The Song of Songs. Hermann Sudermann
were even pupils of his who did not know his residence.
Scarcely were they gone when the mother was again at her post.
Lilly struggled against sleep.
She saw as through a veil the thin blond hair waving over her mother's forehead in the morning breeze, saw the pointed nose, red with weeping, turn now to the right, now to the left, according to the direction from which a sound came; saw the nightgown fluttering like a white flag, and the lean legs incessantly rubbing against each other in nervous agitation. Then she had to retell, perhaps for the hundredth time, the story of the hand-bag and the linen chest, but her eyes closed.
And then suddenly she started up with a cry; her mother had dropped back in a swoon, and lay supine on the floor like a log of wood.
CHAPTER II
So Kilian Czepanek never came back.
Good friends were not wanting, of course, who had for years foreseen the event. In fact, they failed to understand how he could have endured it so long—he, the man of genius, of God-given fancy, with the hall-mark of creative restlessness on his thunder-headed brow. Others called him a good-for-nothing, a dirty scoundrel, who ran after innocent girls and enticed young men to gamble. They declared Mrs. Czepanek lucky to be rid of him, and charged Lilly to erase her unworthy father from her memory.
Most unpleasant of all, however, were those who said nothing, but presented bills. Mrs. Czepanek sold or pawned all the articles of luxury left her from the middle-class comfort of her youth, or from her husband's liberal moods. But these soon gave out. Furniture, dress and linen not absolutely indispensable followed; then at last the creditors were stilled.
The singing society, to the leadership of which Kilian Czepanek had been called fifteen years before, and which, during that period, had carried off no less than six prizes, expressed its satisfaction with the accomplishments of its conductor by holding the position open for half a year and paying the salary in full to his wife.
But this period of grace also came to an end. Now began the bitter begging pilgrimages to the eminent citizens and officials of the city, the sorry pulling of bells, the anxious scraping of shoes before strangers' doors, the half-hour waitings in dark corridors, the abashed sitting down on the narrow edges of chairs, the sighs, the stammering, the wiping of eyes, which, however honestly meant, came to have somewhat the appearance of professional hypocrisy. The more it was calculated to produce an impression the more it failed of its purpose.
Now came the chase for work in shop and factory, in all places where bed-linen and shirts and nightgowns are made, where cheap lace is added to cheap underwear, where white goods is vitalised with hems and yokes and bindings and strings. Now came the whizz of the sewing machine the whole day and the whole night. Now came pricked fingers, inflamed eyes, swollen knees, vinegar compresses about feverish temples, a simmering tea-kettle at four o'clock in the morning, watery coffee heated three times over, with bread and butter instead of the midday roast and the evening eggs. In short, now came poverty.
And strange to say, the more remote the day on which Kilian Czepanek had disappeared, the more confidently his abandoned wife looked forward to his return. The first half year had passed; another conductor appeared and challenged comparison. For a couple of weeks the papers contented themselves with mortifying him by flattering allusions to the former leader. But this also passed. And now followed the great silence of the grave. At most, Czepanek's picture remained alive only in a few bar-rooms and a few girls' hearts.
Mrs. Czepanek, however, who had so long compressed her lips in smothered shame when the conversation turned upon her husband, began to speak of his coming back as of an established fact definitely prearranged. More than that, she who in the course of fifteen years had gradually lost her youth, her beauty, her ready wit and laughter, everything she had brought as a marriage dowry to her husband, sinking it, for no reason at all, in a grey pool of self-reproach and anxiety; she who for many years had not tried a coloured ribbon on her sunken breast, who had not troubled to arrange a lock of hair on her forehead, which kept growing higher and higher—this woman became vain again. Each time she received her meagre pay she made haste to invest part of it in powder and beauty creams. In moments of exhaustion, when she could no longer stand on her feet, she quickly whipped a red stick from her pocket and passed it over her thin lips. And about eight o'clock every morning she bustled between the kitchen fire and the sewing machine with a freshly burned wreath of curls.
In this way she prepared herself for his return. She would receive her repentant husband in her outstretched arms, bedecked and radiant as a bride.
For he was bound to return; that was certain. Where else would he find a comprehending smile like hers, where else the secret soul-harmony which consoles by silence and compels happiness by prayer, which, with the dropping of the rosary beads, secretly insinuates dreamy stipulations with Providence, and dissolves the whole universe into one great minor harmony of yearning? Where else was there a human being who served as she did, without malice and without regret, with body and with soul, who allowed herself to be taken or rejected according to impulse or desire?
Thus she had once welcomed him, a young, blond, laughing, unsuspecting thing. She had given herself to him without stint and without questioning; just because he desired it. And she had scarcely felt it as her right and his atonement, when he led her to the altar at the command of her father, an honest subordinate in a court of justice. In fact, Czepanek had been forced into marriage by half the city, which otherwise would have ostracised the seducer and ousted him from his soft berth.
Happier she could not be, that she knew. Of the nameless misfortune bound to come she had not the least presentiment; and when it came she took it without complaint; she loved him so very much, she regarded it as the natural indemnity for the unnatural gift of having possessed him.
Yet he would come back in spite of all. Whether he wished to or not, he would come. She had in her possession a pledge which chained him to her for all time, and which, sooner or later, must force him to cross her threshold.
It was not Lilly. True, he loved his child, loved her with a tenderness strangely compounded of pleasure in a toy for idle hours, and of aesthetic delight in her inner and outer loveliness. But for a real father's love, she knew, there was no room in his gypsy heart. Even in hours when he would feel himself most alone and abandoned, the thought would never occur to him to seek solace and comfort with a child of his.
But the wife had something else in her keeping which gave her a far stronger hold upon him—a roll of music; that was all. He might easily have put it in the bag with which he had departed on his great journey. In fact, he had attempted to. But so great at the decisive moment was his desire to escape that he did not dare to face his suspicious wife.
This roll of music contained everything that had linked his past with his future during the fifteen years of his Philistine life, everything remaining from the titanic storm and stress of his youth, from the giddy hopes and ambitions of the days when he starved.
This roll of music—it was slender enough—contained the work of his life; it contained the Song of Songs.
Since Lilly could think, nothing in the world had been spoken of with such respect, with such tender and reverent awe, as this work, of which, with the exception of the two women, no one knew a note.
It was something that had never yet been, something unheard of, a new world of sound, the beginning of a musical development, of which the end was lost in the twilight of mystic anticipation.
The opera had reached its culmination in Wagner, the road from which pointed straight down into the abyss; symphonic composition no longer answered modern requirements for sense music; the song had been split up by the newest school into a series of small subtle effects. The art of the future belonged to the oratorio, but not that constrained wooden production hitherto suffered to pass by the name from a false belief that we have to make concessions to a misunderstood ecclesiasticism, but—and