Читать книгу The Song of Songs - Hermann Sudermann - Страница 6

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Lilly was now a tall young woman with a well-developed figure for her age, who carried her school-bag through the streets with the air of a princess.

Her plaid dress of mixed wool was always wrinkled by rain, and despite the let-out tucks was ever too short. Her rainy-day boots went to the cobbler time and again, and between the wavy ends of her cotton gloves and the hems of her sleeves laboriously stretched to meet them, gleamed a strip of red, slender arm.

But whoever saw her come down the street with the easy swing of her beautifully curved hips, with the careless, rhythmic tread of exuberant youth and strength, with the mobile head, too small for her tall body, set on a long neck, with the two mouse teeth that looked out eagerly from behind an upper lip somewhat too short, and with the two famous "Lilly eyes"—he who saw her did not think of the shabbiness of her dress, did not suspect that this delicately shaped, broad breast was bent for hours and hours over sewing, that this whole glorious, youthful organism, whose sap, as it chased through her veins, manifested itself in causeless blushings and passionate palings, was grandly maintained and preserved on boiled potatoes, bread spread with clarified fat, and bad sausage.

The high school students followed her all afire, and for a long time the poems composed in her praise in the first year class were to be counted by the dozen.

It cannot be said that she remained indifferent to their homage. When a troop of them came toward her on the street she felt as if a rosy veil were descending over her eyes from shame and dread; and when the young men passed by, doffing their caps—they had met her at the skating-rink—she was overcome by giddiness, or a sinking sensation, so suddenly did the blood mount to her head. The aftertaste of the meetings was delicious. For hours she recalled the picture of the young man who had greeted her most respectfully, or the one who had blushed like herself. That was the one she loved—until at the next encounter he was replaced by another.

Despite her adorers she was subjected to less teasing by her schoolmates than is usual in such cases. The contented defencelessness of her manner disarmed all enmity. If they hid her school-bag she merely entreated, "Please give it back to me." If they stuck her up on the stove, she remained there laughing, and if they wanted to copy her English exercise, she gave them the solution to an arithmetic problem besides.

The only discord in her relations with them arose from the jealousy that set her bosom friends by the ears. In this she was not quite blameless, as she changed her friendships with startling rapidity, feeling in duty bound to respond to all overtures of intimacy. Consequently her affections could not be fastened on a single companion for long, and she herself was amazed when she saw one sentiment pushed aside by the next attack.

The teachers, too, had kindly feelings for her. The words, "Lilly, you are dreaming," which sometimes came from the platform, sounded more like a caress than a reproach. As head of the newcomers in the 1 B class she sat for a time at the end of the sixth row, and more than one hand gave her hair a paternal stroke in passing.

Her nickname was "Lilly with the eyes." Her schoolmates declared such eyes were absolutely improbable, such eyes could not exist. "Cat eyes," "nixie eyes," are samples of the epithets bestowed upon them. Some maintained they were violet, some knew for sure she penciled her lids. However that may be, he who looked at her face saw eyes and nothing but eyes, and was content to look no further.

When fifteen and a half years old Lilly passed from the first-year class into the Selecta, the class for advanced pupils, for it had been decided that she was to earn her living as a governess.

With this came a change in many respects; new teachers, new subjects of study, new companions and a new tone in intercourse. Nobody was addressed by the first name; the throwing of paper balls ceased, and no one on going home found bits of paper stuck in her hair. Phrases like "sacredness of a vocation" and "consecration of life" were cheapened by repetition; but so also were love episodes and secret betrothals.

For the first time Lilly experienced a slight feeling of envy—she was neither engaged, nor did the least love affair come her way. Such trivialities as anonymous bouquets or verses bearing the superscription, "Thine forever," with two initial letters intertwined, were, of course, not to be counted.

But her time came. Her love was compounded of marble statues and temple pillars, of evergreen cypresses and a sky eternally blue, of pity and yearning for the far-off, of a pupil's adoration for her teacher, and of a desire to save.

He was assistant instructor in science in the girls' high school, and taught in the lower grades, where the ruler is still used on pupils' knuckles and tongues are stuck out behind the teacher's back in revenge. He gave no instruction whatever in the higher classes, but delivered lectures on the history of art to the Selecta.

"History of art." The very words are enough to send a shiver of ecstasy through a maiden's soul. How much greater the charm when a suffering young man with deep-set, burning eyes and a lily-white forehead expounds the subject!

His first name was Arpad.

