into the dining-room to snatch a cognac and arrange his disordered tie. He had playfully pulled Lilly's brown, flowing curls, as she sat pondering over her French verbs, and then vanished again into the drawing-room, where pupils came and went and only discords and curses went on for ever.
Contrary to his custom, he had not reappeared in a fury, with a tremendous appetite, after his last unfortunate victim had strapped up his portfolio and slammed the front door behind him. Instead, Czepanek had stayed where he was. He neither whistled nor wept, nor gave vent to his rage on the keys of the piano, as he was sometimes in the habit of doing when the day's work was over. No sounds of any sort, except a deep-drawn groan, proceeded from the other room.
Lilly, who was greatly interested in everything this handsome papa of hers did or did not do, let her French grammar slide from her lap to the floor, and crept to the keyhole. Through it she saw him standing before the long mirror absorbed in self-contemplation. Now and again he raised his left hand and pressed it with a gesture of despair to the silken, dark artist locks, which mamma tended regularly every day with bay-rum and French brilliantine.
There he stood glaring fiercely at his reflection, his cheeks flushed and damp, his eyes rolling wildly, and Lilly's heart went out in admiring love to her idolised papa. This was not the first time she had seen him pose before the glass; she knew the attitude well. It was his way of conjuring up once more the life he had missed and the loves he had lost; that grand vanished world where all the duchesses and prima donnas never ceased to think of their lost favourite with longing and regret. Like an elderly Cupid he stood there, with little bags under his eyes and a budding corpulency apparent in his person. Both mamma and Lilly coddled and spoilt him with unremitting care and never-tiring enthusiasm. They regarded him as some gorgeous bird of paradise, which happy chance had captured between four walls--a bird that it was their duty to exert strenuous efforts to keep in its cage.
Lilly, by rights, should long ago have been seated at the piano; for in the house of Czepanek silent keys were considered a shameful waste of time and an unpardonable sin. She had to practise four or five hours daily. Often, when her father in the throes of creative inspiration forgot the time allotted to his daughter's practising, she did not set to work till nearly midnight. Then she would sit half frozen, with heavy eyes, swaying on the music-stool till dawn. Lilly's mother had found her many a time in the small hours, her head pillowed on her arms, which were stretched out on the keyboard, wrapt in a profound childish slumber. Such hardships gave Lilly a distaste for the career of artist, for which her father's ambition destined her. She preferred, to serious study, getting up on her own account forbidden polkas out of old albums, the brilliant but incorrect performance of which drove her father distracted. But this evening her lesson was to be on the Sonata Pathétique, and that, as everyone knew, was no joke.
For this reason she was thinking of breaking in on her father's introspective meditations, when she heard the door of the other room open. Lilly, with a bound, deserted the keyhole and ran into her mother, who was carrying up the supper things on a tray. The prematurely sunken cheeks of the lady of the house were flushed from the heat of the kitchen fire. She held her lean figure proudly erect, and in the once beautiful eyes, which gnawing connubial disappointments had converted into dull, restless slits, there was something like a gleam of joy and expectancy; for to-day she entertained high hopes that the result of her culinary skill would appeal to her husband's appetite and put him in a good temper.
The sound of plates rattling, as the table was laid, brought papa to the door between the two rooms, and his head, with the sunlight playing round its halo of frizzy dark hair, appeared.
"Heavens! Supper-time already!" he exclaimed, and cast up his eyes with a peculiarly wild expression.
"In ten minutes," replied his wife, and a smile at the thought of the surprise dish that awaited him hovered about her dry chapped lips like a delectable secret.
He now came into the room, and breathing deep and hard he said, with an effort as if speaking hurt him:
"I've just been looking at my portmanteau. The strap is in two."
"Do you want your portmanteau?" asked mamma.
"It should always be ready in case of emergency," he answered, and his eyes wandered round the room. "A man may be summoned at any moment to this place or that, and then it's well to be prepared."
It was true that, the winter before, a Berlin pianist who had agreed to appear on tour in the next town had been detained by the snowing up of his train, and the committee had telegraphed to Czepanek to take his place. But, in the height of summer, the probability of such a thing occurring again was more than remote.
"I'll send Minna to the saddler's with it directly after supper," said his wife, as usual taking care not to contradict her irascible husband.
He nodded a few times, lost in thought; then he went into his bedroom, while mamma hurried to the kitchen to put the finishing touches to the dainty dish.
A few minutes later he reappeared carrying the portmanteau, which seemed rather full. He paused in front of the linen-press.
"I was going to try, Lilly dear," he explained, "whether the score would fit into the bag. You see, if one had to go to rehearsals later----"
The score of "The Song of Songs" was kept in the linen-press, being a handy place for the family to rescue this priceless treasure in case of a fire breaking out when papa chanced to be away.
Lilly looked round for the bunch of keys, but mamma had taken it with her to the kitchen.
"I'll go and ask for the key," she said.
