Читать книгу The Song of Songs - Hermann Sudermann - Страница 12

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When Lilly was just fourteen her father, Kilian Czepanek, the music-master, suddenly disappeared. He had been giving lessons all day as usual, cursing the heat--which was terrific--and drinking seltzer water and moselle in the intervals. Now and then he had rushed into the dining-room to snatch a cognac and arrange his disordered tie. He had playfully pulled Lilly's brown, flowing curls, as she sat pondering over her French verbs, and then vanished again into the drawing-room, where pupils came and went and only discords and curses went on for ever.

Contrary to his custom, he had not reappeared in a fury, with a tremendous appetite, after his last unfortunate victim had strapped up his portfolio and slammed the front door behind him. Instead, Czepanek had stayed where he was. He neither whistled nor wept, nor gave vent to his rage on the keys of the piano, as he was sometimes in the habit of doing when the day's work was over. No sounds of any sort, except a deep-drawn groan, proceeded from the other room.

Lilly, who was greatly interested in everything this handsome papa of hers did or did not do, let her French grammar slide from her lap to the floor, and crept to the keyhole. Through it she saw him standing before the long mirror absorbed in self-contemplation. Now and again he raised his left hand and pressed it with a gesture of despair to the silken, dark artist locks, which mamma tended regularly every day with bay-rum and French brilliantine.

There he stood glaring fiercely at his reflection, his cheeks flushed and damp, his eyes rolling wildly, and Lilly's heart went out in admiring love to her idolised papa. This was not the first time she had seen him pose before the glass; she knew the attitude well. It was his way of conjuring up once more the life he had missed and the loves he had lost; that grand vanished world where all the duchesses and prima donnas never ceased to think of their lost favourite with longing and regret. Like an elderly Cupid he stood there, with little bags under his eyes and a budding corpulency apparent in his person. Both mamma and Lilly coddled and spoilt him with unremitting care and never-tiring enthusiasm. They regarded him as some gorgeous bird of paradise, which happy chance had captured between four walls--a bird that it was their duty to exert strenuous efforts to keep in its cage.

Lilly, by rights, should long ago have been seated at the piano; for in the house of Czepanek silent keys were considered a shameful waste of time and an unpardonable sin. She had to practise four or five hours daily. Often, when her father in the throes of creative inspiration forgot the time allotted to his daughter's practising, she did not set to work till nearly midnight. Then she would sit half frozen, with heavy eyes, swaying on the music-stool till dawn. Lilly's mother had found her many a time in the small hours, her head pillowed on her arms, which were stretched out on the keyboard, wrapt in a profound childish slumber. Such hardships gave Lilly a distaste for the career of artist, for which her father's ambition destined her. She preferred, to serious study, getting up on her own account forbidden polkas out of old albums, the brilliant but incorrect performance of which drove her father distracted. But this evening her lesson was to be on the Sonata Pathétique, and that, as everyone knew, was no joke.

For this reason she was thinking of breaking in on her father's introspective meditations, when she heard the door of the other room open. Lilly, with a bound, deserted the keyhole and ran into her mother, who was carrying up the supper things on a tray. The prematurely sunken cheeks of the lady of the house were flushed from the heat of the kitchen fire. She held her lean figure proudly erect, and in the once beautiful eyes, which gnawing connubial disappointments had converted into dull, restless slits, there was something like a gleam of joy and expectancy; for to-day she entertained high hopes that the result of her culinary skill would appeal to her husband's appetite and put him in a good temper.

The sound of plates rattling, as the table was laid, brought papa to the door between the two rooms, and his head, with the sunlight playing round its halo of frizzy dark hair, appeared.

"Heavens! Supper-time already!" he exclaimed, and cast up his eyes with a peculiarly wild expression.

"In ten minutes," replied his wife, and a smile at the thought of the surprise dish that awaited him hovered about her dry chapped lips like a delectable secret.

He now came into the room, and breathing deep and hard he said, with an effort as if speaking hurt him:

"I've just been looking at my portmanteau. The strap is in two."

