The Song Of Songs Part 28

Despite his uncomfortable experiences he could not get himself to live alone again with his young wife. Habituated from youth up to motley a.s.sociations, he required noise and light and laughter. But his suspicions waxed, and finally fastened upon Lilly, too.

He forbade the matinal visit to church, to which she clung so ardently.

What she had done, following a mere impulse, after the first awaking at his side, had by and by become a custom; and while he slept his profound sleep she dressed without making a sound and slipped out into the freshness of early morning.

Going to church served as a pretext.

Generally all she did was dip her fingers in the holy water and make her three genuflections. Sometimes she even contented herself, untroubled by scruples, with merely pa.s.sing the church.

For here was an hour of golden liberty, the only one throughout the day.

First she hastened to the Augustus bridge to offer her breast to the winds always blowing there and watch the waters course by far below.

Then she walked along the banks of the river, usually at a wild pace, in order to gather in as large a harvest of pictures and incidents as possible before creeping back to her husband's home.

Everything the hour brought was pregnant with significance.

The early morning mist lying red on the hills and descending to the river in golden ribbons; the chorus of the bells in the Altstadt; the first timid bursting of the boughs already russet with sap; the joggling carts on their way to market; the hissing and sparking of the swaying wires when the trolley-pole of an electric tram swept along underneath them--all this was joy, it was life.

Since she was not threatened with a gift in consequence she ventured also to look into shop-windows, and greedily, in amazement, devoured every morsel of art.

An end to all this from now on!

The gates suddenly swung shut through which she had escaped for a single hour her perfumed life-prison overheated by desire and indolence.

But she was so soft and pliant that she yielded without a murmur even in her innermost being.

It was his wish--that was sufficient.

Such a quant.i.ty of love lay fallow in her soul and cried for activity that in this time of inner conflicts she proffered him a double measure of tenderness. She had to, whether she wished to or not, whether her thoughts dwelled with him or glided off on the viewless path of dreams.

She was his slave, his plaything, his audience; she dressed him, admired his good looks, rubbed his hips with ointment, adjusted the hare's skin about his loins to protect him against his gout; brought him his sodium carbonate when he had eaten too much; ma.s.saged his grizzled head with hair tonic, the pungent perfume of which nauseated her, and stood by to help and advise when he trimmed his moustache.

She did it all with eager devotion and ingenuous confidence, as if in ministering to her husband she had found the end and aim of her existence.

Nevertheless he lost his supernatural, G.o.d-like qualities in her eyes, became nothing more to her than a man, knightly to be sure, but whimsical and vain; for all his mental force intellectually indolent; for all his sensitiveness utterly brutal, and for all his thirst for love an oldish man, whose powers had long been enervated.

Not that she ever put it in this way to herself.

Had she seen his characteristics so clearly she might have come to hate and scorn him; for she was too immature to know that the witch's cauldron of worldly life brews the same out of most men's souls, provided the great feelings grow grey along with a man's hair, and he has erected no altar for himself at which he may seek refuge while sacrificing to it.

But the picture her fancy had made of him s.h.i.+fted and changed colours from day to day, taking on now one aspect, now the reverse, until a little pity mingled with her terrified respect, and her childlike relation to him was tinged by a certain motherliness, which would have been ridiculous had it not had its roots in the unfailing warmness of her heart, which trans.m.u.ted another's weakness into cause for her solicitude.

Oh, if only she had not had to starve so!

Starve, when sitting at a festive board each day decked anew with choice viands.

Every morning Lilly eagerly read the theatrical and musical announcements posted in the hotel lobby, only to be drawn away swiftly by the colonel, who in his little garrison town had lost all interest in the arts. For lack of exercise his organs for perceiving and enjoying had lost their functions, and he shrank back petulantly from the intellectual work she expected of him.

Everything in which he took pleasure, the exaggerated gaiety of the music halls, the display of physical strength and agility, the loud colours, soon became an abomination to Lilly after her first curiosity had been stilled.

Wild horses, the colonel said, could not drag him to Shakespeare or Wagner again, then certainly not to a concert, the object of Lilly's profoundest cravings.

One day she saw an announcement of the Fifth Symphony, which was bound to her childhood days by a thousand ties. She maintained silence, as was proper; but when she reached their room she threw herself on the bed and cried bitterly. He questioned; she confessed. With a bored laugh he made the sacrifice and took her to the concert.

She had not been at a concert since her father's last performance.

When she entered she trembled, and suppressing her tears, drew the air in through her nose.

"You snuffle like a horse when he smells oats," joked the colonel.

"Don't you notice there's the same atmosphere at all concerts?" she asked in a joyous tremour. "Our concert hall at home smelt just like this."

But he had not noticed the similarity of smell, and he did not recall the Fifth Symphony.

"Such matters--" he began.

She was indifferent to all that preceded the symphony. She wanted to hear nothing but that trumpet call of fate which had once filled her, when just blossoming into womanhood, with a shudder of foreboding.

The call came and knocked at people's hearts, and set the knees of all those a-tremble who, companions and fellow-combatants, filled with the same fear and the same impotence, writhed like worms under the blows of fate.

Her husband amusedly hummed:

"Ti-ti-ti-tum, ti-ti-ti-tum." That was all he understood of it.

Turning about softly to urge him if possible to keep still, she noticed for the first time a profusion of yellowish-grey hair growing in his ear. It disgusted her.

"If he has hair in his ears," she thought, as though that were the reason of his deafness to music. A profound despondency seized her.

Never again would she rejoice in the beautiful, never again stretch arms in prayer to wrestling heroism, never again quench her thirst for a higher, purer life at the sources of enthusiasm.

Between her and all that stood this man, who sang "ti-ti-ti-tum," and in whose ears there was a little bush of hair.

The soft consolation of the violins died away unheard, the melancholy acquiescence of the andante found no echo in her soul, and the triumphant jubilation of the finale--it brought her no triumph.

Tortured, debased, undone in her own eyes, she left the hall at the side of her yawning husband.

But her vital energy was too sound, her belief in the sunniness of human existence too lively to permit her to succ.u.mb to such moods.

Moreover, an event occurred which lent new wings to her being and flushed her with the intoxication of bold hopes.

Though little was said about plans for the immediate future, it was settled that they should remain in Dresden, or some other large city, until May, and then go to Castle Lischnitz, where the household, as always in the master's absence, was conducted by the oft-mentioned Miss Anna von Schwertfeger.

The colonel, forever hovering between trust and distrust of his young wife, was seized one evening by a fresh attack of doubts, and tried to get a view down to the bottom of her soul by questioning her as to how often and whom she had loved before she met him.

Unsuspecting as always, Lilly blurted out her two little experiences.

She told of Fritz Redlich first--because that had been the greater love--and then of the poor, consumptive teacher.

Despite his petty misgivings her husband's judgment had remained clear enough to appreciate the trustful purity of her conscience, and he sent his doubts to the devil with the laugh he usually reserved for his vulgar jokes.