"No, no," he exclaimed hastily, and a slight shudder passed through him.
Lilly had often noticed that he shuddered when the conversation had anything to do with mamma.
"I'll run over to the saddler's myself."
Lilly was horrified at the idea of her famous parent going on his own errands to a common little shop.
"Let me," she cried, reaching out her hand for the bag, with the intention of saving him the trouble. He pushed her away.
"You are getting too old for that sort of thing now, little girl," he said. His eyes rested with satisfaction on her tall, girlish figure, already developing the soft rounded curves of womanhood. "You are quite a signora."
He patted her cheek, and fidgeted a moment with the lock of the linen-press, his lips compressed into a bitter line; then, with a half-alarmed, half-sneering glance towards the kitchen Lilly knew that glance too he went quickly out of the room went never to return.
The night that followed that rosy summer evening was never to fade from Lilly's memory. Her mother sat by the window, in a cotton dressing-jacket, and looked up and down the street with anxious, feverish eyes. Every footfall on the pavement made her start up and exclaim: "Here he comes!"
Lilly knew that it was all over with her Sonata Pathétique for this night at least. A feeling of depression prompted her to appeal to her dear St. Joseph, to whom she had always confided all her small troubles since her confirmation. Many an hour had she passed in St. Ann's before his altar, the second chapel in the right aisle, dreaming and musing, as she gazed up into the kind old bearded face, and sighing without reason. But now his consolation failed her utterly, and she gave up the quest, disappointed and baffled.
The last cab was heard in the streets at midnight. At one the footsteps of passers-by became rarer. Between two and three nothing was heard but the shuffling footsteps of the night-watchmen echoing through the narrow alley. At three, market waggons began to rumble, and it became light. Between three and four Lilly made a cup of boiling hot coffee for her mother, and herself ate up the cold supper, for which waiting and weeping had given her a ravenous appetite.
It was nearly five when a string of belated young revellers went by, kissing their hands to the watching woman at the window, thus forcing her to withdraw. They then started a serenade in their pure clear voices, which Lilly, in the midst of her trouble and anxiety, appreciated. The singing was good, and devoid of the pedantic tricks that her father abhorred. Probably these youths were pupils of his, who had failed to recognise his house.
No sooner had they gone than Lilly's mother resumed her post at the window. Lilly struggled hard not to allow herself to be overcome by sleep. She saw as through a veil her mother's scanty fair hair ruffled by the breeze, her sharp pointed nose--reddened by crying--turning first to the right and then to the left at every sound, her dressing-jacket flapping like a white flag, her thin legs crossing and uncrossing perpetually in nervous excitement. She was told to relate the story of the portmanteau and the linen-press for the fiftieth time, but her eyes would not keep open. Then suddenly she sprang up with a shrill cry. Her mother had slipped down in a dead faint, and lay like a log on the floor.
CHAPTER II
Kilian Czepanek did not come back. Of course, there were kindly-intentioned friends who said they had always foreseen it would happen; indeed it was a wonder that a man, so divinely gifted, with the brand of genius imprinted on his stormy brow, could have endured the trammels of convention as long as he had. Others called him a scamp and a good-for-nothing, who corrupted innocent girls and led young men astray. They considered Frau Czepanek lucky in being rid of him, and advised Lilly to pluck her father's image from her memory. Worst of all were the people who held their tongues, but sent in bills.
Frau Czepanek pawned or sold all the little articles of luxury belonging to her bourgeois youth, and every present that her husband in moods of sheer wanton extravagance had lavished on her. These soon came to an end, and furniture, dress, and linen--all save absolute necessities--followed. Then at last the duns were satisfied.
The choral society, which Kilian Czepanek had conducted for fifteen years, and which under his régime had won no less than half a dozen prizes, expressed its appreciation of the decamped conductor's services and talents by holding the post open for six months, and paying the widow a half-year's salary. But this gracious grant came to an end also. And then began the heart-sickening begging expeditions to the houses of local magnates and wealthy residents in the town; the timid pulling of front-door bells, and scraping of feet on strangers' door-mats; the long, anxious waiting in shadowy halls and ante-rooms; the sitting down on the extreme edges of chairs; the sighing, stammering petitions, accompanied by wiping of eyes, meant to be sincere yet sounding all the time hypocritically mercenary, and failing to make the intended impression.
Next came the hunt for work in shops and factories where sewing was given out--depôts of sweated industries where cheap lingerie was turned out by the gross, cheap lace sewn on to cheap nightgowns and chemises, and the whole galvanised for use by the addition of buttons and buttonholes, ribbons and tapes.
Now followed the period of eternal grinding at the sewing-machine, fingers covered with needle-pricks; inflamed eyes, swollen knees, vinegar and brown-paper bandages for fevered temples; the stewed tea at four in the morning; the sweet diluted coffee, warmed up three times, the so-called bread-and-butter instead of the midday roast meat, and the evening eggs--in fact, the period of wretchedness and approaching destitution.
