The Song Of Songs Part 76

They were pa.s.sing a crowd of roysterers, young fellows shouldering their canes, with swimming eyes dreaming into s.p.a.ce. One whistled Wagner, another sang a students' song; and sweet little street-walkers cast longing, seductive glances at them. Lilly and Dr. Salmoni pa.s.sed more people, adults and half-grown girls, men and youths. All seemed under the spell of the same transport. It was like a great dance, at which each offered his neighbour hand and mouth and body and soul.

"What can I do?" she whispered, dropping her chin on her heaving breast.

"I will tell you," he replied with a smile which harboured dark promises. "You must learn to live another life along with this one. One all for yourself, for yourself and a few select. Do you understand? As a Frenchman once said, you must lay out a secret garden, in which you will cultivate in absolute quiet those thoughts and desires that seem dear to you, and above all, those that seem to be forbidden and those that you have stolen by the way, no matter how. Do you understand?"

"Whatever I have stolen has brought me misfortune," said Lilly, hesitatingly.

"Rather the law which calls it stolen. The distinction is a difficult one to make. However, you may believe me in this: so long as we are not permeated with the religion of self-exaltation--do you understand me, child?--so long as we haven't rooted out the words 'attachment' and 'duty' from our thoughts, our road is not perfect. We continue to knock our toes on the crushed stones that the others heap up ahead of us under the pretext that they are levelling the way."

"Sometimes they do," said Lilly, recalling all the good things she had received from Richard.

He smiled at her with compa.s.sionate indulgence.

"You seem to be suffering from what I call chain madness."

"What is that?" asked Lilly, suspecting, to her dismay, that he again divined what lay in her innermost being. Could he know of the shameful role that a certain chained beauty had played in her life?

"It is said," he continued, "that if galley slaves who have worn chains for many years are liberated, they cannot endure their freedom. They complain that their arms and legs have been chopped off. They miss the support and weight of their chains. You have such beautiful arms for stretching upward. Just exercise them a little."

"And such long legs for running away," she supplemented with a tortured laugh. "The only question is: Whither?"

"Oh, oh! Why run away immediately?" he asked, stroking her hand, which rested on his arm, and speaking as to a child. "You would simply run into the arms of another so-called duty. First you must be free inwardly. You must first forget to fetch and carry for persons who are themselves meant to fetch and carry."

"Teach me," she burst out.

"I will bring you some books," he said, as if deliberating, "books which will lead you back to yourself. To-morrow at noon, I will--"

At that moment they were separated.

In bed Lilly lay with clasped hands smiling up at the ceiling.

She was again aspiring to the heights.

But the next day when he was to come, dread fell upon her again, dread of him, of Richard, of herself.

It was the first secret visit, the first to knock a breach in the peace of her home.

When she saw him step from the cab with several volumes in his arm, she flew into the kitchen and told the maid to say she was not at home.

But the instant he left she seized the books which he had brought.

Some were printed in Roman type and looked dreadfully scientific.

However, they were intelligible, and Lilly took up one after the other.

What she read sent the blood coursing turbulently through her veins, and mounted to her head like sweet wine.

All the books spoke of the "will to power," "the free man," "the right to live one's life," "the religion of pa.s.sion," and similar things. In each pure beauty was extolled as the goal of human endeavours; in each the word "individuality" recurred numberless times in numberless connections. Each taught you to look down upon your fellow-beings with vigorous pride, and despise them as a blunted, debased, tortured and enslaved ma.s.s. In each you wandered along in blessed solitude--or in the company of a very few like-minded, n.o.ble souls--on free wind-swept mountain heights surrounded by an eternally bright ether.

It was a constant offering of incense, an insatiable las.h.i.+ng of oneself into satiety, pleasant murder, hymn-singing rape. The main subjects invariably were intoxication, dreams, life's festivals, and ecstasy.

Thus, a veil of intoxication and dreams was spread over Lilly's soul.

She felt she was enveloped in a sapphire haze shot with the purple of a distant glow. She heard hot, wrathful music storming onward in discords like maenads tearing down every hindrance in their way. She felt she was climbing up perpendicular rocks, ever higher, ever higher, fighting the whole time against the dizziness which threatened to cast her back into the abyss. But she did not sink. She clung to the edge, which bruised her hands, and laughed down--laughed--laughed--at the sorry wretches there below crawling along in flocks, permitting themselves to be ground to death for their bit of daily bread.