But there the romance ended. What remained was a poor consumptive, who had painfully earned his way through the university by private tutoring, only to fall a victim to the grave just when he had hoped to reap the scant fruit of the sufferings of his 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.

"Let's form a committee," one girl proposed, and the others seconded enthusiastically.

"Thank God," Lilly thought. She felt as if his life had already been prolonged by forty or fifty years.

At the ten o'clock recess they lost no time in getting together for urgent deliberation. Officers were chosen, and Lilly had the inexpressible joy of emerging from the election in the dignity of secretary.

A few days later the first meeting took place in Klein's confectionery shop—they did not venture into Frangipani's, the resort of military officers and city officials—in the course of which fifteen young ladies consumed fifteen small meringues glacés and fifteen cups of chocolate, business expenses subsequently to be divided among them. Various promising plans were submitted for consideration. Emily Faber suggested that a public reading of Romeo and Juliet with assigned rôles be given in the club house, and the leading man of the city theatre be asked to take the part of Romeo. The proposal received unanimous approval; for this leading man was one of the most beloved of leading men that ever found his way into girls' hearts.

Kate Vitzing, whose cousin was tenor of the boys' high school quartette, proposed an amateur concert to be given jointly by the quartette and the Selecta. This, too, was unanimously approved.

Finally, Rosalie Katz, who was of a practical turn, submitted a scheme for printing subscription blanks to be presented to well-to-do citizens. This plan gave less satisfaction, but in the end the girls agreed that one good thing need not exclude another, and decided to put all three projects into execution.

Lilly conscientiously recorded all the transactions, and her heart went pit-a-pat, "For him!"

The lectures on the history of art followed their regular course; so also the meetings of the aid committee. The consumption of meringues glacés and cups of chocolate remained on about the same level, but enthusiasm for the cause markedly diminished. Not that Dr. Mälzer's subsequent lectures offered ground for disillusionment. Rich alike in substance and figures of speech, they never failed to win the same tense sympathy from the girls. But the plans for helping him had met with serious obstacles.

The much-beloved Romeo had been engaged to perform in another city at the beginning of the autumn, the quartette had been refused permission to coöperate with the Selecta, and a permit from the police department was necessary for a house to house collection. None of the girls dared apply for it.

Thus, the great life-preserving idea gradually petered out, terminating in a confectioner's bill, of which three marks eighty fell to Lilly's share. Lilly well knew the way to the pawnbroker's, and she did not have to pluck up courage before relinquishing the little gold cross that she wore about her neck, the last remnant of better days. Besides, it was all for his sake.

Autumn came, and Dr. Mälzer grew worse. He coughed a great deal, each time putting his handkerchief to his mouth and then examining it furtively.

One day the girls were told that the lectures on the history of art would be discontinued until further notice.

Anna Marholz reported he had had a hemorrhage.

Lilly did not stop to ask for an explanation of what that meant.

"He's dying, he's dying!" was the cry in her soul.

After dark she stole to his house (Anna Marholz had found his address in one of her father's books). A weary, green-shaded lamp was burning in his room. Not a shadow stirred, no hand appeared at the window-curtain. But the little lamp continued to burn patiently for hours and hours, despite its weariness, all the time that Lilly trotted up and down the damp street in front of his house, full of conscientious scruples for having robbed her toiling mother of her help.

The adventure was repeated the following evenings, and anxiety waxed in Lilly's soul. She pictured him lying there gasping for breath, with no woman's hand to wipe the death sweat from his brow.

On Saturday her solicitude drove her from her work-table early in the afternoon. To patrol his house in broad daylight was impossible, but she ventured to pass it once, and lacked the courage to return. Then she was seized by a heroic resolve. She went to the florist's shop, and sacrificing the two marks eighty left over from the transaction of the little cross, she walked back to his house with a brownish yellow bouquet of drooping autumn roses.

Without stopping to think she ran up the steps, and rang at the door of the second story, where she had seen the green lamp.

An old woman in a soiled blue apron and mumbling her lips opened the door. Lilly stammered Dr. Mälzer's name.

"In the rear," said the woman, and shut the door.

Then the little green lamp did not burn for him. An old woman lived there, who wore a dirty apron and whose lips kept mumbling. For a week she had been worshipping a false idol. Disappointed, she was about to steal down the stairs, when her eye caught his name among four door-plates. Her heart leapt, and before she knew it, she had knocked.