And, strange as it may seem, the further the day on which Kilian Czepanek had vanished receded into the past, the more surely did the forsaken wife count on his return. The six months had passed, and a new conductor was appointed to challenge comparisons with the old. For a fortnight the newcomer was annoyed by flattering eulogies of his predecessor in the provincial press. Then these too ceased. Oblivion followed, and the man who had so mysteriously disappeared seemed to be almost entirely forgotten. Only in a restaurant-bar here and there, or a girl's heart, did his image linger. But the wife, who at first had bitten her lips in silent anguish when his name was mentioned, now began to talk of his return as an assured and long-planned future event.
What was more, she became vain again, she who in the course of married life had let her youthful prettiness and sprightly gaiety--all that he had married her for--pass under a cloud, and had fretted and worn herself to a shadow by needless self-reproaches and anxieties. After not having decked her shrunken breast with ribbon or jewel for years, or curled a lock of her straight hair, she screwed and scraped out of her meagre earnings something to spend on powder and cosmetics. When she could hardly stand for tiredness, she would paint her thin lips, and at eight o'clock in the morning come to the sewing-machine from the kitchen hearth with a freshly frizzed fringe covering the forehead that she had before allowed to get higher and balder every day.
Thus she prepared for the moment of reunion. Rouged, and adorned like a bride to meet her bridegroom, she would hold out her arms to meet the repentant profligate. For it was certain he must come back. Where else would he be greeted with a smile of such perfect sympathy as hers, where else find the understanding soul whose silence is consolation and whose prayers bring peace and happiness? Would there be anywhere else one who without complaint or regret slaved for him body and soul, and submitted, as she did, to be taken or left according to his whim?
So it was that she had given herself to him when she was a fair young laughing thing, careless and unsuspecting. Without conditions she had let him take her, simply because it pleased him. She had not regarded it in the light of a just recompense when her father, an honest attorney, had insisted on his leading her to the altar, a measure which had saved him from being ostracised by the whole town as a seducer. She had only cared to know that she was happy, and had not the slightest presentiment of the consequences of her gentle yielding. She accepted what came uncomplainingly, as the natural cost of the gift he had bestowed on her in himself.
He would come back; whether he liked it or not, he must come back. Did she not possess something that linked her to him for all times, something that he was bound to cross her threshold to claim? Not Lilly! No doubt he loved his child, loved her with tenderness, and took delight in her outward and inward charm. Yet she was but a toy to amuse him in his idle hours; in his vagabond heart there was no place for a steady paternal love. Even in hours when he felt most lonely and depressed, he would never have dreamed of seeking solace in the company of a child. The tie was something that bound him closer to her than their child. It was a roll of music in manuscript, and that was all. It would have been easy enough for him to stuff it into the portmanteau on the day that he had started on the memorable journey. He had indeed thought of doing it, but at the last, in his eagerness to seize the moment of escape without again facing his suspicious wife, he had forgotten everything else.
This roll of manuscript contained all that had been his anchor during the fifteen years of stagnation in a narrow middle-class groove, all that had linked his future with the fiery aspirations of his youth and the glorious hopefulness of his adolescence. Slender as it was, this roll of manuscript embraced his whole life's work. It was his "Song of Songs." As long as Lilly could remember, nothing in the world had ever been spoken of with such bated breath, such reverent awe, as this composition, of which no one save Lilly and her mother knew a single note. It was something as yet altogether unknown and undreamed of; it opened out new realms of sound, inaugurated the beginning of a musical development destined to rise to mystic heights and be lost in the clouds of the unattainable. It embodied the Art of the future as represented by oratorio, opera, after reaching its culmination in Wagner, having descended into abysmal depths, and the symphony no longer meeting the demands for regeneration in modern music. Oratorio was to accomplish this, not in the old exploded wooden form which pandered to an outworn ecclesiasticism, but in the new world of harmony introduced by "The Song of Songs." The score had been completed years ago, and laid aside. It would have been sacrilege to entrust its rendering to the tender mercies of provincial performers, so there it lay and rusted, unperformed. It shed beams, unseen but felt, of hope of a golden future into the grey present. It filled a child's heart with such ecstasy, devotion, and love, that it would rather have ceased to beat than be deprived of this source of noble and exquisite dreams on which it nourished itself daily.
For Lilly, those sheets, held together by an india rubber band, lying in the top drawer of the linen-press, were like sacred relics, which radiated and sanctified the household. She reverenced and adored the scrawl of curly-headed black notes, and her earliest recollections were bound up with the melodies they expressed. Lilly's papa, however, objected to his sublime motifs being dragged into the light of common day, and when he caught wife or daughter humming them he would tell them to sing things more on their level. In time there was no need for his remonstrances. Mamma gave up singing altogether, and Lilly withdrew into herself. When she was alone in the house she amused herself by making a kind of drama out of "The Song of Songs," and acting it before the glass. She arrayed herself in sheets and muslin curtains, braided her hair low round her brow, and adorned it with tinsel pins. Then she declaimed, danced, laughed, and cried; went down on her knees and posed in passionate attitudes, acting Solomon's bridal rhapsody, which papa had made live again, after a lapse of twenty-five hundred years, in his great masterpiece.
