Читать книгу The Song of Songs - Hermann Sudermann - Страница 13

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Kilian Czepanek did not come back. Of course, there were kindly-intentioned friends who said they had always foreseen it would happen; indeed it was a wonder that a man, so divinely gifted, with the brand of genius imprinted on his stormy brow, could have endured the trammels of convention as long as he had. Others called him a scamp and a good-for-nothing, who corrupted innocent girls and led young men astray. They considered Frau Czepanek lucky in being rid of him, and advised Lilly to pluck her father's image from her memory. Worst of all were the people who held their tongues, but sent in bills.

Frau Czepanek pawned or sold all the little articles of luxury belonging to her bourgeois youth, and every present that her husband in moods of sheer wanton extravagance had lavished on her. These soon came to an end, and furniture, dress, and linen--all save absolute necessities--followed. Then at last the duns were satisfied.

The choral society, which Kilian Czepanek had conducted for fifteen years, and which under his régime had won no less than half a dozen prizes, expressed its appreciation of the decamped conductor's services and talents by holding the post open for six months, and paying the widow a half-year's salary. But this gracious grant came to an end also. And then began the heart-sickening begging expeditions to the houses of local magnates and wealthy residents in the town; the timid pulling of front-door bells, and scraping of feet on strangers' door-mats; the long, anxious waiting in shadowy halls and ante-rooms; the sitting down on the extreme edges of chairs; the sighing, stammering petitions, accompanied by wiping of eyes, meant to be sincere yet sounding all the time hypocritically mercenary, and failing to make the intended impression.

Next came the hunt for work in shops and factories where sewing was given out--depôts of sweated industries where cheap lingerie was turned out by the gross, cheap lace sewn on to cheap nightgowns and chemises, and the whole galvanised for use by the addition of buttons and buttonholes, ribbons and tapes.

Now followed the period of eternal grinding at the sewing-machine, fingers covered with needle-pricks; inflamed eyes, swollen knees, vinegar and brown-paper bandages for fevered temples; the stewed tea at four in the morning; the sweet diluted coffee, warmed up three times, the so-called bread-and-butter instead of the midday roast meat, and the evening eggs--in fact, the period of wretchedness and approaching destitution.

And, strange as it may seem, the further the day on which Kilian Czepanek had vanished receded into the past, the more surely did the forsaken wife count on his return. The six months had passed, and a new conductor was appointed to challenge comparisons with the old. For a fortnight the newcomer was annoyed by flattering eulogies of his predecessor in the provincial press. Then these too ceased. Oblivion followed, and the man who had so mysteriously disappeared seemed to be almost entirely forgotten. Only in a restaurant-bar here and there, or a girl's heart, did his image linger. But the wife, who at first had bitten her lips in silent anguish when his name was mentioned, now began to talk of his return as an assured and long-planned future event.

What was more, she became vain again, she who in the course of married life had let her youthful prettiness and sprightly gaiety--all that he had married her for--pass under a cloud, and had fretted and worn herself to a shadow by needless self-reproaches and anxieties. After not having decked her shrunken breast with ribbon or jewel for years, or curled a lock of her straight hair, she screwed and scraped out of her meagre earnings something to spend on powder and cosmetics. When she could hardly stand for tiredness, she would paint her thin lips, and at eight o'clock in the morning come to the sewing-machine from the kitchen hearth with a freshly frizzed fringe covering the forehead that she had before allowed to get higher and balder every day.

Thus she prepared for the moment of reunion. Rouged, and adorned like a bride to meet her bridegroom, she would hold out her arms to meet the repentant profligate. For it was certain he must come back. Where else would he be greeted with a smile of such perfect sympathy as hers, where else find the understanding soul whose silence is consolation and whose prayers bring peace and happiness? Would there be anywhere else one who without complaint or regret slaved for him body and soul, and submitted, as she did, to be taken or left according to his whim?