"Do you want your portmanteau?" asked mamma.

"It should always be ready in case of emergency," he answered, and his eyes wandered round the room. "A man may be summoned at any moment to this place or that, and then it's well to be prepared."

It was true that, the winter before, a Berlin pianist who had agreed to appear on tour in the next town had been detained by the snowing up of his train, and the committee had telegraphed to Czepanek to take his place. But, in the height of summer, the probability of such a thing occurring again was more than remote.

"I'll send Minna to the saddler's with it directly after supper," said his wife, as usual taking care not to contradict her irascible husband.

He nodded a few times, lost in thought; then he went into his bedroom, while mamma hurried to the kitchen to put the finishing touches to the dainty dish.

A few minutes later he reappeared carrying the portmanteau, which seemed rather full. He paused in front of the linen-press.

"I was going to try, Lilly dear," he explained, "whether the score would fit into the bag. You see, if one had to go to rehearsals later----"

The score of "The Song of Songs" was kept in the linen-press, being a handy place for the family to rescue this priceless treasure in case of a fire breaking out when papa chanced to be away.

Lilly looked round for the bunch of keys, but mamma had taken it with her to the kitchen.

"I'll go and ask for the key," she said.

"No, no," he exclaimed hastily, and a slight shudder passed through him.

Lilly had often noticed that he shuddered when the conversation had anything to do with mamma.

"I'll run over to the saddler's myself."

Lilly was horrified at the idea of her famous parent going on his own errands to a common little shop.

"Let me," she cried, reaching out her hand for the bag, with the intention of saving him the trouble. He pushed her away.

"You are getting too old for that sort of thing now, little girl," he said. His eyes rested with satisfaction on her tall, girlish figure, already developing the soft rounded curves of womanhood. "You are quite a signora."

He patted her cheek, and fidgeted a moment with the lock of the linen-press, his lips compressed into a bitter line; then, with a half-alarmed, half-sneering glance towards the kitchen Lilly knew that glance too he went quickly out of the room went never to return.

The night that followed that rosy summer evening was never to fade from Lilly's memory. Her mother sat by the window, in a cotton dressing-jacket, and looked up and down the street with anxious, feverish eyes. Every footfall on the pavement made her start up and exclaim: "Here he comes!"

Lilly knew that it was all over with her Sonata Pathétique for this night at least. A feeling of depression prompted her to appeal to her dear St. Joseph, to whom she had always confided all her small troubles since her confirmation. Many an hour had she passed in St. Ann's before his altar, the second chapel in the right aisle, dreaming and musing, as she gazed up into the kind old bearded face, and sighing without reason. But now his consolation failed her utterly, and she gave up the quest, disappointed and baffled.

The last cab was heard in the streets at midnight. At one the footsteps of passers-by became rarer. Between two and three nothing was heard but the shuffling footsteps of the night-watchmen echoing through the narrow alley. At three, market waggons began to rumble, and it became light. Between three and four Lilly made a cup of boiling hot coffee for her mother, and herself ate up the cold supper, for which waiting and weeping had given her a ravenous appetite.

It was nearly five when a string of belated young revellers went by, kissing their hands to the watching woman at the window, thus forcing her to withdraw. They then started a serenade in their pure clear voices, which Lilly, in the midst of her trouble and anxiety, appreciated. The singing was good, and devoid of the pedantic tricks that her father abhorred. Probably these youths were pupils of his, who had failed to recognise his house.

No sooner had they gone than Lilly's mother resumed her post at the window. Lilly struggled hard not to allow herself to be overcome by sleep. She saw as through a veil her mother's scanty fair hair ruffled by the breeze, her sharp pointed nose--reddened by crying--turning first to the right and then to the left at every sound, her dressing-jacket flapping like a white flag, her thin legs crossing and uncrossing perpetually in nervous excitement. She was told to relate the story of the portmanteau and the linen-press for the fiftieth time, but her eyes would not keep open. Then suddenly she sprang up with a shrill cry. Her mother had slipped down in a dead faint, and lay like a log on the floor.