And now that the master had left his manuscript behind him on his disappearance from the house, it became more than ever the keystone of his family's hopes and longings. It was conceivable that he, Bohemian to the core, might cast off his wife and child, emulating the example of his own parents, who had turned him out into the streets at a tender age. But it was not conceivable that he should do anything so preposterous as weakly abandon the great work of his life, the weapon with which he might conquer the world.
So the manuscript of "The Song of Songs" reposed in the drawer of the linen-press, which had been saved from the wreck when Frau Czepanek and her daughter moved to a humble attic, where the sewing-machine continued to hum and whir day and night. Here, as a symbol of coming reunion, it spread a miraculous influence around it; while the deserted wife became more withered in face and gaunt in form, and paint could no longer conceal her projecting cheekbones or the hollows beneath her haggard eyes.
CHAPTER III
In these days Lilly bloomed into a tall, well-developed girl, who carried her satchel of books through the streets to school with the air of a princess. She was generally dressed in a green plaid woollen frock much cockled from rain, which, despite perpetual letting down, always remained too short. Her feet were shod in a pair of down-at-heel and worn boots. She wore woollen gloves, which, pull them up as she would, left below her sleeves a hiatus of bare slender red arm.
No one who saw her swinging down the street, with her easy graceful carriage, a picture of radiant health and youth, with her vivacious small head--too small for her tall figure--set on a long stemlike throat rising from broad shoulders, her white and rather prominent teeth beneath her smiling short upper lip, and with those eyes, afterwards known as "Lilly eyes"--no one noticed the poverty of her dress, or suspected that those erect, delicately formed shoulders stooped for hours over a sewing-machine. Who could guess that this magnificent young frame, with the vigorous blood coursing visibly through it, prone to blushing and paling without cause, was reared on salt potatoes, stale bread, and bad sausage?
The college students went mad about her, and the verses written to her in the lower school were legion. Lilly was not indifferent to their boyish homage. When she saw a batch of students coming towards her in the street, her eyes grew dim from self-consciousness. When they saluted her--for she had made their acquaintance on the ice--she felt dizzy and ready to sink through the earth to hide her blushes. But the sensation felt after such meetings was quite lovely. She recalled for hours with delight the face of the boy who had greeted her most courteously, or the one who had blushed as rosy red as herself. He was her chosen cavalier till next time, when she fell in love with another.
In spite of her numerous admirers, her school-fellows did not torment her as much as might have been expected. There was an innocent defencelessness about her which made it impossible to be her enemy. If her satchel was hidden, she only said, "Please, don't," and when the girls perched her on top of the stove, she sat there and laughed, and in addition to letting them copy her English exercises she did their sums for them. The only trouble was jealousy among her bosom friends, who flew at each other's throats on her account, for she was fickle, and dropped old friendships to take up new with an ease which startled herself. She could not help responding to every fresh overture of friendliness made to her.
With her masters, too, she was popular. The rebuke, "Lilly, you are dreaming again," that came sometimes from the dais, had no sting, but a tone of playfulness in it. And when she was a new-comer, and had sat at the end of the sixth row in Class I, B, more than one hand had stroked her brown head with paternal fondness.
Her nickname was "Lilly of the Eyes." Her school-fellows declared such eyes were uncommon to the point of being uncanny. They had never seen eyes like them. Sometimes they called them "witch's eyes," sometimes "cat's eyes." They said their colour was violet, and some were sure she darkened the lids with a pencil. However that might be, to look at Lilly meant looking at her eyes, and not caring much to look at anything else.
Lilly went into the advanced class, called "Selecta," when she was fifteen and a half, for it had been settled that she was to earn her living as a governess. This was a great change; everything was different--teachers, girls, lessons, and friendship meant a different thing. You were not called by your Christian name. There was no throwing of paper pellets and going home to find blotting-paper in your hair. Much was said about "the sacredness of vocation," of "noble living," and consecration of life to work, and at the same time there was no end of chatter about love affairs and secret engagements.
Lilly felt for the first time in her life a little envious. She was neither engaged nor had she any love affair to boast of. Anonymous presents of flowers, with verses signed "Thine for ever," of course didn't count. But in time it came. Love began to dawn in an imaginary atmosphere of marble statues and pillars, of dusky cypresses and eternally blue skies; it was the adoration of a schoolgirl for a master, and the longing to be a benefactress to the adored one. He was the assistant science-master, and taught in the junior school, where knuckles were rapped with the ruler and tongues thrust out in retort. He did nothing in the higher school, but he gave lectures to the young ladies of the Selecta on the history of Art. The very name of "Art" fills the budding soul of a young girl with ecstasy; how much more intense then was the sentiment when Art was associated with an interesting young man of delicate health, with deep-set burning eyes, and a snow-white brow--a young man who was called Arpad?