So it was that she had given herself to him when she was a fair young laughing thing, careless and unsuspecting. Without conditions she had let him take her, simply because it pleased him. She had not regarded it in the light of a just recompense when her father, an honest attorney, had insisted on his leading her to the altar, a measure which had saved him from being ostracised by the whole town as a seducer. She had only cared to know that she was happy, and had not the slightest presentiment of the consequences of her gentle yielding. She accepted what came uncomplainingly, as the natural cost of the gift he had bestowed on her in himself.

He would come back; whether he liked it or not, he must come back. Did she not possess something that linked her to him for all times, something that he was bound to cross her threshold to claim? Not Lilly! No doubt he loved his child, loved her with tenderness, and took delight in her outward and inward charm. Yet she was but a toy to amuse him in his idle hours; in his vagabond heart there was no place for a steady paternal love. Even in hours when he felt most lonely and depressed, he would never have dreamed of seeking solace in the company of a child. The tie was something that bound him closer to her than their child. It was a roll of music in manuscript, and that was all. It would have been easy enough for him to stuff it into the portmanteau on the day that he had started on the memorable journey. He had indeed thought of doing it, but at the last, in his eagerness to seize the moment of escape without again facing his suspicious wife, he had forgotten everything else.

This roll of manuscript contained all that had been his anchor during the fifteen years of stagnation in a narrow middle-class groove, all that had linked his future with the fiery aspirations of his youth and the glorious hopefulness of his adolescence. Slender as it was, this roll of manuscript embraced his whole life's work. It was his "Song of Songs." As long as Lilly could remember, nothing in the world had ever been spoken of with such bated breath, such reverent awe, as this composition, of which no one save Lilly and her mother knew a single note. It was something as yet altogether unknown and undreamed of; it opened out new realms of sound, inaugurated the beginning of a musical development destined to rise to mystic heights and be lost in the clouds of the unattainable. It embodied the Art of the future as represented by oratorio, opera, after reaching its culmination in Wagner, having descended into abysmal depths, and the symphony no longer meeting the demands for regeneration in modern music. Oratorio was to accomplish this, not in the old exploded wooden form which pandered to an outworn ecclesiasticism, but in the new world of harmony introduced by "The Song of Songs." The score had been completed years ago, and laid aside. It would have been sacrilege to entrust its rendering to the tender mercies of provincial performers, so there it lay and rusted, unperformed. It shed beams, unseen but felt, of hope of a golden future into the grey present. It filled a child's heart with such ecstasy, devotion, and love, that it would rather have ceased to beat than be deprived of this source of noble and exquisite dreams on which it nourished itself daily.

For Lilly, those sheets, held together by an india rubber band, lying in the top drawer of the linen-press, were like sacred relics, which radiated and sanctified the household. She reverenced and adored the scrawl of curly-headed black notes, and her earliest recollections were bound up with the melodies they expressed. Lilly's papa, however, objected to his sublime motifs being dragged into the light of common day, and when he caught wife or daughter humming them he would tell them to sing things more on their level. In time there was no need for his remonstrances. Mamma gave up singing altogether, and Lilly withdrew into herself. When she was alone in the house she amused herself by making a kind of drama out of "The Song of Songs," and acting it before the glass. She arrayed herself in sheets and muslin curtains, braided her hair low round her brow, and adorned it with tinsel pins. Then she declaimed, danced, laughed, and cried; went down on her knees and posed in passionate attitudes, acting Solomon's bridal rhapsody, which papa had made live again, after a lapse of twenty-five hundred years, in his great masterpiece.

And now that the master had left his manuscript behind him on his disappearance from the house, it became more than ever the keystone of his family's hopes and longings. It was conceivable that he, Bohemian to the core, might cast off his wife and child, emulating the example of his own parents, who had turned him out into the streets at a tender age. But it was not conceivable that he should do anything so preposterous as weakly abandon the great work of his life, the weapon with which he might conquer the world.

So the manuscript of "The Song of Songs" reposed in the drawer of the linen-press, which had been saved from the wreck when Frau Czepanek and her daughter moved to a humble attic, where the sewing-machine continued to hum and whir day and night. Here, as a symbol of coming reunion, it spread a miraculous influence around it; while the deserted wife became more withered in face and gaunt in form, and paint could no longer conceal her projecting cheekbones or the hollows beneath her haggard eyes.