The Song of Songs. Hermann Sudermann
youth. His superiors helped him to the extent of their ability. They assigned him the easiest classes, and as soon as they noticed the fever stains burning on his cheeks, they obtained a substitute in his place and sent him home. But they succeeded in securing only a short respite, during which the dying man became a burden to the teaching staff. Feeling this himself he put forth suicidal energy to disarm whatever criticism might be made against his ability to work. He eagerly assumed all possible duties in his line, and what the most industrious and ambitious man found too difficult he, who stood with one foot in the grave, with no career ahead of him, gladly took upon his shoulders.
The day the principal introduced him to the Selecta remained fixed in Lilly's memory. It was between three and four o'clock, the last hour, when the almighty principal's portly belly unexpectedly appeared in the doorway. He entered followed by the slender, good-looking young man with a slight stoop, who stood at Miss Hennig's right side during morning services in the main hall and dog-eared the pages of his hymn-book while the anthem was being sung. He wore a tight grey coat, which emphasised his slimness, and his shining modish silk vest cast a false glitter of the world of society over him. He made two or three abrupt bows to the class, like a lieutenant, and looked very shy and embarrassed.
"Dr. Mälzer," said the principal, presenting him. "He will introduce you to the art of the Renaissance. I should like you, young ladies, to listen most attentively, for although the subject is not obligatory, and you will not have to pass an examination in it, it is of great importance for general education, and I shall have occasion to test your progress in the literature class when we take up, for example, Lessing, Goethe, or Winckelmann."
With these words he strutted out of the room.
The young pedagogue twirled his little blond moustache, which fell in two thin scraggly tufts over the corners of his mouth. A smile both bashful and sarcastic flitted across his face. He looked around irresolutely for the chair, hesitating, apparently, whether to sit down or remain standing.
Meta Jachmann, with her usual inclination to be silly, began to giggle, and soon half the class had followed suit. A hot red spread over the teacher's wan face.
"Laugh, ladies, laugh," he said with a voice which despite its weakness shook his narrow chest. "Persons in your position may well laugh; for a life full of activity and vigour lies ahead of you. I may rejoice, too, for I am permitted to speak to you as soul to soul; which is a piece of good fortune that rarely falls to the lot of a novice in the teaching profession. You will find that out from your own experience soon enough."
The class grew still as a mouse. From that moment on he had the girls in his grip.
"But that's not the whole of my good fortune," he continued. "The theme which the authorities of this institution have entrusted to my slender ability—whether from magnanimity toward me, or lack of respect for the subject, I cannot say—is the highest theme which human tradition knows. Every personal expression in history, however defiant, revolutionary, or alien the voice of the chosen one that uttered it, later exegesis used as moral fodder with which to satiate the masses. The only personages with whom this did not succeed were the men of the Renaissance. The nine times wise branded Plato as a shield bearer of Christianity, Horace as a pedant, Augustine as a church saint, Jesus as the Son of God. But no one has ever undertaken to make of Michael Angelo, of Alexander Borgia, of Machiavelli, anything but an ego, an ego which faces surrounding conditions and the world either as creator or destroyer, relying on the fulness of his own power."
The young souls sat up and listened. Never had anyone spoken to them in such a tone. They felt he was talking his life away, but in the very moment they realised this, they drew a chain of freemasonry about him with which they shielded him.
He continued. With bold rapid strokes, which wrung new life from the dead, he pictured to them the time and the men. The accumulation of many years of repression now burst from him in passionate utterance.
His auditors suspected that here was more than a school lesson, more, even, than the harvest of scholarship. They divined that they were listening to a confession of faith; and they attached themselves to him with all the rapturous abandon of a woman and pupil, most rapturous when they did not understand.
Lilly being one of the younger girls sat nearest to the instructor. She had a vague feeling, as of a flood of new, ineffably beautiful melodies being poured over her. Since everything in her life and imagination had hitherto centred about music, she had first to translate pictures and thoughts into the world of sound, before her perceptions could grasp them.
She turned pale, and sat there squeezing her handkerchief in her left hand. Her eyes staring at him clouded over with moisture in the joy of surmise. She saw his breast working, saw the drops of perspiration on his forehead, saw the flames burning on his cheeks; she wanted to weep, to laugh, she wanted to cry: "Stop!" But she might not. So she sat motionless, and listened to the poor suppressed voice proclaiming the evangel of that old time which is still new. She listened also to another voice which cried jubilantly deep down in her heart: "Let there be——!"
"But how does the world look," he continued, "in which that high-keyed life developed? Like Moses, I have viewed it only from the mountain. I have loitered a little in its outer courts, but I have seen enough for me to know that my soul will never cease to desire it while breath remains in my body. There between cypresses and evergreen oaks, temples and palaces sprang up in white glory from the soil, seeming like a part of it. What is clay here is marble there; what is routine here is free creative energy there; our feeble imitation there is spontaneous growth. Here laborious, grafted culture, there the grace of a happy nature; here poverty-stricken pursuit of the useful, there voluptuous passion for the beautiful; here sober, subtly reasoning Protestantism, there glad, naïve, Catholic paganism."
This came to Lilly like a blow on the head. She had been raised by Catholic parents in a Protestant country. Though there had been little place for piety in her home, a great deal of religious enthusiasm dwelt in her soul, fostered by an imaginative faculty and a compelling emotionalism. To hear her Catholicism praised did her heart good, but why it should be linked, almost as a matter of course, with the wicked heathens, whom she had been taught to despise and deplore, was a riddle to her. Her mind was a whirl of anxious thoughts and queries. She was unable to follow the speaker any longer, and lost the thread of his discourse, until after a while she heard him, in soft caressing words, give a picture of the southern country.
She saw the golden-blue summer sky rising over the isles of the blessed, she saw the sun's bloody disk dip into the sea blackened by the breath of the sirocco, saw the shepherd with his flute of Pan pasturing his long-haired goats on the shining meadows of asphodel, saw the evergreen forest clambering up the slopes of the Apennines to their snow-clad peaks. She breathed in the fragrance of the laurels and strawberries and inhaled the olive vapours, which, at the sounding of the Angelus, ascended heavenward in blue pillars, like the offerings of a prayer.
When she glanced up again, she almost started back in fright. A consuming, tortured look of yearning shot from his eyes as they stared with clairvoyant gaze, past them all, into emptiness.
The bell rang, the hour was over. He looked around like a somnambulist roused from sleep, snatched up his hat, and rushed from the room. Sacred silence remained. After a while the tension was broken by a whisper here and there and by a shy fumbling for school-bags.
Lilly spoke to no one, and managed to make her escape into the street alone. Humming and weeping softly she walked home.
The next morning there was profound excitement in the Selecta. The waves set in motion by the great event of the day before continued to vibrate.
Anna Marholz, the daughter of a physician, who was a member of the Board of Health, brought some facts about the young instructor's life. It was absolutely necessary, she reported, for Dr. Mälzer to go to the south. If he remained at home, he would probably not survive the winter.
Lilly's heart stood still. The others considered ways and means of helping him. Since he lacked the money and since the city would not assume the cost of so long a leave of absence, especially as his position was not yet assured, the means for saving him would have to be obtained privately.