Here romance ended. What remained behind it was a poor consumptive young fellow who had painfully accomplished his university career by private tutoring, only to be doomed to an early grave at the moment that he hoped to reap the fruits of his drudgery. The authorities did the best they could for him. They gave him easy work, and when they saw the hectic flush on his cheek they supplied his place and sent him home for a term. But this could not last, and, feeling that he was becoming a burden to the staff, he strove by suicidal efforts to show himself still capable of working. He volunteered to undertake all sorts of duties outside his province, and what men in health shirked he with one foot in the grave cheerfully took on his shoulders.
Lilly never forgot the day on which the principal brought him into the Selecta. It was between three and four, and the last lesson was in progress. The stout figure of the principal was closely followed by the slim, rather handsome young man with a slight stoop, who had stood during prayers in the big hall at Fräulein Hennig's side, and turned down the leaves of his book while the hymn was being sung. He wore a tight-fitting grey frock-coat, which revealed the lines of his emaciated figure, and a fashionable silk waistcoat that gave a false impression of the world to which he belonged. He made a series of abrupt military bows, and appeared shy and embarrassed.
"This is Dr. Mälzer," said the principal, introducing him. "He will initiate you ladies in the art of the Renaissance. I hope you will pay particular attention to the subject, which, though not obligatory, and one you will not be examined in, is of the greatest importance to general culture, and by-and-by will accelerate your progress in the study of Lessing, Goethe, and Winckelmann."
The principal, with these words, retired, leaving the young lecturer nervously tugging at the blond moustache, the thin ends of which drooped on either side of his mouth. A half-sarcastic, half-shy smile hovered about his lips. He looked uncertain whether he should sit or stand on the dais. Meta Jachmann, who was always inclined to be silly, began to giggle, and set half the class giggling too. His transparent face flushed. In a voice which, weak as it was, shook his whole narrow person, he said:
"Yes, ladies, laugh. You can afford to laugh in your position, for life lies before you full of possibilities of endeavour and attainment. I too may laugh over the privilege of being allowed to address you soul to soul. That does not often fall to the lot of a man at the outset of his teaching career. You will soon experience for yourselves what a happiness it is."
The whole class became quiet as mice, and from that moment onwards he held it spellbound.
"But my good fortune does not end there," he went on; "the authorities of this institution have been generous enough to place such confidence in my poor abilities as to entrust me with a theme that is the noblest in existence. Till the Renaissance, every thinker in history, no matter how much a revolutionist and free-lance at heart, has been made by the interpretations of history to play to the gallery in the personal expression of his ideas. The sages have labelled Plato as a mere shield-bearer of Christianity, Horace as a pedant, and Jesus as the Son of God; but no one has attempted to show Michael Angelo, Alexander Borgia, Machiavelli in any other light than that of an ego defying the world and relying on its own power in its lust for creative or destructive activity."
The pupils pricked up their ears and listened. They had never heard anything like this before. They felt that he was talking out his life's blood, and at the same time that this established a tie of protective freemasonry between him and them. He continued in bold, rapid outline to draw vivid pictures of the men and period, making dead bones live. What had long been repressed and dammed up within him poured from him now in passionate eloquence. His hearers realised that this was something more than an ordinary school lesson, more even than the fruits of ripe scholarship. It was a confession of faith, and they hung on his lips with all the abandon of woman's enthusiasm for what she doesn't understand.
Lilly, being a younger pupil, sat close under the dais, and she felt vaguely as if a vast flood of new melody was floating over her head; music having always played the supreme part in her life and imagination, pictures and thoughts came to her first through the world of sound. She grew pale, and gazed up at him in dawning appreciation. Through a mist of tears, her handkerchief crushed into a ball in her hand, she saw the nervous heaving of his chest, the drops on his forehead, the burning excitement that flamed in his cheeks, and she longed to laugh and cry together, to call out "Stop!" But, as she couldn't do this, she sat motionless, listening to the poor, thin voice as it proclaimed the gospel of that ancient yet ever-glorious time, and then she heard another voice deep down in her heart crying jubilantly, "It's coming!"
"But what of the world," he went on, "in which that exalted life developed? Like Moses on the mountain-top, I have only seen it from afar, only lingered in its outer courts; but I have seen enough to know that, as long as breath is left in my body, my soul's yearning for it will never cease. There, gleaming palaces and temples rise like part of the soil, white among dark cypresses and evergreen leafy oaks. All that is clay here is marble there; what is here cribbed and cabined by convention, there flourishes in free creative opulence; here we have barren imitativeness, there spontaneous growth; here laboured culture, there Nature's happy abundance; here the deadening sense of utility, there luxuriant revelling in the beautiful; here, plain hard, matter-of-fact Protestantism, there the joyous naïveté of Catholic paganism."