Then she felt sorry that she alone had scaled such heights, that she alone should be up there enjoying the wild, golden sunlight, while all the others little conceived that deliverance was at hand. She wanted to hold out her hand to her poor, starving brothers and sisters and draw them up after her. But they could not understand her message of salvation--he had said "message of salvation." She saw wasting faces, dank with the sweat of death; gla.s.sy eyes unable to turn from the gleaming penny, their pay. She saw pregnant bodies, swollen yet emaciated.

The working woman in Richard's wrapping room recurred to her. She recalled her hands flying in feverish haste about the swaying doll. She and others recurred to Lilly, with the timid hate and the hopeless yearning in their weary eyes.

Her unhappy love for the factory, which she thought had been extinguished forever on that day of shame, awoke within her again, as a quiet, painful tenderness, like the spring antic.i.p.ations that tremble in us when the February snows begin to melt.

This, to be sure, was hardly the sense or purpose of Dr. Salmoni's books. But they served another purpose most admirably. Her faint toothache rose to a veritable anguish. The desire for a man, any man not Richard, who understood her and swept her along with him, overwhelmed her with such force that she could only twist this way and that and feel she would perish under the lash.

Somewhere the "one" was surely to be found. Was it not possible for a favouring wave in this sea of humanity to toss him to her feet?

One evening she put on simple, dark clothes--she might have been taken for a seamstress returning from work--and slipped down the street, as she used to when Richard's house drew her to it with a thousand secret threads.

Since she was unskilled in strolling about aimlessly and needed a goal, she listened to the voice of her newly awakened love, and took the accustomed route to Alte Jakobstra.s.se. On the way she shudderingly avoided two old beaux and a fresh clerk.

The latticed gates of the famous marble-columned portal cried an iron "Halt!"

She stood a long time pressed up against her old door on the opposite side of the street, and stared at the house to which fate had anch.o.r.ed her.

Lights were burning in his mother's room.

The two gas jets of the chandelier resembled her cold, clear eyes. The rest of the jets were not turned on, probably from motives of economy.

Of the factory nothing was to be seen save the dark top of the chimney towering above the roof of the house in front.

A sorry greeting. Nevertheless a greeting. She would have liked to say "How do you do?" to the beloved staircase also. But she no longer dared to cross the street.

Then, as if after a good deed accomplished, she turned homeward feeling at ease.

She repeated the visit three times in the course of the week. She began to feel that the aimless journeys were a life necessity.

Once, just as she was disposing herself comfortably in her protecting doorway, an elegant slim gentleman, who evidently had come the same way behind her, stopped and raised his hat.

Dr. Salmoni.

Lilly in her fright nearly forgot to return his greeting.

If he were to betray her to Richard! Richard would a.s.sume that jealousy, or even worse, had driven her there.

"Well, well," began Dr. Salmoni, complacently rolling the words in his mouth. "It strikes me as somewhat touching that we should meet directly opposite Liebert & Dehnicke. As you know, I'm a gentle nature, a soul in socks, as it were. So I refrain from asking you what stirrings of your heart prompted you to come here. You know the fairy-tale of the queen who sallied forth to find her king, and ended in finding a swineherd.

Thus a pearl may stray into a bronze ware factory. I should not have permitted myself to follow you intentionally. I was seduced by a certain play of lines and curves. Perhaps a certain suspicion of brilliance shone through--but a young pheasant should not be shot out of season.

Let your fruit ripen, is a very sound motto, and not only with respect to _soi-disant_ love. But it's questionable whether mottoes are worth the while. They smack of respectability, and respectability smacks of Virginia tobacco, and Virginia tobacco smells, and is celebrated far and wide _because_ it smells. Do you get my profound meaning?"

"I should like to leave this spot," said Lilly. "If we were to be seen here!"

"Oh, here of all places we may be seen together," he rejoined, laughing with childlike glee. "It would take a perverse imagination to a.s.sume that we selected this very house for a secret rendezvous. But as you wish."