A brief interval elapsed before his head appeared behind the door, which he held only partly open. The lapels of his grey coat were raised to cover his neck, which apparently was collarless. His hair was in wild disorder, and the ends of his moustache were more matted than ever. And how his eyes glared as they seemed to demand in embarrassment, "What do you want?"

"Miss—Miss—Miss—" he stammered. He appeared to recognise her, but failed to recall her name.

Lilly wanted to give him the bouquet and run away, but she remained rooted to the spot as if paralysed.

"You have been sent here by your class, I presume," he said.

"Yes, yes," Lilly answered eagerly. That was her salvation.

"Otherwise, you see, it would be impossible for me to invite you to come in," he continued with a shy smile. "It might have very serious consequences for both of us. But as a delegate—" he reflected a moment—"come in, please."

Lilly had imagined him living in high, spacious apartments, surrounded by carved bookcases, vases, globes, and busts of great men. In dismay she observed a little room with only one window, an unmade bed, an open card table, a clothes-rack, and a small book-stand holding mostly unbound and crumpled old volumes. Such were his quarters.

"He lives more wretchedly than we do," she thought.

At his invitation she seated herself on one of the two chairs, feeling less embarrassed than she had expected to. Poverty shared alike brought them nearer to each other.

"How lovely in the young ladies to remember me!"

Lilly recollected the flowers she still held in her hand.

"Oh, excuse me," she said, proffering them.

He took the bouquet without a word of thanks, and pressed them against his face.

"They don't smell," he said, "they are the last—but my first. So you can imagine how precious they are to me."

Lilly felt her eyes growing dim with joy.

"Are you still in pain, Dr. Mälzer?" she managed to ask.

He laughed.

"Pain? No. I don't suffer from pain. A little fever now and then—but the fever's pleasant, very amusing. Your soul seems to soar in a balloon away over everything—over cities, countries, seas, over centuries, too; and often great persons come to visit you, persons, if not so beautiful—that is to say—I beg your pardon—"

His compliment frightened him. Why, he was the teacher and she the pupil.

In the midst of his embarrassment a certain blindness seemed suddenly to drop away from him. He stared at her with eyes burning like torches in two blue hollows.

"What is your name?" he asked in a voice even shriller and hoarser than usual.

"Lilly, Lilly Czepanek."

The name was not familiar to him, as he had been in the city only a short time.

"You intend to become a teacher?"

"Yes, Dr. Mälzer."

"Do you know what? Get yourself exiled to Russia and throw bombs. Go to a pest-house and wash sores. Marry a drunkard, who will beat you and sell your bed from under your body. Don't become a teacher—not you."

"Why not just I?"

"I will tell you why. A flat-breasted person with watery eyes and falling hair who can only see one side of a subject—such a creature should be a teacher. Somebody without the blood and nerve to live his own life can teach others to live—he's good enough for that. But he whose blood flows through his body like fluid fire, whose yearning spurts from his eyes, to whom the problems of life exist for seeing and knowing, not for paltry criticism, he who—but I mustn't talk to you about that, though I should very much like to."

"Please do, please," Lilly implored.

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"And already a woman." His eyes scanned her in pained admiration. "Look at me," he continued. "I, too, was once a human being—you wouldn't believe it—I, too, once stretched two sturdy arms longingly to heaven; I, too, once looked with desire into a girl's eyes, though not into such as yours. Let me prattle. A dying man can do no harm."

"But you shall not die," she cried, jumping from her seat.

He laughed.

"Sit down, child, and don't excite yourself about me. It doesn't pay. A friend of mine once broke the back-bone of a cat that had gone mad. He did it with one blow of a stick. The cat couldn't run away, she couldn't howl, she couldn't do anything but just remain on all fours and cough and choke and cough and choke—until the second blow came. That's the way it is with me. There's nothing to be done. Go away, child, I've already made my peace, but when I look at you my heart grows heavy again."

Lilly turned her face away to hide her tears.

"Must I?" she asked.

"Must?" He laughed again. "I shall feed on every minute of your presence as a hungry man feeds on the crumbs he digs out of his pockets. You sat on the left end of the first bench. I remember. I said to myself, 'What a pair of improbable eyes! Such eyes the magic dogs of Andersen's tales must have, eyes to which you would like to say, Please don't make such big eyes. And from being thought big, they grow still bigger and bigger.'"

Now Lilly laughed.

"You see," he said, "I have made you merry again. You must not carry away too deathlike a picture from here. Our lessons were beautiful, weren't they?"

Lilly answered with a sigh.