Lilly's heart bounded at the compliment to her faith. In a Protestant country she had been brought up a Catholic, and though there was not much time, and never had been, for piety in her home, her soul was capable of a fair amount of religious fervour. It warmed her heart to hear her faith praised, but why it should be coupled with heathenism, which she had always been taught was wicked and deplorable, puzzled her. A whirl of chaotic, questioning thoughts distracted her attention; she found herself unable any longer to follow the speaker, and it was only after some time that she woke up to a consciousness that he was painting the South in low, loving tones. Now she took up the threads of his discourse again, and saw a gold and blue summer heaven rising above the Elysian isles, and the sun's blood-red globe drop into a violet sea, ruffled by the sirocco. She saw the shepherds feeding their goats in meadows of shining asphodel, playing on their flutes like Pan--saw the ever-verdant beech-woods stretching up to the snow-clad summits of the Apennines; breathed in the perfume of laurel, arbutus, and olive, and heard the music of the Angelus ascending heavenwards in the glow of eventide; and as she gazed up once more into his face, she was almost frightened at the martyred expression of devouring longing with which his eyes stared beyond the heads of the class into space.
The school-bell sounded; the lecture was over. He looked round him bewildered, like one who had been walking in his sleep, seized his hat, and rushed out of the room. The class-room was silent as the grave. Then the tension was broken by shy whispers and fumbling for school-satchels. Lilly, without speaking a word to anyone, escaped into the street to hide her emotion. Sobbing and singing softly to herself she ran home.
The next morning excitement reigned in the Selecta. No one thought or talked of anything else but what had happened the day before.
Anna Marholz, the daughter of a doctor, had interesting particulars to impart about the young teacher, who was a patient of her father's. She said it was urgently necessary that he should go to the Italian Riviera for the winter, as it was probable he could not live through it in his native climate.
Lilly's heart stood still. The others laid their heads together to think of how he was to be helped. It could only be accomplished in a private way, because he had no money and no official position, and the town would therefore not bear the expenses of his foreign trip.
"We will start a committee," someone proposed, and all the others agreed to the proposal with acclamation.
"Thank God!" Lilly said to herself, and felt that now his life would be prolonged to fifty or sixty, at least. During the ten o'clock break a council of war was held, and Lilly, to her great delight, was appointed secretary of the committee.
The first meeting was held at Klein's, the confectioner's, a few days later. They dared not go to Frangipani's, the resort of young officers and barristers. Fifteen girls consumed fifteen iced meringues and fifteen cups of chocolate, the cost of which they shared, and at the same time brought forward some practical suggestions. Emilie Faber's idea was to get up a Shakespeare reading in the town-hall and to assign the part of Romeo to the leading "star" of the provincial theatre. Everyone approved, because all the girls were crazy about the favourite actor. Not less well received was a scheme of Käthe Vitzing's, whose cousin sang tenor in the college choir, to organise an amateur concert. Rosalie Katz, more businesslike than the rest, thought of getting blank subscription-forms printed and taking them round to all the well-to-do people in the town. This plan was not so popular, but finally it was decided to accept it and to try and put all three plans into execution. Lilly, in her rôle of secretary, made a note of all the suggestions, and kept saying to herself, "Hurrah, it's for him!"
Meanwhile, the lectures on the history of art continued, as well as the sittings of the committee. The bill for refreshments mounted higher and higher, but enthusiasm for the object of the meetings became visibly damped. Not that Dr. Mälzer's lectures were in any degree less fascinating. They still held his listeners in thrall with their rich imagery and flowery language, but serious obstacles arose in the carrying out of the plans to aid him. To begin with: the popular Romeo had to appear in another town during the autumn season, and was not available; secondly, the college chorus could not get leave to join with the Selecta in giving an amateur concert; and the house-to-house collection could not be set on foot without the sanction of the police, and this no one had courage to ask for. So the great scheme of lofty benevolence gradually died out, and Lilly found herself three marks to the bad for confectionery. She knew the way to the pawnshop, alas! too well, and it required comparatively little pluck on her part to sacrifice the small gold cross she wore round her neck--a last relic of more prosperous days. She did it gladly, because it was done for him.
Autumn came, and Dr. Mälzer grew worse. He coughed a great deal, and now and then covered his mouth with his pocket-handkerchief, afterwards examining it with an anxious, furtive eye. And then came the announcement that the lectures on Art would be discontinued till further notice. Anna Marholz brought the news to school that he had broken a blood-vessel. Lilly, without stopping to ask for further details, jumped to the conclusion that he was dying. After dark she found her way stealthily to his house, Anna Marholz having got his address from her father's books. There was a lamp with a green shade burning faintly in the window. Not a shadow stirred. No hand drew down the blind, but the lamp went on burning faintly the whole time that Lilly paced the damp street. Her conscience pricked her for not being at home helping her hard-worked mother; yet the next evening and the next she repeated the pilgrimage. She became more and more distressed, and fancied him lying there in his death-throes with no loving, gentle woman's hand to minister to him. On Saturday her anxiety took her from the work-table at home early in the afternoon. It was impossible to walk up and down before the house in broad daylight, but once there she didn't like to go back. Then suddenly she acted on an heroic impulse. She went to a florist's and spent the two marks fifty that was left over from the pawning of her little gold cross on a bunch of brownish-yellow autumn roses. With these she sprang up the steps of the house and rang at the door of the second floor, whence the light of the green-shaded lamp had proceeded. The door was answered by an old hag in a dirty blue-check apron. Lilly stammered forth his name.
"He lives at the back," said the old woman, and shut the door.
Then the green lamp wasn't his after all; it belonged instead to an old woman who wore dirty aprons and champed with her toothless gums. She had been worshipping at the wrong shrine for more than a week.
Lilly, utterly discouraged, was about to descend the staircase when his name caught her eye on one of the brass plates inside the lobby. Her heart gave a bound, and before she realised what she was doing she had knocked.
A pause ensued and then his head appeared through the half-opened door. The collar of his grey coat was turned up, apparently because he had no collar underneath. His hair was dishevelled, and the ends of his moustache drooped more than ever on either side of his mouth. His eyes seemed to ask in embarrassed surprise, "What have you come here for?"
"Fräulein--Fräulein----" He evidently recognised her, but could not recall her name. Lilly wanted to give him the roses and run away, but she was paralysed with shyness, and remained glued to the spot. "I presume you have been sent by your class?" he asked.
"Yes," assented Lilly eagerly. This saved her.
"I could not invite you to come in otherwise," he said, smiling nervously. "The consequences might be serious for both of us. But if you come as an emissary, that makes all the difference. Please come in."
Lilly had pictured him in a suite of lofty apartments filled with books, curios, instruments, and statues of great men. She was horrified to find that he lived in one small room. The bed was still unmade; besides the bed there was no furniture except a couple of chairs, a folding-table, a clothes-rack and a stand for books containing a few shabbily-bound volumes and paper-covered periodicals.
"This is a worse place than ours," she thought, and felt less shy as she sat down on one of the two chairs. Poverty seemed a bond between them.
"How very kind of the young ladies to think of me!" he said.
Lilly remembered the flowers that she held in her hand. "Will you accept these?" she asked, offering them to him.
He took the bunch of roses and held them against his face without a word of thanks.
"They have no smell," he remarked. "They are the last roses, but my first, so you can imagine how much I appreciate them."
Lilly's eyes grew dim with delight. "Are you still in great pain, Dr. Mälzer?" she stammered forth.
He laughed. "Pain? ... Oh dear no! I am feverish now and then, that's all. It's quite amusing to be feverish. One's soul floats away in an airship far away over cities, land, and sea, over centuries; one is visited by distinguished persons, if not so beautiful as----"
He paused in the middle of his compliment, thinking of their relations as master and pupil. His confusion seemed to clear his vision. He fixed his eyes, which burned like two flames in blue cavities, on her and asked in a voice which sounded higher pitched and hoarser than usual:
"What's your name?"
"I am Lilly--Lilly Czepanek."
The name conveyed nothing to him, because he had not lived long in the town.
"You think of taking up teaching?"
"Yes, doctor."
"Listen to my advice. Don't! Go to Russia and hurl bombs. Go to a hospital and wash feet. Marry a drunken scoundrel who'll ill-treat you and sell the very bed you lie on. Anything rather than being a teacher. You mustn't be a teacher, not you."
"But why shouldn't I?" she asked.
"I'll tell you.... The qualifications for a teacher are a flat chest, weak eyes, poor hair, and a character that can see one side of a question only. People whose nerves and blood are too feeble to live their own lives are good enough to teach others, but those whose blood courses through their veins like molten fire, whose eyes are filled with longing, to whom the problems of life are there for seeing and knowing, not for blind mechanical vivisection, they--but I mustn't go on, though I should like to."
"Oh, please go on--please," Lilly besought him.
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"And a woman already!" He looked at her with an expression of tortured admiration.
"Look at me!" he exclaimed. "I too was once a human being, though you'd hardly believe it. I held my arms stretched out to heaven, full of burning desires. I too looked into a girl's eyes with longing, though they were not such a pair of eyes as yours. Let me chatter. You see, I am a dying man, and it'll do you no harm."
"You mustn't die! you shall not die, Dr. Mälzer!" she cried, jumping to her feet.
"Sit down, child," he said with a laugh; "don't excite yourself about me. A friend of mine once broke the backbone of a wild-cat with one blow of a stick. The cat couldn't run away, couldn't cry or do anything till the next blow came. It just crouched on all-fours, coughing and choking. That's like me. There's nothing to be done. You had better go, child. I've made my peace, but when I look at you it becomes difficult again."
She turned her face away not to show her tears.
"Must I?" she asked.