"When I spoke of Italy, you gasped a couple of times from sheer longing. I thought to myself: 'She's gasping just like yourself, yet she doesn't need it.'"

"Would you like to go there very, very much?" Lilly ventured to ask.

"Ask a man on fire whether he would like to take a cold plunge."

"And it's the only thing that would save your life?"

He looked her up and down a moment with a black, morose gaze.

"Why are you questioning me? What do you want to find out? Tell the young ladies of your class that I'm very grateful to them, tell them I'm touched by their sympathy, I—"

An attack of coughing choked him. Lilly jumped up and looked about for help. She instinctively seized a glass from the folding-table, which was half filled with a pale liquid, and held it to his mouth. He groped for it eagerly. After drinking he fell back exhausted, and looked at her gratefully, tenderly. She returned his look with a feeble smile, thinking only one thought:

"What happiness to be here!"

It was so quiet in the dark, overheated room that she could hear the ticking of his watch, which hung on the wall not far away. He wanted to sit up and speak, but he seemed not to have recovered sufficient strength. Lilly gave him an imploring look of warning. He smiled and leaned back again. So they sat in silence.

"What happiness!" thought Lilly. "What great, great happiness!"

Then he stretched out his hands to her wearily. She took them in an eager grasp of both her own. They felt hot and clammy, and his pulse beat down to his finger-tips. It went twice as fast as hers, for she could feel hers, too.

"Listen, child, sweet," he whispered. "I want to give you a piece of good advice to carry away with you. You have too much love in you. All three kinds: love of the heart, love of the senses, love springing from pity. One of them everybody must have if he's not to be a fossil. Two are dangerous. All three lead to ruin. Be on guard against your own love. Don't squander it. That's my advice, the advice of one on whom you cannot squander it, for I can use it—God knows how well I can use it!"

"Have you nobody to stay with you?" she asked, dreading to hear that some other woman had the right to nurse him.

He shook his head.

"May I come again?"

He started, struck by the ardour with which she asked the question.

"If the class sends you again, of course."

Lilly cast aside all reserve.

"That was a lie," she stammered. "Not a soul knows I came here."

He sprang to his feet, almost like a man in good health. His face lengthened, his eyes filled with tears. He stretched out his hands, which were trembling violently, as if to ward her off.

"Go," he whispered. "Go!"

Lilly did not stir.

"If you don't go," he went on, excitement almost stifling his words, "you will ruin your future. Young ladies do not visit unmarried men who live the way I do—even if the man is their teacher and sick as I am. Tell no one that you have been here, no friend, not a single human being. Your livelihood depends upon your reputation. I cannot steal your bread. Please go."

"May I never come again?" Her eyes pled with him.

"No!!" he shouted in a voice like riven iron.

Lilly felt herself being shoved through the doorway. The key was turned in the lock behind her.

She disobeyed his injunction that very hour. She ran to Rosalie Katz, her friend du jour, to confess everything and relieve her feelings in tears. The little brown Jewess had a soft heart and was also head over heels in love with her teacher, and so the girls wept together.

But they had forgotten to lock the door, and thus it happened that Mr. Katz, whose wealth and social position found pictorial expression in a round paunch, and whose waistcoat buttons consequently were always coming loose, entered his daughter's room to have one sewed on.

When he discovered the girls in tearful embrace, he discreetly retired. But the instant Lilly had left the house, he extracted all the completer a confession from his daughter. He learned the story of the sick teacher, the abortive committee meetings, and the futile meringues glacés.

"Well, we can fix that," he said with a smirk, twirling the very thin watch chain—heavy watch chains were worn only by those among the grain merchants who had remained below on the social scale—which branched out to the right and to the left from the third buttonhole of his waistcoat.

A week later Dr. Mälzer received a registered letter from two strangers informing him that means had been found to enable him to make a lengthy sojourn in the south. All he needed to do was obtain leave of absence and draw the first payment at the office of Goldbaum, Katz & Co.

He departed on a cold, crisp October evening. The faculty accompanied him to the station. Lilly and Rosalie, who had learned the time of his leaving at papa Katz's office, also were present, but they kept themselves in the background.

He glided past them muffled in a thick scarf, his fiery eyes turned upon the distance.

When the train left, the two girls flung themselves into each other's arms and wept for love and pride.

On their way home Rosalie invited her friend to have an éclair with her, for it had grown too cold for meringues glacés.

Half an hour later they were sitting in the confectionery shop smiling at each other and looking at the pictures in the illustrated papers.