"Must?" he laughed again. "I'll devour greedily every minute of your presence here as the hungry beggar devours the crumbs he turns out of his pockets. You sat, didn't you, at the end of the first form on the left? ... Yes, of course I remember. I said to myself, 'What extraordinary eyes!' They are like the eyes of the magic dog in Andersen's fairy tale, which grew bigger the more they were asked not to."
It was Lilly's turn to laugh.
"There, you see," he said, "I've made you merry again. You shall not carry away from here nothing but the memory of a corpse and death's-head. We enjoyed our lectures, didn't we?"
Lilly answered with a sigh.
"You gasped for sheer longing when I talked of Italy. I used to think: she gasps like yourself, though she has no need to gasp."
"You want to go there very much, doctor?"
"You might as well ask a man on fire whether he'd like a cold bath."
"And it's the only thing that can do you any good?"
He looked at her for a moment with a dark savage expression.
"What are you cross-examining me for? Have you come to find out something? I am very indebted to you and the young ladies of the class for such sympathetic interest but----"
A fit of coughing stifled his voice.
Lilly sprang up to see if she could do anything for him. Involuntarily she snatched up a glass filled with a pale fluid from the table and held it to his lips. He took it eagerly, and after drinking fell back exhausted and gazed at her tenderly with grateful eyes. She returned his gaze with a faint smile, feeling it was infinite happiness to be there.
It was so quiet in the half-dark stuffy little room that she could hear the tick of his watch, which hung on the opposite wall. He made an effort to sit up and go on talking, but appeared not yet quite equal to it. Lilly gave him a look of entreaty and warning; and, smiling, he leaned back again. So they continued in silence.
"Oh, how happy I am!" thought Lilly. "How happy I am to be here!"
Then he held his hands out to her with a weary gesture. She caught them in hers eagerly. His skin felt hot and clammy, and it seemed as if his pulse beat in his fingertips. Hers was beating fast too, but could not keep pace with it.
"Listen to me, my dear child," he murmured. "I want to give you some good advice before you go. You overflow with a superfluity of love; three kinds of love--love emanating from the heart, from the senses, and from compassion. One or other is necessary to everybody who isn't a dried-up fossil, but two are dangerous, and all three are likely to lead to ruin. Be on guard where your power of loving is concerned. Don't squander your love. That is the advice of one on whom you cannot squander it, for God knows he needs it."
"Have you no one to take care of you?" she asked, dreading to hear that anyone but herself was privileged to nurse him.
He shook his head.
"Mayn't I come again?"
He flinched. The fervour of her question was startling. "It depends on whether the class send you."
Lilly now cast off every shred of deception. "That was not true," she stammered. "Not true! The class didn't send me. No one knows I've come."
He bounded to his feet--almost as if he were quite well. His face lengthened with dismay; his eyes filled with tears. He stretched out a trembling hand, as if he would ward her off.
"You must go at once," he whispered; "at once!"
Lilly did not stir.
"If you don't go," he went on excitedly, "your prospects will be ruined. It is not customary for young girls to call on unmarried men in my position, even when the man is their master, and such a wreck as I am. Mention to no one that you have been here, not even to your greatest friend. Remember, your living depends on your reputation, and I should be taking the bread out of your mouth if I let you stay. Go instantly!"
"Am I never to come again?" Her eyes pleaded.
"No!" he thundered in a voice of iron resolve.
The next minute Lilly was pushed out of the room and the key turned in the lock behind her.
She lost no time in disobeying his urgent instructions, and went straight to Rosalie Katz, her chosen friend for the time being, to whom she confided everything, and in whose company she relieved herself by having a good cry. The little brown Jewess was soft-hearted and desperately in love with him too, so they mingled their tears. They forgot to shut the door, however, and it happened that the portly and wealthy Herr Katz, whose waistcoat buttons were always bursting off, came in to ask his daughter to sew one on. Finding the two girls locked in a tearful embrace, he tactfully withdrew; but no sooner had Lilly left the house than he extracted the whole story from Rosalie, of the invalid master, the abortive committee meetings, and wasted iced meringues.
"I dare say we can arrange the matter," he said, twisting the thin gold watch-chain that dangled from the third button of his waistcoat. A thick gold watch-chain was the insignia of being left behind in the social race among the gentlemen of the corn trade.
So it happened that Dr. Mälzer received a few days later a registered letter from two "well-wishers." In it he was told that means had been found to defray the expenses of his foreign tour. All he had to do was to draw a cheque on the firm of Goldbaum, Katz & Co. He started on a chilly October evening, and the staff saw him off at the station. Lilly and Rosalie, who had found out the time his train departed, were there too, but they kept in the background. He passed close by them, muffled in a thick plaid, his eyes aflame, fixed on the distance. After the train had gone, the two girls threw themselves in each other's arms, and wept for joy and pride in what they had done for him. Rosalie stood her friend an éclair on the way home, it being too cold now for iced meringues. Half an hour later they were sitting in the confectioner's, smiling happily over pictures in the illustrated papers.